They Marched Into Sunlight (27 page)

If the early warning system failed, the Americans in any case were easy to follow once they were on the move. The First Division was vastly superior to the Ninth VC in terms of airpower and military hardware, but its reliance on technology and heavy equipment also made it easily detectable. What Triet and his men feared most, even more than the heavy pounding from B-52s, were airborne squads that swooped down on them in helicopter raids. They considered speed more disruptive and dangerous than power, because with speed the Americans could confront them before they were ready to fight, or escape, or go underground. They respected the Big Red Brothers for power and ferocity but not speed. First Division maneuvers seemed predictable, cautious, and slow to develop. “If we saw an observation plane, we knew the American ground forces were coming in,” Triet recalled. Soon would follow artillery and air strikes and napalm-grazed landing zones and a squadron of supply helicopters, all in a familiar routine. “So,” Triet said, “unexpected attacks were not many.”

Just as General DePuy disparaged the Viet Cong for relying on “cowardly” ambushes, the military rhetoric from Hanoi sounded harshly critical of American combat methods. “Their basic fighting methods are the following: Seek ways to quickly get away from liberation troops and determine enemy and friendly lines in order to call for help from air and artillery units,” wrote Brigadier General Vuong Thua Vu that fall, according to a Hanoi Domestic Service report translated by the CIA. “This is a very monotonous and outmoded fighting method of a cowardly but aggressive army.” By Vu’s account this method virtually emasculated the infantrymen of the Big Red One. While air force and artillery units seized the primary offensive role, infantry forces were “given the secondary role of searching and pinning down enemy troops”—a task at which “they are not efficient.”

There were two keys to success for communist forces facing American search-and-destroy missions, Vu wrote. The first was to get so close to the enemy during battle that artillery and air power could not be effective. In the metaphorical language of the Vietnamese, this tactic was popularized by a saying: “Grab the enemy by the belt and hang on.” The second element was surprise. “The side which is caught by surprise will be embarrassed and unable to capture the initiative. The side which is caught by surprise will be at a loss and be quickly annihilated.” In several recent battles, Vu wrote, the other side seemed surprised. “When he believed we attacked from the east, we attacked from the west. When he believed we stopped, we attacked again. When he believed we advanced, we stopped. Truth and falsehood, falsehood and truth. This completely confused the enemy.”

During the same week that Clark Welch was concluding his training of Delta Company, liberation forces were holding their Second Congress of Emulatory Heroic Combatants at a base camp deep in the jungle north of Tay Ninh. More than two hundred delegates arrived from all fronts. Tran Quoc Vinh, deputy political commissar of the People’s Army of Vietnam forces in the South, gave a speech stressing “seven manifestations of revolutionary heroism.” The heroic soldier, he said, must be staunch, be absolutely loyal, have a firm grasp of the revolutionary offensive, ardently love his fellow fighters, associate his personal interest with the revolution’s by “adequately resolving the problems of life and death, happiness and hardship, and individual and collective welfare,” scrupulously implement orders, and be self-reliant and creative “in finding every ways and means of fighting the enemy.”

The military exploits of the VC Ninth Division (whose slogan was “To be victorious everywhere and completely wipe out enemy forces in every attack”) were extolled, and particular honor was given to its oldest unit, the First Regiment. Three members of the regiment, Ta Guang Ty, Doan Hoang Minh, and Nguyen Duc Nghia, were named Hero of the People’s Armed Forces, and the regiment itself was cited as “the best regiment of the Eastern Nam Bo’s main-force contingent.” Vo Minh Triet’s men were given a banner with sixteen words embroidered in gold:

