Bunker

What am I doin' here?
Please Mr. Custer, I don't want to go.
—Larry Verne, Mr. Custer (1960)

Early February, 1970. 

For hours, we hacked our way through thick bamboo over our heads. The higher-ups had us investigating some funny business that The Duck had spotted in the stomping grounds of the 9th NVA (North Vietnamese Army) Division. 

All well and good, but the appalling 1968 Tet Offensive was on our mind. Back in the world, Jean Dixon, the gossip prophet, foresaw that our regiment (the 7th Calvary) would be wiped out again like at the Little Bighorn. This gal could knock 'em dead. She had predicted the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the launch of Sputnik and the sinking of the Thresher.

Late in the afternoon, I almost crashed into Bob after the point man had stopped chopping. Something piqued his interest—a fresh path. Normally, we didn't touch a path, follow it, or cross it. Better to break bush than mix with heavy traffic and ignorant crowds. 

Other leaders tossed lives around to make a name for themselves, but not Capt. Jackson, our CO. He felt the weight of each man on his shoulders, took no unnecessary chances and preached no sermons. It rubbed off. I never heard company members bitch at each other or their boss. We cared deeply for each other. No slackers or trolls—instead, results and boatloads of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

After a pow-wow with his platoon leaders, Jackson picked a squad to reconnoiter. We held our breath and slipped safeties. The news came in. The path led straight to the front entrance of Hernando’s Hideaway—a bunker complex hidden behind a dense bamboo screen, odd as a load of furniture left in the jungle, and no booby traps! 

The bunkers were not mere curiosities. Some were open trenches. Others were dug into the ground and domed like igloos, with slits for visibility and firing. Weaponized termite mounds, two feet high, hidden from eyes in the sky, scattered about and connected with tunnels. The ground around the bunkers had been freshly disturbed, but the ground atop the tunnels looked ordinary and harmless. 

Fucking clever.

Bob and others inspected one of the larger bunkers, 10 x 10 and 5 feet deep. He pulled out three discarded film cartridges, likely for training or propaganda. Ho! We didn't expect Hollywood. The next bunker was twenty feet deep, but most were smaller hidey-holes, 7 x 7 or 8 x 8. Bob thought an entire regiment, five hundred men, had used it recently. The tunnels of Củ Chi? Too remote. Training or food and weapons depot? Not likely. Favorite haunt or deserted fortification? No way to tell, nothing incriminating had been left.

Captain always gave us plenty of time to set up for the night in a safe area, but with daylight slipping away, we circled our wagons in a place certain to be hot. We cleared only the necessary, filling sandbags the best we could, marking our territory with less than Roman-like thoroughness. Some bunkers were incorporated into our defensive perimeter, others stretched too far away. Captain adopted one behind us for his CP (command post). Our squad deployed smack dab on the three-foot wide approach, directly ahead of the CP, to face any unwelcome guests head on. Killer's rifle squad was on our right. I don't recall who was on our left.

Well I don't know why I came here tonight.
I got the feeling that something ain't right.
Clowns to the left of me.
Jokers to the right.
Here I am—Stuck in the middle with you.

Capt. Jackson had never put us at greater risk, but we were armed, dangerous and prepared to inflict pain:

M60 machine guns
A hundred ammo belts for the M60s
Grenade launchers
A hundred M16s
Two hundred M16 ammo bandoliers
A Winchester Model 12 trench gun (shotgun)
A Thompson submachine gun, carried Chicago-style by a vet on temporary duty
Claymores
Frags
Smoke grenades

At four hundred rounds per man, we pulled twice as much ammo, mano a mano, than the NVA.

As the gorgeous blood-red sun disappeared behind the bamboo, Walt's twenty-three-pound M60 machine gun sat perched on its bipod, worth its weight in gold, parked at the front door, aimed squarely down the path—the same weapon Rambo used to blow down a town in First Blood. 

We rested our black rifles against sandbags, barrels pointed outwards, and settled into our guest house like rabbits in a pea patch. 

The guards better stay awake. 

Shortly after midnight, our guard saw flashes of light darting to and fro in the darkness behind the clumps of heavy bamboo. The interlopers were taking our measure, searching for tripwires, deciphering our layout. We didn't know what they were but they didn't know what we were, either. Two or two thousand? The fog of war.

The tide turns quickly in Vietnam.

Fear can strip you to your naked self. To counter the butterflies in my gut, I popped in earplugs, listened to the Rolling Stones on the American Forces Vietnam Network, and held on for Judgment Day.

The Romans used “Hour of the Wolf” to refer to morning twilight—a half-lit world where magic held sway, dreams came true and most people were born and died. So it was in this peculiar light of the predawn sun that one of our visitors made a fatal mistake to reach out and touch someone; he tripped a flare in the perimeter belonging to our squad. A scream rang out across the jungle. Sam squeezed the M57 clacker, blowing our Claymores, killing the guy and any of his buddies nearby.

