darker shade of green.
Following one of several narrow trails leading from the valley’s lowlying rice paddies into the lightly vegetated foothills and then, the ascent becoming decidedly steeper, up the eastern side of the mountain, we climbed… hour after exhausting hour. Finally, nearing the mountain’s crest, we paused, noting that our trail had leveled off somewhat and now seemed to run generally parallel to the mountain’s face in a north-south direction. We also noted it was well, and recently, traveled.
“Fresh hoofprints, sir,” Lieutenant MacCarty whispered, pointing at the telltale footprints in a portion of the trail wetted by the mountain’s runoff. “These aren’t VC, they’re NVA, and a lot of ’em!”
“Yeah,” I whispered in return, “and most of them seem to be moving the same way, north to south.”
Cautiously, we continued moving north along the narrow trail. And, I observed with satisfaction, we were moving as men ought to move in such a situation. Proper distances were maintained, there was no talking or horseplay, and weapons were kept at the ready, trained on both sides of the trail. These soldiers of Charlie Company were quite obviously professionals who knew what they were doing and were deadly serious about doing it. I was impressed.
Twenty meters or so to our front, a single point man led the column, followed by his squad leader and a two-man M-60 machine-gun team.
Lieutenant MacCarty and his RTO were behind the machine-gun team, with me and my two RTOs trailing him. Lieutenant Norwalk and his 1st Platoon trailed Two Six.
Not at all the way we taught it at Benning, I thought to myself. But, like Al Fallow says, There’s the way it’s taught and the way it’s done.
Yet it made sense in this kind of war, in this kind of terrain. We knew that if we found Charlie it would in all likelihood be by means of a frontal meeting engagement; in other words, the two of us would just run into each other. If that should happen, it was important that we have two assets well forward: firepower and leadership. Few things are more frustrating to a commander than finding himself midway in a column moving through dense vegetation when a firefight suddenly erupts a hundred meters and two platoons to his front.
Bam!Bam!Bam!
Three ear-shattering rifle shots from the point man’s M-16 abruptly interrupted my philosophical wanderings concerning small-unit tactics in a jungle environment.
Everyone dived to the ground, training their weapons on the thick foliage flanking the trail but holding their fire.
Simultaneously the point man yelled, “I got that dink sonofabitch, know I got him!”
MacCarty and I ran forward to find our point man grinning excitedly, and perhaps a bit nervously. In his hand he held a Chinese SKS carbine, now legally his as a war trophy.
“I got him, LT! You ain’t believing it! Fucker’s just bopping along like he ain’t got a care in the world. Had his weapon shoulder slung, fucking sloppy. But I got him, got him dead in the chest, sir, I mean blew him away! The mother ain’t gonna go far.”
Sure enough, we had a good blood trail. Leaving the rest of the column in a hasty trail-watch defense, we cautiously followed the blood markings north, accompanied by MacCarty’s leading rifle squad. Within a matter of minutes we found our quarry wedged between two fallen trees about fifteen feet off the trail. Although it was obviously a painful task, he was busily trying to conceal himself with whatever vegetation he could grasp.
Our point man was right. He had hit his foe dead center in the chest, collapsing a lung and producing a hole in his back the size of a baseball. Gazing up at us, the wounded soldier’s eyes reflected a dead certainty that regardless of how lucky he might have been in surviving his initial encounter with Charlie Company, the coup de grace was to be administered momentarily.
Taking the extended handset from Specialist Anderson, my company RTO, I told Lieutenant Norwalk to bring the rest of the column forward.
Upon its arrival moments later, “Doc” Heard, our company medic, went to work doing what he could to patch up our wounded captive. As he did so, I reported our contact to battalion, requesting a dust off (aerial medical evacuation) for our prisoner. Overhearing me, Heard yelled out that the man could not survive the trip down the mountain and would have to be picked up in place.
This meant the dust-off helicopter would have to hover over us, using a jungle penetrator to retrieve the wounded soldier. This procedure would in turn reveal our location on the mountain to anyone who might be watching. And some of Charlie Company’s rank and file looked upon this with disfavor.
Pulling me aside, Lieutenant MacCarty said, “Sir, you can’t do this, not to save one fucking gook. Hell, leave him here for his own to find, or if he’s gotta be evac’d, let’s take him back down the mountain. He buys the farm en route, to hell with it; we did what we could.”
“Perhaps, but higher ain’t gonna get much intel out of a dead man, right? Besides, hooking him to that penetrator won’t take but a matter of minutes, and we’ll be long gone before anyone watching has a chance to react.”
Seeing that he was unsatisfied with my response, I added, “Hey, Mac, it’ll be all right. And anyway, we don’t have any choice. I mean we just don’t leave enemy wounded to die. It’s not the way the game is played.”
He looked at me a moment and then, a bit cuttingly, said, “This is not a game, Captain!”
“I know that, Mac. Poor choice of words. Now let’s just get the guy out of here. We’ll talk about all of this later.”
But we never did.
The medevac was uneventful. We moved our wounded prisoner fifty meters or so back down the trail to a point where we felt the jungle penetrator (basically a steel shaft with retractable arms upon which an evacuee was seated and secured) could most easily access the forest’s thick canopy.
Hearing the helicopter overhead, we marked our position with colored smoke and minutes later had our captive tied to the penetrator, which had been lowered to us by means of a retrievable steel cable.
As the prisoner was being hoisted upward, one of our soldiers gave a thumbs up to the crew chief aboard the helicopter. Our wounded prisoner, evidently believing the gesture was meant for him, weakly returned the thumbs up and briefly smiled at us below.
Mac’s wrong, I thought silently. In many ways it is a game, a competitive sport, the ultimate of man’s competitive follies.
Later that night we learned our captive had died en route to an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) hospital in Qui Nhon.
Perhaps it was just as well; he wouldn’t have lasted long in an ARVN hospital.
Working our way down the mountain on a different route of regress, we ended up on the valley floor about a half a mile from where we’d started our climb that morning. With the company again consolidated, we set up our NDP a short distance from Daisy, which was where 3d and Weapons Platoons had waited out most of their day uneventfully.
In the Nam there were generally two schools of thought on the establishment of NDPS. The first, and I suppose most prevalent, embraced a policy of getting into the NDP as early as possible so as to have sufficient daylight for optimal defensive preparations—in other words, plenty of time to clear fields of fire, dig fortifications, set up claymores and trip flares, send out listening posts and ambush patrols, and so on and so forth. In my mind, the drawback to this line of thinking was twofold: first, time spent preparing an NDP was time not spent looking for Charlie, and finding and destroying Charlie was the only reason the American infantryman had for being in Vietnam. Second, the longer a unit spent organizing its defenses, the longer the enemy had to ready himself for an attack.
We of Charlie Company were proponents of the second school, believing it best to enter our NDP late in the day, thereby reducing the enemy’s ability to react to our choice of site. Charlie was good, but he was slow and needed time to prepare his attacks. However, to further confuse our enemy, we would sometimes enter our NDP early in the evening, set up a hasty defense, bring in the log bird, and then after dark move a kilometer or so to a second NDP at a previously selected location.
On my first evening with the company in the boonies, we established our defenses in generally the same manner we would throughout my tenure.
Each of the three rifle platoons assumed responsibility for a third of the perimeter’s periphery. Within their assigned sectors, the platoon’s soldiers prepared two-or three-man fighting positions, to the front—or enemy
