RIGHT 12....DROP 2
Mid-July 1970 when FSB Ripcord was under siege, I monitored an exchange between our FAC (Bilk 43) and the CO of B/2-319 Arty (our 105mm direct support battery on the base). The FAC had just expended a set of fast-movers on a .51 cal position in a cave down low on a small ridge, with no apparent effect, since green tracers kept popping past the FAC's cockpit. In frustration, he called the TOC and asked if there was any way to shoot the target with a 105. Quicker'n you can say "this ol' Army is alllright" the battery CO had a 105 moved to the log pad, propped up the trails on ammo boxes, and pointed the snout down the mountain side toward the offending North Vietnamese machine gunners. He fired a round for the FAC to adjust--shot, out--and here is the abridged version of what happened.
FAC: That's good, that's good. Move it right about 100 yards and down about 50.
The battery CO didn't bat an eye that the FAC didn't know the correct Army terminology for adjusting fire. A few seconds later another 105 round slammed into the jungle. Shot, out.
FAC: That's close, really close. Adjust right 25 yards and drop 10 yards.
Hell, the closest change the arty make on adjustments is 25 meters x 25 meters. The CO didn't hesitate, and another 105 round burst near the enemy position. Shot, out.
FAC: [Very excited voice now.] We're really close. Right 12 feet and drop 2 feet.
Arty CO: Roger, wait ... shot, out.
FAC: [Jumping up and down in his cockpit.] You got 'em! Right into the mouth of the cave. Nothing but smoke and flame coming out. You got 'em!
Now, how the heck can you put an adjustment of right 12 feet, drop 2 feet on a 105 howitzer propped up on ammo boxes, and which isn't even surveyed in? Sometime later, after the siege ended and my redleg friend recovered from wounds and returned to duty, I met him in the rear during a standdown. I asked him the question.
His reply: "Just piss down the bore and lean against the tube."
That's good enough for me.
We ain't gonna win .. what I learned from the troops ..
On July 30, 1970, First Sergeant John Ross and I reviewed what could only be described as the "new Alpha Company." Just nine veterans of Ripcord were fit for field duty, and 30 new guys, "cherries," peopled the ranks. "I wonder who's more nervous, Top," I said to John Ross, "me, for all the new men we have, or them for knowing what the company has just been through?"
We chuckled at the thought, then Ross turned serious, "Just stay tight," he told me. "You and your old-timers have your work cut out for you."
And that's how we went back into combat: A 39-man company, with squad-sized platoons and a command post of seven. By mid-August our strength would grow to close to 100 men, from returning wounded and new replacements, and I later added a squad-sized 4th Platoon to perform reconnaissance missions for the company.
Although the NVA didn't challenge us in any great strength, there was still plenty of action. Efforts by the Viet Cong to supply NVA forces deep in the jungle from the fertile lowlands continued, and interdicting rice-carrying parties remained an important mission. Too, the regular North Vietnamese often sent platoons and companies, to work in smaller groups, to disrupt our activity, provide security for rice-carriers, and maintain or build bunker facilities for unspecified future operations; and the ubiquitous trail watcher remained a fixture.
I groomed my new charges carefully, and employed the company aggressively. No one in the battalion worked harder to ensure a combat edge, so necessary to survival--to winning every little engagement against our foe. But if I desired pay-back for the hurt of Ripcord, it came only piecemeal, a little bit at a time.
Obsessed with the dual and seemingly contradictory missions of taking care of my men and killing the enemy, I planned operations that were designed to cause maximum confusion and disruption to the North Vietnamese. We disdained typical "ridge running" tactics, forewent regular resupply (we carried extra rations--rice, like our foe--and extra munitions) and pursued the enemy on "hunting trips," in valleys and along streams. The easy, less secure way was rejected, the tougher the hump, the less likely the enemy would be aware of our presence. Ruse and deception became the rule.
The war, my war, became increasingly personal. As long as I could command Alpha Company, every hour of every day would be spent trying to kill and damage the bad guys. "We were still winning," I thought, "Vietnamization could work."
The thought that America might lose the war did not exist for me, but the corollary thought, that America did not want to win the war, was made graphically clear one day in September.
It was resupply day. We were securing a perimeter by an LZ deep in the jungle on some nameless ridge. Four of my men approached, all hardened Ripcord jungle fighters. They were short-timers, tours almost over, they would leave with the log bird, due momentarily. They had come to pay their respects, and say "good bye."
"Currahee, sir," they said quietly, "Currahee, Charlie Oscar."
"Currahee, men," I said back.
There was a moment of awkward silence, of downward-looking at jungle-booted feet, then the self-appointed spokesman for the group, Sergeant Buster Harrison spoke. "It's been good having you for a captain, Charlie Oscar," Harrison said, "We're real proud to have been with you and Alpha."
The obligatory comport out of the way, Harrison continued, "Sir," he said formally, his voice determined, "if we thought we were going to win this mutherfucker, we'd stay."
He paused, gathered his words, and said, "If you told us we were going to combat assault into Hanoi tomorrow, we'd volunteer to be on the first bird in the lift."
He paused again and looked me square in the eyes ("We really mean this, captain," he was telling me, "This is from our hearts.") Then, he finished: "We ain't gonna' win, so we're goin' home."
And when the resupply chopper came, they got on it and left.
"These are the American boys," I thought, "who would have won this war for their country and for the South Vietnamese allies they so valiantly supported. Savvy, battle-hardened troops, whose tour was over and who were now going home to friends and family, these men would have stayed, and fought and died if America had told them they were going to win, and had let them do it."
The man who carried a machine gun with 3d Platoon, who had helped avenge Doc Draper's death, said it all: "If we thought we were going to win ... we'd stay."
