"Strap Hanger" CHAPTER TWO [continued] If you haven't already done so, please read http://www.don-valentine.com/gruntp.htm first. [This section covers a tour with the 1st SF Group including TDY trip to MACV-SOG in Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, & Philippines Oct 1967-April 1970]
Within twenty four hours after I
arrived on Oki, I learned "the other half of the story.” It was true that the 1st Group no longer sent
teams TDY to the 5th Group — they only sent teams TDY to
MACV-SOG [Military Advisory Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations
Group]. If you wanted to commit suicide, SOG recon team was the place to
be. In fact, that’s what
the enemy called them, "Suicide Squads.”
I forget who, but someone told me the
SOG lurps "averaged" 200% casualties annually at that
time. Back then SOG and
Project Delta lurps were simply referred to as "RT’s" which
was a nickname for "Recon Teams.”
Officially, SOG was an acronym for "Studies and Observation
Group," but that was just its "cover" name.
Actually, SOG was really a Special Operations unit. SOG casualties were so high by1968 that
SOG was taking anybody from any outfit who was dumb enough or brave enough
or crazy enough to volunteer regardless of their age, rank, experience or
training. They just had to
volunteer for SOG and lurp duty. [About
four months later, I learned that you didn't even have to volunteer for
SOG duty. Almost all of
the special forces men who are still listed as MIA were on SOG RTs and
there are a lot of them in that status, about 25, especially when you consider
how few Americans served in that tiny outfit. About 30 years later,
after this was all de-classified, I learned that SOG was the most
decorated unit in the war, maybe of any war.] The 1st Group assigned me to Master Sergeant
George "Pappy" Townsend’s A Team.
Captain Bauer was the Team Leader and Lieutenant Purdy the
Executive Officer. The other
enlisted men were Max "Fat Max" Recod, our Light Weapons Man,
Jesse Simmons, our Operations Sergeant, Dale Jennings, our Assistant
Medic, Doug "Doc" Hardy, our Medical Supervisor, Larry D.
Jenkins, our Heavy Weapons Man, Joe Payne, our Demolitions
Sergeant, John Gilgren, my radio man, and David B. "Big Dave"
Taylor, our Assistant Demo man. The company sergeant major selected me
to be an instructor in a three week Basic Airborne Course that the 1st
Group was about to conduct. They
assigned me to be a platoon cadre and I also worked the 34 foot tower
during tower training and acted as jumpmaster during jump week.
Most of the students in my platoon were Marine Force Recon troops
from Vietnam, I only had a handful of army soldiers and one air force
captain. Those poor marine
bastards came straight from Vietnam wearing filthy jungle fatigues.
The clothes they wore was all they had with them.
They had no spare uniforms nor helmets, packs, etc.
Jump school administration guys saw to it that they got the
clothing and equipment that they needed to attend the course.
How, I don’t know. Like
everything else in SF they just somehow managed to do it. Naturally, I went at being a Jump
School Cadre the same way I went at being a Drill Sergeant. During Tower Training, a student in my door kept hesitating
in the door when I slapped him on the butt and commanded him to,
"Go!” The student was
a lieutenant. Regardless of
what I did, and I tried every trick that I knew to get him to overcome his
fear of that tower, he would not jump.
He quit! One day during jump week while enroute
to the drop zone, I noticed one of my students who was a young army
enlisted man — his expression told me that he was going to freeze in the
door when he reached it. He
had that 1,000 meter stare, his face was paper white and he was chewing
his gum about a-mile-a-minute. They
were already standing and hooked up, just waiting for the green light so I
walked back to him, got nose-to-nose with him, and screamed, "When
you hit the ground, go directly to the sergeant-in-charge of the DZ and
tell him to give me ten pushups for laying out such sloppy panels.”
He stared at me in sheer disbelief.
Still nose-to-nose, I yelled as loud as I could, "Is that
clear?” "Clear sergeant," he yelled back.
That poor dumb-ass knew that the sergeant down there would make him
pay dearly for telling him to do pushups.
He had other problems on his mind now besides going through that
damn door and when it came his turn, out he went just like he had been
taught. When the class met
the following morning, that same young soldier came up to me and said,
"Sergeant Valentine, I was so damn scared yesterday, I was going to
quit. But when you ordered me
to deliver that message to the Sergeant on the DZ, I forgot all about
being afraid of jumping.” [Maybe
I missed my calling — maybe I should have been a damn mind-reader.] Before that course ended, they selected
some of the instructors, me included, to stay there and conduct a two week
Jumpmaster Course. The
marines stayed for this course also because in order to get the navy
parachutist badge they had to make ten jumps.
So we helped them out by putting them through the Jumpmaster
Course. That course had no
physical training and no harassment, it was just one week of academics,
practicing from the tower, and then jump week. At the end of the Jumpmaster Course, my
team was designated for pre-deployment training which was commonly
referred to as "mission training.”
Seven A Teams from the 1st Group, they were going to
MACV-SOG in Vietnam for six months. We
used the Jump School Area as our training headquarters.
We got plenty of physical training, which didn’t bother me. I had just spent three weeks as a jump school cadre and three
weeks getting ready for jump school.
Some of the older sergeants were dropping behind on the runs.
One morning after we had finished a run, the Major, who was in
charge of our training, commented on the men lagging behind on the runs
and said, "When I drop out, you can drop out.”
Snuffy Smith, who was suffering from the "Queen of All
Hangovers," was one of those who had lagged behind on that particular
run. [Remember this,
you will see this again later.] We also spent a week or two training at
Camp Hardy, our training camp on the beach in northern Okinawa.
We came in to the beach by rubber boats and ran through a
demolition obstacle course with guys on the hills shooting over our heads
and setting off C-4 explosive charges along the way.
We trained in tracking
people and we ran five miles each day.
The training camp commander, Lieutenant Colonel H., reminded me a lot of Charging Charlie Beckwith. Colonel H. must have thought that we were Navy SEALs because
we dressed like SEAL students and we even used the same exercises they
used during PT. That is a bit
stupid. SEALs work mostly in
water,
we walk, climb, crawl and run
—
wearing boots and carrying rucksacks or field packs. That tidbit
of information didn’t seem to sink into that Light Colonel’s head so
we wore tennis shoes for PT instead of jungle boots, we did the
"dying cockroach" exercise instead of our normal routine and we
ran through the surf before we headed out for our daily five mile jaunt
down the highway in our wet tennis shoes filled with sand.
That guy definitely impressed me as having one loose rafter in his
attic. Latrine rumors had it
that colonel was addicted to pep pills and while we were there I saw
nothing that would dispute that rumor. [The very best all-around physical
training exercise for conditioning Grunts to be Grunts, is cross-country
speed marches with each person carrying a minimum of 50 pounds in their
rucksack. With
the Proficiency Course in Thailand, the 1st Group had access to
the best lurp training available to the SF community outside of Vietnam,
but for some strange reason they chose not to send their troops to that
course in Thailand or
to the lurp school at Nha Trang, Vietnam.
There was no school to train SF men how to be efficient Hatchet Force
leaders or A Camp members either for that matter.] In early 1968, I think it was late February, we shipped out to MACV-SOG duty in Vietnam. The specific unit was known as Detachment B-50 which was also known as "Omega Projects" or "Project Omega.” [This super secret stuff gets very confusing so bear with me. Don’t be intimidated by it. It is intentionally designed to confuse you. As you may recall, I mentioned earlier that I was told that Project Omega troops were the ones that the CIA used to instigate the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. To many people, the date of the Gulf of Tonkin incident officially marks the beginning of the Vietnam War so far as the involvement of American forces is concerned. That is baloney. American forces had been involved in Vietnam affairs for many years prior to that incident. Colonel Aaron Bank, the father of Special Forces, as a captain, parachuted alone into Vietnam for the OSS back in the 40s and met with Ho Chi Minh. Colonel Bank recommended that the USA support Ho Chi Minh because he was primarily a nationalist who was forced to rely on the communists for support. Had we heeded Colonel Bank's advice, we could have avoided the most costly war in our history and in my opinion, the most senseless war in this century with the Korean War running a close second.] The Major who had been in charge
of our mission
training was not going with us to SOG.
He and the Group commander stood together and waved bye-bye as the
big C-130s slowly pulled out from the marshaling area at Kadena Air Base.
The tailgate was still down when Snuffy Smith got up and walked
back to the very rear of the plane and yelled, "Can we quit now,
Major?” The major’s face
turned beet red and everyone on the aircraft broke out laughing. My services on a SOG lurp were
requested, but I refused to volunteer.
I figured that
Hatchet Force duty would be tough enough.
After serving a year with Project Delta and Charlie Beckwith, I
knew better than to volunteer for the lurps. We were stationed at three different
SOG FOBs [Forward Operations Base] during
this tour. We were first
stationed at the FOB
in Ho Nhoc Tao which
located in III Corps.
Then we were at the Khesanh FOB which was located immediately south
of the DMZ
[demilitarized zone] in I Corps [we
referred to it as "
Eye core" instead of "first core"] where
the NVA had just introduced tanks into the war.
When our tour ended, we were at the Marble Mountain FOB in Danang
on China Beach, still in I Corps. The US Army’s largest base in Vietnam
was Long Binh which was located about halfway between Saigon and Bien Hoa.
Ho Nhoc Tao was located about halfway between Long Binh and Saigon.
Three of our team members volunteered to go on Recon Patrols while
we were stationed there. It was obvious to me by their preparations that none of them had
any prior lurp experience or training.
At night we could sit outside and watch
the gun ship known as "Spectre" work.
This gun ship, formerly known as "Puff the Magic Dragon,"
had been up-dated since I had last been in Vietnam and was now a C-130
instead of a C-47. Spectre
was armed with two 7.62mm mini-guns, one 40mm chain gun and one 105mm
cannon that was mounted on the tailgate or at least that’s what I heard.
Puff had only been armed with six 7.62mm mini-guns.
It was hard to believe that they were firing a 105mm cannon from a
damn plane. It was still
"Puff" to me. "Spectre"
just didn’t sing, if you know what I mean. It didn't sound right. Now, "Puff," that fits perfect. While we were still at Ho Nhoc Tao, I
dislocated a toe while jumping from the bed of a 2 ½ ton truck to a paved
road. At the time, I was on
the Saigon-Bien Hoa Highway at the main entrance to the main army camp at
Long Binh. I had just hitch-hiked
there from Ho Nhoc Tao. After I was
injured, I hobbled over to the MP at the gate and asked him where the
dispensary and the NCO Club were located.
He told me and I hobbled to the NCO Club because it was the
closest. There I had about
four or five bourbons and then hobbled to the hospital.
That was a very busy hospital.
Seeing all of those kids torn up so badly, made me feel guilty
being there with something so simple as a dislocated toe.
It didn’t take them but about an hour total to xray it and then
pop it back in place. The
doctor gave me a shot of lime-green liquid and said he would be back in a
few minutes to pop that toe back in place.
I do not know what he gave me, but when he came back, he asked me
if it still hurt and I said hell yes, but I don't care.
Now I could understand how people could become addicted to dope.
Later, I asked the nurse if I could get a gallon of that lime-green
stuff To-Go. I hobbled back
out to the main gate and thumbed a ride back to our camp. During the rest of that tour in
Vietnam, I hobbled, especially when I was on a hard surface. In sand, I didn’t have any problem walking, but I
couldn’t walk on a hard surface without limping.
[When we finally got back to Oki, the hospital there put a
support bar across the sole of my left jungle boot and that’s when it
finally healed. It took
almost 18 months for that damn foot to fully heal.] After about a month at Ho Nhoc Tao, we
were transferred to the Khesanh FOB to reinforce it in March 1968.
They also sent every A Team that had left Oki with us to SOG.
Things were really getting hot there.
The 5th SF Group had an A Team camp just west of a small
village called Lang Vei which was a few miles west of Khesanh.
Lang Vei and Khesanh were located in the Northwest tip of South
Vietnam. Lang Vei was the end
of the American supply line in I Corps.
The SF camp at Lang Vei was the farthest American-manned post from
Saigon. Lang Vei was situated
right smack in the middle of the huge trail network that we called the Ho
Chi Minh Trail. Khesanh was
located on a nearby plateau. France had their French Foreign Legion try this tactic at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It turned into a disaster and cost them their colony in Indochina. Unlike the Americans at Khesanh, the French did not have sufficient air power to support their camp. However one thing the Khesanh Combat Base had in common with Dien Bien Phu was neither camp occupied the dominating hills in the immediate vicinity. America was supposed to provide the air power, but President Eisenhower backed out of the agreement after it was too late to save the French paratroops. I don’t know for certain why Westmoreland thought Khesanh was so critical, but the answer has to be — location. Khesanh was located near the Ho Chi Minh Trail network and the border with North Vietnam. Khesanh had a good airfield. Mr. Pisor, author of The End of the Line ,wrote ”The marines very strongly resisted moving into Khesanh. One marine general said, 'When you’re at Khesanh, you’re not really anywhere. It’s far from everything. You could lose it and you really haven’t lost any damn thing.’ “ Much of the following information on Khesanh and Lang Vei was taken from Mr. Pisor’s excellent documentary, The End of the Line. Originally, only a 5th
Special Forces Group A Team was located at Khesanh.
Then SOG put an FOB there near the airfield in an old French
concrete bunker. A large part
of the US Marine 26th Regiment was moved in later in 1966 under
the command of Colonel David E. Lownds.
He immediately applied the RHIP [rank has its privileges]
principle and commandeered the bunker.
The SOG FOB eventually took over the 5th Group camp and
5th Group relocated their A Team to a Bru village called Lang
Vei about 6-8 miles farther west. Any SF in that area now had more to
worry about than the enemy. They
also had to hide from the marines. The
marines had a nasty habit of firing on anything that moved that wasn’t
wearing a marine uniform and sometimes those that did wear their uniform.
SF was accustomed to operating in small units without artillery
support. Now they had to
dodge "friendly" artillery. Marines fired artillery and mortars at random with no regard
for the local natives in Khesanh. Marine
aircraft killed100 Bru natives in Lang Vei with air strikes. One day Sir Charles decided to kill a
few marines at Khesanh and get rid of the SF camp at Lang Vei at the same
time. He started out by
probing the marine OPs [outposts] on
the hills west of Khesanh. While
everyone was concentrating on saving those OPs, he mounted a massive
attack against the SF camp at Lang Vei and completely destroyed it.
The next A Team re-built the Lang Vei camp, but this time they
built it atop a knoll about four miles west of Lang Vei. This time SF built a fortress at Lang
Vei. SF soldiers were
infamous as scroungers and apparently the Lang Vei team had recruited one
of SF’s finest scroungers. Their
scrounger somehow found and imported some high quality large teak timbers from
somewhere out of country to use in their bunkers.
They could not cut local trees with a chain saw because they were
so full of shrapnel. But even
if you felled local trees with axes, the timbers would quickly rot in the
humid climate or the termites would make short work of the wood.
Either way, the timber and your bunker would soon crumble and
cave-in. SF and the Navy Seabees had a great
mutual respect for one another. Probably
because they both respected job performance and courage.
So, like many other SF Teams before them, they got the Navy Seabees
to construct their defenses at Lang Vei.
Their command bunker was made of reinforced concrete and it is
still intact today. They also
erected a chain-link cyclone fence and installed powerful flood lights and
generators. Of course the
team house was well furnished and properly equipped with a wet bar.
The typical SF camp in Vietnam had fighting positions along the
wall, trenches that connected these positions, sleeping and ammunition
bunkers on the backside of this trench, and mortar and recoilless rifle
positions in the middle of the camp.
Someone once asked an SF sergeant,
"How does special forces build their fortified camps in South
Vietnam?” The sergeant
replied, "Well, first you select a good spot for a bar.
Next, you build the bar and stock it with the best booze and beer
that your team can afford. Then
you build the rest of the camp to best defend your bar.”
Of course, he was joking. At
least — I think he was joking. I
am almost positive some consideration was given to tactical location
before building the bar. Perhaps
the exact site for the bar was based on the view. The straight-laced marine officers
despised special forces soldiers. They
considered them to be an undisciplined mob that had no respect for rank or
rules and no morals. They
considered them to be "a bunch of geeks that drank rice wine and ate
rats and snakes with the natives.”
Colonel Lownds hated special forces.
He called the SF at Lang Vei "hollow-eyed wretches" who
were "high on something," and added, "Those miserable
wretches are a law unto themselves." On the other hand, SF considered the
marines to be "a bunch of dumbasses that blunder around in the
jungles and mountains like a herd of wild elephants and shoot each other
in the ass more often than they shoot Sir Charles.”
I strongly suspect that the
"hollow-eyed" look was the result of prolonged stress.
Every front line, combat-hardened infantryman has had that
"look." In this case, part of that stress may have been
due to having to avoid marine friendly fire. Lownds probably felt the way he did
about SF partly at least because of what he had seen at the SF camp when
he had visited Lang Vei earlier. He
had been very shocked by the quality of their defenses and their living
quarters which always included a bar. He was especially
upset with the quality of timber that the SF camp was getting.
