“Called trains, and they said they’d already planned to get us charlie rats and water at first light, just waiting for our head count… uh… I forgot to send it in, what with everything else going on.”
He paused momentarily, then added, “Said they’re gonna do everything possible to get us a hot breakfast out too—you know, if they can figure a way to backhaul the mermites.”
We looked at each other in silence a moment and then started laughing.
“You know, sir,” he said, smiling shyly, “you and me, we’re lucky as hell to be in the Fifth Cav! ‘Cause those other outfits, well I can tell you right now, their philosophy is, ‘Fuck the troops; just feed ’em beans and mark ’em for duty.” Right, Six?”
“Right, Top.”
“Comanche, this is Arizona Six. Give me some smoke on your right flank, okay? Over.” It was Colonel Lich, orbiting above us in his C&C.
“This is Comanche Six. Roger, wait,” I replied, then told Lieutenant MacCarty, via the company net, to pop smoke.
In a matter of seconds, Colonel Lich was back on the air. “This is Six.
Okay, I’ve got your yellow smoke. Now listen up; you’re moving too far ahead of Lean Apache. They’ve got something in some caves along the river slowing them down. I don’t want the two of you shooting each other, so ease it up a bit till I give you word to throttle forward again. Over.”
“This is Comanche Six. Wilco.”
It had been an uncomfortable and, for the most part, sleepless night.
Although Vietnam’s days can be sweltering throughout the year, its January nights are often quite cool. And trying to sleep wrapped in only a thin poncho, lying in the middle of a rice paddy, with artillery rounds exploding half a mile away in a village that may be occupied by a battalion of armed enemy who will probably have an opportunity to shoot you when you attack them in the morning—well, all in all, these conditions simply aren’t conducive to a good night’s sleep. On the bright side, however, it didn’t rain.
But things looked better as dawn broke in the east, bringing in its wake a clear sunny morning devoid of fog. Things looked better still when the log bird arrived a short time later with C&D and our charlie rats—and 7.62-mm linked ammunition for One Six. Why the ammo? I asked myself. To the best of my knowledge we haven’t fired a round since last being resupplied a couple nights ago.
I asked the Bull about it, and he said he and Lieutenant Norwalk had jointly decided that since we were facing what might be an enemy battalion, it seemed neither illogical nor imprudent for the company’s reserve to carry along a little extra machine-gun ammo.
Well, I couldn’t argue with that.
“Besides, Six,” he added, a wily look in his eyes, “it was good insurance. Mean, if trains sent us out the bullets, they’d have little damn excuse for not putting some beans on the same bird, now, would they?”
And I couldn’t argue with that either.
Shortly after the log bird’s departure, we began moving toward the village. We were at its outskirts when Colonel Lich slowed us down so as to allow Alpha Company time to investigate their caves. So far the exercise had been an uneventful walk in the weeds.
“Lean Apache is sending to the old man, sir. You want to listen in?” Blair said, extending his handset.
Nodding my head, I took his extended handset and monitored Alpha Company’s transmission to Colonel Lich.
“Roger, got caves or shelters dug in the side of the riverbank. Must be most of the ville’s population in ’em. They’re reluctant to come out, which I guess is understandable under the circumstances. Over.”
“This is Six. Any enemy intermingled with them?”
“This is Apache Six. Not sure, but I would guess not.”
“Okay, Apache, see if you can talk any of ’em out. If not, leave ’em alone, let’s get on with the op. Comanche’s ready to enter the village now… break. You got a Kit Carson with you? Over.”
“This is Apache Six. Affirmative.”
“This is Six. Well, put him on those villagers and see what he can find out… uh… then get back to me. Out.”
A “Kit Carson” was a VC or NVA defector who usually spoke some broken English. In talking to the villagers, he would try to find out if the enemy was still in their midst while concurrently soliciting information on the unit’s designation and order of battle, the number of casualties it might have suffered, how it was armed, whether morale was good or bad, and so on.
We entered Binh Loc 4 around 1000 hours; it was an anticlimactic event.
As the Bull had predicted, Charlie was gone before dawn.
However, he had left many a dead comrade behind when he departed—red leg and the fast movers had done their jobs well. Surprisingly, and happily, for it was something that worried many of us the night before, there were few civilian casualties. That was perhaps not so surprising.
Having obviously been through all of this before, the villagers had their caves and bunkers dug deep and knew how to get to them in a hurry.
One simply doesn’t survive in places like Binh Loc 4 without knowing such things.
So we counted enemy kills reaped by death from the heavens instead of at our own hands. It was not a happy task—many of the bodies were horribly mutilated by the artillery and air strikes. Most, perhaps all, had died the night before and now, rigor mortis having set in, lay in the grotesque, distorted positions of those who suffer death suddenly and violently. They lay on their backs with arms extended, as if reaching for something, someone. They lay on their sides, glazed eyes open, stiffened in a fetal position. One clutched his weapon, an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launcher, as if his punishment would indeed be severe if he surrendered it, even in death. But surrender it he did, as did several others who had evidently been overlooked by their surviving comrades as they departed the village, evading us in the darkness of the night before.
After spending the rest of the morning and most of the early afternoon in these joyless duties, we departed Binh Loc 4 and later established an NDP to the north of it in the same general area ARVN had previously occupied.
Our log birds flew early, bringing with them our rucks (containing those comforting poncho liners), steaks and mashed potatoes, and one can of beer and one of coke per company head count. Such a small offering, as I think back on it, but that evening, north of Binh Loc 4, it was like Christmas. You could actually feel the company’s morale soar.
Sharing a beer with me, the Bull summed it up. “Like I say, Six, we’re lucky as hell to be in the Fifth Cav, ‘cause those other outfits’ attitude, most likely as not, is ‘fuck the troops; just feed ’em beans.”
6. LZ Daisy and Points Beyond: January 1968
For the next week or so, we worked the area northwest of Binh Loc 4, discovering nary a trace of the elusive NVA battalion. Of course the question that those in Saigon, Honolulu, and Washington would have liked answered was not where the remnants of a single and now combat-ineffective battalion were, but why these forces were massing just days before Tet, the Chinese lunar new year. Where were they coming from, and why were they assembling in the populated coastal and piedmont areas, when the real threat was supposedly poised against the country’s hinterland, primarily against a remote Marine Corps outpost and its six thousand occupants at a place called Khe Sanh? In a matter of days, the questions would be answered. In Saigon, and throughout much of Vietnam, the answers would be punctuated in blood. And within a month, we would win the war’s greatest battle—and the war would be lost.
But tonight we settled into our NDP in the mountains surrounding Happy Valley. Major Byson radioed us a very informal warning order for the following day’s operation.