The Last Ditch - WikiLeaks



The Last Ditch

Spotting Naval Gunfire and Myself in Vietnam

By Michael McCullar

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Jose Hernandez (left) and me with South Vietnamese Marines, northern I Corps, summer 1972.

On July 11, 1972, just northeast of Quang Tri City in the Republic of Vietnam, Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Felix Hernandez found himself in a tight spot. He and 1st Lt. Steve Biddulph were assigned to a South Vietnamese Marine battalion delivered by helicopters into a landing zone teeming, as it happened, with members of the North Vietnamese Army’s 320-B Division. Leaping from the helicopter, Biddulph was shot in both legs, and the battalion adviser, Marine Capt. Larry Livingston, gathered him up and deposited him into a shallow depression as enemy fire swept the LZ. With his lieutenant painfully immobile, Hernandez took charge of the fire missions, laying round after round of naval gunfire into tree lines bordering the LZ.

The battle lasted three days, during which the enemy fire was so intense that no helicopters could come in to retrieve the wounded. Nevertheless, the perimeter slowly expanded, due largely to the momentum established by Capt. Livingston on the first day, when he organized scattered elements of the assault force and charged NVA trenches hidden in a tree line 50 meters away (Marine advisers were called covans, which means “trusted friend” in Vietnamese).

It was an epic struggle throughout, as close and personal as the Vietnam War had ever been, involving hand-to-hand combat, fire and maneuver and the complex play of supporting arms. By July 14, the LZ was finally secure enough for the wounded to be evacuated, including Lt. Biddulph, who lay on the floor of a U.S. Army helicopter with his M-16 rifle pointed out the door and a wounded Vietnamese Marine draped across his legs. For their efforts, Livingston would be awarded the Navy Cross and Hernandez and Biddulph Silver Stars, the second and third highest awards for American combat valor.

I know the details of the action from reading an official Marine Corps history, but the real-time event has been embedded in my memory for decades. I was on the same operation, a summer campaign to retake Quang Tri City after the NVA’s Easter Offensive that spring. I, too, was a U.S. Marine radio operator tethered to a forward observer and hunkered down in a ditch in Quang Tri Province. Our battalion was some distance away from the fateful LZ – several kilometers to the south – in an area beset by NVA artillery fire from the foothills to the west.

The action I witnessed during this three-day period paled in comparison to what Hernandez endured, but he was my friend, and I listened with alarm to the frantic chatter that flooded the radio frequency. We relayed messages and helped coordinate the naval gunfire support, and when it was all over I stood on a wooded rise and watched heavy Marine helicopters haul the wreckage of the battle away.

The photographer David Douglas Duncan entitled a book of his Vietnam War photographs War Without Heroes. I’m not sure what he meant by that, for all wars involve heroic as well as cowardly acts. Duncan could have been suggesting that the Vietnam War was unique in its futility and waste; his message seems to be that for courageous acts to count in war they must be validated by a higher national purpose.

Such a purpose was sorely missing in Vietnam in the summer of 1972. The attempt to retake Quang Tri City was a last-ditch effort in a lost war. At the time, of some 50,000 American troops remaining in Vietnam (down from a peak of 500,000 in 1969), only a handful were involved in combat operations. Most everyone else was packing up to go home -- this at a time when the Vietnam War had never been bigger. In a way, the few Americans still being shot at -- advisers, naval gunfire spotters, pilots and aircrews -- were more like mercenaries than citizen soldiers, wholly detached from the national will and willing to risk their lives for personal or professional reasons, not patriotic ones.

This experience has made me wonder whether patriotism, in the years since World War II, has become little more than a quaint cultural custom, something that really isn’t applicable to modern life. Is patriotism even a good thing? If it is, how does one demonstrate it in a shrinking, globalized world? Is it only for those among us who are less privileged and have fewer options in our commercial culture? Would speaking out against a misbegotten war be more patriotic than participating in one? Is patriotism only a feeling or should it involve a physical act? Was young Jose Hernandez an American patriot in Vietnam in the summer of 1972?

The first time I laid eyes on Hernandez after his ordeal in the LZ was about a month later, at a Navy enlisted men’s club in Da Nang. A group of us found ourselves on a serendipitous in-country “R&R,” and we behaved liked un-caged wild animals. It was not a happy occasion. We got drunk, stupid and maudlin, cursing the Filipino band as it played the Eric Burden anthem “We Gotta Get Out of this Place,” chewing on our drink glasses and otherwise making complete fools of ourselves.

At one point, Hernandez put his head down on the table and began to cry. I walked him to the head and sat with him by the shitter as he vomited and sobbed his guts out. I don’t remember how we got back to the Marine barracks. In a day or two we were all back up north, needing rest from our respite as the battle for Quang Tri City continued in all its fury.

Incoming Home

On Sept. 15, 1972, South Vietnamese Marines clambered over the rubble of the Quang Tri citadel in the heart of the city and declared the provincial capital “secured.” Two weeks later I was on a Pan-Am flight back to “The World,” a weary Marine corporal with battle ribbons on my chest and a constant ringing in my ears.

It was the end not only of my war but also the American one. By the fall of 1972, Nixon’s long draw-down was almost complete. The Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV) had shepherded the South Vietnamese military through the shock and awe of North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive that spring and summer. Most other American units were long gone as our “Vietnamization” policy entered its final phase: holding the battle lines without hands-on American support.

I was a straggler from a forgotten war, which was fine with me. I was out of there, eager to return to college and pick up where I’d left off some 17 months before. Like the rest of America, I was ready to be rid of Vietnam. Little did I know that Vietnam was not so ready to be rid of me.

I had served as a radio operator with Sub Unit 1, 1st Air and Naval Gunfire Liaison Company (ANGLICO), a Fleet Marine Force detachment consisting mainly of forward artillery observers, close air-support specialists and radio operators that had been in South Vietnam since 1965. I had been part of a Marine reserve artillery unit as an unmotivated freshman at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, and after the Kent State shootings and attendant anti-war brouhaha in the spring of 1970, I decided that I needed to take hold of history and do one of two things: either join the demonstrators at the ramparts or join the grunts in Vietnam. Volunteering for active duty in the Marine Corps seemed to be the right thing to do, so that’s what I did. There was absolutely no patriotism involved in the decision. I simply wanted to be in the arena before it was too late.

ANGLICO was an unusual Marine outfit. It was created during World War II to facilitate naval gunfire and close air support for any allied military force other than the U.S. Marine Corps (which has the organic expertise). In some form or fashion, ANGLICOs were involved in the Korean War, Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm, only to be disbanded in the 1990s and recreated in the early 2000s, when it became clear that coordinating supporting fires was an integral part of the Marine Corps skill set and should be merchandised in today’s joint environment. I imagine that the current American war in Iraq will wind down very much like the Vietnam War did, with U.S. combat formations pulled out first and with advisers and units like ANGLICO training and supporting the indigenous forces as they continue to battle the bad guys.

To my knowledge, naval gunfire has not been employed in Iraq (most of which is some distance from the Persian Gulf), but it was important in the defense of South Vietnam, which had a sweeping coastline encompassing more than half the county’s length, from its northern border with North Vietnam to its southwestern border with Cambodia. Offshore, naval vessels with the U.S. 7th Fleet provided a perpetual presence from the South China Sea to the Gulf of Siam. For almost 10 years, attack aircraft were launched from carriers and sea-based artillery was fired from battleships, cruisers and destroyers. To coordinate this fire and air support, boots on the ground were filled mostly by ANGLICO Marines working in spot teams and fire control parties no farther inland than the range of the guns (usually about 15 kilometers).

ANGLICO Marines were considered a cut above the average grunt, though this wasn’t always clearly evident. According to the unit’s table of organization, most of its members were supposed to be parachute-qualified and thoroughly cross-trained in forward artillery observation, close air support and radio communications, though the needs of the service during the Vietnam War created a hodge-podge of personnel whose skill levels varied. Many Marines assigned to Sub Unit 1 underwent jump training as an afterthought at the Vietnamese airborne training center in Saigon or at U.S. Army jump schools in the Philippines or Okinawa.

When I arrived at ANGLICO headquarters in Saigon, a wiry little master sergeant named Heim asked if I would be willing to parachute out of a perfectly good airplane and I said, “Sure.” Jump-school slots came open from time to time but I never pursued them. The Easter Offensive halfway through my tour made parachute training, along with exotic R&Rs in Hong Kong and Bangkok, recreational luxuries. (After my return home, just to see what I had missed, I took a civilian skydiving course at a small private airstrip in the Missouri River bottoms outside St. Louis. I managed to survive five static-line jumps from a Cessna at 2,000 feet, though I sprained my ankle on my third jump and it has never been quite the same.)

During my tour in Vietnam, driven by an intense and occasionally almost fatal curiosity, I spent as much time in the field as I could, including five months with the South Vietnamese Marines and their beloved covans in northern I Corps (Thua Thien and Quang Tri provinces), where some of the heaviest fighting in the Easter Offensive occurred. After I rotated home, in spite of my eagerness to return to civilian life, I had a nagging sense that I had at least seen – if not done – something fairly significant; it would take me more than 30 years to figure out what. It began to dawn on me the day my 17-year-old daughter asked me a question I could not refuse: “Daddy, what exactly did you do in Vietnam?” She was taking a class on the war as a high-school senior, and she wanted me to be part of a panel presentation on what it was like to “fight” in Vietnam. Three fathers had been tapped to speak. I was one of them.

It was as if she had awakened me in the middle of the night with a camera crew and asked me to summarize my Vietnam experience in a one-minute sound bite. Actually, I’d been intermittently putting down reminiscences of my time in Vietnam since Emily’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 and I found the exercise selfishly therapeutic (as she fought her war I re-fought mine). Emily’s request caused me to reopen my dusty Vietnam notebook and begin reflecting again not only on the experience but on how I should recount it.

“I’d be happy to contribute some thoughts to your class discussion,” I told Emily. “Just give me a couple of days. I need to think about it.”

What Emily really wanted to know was: Did I “see the elephant”? I associate this curious phrase with the American Civil War, when it was used as a metaphor for experiencing combat, but I understand it originated with the California Gold Rush. To “see the elephant” meant to behold something unimaginable and sufficiently perilous to last a lifetime, then go home – if that was an option – when you’d seen enough.