None of the marines could figure out how to get that kind of
timber. [All they had to
do was send a marine enlisted man, preferably their supply sergeant, to
the SF camp to ask how he could get such timber for his guys.] The typical SF soldier knew that any
dumb-ass can suffer and live a miserable existence when he’s stuck in a
place like that, but with a little extra imagination and effort and a
couple of extra bucks, you could live relatively comfortable wherever you
were — so they did. Each SF
Team improved upon their camp during their tour and Project Delta’s
clubhouse set the example for them. The marines at Khesanh lived like animals and
built shoddy, shallow defenses. They
dug shallow holes and many times no holes.
Instead of digging, they would pile sandbags up atop the ground and
form a very weak bunker or fighting position.
Their heavy mortars and artillery pieces each used a ring of
55-gallon barrels filled with dirt instead of digging holes to protect
their gun and crew. The
defenses at Lang Vei were ten times better than anything the marines built
at Khesanh. In fact one
marine general remarked, "They built the most magnificent bunker you
ever laid eyes on.” He was
referring to the command bunker at Lang Vei.
After the marines had been at Khesanh for a couple of months,
they looked a lot worse than the SF troops at Lang Vei or Khesanh.
The marine camps became a rat-infested garbage dump. The SF camps had rats, but the Yards considered rats a delicacy so
that helped keep our rat population down. The poorly constructed sandbag bunkers were rotting and
crumbling. Their camps stank
from garbage, urine and feces. The
marine combat base at Khesanh was a "Hell-on-Earth." Lownds was envious and jealous of SF.
He hated the idea of risking any of his marines to help SF, if Lang
Vei came under siege. So far as that ass was concerned, the SF at Lang Vei were on
their own. Lownds sent out one company on a
practice relief of Lang Vei. He
instructed them to not use any roads or trails.
Actually that made sense because they would almost certainly be
ambushed, if the camp were under attack.
It took them 19 hours to reach the camp. On February 7th, 1968 at
0042 hours, the NVA attacked the new SF camp at Lang Vei. Their attack was spearheaded by several light tanks.
By 0300 hours Sir Charles had taken the camp.
From all accounts that I have read of this action, it was one hell
of a fight, but Lang Vei hadn’t been really ready for tanks.
I doubt if any SF camp was at that time. They
did have two 106mm Recoilless Rifles and several LAWs.
LAWs were lightweight, disposable, one-shot rocket launchers, that
were supposed to be an anti-tank weapon.
Sergeant Holt used one of the106s to knock out three of the tanks
and then went for more ammo and just disappeared.
He was never seen again. Most
of the LAWs malfunctioned. None
of the LAWs that worked knocked out a single tank.
Not one stinking tank.
One of those tanks was hit at least nine times by LAWs.
They also had about four 57mm Recoilless Rifles, but they are not
effective against a modern tank’s armor. When one of the SF at Lang Vei radioed
that tanks were attacking the camp, he was told by his headquarters that
the NVA did not have tanks. He
told them, "Wait!” and
kept the mike keyed but didn’t say anything.
When he took his finger off the key, they asked, "What the
hell was all that noise?” He
replied, "That’s one of those damn tanks that they don’t have.
Its spinning around on top of our bunker trying to crush us!”
Sixty percent or more of the indigenous troops were lost and 81
percent of the SF troops were casualties with ten killed and eleven
wounded in the battle for this camp. At the time of the attack, their C Team
Commander was visiting Lang Vei. They
also had 6 - 8 additional SF troops camped outside their camp working with
the thousands of refugees from Laos.
These refugees included the armed survivors of a Lao Infantry
Battalion that the NVA had forced to retreat out of the Laotian mountains
into Vietnam. Six of the SF
men outside the camp were medics who were sent to help the ailing
refugees. Three of these SF somehow managed to convince the Laotian
soldiers to counterattack and led them into the camp, three times.
Based on my experience with the Laotians as soldiers "for
their government," getting that battalion to "attack" a
superior NVA force not just once, but three times, makes all three of those men
worthy of the Medal of Honor. One of these three SF men was killed on
the first attack and another was wounded on the last attack.
The wounded SF man was later killed while being driven to Khesanh
by the third SF man. Enroute
there, a mortar round landed in the vehicle with them.
The driver survived the explosion.
An ARVN Special Forces officer saved him and the wounded C Team
Commander. He got them to the
marine combat base at Khesanh where he was disarmed by the marines, as
ordered by the camp commander, and turned away from the camp along with
the rest of the 5,000 to 6,000 helpless refugees.
The survivors of the Lao Battalion and the Bru Soldiers from the
Lang Vei camp received the same treatment when they reached the marine
combat base. These pitiful
masses of unarmed people were sent away to wander around between the
opposing forces in No Man’s Land without food, water or a means of
defending themselves. Their
situation was worse than hopeless because many of them had just fought
against the NVA and VC. There
would be no mercy for them. A Marine General, a General Cushman I
believe, had been in command of I Corps, but General Westmoreland replaced
him with a US Army General the day after Lang Vei fell. As I understand it, Westmoreland had replaced General Cushman,
because marine commanders had a very bad habit of under estimating the
enemy and because Cushman had personally refused to reinforce the SF
defenders at Lang Vei. General
Westmoreland hoped to use the troops at Khesanh as bait to draw all of the NVA
into one spot so our air force and artillery could destroy them, hopefully
before they destroyed the marine combat base at Khesanh. After much criticism because there were
no Vietnamese troops at Khesanh, which they expected to be the biggest
battle of the war, General Westmoreland decided to put the 37th
ARVN Ranger Battalion in Khesanh in late January.
The marines attached their wire to the SOG Camp’s wire where the
two camps joined. They did
the same to the wire at the Ranger Battalion camp.
No one in either the SOG or the ARVN Ranger’s camp were allowed
to cross that wire into the marine camp during a fire fight.
Only Americans from the SOG camp could enter the Marine camp at any
time and no one from the ranger base could enter it. If the SOG camp or the ranger camp was overrun, it was just
tough. The marines had
orders to shoot anyone approaching that section of wire during a fire
fight. They issued this order
because their troops couldn’t tell one of our indigenous troops or the
rangers from an NVA, especially at night and during the excitement of a
fire fight. Colonel Lownds
also stationed all six of his tanks behind the SOG camp.
He was very uncomfortable with having 400-500 natives
practically inside his camp. The
marine artillery and heavy mortars were also spread out along the SOG side
of their camp. When Sir Charles and the marines got into an artillery dual
all shells passed over one edge of the SOG camp.
Of course many of the in-coming rounds always fell short and hit
the SOG camp. A few marines were inside the SOG camp.
They were CATs [Civic Action Teams] who
were working with the local villagers trying to make life easier for them.
When the NVA moved into the area and the air force really began
bombing, these villagers were brought inside our camp for protection from
the bombing and the marine CATs stayed with them, besides the guys in the
SOG camp got a beer ration which they shared with the CATs.
The other marines did not get any beer.
After the CATs received their first beer ration, they adapted to
their new environment with gusto. Everything outside the Khesanh Combat
Base for miles around had been declared a "Free Fire Zone" and
SOG lurps had stopped patrolling a long time before.
In other words anything that moved outside the marine wire was fair
game. If any nearby aircraft
had any ammo or bombs left over from their original mission, they flew
into this area and unloaded it anywhere they so desired. Since
SOG could no longer run recons out of Khesanh, I thought they should have
relocated that FOB. I suspect
that SOG’s commander kept them there because he didn’t want to pull out
until the marines did. This
was some more of that Marine vs SF mentality. Enroute to Khesanh, we stopped over at
the marine base in Phu Bai. Several
of the marines came up to me and called me by name.
At first, I thought that we were about to have a brouhaha, but they
were some of the Force Recon troops that I had just put through jump
school on Oki. They were
friendly and wished us the best of luck. We took choppers from Phu Bai to
Khesanh. About halfway there,
the door gunner started firing his machine gun at the ground. We weren’t taking any hits from ground-fire so I looked out
the door to see what the hell he was shooting at.
That idiot was firing at everything that moved.
Unfortunately, the only targets that I saw were women and children
working in rice paddies. This must be what they called a "Free Fire Zone.”
No wonder so many Vietnamese sided with the VC and NVA even when
they slaughtered entire villages. At
least they were Vietnamese slime balls and not round-eye slime balls. As we neared Khesanh, we did start
taking some ground-fire, but not really that much.
I noticed that our guys appeared to have dug a lot of trenches all
over the area. The trenches
looked like a giant spider web with the main camp right in the middle so I
mentioned this to the door gunner. He
told me, "Those spider web-trenches aren’t yours.
They belong to the NVA.” That
made my day. As soon as we hit the ground in the SOG
camp, we ran to the command bunker with bag and baggage.
This was the largest deepest bunker in the SOG camp.
Major David 'Bull Dog' Smith then "lectured" us for
almost two hours. The only subject of that lecture was that he, Major Smith,
was the Camp Commander. After
his tirade finally ended, I whispered to Joe Payne, "Hey Joe, who do
you reckon is in charge of this damn place?" The very next morning after we arrived
at Khesanh, our young A Team Executive Officer, Lieutenant Purdy, called
me aside. Purdy told me,
"Val, I think I heard tanks last night out to our front just beyond
that knoll. I think you and I
should go out tonight and snoop around.”
I said, "That’s okay by me, just make sure I know exactly
where the land mines are.” He
said, "What land mines?” I
told him, "I’m talking about our land mines, Lieutenant.
I know in a predicament like this, we must have already planted
land mines somewhere outside all of this damn wire.”
"I’ll check on that," Purdy said. I never heard anymore about his idea. I also had not heard any damn tanks and I could hear a mouse
fart a hundred yards away. As it turned out, the base at Khesanh
was encircled by air-dropped seismic/acoustic sensors. The sensors transmitted every sound that the enemy made to
airborne communication centers. They
forwarded it to a ground-based commo-center who interpreted the
information and targeted enemy positions.
There really wasn’t much need for one dumb-ass lieutenant and one
old sergeant sneaking far from camp on a dark foggy night. The NVA had dug trenches right up to
the barbed-wire in places, mostly at the ARVN Ranger Battalion positions.
No trenches were anywhere near our wire.
Regardless, we knew how good Sir Charles was at tunneling and every
now and then one SF Sergeant would get the tunnel probe detail.
This detail required one man to go through our trenches and at
predetermined intervals he would drive a long metal rod into the ground
and then retrieve it and repeat that act the entire length of the trench. Sir Charles never once assaulted our
camp while we were there. Hell,
they didn’t even probe us. The
corpses of some NVA that had tried it earlier were still scattered in a
small ravine just about a hundred yards down the road towards the village
of Khesanh from our front gate.
The first evening that I went out on a
listening post, I spotted one of those bodies.
It moved and I almost shot it.
It didn’t take but a couple of glances to figure out why the body
had moved, a horde of maggots were working on it.
Sir Charles probed the ARVN Rangers almost every night.
Maybe they figured the Rangers were the weak link.
Maybe they were, but they held and you can’t ask anymore than
that. The camps at Khesanh were located on
bald clay hills. The SOG camp
was on the southwest side of the combat base near the main gate or at
least I think that was the main gate.
All of the digging, shelling, and traffic had killed all of the
vegetation within the wire. Everyone
and everything, except for our weapons, was covered with a thick coat of
clay. Our camp sent out listening posts at
night now and then, but I got the distinct impression that the marines
weren’t allowed to do that. Long
before we arrived, they had sent out a platoon during daylight hours and
they got their clock cleaned and withdrew leaving several dead marines
behind. That ticked their CO
off, so he sent in a company to get his dead and they again withdrew
leaving behind even more dead marines.
They decided to leave their dead where they lay and that’s what
they did. While we were there, I only know of one
excursion outside the wire in our area by the marines.
That marine patrol went out at the crack of dawn on one very foggy
morning and walked right in front of our position where we had a .50
caliber machine gun. They had
a problem: someone in the chain of command forgot to inform our troops. An SF
sergeant spotted movement out front and opened fire with that big fifty.
When he heard all of the yelling and cursing in English he ceased
fire. So far as I know, the
marines never patrolled outside the wire again.
At least they never patrolled outside our wire again. Our latrine and our shower stall were
above ground and peppered with shrapnel and bullet holes. No one ventured to either place during daylight hours.
George "Pappy" Townsend, our Team Sergeant from North
Carolina, never used either facility day or night.
He used an empty ammo can for a latrine.
When it was full, he latched the top and threw it outside the wire.
George took a whore’s bath out of his steel helmet.
Most of us only tried the shower once.
When I tried it, the instant that I was completely lathered, the
enemy started firing rockets and artillery at us.
I ended up being dirtier than I had been before I showered because
I dove into a nearby clay foxhole to duck the shrapnel.
That damn clay was hard to wash off in the dark.
Using the latrine was at best scary and always done at night.
We ate nothing but C-Rations so it wasn’t hard to control your
bowels. After a few days of
rich C-Rations, your bowels locked-up anyway.
No one dilly-dallied in that latrine to read or gab. I believe there were a couple of 5th
Group camps in addition to the SOG camp in Danang. These guys took up collections at their camp clubs [bars]
and we were air-dropped a regular supply of soft drinks and beer
along with our food and other supplies.
As I recall, one can of beer per trooper per week was their minimum
goal. Not much, but it beat
what those poor marines got, which was nothing!
I’m no doctor, but I think the beer ration helped to loosen up
our bowels. All aircraft drew fire.
One ground crew counted over two hundred bullet holes in one C-130
that returned from Khesanh. Other than parachuting supplies, the air force used drag
chutes to jerk supplies out of the plane while flying only a couple of
feet above the airstrip and they also air-landed supplies.
When the cargo planes did land, they never stopped.
They just whirled around, dropped their tailgate, pushed their
cargo out the back as they turned and immediately taxied for take-off with
the tailgate still down. They
raised the tailgate just before they left the ground.
It was all non-stop. If
anyone wanted to catch a flight out, that’s exactly what they had to do,
catch it on the run before that tailgate went up.
Several skeletons of planes littered the area and they tended to
encourage the air crews to land and depart hastily.
They started landing mostly C-123s instead of the C-130s because
the 123 required considerably less airstrip.
The 123s flew high almost to the edge of the strip then they dove
down to the strip. When the
123s took off, they went damn near straight up with jet assists. One day we heard about a group of
marines that were due to leave on the next plane.
Some were due for discharge, some were going on R&R, some were
due to return home, some were wounded, and of course some were in body
bags. They had both
walking-wounded and some that were confined to stretchers.
They all crouched in the trenches dug along the airstrip for that
purpose. A lieutenant that
was going on R&R was in the bunch and he took charge.
He told the marines when the plane landed they were to load the
wounded first, followed by the walking wounded, then the dead and then
everyone else could get aboard. When
their plane took off and the dust had cleared, on the ground lay a pile of
body bags, several wounded that were confined to stretchers and one
trampled lieutenant. When
choppers landed, the door gunners held their pistol on anyone trying to
get aboard until they were satisfied that they were authorized to leave
Khesanh. When Sergeant First Class Richard B.
"Bear" Shorten went on R&R from Khesanh, he rode out on a
C-130 with the marines. He
said that they were hit several times by ground fire as they took off.
The plane took so many hits all of the passengers stood up at
attention to make a smaller target because the rounds were entering from
the floor in the cargo bay. A
.50 caliber round dropped the marine standing next to Bear.
The huge bullet penetrated the floor, went up the side of the leg
of the marine, burning his trousers.
Then the bullet penetrated the marine’s gas mask carrier that was
strapped to his waist and rattled around inside his gas mask carrier but
it never came out. Bear said that gas
mask carrier jumped and jerked like it was alive.
The young marine watched that and then feinted dead away.
Bear said, "Hell, I thought that kid was shot dead for
sure.” Bear swore that it
was true. Strange things
happen in war. The marines provided the drop zone
details at Khesanh. The DZ
detail recovered all bundles that were parachuted into us and loaded them
onto trucks. As soon as a
bundle hit the ground, the marines would swarm over it, free it from the
parachute harness, and load it on the awaiting trucks.
Also as soon as it landed, the NVA mortars would open up.
The DZ detail had high casualties. We were shelled night and day.
Some days we received as much as a 1,000 rounds of in-coming
rockets, mortars and artillery. GIs
in other wars have experienced more in-coming rounds in one day, but none
had ever gone through as heavy an artillery, rocket and mortar attack for
as long as the one at Khesanh. Sir
Charles had to hand carry every single one of those shells all the way
from Haiphong Harbor. When
interrogators asked one NVA deserter why he had deserted, he said, "I
carry two mortar rounds all the way here from Hanoi.
It take many, many days. When
I hand them to the sergeant, he dropped them down the mortar tube and told
me to go back for two more.”
One night after I had hit the sack in
our tiny bunker, our 175mm guns zeroed in on our FPL [final protective
line] for our camp. Those guns were located on the "Rock Pile" or at
"Camp Carroll" maybe ten to twelve miles away East of the
Khesanh Combat Base. Somebody
forgot to notify us. They
just starting firing those damn big guns.
Hell, I didn’t even know that we had big guns anywhere nearby and
had never heard of the "Rock Pile" or "Camp Carroll.”
I thought that the marine artillery was all that we had.
Those guns were so far away their muzzle blast reached us only a
split-second before the round exploded.
It sounded more like direct fire than indirect fire.
Bang-Boom! Bang-Boom!
