Authors: Thom Nicholson
We scrambled on the hovering choppers and pulled away from the crash site. In the distance, two slender spirals of smoke marked where two brave men had died that afternoon while trying to save a man they didn’t know, had never met, or even seen.
I thought of the Biblical saying: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
I should have been filled with bitterness at the deaths of fine men, highly skilled, superbly trained warriors, loved and missed by their families at home, families that would never see them again, except in photographs. Thankfully, all I
felt was admiration and pride at their unselfish bravery, their dedication to saving others regardless of the risk to themselves. What magnificent beings American soldiers can be when the chips are down.
I honor their memory still today.
“Nick, I’m sending you back up to FOB One.” Major Skelton held up his hand to stop my protest. “I know, I know, you just got back. Sorry, but something else has come up.” He flashed his most easygoing grin at me. “I hear you had a pretty easy time of it last trip, anyway.”
I grinned back. “Guilty as charged, I guess. Still, it’s just tough to live up there in such close quarters. Life here has softened me. What’s up?”
The major tapped his fancy pointer at an area of the map showing northern Laos. We had already nicknamed the region “the Bottleneck.” It was one of the exit points of the Ho Chi Minh trail from Laos into the northern section of South Vietnam. What the newspapers called the Ho Chi Minh trail was in reality a spiderweb of trails and rough-cut roads leading down from the western side of North Vietnam through eastern Laos and Cambodia. There the trails branched out into western South Vietnam, from the border between North and South clear to the South China Sea. Dealing with NVA infiltration would have been much easier if there had been just a single trail to plug.
“Air force HQ has informed us that they have programmed a series of B-52 Arc Light (the code name for B-52 bombing missions) strikes on suspected supply caches and truck parks in this area, and they want us to run some BDAs on the results.” BDA is the abbreviation for bomb-damage assessment. For reasons I’ll soon explain, nobody liked doing them.
“Oh shit,” I groused. “Major, you sure know how to make my day, don’t you?” I gave him my most appealing grin, but it did not work. He had made his mind up and, once the major had done that, no baby-faced captain was going to whine his way out of the job.
The mighty bombers, usually flying all the way from Guam, or perhaps Udorn, in the southern tip of Thailand, could drop fifty thousand pounds of bombs per plane. The impact zone would be several hundred yards wide and two to three miles long. The damage done was incredible, and causing it was quite an expensive undertaking.
Since the bombing campaign started, the army had been tasked with providing teams of men to run BDAs through the impact zone, evaluating the effects of the bombing strike.
In theory, it should have been an easy and relatively safe operation. A team of men would be waiting in helicopters, orbiting a few klicks away from the bomb run. They would swoop down on the target right after the bombers made their strike and offload at one end of the impact zone. The helicopters would then fly to the far end of the drop site and orbit, awaiting the BDA team’s arrival.
The men on the BDA would run a zigzag course through the bombed area, looking at the damage and attempting to get an idea of the effects of the bombing mission. The idea was to get in and get out before whatever dazed enemy was left alive nearby had time to react.
A five-hundred- to thousand-pound bomb going off in your face or right over your head was enough to leave a person groggy, if not very dead. Factor in the effect of a hundred and fifty or more striking all around, and you see that Arc Light strikes were a first-class example of high-tech carnage—which is what the big shots somewhere way to the rear were thinking when they pronounced the Arc Light BDA mission a safe one. But all things dreamed up by thinkers instead of doers usually have a slight flaw in the “best laid plans,” and the BDA operation had a beauty: Although it was true that
anyone caught in the blast zone was too busy counting his fingers and toes to be much of a problem, anyone just far enough away not to be affected yet close enough to get there in a reasonable amount of time came a-running to see if there was anything he could do to help those caught in the blast zone.
As people who were on the same side of the SOBs who had just dumped the deadly explosives on their heads, the assessment team was not going to be received in a friendly manner by the NVA. Thus, the BDA missions became a dash to get in and get out before the NVA rescuers arrived in numbers far greater than the four men involved by our side.
