365 Days (18 page)

After almost eleven months in Nam, he was transferred from Headquarters, USARV to the 25th division as a brigade commander, fighting in the Central Highlands. The unit he commanded had been fighting and tracking for almost three weeks. Four times in those three weeks their LRRP units had made contact with at least a regiment of the 17th NVA division, only to lose them again before any significant battle could be pushed. They kept finding bits and pieces, vicious little fire fights here and there, but nothing big, nothing that would really hurt anybody. Not that the men cared. Like so many other units, they fought well enough when they had to, but in between they gave little thought to the fighting itself.

Bosum watched it all for one week, then ordered that the LRRP units, after making contact, were not to withdraw but were to stay where they were and harass the enemy. They were to set up ambushes and keep after Charlie until the units they fixed were hit.

It was not a very popular order. The six-man LRRP teams were Ranger units, scouts, and trackers, who were always traveling in unfamiliar terrain and were always outmanned. They never knew the best places for an ambush, nor, for that matter, the best escape routes. Once they committed themselves, they were always running the risk of being cut off and hit themselves. In the first two weeks after his order, three teams were caught and wiped out. He added more men to each unit, giving them more fire power and turning them into heavily armed recon patrols. In the next week two more got hit. He finally put together three LRRP units, and they worked for two and a half weeks—ate up parts of two North Vietnamese companies, fixed a regiment for the brigade, and got out. The mission was an unqualified if unpopular success. The recombined unit had taken 60-percent casualties.

The lifers accepted it all. Their colonel wouldn’t stay there forever, and there was some logic behind what he was doing. Besides, the units were hardening up.

To give the Brigade more hitting power, Bosum rearranged the weapons platoons, putting two men to a machine gun instead of three. He took the third man from each platoon and created another machine-gun group, giving each platoon 50 percent more support fire. It was a lot more to carry, tough, and with only two men to an M-60 instead of three, there was no reserve if either the gunner or feeder got hit, and no cover. The troopers didn’t like it, and when a platoon on ambush got overrun, the word spread that the machine gunners got it first and left the unit without heavy weapons support. By the end of the week the men were blaming the Colonel for the disaster. They had stopped thinking about home.

The ambush procedures were changed. Instead of one platoon taking part, three were assigned. When a good track was found, the center platoon became the killer group, setting out claymores in series of four and taking up positions directly behind the mines. The other two platoons filled out along the track. Bosum’s orders were that no one was to open fire unless the odds were no more than two to one, or the group to be ambushed could be contained within the flanking platoons. There was less rest for everyone, but the brigade started getting 80-percent kills. They began to hurt Charlie.

With the increase in sweeps and ambushes, their own casualties began going up. Units that had been running at three-quarters strength began drifting down to under 60 percent. Eight- and ten-man squads began humping it, still carrying, under Bosum’s orders, the fire power for the regular twelve-man patrols. Nothing was left behind. They were getting just as tired as they were getting tough. Still, the number of casual mistakes and booby-trap injuries began going down. Men quit smoking grass on patrol and began leaving things behind that might jingle.

Division Intelligence reported that the North Vietnamese were beginning to be leery of the brigade’s area. There were even some reports that the 17th was pulling out. Bosum decided to really push them. Without clearing it with headquarters, he told his commanders that from now on, after making contact with the enemy, they were not to have their units pull back in order to call in artillery or gunships; instead, they were to keep pushing in with all they had. He was sure the techniques of making contact, pulling back, and calling in support strikes gave the enemy forces a chance either to regroup or to filter out of the area. It also tended to keep his men battle-shy.

The company commanders went back to their units and spread the word. Troopers who before had been rather oblivious to it all and had spent their free time feeding the ants or smoking grass began wondering when the next fire fight would be. For the first time, they began sharpening their knives. Trackers and tiger scouts didn’t bother to write home before going out.

