This account of my experience in Vietnam is dedicated to Leslie Hunt. He was a combat pilot, a bonafide WWII hero, my oldest brother, and he never told a war story to any of his sons, and certainly never to me.
We lived in different worlds. The age difference (24 years) made relating to each other nearly impossible. But had Les lived long enough, I would have eventually spent significant time debriefing him about every mission he flew in the Pacific and every related experience at sea. Then, I would have used his story to write a book, featuring a squadron of torpedo bombers off the USS Calpins.
At some level, of course, I wanted Les to ask me about my own war experience, in Vietnam. That was the true hypocrisy of my little debriefing plan. Not that my experience compared to his. I was no hero. I was fired upon several times, but I never had the occasion to return the favor with my own weapon. If I vanquished the enemy, it was by means of my field radio and the more heroic deeds of others.
But I needed to tell my story none the less. I needed to set the record straight. I needed a reality check. I needed to be elevated in the eyes of my oldest brother, whom I worshiped as a child.
But it was not to be.
Immediately after Vietnam, Les didn't ask a single question about my experience. In those years I'm not sure he even knew I had been to Vietnam. Twenty years later he wanted me to tell my story to the whole family, at a family gathering. But I was irritated that he had never asked such questions before this event, and I angrily declined.
I think I may have hurt his feelings. My anger was a wedge between us, and I don't think he knew what the hell was going on.
But in truth, I've always found it nearly impossible to talk about that strange year in my life. In the past when I've started talking about the war my voice would become strained, and my mind would flash on irrelevant things. Talking about it put me in the mind-set that was similar to how I felt when I was in country. And when I was in country I was numb and dumb most of the time.
I've attempted to write about my experience over and over again. But always in the past my writing has evoked the same numb and dumb feelings, serving to really limit what I could write effectively. I've produced several short editorial type essays filled with metaphors and references to facts that could be interpreted many different ways. It's always been good stuff, but people who read those essays probably think that either I was some sort of Rambo, or that I'm the biggest liar west of the Mississippi.
About a month before Les died I visited with him. He brought out his Pilot's Log, and commented that I might find it interesting, even though he found it boring. The combat missions were written in green, and there was a lot of green ink. He also brought out a box full of memorabilia. I had heard from my parents that Les had lost most of his original squadron by the end of the war, and the box was full of pictures of his fellow fliers. It also contained his Distinguished Flying Cross.
But he was tired, in pain, and we didn't really get going on serious story telling. There just wasn't the time. As it turned out, there wasn't any time at all.
I was able to share the only truth I learned from my experience at war. In a letter I wrote to Les I told him, in part,
ì...What survived is my sense of honor. Maybe that was Dad. Maybe it was my hero Les. Maybe it is my perception of the world after being shot at a few times. I know this: any soldier (or pilot) who has had to make a sudden personal decision, regardless of orders or duty, some deadly commitment to some grim action on the battle field, can testify that honor is not something anyone can fail to ignore. Honor, in spite of our more primitive inclinations toward self preservation, stands in total defiance of common sense and reminds our most unwilling self that some things are worth dying for. At the top of everyone's list is simply family and friends.
...It's what keeps every father going.î
Les was touched by that. He asked me what else I had written about the war, and I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn't written anything in years.
..And so, I decided to cut to the chase and tell my own story.
It occurred to me after Les died that one reason I couldn't write about Vietnam was that every story I had tried to tell somehow seemed out of context. I remember Vietnam as a day-in-day-out experience, where everything happened in the context of something else. In the telling, I have always had trouble sticking to the story, because any single event triggered so many other images that were not part of the story I was trying to tell, even though my mind clearly thought they were important. After Les died, it occurred to me that I didn't have war stories so much as I had a single story, that started on day one and ended on my flight home.
And so, thinking about the Les Hunt Pilots' Log, I decided to see if I could create my own log, in retrospect, and cover the whole year in an abbreviated chronological fashion.
That's not exactly how this thing has turned out, but we'll call it a log anyway.
...Better late than never, Les.
© 1997 William D. Hunt, 2418 Cherrywood Ct., Hanford, California 93230 // E-mail: WHunt47740@AOL.CO
Prolog To The Log
I was 25 years old......young.
...Though I didn't feel that way at the time. Everything is relative, I suppose. I was much older than most guys who traveled to Vietnam for the first time. By combat zone standards I was middle-aged. My commanding officers were all old men in their thirties.
I hadn't been in a regular uniform for nearly four years, unless it was to get a ride free on a military transport.
My Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) was Counterintelligence Special Agent. I was not the kind of spook who goes out and collects intelligence, or operates nets of spies who collect intelligence. I was the kind of spook who gathered evidence to hopefully catch a spy in the act of treason, or at the very least, disloyalty.
The Army spent serious money training me to be a good investigator. And, after four years on the job, working in civilian clothes, including 18 months in Germany, I had been the primary field investigator for one major investigation of suspected espionage and one major investigation of suspected sabotage. I had provided VIP bodyguard protection for the wife of NATO's supreme commander, when death threats were in the air. I had conducted several security inspections of facilities charged with the maintenance of several tons of top secret documents. But mostly, I had conducted about a thousand background investigations for the purposes of helping grant security clearances to GI's of every stripe, rank and position.
Never during the course of an investigation had I revealed my Staff Sergeant rank.
When I arrived in Saigon I expected to be assigned to duty that was consistent with my training, experience and expertise.
...I was wrong about that.
Boeing 747 all the way from Travis AFB. Had mechanical problems upon landing in Manila just to let off the stewardesses. Turned out to be a nine-hour delay getting into Saigon. They checked us into a Manila hotel, then checked us out again. Apparently they replaced an engine.
Because of delay we approached Saigon at night, about 3am. Unlimited visibility. Hundreds of night flares were in the sky for as far as the eye could see. Spooky. My thoughts: This is a war zone, and people are shooting at each other down there. I was made speechless by the sudden reality below. The plane came over Tan Son Nhut (Saigon) airport at about 5000 feet and did a cork-screw down to the landing strip. A cork-screw landing in a 747. Wow.
MP took my dollars and gave me MPC...Military Payment Certificates. Orders read: Military Assistance Command Vietnam...MACV...pronounced Mac-Vee. Got on bus, still dark. MACV compound with many WWII style two-story wooden barracks was two miles down the road. Directed to a barracks. Hit the rack. Still dark.
Mommasans came into barracks to clean latrine about 9am. GI's leaving Vietnam and GI's coming in were in the same barracks. They were from two different worlds. Outgoing guys were casual around Mommasans in latrine even though no GI had on more than underwear. First culture shock...nudity and bathroom behavior was not a Vietnamese hang-up. It sure was mine.
Most incoming GI's to MACV were career guys on second or third tour. Bunkmate below me was on second tour and terrified that he was going to be reassigned to the bush. Bunkmate next to me was on second tour and very casual. Later told me he thought killing was easy and wouldn't mine doing it professionally for the Mafia back home. A hit man...I was feeling like a babe in the woods.
We were briefed about compound security procedures in case there's an attack and told to just stand by. Around noon, processing started. First to the quartermaster for sets of jungle fatigues. Then I was given TAC gear...a web belt, web harness, ammo pouch, large field bandage pouch with bandage, canteen, helmet, flack vest and other items. Issued M-16 with eight clips of ammo...the first live ammo I had experienced in the Army outside a firing range or my VIP protection duty...another strange experience, because suddenly live ammo was a casual thing and all my training had been no brass, no ammo sergeant, when leaving the range. Embarrassingly, I admitted to my Mafia friend that I had no idea how to operate an M16...I had been trained on an M14 four years earlier and had served in civilian clothes ever since. All my most recent training had been with 45 automatic and 38 revolver. My buddy showed me what I needed to know and helped me put my web gear together. I was grateful.
That night, way after midnight, one of the outgoing GI's sat outside the barracks on the steps and sang loudly while strumming a guitar. It was a song he had obviously made up, or was making up as he went along. It was sssoooo mournful. It was more like a dog howling at the moon. Ordinarily, someone making that much noise around a barracks that late at night would be yelled at by someone, and maybe even arrested by MPs. But no one said a word. Not one word. We let him go on for hours.
October 1971
Next day my presence was requested at a briefing for incoming personnel. An officer gave us a standard rap on how to conduct oneself around Vietnamese who are just like you. Then we were to return in the afternoon for our orders that would tell us where in this great country we were headed.
Orders said: MACV Team 72, Muc Hoa, pronounced Muck Wha. I was to be a Phung Hoang Advisor, pronounced Phung Wong. That was a program targeted at the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) and was the result, supposedly, of the Vietnamization of the old CIA Phoenix Program (in fact Phung Hoang means Phoenix in Vietnamese).
I understood from my original intelligence training, years earlier in Maryland, that the VCI was a shadow government that organized all Viet Cong sympathizers in the villages and hamlets. All I knew about the old CIA Phoenix program was that it took a great deal of political heat back home for being a clandestine program that tended to terminate Vietnamese suspected of being Viet Cong agents or political leaders.
Also told that the school to train Phung Hoang Advisors had been recently closed, what with the downsizing of the American involvement in Vietnam, and all. I would have to get my training OJT.
My Mafia friend told me that Muc Hoa was a heavy duty assignment, where there had been a lot of big actions in the past. Stupid thought: looks like I might finally have a war story to share with my big brothers. A small story was something I was actually looking forward to, like an idiot.
About day three in country I headed for the MACV gate to catch a bus back to the airport for transportation to Can Tho, pronounced Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, which was considered Military Region IV (or IV Core). I was told that I would be met there and transported on to Muc Hoa, where I would receive further orders.
No bus in sight, so I decided to walk, carrying my duffel bag. After a few hundred yards I was asked by a Vietnamese soldier in a clean crisp uniform, driving a perfectly new American jeep, if I wanted a ride. I accepted, thinking this was a scene right out a John Wayne movie showing the dedicated local patriot helping out the young American come to help save his country. We pulled up to the terminal and he charged me taxi fare. I was so shocked I paid. So much for John Wayne movies and helpful allies. Small time military corruption was everywhere, and I had just experienced a small taste.
The plane that took me to Can Tho was an air America, civilian piloted plane, which I soon learned was part of large fleet of planes owned and operated by the CIA. Not a secret...common knowledge. They even made a movie about Air America. But the movie failed to show how extensive this air service was. There were thousands of planes operated by the CIA. All sorts of planes. For Advisors, Air America was everywhere...your taxi to all parts of Vietnam...and the CIA's ability to re-supply its parallel war effort with no one really looking.
In Can Tho I waited around for about one hour, and was met by a military clerk from Muc Hoa. Nice kid, about 20 years old, a Spec 4. He accompanied me out to a waiting helicopter on the tarmac, and soon we were off. My first time in a helicopter. Felt like an elevator going up. A very odd thing, hovering, and then flying.
About an hour later, Muc Hoa was below. The landing strip had about three feet of water covering the entire surface. Next to this lake was the Province MACV headquarters compound for Kien Toung Province, MACV Team 72. We landed on a helicopter pad set on 55 gallon oil drums that were just high enough to clear the flood waters (typical of the rainy season, I was informed). The pad was next to a large dirt berm (a long narrow hard packed pile of dirt) that surrounded Team 72 headquarters, with an assortment of wooden buildings design to house about 60 people at one time. Only about 20 advisors were still assigned to Province duty, and the number was falling rapidly. On the other side of the airport lake was a Vietnamese military supply company, in a much bigger compound.
Introduced to a Major, who was in charge of the Phung Hoang program for the Province, which included four Districts. I was to replace one of his District Phung Hoang Advisors, a sergeant in Twyen Bien District, pronounced twin Bin . The sergeant was leaving Vietnam in a day or two. He would show me the ropes, and that was about all I was told about this wonderful program...or anything else.
After processing with the clerk, I was put in a boat, a 16 foot Boston Whaler, which could seat about eight people (more in a pinch). It had twin 40hp outboard motors and a machine gun mounted up front. The river, called the Van Co Tam, was about 500 yards wide at Province headquarters. We raced along heading east for about twenty minutes, and then entered a more narrow branch (about 50 yards wide) that eventually took us to the District headquarters...about 45 minutes by outboard. Apparently one could make the same trip by jeep in the dry season, but everyone used the water. I was worried the whole time about possible snipers from the bank, and spent the ride hunkered down into the bottom of the boat, like the green troop that I was. After all, I had no idea about what to expect next.
The biggest culture shock was my first view of my new home, the Vietnamese District Headquarters for Twyen Bien District. We docked at a small wooden dock. A militia soldier was busy fishing from the dock with a hand grenade. A gate leading into the compound had two soldiers outside wearing shower shoes for foot gear and mismatched uniforms that were cheap and poorly kept. Every building looked like a long forgotten, run-down, poverty stricken street scene that was worse than my only previous experience viewing poor sections of Tiajuana, Mexico. Spread out on both sides of the compound, along the river, were huts with families living in conditions that I didn't know even existed.
Next to an old French building (50-year-old-white-peeling-paint over cracked-concrete architecture that was right out of the 20's) stood the American team house (two by fours and plywood, with screened windows nearly surrounding the place).
I was introduced to the guy I was to replace. He introduced me to my interpreters and to the Senior District Advisor (SDA), Major Robert Mays, career infantry on his third tour. There were no other Americans in this team house that once served six to twelve advisors. The Phung Hoang Advisor was supposed to be a Military Intelligence Captain, with an enlisted assistant. There was no Captain in Twyen Bien District. Hadn't been for some time.
Advisors have counterparts. The Major's counterpart was the District Chief. Mine, I'm not sure. Wasn't told. (Later, in my third district assignment, I finally discovered that it was supposed to be the local Vietnamese Police Chief). For the time being, I assumed my counterpart was the Vietnamese Intelligence Officer in charge of the Phung Hoang office (or at least I mistakenly assumed he had that responsibility).
That evening the barbecue was fired up with local charcoal sticks (a staple item in Vietnam, used all over the country for basic fuel, and even for placing in old fashioned irons used for ironing clothes). BBQed local small lobster (big crawdads). It was good. Would eat this often. I remember sliced tomatoes and cucumbers on the side, because sliced tomatoes and cucumbers were to accompany virtually every American style meal I would eat in Vietnam. Our choice of vegetables was very limited outside of traditional Vietnamese greens. Cucumbers...I hated cucumbers.
The next morning, the existing sergeant took me to the Phung Hoang office to get familiar with the office staff. When we got inside there was very limited conversation because there was a dead guy in there, under a sheet. Turns out a Hamlet Chief had been killed, and my office was the temporary resting place prior to burial. There was a woman clerk working next to the stiff, and so I was shown the basic files, and then we went outside to discuss the program further. My counterpart wasn't around.
The whole Phung Hoang set-up was a wooden shack about the size of a small one car garage with a large table in the middle (holding the stiff) and one or two smaller tables near the walls. There was a typewriter, I think, and one small filing cabinet designed to hold 3 by 5 cards...lots of 3 by 5 cards. The routine, I was told, was that informants would tell about suspected VCI --cadre who operated a shadow government for the Viet Cong--. When a suspect had three cards filled out, meaning three reports had been logged from three sources, then he was basically guilty of being VCI. He would then be arrested, presumably, and sent off to prison after a trial. I was not to accompany my Vietnamese counterparts on any arrest mission, because I was not adequately trained (they had that information correct).
My trainer took off for the world and I was now firmly in charge of all efforts to locate the VCI and save Vietnam from the Vietnamese. More importantly, the departing sergeant taught me how to deal with the cook who came in once a day to prepare meals for the Major, me and the interpreters. make sure she washes her hands...she never washes her hands.î I was introduced to the cook, and it looked to me like she had never washed any other part of her body either. I was also instructed how to start the generators. We had two units which had to be rotated every twelve hours and re-fueled. The sergeant also showed me how to service the latrine. We had a cut-in-half 55 gallon oil drum in a one-holer outdoor privy. One took a dump and covered the offending stuff with lye. Then once a week or so the can was dragged down to a stream behind the compound, emptied into the water next to the Vietnamese latrine, and then burned out with gasoline.
The Vietnamese latrine, by the way, was two bamboo rails supported on bamboo posts stuck into the bottom of the stream. It was open air, and was used by both men and women alike, by balancing on the two rails, one foot on each rail, in a full squat.
Finally, I was introduced to the artillery compound with two really big 155 mm guns, the hard way. I'm just standing in the team house when the loudest, most nerve shattering explosion literally rocked the walls. I jumped straight up and straight out of my skin, but everyone else in the team house acted as though they had experience nothing at all. IT was the 155 gun (the big stuff with a range of about 27 miles), within 50 yards of our kitchen, firing right over the top of the house. Such firing missions were common I was told, and I would get used to it. (I jumped for several days, but damn if I didn't get used to it.)