The phrase “seeing the elephant” is similar to the parable about the elephant and the blind men, who are asked to describe the creature. That’s exactly how I feel about describing Vietnam. I can’t get my arms totally around it. I can only touch and feel some of the form and texture, and what I come up with may bear no resemblance to the whole, visible thing.

Perhaps that’s how most war veterans feel about their experiences. The problem was, 33 years hence, I didn’t know if I was a real war veteran or not. Had I seen the elephant? Well, yes, part of it. I had gotten shot at, endured a few close calls and seen people die. But I was not a trigger-puller at the tip of the spear. Although my position on a naval gunfire spot team put me in harm’s way on a somewhat regular basis, I took no chances. I did what I was told, kept my head down and endured.

If anything, the war changed me for the better, allowing me to confront the elements and feel like a survivor. I certainly felt no shame for my involvement, which was expected of me in the 1970s, and this created a confusing ambivalence. I could write the experience off as a brief, inconsequential interlude in my life; bury it as a bitter regret; or (God forbid) embrace it as an achievement, something actually to be proud of. What I couldn’t do was turn it into a morality tale, for Emily or anyone else.

So I told Emily that Vietnam was a difficult subject for me to talk about – not because it had been a traumatic experience but because I still hadn’t figured out how to describe it without being entirely true to myself. “I will certainly talk to your class,” I said, “but I feel the need to tell you more than I can in a one-hour panel presentation. I tell you what: If you’re really that curious about it, I will write it down for you and your brother as completely and honestly and accurately as I can.”

Following is that account. There is nothing glorious or shameful about it. It falls on a wide spectrum of war experience, one that few people who’ve never been to war can fully comprehend. It only has real meaning for me. For others, it is worth noting mainly for its worm’s-eye view of America’s last fight in Vietnam, however faulty my memories might be.

What I Did

As a radio operator on a naval gunfire spot team, my job was to maintain and operate the radio equipment, which I either carried on my back when we were on foot with Vietnamese infantry battalions or laid atop a sandbagged bunker or tower when we working at a brigade command post, firebase or similar “fixed” position. The spot team’s primary job was to call in and adjust naval gunfire from ships offshore (these were destroyers with the 7th Fleet with call signs like “Sharp Note” and “Husky Pup”). We also coordinated air strikes, medevacs, resupply and other aerial support tasks that required English speakers on the ground to talk to the Americans piloting the aircraft.

ANGLICO spot teams were attached to U.S. Army, Vietnamese and Korean infantry units, and while I served a few months with the 21s ARVN Division in the Delta and a few weeks with the ARVN Rangers in I Corps, most of my time was spent with the Vietnamese Marines (mainly Brigade 369). Elements of the brigade spot team would circulate out to the battalions as tactical needs dictated.

When spot teams went to the field, most enlisted ANGLICO Marines were qualified to – and often did – adjust naval gunfire and air strikes, so being a radio operator meant that I did just about everything when I had to. I identified and plotted targets, encoded grid coordinates, called in fire missions and contributed to the violence that visited the NVA in An Xuyen, Thua Thien and Quang Tri provinces during this period. I am not bothered much by the destruction I helped deliver specifically to the NVA, but I am still haunted by the knowledge that innocent civilians were sometimes caught in it, too. We were all trapped in a frenzy of sanctioned violence, and I do feel guilty about having sought a selfish personal experience at the expense, in a sense, of a whole people. Unfortunately that is part of war and I hope I am forgiven.

What my job did not involve was the daily grunt-grind endured by junior enlisted men in American infantry units. I never filled a sandbag, never burned a shitter, never “walked point.” The Vietnamese did all that. In whatever size unit I was with, I was always part of the command post (CP) group, and while we displayed a small forest of radio antennas that made us a tempting target, we were fairly well protected by the layers of infantrymen around us. I would often dine with these Vietnamese grunts, squatting down like they did on their haunches, pretending to enjoy their food and genuinely enjoying our contact in broken English and Vietnamese. Several became my friends and I will never forget them.

Depending on the size of the Vietnamese unit, we usually had two to six men on a spot team, which was usually led by a lieutenant. We worked closely with the American Marines advisers, who were usually company- and field-grade officers (captains and majors) with previous Vietnam tours under their belts. At the battalion level, there might be three Americans – the adviser (usually a captain), the naval gunfire spotter (usually a lieutenant) and a radio operator (usually a corporal). At the brigade level, there could be as many as four ANGLICO types and three or four Marine advisers.

It is important to note that, although we carried loaded individual weapons – usually M-16 rifles – we weren’t expected to fire them very often. Our primary job was to call in and coordinate supporting fires. I fired my M-16 twice during my entire tour: once from the roof of a sandbag bunker at a flock of white egrets in a rice paddy and once out the door of a Huey helicopter at an abandoned fishing village on the coast where snipers took potshots as passing helicopters.

Over the years I have been reluctant to talk freely about “what I did” in Vietnam for a variety of reasons. The Vietnam War was a hackneyed and unpopular topic by the time I returned to the states in October 1972. As I went about my life, it became exceedingly awkward to bring up the experience of war in casual conversation, as one would relate any other youthful adventure. Even at the most opportune moments, I couldn’t just chime in: “Hey, that reminds me: did I ever tell you about the time we treated this wounded NVA and I helped hold him down as the Vietnamese corpsman poured hydrogen peroxide into a gaping wound in his face, and the NVA writhed and screamed bloody murder as the hydrogen peroxide fizzed and bubbled into a frothy pink foam?” I couldn’t talk about Vietnam the way everyone else talked about backpacking tours of Europe or rafting trips on the Rio Grande.

Another reason I feel uneasy talking about “my war” is that over the years, off and on, I’ve had this nagging feeling that what I did in Vietnam – in spite of its lasting impact on me – was really not that interesting or significant. After all, I was there at the very end of active American involvement. To this day, when I think of a “Vietnam Vet,” I always think of someone who was there back in ’67 or ’68, when the American war was so big.

And even though I was there, and I did get shot at and see some ghastly sights and fear for my life, I was not a rifleman at the very tip of the spear. Thinking back, recalling images of Vietnamese Marines assaulting tree lines and dropping like flies, I am sick with the realization that at the height of the American war, when the level of violence was as high as it was in 1972, those little figures struggling through the tall grass were American kids just like me.

Nevertheless, in formally setting down this narrative I have accepted the fact that I was in Vietnam for 11 months and nine days and that I witnessed a broad spectrum of events worth noting. I also knew three young Americans in my unit who did not come back, and dying in Vietnam in 1972 was no different than dying in Vietnam in 1968.

Water World

I went to Vietnam as a college dropout and Marine reservist, with only a rudimentary knowledge of military science. Just before my departure, I did some boning up with the 11th Marines at Camp Pendleton, an artillery regiment newly returned from Vietnam, but I was not – by any measure – a fine-tuned fighting machine.

My MOS (2531) put me virtually on the lowest rung of the Marine Corps’ tactical communications hierarchy. Following boot camp and basic infantry training, instead of going to radio school I was shunted off (in typical Marine fashion) to OJT with an infantry regiment (the 28th Marines), tasked with operating a simple two-way FM radio called a PRC-25 (or “Prick 25”), which I carried on my back. I knew little more about the radio than how to change the frequencies and batteries and could no more repair the instrument than I could repair a tank. My communications training consisted of humping the hills of Camp Pendleton and frustrating the hell out of a young infantry lieutenant, just back from Vietnam, who expected a lot more out of his radio operator than I was ever able to deliver.

Eventually, however, I did learn how to read a map and think and talk on the radio at the same time, abilities on which the Marine Corps places a premium. During my first few months in Vietnam, I was encouraged to take – of all things – a correspondence course from

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Bien Nhi Outpost, Ca Mau Peninsula, South Vietnam, fall 1971.

the Marine Corps Institute in Washington titled “Forward Observation for Field Artillery and Naval Gunfire Personnel.” I received the materials in the mail on the resupply

helicopters and dutifully did the assignments. Meanwhile, during the ongoing American pull-

out, Marines in my widespread unit (sprinkled literally from the Delta to the DMZ)

continued to be dispatched to Vietnamese Army outposts in the coastal regions of South Vietnam, where U.S. naval gunfire served as a stop-gap while the Vietnamese established their own artillery positions.

One such place was the West OP, also known as the Bien Nhi Outpost. It encompassed two or three acres of ground in the inundated rice paddies and swamp land of the southern Mekong Delta, in an area known as the U-Minh Forest. It was hard to think of

it as “forest,” really, or even “ground.” Defoliated mangrove trees and bomb craters testified to the area’s historic value as a VC sanctuary and target-rich environment. The outpost itself,

one of many in the U-Minh, was little more than a collection of rotting sandbags, concertina wire and sharpened bamboo fence stakes that protruded from the swamp like a ship sunk in shallow water.

I was deposited at Bien Nhi by helicopter in early November 1971. It was the tail end of the monsoon season in the Delta, and everyone at the outpost looked like they’d been hung out to dry. I joined two other enlisted Marines to round out the naval gunfire spot team for that particular area of operations. We were the only Americans attached to a battalion of Vietnamese infantry commanded by a Major (Thieu Ta) Vinh, a portly officer with delicate hands and clean fingernails who drank rice wine from dawn till dusk and insisted that we join him in his daily ablutions (which Lance Cpl. Metzger very often did). The major was a reckless drunk, and he was in the habit of scrambling atop a bunker from time to time and firing an M-16 around the perimeter on full automatic.

After sunset, to escape the dank, musty interior of our bunker, Metzger, “Stoney” Atchison and I would stretch out on top of it, beneath the rickety legs of our spotting tower, until we could no longer stand the clouds of mosquitoes that would eventually make it almost difficult to breathe. Darkness would fall like a wet curtain, then the perimeter guards would begin tapping on empty artillery-shell casings, signaling throughout the night that they were alive and alert and that we could all rest assured.

