Authors: Thom Nicholson
I was more than a little uncomfortable with the chopper support CCN had assigned to support field operations. The powers that be in I Corps HQ had decided the SVN Air Force would become our primary source of helicopter support instead of the 101st Division Aviation Battalion at Camp Eagle, about fifty klicks north of Da Nang. Our support would be closer, but not nearly as dependable, nor as well trained. To make the situation worse, the ARVN Air Force only flew the H-34 Choctaw choppers, which were nearly twenty years old and slow, instead of the newer and faster Huey choppers of the 101st. Painted in the black colors of CCN, the old choppers were an awfully inviting target to any hotshot NVA ackack gunner.
The uncomfortable reality of the H-34’s age and condition, apparent to the passengers, who sat right under the massive transmission of the bird and were usually bombarded with hot drops of leaking oil or hydraulic fluid, didn’t improve our disposition. Any crash impact would certainly drop the hot engine right in our laps.
The gung ho SVN pilots who flew the lumbering, old war-birds were top notch, so that offset some of the negatives. Unfortunately, I believed none were as good as the fine, young American warrant officers who flew for the 101st; I trusted them above any others. They were famous for coming in for their pickups, no matter how hot the LZ was. I hoped we’d get the 101st if the going got really rough. Only later, when the poop hit the fan one day, did I learn the VN aviators were, in truth, the better choice when things got
really
hot.
B Company worked hard the rest of the day, training and practicing combat maneuvers until sundown. As soon as it was dark enough to hide our movements, we left the spot where we had eaten cold, long-range reconnaissance patrol rations (called LURPs) and moved to our first RON (remain overnight) site. LURPs are dehydrated glop, but filling and, I suppose, nourishing. I had chosen a great spot, I thought, to RON. It was at an intersection of two trails headed directly for Da Nang in the distant northeast. From our position, we could see the fiery red cones of exhaust as jets took off for night missions from the always busy Da Nang airfield, many miles to the east.
A rumble of thunder warned of approaching rain. It didn’t take long to reach us. We endured a vicious thunderstorm, with flashes of lightning and pelting rain. It was over by midnight but left everyone soaked to the skin and very uncomfortable. The night was cool and damp as we huddled in our ponchos and waited for the dawn.
Around two
A.M.
, I had finally dried out enough to think of getting a couple of hours of sleep before the sunrise stand-to. I figured the storm had discouraged any Viet Cong from walking down the trail we were hidden beside, at least on this night.
I might have known that uninterrupted sleep was too much to hope for on my first night in the brush. We had called in our RON coordinates to the area fire control center immediately
upon reaching the site. The AFCC radio operator repeated the numbers I had read him in the daily one-time cipher. Foolishly, I just supposed that made everything all right. Around three-thirty, the world came down on our heads, scaring several year’s growth out of every man on the mission, including me.
It seemed that the Marine cannon units that provided long-range fire support to the Da Nang defenders never received the message that B Company, CCN, would be bivouacking at such-and-such trail crossing. They had scheduled some H & I (harassment and interdiction) fire on said intersection for 0330, just in case some nasty Charlies were walking along at that spot at that exact moment. Just think what the odds were on catching someone at some spot on a map at the very moment we fired. But, we Americans had lots of ammo, and H & I kept the gun crews busy, so they repeated it nearly every night.
Down came about twelve 155mm rounds, all at the same instant. This was the standard artillery plan with the ominous name of TOT (time on target) fire. Luckily for us, the Marines were good shots, and all the rounds hit the intersection. Since we were thirty yards or more off the road, none landed in our midst. More importantly to our survival, the heavy rains had softened the sandy soil enough that most of the explosive impact was absorbed by the ground. However, listening to redhot shrapnel whizzing overhead at zero-dark-thirty in the morning is not the best way to start a day.
With the roar of an oncoming train and then the breath-stopping
krrump!
as the first impacts blasted the night, I damn near had a heart attack. It sounded like the world had come to an end, right next to my foxhole. I squatted down, getting my butt good and muddy, hoping none of the rounds landed short. Then, after the ground quit shaking, I got on the radio to the area fire control center screaming numerous insults about the radio operator’s ancestry, and giving him, in the clear, exactly where we were on the map. Lieutenant McMurray
cautioned, “Sir, if any Charlies are monitoring our radio freqs, they’ll know where we are.”
