“Okay, Apache, see if you can talk any of ’em out. If not, leave ’em alone, let’s get on with the op. Comanche’s ready to enter the village now… break. You got a Kit Carson with you? Over.”
“This is Apache Six. Affirmative.”
“This is Six. Well, put him on those villagers and see what he can find out… uh… then get back to me. Out.”
A “Kit Carson” was a VC or NVA defector who usually spoke some broken English. In talking to the villagers, he would try to find out if the enemy was still in their midst while concurrently soliciting information on the unit’s designation and order of battle, the number of casualties it might have suffered, how it was armed, whether morale was good or bad, and so on.
We entered Binh Loc 4 around 1000 hours; it was an anticlimactic event.
As the Bull had predicted, Charlie was gone before dawn.
However, he had left many a dead comrade behind when he departed—red leg and the fast movers had done their jobs well. Surprisingly, and happily, for it was something that worried many of us the night before, there were few civilian casualties. That was perhaps not so surprising.
Having obviously been through all of this before, the villagers had their caves and bunkers dug deep and knew how to get to them in a hurry.
One simply doesn’t survive in places like Binh Loc 4 without knowing such things.
So we counted enemy kills reaped by death from the heavens instead of at our own hands. It was not a happy task—many of the bodies were horribly mutilated by the artillery and air strikes. Most, perhaps all, had died the night before and now, rigor mortis having set in, lay in the grotesque, distorted positions of those who suffer death suddenly and violently. They lay on their backs with arms extended, as if reaching for something, someone. They lay on their sides, glazed eyes open, stiffened in a fetal position. One clutched his weapon, an RPG (rocket- propelled grenade) launcher, as if his punishment would indeed be severe if he surrendered it, even in death. But surrender it he did, as did several others who had evidently been overlooked by their surviving comrades as they departed the village, evading us in the darkness of the night before.
After spending the rest of the morning and most of the early afternoon in these joyless duties, we departed Binh Loc 4 and later established an NDP to the north of it in the same general area ARVN had previously occupied.
Our log birds flew early, bringing with them our rucks (containing those comforting poncho liners), steaks and mashed potatoes, and one can of beer and one of coke per company head count. Such a small offering, as I think back on it, but that evening, north of Binh Loc 4, it was like Christmas. You could actually feel the company’s morale soar.
Sharing a beer with me, the Bull summed it up. “Like I say, Six, we’re lucky as hell to be in the Fifth Cav, ‘cause those other outfits’ attitude, most likely as not, is ‘fuck the troops; just feed ’em beans.”
6. LZ Daisy and Points Beyond: January 1968
For the next week or so, we worked the area northwest of Binh Loc 4, discovering nary a trace of the elusive NVA battalion. Of course the question that those in Saigon, Honolulu, and Washington would have liked answered was not where the remnants of a single and now combat-ineffective battalion were, but why these forces were massing just days before Tet, the Chinese lunar new year. Where were they coming from, and why were they assembling in the populated coastal and piedmont areas, when the real threat was supposedly poised against the country’s hinterland, primarily against a remote Marine Corps outpost and its six thousand occupants at a place called Khe Sanh? In a matter of days, the questions would be answered. In Saigon, and throughout much of Vietnam, the answers would be punctuated in blood. And within a month, we would win the war’s greatest battle—and the war would be lost.
But tonight we settled into our NDP in the mountains surrounding Happy Valley. Major Byson radioed us a very informal warning order for the following day’s operation.
“Comanche Six, this is Arizona Three. I’ll be picking you up in the A.M. soon as the ground fog clears with four, plus two, plus two. Gonna put you in on LZ Daisy again. Uh… you seem to have pretty good hunting in that area. Conduct operations at your discretion and see what you can come up with… break. Higher is screaming for intel. Anything you come up with might be significant. You know, maps, documents, rumors amongst the villagers, POWs—anything we can pass to higher. Over.”
“This is Comanche Six. Roger that, but be advised there’s not many villagers vicinity Daisy, over.”
“Understand. Just keep your eyes open and give your kills a good going-over.”
Our extraction from Happy Valley and air assault on LZ Daisy the following morning might well have been a company airmobile test conducted by the 11th Air Assault Division (the forerunner of the First Air Cav) at Fort Benning four years before—unopposed, uneventful, LZ green.
We had decided the night before that One Six and Three Six—Three Six with the command section in tow —would establish separate two-point claymore ambushes on the mountain west of Daisy, while Two Six would work the valley floor. As we prepared to depart the LZ in different directions, I pulled Lieutenant MacCarty aside, giving him an additional task to perform during his sweep of the valley.
“Hey, Mac, while you’re working the floor, I’d like you to find us a new NDP within a klick or so of the LZ. I just don’t feel comfortable setting up here so soon after our stay-behind.”
“Roger that, sir. I agree.”
“Think what we’ll do,” I continued, “is go ahead and set up here this evening, bring in chow and our rucks, and then, ‘bout time it starts to get dark, move to whatever site you select. That means you ought to be thinking ‘bout guides, okay?”
“Okay, and I’ll try to find something fairly close, since it’ll mean carrying our rucks, mermites, eighty-ones and their ammo.
“No problem on the eighty-ones, Mac. We won’t bring ’em in tonight.
“Good idea,” he said, then commented, “hey, sir, you see our dead lieutenant over there?”
“What?” I said a bit frantically, momentarily not knowing to whom he was referring, then quickly realizing he was talking about the luckless NVA lieutenant we had killed in our “helicopterless” false extraction.
Smiling, I recalled a similar incident on the bridge when the Bull, during the course of one of Colonel Lich’s inspections, whispered in my ear, “Sir, we’re in trouble. The old man found a dead soldier in one of our bunkers.” I nearly went into shock! The Bull thought it absolutely hilarious that, having been in the Army ten years, I didn’t yet know that a “dead soldier,” in a soldier’s vernacular, was an empty liquor bottle.
Turning in the direction Mac was pointing, I noted the neatly packed mound of raw earth where someone, most likely his more fortunate comrades, had buried our lieutenant. I wonder what happened to our Cav patch.
Climbing the mountain’s eastern slope via the same trail we had used in setting up our first claymore ambush, we reached the main northsouth juncture within an hour or so of departing the LZ. One Six turned left to the south, while we began following the trail to the north. Within minutes, we were overwhelmed by the stench of rotting flesh—the haunting odor of our first claymore victims.
“Whew! They sure did ripen, didn’t they?” Anderson said, covering his nose with the sweat towel that RTOS, and many of the rest of us, wore about our necks like scarves.
“Yeah, isn’t it great, Andy!” Blair responded, gleefully. “Just another unique but integral part of our daily nature walks through this tropical paradise. But one of many memorable ingredients that will make up your ‘Vietnam experience’ as the years unfold. Savor it, my friend. For though many were called, few were.”
“Okay, let’s hold it down and keep moving,” I said. Then, turning to Blair and winking, I added, “And you better watch it, Blair; your college is showing again.”
My battalion RTO was one of those rare animals who had gone to college and still got drafted, and still ended up in the infantry, in the Nam.
After moving thirty minutes or so, our trail intersected with yet another well-traveled trail running generally southwest toward the mountain’s crest. We climbed upward astride this new route for perhaps another half hour before Lieutenant Halloway, finally, thankfully, found what he felt to be a good ambush site. He sent his claymore