This, of course, was out of the question. Though the war was winding down, Bien Nhi had been overrun a few months before, and the grid coordinates of our bunker were already registered with the ships on the gun line, in case we ever had to hunker down in the bunker as VC swarmed over the outpost and actually call a fire mission upon ourselves. This was not likely to happen, but the mere fact that our very location was an on-call target, and the occasional VC mortar round or rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that came our way, made nightfall a dreaded, insecure time. And it was not heartening to see the camp fires that would flicker around the perimeter at night, for I could easily imagine a muddy VC sapper picking through the leftovers of a perimeter guard’s meal as the guard lay dead with his throat cut and the VC continued the rhythmic tapping.

The night would also bring a continuous light show as 81mm mortar crews sent illumination rounds skyward every 10 or 15 minutes, turning the 100-meter killing zone beyond the perimeter into a kind of stage set. The jerky yellow flares, suspended from small parachutes (the source of our jaunty colored scarves), would slowly descend over the water with a strange noise that sounded like a dog barking in the distance (which was actually the empty canister of the flare tumbling into the night). Each time a flare went up, the outpost would come alive with rats, and we would lift our heads from our flack-jacket pillows on top of the bunker and realize the god-forsaken squalor in which we lived. Rats would scurry and hop over our outstretched legs and tumble off the bunkers to get away from the yellow light.

Stoney escaped this wretched reality by smoking potent pot out of a stemless pipe; I tried it a few times, but it made me even more vulnerable and afraid. When it came time to sleep, we climbed down from the bunker and sloshed inside, where our muddy green air mattresses (“rubber ladies”) lay atop a sheet of plywood covered by mosquito netting (we called it “room and board”). Under the plywood was a about a foot of swamp water, and the rats would swim and frolic in the water all night – sometimes even skitter across our mosquito nets – and all we could do was lay still and stoned and hope for an otherwise peaceful slumber. I could not imagine – and still cannot – a worse place to be than Bien Nhi.

Confidence

Sometime in early December I was thankfully detached from Bien Nhi and moved to a larger regimental firebase in the same general area. It was definitely a step up. Banana trees had been planted along the boardwalks of the muddy compound as part of some insipid landscaping scheme, and the bunkers were dry and big enough for steel-frame bunk beds instead of our usual outpost accommodations.

There were a handful of Army advisers at the place, good guys – seasoned officers and NCOs – who seemed to think that Marines were O.K. And for some reason, as I recall, I was the only Marine there. This particular billet must have called for just one representative of the mighty 7th fleet – in this case, me. As a neophyte lance corporal with less than two months in country, I had called in only a few fire missions and air strikes from the West OP under the tutelage of two veteran lance corporals who’d been out there too long. As the regimental naval gunfire rep, I was in way over my head.

One evening I was lying in bed in the bunker reading a book when the senior regimental adviser, an Army lieutenant colonel, walked up to me and casually explained that I would be joining him in the morning for a helicopter assault on a nearby village.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, lifting my head from my book. “What did you say?”

“Tomorrow morning you will fly with me in the C and C [command and control helicopter] and shoot some naval gunfire. Get your shit together for a briefing at 0600.”

“But sir,” I said, “I’ve never shot naval gunfire from the air.”

“Don’t worry, son,” he said. “You’ll do fine.”

“No, sir, you don’t understand. With all due respect, I believe there has been some kind of misunderstanding here. I don’t believe I’m authorized to do that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Be ready at 0600.”

The lieutenant colonel, a tall, friendly man with coal-black hair (in my memory he looks a bit like Alan Alda), bid me goodnight and walked out of the bunker.

Shit, I thought, I don’t believe this. The Army lieutenant colonel (I wish I could remember his name) was demonstrating a completely unfounded faith in my abilities. The next day I was sure to blow my cover – along with the fraying can-do spirit that the Marine Corps still clung to even in the latter stages of the war. I don’t remember being afraid of death, only of catastrophic failure.

The next morning I showed up in the TOC (tactical operations center) with all my shit – radio, map, compass, field glasses, helmet, web gear, canteens, first-aid kit, K-bar knife, M-16, bandolier of ammunition. We stood around a table and looked at a larger map as the lieutenant colonel explained the operation. American helicopters would deposit Vietnamese infantry near a village along a canal. Scout helicopters (“Loaches”) and Cobra gunships (constituting an attack helicopter unit called a “Pink Team”) would recon and prep the LZ. Naval gunfire – laid along the canal – would keep the enemy from escaping across it. We reviewed such essentials as ship armament, call signs and radio frequencies. When I heard the helicopter engines begin to whine and power up outside the bunker I swallowed hard, tried to appear calm and followed the lieutenant colonel to the C and C.

Off we went at treetop level, door gunners scanning the desolate landscape. It was a thrilling ride (to this day I think fondly of the Huey helicopter): doors off on both sides, sitting on the port side, the rushing wind and fwopping rotors so loud that I could barely hear the lieutenant colonel yelling in my ear. “When we get to altitude I want you to contact the ship and get them ready for a fire mission, O.K.?!”

We were soon making lazy circles 1,000 feet or so over the target area. It was a clear, sunny morning, and I tried to get my bearings as I surveyed the layout of the village, location of the LZ and orientation of the canal. I matched the village and canal with the ones indicated on my map and double-checked the grid coordinates. Then I confirmed the coordinates with the lieutenant colonel, who looked at his own map, then at me and gave me a smiling thumbs up.

We watched below as the Loaches and Cobras crisscrossed the LZ, firing machine guns and rockets. I contacted the ship on station and told them to standby for a fire mission. “Good copy,” they said; “standing by.” The radio transmission was monitored by our spot team’s fire control center in Ca Mau, which was responsible for coordinating naval gunfire support in that part of the province. Lt. Brindle (who weeks later would barely survive the crash of an OV-10 spotter plane into the sea) got on the radio and asked me what I thought I was doing. “Following orders,” I said. There was apprehension in my voice, but the momentum of the mission swept us away, and I imagine the lieutenant thought, “What the hell” as he approved the fire mission, listening to my plaintive but workmanlike exchanges with the ship.

We watched the transport helicopters disgorge their cargo and the Vietnamese infantry fan out to do battle, tiny green figures sloshing through the rice paddies. Everything seemed well orchestrated, though I couldn’t tell for sure; while the helicopter crew and lieutenant colonel had headsets for communicating with each other, all I had was my radio handset plastered to one ear.

At last it was time for the Navy guns. The lieutenant colonel directed me to engage the ship in a fire mission. I yelled into my handset, against a background cacophony of rushing air, rotor blades and machine gun fire from the door gunner immediately to my left. The call for fire went something like this:

“Husky Pup, this is Whiskey Two, I have a fire mission, can you copy, over?”

“Roger, Wiskey Two, send it.”

“Husky Pup, Whiskey Two, roger, fire mission target number five zero one . . . grid one zero five zero zero niner, altitude sea level, bearing gun target line . . . enemy troops approaching treeline along canal, danger northeast 800 . . . I need HE fuse quick, one gun, one salvo in adjust, be prepared to fire one gun, 10 salvos in effect, at my command adjust fire.”

(I learned a few weeks later, when I was on a field trip to a Navy destroyer on the gun line, that calls for fire often were broadcast on the ship’s loudspeaker system, and all hands – from cooks to gunners to the officer of the deck – were thoroughly energized by the fire missions. Delivered from the doldrums of sea duty, they felt as if they were actually doing something useful when they sent rounds downrange at the command of a pimply-faced 20-year-old Marine. It was a profound realization for me of how this crazy system worked – the power that could be brought to bear linking one American adolescent to another by radio in time of war. I have never had such authority in all the years since.)

The ship’s radio operator read back the mission particulars and I acknowledged he had a good copy. Then he said, “Ready three one,” which indicated the number of seconds it would take for the round to travel from the muzzle of the gun to the point of impact.

“Ah, ready three one, break, fire,” I said.

“Shot!”

“Roger, shot.”

Five seconds before impact the ship’s radio operator said “Splash,” which was a heads-up. The lieutenant colonel and I rubber-necked the landscape, searching intently for the first round.

It exploded in a rice paddy north of the canal, sending up a geyser of water and mud. After several adjustments and a “check fire” because of the crowded airspace, the ship pumped round after round of flat-trajectory five-inch shells into the treeline along the canal. Splinters of bamboo and banana trees flew through the smoke and erupting water. I could not tell if people were dying in the barrage. All I could see were rounds impacting where we wanted them to. No friendly casualties, as far as we knew, no helicopters shot down. The lieutenant colonel gave me another thumbs up. A thousand feet above it all, I was feeling pretty good.

Sometime during the fire mission, as the C and C circled the impact area, it suddenly pitched and climbed, the main rotor gulping the air. I looked around and saw the lieutenant colonel and air crew talking excitedly into their headsets and the port-side door gunner firing madly toward the canal – then a commotion behind me, where a Vietnamese interpreter was grimacing and grabbing his foot, which had been pierced by a bullet that had come up through the floor. When we got back to the firebase, the Vietnamese sergeant was carried to the aid station and the aircrew inspected their wounded bird, counting half a dozen bullet holes in the thin aluminum skin. None had hit a vital part. They covered the holes with green duct tape and flew back to the airstrip in Ca Mau.

When I reflect on this experience – the only time I ever even pretended to fire naval gunfire from the air – I suspect the lieutenant colonel knew far more about the procedure than I did. He simply used me as an instrument, much as I, in turn, used my radio. But he did so in such a way that I felt completely competent and in control. This confidence would serve me well in the months ahead (thank you, lieutenant colonel, wherever you are).

Before I left the regimental firebase, an Army Loach – a tiny teardrop-shaped helicopter with only a pilot and door gunner aboard – was shot down near the same village on the canal. I was not with the lieutenant colonel that day. Nevertheless, when the C and C arrived back at the firebase with the injured Loach crew, I was called upon to help. The pilot had broken both legs and the door gunner had been shot through the chest. The firebase LZ was like the scene of a bloody car wreck. I remember the noise of the helicopters, which kept their engines running as they crouched in the LZ, and watching the bare-headed pilot being carried off the C and C, two men on either side of him, his useless legs dangling, his head thrown back and his mouth open in a silent scream.

