Our Year of War

by Daniel P. Bolger

  Losing William Edward Smith hurt a lot. With him gone, Chuck Hagel became acting platoon sergeant. Chuck had just advanced to Specialist 4. Now, with about a year in service, he had to replace a senior NCO, an eighteen-year U.S. Army veteran. Hagel had to run the rifle platoon, evacuate Smith, and finish the day’s mission. The morrow would bring more of the same, as would every day to come. Tom took over Chuck’s squad. To an outsider, it seemed like some kind of children’s crusade, eighteen-year-olds led by a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old.

  And yet, even by the standards of the world wars, both Hagels had been through a lifetime of combat: Tet, patrols, ambushes, roadrunner ops, calling in artillery, arranging medevacs, twice wounded, and then Mini-Tet. They knew their jobs quite well, better than some Fort Benning ninety-day-wonder officer candidate could ever absorb from a field manual or a blank-fire game of bang-bang in the Georgia pine woods. It was that Darwinian impulse once more, survival of the fittest. “And both of us were very, very good at killing,” [emphasis in original] Tom recalled. “We were amazingly proficient at it all.”7

  For a month, the Hagels kept their platoon going. Above them in the chain of command, nobody felt sorry or backed off. Far from it. Ewell kept bringing the heat. “That was the deal, body count,” Chuck Hagel said. “You used that body count, commanding officers did, as the metric and measurement [of] how successful you were.”8

  On June 10, the 2-47th scout platoon went out at night. Their lead track ran into another road mine. Two sergeants died hard. To secure the site, the Hagels’ platoon rolled up the next morning.

  When he saw the dead men, Tom Hagel immediately recognized Sergeant Arthur John Enquist, the scout platoon medic, from Columbus, Nebraska. Enquist, aged twenty, had been in country a few days longer than Chuck. In Hollywood, actors in war movies die with a little red spot and some dramatics. But Enquist didn’t go out in any way suitable for family viewing. He would have to go home to Columbus in a closed casket. “He didn’t suffer,” Tom summarized grimly.9

  It fell to Tom Hagel to pack up Enquist’s things and send them back home. There wasn’t much to send. Like the Hagels, like all of them, Enquist didn’t have much of his own in his dusty tent at Bear Cat. Tom told himself that when he got home, he’d go see the Enquist family. He never did.10 Anyone who’d never been in combat would wonder why not. Anyone who had been under fire, like brother Chuck or father Charles Dean… well, they’d understand immediately. When you’re already carrying the crushing weight of all those you lost, and all those you killed, you don’t volunteer to add another.

  Tom Hagel did mention it in a letter home, another example of both brothers’ tendency to share difficult thoughts with their mother and brothers. After mentioning Enquist, Tom wrote: “Well, last night I was talking to him and messin’ around until they had to go on patrol.” He continued: “Last night some VC snuck up on them and killed four and wounded four. Bad! Enquist was killed.”11 Tom didn’t get the casualty count right—although badly wounded, two scouts he thought dead made it out alive. But it served as a reminder of the steady attrition.

  Tom also broke the news of the brothers’ second set of Purple Hearts. Here, he softened the blow as Chuck had in his letter about their first wounds. He described Chuck as burned but “completely healed and no scars.” Tom spared his mother the details of his brother’s post-wound agony. “I had never felt such pain before in my life,” Chuck wrote, although not to his family in Nebraska. It would be decades before Chuck Hagel could shave the left half of his face with a nonelectric razor. In later life, an attempt to grow a beard produced a wild patchwork akin to the surface of the Dakota badlands.12 Not a bit of that made it into Tom’s writing to his family.

  Tom tiptoed around his own condition, too. He briefly mentioned his own scorched arms and his head concussion, “which is completely healed.” No more was said, nor could it be. “So no sweat when you get the next set of Purple Hearts,” he wrote.13

  But Betty Hagel did sweat. She loved getting the letters. “She lived for the mail,” her son Mike remembered. But she worried, too. What she didn’t know could hurt her, all right. When the phone rang one day in May, her son Mike answered. A distant, static-filled military voice asked for “Mrs. Betty Hagel.” Mike told her it sounded like the U.S. Army. She began crying, fearing the worst. But it wasn’t that. Instead, after Mini-Tet, Chuck and Tom made it to the Bear Cat MARS (Military Auxiliary Radio System) station and phoned home, a bit late for Mother’s Day, but close enough.14 The brothers wanted to give her a surprise. They did.

