Our Year of War Page 26
Lieutenants and captains and lifer NCOs certainly qualified if they went out on missions day after day. Men like Robert Keats, Jim Craig, Skip Johnson, William Smith, and Doc Rogers might be regular army types. Still, they certainly lived and fought, and sometimes died, as grunts. The battalion and brigade commanders, not to mention the various generals, did not count. Flying overhead in a helicopter or popping out as a guest patroller impressed none of those sweating and bleeding on the ground. Soldiers credited “Gunfighter” Emerson as crazy-tough, swooping down in his chopper to chase VC, and sometimes loping along on foot in the dirt, out with rifle platoons. The grunts saw old Ewell mix it up, too, now and again. But those two were the exception. Most senior officers sent out grunts. They didn’t lead them. As a rule, the top guys lived up in the ether, orbiting in their C&C birds, out of sight, out of mind. “You just didn’t ever see those people,” recalled Chuck Hagel. “They didn’t make much of an impact or difference.”10 The braver and smarter higher commanders earned some credibility. But not enough.
Grunts “humped.” Humping bore two connotations. The obvious one referred to camels, beasts of burden. A rifleman lugging eighty pounds of ammunition, water, and gear through the hot, humid Mekong Delta certainly sympathized with the erstwhile ships of the desert.11 The less obvious idea, a bit crude, tied to sex, not in the sense of anything pleasurable, but in the way it drained you, took it all out of you, left you limp and gasping. Given the utter absence of satisfaction in laboring cross-country under a bulging rucksack, perhaps humping might have been better rendered as dry-humping. But nothing stayed dry for long in Vietnam.
Moist and warm as an overgrown greenhouse, the “boonies” hosted the grunts. Boonies derived from boondocks, the hinterlands, the countryside, the pastiche of jungles, hamlets, and Mekong tributaries that characterized the Delta. In Tet and Mini-Tet, 2-47th fought in and around Saigon. The marines up north, reinforced by army battalions, did likewise in Hue city. But those were unusual occurrences. Most of the grunt war happened in the great outdoors. Riflemen also called it the bush or the field. Or Indian country.12 They called it that, too. By whatever name, although green and savagely beautiful, it was anything but inviting or pleasant. The bad guys saw to that.
The opposition went by “Charlie,” of course. To be precise, that referred to the true guerrillas, the VC, Victor Charlie in the military phonetic alphabet. The NVA regulars never rated their own nickname. When especially able, Charlie earned promotion to Mr. Charles or even, in exceptional cases, Sir Charles. Sergeant Tom Hagel, for all his doubts about the war, judged the VC cause “absolutely evil.”13 The opposition brutalized the Vietnamese villagers in the most personal ways, opting for retail hut by hut murder by AK-47 bullet and knife edge as compared to wholesale U.S. attempts to blow away entire square acres with artillery shells and high-explosive bombs. In the end, though, Charlie’s harsh methods suited the war he fought.
Runty, slight, and often young, Charlie displayed endless ingenuity, courage, and endurance. He could also be obstinate, suicidal, and predictable. But for sure, Charlie fought, and fought hard. While U.S. body counts tended to be inflated, undoubtedly the enemy suffered high casualties. Somehow, though, enough of them always seemed to slip away and the hostile battalions reappeared as consistently as weeds on the lawn. The communists fought so hard that, despite their many reasons to think otherwise, the U.S. riflemen respected their foe. Tom Hagel certainly did, referring to his opponents as “incredible soldiers.” Senior officers discouraged such “Charlie worship.”14 But the grunts believed.
As guerrillas, Charlie swam in the sea of the local people. The fighting fish impressed U.S. infantrymen. The sea—the Vietnamese population—did not. Although neither Chuck nor Tom Hagel resorted to the common terminology, they certainly heard it constantly. Americans called the Vietnamese “gooks,” “slopes,” and “dinks” as a matter of course.15 Even in the much more tin-eared American society of 1968, one in which the most offensive racial monikers could be heard daily on radio, television, and in street conversation, calling a human a gook, slope, or dink consigned the already put-upon citizenry of South Vietnam into a subdungeon all their own.
