by Orr Kelly
“No problem.”
Lieutenant Prouty, the Mike Platoon commander, put Wardrobe in charge of the operation even though he was an enlisted man. “He encouraged the enlisted men to run missions, if you could prove you were capable, to develop a sense of responsibility,” Wardrobe says. “He never once during this mission interfered with me. To his credit. He was a hell of a fine officer.”
I told everybody in the platoon it was going to be a hairy op. It was voluntary. I didn’t want anybody to go that didn’t think they could cut it. I got ten volunteers. I briefed it. We had a real good plan. We loaded up and took off.
This army pilot was flying treetop level and damn if he didn’t miss it!
He flew right over the top of the hootch. I yelled at him. He banked real hard, back around. They were alerted. When he came back around we were hanging on inside for dear life. The g forces were bad—worse than a roller coaster—when he turned that thing. When he came in for another approach, I was crouched between the two pilots. I saw two VC run out of the hootch and they were shooting back at us. He flared the helo just above the corner of the house where he was supposed to be. But when the bullets started hitting the helo, he adjusted so the helo was in fact over the middle of the roof. He flared the helo to protect himself from the bullets with the underbelly of the helicopter.
But what he forgot about, the bozo—you can say that in your book, that I called him a bozo—was the rear rotor. The tail went into a coconut tree and the rotor disintegrated.
Just before that happened, I had yelled for everybody to get out. Everybody jumped out and slid down this big roof to the ground. They formed their defense perimeter just like we briefed. Hearing that tail rotor go into that coconut tree, I got a sickening feeling. I remember the pilot yelling at me, “Get out!”
Just as I jumped out on the roof, the skid on the helicopter broke the main beam of the hootch’s roof and I fell upside down through the roof, landing on the back of my neck. I would have broken my neck but I had a can of serum albumin taped to my H-harness. It smashed the can. The impact from the fall knocked me unconscious and the whole roof fell on me.
Here I am in this room full of VC and the roof falls in on us. My officer, Prouty, and the radioman, Decker, also fell through the roof. The radioman would have been killed except for the radio. Not only did the roof fall on us, but the helicopter lifted up into the air, the rotors disintegrated, and then it flipped over and landed on top of us, bursting into flames. The door gunner jumped out and he saw my arm sticking out of the rubble and he dug me out. He got Decker and Prouty out, too.
Everybody was all cut up and bruised. Prouty had a dislocated shoulder. We all struggled to get away from this burning helicopter that was going to explode any minute. Bullets were cooking off, rounds, rockets, everything was exploding. It’s a miracle we weren’t all killed.
Finally we got out to the perimeter just as the helicopter blew up. What we didn’t know was that most of the Viet Cong had gone into that bunker. When the helicopter blew up, I never saw anything like it.
I did a head count and I was missing Doc, my corpsman, HM1 Richard Wolfe. I asked for volunteers to go back to the hootch to look for him. I had two volunteers, a guy named Farmer [AO2 Lance G. Farmer], another guy named Crumbo [PH3 Kim H. Crumbo], and they came with me. They were both automatic weapons men. We walked back to the bunker and I noticed the bunker had been cut in half. The whole top of it was gone. And inside all these Viet Cong were fried, crispy critters. Just bodies in there. Piled on top of each other. When the helicopter exploded, it had cut that thing in half, killing everybody inside.
And then about ten feet away, I saw movement, and I went into the bush and drug a wounded VC out of the bush. I drug him with me. He was all banged up, bleeding, and everything. Crumbo and Farmer found Doc. Doc was lying right where he was supposed to be. I shoved the VC prisoner over to Crumbo.
Doc was a great man. Real aggressive. You could always count on him to do everything just like you’d briefed him. And that’s what got him killed. He was exactly where he was supposed to be except when the helicopter broke up, those damn blades had cut the top of his head off.
