They Marched Into Sunlight (42 page)

This was not part of the plan; no battle was intended here. It was rather only an annoyance to Vo Minh Triet that Terry Allen’s 2/28 Black Lions kept marching out from their night defensive position a kilometer to the north.

Chapter 15

“The Trees Are Moving”

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE,
under a full moon, the last thing Clark Welch had talked about was the coming of the B-52s. The huge Stratofortress jet bombers flew so high in their missions over South Vietnam that they usually went unseen even in daylight, but they would soar overhead hauling payloads of up to sixty thousand pounds in their big bellies, and the falling bombs made a sound all their own, and there were violent flashes of light, and then “the fucking world erupted.” It would be that way all night, Welch had predicted to Sergeant Barrow. The eight-engine swept-wing monsters would fly in from the U-Tapao Royal Navy Air Field in Thailand and make the world erupt in the jungle of the secret zone where the Viet Cong tried to hide.

In the soggy earth next to his sleeping mattress, Welch placed two small sticks and pointed them in the direction that he expected to hear the overnight rumble. The B-52s, he thought, would be only the loudest instruments in a percussive symphony of devastation that might also include the boom of howitzers from 105- and 155-millimeter artillery batteries at the fire base on Route 13 as well as the
thwoop
of rocket grenades from the night defensive position and the eruption of claymore mines beyond the concertina wire. Noise was good, the more racket the better. The Viet Cong had even coined a phrase to describe the cacophony of fire they usually received from the Big Red Brothers. They called it “New Zealand music,” a poetic allusion to the atonal sounds of the Maori people, some of whom were in Vietnam fighting in alliance with the Americans.

There was no New Zealand music from midnight to dawn on the morning of October 17. There were no sounds of war at all, only stillness.

Welch woke up realizing that he had missed the artillery and the B-52s. The big bombers had made preplanned strikes earlier in the week a few miles away but had not returned. They were assigned elsewhere in MACV’s countrywide B-52 strike plan, a tightly controlled operation run by the Strategic Air Command and not always tied directly to specific ground missions at specific times. Some First Division officers would say later that B-52 strikes preceded the march that day, that in fact the mission was designed specifically for the 2/28 Black Lions to go in and see what damage the bombs had done, but it did not happen that way. An air force captain later signed an affidavit certifying that “no B-52 strikes were placed in the area” until five days later. Instead, as Welch put it, “the big thing that happened all night was nothing. Silence. Silent night.”

They woke at six, then roll call, and with coffee the buzz started, same as the night before. The resupply helicopter arrived with more ammo. Men were moving faster, with more determination, though not all of them reacted to pressure the same way. Some soldiers, by training or instinct, focused only on what was in front of them. This was another day, another search-and-destroy mission, and they would handle whatever came their way, when and if it came. They knew little about the orders and had no desire to learn more. They survived in the moment; anything else was extraneous and probably dangerous. Other men, sensitive to the slightest portent of trouble, felt an unusual stir that morning. They would later describe an eerie sensation in camp, as though an ominous smell or a smog were hanging over the Ong Thanh stream.

Private Melesso Garcia of Delta told his buddies that he had a feeling he shouldn’t go out that day.

Jim George, the Alpha commander, awoke with a sense that if ever he was going to be shot, it would be that day. He gave his executive officer the addresses of people to write to just in case.

Ernie (Goodtimes) Buentiempo, a radioman in Alpha, conducted his morning ritual, placing his hands in front of his chest in a healing motion, as though he were divining the future.

Hey, man, what is it?
asked his fellow RTO, Michael Arias.
Something,
Goodtimes responded.
I feel it in my bones.

I
T WAS EARLY EVENING
in Washington, twelve hours behind Vietnam time, and LBJ and McNamara at that very moment were meeting with the White House economic team, including Charles L. Schultze, director of the Bureau of the Budget, and Gardner Ackley, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Johnson too felt something bad in his bones. With growing desperation he was searching for ways to sustain the war effort without sacrificing his domestic agenda.

