Authors: Thom Nicholson
“Yes, sir!” I was so elated, I nearly shouted. I had hoped to be able to transfer after six months with the 4th Division, but this was better yet. I felt I belonged in Special Forces; the 4th Infantry Division was for grunts, mud-pounders, junglehumpers. I was Airborne Special Forces, a cut above such a mundane assignment. Besides, we got to wear the nifty green beret instead of the standard, army-issue, green baseball cap.
The next morning, well before sunrise, I was on the shuttle plane to Nha Trang, the headquarters of the 5th Special Forces Group, anxious to get my duty assignment for the coming year.
Was I ever disappointed. “S-5 with C Company, Pleiku,” the gray-haired older major who was the personnel officer (assistant S-1) at group headquarters told me, as he passed me my assignment orders.
I left his office numb with disbelief. S-5 meant Civil Affairs (CA). Assignment to the C-team meant higher headquarters. I’d be involved in building dispensaries and rice warehouses for villages of the local area of operations (AO) for C Company, the control headquarters for A-teams in the
Central Highlands. I would be a staff puke, as far from the guns as any “Saigon cowboy,” the derogatory term we field soldiers used for the support people way to the rear. To my mind, Civil Affairs was a nothing job that involved the handling of a lot of Vietnamese money, dealing with local contractors, bribing the various district chiefs to ensure their cooperation, sending out action teams to survey potential CA projects. I wanted a combat assignment, damn it, as long as I was going to be in Vietnam. My first tour had been in a rather quiet district of central Vietnam. I had been the executive officer (XO) of the A-team assigned there, and the action had been sporadic. It made for a long and rather boring year. I wasn’t back in Vietnam to pass out tongue depressors; I wanted to shoot it out with the bad guys.
I knew the executive officer of the 5th SF Group, Lt. Col. Dan Schungel; I’d served under him at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the 5th Mechanized Division, during 1963 and ’64. Then, I’d been a gung-ho lieutenant commanding the heavy mortar platoon of his battalion, the 2/10th Mechanized Infantry. I’d worked hard for him, and I hoped he would remember that.
Screwing up my courage, I went to his office. He was happy to see me, and we made small talk for a few minutes. Finally, I made the plunge. “Sir, please help me get another assignment. I don’t want anything to do with S-5 work. There must be something else available.” I was hoping he would give me my own A-team to command, for old times’ sake.
Lieutenant Colonel Schungel’s eyes narrowed, and his displeasure was obvious. An assignment was an assignment, and a person was expected to fulfill it, to the very best of his ability. He looked over my shoulder, silent, thinking. Finally, old loyalties got the better of him, I guess. He jotted a note down on a slip of paper. “CCN called and asked for another captain just a few minutes ago. Tell the S-1 that you’ll be going to them.”
I grabbed the slip of paper. “I don’t think I know what unit
that is,” I remarked. I did not remember hearing of a “CCN” the last time I was in country.
“MAC-SOG,” Lieutenant Colonel Schungel grunted. “CCN is their northernmost operation, up at Da Nang. Stands for Command and Control North, which is a cover name. You’ll get briefed about what the job is when you get there.” He turned back to the stack of papers on his desk. “Good luck, Tiger.” He smiled at me with his recruiting poster—perfect senior-officer look. “You’ll need it.”
I fairly waltzed out of the room. “MAC-SOG,” as we called it, the Military Assistance Command’s Studies and Observations Group. Super spook, black death dealers. I was going to the cream of the crop. Only the best of the SF got assigned to SOG. I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself if I had just picked the winning trifecta at Churchill Downs.
The S-1 was nursing a sunburn on his high forehead, rubbing some white grease on it when I returned. He did not like me going over him to get reassigned. Screw him, the desk puck. What did I care?
“I’ll book you out first thing tomorrow,” he grumbled. “The CIA has a daily flight from Nha Trang to various places up north. We hitch rides with them all the time.” He studied me with a slightly mystified expression the staff types reserve for a warrior, sort of a “What rock did you get raised under?” or “What happy dust you been sniffing lately?”
“Sir,” I asked suddenly, “where is CCN anyway?” Of course, to me, it really didn’t matter if the unit was stationed in hell.
The look he gave me now was one of abject scorn and maybe just a little pity. He must have thought I was out of my head from the heat. Volunteering for an assignment with a spook outfit and not having the faintest idea what it was all about.
