It works. The men are not lost to the fight, and the terrifying stupidity of war is not allowed to go on crippling forever. At least, that’s the official belief. But there is no medical or psychiatric follow-up on the boys after they’ve returned to duty. No one knows if they are the ones who die in the very next fire fight, who miss the wire stretched out across the tract, or gun down unarmed civilians. Apparently, the Army doesn’t seem to want to find out.
“After six months they promoted our
colonel and sent him to Washington. It’s
not that he’s a liar or a bad guy. It’s
just that he likes this shit. If they listen
to him, they’re fucken crazy.”
Trooper, 101st Airborne
Orthopedic Ward
U.S. Army Hospital, Camp Drake, Japan
11
Bosum
THE OFFICERS WHO RUN this war survived World War II. They remember, as if it were yesterday, what it was to lose a division in an afternoon and then go on to worry about losing an army. They remember what it was not to be ready and then not to have enough. It was their youth, and even today, thirty years later, it is what happened then that forms the comfortable base on which they work and argue. They are not dishonest officers, nor are they particularly shortsighted or brutal; if anything, they are incredibly sincere and dedicated men who unfortunately are locked into the early 1940’s. For all their professional and at times personal restraint, though, they desperately want to win, or at least not to lose, and are always, even within the shifting quagmire of Nam, pushing a bit, trying for a better way.
Bosum had been trying for quite some time. It was not his first war. He’d been in Burma and Korea. Things had been tougher then, much tougher, but they had never been so confused or muddled. In Nam, he’d been assigned to MACV as an operations adviser to the ARVN’s and spent his first five months in country trying to understand what was expected not only of the South Vietnamese Army but the Americans as well, and what could be done to satisfy those expectations.
It had been a tortuous pursuit, during which, despite himself, he gradually became uneasy about the whole thing, then plainly doubtful. No one seemed to know anything. When he questioned his superiors about how many men they thought they’d need to do the job, nobody seemed to know; worse, no one knew exactly what the job was. When he asked if the bombings of the north had been effective, the field Commander said no, while the Air Force officers said yes. When he asked if the recent troop buildup had changed the complexion of the war, the answer was no. When he asked the ARVN Commanders about deployments and orders of battle, they just shrugged. He came to realize that despite what was said, the only real United States policy was to send in more and more troops to fight more and more communists. The number of villages pacified, the amount of area held and people won over were simply manufactured data distributed, as necessary, withdrawn, and manufactured again.
The only realities he found were the soldiers and the gunships. The weapons and troops he agreed with; what he opposed was the sloppy, inconsistent way in which they were used. There was no commitment; everything was done in dribbles. And with the dribbling went a constant, never-ending shifting of resources and concerns. No one knew what was going on. The only thing everyone agreed on was that they were killing people, but the killing, Bosum realized, wasn’t enough. With it had to go the understanding that the killing and terror must go on until the whole thing was over. If Vietnam could not be handled politically, then at least the solution should be found on the battlefield.
The tail, it seemed to Bosum, could wag the dog, but during his time with MACV he kept his thoughts to himself, supervised what he was supposed to supervise, and continued to write his trim, efficient reports.
From MACV he went to Headquarters, USARV. He began by inspecting the field units, going on patrol with them. He found the troops universally sloppy. They smoked on patrol, played radios, and dropped cigarette butts and candy wrappers around ambush sites. Some even lit fires at night. They fought well when they fought, but they seemed to give no thought to the fighting until the shooting began.
If there was any morale at all, outside of the mutual concern of a fire fight, it was a morale of time. He had never seen troops so fatalistic. Even at the worst in Burma, when the only thing between the Japanese and India were 15,000 poorly equipped United States and British troops, there was nothing close to the soporific fatalism he found gripping the GI’s in Vietnam. The troops knew that if they made it 365 days without getting killed or wounded they were done. It would be over without even having to look back. Everything was geared to that departure date—their hopes, their concerns, their plans. Friends, if there were any, came next, and then maybe the VC. It was an impossible way to fight. He could only wonder how the troops did as well as they did.
Bosum was up with the 1st Air Cav when they tried to take hills 837 and 838. Two companies tried for three days, and finally, after almost 80-percent casualties, they drove the VC off the hills. He stood there in the valley and watched the helicopters come to take the troopers home. Perhaps he was too old-fashioned not to feel a bit foolish to have seen troops fight so hard to get somewhere only to be taken home just when they got there. But this wasn’t to be a war for land.
He went back to headquarters in Saigon and wrote a factual report on what he had found. All the units were understrength; platoons that uniformly were to hold forty-seven men ran with thirty; ambushes were poorly arranged and carried out; LRRP units were not being used effectively; booby traps were not standardized throughout the same unit; body counts were not reliable. The report was fully documented and endorsed. Again he kept his more subjective thoughts to himself.