One afternoon a militia soldier arrived with a gift for the District Chief. A huge Cobra snake, about twelve feet long. Dinner. I wanted a taste, but my desires were ignored. Didn't get a taste.
I called my first American Medi-Vac (Dust Off) after two Vietnamese soldiers who got mad and started shooting at each other, Dodge City like. One was hit in the ankle. The bigger story for me was simply learning how to use the radio on my own for the first time. The first couple of days I couldn't understand a word of what was being said over the radio net (team radios were on with a loud speaker 24 hours a day). But the radio slang was picked up quickly and the need for a Medi-Vac cured my shyness about picking up the mike. Small mission accomplished.
Just down the road a mile or so from the District compound was a Navy compound, with a contingent of US Navy Seals and their Vietnamese counterpart boat drivers. The boats were called PBRs....Patrol Boat, River. They had six or so PBR's. Each was a fiberglass hull rapped around twin diesel engines. Each had a serious twin 50 caliber gun up front, with a serious gunner, and M60 mounts in the rear. Good firepower, great speed, but no armor.
A Vietnamese crew was out without Americans and got hit from shore by a Viet Cong B-40 rocket grenade. They were about two miles from the District Compound in territory that was more Viet Cong than friendly. The boat limped home with a big hole. Then, same day, the District Chief sent out a squad to pursue the bad guys and hopefully quiet the B-40. Two of his troops were ambushed and killed. A third troop was badly wounded with a round through the lungs. The wounded man was brought back to the District compound, and I called my second MediVac.
After I knew the helicopter was on its way, I went out to the pad to await the arrival. The wounded man was already next to the helicopter pad, on a stretcher. I was immediately bothered that no one was around, taking care of the guy. He had been left alone, and in my culture one takes care of wounded people. He was awake, and in almost classic war-wound style, his chest had the big bandage that everyone in Vietnam carried. But my indignity was blunted by the reality that I didn't even want to look at the guy. I just wanted to run away. Everyone else had, it seemed (later I would learn that wounded were a potential financial burden to the Vietnamese because of the way corruption fees worked...but more of that later). What I recall most was my aversion to this seriously wounded man, as if he had a deadly virus that one could catch and die from. It was a primitive feeling, a powerful cowardly feeling, that overwhelmed me. It nearly took my breath away. I didn't expect to feel such things, and I was ashamed.
I can remember what he looked like, but from then on, at least for a long while, I stopped looking at the dead and wounded. Psychological denial was my new side kick. I got him on the American helicopter, and never heard how he made out.
Found a football in the team house, and spent a couple days tossing it around with my interpreters. Quit, though, after a day or two. It was just too frustrating. They were having fun, but throwing a football is a specific American skill, and either you have ball throwing skills or you don't. These guys could probably kick my ass in soccer, but they had never thrown a ball of any sort, ever. I concluded that if one doesn't learn how to throw a ball by the time one is seven years old, or so, one can forget it.
More local shrimp on the barbie. Good, good, good. And more cucumbers.
My departing mentor, the long gone sergeant, had warned me about the sundries Box. Each District Team received a box of goodies from the US Army once every month. It contained free stuff, like cigarettes, shaving cream, razor blades, shoe laces, soap, and lots of candy. The box was designed as a field ration for a company of troops, and so there was always plenty of stuff to give away. Advisors and interpreters never had to buy cigarettes; they had cigarettes to spare. And everyone I knew smoked at least a pack a day.
My mentor said he always gave the candy to a local priest for distribution to the kids, because otherwise they would pester one to death asking for candy and chew (gum). I made the mistake of giving candy to the local kids when our sundries box arrived, and for the next few weeks I was swarmed by kids every time I left the team house.
Lesson learned. All candy from then on went to Vietnamese adults first, for distribution as they pleased.
About week three I went on my first Visual Recon. A helicopter, always a Huey, brought the mail twice a week. It was referred to as the Province helicopter, because it was assigned to the Province for the whole day, ferrying mail, supplies, people, wherever they needed to go, anywhere in the Province...provided that a request was placed through channels a day ahead of time, or as time and space and availability permitted. The District Chief wanted to take the Province helicopter on a visual reconnaissance run. So, up we went, up and over Indian country to check on the local situation. About five minutes into the flight the District Chief spotted what he was looking for, a sampan fishing in waters that were off limits.
We must have circled that sampan for five minutes, boring a hole in the sky, while the District Chief looked at them through binoculars. The door gunners on the M60 machine guns were just waiting for the word. The two guys in the wooden sampan didn't even look up, though we were probably flying at around 1000 feet (standard VR altitude in Vietnam apparently...just a tad out of rifle range). Then we just flew off, back to the District compound. What happened?? I haven't a clue. Just another day in Vietnam.
Sampans, by the way, were everywhere. They were canoes, really, but with relatively flat bottoms and relatively wide tops. They seemed to be made from standard board lumber, and they came in all different sizes, from really small two person rigs to really big water taxis. The largest could carry twenty people or more. Many designed to carry more than four people were motorized with any engine that would run. Lawn mower engines were the most popular.
I never heard the "m" in sampan pronounced. To me they were san pans.
We had a jeep, but it never went more than a mile down the road. I know, because that is where Major Mays preferred to eat when he could. We rode through the poverty laced huts, and across a landing strip that was dirt and no bigger than a football field, and into the Navy compound, where they had a real cook, with real food. The Seals were a hardy lot, but they never bothered to talk much to me. I was way too green to actually talk to. But we started eating there at least three times per week.
Just before November, Major Mays drummed up a combat mission for himself. I wasn't allowed to go along. A helicopter came in at night and picked him up. They met up with a small Bell Loach helicopter that was equipped with a high intensity night light and a door gunner. Then the two helicopters began to search the tree lines along a Viet Cong controlled section of the river. This type of operation had a name, but I forget what it was called. The idea was to provide a nice low target and hope that some young VC takes a shot at the helicopters, and then the idea was to spot the bad guys and blind them with the light, while blowing them away. This night they came back without contact. I helped the Huey helicopter carrying the Major find the District compound and the landing pad in the pitch black with a bunch of flashlights. Something about the whole operation seemed kind of stupid at the time. I never saw the operation repeated by anyone else while I was in Vietnam.
November 1971
Major Mays left on R&R for two weeks. An infantry Captain, name unrecalled, came down to replace the Major. He was ambitious, and wanted to mount an operation to get the VC who had ambushed the PBR a couple weeks earlier. That was the same area, by the way, that Major Mays had looked over at night with the spot light. Anyway, the Captain wanted some action, so he ordered up a PBR to take the Captain, and me, and two interpreters into an area of the District that was clearly hostile territory.
The PBR displaced a great deal of water, and for the first few miles, through friendly territory, it traveled dead slow. The wake alone was enough to swamp huts on shore and more than enough to drown a sampan. But the moment we turned the corner into more unfriendly waters, they opened up the throttle and took off. I guess we were doing 50 knots with two PBRs, loaded for bear. The boats were propelled by hydro-jet, not propeller, and rooster tails shot up from behind the boats...at least 30 feet in the air. After about 15 minutes we reached our destination, the headquarters for a local village. The interesting part was that this was still the rainy season, and we had to walk to the village hut over a bridge system that required heal over toe walking, tight rope style, over a single line of bamboo, with hand rails of bamboo...not an easy task when you are loaded down with combat gear. Nevertheless, we visited, found out nothing about enemy activity, and returned the way we came. Great photos. No enemy contact.
I filled out and submitted my first Phung Hoang report, a monthly summary of the local situation. Learning to fill out this report was difficult, and seemed to be my total association with the local Phung Hoang program. I had no idea what was really going on.
The Province Chief called a meeting of his District Chiefs, in Muc Hoa. The Province helicopter, for some reason, was unavailable at the last minute to help provide the transportation for our District Chief and his substitute counterpart, the Captain. So once again, the PBRs were pressed into duty. I went along, just for the heck of it. But this ride was slow, slow, slow, all the way. The District Chief was late...very bad.
We spent the night in Muc Hoa, and I discovered the officers Club...a wooden building devoted to alcohol. You could cash a check at the club. All the comforts of home. Also discovered the mess hall. A real Army cook, preparing some of the best Mexican food I have ever experienced (he had supplies shipped from home). Water had receded from the runway.
The personnel officer at Province, a first lieutenant, took me aside and confided in hushed tones that he had forgotten the combination to the field safe in his office. He had a million excuses, but someone had told him that MI Special Agents could open a safe. You know, intelligence stuff and all that. Well, it is true that I was given an orientation that lasted about three hours back at Fort Holabird, Maryland, more that four years ago. And I even remembered the basic principles involved. So, I gave it a shot. He thought he remembered one of the numbers, and I was able to manipulate the rest. Open sesame. I was just as surprised as the lieutenant, but I tried not to let on.
Around the middle of November, Major Mays returned. Not much going on. Boredom was setting in. I had started learning Vietnamese from my interpreters (we had two). But after about two dozen words were in my vocabulary, I was really frustrated. Even when I thought I knew how to say something, only the Vietnamese who were around me everyday seemed to understand what I was trying to say.
Someone in Saigon decided that all Vietnamese officers needed to be trained in the exact science of talking to American pilots, so that American Advisors on the ground could be sent home, I guess. You know, the continuation of Vietnamization. Let's get the Americans out of the ground war (understand that there were damn few Americans involved in the ground war at this point, except the dwindling ranks of advisors). The strangest part of the idea was that I was designated to train the Vietnamese officers in my District. What a joke! I had never talked to a plane trying to make a bomb run. All I knew were the words on the curriculum outline that I was provided. Nevertheless, I convened nightly meetings for about two weeks, going over and over the words in English, while my interpreter actually taught the class. In the end, I knew exactly how to give proper directions to a pilot looking to help out a few grunts on the ground. But I also knew that no pilot was ever likely to understand any of my students. End of class.
Boredom piled on top of boredom, for weeks on end. No enemy action. Not a peep. Thanksgiving came and went without notice.
The generators seemed to be plagued by water in the gas. Boat fuel had the same problem. Discovered that the gas was supplied by the Vietnamese and that it was standard practice to stop along the way, sell a few gallons, replace the sold quantity with water, and then deliver the gas to the stupid Americans. One had to make sure that one didn't try to suck gasoline from the bottom of the barrel, because that is were the water collected.
One or two supply trips were made to Muc Hoa. One trip was made by my interpreter, who sank a sampan with the wake of the Boston Whaler. The story was that the sampan had been full of fish. Fish costa Uncle Sam plenty.
December 1971
Out of the blue, unannounced, a helicopter arrived carrying an inspector from the Inspector General's Office (the dreaded IG). Major Mays, during all of his experience through two previous tours in Vietnam had never seen an IG, and had never heard of such a thing out in the boonies. But here he was, conducting a full scale IG inspection on a team house that was hardly anything out of a manual. If we were doing anything in a traditional military manner, I'm not sure what it was. He really quizzed me on security measures associated with our field safe and the radio codes (the CAC codes, we called them).
Upon departing, he told the Major that he found our little operation very untidy. He specifically gigged us for uncovered food in the refrigerator (had electricity, had refrigerator, but had no Tupperware). One could laugh, but being a Senior District Advisor was a big career step for any Major on the way up in the US Army, and a bad IG inspection could be a career killer. (Years later I've discovered that the famous Colonel David Hackworth, America's most decorated soldier, was also an Advisor in IV Core just a few weeks earlier, and had just finished blowing the whistle on the US Army in Vietnam, by appearing on TV no less. An investigation of his advisory command revealed a brothel, and other irregularities. The Army then decided to investigate all Advisory commands, and damned if my Tupperware wasn't out of order.)
My Phung Hoang boss from Province came down for a Phung Hoang operation that I knew nothing about. He thought I should have known. I told him that my counterparts didn't tell me. He told me that I needed to ask them more questions. What I wanted to tell him was that my real job was covering up food in the refrigerator and cleaning out the latrine barrel. He informed me that Major Mays wanted someone around with more experience. They were planning to send me to another district were I could serve under an MI Captain and learn the ropes. Meanwhile, they would find a replacement for me.
I was clearly being fired. And to this day I believe that the IG inspection was the entire reason. The Major needed to explain the bad inspection report, and the solution was to hang the sergeant, and show resolution of the problem back to the IG. Smooth move.
The Navy Seals were spotted more than once water skiing behind the PBRs.
Fishing by hand grenade off the boat dock was still in fashion.
Shrimp on the barbie was still a treat.
Christmas came and went without much notice. My mother-in-law sent me a large cardboard Santa, which we put up. She also sent me a toy electric train set. Suspecting that the track would get ruined quickly, I found a piece of heavy plywood and nailed the track on permanently. The train was a novelty that did break the boredom for a few days.
Drank my first rice-wine with locals while squatting in a circle. I was getting good at squatting.
My interpreter stole my Zippo lighter, with a map of Vietnam etched in the metal, and lost it in a poker game...so much for trust.
Late one afternoon I was sitting in the living room area of the team house when I heard muffled automatic weapons fire. When I looked outside, a Vietnamese Captain had a squad of troops lined up at attention while he fired rounds into the ground at their feet. He seemed to be drunk, and he was yelling and ranting and raving and carrying on about what I didn't have a clue. A few moments later he was still ranting and raving, but he had a concussion grenade in his hand, with the pin pulled out. I think he was threatening to kill himself, but I just watched through the screen window. He was only a few feet away from the team house, and so I informed the Major, who was in his back room office. The Major didn't even acknowledge that there was a problem, he just stayed at his desk, working on paperwork. Five minutes later, the District Chief strode out, casually, and talked to the man. Then the District Chief casually returned to his office/home (that was next to our team house). Eventually, the Captain put the pin back in and went home, across the compound, where he lived with his wife. End of story. What really happened? Dunno. Later there was life as usual. There was no disciplinary action. It was as if nothing happened at all.
My replacement showed up. He was an E7 (Sergeant First Class for you civilians) who had a previous tour in Vietnam in an infantry unit, prior to joining Military Intelligence. I spent a couple days with the Sarge, showing him everything I knew about the Phung Hoang program, which was nothing. Of course I also showed him the location of the latrines, both American and Vietnamese, and the generators, and this and that, and then I was off to my new post---Long Knot.
The trip to Long Knot was by boat to Muc Hoa, where I was met by the Province Helicopter, which would take me the rest of the way.
As we arrived at the dock in Muc Hoa, the dead bodies of two Vietnamese militia soldiers were being off-loaded from a sampan just down the beach. Waiting for the bodies were two women, probably mothers. The public wailing was something to behold. It was chilling. Vietnamese culture requires that mourning by women be public and loud and uninhibited...none of the subdued handkerchief approach to sorrow that Americans think appropriate. These women were lighting up the whole village area with their heartache, and I'll never forget the sound as long as I live.
January 1972
Long Knot, pronounced Long Cot was about twenty miles due west from Muc Hoa, toward Cambodia. Twyen Bien District had been about twenty miles due east, toward Saigon. The District was actually called something else, officially, but everyone called this outpost Long Knot, and that was that. Before arriving I had been told that I would serve as the third man on a team that consisted of an Infantry Major and a Military Intelligence Captain (who had been doing Phung Hoang stuff for almost a full year). What I hadn't been told was that Long Knot was considered a high risk area...and sort of the end of the line for many of the Vietnamese troops who were sent there. It stood as an early warning area, in a way. The northern boundary of the Mekong Delta was a land mass that jutted out from Cambodia and pointed directly at Saigon. Using this Cambodian peninsula one could walk to a point that was only a few miles from Saigon. The land mass was referred to as the parrots Beak, and it was an area that was watched carefully. For the North Vietnamese to move a large number of troops down the Parrots Beak, they would have to attack Long Knot first. Not five hundred yards from the Cambodian boarder, directly under the Parrot's Beak, and in a prime location to observe and counter large troop movements, Long Knot had seen more than its share of hard times, starting when the outpost was first put together by the French.
There was no town worth talking about at Long Knot. Just camp-follower huts. The compound stood on the north side of the Co Van Tam river, but my first trip to Long Knot was by helicopter. We landed on the pad, which was elevated dirt, about six feet above marshy water. From the pad, one walked on an elevated path of dirt leading out of a barbed wire area unto a dirt road that went directly from the river to the gate of the compound. The first thing I noticed was the tall earthen berm all the way around the compound perimeter, high enough to obscure any view of the inside. In the middle of the compound was a tall observation tower, with machine gun mounts. Except for areas near the river, there were no trees. This was a flat plains area, and one could see flat-land for miles and miles. To the south was Vietnam great Plain of Reeds and to the north and east stretched somewhat dryer Cambodian flat lands.