“Da Nang, up in I Corps, Marble Mountain.” He pronounced it “Eye Corps” in the standard military way. “CCN’s just a cover name, so MAC-SOG isn’t mentioned.” I knew
that, but didn’t say anything. You could see his barely repressed shudder at the mere sound of the names. He was the epitome of the professional staff officer. Happy to be as far away from the guns as possible, immersed in his paperwork, and intrigued by the psychology of anyone who thought war meant combat rather than shuffling papers.
The flight from Nha Trang to Da Nang was as smooth as silk. We touched down on another ten-thousand-foot runway built by one of the numerous American construction firms brought over from the States. I briefly wondered how the government of South Vietnam would utilize what we were going to leave behind when the war was over. Little did I know.
Four other SF troopers and I walked through the airport building toward a rickety, old, half-size school bus that had seen better days. CCN was painted in foot-high, white letters on its side. The old bus was painted jet black and had a bullet hole in the left front windshield. The silver cracks radiating from the hole completely criss-crossed the window. Facing oncoming headlights, it would be a bitch to drive at night.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. The escort officer that jumped off to meet us was Paul Potter, a wisecracking lieutenant I’d been friends with back in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, during the SF officers’ course. We had a fast, backslapping reunion and piled on the bus with the others. He was short, stocky, and cocky.
“What are you doing here, you little hillbilly pissant?” I quizzed my friend, punching him on the shoulder.
“Not much lately, you rednecked peckerwood, sir,” Paul replied, to show he respected my new rank. “I’m due to rotate back to Bragg in a week. For the past month, I’ve been doing gofer work for the XO back at CCN. You know, go fer this, go fer that. Before that, I was a launch officer at Forward Operational Base 2 (FOB2) up at Camp Eagle, where the 101st Airborne has an aviation brigade located.”
“What do you launch?” I asked quite innocently.
“Jesus, Nick,” he responded. “Don’t you know what you’ve got yourself in for?”
“Nope,” I replied. “All I know is that it was CCN or a staff job at C Company, Pleiku. I volunteered, sight unseen.”
Paul gave me a look one would save for a slightly demented cousin. “CCN works across the border, in northeast Laos, north Cambodia, and some in southern North Vietnam. We monitor and interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail. Either with six-man recon teams or with larger strike force units, up to company-size in strength when the target justifies it. It’s a top secret operation. You can’t even tell your wife or family what you’re up to. Our base camp is as secure as a bank vault, but we hang our ass out on a very short limb when we cross the border: no ID and it’s kiss yourself good-bye if Charlie gets ahold of you.”
“Do tell,” I airily replied. “How did a loud-mouthed beer-head like you ever keep from spilling the beans?”
“No shit, Nick,” he answered grimly, a stern expression on his round, cheery face. “It’s hard time at the penal barracks at Fort Leavenworth if you talk out of turn. From the moment you get on the bus, you’re under top secret security regulations. Don’t say nuttin’ to nobody if you want to stay out of trouble.”
I shut up and contemplated Paul’s words while we made the long drive on a well-worn macadam blacktop road that deteriorated into a well-rutted dirt road as soon as we got out of town, headed toward my new home for the next few months. Heavy, green-painted army and Marine trucks zipping past made the trip exciting by itself, not to mention my anticipation at getting to my new assignment.
We headed south out of Da Nang, following the curve of the bay. We drove past a Marine airfield and a navy evacuation hospital. Both seemed plenty busy. Then, we passed an immense scrapyard filled with destroyed tanks, wrecked trucks, and jeeps, as well as stripped-down shells of helicopters, which were stacked up like cordwood. I was fascinated by the debris
of war piled up in the barbed wire–enclosed yard. Just before we reached a dark upthrust of rock, which had to be the Marble Mountain I had heard about in Nha Trang, we turned into another compound enclosed in barbed wire. Rolls of coiled razor wire and tangle-foot barbed wire were piled six feet high and just as deep. A sharp-looking SF sergeant and a stern-looking Vietnamese soldier checked our orders and then waved us through the front gate.
I smiled. In a big arch, from one side of the entrance gate to the other, in two-foot-high letters, was a sign:
WE KILL FOR PEACE
. Underneath was the camp symbol, painted on a blood-red shield: a white skull suspended below an open parachute, a green snake, tail protruding from one eye, head from the other, glared at the visitor. From the four corners of the shield, lightening bolts arced toward the skull. What a macho, grab-your-balls welcome sign, I thought to myself. My adrenaline got to flowing even faster.
