They Marched Into Sunlight (37 page)

Hay felt the pressure and thought that he was being unfairly criticized, even conceding his naturally deliberate nature. The enemy main force units in his tactical area of operations had been only intermittently active during that rainy season of 1967 and were “hard to find.” The other side could strike and then move across the Cambodian border in a few hours. Also, the weather made it difficult, as did a shortage of helicopters for offensive operations.

Like most commanding officers of his generation, Hay was steeped in the history of the Big Red One, and an unavoidable character in that military story was General Terry Allen. Hay knew all about Terrible Terry and his days leading the Fighting First in North Africa. Alpha Company’s Jim George once overheard a radio conversation between Hay and Terry Allen Jr. during which Hay called him Terry (instead of Allen or “Dauntless Six,” the code name for a 2/28 Black Lions commander) and said, “Terry, your dad was a great soldier!” In their command styles Hay and the elder Allen could not have been more different. Hay was a man of routine who went by the book, slow and steady, fond of distributing long “Commander Notes” on subjects like how to clean a .45, how to brief your troops, how to cross a river, and how to prevent malaria. Members of his staff knew that if they asked him a question, they were likely to get a lecture. General Allen had been a stickler mostly about one thing: fighting. When he wrote, he wrote about fighting. The rest of it was less important to him. He was a doer, not a talker.

Terry Jr. was somewhere in the middle, not as bold as his father nor as pedantic as Hay. He was personally selected for the job, like all of Hay’s battalion commanders, and had to undergo an “audition,” showing the general how he would conduct a combat assault. “I demanded perfection and insisted they follow our division SOP [standard operating procedure] to the letter,” Hay explained later. Being a battalion commander under him “was not an easy job,” he acknowledged, because he “perhaps oversupervised…not allowing them very much leeway in a fight, particularly new commanders,” lest they “do something stupid” and get a lot of men “killed needlessly.”

But now they had a Viet Cong regiment in their sights. The 2/28 Black Lions were moving and preparing to strike. They had a chance to search and
pursue
and destroy. Pressure flows downhill, and here it came thundering down in a molten flood. Down from Lyndon Johnson to William Westmoreland to John Hay. And down from there, down to William Coleman, Hay’s deputy; down to George (Buck) Newman, who ran Operation Shenandoah II for the First Brigade; and then down to Terry Allen.
Pour the steel on.

Yet even then, unknown to the public, and out of sight of Terry Allen and his Black Lions and the other men who did the fighting, a dispute was roiling among the war managers in Washington about whether Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition through search-and-destroy missions could ever succeed. General Gavin’s grave skepticism on the subject was shared privately by many of McNamara’s top analysts at the Pentagon, led by Alain Enthoven and his so-called whiz kids in the Office of Systems Analysis, who had been pointing out the weaknesses in the concept for months in private memos and studies related to Westmoreland’s request for more troops. The essence of Westmoreland’s strategy was that if the war had reached the mystical crossover point where more enemy troops were being killed than North Vietnam could provide or the Viet Cong could recruit in the South, then the United States, with an even larger force, could search and destroy more of them and improve the crossover ratio to the point of eliminating the enemy army in ten years and debilitating it long before that.

Enthoven’s analysts tested this thesis in a study of fifty-six pitched battles fought in Vietnam during the previous year, and they found it illogical. Their central conclusion, in fact, was that “the size of the force we deploy has little effect on the rate of attrition of enemy forces.” The determining factor was not battlefield superiority, which usually went to the Americans, but the choice of battles. In a vast majority of cases, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese controlled whether they would stand and fight. And when they did, according to the study, it was usually because they had initiated the battle. Some 66.2 percent of the battles began with an enemy attack on U.S. troops: the enemy attacked as U.S. troops landed to deploy on the battlefield (12.5 percent), or attacked a static U.S. defensive perimeter (30.4 percent), or ambushed a moving U.S. unit in a preconceived battle plan (23.3 percent). When another category was included—attacks on a moving U.S. unit by the enemy in a dug-in or fortified position in which the engagement came as a virtual surprise to the American tactical commander (12.5 percent)—the percentage of battles involving some element of enemy initiative rose to 78.7 percent. This meant that even though U.S. forces had vastly superior kill ratios on the battlefield, the enemy, at almost any time, could limit losses—and frustrate Westmoreland’s attrition strategy—by simply refusing to stand and fight.