This was no time to brush my teeth. We were already in fighting position, hugging the ground in shallow bunkers behind our massive firepower. 

All hell broke loose from the heavy metal pouring in and our resounding roar. Enemy bullets busted above my head. When you hear the whistle, you know they’re close. 

Despite the chaos, I could tell the guns apart; ours were faster, louder, more violent; our bullets were smaller and lighter. They say you can hear a popping sound when a bullet hits a body; well, I never heard it then or ever.

Whole bamboo trees toppled like dominoes, pulverized by the incredible fire. By some strange miracle, the incoming flew above our heads and no friendly fire came from the squads at our back; they were hugging the ground in their bunkers, clueless. The only outgoing came from us and the two squads flanking us, especially the blazing fury from Killer's men, who lacked a machine gun.

We had the same thought as our enemies,

Kill the bastards.

Walt lay on the ground without protection, directly behind his M60, ripping fire down the path. Bobby Parris fed him 100-shot ammo belts hooked together into an endless lead salad. Belts were plentiful, since each man in the company carried one. Bobby blasted away with his 12-gauge when he could. They were alone together; who wants a shower of red-hot shell casings? 

Walt's hell-gun fired sustained barrages up to 600 rounds per minute, low ricocheting bullets all over the path, a huge morale booster and perhaps why the incoming fire was aimed over our heads.

In my bunker, a few steps to the right of Walt, I laid Thumper aside, my single-shot M79 grenade launcher. The smallish, 40 mm grenades could ricochet off overhanging trees and be back on top of us before we knew it. Behind thick bamboo, we had zero visibility; anything other than bullets was a bad idea (we rolled regular frags down the path). Hey—legend has it that a soldier fired his M79 point-blank at an enemy and the grenade got stuck in the guy's gut without exploding!

I snatched bandoliers, took magazines out of ammo pouches, and fed them as fast as I could to the guys with 16s. Nobody ever filled their magazines completely. The quirky, zigzag way the bullets fit into the twenty-round magazines made the last two bullets unusually tight fitting. Over time, dust, dirt, moisture and metal fatigue would make the spring fail, jamming the gun. Even then, a spent cartridge case could fail to eject from the firing chamber. The new round would bump into the old casing and cause a different kind of jam, a failure to extract: 

Can I get a whistle? My gun's broke!

Our 16s had been bored-out, eliminating the problem. 

Thirty minutes of fire had almost drained our ammo when Capt. Jackson changed the balance of power—he called for Shake, Rattle and Roll, a tactical air-strike from Bien Hoa's huge runways. Because the enemy could throw matching smoke, Killer only identified our camp with lefty lemon (yellow) when Jackson was still talking to the overhead forward air controller. 

F-4 Phantom 

In the blink of an eye, a pair of swept-wing F-4 Phantoms—the leading distributors of MiG parts—came screaming out of the sky like fiery Bellonas,¹ skimming trees, dropping high-drag 500-lb shakes and dashing out, trailing black smoke from their twin GE turbojets. 

I hate noise!

Concussions from the ill-natured bombs pounded our chests, kicked tons of dirt and dust into the sky and scared the living shit out of us—and we were expecting! It couldn't have been any better for the other side—imagine the looks on their faces.

As soon as the music stopped, we evacuated our bunkers beat it to the nearest tree for an umbrella against the dirt balls raining down. Lt. Ashmore, our platoon leader, had gone poof! What the hell? He had remained in his bunker and been hit by a dirt ball a foot in diameter. It knocked him ten feet through the air, breaking his thigh bone.

The NVA rounded up their dead and went đi đi mau ("go quickly"). They had a prior appointment.

We had taken no casualties except for the lucky Lt. with the million-dollar wound. He would likely get to go home after the medevac flew him out. But there was no joy in Mudville. We were in shock. Shit happens, your survival instincts and training take over and you react to the chaos around you.

The molten sun was up now. A squad went down the path to take stock. I only saw one dead enemy, dumped into a bomb crater for later retrieval. Vietnamese believe that the souls of the dead will be in turmoil forevermore, if not buried on family soil—a custom that obfuscated our body counts.

Bob took off with the patrol and came back with a bag of meat, blood and bone meal to add to the pile of remains.

You fuckers figure it out!

He estimated 200 coonskins on the wall.

Oops. The NVA had miscalculated, but Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap threw cold water on Gen. Westmoreland's strategy to break Hanoi by attrition:

Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die on this Earth. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little. 

We would out-kill; they would outlast. If they didn't lose the war, they might win it; if we didn't win the war, we must lose it.

The platoon leaders added the number of enemy bodies on the ground to those hauled away by the enemy and gave the inflated count to the CO. The exploits of Charlie Co. accrued to the balance sheets of the officers, lifers and those above; they were punching their career tickets with our kill ratios and body counts, like Edward III after the battle of Crécy. Therein lay the rub—why we grunts were resentful and suspicious of the higher-ups.