With loyalty and bravery

Overcoming all difficulties

Continually recording achievements

Destroying the puppets, defeating the Americans

In reality the storied VC regiment had not so much prevailed as survived. It had been the target of American searches for two long years, and though it was not destroyed, even its own glorifying historians acknowledged that it had been subject to “fierce American attacks” during the 1966–67 dry season (roughly November through March). Documents captured by a unit of the Fifth U.S. Special Forces Group indicated that there was some “friction…in relations between officers and men” in the aftermath of the battles, and an accompanying “loss of revolutionary pride” that was exhibited through “escapism and demoralization…lack of determination to seek and fight the enemy…weariness and the inclination to enjoy some rest…lack of a sense of responsibility and lack of a sense of discipline.” Regular army soldiers who became casualties during that season had been replaced by fresh recruits from the provinces and filler troops marching down from the north along the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The supply system, less easy to replace, was a mess. “A number of rice and ammunition depots had to be scattered or evacuated to evade enemy mopping up operations,” Ninth Division historians later wrote, and the rainy season of 1967 made “the transportation of material and logistical supplies even more difficult.” As a way to recover from the earlier battles and to help with the resupply effort, the First Regiment had been given a new mission in the summer and early fall of 1967. It was put in charge of moving supplies and defending the transportation corridor that cut across from War Zone D to War Zone C.

Truth and falsehood, falsehood and truth. As much as the VC First Regiment prided itself on confusing its foes, this did not mean that the Americans were unaware of what Triet’s unit was doing. From documents recovered in battle and information gleaned from Chieu Hoi (a former VC who went over to the other side), the Big Red One had detailed and basically accurate intelligence on the enemy unit. In the special intelligence estimates for September and October 1967 seen by First Division commanders at Lai Khe, the First Regiment (or 271st, as the Americans called it), was listed with a battle strength of fifteen hundred soldiers, bolstered by three hundred men from a rear services supply group, three hundred guerrilla fighters from the Phu Loi battalion, and another two to three hundred local VC forces. The latest evidence also showed that the regiment was well armed, with heavy machine guns and 82-millimeter mortar ammo, but desperately hungry, suffering from a lack of rice, and always on the move. It was said to have marched from War Zone D into a new supply area in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone north of Lai Khe along the southern border of Binh Long province. It was a sparsely populated area (Binh Long was the sixth-least populous of South Vietnam’s forty-three provinces) of scrubby, rolling terrain and moderate-growth jungles. From their interpretation of captured documents, American intelligence officers concluded that soldiers in the Viet Cong regiment were “becoming increasingly disoriented and vulnerable.”

Everything seemed in place for a successful search-and-destroy operation. When First Division troops went after the regiment in Long Nguyen, the VC unit would face the choice of leaving or being destroyed. “Even if it moves, the significant quantities of supplies in the area will be destroyed. So the conclusion is: Both the [First regiment] and its supporting logistical structure can be simultaneously destroyed or seriously incapacitated.” There was one final word of caution: because of all those conditions, the report noted, “the probability of chance encounters with sizeable enemy forces will be appreciably heightened.”

It was with such great expectations that Operation Shenandoah II began.

T
HE YOUNG SOLDIERS
of Delta Company sensed that they would be seeing a lot of combat from late September into October. It was the talk of their camp: something’s coming. “In the months ahead we’re really going after the V.C.,” Greg Landon reported in a letter home. “No let up. Should be interesting for me since the company has been decimated by health problems, transfers etc. The CO [Welch] is a gung-ho lieutenant who…emphasizes close-in combat. Whew! Looks like lots and lots of jungle tramping after the little men.”

That was the word: they were heading into the jungle north of Lai Khe. “The gooks up there have got their shit together,” Mike Troyer wrote to his parents. “The last time a company went up it took ten choppers to take them up and about four to bring back those that were left.” But Troyer was the sort of young soldier who thought he was invincible. “I am not too worried because there hasn’t been a gook born yet that is going to get me. Not as long as I have anything at all to do with it.”

Jack Schroder was less confident. One night, after cleaning his M-60, he wrote a letter to his mother with more details about the mission ahead. “We’re supposed to be going up to Operation Shenandoah II for a ten-day operation,” he noted. “It doesn’t sound good. It kind of worries me. All hard core VC. So I don’t know what to expect.” A few days later he urged his wife, Eleanor, to send him a .38-caliber revolver. He had been pushing her on the subject for a few weeks, with no success. She had said that she might be able to send him a .22, but he worried that it “just won’t have enough to stop Charlie,” and furthermore he would have a hard time getting ammunition for it. “My buddy Bob Nagy from Ohio, his father bought and sent him the exact .38 revolver like I need and 100 rounds ammo,” Jack told his wife. “All they did is wrap it in newspaper and aluminum foil and put it in a coffee can with some cookies and mailed the package…. I know 5 different guys that have got these.” They were loading up on weapons for battles to come.

