Allen was not the boasting type; he did not go around pretending that he was his old man, “punching guys in the chin and grabbing butts and bullshitting with the guys,” as Shelton later put it. He lived in his father’s shadow but did not seem overwhelmed by it. He loved his father and was not put off by requests to talk about him. He had some of his father’s traits but not all. General Allen believed that a good infantryman always wore his web gear, and that was something Terry Jr. was religious about; the belt and suspenders with the hooks were part of his uniform every day in the field. The general slept on the ground with a bedroll during wartime; Terry preferred a cot. He was more reserved than his father, less boisterous in showing that he was one of the guys. The father didn’t mind looking like he had been roughing it. The son was insistent about appearing clean shaven. Every morning, wherever he was, he shaved with a straight razor. If all he had was his helmet, he filled the steel pot with cold water, washed his face, lathered with a brush, and shaved slowly and carefully while looking into a little stainless steel mirror. According to Shelton’s recollections, if the son once aspired to reach or surpass his father’s rank, he had abandoned that dream by the time of their late-night chats. “I’ll never make general,” Shelton remembered Allen saying to him.
Shelton sensed, much as the estranged wife Jean Allen had during Terry’s emergency leave in El Paso, that the realization that he would not make general was accompanied by, or perhaps caused by, a certain disillusionment with the military and a desire to do something else when he finished his war tour. Allen and Shelton talked about setting up a deluxe concierge service: businesses that needed something done would come to them and they would find the right subcontractor for the job. “Terry thought it was a great idea,” Shelton recalled. He also talked about going into financial management.
At his home on Cumberland Circle in El Paso, Terry’s father knew nothing about his son’s apparent turn away from the life they had so carefully plotted together. The general, though suffering from mental deterioration, was not altogether gone. He understood when Mary Fran told him that Terry’s marriage had gone to hell. He still had hundreds of contacts spread across the military world, friends from the officer corps and former soldiers who had fought for him with the Big Red One and the Timberwolves, and he recruited one of them to check on his son. James A. Snow was in Vietnam working for Pacific Architects and Engineers, one of the large contractors employed by the U.S. military in its massive effort to pave and build over much of South Vietnam. At the general’s request Snow tracked down Terry Jr. during the Uniontown assignment at Bien Hoa. “It was a highlight of my life,” Snow wrote later of the meeting. He saw no signs of trouble. Terry seemed to be performing his duties well and “filling the ‘Allen Boots’ to the letter.” After taking over the Second of the Twenty-eighth under “adverse conditions,” replacing a fired commander, he had made his battalion “the first of the First.” It appeared obvious to Snow that Lieutenant Colonel Allen had won the “respect and high regard” of his men. “We talked long that night,” Snow recounted. “I must say that, short of being with his loved ones, he was doing what he wanted to do; what he was trained for; and doing it outstandingly!” At the end of the night Terry Jr. gave Snow a certificate naming him an honorary “Black Lion Extraordinaire—Vincit Amor Patriae.” Love of Country Conquers.
Nothing to worry about in this report. It could not have been rosier had it been written by the publicists at MACV headquarters or in Lai Khe.
The combat readiness test for Delta Company, its final exam of sorts, was supposed to take place on September 25, less than a week after Allen, Shelton, and most of the rest of the battalion returned to Lai Khe from the Uniontown operation, but it never really happened. Midway through the test, Delta was sent off to seal a nearby village where First Division engineers were repairing a bridge. They stayed at the village two days, and when they returned to Lai Khe, the brigade commander told Welch his company had done enough to pass the readiness test. At the end of a short critique Welch got an operation order. “We go out tomorrow as part of the battalion on a real hot operation,” he wrote to his wife that night. “This time we’re acting on real reliable recent information. We should be able to get something. Everyone’s really up for it…. I can’t say that I’ve done all I can—I can always do a little more right up to the time some of mine get into it. And then I can really help—once I know where Charlie is, I’m sure I can get him. I shouldn’t even say that—it’s silly. But if we are ‘successful in combat,’ that’s all and everything I can ask for over here.”
