They Marched Into Sunlight (35 page)

Walk two steps, stand around for half a minute, move ten yards, wait five minutes, the companies now stacking up, breathing heavily, now spreading out. It took all day to negotiate a curved and uneven route that ended up only six kilometers from where they started. Gerald Thompson of Maryville, Tennessee, a squad leader in Delta Company, was in agony the entire time, his boots waterlogged, both his big toes swollen and black and blue, sharp pain streaking up his body whenever an ingrown toenail scraped against boot leather. They walked along the earthen dikes of fallow rice paddies and found traces of old enemy camps on the edges of their route but no stores of food or ammunition. Every hour or so, from his company’s position in the rear, Clark Welch sent out small squads on cloverleaf patterns to scout the nearby jungle and make sure no one was following them. A few times his men thought they saw flashes of movement and fired into the trees. No contact, so they kept going, cautiously following the stream as it meandered up and across the uneven terrain of lower Binh Long Province.

The new night defensive position was being set up when the rear forces of Delta arrived. Welch was disappointed by the location. The ground was low, swampy and exposed. The site was as bad as the last one, which none of the men had liked—or worse. To build fighting position bunkers here was no easy task. Many of the holes started filling with water as they were being dug. There were ants everywhere, even falling from the trees like nasty little bombers. Private Frank McMeel was miserable from ant bites; he had misplaced his towel, which he usually draped around his neck to ward off the falling ants. Darkness coming in a rush, exhausted men shoveling in the gloaming drizzle of the open field, sometimes having to use C-4 explosives to blast open hard laterite soil, not enough time to bring in resupply helicopters for a hot meal, C-rations for dinner instead, guard duty after all that, two hours on, two hours off—the fourteenth was a long day that did not end well.

The command readjusted the perimeter the next morning, moving some troops a hundred meters to ground that was higher and half-protected by bamboo and trees. They were now near the intersection of two intermittent streams, the Ong Thanh and Ba Gia. The coordinates were noted in the daily log and radioed back to Lai Khe—XT684586. This is where the First Division operations center wanted Allen’s Black Lions to be—on the northern rim of the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, 12.3 miles north of Lai Khe, blocking the path north toward Cambodia, within striking distance of where the latest U.S. intelligence put their long-sought quarry. By whatever name—Q761 or First Regiment to the Vietnamese liberation forces, the 271st to the Americans—elements of the elusive unit were now thought to be closer than ever in the jungle to the south.

Erwin’s recon platoon and Kasik’s Bravo Company were sent on the first search-and-destroy patrol from the new location while Alpha and Delta stayed back. They marched due south toward an area that had been targeted for B-52 bomb strikes the day before. Not far into the dense jungle, they discovered “a kind of trail that was really spooky,” as Kasik later reported. The trail “consisted of broken saplings to your left and right as you walked down it. If you were not directly between the broken small trees, you would totally miss it.” Kasik assumed they had found “a marker system used by the V.C. to move at night.” The Americans followed the markers carefully and reached a larger trail, where recon spotted a rucksack placed at the trunk of a tree. Erwin set up an ambush, and soon three Viet Cong soldiers came into view, walking north. One was shot in the surprise attack, but his two comrades pulled him along as they made their escape, leaving behind the wounded man’s canteen and a pair of blood-stained sandals. Kasik took the canteen, Erwin the sandals—mementoes of war.

The mission that day and the spoils the officers brought back added to the cocksure sensibility of the battalion leadership. Yes, the long march of the day before had been trying, but overall the experience in the fields of the secret zone that month had built their confidence. They were the Black Lions, feared unit of the powerful Big Red One. It seemed apparent to Allen and some of his aides that they had the enemy on the run, that the Viet Cong did not want to stand and fight, and that an American victory inevitably would result when and if a battle developed.