Bang-Boom! It scared
the crap out of me. When the first round hit, the
ground shook like an earthquake and I bounded out
of bed, grabbed my rifle and headed for my fighting position yelling,
"tanks!” It wasn’t
just me, everyone was yelling tanks.
Finally some one told us what was going on.
Those damn big rounds were landing about a hundred yards to our
front. Trust me, 175mm rounds
make a big bang when they explode. We
started getting secondary explosions from our mine field. There was a mine field out there after all.
We still had no idea where those damn mines were planted.
[When this happened, someone at the main bunker said they were
8" guns, but Mr. Pisor, in The End of the Line, said they were 175mm.
I’ll take his word for it. Actually,
I think 175mm is pretty darn close to 8”.
We obviously didn’t know what was going on.
Air support and those damn big guns were what Westmoreland relied
on to save Khesanh should Sir Charles try to take the combat base.] War is a lot of noise and mayhem
concentrated into one place.
Really, I should say that war is one hell of a lot of noise.
One old sergeant once described war to me as "organized
chaos" and another described it as "endless hours of extreme
boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of absolute terror.”
They were both right, but it was 'noisy' chaos and 'noisy' terror.
Damned noisy! If you could adequately hear
instructions, warnings, or some wise ass enemy soldier trying to sneak up
on you while wearing earplugs, every soldier should be required to use
them during bombardments and fire fights.
But that is impossible. Earplugs
would reduce fear and shock by 99% because the noise of a battle is
absolutely maddening. That
hellish racket causes as much fear as anything else does, maybe more than
everything else combined. If
you haven't experienced it, you can’t even begin to imagine how loud it
gets and if that isn’t bad enough, the first couple of times all of the
bad guys seem to be shooting only at you.
Combine that with the screaming of the wounded and dying and you
have a man-made nightmare that you can not wake up from.
The only thing that saves a green unit is repetitious, realistic
training and a deep trust in, and loyalty to, their buddies.
[After years of exposure to loud noises, I now draw compensation
from VA for loss of hearing. Of all types of
noise, I'm told that a muzzle blast has proven to do the most damage to our hearing.] The SOG camp at Khesanh was shaped more
or less like a square. The
four sides faced to the Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and Northwest.
We only manned the Southwest and Southeast sides.
The other two sides of the camp joined the marine camp.
My team was on the Southwest wall.
Every fighting position in our camp that was manned by SF troops
had several LAWs. Since the
poor performance of the LAWs at Lang Vei, no one trusted them to stop a
tank even if they didn’t malfunction.
So that meant that the SOG camp had absolutely no defense against a
tank attack, except for the marine tanks that were located to our
immediate rear and anti-tank mines. Because
of the terrain, the marine tanks could not effectively engage the enemy
tanks until they were practically on top of our camp.
One marine SPAT [self-propelled anti-tank]
parked at nights on the marine line to our right.
It had a Starlite scope for its 90mm cannon. While we were at Khesanh, I manned a
.30 caliber light machine gun. That
had been my assigned weapon for about two years when I was in the 11th
Airborne Division during my first hitch.
That had been 1955-1957 and I had been 18-20 years old.
At Khesanh I was a 31-year old Sergeant First Class and still a
damn machine gunner, well temporarily anyway.
[I kept thinking that I had not advanced very far since 1957.
Maybe I started my mid-life crisis right then and there.] There was also an M-79 Grenade Launcher
in my position along with several rounds of grapeshot [buckshot]
for that big sucker too. The
grapeshot was in case they bunched up when they came at us.
A 40mm grapeshot round cuts a very wide swath.
In addition, to those weapons, I also had two or three LAWs and the
individual weapons that every A Team man was issued at the time, an M-16
and a .45 automatic. I manned what was supposed to be a
two-man position, but we just didn’t have enough Americans to put anyone
else in there with me. Except for the crew served weapon positions,
there was only one American per fighting position. If I had another
American with me and I out-ranked him, I would probably have assigned him the job of guarding
my rear. We knew from experience how long it
took the artillery shells and rockets to reach us once we heard them fired
from Co Roc Mountain where they were located.
It took from 10 to 12 seconds for them to hit, depending on exactly
which cave their gun was in. So
we had plenty of time to find a hole.
Mortars were a different matter altogether.
They were more mobile and fired from a different site and distance
so there was no timing it. Like good GIs, we figured out a system.
The roof of our tiny sleeping bunker protected us from air bursts
and direct hits by small mortars but they were no protection against a
direct hit by the big rounds. The bunkers were much wider than a trench and therefore much
more likely to take a hit so we ducked into
the narrow open trenches when the big guns fired.
When the small mortars fired, we jumped into our sleeping bunker. Khesanh was the only place in Vietnam
that I know of where SF always wore flak jackets and helmets.
We were fined $500 if we were caught outside without either. A combat veteran quickly learns to
identify the various types of weapons by the sound of their muzzle blast.
An M-1 Garand, a BAR and an A-6 all fire the exact same bullet, but
they do not sound alike. There was a big difference between the sound of an AK-47 and
that of an M-16 or any other weapon.
That’s one reason it was not a good idea for one of our guys to
use a captured AK-47 in combat, especially in thick undergrowth or at
night. His buddies would
automatically fire at the sound of the enemy — an AK-47. One day while I was walking along the
top of our parapet and my mind was a thousand miles away, the NVA fired
their big guns on Co Roc Mountain. I
heard the gun fire, but my mind was on my problems with Frankie, and the
guns just didn’t register in my brain.
The round exploded inside our camp back near the marine’s camp
boundary about 150 yards behind me. Instead
of dropping into the trench when I heard the shell pass overhead, I
whirled around and saw it explode. As
I stood there watching it, a large piece of shrapnel left the blast and
flew right at me. That
shrapnel was going to hit me and I knew it the instant that I saw it.
No one had ever told me that you could see shrapnel before it hit
you. It seemed like an
eternity before it reached me and I seemed to be frozen in place, but it
was only a split second at most. The
shrapnel caught me in the left side of my chest right under the breast,
knocked me down and rolled me into the trench, where I should have been in
the first damn place. That
piece of shrapnel was about the size of the first joint of my thumb and it
was red hot. If I hadn’t been forced to wear a flak jacket that day, the
shrapnel would have went straight through to my heart, instead it slightly
scarred my flak jacket and knocked the breath out of me.
My helmet also stopped a smaller fragment. A couple of days later, I went over to
where some of our Bru soldiers were digging a hole to be used as an ammo
bunker. When I approached
their 55 gallon water drum, I heard a "Snap-Ping!”
and water began squirting out of a small hole that had suddenly
appeared in the can. Sniper! The only thing that I had ever been taught about sniper fire
came back to me in an instant. That
old sergeant had said, "If they miss you, do not let the sniper see
you react to his shot and use that to correct his aim.
Don’t jump away from where the bullet hit, don’t even glance at
where it hit.” So I
continued to walk at the same pace, I just changed my course slightly and
passed the Bru as I headed for the trench.
The Bru thought this was very funny and they were doubled-over
laughing. Well, I have to admit that I ran the last ten feet and dove
into that damn trench. My SF buddies also thought it was great
fun. From then on, every time
I was above ground, they would pop up like prairie dogs and salute me as
if I were an officer — big joke. Any
sniper worth his salt will shoot leaders and radiomen first. The next morning when I was walking above ground, almost in
the same damn place, another bullet snapped by my me. That pissed me off and I began ranting, "Ok, you son of
a bitch, that did it! You
asked for it, now you’re gonna get it.
Of all the guys in this fucking camp, you had pick just me to shoot
at. You sorry motherfucker,
I’m going to shoot you in the ass.”
It required me searching bunker-to-bunker looking for a sniper
rifle, an M-1 Garand or any heavy caliber long range rifle, but I finally
found one. There was only one
in camp. One of the marine
CATs had an M-14 that had a scope mounted on it and I borrowed that beauty
and a pair of binoculars too. I
thought, "Now, I gotcha. I’m
going to shoot you in your fat little ass.”
Meanwhile, all of my buddies were doubled up with laughter. The next morning before daylight, I
bedded down atop the .50 caliber machine gun bunker under some empty sand
bags so I would blend in with the bunker.
I had already told the SF sergeant on the fifty what I was up to.
If I spotted the sniper, I would warn him before I fired.
Then when he saw where I was firing, he could also open up with the
fifty. I was going to shoot that sniper in the
ass. I lay under burlap sacks
atop that damn bunker in the hot sun all damn day searching for that
asshole-of-a-sniper. I was
waiting for him to shoot at someone else or to move so I could spot him.
Nothing. The sniper
never fired another shot at anyone in our camp.
To say that I was disappointed and disgusted would be putting it
mildly because I dearly wanted to shoot that son of a bitch.
The guys had a big laugh out of this also.
I had become their favorite source of entertainment. We kept open 55 gallon drums
scattered along behind our trenches full of water for our Bru soldiers to
use as they saw fit. Each SF
man got one canteen of water a day. We
mostly drank it and brushed our teeth with it.
One day some general in starched jungle fatigues toured our camp.
He walked along above ground and peeped down into our holes,
trenches, and bunkers. He
commented on how filthy and unshaven we were to our Team Sergeant, Pappy
Townsend, and Pappy replied, "Yes sir. I’ve been on them boys about that. I really gave them hell.
I tried and tried to get these boys to clean up.
We give these big dummies one whole canteen of water every day
General and do you know what they always do with it?”
"What sergeant?” "They
drink it sir. Every damn drop
of it. What am I going to do
with them sir?” The general
turned beet red and walked off. One night while on guard duty, I saw
some strange lights off to our southeast.
The lights were constant, they never blinked or flickered, they
never went out and they all constantly moved in a single file.
There was no end and no beginning to the line of lights because
their line of movement formed a perfect right triangle.
Starting at the top of the triangle, they moved fairly fast
straight down. From there,
they moved at a slightly slower speed to my right and then they moved at
an even slower speed back up to my upper left to the point of beginning.
Well, at least it was the point of beginning as I am describing it.
As I said there was no beginning or no end because it was constant. You could not see them with the naked eye.
You had to use either binoculars or a star-light scope.
There were many, many lights and they followed very close behind
one another. There was no
hill in that direction for the lights to climb, at least none that high. At this time, I had been in the regular
army 13 years. Since basic
training, all of that time had been spent in paratroop units.
Anyone with that kind of experience is very familiar with how
aircraft appear day or night, all kinds of aircraft.
These were not aircraft — at least as I know aircraft.
Because I was beginning to think that I was a shell shock case for
sure, I called the sergeant in our 4.2" mortar pit and asked him to
take a peek that way with his binoculars and tell me what he saw.
He described the same lights.
We decided that it had to be VC hauling ammo or some kind of gear
and using flashlight, even though I had never before heard of them being
bold enough to use flashlights in the open.
He fired a couple of rounds just to see what would happen —
nothing happened. The lights
continued as before. We
couldn’t tell, if the rounds were short or over.
At any rate, they had absolutely no affect on the lights.
Finally, I just stopped watching the damn things and I never
mentioned them to any of my team mates either.
That damn sniper had already made me their number one source of
entertainment anyway. They
were still saluting me trying to draw some more fire so they could watch
me fuss and fume. Like I
said, SF had a rare sense of humor. [Much later at a Special Forces
Association reunion at Fayetteville in 1996, I told Max Recod about this
light and he told me about a strange light he too had seen at Khesanh.
He said, "Val, I saw a weird light one night when I was on
guard duty too. I was
watching through the Starlite scope and spotted this ball of light come
over the ridgeline to our front. It
came slowly straight toward me. I
thought that it was a VC with some kind of night vision scope.
I was going to open up on him when he reached our wire.
When that light reached our wire it came right straight through it
without hesitation. I could
see right through the ball of light and no one was there.
Just as it reached our trench line it went straight up and
disappeared.” Max had also
kept his experience a secret. Now
I strongly suspect that what we had seen had something to do with some
kind of gas mixing with the atmosphere.
Maybe, the VC were eating C-Rations too.] I thought that every A-Team that left Oki with our team was at Khesanh,
but I was later proven wrong. One of our demo men was a Specialist Fourth Class that was on
his first hitch in the army. The
young demo man went on listening post one night and decided to take a
claymore mine with him. That’s
okay, but he armed the damn thing before he stuck it inside his shirt.
By armed, I mean he had inserted the blasting cap into the Claymore
and attached a blasting machine to the other end of the wire.
All it needed was just a little pressure on the grip-type of handle
on the blasting machine. The first time he hit the dirt, he disappeared from the waist
up in a big blast and scared the living shit out of the rest of the guys
on the listening post detail. He
wasn’t on our A-Team and I can’t even remember his name for sure.
He was married and I believe he had a kid and his family was on
Oki. One day while we were still at Khesanh,
the NVAs big guns began to fire. Per
our unofficial SOP, Jesse and I grabbed a bottle of Old Grandad and dove
into the open communications trench.
Big Dave and Fat Max also dove into the trench, but then they both
decided to dive into the nearest fighting position.
The entrance to the fighting position from the trench is through a
small portal that connected the two.
Dave and Max jammed belly-to-belly in the portal.
Their chest was stuck with their shoulders and heads inside the
fighting position and their body from the waist down was out in the
trench. When the shells were
flying, they struggled to get into that damn position with those legs just
a-wiggling and them cursing to beat-the-band.
During lulls in the shelling, they relaxed and laughed until the
next shells started falling and then it began all over again.
Jesse and I laughed so hard at those two damn fools we almost
cried. When I was with SOG at Khesanh, my anger and frustration at the way we were fighting that stupid war came to a head. Maybe I actually was going through my mid-life crisis, maybe it was the problems with Fran or maybe it was a little of both. Whatever the reason, I was not my normally happy go lucky self. We heard one day that one of 1st Group’s very best sergeants — a master sergeant, had been killed on patrol. One bullet, just one, had hit him in the right spot and he was dead before he hit the ground. That was when I knew that I had to do something, take a stand, say something, do anything, or I was going to emotionally bust. That team sergeant had been the epitome
of the word "soldier.” SF
had many NCOs who should have been officers.
In fact most of them could have made damn good officers, except
they weren’t butt-kissing politicians, they weren’t tin soldiers, and
they were smart enough to know it. He
was one such NCO. He was the
perfect image of what everyone expects a special forces soldier to look
like and he was also very
intelligent, experienced and very team-oriented.
He was a professional in every true sense of the word and very
popular within SF, enlisted and officers alike.
[When I wrote this, I could not even remember the man's name and that
hurt like hell. How stupid and forgetful can a guy be? A buddy of mine recently told me that sergeant’s name.
He thought his last name was Manuel and I think he is right.] One day Captain Bauer stuck his
head into our sleeping bunker and asked who wanted to go on R&R first.
Jesse Simmons, a slim wiry white man of average height from North
Carolina, Big Dave Taylor, a heavily muscled black man from Binghamton,
New York, Max Recod, a heavy built Hispanic who was originally from Puerto
Rico, and I shared that bunker with a young SF second Looie who was not on
our team. Big Dave was the
only bachelor from our team that was in our bunker.
The only one that raised his hand was me, but I was also the only
one who was on his third Southeast Asian combat tour and I had
learned a long time ago not to let my ego get me killed.
[Usually, I held to that rule, except sometimes when my mind was
pickled with booze and we had run out of Old Grandad a long time ago.] For R&R, they sent me back to
Okinawa for a total of five days, including travel time. Fran and I were headed for a divorce and of course that
wasn’t helping my emotional situation a damn bit either. The reason I raised my hand to go back to Oki wasn’t so I
could see Fran and it wasn’t just to get away from Khesanh or SOG
either; it was so I could speak to my company commander.
Right then, I had an irresistible urge to express my opinion about
our involvement in that stupid war, especially about the 1st
Group’s involvement with someone higher in rank than a damn major.
If the only thing I accomplished was making sure that they knew
that we weren’t stupid just because we always did their bidding, I would
be happy. I was very angry
and frustrated because there was no damn way to change what was going on. The 1st Group commander on
Okinawa always replaced the 5th Group commander in Vietnam
because the 1st Group Commander was the only other SF Group
commander who always had troops in Vietnam.
Being the Commander of the 5th Group could also make you
a general or like one commander, it could break you and get you thrown
into the stockade and forced out of the army.
That particular commander was one of the best Group commanders that 5th
Group ever had. When I went on R&R, I packed up
everything I had brought with me, except for my combat field gear, and
took it with me because I wasn’t sure what the outcome of my R&R
would be and I didn’t want my buddies to have to pack all of my crap up
and ship it to Okinawa. For
all I knew, I could have ended up in the stockade on Oki.
Besides, I didn’t need all of the crap that they made us take
with us to Vietnam anyway. At
any rate, I intended to let them know that we weren’t stupid and that we
knew this war was a bunch of crap. To
phrase it nicely, I was very ticked-off.
If you phrased it in SF terminology, I had a bad case of the
red-ass. I wasn’t angry at the VC or NVA, I was angry at our stupid,
self-serving politicians and generals for the way they were mis-managing
that stupid war. I had already learned not to put any faith in the corrupt two-faced Vietnamese officials and at
the gutless Vietnamese soldiers. While I was on R&R, I met privately
with my Company Commander. I
have forgotten his name, I just remember that he was a Japanese-American
and a good officer. When I
set out to put the bad stuff out of my feeble mind, boy I sure did a good
job. I told him, that it was
stupid for the US to be so heavily involved in that stupid war and it was
even more stupid for the 1st Group to be there.