Three days after Bosum issued the orders, a patrol was ambushed, and the relieving patrol got pinned down. He committed another company, then two. The fighting spread. Air strikes hovered overhead, but the fighting was too close to get in. Bosum threw in another company, then the reserve. There was no time to get the wounded out; Dust Offs were cancelled and told to stand by. Over a thousand men were fighting, most within three or four meters of each other, in jungle so thick you couldn’t even see who was firing at you. It went on for hours. Bosum asked Division for reinforcements, and they airlifted in another company. The men kept fighting, pushing, and when it got dark, the units were so tangled up with each other they couldn’t disengage, and the killing went on through the night.

Whole platoons were wiped out. Squads of North Vietnamese were killed where they lay. By two in the morning the fighting turned into hundreds of terrifying individual battles. Boys killed one another in the dark, shredded apart by automatic fire from no more than a meter away. The wounded, lying broken on the ground, whispered hoarsely to passing figures, only to be killed. At first light, the Vietnamese began pulling out. The orders were for prisoners, but the bitter and exhausted survivors shot them down where they found them.

It had been an expensive victory. Division was a bit concerned about the casualties, but they decided to wait to see what effect these new tactics had on the enemy before they passed judgment. As for himself, Bosum was impressed. For the first time, the area was clear of NVA, not because the communists had decided to move, but because they had to.

The next night, after he had gone to sleep, somebody rolled a grenade into his tent. Bosum died on the ground, waiting for the Dust Off.

“What the fuck, they’re trying to kill me

and I’m trying to kill them. Who gives

a shit.”

Trooper, 4th Division

Psychiatric Ward

U.S. Army Hospital, Zama, Japan

I
’M GONNA KILL THE
fucker...no, don’t say a word; he’s dead and that’s it.”

“They’ll just send another one.”

“I don’t care about the next one, man. This is the fucker that’s got to go.”

“Listen Cab, it could be trouble.”

“Where the fuck do you think this is—paradise? Look around you. You blind or something? What the hell else can they do to us?”

“How you gonna do it?” one of the troopers asked, shading his eyes from the sun so he could look at Cab.

“Shoot the fucker down, man; just shoot ’em down.”

“It ain’t gonna be easy,” Tracy said.

“Look,” Cab said, slinging his M-16. “The RTO calls him down and when he comes down, we light him up. It’s that simple. Bamb! Another chopper gone, man, that’s all it is.”

“What happens when they find him shot to shit with M-16 and M-60 rounds?” Trowl asked from the back of the group.

“I’ve got two AK’s broken down at the fire base. Next sweep we’ll just take them along.”

There was a long, heavy silence, broken only by the sporadic crack of a distant sniper round. “What about the First Sergeant?” Trummer asked.

“He’s out here, man; he ain’t anywhere else. You don’t see him sitting in Saigon, getting fat. Don’t worry; when that chopper goes down, he ain’t gonna be running over to see who’s left to save.”

“OK,” Kolwitz said, getting up from where he was squatting. “We kill him. but only this one. That’s it—no more!”

“What about the chopper pilot?” someone asked from the back of the group.

“He’s got to go, too.”

“Do you know who he is?” the trooper asked. “One of the guys back at the TOC told me MacGreever’s flying the Old Man now. He ain’t got long till his DEROS.”

“That’s tough, man, but you can’t shoot down half a chopper.”

“I ain’t for killing MacGreever,” Trowl said.

“Me either,” Johnson said, slamming his weapon closed. “He brought us in those 50’s that night, man, and he didn’t have to do it.”

“Count me out,” Trowl said defensively. “I ain’t killing MacGreever just to grease some fucking Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Me neither,” Tracy said, taking off his helmet and licking the salt off his lips.

“He flew Dust Offs, too,” someone else offered.

“Count me out,” another trooper said, nervously fingering the safety on his weapon.

“Me too.”

“Me either.”

“The gooks use greenish-blue tracers.

I swear to God they’re lovely coming

up at you.”

