And once again he paused, staring at the distant horizon as if hypnotized by the sun’s setting over the Laotian mountains to the west of us.
Sonofabitch! I thought to myself. Maybe he wasn’t kidding. Maybe this hilltop does play on a man’s mind.
“So,” he said abruptly, as if coming out of a trance. “Uh… let’s see, I’ve briefed you on your mission and the troops you have available to accomplish your mission. Now, let’s talk of logistics and how we resupply those troops as they go about failing to accomplish their impossible mission. See, the concept was to build an airstrip and then airland everything you needed to keep the camp going. You know, a little Dien Bien Phu. So Danang airdropped a bulldozer and road grader in and built us an airstrip.” He gestured to our front at the dirt runway that ran the length of the camp from east to west.
“Know how many planes we’ve had land on it, Lieutenant?”
“No,” I replied, shaking my head.
“One! Know how many planes have taken off from it?”
“One?”
“Nope, none!” he answered, directing my attention to a heavily sandbagged bunker, protruding from one end of which was the nose section of a two-engine CV-2B Caribou. Above the aircraft’s windshield, affixed to the sandbagged roof covering the wingless, tailless fuselage, was a neatly painted sign: HAMMOND HOUSE Presented to the United States of America by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia. “See, Lieutenant, only trouble with our airstrip is it ain’t very long, and, since they tried to cut it out of the top of the hill here, it’s eight or ten feet lower on each end than it is in the middle. Air Force came out, surveyed it, and said, ‘Hell no, we ain’t gonna land no fixed-wing on it.” Which, when you think of it, I guess is understandable. Our pilots are a bit leery of landing fixed-wing aircraft on runways with a fucking hill in the middle of ’em!”
Then, smiling a bit peculiarly, he said, “Not so with the Aussies. Hell, no! If you don’t know it yet, Lieutenant—and you don’t—you’ll learn it very damn soon ‘cause you got two of ’em attached to your team here. Anything an American can’t do, an Australian can. And anything we can do, they can do better. Uh… think, they’ve never forgiven us for saving their cookies in World War II.”
He paused and then, a bit sheepishly, apologetically said, “Hell, shouldn’t talk like that. Both our Aussies are with the Special Air Service, super soldiers and likable people, kind of folk you like to have around you in a place like this. Like I say, I’ve just been out here too fucking long.”
I nodded understandingly.
“Anyway,” he continued, “the Australians have an aviation contingent flying out of Danang. So they come out here after the Air Force survey and say, ‘Sure, mate, we can put a Caribou in here in a flash. Nothing to it.” Well, couple days later, we’re all sitting out here waiting for the first plane to land at ARO. And ‘course our two Aussies ain’t missing this opportunity to rub our noses in the dirt a little.”
He started laughing. “Damn, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Plane comes in from the east, circles the camp a couple times, then approaches the strip from the west. And the ‘Kipper’—he’s one of your attached Aussies—says ‘Now you Yanks gonna see a bit of flying skill.’
And we did. Plane hits perfectly, looks like it’s slowing, but then goes over that hill in the middle of the runway, and, shit, all of a sudden it’s airborne again! Comes back down on the far side, bounces a couple times, and then just keeps on going… off the end of the strip, through the wire, and into the fucking jungle, shedding pieces of itself ‘long the way. Didn’t phase the ‘Kip’ at all! Plane finally comes to a stop, and he says, ‘What say, mates? You ever saw a Yank what could land a plane and clear fields of fire at the same time?’” We both laughed, he in recalling the incident, and I in envisioning it.
“Pilot’s name was Hammond,” he said, wiping at his eyes. “He and the crew walked away from their Caribou laughing. Said they wanted to do their takeoff in a helicopter. So now it’s our alternate command post, leastways the fuselage is. Used the wings and tail sections for revetment.
“Well, sir,” he said soberly, “that about wraps up my orientation of your new home for the next year. I’m sure my boss is giving your boss a similar pitch, ‘though I’ll bet it’s not quite so… uh… open minded. Now you’ll probably want to be getting with our XO so as to figure up a fair price for the team rations we have on hand.”
He strolled off toward the team house, undoubtedly having more important tasks to perform than explaining the pitfalls of ARO to a “butter-bar” lieutenant. I remained atop the bunker, spending a few additional minutes in the fading light, assessing our new home.
ARO sat atop an elongated, east-west ridge with its useless airstrip running the length of it. Actually, it was more three camps than one, with separate fortified positions at each end and midway along the airstrip on its northern side. A zigzag trench network (reminiscent of World War I trench systems), intermittently strongpointed with covered fighting positions and crew-served weapons bunkers, surrounded each of the three encampments. Forward, or on the enemy side, of these entrenchments, the camp’s occupants had emplaced wire barriers composed of alternating runs of triple concertina, double-apron fence, and “tanglefoot,” which, without going into a lengthy explanation, were merely three different techniques of employing barbed wire. On the enemy’s side of the wire, at a distance of fifty meters or so, the jungle encircled the entire hilltop.
One of ARO’s three strike-force companies, the best of the three according to Grimshaw, occupied the fortified position on the eastern end of the airstrip; the other two were encamped on the western end. Each of these companies was composed of eighty to a hundred “strikers” armed with light-infantry weapons of World War II vintage. Although the mainstay of this arsenal was the .30caliber M-1 carbine, some strikers were armed with the M3A1 “grease” or M1A1 Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun, the .30caliber M1918A2 Browning automatic rifle, or, in rare cases, the M-1 rifle. Their crew serves consisted of the.30caliber M1919A6 machine gun, the 60-mm mortar, and the 57-mm recoilless rifle.
Our team and a Nung force of perhaps twenty-five men resided in the camp’s center fortification, about midway between the two strike force contingents. This position was dominated at its highest point by an above/belowground communications bunker, on top of which was a sandbagged observation post. From this vantage point, I could survey the entire hilltop, noting as I did so the other facilities composing our part of ARO. These included a combination cookshack and team house—a clapboard, tin-roofed structure in which the team ate and spent most of its leisure time; a small underground dispensary, which our senior medic, Sergeant Morgan, would soon relocate to the more spacious, dryer, and less rat-infested Hammond house; our sleeping, fighting bunkers, located at various points on the trench network; two 81-mm mortar pits and adjacent ammunition bunkers; and, on the northern side of the hill and lower on its crest, the Nung encampment from which the Nung force would rush to our aid should the Viet Cong attack ARO.
The Nung was a mercenary, a holdover from an earlier era in which the CIA, then controlling Special Forces operations in Vietnam, had hired these clansmen to protect U.S. team members from the Viet Cong or from their own strike force if it should turn upon them. He was a Vietnamese nationalist of Chinese origin who considered himself only Chinese, and understandably so inasmuch as he spoke Chinese, was of pure Chinese genesis, and, like the Montagnard, passionately hated the ethnic Vietnamese.