Attempting to cover as much of the area as possible in interdicting the enemy’s withdrawal from Binh Dinh’s populated areas, we kept two of our rifle platoons on the valley floor, sweeping the plain’s approach routes into the mountains. One Six moved due north while Three Six, accompanied by the headquarters section, moved south. The 3d Platoon, Two Six, charged straight up the mountain to the west of us, accessing it by means of the same trail we had first discovered upon departing the Bong Son bridge two months before—the trail from which we had evacuated our nearly dead captive strapped to a jungle penetrator.
Neither of the valley platoons found Charlie, though both ran across evidence, hoofprints and so forth, that he had been traveling the area recently and extensively. In the process of making these discoveries, Lieutenant Norwalk found a suitable NDP site, and by 1500 hours One Six and Three Six had converged at this location.
Lieutenant O’Brien, MacCarty’s replacement, remained on the mountain with Two Six. But not as long as he should have.
Within minutes of joining forces with Norwalk, we heard an abrupt explosive blast of automatic-weapons fire intermingled with the detonation of 40-mm grenades. O’Brien was evidently in contact!
Concerned at not having heard a claymore explosion precede the sudden outbreak of small-arms fire, I took Anderson’s handset from him and attempted to contact O’Brien.
“Two Six, this is Six. Give me a sitrep. Over.”
Silence. No response from O’Brien, and the firing had stopped as suddenly as it began.
“Two Six, Two Six, this is Six. Over.”
“This is Two Six. Uh… Roger, ran into something big. Think a large enemy force. We’ve succeeded in breaking contact and are now regressing down the hill. Looking forward to marrying up with you in about two zero.”
You only think you’re looking forward to marrying up with me, Lieutenant. Regressing, indeed!
“This is Six. Do you need dust off? Red leg? Over?”
“This is Two Six. Negative. Over.”
“Okay, Two Six, I’ll see you on the floor in two zero. Out.”
I wanted to give our new platoon leader every benefit of the doubt, but the doubts were surely there. They’d been nagging at me since his arrival and Mac’s departure two days previously. Of course, snap judgments based on first impressions are dangerous and often faulty, but I made them routinely. And although I hardly expected a platoon leader to report in with a bayonet between his teeth screaming, “Can do, Sir!”
O’Brien thus far impressed me as someone who would really rather be anywhere else, involved in anything else, and doing it with anyone else. I missed Mac.
I didn’t know what had happened on the mountain minutes before (and never would); however there were several unsettling adjuncts to the incident: Why had O’Brien broken contact? Where were the casualties? His or Charlie’s? Why no request for fire support? Or assistance from us down here below? In a matter of far less than twenty minutes, Two Six entered our perimeter. Taking Lieutenant O’Brien aside, I asked, not unkindly, “You got any wounded? We need a dust off down here?”
“No, real lucky there, sir. All of us are okay, but it was close, real close!”
“Okay,” I replied. “Well, tell me about it, Dick. I mean in your own words, what happened?”
“Well, see, sir… uh… don’t know exactly what happened. Mean, I was pretty far back in the formation… not really far, but, you know,… ‘bout midway, where I could best influence the outcome of any encounter… uh… like they taught us at Benning. But, anyway, shortly after we hit that main trail paralleling the mountain, all hell broke loose up front, and since we were in a draw, obviously at a tactical disadvantage, I thought it prudent to withdraw before we got someone hurt.”
“Okay,” I said—my initial response to his account of the encounter on the mountain, our mountain! And then, perhaps because it had been a long day—and the day wasn’t over yet—I lost my temper.
“Now listen and listen closely, Lieutenant,” I said as calmly as I could. “I don’t know what you may think they taught you at Benning, but let me assure you, you can best influence the outcome of any encounter by being as close as possible to that encounter when it happens! And if you’re in Europe conducting a reconnaissance in force, perhaps midway in your formation is an appropriate place to be. But we ain’t in Europe. And if you’re conducting a retrograde movement, the rear of your platoon is where you should be. But we don’t do retrogrades in Charlie Company! In this environment, in this war, things happen from the front! And that’s where you should always be, always! And, goddamn it, if you can’t see your point man, always see your point man in front of you, you’re shirking your duties, and I won’t tolerate it!”
I paused a moment to let our new lieutenant digest what I had said, words I perhaps should never have uttered. Then I continued.
“Finally, getting someone hurt is what we do around here, and we’ve been doing it rather well lately. Now, I want you to understand something, Lieutenant. You have, without question, one of the finest fighting platoons— undoubtedly the best platoon sergeant and point man—in all of Vietnam. I will not allow you to change that in any way. Understand?”
He nodded obediently.
“Dick, that mountain behind you there,” I said in a somewhat kinder voice, “belongs to Charlie Company. It’s our playpen, and nobody runs us out of our playpen. So I want you to take your platoon and get back up that mountain, find that large enemy force, and kick the shit out of ’em. Understand?”
He did.
As he was turning a very disgruntled platoon around and starting back up the mountain, I walked over to Lieutenant Norwalk. “Hey, Bill, saddle up One Six. We’re going up the hill. Bring your claymores.”
O’Brien and Two Six accessed the mountain by way of the main east-west trail, their route of regress just minutes before. In the meantime, we began working our way upward along a secondary trail (one we had used several times in the past) fifty or sixty meters to the north of Two Six. It was about three-thirty in the afternoon, still plenty of daylight left. Still time to make a hit!
Shortly after reaching the main north-south trail running parallel to the mountain’s face, we were suddenly overwhelmed by the stench of rotting flesh. These were the decaying corpses of enemy soldiers who had fallen victim to our claymore ambushes over the course of nearly two months. The odor was nauseating, and several of us found it difficult to refrain from gagging.
“Whew! Talk about ripe!” Andy commented.
“Yeah, and to think we did this to ourselves,” Blair responded.
Norwalk, meanwhile, began searching for an ambush site, preferably at some point on the trail without enemy dead astride it. Within ten minutes or so he found a place tactically sound and where, if the breeze remained calm, the stench was bearable.
While Norwalk set up his two-point north-south ambush, I contacted O’Brien, passed our location to him, and asked for a sitrep.
“This is Two Six. Enemy seems to have withdrawn from the area. No sign of Charlie now. Over.”
“This is Six. Roger, go into a trick or treat somewhere in that general area. Maybe one of us will get lucky. Good hunting. Out.”
So our two platoons went into ambush and waited for the enemy that had wreaked havoc on the people of Binh Dinh the night before.
“What do you think happened last night, sir?” Bill Norwalk whispered as we sat straddling the trail about midway between the two ambush sites.
“I mean, with Charlie hitting all over the province like that.”
“Beats the shit out of me, Bill. I’m more concerned ‘bout our new platoon leader right now. What do you think he ran into?”
“Beats the shit out of me, Six,” he responded, smiling. “Could’ve been a sniper, chance engagement, or maybe just overwhelmed by his own imagination, you know, being new on board and all… or maybe he just couldn’t stand the stink.”
“Well, I can relate to that! Damn, we gotta find us a new mountain to play on, Bill. It’s all I can do to keep from puking anymore. Mean, this is a facet of combat they never taught us about at Benning.”
“Yes, sir! Ought to have subjects in the curriculum like ‘Coping with the Messy Battlefield’ or ‘Secondary Uses of the Gas Mask.’”
I nodded, grinning, then said, “But shit, Bill, I don’t know how we could’ve done it any different. I mean, we
