Last Man Out (16 page)

The youngster, already on board, said, “Not necessarily the helping hand the lieutenant was looking for.”

Ernst was finally righted and put on the helicopter. With his good hand, he gave a thumbs-up to his men. He was eventually evacuated back to the States and we never saw him again.

For a short while I was the only platoon leader left in the company and then a new second lieutenant, “Brad Arthur” [alias], arrived. Woolley gave him Ernst’s platoon. Arthur was loud. When some other replacements whom he knew dropped by, he repeated the stories he had heard about Ernst’s medevac, but with the wrong emphasis, I thought. He hadn’t earned his spurs yet and didn’t have the right to laugh.

The new M-16 assault rifles arrived and, like Arthur, they did not make a good first impression. I had handled guns all my life, but I instantly disliked that light aluminum and plastic toy with its designer lines. It didn’t feel right, made silly little sounds when a round was chambered, had no recoil when it was fired, didn’t come up naturally to the shoulder, and had a handle on the top. For what? It made sighting awkward. I told the men I didn’t know about this thing that looked like it was made by Mattel. Didn’t look like the kind of gun that would win wars. Didn’t want any of my men holding it by the handle, like a woman’s pocketbook.

I told Bratcher I was keeping my shotgun. He nodded and asked when I had last fired it. I figured about three or four weeks before. Bratcher said that he had noticed a lot of rain and wondered how waterproof that gun was, how well it might be able to handle, say, firing all seven rounds without jamming.

Newsome, my RTO, had covered it with oil, and I had cleaned
it religiously every time we returned from an operation. It seemed to be in good shape.

On Bratcher’s suggestion, however, we took it down to the perimeter. Standing on top of Spencer’s bunker, I put it to my shoulder and fired. The gun jammed after one round. I tried to clear it and heard something break inside. The bolt stopped working altogether. Bratcher looked at me with his eyebrows raised. I tore the gun down as much as I could and found several pieces, weakened by rust, broken or bent from firing that one shot.

“Not many spare parts around here for a Stateside rabbit gun,” Bratcher said.

I threw the shotgun and the parts into the minefield, then went back to the company armorer and drew an M-16. I tried to like it, but the more I handled it the cheaper it felt. Where was the wood, the weight? Sure, we could carry three times more ammo, but everyone would fire the thing on full automatic and no one would aim. It was not a woodsman’s gun.

And the magazines? The guns might be high-tech, but those magazines were mass produced and cheap. The spring wires were smaller than coat hangers. I could bend them with my finger.

I raged against those M-16s and the magazines, but no one listened seriously.

So I resigned myself to life with the M-16. Like everyone else, I put twenty rounds in each magazine, as we had been told to do, and then one more for Mother. If we squeezed down tight on that thin wire spring, we could get twenty-one rounds in. For many people that last bullet was a tragic mistake because the springs in the early-version magazines rusted together. Also, because they were so light, men taped two, sometimes three magazines together so they would be at the ready in a firefight. This extra weight on the light latch that held in the magazines caused the magazines to droop just enough to cause misfires. Plus, the guns were not hardy and would not function with any dirt in the workings. And there was a lot of dirt in the jungle. We had to give up the durable M-14 and got a light, faster, cheaper replacement. Initially we certainly suffered more from its disadvantages than we gained from its lighter weight and higher speed.

At about that time, Mother and Daddy sent me wire spectacles
and a commode seat. I had asked for the latter item because the company latrine had uncomfortable holes cut in flat wood. I took great pride in my ass, I told my friends. The civilized man looked after his toilet facilities. It was what separated us from the animals that crapped in the jungle. Woolley said he wondered about me sometimes—the bar, the toilet seat. He wondered if I was queer.

I kept the toilet seat near the bar and took it with me on each visit to the latrine. No one made any catcalls. That might have been because I usually carried the toilet seat in one hand and a .45 in the other.

One day I was walking down the company street toward the latrine with the commode seat. I saw Spencer sitting in front of his tent. He looked at me and the seat and then smiled. I tried to look ahead and ignore him. I was wishing I had my .45. As I walked in front of Spencer, he followed me with his smile. I passed by.

“I can’t think of a damned thing to say, Lieutenant. Goddamned I’m trying hard and I can’t.”

Just before Christmas, Jim Newsome, my RTO since Fort Riley days, rotated back to the States. I went down to his tent to say good-bye. I picked up his PRC-25 radio and walked over to Spencer. Bratcher, Castro, and Rome were standing by the entrance to the tent.

“No sir, goddamned, no sir, goddammit, no. I ain’t carrying no fucking radio. I ain’t. I don’t have to.” He appealed to Bratcher, “Tell him, Platoon Sergeant.”

“I don’t care what you think about this thing, Spencer. Get the freqs and call signs you need from Newsome before he leaves.” I had a half smile on my face, but my eyes were serious.

Spencer looked at me and said, “Ah, shit.”