The only reason the 1st is involved in that stupid war
is to justify our group commander replacing the 5th group
commander.
The teams from the 1st Group are not really needed in
Vietnam at all, much less in SOG. The
5th Group has enough people assigned to get the job done.
The SOG RTs did not need to be manned by SF soldiers.
That was a LRRP or Ranger type mission.
That type of mission was a waste of special forces troops not to
mention the taxpayers money that was spent on all of their lengthy
specialized training, especially the SF medics that served on lurps.
The members of a SOG RT only needed Basic Combat Training, Advanced
Infantry Training, and 3-6 weeks of LRRP training.
They also needed balls the size of basketballs, a death wish or
maybe they needed to be crazy as bed bugs.
The one thing no one could find fault with those guys about was
courage. If anything, they
had too much courage. SOG has
plenty of permanently assigned troops to do the job, if they just used
them effectively. They were
literally wasting the damn fighting troops we had. We had a decent company commander and
that was rare because officers were the "weak link" in SF at
that time. With the patience
of Job, he
listened to my every word. When
I was finally finished ranting and raving while blasting everything and
everybody that had anything to do with that stupid war except the field
troops, he asked, "Sergeant, what do you intend to do about it.”
I told him, "Well sir, just talking to you took care of part
of it, at least somebody knows that I’m not a total idiot and neither
are any of the other guys. But
it just doesn’t seem to be enough.
I’m a professional soldier so I can’t do an expose, but I have
to do something else. I have decided that a "sacrifice" is required to
get my emotions back under control. I
decided that I am going to "sacrifice" my jump pay. I want to terminate my jump status.” He didn’t get upset at all.
He just told me, "You will still return to your team in
Vietnam and you probably won’t leave SF.”
I told him, "Sir, that’s fine by me, I don’t want to
desert my team, I just had to do something or bust.”
The guy who prided himself on controlling his temper, let his
emotions cost him $55 per month. I believe that most of SOG’s problems originated
with its organization. Many of its
operations were centrally controlled from Washington, D.C.
Depending on who was in charge of SOG and the FOBs at the time, a
SOG FOB commander sometimes could not extract a team under any
circumstances without prior approval from MACV-SOG Headquarters in Saigon.
I suspect, they dreaded the thought of contacting whoever in
Washington had conceived, approved, and tasked SOG with that mission to
ask permission to extract the team before they had completed that
particular mission. I don't know
this for a fact, this was the impression I got. If the decision was
made that high up the chain of command, the people that made the decision
would usually have no field
experience in that type of operations and weren’t SF.
I recall being told that the TOC [Tactical Operations Center] maintained charts showing how
many teams they had infiltrated during each month and the results of each
mission such as enemy losses [body count], number of air attacks called
in, results of bombings, etc. I
am leary of officers that are chart lovers. The FOB commander’s OER [Officer’s
Efficiency Report] was at least partially based on how successful his
operations were. This was
sometimes based on information he and his staff reported to Saigon.
If those reports didn’t reflect well on the performance of his
unit, that might result in a poor OER and a poor OER could be cause for
him to not be considered for promotion. If they weren’t promoted by a certain number of years of
service, they were discharged or reverted back to enlisted men. Back to Vietnam, my team, and SOG I
went, a little lighter in the wallet, but believe it or not, I felt better
because I had managed to pop my "emotional bubble" before it
popped me. It may sound
stupid, but that’s what happened. Psychologists
might swear on their diploma that would never work, but it did for me and
I didn’t even get court-martialed.
How damn lucky can one dumb-ass be? Meanwhile, while I was gone on R&R our great leaders gave up on their brilliant plan to trap the enemy at Khesanh. They called in the 1st Air Calvary Division instead. Every squad in the 1st Air Cav must have had their own chopper. We now had gun ship helicopters called Cobras and the enemy quickly learned to stop shooting at passing choppers because it might be a Cobra or a Cobra might be covering it. The 1st Air Cav descended on that area like a cloud of locusts and killed or chased off all of the NVA in a very short time, all to the complete amazement of the marines. One marine sergeant, who was sitting atop his bunker watching the show, said, "We don’t have that many choppers in the whole damn corps.” I understand the 1st Air Calvary turned into one damn fine combat outfit. [If the truth was known, I would bet that the enemy commanders
knew before hand that the 1st Air Cav was coming and had
already relocated most of their troops.
If any Vietnamese military or civilian personnel knew about that
operation, I promise you the enemy commander also knew.] Also while I was gone on R&R, Big
Dave and Jennings were wounded while making a water run. We had a water truck on our camp and we had to make a water
run over to the water point on the main marine base every couple of days.
We took turns going on the water run because it was dangerous.
That truck was full of shrapnel and bullet holes.
The holes in the tank had improvised plugs.
Jennings was replaced by Sergeant Steven R. Schofield. Big
Dave’s wound was just a scratch and he was deaf as a stump for a day or
two so he stayed at Khesanh with our team. As soon as the NVA had hauled ass I
Corps sent a re-supply convoy in on the road from the coast.
An SF supply officer, a Lieutenant as I recall, accompanied this
convoy. He brought us a brand
new water truck to replace our old one that was full of holes and plugged
with gum, sticks, cloth, etc. The new water truck wasn’t empty. Our enterprising young lieutenant had filled it with ice and
beer. He also was accompanied
by a couple of very pretty Danang whores in the front seat who were
dressed in SF tiger suits. As
soon as the Lieutenant hit our camp, he set up shop selling ice cold beer
and well, you know what else. Within
30 minutes Major Smith had the young, enterprising lieutenant and his two
pretty whores on a chopper bound for Danang.
At least that is the story I heard.
So much for business for profit in the DMZ.
Ever since then, I have wondered what a water truck full of
iced-down beer costs at the PX. Hopefully,
that officer had bought the beer he was selling out of that water truck
with his own money and it wasn’t donated by the SF and SOG camps in
Danang. We never heard what
happened to that lieutenant. When I was enroute back to Khesanh from
R&R, I stopped briefly at Danang.
While I was there I made a trip to the Class Six store and bought
a bottle of bourbon which I stuffed into my duffle bag.
As soon as I landed at Khesanh, I made a mad dash to my old bunker
and met my whole team racing towards the very same choppers that I had
just left. They yelled,
"We’re leaving this hell hole Val. Come on, get back on the chopper!” On the way back to the chopper, I removed the booze from my
duffle bag and tossed it to one of the unlucky bastards that we were
leaving behind [I think it was one of the CATs] and yelled, "Share it with a buddy. Good luck.” He
asked, "How much?” and
I answered, "No charge dumbass!
Just don’t get too drunk to fight!”
and I kept running. I
wasn’t about to miss that chopper. [Now, every officer and politician
seems to have a different opinion about the effectiveness of the Khesanh
operation. Both sides claim
victory. The simple truth is, the NVA never
mounted the massive assault on Khesanh that Westmoreland wanted.
That was why he put all of those poor marines there in the
first place. We also never
got to blow a horde of charging NVA troops to smithereens with our huge
artillery and bombers. Meanwhile,
the VC had infiltrated every major city in Vietnam and won the
"propaganda war.” If
there was a winner, it sure as hell wasn’t the American GIs who served
at Khesanh and Lang Vei, unless you considered just surviving – winning! I got these figures from "The
End of the Line:" The "official" body count
of American KIA for the battle for Khesanh was set at 205.
However, that figure is a tad misleading, which is normal for the
body count game. That figure
doesn’t include any of the marine casualties on the outposts around
the Khesanh Combat Base. It
also doesn’t include the US Special Forces casualties at the two Lang
Vei Camps or the SOG camp on the Khesanh Combat Base. It doesn’t include any casualties taken by the ARVN Rangers
that were also stationed at the Khesanh Combat Base. It doesn’t include the casualties suffered by the ARVN
Special Forces team at Lang Vei. It
doesn’t include any casualties suffered by the Bru soldiers in the Lang
Vei and SOG camps. It does
not include any casualties suffered by the Laotian battalion. Nor does it include any of the thousands and thousands of
casualties suffered by the civilians.
Out of the original 6,000 refugees, the marines finally airlifted a
little over a thousand of them out of the area. Probably, Sir Charles, true to form, slaughtered the rest.] In May of 1968, our A Team bid a not so
fond farewell to the mountain resort of Khesanh and flew to the SOG FOB
at Marble Mountain on the beach at Danang.
That FOB was located about a half mile North of Marble Mountain and,
at the time,
adjoined the South side of a MASH compound.
Me, I was assigned as a Hatchet Force Platoon Leader and Steve Schofield,
who had replaced Dale Jennings, was my Assistant Platoon Leader. As soon as we reached Danang we showered and scraped off the Khesanh clay. That night Jessie Simmons, Joe Payne and I headed for downtown Danang. Danang was off limits, but we did not know this at the time or at least I don't recall knowing it. Jessie and Joe wore their regular
jungle fatigues and beret. They
looked sharp, but I wore the SOG sterile jungle fatigues [no patches or
insignia] and my floppy
GI field cap. Compared to
them, I looked like warmed-over shit.
What the hell, I was comfortable. We found a restaurant that was open and
ordered three cold beers. We
had not even tasted our first beer and up drove two jeep-loads of Marine
MPs. They called us outside,
informed us that all of Danang was off limits, and then one-by-one they
shook us down. Perhaps they
had not heard how nice we had been to our CAT Marines at Khesanh.
While I waited my turn to be searched, I noticed a copy of the Stars
and Stripes newspaper dated that same day laying on the jeep’s front
seat. We hadn’t seen a
paper that was less than a month old in a long time so I sat down on the
seat and begin reading. You
wouldn’t believe how much this upset those damn prissy ass MPs.
They really got bent out of shape.
After we were all searched, those shit heads hauled us to their
Headquarters and enroute one of those prissy asses asked Jesse, "Is
that big guy really a Green Beret?”
Jesse laughed and told them that I was.
Nothing came of this innocent incident. The very next night, Fat Max Recod and
I decided to buy a case of beer and christen our new camp plus celebrate
being out of Khesanh. About
two thirds of the way through that case, we began taking incoming small
arms fire. Tracers were
flying all over the damn place. Max
and I grabbed the remaining beer and raced to our assigned fighting
position which was the 4.2" mortar pit.
[One comment here, until this night, I can not recall ever seeing
Max take one sip of any kind of alcoholic beverage.
I also never knew of Max or any other member of our team seek the
services of a hooker. The heavy mortar was back near the
beach and the 95th Evacuation Hospital fence.
As soon as we reached the pit we toasted ourselves for our
"excellent performance under fire.
I mean after all we were still breathing and in our assigned
fighting position.” That
was when we noticed that we had completely forgotten to bring our weapons
and web gear. All we had
carried with us was our beer. Back
to the barracks we raced to get our combat gear.
When we finally were back in our mortar pit and ready to blow the
whole world away with that big ass mortar, we toasted ourselves for our
"efficiency in correcting defects.”
the operations bunker called and ordered, "Put up some flares
over the west wall.” We
pondered, this new problem" Which damn way was west?”
We weren’t sure so I spit in the palm of my hand, smacked it with
my other fist and pointed the way the biggest blob squirted and yelled,
"That-a-way Max.” Max
aimed that big-ass mortar and told me what charge to set on the round
while I grabbed a flare and prepared it to be dropped it down the tube.
When Max sounded, "Up," I let it fall.
When the flare popped, operations called and said, That’s just
where we wanted it.” So
naturally Max and I once again toasted our efficiency. We were put off alert shortly afterwards.
It seems all of that firing was by some drunk soldiers just letting
off a little steam at our expense. Hatchet Forces were organized into
platoons, companies and battalions. This
particular battalion was all Chinese, who were called "Nungs.”
Nungs were famous for being good combat soldiers.
It would surprise me if SOG ever used the entire battalion [600-800
troops] on one operation. They
usually went on platoon or company size operations. They were called Hatchet Forces because they were used like
you and I would use a hatchet. When
a lurp found a suitable target they radioed the information to the FOB and
the Hatchet Force swung down out of the sky and whacked the target — or
at least they tried to. Sometimes
it didn’t quite work out that way.
Sometimes the enemy force was too big to handle or they had
reinforcements too close at hand. They gave me a platoon of brand-new raw
recruits and I had to give them their basic training which usually
consisted of only four weeks. No
American commander in a conventional US outfit, who was in his right mind,
would consider taking troops with that little training into combat.
But I think that was SOP [standard operating procedure] for the indigenous troops under SF.
Our indig learned the rest of their combat skills by OJT, all they
had to do was survive long enough.
Later, our FOB operations
"volunteered" my platoon to become the only paratroop platoon in
our battalion so I had to give them parachute training also.
This had absolutely no noticeable affect on my little China-boys
and they all jumped. I was
very impressed. You sure
couldn’t get a qualification percentage that high, if you
"volunteered" a typical American platoon to be paratroops.
All of my troops were Chinese and all but three were teenagers.
Those three soldiers were in their twenties and one of them was a
combat veteran.
One of those three landed in the mine field around a POW camp that
was two camps North of us. Only
the 95th Evacuation Hospital, which adjoined our camp on the
North side, was between us and the POW camp.
When we finally got him out of there alive and still in one piece,
he came to me and said, "Sargie, I no jumpee no more!”
I didn’t hold it against him, we just transferred him to one of
the other platoons. If I had
been in that same situation, I may have done the same thing.
In fact, I figured he probably was the smartest one of the bunch.
I could not in my wildest dreams imagine parachuting with that
platoon into a combat situation in that war and on that
terrain. While at that camp, I saw how heavily
armed the recon guys were when they went out.
They were so heavily laden, they could barely walk for God’s
sake. One man would have an
M-16 with 30 or more magazines of ammo, a 45 pistol, a hideout pistol, an
M-79 with a sack or two of 40mm grenades, two or three claymores, as many
grenades as they could carry, a half dozen plastic foot mines
[toe-poppers], at least two different types of radios, sometimes three,
and food, water, and spare batteries for at least seven days.
The recon teams were so heavily armed
because they knew they were going to make enemy contact and that
they would be vastly outnumbered. Many
teams never made it off the LZ -
they had to dig in and hold off the enemy until they could be extracted or
died. They had to last long
enough for someone to get them out of there.
In the beginning, Delta lurp members had carried only 13 magazines
for their AR-15, a 45 pistol with two extra magazines, and a hideout
pistol. For grenades, they
mostly seemed to prefer Willie Peters [White Phosporous]
grenades over fragmentation grenades [frags] because they tended to shock the enemy and made it easier for
our guys to break contact. "Break
contact" is recon talk for "haul ass." I know that couple of SOG teams waited
for a week to be inserted into a hot LZ because of fog in the area of the
LZ. A hot LZ is an LZ that is
known to be under close surveillance by the enemy.
A hot LZ is almost always guarded and may be mined and booby
trapped. Knowingly putting troops into a
predicament like that was insane — but they did it anyway.
The SOG leaders at the FOB were just waiting for enough of a break
in the fog to quickly insert that team.
I couldn’t help but wonder, if it took a week to find an opening
in the weather to put that team in, how damn long would those poor
bastards have to hold out before the weather would clear up enough so they could be extracted. During this period of time, SOG RTs never
found a ‘dry hole’ [no enemy covering the LZ]. I think it was because the enemy
knew every detail about every mission before they ever left base camp.
The enemy simply did not have the manpower to cover every single
tiny clearing in Cambodia and Laos within ten miles of the Vietnamese
border twenty four hours a day. It was pretty obvious
that there was a VC in the SOG chain of command somewhere.
And he had to be higher up the food chain than the FOB level.
SOG continued to send teams on those crazy missions as if there
wasn’t a problem. [I
later learned that the enemy knew even more than the objective and
proposed LZs, they knew every detail about the members of
that RT, including name, rank, and
MOS. As I recall, they
also knew their assigned radio frequencies and call signs. I also discovered that the local
commander or S-3 or even MACV did not task SOG teams for many of their
missions. The President of
the United States, the CIA, the National Security Council and other rear
echelon armchair warriors did that from 10,000 miles away.
That was sheer lunacy and explained a lot about why everything was
so damned screwed up and why our RT’s casualty rate was so high!
When a mission comes down from that high in the food chain, it is
very rare to find an officer at the bottom of the food chain that would
stand up and tell them their mission is a mistake.
That it should be cancelled and why.
SOG had the best men in the army on their recon teams.
When it comes to guts, nobody and I mean nobody was braver than
those SOG recon guys. They
weren’t the problem, but they were the ones that had to pay the fiddler.
Normally, the guys at the FOB level really weren’t the problem either. The problem was everyone higher up the food chain.
The problem was centralized control.
When the FOB Commander tried to direct every action of the recon
team while it was deep in Cambodia or Laos, that would be a serious
problem. When the President
of the United States of America or someone immediately under him is trying
to direct every movement in the combat zone, as was the case in SOG, it
isn’t just a problem, it is just plain lunacy.