“Hell, Pete,” I snarled, “Better that than letting the G-d’ed Marines blow us to hell in a handbasket. They’re on our side, for Christ’s sake. I don’t need any friendly-fire casualties to explain to the CO.”
Fortunately, my message was quickly relayed to the offending artillery units, and the second salvo was directed somewhere else. With what dignity I had left, I cleaned myself up and took stock of the chaos resulting from the close call.
Men were shouting and moving around, and several flashlights blinked on, destroying any hope that our location would remain a secret to nearby VC. “Okay,” I muttered to myself, “if this is the best you can do, we’ll train some more on night security procedures.”
“Mac, send the platoon leaders to me right now,” I called over the company radio to the XO. My lieutenants hurried to my hole, all as shocked by the artillery barrage as I was. Explaining what had happened, I chewed their butts good for losing control of their people. “We’ll start out in ten minutes, night movement down the trail
there
. Maybe that’ll help the strikers to see the wisdom of staying quiet in an ambush site.”
Since old Charlie put ambushes on trails and roads, just as we did, the silence exhibited by the young soldiers as they cautiously went deeper into the “badlands” was gratifying. By morning’s first light, I think they understood that I put a lot of emphasis on the need for light and noise discipline at an ambush site.
Fortunately, we didn’t encounter any bad guys, so the lesson was learned without cost. The little soldiers quickly understood that I meant business in the brush. It was okay to be a little slack in camp, but out where the game was for real, I didn’t want any screwing around. I had two sons to raise, and I meant to get home to them.
The next few days passed routinely, with a lot accomplished in training, and on the last evening we moved into our
nightly RON without having seen a single VC or having suffered any training casualties. Since we were two hundred men armed with automatic rifles and with M-26 hand grenades hanging from every place possible on our web gear (called LBE, for load-bearing equipment), that was saying a lot.
On the last night of the exercise, after making sure the outposts were in place and every man had constructed some kind of hasty fighting position, I settled into the scooped-out depression I called a hasty foxhole. I could hear Pham settling down close by me in the pitch blackness of the night. I quickly fell asleep, dog-tired from the strain of commanding men in the field for a week.
First Sergeant Fischer woke me about two
A.M
. “Sir, there’s a hell of a firefight going on up yonder. Must be the old French fort under attack.” The top sergeant pointed me in the right direction as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and put on my glasses.
Sure enough, in the foothills about three miles away, star shells were slowly drifting down out of the low-hanging, gray clouds, illuminating the wet land and black sky. The faint sounds of gunfire cracked and popped, and trees came alive in the flickering chemical light. Not two minutes later, a chopper roared overhead, headed toward the outpost. I whispered to Sergeant Fischer, “Get on the horn (radio), Top, and let air force combat control know where we are. I don’t want any gunships to take us for the bad guys.”
I knew some of the night choppers had infrared scopes on their gunsights, and my two hundred unwashed men would surely send out a bright signal to any trigger-happy gunship driver. In fact, the army was said to have little boxes with body lice in them that could smell a man at five hundred feet, and stamp their feet or something to alert a tracker. So, I didn’t want to take any chances so close to heavy fighting.
As we sat there and watched the show, Pham eased beside me. “Radio,
Dai Uy,
” he whispered. I took the handset and leaned back against the side of my shallow hole.
The call was relayed by the AFCC from the HQ, 3d Marines: Proceed with your unit toward coordinates AX blah, blah, blah, with all possible haste. Relieve besieged outpost defenders and hold until reinforcements arrive at first light. Do you copy?
“Affirm, Tango Zulu out,” I replied. “All right, Top,” I whispered to First Sergeant Fischer. “They want us to get up there and give ’em a hand. Get the company ready to move out.”
“Shit, Captain,” Fischer answered. “The VC’ll have the road covered tight as a tick on a coon dawg’s butt, as long as it’s dark. If we go bustin’ up there like the 7th Cavalry to the rescue, they’ll shoot our nuts off.”