O
N THE MORNING
of the sixteenth, Clark Welch’s Delta led the way for the Black Lions, with Kasik’s Bravo following. They headed out on a search-and-destroy mission at two minutes before eight, marching in a southeasterly direction through an open stretch of heavy bamboo and then moderate-growth jungle. They stayed south of the Ong Thanh but crossed to the far side, or east, of what the Americans called a draw and the Vietnamese identified as the lower extension of a stream. The trees in the jungle beyond the draw were about 120 feet tall at the highest and at places formed a complete canopy overhead. The marshy soil underfoot, littered with deadfall brush and trees, made for slow moving.

Welch felt most comfortable when his company was placed in the lead, as it was that morning. In two-company patrols, the lead company commander had substantial control of the operation, while the rear company commander was there mostly for backup work. The lead commander could set the pace of the march. He could decide how and when to cloverleaf to assess where the enemy might be. Even while taking orders from the battalion commander and others above him, he could make instinctive judgments on where to place his men and whether to diverge slightly from the planned route. And he could control artillery support from the big guns located at fire bases a few miles away.

Welch and his new artillery forward observer, Pinky Durham, had melded into a smooth team in their few days together. They shared a philosophy of using artillery aggressively and proactively. Welch would order what was known as marching fire as soon as he left camp, directing mortar and artillery rounds in front of him, and sometimes to the sides, as his platoons moved forward. This had a dual purpose. The obvious one was to discourage the enemy from setting up an ambush. The less obvious but to Welch more important purpose was to establish an early and continuous dialogue with the artillery officers on the other end of the radio (in this case at a Thirty-third Artillery fire base camp, Caisson V, near the village of Chon Thanh on Route 13), so that when real trouble arose, they would have the bureaucratic procedures authorizing the use of artillery already out of the way, the coordinates established, enough rounds of 105-millimeter shells broken down, and everything ready to aim and fire.

Walking point in front of Delta’s troops that morning was a little squad that Welch liked to bring along for patrols through unknown territory. It was a provincial reconnaissance unit comprised of Vietnamese scouts from nearby Ben Cat. Some were former Viet Cong, some were thrill seekers, most were local men who signed up for the money. They were paid as independent contractors—cold cash handed out at the end of a day’s work—and they worked only when they felt like it. Their numbers on any given day ranged from two to six men from a pool of twenty. Army Captain Bernard Francis Jones of Coalton, West Virginia, served as their adviser. Jones could speak Vietnamese fluently and implicitly trusted his little squad of irregulars. They looked out for each other, Jones said, and performed important work that went largely un-appreciated.

“Important work” in this case meant killing people, an estimated four to five suspected Viet Cong a week. Welch, who understood Vietnamese but was not fluent, was among the few who appreciated them. He believed that the closer the Americans worked with the Vietnamese, the more they understood about Vietnamese behavior patterns, and the more they tapped into local knowledge of the geography, the better they could fight the war. Nonetheless many American soldiers viewed the scouts—Kit Carsons, they were informally called—with skepticism. To them Vietnam was a forbidding and alien place, its people difficult to read. They felt they could trust nothing. A persistent rumor rustling through the enlisted ranks was that some Kit Carsons were surreptitiously working for the other side.

Welch walked near the front of his second platoon, accompanied by his dependable first sergeant, Bud Barrow, and his two radiotelephone operators, both Scotts from Michigan, Jimmy Scott from Detroit and Paul D. Scott from Flint. Scott Up and Scott Down, he called them, Up carrying a radio for contact with battalion headquarters, and Down on a frequency with the platoon leaders. They were both experienced soldiers, and Paul D. Scott had been through several major operations before, including Junction City and Billings. Also in the group was the medic, Joe Lovato Jr., a large and friendly man who knew Welch’s fighting tendencies all too well. Lovato carried two stretchers with him that morning, each weighing twenty pounds, along with his oversized medical bag.