The exact same kind of lunacy happened again in Somalia and the
former Yugoslavia during
Clinton’s Administration.] Before my platoon had finished
training, they were all issued Swedish K’s but no ammunition, no
magazines and no magazine pouches. A
Swedish K is a reliable weapon, but it is a fully automatic
sub-machinegun. The next day,
Captain Bauer came to me and said, The FOB Operations wants you to take
your platoon out on patrol and sweep the peninsula north of Danang.”
I told him, "Captain, you can tell them for me that they can
kiss my big airborne ass. I’m
not taking my platoon on an operation until they are properly armed."
Then I told him what they had issued my troops. FOB Operations then saw fit to issue
each of my troops one 30-round magazine and 120 rounds of ammo to
go along with their handy-dandy sub-machineguns.
One magazine of ammo for a fully automatic weapon would have lasted
those green recruits all of ten seconds.
After that, they would be using those nice new sub-machineguns for
clubs. Shortly afterwards,
Captain Bauer relayed the same message to me again.
They still got the same response.
"Until my troops are properly armed, they’re not going on an
operation, at least not with me as their leader they aren’t.” They
then suggested that I borrow another platoon’s weapons and ammunition.
I told them, "Neither me nor my men know how well those
weapons and magazines have been maintained.
They’ve never fired them. I
think not." The FOB S-3 sent word that there
weren’t any VC on that peninsula. I
told Captain Bauer, "I’m glad we have the only American officer in
this fucking world that knows where the damn VC aren’t!" I dreaded the thought of going into
combat with those kids even after they were properly equipped because they
had minimal training, no experience, some of the members of my platoon
thought that one of their own was a VC, and when it came to marksmanship,
they couldn’t hit a bull-in-the-ass with a bass fiddle.
Only the interpreter spoke English and I didn’t speak Chinese or
Vietnamese. If anything
happened to the interpreter that was with an SF unit, that unit was in
serious trouble. Special Forces combat units were not
intended to be used like this. They
were intended to be used for "specific and very limited" combat
assignments, such as raids, ambushes, sniping, mining, sabotage,
intelligence gathering, and establishing and operating Escape and Evasion
networks for downed air crews. And
their troops were only trained and rehearsed in what they needed to know
to accomplish that one specific mission.
I think the only reason they were used for this type of work was
because SF were triple volunteers and held high security clearances, and
in the case of SOG lurp duty, quadruple volunteers.
I also believe that none of the brass and politicians at the top of
our food chain got overly concerned about what happens to a quadruple
volunteer. And they certainly
did not get concerned about the loss of indigenous troops. Our Chinese Battalion Sergeant Major
married a beautiful Chinese lady while we were there.
All of the SF assigned to the Hatchet Force and my entire platoon
were invited to their reception. Maybe
my platoon was invited because they were the only parachute unit in the
battalion and they had just finished all of their training. At any rate, the reception was held at
a restaurant in downtown Danang. I
believe that Schofield and I took our platoon down in 2½ ton trucks.
Danang was off limits to US personnel at the time except for
official business. How this
party qualified as official business, I didn’t know.
Anyway, things in that restaurant got mighty drunk and mighty loud.
One of my little Nungs filled a small plastic glass, about 3-4
ounces I guess, and a tall 16 ounce glass with whiskey and handed the
large one to me. He toasted the couple and downed the whiskey in the smaller
glass and told me to toast and drink up.
But I toasted and only sipped.
The little soldier said, "Oh, no Sargie, I drank all, you
drink all.” They all had a
good laugh when I told him, "Fuck you, you little shit, I’m not
that much bigger than you." It was very late by the time I finally
got my troops out of that restaurant.
Maybe I was drunk, but I wasn’t nearly as drunk as they were.
Most of them had to be drug out and tossed on the truck, but while
I was back inside getting some more, some of those little dudes that I had
already put in the truck would wake up and crawl back off the truck.
it reminded me of my Advanced Infantry Training unit when the cadre tried
to round up a detail.
What a damn mess that was and loud, boy were those little shits
loud. They were so loud, someone called the
White Mice [Vietnamese Police] down
on my noisy, little drunk Chinese. The
Viets and the Nungs hated each other.
The Viets also hated all of the mountain natives and I know the
feeling was mutual there also. My
boys were not armed. The
White Mice were armed with clubs, pistols and M-16s.
They bad-mouthed and threatened my China-boys.
A White Mice poked one of my China-boys in the stomach with the
muzzle of his rifle. My
little Nung quickly disarmed him and threw his rifle away.
Maybe his daddy had taught him that trick, I didn’t recall
teaching it. I thought for
sure he was going to blow that cop away and get us all slaughtered.
Suddenly a miracle happened, I finally
got all of my China-boys on those trucks without anyone getting shot and
off to camp we went. Of
course, I was unaware of it at the time, but the White Mice had arrested
our Chinese Battalion Commander, who was also at the party, and had taken
him to jail. As I lay on my
bunk, I felt very proud of myself, even though I was as drunk as a skunk,
my common sense and military bearing had prevailed.
My little Nungs had followed their great white leader home. Shortly after I had hopped into bed, I
heard my loud, drunk little Nungs chattering and the trucks cranking up
again. I staggered to the
door just in time to wave goodbye to my little Nungs who were in full
battle garb with, grenades, machine guns, M-16 rifles and M-79 grenade
launchers as they headed back downtown to settle their dispute with the
White Mice. My brain just
refused to process what my eyes were seeing.
My little devils were armed to the teeth and grinning from
ear-to-ear. The only reason
they had returned to camp with me was to get their weapons. So
much for my inspirational leadership. The next morning I found out what
happened. Our troops had gone
straight to the source of the problem, the Police Chief. They surrounded his home and demanded the release of their
Battalion Commander and immunity from prosecution. Apparently negotiations did not proceed fast enough to suit
them, so they fired an M-79 grenade through the window of the house to
speed things up. The grenade
blew off the leg of the Police Chief’s wife.
The two sides soon reached an agreement.
Our Nungs got their commander back, but they could never again
enter downtown Danang. The
White Mice erected a sign on the bridge between the beaches and the
mainland that warned our Nungs that they would be shot on sight, if they
were found downtown. White
Mice also manned a roadblock at this bridge from then on just to enforce
this new law. A couple of our guys complained that
one of our guys wasn’t showering and changing underwear regularly.
One of them bought him a bar of soap and a stick of deodorant.
They had it gift-wrapped, then left it on his bunk.
How the man reacted, I never heard.
A little later, a couple of guys, I believe it was the same two,
conspired to pull another joke on the same guy. The man was a life-long bachelor. They submitted his name to a pin pal club and the poor guy
began receiving letters from lonely women everywhere. Max is the only one that I remember being involved in these
pranks and I didn't remember that until he reminded me. One day, Captain Bauer gave Doug a
mission. Doug was a Kentucky
boy and a veteran of the Korean War where he served with the 187th
Regimental Combat Team. He
was to accompany a Hatchet Force Platoon just across the border into
Cambodia. It seems that a
very large operation was about to begin by inserting a US division, maybe
two, into the eastern end of a valley that was known to be alive with NVA
and they were going to push the enemy out of that valley from East to
West. As I recall, it was the
Ashau Valley. I do remember
that the western end of the valley was inside Cambodia or Laos.
A small hill was located in the middle of the western end of the
valley.
That hill was where our Nung Hatchet Force was going to dig in;
their mission was to create a "bottle-neck" by causing the enemy
to bunch up so our fly-boys could then bomb and strafe them to their
hearts content. There would
be about 50 of our troops there and literally thousands of NVA that wanted
to by-pass them. SF units, especially the secret units
like SOG, were often selected for such jobs.
An all US unit would without a doubt have been more effective
because they were better trained, more disciplined, and all spoke a common
language, but all of their casualties would have to be reported
and, if too high, explained. American
commanders were only required to report American casualties.
We could lose an entire battalion of our natives and Saigon would
only have to report maybe six or at most twelve American casualties.
The damned chart-watching son of a bitches that roosted high up in
the food chain loved those figures.
That meant they could do almost anything with SF units, especially
SOG units, regardless of how stupid it was, and never be held accountable
to anyone for causing all of those deaths. We always operated in pairs.
Captain Bauer gave Doug his choice of any member of the team
to be his partner. Pappy
Townsend relayed this information to Doug.
I felt sorry for Doug and dreaded being picked for his partner, but
I knew Doug would pick me because we had became pretty darn close since
being assigned to that team. Instead, Doug picked our Team Sergeant, Pappy Townsend.
Pappy nearly choked. [If
Captain Bauer had given me that job and the same option, I would have
picked the good captain to go with me.
Not because I wanted that little ass hole beside me in combat, but
because the damn officer corps and politicians were the ones that were
screwing this war up so damn bad in the first place. I learned
later, this was a prank cooked up by George and Hardy was in on it. Others besides George and Hardy
were going on that operation. As I recall, in addition to those two,
Schofield, Taylor and Bauer went also.] The first place Pappy went was to the
FOB Supply Sergeant where he got three sandbags.
He took these and his entrenching tool which no SF soldier ever
takes with him on operation. Doug
later told me, "As soon as we got on that hill, Pappy found a spot
and dug himself a slit trench. Then
he filled those three bags and placed them in a U-shape on the edge of the
hole so he could get his head and shoulders inside the "U" and face out towards the approaching enemy.
Old Pappy Townsend crawled into that hole and stayed there until we
were picked up." The Marble Mountain SOG camp offered
their indigenous troops Sex chit books at payday.
Personally, I do not know who was directly responsible for paying
our China boys because I was never physically present when they were paid
so I can’t actually swear that they were offered these chit books, but I
can swear that such chit books did exist because I saw one of them.
On its front cover was a sketch of a nude female lying on her back
with her legs spread and her feet in the air.
Because the print wasn’t in English, I couldn’t read what was
written on the package, but like the saying goes, "One picture is
worth a thousand words." While we were at Danang, two members of
our team along with their platoon of Nungs took turns pulling guard on the
camp perimeter at night. We
kept one platoon on guard every night.
We also started keeping a small outpost atop Marble Mountain which
was about ½ mile south of us. Only
sand dunes separated our camp from the mountain.
It looked down on us and onto a marine base that was even farther
to the south. The only other
thing to our south was a fishing village on the beach between Marble
Mountain and the ocean. We
tried to get permission from the FOB commander to search that village, but
he didn’t want us to disturb them. Before we
returned to Okinawa, Pappy Townsend tried to convince the FOB Sergeant Major that they should keep at least a platoon
of Nungs with US SF on the wire at night and an outpost with US SF on
Marble Mountain. He laughed
and said, "If you’re concerned about our security, you should
extend for another six month TDY tour and guard the fence yourselves.”
According to rumor mongers, the FOB Sergeant Major stayed drunk most of the time we were there. An SF second
looie had replaced me when I left. I
can not remember his name. After
we were back on Okinawa a week or so, I heard that my platoon of
China-boys were wiped out on their very first field operation. [When a camp or unit was hard hit, rumor mongers
used 'wiped out' rather loosely. It
made the story easier to tell without dealing in specifics and facts.]
Rumors said when
the platoon became surrounded, the Lieutenant called in
supporting fire from the big guns on the battleship USS Missouri.
He apparently gave them his position instead of the
enemy’s position and their big 16" guns blew our guys away or he
could have known he was calling it in that close. Most firefights in
that war, unlike all of our previous wars, were at very close range.
The enemy, especially the NVA, would keep close contact so you couldn't
call in artillery or air support without bringing it down on yourself.
As I understand it, the second looie survived the barrage as a
quad-amputee. Each of those big rounds is pretty much equivalent to a 2,000
pound bomb. New soldiers,
especially if they are also second looies, don’t last very long in
combat under the army’s "Individual Replacement System.
In fact the survival rate for all individual replacements is very
low and it seems like the first 30 days or major battle is when most of
them are lost. If they
survive that, their chances of surviving improve greatly.
When Major
Riggs was doing the "hiring and the firing" for the 7th SF
Group, second looies weren’t even allowed in the unit.
When the army would assign 2d Looies to the 7th, Riggs would
immediately have them shoulder their bags.
He would then double time them out of the unit area "before
they got somebody killed" and tell them, "Go find yourselves a
home somewhere else.” They
should have kept it that way except for 2d Looies that were mustangs.
A mustang is an officer that was formerly a sergeant. In late
August 1968, Sir Charles attacked and over ran that same SOG camp on
Danang Beach. The FOB
Sergeant Major appears to have been the first KIA.
Reportedly, the FOB commander wasn’t even there.
Everyone figured he was
probably off somewhere on a toot.
Here’s how
a sergeant who was there when the camp was hit said Sir Charles did it. Several
VC got jobs working inside the camp as carpenters repairing some of the
buildings. Each day Sir
Charles infiltrated a few pieces of explosives, ammunitions and/or weapons
and stored them in the attic of the US latrines.
The main enemy element, including a dispensary, were poised nearby
in a support base in a tunnel system that they had dug beneath that damned
fishing village. [The
village
the Camp CO wouldn't let us sweep and search earlier.]
On the eve of the attack, instead of leaving at the end of the day with the rest of the work force, the sappers that worked inside the camp slipped beneath one of the buildings, I believe it was the camp club. When everyone in the camp went to bed, Sir Charles crawled out and secured his weapons from their hiding place. Some of the sappers cut the camp wire to let their VC buddies from the main element enter the camp while others started heaving satchel charges into the barrack doors and machine-gunning anyone who tried to escape. All of the sappers reportedly died inside the camp, but they killed 21 US SF soldiers and I have no idea how many Nungs because, to the best of my knowledge, the indigenous losses were never included in any body count report to commands above Westmoreland. This turned out to be the highest number of special forces soldiers lost in one battle during the entire Vietnam War.
In the late
1980s, there was a television series about that MASH unit on Danang
Beach that shared one fence line with us called,
"China Beach.” Trust
me, except for the care of the wounded and the pretty beach, it was
nothing like the TV show, absolutely nothing.
The MASH unit was not in the same location during the entire war.
For some reason it seems to have relocated every now and then. It
was relocated shortly after the sapper attack on the CCN camp.
The rest of that show was the figment of someone’s ripe imagination.
The term "fantasy" may be more applicable, much like a
movie that was very popular in the late 1970s or early 1980s, its name was
"Apocalypse Now.” That
movie starred Martin Sheen and an old and very fat Marlon Brando.
The movie was about SOG. Martin
Sheen played a non-special forces officer who was sent to kill a renegade
Special Forces Colonel (Brando) who had deserted and was operating on his
own. As I recall, there were only five things in that entire movie that were realistic: 1. There really was a MACV-SOG; 2. There really was a special forces; 3. SOG did have an assassination unit. (As I recall, that unit was once called the "Phoenix Program.” The American members of that program were "assigned" to the unit, not just used on a "job-to-job" basis as implied by the movie and they were never targeted against Americans and the indigenous troops were supposed to do all of the killing); 4. The French-style hotel where Sheen stayed before the mission was realistic; and 5. One statement that Martin Sheen’s character made about being addicted to the adrenalin high caused by immense fear was realistic. The statement went something like this: "When I am here, I wish to God I was somewhere else, anywhere else, but as soon as I leave here, I begin to miss it.” I am very familiar with that feeling. Other than those few points, that movie appeared to be the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a soldier that was continuously high on LSD or heroin. I think the Phoenix Program probably best
illustrates how ridiculous our efforts in Vietnam had become.
Think about it. We supported murdering people sometimes based on one person’s word
that they were the enemy. The Phoenix program teams did not
kill
nearly as many people as the communist murdered, but I think one killing under
those circumstances was one too many.
The person that 'fingered' those people as VC could just as easily
have been a VC themselves. The
communist murdered millions just because they were well educated, because
they were teachers, or because they held leadership positions and Vietnam and Cambodia are literally covered
with secret mass graves, but in my mind that still did not justify the US being
involved in something like the Phoenix Program. Special Forces worked only with
indigenous troops. The me on the A
Teams had
learned from experience that they should always consider 30% of their troops,
including the interpreters, to be either VC, VC sympathizers or someone
who had a close relative who lived in an area that was controlled by the
VC and who could be taken hostage in return for cooperation.
That was the only way to survive, "Never
trust anyone, except another SF man.”
There were usually only two US SF on a patrol or with a platoon or
company sized operation. Some
of our A Team guys were shot in the back while on an operation.
Some teams secretly "mined" the key weapons positions
inside their own camp in the event that one of the VC inside the camp gained
control of that weapon and turned it on the camp defenders. So, several of the informants used by
the Phoenix Program were surely VC and you can bet that they never pointed
out a fellow VC to be executed. No
one knows how many innocent people that were sympathetic to our side the
Phoenix Program executed while thinking they were killing a VC. When I served with Project Delta in
1964-1965, our recon guys learned the hard way that you do not travel the
trails and you do not travel at night in the jungle. If you use the trails long enough at any time of day or
night, sooner or later you will collide head-on with Sir Charles [VC]. If
you moved at night, it would just tend to happen sooner.
We did not have the night vision equipment or navigational aids
then that SF has now. Many
times, when reporting their position, the two SF team members would agree
on which grid square they were most likely in and then report the
coordinates to the center of that grid square.
Each grid square was a 1,000 meters by a 1,000 meters.