I was met on the path by Captain Miller, a slim, bespectacled man about my own age. We shook hands (no one saluted in Vietnam) and I followed him into the compound. From the front gate, directly in front of me, was an old French built District headquarters building. We did an abrupt left face and headed along a tall barn-like structure that was the Advisors team house. It was at least one hundred feet long, and about thirty feet wide. Strangely, it was about twenty feet tall, built of long telephone poles and railroad ties. The bottom five feet of the perimeter was concrete. There was one door, at the far end of the building, away from the gate. On top of the telephone poles, inside the building were heavy beams, which carried the weight of two feet of sandbags. By way of comparison, the team house at Twyen Bien was made of two by fours, with a light load of sand bags over the living room area.
The inside of the Long Knot team house was like a dark cave, with practically no windows. The windows that did exist faced to the berm-side of the building, but were designed to be closed by an exterior shutter, so no interior light could escape at night. An interior bunker was located in the radio room, but it was really more of a crawl hole that lead to a larger bunker in the berm, a bunker that would serve as a firing position in case of attack.
Concrete provided the first five feet of the exterior wall and concrete was also used to divide the interior of the team house into rooms, partition style. But the partition walls were only five feet high, so one could see the full length of the building. In this manner, however, there were probably ten rooms, and enough space to house at least a dozen advisors in complete discomfort.
But these days there were three advisors assigned to Long Knot, including me. Captain Miller introduced me to the Senior District Advisor, Major Mennor. Like everywhere else, we had two interpreters, and they were both in the team house when I arrived. Later I would meet Mr. Tien, our boat driver, and basic generator mechanic, water pump operator, and general house boy (though we never used that term). Every evening a Vietnamese cook came and prepared dinner.
The team house had a large water tower with a rubber storage tank, that got its water by pump and long fire hose directly out of the river (Mr. Tien's job). The bad news is that this disgusting water was the drinking water, treated with alum, and the treatment seemed pretty hit and miss to me. The good news was that we had a full working shower (cold water only), and best of all, a real flush toilet. By Vietnam standards, I had died and gone to Heaven.
The team also had a dog...Thor. He was by far the best security feature. A mongrel version of a German Shepherd (I think); he was fun, friendly, and best of all, he terrified the Vietnamese. Perfect.
Eventually I would get a tour of the whole place, but it was getting late, and I had interrupted a game of Co Toung, which you can pronounce as you choose, because I never could get it right. The game was a Chinese version of chess, but with pieces that supposedly represented tanks, elephants, and other important items of oriental warfare. I was invited to play, and I was beaten soundly by a group of men who sat around playing Co Toung a lot.
The next day I got the tour, by CPT Miller. First we checked out the generators which ran twenty-four hours per day. Near the generators was a guard post in the corner of the compound. There was a guard post at each corner, manned all the time. In front of the large berm was a wire fence, about eight feet tall, and the fence was completely wired with claymore mines, with activation by clackers that ran back to the firing positions in the berm. To the south was the river, and between the river and the compound was a swampy area that was fortified with lots of barbed wire criss-crossing the whole area. To the east was an old French mine field, and to the north and west was more of the same barbed wire treatment. Inside the compound was an assortment of buildings that housed about a company of local militia troops.
Long Knot had been written up in several primers that the US Army used in various training and war college presentations, to demonstrate what proper security was supposed to look like around a troop compound in Vietnam. Its reputation came from an attack a few years earlier that left very few casualties inside the compound, while over one hundred dead Viet Cong were pulled out of the wire when the fighting was over. The attack had been a classic attempt to overrun an outpost with a human wave, many of whom were armed with sticks. But except for a minor breech of the northwest corner, the entire attack was repelled.
CPT Miller introduced me to the Vietnamese who ran the Phung Hoang office, but I do not recall ever actually being inside the office. CPT Miller filled out his monthly report, and that was all that was ever said about the Phung Hoang program.
A loud explosion just before dinner got everyone pretty excited for a few minutes. But it was not incoming...one of the French mines blew up.
After a few days, went down to the river, started the Boston Whaler with twin 40's and took off for Muc Hoa. Major Mennor needed to talk things over with the Province Senior Advisor, and the rest of the need was shopping. Supplies, supplies, supplies. It was a big problem for any remote outpost. And the problem seemed to be getting worse as American support systems were vanishing.
One motor quit on the way back, and we limped home with the other motor. I decided to break out some tools and work on the thing. Boat maintenance had been a staple item at Province, but that was one of the systems that was pretty much gone by the time I arrived. Spent the next two days down at the river, dismantling engines and putting them back together again. When I was done they worked pretty well, but the biggest problem was that the damn things tended to shake themselves apart. Needed a torque wrench, but I was lucky to have screwdriver.
Late one afternoon, two soldiers were outside the team house on the berm side, chasing something through the weeds. We went outside to investigate, and just as we rounded the corner of the house they caught their prey...a giant Cobra.
Major Mennor complained that this was the third Cobra that had been captured near the team house in about as many months. He got on the secure radio and reported the Cobra to Province, and asked the Province Medic to order anti-serum in case of a bite. Cobras, in case you didn't know, were deadly. They were also considered good eating, and were never allowed to escape by the Vietnamese.
Three days later we received word relayed all the way from the Doctors in Can Tho. there are no Cobras in the Mekong Delta.î Apparently we were so far away from Can Tho that we were no longer in the Mekong Delta. Amazing and almost amusing. We did not get the serum.
Boredom city. Man, I was getting good at Co Toung. I could also squat as good as any Vietnamese soldier. Life was a little slow.
I liked to go up the ladder of the water tower and look around. You could see things from water towers, I discovered. Our water sure was muddy.
Every night the guards at each corner of the compound would clang and bang on old artillery shell casings, as a gong, just to prove to the Sergeant of the Guard that they were awake. About every twenty minutes or so, gong, gong, gong.
It wasn't disturbing; it was reassuring.
February 1972
A Vietnamese artillery platoon had moved in last week, and this week they were all outside the compound awaiting the arrival of two 105mm Howitzers (standard field artillery). The first I knew anything about this big event, Major Mennor was being summoned to talk to the pilot of the Chinook C47 helicopter that had one of the guns dangling from ropes under its belly. Smoke was popped (from a smoke grenade) so the pilot could get a better fix on the wind direction, and then the piece was lowered to the ground. A few minutes later the helicopter was back with gun number two.
Within a few minutes the guns were rolled through the gate. After being parked in the middle of the compound, the platoon started a long run of H&I fire...harassment and interdiction fire...in celebration of the new arrival. My aching ears.
A water buffalo wandered into the French mine field while I was just walking around the compound, as I did often. I expected the beast to blow up. The farmer who owned the animal was off in the distance making a lot of noise about the problem. To my amazement, a young boy, about 10, maybe 12, ran into the mine field and chased the beast of burden out of the mine field. Neither was hurt. I was shocked. The water buffalo was apparently more valuable than the young boy.
One of our Vietnamese soldiers wanted to go out on a revenge mission. Basically, if a family member was killed by the Viet Cong a soldier would take it upon himself, usually with the help of a friend, to revenge the death. The team owned a sniper weapon, that we loaned out on occasion. It was an old M14 with a scope and a silencer, left over from previous CIA activity in the area. (Only the CIA had silencers, because of Geneva convention rules). Revenge missions were always successful in Vietnam, and this one resulted in two VC KIA, Killed in Action.
The revenge action happened in the horse shoe area. One of the first things I had been told during my first security briefing at Long Knot was to stay out of the horse shoe area. It got its name because a branch of the Van Co Tam river headed in a loop that eventually rejoined the main river. On a map the loop looked like a horse shoe and thus the name. At the southern most part of the loop was a village that I never got to visit. IT was considered Viet Cong. Just approaching the village was considered unwise. During my first trip on the river with the Boston Whaler I was shown the branch that headed off into the horse shoe and warned to never take the wrong turn.
A gun fight broke out at the main gate between two soldiers who were mad at each other. Each fired high. No one got hurt.
Someone tried to break into the team house at night while we were sleeping. Slit a screen in a window near my bedroom.
I started wearing a 45 automatic, that was also an extra weapon left by previous Advisors. At night I parked it in a holster nailed to a post near my bed. Because of the concrete walls on the inside of the house, I also parked a hand grenade next to my bed, figuring that it would be possible to fight with grenades if VC managed to get inside the house. Serious paranoia was setting in I think.
My web gear in the field started sporting at least two hand grenades, and at least one can of smoke. I also found a white phosphorus (Willie Pete) hand grenade, and carried it for the remainder of my tour. A Captain in Germany had told me that it was great for breaking contact with the enemy, and that sounded just fine to me.
While Major Mennor and I were walking out of the compound, one of the militia troops called us pigs, pigs, pigs in Vietnamese. I pretended I didn't understand. But I wanted to kick the guy's ass.
Boredom, boredom, boredom.
Observed our District Chief slapping and beating one of his troops before placing him in a tiger cage next to the main gate. The tiger cage was the brig. Made of barbed wire and bamboo, it was about four feet square and four feet high. The prisoner was to sit there on public display until released.
Captain Miller went home. One year at Long Knot was a long depressing tour. He had taught me how to play Co Toung, and nothing more. Nevertheless, my training was complete, and now I was the one and only Phung Hoang Advisor. I wondered if anyone would ever ask me anything...you know, ask my advice.
Since neither CPT Miller or MAJ Mennor ever related war stories in or around Long Knot, I surmised that it had been quiet for the entire year.
Shortly after Captain Miller departed on that joyful Huey, MAJ Mennor took the Province helicopter to visit a Vietnamese Ranger unit that was located south of us, in the Plain of Reeds. The Ranger unit was part of someone else's Advisory command (COL Hackworth's previous command), and it was time to share information about possible combined action against the horse shoe area. I took off in the Boston Whaler with my interpreter on a mission to pick up the Major after his meeting with the Rangers. There was a series of canals that one could use to safely reach the Ranger compound, but it was a long trip. I spent some time along the way practicing with the M79 grenade launcher in the wide open spaces of nothingness. Fired a few clips from the M16 too. Then tried out the M60. Didn't hit anything I aimed at, but a few birds will never be the same.
Food was becoming a real problem. Supplies from Province were hard to come by, because of closures of commissary systems elsewhere. We could order company level supplies, but items for two guys were impossible. We were living on a case of hotdogs, for example, and that is a lot of hot dogs for two GIs to consume before they go bad. The local economy in Long Knot wasn't much help either. Even duck eggs, which were so common everywhere, were hard to get in Long Knot. Hot dogs, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. I was losing weight like crazy.
Major Mennor and I went to Muc Hoa for a night on the town, so to speak. A Vietnamese stripper was coming to the club and we were invited. Watched the show, spent the night. One of the lieutenants got laid. Figure it cost him plenty.
The next day, as we were getting into the Boston Whaler, the Province medic, a homesteader who had been at Muc Hoa for several years with a Vietnamese wife, came out to the boat dock to warn us about possible enemy action up the river. Vietnamese radio traffic was all ablaze about something, but the details were unknown. We promised to keep a sharp look out, and shoved off.
As we approached a wide area of the river near Long Knot at a juncture where one turns right to head for the Long Knot compound or left to head into the horse shoe, the damnedest thing appeared on the water. It was a barge with tall sides...a troop carrier like the ones made famous in a dozen D-Day movies. From our little Boston Whaler it looked as big as a house, a very big house. I didn't know there was such a thing in Vietnam, though I was aware that there was a Vietnamese Navy Base west of Long Knot on the same river.
The troop carrier was full of troops. Our militia troops! And our District Chief was in the barge and he was waving for us to follow him. There had been no radio communication with Major Mennor. Whatever was going on had been put together very quickly in Major Mennor's absence.
We turned around and followed in the wake of the troop carrier (which was a rocky ride, by the way). The barge headed directly into the horse shoe, and each side of the small river branch was overgrown with thick jungle foliage. This was a situation that was ripe for ambush, and I immediately took the safety off my M16. For the first time since my arrival in Vietnam I really expected to be fired upon with deadly consequences. I didn't know what we were about to get into, and neither did Major Mennor.
After about two miles the barge pulled to shore and let down the ramp to let the troops off. That is when I first noticed why they stopped where they did. There were about thirteen dead militia soldiers on the bank of the river, with noticeable holes in many of the foreheads.
That many dead bodies, all shot up, laying out like rag dolls, is a powerful sight. None lived very long. There was very little blood. The amazing thing is that I barely remember looking. My denial eyes were working perfectly. See, but don't see. Survive. Even today, this memory is locked up somewhere. My brain refused to record the details...it was just too tough to see with my brain fully engaged.
After a few minutes the troops indicated that no VC were still in the immediate area, and I got out of the boat to help as I could. One of the soldiers was still alive, with a chest wound. We loaded him into the Boston Whaler, on a stretcher across the bow, and with me driving, took off for Muc Hoa on a mission to beat the clock with wounded.
Leaving the horse shoe was even more tense than going in. I felt certain that a second ambush was waiting.
But not this time. This time the VC missed a sure bet.
The story was this: Three squads of Vietnamese militia were on routine security patrol using sampans in the horse shoe. One squad got on the radio and invited the other two squads to join them up the river for lunch or some such thing. Common thinking was that the VC intercepted the radio transmission, but my thought was that one of the soldiers was a VC agent who set up his buddies. Nevertheless, two sampans full of soldiers paddled up the river, when a VC sniper fired from the shore. The soldiers made haste for the opposite shore, and as they stepped onto the bank they were met by a large group of VC, who let them get out of the sampans before blowing them all to hell.
One week later, got the word that the Long Knot Advisory Team was to be closed down forever. In Vietnam, one made decisions and one moved quickly. Two days later Major Mennor and Staff Sergeant Hunt loaded what government and personal belongings they could on several Huey runs and left. Mr. Tien stole the pump used to fill the water tower, and was not seen from again. Thor was given to the District Chief, along with my train set (for his children, who loved to play with it. It could be operated by PRC25 radio batteries, we discovered). That fast, I never saw the place again.
Muc Hoa was my new home. The Province team was now a total of twelve Americans. And that was a problem, because enemy activity seemed to be heating up. The perimeter of the American compound was designed to be defended by about 60 American GIs, not 12. For two weeks I awaited orders while we built a smaller fort within the fort. We called it the Alamo, and in it we piled all of our ammunition. Inside the big compound, but outside of the Alamo, we placed concertina wire (tangle-foot) and claymore mines everywhere. One of those claymores was right along side the wooden bedroom I occupied at night, and so I spent one day filling sand bags to protect my butt should the thing go off by accident.
While I waited for orders I was assigned night duty in the TOC...the Tactical Operations Center. That's really a radio room, but everything in the Army needs a fancy name at headquarters. About all I had to do was read artillery warnings all night long. When artillery fired, the range, altitude and azimuth was supposed to be broadcast to warn helicopters and aircraft, so they could avoid being shot out of the sky.
Twyen Bien came under attack one night while I was in the TOC. Small arms and mortars. Muc Hoa came under similar attack several times while I waited for orders. We would go to the berm perimeter bunkers, and if VC were to attempt to actually enter the compound, we had a whole machine gun routine worked out that would hopefully allow us to fall back as a group to the Alamo.
But the attacks were minor. No one hurt. Just harassment by mortar. After so much quiet for so long, though, it seemed like the VC were up to something.
March 1972
Ordered to Vinh Binh Province. Apparently they needed an experienced, sage, highly qualified Phung Hoang Advisor. The Muc Hoa Team was closing down, but it wasn't clear to me just when they would close the gate. Everyday someone else left. Everyday more equipment was dismantled and shipped off. I left Muc Hoa pretty much the way I arrived, by air.
I remember spending the night twice in Can Tho, and this must have been one of the trips. MACV Advisors were directed to an old French hotel outside the regular Army base, where all the planes and helicopters landed. The hotel functioned as a BOQ...Bachelor Officers Quarters..., and it had a private security force at the gate. The walls were concrete and high. It felt secure enough. The rooms were large, the ceilings were high, and each room had a lazy ceiling fan, like a scene from Casablanca. Or, if you saw Apocalypse Now, this room was just like the burnt-out Captain was in during the opening scenes.
