Delta Force (9 page)

The Special Forces captain in charge of the camp was Harold Moore. I let him know quickly that I was the new mayor of Plei Me. Shaped like an equilateral triangle, the camp sat in a slight bowl and was surrounded by barbed wire. There was a trench system that ran throughout the inside of the camp. About ten wooden buildings with corrugated metal roofs made up the interior. The outside of the camp was usually occupied by the Montagnard soldiers' families. Needless to say, under siege the families were now all inside. The camp was crowded and it was dirty. A thick red dust covered everything. It was in turmoil. The Vietnamese camp commander, Captain Moore's counterpart, stayed in his deep bunker. I never saw him once the whole time I was there. Outside the barbed wire there were a hell of a lot of Communists.

I called Pleiku and explained to them that we should fortify the camp first, to make sure we could hold it, and then find out how many of the enemy we were facing. We shouldn't do anything until we knew for sure. Bill McKean did not agree with me. He said, “I want you to get outside the camp, rummage around, clear the enemy out of there. Then, obviously, if you do that you can hold the camp.”

I said, “Sir, that's not a good idea.”

He said, “Well, Major, I'm ordering you.”

In the afternoon we mounted up both Ranger companies.
Captain Thomas Pusser, a West Pointer I thought a lot of, was the advisor to the Vietnamese Rangers. I got him and the other American advisors who were going out on the sweep operation together. “I want you all to be very careful out there. Don't take any chances you don't have to take.” Then Pusser and I discussed the two Vietnamese companies. The leadership of one of them was stronger than the other. I suggested to Tom he go with the stronger unit. He felt because he could kick ass and get it moving he should go with the weaker one. I finally agreed with him. He went out with the weak company. I shouldn't have let him do that.

The plan was to begin to clear the northern slope area from which most of the heaviest fire was coming. The NVA waited for both companies to get outside the gate. Then they came out of their holes and hit us with everything they had. About fourteen men were killed, including Tom Pusser. Many more were wounded. I felt fortunate to get any of those Rangers back inside the camp. They had been very badly mauled. I immediately got on the radio, and got Bulldog to agree that we should fortify the camp. I then asked for an air drop of a couple hundred 5-gallon water cans, since we were running out of water, and a basic load of ammunition. I didn't know how much we had, but I wanted to make damn sure we had enough. I also asked for a couple of boxes of cigars, some cigarettes, and a case of whiskey. “I don't care what it is, anything assorted.” This got McKean a little bent out of shape. Then I asked to have a chopper come in and get our dead. I felt that many dead were bad on morale. Reportedly, McKean asked for volunteers in Pleiku to fly in to us, but no American chopper pilot stepped forward.

The first Air Force resupply drop, in order to avoid the enemy .51-caliber machine guns that ringed the camp, flew too high and dumped most of its ammunition outside the wire. The second drop landed in the camp. It was all ammo. The third drop contained water, cigars, and the other things I'd ordered. It, too, landed on top of us.

Late in the afternoon of this first day, after the Ranger companies got back and we licked our wounds and took our resupply
drops, I got together with Tommy Thompson, Bo Baker, Bill DeSoto, and John Pioletti. We were all beginning to realize that we would be damn fortunate to get out of this camp alive. We were receiving a lot of 81mm mortar and 75mm recoilless rifle fire. I was very concerned that we hold that first night. I had our people go out to all the crews manning the machine guns to make sure they knew what their instructions were. I didn't want them picking up and running away scared. That night I thought we were going to get hit. We took heavy mortar and recoilless rifle fire all night long, but were not probed.

The next day we began to strengthen the camp's fortifications. The mortar and recoilless rifle fire fell in spurts. Occasionally a lone enemy soldier would jump out of a hole and rush the wire throwing hand grenades. Around 1030 hours Bill DeSoto got hit. One of those heavy machine gun slugs nearly tore his arm off.

From the intensity of the fire Plei Me was absorbing, I made an estimate of the enemy force besieging us. When I reported I thought there were at least two, maybe three, large forces of regimental size surrounding the camp, I got some people in Pleiku really shook up. After that I got priority on all air strikes. I don't deserve credit for the damage those strikes did to the enemy. My deputy, Major Thompson, organized and directed the strikes. Air Force fighters and naval aircraft flying from the carriers off Yankee Station pounded the jungle around us. They hit the enemy with napalm and 250- and 500-pounders all day long. We learned later we were surrounded by two regular North Vietnamese infantry regiments, the 32nd and 33rd.