The notion that the U.S. economy was so powerful that it could support “guns and butter” simultaneously was collapsing. There were projections of a ballooning budget deficit. Johnson wondered how he could “fight the war, send children to school, and meet all our other responsibilities.” Although he did not want the press or public to know the details yet, he was considering asking Congress for another $4-billion supplemental appropriation to fund the war. His prized Great Society initiatives, especially the War on Poverty, were in jeopardy. A test vote in the House had just slashed $1.2 billion from the poverty programs. Schultze and Ackley suggested that McNamara could restructure his budget to make it appear that he was cutting non-Vietnam expenditures. They advised Johnson to co-opt Congress by proposing modest cuts in some of his favorite programs along with a tax increase—“even if in your judgment there is no chance of getting a tax increase passed.” Without it, they said, interest rates and inflation would soar in 1968, and “responsibility for those conditions [could not] help but be a major election issue.”

At the same approximate time, in Hanoi, a communiqué was being released announcing the formation of the Committee of Solidarity with the American People, a group intended to “provide favorable conditions for understanding between Vietnamese and American” citizens. In its first pronouncement the committee urged Americans “to demand that the U.S. government stop its aggression, bombing raids and other military actions against the People’s Republic of Vietnam, withdraw U.S. troops, and recognize the National Liberation Front as the only true representative of the South Vietnamese people.” American intelligence officers in Vietnam and Washington immediately interpreted the communiqué and related it to events at home. “The announcement was obviously timed for the antiwar demonstrations scheduled this week in the United States,” the State Department intelligence and research office reported to Secretary Rusk. “Within a few hours of the initial announcement, Hanoi radio reported that the Front committee had sent a message to the U.S. National Mobilization Committee and the Students Mobilization Committee applauding their October 21 ‘struggle to end the war in Vietnam.’ The message added that ‘our struggle…in coordination with your struggle’ will compel the U.S. government to end the war in Vietnam.”

In Moscow, it was “Hanoi Day.” The mayor of Hanoi had arrived the night before, and preparations were under way for a daylong “soiree” at the Central House of Culture of Railway Workers. The mayor spoke in praise of the “two hero cities” and the “immense help” the Soviets had provided liberation forces in Vietnam.

T
HE
B
LACK
L
IONS
began gathering at twenty to eight. Kasik’s Bravo Company would stay back to guard the NDP, along with the mortar platoons. Reese’s Charlie Company was stationed at the artillery fire base, Caisson V, a few kilometers away. Erwin’s reconnaissance platoon had its separate marching orders, to head west later in the morning. For the two-company search-and-destroy mission, George’s Alpha would lead, followed by Welch’s Delta. Major Sloan, the battalion’s operations officer, would stay at the field camp’s tactical operations center, but Lieutenant Colonel Allen was bringing most of the rest of his headquarters staff on the ground with him, including his intelligence officer, Captain Blackwell; Sergeant Major Dowling; operations sergeant Eugene Plier; and his new radioman, Pasquale Tizzio. The battalion’s air operations officer, Captain Grosso, would stay back and then go overhead in an observation helicopter. The mission was of enough significance to the division’s commanders—especially General Coleman, Colonel Newman, and his operations officer, Major Holleder—that they intended to pay special attention to it when they went up in command-and-control helicopters that day. General Hay would not be around; he had a meeting at MACV headquarters near Saigon.

As the battalion gathered to leave, Blackwell came running back toward the operations tent and asked Grosso to lend him his K-Bar knife. “I’ll bring you back an ear,” he said. It was a moment of mindless bravado that at least reflected some confidence from the command team. They were going hunting for VC.

The morning opened in a bright haze, with temperatures already in the eighties. It was “just a very muggy dog day, with no air movement,” thought Joe Costello, the Alpha grenadier. “It was just kind of
aaaggghhh.
” At two minutes after eight, out from the perimeter they marched, into the sunlight, into the dog day, through the tall grass, toward the wood line to the south. They were loaded. Each rifleman carried fifteen magazines of ammo, with eighteen rounds per magazine. Don Koch, a platoon sergeant from Bravo who had been up all night guarding the perimeter, stood silently watching the companies march away. He had never bothered to study a departing patrol before, and never would again, but he watched that morning and the image stayed with him.