Since I had no desire to sing tenor the rest of my life and still had ideas about a basketball team–size family, I nodded at the wisdom of his counsel. “Good point, Top. We’ll head out cross-country. Get the XO up to me quick. And send for Sergeant Garrett and the VN sergeant—Trung, isn’t it? Their squad will be on point.”
I called the AFCC and told them of my plan while the company was loading up. The men were quiet, and I didn’t see a single night security violation. AFCC wasn’t happy and told me the Marines at the fort were in desperate straits, but I flat out refused to go up the road in the dark. “You’ll have to get the CO of CCN to order me before I’ll do it,” I insisted. “Meanwhile, we’re wasting time arguing. I’m departing RON now and estimate arrival at the outpost at 0430.”
The two NCOs I had sent for arrived. Sergeant Garrett was a first-rate soldier, a slow-talking cracker from Georgia with the scarred face of a man whose teenage years had been plagued by superzits. He had joined the army to get away from poverty and was a gung ho career man. Like many southern boys in the service, he was lean and rawboned, able to withstand the rigors of army life in the field without a thought of complaint.
Giving Sergeant Garrett orders to stay off the road but to
go as fast as he could cross-country, I moved the company out. Movement was slow, and Americans were fighting a desperate battle ahead of me, but we couldn’t do any good getting the shit shot out of us before we even got to the old fort. The wet brush quickly soaked our clothing, increasing our discomfort. The drip of raindrops muffled the tread of our boots on the wet ground. Besides, I consoled myself as I panted through the darkness, “They’re only Marines.”
My estimate of the net worth of a handful of Marines was about to take a giant leap forward. Live and learn. Those Marines were about to show me some real heroism.
We didn’t see or hear anything that seemed suspicious until we came to a wide stream, maybe a thousand yards from the little hill where the old fort was located. As the point squad started across, a single automatic weapon clattered a red stream of death at us. If the enemy gunner had been only a little more patient, he could have greased the whole bunch of us in the middle of the water. As it was, he killed one of the strikers and wounded another very slightly in the hand.
In an instant, nearly everyone on our side dropped to the ground and opened up. The VC over there must have been scared half to death, or shot to hell, or both; when we cautiously crossed the stream, the night remained quiet. By that time, the light from the star shells helped illuminate the ground in front of us, but the flickering light made every bush come alive, every tree seem a threatening, half-visible menace. Detailing a couple of men to carry the KIA, we moved as quickly as possible, using the trees and brush for cover, toward the hill. But it sounded as if the shooting had lost some of its previous intensity.
Of course, choppers and planes were overhead, blasting the hell out of anything that even looked like a target. VC and NVA soldiers were tough, but nobody could take the massed fire of helicopter gunships very long without backing off. The enemy soldier was well able to face fire from an opponent on the ground, but when the airplanes zipped past, dealing death
with startling, overwhelming, high-volume efficiency, his resolve quickly faded.
Sergeant Garrett sent word back that he saw activity to his front. I really didn’t want to go into an attack formation so far from the objective, but we couldn’t walk up single file, right to the door. One of the most hazardous undertakings is an assault directly into the face of the enemy, so reluctantly, I spread the word for the unit to go on line, and off we went, three platoons abreast, and my little HQ section behind the middle of the formation.
The line of men stretched about a quarter of a mile, and I couldn’t see either end from my position. It was definitely pucker time for everyone; not a man of the two hundred, slowly advancing with me toward the sound of the guns, could have squeezed out a fart louder than a gnat’s whisper.
My mouth was dry and my palms were sweating profusely. Oddly, I couldn’t seem to get a full measure of air in my lungs; every breath was more like a gasp. Out of the darkness, far off on the right flank, heavy gunfire shattered the calm. Lieutenant Cable’s platoon had run into an ambush. The serpentine line of men went to ground like a poleaxed mule. After a second of swallowing the heart lodged in my throat, I whispered to First Sergeant Fischer. “Stay here while I see what’s happening. If I call, start the 3d Platoon on a sweep toward the gunfire. Come on, Pham.”