That night I received a telegram by radio from President Johnson. It said something like, “We're thinking about you. Hold out there as long as you can. God bless you all.”

The nights were worse, far worse, than the days. Ropes of green and orange tracers flew into and out of the camp. Overhead, circling C-46 Flareships kept the area illuminated. Multicolored parachutes, which had been used to resupply us, were strewn here and there and gave the camp a raffish appearance.
The pounding intensified. Mortars and recoilless rifles fired relentlessly. Amazingly, during these terrible nighttime hours the camp rats, oblivious to the havoc they were a part of, continued to come out and run over the ruins just as if everyone was asleep.

Bombers came over again on October 24th and began to eat up the NVA. I'd say our side flew seventy-five to one hundred sorties a day. We just walked these air strikes all around the outside of the camp. We used a lot of air, and we broke the enemy's back with it. Many of the strikes were so close to the wire we took shrapnel in the camp. One particular string of bombs hit very close. Major Thompson, who was calling in the strikes, kept hollering, “I like it! I like it!” Captain Moore had wanted to take a photograph of one of these strikes. I tried to warn him to keep his head down. A piece of shrapnel from one of the hard bombs ripped half his shoulder off.

During the daytime, between the air strikes. I tried to sleep. Besides the newspaper photographer who was killed during our run for the camp, I had two other unauthorized newspaper people with me in the camp. We taught them how to shoot a .30-caliber machine gun and gave them one to man in the south corner of the perimeter. They did a first-class job for us.

The situation on the third day: We were putting in a lot of air strikes and I wasn't sure what was going to happen next. We learned by radio that a South Vietnamese armored column trying to reach us had been pinned down and stopped cold by an enemy ambush.

Sometime, I'm not sure when, Khoi, the Vietnamese helicopter pilot I thought so much of, flew into the camp. I told him he was crazy, and he should fly his ass out of there. “You know, Boss,” he spoke perfect English, “your problem is you worry too much.” He loaded up a lot of dead. We had problems keeping the Montagnards off. They wanted to get out, too. Khoi made two flights in and out. He took fire the first time but not the second. His luck held that day. Sometime later, though, he was killed in Military Region I when his chopper crashed into a mountain in bad weather.

With the napalm and bombs doing their work, the NVA
began to relax their hold on us. The mortar barrages fell off, so did the small arms and machine-gun fire. It got so that even a couple of Huey slicks (small troop-carrying helicopters) flew in. We were then able to get a lot of the kids and women out. We also began flying out our dead. Some of the dead had been lying in the jungle heat for six days. They were ripe. I know that John Pioletti, while loading one of the choppers, was throwing up over the body bags.

There was another problem that worried me. The first day in Plei Me, Captain Pusser had been killed with the Ranger companies outside the wire; in the melee that followed, they hadn't brought his body back. I knew I had to recover his body. We mounted an operation. It was on either day four or five. I asked for volunteers. “The Vietnamese,” Major Tut told me, “will get his body for you. We want to do this.” Some Vietnamese went out and brought Captain Pusser's body back. He could only be identified by his dog tag. The heat had distorted his body terribly. It was a damn shame.

We received word by radio on Monday, the 25th, that the relief force of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and troops was on the move again. A slick arrived and left a forward observer in the camp who would help direct artillery fire down the road, walking it just in front of the slow, chugging armored column. As the sun went down the first tanks finally clanked into view and took up a defensive position around the camp's perimeter.

The following morning the 2nd Battalion, 1st Brigade, from the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) was helicoptered into Plei Me. I was asked by their liaison officer where I would recommend he put his unit. I selected an appropriate area for the Cav to land in. Around and beyond the north slope there were a lot of dead enemy soldiers and the stench was terrible. Landing there would be an instructive introduction for the 1st Cav, which had only arrived in country a short time before. No better way to let them know war is hell. After the battalion landed, because his people were throwing up all over themselves, their CO asked if they could move somewhere else.

Before I left I walked around the outside perimeter of Plei
Me. The ground was pitted by bomb craters and blackened as far as I could see by napalm. There were also a lot of dead out there. In one case I noticed two enemy soldiers who were actually chained to their machine guns. It was later estimated there were 800 or 900 dead North Vietnamese regulars in front of the camp. I don't know the exact number and I didn't run around counting them. Eventually a bulldozer came in and just covered everything up.

ELEVEN

WHEN I GOT
back to Pleiku. I had some people to thank. I personally expressed my appreciation to the Air Force forward air controllers. Then I found the senior Air Force office at Pleiku and told him if it weren't for his people obtaining and directing the air sorties I wouldn't be there talking to him. Then I went to bed.