[Now, the A Team both communicates and navigates via
satellites.] One RT leader was ordered to use the trails because his patrol was moving too slow through the brush. After he and his team had "run" on the trails for half a day to make up time and distance and they were still not to their objective by dusk, they were ordered to keep moving at night until they reached their objective. When the team got to where their leader thought they were supposed to be, he halted the team and they settled down for what was left of the night. A short time later one of his Vietnamese team members gently awoke the team leader and whispered, "Sargie, VC wake me up to pull guard.” The patrol had bedded down right amongst the enemy.
How they got out of that predicament alive, I don’t know. One of my buddies who was awarded
the Medal of Honor for action while he was TDY from Okinawa to MACV-SOG
during 1969, was
married to a North Carolina Indian gal.
They began having marital problems.
My friend and his wife apparently had separated, but he went back to the house
one night drunk and was raising hell and she whipped out a pistol and shot him
through the chest as he stood in the yard.
My buddy looked down at his chest and then told her, "I’ve got a
sucking chest wound. Go in
the house and get my poncho so I can wrap it around my chest.”
She said, "You drunk son of a bitch you took all of your field
gear to Fort Bragg with you when you left.
I don’t have your damn poncho.”
I don’t know how, but my friend lived to retire and for quite a while
he worked as a counselor for the Veterans Administration.
Pappy Townsend retired and lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina with his wife. Doug Hardy married and lives in the Freeport, Florida area. Big
Dave got out after one hitch and lives in Binghamton, New York.
Big Dave eventually became the owner of a plate glass company, but
was forced out of business and later applied for a job managing a
"half-way" house for mentally impaired persons.
Part of Dave’s job interview included a tour of the house.
After the tour, Dave’s prospective boss asked Dave if he thought
that he could handle working with those people.
Dave told him, "No sweat.
I spent three months pinned up in a tiny bunker in Vietnam with
four guys that were crazier than these people.”
He got the job. Dale Jennings retired and now lives
in Oklahoma. Dale has made
several trips back to Vietnam since retirement.
Either Dale or I must have an emotional problem because I have
absolutely no desire to return to Vietnam. Gillgren got out after one hitch, but I believe he is, or was, an officer in the US Naval Reserve. Max retired and lives in Fayetteville where he managed the Fayetteville Wells Fargo office for a while and worked part-time at Camp Mackall helping to assess special forces candidates. Max and his wife are born again Christians now so we don't get to see him much anymore. I miss Max. Schofield got out and served in Laos for several years as a government civilian, became a Major in an SF Reserve unit in Illinois and retired to his lakefront home in Wisconsin. Joe Taylor was medically retired and then died from chain-smoking. Joe continued to chain-smoke camels even after he had to carry a tank of oxygen around with him. As for the rest of Pappy’s team, we have simply lost track of
each other.] When we returned to Oki in 1968 after
my third combat tour, I think it is safe to say that I was still angry,
and maybe even a little crazy. Hell,
let’s face it, compared to the guy that I used to be, I was practically
a raving lunatic. When
you’re caught between a stupid war and a lousy marriage, that’s enough
to drive anybody nuts. If that wasn’t bad enough, my vision
had consistently grown worse over the years.
It had declined to 20/450, but it had leveled off at that point.
A vision of 20/450 simply means, "What a person with 20/20
vision could easily see from a distance of 450 feet, I had to be within 20
feet to see clearly." For years I had secretly practiced
moving quietly through the boonies and my barracks while blindfolded until
I could do it without stumbling over everything or getting lost. I figured that this might give me the "edge" on
those pitch-black nights — with my poor vision, I sure wouldn’t have
the edge during the daytime. Also,
I had practiced setting up and operating my radio while blindfolded and
transmitting morse code with my left hand and right foot.
We could not always get help right when we needed it, but if we
needed help, somebody had to use the radio to get it. So far, I had been very lucky and I
knew it. When it comes to
women, I don’t know diddly squat, but I do know that the typical married
woman expects to have a husband and they believe that a husband is someone
who goes to work every morning, comes home every night, is with her when
she has her babies, and he’s the guy that takes out the garbage or
repairs the leaky faucets and takes the car to the mechanic.
That sure as hell does not describe the typical guy on a special
forces operational detachment. Mixing
SF duty with marriage is like drinking alcohol and driving.
It’s a disaster waiting for a place to happen. The guys in SF had become more like a
family to me than my own family was and I would rather be with an A Team
than anywhere else in the world. Most
of the enlisted SF men felt the same way.
That, plus the SF training and experience, is what made SF so
successful in tough situations and what kept our casualties so low even
with the type of missions that we were given. Shortly after I returned to Oki, I told
Fran to forget our relationship; I was sending her home and she could
get a divorce and find someone else.
Then I made arrangements to ship her back to the states. Pappy’s team was split up and I was assigned to a B Team,
but I can’t remember the name of anyone else that was on that B Team.
For $600, I bought a lime green, 1960 Volkswagon Bug and found me a
small two bedroom house off post. I
later invited Big Dave Taylor to share it with me.
About a month after we returned from
Vietnam, several of us from our company were at the Stag Bar in the
American Legion and they announced over the public address system that we
were to report back to our unit immediately.
When we arrived at our company, we were told that the Okinawans
were rioting. None of us had
received any riot control training.
We loaded onto trucks and off we went.
My truck went to a road intersection where the US camp bordered the
civilian highway and out we hopped. They
issued us live ammunition, but they left it in the wooden case on the
truck. We did have our rifles
and bayonets. A group of
Okinawan men were standing on our side of the highway waving flags and
shouting something in Japanese. Our
officer jumped out of the cab of the truck, observed the situation, and
told us, "Our orders are to eject any rioters from US property and
those people are on US property.” Then
he said, "Move them off of it!”
Without a word spoken between us, we looked at each other, shrugged
our shoulders, fixed bayonets, and then, screaming like a bunch of blood
thirsty maniacs, charged. Those
protesters disappeared like a wisp of smoke. Someone else radioed for help.
According to the radio message, there was a huge mob trying to push
their way onto the Sukiran Marine Base from Highway 1.
So we loaded back up on our trucks and away we went.
We were the first troops to arrive at the besieged gate.
We already had our orders from the first job so as soon as the truck screeched to a
stop, we leaped off, charged past the Marine MPs, and went after the mob
with our bayonets. It was a
race to see who would get the honor of drawing first blood.
If you want to be a leader in SF, you must be fleet of foot.
We were in pretty good physical condition and some of our guys were
fast, but none of us could get close enough to a protester to stick him.
We chased them across Highway 1 and through the alleys and side
streets. In some cases men chased rioters into, through and out of houses.
Those protesters scattered like a flock of geese.
We couldn’t get within bayonet range so no one got stuck. Our fearless leader received another radio call and we were ordered to the gate at the American Legion. Now that’s carrying things too damn far. The American Legion was Group’s favorite watering hole on the island. This time it took us a while to round up our troops because they had chased protestors to the four winds and were reluctant to give up the chase. When we finally arrived at the American Legion, there were several trucks full of SF troops already there. Thousands of protesters were along the civilian highway, but outside our fence. Our company commander stationed one A Team outside our fence along our side of the highway right of way and told the rest of us, "Stack arms and take a break.” What better place to take a break than our favorite watering hole. We left one man to guard our weapons and the rest retrieved a cold drink. Of course we bought one for our guard also. The size of the mob continued to
increase. They began to
Dragon Dance and the line of dancers started weaving closer and closer to
our guys that were standing at parade rest on our side of the highway.
To the best of my memory, the Island Commander at the time was a
tiny general that the men had nick-named "Small Paul.”
Anyway, the Island Commander, whoever the hell he was, decided to
intervene and interject his inspirational leadership and wisdom into the
situation. The general landed
in the parking lot, hopped out of his itty-bitty "bubble"
chopper and ran his itty bitty ass towards our company commander.
Our Colonel ran to meet the little general as if he was overjoyed
to meet with his much-adored superior officer.
The general observed the situation and noted the protesters slowly
working their way closer to the men we had stationed outside the fence.
By this time the line of Dragon Dancers were weaving within three
to six feet of our guys who were standing at parade rest — and
practically defenseless in that position.
The general made a command decision.
He told our CO, "Move your troops out Colonel!”
[He later explained that he really meant for our CO to bring
that A Team "back inside" the fence.
However, what our CO heard was "Charge!"] Our Colonel shouted, "Move ‘em out!” Our twelve men, brave and true, immediately "snapped to" and charged that mob with fixed bayonets. This time all of those bastards couldn’t escape and at least one of that A Team drew blood. The protesters in the front of the mob literally climbed over the protesters behind them in an effort to avoid being stabbed in the ass. We snatched up our rifles and raced towards the gate to help our guys that were outside the fence. Before we could reach the gate those twelve guys had already broken that mob up and sent them fleeing in all directions trampling each other in the process. The itty bitty general damn near had a heart attack. He quickly clarified his order, jumped back on his itty-bitty chopper and flew away as our company commander tried to call off our attack. When the civilian paper hit the stands the next day, almost the entire edition was devoted to the protest and the brutality of the American forces. The very next day the entire 1st Group began mandatory riot and mob control training that was conducted by the local military police battalion. We were marched around in formation at a half-step with fixed bayonets while wearing helmets and gas masks for several hours. Even after we had riot control
training, from that moment on, SF troops were not allowed to directly
confront protesters unless the protestors broke through the military
police lines and actually entered a US base.
When SF was called out for riot control duty, they would always
place us in the center of the base that was threatened and we were told to
stay there. They told us, "If the protesters jump the fence or
overrun the MPs, we’ll radio you and tell you where they are. Then they belong to you.
Until then, stay put." The
protesters threw rocks of all sizes, shouted obscenities in English, and
threw paper bags full of shit at the riot control troops and MPs and they
just stood there and took it. If
they had put an SF unit in a situation like that, I think somebody would
have been killed. Using the approved and politically correct riot control techniques, the US eventually lost control of Okinawa in a few short months and returned it to the Japanese Government who did not really want it because it would be a drain on their economy and they always considered the Okinawans to be inferior savages. I don't know why, maybe an Okinawan stealie boy stole Hirito's underwear. The US greatly reduced their "payments subsidizing the local economy" and prices have soared. How the typical Okinawan benefited from the Japanese takeover, is a mystery to me. I was put back on jump status with full
pay a few months after we returned from Vietnam.
They wouldn’t reinstate me immediately after we returned to Oki,
I had to "pay the price" first and I had to request it in
writing. All of my buddies
teased me about that at every opportunity and some still do.
While I was off jump status, I went on more TDY trips than I did
when I was on jump status. That
didn’t bother me one bit, in fact I preferred going TDY and to the
boonies. To me, that beat
garrison duty, even SF garrison duty, all to hell. Several of us from my company were sent
TDY to the Philippines in January 1969 to participate with their troops in
a guerrilla warfare training exercise.
I left
Big Dave in charge of my little VW bug and our house rent.
The night before we were to depart, I went out with two lady
friends. Well, one was a bed
partner and the other was just a friend. The next morning we stopped by the barracks where I drew my
weapon and packed my rucksack. Then
we went to the American Legion for breakfast and a few more drinks before
I departed. We lost track of
the time and suddenly realized that I was running late so they drove me
back to the barracks. As we
pulled up at the barracks, my company was pulling out in trucks. When the guys spotted me just pulling in, they really got a
kick out of that. They
figured that this screw up would really make them look good in comparison
to their latest fuck up. While
the girls waited for me, I raced inside the barracks for my gear.
The girls took off as fast as they could drive and we caught up to
my unit before they reached the front gate of Kadena Air Base.
We followed them to the marshaling area and all the way there my
guys were giving me a hard time. They were really enjoying this.
The girls let me off where our trucks stopped and then they sped
away. After we had moved inside the cyclone
fence area adjacent to the terminal, we sat down to wait for our plane to
show up so we could leave. About
forty five minutes or an hour later, I heard somebody calling my name and
turned around. There, on the
other side of the cyclone fence, were my two friends and they were waving
a thermos at me. The guys
started laughing, whistling and kidding me in general.
When I ran over to the girls, they tossed the thermos over the
fence to me. We talked for a
couple of minutes and then our C-130 taxied up and it was time to saddle
up. After our plane was in the air, I
opened the thermos and sniffed its contents, it was gin and tonic.
That was the same drink that the three of us had been drinking the
night before and that morning at the American Legion.
To this day, I still wonder how much those girls paid to have that
jug filled at the local officer’s club.
Of course I shared with my buddies. We landed at Clark Air Force Base, but
we only stayed there one night then we were trucked north.
We stopped overnight at a Philippine Army Base on northern Luzon
and then the next day we went out to our individual area of operations.
Me, a USSF First Lieutenant, and one Filipino SF Master Sergeant,
Sergeant Tosoc [prounounced TOWSOCK], took one 2½ ton truck and a
platoon of regular army troops and went to a large river near the village
of San Mariano. [It may have been spelled "San Marino.”
I honestly do not remember.]
The river was very wide at the ford.
I told the lieutenant that we were already out of range of our
Prick 25s [AN/PRC-25 Radio Set]. I would probably have to improvise a special antenna in order
for my signal to reach base station from where we were. If we go any farther, I doubt if I can do anything that will
help us make radio contact with base because across that river is nothing
but mountainous jungles. The lieutenant decided to leave me and
Tosoc there and we were to set up in the village.
The lieutenant would take one of the radios with him and I would
relay messages between him and base station.
It was already getting dark when they dropped Tosoc and me off.
We decided to camp along the riverbank for that night and go find
us a place in the village to rent the next morning. The next morning, I jumped up, stripped
off my clothes and waded out into the river to bathe. Tosoc didn’t join me, instead he squatted at the edge of
the water and sprinkled water on his face with his hands. The shores of the river were shallow so I had to wade quite
aways into the river before the water was deep enough for bathing.
While I was out there, I tried several more times to persuade Tosoc
to join me, but he refused. Finally I asked Tosoc, "Why won’t you come into the
river with me?” He just
grinned and said one word, "Crocodiles!”
I nearly shit a brick. Believe
me, I came out of that damn river one hell of a lot faster than I went
into it. Enroute to the
shore, I spotted what I thought was a croc and I cleared it and that knee
deep water in one leap. It
was actually a sunken log that was half imbedded in the sandy bottom that
I hadn’t even noticed when I entered the river.
After I reached the river bank and caught my breath, I asked Tosoc,
"Why didn’t you tell me there were crocodiles in the river before I
went in the water?” and he answered, "Oh Sargie, you no ask.”
Well, I can assure you that I asked Mama Tosoc a lot of questions
during the rest of our time together.
Trust me, I had no desire to end up as a pile of crocodile shit or
any other kind of shit for that matter.
As it turned out, we stayed in that
tiny village for about the next three or four weeks. At the time, I smoked cigarettes and the pack in my shirt was
empty so I rummaged around in my rucksack for cigarettes.
That’s when I discovered that I had forgotten to pack any smokes.
That didn’t upset me very much because I figured I could buy some
in the village. Besides, I
figured that I didn’t really need them anyway because I wasn’t hooked
on them. Tosoc and I rented the upstairs of a
frame house that was built on stilts from the widow who owned it.
The upstairs was just one large room with no furnishings.
We slept on our air mattresses and in my case under my poncho
liner. Electricity was the only utility that served the house.
The hand-dug well was outside and so was the latrine.
We bathed out of dish pans in the latrine.
The first time, I tried to bathe in the daytime, it didn’t work
so well because before I even got started about half the village had
gathered there to watch the giant American wash his big white ass.
It seemed that the local natives loved Americans, at least those
villagers did, especially the kids. Then
I tried to bathe at night, but I really didn’t like that idea very much
because there was no outdoor light and that place has too many poisonous
snakes to be walking around bare footed at night.
None of the natives seemed to bathe at night while we were there.
So I started taking "sponge" bathes one or two nights a
week. Since my tour in
Thailand, I was a little more wary of snakes. The first morning we were there, Tosoc
and I went downtown to look for some cigarettes and to scope-out our new
home. We had to pass the
school enroute to the business district and the school yard was full of
children and teachers. The
teachers temporarily dismissed class and the children all swarmed around
Tosoc and I. They were all
eager to try out their English lessons on me so I had to stop and talk to
every kid there and answer their questions.
"Good morning.” "How
are you?” "I am fine,
how are you.” "My name
is Don Valentine.” "What’s
your name?” "Where are
you going?” "Where are
you from?” It seemed like
it took forever because there must have been over a hundred kids, but it
was fun and I enjoyed every minute of it.
The kids really thought that was something.
They made me feel like the king of their little village.
This happened every
time I walked by the school. Of
course I always made sure to pass the school when I went downtown. When I tried a pack of the local
cigarettes. They were
horrible and I nearly choked to death trying to smoke one.
"Aw to hell with it, I’ll just do without, "
I said. "Besides,
I don’t really need those damn things anyway.”
That afternoon two local policemen paid us a visit.
One was the police chief and the other was his one and only police
officer. The chief was armed
with a .38 caliber revolver and his officer was armed with an M-1 Garand
and had one bandolier of ammo strung across his chest.
We invited them upstairs and sat on the floor and talked.