  There weren’t any good surprises in the 2-47th those days, only more of the same. The month after Mini-Tet ended badly, just the way it started. In a major firefight with the 294th NVA Battalion on June 25–26, Company A and Company B joined in an attempted encirclement by parts of five U.S. battalions. The piling on went as well as ever—which meant it didn’t quite work. Charlie ate a great many artillery rounds, helicopter rockets, and aerial bombs. A lot got away. When the gunfire subsided, the Americans claimed 166 foes killed, one captured, and eighty-two weapons found. It cost twenty U.S. dead and eighty-one wounded. The division hailed it as a great success, a worthy next achievement after Mini-Tet.15 You wondered if anybody had whispered to Ewell that after LBJ’s retrenchment of March 31, only the U.S. losses counted. And twenty were twenty too many.

  Among those killed were seven men from Company A, including two platoon sergeants. Company B suffered two killed, PFC Dominic Ungaro Jr. and Specialist 5 Phillip “Doc” Rogers, one of the stalwarts of the outfit.16 The doc’s wound in Mini-Tet turned out to be just enough to get him evacuated from South Saigon but not enough to send him home. It was probably the only diagnosis the senior medic ever missed. The VC did not miss. The deaths just added up, one after another.

  At the 9th Infantry Division, the bookkeepers didn’t think about William Smith or Arthur Enquist or Doc Rogers, all numbers at that level. It’s not that the staffers didn’t care. They did. But they didn’t know these 2-47th soldiers, any more than they knew Senator Robert Kennedy. What the guys at division headquarters did know was that 2-47th had the worst ratio of American to VC dead in the entire command.17 And that had to change.

  On June 15, just before the big operation that took the life of Doc Rogers, a new commander took over 2-47th Infantry. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick French “Fritz” Van Deusen came with a pedigree and a half: son of an army colonel, West Point Class of 1953, veteran of post-war Korean duty and the 1965–66 Dominican Republic incursion. He owned a reputation as a hard-charger. He was also General William C. Westmoreland’s brother-in-law.18 Van Deusen had something to prove. He had never failed at anything in his life.

  But as Americans learned over and over in Vietnam, there’s always a first time.

  HELICOPTERS! They’d carry Fritz Van Deusen and his hard-luck 2-47th to victory. Choppers could zip right across Saigon, from Bear Cat into the Mekong Delta. Forget about those bulky 12-ton M113s. In rural Long An, even a mediocre VC leader could guess which few routes American mechanized forces must use in the wet season. But with aviation, the possibilities for getting out and about mushroomed exponentially. Speed, surprise, flexibility—every tactical buzzword seemed right there for the taking.

  Helicopters solved it all in Vietnam. Jungles, mountains, and rivers could be crossed at will. Moreover, choppers landed and took off not from long, prepared runways but out of any reasonable patch of open ground. Whereas World War II parachute drops scattered troops all over the place and gliders of that era delivered key heavy weapons and small troop elements almost on the X (admittedly often by crashing there), by the 1960s, rotary wing aircraft placed formed units together smack atop isolated wilderness locales. Leg infantry slogged at two and a half miles an hour, and M113s on flat hard ground might roll along at ten times that speed. But helicopters raced above it all at a hundred miles an hour. Even guerrillas couldn’t outrun American sky cavalry. The army called it breaking free of “the
tyranny of terrain.”19 For a society in love with technology, the helicopter sure looked to be an answer, and probably the answer, to the challenges of finding and killing Cong in the backcountry of South Vietnam.

  The enduring image of the Vietnam War must certainly be the bulbous-nosed UH-1 helicopter, skids up, flaring to land on a flattened billow of elephant grass. The army labeled the UH-1 “Iroquois,” adhering to the service’s tradition of naming aircraft for Indian tribes. Nobody but a few purists ever used the official title. Everybody called it “Huey.”

  The Huey came in four basic variants. UH-1C “Hog” gunships carried rockets and mini-guns. UH-1 D “slick” troop transports flew riflemen into battle; those had an M60 machine gun swinging free in each open side door, and so the onboard gunners could stitch a hostile treeline as their Huey came in to land. UH-1H “Dust Off” medevac helicopters pulled out the wounded. Finally, the UH-1D and H model “C&C” or “Charlie-Charlie” birds allowed commanders to get up in the air to direct operations.