Victory had been brought and we remained the victors, but to go in and get out was Capt. Jackson's motto. We skipped breakfast, pressed play and gave back the won territory; air-strikes would obliterate our shallow entrenchments and what they had built.
After a wild one-night-stand, we rode out essentially as we rode in until an intemperate endnote arose. We crossed an open field and halted in front of a wood to rest our asses in the elephant grasses. Sam looked over his shoulder and saw two figures following us a hundred yards distant. NVA tracking, coming up before we were into the tree line? Curiosity seekers? We were still in Tet.

Sam, our John Wayne, stood up and spoke in his slow Texas drawl,

Well, gentlemen, the party's over.

He opened up with his 16 and several more of us let fly. I lobbed a few grenades on target with my 79, but our after-action patrol found only one body.

Jean Dixon had misfired, but we hadn’t. We had dodged a bullet—several, in fact.

Ha! I never believed in horoscopes.

¹ Roman war goddess. As the twin sister of Mars, she loved to spill foreign blood and wield a spear, sword, shield and fiery torch while bellowing orders and war-cries over the roar of battle. She's said to bring good luck. The Roman Senate met in her temple when business was foreign war.

The Path

Combat Assault

In early December, we had orders for a combat assault. Firebase Jamie's artillery prepped the LZ (landing zone) with HE (high explosives). CS (tear gas) was not used.

A Huey can get you to ground where there's no roads or train tracks. The next morning, five landed thirty feet apart on Jamie's dirt strip. They flew back and forth to the LZ in formation, lifting thirty G.I.s at a time, to a field not too distant.

We scrambled out and made a bee line for the wood line. From there, we formed into platoons and worked our way into the jungle, breaking bush all morning. In the afternoon, we came upon a meandering path. As each platoon crossed, two guards posted right and two left. Once the platoon was across, the guards scurried to catch up.

Our platoon was the last to cross. The bush was thick, limiting our vision. Lt. Martinez picked Sam and me to guard the right.

Beware, friendlies are patrolling in front of you.

We peeled off twenty feet to the right, behind bushes, Sam two feet ahead.

I remember it like yesterday. Sam opened up with swift rounds from his M16, scarin' the livin’ shit outta me!

My God, are we shooting friendlies?

He yelled back,

No, no, this is enemy!

Are you sure?

He screamed,

Take my spot! My gun jammed!

I came up, shot off a tentative three-round burst.

Are you sure?

Faster!

I couldn't see. Sam grabbed my weapon,

Let go. Unjam my gun!

Sam had the better view. He had seen the threatening shape and had acquired the target, an NVA (North Vietnamese) officer moving toward us on the path about thirty feet away. Evidently, the guy didn't get Capt. Jackson's memo on the dangers of trails. Sam held on him, pumping through magazines like there was no tomorrow. Luckily, he didn't see us. If there were any more behind him, they had already dropped.

To kill, you have to move fast.

The M60 machine gunner came running up, plopped to the ground, mounted his gun on a tripod, mouthing the same shit about friendlies. I had Sam's gun ready to go, but he took over the M60 instead, mowing the jungle like grass with 100-shot belts.

Bob, who had been guarding the left flank came over and opened up, too. When the firing stopped, Killer, a highly respected old-timer, rose from the dirt and walked ahead with a couple guys from his squad. All they found was a bloody pile of raw hamburger they could have washed away with a garden hose. No jungle alive anywhere around it.

The poor guy was unavailable for comment. Sam said nothing. My guts went cold.   

Five minutes and it might have been us.

I remembered what they told us in basic,   

Never point a gun at anyone unless you mean to shoot him. And if you do shoot him, you better make sure he's dead. 'Cause if he ain't dead, he's gonna shoot you.

Killer collected maps, documents, an AK-47 and an aluminum belt buckle. His men threw dirt on the site to keep flies away. He gave me the buckle, a rite of passage that I still have.

This was no time to relax and count our blessings. Capt. Jackson radioed that our platoon would stay here and camp overnight on the bloody path. The rest of the company would push ahead and set up in the jungle.   

What if they return?

We set up a perimeter with flares and Claymores, dug bunkers for cover and clocked our weapons. Killer's squad was on our right, fifteen feet from the remains, an unnatural conjunction of the living and the dead. Any shreds of military romance or chivalry in me were banished forever.

The Hell With It

When it finally happens and it's over,
As you stand there and think—
Something so mutilated can't be human
So it was dead enough without this
But even here there is beauty
A small flowered patch of ground, a bird's call
And the grace of a butterfly
Frustration and disappointment
Become a laughable thing
But always the conflicting emotions to smile
Or say the hell with it and cry

—SP4 Bob Jackson (1970)

We slept alfresco, as usual; each of us would pull an hour of guard duty. In the middle of the moonless night, POP, a flare tripped. All was quiet until the flare had almost burned out. Then the Claymore blew, too late to do any damage. The guard either had trouble finding the clacker or hit it when the flare woke him up.