I didn’t know what to do. I saw the top of Doc’s head and I put it back on his head and I put a bandage around his chin to hold it. The kid, Crumbo, freaked out when he saw that and he grabbed that prisoner and he stuck his Stoner machine gun in his mouth and said, “You rotten son of a bitch, die!”
I yelled at him and said, “Don’t! You’ll regret it.”
I got right in his face and I said, “Kim, don’t do this. You’ll regret it. He’s just a soldier, doing his job.”
And he stood there for the longest time with the barrel stuck in that Viet Cong’s mouth. That guy’s eyes were shut as tight as you can shut ’em. Crumbo, still crying for Doc, pulled the gun out and he didn’t kill him.
I tied this bandanna around Doc’s head. When I picked him up all his brains fell out all over my feet.
We didn’t know what to do. The VC were moving in on us again. We got the word from the Sea Wolf pilots: another main force was coming. We were determined not to leave Doc Wolfe behind. We were trying to carry Wolfe, but he was a big man, over two hundred pounds. He was six foot something. It is awful hard when you’re trying to carry a dead guy. We were having an awful time, not like in the movies. We jumped into dugouts and headed out into the river.
But the Sea Wolf pilots told us the VC were moving ahead of us and were going to ambush us upriver. They ordered us to get back to the crash site. They said they were going to send another helicopter to get us. They thought they could get us out before the main force got there. So we set up a defense perimeter.
While waiting, I think that was the closest I ever came to losing it. For a second there, I felt like just dropping my weapon. Like a kid. I wanted to go home. Just quit. It was dreamlike. I felt for a second like I left my body. I wanted to just tune out. Disappear. Beam me aboard, Scotty. It only lasted a few seconds. And in that moment, I knew the value of BUD/S [basic underwater demolition/SEAL training] and Hell Week and the mud and all the harassment. An ordinary guy would quit. A SEAL can’t quit. Those guys were really whipped, still looking to me for leadership. We were still in a jam. The VC were coming. Lieutenant Prouty, with his banged up shoulder, never interfered with my leadership.
Finally, they sent us a helo and lifted us out before the main force got there. And we were a mess. Everybody was banged up, cut up, bruised, battered, shaken pretty bad.
I guess that was my worst disaster. That was really rough to lose a great man like Doc.
CHAPTER
19
The Sting
Wardrobe’s obsession with efforts to avoid killing innocent people took an unexpected turn. He tells what happened:
We went up into this no-man’s area where the boats always got ambushed. And the chaplain, for some reason, wanted to come along that night. I was really anxious that night. I had been careful up to then, avoiding accidentally shooting fishermen who were curfew violators. But this area had a terrible reputation. It was a 100 percent free-fire zone. Every time we went up there we knew we were going to get into it. So I had a little different attitude.
We inserted in a French graveyard right where the river had a Y. Right in the middle of the little peninsula was the graveyard. We set up a static ambush right there among the grave markers. No sooner had we got set up than the boats ran into a sampan with two armed Viet Cong and took them prisoner. They broke radio silence and asked me what to do.
I said, “Shut up and get out of the area.”
We sat there for about an hour and the next thing I know I heard this loud noise and here comes an ocean-going junk to our right. It was full of supplies. It was bigger than your average Vietnamese boat. It had a high stern area and had a tiller and was heavily laden. It had a big outboard engine.
It was three or four o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t see the guy at the tiller clearly but I thought he
was armed. I shot him. As soon as I opened up, the whole platoon opened up. We got no return fire at all. We ran out into the river and grabbed the boat but we couldn’t find the body. When we checked out the boat, we found a frightened old woman who had apparently been sleeping down in the bilges, and that’s what had saved her.
My interpreter said she said we had just killed her husband and they were just farmers and they were bringing the food to market and the reason they violated the curfew is they were trying to avoid tax collectors.
I was devastated. I thought that I had had the power in me. All these years, I had been trying to be so humane, so discretionary, to keep from doing that. And my worst nightmare had finally come true. I thought that I had killed an innocent person. Unintentionally, of course, but it bothered me real bad.