  In addition, the 9th Infantry Division also used little bubble-top OH-23 Raven choppers for C&C and reconnaissance, and the armed AH-1G Cobra (a heavily modified Huey derivative) for rocket and mini-gun missions. Now and then, higher headquarters allocated larger CH-47 Chinook and CH-54 Tarhe cargo craft to move artillery howitzers and other heavy cargo. Those types could even sling a stripped-down M113 on their cargo hooks, one of the reasons the tracks featured lightweight aluminum armor.20 Given a choice, most 2-47th soldiers would have preferred heavier M113 armor and the hell with the mech battalion’s infrequent resort to heliborne mobility. But, of course, none of the weapons developers asked the infantry privates.

  The M113’s armor might have been inadequate to stop a .50-caliber machine gun bullet, let alone an RPG, but a track could shrug off the smaller stuff, like AK rounds. Helicopters could not. For all their many advantages, rotary wing aircraft had no armor. If struck in one of their many, many vulnerable spots—engine, transmission, cockpit—helicopters tended to stop running and come apart. It’s probably an indicator that the key connector between the rotor shaft and the main blade assembly went by the name of the “Jesus nut.”21 Only He could save you if that thing got hit. Worse, once the main rotor disk quit spinning, or the tail blades failed, a Huey possessed the aerodynamic qualities of a brick. Army aviators told each other, and their human cargo, that a damaged bird could “auto-rotate” to the ground, the big main blades spinning without power until the thing safely touched down. Nobody wanted to try that, especially with Mr. Charles blazing away during the entire lazy downward spiral.

  During the entire war, during 36,145,000 separate helicopter sorties, the enemy, bad weather, mechanical failures, and aviator errors combined to knock down 4,642 aircraft. That number amounted to more than the total number of army helicopters in country in 1968, and far exceeds today’s entire U.S. Army rotary wing fleet.22 If you sifted the statistics like an insurance actuary, comfortably ensconced in an air-conditioned office, the probabilities didn’t sound that dire. About one flight in eight thousand ended in an unpleasant way, not all fatal, and not all nonrecoverable. Many cracked-up helicopters underwent repairs and flew again. So there.

  To say that only one in eight thousand crashed might seem pretty acceptable, until you considered that amounted to twice the rate of incidents in nonhostile military helicopter flights. It also mattered what the choppers were doing. Carting Bob Hope and a USO troupe from one U.S. camp to another didn’t risk much. But going into a hot landing zone (LZ) sure magnified the hazard; 57 percent of all helicopters lost went down trying to land or take off under fire. And, of course, if you happened to be aboard unlucky number eight thousand, well… all bad. Army aviators, largely young warrant officers with a bit more time in service than the Hagel brothers, flew these dangerous missions. Almost one in ten Americans killed in Vietnam died during helicopter operations. 23

  Most aviation missions in Vietnam occurred in daylight. Two decades later, evolving night-vision technology allowed helicopter operations to benefit from the concealment of night. But in Vietnam, those were unusual. Pushed by Ewell, the 9th Infantry Division carried out more night flights than most, although still less than a fifth of all missions.24 By 1968, though, any novelty in Vietnam helicopter warfare had long worn thin. Airmobility might be new for 2-47th. But Charlie sure knew the deal.

  The warrant officers did, too. Faced by often alerted opponents richly endowed with machine guns, automatic rifles, and RPGs, the aviators argued for strong preparatory airstrikes and artillery fires, cover by helicopter gunships, very careful selection of LZs, and quick dismounting by infantry to permit the most rapid possible trips in and out. If ground commanders tried to get cute, or even worse, if all the pre-assault fires fell flat, experienced flight warrants knew what came next. “We went in there one afternoon,” one account read, “and I never seen such shit thrown at us, from both sides of the mountains and below.” That from below was more lethal. “You get the River Blindness out there,” the speaker said. “It’s when you go down to the river and get your eyes shot out.”25

  DOWN TO THE RIVER—that’s where 2-47th went on July 3, 1968. Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Van Deusen read the tea leaves from higher. The G-2 estimates placed a company, maybe less, of the 294th Battalion (supposedly VC, but really NVA) near Hoang Hon Tren, a gaggle of thatched-roof hootches right on the west bank of the meandering, muddy, rain-swollen Vam Co Dong River. Encouraged by his innovative, fire-breathing brigade commander, Colonel Henry E “Gunfighter” Emerson—Ewell’s favorite, but legitimately gifted as a tactician—Van Deusen planned to try a new method called “jitterbugging.”26