I ran to the door gunner, who had been laid on the ground. He was a black kid but his face looked pale, and his entire flight suit was saturated in blood like a sodden sponge. Leaning on my knees at his shoulder, I helped strip the top of his flight suit down as an Army medic swabbed his chest and located the entry wound. Then we gently tilted him on his side to see where the bullet came out. The medic sighed, wrapped a battle dressing around his chest and we carried him to a waiting Huey, which sped off to an American military hospital in Can Tho. I never knew whether he lived or died.

The Village

“In the Hue area, North Vietnamese units once again attacked South Vietnamese positions across the My Chanh River on both sides of Highway 1. One morning before dawn, their tanks quickly encircled the South Vietnamese Third Marine Battalion, running around their positions, as one U.S. adviser put it, “like Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn.” The South Vietnamese cheered and yelled when U.S. Army Sergeant Bill Tillman fired a brand-new wire-guided missile which corrected its course in mid-air and blew the turret off an oncoming tank. As the sun rose, 22 North Vietnamese tanks were left burning on the plain. Although the marines had some bad moments and had to give a little ground, they did so in good order and finally held firm; the North Vietnamese tanks had not proved to be all that formidable.”

-- Time magazine

May 1972

I found the above dispatch several months after I returned home from Vietnam, when I was leafing through a stack of Time magazines that my mother had saved. I’ll be damned, I thought; I was there, though I didn’t remember it exactly the same way.

I’m not sure I ever knew the name of the village. It was just another wide spot off a red-dirt road north of Hue – Highway 555 (the “Triple Nickel”) – that stretched northwest through the sand flats along the coast. To the west several kilometers was the paved Highway 1, which skirted the foothills of the Annamite Mountains (you could make them out in the hazy distance). The landscape around the village was rolling, scrub-covered sand and dry rice paddies trimmed in bamboo.

The housing stock consisted of two- or three-room thatched huts with metal roofs and vegetable gardens in back, all more or less centered around a village well. There were no real trees to speak of, nor were there any motorized vehicles (except for our few jeeps and armored personal carriers [APCs] scattered about). The only other internal combustion engine I remember seeing was that of a hand-operated “roto-tiller,” which presumably was used for maintaining the gardens. People still lived in the village, though there seemed to be no able-bodied males between the ages of 15 and 50. At this stage of the war in the northern provinces, many villagers were voting with their feet and hitting the road south. Some, however, elected to stay – apparently to salvage their rice crop before the tide of battle made that impossible.

It was early May 1972, about a month after the NVA launched their Easter Offensive across the DMZ. By then, all of Quang Tri province to the north had been abandoned by the South Vietnamese, and the new DMZ had become the My Chanh River, the boundary between Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces. About five klicks south of the river, the village had become the command post for an exhausted Vietnamese Marine Brigade 369, one of the last Vietnamese units out of Quang Tri Province and one of the few still fighting. Just south of the village, berms had been bulldozed and a battery of 105mm howitzers emplaced to support the brigade’s three infantry battalions. The haggard Americans present in the village – fewer than 10, mostly Marines – lived together in the main room of a thatched hut (“hootch”) while the family who owned the house went about their business in one corner bedroom.

I liked being in the village. I had spent a rainy April in Hue, at the Vietnamese Marine Division headquarters in the Citadel, standing radio watch and otherwise lounging on a cot in the Palace of the Dancing Virgins. I was glad to be out of the water-logged Delta and anxious to go further north, where U.S. Marines once dominated the battlefield. ANGLICO spot teams were being assembled from all over the country and assigned to the South Vietnamese government’s “fire brigades” – the Marines, Airborne and Rangers – to help stem the tide in the northern provinces with naval gunfire, which proved to be a fat finger in the dike, particularly when the weather was bad and airpower less effective. With the weather clearing, enemy activity had slowed, and life in the village was relatively tranquil. The young enlisted Marines enjoyed horsing around with the village children, sharing ice cream from the resupply helicopters and waging rubber-band wars. We caused a stir among village elders one day when three of us bathed at the village well dressed only in camouflage shorts and flip-flops.

The eye of the storm would soon pass, and the village would become everything Vietnam was for me – boredom, laughter, fear, bravery, emptiness. The NVA tank assault occurred on May 22, and events leading up to it suggested something big was going to happen. The villagers certainly knew it, quietly packing their belongings and joining the refugee exodus south just days before we were hit.

The next ominous sign was the loss of our favorite FAC (forward air controller, call sign “Wolfman”). His real name was Chief Warrant Officer Bill Thomas and he was an ANGLICO aerial observer who rode in the back seat of an Air Force OV-10. He would check in on-station almost daily, with the weather clearing, and we always felt more secure when we could hear the lazing droning of the twin-engine turboprop overhead, lending us eyes in the sky.

Wolfman reported in one morning, we exchanged friendly banter, and then I forgot about him. I don’t remember what was going on. There may have been some light contact to the north. I do remember the ship calling me once and asking if I had heard from Wolfman lately. I said no. Soon an excited Vietnamese Marine ran into the hootch and exclaimed “VC shoot Wolfman! VC shoot Wolfman!” I stepped outside and looked to the north to see an OV-10, about a kilometer away, spiraling down with smoke trailing behind it and two parachutes descending on either side. When it hit the ground the airplane exploded in a ball of flame and the two chutes disappeared in the brush. I can recall no discussion of a rescue mission, as if death or capture were foregone conclusions.

(I thought I had seen the last of the Wolfman, but that was not the case. Months after I returned home, and shortly after the ceasefire was signed, the American POWs were released and brought to Clark Air Force base in the Philippines with much fanfare. The names of the returnees were published in a long list in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Sure enough, there was Gunner Thomas. Watching television coverage of the return, I was delighted to hear his name announced and then watch him step gingerly onto the stairway of the giant C-141. I have no idea what happened to his pilot.)

The next day the village was pounded by NVA artillery. It began when Sgt. Joe Swift, Lance Cpl. Hernandez and I went out to the LZ to meet an incoming resupply helicopter. After the helicopter left, an artillery round exploded south of us about 200 yards. We didn’t even hear it coming, that unmistakable sound of the air being torn like ripping cardboard. A spot of earth simply bloomed black and gray, without a sound, then the crack-boom of the explosion sent us diving to the ground.

Now we could hear everything: the distant boom of the gun, the round tearing through the air, the explosion, the shrapnel clattering across the metal roofs of nearby village huts. We ran as fast as our legs could carry us back up the sandy road that led from the Triple Nickel to the village proper as shells continued to land around us. I remember running so fast my legs gave out, and I went sprawling in the sand as shells exploded and shrapnel clattered on the rooftops. After a few adjustment rounds, the gun was now firing for effect. What were we running to? The sanctuary of a thatched hut. A sandbag CP bunker had been built, but the Americans gathered in the hootch and hunkered down, leaving the bunker (I assume) to our Vietnamese “counterparts.”

We slid into the hootch out of breath, then collected ourselves, took a seat, and began calmly counting the incoming rounds: 18, 19, 20…. It was not a tremendous pounding, as artillery barrages go. I can’t remember how many rounds were fired or how long it lasted. It seemed to last forever. Maj. Regan Wright, a Marine artillery adviser, squatted under a rickety wooden table. Distant boom, ripping cardboard – a sound that traveled right up my spine – then a crack-boom, either close or not so close.

Each time the gun went off and the round ripped through the air, I imagined it landing right on my nose. But it never did. In time the barrage just stopped. The last crack-boom was followed by a tense silence. Amazingly enough, we were all in one piece, though several Vietnamese Marines in and around the village had been killed or wounded. As we crept outside the hootch, we watched through a lingering haze of smoke as medical corpsmen tended the wounded and the dead, wrapping the latter in green ponchos.

That night, “all hell broke loose.” I was awakened by a whispered radio transmission from a battalion adviser telling me something about “tanks.” I passed it on to Maj. Bob Sheridan, the senior brigade adviser, who grabbed the handset and communicated something to the battalion adviser – Capt. Phil Norton, I think it was – who showed up at our doorstep not long thereafter. By now we could hear the engines and tracks of the NVA armor, growling and clanking in the night, and the sky was lit by red and green tracers, flares and anti-tank rockets. Norton’s battalion just to our north had been overrun, and I could tell there was grave concern among the advisers. I have a vivid memory of a “Spectre” AC-130 gunship coming on station in the night – it may well have been this night – and spitting out long, solid streams of red tracers toward the earth. The sound that finally reached your ear was a kind of mournful groan.

Later we gathered around in the glow of a flashlight as Maj. Sheridan scratched an escape and evasion plan in the dirt floor of the hootch. If the brigade CP was overrun – and that had happened a lot since March 30 – we were to sneak away into the night in separate groups and try to make it back to another friendly position. I didn’t like that idea at all.

After daybreak, the tide began to turn. Hernandez and I chopped down a stand of bamboo trees with our K-bar knives to clear a field of fire for a new TOW missile launcher that U.S. Army Sgt. Bill Tillman had been teaching the Vietnamese Marines how to use. As small-arms fire cracked over our heads, we set up the launcher on top of the CP bunker, uncrated several TOW missiles and loaded one into the tube. Tillman put his Army “baseball” cap on backwards, made a few adjustments and said he was ready.

“He’s gonna fire the TOW!” we yelled as we scrambled off the bunker.

Dust flew with a deafening KABOOOOM! The wire-guided missile rocketed through the air and detonated against the turret of Russian-made PT-76 tank, whacking the steel-plate armor with an explosive CLANG! and enveloping the tank in a shroud of flaming black smoke. When the missile hit, a cheer rose from our side of the battlefield that made we think for a moment we were at some kind of sporting event. We also wiped out a heavy machine gun position with the TOW and took several shots at clumps of trees that we thought could be hiding tanks or troops. I have since read it was the first time the TOW missile – now an integral part of the U.S. infantry arsenal – was ever used in ground combat.

