There were some, however, who privately harbored doubts concerning the plan’s feasibility in certain parts of Vietnam.
“You ain’t never seen terrain like that,” Sergeant Scuggs, one of the area specialist team leaders, commented, returning from an aerial reconnaissance of surveillance sites in I Corps. “I mean, it’s impossible to move through that shit! Pity the poor bastards who get stuck in that godforsaken place.”
“Where’s that, Sarge?” Pfc. Chester, one of his assistants, asked.
“Right here,” he said, pointing to a large map depicting prospective sites in I Corps. “On the map it’s called ARO, although Lord only knows why, ‘cause there’s nothing there. I mean, there ain’t nothing there. Just a hilltop in the middle of the jungle with nothing ‘round it far as you can see ‘cept more jungle. Ain’t no sign of life anywhere, no people, no water buffalo, no hutches, roads, trails, crops, nothing exept that godawful jungle. Like I say, pity the poor bastards who draw ARO as a duty site.”
Chester and I just shrugged our shoulders. Duty at ARO was of no interest to either of us. Little did I know that within two years I would be one of those “poor bastards” who, along with eleven other valiant souls, would spend long hours atop that hill and in the “godawful” jungle surrounding it, wondering what in the hell the Army could possibly have been thinking of in 1963 when it selected ARO as a border surveillance site.
But this was a challenge yet to be faced. In our downtown TOC on that bright and sunny day in 1963, looking at a “one over the world” planning map, ARO really didn’t look bad at all. Besides, a desolate hilltop 250 miles away was someone else’s problem.
Seasons change little in Vietnam. It’s always hot, sticky, and dry or hot, sticky, and wet, so the transition from spring, and then to summer, went unnoticed. By this time our daily duties in the TOC were more than merely routine; they were just plain boring. Plot, type, monitor, brief, file, and then… plot, type, monitor, brief, and file some more. We existed in a perpetual cycle of trivial administrative minute. Thankfully, our year in the Nam was rapidly drawing to a close.
In the evenings, there was little talk of anything other than that magic fall date when we would go “wheels up” out of Tan Son Nhut, winging our way back to the “land of the big PX.” One day, while we were busy plotting, typing, monitoring, briefing, and filing, my boss, Sergeant Fallow, casually asked if I’d like to see some action.
Tongue in cheek, I retorted, “What you got in mind, Al? One of them new electric typewriters?”
“Hey, Jimbo, I’m serious. Team in Cheo Reo, up in Phu Bon Province, is opening a new camp at Plei Do Lim.”
I nodded.
“Well, they’ve lost a couple folk to hepatitis and, what with being stretched between two locations, find themselves in need of a lightweapons man. Want to go up there and give ’em a hand for a couple of weeks?”
“Hell, yes!” I enthusiastically responded. I was on my way to Cheo Reo that afternoon.
In addition to its twelve-man Special Forces A detachment, the camp at Cheo Reo was populated by a Montagnard strike force of Jarai, Drung, and Bahnar tribesmen. These tribesmen impressed me. As one of my adopted team members pointed out, other than providing them with a rudimentary knowledge of modern firearms and explosives, there was really little we could teach them. They were more adept at this type of warfare than we were.
Wearing only a loincloth and armed with a medieval crossbow, these primitive warriors could live and fight indefinitely in the country’s most impenetrable jungles. Moreover, they were unfailingly loyal to their Green Beret comrades, as they had been to our French counterparts during the first Indochina war. In both instances, the enemy, probably because he was Vietnamese, albeit Communist Vietnamese, had little success recruiting these tribesmen to his cause. Quite simply, the Montagnards, or ‘Yards, disliked all Vietnamese. Many of them found it incredibly fortunate that with the coming of the second Indochina war it was not only permissible to kill these descendants of the SinoMongol race that had pushed their ancestors into the highlands centuries before, but that their Green Beret “round-eyed” compatriots would pay them a monthly salary to do so.
During my brief stay with these hardened warriors and the professionals who led them, I helped out where and when I could, shuttling myself between Cheo Reo and the new camp at Plei Do Lim.
The two weeks passed all too quickly, and before I knew it I was back in Nha Trang—plotting, typing, monitoring, briefing, and filing. The boring routine would be broken once more before the end of my tour.
“Pack it up! We’re moving, lock, stock, and barrel,” Sergeant Fallow yelled. “And I mean on the double!”
It was early afternoon on the first day of November, and we were assembled in our downtown TOC as he and “Quick Draw” McDawe, returning from an emergency session with the colonel’s staff, charged through the door.
“Big fight going on in Saigon, maybe throughout the country,” Major McDawe, our operations officer, said, stuffing papers from his desk into a laundry bag. “Nobody knows what’s happening, but we’re moving to Long Van. No security here in Nha Trang, and we don’t want to get caught in the middle of this thing… uh… whatever it is.”
Of course Quick Draw, and most of the rest of us, knew there was more to it than that. We had been told throughout the summer months of the possibility of a coup, and we knew that President Ngo Dinh Diem’s palace guard, perhaps the only force that might remain loyal to him in the event of a coup, was the LLDB, Vietnam’s Special Forces and our counterparts. And that was what we didn’t want to get caught in the middle of.
Within a matter of minutes, we had everything loaded on trucks and were on our way to Long Van, where we set up operations in our alternate TOC, a sandbagged bunker. We stayed there for the next thirty-six hours or so as events in Saigon unfolded. Although we received some information from MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) and our Saigon liaison element, most of the news came to us via AP/ UPI teletype. Midday on the second day, the teletype printed out a message stating that the president and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had committed “accidental suicide”—rather difficult to do with one’s hands wired behind one’s back.
The celebrations then began, and for the next several days an atmosphere of controlled anarchy prevailed throughout most of the country, especially in the larger cities. The celebrations would not last long, however. By every measurable standard—economically, politically, and most assuredly militarily—the country’s fortunes would quickly take a turn for the worse. But by then I was on my long-awaited journey back home, to the land of round doorknobs and the big PX.
10. Fort Bragg, North Carolina: January 1964
Returning from that first stint in the Nam, I reported to the Fifth Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as ordered, only to discover I’d been reassigned in transit. My next stop was Infantry Officer’s Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, from which I was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry the following June. After OCS, I reported back to the Fifth Special Forces, whose group adjutant welcomed me with open arms.
“Got great news for you, Lieutenant. We’re on our way to Vietnam! Whole group’s going. We’re replacing all the A teams from Okinawa and the Seventh. Gonna be strictly a Fifth Group show from now on Assigning you to detachment A-104. Team’s in predeployment now, presently conducting area studies.” Then, after picking up a red-bordered folder stamped Secret and studying it a moment, he uttered his frightening pronouncement. “Your team’s going into the northwestern part of the country. Place called ARO. Hummmm, never heard of it myself.”
Oh, no! I have!
11. ARO, Vietnam: January 1965
“Lieutenant, it beats the shit out of me why it’s called ARO,” Sergeant Grimshaw said grumpily but not unkindly. He was a senior sergeant of the Okinawa-based Special Forces detachment that had occupied this desolate hilltop for the past six months, a sergeant who was obviously anxious—as indeed was his entire team—to