Can Tho was the Region IV MACV headquarters, and they had my personnel records, finance office, etc., at the Army base. I visited each facility, taking care of business, and the next morning I got on another Air America plane for Vinh Binh Province, about 100 miles due east of Can Tho, and about 100 miles due south of Saigon.
Vinh Binh Province was bordered on three sides by water. A major river was on the northern border, a tributary of the great Mekong River was on the southern border, and the eastern border was the Pacific Ocean. The Province had six Districts (Muc Hoa had four). And it had something I had yet to experience in Vietnam: a sense of wealth. Vinh Binh was a major agricultural area, where absentee landlords grew rich, and the VC could hide in a maze of Vietnamese government corruption that had to be experienced to be believed.
The Province headquarters was located in Phu Vinh, but we always called it Tra Vinh...I don't know why. It was on the northern river border, and had a fairly long runway. A commercial Vietnamese DC3 made weekly trips to Saigon.
I landed at the airport, and was met by a clerk, who took me by jeep to the MACV compound.
Arrival at Vinh Binh was very similar to the way things were handled when I landed at Muc Hoa for the first time. I was processed in by the clerk, and introduced to my new Phung Hoang boss, a Major, whom I would never see again. This time I made it clear that I didn't feel qualified to advise the Phung Hoang program, because there had been no training, and no one could seem to explain exactly what I was supposed to do. For this bit of insight the Major started to glow red. So I shut my mouth like a good sergeant, and backed out the door. Soon I was on a helicopter to my new District assignment: Tieu Can, pronounced 2eee Con.
The helicopter pad was on the northern end of the Tieu Can District village town, and probably a half mile or so from the team house. To me, that seemed odd. I was used to helicopters putting down pretty close to the final destination. This pad seemed remote, by comparison, and lots of palm trees and lots of bamboo made the pad look unsecured to me. But we landed, and waiting was a jeep, with an Hispanic looking sergeant, who introduced himself as Pete Vargas. With him was a Vietnamese-Cambodian interpreter, Thach Sanh, the only interpreter in Vietnam I would eventually learn to trust completely.
I was Pete's replacement, and he was clearly glad to see me. He had been in Tieu Can for his entire tour of duty, and he was more than ready to go home to momma, meaning his wife. I liked Pete right away, and called him Pedro from the moment I learned it was his real name (he was Puerto Rican).
Due south down the dirt road was the commercial shopping area of the village of Tieu Can. The shops were on both sides of the dirt street, made of ad hoc wood, concrete and tin, in a construction patchwork that was typical Vietnam. There were about 30 shops, roughly 15 on each side of the road. At the end of the shopping area, straight ahead, was a small open village square area with the base of some long removed statue or fountain directly in the path of anyone trying to reach the gate of the District Headquarters.
It was all very compact. Through the gate and to the left was an old French building, housing the District Chief and all the Vietnamese staff. Straight ahead a few hundred feet was an artillery position with two 105mm Howitzers. To the right of the gate was a small green Advisors team house, American made by Seabees years ago (as were all of the team houses I had seen to date), from 2 by 4's and concrete and corrugated roofing material.
A creek about twenty feet wide and about six feet deep ran the length of the shopping area and completely around three sides of the District compound, in horseshoe fashion, providing a natural security moat. It was the creek that crowded all the buildings together enough to inhibit helicopter pilots, and force the pad to the far edges of town. On the far side of the creek, huts and businesses continued down other dirt roads, with nearby pagodas to the north and south of town.
We parked the jeep in front of the team house, on a small concrete driveway made for that purpose. There were large trees just outside the fence, shading much of the team house and creating a cozy setting (if one can put aside the sandbags and fire walls that were everywhere around and in front of the place).
Inside there were three rooms. One large room was divided into a living room with a couch and two chairs. It held the standard situation briefing maps. Tall storage lockers served as a room divider, partly hiding three bunk beds (six bunks). To the left of all of these was a desk, which served as the office for the Senior District Advisor. Immediately to the left of the front door was a radio room/bunker, that held one more bunk bed(two more bunks). The radio room bunker was all concrete, though some of the construction was obviously concrete poured over sandbags. It had been added after the main structure had been built. And to the left rear of the main room was a door leading to a kitchen that had also been added as an afterthought. To the right rear was a indoor wash basin and mirror, where one could shave. Out the back door was a small back yard area, fenced with barbed wire, where the team had a generator, a bucket-well, a second electric sump-pump well (that was out of order), a 50-foot water tower for the well water storage (that was empty) a cold shower (that only worked when the water pump worked to fill the tower) and a flush toilet outhouse that was flushed with a bucket of water from the bucket-well in lieu of the regular plumbing system that didn't work. Since the team had only one generator, it was operated only at night. The refrigerator was operated by propane, in bottles surrounded by sandbags (sort of a ten-thousand pound bomb in the back yard.) In lieu of a freezer, that my other two teams had, this team had a freezer chest with fifty pound blocks of ice from an ice-factory located a few miles away.
Short timer Pedro introduced me to Major Saunders, who was even shorter. The Senior District Advisor was due to leave Tieu Can in two weeks. Pedro would be around for another six weeks or so. Only a month earlier the team had a MI Captain as the Phung Hoang Advisor, but for now, Pedro was it, an MI Staff Sergeant like myself. Sometime during the course of the first day I was also introduced to the other interpreter, Minh, and to the primary Mommasan, Ba Ba (Mrs. Three), or just Ba for short. She had been taking care of Americans in this team house for several years. She was assisted by another woman, Lin. (One had to be careful with the word Ba in Vietnamese, because it meant about six different things depending on the inflection and tone. It meant pig for example, but it also meant the number three. Children in Vietnam were often named by the order of birth.)
In front of the team house was a concrete-over-sandbag bunker that served as a primary fighting position in case of attack. It also served as storage for various weapons, including an M79 grenade launcher, a 12 gauge shotgun with aluminum dart fleshette ammunition left by CIA folks (another illegal Geneva Convention item) and about a case of hand grenades. The team also had an M60 machine gun, and an anti-tank (blow the bunker) type weapon of the collapsible tube, disposable tube, variety. Oh, and there was an old burp gun, which fired long clips of 45 caliber ammo. It was really crude looking.
Dinner was served in the kitchen, and we ate as a group, including the interpreters, who often shared the Advisor's food.
The generator was turned off at bedtime, and we sat around with kerosene lamps, talking. For my whole tour I had lived with the background noise of electric generators. This particular generator was really noisy, because it was so close to the house. Quiet was a new experience for me. Suddenly I could really hear the night, and all the little sounds from the Vietnamese living so close around me.
Lizards were drawn to the light from the kerosene lamps that we burnt that night and every night. They would cover the screens, seeking a meal of mosquitoes, also suckers for light.
You could actually hear the lizards, a new experience for me. Sanh told a old Vietnamese folklore story about how the lizards are descendants of a once noble Prince who lost his lover, and in sadness walked the earth as a lizard, saying tsk...tsk...tsk.
Also met some of our team house rats that night. The rice fields in this area were home to really big rats, and they were a source of protein in the villages. (Yes, they were consumed).
After the Major retired to his bunk, Pedro celebrated my arrival by giving Sanh some money for Chinese Soup from a spot in the middle of town they referred to as Howard Johnson's.î I would later learn that it was a small restaurant, with dirt floor and maybe eight tables. In the middle of the place, a Chinese cook/owner had meat of various types hanging from the ceiling by ropes. Sanh came back in a few minutes with a bowl for each of us. It was noodles in a broth with sliced beef on top. God, it was good.
Since I had already been in two different Districts, I was considered seasoned help, and I was treated very openly when I arrived at Tieu Can. Pedro showed me around, almost continuously for awhile. He introduced me to the Phung Hoang office staff (same set-up I had seen before) and the District Vietnamese Intelligence Officer, whom I later considered my unofficial counterpart. He also introduced me to my real counterpart, the local Police Chief, and the only police officer in town. The local cop and I never actually spoke during my entire tour, but he did acknowledge my presence, and that was that.
Pedro had worked it out so that Sanh did all the monthly Phung Hoang reports, and just turned them over to Pedro for signature (I had died and gone to Heaven again). I told Sanh I wanted to continue the same system, and that all I wanted out of the Phung Hoang office was full advanced knowledge of any planned arrests or operations. I knew that was all I needed to stay out of trouble with Province. And with that, I was destined to become a first class Phung Hoang Advisor.
The team house had a dog. We called her Madeline.
A true mongrel, she was about forty pounds of over the hill mutt. I don't remember her ever barking, and I don't think she could scare a flea. But she was something to pet and stroke and care about.
The artillery at Tieu Can was located at the rear of the Headquarters compound. They fired H&I continuously, but here as elsewhere, everyone seemed to be used to it.
I spent a lot of time initially with Pedro in the jeep. He knew everyone in the District. We visited several villages, and we got invited to several meals with hamlet chiefs and their families.
The mosquitoes were worse in Tieu Can than anywhere I had been previously. From my first night in Vietnam I had always slept under mosquito netting, but here the flying things were really thick. We wore heavy quantities of mosquito repellent every time we went outside. The Vietnamese in these parts had a twitch that was habitual after years of practice. The idea was that if your hands and feet were moving constantly, the mosquitoes wouldn't land. I preferred the repellent.
I got the full story of how life had been at Tieu Can for the last year. Basically, up until a few months ago, Advisors were each expected to go out with Vietnamese troops on night ambush duty. That could get rough if there was enemy contact, which happened. Only one large operation was talked about, though. Apparently the VC attacked a village a few miles north of Tieu Can, and between the District Chief and the SDA, several trucks were gathered together, and about two companies of militia were loaded on the trucks for a hasty trip up the road to rescue the village defenders. In an open area, just before arriving at the village the convoy was ambushed with heavy machine gun fire and command detonated anti-personnel mines.
Apparently the situation was blinding chaos. The troops were pinned down in the open and many died even before they could get off the trucks. In situations like this the SDA is expected to call for American air support, but Major Saunders was reported to be literally in the mud, in a state of panic. In Vietnam, panic in the face of enemy action was a serious, unforgivable, thing to soldiers who had been in the shit more than once. After that incident there had been a bunch of tension between the Major and the now departed Captain. In a nutshell, Pedro didn't like the Major, and was looking forward to the Major's departure.
I have to admit, Major Saunders seemed paranoid, but in Vietnam that seemed normal to me.
Our drinking water was runoff from the roof. It was captured in a large barrel and then transferred to other containers. The rainy season had come and gone, but you could still count on a downpour every week or so. When that happened you would wait until the dirt had been washed off the roof, and then start catching the water in the barrel. It was great drinking water. Made great tea.
As the days rolled on, it was more and more obvious that Pedro was running the District and that the Major was just puttering around in the background, counting the days.
One night, late, after Chinese soup had long been consumed, in the quiet of the night without generators, there was a distinct splash. It was from the rear of the compound, near the artillery. Pedro went out to investigate, but he came back reporting that something had hit the water near the artillery, and nothing else was known to anyone he talked to. Next morning a militia troop went into the canal, and retrieved a 105mm artillery projectile, a projo to you artillery types. It had been fired by the VC from a concrete hollow place in the earth just a few hundred feet from the opposite bank of the canal. We walked into the open area on the other side of the creek to investigate what the troops had found, and there it was, just has they described. The VC, operating at night, had poured concrete into a dirt hole, and probably by working over a few days had fashioned a concrete launching pad for the projo, using the brass shell casing as a short barrel. Then they packed the homemade Howitzer with explosive, and ran wires to some sort of electric detonating device.
They had the projo fuse wired so that it was hot upon launch, and they just popped it off with the explosive charge, hoping it would reach the artillery position. Ingenious, but the round fell short, and all that hard work was for naught. (Strange, there were so many exploding sounds around Tieu Can that no one really noticed the muffled blast from the hole in the ground. It was the loud splash that everyone noticed because that was such an unusual sound.)
Sanh was a Medic, and held doctor appointments for local Vietnamese in front of the team house, where he kept his medical supplies. His supplies were all American, and if he took money for his medical services it was out of my eyesight.
One afternoon Madeline, the team house dog, appeared to be feeling poorly, and came over to where I was sitting in the living room. She laid down and I started rubbing her some, while I was mostly paying attention to other things. Then, quite without warning, she gave birth to a puppy. In a minute, puppy number two was born.
What a surprise! We didn't even know she was pregnant. We picked up the puppies and took them out to the bunker, and made a new bed for mom. Then she proceeded to have two more puppies.
For a couple weeks the puppies kept everyone pretty entertained.
But the pick of the litter was stolen from the backyard. And rather than lose any more, as soon as they were weaned, we gave them all away.
We kept visiting villages. (I prefer to use the term village, though technically most of my visits were to hamlets...and unless one is interested in the geo-political organization of the countryside, it is probably only important for the reader to understand that a Village Chief had much more political juice than a Hamlet Chief. In fact the Village Chief served as a sort of Chairman of the Board for several Hamlet Chiefs, in a carryover from the old Village Elders tradition in Vietnam. Except when I refer to the respective chiefs, I use the terms village and hamlet interchangeably).
Sometimes the Major would come along, sometimes he was too busy. One day Pedro and I used the Province helicopter to visit one of our most remote villages without the Major. It was called Tap Ngai, pronounced Tap Ni.
There were no passable roads to Tap Ngai. One walked, flew, or paddled a sampan. After we landed at the village helicopter pad, Pedro warned me about the southern part of the village, and that he didn't think the helicopter pad was in a safe location. It was easy to be shot at around Tap Ngai.
The village was split down the middle by a creek with a wooden bridge joining the two natural halves of the same village. But the split at Tap Ngai was more than physical. Generally the southern half of the village was sympathetic with the Viet Cong, and the northern half was owned and operated by a strong village chief. And this was unusual in Vietnam. Village Chiefs and Hamlet Chiefs had been targeted for assassination in the early sixties, and most of them simply chose to live outside the area...choosing to keep their title, but govern from afar. As a result, the village unit was politically turned over to the Viet Cong, by default. The cold blooded act of political assassination, more than anything else, had allowed the VC to be successful in the countryside, and frustrated every American attempt to have it otherwise. But the Village Chief at Tap Ngai had taken a military commission early in the sixties after his wife had been killed by the VC. He moved into a village outpost, and vowed to fight back. He now had the rank of Major, equal to the District Chief. He had a Captain as second-in-command. He had his own mortar tube, considerable quantities of mortar ammunition, and he was conducting his own little war without much assistance from the outside world.
The thing that struck me most about Tap Ngai was the old Catholic Church, built eons ago, and now a relic of better times. The rear wall had been blown by an anti-tank weapon, and I asked Sanh what he knew about the battle that had obviously taken place. There wasn't too much of a story, but the VC had used the church as a local refuge and firing position for a while, when they were driven off by Province forces who came in with the ways and means to blow the wall. The good guys fired from behind a stone wall in a graveyard outside the church, and the poet in me just raced with symbolic possibilities.
At any rate, we visited the troops in the local outpost, a pile of mud, sandbags, and barbed wire, and I noticed how few of the soldiers seemed to have much in the way of ammunition. Their radio battery was low too. So, I took the battery out of my radio (we all used the same PRC25s), and left it behind with all of my ammunition. I had already given my field map to the Captain, who was genuinely grateful. He had been trying to give me a briefing and he had no map of the area. I got the impression he had never had a map.
The typical meal served in the home of a Hamlet Chief or Village Chief was almost out of a script. The whole setup was always the same. A woman or two would prepare the meal in a back room, or behind the hooch, and when the table was fully prepared the men folk would all set down. There would be a large bowl in the middle of the table, from which the guests could fill their own smaller bowl in front of them. There was always Coca Cola in bottles, and Salem cigarettes on the table. As the honored guest, I was usually presented with a rooster foot, as a token of honor and good luck. I never had any idea what to do with the thing, but someone had told me that it was OK to pass it to another guest, so I always gave it to Sanh.
Some of the best eating around these village homes, however, was the fruit that someone would inevitably pick and prepare just for me, the guest. There is nothing like fresh Mango right off the tree. I especially enjoyed Coconut right off the tree. It was green and soft. They would slice it open with a large knife, and then pour out the milk into a tall glass. Then they would add long slivers of the soft coconut meat to the liquid in the cup. The meat tasted like gelatin, not like strong coconut at all. It was very refreshing, and if I were to compare it to anything in the states I'd say it tasted like Cream Soda. Loved it.