FOR THE U.S. Army rifle companies in Vietnam, combat usually took place during what were known as search-and-destroy missions. In later years this terminology would evoke images of soldiers searching Vietnamese villages and destroying them, thatched roofs set aflame with Zippo lighters or napalm. The original concept, when the phrase was coined by General Westmoreland and his aides at MACV headquarters, was no less violent but more precise in its military connotation. Search and destroy meant sending infantrymen into the jungle and countryside in search of enemy units and base areas, finding them and fixing them in place, engaging them if possible, and destroying them with massive firepower, preferably from a distance through artillery and air. Even though the larger American military objective in Vietnam was essentially defensive—to stop the North from overrunning the South—the search-and-destroy mission reflected an offensive strategy designed to reach that objective. Westmoreland and his staff believed that they could prevail through a campaign of attrition, much like General Grant won the Civil War. If they could pile up body counts in their favor, they thought, sooner or later North Vietnam would relent and pull back.
Major General DePuy, one of Westmoreland’s top infantry strategists, and himself commander of the Big Red One from March 1966 to February 1967, had been the godfather of search-and-destroy missions as the best way to fight a war with no front lines against an enemy whose favorite tactic was the ambush. DePuy often used Thunder Road as an example. If U.S. troops remained defensive and merely tried to protect supply lines along Route 13, they could be subjected endlessly to ambushes unless they lined twenty battalions up and down the road. Mere defensive protection was a “forlorn strategy,” he told Associated Press correspondent Malcolm W. Browne. “The only way to keep the road open is to attack the Viet Cong units which in turn have been attacking the road.” This same military theory was applied to the larger war. But the problem was in finding the enemy forces and getting them to stand and fight. In a moment of frustration DePuy once said that while the VC were skilled at staging ambushes, “that was kind of a coward’s way of fighting the war.” He could not have meant this literally, for if he did he was calling every American company cowardly. They sent out ambush patrols every night—and was it not an ambush when Clark Welch’s recon patrol staged its surprise attack on the L-shaped trail in the predawn darkness? What he meant was that the VC were not making it easy for American forces.
At their First Division base camp in Lai Khe, the 2/28 Black Lions sat smack in the middle of the Big Red One’s 5,700-square-mile area of operations. It was prime search-and-destroy territory. To the east was War Zone D, to the west War Zone C, to the southwest the Iron Triangle, to the north the Long Nguyen Secret Zone. Enemy forces operated in all of them, part of a region known to the war planners in Hanoi as the B2 Front. Along with several indigenous Viet Cong guerrilla units, the three regiments of the regular army Ninth Viet Cong Division, starting with Vo Minh Triet’s First Regiment, had been roaming the fields and jungles of the B2 Front for several years, joined later by other regiments and the Seventh Division of the North Vietnamese Army, all supported by a string of logistical units. As disparate as these elements seemed, they were thought of as one seamless operation, controlled by political and military leadership from Hanoi, which had set up mobile forward command posts run by the Central Office for South Viet Nam (COSVN) and its military affairs department in the dense jungl
es of the Fishhook area near the Cambodian border north of Tay Ninh.
By the time Terry Allen Jr., Jim Shelton, Jim George, and Clark Welch reached their respective positions with the Black Lions battalion, the First Division had been searching for these units for more than eighteen months, since early 1966, undertaking two massive operations, Junction City and Cedar Falls, and a score of lesser ones. The enemy had not been destroyed, not even by the most optimistic American account, but there had been claims of victories large and small. Three hundred and eighty-nine Viet Cong killed in Operation Cedar Falls. Seventeen hundred tons of rice captured in Operation Tucson. A cache of 350 weapons and 450 rounds of ammunition found in Operation Manhattan. Nearly eight thousand acres of jungle cleared by the huge Rome plows in Operation Paul Bunyan. In all, they killed (or claimed to have counted the bodies of) more than four thousand enemy soldiers, captured thousands more documents, and unearthed dozens of base camps and vast tunnel complexes with underground hospitals, sewing rooms, and mine factories. Every body count, every cache of war materiel, every enemy document, was used by MACV as proof of progress and evidence in the case against the claims of stalemate. If the war in Vietnam could be decided by statistics, no doubt the Americans would win.
