“Comanche Six, this is Arizona Three. I’ll be picking you up in the A.M. soon as the ground fog clears with four, plus two, plus two. Gonna put you in on LZ Daisy again. Uh… you seem to have pretty good hunting in that area. Conduct operations at your discretion and see what you can come up with… break. Higher is screaming for intel. Anything you come up with might be significant. You know, maps, documents, rumors amongst the villagers, POWs—anything we can pass to higher. Over.”
“This is Comanche Six. Roger that, but be advised there’s not many villagers vicinity Daisy, over.”
“Understand. Just keep your eyes open and give your kills a good going-over.”
Our extraction from Happy Valley and air assault on LZ Daisy the following morning might well have been a company airmobile test conducted by the 11th Air Assault Division (the forerunner of the First Air Cav) at Fort Benning four years before—unopposed, uneventful, LZ green.
We had decided the night before that One Six and Three Six—Three Six with the command section in tow—would establish separate two-point claymore ambushes on the mountain west of Daisy, while Two Six would work the valley floor. As we prepared to depart the LZ in different directions, I pulled Lieutenant MacCarty aside, giving him an additional task to perform during his sweep of the valley.
“Hey, Mac, while you’re working the floor, I’d like you to find us a new NDP within a klick or so of the LZ. I just don’t feel comfortable setting up here so soon after our stay-behind.”
“Roger that, sir. I agree.”
“Think what we’ll do,” I continued, “is go ahead and set up here this evening, bring in chow and our rucks, and then, ‘bout time it starts to get dark, move to whatever site you select. That means you ought to be thinking ‘bout guides, okay?”
“Okay, and I’ll try to find something fairly close, since it’ll mean carrying our rucks, mermites, eighty-ones and their ammo.
“No problem on the eighty-ones, Mac. We won’t bring ’em in tonight.
“Good idea,” he said, then commented, “hey, sir, you see our dead lieutenant over there?”
“What?” I said a bit frantically, momentarily not knowing to whom he was referring, then quickly realizing he was talking about the luckless NVA lieutenant we had killed in our “helicopterless” false extraction.
Smiling, I recalled a similar incident on the bridge when the Bull, during the course of one of Colonel Lich’s inspections, whispered in my ear, “Sir, we’re in trouble. The old man found a dead soldier in one of our bunkers.” I nearly went into shock! The Bull thought it absolutely hilarious that, having been in the Army ten years, I didn’t yet know that a “dead soldier,” in a soldier’s vernacular, was an empty liquor bottle.
Turning in the direction Mac was pointing, I noted the neatly packed mound of raw earth where someone, most likely his more fortunate comrades, had buried our lieutenant. I wonder what happened to our Cav patch.
Climbing the mountain’s eastern slope via the same trail we had used in setting up our first claymore ambush, we reached the main northsouth juncture within an hour or so of departing the LZ. One Six turned left to the south, while we began following the trail to the north. Within minutes, we were overwhelmed by the stench of rotting flesh—the haunting odor of our first claymore victims.
“Whew! They sure did ripen, didn’t they?” Anderson said, covering his nose with the sweat towel that RTOS, and many of the rest of us, wore about our necks like scarves.
“Yeah, isn’t it great, Andy!” Blair responded, gleefully. “Just another unique but integral part of our daily nature walks through this tropical paradise. But one of many memorable ingredients that will make up your ‘Vietnam experience’ as the years unfold. Savor it, my friend. For though many were called, few were.”
“Okay, let’s hold it down and keep moving,” I said. Then, turning to Blair and winking, I added, “And you better watch it, Blair; your college is showing again.”
My battalion RTO was one of those rare animals who had gone to college and still got drafted, and still ended up in the infantry, in the Nam.
After moving thirty minutes or so, our trail intersected with yet another well-traveled trail running generally southwest toward the mountain’s crest. We climbed upward astride this new route for perhaps another half hour before Lieutenant Halloway, finally, thankfully, found what he felt to be a good ambush site. He sent his claymore hit teams up and down the trail, and then we waited.
We waited and munched on charlie rats and napped, waited and whispered of or daydreamed about home, women, the Army, the war, families, and R&R. Combat, at least combat in the Nam, is mostly waiting, I thought to myself. Waiting in ambush, waiting for mail, for chow, for dawn, for insertion or extraction helicopters, for R&R—and most of all, waiting for that magic end-of-tour date when we’d put Vietnam and all the waiting behind us.
My thoughts were interrupted by a distant but loud explosion, followed immediately by the rhythmic rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of an M-60 machine gun.
“One Six got ’em!” Blair whispered, gleaming.
Anderson, sitting on my right, quietly asked, “Want me to give em a call, sir?”
“No, not yet,” I responded. “They’re busy. Let ’em sort it out.”
And again, I waited. Two minutes, three minutes, five minutes.
Anxious, then annoyed, and finally a little angry. Yeah, waiting really is the name of the game. But goddamn it, Norwalk should give me some indication of what’s happened.
We had talked of this before, and it was a problem at every level of command, because the Nam was a different kind of war. In previous wars, lines were drawn with platoons forward of companies, companies forward of battalions, and battalions forward of regiments. And commanders at each intervening level would anxiously, but usually tolerantly, await the results of any ongoing engagement, influencing its outcome with the resources they could bring to bear but relying on their subordinates to fight the battle at hand. In Vietnam, in contrast, a platoon leader frequently had every commander in the world directly over top of him in his C&C ship within moments of a single round having been fired in anger. From that vantage point, colonels and general officers too often tried to become squad leaders. Thankfully, that was rarely the case in the Cav. General Tolson, the division’s commander, believed firmly in letting his subordinates fight their own battles while ensuring that they had the entire division and all its resources behind them. Colonel Lich, a decorated veteran of our little Korean ado, who knew what it was like to fight the fight on the ground, adhered to the same philosophy.
However, commanders at all levels had one thing in common: when their soldiers got themselves into a fight, they wanted to know what was going on as soon as possible. Or as Colonel Lich had told me on the bridge,
“If you get into something, tell me. I can’t help you or prepare others to help you if you don’t. And don’t wait until you can consolidate an Infantry School-formatted situation report. Just give me what you got at the time and ‘more to follow.’” Charlie Company’s platoon leaders had been told the same.
“Six, this is One Six,” Norwalk said, his voice emanating from Anderson’s handset. “At one four two five hours local, engaged NVA at point of origin right two eight, up zero six. Three, say again three, NVA killed in action. One AK-47 and two SKS assault rifles captured in action. No friendly casualties. How copy?”
Good report. Clear, concise, and complete. Provides the who, what, where, when, and results. And the results were good, the claymore having proved once again to be the weapon of choice. Three dead, three weapons taken, none of us hurt. Good show! Bill Norwalk is a solid officer. Hell, they all are.