For some reason, that never occurred to the bright boys who dreamed up the BDA assignment originally. Nobody really wanted to do the damned job, and nearly everyone who did complained about the dash to the far end of the drop zone. The unofficial name for a BDA job became “Run for your life, Charlie Brown.”
Therefore, the call sign was changed to Charlie Brown One-zero,” for all radio communication with the assessment team members on the ground. The Charlie Brown One-zero would be talking and running, as the four team members made a dash for their lives through the debris of an Arc Light strike. The speaker would be panting and puffing so hard he was difficult to understand over the radio.
It wasn’t unknown for a team to vanish before it reached the far end of the run, gobbled up by those left alive after the B-52s’ visit.
“Take two recon teams and a reaction platoon with you,” Major Skelton finished his instructions to me. “I’ll have the choppers here at 0700 tomorrow morning.”
I thought about complaining that two recon teams were insufficient for a BDA assignment; if the big bombers were in any way active, there might be two or three BDAs a day to complete.
Nobody wanted to run the damned things more than once a day; that was a given. Then I reconsidered. More than likely,
the reaction platoon wouldn’t have much to do. Rarely did the BDA teams uncover anything after a B-52 strike that required a platoon insertion into the area. I could make additional teams from the soldiers of the platoon, and give a couple of my lieutenants something to write home about. I decided to take two extra lieutenants as supernumeraries. That way I could field five BDA teams, with myself and First Sergeant Fischer as the fifth and last to go out, if needed. Our call sign would be Charlie Brown Five.
I made the assignments that night, and received a positive reaction to my plan. One nice thing about young lieutenants, they were so gung ho dumb, they’d go anywhere. A person grew to love them, just like little puppies, not quite paper-trained.
We lifted off the helipad the next morning, loaded down with the tools of our trade and anything else that we thought would make our stay at the FOB comfortable. As the struggling chopper dipped its nose and gathered forward speed, I realized I was anticipating the coming mission. Damned if I wasn’t as eager as the ell-tees riding with me. I leaned over to Fischer, who was stoically puffing on a smelly cigar and watching the ground below. He was probably daydreaming of better times.
“By God, Top. I sorta hope we get a chance to make a run, don’t you?”
The wise old NCO just looked at me as if wondering, “Is this guy a candidate for the psycho ward or what?” He just grunted, probably hoping I would outgrow whatever was temporarily affecting my reasoning.
We arrived at the FOB, still tucked alongside the Marine position at Vandegrift. We were met by Sergeant Saal. He reported that the NVA had recently started to shell the base with long-range 122mm rockets.
“We’ve got a bomb shelter dug,” he told me. “Usually, it’s not needed. The NVA can’t get the right trajectory on their launchers to hit us.” FOB 1 was located on a slope at the top
of the basin above the main compound, which was in the valley below. The Marines down there weren’t quite so lucky.
Saal continued, “It means if they pop off a few rounds, especially if it’s after dark, we can sit outside the shelter and watch the rockets go over and slam into the Marines below. When they hit something, it’s quite a show.”
“Better them than us, I reckon,” I replied. “Anything to make the time go by, right?”
Saal just laughed. “You’ll see. The Marine artillery that fires counterbattery is over there.” He pointed directly east of us. “When they shoot back, the shells go right overhead. It’s a blast.”
We settled in and put away a few cool ones while the trusty barbecue was heating up. After a delicious repast of barbecued Spam, beans, potato chips, and beer, we relaxed and watched the Marines, busy below us in the main camp. From our position, they looked like tiny ants hurrying about on ants’business.
Before long, the sound of men at ease ripped through the darkness. The beans were doing the job Mother Nature intended. All a person could do was ignore the lack of etiquette, suck on the cold beer, and dream of home. Mixed with the sounds of evening—bugs, noise from below, and jets high overhead flying off for the night interdiction raids on the supply lines of the enemy—it wasn’t all that unpleasant. I was just about ready to call it a day, when a siren cut through the din.