I would not go out on any operations. For the next two or three weeks I would not do anything. I gave this woman, out of guilt, all my money. I got my men and I made them patch her boat. I ordered them to overhaul the engines.
Lieutenant Prouty didn’t know what to do.
He said, “You’ve got to get over this. I’ve got to have my old Gene back.”
I told him I was never going to fight in this stupid war again and all I cared about was this woman. I waited on her, brought her breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Everybody on Seafloat came up to me and said, “What you’ve done is really noble but you’ve got to get over your grief.”
I said, “I want volunteers. When I get her boat repaired, I’m going to take her back up to the graveyard.”
They said, “You can’t go there in broad daylight.”
I said, “I know. I want volunteers.”
I couldn’t believe what happened next. The Swift boat navy guys, they were so proud of what we were doing for this old woman, they volunteered, with two boats. So we towed her boat. We had big fifty-pound sacks of rice. We had taken up a collection. She had hundreds of American dollars. She had food, everything. She was a rich woman.
And we towed her back to that French graveyard where we had ambushed her and her husband and let her go. I even gave her a chart. She said she knew how to get home from there. She sailed off crying. I was crying, waving good-bye.
As she went away, the other boat was holding off to the right, right where the ambush had taken place. In this area, we experienced extreme tidal ranges. No one had been up there since two weeks before. The tides were known to take a body out and then bring the body back in. And there was the body. The other boat crew noticed it floating in the water. So they hauled it alongside. It turned out the guy was an NVA adviser. They pulled the documents out of his pocket.
They called over on the radio and they said, “Hey, Wardrobe. We just found her old man. Guess what?”
This guy was an NVA adviser and they were taking that food to a sapper team we eventually hit. They were taking them their food rations.
And she’s sailing away, with all our money and all the riches we bestowed on her.
The officer in charge of the other boat said, “You want to go get her?”
I told them, “No, let her go. That’s the biggest con I’ve ever had.” I call it “the sting.” That woman played that role for two weeks to the hilt. She never confessed they were VC.
Besides, I grew from that experience, real internal growth. As soon as we found that body, in the NVA uniform, with the documents, it felt like a hundred-pound weight had been taken off my shoulder. I felt liberated. I had not killed an innocent man.
CHAPTER
20
Like a Shooting Gallery
Jack Luksik, who had surveyed the beaches of Vietnam as a UDT frogman, became a SEAL in 1967. This is his account of his introduction to ground combat in the southern part of Vietnam:
In 1967, some selected people were drafted into the [SEAL] teams from UDT. That didn’t ride very well with some of the guys in the teams. But I volunteered to go and it worked out fine.
I was in SEAL Team ONE in the Rung Sat Special Zone trying to keep the Viet Cong from sinking ships. This was from November or December 1967 through May 1968.
We had very little of the restrictions that were later put on. We had a lot of flexibility. But that particular platoon was a hard luck platoon. On our third patrol, Frank Antoine, who was the point man, had just relieved Lenny Scott, who was our other point man. They had just switched off.
We were strung out probably a hundred yards in the brush—a full platoon. This is in the daytime.
Frank stood up. Him and two LDNN [Vietnamese SEALs] scouts were dropped.
We had patrolled into, unknowingly, a base camp. But the platoon commander probably didn’t realize we were in the middle of a base camp. Right then he brought up the rest of the platoon. It probably would have been more prudent to grab the dead bodies and back out. What he did was pull the platoon right up into the center of this place.
He pulled the platoon into the kill zone and basically took two or three more casualties. Nobody else got killed. We were taking fire from about 360 degrees. They probably shot as many of their own as they did of us. We were right in the center. In a way, it was kind of nice. We could attack from any direction.
One comical thing. Lenny Scott, the other point man, had gotten into the prone position.
He hollered, “Goddamnit!”
He had gotten shot in the ass. Later, we figured the round had probably bounced off something else before it hit him. It went into the cheek of his butt but it was kind of funny. In retrospect, even he got a chuckle out of it.
