Battle Ready

could.”

When I told him what his officer had said, he rolled his eyes. “It figures,” he said.

The three of us then huddled between the forces, yelling to our respective sides to stop firing. After a few minutes, thankfully, the shooting stopped.

The situation remained tense until Major Voung and the other Vietnamese commanders (as well as Bob Hamilton) came screaming up the road in jeeps and drove into the railroad station. Moments later, a helicopter landed. A Vietnamese major general climbed out and joined them — obviously sent there to sort out the mess and get the units separated. When Major Voung passed us on the way in, he looked angrier than I had ever seen him.

We waited to hear what was being decided inside. The discussion was obviously heated; and there was a lot of yelling.

While this was going on, Hoa had a few moments free to explain what was going on. “We’ve hated these guys for a long time,” he told me. “Years ago, the ARVN unit bugged out in a firefight and abandoned us. Seeing them spurred the old hatred; and some of the troops got into a brawl that boiled over into this mess.”

A little later, I began to sense something was coming to a head. Kinh was moving troops around, positioning our battalion to surround the train station. When he completed this movement, he went inside and whispered something to Major Voung. The major immediately stopped the discussions. “The station is surrounded,” he announced. “The Marines will attack unless the commander and executive officer of the ARVN unit are turned over to the Marines for execution.”

The major general couldn’t allow that. But the situation was almost out of his control; and Kinh wanted to attack in the worst way. Voung remained open to reason, though, and, after a lot of jawboning, he was persuaded to back off.

The arrival of our trucks helped the situation. The troops were anxious to get back to our bases. And so we boarded the trucks — to my enormous relief — and got out of there. We arrived back home late that night; and I slept until midmorning.

After breakfast, when I joined Bob Hamilton in his bunker, he told me he was putting me in for a Navy and Marine Corps Medal (given for heroism in noncombat situations, normally for saving lives).

“Thanks,” I told him, “I appreciate it. But the Army staff sergeant should also be nominated for the Soldier’s Medal [the Army equivalent].”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, after I’d described what happened.

Though I never received the medal, I did get a letter some months after I left Vietnam from a U.S. Army colonel, the senior adviser of the 22nd ARVN Division. “Your timely intervention during this confrontation,” the last paragraph said, “prevented a situation which could have been extremely embarrassing to the Vietnamese government.”

It was obvious the brass wanted to bury the incident without the publicity of awarding medals. That was fine with me.

MEDEVAC ONE

In the tenth month of his one-year tour, Zinni was with the 4th Battalion, operating in a remote and heavily vegetated area of the hills near the Central Highlands in II CTZ. It had been a good ten months; he was thinking about extending for another six.

He was caught up in this conflict. It had become his life. He knew this was where he belonged. He knew exactly why he was there and what he was doing… and felt absolutely confident about that. He knew he could handle himself in a firefight, or in any other tactical situation he might encounter. He had a very close relationship with the Vietnamese Marines. They were his buddies and friends; he’d seen a lot of them die. “My purpose for being was right there,” he explains now.

The bad news: He felt terrible. The rigors of constant field operations had taken its toll. Though other advisers were commenting on his weight loss — about forty pounds (and he was small to start with) — that didn’t bother him much. They had all lost weight. He was sick with something he couldn’t shake. All the advisers had bouts of dysentery, but his latest round didn’t go away. His urine had turned black as coffee, his skin was turning yellow, sleeping was difficult, he was having trouble eating (everything he tried made him nauseous), and he was growing weaker by the day. Something had to be done. But what? He wanted to hang on until he got back to a rear area, but he knew he needed to see an American doctor (the Vietnamese doctor had given him shots that had no effect). He thought an American doctor would have medicine that would work better and get him back to full strength faster.

One day the patrol he was with passed close to an American Army forward logistic base set up on a mountaintop (making it easy to defend and to support troops in the field by helo).

“I’d like to go up to the base and pick up some medicine,” he told the patrol leader.

“Let’s go,” he agreed.

As they approached the hilltop position, the soldiers providing security challenged them. “I’m an American Marine,” Zinni announced. That did not compute with them. He was accompanied by Vietnamese troops; he was wearing a Vietnamese Marine uniform, tiger stripes, and a green beret; and he was carrying a grease gun. Since the Army troops didn’t know that Marines were in their Corps area and were unfamiliar with advisers, they decided not to take any chances. They didn’t ask for the Marines’ weapons, which remained slung, but they weren’t about to welcome them like friends.

“I need to see a doctor,” Zinni told them.

They contacted their officer, who told them it was okay to take him to the medical aid station — but under guard. They did that.

As they approached the field hospital, a voice yelled out to Zinni. “Stop. Hold it where you are.”

A captain with medical insignia came out of a tent with a bottle and handed it to Zinni. “Piss into this.”

As black urine filled the vial, he said, “I don’t know who or what you are; but if you’re an American, your tour is over and I’m medevacing you.”

“I can’t go now,” Zinni answered. “Just give me some pills, and I’ll be okay.”

He gave Zinni a quick visual once-over. “Listen,” he said, “if you don’t get to a hospital soon, you could die.”

That got Zinni’s attention.

As the doctor went about arranging a helicopter evacuation to the U.S. Army hospital at Qui Nhon, Zinni called the task force headquarters to tell them what was happening, then turned his gear over to the Vietnamese Marine captain who was the patrol leader.

“I’ll be back,” Zinni told him, and as the helo came into the landing zone near the aid station, he and the captain said good-bye.

When he arrived at the hospital at Qui Nhon, he was immediately put through a series of tests. At that point, force of will failed him, and his body gave out completely. He could no longer eat. Simply looking at food sickened him. The little strength keeping him going in the field was now gone. He didn’t have energy enough even to get out of bed.

A doctor brought in his test results. “You now weigh 123 pounds,” the doctor told him. “You have a severe case of hepatitis, dysentery, mononucleosis, and probably malaria. The good news,” he continued, “is that all of them require the same treatment — lots of rest and food, even if you have to force it down.”

He was put on intravenous hookups to increase his strength and fed six meals a day. The medics brought tempting cheeseburgers, fries, and milk shakes at all hours, but stomaching more than a few bites of anything proved nearly impossible.

Tony Zinni was a very unhappy young Marine. He wanted in the worst way to get back to the advisory unit; and lying in a hospital bed was not his idea of how he wanted to spend his time.