Our Year of War Page 13

  In between dealing with the Tet Offensive and its aftermath, both brothers endeavored to link up. For two junior soldiers in a war zone, that was easier said than done. They talked very briefly on the telephone and swapped notes via the army post office.

  Tom thought he had heard somewhere that two brothers couldn’t be sent to the same theater of war at the same time. He guessed that if he was in country, maybe Chuck could go home. Of course, he never asked Chuck, who had no intention of leaving. But the younger brother figured why not try it. Some barracks lawyer convinced Tom that the Red Cross would sort it out. When Tom tracked down a Red Cross representative, the person gave him the penguin salute, arms up and flapping—never heard of it.49

  But Tom had read a lot, and his memory served him pretty well. He was indeed on to something. There was a protocol, the so-called Sullivans Rule, that said something about brothers or sisters serving together in the same unit. It stemmed back to the sinking of the light cruiser USS Juneau, torpedoed by the Japanese on November 13, 1942, following a fierce night naval clash off Guadalcanal. Sailors George, Frank, Joe, Matt, and Al Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, had asked to serve together. They died together, too. Their sacrifice became a rallying cry on the home front in World War II and resulted in posters, a movie, and a destroyer named USS The Sullivans.50 It was a noble and heart-rending episode.

  And the U.S. Congress, overseeing a military composed of citizens in uniform, had no intention of letting it happen again. In 1948, congressional legislation established the Sole Survivor Policy, which most people knew as the Sullivans Rule. It provided that if one child had been killed, gone missing, or declared captured, any sole survivor could apply to be discharged from the armed forces or excused from the draft if not already in the ranks. The policy did not require the services to separate siblings in units, nor did it compel them to release sole survivors automatically. An individual had to apply. In addition, any potential sole survivor might waive eligibility.51 Unless or until one died in Vietnam, neither Hagel brother qualified.

  But with one door closed, another opened. Nothing prevented the brothers from serving together voluntarily. So both soldiers made application to serve together. Chuck applied for 3-5th Cavalry. Tom asked for 2-47th Infantry. The documents got typed up by bored base camp clerks. Signed off, the forms vanished into the gaping maw of the U.S. Army Adjutant General Corps. As Chuck recalled: “And we decided that I would put a transfer request in to go where he is, and he would put a transfer request to come to where I am, knowing full well the way this all works, we would never ever see each other, but maybe once during the time we were there in Vietnam, we might run across each other.”52 The Hagel brothers gave it a shot, then kept right on going, as did the war.

  In mid-February, just in to the battalion tent city at Bear Cat following another ambush patrol, a sergeant handed Hagel orders for the 25th Infantry Division. So maybe that was the plan—get him and Tom together in another unit. The sergeant offered zero explanation, only instruction in the unmistakable army style: “Pack your bag. Grab your rifle. Get your ass on that fucking truck.” Hagel complied. The truck loaded up with other men, then headed out the gate.

  Unexpectedly, just past the exit, the vehicle stopped with a screech. A military police soldier, “MP” on his shoulder brassard, just like stateside, walked to the back of the truck. The MP looked down at a clipboard. Then he spoke.

  “Is there a Private Charles Hagel on the truck?”

  No answer. Hagel wondered, “What now?”

  The MP grimaced. “Are you so dumb, soldier, that you don’t know what your name is?”

  This time, Hagel acknowledged.

  “Get down here, Private Hagel,” said the MP. “The captain wants to see you. Bring your bags.”

  The captain told him to get back to his platoon.53 He headed out on operations shortly thereafter. Chuck Hagel never did go to the 25th Infantry Division, and as for what became of the orders, who can say? The ways of army administration can be mysterious indeed.

  Without fanfare, the big green machine ground its cogs and spat out one more unanticipated event. As March of 1968 began, PFC Chuck Hagel found himself, as usual, out on foot patrol, screening for the column of tracks, clearing yet another stretch of roadway. Around midmorning, as the men finished one segment of their route, they formed a roadside perimeter to take a break. A sergeant motioned to the PFC.

  “Hagel, come on back here. There’s a chopper coming in to pick you up and take you back to base camp,” he said. Hagel didn’t get it.

  “Well, why is that?” asked the PFC.

