“Goddamn!”
“My man, this here is a fucking mess!”
“Sweet mother of God, that claymore’s bad!”
In unison, everyone uttered some comment of surprise, shock, or incredulity regarding the two very dead men at our feet.
Everyone except the hit man, a seventeen-or eighteen-year-old Pfc.
Apparently in shock, he just stood staring fixedly at the mess he had created. On activating the claymore’s electrical detonator, he had instantly solved our problem of wounded runaways—you cannot run when you have no legs.
Our hit man had obviously waited until the last possible moment before detonating the mine. The remains of the two enemy soldiers were less than ten feet from the base of the tree on which the claymore had been placed, a range at which the seven hundred steel pellets were concentrated horizontally in a pattern little greater than the width of the human body. This force had struck the lead man at midwaist, literally cutting him in half. Since the two men had been walking in file up a slight incline when hit, the mine’s force had slammed into the second man at a greater height, virtually decapitating him. It was not a pretty sight. Moving them off the trail, piece by piece, was like working with rag dolls inasmuch as the hundreds of steel pellets had essentially pulverized their bodies.
After cleaning up our mess, we moved the north killing position thirty or forty meters farther up the trail, leaving the south position in place. We waited, in vain, for another couple of hours, hoping that Charlie might once more fall victim to our devastating claymore ambush.
We used this ambush technique, with great success, on many occasions.
One might view this method of killing as excessively cruel or ugly, but there are several factors to consider: dead is dead, and it makes little difference to the deceased whether his demise is caused by a machine-gun bullet, napalm, or a claymore mine. Moreover, the ambush is one of war’s oldest tactics and in Vietnam was executed far more frequently by the enemy than by U.S. or South Vietnamese forces. Thirdly, the North Vietnamese soldiers who perished in our December ‘67 and January ‘68 claymore ambushes were then in the process of staging for their infamous Tet offensive, an operation in which the enemy committed monumental atrocities against a defenseless civilian populace, at times murdering entire families. Finally, the nature of war is excessively cruel and ugly.
Returning to our NDP later in the afternoon, we learned that Three Six, although discovering many enemy footprints, was still scoreless after completing its long trek on the valley’s floor. Because of this, and because of the flak they were catching from the rest of the company for being the only line platoon without a kill to its credit, Three Six’s soldiers were anxious to work the mountain the next day. But so were One Six and Two Six—success does indeed breed confidence.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately as things turned out, the operation was not to be. While waiting for the evening log bird, we received a warning order from battalion telling us to prepare for an airmobile extraction at 0900 hours the following morning to conduct an air assault approximately twelve klicks north of our present location.
The warning order was not greeted with wild fervor by the men of Charlie Company.
“Goddamn, isn’t that just like battalion. First time we’re in a locale where we’re getting good kills, and they move us,” MacCarty commented.
“Yeah, it’s that fucking S-2. He keeps his head up his ass,” someone else added, while others expressed themselves in a similar vein.
I assumed that battalion had a good reason for moving us, and I told Sergeant Sullivan, our “air-movement officer,” to organize the company for an airmobile extraction. Then I had an idea!
Turning to my assembled platoon leaders, I said, “Hey, we know Charlie’s around here, probably watching us right now. Seems to me a false extraction might be in order.” (In essence, a false extraction was a deceptive ploy in which only a portion of the unit actually got on the helicopters. Those remaining hid in ambush around the pickup zone, waiting for Charlie, who, seeing the helicopters take off, might very well visit the supposedly vacant pickup zone to scavenge anything usable or of an intelligence interest.)
The others looked at me for a few moments in uneasy silence before MacCarty and Bull Sullivan tactfully explained that such an operation wouldn’t work. “Naw… sir, false extractions worked back in ’65, and maybe early ’66, when the Cav first got over here. Don’t work now ‘cause it’s an old trick and Chuck knows all our old tricks,” MacCarty commented.
“Yeah, LT’s right, sir. Charlie’s always watching for a false extraction, and counting. If the numbers don’t add up when we get on the helicopters, he ain’t gonna go near our LZ,” Sergeant Sullivan added.
Made sense to me.
Putting the idea aside, we talked briefly about the next day’s air assault and subsequent search-and-destroy mission in our newly assigned operational area astride Binh Dinh’s Route 506. At the conclusion of this brief planning session, Bull Sullivan issued a clear, concise, and very condensed air-movement order, and I was confident the liftoff would be flawless. At this point, having completed company business, the conversation drifted to R&R and what the married men were going to inflict upon their wives when they met in Honolulu—“and the second thing I’m gonna do is kiss her and say, ‘Hello’”—and what our single soldiers were going to do to every sweet young thing they could lay their hands on in Bangkok, Sydney, Manila, or wherever. In the midst of these mutually shared fantasies, Blair received a change to the next day’s mission.
“Sir, helicopters’ve been scratched. Battalion says rest of the order stands; we walk in.” Mutually shared fantasies quickly turned to mutually shared groans.
Radioing battalion, I spoke with Major Byson, who confirmed that we had indeed lost our birds. He still wanted us to conduct the operation, pointing out that our new AO was less than twelve kilometers’ walking distance in fairly open terrain and therefore shouldn’t pose any great problem. He was right. And Slim Brightly had an idea.
“Now is the time to try a false extraction, sir,” he blurted out.
Lieutenant MacCarty, as usual, was the first to speak, “Slim, you can’t do a false extract without helicopters. See, you gotta have a platform upon which to be extracted ‘fore you can be falsly extracted! I mean, honestly, I’ve never heard it worked any other way.”
“No, Mac, and maybe Charlie hasn’t either,” Brightly replied. “I mean, like you say, he’s probably looking for false extracts with helicopters.
Maybe, just maybe, he’s not expecting a stay-behind if we move out of here on foot!”
MacCarty, Sullivan, and the other platoon leaders stood in silence for a moment, obviously mulling over the feasibility of such a proposal.
Then they all started talking at once.
“Yeah, might work. Must’ve been tried before, but not on my watch.”
“False extraction without helicopters! Shit, let’s do it.”
“Can’t hurt to try it, might get lucky.”
“Sure, couple squads could pull it off. Set up an L-shaped ambush from there to there. Cover the whole fucking NDP.”
“Right, and put a couple claymores over there, covering the open end of your L.”
Ideas, good ideas, were coming faster than we could assimilate them.
Within a very few minutes, however, we had jointly developed our basic plan.
As the Bull had suggested, two of our rifle squads would position themselves in an L-shaped ambush along the densely vegetated eastern and southern sides of the NDP, thirty to forty meters outside its perimeter.
Machine-gun teams would anchor each of the ambush’s flanks, while claymore mines covered the site’s killing zone and dead space on the NDP’s western side, where the ground fell sharply into a rice paddy. The ambush force, manned by Two Six, would be in position before dawn, remaining there until Charlie took the bait or until 1000 hours.