It was Sanh's birthday. His home village was going to give him a big party, and the American Advisors were invited. Thach Sanh was Cambodian, and so was his village. It was brought to my attention, through Sanh, that about 20% of the population, and villages, in the Mekong Delta were Cambodian. They generally avoided the Vietnamese, and generally didn't like the Vietnamese. The problem was straight-up racial. Cambodians were considered the racial minority in Vietnam and were treated with all the discrimination that minority status might accord. More interestingly, the Vietnamese didn't trust Cambodians. I came to believe that the distrust was because of all the stories that every Vietnamese family told their children growing up. Cambodians were once feared as marauding troops working for various Cambodian warlords, and Vietnamese folklore was full of heads being chopped off by Cambodians from ancient times. (In this context, Vietnam's direct approach to invading and stabilizing Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975 made perfect sense to me.)
Sanh's village was only a couple miles from the Tieu Can District town. I met his father and his grandmother, and his brother (who was part of the local militia too). Learned how to dance, Cambodian style. Ate too much. Had a good time. Felt welcome. Felt as though this village could be trusted to protect me in a pinch.
The District Chief suddenly made a decision that Major Saunders had fought for a long time. Now that Major Saunders was about to leave, the District Chief decided to move the artillery position to a separate spot on the opposite side of the canal. The excuse was that the children in the Headquarters compound could not study in the presence of the H&I fire. Major Saunders had argued that the guns were added security to the headquarters compound, and that it would not be easy to provide for the security of the artillery platoon away from the Headquarters troops. But all arguments were now moot. A new artillery compound would be built about 100 yards away, on the opposite side of the creek. It was decided, and within a few days, it was done. The two 105mm Howitzers and their platoon were moved.
The whole team got in jeeps and traveled to Vinh Binh for a going away party for Major Saunders. When we got there it was not just the Major's party, it was a party for all departing personnel, and there were about six outgoing folks. There were speeches and booze and food. We spent the night. The next day the Major caught a flight out for Saigon and home.
When we got back to Tieu Can from our little party in Vinh Binh, Major Hayes was already there, waiting for us. He flew in from the neighboring District, and would be the temporary replacement for Major Saunders until a more permanent replacement could be found. The neighboring District was Tra Cu, and was very similar to Tieu Can in most respects. Major Hayes had been the SDA there for most of his recent tour. This was his fourth tour in Vietnam. He was a very impressive, ex-Special Forces grunt, with a resume of been-there-done-that all over the country.
He didn't talk much, but you could tell that he was worried about possible enemy action. The first thing he did was contract with a Vietnamese laborer, through the District Chief, to make the sandbag wall in from of the house much higher.
After a day or two, we found ourselves cleaning every round of ammunition we owned. Something was up, or this guy was overly cautious.
Major Hayes wanted to take the Province helicopter up for some Visual Recon. When we got over an area that was clearly VC controlled a burst of green tracer bullets raced up to greet us. That was enough looky-lou at that particular area, we decided abruptly, and we turned a bit north. Then we noticed a Viet Cong flag flying from a large dirt mound below. The District Chief wanted to go down and get the flag. The Advisors said no. Home James. Something was up.
I don't think he told anyone else, but Sanh told me. Viet Cong women were coming into the lumber yard outside of town and purchasing lumber that could only be useful for making caskets. Hm..
April 1972
Visited Tap Ngai with Major Hayes. This was a very remote area of the District, that tended to provide safe haven for VC that sometimes attacked Tra Cu District. He wanted to know if anything unusual was going on. As soon as the Province helicopter dropped us off and departed, it took ground fire from the southern part of the village. The door gunners returned fire. That would be the last time that we used that particular helicopter pad at Tap Ngai...it was too exposed to hostile intentions. When the helicopter picked us up we instructed it to land to the north of the militia outpost. Once again I left all of my ammunition and my radio battery with the outpost defenders.
On a supply trip to Tra Vinh with Sanh, by jeep, we noticed an Air America helicopter landing to re-supply a Vietnamese platoon all dressed in black pajamas. Sanh explained that this unit was the PRU, Province Reconnaissance Unit, and that they were mercenaries hired by the CIA to do what the old CIA Phoenix program had done and what the new Phung Hoang program was supposed to do, but didn't. Anyway, I had received a few small intelligence reports citing the PRU as the source of the information, and now I understood, for the first time who they were. They looked VC, to me. Very scary.
One long day in April
About 2:00am I was nearly knocked out of bed by an explosion that was huge and ground rattling. It was immediately followed by incoming mortar rounds targeted at the team house (or the District compound...I was inclined to take it personally). Within seconds the air was full of explosions and screams and automatic weapons fire and machine gun fire and outgoing mortar fire and more screams and more mortars and more screams.
It was April 9th, I think. Pedro headed for the bunker outside, I headed for the radio room/bunker, Major Hayes headed for the District Chief operations center next door. Province had already heard over the Vietnamese net that we were under attack, and they wanted confirmation and all the details. I confirmed, but I had no details. It sounded like WW3 outside.
I soon joined Pedro in the bunker outside, and waited for some onslaught of VC. About 40 local militia were waiting too, flat on the ground in the open village square in front of the team bunker. Seeing nothing to do in the bunker with Pedro I went back to the team house radio. Soon Major Hayes came in and told me that the VC had cut the wire at the new artillery compound, and they had blown all of the artillery ammunition. It was reported to be a blood bath. A company of militia from a compound near the artillery compound were engaging the remaining VC, some of whom were using a nearby pagoda as a firing position. The District Chief had called for air support.
Meanwhile the VC kept our heads down with constant mortar fire, one round every minute or so. The District mortar tube was putting out rounds like there was no tomorrow, since there was now no artillery support. A 50 caliber machine mounted on the water tower at the north end of Tieu Can was firing directly at the VC mortar position (they could see it from up there, but the effect was limited by the distance involved, about 4 kilometers). Somewhere in Major Hays description of action at the artillery compound, he also said, the District Chief wants the generator started so the front lights can be turned on.î, which meant, sergeant, start the generator.î I started to head out the back door just as a mortar round hit the roof of a building to my left. I took a deep breath, and then went outside to start the generator. It started on the first pull. But it is amazing how long that took under the circumstances.
The militia company exchanged small arms fire with the VC for about two hours. The only reinforcements available were on the wrong side of the creek, and the one bridge across the creek was the focus of a VC machine gun. Meanwhile, every minute or two another mortar round would fall, seemingly trying to hit our team house. I was in the outside bunker, when it took a direct hit, without damage. Several rounds hit the trees in front of the team house, and the roof took a licking from shrapnel. One piece of shrapnel came through a non-sandbagged area of the house, the kitchen, and embedded itself three inches into a concrete wall. Impressive.
Sanh came to the team house, and surveyed his medical supplies. He was scared, and so was I. I remember sitting in the radio room, expecting a human wave attack on the District compound, and feeling so thirsty. I would take sips from my canteen, but the thirst was too powerful to be quenched. It was as if my tongue had turned to cotton.
Then came the airplane. It was reported to be Vietnamese, a new experience for me. All communication with the plane was done by the Vietnamese next door. It appeared to be an old DC3, with electronic mini-guns out the side.
When the plane started to circle the area, at about 1000 feet, it dropped large white parachute flares, one after another. It took about five minutes to drop about 50 parachute flares, totally turning the night into day. Then, with the area fully lit, a stream of fire traveled out the door of the craft and made its way in a beam of light all the way to the ground. All we could hear was something that sounded like a giant sewing machine in the sky. It was Puff the Magic Dragon, and he was breathing tracer bullets in a steady, heavy, streak of fire. The bullets were said to cover the ground with holes every few inches or so.
The old French water tower in the northern part of town had no water, but it had a 50 caliber machine gun mounted on top, and the Vietnamese gunner used tracer ammunition to point out trouble spots to the plane.
Except for a few green tracers fired up toward the DC3 from a few bold and crazy VC the battle was basically over. It had lasted about four hours, and it was almost day break.
The pilots reported seeing about 150 farmers and other locals waiting to assist the fleeing VC. That's when it hit me. This war was a family affair, and they had more family support than we did.
And then it was day break, and what I remember best was the silence. Not a bird, not a cricket, not a damned lizard, dared disturb the absolute quiet.
Children started to come out and collect the shrapnel in baskets. It was everywhere, very sharp, and Vietnamese are a barefooted lot.
Major Hayes and Pedro got in a jeep and headed for the artillery compound, while I manned the radio.
Ba Ba came in and prepared my breakfast. She brought a plate into the radio room, and I ate it with no appetite at all.
After a while, when the Major and Pedro failed to return, I got in the other jeep and headed for the artillery position too.
About thirty dead local militia had already been carried away.
About six seriously wounded militia were on stretchers placed on the dirt road in front of the artillery compound, waiting for helicopter transport, when the VC targeted them with new mortar rounds. Pedro moved quickly, exposed himself to the mortar rounds, and cleared the road of the wounded, single-handedly. A hero.
I talked with the only survivor of the artillery platoon, the leader, a Vietnamese Lieutenant. He reported that the guards were asleep, after the whole platoon had been invited to a party down the road earlier in the evening. A local businessman had bought everyone plenty of beer. Major Hayes surmised that the VC had spent months planning the attack, and had probably spent several days cutting through the barbed wire by stealth of night. The party was part of the set-up. Drunk and sleepy, most of the platoon never woke up. Upon the first explosion the Lieutenant went into a one man fox hole, and that is where he remained throughout the chaos.
The VC could have gotten away without losing a man. They somehow blew up the ammunition with most of the VC attack force inside the artillery compound...an obvious screw-up. Numerous VC were killed outright. Those who survived heaped their dead and wounded onto an ammunition trailer and wheeled off down the road with a full wheelbarrow load. Major Hayes and Pedro had retrieved the ammunition trailer from an intersection down the road a thousand feet or so. It had no bodies, but there was about two inches of blood in the bottom of the trailer. What a mess. Given the amount of blood, and the impact of Puff, we estimated that the VC lost 30 or so men, about the same number they killed in their attack. 60 souls all together.
Both artillery pieces had flat tires, rendering them temporarily useless. One piece had been aimed at the District compound, with barrel lowered. A round was properly loaded, and the breach was closed. The platoon leader said that the VC were trying to fire the thing, when they just gave up and left. Apparently they were looking for a trigger, and all they needed to do was pull the lanyard rope.
There were still a few dead VC around the compound, and they were untouched by the militia; left for relatives. This was, after all, a family affair.
I didn't have the occasion to render aide to the wounded, but I had no trouble looking at the dead. I had crossed over some sort of emotional threshold. I was numb, but my eyes were wide open.
Back at the team house we spent the rest of the morning communicating the list of damage to Province. Turns out that we were just one target among many that night. The offensive was nationwide, and it would become known as the Easter Offensive. Up north, Quang Tri Province was completely lost. Several District towns were lost. The City of Hue was under siege. Muc Hoa was under siege. And most of Vinh Binh Province was the mirror image of Tieu Can. If I had been bored a few times during this tour, that was now in the past.
As the day wore on, reports of other attacks throughout Tieu Can District made their way to the team house. Of particular importance to me was Tap Ngai. The village platoon had not checked in. Radio silence in Vietnam usually meant that no one was alive. But having been out there several times, and understanding that radio batteries were hard to come by, I assumed that the defenders mostly needed re-supply.
I made a very deliberate decision to call the Province helicopter for myself and Sanh. We would travel out to Tap Ngai, with a clear mission to re-supply the outpost and stay for the duration of the fight if necessary. I knew that we could land safely, using local trees as cover, and if anyone was still left in the outpost I knew they would signal us even before we landed.
It was going to be a dangerous mission, but the risk was reasonable under the circumstances. I knew the village, and I wanted to help. The thought occurred to me that I might get killed in the process, but I went forward nevertheless. All of this on-the-spot planning was a very sobering, tension filled act of mental gymnastics, because I identified with the outpost as my friends.
We loaded our ruck packs with as much ammunition, radio batteries, and other essentials as we could each carry, and then we sat down and waited for the Province helicopter to pick us up.
And waited. And waited. And waited.
First word that the Province helicopter had been diverted came with a trouble call from the helicopter. Seems that a civilian, the Province CORDs Advisor...Civilian Organization for Regional Development..., had suddenly taken an interest in Tap Ngai too. He usurped my request to take the helicopter to Tap Ngai, and instead took the helicopter there himself.
CORDs was a cover for the CIA, and this guy was really trying to check on his PRU. But he had not bothered to check with the military (me) prior to his little trip, and after landing at the helicopter pad that the District Advisors had just abandoned, and after departing said aircraft, this civilian, without weapon, and without radio, was left stranded by the helicopter in his Hawaiian shirt and tennis shoes, as the VC started zeroing in mortar fire on said helicopter's location.
It was the lack of radio communication that was the real panic. No one with the task of now rescuing this idiot civilian could be certain of the situation on the ground. The possibilities were endless. Did we now have a captured civilian to worry about? What kind of a response was needed to resolve this new crisis? No one in authority had a clue.
Four two-and-a-half ton trucks (deuce-and-a-half for you ex-GIs) were brought to the District compound. The plan to rescue the civilian was to send in about a company of troops to an area that was close enough to mount an attack, if required. All the troops were quickly assembled, loaded on the trucks, and with two jeeps carrying me, Major Hayes, the District Chief and Sanh, we all rolled off to some destination down the road that seemed pretty half baked.
We turned right after a mile or two, and headed down a dirt road that hadn't seen a vehicle for a long time. After about one more mile we came to a village that was heavily lined with trees and jungle foliage, providing good cover for both our company and any VC that might be waiting within a stone's throw of our new location. Then, the Province helicopter came down to pick up Major Hayes and the District Chief, leaving me somewhat in charge of the Vietnamese rescue force. Pedro was back at the team house, manning the radio. I didn't like the whole setup, because there were too many tree lines in this area that looked like perfect VC cover to me. I had Sanh send out flanking troops, and hoped like hell no one started shooting.
The Province helicopter took my Major and the District Chief on a visual recon of Tap Ngai, while I waited for their orders. After about ten minutes of sweating bullets (literally I suppose) they looked down and spotted the American with the Tap Ngai Village Chief and about two or three militia members walking through the rice paddies toward a more secure village. The American was stranded, and the Village Chief decided to simply walk him home. Cute, huh?
The helicopter landed in the rice paddy and picked up the party. As soon as they were all on board, the VC, waiting for this specific opportunity, bracketed the helicopter with three quick mortar rounds.
The good news is that the VC in Tieu Can District were terrible shots. Three tries and no cigar. The helicopter landed with its party near my jeep so that Major Hayes could ride back with me. The rest of the group, including the District Chief headed for Province headquarters. They all had explaining to do.
When our jeep made it back to the team house, Pedro was there with cold beer.
Ba Ba was starting dinner.
I was shaking like a leaf.
It had been a long day.
The rest of April
Pedro left for momma. He had taught me a great deal...everything he knew about the district and the villages and the local VC. I knew the district better than any replacement had known this district in a long time, and I give full credit to my mentor.
A day or two later, Sanh and I completed our re-supply mission to Tap Ngai. We went out early in the morning on the Province helicopter. There seemed to be a lot of commotion around the Village Headquarters building (a hut really). Something was happening, and two soldiers were trying to get the Village Chief's attention. Then, when he saw us, the Village Chief wanted us to follow him into a rice paddy just east of the village. An ambush had killed a suspected Viet Cong tax collector, just moments before we landed. We walked out of the village a hundred yards or so and joined three or four troops looking at the body. By the time we got to the body all papers and property had been removed. He had a document that looked like a tax record to me....but who knows. The tax records were abruptly turned over to the Village Chief, and that was the last I saw of the evidence. I'm certain that these records never turned up at the Phung Hoang office in Tieu Can. They were too important, on a bunch of different levels. Either the Village Chief kept them for his own purposes (perhaps to protect certain people) or they were given over to the CIA somehow.
The tax collector also carried a Viet Cong flag, that was added to the team house collection. The last thing any militia troop wanted to keep was a VC flag. Having one in your possession was serious evidence of loyalty to the Viet Cong, and a quick ticket to jail for all South Vietnamese citizens.
I was also given some North Vietnamese money that was in the tax collector's pocket, another worthless commodity to the militia troops.
A few days later, Major Hayes returned to Tra Cu, and Major Richard K. Holaday arrived, my new DSA. Third tour. A really nice guy, a former football hero, an aspiring football coach, with combat experience up the wazoo.
I started calling Major Holaday Tieu Taw, which is Vietnamese for Major. I prefer to write it ìTu Ta, because that is how it was pronounced. His new District was deep in the middle of a VC offensive, and his first day or two was taken up by briefings and meetings with just about everyone. Because I knew so much, I quickly became his confidant and second in charge of everything.