  “Well, I don’t know. They didn’t tell me,” the sergeant answered. “They said get Hagel out of the field. Bring him back to base camp.” “They” said a lot of things in the army, especially to a PFC, and to sergeants too, evidently.

  Hagel connected some dots. “Well, sergeant, is this about my brothers or something there that I need to know about?” He thought of Tom up north, but Mike and Jimmy back home also crossed his mind. Things happen to young men all the time, and not just in wars.

  The sergeant shrugged. “If I knew, I’d tell you,” he said, “but you don’t need to know that. Your instructions are to get on that chopper, it’s going to be here in an hour, and get the hell out of here.” Okay then. Like the good PFC he was, Hagel got on the Huey when it briefly touched down.

  In a few minutes, the helicopter landed on the dusty helipad and Hagel clambered out, more than a little disoriented to be back in Camp Martin Cox while his unit stayed out on patrol. Nobody met him. He didn’t know what else to do, so he went to his tent. Using excellent PFC logic, he figured if they needed him, they would send for him. Trust in “they.”

  Nothing happened.

  Just before the evening meal, Hagel decided he had waited long enough. He went to the company orderly room. The clerk looked up. Hagel asked why he had been flown back from his platoon. “We don’t know,” the office soldier said.

  “Do I have orders to leave?” Hagel asked. He wondered if the 25th Infantry Division assignment had come back into play.

  “Well, I don’t know.” Nobody seemed to have a clue. Yet Hagel was right there. Somebody summoned him, and thought enough to send a Huey.

  At a time like this, a good infantry soldier’s thoughts turn to the fundamentals, i.e., food. Lacking any other instructions, Hagel went to the mess hall to eat. There he ran smack into First Sergeant Martin M. Garcia of Killeen, Texas. “And he was not a particularly [sic] favorite of mine or I don’t think anybody’s,” Hagel noted. A hard-bitten, busy first sergeant rarely had anything good to say to a PFC.

  But that night, Garcia had the word.

  “By the way, Hagel,” he said, “your brother’s coming down. He’s been transferred to your unit.”

  “When’s he going to arrive?” asked Hagel.

  “He’ll be here tomorrow morning,” answered Garcia. At eight the next morning, Tom Hagel showed up, duffle bag in hand. If he ever heard of the Sullivan brothers, First Sergeant Garcia did not let it affect assignments in Company B. As promised, the first sergeant put Tom into Chuck’s platoon. And the platoon sergeant figured what the hell and assigned Tom to Chuck’s squad.54 They served together from that time onward.

  THE HAGELS FOUND OUT that the 2-47th scout platoon also included two brothers, big men from Michigan with bright red hair and matching handlebar mustaches. It seemed like someone somewhere up the chain decided to honor these kinds of requests. A week or so back—hard to remember, the days and nights ran together—Chuck Hagel had mentioned his request to serve with his brother to a visiting general. Had it been Ewell, full of energy as he grabbed hold of the 9th Infantry Division? Chuck Hagel definitely met the new division commander later, and saw him often, out and about, “a very hands on general.” 55 Ewell very much wanted to keep his infantry soldiers happy and out fighting. If the Hagels asked to serve together, that worked for Ewell. And it kept riflemen in the field, chasing VC.

&nb
sp; Back in Columbus, Nebraska, Betty Hagel and sons Mike and Jimmy waited for every letter from Vietnam. Mike realized that Tom had done a good amount of hunting, so that boded well as far as protecting Chuck, who didn’t do much with firearms before the army.56 Betty said, “I was just glad they were together. That they would be company for each other.” Aside from the odd snatches of televised “bang-bang” on the nightly news, the raw details of infantry combat in Vietnam remained opaque on the home front. It was just as well.

  The prospect of losing a son, let alone both, lurked somewhere back in Betty Hagel’s mind. But she dared not think about it. As she remembered: “If I had seen an Army officer walk up the front steps, I would have probably run out the back door as fast as I could.”57 Like Charlie in the Delta, she could run, but she couldn’t hide.

  CHAPTER 5

  Blast

  Something strange happens when a man is hit.