  In essence, jitterbugging took advantage of the flat terrain in Long An, a mix of open rice paddies, small settlements, waterways, and irregular patches of thick forests. In the jitterbug approach, a battalion gathered every scrap of intelligence: aerial photographs, radio intercepts, airborne radar readouts, agent reports, the ARVN rumor mill, and even the findings of a Huey rigged with an XM-2 “people sniffer” that smelled human body odors (urine and sweat) in remote areas.27 The U.S. battalion staff pieced it all together, a mosaic of suspected enemy positions in woods and villages surrounded by an array of small open rice paddies. Then the commander would pick where to get started, the most likely VC hideout, as well as a series of alternates. Working with the aviators, the Americans then selected the nearest possible LZs.

  Rather than rely on company-scale or even battalion-strength lifts into big LZs, jitterbugging went small, at least to begin. The infantry battalion used five Hueys to insert a rifle platoon in the rice paddy closest to the suspected enemy positions—in a village, an overgrown river bank, or a wooded area. If the first spot turned out to be a dry hole, the Hueys came right back and the platoon reboarded and flew to the next location, then the next, until the troops struck pay dirt.

  Sometimes the intel really came together, and the Americans plopped down within fifteen yards of Charlie. That got interesting fast. When the bad guys reacted, other platoons would be put in by helicopter, one after another, forming a cordon to keep the enemy trapped in the trees or village. Usually those reinforcements came from the U.S. battalion itself, but they could also be thrown into the fray from other nearby friendly outfits. In one really energetic battalion, the troops carried out sixteen separate jitterbug combat assaults in a single day, often into the teeth of VC fire. Once the blocks were set, the Americans poured in the firepower: artillery, helicopter rockets, napalm, and high explosives.28 It was the field and stream version of what happened in south Saigon during Mini-Tet.

  Jitterbugging shocked the Cong in Long An. They were not used to seeing such direct assaults. And it ran up the opposition body count, all right. But it wasn’t free of cost. As Ewell later noted: “This was pushing the balance of the risk of a hot landing zone against the achievement of total surprise to its limit.”29 Well, like the guys in Third Army used to say about George Patton, his guts, our blood.
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br />   At the user level, among the sergeants and acting sergeants, hopping right on Mr. Charles didn’t resonate all that well. Asked for his thoughts by an interviewer enthusiastic about Emerson’s jitterbug tactics, Chuck Hagel replied with: “Mm-hmm.”30 His laconic recollection says it all. The bugs were not happy.

  Happy or not, first light on July 3 saw 2-47th jitterbugging away. Lieutenant Colonel Van Deusen inserted his lead platoon not long after sunup. They landed a hundred yards west of Hoang Hon Tren, in a rice paddy filled ankle deep with brown water and God knows what else. Mr. Charles welcomed them immediately with AK-47 rifle fire and at least one RPD machine gun. Some guerrilla loosed an RPG, but the Hueys got out okay and headed back to pick up the next platoon. Meanwhile, UH-1C Hog gunships rocketed the hostile treeline.31 Pile on.

  The 9th Infantry Division’s massive base at Bear Cat served as the pickup zone for 2-47th. On the helipad waited a single rifle platoon, the next to launch. The riflemen had a new lieutenant, a young guy just in country, and a new platoon sergeant, too. They formed in six-man squads. Each group knelt on the edge of the airstrip, awaiting the inbound Hueys. On paper, a UH-1D could move eleven troops. But in the hot, humid Mekong Delta, ferrying soldiers laden with eighty pounds of gear, water, and ammunition, six about did it, with seven in a pinch.32 That worked out well, as five Hueys could handily pick up one of the 2-47th understrength rifle platoons.

  Specialist 4 Chuck Hagel wasn’t with them. He remained on the other side of the huge camp at Bear Cat. Chuck had orders to attend the Reliable NCO Academy, a two-week course that would qualify him for promotion to sergeant. First Sergeant Garcia assigned Chuck to supervise Company B’s detail assigned to the local defense team on the Bear Cat base perimeter. That would allow Chuck to report on time to the training.33 Frankly, with two Purple Hearts already, it was a break. Garcia knew it, and despite the blizzard of orders descending from division about getting a maximum number of infantrymen out into the rice paddies, the first sergeant did it anyway.