Now we had a hole in our perimeter—no trip flare and no Claymore; a blind spot and too dark to chance a reset. The enemy could waltz right in! For the rest of the night I could taste the stress.

Are they coming back for the body or for us? Are we bait on a hook?

Thank God, the rest of the night passed quietly. In the morning, after sending out a patrol, we rejoined the rest of our company at their camp nearby.

Life was not so shiny anymore. I thought things would be calmer than this—I'll never survive.

I needed to shut that out from my mind—otherwise I would be unable to fight. Yet it was all I could think of. Fear of death is a normal thing, but after those bits and pieces scattered all over the place, uncontrollable cough and choking spells plagued me each night for the next week. Doc Walsh gave me the entire bottle of cough medicine to stifle it.

And then for some reason, I got used to it. I felt war and I was learning to be a soldier, hard and fast.

The Trail

For the times they are a-changin'—Bob Dylan 

The seasoned vets of Charlie Company were mighty unsure of the future under Capt Rice. Neither were Keith Kay, James Clevenger and John Laurence of CBS, embedded in Sgt. Dunnuck’s squad. 

The bare statistics of twenty-four-year-old Al Rice were these: a southerner, a gungho ranger and a martinet. After lavishing praise on Capt. Jackson just two days before, Rice had taken over Charlie Company and been acting odd—not stopping soon enough to set up an adequate NDP (night defensive position) and making map reading mistakes.

Friendly artillery might rain down on us any minute!

Circling overhead in his Cobra, Battalion CO Lt. Col. Trobaugh had scheduled us to be plucked out of the thick jungle today, but first we had to find a suitable LZ (landing zone) for the lift ships (helicopters). 

Bob took point; when he crossed an old, overgrown APC (armored personnel carrier) track and emerged onto a single-lane dirt road lined by thick foliage on either side, footprints in the dirt seemed to jump up and hit him between the eyes. 

Fresh NVA (North Vietnamese Army) slicks (sandals)!

Battalion had steered us smack onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail! Why hadn’t Rice told us last night and why hadn’t we been told how close we were to the trail? 

We were used to Capt. Jackson’s wise old ways—no trails, never! He had learned his tricks from a crafty South Vietnamese colonel: how the enemy thinks, how to keep your people safe, how to fight the enemy on your terms. Scrupulous, time-tested methods which had served us so well during the last five months. 

Bob stopped. The squad stopped. Our whole platoon stopped. Bob brought our squad back into the safety of the bush. 

Kay and Clevenger ceased to be lookers-on and rolled film as Dunnuck moved up to observe the road for himself. Dunnuck wholeheartedly agreed with our squad. 

Any number of men could be lurking behind the thick foliage and trees. The road is only six or seven feet wide, too tight for birds [helicopters] but plenty wide for NVA tracks, everywhere, plain as daylight. 

Our platoon leader, 2nd Lt. Eggleston, radioed to Rice back of us. Rice copied Trobaugh straight from the bird, 

Go to the left and walk the company down the road 3/4 of a mile to a possible LZ. 

This time Dunnuck went ballistic.

A fuckin' road!! Any NVA would be invisible five feet from the road, on either side. We'd never know it. Wipe us all out. Booby traps. We don't take trails, let alone a fuck’n road. It's suicide. Not gonna walk down it. No! That's it.

Dunnuck took his misgivings back into the bush.

Trobaugh, Rice and Eggleston—the entire battalion chain of command—were rookies; the company was a walking poison pill. 

  

Capt. Jackson wasn't here anymore, but his spirit was. 

We're not gonna be killed by a bunch of FNGs (fucking new guys). 

Roll more tape. While Kay and Clevenger went up and down the column with their camera, the battalion clock was ticking—counting down fifteen minutes. Rice came up for a look and confabulated with his platoon leaders. Everyone opposed the road, but Rice squeezed, 

We're gonna move out on the road. Or I'm gonna take point if I have to. We've got a job to do and we're gonna do it. It's not half dangerous as some of the crap we've done in the boonies a while ago. At least we can see what we're doin'.

Ridiculous. We had Rice for only two stinkin’ days. 

Rice kept picking from a buffet of futility,   

Either move out or I'll move out and they can sit on their butt right here. It's that simple. All right. Let's move out. Make up their mind. Or I'll send some people back for 'em, which won't go over big. What we have here is extremely safe. 

He had yet to absorb the lessons that Capt. Jackson tried to teach him and he wasn't about to listen to us, either. Eggleston made a last-ditch attempt to talk sense into him, but Rice would have none of it; he summoned the dog team and the RTO (radiotelephone operator).

Dog team

The dog refused to move!