A few days earlier, during a search-and-destroy operation out of their first NDP (night defensive position), Bravo and Delta had wandered into the largest VC base camp they had ever seen, larger than three football fields, in “good repair but otherwise unoccupied,” according to Kasik. When they had reported their find back to Allen, he had responded with the bold order, “Each bunker gets a grenade.” Kasik had joked with Welch that they would have to “put in a rail line and haul box cars of grenades in” to carry out the command, but they tossed as many grenades as they had with them. There was little voiced concern that a base camp of that size, though empty, might portend danger. On another patrol that first week, Alpha Company had chased after a lone Viet Cong soldier at dusk. They had wounded him and picked up his AK-47, which he dropped while escaping. Jim George double-timed his troops back to the defensive perimeter as the sun fell and brought the captured souvenir to the nightly meeting of the Black Lions command group, where the other officers “had some good laughs” about it. George went along with it, but he was not feeling invulnerable himself. As he rushed his men back to the safety of their protective bunkers, an eerie sensation had washed over him. He wrote in a letter to his wife, Jackie, that he had “a very bad feeling” about the mission in the secret zone.

F
OR PROSAIC, OBVIOUS, AND ODD REASONS,
or for no discernible reason at all, soldiers came and went, even when the battalion was in the middle of an operation. Joe Costello, the grenadier in Alpha’s second platoon, rejoined his company on the morning of the fifteenth after spending a week in the infirmary at Lai Khe, where he was treated for a huge abscess on his ankle. Someone snapped a photograph of Costello as he waited for the Huey that ferried him back to the field. He was sitting in the scruffy grass near a helicopter pad, a lanky, dark-haired private of only eighteen, knees drawn toward his chest, arms tucked under his legs, helmet and rifle to the side, eyes squinting into the sunlight.

What was Costello thinking as he sat there?
If only I had said I could type.
When word had gone out that the company was looking for a clerk, Costello had thought about applying for the job but decided not to because the clerk was supposed to have minimum typing skills, which he lacked. Now, looking forward to another round of grunt work in the field, he thought,
Damn, I could have volunteered for the thing. How much typing could there be? They wouldn’t have given me a test. What a jerk!
He was confident by nature, not afraid, but still he wanted to make sure that he got back home to his high school sweetheart on Long Island. Behind him were piles of supplies headed for the field with him—ammo boxes, weapons, food, clothes, including a new pair of pants for Michael (Peewee) Gallagher and a fresh web vest for Allan V. Reilly, two members of his platoon. Peewee and Reilly would be “feeling all spiffy about their clean, new clothes” when the shipment arrived. Their reaction, such a simple pleasure, stuck in Costello’s mind’s eye as a grain of unsullied memory.

The same Huey that brought him in might have taken Gerald Thompson out on the return flight. As Costello’s ankle healed, Thompson’s toes worsened. The long march had aggravated his ingrown toe-nails so much that he now was rendered virtually immobile, and a medic recommended that he go back to Lai Khe for treatment, which entailed wearing flip-flops and soaking his feet three times a day. The point man in Thompson’s squad, Fred Kirkpatrick of Stow, Ohio, also left that morning on a helicopter that took him down to Bien Hoa. He was yanked from the field for a welcome but unexpected week of R and R in Japan. Kirkpatrick had put in for the vacation with his squadmate and good friend Ronnie Reece. He expected Reece to get the break but not him, since he already had taken five days off in June. Military bureaucracies work in mysterious ways: Kirkpatrick was approved, Reece denied. Kirkpatrick did not complain; he was exhausted from the daily grind and glad to be getting away. In the morning stillness, before leaving the NDP, he had a brief talk with his buddy Reece, who confided that he was nervous about going out on another mission. Kirkpatrick tried to ease his mind by borrowing ten dollars from him, promising to repay it when he returned. In Bien Hoa later that day, as he awaited his flight to Japan, Kirkpatrick scribbled a lighthearted letter to Gerald Thompson, the “Baddest Squad Leader in Delta” Company.

“Hello Dude, how’s the infantry life going?” he began, as though he had been away from that life so long that he could barely remember. “I’ve been in the NCO club most of today and the rest of the time in the EM [enlisted men’s] club. I’m about half drunk now. Hope you guys are staying out of trouble; I’d sure hate to come back and find no squad.”

The letter was postmarked the next day, October 16, from Japan.

