Before they sallied forth to again battle the North Vietnamese in Binh Dinh Province, I had an opportunity to meet most of the battalion’s officers and key NCO’s and many of their soldiers, or “snuffies,” as they were then called. Collectively, they possessed a phenomenally upbeat, can’t-lose attitude toward the war and the enemy they fought and well they should. In the two years since so soundly defeating North Vietnam’s finest in the Ia Drang Valley, barely two months after the division’s arrival in country, the First Air Cav had kicked Charlie’s ass whenever and wherever it found him. The problem now lay in finding him. North Vietnam’s military chief, General Vo Nguyen Giap, had made this task difficult since concluding, after assessing his losses in the la Drang campaign, that his forces couldn’t shove the American Army around with quite the same impunity they had enjoyed while fighting the French. Hence, he had placed his army on the tactical defensive, directing his commanders to avoid combat with U.S. ground forces in general and, we snuffies supposed, the First Air Cav in particular.
This can-do winning outlook was so ingrained in the minds of the division’s soldiers that it influenced virtually every facet of their daily existence. They quite simply believed they were better than their foe.
And of course they were. The account of a young Cav trooper’s first night in I Corps, after deploying there with his unit from Binh Dinh, is illustrative of this attitude. Supposedly, he sat down under a palm tree, in the black of night, on a defensive perimeter shared with the Marine Corps… and lit a long cigar. Seeing this abhorrent breach of light discipline, a Marine Corps officer ordered him to extinguish his cigar, quite naturally fearing it would draw enemy fire. In response, the young soldier, still sitting with the glowing cigar between his teeth, calmly replied, “Relax, Lieutenant, Charlie don’t fuck with the Cav!”
Granted, his quote will never go down in the annals of history alongside
“damn the torpedoes,” but, apocryphal or otherwise, it certainly embraced the division’s purview toward the enemy.
Sergeant Major Cooper, our command sergeant major, was one of the most colorful of the battalion’s soldiers. I had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with him during the brief interval before the unit returned to Binh Dinh. A hard-charging, hard-drinking, totally professional NCO from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, he knew full well the importance of relaxing in a combat environment when one had the opportunity to do so. I liked him.
Booze, the hard stuff, was not permitted in the boonies, and rightfully not. Therefore, it flowed quite freely during a unit’s so-called stand down at An Khe, the division’s soldiers viewing Camp Radcliff, after months in the boonies, in much the same fashion as sailors look upon their home port after a long tour at sea. One of the hutches in which booze flowed most freely was that of the command sergeant major.
In the waning days of the battalion’s stay at An Khe, Cooper invited a couple of the company commanders, several of their lieutenants, and some of us on the staff to his hutch for evening cocktails.
Arriving late, I found that the sergeant major and my fellow officers had been “cocktailing” for quite some while.
“Yeah, and that’s the last I ever heard of young Romeo,” Cooper was saying, laughingly, as I walked in.
“Who’s Romeo?” I asked offhandedly, pulling up a chair.
“Who’s Romeo, indeed!” the sergeant major responded. “Well that was before your time, Captain. Matter of fact, it was before the old man’s time.” (A unit’s commander, in this case Colonel Lich, is traditionally, and respectfully, referred to as the “old man.”) “Well, Romeo—which is what we called him, for reasons that will soon be obvious—was a young seventeen-year-old from the farmlands of Indiana… or was it Illinois?”
He paused momentarily, as if this aspect of Romeo’s earlier existence might have some bearing on the story, then, evidently deciding it did not, continued. “Oh, well, no matter where the fuck he was from, he was a young stud who ain’t never been off the farm till he was drafted and found himself in the Nam… where he fell in love.”
He started laughing, as did the others, who obviously enjoyed hearing the saga of Romeo again as much as the sergeant major relished telling it.
But then abruptly he stopped laughing and, in a serious vein, said,
“Gentlemen, the unfunny part of this tale is that we lost, the Army lost, what might otherwise have been a good soldier to a goddamn Communist whore!”
After a brief pause, he continued. “But that’s neither here nor there.
Hell, story’s old as the Army itself and ain’t anything you can really do ‘bout it. Young man leaves the farm, goes overseas, and falls in love with the first hooker he puts it to, which, likely as not, is also the first broad he ever put it to. Anyway, our Romeo falls in love with this sweet young thing from the ville last time the battalion pulled base security—shit, nearly a year ago now. Well, falling in love’s okay, but when it comes time to go back to the boonies, Romeo decides he’s gonna stay in the ville with his true love… uh… you know the story, first love, can’t live without her, Charlie might get him if he goes back, so on and so forth. So the battalion returns to the boonies and reports young Romeo AWOL. And next day the MPs go down to the ville, police him up, and return him to the rear detachment [the battalion’s residual force at An Khe], where he’s restricted to quarters till his company can be informed of his apprehension.”
“Meanwhile, his true love returns to her family in Qui Nhon with matrimony on her mind. Well, Romeo, knowing that, decides to “unrestrict” himself. So he just walks out of camp, boards a gook bus, and goes to Qui Nhon. A week or so later, the MPs find him there, pick him up, and bring him back to An Khe a second time.”
“Now the rear detachment commander—that’s your predecessor, sir,” he said, looking at me, “what with being just a bit embarrassed ‘bout his first disappearance, puts a guard with a loaded forty-five on Romeo and initiates an Article 32.” (Article 32 of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice provides for a pretrial investigation of serious allegations to determine whether or not the alleged offense should be referred for court-martial.)
“That same evening, the guard, feeling he needs a short break for a beer at the Black Horse, handcuffs Romeo to his bunk and takes leave.”
The sergeant major paused briefly to collect his thoughts and mix himself another drink. Several of us followed suit.
“Now, as you might guess,” he continued, again looking at me, “when the guard returned, both Romeo and the bunk were gone! Damn, now I think of it, we never did find that cot. Well anyway, the MPs now know where to find young Romeo, so they quickly police him up in Qui Nhon and bring him back here a third time. Needless to say, the RDC is pissed!” (The RDC was the rear detachment commander.)
“So he decides to send Romeo to LBJ.” (Cooper was not, in this context, referring to our commander in chief, Lyndon Baines Johnson; he was referring to the U.S. Army’s correctional facility in Vietnam located at Long Binh, which snuffies called Long Binh Jail or simply LBJ.) “So the RDC calls Battalion Forward and starts to set the wheels in motion for pretrial confinement. Well, Romeo’s company commander hears about this and says, ‘No way! Ain’t no goddamn AWOL of mine gonna sit on his lazy ass at LBJ, safe and sound eating three hots a day, while the rest of us suffer out here. You put young Romeo on the next log bird flying, and he can pull his pretrial here in the boonies!” Which, when you think of it, made a lot of sense.”