And that is how it came to pass that only a poor RTO—wondering if this was the last day of his life—accompanied Rice down the road. 

Was Rice the Lone Ranger or Don Quixote? 

Neither. He returned after only a few yards,   

The longer we sit here, the worse it gets. 

Was he throwing in the towel? 

Not really—his elongated southern vowels weren't working. 

Then a miracle. Battalion changed their mind, 

Go a hundred mikes (meters) to the right to a notch on the side of the road. Cut an LZ. Get out ASAP. 

Nobody on the ground, including Rice, knew that a massive B-52 Arc Light mission had been scheduled that day, three hundred mikes from our LZ. Fifteen hundred mikes is the smallest margin of error for Operation Arc Light munitions. Not a time for duck and cover. 

Laurence to Dunnuck,   

What do you think of this operation?

It's crazy. It's senseless, walkin' down the road?

What's the problem? 

I don't wanna walk down the road. This is one of the things I told ya about when we were wondering what a new CO was going to be like. This is one of those things you don't want him to be like. Ducks in a shooting gallery. Tracks all up and down this morning. Bad. We'll have to go in and see what happens. 

Charlie Company single-file down the trail

The interview was over. Charlie Company spread out and edged down the road toward the new objective. At last, the men found the notch on the side of the road and set about hacking an LZ out of the small trees and brush. 

A single chopper squeezed into the roadside clearing as soon as it was wide enough. It would take the first six GIs. At that rate, it would take over an hour to evacuate the company to Firebase Wood. 

Through the magic of radio, Battalion kept in continuous touch with Charlie Company and Arc Light. With two minutes until the bombay doors opened, only forty-two troops had been lifted out to safety. 

Battalion to Division,   

Abort Arc Light!

Did you say abort?

Roger.

Mission aborted. 

That’s how on April 6, 1970, Capt. Rice had become infamous at the Ho Chi Minh trail, the same day, one hundred eight years earlier, that Gen. Grant was becoming famous at the Battle of Shiloh. 

News travels fast, too fast for poor Lt. Tuck at the battalion information desk. He waited until the next morning to brief brigade. That kicked off a sloppy weekend for the army. 

The army brass panicked. Brigade CO Col. Ochs summoned CBS for a noon meeting in the air-conditioned VIP lounge at Tan Sun Nhut AFB (Air Force Base), Saigon. CBS was outnumbered five to three. Ochs wouldn't let it alone, he forced Laurence to read the script of the rebellion aloud. Every word. He pleaded with Laurence not to release the tape. He twisted arms and words, spun and threatened. 

Maj. J. D. Coleman, Battalion PIO (Public Information Officer) warned Laurence, 

You better keep your heads down. 

Laurence was unbowed—he had a goldmine. Besides, the story was already on its way to New York. CBS brass were ecstatic. Walter Cronkite ran the six-minute-and-forty-second bombshell on Monday's April 9 edition of The CBS Evening News. The April 20 Asian edition of Newsweek carried the headline,  

JUST DOWNRIGHT REFUSAL 

The last straw. 

Trobaugh cleaned house in a classic Gambino-style roll-up. Tuck was banished to a rifle platoon in the field; Rice requested reassignment; Eggleston was driving a water truck; Dunnuck never got the supply job he coveted. 

Within a month, Ochs was relieved of command, a death warrant for his career. Capt. Jackson? Doing fine at his desk in Phuoc Vinh as CO of brigade headquarters company. 

As its reward, CBS was expelled from Charlie Company and reassigned elsewhere within the battalion. They were only allowed back in the field bugged and accompanied by minders. After their movements had been made difficult, if not impossible, they got the hint and relocated to Cambodia. 

When Laurence was scooping the invasion of Cambodia by U.S. forces on May Day, he ran into us again. A month later, he was out and back at Tan Son Nhut, hospitalized for fever, dehydration and exhaustion. But at the end of June, he was home in Manhattan, nonstop editing a one-hour documentary, The World of Charlie Company, which ran on July 14 opposite the NBC All-Star game. 

The infamous incident ended with no KIA or WIA. The collective knowledge of the vets—real people solving real problems in real ways—had kept us safe. 

Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few—Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) 

Charlie Company had spit the bit. The old army of lifers and compliant conscripts was dead. 

Long live Charlie Company!

Tanks for the Memory

You never know what you're gonna run into breakin bush in the middle of a war. One fine April day, the jungle was jungle. Then, presto mundo—a three-acre clearing.

A road ran through it. No bush on the sides of the road. No leaves on the trees. Somthin happnin here. When you see a turtle on top of a fence post you know it didn't get there all by itself.

Agent Orange was up to its old tricks. The entire area had been bladed to the ground and sprayed extensively. Busybody U.S. engineers had left a wasteland, except for a big pile of logs and brush on the far side of the road next to a termite mound.

As the lead elements of Charlie Company stepped into the clearing, Lt. Martinez shouted,

We're makin a combat assault on the road!