About midnight, Lt. Col. John A. Hemphill, the assistant operations officer of the 1st Cav, knocked on my door, “Charlie, they want to see you at the command post. The Cav's ADC [assistant division commander] wants to talk to you.” When I got to the command trailer I was introduced to Brig. Gen. Richard Knowles, a great big tall fella. He had a problem. The 1st Cav was going to stage out of Plei Me and go on westward into the Ia Drang River Valley to find, fix, and defeat the NVA regiments that had just withdrawn. Lt. Col. John Stockton, who commanded the division's recon squadron, had asked to have a rifle company from Harlow Clark's 1st Brigade assigned to him to guard his parked helicopters. When Stockton ran into trouble near Duc Co, at a place called LZ Mary, he deployed this company in a combat operation. They were deeply engaged and now General Knowles was asking if there was anything Project DELTA could do to help them out.

While I was standing there General Knowles got Colonel Stockton on the radio. Knowles's call sign was Longstreet and Stockton's was Bullwhip Six. “Bullwhip Six, this is Longstreet.
I do not appreciate that you took that rifle company and used it for a purpose other than the one you stated. I don't appreciate it a bit. Now we have to mount an operation to get it out. What have you to say about this?” Bullwhip Six, Stockton, came back with some kind of bullshit. When he was done the general put the radio down, looked at me and said, “That's what you call really telling him, isn't it?” I looked at him and said, “Sir, if I was a general and an officer under my command disobeyed an order, as that colonel has, I would tell him to put his hat on backward and start marching in an eastward direction till he hit the China Sea. That's what I would do.” Well, the general's mouth fell open. John Hemphill told me later the general had not appreciated my thought. I felt, if this is the way the Cav's going to operate, then I don't want to fool with them. They made me nervous. I didn't sleep anymore that night.

But, the choice wasn't mine, and the Cav needed DELTA's assistance for Operation Silver Bayonet in the Ia Drang Valley. Colonel McKean was running around wanting to know what we could do. At this time Major Tut informed me that his instructions were to stand down and prepare to go back to Nha Trang. He had been told by General Quang not to participate in anymore combat operations. The Vietnamese Rangers had run out of gas and were not going to do anything more.

General Westmoreland was in Pleiku and asked me what we could do to help the Cav. I told him I had four all-American teams back in Nha Trang we could deploy, but we needed his authority to use them. He said, “You got it!” That made my day. Now that Project DELTA could use all-American teams, I felt we'd taken another giant step forward.

Then there was the fight over who owned the helicopters that inserted DELTA's teams. The Vietnamese Rangers had taken Khoi and their choppers back to Nha Trang, leaving me naked. I stated my requirements to the Cav and was told that Colonel Stockton's helos would support DELTA, but that they would remain under his operational control. I became very hard-nosed over this point. I'd stood there and watched that general take crap from Stockton, so I wasn't comfortable with
Stockton. He took too many risks to suit me. I wanted to control all my own parts. The argument went all the way to Maj. Gen. Harry Kinnard, the division's commander. The Cav finally agreed to attach the helicopters to me, but they didn't like it. They didn't like it at all. Stockton was very angry. But I got my way.

As things turned out, the Cav's choppers weren't much to brag about. Their pilots couldn't find our LZs. They couldn't come back, put a pin in a map, and say for sure that's where they'd put a team. The first time they tried it they put the teams in twenty kilometers from where they were supposed to. We went out, found the teams, brought them back, and reinserted them the next day. This time the pilots were only ten kilometers off. It was just a damn mess. The teams on the ground, when I asked them if they wanted to be airlifted out, told me they'd rather walk out. It was just ludicrous. In fairness to these pilots, it has to be pointed out that they had recently arrived in country and Silver Bayonet was their first large operation.

When our part of the Ia Drang campaign was over, I didn't even ask permission to leave—I just scrambled us up a couple of C-130s, loaded everybody up, and moved on back to Nha Trang. Later Colonel McKean told me the 1st Cav hadn't been impressed with DELTA. We were too expensive and required too many of their assets. From that moment on, whenever I was around Colonel McKean he'd keep talking about the relationship between Project DELTA and the 1st Cav, “We gotta get this patched up.” I finally decided he was more concerned with the fact that maybe this general who commanded the 1st Cav, Harry Kinnard, might sit on one of his promotion boards.

Anyway, Plei Me was over and Project DELTA had done well. We could go anywhere now and people knew who we were. We were proud of ourselves. We had had a successful operation. We helped save the camp and had killed some bad guys.