and, in a concerned voice, said, “Morgan’s in a bind, sir! Says he’s surrounded and can’t extract himself! Got two dead on the ground, more wounded.
“He’s in a firefight?” I asked excitedly, then said to myself, well, that’s brilliant, Lieutenant. What the hell do you think they’re in with two dead on the ground?
“Yes, sir! Ambushed! Crawford’s moving in to assist him, but he has a way to go.” He paused, then said, “Hell, they’re not too far from us. Here’s his plot.”
He showed us Morgan’s plot on the map he always kept within arm’s reach of his radios.
“Let’s go talk to the Dai uy,” I said.
Running toward the commo bunker, I thought, damn, the enemy! A firefight! We just got here, and we’re in a firefight! Three months at ARO, and, except for an occasional sniper round, we never heard a shot fired in anger.
“Outbound Six, this is Base Five. Over,” I said into the mike attached to our SSB base-station receiver.
“This is Outbound Six,” Captain Crawford responded immediately, in a seemingly fatigued voice. “We’re on the move. What do you got…”
“This is Base Five. Outbound Alpha One says he’s in trouble. Can we assist?”
Crawford replied, “Think we can get to him before you. Moving toward him fast as we can from the southeast. Don’t know what he’s into, but if you assist, try to come in from the west. Might be able to catch ’em between us. Use your own discretion and keep me informed. Out.”
I liked Captain Crawford. Few commanders would tell a butter-bar second lieutenant to use his own discretion. Of course, being a butter-bar, I interpreted that to mean “do whatever you want.”
“Okay, Sergeant Luden, Sergeant Boyde, saddle up 403d Company. We’re moving!”
The two of them smiled broadly, obviously as enthused as I was over the possibility of actually, finally engaging our evasive enemy.
None of the three of us, or Phil Sanford looking on, commented on the very apparent fact that the camp would be virtually defenseless if we sallied forth with the third of our three strike force companies. But that was really of secondary importance. We had some of our own in trouble to the north.
Within ten minutes we had assembled as much of 403d Company as could be found on short notice, approximately forty men, and began moving north across the valley’s lush, green rice paddies and then into the lowlying hills beyond. After accessing the concealment afforded by the vegetation of these foothills, we began maneuvering eastward toward Sergeant Morgan’s last reported location. Hopefully, we’d be entering the contested area from the west as Crawford approached it from the southeast. We had little trouble orienting ourselves in the right direction. We simply followed the sound of gunfire.
The sun had been shining and the sky nearly cloudless when we left Ha Thanh. Now, as was often the case in the Nam, it began to rain. Not a monsoon downpour, just an annoying, body-soaking drizzle. We continued moving, the gunfire becoming increasingly louder.
As we emerged from a tree line we saw in front of us, across a wide valley with a stream at its base, the hill that Morgan was supposedly on. But he wasn’t. Charlie was!
Captain Crawford, as he predicted, had beaten us—only to find that Sergeant Morgan had already succeeded in extricating himself from his precarious locale. Having joined forces with Crawford at the base of the hill (the hill’s right, or southern, flank from our perspective), the two of them were now exchanging fire with the enemy above.
For a fleeting few moments I had visions of conducting a classical textbook “fire-and-maneuver” assault against the enemy atop the hill to our front. Let’s see, I thought quickly, I’ll leave half the force here in the tree line. They’ll lay down a good base of fire while the rest of us, using my OCS-taught fire-and-maneuver techniques, assault the hilltop. Yeah! The final coordination line will be the… uh… enemy hill’s tree line. Right. When we reach that point, our base-of-fire element will shift their fires to the… uh… left.
Sure, that’s best. Keep their fires away from Crawford and Morgan on the right. I’ll signal the shift with a smoke grenade. Then, we in the assaulting element will close and…
Pop! Pop! Pop! Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
We were under fire! The enemy, having become aware of our presence on his flank, was redirecting his fire and throwing everything he had at us!