We orchestrated naval gunfire and air strikes throughout the morning, with bombs impacting the earth across the road like giant sledgehammers. I remember Maj. Don Price adjusting the bombing and strafing runs from atop the CP bunker, peering through a tiny pair of binoculars that looked like opera glasses. One of the Air Force F-4 jets supporting us was shot down nearby and we retrieved the pilot and backseater, who were able to bail out before the airplane crashed some distance away. Both were pale, disoriented and thirsty but otherwise unhurt. We got them to the front of the hootch and formed a semi-circle around them, amazed at their survival. They were curios in our midst, small, clean-cut yuppies who had crossed into another world. One of them asked for a canteen of water and we eagerly obliged. Then a shout went out and hands reached for the canteen as the pilot started pouring water over his head. Potable water had been precious to us in the village – particularly that day, when we had to dodge small arms fire to fill canteens at the village well. Based in the big city of Da Nang, the pilot didn’t understand the thing about water at all and had probably never set foot in the Vietnamese countryside.

By noon the battle was over, and we waddled to the road with our gear and weapons. In the fallow rice field on the other side, burning tanks (10 at most, not 22 as Time claimed) were sending up billowing columns of black smoke and broken bodies and equipment were scattered everywhere. The atmosphere was thick with the stench of cordite and tank fuel and the freshly killed. A fat CBS reporter showed up in a green and white jeep, wearing a helmet and flack jacket that barely fit him. Americans and Vietnamese milled about the steaming debris field, careful not to disturb any unexploded ordnance. We had won the battle, but

[pic]

Me and an NVA (Russian-made) PT-76 tank hit in May by direct-fire artillery not far from our CP.

everyone was too exhausted to say much of anything. When the camera panned us standing in the road, I smiled and flashed the peace sign.

That afternoon we moved to another position west of the village, deeper into a wooded area closer to the river. There were no buildings or people to be seen anywhere. At a turn in the road we passed the rusting hulk of a U.S. Marine tank abandoned years before, probably the victim of a mine. We set up just before dark in the grassy ruins of village, where all that remained were ragged concrete foundations that must have been the remnants of a district settlement wiped out during the French war or early in the American one.

After dark we emerged from our poncho hootches, gathered under a starlit sky and talked about the day. The North Vietnamese unit that had attacked us was now collecting itself somewhere in the night and licking its wounds. We had beaten them soundly and – at least for the moment – could enjoy the sublime relaxation of victory and the joy of survival.

Sometime that night the Time writer showed up, a stranger wearing a flop-brimmed bush hat approaching us out of the darkness. I recall sitting in the open around a kind of camp-fire ring, though I don’t recall any light source other than the starlit sky (light discipline would have been important that night, so I doubt there was any fire or Coleman lantern burning). The reporter asked us questions about the tank assault, which was a pretty big deal. The Easter Offensive saw the first concerted use of NVA armor, and everyone – more than a month into the campaign – was still amazed at this tactical evolution. After the reporter joined us, the officers talked and the enlisted men said very little. I eventually drifted away from the group and lay down and slid into a deep, dreamy sleep, processing the events of the day.

Fire in the Lake

I still have a tactical map that shows a series of finger lakes lacing the sand flats between the village and Highway 1. It was on a slight rise near one of these lakes, which lay downslope to the west, where we set up the brigade CP a few days after the tank fight.

The first day a U.S. Army Ranger adviser and his radio operator, a gargantuan American kid, strolled into our encampment (I marveled at the radio operator, who was like Lurch in The Adams Family; what a lucrative target he must have posed, particularly when he had a whip antenna swaying over his head). They had just walked with their battalion past the village and the killing field, where the dead tanks were still warm to the touch and more than 100 NVA bodies were ripening in the sun. “You guys really kicked ass over there,” the Ranger adviser said. “Smells like shit.” We all had a good chuckle.

From the moment we arrived in the lake country, the NVA seemed to know our every move. The first night we were jarred awake by a hand-held “pop-up” flare fired by a Vietnamese Marine not 50 yards away. The guy might as well have been standing by my cot. We all shot up with the flare, grabbing helmets, flack jackets and weapons as we scrambled into the TOC. More pop-ups, then the rattle of small arms and the fwoosh-bang of RPGs and the concussion of 105mm howitzers firing right over the bunker. “Shit, what next?” I said. Maj. Charles Goode, a brigade adviser, told me – only half in jest – that I was a whiner. “This is what happens when you piss them off.”

The firing stopped as abruptly as it started. Word was that VC sappers – “local boys” – had probed the perimeter but everything was fine now (one RPG had actually hit near the corner of the TOC, but the bunker remained intact, and no Americans were injured; I remember examining the spent fin assembly of the RPG, which probably became someone’s souvenir).

An hour or two later, as soon as the sun started coming up, Maj. Jim Beans had me drive him in a jeep down to the northwestern perimeter, and my Vietnamese pal Ha Si (corporal) Nhat rode along. When we got there the grunts were dragging half a dozen dead VC through the sand and arranging them in a neat row. The bodies were gray, torn and limp, clad only in black shorts, camouflage shirts and rubber sandals. We stood around and tried to feel victorious – even thought about taking pictures, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The Vietnamese Marines who killed these guys were all smiles, but my friend Ha Si Nhat had a terrible look on his face. We stood around for a while, staring at the dead, then jumped into the jeep and drove back up the hill to the TOC.

The next day we ventured down to the lake. We went in two jeeps, one full of Americans and one full of Vietnamese, who brought with them a mongrel puppy that someone had found abandoned in the village. Our mission: relax and take a guarded dip. We parked the jeeps in defilade, beneath the slope of the road, then scampered down to a culvert where we shed our gear and eased into the water. Vietnamese Marines took turns standing watch.

It was the first real bath that any of us had had in a long time (notwithstanding our antics at the village well). It was also daringly fun, like skinny-dipping in a forbidden pond. I swam toward the middle of the lake, treaded water for a while, then I floated on my back, with my ears just under the water, looking up at a hot, silent, cloudless sky.

Then the shelling started. Glancing toward the CP, I noticed a cloud of smoke rise and drift across the artillery berms. I lifted my head from the water and could now hear the distant gun, the ripping cardboard, the crack-boom of the rounds hitting the hilltop. I began a slow sidestroke back toward the culvert. Poor bastards, I thought. Forgive me, but I think I’m going to sit this one out. Then the air ripped over our heads and a towering spout of water erupted from the middle of the lake. The gun had shifted from the CP to the lake and was now shooting at us. I yelled at the other heads bobbing in the water, and everyone started swimming frantically – Olympic freestyle now – to the protection of the culvert.

There were about a dozen of us crouched inside, in water up to our chests. Artillery rounds continued to land in and around the lake, including several that slammed into the road overhead, causing the corrugated steel of the culvert to buzz with vibration. And each time a round hit, no matter how close, the Vietnamese Marines would laugh. It could have been something cultural, but it was also contagious. Soon we were all laughing at our fear as the rounds impacted and acrid smoke wafted through the culvert. One American had had the foresight to light a cigarette on his way in, and we passed it among us, sucking deeply and somehow keeping it dry.

The shelling stopped and, as always, we wondered why. They almost had us, for God’s sake. Why stop now? But the NVA had to conserve ammunition more than we did, which limited their “fires for effect.” We slowly emerged from the culvert. (An incoming barrage is like a very violent storm, but it is maddening in its unpredictability, unique in the fact that other human beings – the enemy – turn it on and off.) One of the Vietnamese, a young lieutenant, set out for the CP on foot, hugging the roadside embankment that rose from the lake. The other Vietnamese scrambled out of the culvert, piled into their jeep and sped off toward the CP. Watching the Vietnamese peel out, we were horrified to see the puppy, still leashed to the jeep, bouncing in the dust behind it.

After we returned to the TOC, the shelling started up again. Another FAC, the Wolfman’s replacement, was on station now looking for the gun. We had to figure out where and what it was so that the 105 gunners would engage in “counter-battery” fire (which was very labor intensive and, like so many tactics in war, counter intuitive; artillery crews were expected to methodically man their guns during an incoming barrage, prepare the shells and measured charges, load and fire back).

It occurred to someone that a “crater analysis” was in order. This was a procedure that, to my mind, absolutely flew in the face of all that rational and good during an incoming barrage. Today the military uses counter-battery radar to trace the origin of an incoming round. In 1972 there was no such technology, as far as I know, and the most tried-and-true method was the physical examination of a warm, smoking crater during a lull in a barrage. How long would the lull last? Maybe the officers had a good sense of that, but I certainly didn’t. In the bunker that day, Cpl. Lube, a hard-charging U.S. Marine who had just arrived in country from 1st ANGLICO headquarters in San Diego, volunteered to conduct a crater analysis and suggested that I help. The senior officer in the bunker must have thought that was a good idea, for I soon found myself bolting out the bunker door with Lube and searching frantically for a fresh crater. It was a race against time. We found a suitable hole near a 105 gun emplacement, where the terrified Vietnamese gunners were balled up as low as they could get against the sandbag parapet. It was clear there would be no counter-battery fire anytime soon. We dug with our hands like dogs, searching for the nose of the projectile, the fuse, which would give us a few clues. We found it buried deep, juggled it out of the hole, shot a “back azimuth” with a compass along a blackened furrow in the crater, then raced back to the TOC.

It was a tank shell, and we relayed what we knew about it to the FAC, who soon spotted the beast nestled in a creek bed. Brilliantly, the tank commander had positioned the muzzle over water, which would minimize the telltale dusty muzzle blast that could give the tank’s position away to an aerial observer. The FAC called in an air strike, and we could hear the attack jets promptly come on station. With airpower overhead, the lull became a check-fire as the tank commander frantically considered his options, which were limited. We climbed atop the bunker to watch as the jets worked the target with a vengeance, gathering high then swooping low across the sandy hills like raptors, blasting the tank and brilliant tank commander to oblivion. Black smoke billowed from behind the dunes, followed by the thumping boom of the bombs. Not long thereafter we left the lake country.

No Joy

When we called in close air support from attack jets in Vietnam, we always worked through a FAC (forward air controller), which was an airborne middleman between the ground troops and the jets (which were called “fast-movers”). The FAC flew in a slow-moving prop plane and could linger in the airspace, with time to provide a reflective overview of events. It is my understanding that he operated two different kinds of radios, one to communicate with the ground troops (FM) and another (HF) with the jet pilots, with whom we had no direct contact unless they were shot down and became our guests like the pilots in the village.