  JAMES JONES, WWII1

  The Hagel brothers walked point. Major General Julian J. Ewell could talk all he wanted about sending out more hunters, finders, beaters, whatever. In concrete terms, that meant groups of young riflemen walking through villages, rice paddies, or jungles, looking for the Viet Cong. And where those men walked, somebody had to go first. For Company B, 2-47th Infantry, Chuck and Tom Hagel were those somebodies.

  According to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, the point element consisted of an eleven-man rifle squad led by a staff sergeant. Under that NCO, two sergeants (“buck” sergeants) each led five-man fire teams. Along with the sergeant in charge, each fire team included an M79 grenadier and three riflemen. One soldier carried a flimsy little aluminum fold-up bipod to make his M16 an “automatic rifle.” It was a leftover from another era, as any M16 became “full auto” by a simple flip of the selector switch, easily thumbed on the left side of the rifle, just up and back from the trigger. Anyway, the field manual told you to send the point about two hundred yards forward of the following troops. The book even provided a neat little diagram. 2

  War doesn’t follow the book. It never did. Forget about sergeants and grenadiers and the rest of the panoply. In their habitually understrength 2nd Platoon, leading their equally undermanned Company B, the Hagels, both PFCs, were the entire point. And as for being two football fields out front, well, in the dense jungle near Bear Cat, that would be the equivalent of the far side of the moon. The point team stayed about ten yards ahead and you could barely see them, just some waving fronds and an occasional flash of a sweat-stained green fatigue shirt. They needed to be just far enough out to absorb the first shot. And, of course, the VC opened the show 88 percent of the time.3 For point men, it was not healthy to dwell on that particular number.

  The first brother looked for trip wires, buried mines, flashes of movement, and physical evidence of the VC: footprints, trash, maybe broken branches that indicated something wicked this way came. The point man also broke brush, often with a machete. Picking the way, hacking a good bit, a hundred yards an hour, head on a swivel, a smart point man took his time. Stands of tough bamboo, replete with rough edges, flayed arms exposed in rolled-up sleeves. The high heat and humidity slowed him down. So did his exhaustion—with night ambushes and alerts, riflemen rarely got more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. There had been method to the madness imposed by the frantic pace of Basic Combat Training back at Fort Bliss. If nothing else, it offered a preview of what to expect. But it didn’t make it any easier.

  The second brother, the “slack” man, stayed back about three yards, maybe less. He held the compass, and used it to keep the point man, and thus the platoon, going in the right direction. That’s one reason the second guy had to stay close: to give directions. Talking was kept to a whisper, and preferably not done at all. A gesture sufficed. A good point and slack duo could run for hours without a word. The Hagels were very good.

  Some platoons used a separate pace man to measure distance.4 With the Hagels, the slack man kept the pace. A good slack man knew how many steps it took him to move a hundred yards. For a six-footer like Tom about sixty-two would do it. Chuck, an inch or so shorter, needed a few steps more. Each time the slack man hit a hundred yards, he tied a knot on a cord. The second brother also consulted a paper map with the route legs marked—segment by segment, direction and distance through the bush, all the way to an oval blob, the objective, the neck of the woods where Charlie supposedly hung out. The Hagels knew each leg of the route, direction and distance.

  Behind the brothers, the lieutenant and platoon sergeant also glanced at their maps, checked their compasses, and kept their own pace counts. Even though they trusted the brothers, the platoon’s leadership double-checked the pair. The NCO knew his stuff. The rookie officer—well, the jokes about second lieutenants and maps reflected only too many actual goofs. As Chuck Hagel commented afterward: “Some of the officers couldn’t read maps very well.”5 The Hagels could and did.

  That morning of March 28, 1968, the brothers led a long file of Americans, the entire field strength of Company B. Those pleasant little drawings in the field manual depicted echelons, vees, wedges, and orderly open columns with entire squads pushed out forward, trailing, right, and left to clear the way and push off curious enemies. With less than sixty men—Major General Ewell would not approve at all, but there it was—incredibly tangled undergrowth, and a wary, elusive foe, the company commander, as usual, chucked the Fort Benning school solution. In this endless green bamboo thicket, the captain put out no flankers, judging it better to have clear shooting lanes port and starboard rather than a few more guys on either side seeking trip wires and swinging machetes. For early warning, the captain counted on the Hagels in the lead and a “drag” duo at the very end of the file, ten yards back. The tail-end man spun around every ten steps or so. Sometimes he walked backward for a minute or so.