On April 9th, in addition to the attack on the artillery compound, the District had lost one remote outpost to enemy action. There were a total of perhaps 24 outposts in the district, each with a Vietnamese militia squad or platoon. The outpost that was lost had simply been abandoned by the troops when they were told to leave by VC, who were threatening to blow them away with B40 rocket grenades. Everyday it seemed another outpost was lost in the same manner. Before this whole abandonment saga was over we had lost 14 outposts to the VC, representing about half of the district. The VC could now roam freely.
The VC continued to lob in a mortar round or two every three or four days, just for drill. The old French water tower responded with the 50, zeroing in on the mortar positions as well as possible.
One paid attention to the moon in Vietnam. I never went to bed without noticing just how much light the thing was making. Almost all attacks were known to happen on moonless nights. When the moon was full and the night was brilliant white, one could sleep tight.
We were just sitting around one April afternoon, when Sanh came in and said, there are two soldiers outside that just came back from patrol. They killed two VC and they have the heads in a gunny sack. They want you to come out and look.î
We didn't. Neither the Major nor the Sergeant were going to look into that sack. To do so would have condoned the decapitation of heads. But we couldn't condemn the act either. This was the era of Vietnamization, and the Advisors were just observers, really. It was up to Vietnamese militia officers to condemn the act, and we knew they wouldn't. As a way out, we had Sanh tell the soldiers that the Advisors didn't care to look at such a gruesome sight. The idea that the Advisors had weak stomachs would thrill the soldiers more than insult them.
Later that night, over a bowl of Chinese soup, Sanh and I talked some about the decapitation. His first reason offered for the act was that the soldiers were afraid no one would believe they had actually killed two VC. Lying about the results of patrols and ambushes was routine in Vietnam, for all armies on all sides of the war. My guess was that the VC lied like fools most of the time.
But then Sanh offered a religious reason. It seems that Vietnamese, and Cambodians too, believe that if one mutilates a fallen enemy, one will not have to fight him again in the afterlife. Cut off an ear, and deny your enemy access to heaven. I had heard stories about mutilation the whole time I had been in Vietnam. One of my previous DSA's spoke about finding his soldiers eating human liver after an action. Said they believed, as the Vietnamese believed, that such acts gave you the strength of your enemy.
These were heavy thoughts. I suspected that mutilation was more common in Vietnam that I ever dreamed.
Given the action and the constant alert status that we were under, Province found a third man to give the team a boost: Staff Sergeant Richard Cramer, a medic and homesteader...he had been in Vietnam for at least four years, with a wife in Saigon. He had come to Vinh Binh as a replacement for the Province medic, who had not yet left, so he was ours for a while. He spoke fluent Vietnamese, like a native.
One benefit of his presence was that I could put in for R&R (Rest and Relaxation), and maybe go home to Robin and Erika in Ogden, Utah, for a few days. I called Province on the secure radio in the clear and explained my need for R&R.
One of the first things Sergeant Cramer did was announce that an old friend of his from Saigon wanted to visit...an Army Chaplain, a Catholic, with an unrecalled Irish name. Seems the Chaplain wanted to visit a Priest in Tieu Can's largest village, Long Thoi, pronounced long toy. Long Thoi sat on the southern border of the district, and was a port to the Mekong River. I had visited the village several times with Pedro. It was prosperous, by Vietnam standards, and generally quiet as far as war action was concerned. Even in this current offensive the VC had held themselves to action far outside of Long Thoi. There seemed to be a lot of commerce going on there, and even the VC could profit by the ebb and flow of good business. From an intelligence point of view, I saw it as the point-of-entry for VC supplies, particularly mortar shells.
Within a day or two the Chaplain arrived. We served him dinner, found a bottle of wine, and spent the evening talking about all sorts of things. Cramer reviewed how previous years in Vietnam had found them both at the same hospital evacuation sites, Cramer a medic and the Chaplain a giver of last rights. The Chaplain didn't look old enough, but he said he had been a PT Boat commander during WWII.
I remember how protective I felt. This was a dangerous place, and somehow the Chaplain's safety felt like my personal responsibility. The next morning he wanted to push on to Long Thoi, and I had Sanh drive the jeep so that I could sit in the back, riding shotgun. But I didn't have a shotgun, I had both my M16 and a grenade launcher. I was ready for serious trouble.
As we pulled out of Tieu Can village and headed down the road toward Long Thoi we went by one hamlet after another. I had been down this same route many times, and never had anyone even bothered to look up. This time, however, it was as if everyone in Vietnam knew that the Great American Father was on his way to visit the one and only Long Thoi Priest. The road was lined with spectators wanting a glimpse. In the back, riding shotgun, was Sergeant Hunt, who had never announced personal movement since the day he realized such announcement could be fatal. This was bad. This was very bad.
But we made it. The local Vietnamese Priest in Long Thoi was reputed to be a graduate of a major university in Ohio. The two Catholics met for about two hours, speaking at times in Latin, and at times in English. Then we piled back into the jeep and returned to Tieu Can. No spectators on the way back. This time they didn't seem to know we were coming. Just the way I liked it.
After taking 14 outposts, without much force, the same VC gang decided to dig in at Tap Ngai. The southern half of the village was theirs anyway, so they spent some time reinforcing various bunkers built into the huts (most Vietnamese homes had some sort of bunker on the interior). Their plan was to connect a few of the huts by way of the bunkers, and fight off any attack, no matter what. The frustrated Tap Ngai Village Chief reported that the VC seemed to be in Tap Ngai to stay, and he could not muster the force necessary to kick them out.
We knew that the number of VC at Tap Ngai was no more than 9 well armed enemy soldiers. The District Chief thought that if he went to Tap Ngai in battalion strength the VC would just pack up and leave before we arrived.
Trucks picked up the battalion of troops (that was over half of all the troops the District Chief had in his command) and transported the whole load to a jumping off spot that was actually in the district to the north. Tu Ta Holaday and Sergeant Hunt and Sergeant Cramer and both interpreters followed in two jeeps, with instructions that the jeeps be driven back to Tieu Can by militia personnel. I carried a M79 grenade launcher and two bandoleers of grenade ammo.
At the right spot, the trucks stopped and everyone started filing into the open rice paddles, through a thin line of trees at the side of the road. The District Chief and Tu Ta Holaday were near the front of the string of troops, and that is where I wanted to be too. But a lieutenant from Province had my R&R papers, and met me at the jumping off point. By the time I signed his papers and pointed him back to Province headquarters I found myself almost a full quarter mile behind Tu Ta.
Walking through rice paddies in Vietnam, with a full load of gear, is hard enough. Trying to make time so one can catch up to one's leader is harder still. Add the possibility of VC ambush the whole way and it gets very grim. Add the 110 degrees of pure tropical humidity, and well, you get the picture. I hadn't really been in prime physical shape since basic training four years earlier, and this experience proved my undoing. After ten kilometers of muddy rice paddies, I damn near had a heat stroke. As the line approached Tap Ngai, everyone stopped to rest a while and get fresh legs. By the time I reached the resting point the whole battalion was poised to move on. It was clear to Major Holaday that Sergeant Hunt was having serious heat exhaustion problems and he put me on a sampan for the rest of the trip (I swear, you could go anywhere in the Mekong Delta by sampan, even to war.)
The sampan was paddled by a woman. I was just along for the ride. After about a half mile of narrow water we came to the bridge that separated north and south Tap Ngai. As I started to get out of the sampan, it sank in about four feet of canal water. My awkward American self had capsized the damn thing. I was so embarrassed, but the woman just laughed. Others on shore, also laughing, helped us both get out of the canal, and I rejoined Tu Ta, who would set-up his little base of operations at the old church, just north of the village square.
Not two many months earlier, the American DSA would have taken a direct leadership role in a situation like this. But Tu Ta Holaday had come to Tieu Can with orders to let the Vietnamese leaders lead. And so, Major Holaday watched and waited mostly. The District Chief sent in his troops and found that the VC had not left as predicted but seemed to be well dug in and well supplied for a long siege. Small arms fire was exchanged for the rest of the day and into the night. No one on either side seemed to get hurt. The Americans were given hammocks in the outpost, and that was the end of day one.
Day two was more of the same, except that the District Chief lied to Major Holaday about a wounded soldier. No one had been wounded, according to the District Chief, when both Tu Ta and Sergeant Hunt had seen differently with their own eyes. Why? Not sure. More speculation later. For now, the standoff continued all morning, the second day, with the VC not giving an inch.
Then, unexpectedly, the District Chief announced that his troops had only been prepared to stay two days, and that they were going to head home by noon. More fighting, but no movement on behalf of the VC. The District Chief wanted the DSA to call an American air strike, and level the village.
I wondered why the District Chief didn't do it himself, with his own artillery out of Tieu Can. But the bottom line was no, the village would remain standing.
So the afternoon of the second day the District Chief walked out with his battalion of troops, and the nine VC defenders ruled the day. I called the Province helicopter and skillfully popped smoke and guided the pilot into a potentially hostile area without incident. The three American Advisors, tired, dirty, disgusted with their counterparts, boarded the helicopter for the team house.
This was the day that I knew for sure the war was already lost. I was a stupid son-of-a-bitch. It had taken me six months to figure out what so many other people already knew. I assumed that my high command already knew too. I noticed from day one that MACV authorities had been acting as though they had already conceded the war. I was just the last to know.
A day or two later, I left for R&R....To Snowbird, Utah, with Robin. Skied one day. Not a particularly good time. Too much time and distance for a married couple to recoup in a few days. It probably took me about 4 days to get to Utah from the District, and a total of about 4 days to get back. So, actual R&R was more like 6 days, max.
Spent the last day of R&R shopping for presents to take back to my Vietnamese crew. Levis for both interpreters and terry cloth towels for the cooks.
Sergeant Cramer had stayed in Tieu Can for my entire absence. But when I got back he had to return to Vinh Binh, as now he was the only medic available in the Province.
While I was gone there was an accident in the local shopping area of Tieu Can. Some kids were playing a game in the dirt, and one of the players was a young militia member with a grenade hanging from his belt. A child grabbed the grenade and the pin immediately fell out. The device went off, killing the militia soldier and killing the child. A dozen others were hurt badly. Sergeant Cramer and Sanh cared for a few on the spot. Others were transported to a local hospital. The situation was chaos, and I'm glad I missed it.
May 1972
I was getting noticeably thin. My fatigues hung on me like sacks. I would put on shorts during the evening that had to be held up by safety pins. The weight loss had started in Long Knot, and it had simply never stopped. Maybe it was the food, but I think not. I finished off every meal in Tieu Can with lots of French bread (a staple item in Vietnam) lots of butter (we could always get American butter...go figure) and lots of honey (we could always get American honey). And still I was dropping pounds.
The shower hut in the backyard had just been a place to wash up with a bucket of water for along time. The formal plumbing from the electric well had worked only one or two days since I had been in Tieu Can, and Province had no one to send down to repair the pump motor. But the plumbing was in place for a real shower (cold) were it not for the absence of water in the water tower in our back yard.
So, Sergeant Hunt invented a more accommodating alternative. Got a 55 gallon barrel and with the help of local Vietnamese we welded a pipe nipple into the bottom. Then set the barrel on top of the shower hut (a tin shed) so that the pipe extended through the roof. Then hooked up a valve and a shower head. Now we only had to bucket the thing full of water in order to have enough water for several real showers.
Ah, but here was the real stroke of genius. Tu Ta was able to come up with a field-mess water heater, the kind that every GI has used in the field at one time or another when rinsing and washing eating trays in the field. The military, all branches I believe, have used boiling water in the field for this job since the turn of the century. The heaters are crude affairs, designed to be put in large drums or large trash cans, and operate by submerging a heating vessel at the bottom of the barrel that literally burns raw kerosene from a small fuel tank. The resulting heat can boil 55 gallons in about an two hours.
Ah, but it can bring that much water up to shower temperature in about an hour.
Our bucket well was a hole in the ground about 2 feet in diameter, but right next to the shower hut. So we tied a rope onto the bucket, and between Ba Ba and me, or either of the interpreters, we eventually had hot showers every evening.
This was by far my most glorious crowning achievement in Vietnam...a real tribute to the American way.
Made several trips to the top of the Tieu Can water tower, with the excuse of looking over the machine gun. Truth is, I just liked the view.
One day Tu Ta was required to submit an official Escape and Evasion (E&E) plan to Province. An E&E plan is simply the directions one gives to rescue teams when all else fails. It says in a nutshell, if you can't find me home, and I don't answer the phone, look for me here.î I had submitted a E&E plan for Major Hayes a few days after Pedro left. Then the paranoia was that the District town would be lost, with the Advisors running for the woods. Now there was a different paranoia brewing. The war was hot again, while American withdrawal plans moved forward unabated. Advisors in Vietnam were starting to voice concern that, under the right circumstances, they might be held hostage by the South Vietnamese military.
It was a sobering possibility. If the North Vietnamese were to attack full force from the north, Advisors would be saddled with desperate counterparts all over Vietnam, possibly watching a nightmare unfold. I think it was pretty clear to everyone in a position to understand the reality in the field that the Vietnamese could not carry on the fight without American ground troops...and those troops were now long gone.
We re-submitted the same plan I originally proposed to Major Hayes. We would leave the team house and walk between two of the Vietnamese buildings next to our back yard. Then we would cross the creek moat, and walk down the back of a long string of village huts. Then we would cross an open area (hopefully this would be at night) and proceed cross-country to Sanh's village. It was the only village nearby where I felt that the occupants would risk their lives hiding a couple of American GI's until a helicopter could swoop in for a rescue.
Major Holaday and I walked out of the team house and took a look at the gap between the buildings that allowed access to the water. We were both concerned that the muddy bottom of the canal might make it impossible to cross with our gear. He came up with two inflatable rubber things. I can't remember what they were, but somehow we were going to be able to blow them up with air and float across.
I had spent so much time listening to our radio net, with a loud speaker on 24 hours per day, that my call-sign was just like my name. I thought it was interesting that I could sleep through radio traffic that sometimes went on all night long, and then wake up the moment someone used my call sign...just like someone calling my name.
Ba had a daughter, in her twenties, with a baby girl, about 15 months. For a period of six weeks or so Ba's daughter and granddaughter would visit while Ba did housework. The daughter would help Ba, while I played with the baby.
I think Ba was doing me a favor, of sorts. She knew that I had my own little girl, about the same age, and that I missed her beyond words. So I took to playing with this child like a fly takes to sugar.
What a sweetheart. But she had no diapers! None of the young Vietnamese children had diapers. It was entirely practical given the tropical climate and the reality that most floors were dirt. But it was still sort of a cultural flex to just let the child pee on the floor. Ba's daughter was always quick to clean it up...but diapers are better. Trust me.
About once per week I would take Sanh out for lunch at Howard Johnson. I almost always had the same thing, a concoction of fried rice, diced ham and two fried chicken eggs on top. It was terribly expensive by Vietnamese standards, about $2.50. Sanh would have the same thing. But during these trips to Howard Johnson's I often found myself thinking, oddly enough, about corruption in the militia. Buying Sanh meals came to symbolize for me the basic problem in Vietnam and the core reason for all the petty corruption that seemed to be everywhere. Poverty. Sanh's basic military pay was about $12.00 per month. That meal represented almost a week's wages. The cigarettes and the shaving cream we gave the interpreters from the sundries pack was a major boost to their economic stability. One just could not feed a family in Vietnam with the salary provided by the Vietnamese military. My American Staff Sergeant's salary was about ten times what the District Chief made officially.
Being on the take was a normal way of life for all Vietnamese, except farmers, who were the takees.
Rather than contend with water in my gasoline, I found it easier to buy a six pack of beer for the truck driver who delivered the stuff. After the first time, though, I hated the routine. The truck would arrive, the driver would make a bee-line for the team house kitchen, I would reach into the ice-chest for the beer, and then two weeks later the process would repeat itself. Nevertheless, it worked.
The enemy offensive had put a real strain on American medivac helicopters, and served to illuminate the reality that the Vietnamese were slow to call their own medivac equipment. The Vietnamese had plenty of their own. Suddenly, the word came down, no more American medivacs for Vietnamese personnel.
At least one mortar round could be counted on to fall around the District town once or twice each week. Each time, the 50 caliber machine gun on the water tower would try to find the location and bring down a little wrath. When everything was working well the range of the two weapons was a wash. The 50 caliber meant that usually the mortar could only get off one round before it had to pack up and move.