We glanced at each other.

Huh?

We formed up along the road in a hundred-yard line and began to cross like Civil War soldiers.

Someone said to Bob,

Look, over by the wood pile.

What are you talkin about?

The soldier pointed to a group of men next to the brush pile busy attaching leafy branches to their bodies. Light bulbs lit up—a camo party. No friends of ours!

Before they could get into costume, we emptied the punch bowl with our M16s and frags. Wood chips flew everywhere. They threw their gearshifts into reverse and vanished into the jungle. This'll keep 'em off the streets.

Bobby Parris, a fellow squad member from rural Georgia, had done a peck of bird hunting. He had a U.S. Army Remington 12-gauge special issue pump-action shotgun, a supply of 00 (double-aught) buckshot in a sack draped on his belt opposite a razor-sharp 6-inch buck knife from his mother.

Bobby approached the wood pile. Twenty feet away, he halted and blasted several rounds of buckshot at the logs. After the dust settled, we pulled out a dead NVA. A BB from one of Bobby's shells was trapped in the guy's canteen, making it sound like a toy rattle. Bobby still has it.

Charlie Company was still in the zone. We had escaped casualties twice—when we crossed the road all strung out and when Bobby got too close to the wood pile.

While the rest of us stood around, arms at the ready, a squad reconnoitered the area. After they returned, we gathered at the wood line on the far side, formed a column and followed the escapees into the jungle.

One dead monkey doesn't stop a circus.

The Mouse Trap

Later that day, we ran across another man-made feature, a path with an over-sized log lying across it. Instead of pushing deeper into the jungle, we stopped and camped thirty yards away (don’t ever sleep right next to a path).

While others set a standard security perimeter and dug foxholes, J.R.'s squad reckoned it was time to make donuts. They had trained with demolition and explosive experts and had been experimenting with ambushes all along. Like Wily E. Coyote eagerly opening his parcel from ACME Blasting Products, they were gonna lay a clever trap and beat Charlie at his own game.

A kill chain is intricate, sensitive work. Stressful. A trip wire is strung over a log and connected to a specially designed fuse, det cord and an array of Claymores mines set in series along the path, concealed with the utmost pains.

The plot was blood simple: the enemy point man would pause to climb over the log and his colleagues would pause behind him, lining everyone up with the mines. As he steps over the log and trips the wire, the fuse breaks, the det cord ignites, the mines blow and the entire patrol is dead bananas.

In any event, we built our nest, posted the usual guards at the perimeter and went to bed on pins and needles. Dawn finally arrived along with a rude blast from beyond the trees. The trap was sprung. Animal, vegetable or human? That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

Our squad was closer, but the honor fell to J.R. His squad had set the trap. They knew the score. Too many cooks can kill the cooks.

J.R. approached the path with an M60 machine gun. Suddenly, a sniper bullet hit one of his men in the head. The squad immediately opened up and dove for cover, but J.R. ran along the path walking fire from his cock-high M60 like Rambo.

Mexican Standoff

Now that the pig was out of the python, neither Capt. Jackson nor anyone else knew exactly what we were dealing with. A few stragglers or an entire regiment? They weren’t talking.

Our soft-spoken captain wanted no more surprises—one seriously injured man out there was too many. The U.S. 11^th Armored Cav Division was just around the corner, so he ordered up a Big Boy.

If you could swing by, it would be greatly appreciated.

Patton Drops In

Just what the doctor ordered. Before long, the faint sound of a diesel in the distance grew louder. The ground began to shake. The sound of falling trees and a dull, angry roar echoed through the jungle until out came a monster from the deep—99,000 lbs. of 5th Cavalry steel grinding to a noisy halt in the dirt in front of us. We gazed up at the iron beast like grasshoppers, dumbstruck by an M48 Patton battle tank in the middle of the jungle.

These guys were notorious for running down NVA and tossing grenades at them from the turret—straight out of Kelley’s Heroes.

A man popped out.

You rang?

Sure did.

While the nearest medical facility at Bien Hoa was receiving timely updates from the medic treating the wounded man, we explained the situation, emphasizing that J.R. and friends were still out there.

The armored knight slowly ambled up to J.R.'s squad, knocking down trees and running over eleven NVA bodies along the path. Were these clowns at the woodpile? Who knew? Who cared? Charlie Company had just set the ambush record.

J.R. suspected two had survived—one in a tree and one in a bush.

A tree? We worshiped the ground.

For the plat du jour, the master blaster recommended the Beehive (90 mm M377 canister) instead of the HE (high explosive). A Beehive round breaks apart when leaving the gun barrel, propelling 5,600 flechettes (little steel arrows) in a dispersal cone, like shot. Its melliferous name comes from the soothing sound the arrows make flying through the air, exenterating thickets of vegetation, dense foliage, and everything else with startling ease. Range, 1200 ft.