The cultural contempt extended into the pidgin dialect used by U.S. soldiers in their interactions with the Vietnamese. The residents of the south ranked so lowly that the men from across the Pacific did not often deign to address the locals in their own vernacular, a delicate tonal language that remained almost wholly unintelligible to pretty much all Americans. Instead, impatient grunts employed an amalgam of words borrowed from previous wars and other countries, plus a very few choice snatches of Vietnamese. From the French era came beaucoup (many) and fini (the end); most rural Vietnamese understood neither. Out of occupied Japan Americans appropriated “hootch” (from uchi, house), “papa-san,” “mama-san,” and “baby-san,” all nonsense even in the Tokyo ginza, let alone in the hamlets of Long An Province. The Korean War contributed the callous epithet gook (literally people, but most often applied to an individual), which meant nothing to the populace of the Mekong Delta.16 The usual remedy to U.S. linguistic incoherence involved yelling louder, gesticulating forcefully, and waving firearms around. It all got responses. But most replies made as little sense as the gibberish shouted by frustrated American troops.
As for Vietnamese phrases, the real business terms were few. Di di mau (move out). Dung lai (halt). As a villager, get those wrong and it might earn a burst of M16 rounds. Whatever happened, good, bad, or indifferent, the Americans shrugged and offered the all-purpose conversation closer: xin loi (sorry about that). That one came not from the traditions of the region, but from the U.S. television spy comedy Get Smart.17 When a zany character caught his nose in a fast-closing elevator door or the unwieldy cone of silence clunked on unwitting heads, “sorry about that” made it all better. Raised on television, sardonic American grunts favored the phrase, courteously translated into Vietnamese. Shoot the family hog? Burn the hut? Kill the daughter? Xin loi, mama-san. They were only dinks.
Sweeping racist generalizations also included ARVN and the national police, the White Mice. Those often inept organizations lived down to their reputations. All the committed, brave Vietnamese appeared to have signed up for the VC. Our side got the leftovers. Tom Hagel contemptuously recalled moving out on dangerous M113 roadrunner missions and passing ARVN soldiers “swinging in their hammocks” on the roadside, taking their ease. It might be their country, but a great number seemed ready to sit this one out. 18 After all, they had the best army in the world—the Americans—fighting on their behalf. From their South Vietnamese allies, grunts expected very little.
With regard to the village inhabitants, the Americans thought even less. Dirt poor and alien to the grunts, the average Vietnamese hardly ranked as humans. Some actively supported the Viet Cong. Others strongly opposed the communists. Most seemed to blow with the wind, “GI Number One” by day, “GI Number Ten” by night. The locals sold everything: smokes, soft drinks, beer, black-market post exchange goods, marijuana, hard drugs, their daughters, you name it. And the prices stayed low, low, low. The grunts figured that being so desperately indigent, the Vietnamese would do anything for money, to include selling out a neighbor. And the locals just didn’t appear to care about much of anything, even each other. Life seemed cheap. Even well-educated senior U.S. officers sometimes echoed such stereotypical sentiments.19 They were, of course, horribly wrong. But the language and cultural barriers, combined with the incredibly tortuous need to figure out which guy sowed rice and which one buried land mines—and which Vietnamese planted both—well, it demanded the patience of Job. American grunts just didn’t have it.
And impatience, rashness, anger—those impulses led directly to the short, blunt, single-syllable words, the ugly ones. Bust caps. Fuck ’em up. Light ’em up. Nape and snake. Rock and roll. Zap. Waste.20 “Kill” and “dead” and “body” were three other four-letter words, but grunts tended to use them only in referenc
e to Charlie or other Vietnamese. The telling term, le mot juste (with a nod to the French who’d gone before), had to be “waste.” It served as a verb. It worked as a noun. It summarized the whole damn war.
DURING THE DAY, Tom Hagel found things to do. As those who placed him there expected, the lanky sergeant determined to operate the best possible small PX in Vietnam. The big bases, like Dong Tam, overflowed with creature comforts: a swimming pool, clubs (officer, NCO, junior enlisted), USO shows, intramural sports leagues, and even a Red Cross club-mobile, staffed by young female American civilian volunteers.21 Dong Tam hosted a large PX full of televisions, radios, and other consumer goodies. The quality beer like Ballantine, Budweiser, Michelob, and Miller High Life remained cold and ready in bulk at Dong Tam.
Binh Phuoc had almost none of this beyond tiny club huts and Hagel’s miniscule PX. Out at the 2-47th firebase, the suds stayed warm and inferior: Carling’s Black Label, Falstaff, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, and even Vietnamese 33 brand. In later wars, American soldiers didn’t drink alcohol.22 In Vietnam, they did.