The main camp of CCN was a four hundred- by six hundredfoot rectangular compound, surrounded by barbed wire, with twenty-foot-tall guard towers at each corner. There were only two exits, one to the road I’d just arrived on, and another to the beach of Da Nang Bay, behind the camp. Inside the compound, orderly rows of Quonset huts lined the rear half of the camp, and cavernous buildings made of corrugated metal and concrete the front. Paul said that the camp had room for 250 SF soldiers and 400 Montagnard mercenaries, whom we used as our strike troopers. An imposing concrete building smack in the center of the compound caught my eye.
“What’s that?” I asked. I pointed to the big concrete structure as we pulled up to a prefabricated building with corrugated siding. A sign proclaiming the prefab
HEADQUARTERS, CCN
was fastened alongside the door.
“That’s the TOC,” Paul replied. “It’s nearly impregnable. The walls are three-feet-thick concrete. Only one entrance, and that’s always guarded.”
The TOC (tactical operations center) was the hub of business for the camp. From inside its concrete protection, plans were made, teams dispatched, messages received, and operations orders given. Everything that happened started and ended there, first as a plan, then as an operation order, then as a briefing, and, after the operation, as an after-action report that went down to Saigon to MAC-SOG headquarters.
CCN was situated along the beach of Da Nang Bay. A person could walk out of the back gate right onto the sand of the beach, only twenty yards from the polluted waters of the bay. To swim in it was to risk mysterious diseases since the city of Da Nang, with its population of over 500,000, dumped its sewage directly into the blue-gray waters. Still, I swam there every chance I got and never was sick. Angels watch over fools and SF soldiers, I guess.
Paul dropped us off at the HQ building, and I reported in. The S-1 turned me over to the XO. Skinny, sported a big nose and pale eyes too close together, with a sallow complexion that accentuated his sunburned face and arms. He was additionally cursed with a pronounced receding chin. He had shifty eyes, as if he was trying to catch me staring at his nonexistent chin. He flipped through my record folder and turned me over to the camp commander, Lt. Col. Jack Warren, a hard-core soldier if there ever was one.
Lieutenant Colonel Warren was the toughest and most intimidating combat commander I ever served under. He lived to kill the bad guys, and worked hard at it. He also made sure we all kept pace with him. He could roast a young captain’s ass pink with a few, well-chosen words if he did not have his ducks lined up properly. Colonel Warren was shorter than average, lean and wiry, but looked like he could win a triathlon. His flashing dark eyes bored right into you when he asked a question. He was no-nonsense and truly a professional soldier whose intensity made me a bit nervous, right from the get-go.
My new boss gave me a quick rundown about CCN and its
assigned mission. “I run a taut ship, Captain. Do your job, and do it right the first time. Then we’ll get along. Fuck up, and you’re gone, period. I need an assistant S-3, operations officer, for a while. When Captain Jones rotates end of February, I’ll consider you as his replacement in command of my raider company.”
My heart beat a little faster. Command of a raider company. That was hot stuff. I almost missed the rest of Lieutenant Colonel Warren’s monologue.
“You’ll be involved in distributing Italian Green, a secret project sent up from SOG HQ. You’ll find out more about it at the S-3 briefing Major Toomey will give you. I’ll send for him right now and get you started to work.”
I was hoping for time to get some chow at the mess hall, but I decided to shut up, and saluted my way out of his office. I wanted to earn that company command.
Maj. Samuel Kanniu Toomey was a half-breed Hawaiian and looked more Indian than Caucasian. His hair was coal black, and his skin was darkened by the sun. Although stocky, there was a fluid grace to his every movement. He took me over to the tactical operations center, briefed me on my duties, and quickly put me to work writing operation orders and planning Italian Green (IG) inserts for coming recon missions.
“Italian Green” was a code name for booby-trapped munitions and supplies. We would find a supply cache somewhere along the Ho Chi Minh trail and, in the name of lowering enemy morale, sneak into it booby-trapped ammo that would explode on use. Somebody figured it would shorten the war if the Viet Cong lost confidence in his supplies. It was a dangerous operation, and I’m doubtful that it was very effective, but faithful to our orders, we did it.