“Incoming, Captain,” Saal shouted. “Get to the bomb shelter.”
“I thought you said they couldn’t hit us?”
“Haven’t yet. You want to sit out here and see if they have figured it out?”
“Point well taken,” I agreed as we dashed to the heavily sandbagged dugout.
We hadn’t even made it inside when the first rocket arced overhead, several hundred feet above us, and dropped toward the massed humanity below. It hit with a loud
boom!
next to
the piled supplies behind the main complex of buildings far below.
From where we were, the rocket looked like a giant roman candle, spewing red sparks as it rode through the sky. It was easy to follow its path toward the Marines huddled below. They must have felt like fish in a barrel, waiting for the impact.
The big rocket sounded like a runaway train rumbling through the dark sky. All in all, it was a spectacular way to end the evening. The Marine artillery promptly responded, shooting the big 155mm shells right over us toward the unseen enemy in Laos. The shells headed out and the rockets coming in passed overhead. The roar was like standing in a tunnel hearing semis whiz by at ninety miles an hour.
Several more rockets streaked over us, one impacting right on top of a crowded bunker, sending sandbags and timbers flying and causing two ambulances to race from the hospital area to the aid of the unlucky Marines inside. Their lights and sirens added to the carnival atmosphere. After the all-clear sounded, I made my good-nights and went to sleep, satisfied that I’d seen a real rocket attack, up close. Just like front row seats at the Fourth of July fireworks show back home when I was a boy. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking of the cost to the unlucky Marines below. It would only have interfered with my sleep. I suppose my callousness would have been less pronounced if they were army troops; it would have turned to pure outrage had it been Special Forces soldiers taking the pasting.
I woke up the next morning in a good mood, and we proceeded to get on with the business of BDA runs. For the next two days, things went smoothly. We only had two or three runs a day to make, and the enemy wasn’t a bit active in the area after the bomb runs. Most of the Arc Light strikes did more damage to the jungle vegetation than to the bad guys. Every now and then, one would catch the NVA, and I guess the carnage was horrendous. Most of the time, at least as I saw it, we were a day late and a dollar short with our intended
targets. Like everything else wrong with the damned war, the bomb strikes had to be approved at both Washington and Saigon political levels. By the time the poor air force got approval for the strike, the enemy had moved on or died of old age. The men who risked their lives flying the overladen bombers off the ground and to the target in twenty-year-old planes to attack empty jungle didn’t get a say, unfortunately. Welcome to the war, air force.
You could say it’s similar to today, trying to build a dam or highway someplace. The paperwork takes longer than the project itself. I often wondered later if environmental impact studies were filed before we bombed the enemy jungle. I would not have put it past the bureaucrats running the war.
The first two days were easy, with very little to report from the bomb strikes. The third day was something else. Charlie Brown Two didn’t show up at the end of the bomb area. The chopper pilots had radio contact with him until about halfway through the run, and then silence. Repeated calls were not answered, and finally the choppers returned empty.
I met the first chopper back and talked to the pilot. He was a grizzled warrant officer (WO), the predominant rank of army aviators. Judging by the master aviator wings sewed over his left pocket, he’d been driving choppers a long time. He looked older than his years, the fatigue of a long flight on his face. His eyes squinted at me in the sunlight, showing the sun wrinkles around the sockets. He wiped a sheen of sweat off his upper lip with the sleeve of his green flight suit, the heavy kind, made of Nomex material, which was supposed to retard the flames of a crash. It was required wearing for the flyers, but it must have been like wearing long johns in the desert.
“I swear, Captain. We stayed right up till we were short of fuel. The team just never showed up. I flew down the entire length of the DZ callin’ on the radio. Not a peep. There was ground fire, though. Charlie was back in business, quicker than usual.”
“Well, shit fire,” I groused. “What the hell happened to them? You didn’t see any bodies?” The weary pilot shook his head. I looked at the rapidly setting sun. “It’s too late to make another run today, but you be here at first light tomorrow. I want to be over the last place you heard from them as soon as we can see. Okay?”