THE OTHER SIDE was fully aware of the American search-and-destroy strategy, according to Vo Minh Triet, deputy commander of the First Regiment of the VC’s Ninth Infantry Division. His response was: If they can’t find us, how can they destroy us?
There was a touch of bravado to his boast, for his First Regiment had been roughed up in several major battles with the Americans over the previous two years, but it was valid in one sense. The Viet Cong had a far easier time finding the Americans than the other way around. Their advantage was obvious long before the moment of combat. Among the Vietnamese living inside the village of Lai Khe were people who secretly worked for the Viet Cong and regularly provided information. One such informant, whose loyalties were misjudged by the Americans until they killed him in an ambush firefight, was the man who had served as the barber for Jim George’s Alpha Company. Some VC supporters inside Lai Khe communicated with the Ninth Division by leaving messages in a bottle at a pickup point in the jungle nearby. There was also a special reconnaissance team from the VC Ninth Division that worked stealthily around the perimeter of the Lai Khe base camp. Soldiers on this team climbed trees to observe the Big Red One’s daily operations and relayed reports over hard-line telephones hidden in the dense brush. They counted precisely how many soldiers were leaving camp every day. “They saw them and let us know,” said Triet.
If the early warning system failed, the Americans in any case were easy to follow once they were on the move. The First Division was vastly superior to the Ninth VC in terms of airpower and military hardware, but its reliance on technology and heavy equipment also made it easily detectable. What Triet and his men feared most, even more than the heavy pounding from B-52s, were airborne squads that swooped down on them in helicopter raids. They considered speed more disruptive and dangerous than power, because with speed the Americans could confront them before they were ready to fight, or escape, or go underground. They respected the Big Red Brothers for power and ferocity but not speed. First Division maneuvers seemed predictable, cautious, and slow to develop. “If we saw an observation plane, we knew the American ground forces were coming in,” Triet recalled. Soon would follow artillery and air strikes and napalm-grazed landing zones and a squadron of supply helicopters, all in a familiar routine. “So,” Triet said, “unexpected attacks were not many.”
Just as General DePuy disparaged the Viet Cong for relying on “cowardly” ambushes, the military rhetoric from Hanoi sounded harshly critical of American combat methods. “Their basic fighting methods are the following: Seek ways to quickly get away from liberation troops and determine enemy and friendly lines in order to call for help from air and artillery units,” wrote Brigadier General Vuong Thua Vu that fall, according to a Hanoi Domestic Service report translated by the CIA. “This is a very monotonous and outmoded fighting method of a cowardly but aggressive army.” By Vu’s account this method virtually emasculated the infantrymen of the Big Red One. While air force and artillery units seized the primary offensive role, infantry forces were “given the secondary role of searching and pinning down enemy troops”—a task at which “they are not efficient.”
There were two keys to success for communist forces facing American search-and-destroy missions, Vu wrote. The first was to get so close to the enemy during battle that artillery and air power could not be effective. In the metaphorical language of the Vietnamese, this tactic was popularized by a saying: “Grab the enemy by the belt and hang on.” The second element was surprise. “The side which is caught by surprise will be embarrassed and unable to capture the initiative. The side which is caught by surprise will be at a loss and be quickly annihilated.” In several recent battles, Vu wrote, the other side seemed surprised. “When he believed we attacked from the east, we attacked from the west. When he believed we stopped, we attacked again. When he believed we advanced, we stopped. Truth and falsehood, falsehood and truth. This completely confused the enemy.”