They spoke pretty good English, but Tosoc had to interpret now and
then. As soon as we were
upstairs, I remembered the custom of the Filipinos that I had met in Laos
and I brought out the bottle of Old Grandad that I had brought along.
After I opened the bottle, I threw away the cap.
They really enjoyed that and we sat and talked untilthe four of us
had emptied the bottle. As they were saying good night, the police chief told Tosoc
something in Tagalog just before they left.
When I asked Tosoc what they had said and he told me, "He say
that we would not have to worry about thieves as long as we are in San
Mariano.” I doubted that
very much. After they left
our house, we heard them going around to every house in the village
banging on the door and yelling. Again,
Tosoc had to interpret what they were telling the villagers.
The policemen were telling the villagers, "If the American
loses so much as one sock, we will shoot the thief on the spot.”
It worked because we never lost a thing even when I washed some
clothes and hung them on the line to dry and forgot and left them there
all night. Everything was
still hanging there the next morning — and that ladies and gentlemen was
a miracle. Tosoc was a muslim and I soon nicknamed
him "Mama Tosock" because he was so neat and nit-picking.
It took that man forever to get cleaned up and suitably attired to
go outside. He would spend at
least thirty minutes picking invisible lint from his fatigues.
Never have I seen a male go through a ritual like that.
The only males that I had seen before who came close to being that
egotistical were Mike Dirocco and Ron Chellman from my radio operator
school days. Neither of those
guys could pass a mirror or a plate glass window without stopping and
admiring their reflection and flexing. Mike
and Ronnie were good guys and I like them, but that was just the way they
were and probably still are even today.
Ronnie and Bob Kaszer even went so far as to have the pockets on
their fatigue shirts and the front pockets on their fatigue trousers sewn
shut! That was so they
couldn’t put anything in those pockets that would make their uniform
bulge. Muslim troops in the
Philippine Army were allowed to wear a special hat. It was shaped like the issue hat, but it was furry. Well, I was wrong about the cigarettes;
I was addicted to them. For
about three or four days, I constantly patted my pockets down searching
for a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches that wasn’t there. Then I tried smoking a local cigarette again and I nearly
coughed up a lung. After
about two weeks, I was thoroughly ashamed of myself for what I was letting
those damn little white sticks do to me.
That was when I became angry at myself, very, very angry.
In fact, I had never been that angry before at anyone or anything.
It enraged me so much, I swore that I would not touch another one
of those damn things again as long as I live.
Since that day, I have never even wanted a cigarette.
If you want to quit cigarettes, I guess all you have to do is just
get good and angry at yourself. One day Mama Tosoc and I went to the
business district where we saw a Negrito family strolling down the main
street. As I recall, all of
the streets in the village were dirt.
There was only that one Negrito family, a man, his woman, and the
little baby. The woman
carried the baby strapped to her chest.
The adults wore only a loin cloth and the baby wore nothing.
They were pitch black and he only stood about five and a half feet
tall, but his body would have made Tarzan envious.
His body looked as if it had been chiseled out of black granite.
He carried a very long knife in his loin cloth string and it looked
razor sharp. Mama Tosoc said that this tribe of
Negritos were formerly head-hunting cannibals and their village was
located in the mountains across the river about two weeks walk from San
Mariano. Apparently, they had
already traded some of their goods for a very brightly colored parasol
which the man carried. The
native held the parasol over his head and spun it again and again.
He and his woman were both obviously spellbound by all of those
spinning colors. As they
passed slowly along the dirt street watching that spinning parasol some of
the Filipinos slipped around behind the shops where they could stifle a
laugh or giggle without being seen. However,
not one Filipino so much as grinned in the presence of those natives.
Those natives were taken very serious by the local villagers and I
made a mental note to do the same. One day, my lieutenant radioed that a
little boy in a nearby village had been snake bit and was in a bad way.
He said that they were going to carry him out of the mountains and
for me to meet them at the river crossing with transportation for him, the
boy, his parents and a couple of his Filipino soldiers.
Hell, that meant we needed a truck.
We had no vehicles. What
to do. Then I remembered my
police buddies. Tosoc and I
hot-footed over to the police station and explained everything to them.
The police chief issued an order to his assistant and away he
raced. The assistant commandeered an empty, flatbed, logging truck
right off of the main street with the agreement that I would reimburse the
man for the gas plus fill his tank when we were finished. That was okay by me. Hopefully,
whoever was in charge of such things back at our base was a little
flexible. Anyway, off we went
to the river and after a few hours our guys waded across the river
carrying the poor little boy. After
a short discussion as to where was the best place to take the boy for
treatment, the lieutenant ordered us to drive to the nearest civilian
clinic which was about 50 miles farther north and closer to the coast. When we arrived there, I sat up my
radio and erected an improvised antenna and tried to communicate with our
home base to advise them of our situation.
They did not answer, but I just knew that my signal was getting
through because of the antenna that I had made and because we were on a
high bald hill. The Filipinos
in the clinic refused to help the boy.
They said that he would live or he would die and that was the way
it is. My lieutenant could
not accept that answer so we loaded up and headed for our base camp which
must have been at least 150 miles away.
When we finally reached our base camp, I learned that they had
heard me, but one look at their antennas and I knew why I had not heard
from them. All they were
using were the damn issue antennas. While
the boy was taken to our medics for treatment, I escorted our magnanimous
truck driver to our motor pool and had his gas tank filled with good old
US of A gasoline. That truck
driver was one happy camper — at least somebody was happy.
There wasn’t much that our guys could do for the boy, but they
did their best and somehow he survived.
We returned to San Mariano that night and the next morning, either
of us could have been elected King of Northern Luzon for sure. Shortly after that, we were trucked
back to our base camp and the maneuver was officially over. We remained there for a couple of days before returning to
Oki. Our commander lectured
us on our military bearing while we were still in country, "Anyone
who is drunk or rude, will be court-martialed.”
The night before we left, we were all invited to a performance by
the local military band. The
band was very good and I tapped my foot to the music and patted my knee. One of the band members started motioning in my direction for
someone to come sit beside him on the bandstand. Eventually, I figured out that guy was motioning to dumb-ass
me. It took several attempts
by him and of course my fellow SF buddies before I finally relented and
sat beside him in the band. That
little shit handed me a tambourine and I had never played
a tambourine in my life. Hell,
I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he insisted so I tried.
Naturally I was terrible, but all of the band members pretended
that I was doing great. Our
guys got a big kick out of this and I thought, "Oh shit, am I always
going to be their favorite source of entertainment?”
Not wanting to see the expression on my commander’s face, I never
glanced towards where he was sitting. Just before we loaded onto the trucks
and headed back to Clark Air Base on the day that we left for Oki, the
Philippine Commander thanked us for our efforts and then that damn Mama
Tosoc whipped out a very long switchblade knife and cut off every damn
insignia that I had on my uniform and pocketed them as souvenirs.
Moma Tosoc gave me a couple of his Muslim SF caps and a pair of his
parachutist wings. Then he
brought out a bottle of whiskey, opened it and threw away the cap.
Come to find out, I was the only one to be so "honored." When I unloaded from that bus at Clark
Air Force Base, I looked like a blivet and I was walking on rubber legs.
My jungle fatigues were stripped of any means of identifying me,
broken threads and shadows were located where my SF patch, US Army patch,
Name Tag, and jump wings had been. My
green beret was long gone and in its place I wore a tiny, furry Muslim
Philippine SF Cap perched atop my big bald head.
As I departed from the bus and staggered for the aircraft, I did my
best to manage a proper soldierly appearance as I headed for the aircraft,
but I have to admit that I didn’t do so well.
When my company commander’s face turned beet red and he nearly
busted a gut trying to hold his temper, I figured he would bury me under
the stockade on Oki when we returned.
Over the next few weeks, my buddies reminded me of my departure
from Clark Air Base, but I never heard about it from my commander.
That company commander left SF shortly after that.
That’s good, he just didn’t have a sense of humor. Shortly after we returned from the
Philippines, I was selected to go on another field training exercise with
the same lieutenant, this one was to Taiwan.
During that entire trip, I never really knew what my particular
team was supposed to be doing in Taiwan.
We rented a couple of hotel rooms about 75 miles south of Taipei
and that’s mostly where we stayed for the two or three weeks that we
were there. There was a
decent restaurant around the corner where we ate all of our meals.
It didn’t matter to me which restaurant we chose because I love
Chinese food and every restaurant in Taiwan is a Chinese restaurant.
Hell, I couldn’t miss. As
far as I was concerned, I was in hog heaven.
There was only one small problem with the restaurant.
They changed their prices for us Americans almost every meal.
They kept raising the prices for us until we finally complained and
then they dropped the price a little and that was the price for that meal
whether breakfast, dinner or supper, for the rest of our stay. Taiwan was where I learned the meaning
of the term, "negotiation.” [Later,
I discovered that the process was the same in Mexican towns on the US
border.] If you don’t
haggle and then walk away from the merchant and let him follow you and
persuade you to do business with him by dropping his price, you will pay
three or four times the market value. One day our team leader had to go to an
army base that was located about 25 or 30 miles southwest of Taipei and
took me with him. That base
was where the Taiwan SF troops were stationed, but I don’t recall why we
went there. Neither of us
spoke Chinese so we were pretty much flying by the seat of our pants.
Anyway we thought that we caught the correct train because it was
going to Taipei, but when it sped past that army base, we knew that we had
caught the "express.” When
we arrived at the train station in Taipei, we looked at each other, smiled
and mutually agreed that fate had dealt us a great hand and we decided to
spend the night there and try another train the next morning.
Taipei seemed to have a thriving economy and the people were very
friendly. While we were in
town, I found the local bar where all SF hang out when they’re in town
and made that my base of operations.
We managed to catch the correct train the next day with no problem. The only other thing that I can
remember about my time in Taiwan was my getting involved in a teeny tiny,
international incident. Believe
me, as far as I could tell, it was a "nothing" that got
completely blown out of proportion by "politics." I had to pick up some US and Chinese A
Team guys in a ¾ ton truck and haul them to an American air base that was
about 75 miles farther south from our hotel.
The driver, interpreter and truck were all Chinese. The driver was a sergeant and the interpreter was a captain.
That driver drove like a damn maniac.
While we were on Chinese highways, I didn’t say anything to him.
After we entered the American base and he had roared through a
couple of stop signs, I told the captain to tell him to obey the traffic
signs while we were on that base. He
ran another stop sign and I told the captain, "Tell this dumb
motherfucker to stop at every stop sign on this base!”
and the captain translated it word-for-word.
That damn truck screeched to a stop and the driver jumped out and
walked over to the side of the road and squatted on his heels and crossed
his arms over his chest. He
puffed up like a damn toad. When
I asked the captain about this strange behavior, he told me that the
driver had lost face. I said, "Tell him to get back in the truck and let’s
go.” "Oh no, he has
lost face," he replied. That
damn officer would not order him to get back in that truck.
"Aw to hell with him," I said.
"I’ll drive the damn truck the rest of the way and we’ll
pick him up on the way back or leave him there whichever he wishes.”
With that, I headed for the driver’s side of the truck.
I thought the insulted sergeant must have found his lost face fast
because he beat me to the driver’s seat and off we roared.
We delivered the troops and the ride back to our hotel resembled
something very close to a Demolition Derby back home. About three weeks after we returned to
Oki, I was called into our company orderly room to see the company
commander. He passed me a
letter that had been sent from the Commanding General of the Taiwan Army
through the Commanding General of the Pacific Theater down through
channels to my company commander. It
spelled out in detail how I had insulted the soldier and demanded an
apology. As it passed through
each level in my chain of command, a letter was attached ordering me to
apologize. My company
commander informed me that an appropriate response would be prepared for
me and I would sign it. It
was and I did. Every
commander in my chain of command also had to attach a "letter of
condolence" to it as it passed through their office enroute back to
Taiwan. That one document must have taken up an entire diplomatic
mail pouch by the time it finally got back to that fucking Chinese
sergeant. That little shit
has probably shown that document to his buddies at the NCO club a few
hundred times. Shortly after we returned from Taiwan,
I went on another TDY trip. This
one was to South Korea. TDY
trips, field training exercises, parachuting, firing on the rifle ranges,
and similar duty made me appreciate a nice clean barracks, the mess hall,
and the good life in general, so I loved them.
Nothing made me appreciate being near headquarters, however so
naturally I did not like CPX’s. A
CPX is a Command Post Exercise. On
a CPX, nobody actually goes into the boonies on maneuvers, everything is
simulated. The base station
radio operators encode, send, receive, and decode "canned
messages" on "reduced distance radio nets.”
One radioman will send the message to another radioman who is in
the room, building or tent next door.
The two radio operators might only be separated by a wall, but they
have to go through the entire procedure for each message instead of
someone just handing the message directly to the intended addressee. The only things that I can remember
about Korea is the kimche, which is the hottest damn food I have ever
eaten; the multitude of whores, who pounced on every GI as soon they
stepped off base begging for his "business"; the mountains,
because they were very steep, rugged, and high; and the stink—that place
is the latrine of the world. All
in all, I was very thankful that our CPX in Korea didn’t last very long
and that I wasn’t stationed permanently in Korea.
Korea must truly be the asshole of the world. Big Dave had returned to the states to
be discharged so I got another SF sergeant named Quiroga to move in with
me. Quiroga and I came home
early from the club one night to watch TV because our NASA was scheduled
to put men on the moon for the first time.
The second guy to exit the landing craft had just dropped down to
the ground when the first guy on the moon came bouncing into the
background of the picture and Quiroga, who was shit-faced, leaped up from
the couch and shouted, "Watch out behind you, you son of a bitch.”
With that, I fell in the floor laughing at that damn drunk Puerto
Rican. Early in the summer of 1969, I was
selected to be the Assistant Camp Counselor for Summer Camp at Camp Hardy
for some army brats [dependent children].
In this case it was boys who were between seven and fifteen years
old. At least that’s the
age bracket in which they were supposed to have been.
One little squirt that I named "Pee Wee" had trouble
walking with a full canteen of water on his pistol belt.
Later, I found out that an exception had been granted for "Pee
Wee" — he was only five years old. A married master sergeant was
originally assigned as the Camp Counselor, but two days after we arrived
at Camp Hardy, he had family problems.
He returned to base and I was promoted to Camp Counselor.
Lucky me, a bachelor with no experience with kids, was left in
charge of 80 boys at Summer Camp for the next three weeks. That was an experience I will never forget. Camp Hardy was the pre-mission training
camp for the 1st Group. We
all slept in squad tents that were erected on concrete slabs.
We began each day at the crack of dawn with reveille followed by
breakfast and then we took a little time to clean up our tents before we
took physical training. From
that point on the curriculum varied from day-to-day.
We put those kids through a "gentle" version of
pre-mission training, but, I really worked their little butts off.
I tried my best to wear those kids out so they would go to sleep at
nights and not get into trouble. You
see, we had no television and very few of the boys even had a radio.
There were also very few books available. But, regardless of how hard I worked them, you could hear
them horse-playing until taps, and sometimes afterwards. Usually, I had to make only one visit to one tent to calm
them down after taps because I was loud enough for all the tents to
benefit from it. Hell, I was
pooped and that saved me some time so I could get some sleep to.
Riding herd all day on eighty young energetic mischievous boys can
wear a person out. We trained them in marksmanship using
BB Rifles; we trained them in the art of tracking humans; we trained them
in using little rubber boats; we ran them through a modified version of
the Camp Hardy infiltration course; we gave them swimming lessons in the
ocean; and most of the third week we spent camping out.
The rest of the third week, we spent at the Basic Airborne Course
at Sukiran where they got to exit the 34 foot training tower.
We also offered scuba-diving lessons to any boy that could pass the
swimming test, but no one passed it.
Every kid tried their best to pass that swimming test, even Pee
Wee. We had to pull some of
them to safety because they would have drowned before they would have
quit. If they were members of
the boy scouts, they received credit toward merit badges for successfully
completing the swimming lessons, weapons classes, erecting an emergency
shelter and for cooking when they camped out. If they did good with the BB rifles,
they got the same training with a .22 caliber rifle. They were taught "Quick Fire" techniques.
That is where you lift your rifle and fire without using the
sights. Those little
snot-nosed brats did pretty damn good.
They put everything they had into it because they all dearly wanted
to shoot the 22s. On the
infiltration course blanks were fired over their heads instead of bullets
and firecrackers were set off here and there instead of plastic
explosives. Survival training was included in the
camping trip. After we
arrived at our bivouac site, I assigned each squad a section of the woods
and told them to build their shelters.
On the very first day, we had assigned the oldest kids to be squad
leaders and the next oldest to be their assistants and made them
responsible for taking care of the younger members of their squads, just
like in the army. They had hatchets, knives and army field gear.
I told them, "I will grade each shelter tomorrow morning.”
Also, I issued each squad their rations for that evening and the
next day. They scurried off
into the woods like a bunch of newly hatched chicks and pretty soon all
you could hear was chopping and squeals of laughter all through the woods.
Those little guys were having a ball.
Most of the boys had built sleeping platforms off the ground in the
trees. All during the night,
you could hear a tree begin to crack, then a snap and crash as the
platform came down amid cries of fear.
No calls for help came so I knew nobody was hurt.