The first few days in the field there was much searching, some finding, but little combat. “We found a base camp with 20 bunkers but no VC,” Clark Welch wrote of his company’s maneuvers on September 28. They destroyed the bunkers and brought back “all sorts of odds and ends”—land mines, booby traps, gunpowder, bicycles, clothes, fifty sets of chopsticks, thirty-two baby chickens, and a bag of documents. Welch’s company was the only one to find anything, so they were sent back the next day and found twenty more bunkers about a half mile from the first. They just missed the enemy troops; still-wet toothpaste remained on one of the low tables, and in the bunkers they found a map, dated the day before, that showed the Black Lions’ night defensive position and had several key marks on it, a prized document for the intelligence staff. On the way out one of Welch’s squads came across a small unit of VC setting up their version of claymore mines, pointing them straight up in the air, apparently to be used as antihelicopter weapons. There was a brief firefight and one Delta soldier was wounded. The casualty left Welch distraught. “I know we’re going to have them—but it really hit me when I saw him and knew he was mine…and there wasn’t anything I could do. A rifle company has a lot of people and some are certain to get hurt. I wish I could be right there each time to help.”

These were still sporadic operations. During the last week of September the Black Lions were in the field a few days at a time, but they were called back on the third of October to serve as the division’s ready reaction force, which meant they spent most of their time in Lai Khe, waiting for action. Welch, who felt that he had not done much yet, was stunned to hear how Delta’s modest exploits were being exaggerated by the publicists of the First Division.

Truth and falsehood in another context. “I don’t know sometimes what I should say about our actions—the 1st Infantry Division has got quite a reputation for ‘slightly distorting’ what actually happens,” Welch confided in his letter to Lacy. “Most of the time I guess they really bend things around so it seems like we always come out on top. Lately we’ve been taking quite a beating—my recon platoon killed more VC in the first two months than the entire battalion has killed, or even seen, since then. But the stories that come out of this don’t show that at all. I saw some of the stories being prepared for this last operation—and they’re just plain not true. They’re really building up Delta company. We were pretty successful in this operation…and they’re making Delta company into the shot in the arm to get the Bn going again. The end result is good—I hope we can bring success to the battalion—but I don’t like being a part of ‘lying.’ Maybe I don’t know enough about this whole thing to make any statements about it, but somehow I just don’t like to be part of it.”

On the night of October 4 the Black Lions were placed on one-hour alert. Delta Company had to be able to pack its gear and get to the helicopter assault pads two miles away within sixty minutes of being called. Welch plotted how his troops could do it, taking trucks instead of marching, then went to sleep after midnight. At five the next morning he got the alert to be at the strip by six. At ten minutes to six Welch and the first truck arrived. “We were met there by evaluators from Division—they were just checking our reaction time,” he reported to his wife. “What a funny war!” Only two days earlier Welch’s company had been yanked back and forth in the field as division officers twice changed their minds on where they should go; now this. He would be “pretty disgusted with this sort of thing,” Welch said, but he was trying hard to look on the positive side. “My men do just about exactly what I tell them to and even after what we’ve had to tell them to do the last few days they’re still working and putting out for me. I know I’ve got a good company—even during these screwed up affairs—and they know they’re good so it comes out all right. All we have left to do now is find some Charlie.”

Four days later, not practice but the real thing. On the morning of October 8 the entire battalion, minus C Company, which was assigned to protect an artillery fire base along Thunder Road, got the alert to be at the helipads in thirty minutes. George Burrows, a member of the recon team, would forever remember his squad’s quick trip to the helicopters. They were sitting in the back of a deuce-and-a-half, rolling through camp, when they passed the Red Cross station, and there, standing outside in the early morning light, stood a group of American women volunteers—“donut dollies,” they were called—singing softly:
Shenandoah, I long to hear you. Away, you rolling river.
Burrows loved the traditional folk song, and its hauntingly beautiful melody stayed with him as they boarded the choppers and were taken to the field. Official reports later said that 450 troops were moved by twenty-five airships making three round-trips each. The numbers were fictitious, based on the mistaken assumption that Terry Allen’s battalion was at full force. A more accurate count would have found about a hundred fewer men.