During the same week that Clark Welch was concluding his training of Delta Company, liberation forces were holding their Second Congress of Emulatory Heroic Combatants at a base camp deep in the jungle north of Tay Ninh. More than two hundred delegates arrived from all fronts. Tran Quoc Vinh, deputy political commissar of the People’s Army of Vietnam forces in the South, gave a speech stressing “seven manifestations of revolutionary heroism.” The heroic soldier, he said, must be staunch, be absolutely loyal, have a firm grasp of the revolutionary offensive, ardently love his fellow fighters, associate his personal interest with the revolution’s by “adequately resolving the problems of life and death, happiness and hardship, and individual and collective welfare,” scrupulously implement orders, and be self-reliant and creative “in finding every ways and means of fighting the enemy.”
The military exploits of the VC Ninth Division (whose slogan was “To be victorious everywhere and completely wipe out enemy forces in every attack”) were extolled, and particular honor was given to its oldest unit, the First Regiment. Three members of the regiment, Ta Guang Ty, Doan Hoang Minh, and Nguyen Duc Nghia, were named Hero of the People’s Armed Forces, and the regiment itself was cited as “the best regiment of the Eastern Nam Bo’s main-force contingent.” Vo Minh Triet’s men were given a banner with sixteen words embroidered in gold:
With loyalty and bravery
Overcoming all difficulties
Continually recording achievements
Destroying the puppets, defeating the Americans
In reality the storied VC regiment had not so much prevailed as survived. It had been the target of American searches for two long years, and though it was not destroyed, even its own glorifying historians acknowledged that it had been subject to “fierce American attacks” during the 1966–67 dry season (roughly November through March). Documents captured by a unit of the Fifth U.S. Special Forces Group indicated that there was some “friction…in relations between officers and men” in the aftermath of the battles, and an accompanying “loss of revolutionary pride” that was exhibited through “escapism and demoralization…lack of determination to seek and fight the enemy…weariness and the inclination to enjoy some rest…lack of a sense of responsibility and lack of a sense of discipline.” Regular army soldiers who became casualties during that season had been replaced by fresh recruits from the provinces and filler troops marching down from the north along the Ho Chi Minh trail.
The supply system, less easy to replace, was a mess. “A number of rice and ammunition depots had to be scattered or evacuated to evade enemy mopping up operations,” Ninth Division historians later wrote, and the rainy season of 1967 made “the transportation of material and logistical supplies even more difficult.” As a way to recover from the earlier battles and to help with the resupply effort, th
e First Regiment had been given a new mission in the summer and early fall of 1967. It was put in charge of moving supplies and defending the transportation corridor that cut across from War Zone D to War Zone C.
Truth and falsehood, falsehood and truth. As much as the VC First Regiment prided itself on confusing its foes, this did not mean that the Americans were unaware of what Triet’s unit was doing. From documents recovered in battle and information gleaned from Chieu Hoi (a former VC who went over to the other side), the Big Red One had detailed and basically accurate intelligence on the enemy unit. In the special intelligence estimates for September and October 1967 seen by First Division commanders at Lai Khe, the First Regiment (or 271st, as the Americans called it), was listed with a battle strength of fifteen hundred soldiers, bolstered by three hundred men from a rear services supply group, three hundred guerrilla fighters from the Phu Loi battalion, and another two to three hundred local VC forces. The latest evidence also showed that the regiment was well armed, with heavy machine guns and 82-millimeter mortar ammo, but desperately hungry, suffering from a lack of rice, and always on the move. It was said to have marched from War Zone D into a new supply area in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone north of Lai Khe along the southern border of Binh Long province. It was a sparsely populated area (Binh Long was the sixth-least populous of South Vietnam’s forty-three provinces) of scrubby, rolling terrain and moderate-growth jungles. From their interpretation of captured documents, American intelligence officers concluded that soldiers in the Viet Cong regiment were “becoming increasingly disoriented and vulnerable.”
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