Shortly after each platform crashed, you would see flashlights
through the trees and the chopping and laughter would begin anew as the
hapless camper and his team mates set about re-building his sleeping
platform. Those kids were having the adventure of their life. None of their food was cooked for them.
It was all raw. Sometimes they got hot dogs, sometimes it was hamburger meat
and sometimes it was chicken. They
had to prepare their meals themselves.
While they were camped out, I was required to taste and hopefully
approve one meal by each boy that wanted credit for a boy scout badge —
that took guts. Pee Wee was
too young to be in the scouts, but he wanted to do everything that the
"big boys" did so I just had to eat a meal with him also.
Pee Wee served hamburgers that meal and as he picked my burger off
of his makeshift grill, he dropped it into the ashes.
That little guy never blinked an eye, I thought sure he would break
down and cry, but he didn’t. He
plucked my burger from the ashes, wiped it off the best that he could, and
proudly presented that little piece of charcoal to me.
Boy, was he proud of that burger.
Oh well, I like my meat well done anyway and besides, charcoal is a
great remedy for the shits. Of
course I didn’t have the shits yet, but you never know when they might
strike and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have a little extra protection
already inside me, just in case. Also,
I had to inspect and approve each shelter before the Boy Scouts would
award them credit for that. Thankfully,
I was not required to sleep in them. We returned the boys home each Saturday
afternoon and picked them up early each Monday. The second time that I picked them up, several of the mothers
approached me and asked me what I was doing to their boy.
I asked, "Why? What’s
wrong?” The most common reply was, "Nothing’s wrong, he’s
just changed. He’s not the
same little boy that I sent
to you. He’s independent
now and wants to do everything for himself.”
Well, it seemed that the mothers didn’t have as many kids to
smother…errr…mother anymore
and that bothered them. Well,
I took it as a compliment, but I’m not sure that’s how it was intended.
However, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was going to get another
one of those damn "letters of apology" that I "must"
sign and send back through channels. There was a lot of hard things being
said about American kids at that time because of the drugs, hippies,
flower children and protesters. There
wasn’t a damn thing wrong with any of those boys.
They were all crackerjacks. All
they needed was just a little leadership, a lot of challenge, and enough
freedom to make mistakes. Hopefully,
they also had enough wisdom to learn from their mistakes. Believe me, I learned more from those
kids than they learned from me — a lot more.
For the first time in my life, I regretted not living a normal life
and having a family of my own with my own kids, but that feeling wore off
in about thirty seconds. Several
times since then, I have wondered how those young men turned out and how
their experiences that summer affected their lives.
Well, if I had any sense, I would have kept a roster of their full
names and their parents and I could have followed up on that Shortly after that while I was
wandering around in downtown Koza bar-hopping, I spotted a plastic
battery-operated dildo. Right
away I decided that I could have some fun with that so I went into the
store and bought one. At the
time, I did not know how to dance. Some
of the women at the base clubs always wanted to dance with me, but I
always turned them down because I just did not know how to dance.
One of the MPs that gave us riot control training had went out of
his way to make friends with me and later on, he taught me one simple
dance step that could be used in just about any dance.
It was just a simple two-step.
After that, when I went to the club at nights, I took the massager
with me in my right front trouser pocket, but I never turned it on.
When I slow danced I held the woman very close.
Hell, I had those lovely ladies lined up waiting for another chance
at a slow dance with me and my little dancing buddy.
My buddies were amazed at my new found dancing success until I
showed them my dancing buddy and then they cracked up.
In fact, they laughed so loud and so long, the club manager made us
leave. Many of the Okinawan girls did not like
SF because they thought that SF drank too much, cursed too much, fought
too much, went off to war too much, bounced from girl to girl, and
didn’t wear skivvies. Even
some of the whores would not do business with SF.
There was a two story cat house next to the army airfield on
Highway 1. A bar was
downstairs and the girls’ rooms were upstairs.
It was not unusual to see some GI in civvies being chased down the
stairs by a raving whore shouting, "Get out you hot damn sumbitch.
You say you no speshul hosses.”
"But honey, I’m not. I’m
a marine," the retreating GI would laughingly plead.
"Bullshit, you no good lying sumbitch.
You be speshul hosses. You
no habba skibbies.” Lots of guys in SF had nicknames.
Many radio operators were nicknamed "Sparky" or
"Sparks" and most of the medics were naturally nicknamed
"Doc.” Some other
nicknames were : Richard Shorten was nicknamed Bear
because of the way he fought. Bear
tended to maul an opponent instead of boxing him. Snuffy Smith was called snuffy because
his physical appearance and morals reminded you of the cartoon character. Stick earned his nickname the
hard way. "A husband
came home unexpected and walked in on Stick and his wife in the bed and he
picked up a handy mop or broom and commenced to beat Stick severely about
the head and shoulders until he put Stick in the hospital." Harold "Catfish" Dreblow was
nicknamed Catfish because he would eat anything, but he wasn’t the only
Catfish. SF had lots of
those. I nicknamed Larry Dickinson “The
Cook” because he was always cooking something and it usually tasted
pretty good, but you soon learned not to ask too many questions about the
recipe. If you were having
some yummy pinto beans and felt a lump while stirring them, you might dip
out a Snicker’s bar or two. At
least one bar would still be in its wrapper.
"One Ear" lost one
ear when an angry husband bit it off during a fight after he caught Jim in
bed with his wife. At least
that’s what Pete Garner told me.
Railroad Smith used a tad too much
demolition to destroy a railroad track during training.
A piece of track almost went into orbit. Whispering Smith had a naturally weak
voice and always spoke in a whisper. John "One Eye" Riley had a
glass eye in place of the one that he lost in Vietnam when the tip of a
tiny antenna on an airplane wing plucked it out for him.
One Eye Riley was a black-haired, chunky-built Irishman from New
York City. I reckon John
stood about 5’ 8" tall and he had a habit of sometimes dropping his
glass eye in his drink when he went to the latrine so no one would steal a
drink from it. John had one
glass eye that matched his good eye and one that had a USA flag where the
iris should have been. One day One Eye, who was as drunk as a
skunk at the time, drove into the Dixie Drive-in Restaurant in Spring
Lake, North Carolina, which was located just outside Fort Bragg. Unwittingly, One Eye put the gear into "Neutral"
instead of "Park" then passed out over the steering wheel and
his car rolled back out into the middle of Bragg Boulevard. One Eye didn’t even realize that he was sitting broadside
in the middle of the six-lane highway.
A highway patrolman arrived on the scene.
The state trooper walked up to the car and tapped on the window.
One Eye finally awoke, rolled down his window and said, "Two
cheeseburgers and fries to go.” Needless
to say, One Eye didn’t get what he ordered and he didn’t drive anymore
that night either. [How he
did it I don’t know, but Ole One Eye made it to retirement and returned
to New York. Rumor has it that One Eye died in 1995, but I do not recall
hearing what killed him.] John "Wild Dude" Wicker was
nicknamed Wild Dude by Max Recod while they were on a field training
exercise in Okinawa and Max saw Dude swinging on a limb high in a tree and
making monkey-like noises. Wild
Dude was just an average size guy who was a karate freak or "Jap
Slapper" as some of the guys called karate students.
Wild Dude studied karate while he was stationed on Okinawa and
became a black belt. Dude was
a real character who forever courted disfavor with his superiors, but his
fellow enlisted men liked to have Wild Dude around, especially when the
pollution hit the rotary blades. One night on Oki when Wild Dude was
downtown some local Okinawan street punks slipped up behind him and hit
him across the back with a plank. Wild
Dude leaped straight up, spun around, landed in a fighting stance and
yelled, "Thank God, I didn’t think anybody was going to fuck with
me tonight.” With that,
Wild Dude charged his assailants, who immediately fled the scene. On another occasion while downtown in
Okinawa, Wild Dude unknowingly entered a bar where off duty MPs hung out.
Of course he promptly got involved in an altercation with a couple
of off duty MPs who were wearing civvies.
The MPs did not allow any other soldiers to visit the bar that they
picked as their hangout and they had told Wild Dude to leave, "This
is our bar.” Naturally
that’s when the disagreement began. A horde of off duty MPs poured out of the bar and began to
chase Wild Dude after he had punched their two buddies silly.
Wild Dude managed to lose them briefly and then he stopped at a pay
phone and called the MPs to report that a bunch of idiots were chasing
him. After that every MP on Oki, whether
they were on duty or off duty, knew exactly where to find Wild Dude and
they descended upon him like a cloud of locusts.
Wild Dude was badly beaten physically, but not in spirit.
After Wild Dude was subdued and handcuffed, the uniformed MPs beat
his back, buttocks and legs with their batons.
When they finally stopped, Wild Dude told them, "Boys that’s
the best damn massage I’ve had in years.”
They gave him another one. [In my opinion, if you want to locate the majority
of the worst criminals in the army, you need look no
farther than the members of the Military Police and Criminal Investigation
units. Trust me on that one.] Once while on patrol with a SOG recon
team in Vietnam, Wild Dude’s team had to be extracted by McGuire Rig
while under fire. Wild Dude
did pull ups on his rope all the way back to base camp.
When they finally arrived at base camp, everyone was worn out from
the emotional stress of dangling from one thin climbing rope beneath a
chopper for so long, everyone that is except Wild Dude.
Wild Dude went skipping off to operations whistling and joking with
his buddies. [Somehow,
Wild Dude managed to last long enough to retire as a master sergeant. That in itself is a complete mystery to me.
Anyway, the last I knew about Wild Dude, he lived in Fayetteville
where he owned and operated a Karate Dojo and helped out part-time at the
SF Assessment and Selection course at Camp MacKall.
Wild Dude died in the late 1990s.] [I have listed below additional
nicknames of special forces soldiers that I collected from members of the
Special Forces Teamhouse through their web site at http://teamhouse.tni.net.] Fly Face; Peg-leg; Half-head;
Three-fingers; Needle Dick; Long Nose; Rat Face; Filthy Fred; Hose Nose;
Dirty Dick; VC-in-the-tree-line; Baby Arm Dick; Pinto; Bata Boots; Ranger;
Patch; Dirty Shirt; Shaky; Blinky; Spear Chunker; Firewood; Dawg; Shit
Face; Slats; Preacher; Trash Can; Snapper; Jumpy ; Black Jack; Fats;
Small; Frosty Ice; Swede; Cheap; Greasy; One-Eyed; Garbage Gut; Duffle
Bag; Clean; Blind; Mad Dog; Babysan; Crazy; Good Deal; Lightning;
Boom-boom; and Boar Hog. Meanwhile, I decided to find a way to
survive until retirement. Under
the circumstances, that definitely eliminated SF field duty.
That stupid war, politics, and the officer corps had changed SF too
damn much to suit me any more. If
I couldn’t believe in what we were doing and how we were doing it and if
I couldn’t or wouldn’t give 100%, then I had no business taking up a
slot in SF. General Creighton Abrams had been
assigned as Westmoreland’s replacement as Commander of all US Forces in
Vietnam and he thoroughly hated special forces.
Abrams was strictly a conventional army man — a tank and cavalry
man to be exact. It was
General Abram’s opinion that the only elite units in the army were the
armored units. He saw this incident as an excellent excuse to rid the army
of the irregular upstart called special forces. He put out the word to all commands in Vietnam to not have
anything to do with special forces. Shortly after that, the Commander of
the 5th Group, Colonel Robert B. Rheault, and several sergeants
from one of the Projects had been arrested for murder while I was still on
Oki. They were all placed in
the stockade in Saigon while awaiting a General Court-martial and General
Abrams placed a non-airborne, much less special forces, colonel as Commander of the 5th
Group. This was the ultimate insult to any airborne unit, much less
a special forces unit. You
just don’t place Colonels in the stockade while they are awaiting trial.
This was outrageous treatment and it greatly angered the SF
community. Such personnel
would normally be placed under "house arrest" which is basically
being restricted to your quarters except for meals and medical treatment. It seems that the CIA had found
evidence that proved that one of the interpreters that worked for one of
the 5th Group’s Special Projects [Delta, Omega, or Sigma] was a spy for the VC and had caused the death of several SF
on RTs and many more ARVN troops. The
CIA also gave the special forces’ men specific instructions on how to
deal with the spy. According
to latrine rumors, they told them to take him out over the ocean and throw
him out of the plane without benefit of a parachute.
Apparently they decided to use a boat and several pounds of ballast
instead. Somebody turned them
in for killing the spy and that’s how they ended up in the stockade.
No corpse was ever produced and of course the CIA had no knowledge
of the affair. According to
the CIA, sometimes referred to as "Clowns In Action," they had
not passed any such information to Delta.
Eventually the charges were dropped, but Colonel Rheault’s career
was over. He retired shortly
afterwards. He was one of the
best SF officers ever, maybe the best.
He had been with SF since its origin and was greatly admired and
respected within SF. In fact,
the enlisted men in Project Delta, had already planned to rescue them from
the stockade using Delta’s choppers.
On the eve of the raid, Colonel Rheault got word about their plan
and convinced them to abort it. [I
did not learn of the CIA involvement in this incident until much later.] Meanwhile back at the Puzzle Palace in
Arlington, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, jumped aboard the
"get-rid-of-special forces band wagon": He immediately began
down-sizing SF world-wide and assigned a General to be the commander and
"hatchet man" of all US Army Special Warfare units.
This "hatchet man" had the SF enlisted men at Fort Bragg
saluting any other SF enlisted men who was of a higher rank.
If you have never served in the military, you can not possibly
understand how stupid this is. That
was one general that was definitely not playing with a full deck of cards.
I’m not certain about that general’s name, but the name "Flannagan"
comes to mind for some reason. The
"5th Group spy fiasco" was to the conventional army
as fresh blood would be to a shark. The
generals went into a "feeding frenzy" and special forces was the
food. SF enlisted men that were returning to
the states from overseas were being reassigned to non-SF duty by the
droves. Several SF enlisted
men on Oki were reassigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the home of the
main military and federal prison. What
they did there, I did not know and I definitely did not want to find out. "It’s time for Old Val to make
another brilliant career decision," I thought.
Just the thought of leaving my special forces buddies for some
other part of the damn army was more emotional for me than leaving my wife
to go to combat or even divorcing her.
Hell, divorcing my wife was a relief, but leaving my SF buddies was
heart-breaking. Regardless of
where I went in the army, I knew that I would never find another bunch of
guys like them . If you’re
ever in a root-hog-or-die situation, you can’t ask for a better bunch of
guys to be with you. If I
were picking the guys that I wanted around me when I die, regardless of
how I died, I would pick all SF. Not
my wife and kids, not family — SF!
Because they would laugh, tell jokes, and pester the living shit
out of me right up to the end. Also I could count on one of them to sneak me at least one
cold beer before I checked out.
Leaving them behind and not knowing whether I would see them again
hurt like hell. They were family. For me, it was simply a matter of
survival because I just couldn’t see anyway that I could survive another
trip to Vietnam with the new SF. So
far, I had been very lucky and I was at least smart enough to realize it.
Besides that, by the summer of 1965, I had already figured out that
regardless of what our troops did, they would not be allowed to even
accomplish the military's mission much less win that stupid war.
Our mission wasn’t to win, it was to contain the enemy and
preserve the government of South Vietnam.
It made no difference how corrupt that government was or whether it
deserved to be saved or that most South Vietnamese didn’t care whether
it was saved. After checking into one possible duty
station after another with no luck, I just happened to meet a sergeant in
the military intelligence detachment that was attached to the 1st
Group. I don’t recall ever
knowing we had an MI detachment attached to the group.
His name was Smart; I remember his name because the TV show,
"Get Smart" was popular in the states back then and that made
the name stick in my mind. Sergeant
Smart convinced me to volunteer for "special intelligence" duty
with MI [Military Intelligence].
That seemed like it would be a good buffer between SF duty
and civilian life. First, I had to fill out a six-page
personal history statement so MI could use it to investigate my
background. Next, I had to
write a minimum of 500 words about myself.
Then I had to wait while MI spent about a year investigating me.
They wanted to make sure that I didn’t lie, cheat or steal and
that I preferred girls to fat little boys.
[The funny part is, after I passed that test, they would then
spend the next six months teaching me how to lie, cheat, and steal. They would also teach me how to locate and recruit perverts
and hardened criminals to help me accomplish my assigned mission.
That’s the "Intelligence" way.] My new intelligence duties and training
would include typing and I could not type.
So while I was waiting to be approved, I bought a cheap portable
typewriter and a "Touch-Typing Made Simple" book at the PX and
taught myself touch-typing while I was still on Oki.
MI finally approved me for special intelligence training and
assigned me to a 19-week course at the US Army Intelligence School at Fort
Holabird, Maryland. It was
February 1970 when I left Oki and the A Teams for good and I was thirty
three years old. [General Abram's was a Class A, Certified S.O.B. The SF enlisted men never forgot what he did and they never forgave that sorry bastard. Not long afterwards, when he was lying in the hospital hacking and coughing and spiting out pieces of his lung while dying of lung cancer and barely able to breathe, he received a gift in the mail...a box of the most expensive hand rolled cigars money could buy with a card that read, "with the heartfelt wishes of the officers and men of the 5th Special Forces Group." Wish I could have been a fly on the wall of his room when they delivered it. It still brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. You just gotta love guys like that.]
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