The FAC had a lot to do. Perhaps the task was easier than I imagine, but I envision him confined in a noisy, cramped cockpit with a map spread across his lap, fumbling with a grease pencil, dealing with the mind-boggling complexity of terrain identification and working two different radios -- surely he was the busiest and most focused of participants. (Incredibly, sometimes he would even be flying the airplane as well, though in my day, those we called “FACs” were usually ANGLICO aerial observers [AOs] who sat in the back seat of an L-19 “Bird Dog,” a single-engine Cessna driven by a South Vietnamese pilot, or in a U.S. Air Force OV-10 “Bronco,” a more sophisticated twin-engine turboprop.)

The FAC would confirm the target with us, then coordinate the air strike with the fast-movers, which would come barreling in from Da Nang in sets of two or three, bomb and strafe the target, then quickly “RTB” (return to base). Sometimes the FAC would have trouble seeing something we had designated – the target, smoke grenade bursts or fluorescent-orange panels, other aircraft -- in which case he would report that he had “no joy.”

I have often wondered about the etymology of this expression. It certainly did not mean that the FAC was depressed. At such moments, he was probably feeling a kind of professional euphoria, strapped into a light airplane vulnerable to ground fire and engrossed in the direction of an intense symphony of violence. There was certainly joy among members of the ground unit, knowing that help was overhead and that hell-fire would soon rain upon the enemy. But there was still the question of identity. Could the FAC distinguish the enemy from us? Could he see other aircraft, usually helicopters, wandering in the air space? To those of us involved in delivering high explosives in the general vicinity, the radio transmission “no joy” was problematic.

As it happened, the phrase also alluded to a geographic theme. The area to which my Marine brigade was assigned, the coastal region between Highway 1 and the South China Sea, was known during the French war in the early 1950s as “la rue sans joie,” or “The Street Without Joy.” It encompassed stretches of two violent roadways, Highway 1 and Highway 555 (the “Triple Nickel”). Scattered along and between these roadways, villages heavily fortified by the Viet Minh in the ‘50s and the Viet Cong in the ‘60s made the area a notorious combat zone. By the early 1970s, most of these villages had been pacified or emptied out, but the ghosts of French Legionnaires and American Marines still haunted the sand dunes and salt marshes that dominated the landscape. The French historian and author Bernard Fall, whose 1961 account of the French battles in the area, titled Street Without Joy, was killed in February 1967 advancing with American Marines along the Triple Nickel, not far from the village where NVA tanks hit our Vietnamese Marine brigade in May 1972.

Friendly Fire

In June 1972, the South Vietnamese embarked on a major campaign to take back Quang Tri province. The Vietnamese Marine Division, consisting of three brigades (369, 258 and 147), played a significant part in this effort, along with the ARVN Airborne Division. ANGLICO spot teams were attached to most of the maneuver elements in both divisions.

I spent the summer either humping the rice paddies with one of the battalions or manning the radio at the brigade CP. We were north of the river now, moving with the brigade CP almost as often as we moved with the battalions. The war had become very fluid. NVA artillery in the western foothills zeroed in on the sand flats and shot at anything that sprouted antennas and stayed still long enough to present a suitable target.

In mid-July, Lt. Bill Bullock and I joined a Vietnamese Marine battalion southeast of Quang Tri City. A U.S. Army Huey deposited us on a sandy hilltop where an APC was waiting with several wounded Vietnamese Marines and one NVA prisoner. Most of the wounded were badly shot up and had to be carried aboard the helicopter. The young NVA, who looked all of 15, seemed so excited and happy to be on his way out of there that no one seemed to pay him any mind. He crawled onto the helicopter as if he had done it many times before, squirmed between two wounded Marines and sat cross-legged on the floor. I glanced up through the blowing sand as the Huey lifted up and away, and I can see his happy face to this day.

It would be a quick exchange. As we climbed atop the APC, NVA gunners in the foothills began working up the coordinates, bearing and altitude of the hilltop where the helicopter had landed. Before the first 130mm round left the tube, the APC lurched and churned through the sand to the east side of the hill, where we came upon the courtyard of an abandoned village set in the trees. As soon as we climbed off, NVA artillery pounded the hilltop where we had been minutes before. The impacting rounds were too close to shrug off, and I stuffed myself as far as I could into a tiny NVA-built bunker, squirming to get my radio and pack through the opening. I could only get halfway in and it must have been ludicrous sight as I rested on my elbows and knees with my face buried in the earth and my butt exposed to the shellfire. I just knew a round would creep over the hilltop and explode in the trees, shredding my ass with splinters of shrapnel and some exotic Asian hardwood, but it never did. This was the routine.

Lt. Bullock and I set up a hasty spot-team perch behind the hootch where the battalion commander and adviser stashed their gear. A five-foot embankment, topped with bamboo trees, rose behind the hootch, affording us protection and camouflage as well as a vantage point for observing the action. I installed an antenna arrangement in the trees we called a “jungle whip” – the long PRC-25 antenna, sectioned and springy like an REI tent post, stretched out straight and camouflaged high in the bamboo, connected by comm wire to the radio. I strung my hammock near the radio, where I slept and day-dreamed as much as possible.

Another village hut behind us was a collection point for the battalion wounded and dead. It was also where the Vietnamese medics and radio operators cooked food for me, happy to share their bounty – rice, noodles, a pungent, fermented fish sauce called nuc mom and scraps of boiled beef. Once, in the middle of a meal, I offered a canteen cup of water to a wounded Vietnamese Marine lying nearby, and the corpsman waved me off, saying the man had a stomach wound and water would be very bad for him. I shrugged and continued eating my meal as the flies buzzed around us.

My time with this particular battalion – a week or so – was significant to me because of many events, some large, some small, all memorable. For some reason, though, I have trouble putting them in the proper sequence (they may well have happened in the same 24-hour period).

One memory that is still vivid is the death of a young Vietnamese Marine officer. He was brought back to the courtyard one day and laid gently on the tamped earth with great reverence. I squatted respectfully and watched as the medics went to work on him with a sense of compassion and care that made me think he must have been a good leader. They stripped him down and surveyed every square inch of his body, and all they could find was a neat gunshot wound to his chest. He hadn’t bled much, but it was clear to me that he was dead or close to it. The medics chattered and gestured and curiously picked him over, lifting his limp hands, squeezing his fingernails, examining his wilting physical form with a kind of wonder (I asked Lt. Bullock about this later because his dad was a doctor but he had no clue.) In time they gave him up. He was cleaned with a wet green towel, wrapped in a poncho and carried to the hootch where I would eat my evening meal.

Another event stands out, an unfortunate mistake by an Army “Pink Team” (two Cobra gunships, two scout Loaches and a C and C, the same kind of attack helicopter unit that supported us in the U-Minh Forest). We heard the helicopters flying low to the south, then they swooped by us to the east, clearly visible above the trees. I remember standing there, filling a canteen at a small stream and pumping my fist into the air and thinking, “Get some!” A few minutes later we could hear them again, and they seemed to be coming straight toward us from the north, though I couldn’t see them because of the bamboo.

Then they began to shoot – not around our perimeter but directly at us. What I remember most vividly was the growling sound of the Cobra “miniguns,” electrically powered gattling guns that spewed out thousands of rounds a minute. The Pink Team had evidently mistaken us for a unit of NVA and had decided to “recon by fire.” The gunships were like wild, menacing predators, and somehow we had become their prey. Rounds raked through the trees and rooftops as everyone scattered, then the helicopters swooped low over our heads, hot brass from the guns sprinkling the trees and courtyard. I scrambled to the bottom of the embankment with Lt. Bullock, frantically called brigade and begged them to pull the Pink Team off. Brigade quickly went to work on one set of frequencies as we went on work on another, dialing for our lives.

The sound of the helicopters faded in the distance, then there was silence. The Pink Team did not return for a second pass. We picked ourselves up. A few Vietnamese were wounded but I don’t believe anyone was killed (I have no recollection of an irate battalion commander). I never found out what the screw-up was, but in the subsequent weeks and months, when I would occasionally find myself at the Army helicopter base on the coast, I remember wanting to throttle someone. Sporting cowboy cavalry hats with golden braid, these guys were cocky, vain, brave and reckless. But they had also helped evacuate several Marine advisory and spot teams from beleaguered outposts back in April – missions that were suicidal – and we appreciated their courage and commitment. Mistakes could happen – indeed, would happen – and it was all part of the deal.

According to the routine, the battalion did not stay in this position very long. We received a radio transmission one night indicating that an “Arc Light,” or B-52 strike, was imminent in an area that we were dangerously close to. I decoded the coordinates, plotted the target box on our map and saw that, while we were not inside the box, we were right at one corner, which was no place to be for an Arc Light. We pointed this out to the Vietnamese battalion commander, and I remember him looking up from the map and saying, very professionally but with a sense of urgency, “We go now.”

And go we did. I yanked the antenna down from the bamboo, stuffed my gear, strapped it on and stumbled into the darkness, following the Vietnamese Marine in front of me while Lt. Bullock trailed behind (I remember because he kept picking up smoke grenades that had fallen off my pack and making a joke of it). Before dawn we settled on a wooded hilltop to the south, near a Vietnamese cemetery. The view to the north was spectacular, a panorama of war along the coastal plain. Lt. Bullock and I were asked to fire illumination rounds from the ship on station, and I remember being embarrassed when several of the rounds fizzled and dripped their eerie light into the darkness, instead of bathing the scene in a steady, killing glow (word was that the ammunition was old and poorly maintained). We also watched the Arc Light go in – strings of bombs, one after the other, flashing on the horizon and hammering the night. You could feel the earth quiver. This was a bizarre and dangerous place.

The War Story

It has been said that the first casualty of war is the truth. But it’s important to understand that absolute truth, when it comes to telling about war, is a complicated concept full of contradictions. I am sure my recollections here are not completely accurate. Reading them now, I am struck by how dramatic they sound, which seems unfair, given how relatively benign my experiences were compared to those of more direct combatants, like Jose Hernandez and the Vietnamese Marines in my time or the American grunts who slugged it out with the NVA at Hue City or the Ia Drang Valley in the years before. But all of us who were there have our stories, and these are mine. They are based on old sensations and fading images and on what seems real for me now. That’s about as close as you can get.