Flechettes

Flechettes were first used in Vietnam in December, 1966. A landing zone in the Kim Son valley had been overrun and had taken numerous casualties. The officer in charge ordered the last artillery piece to be loaded with Beehive ammo and aimed at ground level. He took out two hundred NVA with a couple of rounds, saving the day. After that, the popularity of flechettes soared and reports of enemy soldiers nailed to trees en plein air began to appear in the press.

The tank bowed and turned its turret before lowering its gun barrel to finish off the two stragglers. Swoosh!!—we had just been insured by the 5^th Armored Cav, funeral arrangements still pending.

Now God’s own lunatics could be brought in to airlift our injured comrade from hell. Charlie Co. prepared to move.

Not so fast. Earlier in the day, an M551 Sheridan light tank had lost a wheel to its mortal enemy, an AT (anti-tank mine) and a soldier riding on the rear with his legs dangling down lost both his. Our tank needed to rendezvous with the damaged tank and the rest of his group in a clearing only a click away.

Part-tee

We arrived at the encampment at the same time. Three M48 (Patton medium tanks) and four APCs (armored personnel carriers) had circled the damaged tank, like elephants do with their young. The APCs were for transporting ammo, parts, tools, food and supplies, not people.

Damaged M551 Sheridan in repair

While a repair crew worked on the tank, the rest of us partied to our transistor radios, sheltered by our combined arsenals. We didn't bother setting up a security perimeter or digging foxholes; nobody would be crazy enough to bring such massive firepower down on their heads. To prove it, a tank riddled the wood line with flechettes, cutting down a cloud of trees in one big whoosh.

We checked on our injured comrade throughout the day, built bonfires, slept alfresco, and pulled guard duty. Bob and I guarded the disabled tank and sacked out inside for the hell of it.

In the morning, tanks went their way, we went ours.

During the daily hump, we learned that our injured comrade hadn’t made it. Upsetting? Absolutely. Though we were all pulling for him, grieving would wait until evening camp. Diverting our minds and our senses in the jungle could be fatal.

Jay

Prince Norodom Sihanouk was living the life. He had ruled his fairy tale kingdom of Cambodia for twenty-nine years, first as an eighteen-year-old puppet-king, now as a forty-seven-year-old father-king. He was an adept, occasionally ruthless sovereign, a professional sax player, filmmaker, and actor. He spoke Khmer, French and English, kept a harem and entertained lavishly, infusing a Cambodian sensibility into all he did.

The prince played both sides of the Ho Chi Minh Trail—North Vietnam could build it and the U.S. could bomb it.

In March, 1970, while on a world tour, this cool cat was overthrown by a conservative faction led by Prime Minister Lon Nol and the military. They wanted the Vietnamese out—others weren't so sure—and just like that, Cambodia was on fire.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the grunts of Charlie Company were speculating on their next assignment. Capt. Jackson removed the contents of the manila envelope and flipped the switch on the tape player:

Good morning, gentlemen. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves the construction of firebase Jay, six miles from the Cambodian border which may result in certain death. As always, should any of you be caught or killed, the army will disavow any knowledge of you. This tape will self-destruct in ten seconds. Good luck.

Our first firebase! Jay would be one of ten temporary artillery camps hopscotched astride the Cambodian border infiltration routes—sure provocations and tempting targets for the 95-C North Vietnam Army Regiment now moving into the Dog Head.

It was a bit worrying. Our foes were experienced and capable, cunning as foxes and tough as nails. They could roar like the devil. Was the U.S. high command dangling live bait to entice the NVA into revealing their dispositions and strength? Goading them into unprofitable, suicidal attacks? Simply putting a thumb on them?

We packed for a combat assault and they lifted us to a scratch patch of virgin prairie in the jungle, a big open space the size of two or three football fields, seventy miles northwest of Saigon. The usual half dozen to a dozen 105/155 mm high explosive rounds had softened our LZ (landing zone), but what if the bush was hot?

We had a lot to do before nightfall.

What if they attacked before Jay was hardened?

Chinook

Shortly, a giant twin-rotor Chinook helicopter buzzed in, dangling a bulldozer from a heavy chain. The dozer dropped and the fun began—an oval perimeter fashioned from a dirt berm three to four feet high; a fire pit scooped out of the center; a trench for an ammo dump dug four to five feet deep at the far end of the enclosure, in the general area of the CP. The iron bull did all this while the Chinook came and went like an enormous bird building a nest, dropping a Mule (motorized cart), coils of concertina wire, mortars, five artillery pieces and beaucoup ammo.

The jungle heat came at us hard. Shirts came off in the hundred-degree heat and humidity. We filled sandbags and collected empty ammo crates for our bunkers. The air was hot and so was the ground. The sweat dripping down from our head and torsos soaked our pants. We dug foxholes—a steel sheet placed on top made a roof. The 23^rd artillery group arrived to man the mortars and the five-gun battery in the pit. Our M60 machine guns lay moored on the berm, their seasoned barrels pointed at the wood line.