After almost eleven months in Nam, he was transferred from Headquarters, USARV to the 25th division as a brigade commander, fighting in the Central Highlands. The unit he commanded had been fighting and tracking for almost three weeks. Four times in those three weeks their LRRP units had made contact with at least a regiment of the 17th NVA division, only to lose them again before any significant battle could be pushed. They kept finding bits and pieces, vicious little fire fights here and there, but nothing big, nothing that would really hurt anybody. Not that the men cared. Like so many other units, they fought well enough when they had to, but in between they gave little thought to the fighting itself.
Bosum watched it all for one week, then ordered that the LRRP units, after making contact, were not to withdraw but were to stay where they were and harass the enemy. They were to set up ambushes and keep after Charlie until the units they fixed were hit.
It was not a very popular order. The six-man LRRP teams were Ranger units, scouts, and trackers, who were always traveling in unfamiliar terrain and were always outmanned. They never knew the best places for an ambush, nor, for that matter, the best escape routes. Once they committed themselves, they were always running the risk of being cut off and hit themselves. In the first two weeks after his order, three teams were caught and wiped out. He added more men to each unit, giving them more fire power and turning them into heavily armed recon patrols. In the next week two more got hit. He finally put together three LRRP units, and they worked for two and a half weeks—ate up parts of two North Vietnamese companies, fixed a regiment for the brigade, and got out. The mission was an unqualified if unpopular success. The recombined unit had taken 60-percent casualties.
The lifers accepted it all. Their colonel wouldn’t stay there forever, and there was some logic behind what he was doing. Besides, the units were hardening up.
To give the Brigade more hitting power, Bosum rearranged the weapons platoons, putting two men to a machine gun instead of three. He took the third man from each platoon and created another machine-gun group, giving each platoon 50 percent more support fire. It was a lot more to carry, tough, and with only two men to an M-60 instead of three, there was no reserve if either the gunner or feeder got hit, and no cover. The troopers didn’t like it, and when a p
latoon on ambush got overrun, the word spread that the machine gunners got it first and left the unit without heavy weapons support. By the end of the week the men were blaming the Colonel for the disaster. They had stopped thinking about home.
The ambush procedures were changed. Instead of one platoon taking part, three were assigned. When a good track was found, the center platoon became the killer group, setting out claymores in series of four and taking up positions directly behind the mines. The other two platoons filled out along the track. Bosum’s orders were that no one was to open fire unless the odds were no more than two to one, or the group to be ambushed could be contained within the flanking platoons. There was less rest for everyone, but the brigade started getting 80-percent kills. They began to hurt Charlie.
With the increase in sweeps and ambushes, their own casualties began going up. Units that had been running at three-quarters strength began drifting down to under 60 percent. Eight- and ten-man squads began humping it, still carrying, under Bosum’s orders, the fire power for the regular twelve-man patrols. Nothing was left behind. They were getting just as tired as they were getting tough. Still, the number of casual mistakes and booby-trap injuries began going down. Men quit smoking grass on patrol and began leaving things behind that might jingle.
Division Intelligence reported that the North Vietnamese were beginning to be leery of the brigade’s area. There were even some reports that the 17th was pulling out. Bosum decided to really push them. Without clearing it with headquarters, he told his commanders that from now on, after making contact with the enemy, they were not to have their units pull back in order to call in artillery or gunships; instead, they were to keep pushing in with all they had. He was sure the techniques of making contact, pulling back, and calling in support strikes gave the enemy forces a chance either to regroup or to filter out of the area. It also tended to keep his men battle-shy.
The company commanders went back to their units and spread the word. Troopers who before had been rather oblivious to it all and had spent their free time feeding the ants or smoking grass began wondering when the next fire fight would be. For the first time, they began sharpening their knives. Trackers and tiger scouts didn’t bother to write home before going out.
Three days after Bosum issued the orders, a patrol was ambushed, and the relieving patrol got pinned down. He committed another company, then two. The fighting spread. Air strikes hovered overhead, but the fighting was too close to get in. Bosum threw in another company, then the reserve. There was no time to get the wounded out; Dust Offs were cancelled and told to stand by. Over a thousand men were fighting, most within three or four meters of each other, in jungle so thick you couldn’t even see who was firing at you. It went on for hours. Bosum asked Division for reinforcements, and they airlifted in another company. The men kept fighting, pushing, and when it got dark, the units were so tangled up with each other they couldn’t disengage, and the killing went on through the night.
Whole platoons were wiped out. Squads of North Vietnamese were killed where they lay. By two in the morning the fighting turned into hundreds of terrifying individual battles. Boys killed one another in the dark, shredded apart by automatic fire from no more than a meter away. The wounded, lying broken on the ground, whispered hoarsely to passing figures, only to be killed. At first light, the Vietnamese began pulling out. The orders were for prisoners, but the bitter and exhausted survivors shot them down where they found them.
It had been an expensive victory. Division was a bit concerned about the casualties, but they decided to wait to see what effect these new tactics had on the enemy before they passed judgment. As for himself, Bosum was impressed. For the first time, the area was clear of NVA, not because the communists had decided to move, but because they had to.
