"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 3 |