Chopper pilot

 Surgical Ward

 U.S. Army Hospital, Zama, Japan

B
Y THE TIME YOU
read this, over 4000 helicopters will have been shot down, a third of all the chopper pilots who have ever been to Nam will have been killed or medically boarded out of the Army, and the average life span of any loach pilot, whether in Nam, Laos, or Cambodia will probably be down to somewhere around three months. But they still volunteer. There is not a Volkswagen in a parking lot at Fort Rucker, Alabama, or at Hunter in Georgia, nor a Scouter or Ford Fairlane running their roads. It’s all Honda 500’s and BSA Scramblers, Corvettes with the heads lowered and Dodges with 3-11 rear ends. The kids who choose to go there are of a type—lean and tough, mechanically oriented, obsessed with speed and daring, and incredibly brave.

My God! One moment the chopper was there, charging in protectively across the perimeter, tail up, and the next it was gone, torn apart in a monstrous ball of flame. For a moment, the sheer unexpected violence of it all held them. Stunned, the troopers looking up from the mud, watched what was left of the chopper come hurtling headless out of the flames, a great torn piece of steel plunging blindly on across the paddy.

Southeast Asia has become, above all else, a helicopter war. The slow, bitter attrition of Dien Bien Phu, the gradual strangulation of a whole army simply cannot happen now. We might lose a platoon or a company, maybe even a battalion—but never an army. You can’t mass against gunships or charge through mini guns. And it is difficult to demoralize troopers who know they are half an hour from the nearest hospital or ten minutes away from a cold beer or a hot meal.

Like the troopers themselves, the Pentagon has come to realize it’s a helicopter war. After years of proudly pointing to the skies we own when it is the land we are fighting, they’ve come around. The Huey Tug, a product-improved Huey that will have the power to hover out of ground effect at 4000 feet and at 95 degrees with a 6000-pound payload is currently being developed under military contract by Bell Helicopter Company. The Kowa OH-58, a light observation chopper, will continue to be bought by the government with $64.2 million dollars provided by the military through 1971. The Chinook Ch-47 medium transport helicopter will be funded at the $41.6 million level. The development of a heavy lift helicopter with a payload of twenty to thirty tons will continue with a 21-billion-dollar budget. Another $17.6 million will keep the Cheyenne AH-56A armed assault helicopter under development.

They are not very pretty. Even the tiny, glass-domed loaches that can hover motionless fifteen feet off the ground and pour machine-gun fire through the six-inch slit of a pill box, or slowly and maliciously track a man down a narrow jungle path, look out of place in the air. Helicopters have none of the grace of an airplane and even less of the style. They have to tug themselves off the ground—and once in the air they stay there, churning on through the sheer power of their engines. If anything happens to that power—and it doesn’t take much....

A single AK round is effective up to 1200 feet; a Russian-made 51-caliber machine gun can get up to 5000. A part of a 37-mm anti-aircraft shell is good almost anywhere. In Vietnam, though, most choppers are destroyed in the thirty feet between landing and taking off. At Rucker and Hunter they call it the area of translational flight, that time between hover and forward flight when the lift from the rotors is decaying and the lift from the forward flight has yet to build up. The stresses on the gear train and the rotor system are fantastic. If anything happens then, if the rotor goes or a round grinds up the gear box, if the hub freezes, or the hydraulics foul, there is no time to change the pitch of the blades and not enough height to allow for auto rotation. It is straight down. The gooks could, if they chose, put a few rounds into a chopper at 800 feet or even 1000, but that might give the pilot enough height to get it down. So they wait until the chopper is too low to glide and too low to hover, and then they light it up.

“6/36, 6/36...”

“36/6,” the radio crackled over the clearing.

“6/36, we have thirteen WIA, six KIA, have managed to regroup and set up an NPD with Bravo Company.”

It was almost dark. You could just begin to see the reddish glow of the tracer rounds heading out into the tree lines.

“36/6 sortie.”

“6/36.” The Sergeant stopped for a moment to keep the blood from running into his mouth. “We’ve burned out thirteen tubes and we’re scraping the bottom of our ammunition.”

A greenish-blue tracer round arched overhead, hit the top of the track, and whistled off up into the air. The Sergeant and RTO pressed in closer against the warm steel of the APC.

“36/6,” the radio crackled again loudly, cutting off for a moment the rattle of small arms fire, “we have Charlie model gunship. It can deliver sortie. Stay on this push.”