Officially, each man received an okay to drink two beers a day. Unofficially, the cans accumulated while troops carried out missions. Some units drank in the field—tracks with coolers were not an uncommon sight, and one wiseass battalion commander even told Ewell that his M113’s basic load included six cases of beer. Old campaigner Ewell, product of a much more rough-hewn army than today’s more tightly wound bunch, laughed it off. The general had been known to quaff a few cold ones when mingling with his men, Chuck Hagel among them.23 Sergeant Tom Hagel inherited the responsibility of feeding this habit. He decided to improve the stockage.
That necessitated a shopping expedition. Hagel approached the major and master sergeant at battalion S-3, the operations section, the 2-47th planners and command post team. Drawing on his reservoir of good will as a veteran NCO with three Purple Hearts and a valor award, Hagel asked to borrow the major’s jeep and trailer. The dutiful PX supervisor intended to make a trip to Dong Tam. He knew “contacts” there. He’d bring back the good stuff. The major agreed immediately. He liked decent brews, too.24
So on a clear December morning—the dry season had returned—Hagel set off as part of a supply convoy en route to Dong Tam Base Camp. He drew on all his M113 mission experience as he planned and executed the movement. Hagel drove northwest on Route 207 into the overcrowded town of Tan An. Had he turned north, he’d run into the same Vam Co Dong River where Lieutenant Colonel Van Deusen’s helicopter crashed on July 3. Bad vibes for sure—and no Budweiser waited up that way. Instead, Hagel motored south on Route 4, entering Dinh Tuong Province. After creeping through the refugee-swollen city of My Tho (about 63,000 people), Hagel turned his jeep onto Route 25 and proceeded west to Dong Tam Base Camp. The twenty-two-mile trip took a few hours, with most of the delays brought on by dodging bicycles, pull carts, and scooters in Tan An and My Tho.25
Bustling Dong Tam Base Camp brimmed with some 10,000 U.S. troops. The major combat forces included the 2nd Brigade (the riverine outfit) and some of their partners in the U.S. Navy task force. The majority of Dong Tam housed the 9th Infantry Division headquarters, the DISCOM logistics battalions, the 9th Aviation Battalion, and various smaller support and service units.26 The place looked like Fort Bliss, only with more tents, corrugated metal roofing, and plywood huts. The riverine guys and aviators certainly sallied forth to fight. The rest? Not so much.
A wily peasant in the imperial capital, Tom Hagel found his way to the right provisioning centers. He backed up his jeep and trailer. Over the next few hours, he loaded up “cases of beer, cigarettes, toothpaste, you know, the essentials.” Being Tom Hagel, he thought it ironic that 2-47th depended on him to get their beer, and yet by law, he couldn’t pop a cold one back in the United States. Tom had just passed his twentieth birthday in November. Well, he gave himself a dispensation. If he could zap Charlie for America, he could certainly see fit to knock back a few.27 Or more than a few, he figured. He owed it to himself.
It took until late afternoon for Hagel and the rest of the convoy to finish their business, such as it was, at Dong Tam. They rolled out not long after three o’clock, heading back to Binh Phuoc. Every uniformed American in country knew the deal. Get to a safe space by nightfall, just before seven. In this potentially terminal version of musical chairs, if the tune ended and the trucks were still out, well… between the ill will of Charlie and the various 9th Infantry Division night hunters in the sky and ambushes on the ground, nothing pleasant would result.28 Sergeant Hagel had no intention of testing that folk wisdom.
About 4 p.m., north of My Tho on Route 4, barely across the Long An provincial boundary, that friction so common in battle showed up right on schedule. Civilian traffic disappeared, which always raised antenna among veteran grunts like Hagel. The locals always seemed to know where not to be. Near the highway, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry, on loan from the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, had been chasing VC rocket teams.29 Evidently one of Charlie’s elements elected to do something about it. Some kind of desultory firefight developed. The distant smoke puffs of unseen shell bursts crumped among the trees a mile or so out from the road, well across a flat expanse of open rice paddies. Not his issue, and far away, Sergeant Hagel thought. He kept right on going.