My schoolbook fire-and-maneuver scheme was doomed the moment Charlie fired his first round, Because before Luden, Boyde, or I could utter a single word, our strikers ran—every single one of them. But not to the rear! As one they charged the enemy to their front, firing their weapons and, in a death-defying chorus, screaming a waffior’s challenge at the top of their lungs. It was all we could do to keep up with them.
Damn! I guess these “Danang cowboys,” these ex-prisoners, have just answered the question I asked Grimshaw that first night at ARO. They’re fighters!
We ran down the hill, jumping the small stream at its base. Bullets ricocheted off rocks at our feet and took large chunks of bark out of trees at the water’s edge. I looked wide eyed at Sergeant Boyde, running beside me.
“Sonofabitch!” he yelled. “This is just like the movies!”
Suddenly, the striker running in front of us caught a round in the side of his skull. In horror, I saw the other side of his head burst open, splattering the tree beside him with blood, bone, hair, and purplish fragments of his brain. It was a ghastly split-second image that would remain with me a long time.
We continued onward, upward. But by the time we reached the hill’s tree line, the fight was over. Charlie had picked up his marbles and retired from the scene to fight another day. Finding nothing in the tree line, we moved back down the hill and joined Captain Crawford and Sergeant Morgan in the paddy below. Then, as a light rain continued to fall, we wrapped our dead in ponchos, strung them beneath bamboo carrying poles, and began our trek back to Ha Thanh.
Walking beside me, Ken Luden commented, “Hey, sir, think we’re in a new ball game here. Charlie’s gonna fight for this place!”
“Yeah, think you’re right, Ken. Sure as hell ain’t ARO.”
And it wasn’t. Our operations differed greatly from those we had conducted at ARO. Certainly there was no need to make two-week forays in Son Ha, since virtually the entire district was within two days’ walking distance of Ha Thanh. We at times ventured forth on three-or four-day patrols, but these operations were atypical. Instead, after discovering our comings and goings were always watched during the day, we normally departed Ha Thanh as stealthily and silently as possible at two or three o’clock in the morning, conducted our operation, and then returned to our campsite by nightfall.
Moreover, the nature of these operations differed greatly. At times they were strictly offensive, the best example of which was the search-and-destroy mission. On other occasions they were humanitarian, an operation such as a MEDCAP (medical civic action patrol). And at times they were a combination of the two, usually in the form of a cordon and search of a village. During a cordon and search we would surround a contested village at night, enter it at first light in the morning, and then kill or capture Charlie if we found him—and treat his family if we didn’t.
Throughout our tenure at Ha Thanh, we attempted to keep at least one such sortie on the move constantly. We did not always succeed in doing so, nor did we always succeed in accomplishing what we set out to do on any given operation. As I suppose was the case with most A detachments in the Nam, we had our fair share of glistening successes and glaring defeats. On one venture we might kill some of Charlie, and on the next he might kill some of us. Or, as we’d later say in the Cav, “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you!”
In the fall of 1965, we sat atop our campsite at Ha Thanh, waiting for the sky to fall. The repercussions of a battle in the la Drang Valley, nearly a hundred miles to the southwest, were being felt in Son Ha District. America’s involvement in Vietnam was escalating rapidly. Now U.S. warplanes were routinely bombing North Vietnam as part of the Air Force’s ill-advised Rolling Thunder campaign; our forces totaled nearly 130,000 men; and U.S. ground forces, the infantry cutting edge of this commitment, were engaging the enemy in direct combat.
The first, and in one little-known respect the last, of these engagements occurred in October and November during the First Air Cavalry’s Pleiku campaign, a campaign that later became known as the battle of la Drang. la Drang had its impact on us only because the battle ended in such a debacle for the north. General Giap’s greater strategic intent in his Dong Xuan (winter-spring) offensive, in addition to destroying a major U.S. force, was to