The four-wheel mule dragged shiny coils of concertina razor wire outside the perimeter, releasing them in strategic locations between the berm and the forest; grunts unrolled these barbed Slinkys into seamless entanglements.

The brass arrived. No big deal. We followed instructions and took care of business.

After the last-light patrol sallied forth, battalion CO Lt. Col. Hannas, who was overseeing most of the activity, walked the perimeter of our rude fortress, to check everyone's night readiness.

Like a good neighbor, he would approach an infantryman,

Do you need anything?

Are you ready to go? 

Notice anything in the bush?

He had some guys fire their weapon. No jams allowed. When Hannas got to me, he pointed to a four-inch, fifteen-foot tree, a hundred yards away.

See that tree out there by the wood line. Try to get as close as you can.

M79 Grenade Launcher

I had removed the M79 grenade launcher’s sight system long ago because it was cumbersome and sure to get tangled in the jungle. Using nothing but dead reckoning, I calmly aimed and pulled the trigger. A direct hit ripped out a chunk of the tree, sending bark and wood high into the air.

Applause from the back row.

I guess you can't get any closer than that!

Or luckier.

Later, it was business as usual. As night cloaked the camp, we seeded trip flares and Claymore mines into the wire—at least 95-C  couldn’t be taking notes.

Next came the christening wild west show: big guns and little guns firing randomly at the trees; flares lighting up the night. Jay was alive!

As the cool night air crept in, we set out air mattresses by our bunker, pulled poncho liners over us, lay back and shot the shit. Hannas slept in a cot on the sheet metal roof over the CP. Weather nice, no rain on our private island in the middle of nowhere.

Our squad pulled guard throughout the night, rotating every hour. It was time to use our night vision training. When something moved, we radioed the mortar platoon to pop a flare.

At the break of day, our squad went on first-light patrol, beyond the wire into the tree line, tracing the same path as the last-light patrol had. Bob and I stirred up a hornet’s nest. And I don’t mean that in the metaphorical sense—we both got stung in the eye and they swelled shut. Using our good eye, we made our way back and tracked down the medic. His treatment took two or three days.

We earned the purple eye.

The following week, we had beaucoup down time between patrols and day to day activities. No humping. A chance to write letters home, listen to music and read books. Bob composed poems; I taped the mad minute. We had grown accustomed to Jay, but don’t get me wrong; Vietnam is not Disneyland. Most of us had no use for the army. We were just putting in time to get the hell out.

Still, what was next was straight out of somewhere.

First, Capt. Jackson woke up with heart attack symptoms. Before he left to be checked out, he shook hands with each of us. Nobody was happy that our beloved leader was leaving—Charlie Company had only two KIA during his entire five months.

Next, Alpha Company arrived—the poor souls man-handling a .50 caliber machine gun through the jungle—and our job here was over. After chow on 28 March, Charlie Company squeezed through a gap in the wire to an assembly spot and hiked into the woods under our new CO, Capt. Rice. 

Two Armies, One Firebase

We had gone only a few clicks when it was time to look for a RON (remain overnight position) and camp-out for the evening. Then, an hour before daylight, faint sounds of gunfire disturbed the relaxing sounds of the nighttime jungle air. Dark red clouds rolled over Jay, the baby built with our sweat equity.

At the onset of the assault, a mortar probably intended for the ammo dump landed right between Hannas’ legs. "Lost everything," according to the air waves. Quick work by the medics saved his life—not his legs.

The same round also took out the CP and fire control antennas, disabling Jay’s communications and artillery except for direct fire. Consequently, support from Cobra gunships, tactical air and supporting artillery were delayed until FSB Illingsworth noticed the red glow and contacted Brigade and Division.

Jay was under heavy attack. Rockets, mortars, recoilless rifles and RPGs rained down. Six hundred NVA swarmed out of the woods, blew gaps in the wire and threw themselves at the perimeter.

We prayed that we would not be sent to the rescue, which would mean walking back to Jay through pitch-black jungle, blind and vulnerable to ambush. I didn't know any guys there, but I hoped desperately that they would fight off the invaders and we would be left alone. The call never came. The brass probably figured Jay could handle the fight.

Jay defended with beehives, small arms, and grenades. Some of the insurgents managed to get inside, but all the raiders withdrew at first-light, leaving a whopping 74 unburied, three captured, at the charred and bloody scene. Jay's casualties were 14 killed, 52 wounded. The bunker we built took a direct hit from an RPG, killing two—that could have been us.

A strange mixture of relief and regret surged through me. A thousand eyes had been taking the measure of Jay that day, watching our eight-man squad patrolling out by the tree line, silently holding their fire.

Alpha Company was devastated, but our our Lucky Charms were still working.

Happy Easter.