The next night, after he had gone to sleep, somebody rolled a grenade into his tent. Bosum died on the ground, waiting for the Dust Off.
“What the fuck, they’re trying to kill me
and I’m trying to kill them. Who gives
a shit.”
Trooper, 4th Division
Psychiatric Ward
U.S. Army Hospital, Zama, Japan
12
Me Either
I’M GONNA KILL THE fucker...no, don’t say a word; he’s dead and that’s it.”
“They’ll just send another one.”
“I don’t care about the next one, man. This is the fucker that’s got to go.”
“Listen Cab, it could be trouble.”
“Where the fuck do you think this is—paradise? Look around you. You blind or something? What the hell else can they do to us?”
“How you gonna do it?” one of the troopers asked, shading his eyes from the sun so he could look at Cab.
“Shoot the fucker down, man; just shoot ’em down.”
“It ain’t gonna be easy,” Tracy said.
“Look,” Cab said, slinging his M-16. “The RTO calls him down and when he comes down, we light him up. It’s that simple. Bamb! Another chopper gone, man, that’s all it is.”
“What happens when they find him shot to shit with M-16 and M-60 rounds?” Trowl asked from the back of the group.
“I’ve got two AK’s broken down at the fire base. Next sweep we’ll just take them along.”
There was a long, heavy silence, broken only by the sporadic crack of a distant sniper round. “What about the First Sergeant?” Trummer asked.
“He’s out here, man; he ain’t anywhere else. You don’t see him sitting in Saigon, getting fat. Don’t worry; when that chopper goes down, he ain’t gonna be running over to see who’s left to save.”
“OK,” Kolwitz said, getting up from where he was squatting. “We kill him. but only this one. That’s it—no more!”
“What about the chopper pilot?” someone asked from the back of the group.
“He’s got to go, too.”
“Do you know who he is?” the trooper asked. “One of the guys back at the TOC told me MacGreever’s flying the Old Man now. He ain’t got long till his DEROS.”
“That’s tough, man, but you can’t shoot down half a chopper.”
“I ain’t for killing MacGreever,” Trowl said.
“Me either,” Johnson said, slamming his weapon closed. “He brought us in those 50’s that night, man, and he didn’t have to do it.”
“Count me out,” Trowl said defensively. “I ain’t killing MacGreever just to grease some fucking Lieutenant Colonel.”
“Me neither,” Tracy said, taking off his helmet and licking the salt off his lips.
“He flew Dust Offs, too,” someone else offered.
“Count me out,” another trooper said, nervously fingering the safety on his weapon.
“Me too.”
“Me either.”
“The gooks use greenish-blue tracers.
I swear to God they’re lovely coming
up at you.”
Chopper pilot
Surgical Ward
U.S. Army Hospital, Zama, Japan
13
Choppers
BY THE TIME YOU read this, over 4000 helicopters will have been shot down, a third of all the chopper pilots who have ever been to Nam will have been killed or medically boarded out of the Army, and the average life span of any loach pilot, whether in Nam, Laos, or Cambodia will probably be down to somewhere around three months. But they still volunteer. There is not a Volkswagen in a parking lot at Fort Rucker, Alabama, or at Hunter in Georgia, nor a Scouter or Ford Fairlane running their roads. It’s all Honda 500’s and BSA Scramblers, Corvettes with the heads lowered and Dodges with 3-11 rear ends. The kids who choose to go there are of a type—lean and tough, mechanically oriented, obsessed with speed and daring, and incredibly brave.
My God! One moment the chopper was there, charging in protectively across the perimeter, tail up, and the next it was gone, torn apart in a monstrous ball of flame. For a moment, the sheer unexpected violence of it all held them. Stunned, the t
roopers looking up from the mud, watched what was left of the chopper come hurtling headless out of the flames, a great torn piece of steel plunging blindly on across the paddy.
Southeast Asia has become, above all else, a helicopter war. The slow, bitter attrition of Dien Bien Phu, the gradual strangulation of a whole army simply cannot happen now. We might lose a platoon or a company, maybe even a battalion—but never an army. You can’t mass against gunships or charge through mini guns. And it is difficult to demoralize troopers who know they are half an hour from the nearest hospital or ten minutes away from a cold beer or a hot meal.
Like the troopers themselves, the Pentagon has come to realize it’s a helicopter war. After years of proudly pointing to the skies we own when it is the land we are fighting, they’ve come around. The Huey Tug, a product-improved Huey that will have the power to hover out of ground effect at 4000 feet and at 95 degrees with a 6000-pound payload is currently being developed under military contract by Bell Helicopter Company. The Kowa OH-58, a light observation chopper, will continue to be bought by the government with $64.2 million dollars provided by the military through 1971. The Chinook Ch-47 medium transport helicopter will be funded at the $41.6 million level. The development of a heavy lift helicopter with a payload of twenty to thirty tons will continue with a 21-billion-dollar budget. Another $17.6 million will keep the Cheyenne AH-56A armed assault helicopter under development.
365 Days Page 14