The American writer Tim O’Brien, who served as an Army infantryman in Vietnam, devotes an entire chapter to “How to Tell a True War Story” in his book The Things They Carried and gets closer to the truth about the truth, when it comes to war, than anyone I’ve ever read. It would be wise for those who read this account and look at these pictures to keep his lessons in mind.

“In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen,” O’Brien writes. “What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed [and the] pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”

O’Brien believes that true war stories do not generalize, analyze or abstract. The old aphorism, “War is hell,” seems perfectly true, he says, but because it abstracts and generalizes, he cannot believe it in his stomach. “Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.”

“War is hell,” O’Brien points out, “but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

“And in the end, or course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

O’Brien hit the nail on the head. So does Tobias Wolff, an American writer who, in another far-away life, served as an Army Special Forces officer in Vietnam. There is a passage in his book, In Pharoh’s Army, that I cannot read without choking up. Mourning a friend who died in the war, Wolff writes eloquently about loss and endurance in a way that touches me to the bone:

“Instead of remembering Hugh as I knew him, I too often think of him in terms of what he never had a chance to be. The things the rest of us know, he will not know. He will not know what it is to make a life with someone else. To have a child slip in beside him as he lies reading on a Sunday morning. To work at, and then look back on, a labor of years. Watch the decline of his parents and attend their dissolution. Lose faith. Pray anyway. Persist. We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That’s how we find out who we are.”

I like to think that life, when lived to the fullest, presents a fairly equal amount of joy and sorrow. Unfortunately, unlike most people their age, David and Emily have experienced more of the latter in recent years. I hope they will have faith that the balance will someday return. I want them to know what it’s like to survive and connect, to feel the dignity in any honest labor done well, to complete the whole tour. If my reflections on a year in Vietnam help them do that, I will consider it a year well spent.

Epilogue

Over the years, I have had very little contact with anyone I served with in Vietnam. When I was released from active duty at the Treasure Island naval station in San Francisco, I said goodbye to Sgt. Swift and the boys, gave a little lip service to the idea that we all meet at Mardi Gras, and that was that. Although I have thought many times about my Vietnam comrades and wondered how their lives turned out, I haven’t tried to find anyone, and no one has tried – or at least managed – to find me.

In late 2002, when I started scribbling on this narrative again after a five-year break, I emailed a historian at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington and asked for advice on making sure my memories jibed with the historical record. He was helpful, said the books I referenced were excellent resources and suggested that I try to contact some of the men I served with for their perspectives on our common experience. He also mentioned that former Marine advisers and their Vietnamese counterparts were planning to have a reunion in Washington during the summer.

A few weeks later an email popped up on my computer with the screen name “PENTREM.” “What are your coordinates?” the message read. It was from Don Price, the Marine adviser I remembered adjusting air strikes with “opera glasses.” The historian at Marine headquarters must have forwarded my email to Price, who was then a retired colonel living in Alexandria, Va., and one of the organizers of the adviser reunion. In addition to inviting me to the gathering, Price helped me fill in some gaps during an enlightening and reassuring email exchange in the winter and spring of 2003.

One gap I had was the Air Force jet getting shot down during the tank fight at the village. Why isn’t it mentioned in any accounts of the battle that I’ve read? A U.S. Air Force Phantom getting knocked out of the sky as it provided close air support to the Vietnamese Marines was a pretty big deal. Did I imagine it, or was it the product of a creative memory and too much postwar reading? Price, in fact, remembered it well.

“The day the two USAF punchouts ended up with us, Rich [Hodory] offered his canteen and the pilot poured it over his head. Those two still owe us a bottle of booze each for rescuing them; they were running toward the NVA. They thought our VNMC troops were bad guys.”

Price was even able to offer some insight into Sgt. Tillman’s historic tank kill with the TOW missile. “I was standing behind Tillman on top of the bunker, calming him down with my hand on his shoulder, when I told him to fire the TOW. He got a Silver Star; I got my ass chewed by Bob Sheridan for not being in the bunker with him trying to figure out what to tell the VNs to do next. Go figure.”

I also asked Price if he remembered “Fluffy.” Of course he remembered Fluffy, a brown, fur-ball of a puppy we found in an abandoned village along the My Chanh, nestled in a wicker basket full of rice hulls. He was the only living thing in the village, and we took him under our broad American wing, nurturing him with sweetened condensed milk (which the Vietnamese used in their coffee) and carrying him around in the cargo pockets of our utility trousers and in the pouches on our packs.

One day Fluffy had a hard time standing up, and when he did he trembled uncontrollably and couldn’t walk. Someone diagnosed distemper, and someone else suggested that we all draw straws; the loser would take Fluffy out back and shoot him. As hardened as these warriors were, none could abide such a thought. Then Price volunteered to take Fluffy to the air base in Da Nang, where he could get the best of care from the U.S. Air Force.

“Remember,” Price wrote, “sometimes a covan would be allowed to go to Da Nang for a day or two to eat steak and get drunk at the Da Nang Air Force officers’ club? Well, it was my turn, so I took Fluffy in a C-ration box to the Air Force guard dog vet at Da Nang. The doc took one look at Fluffy and put him down. When I got back up north, Jim Beans started bitching: ‘You could have at least brought him back to die with people he knew.’ ‘Hey, Jim, I knew him and he went to sleep in my arms.’ No good deed goes unpunished – even back then.”

As for ANGLICO’s Wolfman, Price remembers that an attempt was made to locate him and his pilot, though the shoot-down happened so fast, and the area was so full of enemy troops, that the attempt didn’t get very far.

“We called outlying covans who had seen [where he went] down and did a map resection using back azimuths. We knew about where he was. By this time, [an] SAR [search and rescue] bird was involved and they could not raise him on his SAR radio – a bad sign. After that there was nothing – poof, he was gone. I always wondered what happened, too. I talked to Mr. Thomas in 1977 at 29 Palms when we were on a desert operation together. He said it all happened very fast and he did not have a chance once his boots hit the ground and [he was] miraculously unhurt. He said he was glad no one tried to come in and pick him up because of all the SAMs and AAA.”

In our emails, Price and I also gossiped a lot about people. Of the other ANGLICO types, he remembered Sgt. Swift and Lance Cpl. Hernandez and Lt. Bullock. He said he remembered Bullock, in particular, because Bullock was in Vietnam under false pretenses.

“I was suspect of Bullock because he did not know fire commands, types of NGF ammo, ranges, etc.,” Price wrote. “I pulled him aside one day, grilled him and he folded. I let it slide because he wanted to be there in a fatalistic sort of way, while others were hiding in Okinawa. I later learned he had typed his ANGLICO qualification MOS into his record book in order to get to Vietnam. He had zero training in fire support aside from what all lieutenants have. Anyway, Marines have done worse things to get their boots in mud.”

I liked Bullock. He joined the brigade when we were set up in the lake country, after the tank fight in the village. He came on like a bad-ass lieutenant right out of the helicopter – shaved head, muscular, laconic. He immediately got crossways with Sgt. Swift, who by then was suffering from dysentery and had been through a lot over the last couple of months. In no mood for a new, bad-ass lieutenant, Swift left the field to rest up in Da Nang and eventually was reassigned to a spot team in Chu Lai. That left me as Bullock’s right-hand man, and we got along just fine. He pretty much let me run the naval gunfire show, even after two fresh NCOs showed up from San Diego – Cpl. Lube and Sgt. Pinion – to augment the brigade spot team. They were purebred ANGLICO Marines, complete with gold jump wings, but neither had ever been shot at before, and Bullock seemed to place more faith in me because I had. (“Mac, were you scared when the tanks hit the village that morning?” he once asked. “I was scared shitless, sir,” I said. Bullock smiled and never brought it up again.) I greatly appreciated Bullock’s support, much as I appreciated the lieutenant colonel’s confidence down in the Delta. I had no idea that the freedom I enjoyed under Bullock may have been due, in part, to his incapacity as a naval gunfire spotter.

Bullock did tell me once that he’d received a letter of reprimand for an incident in Hawaii in which he punched out two enlisted men after they mouthed off to him in formation. That was why he had yet to make captain, even though he had more than enough time in grade as a first lieutenant as well as a previous tour in Vietnam – which, I suppose, may not have been true. I really had no reason to doubt that Bullock had been there before; he sometimes talked about his first tour as an infantry platoon leader, and his recollections rang true to me. I think for some reason the experience had simply left him unfulfilled. In any event, Bullock had baggage (who didn’t?), and if nothing else, he must have been intimidated by the larger-than-life and professionally heroic covans.

I mentioned Bullock’s letter of reprimand in an email to Price, along with a painful recollection of how the covans had gotten me completely shit-faced when I was promoted to corporal. (In addition to a life-threatening hangover the next day, I couldn’t lift my arms; after the promotion ceremony, everyone senior to me – and this was everyone – formed two lines of three or four men each, then each man delivered a hard knuckle punch to my deltoids for every pay grade I had attained, in this case, four. You do the math.)

“That was part of the covan culture,” Price wrote. “Drinking, womanizing, fighting in bars in Saigon and on R&R. Looking back, we all deserved letters of reprimand, not just poor, guilt-ridden Bullock.”

The covan culture was more unique than Price makes it out to be. Though I wanted very much to attend their reunion, I couldn’t pull it off. Price was good enough to send me an after-action report, including two reports on the event written by journalist and former Marine infantry officer Richard Botkin and published online at . Botkin was overwhelmed by the reunion, which he portrays as nothing less than a “gathering of eagles.” Some excerpts from Botkin’s articles:

“For the men who volunteered for labor as advisers with the Vietnamese Marines, it was usually their second combat assignment. These men represented the crème de la crème. They were the thoroughbreds, the gunfighters of the Corps – young captains and majors, mostly, who had already tramped the rice paddies and jungle trails in earlier tours commanding infantry platoons and companies or artillery batteries….

“In the history of modern warfare, the chapters on fire-support coordination and the integrated use of artillery, naval gunfire and air support were largely invented by the U.S. Marines…. [And the] ability to expeditiously deliver a world of hurt on the bad guys made the covan a very hot commodity indeed….