My radio got shot. I was very fortunate. I had a collapsible canteen on top of the radio. The round hit the canteen and then the radio and knocked me on my face. I had this hot liquid pouring over my head and I couldn’t see. It ran down into my eyes. I knew I’d been hit. I’d just got knocked down. Son of a gun, I must be shot in the head because I don’t feel any pain.
We were told in combat med, if you get hit in the head, you’re not going to feel any pain. So I thought, oh, jeez! So I had to take time out from the firefight and I’m trying to figure out … feeling over my head and it dawned on me, aha. It’s my canteen. Hey, I’m not shot. That’s great. I was a happy dude.
Fortunately, everybody saved my place and I got up and picked up the fight.
We had a Sea Wolf fire team for gunfire support and cover. They were on thirty-minute call. They got into the air out of Nha Be pretty quick. Basically, they pulled our butt out of the fire.
They laid an excellent base of fire around us while we called up two slicks. We had moved from where we were, which was really a dense thicket, into more of a clearing. After the Sea Wolfe fire team had laid down this great base of fire, we set up an LZ [landing zone], a hot LZ.
The first slick came in. We McGuire-rigged out the two dead scouts and Antoine. [A McGuire rig is an emergency procedure in which one or more persons are attached to a line dangling from a helicopter and transported while hanging below the craft.] I don’t know whether that helo dropped the McGuire rig and came back or whether it was two other slicks. Then we jumped on board. The two birds took off. We had everybody.
The radioman is the last guy in, even though my radio was out. I was hanging on the skids—standing on the skids, not quite inside the bird. It took off and we were taking a lot of fire. We’re flying and I’m looking at the instrument panel of the helo and all I’m seeing is red lights. The guy had all kinds of problems but he nursed it into Nha Be.
Both those birds had taken so many rounds that they decided to just strip them for parts and junk the air frames. I felt we were very fortunate. Certainly Frank Antoine wasn’t fortunate, but I thought frogman luck did us well, considering what we stepped into. We came out smelling like a rose.
There was a lot of criticism of the platoon commander that he shouldn’t have brought the whole platoon up. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
How many people were in the base camp?
From the volume of fire we were ta
king, there must have been thirty or forty people around. They undoubtedly had heard us coming through the dense vegetation leading up to that spot.
What did you expect when you were going there?
We had no intel to indicate there was a base camp there. The purpose of the patrol—we had a predawn insertion—was supposed to be a daylight movement through space where nobody was supposed to be, moving out to a stream junction and setting up an ambush site for the following night.
Just prior to Tet, we worked with [Lt. Richard] Marcinko’s platoon in Binh Thuy.
We were patrolling through a banana plantation and came upon a bunker. We were getting fire from the bunker. The banana trees are situated on mounds. So we took cover behind a mound, basically line abreast behind the mound. We were exchanging shots with the bunker.
We sent out a flanker, our grenadier. He was flanking to the right, coming around, getting on top of the bunker, and he was going to toss in a couple of grenades.
Could you see your flanker?
Oh, yeah, we could easily see. He was out of view of the door of the bunker. We were watching his progress, keeping the people in the bunker busy until he got over there.
Well, just as he was getting on top of the bunker, this kid Roy Keith, for whatever reason, decided to make a one-man attack, right up the middle. And the whole platoon, pretty much in unison, told him to get down. But he jumped up, headed straight for the hole, the entrance, at the back of this bunker.
And right about that time, the occupants of the bunker decided it probably wasn’t a healthy place to be. Three or four of them exited. But before the first Viet Cong had gotten out of the bunker itself and before our flanker had gotten in place to throw a grenade, Keith came within about five foot of the door of the bunker.
The first guy out had an AK on full automatic and damn near cut Keith in half, killed him on the spot. And then, the first guy came out. Our flanker, he had an M79 grenade launcher with canister rounds and nicely took off the guy’s head. Before he could reload, the other two or three came out and took off.