After the initial April 9th attack there were firefights almost everyday somewhere in the District. When they were within 5 miles or so from the team house, which was often, you could usually hear them clearly.
I always found it interesting how similar these fire fights resembled the sound of popcorn being popped on a stove. They would start with a single pop or two. Then more pops, then more, and soon there would be a whole crescendo as everyone joined in. Then the whole fight would wind down, just as it started. The fight always ended with a few lingering pops.
A VC mortar round that was probably aimed at the District compound fell short and killed a woman in a hut just on the other side of the creek. This incident struck me as particularly cruel. Our VC were not skilled with their mortar tube, and they didn't seem to care who they killed.
Suddenly our team was asked to find a local civil improvement project and to spend about $400. I think this was CORDS money, but who knows. Anyway, Sanh introduced me to the doctor at the local clinic. He suggested a new water cistern system, designed to catch rain water. He wanted to know how much of the $400 I was going keep. When I told him that I didn't plan to keep any, he acted surprised. The Vietnamese approach to all things was to take a small fee on the side. The cistern was installed, and everyone lived happily ever after.
A small action, just south of the District town, resulted in two militia KIA and one WIA. A Vietnamese medivac was called for the wounded, but the District Chief turned the bird away. Sanh explained that the District Chief didn't want to pay for the medivac. Pay? Apparently one reason wounded Vietnamese were lied about, and sometimes abandoned by their friends, was that they were a financial obligation in a society where fees were always collected on the side.
The payment system was more often than not indirect. Sanh explained, sheepishly, that the Province Chief selected the District Chief based on local support from businessmen...which one should read, local money paid to the Province Chief by local businessmen. The need to funnel money upward was a clear mandate from above. It was a license to steal.
I had noticed since day one in Vietnam that militia soldiers seemed to never have a full issue of ammunition. At one point I learned that a local company commander required his militia troops to buy their ammunition. The troops, who were locally stationed near their villages, would get the money from local family and friends. The farmers at the bottom of this pyramid scheme were getting screwed. No wonder local farmers refused to take sides against the VC. At least the VC tax collector called it taxes.
It had been obvious to me for a long time that the major difference between the local militia and the members of the Vietnamese Regular Army stationed up north, pitted against the NVA...North Vietnamese Army...was simply the ability of the local family to pay for the militia assignment. When one adds the direct, daily, corruption of purchasing ammunition, I came to understand why virtually no real fighting could be expected from these militia troops. I reviewed daily operations plans, and they were never designed to engage the enemy...the plans generally ignored places anyone could get into a fight any day in Tieu Can. When there was contact it was usually a mistake, or VC initiated. The militia troops literally owned their commanding officers by virtue of payola, and that meant they could safely ride out the war without committing to or being part of the final solution. The Vietnamese Government was filled with officials getting rich, and it guaranteed defeat in time.
Since much of this money was funneled upward, through the Province Chief and all the way to Saigon, one can imagine that there was very little incentive at the top to increase military wages at the bottom, or distribute wealth in any way. Such an effort would stop the cash cow that all government officials in Vietnam had learned to appreciate. When President Thieu flew away with a plane load of gold in 1975, I knew exactly how he got the loot. He won by losing.
June 1972
One day a plane came on the radio. Wanted to know if he could be of any assistance. His call sign was Covey 6, I think. He was part of a whole squadron of Covey birds flying out of some base up north...sent down to the delta to check in with the various districts and offer ad hoc air support. These were not attack aircraft, though they had some capability along those lines, with rockets and a 20mm cannon. Mainly they were scouts and observers. They were twin fuselage push-pull prop jobs. I think we referred to them as OH-10's, and they were flown by the Air Force.
I think we passed on the first offer, but once we had the call sign, Major Holaday worked out a plan to use one of the planes to look over a festering hot spot near Long Thoi, on the border of our neighboring District to the west Cau Ke. The VC were constantly causing trouble in this area, and so we met the airplane in that vicinity one afternoon.
We watched the plane do its stuff, and it was better than any air show I've ever seen in the states. The pilot bobbed and weaved and twisted and turned constantly all over the sky as he carefully looked over the situation on the ground from well below 500 feet.
True to predictions, the airplane drew quite a bit of ground fire, but rather than cut the mission short the pilot just stayed in there almost daring the VC to keep shooting. It was quite a sight. At some point the pilot returned fire, silencing the VC. Tu Ta wanted to recommend the pilot for some sort of medal.
On at least one other occasion the SDA from Cau Ke District used a Covey aircraft in the same area, with similar results. I helped coordinate some of that action, because radio communication from that area all the way to Province was a problem. We relayed radio traffic a lot for Cau Ke District when their SDA was in the field. As a result I have a bunch of Cau Ke stories. But hey, that's another log.
One afternoon a Covey bird checked in and I used him to lay down some smoke for a squad of militia who were pinned down in an open field.
Tu Ta and Sergeant Hunt were invited to a village just east of Long Thoi, in celebration of recent victories over the enemy, I was told. And so, another jeep trip to Long Thoi. This time we walked through the village open air market (you wouldn't believe all the fish for sale.) A motorized sampan was waiting and we gingerly boarded. With Tu Ta and me and Sanh and Minh the sampan was fully loaded, with about three inches of freeboard (generous by Vietnamese standards). The motor was of the lawn mower variety, with a long axle shaft and propeller that the boat driver could dip in and out of the water, for both forward power and direction. This crude arrangement was typical in Vietnam, and so long as one kept away from the propeller and shaft, the whole system was quite efficient.
Across the river was our village destination, and we were the last to arrive. All of the Hamlet Chiefs and the local Village Chief were already present. I had eaten with many local Vietnamese dignitaries, and this meal was similar, except that a barbecue, of sorts, was placed on the table, so that real beef could be cooked in thin strips, teriyaki style.
As the last of the meal was consumed, out came something very interesting. Very interesting indeed. It was a bowl of blood. I was told by Sanh that it was cow's blood, but in Vietnam one could never be sure. Each of the men took a large sip from the bowl and passed it on. Tu Ta was one of the first to be allowed the privilege of partaking ritualistic blood, and he seemed to understand that it was incredibly important to these Vietnamese leaders. When the bowl reached me I wanted to pass, but Tu Ta gave me a look that told me I was in deep trouble if I failed to drink.
And so I did...And immediately I wanted to puke (but I didn't...I just smiled).
Later I understood that this was a ancient ritual of warriors in Vietnam, and to be invited to partake was a major honor not given to very many Americans. But God, it was still awful.
I had a 35mm camera, and Sanh asked me to photograph his family. I was happy to oblige. I had met his wife, but on this day I met his children too. They were all dressed up, as if they were going to a fancy studio photographer for a full set of portraits. Later Sanh and I took the jeep to a local Pagoda north of town, and took pictures of his son. It was all very touching. Sanh setup the shot with a beautiful flower-bush of some sort in the background, just outside the Pagoda. When the pictures were developed I have his family a full set.
The VC were putting more and more pressure on Long Thoi. Along the river, both east and west of Long Thoi were important militia outposts, which had held their ground, despite repeated pressure from the VC. The western most outpost was called Cu Lao, pronounced coo Lao. The VC had pulled their old trick of threatening the militia defenders, but these defenders refused to leave. There were at least 15 militia at Cu Lao, with a Vietnamese lieutenant in charge.
It's possible that the VC just wanted to make good on their threat, because they sure went to enough trouble. Over a period of days, the VC surrounded Cu Lao at night and constructed perhaps 50 small bunkers and foxholes, spread out over an area about the size of four football fields.
The outpost had its back to the river, and the area around the outpost was a combination of rough thicket, tree lines and swamp. The main reason that this outpost existed was to block any main VC force from coming into Long Thoi Village through this area of good cover from the neighboring District of Cau Ke, pronounced cow Kay. In response to the militia's strident position, the VC decided to surround the place with perhaps thirty or forty VC, pick off the defenders one by one, and try to literally starve them out. It was to be a game of nerves. One of the defenders was killed on the first day.
After several days, the District Chief clearly needed help from anyone who could lend a hand. There were three dead bodies at the outpost, and the situation was starting to get ripe. Sending in troops to dislodge the VC was something that was probably unwise, and after the experience at Tap Ngai, probably impossible as far as I was concerned. At any rate, District Chiefs generally tried to call on Province troops, or better yet, Regular Army Vietnamese troops, for such serious rootem out and destroy missions. A year or two earlier, some poor American Army or Marine unit would have been asked to do the deed.
The plan cooked up by Major Holaday and the District Chief was this: A Vietnamese barge with a good 50 caliber machine gun would patrol up and down the VC positions, firing hard and keeping the VC in their holes. Then a local water taxi sampan, large enough to hold the 15 defenders, would pull up to the outpost, and the militia defenders would get into the water taxi and race away under cover from the barge. Somewhere through all of this it was hoped that Major Holaday could get air support to finish off the VC.
I really wanted to go out on the river with Tu Ta. But someone needed to stay with the main radio at District, and relay between the barge and Province, and the air support, if available. There was no way that the Major's PRC25 would reach all the way to Province from the river.
On cue, the barge, carrying my Major and my District Chief started to engage the VC on shore. After about 20 minutes of gunfire going in both directions, the air support arrived pretty much on schedule from an aircraft carrier. I was the first to talk to the planes. They were a pair of A6's with a full load, ready for action. Eventually, Tu Ta was able to talk with them, and he was able to set-up a perfectly coordinated effort.
The A6's timed their fly-byes with the machine gun and with the advance of the water taxi. At just the right moment, the troops left the outpost and filled the water taxi. As they pulled away from shore the A6's dropped concussion bombs that pretty much killed every Viet Cong still in their holes, and silenced any VC attempt to fire on the water taxi..
By the time the two planes had unloaded all their bombs, rockets, and 20mm cannon rounds, it was clear that most of the VC had died a pitiful death.
It was over, and I was joyful. Everyone was. It was the feeling of retribution.
About a week after the great battle for Cu Lao outpost, the American Advisors invited the entire platoon to District Headquarters for an award ceremony. Major Holaday had put the entire list of surviving defenders in for US Army Commendation Medals (the ArCom), and he had about fifteen metals to pin on green jerseys.
The District Chief had invited the Province Chief to the ceremony. He arrived by jeep, with white sheets acting as seat covers, and a twin M60 machine gun rig in the back of the jeep for security. Packing twin M60's in a jeep with clean seat covers was the moral equivalent of General Patton walking around with pearl handled revolvers in WWII. Pompous, to say the least.
A raised viewing stand was placed in the village square in front of the District Headquarters, and the troops were assembled for the award ceremony. The citation was read in Vietnamese, and Major Holaday trooped the line with Sergeant Hunt in tow, pinning on medals, one at a time. It was all very special for the troops, and very ceremonial by our local Vietnamese standards.
When the last ArCom was pinned on the last chest, the Viet Cong joined the party with a mortar round, that hit close to the village square, but didn't hurt anyone. Everyone scattered, of course, heading for cover...everyone except the Province Chief. That son-of-gun sat right where he was, alone on the viewing stand, almost daring the Viet Cong to chuck in another round.
Basically, he was steamed. The District Chief had been lying to him for months about how secure the District was, and it was all bull. This proved it. The District Chief would have to ante up a little more to keep his job.
July 1972
I got a radio call from Tra Vinh requesting to meet me secure, meaning, get off the standard PRC25 unsecured radio and key up the secure, scrambled, radio. Then they told me that the Red Cross had reported that my grandmother had died.
Well, the only grandmother I remember died when I was twelve. I asked them to confirm the message, because my mother was very old, and could be mistaken for my grandmother. Then I waited and waited and waited. I just sat there in the team house and my whole body filled with dread. Had my mother died?
About five minutes later I was back on the secure radio with message number two. My grandfather had died.
I had never met my long dead grandfathers, and so once again I asked for some serious clarification, but trust me, I didn't spare my contempt or mince my words.
Five minutes later message number three came through: Robin's grandfather had died.
Doctor H.C. Lund, M.D., had passed away. A great man. I knew Robin would be in a lot of pain, and there wasn't a thing I could do but write one more letter.
...I took the Red Cross off my Xmas list.
The rainy season was in full bloom. Off and on, it would rain for hours, and when it did it rained really hard. I remember on a return trip by jeep from Tra Vinh that I had to stop the jeep because I could hardly believe my eyes. The road was dry, but coming toward us, across a rice paddy at our flank...a rice paddy that was carrying about a foot of standing water...was a wall of rain creating a wave in the rice paddy as the rain hit the surface and bounced about three feet into the air. We rolled down the jeep's curtain style windows, but we got pretty wet anyway.
The good thing about a rainy day is that the Viet Cong generally took the day off. And so, certain of peace for a few moments during a mid-afternoon monsoon, I decided to take a nap.
Big mistake. A bolt of lighting hit in our back yard, and thinking it was incoming I lifted straight up and out of bed and onto the floor without even sitting up. Then I ran with my sleepy eyes half closed for the bunker, only to trip over a chair. I damn near broke a leg.
I've spent the rest of my life clearing a path to the bunker before retiring.
Everyone thought this was pretty funny. I probably did too, at the time, but be assured that when I heard that explosion I was scared out of my wits.
The time I was the most scared, though, I was wide awake.
It was about eight, perhaps nine o'clock, and the generator was still on. We were sitting around chatting about the day, relaxing, completely unconcerned about anything, when suddenly there was a loud string of firecrackers going off right in front of me. Yeah, that is what my brain thought, a string of firecrackers; but one second later Tu Ta yelled get down and my brain realized that it was serious automatic weapons fire pointed at the team house.
It all happened so quickly, and yet everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Within two seconds I was on the floor and my brain proceeded to tell me in vivid terms that the VC were in the front yard and that I was about to be killed. Laying on the ground next to the front door, I was the one within reach of the light switch, and Tu Ta yelled at me to turn off the lights. By now a whole six seconds had probably transpired.
I don't remember this event in terms of fear exactly, more in terms of paralysis. My arm was so heavy that I could hardly lift it the three feet or so needed to turn off the light. I did, but my God, what a struggle. Then my only obsession was my M-16. It was several feet away and I had to low-crawl to get it. My body weighed 500 pounds.
But the VC were not in my front yard, it just sounded that way. They had managed to penetrate our western moat, by simply walking over the western foot bridge. Apparently the guards were not yet at their post in the western outpost, and the VC came in just for the thrill of scaring everyone in the headquarters compound. Because of the way the buildings were laid out, they could only shoot across the path of our front door, landing more direct hits on the District Chief's building. Then they withdrew and started playing propaganda through a loud speaker. Cheeky.
Others might have taken this incident in stride, but for me it was a totally terrifying experience. There is nothing like being caught by total surprise and then watching seconds spread out like hours. Nevertheless, I remember laughing with everyone else when it was all over.
Even though it was a false alarm, psychologically I managed to catch a glimpse of my own mortality, and it wasn't a pretty sight.
A couple things changed in my life after this small incident: I was never more that two feet from my weapon for the remainder of my tour. And I started distrusting my imagination.
Tell ya what, though...in retrospect, Major Saunders is totally forgiven for any lapse he may have suffered under fire. At least his ambush was real.
Late one afternoon, one of our more competent Vietnamese Captains came into the team house to tell a story about his day. It was quite a day.
He took his company of local militia troops on a routine patrol, in company strength, when they came under attack about six miles south of Tieu Can. While his troops were caught in the open and laying on the ground, the VC started firing mortar rounds containing tear gas... CS Gas as we Americans called it.
I didn't even know they made CS in a mortar round. And I would have never suspected that the VC had tear gas in our district. But they did. And using it turned out to be big mistake.
When the shooting started, the militia hit the dirt in a long scrimmage line formed by the fact that the Vietnamese always went out on these patrols in long single lines (which always opened their flank, by American thinking). The VC fired the mortar rounds a bit too long, and they landed behind the line. The breeze carried the gas back to the line, and the troops really had no choice but to attack in mass in order to get out of the gas. And that is exactly what they did. It was a flat out charge!
Apparently the VC were stunned. In a matter of seconds, twelve VC were dead. Captured was a neat pile of about thirty rounds of CS Gas, ready for use against Tieu Can Headquarters, no doubt. Also captured was a VC radio, turned to the current VC radio frequency, complete with someone on the other end trying to raise the beleaguered VC platoon.
No friendlies were killed or wounded. The Captain was thrilled. The soldiers were thrilled. It was the bravado of the full charge that was the source of their pride. The story was told and retold around the District for weeks.