These are the kind of men America sent to Vietnam, indeed, has sent to all its wars. Men like those of Alpha Company, 2d Battalion, 506th Infantry, were men who embodied America's spirit of freedom, who embraced the soldier's precept of self-sacrifice, who left Vietnam's bloody killing fields unbowed and unbroken, who would have stayed in order to win.
General Sid Berry wrote to me years later that "it is unworthy of a country to send soldiers to a war they may not win." He's right.
It Don't Mean Nothin', It Don't Mean a Thing
We all cope in some way, then and now. Trav
Machine Gunner
The trail meandered along the side of a ridge to a stream below. He couldn't see it, but he knew it was there. Sam was to his left, a thump gunner. "What the hell good is a grenade launcher going to do in this thick stuff," he wondered? But they both had claymores to their front along the trail. That would be enough, if they did it correctly.
To his right was the new guy, Tiny they called him because he stood over six feet. On the far right was Sarge. There were just four of them, lying flat in the dense brush, waiting.
He fingered the cover on the feed mechanism to his M-60 machine gun. He had a teaser belt of 30 rounds fed into the gun with a round locked into the chamber. It, too, would be enough, unless he screwed up. "How long we gotta be here," he thought to himself?
"Until they come," a Little Voice flickered in the back of his mind. "Until they come."
Besides, where else was he going to go? Back to the World? What a joke. "Ain't going nowhere but here," he thought, "and it don't mean a thing. Just doin' my time."
High above the sun beat down on the triple canopy rain forest, turning the jungle into a steam cooker. What light that filtered through the leaves gave the terrain an eerie, primeval feeling. A rivulet of sweat ran down his nose and plopped onto the "sixty."
He thought about what they were supposed to do. Last evening when they discovered the trail, it had been recently used. Quietly, the captain had sent out two small ambushes to catch who ever else might come along. The other ambush was off to the left a hundred meters or so. If the enemy came from the left, that ambush would get them, if the enemy came from the right, it was their show. The rest of the company was behind them a few hundred meters, dug in on a small knoll. He felt very alone for a moment, then pushed the thought aside.
"Waiting is the hard part," he thought. There was no rush of adrenaline, nothing to keep his body tense, his mind alert, just his self-discipline. The heavy stillness of the air and the sound of insects buzzing about made him drowsy. He tried to shake it off, tried to focus on the wall of green directly to his front.
"The Old Man will call it off at noon if we don't get any action," he thought. He looked at his watch. The hands pointed to 1030 hours. "Nobody's gonna come by here," he argued to himself, "they already used the trail, yesterday. Ain't no enemy gonna be stupid enough to use it again so soon." Still, he kept focused on the green tangle to his front.
Suddenly, he felt a presence to his front. Something was out there, moving ever so cautiously. Something dangerous. The hairs on the nape of his neck raised, sending a chill through his body. His gut tightened. Now his mind was racing, thinking, remembering, flushing all thoughts away except for those things he would have to do in the next few moments.
Then he saw it. A dull flash of khaki blending in with the green foliage. "It's them," his mind screamed, "they're directly in front of me."
"Patience," his Little Voice said, "Sarge will initiate contact."
The enemy presence multiplied. Now there were two of them, now four. Their point team poking into the dense underbrush along the trail, suspicious, looking, searching. Warily they continued, AK-47s at the ready. His whole body tensed, "It's gotta be now," he thought, "C'mon Sarge, do it!"
At the far right of the kill zone, Sarge squeezed the clacker to his claymore. It erupted with a terrifying blast. Instantly the other three members of the team squeezed their clackers. The rippling explosions swept along the trail, spewing thousands of double-ought steel pellets ankle to waist high across the trail, shredding leaves and brush and human flesh and bone.
Before the reverberation of the explosions had time to die down he found himself clawing his way forward, stepping into the kill zone, firing the "sixty" at human shapes still dazed and standing. Short, six round bursts coughed out of the barrel of the machine gun. He heard the clinking sound of expended casings and ammo links falling to the ground. More firing from his left and right. Sam had buckshot in his thump gun. "Crazy," he said to himself as he fired, "I didn't think of that."
Sarge was hollering now, "Secure the trail! Secure the trail." Tiny lumbered to the right, sighing his M-16 down the trail, looking for more enemy. Sam was doing the same on the left. "Gunner," Sarge yelled, "cover me while I check the bodies." It seemed surreal.
He looked up and down the kill zone. There were six dead North Vietnamese soldiers. Three had weapons, three had packs full of supplies. They were all dead. Some of the bodies had legs missing. All were shot through with bullets from head to toe. One's torso had been ripped in half. "I did that," he thought, "I did that with the gun."
Sarge was on the radio now, calling the Old Man, giving a SITREP. Shortly, the Old Man and the rest of their platoon would come to join them. He looked back at the bodies in the kill zone. He breathed heavily, the adrenaline rush subsiding now. "That was quick," he thought, "very quick."
"Good job, Gunner," Sarge was saying, smiling. "Good job. We did a damn-damn on 'em."
He looked at Sarge, thought, "This was plain murder, pure and simple."
"Yeah," Little Voice said, "And they would have done the same to us."
Aloud he said to Sarge, "Yeah, the Old Man's dick is gonna get hard when he sees this."
He sat down, then, next to one of the men he had helped to kill. He fingered the feed tray cover on the M-60, popped it open and inserted a new teaser belt of ammo, then slammed the cover shut. He looked away into the jungle, tears welling up in his eyes, mingling with the salt-taste of his sweat. Drops fell from his face and landed on his machine gun.
"Why," his mind screamed at him, "why does it have to be like this? These men had families! They had a home! They had people who loved them! Why?"
"Easy, man," Little Voice whispered in the back of his head, "It don't mean nothin'. It don't mean a thing."
