ARO sat atop an elongated, east-west ridge with its useless airstrip running the length of it. Actually, it was more three camps than one, with separate fortified positions at each end and midway along the airstrip on its northern side. A zigzag trench network (reminiscent of World War I trench systems), intermittently strongpointed with covered fighting positions and crew-served weapons bunkers, surrounded each of the three encampments. Forward, or on the enemy side, of these entrenchments, the camp’s occupants had emplaced wire barriers composed of alternating runs of triple concertina, double-apron fence, and “tanglefoot,” which, without going into a lengthy explanation, were merely three different techniques of employing barbed wire. On the enemy’s side of the wire, at a distance of fifty meters or so, the jungle encircled the entire hilltop.
One of ARO’s three strike-force companies, the best of the three according to Grimshaw, occupied the fortified position on the eastern end of the airstrip; the other two were encamped on the western end. Each of these companies was composed of eighty to a hundred “strikers” armed with light-infantry weapons of World War II vintage. Although the mainstay of this arsenal was the .30caliber M-1 carbine, some strikers were armed with the M3A1 “grease” or M1A1 Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun, the .30caliber M1918A2 Browning automatic rifle, or, in rare cases, the M-1 rifle. Their crew serves consisted of the.30caliber M1919A6 machine gun, the 60- mm mortar, and the 57-mm recoilless rifle.
Our team and a Nung force of perhaps twenty-five men resided in the camp’s center fortification, about midway between the two strike force contingents. This position was dominated at its highest point by an above/belowground communications bunker, on top of which was a sandbagged observation post. From this vantage point, I could survey the entire hilltop, noting as I did so the other facilities composing our part of ARO. These included a combination cookshack and team house—a clapboard, tin-roofed structure in which the team ate and spent most of its leisure time; a small underground dispensary, which our senior medic, Sergeant Morgan, would soon relocate to the more spacious, dryer, and less rat-infested Hammond house; our sleeping, fighting bunkers, located at various points on the trench network; two 81-mm mortar pits and adjacent ammunition bunkers; and, on the northern side of the hill and lower on its crest, the Nung encampment from which the Nung force would rush to our aid should the Viet Cong attack ARO.
The Nung was a mercenary, a holdover from an earlier era in which the CIA, then controlling Special Forces operations in Vietnam, had hired these clansmen to protect U.S. team members from the Viet Cong or from their own strike force if it should turn upon them. He was a Vietnamese nationalist of Chinese origin who considered himself only Chinese, and understandably so inasmuch as he spoke Chinese, was of pure Chinese genesis, and, like the Montagnard, passionately hated the ethnic Vietnamese.
A loyal and ferocious fighter, the Nung would and often did unselfishly surrender his life on behalf of the Special Forces soldier he was paid to protect. But, as we would soon learn, because of his dislike of the Vietnamese, he was not always an asset in what we were trying to accomplish.
In any event, I decided there was scant likelihood this mercenary force would ever be called upon to protect us during an attack, since after listening to what Grimshaw had to say about ARO, I was convinced that the probability of such an attack was microscopic. Here on this barren hilltop we were sustaining a force of some three hundred men, but it was a force in limbo—a force that was inflicting absolutely no damage on the enemy yet was costly to maintain. Charlie was an astute tactician.
I doubted he had any interest in running us out of ARO and seeing us employed in a more meaningful role elsewhere.
As the sun fell behind the Laotian mountains, I put aside my thoughts on the enemy’s philosophy regarding our border surveillance program at ARO and returned to the team house, there to discuss the fair market value of a case of canned wieners with the outgoing team’s executive officer.
12. Toward the River Boung: March 1965
Within days of our arrival at ARO, Captain Peterson, our detachment commander; Sergeant Matis, the team sergeant; and Sergeant Morgan, with a small contingent of Nungs and one strike-force company in tow, departed camp on the team’s first long-range patrol. It was a ten-day venture that, not surprisingly, turned out to be little more than a walk in the weeds. Or, as observed by Captain Peterson, “A great physical conditioning exercise, but probably of little significance as far as the war’s final outcome is concerned.”
Sergeant Wamer, the team’s assistant operations sergeant, and I accompanied the next foray of this sort. It too was an exercise in futility, providing information of no great consequence other than the discoveries that Vietnam’s jungle leeches could penetrate the smallest of openings in our clothing and that the Army-issue insect repellent was without question the most effective defense against them. We literally bathed ourselves in it.
We tried to keep at least one such patrol on the move constantly, screening our area of responsibility as best we could. With two or three team members accompanying each of these operations, any of the twelve of us would return to the bush on every third or fourth patrol.
On rare occasions, we greatly expanded our area of influence on these excursions by inserting our force via helicopters. In early March, Sgt. Ken Luden, our senior demolitions sergeant, Australian Warrant Officer Kipler (the “Kipper,” or simply “Kip”), and I found ourselves involved in such a venture. And everything that could conceivably go wrong did.
“I’ve overflown your LZ and see no great problem,” Yankee Papa’s flight leader said, as we squatted in a circle on ARO’s runway.
Assigned to the Marine Corps 163d Aviation Battalion flying out of Danang, he was briefing us and his pilots on our pending assault. Six of his cumbersome H-34 helicopters, sequentially numbered YP-1, -2, -3, and so on, were lined up on the strip behind us.
“‘Course it’s awful damn small,” he continued, “but shit, finding a clearing bigger than a backyard garden in these mountains is like witnessing the second coming of Christ. See it as a two-ship LZ, so we should have you down in three quick touch-and-goes.” Then, turning from us to his pilots, he said, “Now we don’t know what’s out there, so we’re gonna go in hot!”
Great! I thought to myself. That means an LZ prep, those Marine F-4Cs from Danang, gunships firing rockets, maybe even a little…
“That means your gunners are firing when you go in to set down. And I don’t want to hear any gripes ‘bout cleaning guns when we get back to the house.”
Door gunners! That’s it? That’s going in hot? No fast movers, no red leg, no gunships? Just helicopter door gunners spraying 7.62 around with their M-60s? Sonofabitch!
“Okay, that’s it, then,” he said, concluding our joint air-ground prebrief. “Load time is 0855, takeoff at 0900.”
Having conducted our airmobile insert without incident, by nine-thirty we were moving generally in an easterly, northeasterly direction about twenty klicks from ARO. The operation was to be a tento fourteenday foray during which we hoped to reach the Song (river) Boung, travel it west, then reenter ARO from the north. Accompanied by twelve Nungs and one company of strikers (which had fielded a force of approximately sixty men), there were about seventy-five of us fighting our way through the jungle on this the first day of an ill-fated mission.
In the late afternoon, shortly before dusk, we began searching for an acceptable RON (remain overnight—a position identical to an NDP, RON merely being the acronym in vogue in early ‘65). As we approached a small clearing that descended downward from the side of the mountain on which we were making our way, the patrol abruptly halted.
Moments later Luden approached the Kipper and me from the front of the column, saying, “Point man stepped in a pungi trap, sir. One of the spikes went all the way through his right foot; he isn’t gonna walk much further.”
Shit! I thought. If we hadn’t come in by helicopter, if we weren’t so far from home base, we could send him and fifteen or so strikers back to camp. We obviously can’t carry him around with us for the next two weeks. That leaves only two options: dust off or scratch the op and return to ARO. Funny how we never really think of these things when we’re planning these excursions. Always kind of assume we won’t have wounded. Or if we do, they’ll be walking wounded. Got to get a dust off, can’t scrap the operation on day one.
