By mid-December only three of the original team remained at Ha Thanh—Jock Wamer, Ken Luden, and me. Christmas came and went and with it Sergeant Luden. Jock and I spent New Year’s Eve at the campsite, and then he departed. Three days later, on the next helicopter out, I left the Son Ha Valley, never to see it or its people again. But I think of them now and then—and dream of them often.
15. Fort Benning, Georgia: February 1966
I spent the next eighteen months as an instructor in platoon and company tactics at the U.S. Aray’s Infantry School—watching our Army turn itself inside out. Overnight, the Army had turned its entire focus on Southeast Asia. Suddenly, no Army training post was complete without its media-oriented “Vietnam village.” Doctrine was revised, stressing its adaptability to an insurgency. Training curriculum was changed, deemphasizing subject matter the Army had held so near and dear since 1945—how to fight on the plains of Europe.
We in the school’s company operations department were charged with preparing young leaders, teaching them what cannot be taught, then sending them on their merry way and starting over again with the next class. It was not a thankless task, but a trying one of six-and seven-day weeks, of sixteen-and eighteen-hour days. Before very long, it got old.
One cold, sleety night on CP-77—a seventy-two-hour counter-guerrilla field exercise we’d walk different officer candidates through once, and more often, twice a week—one of my fellow instructors, the two of us having recently been promoted to captain, said, “Called branch today. Asked them to send me back to the Nam.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why? ‘Cause way I figure it, a man has to put in hours like this, he might as well put ’em in where it’s warm and where he can kill someone a little bit.”
Made sense to me. I had “yellow fever.” And American infantrymen were in the fray now. Perhaps I could lead a company of them, perhaps a company in the First Air Cavalry. Hell, they were kicking Charlie’s ass up one side and down the other.
The next day, I called infantry branch.
16. The Cav Prelude to a Truce: 29 January 1968
It was a bright, sunny Monday, like most January days on the Bong Son plain. For Charlie Company, it was another day of business as usual the last day in the Year of the Goat to make a hit in the high country.
One Six and Three Six, headquarters section accompanying Three Six, sallied upward to establish their claymore ambushes on a mountain that reeked of the dead. Two Six, with a new lieutenant at its helm, worked the valley floor. Four Six, as was often the case, if for no other reason than to ensure that we had a secure LZ at our disposal, remained at last night’s NDP, napping the day away.
Lieutenant Halloway, wisely, chose to access the mountain’s main northsouth trail at a point farther north than usual so as to put the remains of most of Charlie Company’s previous victims to the south of us. He felt this was both tactically sound and gastronomically desirable, as it was nearly lunchtime. A short while later, we found an ideal ambush site, one in which the platoon could straddle a curve in the trail without being observed from the enemy side of either the north or south hit teams’ positions—and one in which the stench was at least bearable. Still, when the wind occasionally shifted, we got a healthy whiff of our more recent kills.
Lunch in the Nam, in the Cav, was as often as not ignored. We were authorized two meals of C rations per man per day, but with C&D in the morning and a hot A or B ration in the evening, most of us ate only portions of a meal during the day—whenever the mood struck us and we found ourselves in a posture to eat. “Sweet” Willie Dubray, however, was a three-meals-a-day man.
As we sat in wait midway between the two hit teams, Bob Halloway, Slim Brightly, and I idly talking of unimportant things, I casually watched Dubray—who was filling in for Anderson as my company RTO on this occasion—prepare his noonday fare. He first opened a couple of cans of crackers and then, using a Stateside “church key” can opener, poked several holes in the sides of the cans. In each of these makeshift stoves he placed a heat tablet and lit it, then he set a can of beans and wieners atop one and a can of porksausage patties atop the other.
While his meal was heating, he opened small tins of jelly and peanut butter and spread it on his crackers. Between mouthfuls, he alternately hummed and sang something about a young man named Billy Joe who had evidently jumped off the Tallahatchie bridge.
Blair, lying on his side a short distance away, gazed at Dubray throughout these preparations, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Chow time,” Dubray said in a low voice, removing the bubbling, greasy pork patties from atop the heat tab.
“Don’t do that, Willie,” Blair softly remarked. “Please just don’t do it.”
“Huh?” Dubray said.
“Willie, a sane and starving man doesn’t eat charlie-rat porksausage patties in the dead of night, in the cold of winter, much less at midday in the Nam when the temperature’s registering a hundred plus and the pungent fragrance of victories past are about us. Willie, that stuff’s nothing but grease, pure grease. It’ll kill you.”
Dubray looked at Blair uncomprehendingly a moment and then smiling and shoving the first of the pork patties in his mouth, said, “Shit, you ain’t gotta worry yourself ‘bout me, Blair. Ain’t nothing’s gonna make me sick.”
“I know that, Willie,” Blair responded quietly, almost as if to himself.
“It’s not your health that concerns me. It’s mine. And if you put one more of those greasy patties in your mouth, I’m gonna heave.”
Grinning, Willie said, “Well, you just stick to your fruit cocktail and peaches mixed with them teeny little old pound cakes and pass ‘long your patties to me. I mean all that there fruit ain’t no good for you, Blair, don’t stick to your ribs. My pappy, he say meat, taters and rice, that’s what’ll…”
“And did your pappy happen to have scurvy, Willie?” Blair asked, with a straight face.
Dubray looked at him thoughtfully for a moment and then, nonchalantly, said, “Naw. Had one when I was just a little fellow, but one of the wheels fell off, and Pappy, he never got ’round to fixing…”
Blair just shook his head in resignation and rolled over to his other side, mumbling, “Cretins. I’m surrounded by cretins.”
I smiled and turned my attention back to Bob Halloway, who was somewhat frivolously discussing the strategical value of Secretary McNamara’s electronic “wall,” a barier designed to curtail the infiltration of North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam.
“See, the way I see it,” he said, “we’re really over here because it serves our national interests. No other reason, right?”
Slim and I nodded.
“Mean, the domino theory and making the world safe for democracy are all well and good,” he continued, “but the bottom line is we’re here so as to keep ’em off the shores of California, right? So why not just stretch the secretary’s electronic barrier from Seattle to San Diego and save ourselves all this travel time. Hell, maybe Charlie Company could screen the L.A. area.”
We smiled politely but said nothing.