It didn't bother me at the time, but in retrospect, this mission was less than an accidental encounter. For starters, the advisors were unaware of the company strength patrol before it went out. And that didn't make sense. Anytime a company went out in mass the SDA was certain to be informed. After all, American air power might me needed. I suspect in retrospect that the District Chief was tipped off about the CS Gas, and wanted to find it before reporting the intelligence to Province. The intelligence was going to make it look like the VC could bring anything into his District, which of course was true. This time the District Chief prevailed and came off like a real genius. I suspected at the time that his biggest business supporter, the local gravel and lumber yard, was ferrying in VC ammunition, in return for rights of passage through VC controlled areas of the river into Tieu Can. His supply boats were perfect for hiding ammo under piles of gravel. It was completely possible that the owner of the yard was also a source of intelligence. Such was the complicated nature of local payola and corruption when businesses were just trying to continue doing business in the middle of a war zone. The VC could be very good customers.
The Vietnamese lieutenant who served as the District Intelligence Officer got some bad news. His father was the local druggist in town, and he was arrested for selling medical supplies to the VC. Known VC wives and mothers came to town and made purchases all the time from every business available, so maybe his dad was actually suspected of being VC. I was never able to sort that out, and somehow the Intelligence Officer, my adopted counterpart, was never seen again. I assumed he was transferred to another area.
Province sent us a new man to help out with whatever we might need in the way of full-time help. We really needed a third man to cover the radio. But this guy was a corporal fresh from the states. First tour. Raw. Inexperienced. Didn't know anything. We sent him back. I didn't even think about it at the time, but this was just like firing Sergeant Hunt in Twyen Bien District for being green. It was too risky having him around.
Major Holaday was suddenly called to a meeting with all the other SDA's in Province. Normally we both would have driven up in the jeep, but because of circumstances I don't really recall, Tu Ta flew up to Tra Vinh on the Province helicopter. The plan was that I would drive up by myself a few hours later, and then we would return to the District together.
While he was gone, I gave my very first briefing to an SDA from a neighboring Province, across the Mekong to the south. He was fairly new at his job, and wanted to know the rap on Viet Cong in my District. He figured that my VC were crossing the river and sneaking into his District. Unannounced guests at Tieu Can and journeys through the briefing map were common, but always before my Major had been available and the officers usually turned the whole visit into a briefing plus social hour, dinner or whatever. But this guy had to settle for Staff Sergeant Hunt's real-deal approach to the face of the Viet Cong in Tieu Can District. The only reason I remember the briefing at all is that it was so unusual. Suddenly my role of full-time radio operator, sometimes cook, sometimes generator mechanic, sometimes supply sergeant, was suddenly elevated to District Intelligence Officer. Wow. What a novelty for a guy who used to think he was a big deal Special Agent.
That afternoon I got in the jeep by myself and drove toward Tra Vinh to pick up Tu Ta. Normally it was about two hours to Tra Vinh by jeep, at a ripping 10 miles per hour over continuous pot holes. As usual, I had the radio with me, complete with a headset. So after a few miles from Tieu Can I got word that Tu Ta had managed to get a helicopter ride out of Tra Vinh. We ìcacíedî our coordinates and agreed that the helicopter should land on the road next to my jeep.
So far so good. But when the helicopter took off from the road and headed toward a nearby treeline, Tu Ta immediately got on the radio to inform the pilot that the helicopter was taking ground fire.
Good ears. I didn't hear the rounds until the bullets started coming toward the jeep. The helicopter was apparently OK, but now the VC had a new target.
I remember thinking, these guys are really bad shots. You could hear the rounds crack in the air about ten feet high and about twenty feet to the right. I wasn't particularly afraid, or even nervous. If the rounds had been closer, we probably would have hit the dirt. But given the marksmanship, both Tu Ta and I seemed to have the same unspoken thought: let's get the hell out of here. We jumped in the jeep, and made a mad dash down the road, ignoring the pot holes completely.
August 1972
The Tieu Can Police Chief was ambushed just north of town. He was in his police vehicle, a Land Rover, I think, when someone command-detonated an anti-personnel mine located in a tree stump beside the road. The Land Rover was messed up beyond repair, and the Chief's passenger was hurt badly. But the Chief came away with only some shrapnel damage to his left arm. He was highly annoyed, since this was obviously a targeted attack. The irony is that the Police Chief had so many enemies that the attack could have been carried out by anyone. Given the location of the attack, less than a mile up the main road, it was probably not the Viet Cong.
I don't remember what it was we needed, exactly, but since normal supply channels were drying up, I drove to Province, grabbed an Air America plane and took off for Saigon. The plan was simple, really. I would fly to Tan Son Nhut air base, get off the plane, go to the PX, get back on a similar plane and return to Province and then the District.
Easy, and it was. What I remember most was leaving the front gate at Tan San Nhut, still wearing my 45 automatic, and finding a nearby three-wheel type taxicab. The taxi standing-by was of the Cushman motor scooter variety...sort of a tiny three-wheeled pickup truck, really. About four small passengers could cram into the back, and sit on two bench seats. There was room for two small persons on the driver's bench seat. This taxi had two Vietnamese on the driver's bench. I jumped in, and told them I wanted to go to the PX down the road a mile or two. They were delighted, of course, and would I please buy for them a case of Pepsi, Coke, beer, etc., etc., etc.
I told them no. After feeling ripped off the first time I was in Saigon, I didn't have time for this shit. We went back and forth for quite a while, it seemed, with my veteran self getting more and more steamed. They continued to insist and I continued to say no. They insisted one last time, and I slapped my 45 holster pretty hard and told them in my best Vietnamese, I'm getting damn tired of this war.î Then I started to get out of the taxi.
At that point they were just afraid they would loose the cab fare. They jerked the taxi forward before I could get out, and took me to the PX. I paid the minimum fare. Then they had the stones to ask me one more time if I would buy them a case of beer. I just turned and walked away shaking my head in disbelief. They drove off laughing at their great adventure with a crazy GI.
Staff Sergeant Cramer was offered a commission as a Vietnamese Captain. His Vietnamese was truly remarkable, and his experience was formidable. He thought about it for quite a while because of his wife in Saigon, and I never heard what he did when it was his turn to head back to the states.
On August 19th, according to a letter I wrote home, Tu Ta and I went to Tra Vinh to see a floor show (which never showed up). We took both jeeps and both interpreters. Sanh was with me in one jeep, and Minh was with Major Holaday in the other jeep. Tu Ta had left much earlier, to attend a meeting, I think.
There were two accidents that day. The first was really strange. On the way to Tra Vinh I was driving with Sanh as my passenger. As we came into Tra Vinh, A Honda motor scooter literally went out of control and ran right into me. I saw it coming and I came to a complete stop, but they ran right into the jeep nevertheless. There were three young soldiers on the scooter (that's how they went out of control) and one was hurt. We loaded him into the jeep and took him to the local Vietnamese hospital (using the word very very loosely). End of accident one.
After we got settled in at Province we were told the VC had blown a bridge near Saigon, and the floor show was not going to happen. Tu Ta and I made the tough decision to stay the night and get drunk anyway. We permitted Sanh and Minh to return to Tieu Can in one of our jeeps.
But Sanh and Minh decided to party a bit on the way home, and Minh got pretty tanked up in one of those little villages about ten miles north of Tieu Can. Minh was driving and managed to flip the jeep at a curve right outside the village. Locals helped get the jeep back up on its wheels and Minh raced back to Tieu Can with the unconscious Sanh (Sanh also had a dislocated shoulder).
The jeep had no radiator at all, and looked like any wreck you might find in any junk yard, but it still made the trip. The first Tu Ta and I heard about the accident was from the Vietnamese radio net, and we called a US Medivac for Sanh - completely against the relatively new policy of no American Dust Offs for Vietnamese personnel.
Then, because we were worried about Sanh, we drove the second jeep home. It was still late afternoon, and there was plenty of daylight left. By the time we got to Tieu Can the Medivac had picked up Sanh and transported him to Tra Vinh, where an argument took place over the legality of taking him to Can Tho in the American helicopter. SSG Cramer was in Tra Vinh working as the Province Medic, and he went to bat for Sanh, who was still unconscious. The guy looked dead, and Cramer was going to "go to work on him" right there on the tarmac at Tra Vinh, when the Medivac crew caved in and took the bogus American on to Can Tho where they had real Vietnamese doctors (so I'm told).
Six days later Sanh showed up in Tieu Can, arm in a sling, and not all that much worse for wear. He had been unconscious for 12 hours, but he came around OK and they patched his arm. End of story. Except that our relationship with Minh was never the same. He told some key lies about the accident, and I remember not trusting him after that.
All Phung Hoang slots at the District level were officially eliminated. Suddenly there were to be no more Phung Hoang Advisors anywhere in Vietnam. My replacement was myself. The orders made my slot the official role of an Infantry Sergeant, or in US Army MOS talk, an 11F, an 11-Foxtrot, a ground pounder with stripes.
The hypocrisy of the situation, and the stupidity of it all, really got to me. I had clearly been serving Infantry Majors since day one, as some sort of gun toting assistant or at the very least as some sort of field RTO (radioman). My counterintelligence training had never been used. I was irritated that after ten months it was now official. To more clearly understand my miff one has to hear a story that I failed to relate at the beginning of this diatribe. Major Mays, in Twyen Bien District had made it a point on my second day that I was not to accompany him on combat missions. Mostly he didn't want my green ass along, but he pulled out a memorandum from Saigon that clearly stated that MI Special Agents, 97Bravos in MOS talk, were not trained for combat and were never to be used in that capacity. My slot was officially a rear echelon non-combat role.
Of course, as soon as I had learned a few things the hard way (the only way to learn in Vietnam), everyone quickly forgot the memos and the rules.
As an inducement not to make waves, I think, I was informed that after 45 days in my new 11F slot I would be eligible for the Army's damn near sacred Combat Infantryman Badge (the CIB).
That irritated me too. As far as I was concerned, if they were going to award me a CIB they could do it based on what I had already experienced in the field. My job was not going to change one twit.
Well, I made waves. I wrote an immediate letter to the personnel office in Can Tho requesting an immediate transfer home based on the fact that my slot had been eliminated. The personnel officer in Tra Vinh was on R&R, and so I had his clerk send it out directly.
My request was denied, of course. I knew it would be. And the personnel officer was a little upset when he returned that I had gone behind his back. The Operations Officer at Province, a Major, was a little miffed too. The decision to retain me in the district was really his call. The fact is he had no replacement for me that was anywhere near as valuable or as competent as I was, including the gaggle of officers running around up there.
I was now an Infantry Sergeant and that was that.
September 1972
Got another radio request to go secure. This time the message was clear. A Lieutenant from Can Tho had called Province and said that my father-in-law, Gene Swant, a retired Air Force Colonel, had died suddenly...a heart attack.
Part of the message, however, just didn't make any sense. In fact, it made me angry. The Lieutenant said that I could call my wife in the states using the General's phone. The General in this case was probably the IV Core Commander, a Major General (two stars). I signed off the radio thinking that the Lieutenant clearly had no idea where I was. It sort of confirmed my suspicion that no one knew where I was.
Call home. Yeah, right.
I knew that Robin needed me desperately, but I was a long way from the real world. And the fact was that a father-in-law problem did not qualify a soldier for compassionate leave. Even if the Army could make an exception, in my case I knew they wouldn't because Province would have to literally close the Tieu Can team house for lack of replacements.
About an hour later the radio operator in Tra Vinh said the Lieutenant had called again, wanting to know if I had called home yet.
Now I was really pissed. Not only did he not know where I was, he insisted on pestering me. I told the radio operator in Tra Vinh to tell the Lieutenant that I was way the hell out in the bush, and I only had a PRC 25 radio, with a maximum range of about 25 miles on a real good day.
I thought that would shut him up, but in a few minutes the Lieutenant was on the radio with me, as a direct patch from Can Tho. He again wanted to know if I had called home. He said I could be patched all the way through on the General's direct line to the states.
Shut my mouth!! Within a few minutes the Lieutenant had dialed Robin's telephone in Santa Maria, California (where she had moved with her parents). When she came on the phone I could hear her perfectly well. It was great! But she couldn't hear me at all. So the Lieutenant relayed what I had to say. Basically, I told Robin that her father's death did not qualify me for compassionate leave, but that I was short and that I would get home as soon as I could. In any case, I informed her, I would not make it home for the funeral.
I wasn't sure why the IV Corps General had taken such an interest in a lowly sergeant, but I suspected that it was a matter of my father-in-law being important, somehow, to someone with lots of stars on broad shoulders. In any case, the attention being paid was not lost on Province, and it wasn't lost on Major Holaday either, who cagily saw this as an opportunity to get Sergeant Hunt the hell out of Vietnam. We both traveled to Tra Vinh, where, without my direct input, or even desire for that matter, a drop for Sergeant Hunt was hastily negotiated by Major Holaday. Tu Ta was basically taking care of his troops, or troop in my case. I loved him for it, and I didn't interfere, but I was embarrassed and felt that the whole prospect of leaving Tieu Can and Major Holaday in the lurch was dishonorable. The Operations Officer really wanted to keep me where I was, and didn't give a hoot that the IV Core Commander was watching this case. He needed me in my 11F slot, bless his heart, and frankly I think he was right. But after nearly coming to blows, literally, Major Holaday prevailed (I think it was because Tu Ta outweighed the Operations Officer by about 50 pounds). Sergeant Hunt got his drop, and the next day I was back in Tieu Can packing to go home.
You'd think I would have been happy, but I wasn't.
I felt like crying, but I didn't. Fact is, I wasn't able to cry for years after Vietnam, no matter what.
Probably I felt a lot more guilt than most. It seemed that I was abandoning friends who needed me still.
I had very little hope that any of my Vietnamese family would survive after all the Americans were totally gone.
Vietnam was doomed. I knew it, and they knew it.
Ba Ba stood in the door of the Team House. There were tears in her eyes.
I would come to miss her terribly.
Sanh didn't show up for my departure, but we had said good-bye earlier. I gave him my 45 automatic, and told him to keep it.
The jeep took me to the Tieu Can helicopter pad, and that fast I was gone.
Post-Log To The Log
Vietnam followed me like an ugly dog that just wouldn't go away. It was rare to find anyone who had any concept of where I had been, and fewer cared. Everyone just wanted the old dog to die, including me. But war dogs, I've discovered with some difficulty, die hard.
In 1991 I searched and found Tu Ta Holaday to be a retired Lieutenant Colonel, living in Kansas, teaching ROTC in the school system, working on a Ph.D., and coaching football. He wrote me a nice letter, and confirmed just about everything I already knew about the situation in the District and elsewhere in Vietnam.
After I left Tieu Can, Tu Ta kept the District open for another four months. I don't know if he was alone, commuted from Tra Vinh, or what, but I hoped they came up with a reliable replacement.
He related how elections were suspended in October 1972, and that the VC used the opportunity to just buy appointments as Village and Hamlet Chiefs. They had found a way to open the door all the way to Saigon that was even better than assassination.
The Tieu Can Team House officially closed in January 1973, and after some haggling about his possible re-assignment in-country, Major Holaday took the freedom bird home. There was a serious fire-fight going on just half a click from the Tra Vinh airport when he left.
I'm sure his ROTC cadets have no idea what they have standing before them. He was the best-of-the-best warriors I ever served with, and during my tour I served with the best the Army had to offer.
I didn't get my CIB, the only combat award I feel I earned. But to award such thing to an MI Special Agent would have been very un-Infantry of the Army.
I was awarded a Bronze Star and the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross. The Bronze Star was awarded for meritorious service against a hostile ground force while specifically being the best damn Phung Hoang Advisor this world has ever seen. The Gallantry Cross was awarded for drill, probably because I didn't rat on the District Chief more than once or twice. I like to fantasize that the award was the Vietnamese way of finally saying thanks.
Someday--health, wealth, political realities and time permitting--I will return to my former Districts and favored Villages, especially Tieu Can and Tap Ngai. I'll find out what happened to Sanh, his family and Ba Ba. I'm not anticipating a happy ending.
When I really comprehend the reality, I'll probably cry like an old village woman lighting up the sky with grief. I'll shatter the day and turn it into night. I'll kill the dog; I'll probably eat the dog.
Seems like I owe Sanh and Ba Ba at least that much. I know I owe it to myself.
TO BE CONTINUED
Thank You, Bill Hunt, for sharing this very special memoir with my students. And thank you for your service. You very clearly deserved the CIB. And now you are a combat educator, so I award you the CEB----JKS, Oct 98