Alpha came out in left and right files ten to fifteen yards apart, with small teams protecting the flanks. To call this a company would be generous. Captain George had only sixty-five men with him, half a full complement. The acting platoon leader of his first platoon was a staff sergeant, Willie Johnson, who had two squads of eleven men each. The second platoon was similarly undersized. Second Lieutenant Peter J. Edwards had been in charge of the platoon for only ten days and had not had time to work with his men on fire and maneuver drills before leading them into the field. The third platoon, known as the hillbilly platoon because many of its men came from Appalachia, was under Second Lieutenant Thomas V. Mullen Jr. It was not a platoon at all, only eleven men total, including a machine-gun team. Its other eleven members had served on ambush patrol overnight and remained in the perimeter to rest. Still, with two platoons in front and another company behind him, Mullen thought it would be “a walk in the park” for his little outfit. In the shirt pocket of his fatigues he carried a wallet that a soldier had given him when he went out on ambush patrol the night before and had forgotten to retrieve.

Jim George, carrying a Car-15 semiautomatic and a .45, marched in the right file behind the first platoon along with his forward observer team and two RTOs, big Lee Price and Michael Farrell, the kid from New Orleans who had come over with George on the
General John Pope.
Willie Johnson was the fourth man back in the right file ahead of George, followed by his radioman, Buentiempo. Johnson had a favorite song, the 1966 rhythm-and-blues hit “Knock on Wood” by Eddie Floyd, that he sang every day as an expression of soulful superstition. “It’s like thunder, lightning, the way you love me is frightening…. Think I better knock, knock, knock on wood.” Buentiempo, his own superstition giving him bad vibes that morning, could only hope that Johnson’s wood knocking would get them through.

At the front was a point team led by Ray Gribble, who had left Alpha briefly to work as an aide to Big Jim Shelton in the First Division’s operations shop in Lai Khe but had returned a few days earlier, saying that he wanted to be in the field and that his men needed him. Reluctantly, Shelton had let him go. On the left file, platoon sergeant Donald Pipkin was the ninth man back, followed by his RTO, Michael Arias, who lugged a twenty-five-pound PRC-25 radio on his back. Along with six smoke grenades to mark his platoon’s positions, Arias also had a Chinese hand grenade, a souvenir that he had found during Alpha’s operations on the fifteenth. Behind them was the company’s tough first sergeant, José Valdez, a professional soldier with fifteen years in the army, who by standard operating procedure always marched on the file opposite George.

Private Costello was positioned as the second-to-last man on the right file of the second platoon. As a grenadier, he seemed especially vulnerable, yet he felt comfortable with his unusual weapon. The M-79 grenade launcher, known variously as the bloop gun, blooper, or thumper, was shaped liked a large-bore sawed-off shotgun. It was fired from the shoulder and sent out a single 40-millimeter high-explosive grenade spiraling on an arc toward a target thirty to a few hundred yards away, thereby covering a middle distance farther than a tossed grenade’s and closer than a mortar’s. The spiral rotation caused the grenade, after thirty yards of spinning, to arm itself for detonation on impact. The grenade’s flight path was fairly steady, but grenadiers in Vietnam, where the M-79 was first used, learned to take into account that it tended to drift right. It was a light weapon, weighing only 6.6 pounds, so Costello moved free and easy compared to the man walking behind him, his buddy Tom Hinger, the platoon medic.

Doc Hinger was a walking skeleton by mid-October, down to barely a hundred pounds on his five-eight frame. His pants were twenty-six at the waist. On most days he armed himself only with a .45 pistol, but today he switched to an M-16 and two bandoliers of ammunition because of the high probability of action. He also carried his C-rations for the day (spicy beef), extra water (three canteens holding a quart each), along with his medical aid bag, which contained field dressings, morphine syrettes, IV tubing, a small surgical kit with scalpel, blades, and sutures, antibiotics, salt pills, pain relievers, and other drugs and ointments. Taped to the side of his aid bag were several heavy cans of blood volume expander, each about the size of a can of tennis balls, containing a ready-made IV kit of serum albumen, a clear, nonperishable liquid that was used to replace massive blood loss in the field until a wounded man could receive a transfusion. In all, it was a seventy-pound burden for the gaunt medic, an almost antlike ratio of load to body mass.