As Hagel’s jeep and a 2-47th Infantry 2.5-ton (universally nicknamed “deuce-and-a-half”) cargo truck rumbled north, a VC mortarman overshot his target. An 82mm projectile popped in a hot gray spray right at the roadside. The chance impact riddled Hagel’s trailer. Both tires went flat. Holes appeared in the metal sides. Beer began spraying out in random golden streamers. Unwilling to wait around for more 82mm encouragement, Hagel gunned it. The cargo truck’s driver did, too.
A few miles north, though, Hagel had to stop. The trailer’s wheels, reduced to shaky, creaky rims, sparked on the pavement.30 They’d outrun Charlie’s mortar range. But the trailer was finished.
Hagel went to work. Working with the men from the deuce-and-a-half, Hagel chucked out the leaking cans. Lady Bird Johnson might be keeping America beautiful on the far side of the Pacific. In Long An, Hagel and the other soldiers dumped their damaged goods. Wet cardboard, torn-up cans, busted wooden pallet slats went into the roadside ditch. The locals would eventually pick through the detritus. Charlie might, too. But with the trailer pretty well chewed into junk, there wasn’t much of an alternative. Hagel crammed the intact cases atop the rest of the boxes and crates in the already laden jeep. Then he and the other troops wrestled the trashed trailer up into the deuce-and-a-half’s cargo bed.31 Fortunately, the 2-47th men in a large truck had already delivered their load at Dong Tam. Well, now they had something to carry back.
The jeep and the bigger truck got through the gate into Binh Phuoc about dusk. Hagel expected a less than welcome reception from the S-3 major and master sergeant. “Oh God, I’m in trouble now,” he thought. The major raised some hell, and at least one staff officer mentioned court-martial charges. But in the end, with Hagel weeks from going home—and those three Purple Hearts—nothing came of it. When one of the higher-ups mentioned that Tom Hagel sure went the extra mile to take care of his fellow grunts, the sergeant nodded. “Nobody else would.”32
STAYING BUSY IN the sunshine, even in such dubious exploits, checked off the days on the calendar. But nights proved to be a different matter. Battery B, 2nd Battalion, 4th Field Artillery pounded away the dark hours, its six 105mm howitzers engaging “harassment and interdiction” targets all over Long An. Together, the half dozen cannons fired an average of 150 rounds a night, and more on many occasions. The nearby 2-47th Infantry heavy mortar platoon pumped out big illumination rounds. The golden glow lit up the dark spots across the fence line. “Plenty of juice up there,” Tom recalled.33 The sound and light show went on all night, every night.
Under the thunder of the outgoing shells, 2-47th soldiers guarded Binh Phuoc’s roughly rectangular defensive wall. At each corner, a squat tower featured a .50-caliber ma
chine gun. Fired from a dozen feet above ground, the big rounds were effective to about a mile, but could keep right on zipping out to four miles.34 On the wide packed-dirt wall, the berm, a succession of sandbagged bunkers also included M60 machine guns. In between, other bunkers allowed riflemen to shelter under cover and shoot back. At night, 2-47th manned the four corners and some of the berm line. Until the alarm sounded, and then all on the firebase took their posts, most of the bunkers stood empty. Well, not totally empty—on more than one occasion, both Chuck and Tom met the bunkers’ full-time inhabitants, feisty rats the size of raccoons.35
Inside the berm, the Americans crowded together in some seventy- three temporary buildings. In one of the few open stretches, artillery and U.S. heavy mortar crews set up in sandbagged firing spots at the south end of the base. At the northeast end, a bare field—mud in the wet times, dust in the dry—served as the motor pool, with the battalion’s M113s aligned in company ranks, fueled, armed, and set to roll out the gate. The battalion command post was in the northwest, just across from where the tracks parked. Between those two key areas stood the main gate and a “battalion street” that ran all the way to the big guns in the South. On either side of the dirt main artery, a tight clutch of metal-roofed barracks alternated with a mess hall, company orderly rooms, an aid station, and Tom Hagel’s little PX. 36 If you lived inside the dirt wall, you lived in very close quarters.
Beyond the berm, cleared flat ground, much of it flooded former rice paddies, spread all around. About ten yards out, the 2-47th had emplaced and staked down the first of three rows of razor-rimmed, head-high concertina wire. Another such ring ran ten more yards out. And the third one stood ten yards beyond that. Dozens of Claymore mines dotted the open space between the concertina rolls. Any attackers, even skilled NVA sappers, had a rough time ahead of them if they tried to penetrate Binh Phuoc.37