“The epic struggle in which they would so prominently figure draws a blank stare [today] from all but the most erudite students of that war’s history. Many are familiar with the tumult and shock of the January 1968 Tet Offensive, the siege of Khe Sanh, the battle to retake Hue City … With the advancement of President Nixon’s Vietnamization program in 1970-1971, and our growing national distaste for anything relating to the war, by the time the NVA rolled south in March 1972, in an offensive that dwarfed Tet ’68, there was little emotional capital in America left to spend….”

To me, the Marine advisers were a splendid group of young officers – most in their mid-20s to early 30s – who were consistently colorful, courageous and devoted to killing NVA. They were also smart, funny and generous, traits that I didn’t associate with Marine officers in more formal garrison settings in the states, where the social division between management and labor was strictly enforced. In Vietnam, we were all like family, and the covans were my big brothers, my mentors. I really believe they turned history around, albeit temporarily, in the spring and summer of 1972, a time in Vietnam when victory was fleeting and glory obsolete. That didn’t matter. These guys fought like crazy, from what I could tell, because they excelled at waging war and took considerable pride in their expertise.

So what happened to these men and the others I remember, those who survived? My ANGLICO brothers – Atchison, Metzger, Swift, Hernandez, Bullock and the rest – are mirages to me now, hazy visions in the distance that disappear the closer I get. The covans, are easier to track and bring into focus. Following is an update on some of the advisers I remember, most of whom appear in the book, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The War That Would Not End, 1971-73, by Maj. Charles D. Melson (the historian I contacted at Marine Corps headquarters) and Lt. Col. Curtis G. Arnold.

• Walt Boomer, then a major, now a retired general, went on to command all U.S. Marine forces in the first Gulf War.

• Bob Sheridan, then a major, is a retired lieutenant colonel “who was very successful in real estate,” according to Price, and is now a retired tycoon in Isle of Pines, S.C., “where all he does is play golf.”

• Jim Beans, then a major, is a retired brigadier general with prostate problems living in Fairfax, Va. “Nobody sees him much,” Price says.

• Emmett Huff, then a major, retired as a lieutenant colonel and is now a lawyer in Houston. In an email, Price reminded me of Maj. Huff, with whom I never worked but whose impromptu Kipling recitations I can still hear breaking through the squelch of my Prick-25.

• Rich Hodory, then a captain, was a regimental commander in the first Gulf War who “got a whiff of bad gas in the desert,” Price says, and is now 100 percent medically retired as a colonel in Tacoma, Wash., “and not doing very well.” Price says he and Hodory were both stationed at the Naval Academy after the war, and the midshipmen hated Hodory because he was such a hard ass. I remember Hodory as a small, thin, boyish captain who had “titanium balls,” as Price says; “If he hadn’t gotten sick in the desert, he would have been a general.” (Capt. Hodory took the photo of me and the PT-76 tank that appears on page 15.)

• Phil Norton, then a captain (who I thought was a pretty good guy), evidently was not a favorite among the covans. “He was lucky to make major and retired as such,” Price says. “I don’t know what he does now and don’t care.” According to Price, Norton got into trouble with Maj. Sheridan when he left the field on a low-priority medevac to get an infected toenail lanced in Da Nang and ended up spending a week screwing around in Saigon. “This was big no-no in the covan culture,” Price says. “If you left the field it was on a stretcher.”

• Regan Wright, then a major, is now a retired colonel living in San Diego. He was an artillery adviser for VNMC Marine Brigade 369 in the spring and summer of 1972 (the adviser who crouched under the rickety wooden table during the artillery barrage in the village). I think I may well have gone with him to the 1st Vietnamese Ranger Group in September of that year, and I believe he was also the officer who gave me my obligatory “re-up” chat just before I left the field for Saigon and the Freedom Bird home. He actually suggested that I consider applying to officer’s candidate school and making the Marine Corps a career. I told him I was flattered but that I was really anxious to return to civilian life. In any case, 34 years later in an Austin bar, while celebrating the Marine Corps birthday with a bunch of reprobate ex-Marines (mostly Austin lawyers), I ran into someone who knew Wright and he gave me his email address. I contacted him the next day and here is his response:

“Thanks for the update on what you have been doing for the past 34 years. It seems like yesterday when we were in Vietnam with the Vietnamese Marines. I remember the tanks that morning and the Army SSgt that fired the TOW and knocked one of them out. We had four TOW rounds, one hit the tank, one hit two NVA setting up a large machine gun and one hit what we thought was a well camouflaged tank, but turned out to be a large bush. We saved one round in case we would need it later. Direct fire from the artillery battery that was with us took out one tank about 75 meters from their position. Air strikes and the Vietnamese Marines with their LAWs took out the other 8 tanks. That was the first TOW fired in combat. I was also assigned to the Rangers some time later and wound up being their senior advisor for one month because their Army senior advisor came down sick and was evacuated to Saigon. I saw Don Price about a year ago when he was visiting San Diego. He now lives in Arizona. I stayed in the Marine Corps for a 30 year career and retired in 1992 as colonel here in San Diego. After retirement from the Marines I took a position as the Executive Director of the American Cancer Society, San Diego County Unit. In 1996 I became the Executive Director of the San Diego USO. I retired again a year ago. While I was an Advisor in Vietnam I had a son born. He graduated from San Diego State University as an Engineer and married a girl two years ago. My other son was 3 years old during 1972 and he graduated from Oklahoma University with a degree in Journalism and now works in San Diego for the Naval Hospital.”

• Gordon Keiser, then a major, is now a retired colonel and a former editor for the Naval Institute Press in Annapolis, Md. The day of my promotion ceremony, Keiser delivered a bottle of Crown Royal bourbon – a priceless commodity on the banks of the My Chanh – and plied me with spirits out of a metal canteen cup. We talked and laughed and reflected on a wide range of political, social and military issues, including the disappointment I had felt upon entering the Marine Corps in 1969 and seeing the quality of clay it was molding into U.S. Marines. Indeed, after four years of serious bloodletting in Vietnam, the Marine Corps was not being very picky when I became a part of it. I made the comment to Keiser that there were graduates of my boot camp platoon with whom I would not have wanted to be seen in the same uniform in public. Then I remembered a quote by Groucho Marx, a brilliant comment on insecurity and high standards that is still one of my favorite Marxisms: “I wouldn’t want to be part of any organization that would have me as a member.” Keiser thought it was very funny. (I was actually a bit too harsh on my boot camp brothers. I dropped out of a run one time during recruit training and recall watching out of the ambulance window as the rest of the platoon, shitbirds and all, raised a cloud of dust as they jogged on by, sweating and chanting their “Jody calls.”)

• Don Price, then a major, now one of my email correspondents, is also a writer working on a biography of Col. Donald Gilbert Cook, the first Marine to earn a Medal of Honor while a POW in Vietnam. Interestingly, my memory of Price is an ambivalent one. I was around him a good bit at the brigade CP, and he was not one of my favorite covans. Short and pudgy, with a wispy mustache, he didn’t look like a warrior among warriors. He was also edgy and unforgiving, a hard guy to get to know. But he had been through the ringer since the opening round of the Easter Offensive, earning a Silver Star in the process (he shows up frequently in Melson and Arnold’s book). One day I had a run-in with Price after the brigade had displaced in the night to a position further north on the Triple Nickel. The next morning U.S. Marine helicopters were coming in with NVA prisoners and a cache of captured weapons, and ANGLICO troops were assigned to help vector them into the LZ with smoke grenades and radios while advisers gave them hand signals. We were all sleepless and worn out, and there was some operational frustration with the helicopter maneuver. As I was wont to do when exhausted and/or afraid, I expressed my own personal frustration, probably in the same way I had “whined” to Maj. Goode about the VC sapper probe in the lake country. I don’t remember what was said, but I do remember Maj. Price fixing me with his cold-steel eyes and making me feel completely ashamed and irrelevant. Price was the yang of my yin-yang experience with the covans. He held everyone to cosmic standards. I am grateful for his lessons as well as his emails.

As for me, I marked the official end of my Vietnam odyssey in April 1975, when I was a journalism student at the University of Missouri. I picked up a paper at the student union one morning after my ritual workout in the gym and learned that Saigon had finally fallen to the North Vietnamese. I thought immediately of Ha Si Nhat and the Vietnamese Marines, who’d been carrying on the fight without covans and naval gunfire since 1973. I later read that the division was fairly well routed around Da Nang; many of these fine, brave soldiers threw down their weapons and ran like everyone else.

It was hard for me to believe that the Vietnam War was really over. I had literally grown up with it. My earliest memory of the war was in 1962, when I was 11 years old and first noticed the news trickling back about gallant American advisers and the elusive Viet Cong. Of a generation weaned in the aftermath of World War II, I was intrigued by the smoldering conflict in Vietnam because it was happening in real time and not just in the pages of a history book. Ten years later I was there, watching the war lurch to its ignominious end.

And now, finally, it was over. Was it a waste? What did it mean? It certainly meant a lot to my generation, but it took me a long while, as I’ve said, to figure out what it meant to me. Among my close friends, most of whom are educated and accomplished professionals – lawyers, doctors, architects, professors – and some of whom spent time in the military during the Vietnam War, only one actually went to Vietnam. He and I don’t talk about it much, at least around the others, but when we do the memories flow freely, along with good red wine. And the memories are not bitter ones. They are simply reflections of a gainful if somewhat misspent portion of our youth. Like the Air Force “punch-outs” in the village, my friend and I are curiosities in the midst of a slightly different cohort. I would imagine that many veterans returning from today’s conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan will find themselves, in years to come, in the same cultural predicament. It’s a real trip to live in filth and fear for an extended period of time, then return to a civilized home and have to learn how to sleep in a bed again and not be overly dramatic about sharp, loud noises.

It’s quite an adjustment indeed. Did Jose Hernandez make it O.K.? Does he fly a flag on July 4? Do people honor him? Some of us choose the wrong adventure when we are young. We pay a price for that, I suppose, but I – for one – wouldn’t have had it any other way.

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