Kirkpatrick, a battle-tested rifleman who took pride in walking point for his squad, was one of nine Delta soldiers on R and R that week. Another seven had contracted malaria during the rainy season and were recovering in the medical wards of the Ninety-third and Twenty-fourth evacuation hospitals at Long Binh. Ten more were being treated for wounds suffered in the battalion’s skirmishes during the first half of October. And at least that number were back in Lai Khe with various problems ranging from swollen feet to combat fatigue. The unit that Clark Welch had in the field was a thin shadow of a company. By the book he might have had 185 men, and at least 140. According to the personnel roster for October 1967 he had 92, including cooks, supply staff, and a mortar platoon that did not leave the NDP. Jim George’s Alpha Company was equally shorthanded. There were almost half a million American military personnel in Vietnam, and General Westmoreland was clamoring for more, but only one in eight was going to infantry units that did most of the fighting and were being further depleted every week.

Nothing to be done about it; most vacancies just sat there, ghosts of men left behind. Only a few positions were considered essential and filled quickly. Every company had a forward artillery liaison team, usually a lieutenant and sergeant detached from an artillery battery who walked with infantry commanders and called in artillery strikes during search-and-destroy missions. Clark Welch had been working with a new team since the start of Operation Shenandoah II, but he had an uneasy feeling about the lieutenant, who “thought he was hot shit.” Late one afternoon, after a long day in the field, Welch watched the lieutenant and sergeant as they sat side by side cleaning their .45s. When the sergeant finished with his weapon, the lieutenant said, “Let me see that!” and grabbed the gun. The gun was turned toward the sergeant. It went off; a bullet ripped into his abdomen an inch above the navel. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” the sergeant shouted.

There was no blood and no bullet; it had lodged in the sergeant’s midsection, expending all its energy inside. Before the battalion surgeon arrived, the sergeant was dead. Welch, disgusted, ordered the lieutenant to leave on the same helicopter that carried away the lifeless soldier. The next incoming Huey brought in Delta’s new forward artillery liaison officer, a young second lieutenant with a bright smile who had eagerly volunteered for the job. He was Harold Bascom Durham Jr. of Tifton, Georgia, who had answered to one nickname since the day he was born in a hospital that had run out of blue blankets. A random act, reckless gunplay by his predecessor, is what brought Pinky Durham out to march with the Black Lions along the bamboo-shaded edge of the Ong Thanh.

The thinness of their ranks drained bravado from the men. So did daily contact, or near contact, with the enemy. Many of the officers might be exuding confidence, but more soldiers were feeling that they were being used, or misused, as pawns in the larger search-and-destroy strategy. During the long march, the man in front of Alpha Company radioman Ernest Buentiempo turned back to him as they slogged through the brush and muttered, “Ernie, we ain’t nothin’ but a chain of fools.”

Back at Lai Khe, Lieutenant Tom Grady, now Jim George’s executive officer at Alpha Company, was spending more time as a psychological counselor, the same role he had played during the July voyage to Vietnam aboard the troopship. A private balked at an order to rejoin the company in the field. Grady was given the job of “getting him straight,” as he recounted later. “I talked to the kid and he was a nice kid and I sat him down and said, ‘Look, you gotta go. You gotta go. We gotta go.’

“He said, ‘Sir, I’m scared.’

“‘We’re all scared,’ I said. ‘If you think I’m less scared than you are, you’re nuts.’ He said, ‘I’m just too scared to go.’ I said, ‘But you’ve got to go, because what’ll happen is when you refuse, when I say, “Private, get your gear, get on the helicopter, go to the forward area,” if you refuse it’s disobedience of a direct and lawful order. I’ll then have to put charge sheets together. You’ll be court-martialed. The normal sentence is six months confinement, reduced to lowest enlisted rank and forfeiture of two-thirds pay’—it’s called Six and Two-Thirds—‘You’ll go to Long Binh Jail for six months and the bad part is that’s bad time. You still have to do your full year. You’re scared? We’re all scared. You just gotta go. We’ll get through this together. Just stick with me. Stick with somebody and we’ll all get through this.’ And he was a good kid.” Reluctantly, the private joined his buddies in the field.

A
T A QUARTER AFTER SEVEN
on the evening of the fifteenth, General Westmoreland took leave of his family at Clark Field in the Philippines and flew back to Saigon to prepare for another week as commander of American forces in Vietnam. In his wallet he carried a slip of paper on which he had scribbled a few words to remind him of what he considered most important for his soldiers: Food, mail, and medical care.