What are you carrying two stretchers for?
Welch asked.

God damn, Lieutenant Welch,
Lovato answered.
Whenever you go out, guys get hurt.

Welch could not argue; he knew it was true. He had a way of finding the action. His men might get hurt, he conceded, but not killed.

He moved his company south and east with extreme caution. Late in the morning they were a mile from the NDP. At 11:17 they reported back to the operations center that they had located an oxcart trail running through the high brush. An hour later they were in the canopied jungle when a Vietnamese scout scooted back to the command group and reported that they had spotted a few enemy soldiers in what appeared to be a base camp. They could hear them and smell them.

Welch came forward to look for himself. A Viet Cong soldier was sitting on a bunker, facing the other direction, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette or dope. The bunkers hugged the ground, hard to see unless you knew what you were looking for, barely distant cousins of the “Hay hole” bunkers of the First Division, which could be seen from far away. The firing points were only a few inches above ground level. But this soldier was atop the bunker, not in one, and he seemed unconcerned with the possibility that an American patrol was on the search. A Delta soldier standing near Welch said that he had always wanted to make a “silent kill.” A macho thing, Welch thought, but he said okay, try it. The soldier took off his shirt and brought out his knife and began crawling forward silently. “And then the Vietnamese started to turn around,” Welch later reported. “So I shot and killed him, and that’s what started the fight.”

The skirmish over the next few hours in some ways seemed easy, as if it had been choreographed, although there was one significant tactical argument near the start. Terry Allen, monitoring the action by radio, wanted to bring in close air support, but Welch said continued artillery would be more helpful because the enemy was hugging so close to him. Okay, Allen said, he would hold off air support for now. By the time Delta soldiers began taking small arms fire, Welch had directed his three platoons into position and set up his M-60 machine guns where he wanted them. He was able to employ fire and maneuver tactics to maintain the offensive, moving one platoon forward in a left hook while another was firing. His platoon leaders were close enough that he could direct them by yelling loudly. Amid all the clatter the voice of the lieutenant, Big Rock, could almost always be heard. He moved his first platoon toward unoccupied enemy bunkers ten yards in front so they could use the low berms for protection. Although there was a tunnel network in the base camp, Welch and his men were not disoriented and had a fairly easy time establishing fire superiority. Mike Troyer even found time to eat a can of peaches. A few enemy soldiers were shot as their heads popped up like prairie dogs from their tunnel holes. Welch and Pinky Durham were in constant touch about how closely to call in the artillery support, which came quickly. Welch also called in mortar rounds from his weapons platoon stationed back at the NDP.

When the shooting began, Kasik positioned the lead Bravo platoon ten yards from Delta’s rear position to maintain a connecting file between the two companies. The Bravo soldiers formed a rough oval perimeter behind Delta, stayed low, and held their fire until one of Kasik’s platoon leaders spotted another group of fifteen to twenty enemy soldiers moving toward them from the right side about twenty yards away. They caught only fleeting glimpses in the jungle darkness; Kasik watched one Viet Cong soldier throw a grenade that hit a tree and bounced back toward him.
Dumb shit,
he thought. After a brief firefight, those enemy troops vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

As the shooting slowed, Lieutenant Colonel Allen directed Welch to start pulling back. No sharp disagreement. It was already a clear victory. They had caught the enemy by surprise and never lost control. They had killed at least seventeen and lost none, though four Americans were wounded. They knew more now about where the Viet Cong were. Now napalm bombs could set the jungle ablaze and later the B-52s could come in and level the place.

Welch rested on his knees, calling in a final situation report. Captain Jones was at his side. Welch got off the radio and turned to the adviser.

God damn, we did it again,
he said.
This has been a good day.

Helluva day,
Jones agreed. But he was thirsty and his canteen was empty.
Here,
Welch said, handing Jones his canteen. They were good friends, both trained in Special Forces, both at home in dangerous places, both instinctive soldiers. The captain stood up and tipped the canteen and took a swig. Then he said he hadn’t killed any Viet Cong in two weeks and ran up toward the front. Before he could fire, he was killed by a burst of machine gun fire from a bunker.