  Except for the point and drag teams, everybody else followed the man to his front, the classic ranger file, maybe a yard between each man. The Infantry School instructors said that this kind of follow the leader formation emphasized speed over security. In the primordial underbrush near Bear Cat, the file enjoyed no pretense of speed. But by going so cussedly cross-country, Company B confounded preset hostile ambushes. Even Charlie couldn’t tippy-toe through this stuff without raising a racket. If the VC came from the side, as they often did, they’d be heard. Then the formula became right face or left face and cut loose.6

  In the long, long row, each sweating soldier carried the usual burden: his M16 rifle (about eight pounds with a magazine loaded), a steel helmet with lime green cloth cover, web gear (a belt with suspenders), two full one-quart canteens (emptier by the hour), a first-aid pouch with sterile bandage pack, belt-mounted ammunition pouches crammed with twenty-round magazines (the army recommended ten and the soldiers doubled that), two baseball-sized M26 fragmentation (frag) grenades, and a rucksack packed with more ammunition (two hundred linked rounds for the M60 pig machine gun and C4 plastic explosive), an entrenching tool (“e-tool,” a little fold-up shovel), a nylon poncho liner (lighter-than-air quilted blanket), rifle cleaning kit (the M16 was touchy), a spare pair of socks (critical to change out to keep feet in good shape), a bit of shaving gear, a toothbrush, the ever popular canned C-rations, and for most, some cigarettes wrapped to stay dry. A few men—short-timers and nervous ones—wore the heavy flak jackets, but most used those only when operating with the tracks. In the bush, you took your chances. You already carried way too much.

  While American manufacturers took out every smidgen of excess weight, water and ammunition weighed what they weighed. The field manual estimated it all added up to 78.18 pounds, almost double the amount toted in Basic Combat Training.7 In that regard, the Benning book got it about right. Of course, slight, short Charlie Cong carried much less. The Hagels and their mates struggled along with the equivalent of a Viet Cong wrapped around each tired American. Fleet and nimble they were not.

  As they labored ahead, the primeval vegetation hemmed them in. �
��You couldn’t see the sun,” Chuck Hagel remembered. “It was like you were inside all the time.”8 Gloom, heat, humidity, sleep deprivation, and routine generated tunnel vision. Slowly, slowly, a football field of distance an hour, the troops rustled along, picking their way through the “wait a minute” vines and the dripping leaves. Other than a few leaders and the men at point and drag, the troops droned, heads bobbing, one nylon and leather jungle boot in front of the other. If this constituted hunting, it depended on pursuing some pretty dumb, cooperative, inert beasts. The VC were anything but that.

  Company B’s patrol sought a new, particularly dangerous enemy force. The analysts at division G-2, the intelligence staffers, guessed that the opposition brought in some necessary reinforcements—probably true NVA, really from the North—to rebuild after the savaging suffered in Tet. The intel people wanted to locate the VC K-34 Artillery Battalion, an outfit armed with 120mm mortars (3.5-mile range) and 122mm rockets (5-mile range), big, dangerous weapons that caused a lot of mayhem during Tet. A month ago to the day, the VC bombarded Camp Martin Cox itself, dumping rockets and mortar shells all over the Bear Cat base and killing six soldiers and patients in the 9th Medical Battalion area.9 That had to stop.

  Thus 2-47th went out without its tracks, looking for the VC shooters, Black Panthers on the prowl in the jungle. It briefed well up at division headquarters. But the daily grind of patrols and nightly ambushes, done “unhorsed” at Ewell’s direction, pulled the battalion one way, keyed on a slippery hostile unit. At the same time, roadrunner missions aboard the M113s, tied to routes 1 and 15, compelled 2-47th to do a very different kind of task. In both cases, whether used for the mission or not, the tracks demanded constant repairs and upkeep. Companies alternated between the dismounted search for the K-34 Artillery Battalion and mounted road security operations. Neither went well. Lieutenant Colonel John Tower felt the heat. Even Chuck Hagel noticed that “there was an additional pressure put on the senior guys.”10 It rolled downhill fast.