Initially I had thought about making De Leon my RTO, but as we became more experienced in the field it became apparent that Spencer, in addition to being bright, was very cool under fire. And, I could not explain it, this black youngster from a northern ghetto, and I, a white man from a small southern town, were in sync together in the jungle. Bratcher and I had uncommonly good rapport, but he was usually at the rear of the platoon file during operations. Beck and Spencer were, for whatever reason, always near me when things were happening. Beck’s attitude was
to go get ’em. Don’t matter ’bout nothing. Get’ em. Spencer had just as much courage, but he was more deliberate. He would always hesitate a moment before acting. For all of my initial concern that he would be disruptive and hard to control, he was effective in combat. Plus, he was smart and I liked him. So he was my RTO.

Woolley initially questioned this selection because often the RTO spoke for the platoon leader, and Spencer was known to be irascible. Plus his thick inner-city diction was initially hard for most of the other white college-boy RTOs to understand. But in short order Woolley, and the other RTOs, realized that Spencer always knew what he was talking about. And when he spoke for me, he always got it right.

We stayed in the base camp from shortly before Christmas through New Year’s. Each night different platoons were sent out on ambush patrols. Woolley told Arthur that he had the patrol for Christmas Eve night.

I told the captain how much I appreciated that. “I’ll be able to spend Christmas in camp, probably because I’m your favorite, been around the longest.”

“Nope,” Woolley said. “It’s because I want you on patrol New Year’s Eve. If there is any man I want out away from the base camp New Year’s Eve parties, it is Red Cap Twigs Alpha November Six, the proprietor of the Company A bar.”

Christmas was pleasant. The company cook made a wonderful holiday meal. We cut down a small shrub for a Christmas tree and put homemade ornaments on it. On Christmas Eve, Peterson, McCoy, Dunn, and I opened presents together. Just like home, we opened them in turn, one at a time, so that we could comment on each gift and stretch out the evening.

On New Year’s Eve, I was lying on my belly in the jungle by a bridge south of town. Around midnight the soldiers on the perimeter of the base camp behind us began firing tracers in the air. I started singing “Auld Lang Syne” softly and the men on both sides of me joined in. With the tracers still going off in the distance our voices carried over the water and into the village on the other side. The locals must have wondered.

Ten days later, Colonel Haldane and his staff went to division headquarters to receive new operational orders. They left in the
morning and we expected them back by early afternoon; the trip had never taken more than a couple of hours. They didn’t return until after sundown, and all officers and top NCOs were called to the operations tent at 2100.

Colonel Haldane began by saying that during the twelve weeks we had been in-country, we had learned how to fight in the jungle, had engaged elements of every VC unit operating north of Saigon, and disrupted their ability to control the territory. We had also taken casualties, and we had lost men to disease and through termination of service. Only 50 percent of the men who had left Fort Riley for Vietnam were still with us, but we had received replacements. We were still an effective fighting organization.

“Operation Crimp will launch in three days. It will test our ability to live up to the 1st Infantry Division tradition,” Haldane said. “We are going to attack an area the VC and North Vietnamese have controlled for decades. It is the Ho Bo woods north of the town of Cu Chi. It is where the Ho Chi Minh trail ends inside South Vietnam. We will be up against hard-core Viet Cong combat units supported by local villagers. The VC own this territory. The only significant South Vietnamese military presence in the area is inside the town of Cu Chi. Turn the first bend in the road west of town and you are in territory of the VC’s 7th Cu Chi Battalion, a unit that has never lost a battle. We know from the French that their tactics are to bend away from frontal attacks but slap back on the sides and attack from the rear. They do not run away. They fight. Our mission is to attack the center of the area, secure a base, and clear it from the inside out. Once we have pacified the area, the 25th Division, presently en route to Vietnam, will move in and control it.”

The plan was to move by Caribou airplanes from our base camp to Phu Loi, a staging area some distance east of the operational zone. On 7 January 1966, we would conduct a helicopter assault into Landing Zone (LZ) Jack in the middle of the Ho Bo woods. The landing zone area would be prepped by artillery and then Air Force fast movers (jet airplanes) and finally Air Force prop-driven slow movers. Leading the troop-carrying helicopters (“slicks”) would be helicopter gunships. 1st/16th Battalion would go in first. We would be in the second wave. My platoon
was to be in the third, fourth, and fifth helicopters of the second lift into the LZ.

The briefing went on until midnight. We picked up new map sheets on the way out.

As we walked back to the company area, Bratcher said, “It looks like we got ourselves an operation here. We’re going to get after them Commie bastards, rather than just hanging out the way we been doing, acting a lot like bait. You want to do business, go where the customers are. Am I right or what?”

The following morning we loaded onto the ugly Caribous for the short flight to the staging area. Dunn’s company had already arrived there and had set up poncho shelters at the end of the runway, near where Alpha Company was assigned. The next day more units came in. Helicopters and planes were flying overhead constantly. Round rubber bladders of aviation fuel were positioned at the end of the runway. Fresh ammunition, medical supplies, and batteries arrived. The whole assembly area was alive with activity.

Before dusk Dunn and I went over to an old building built by French plantation owners. A basketball hoop was attached to the back of the building and someone had found a basketball. We joined a half-court game and wore our fatigue pants, combat boots, and T-shirts. Dunn played basketball the same way his father had probably played no-faceguard football for the Green Bay Packers. Very tough. One guy, who was much quicker than Dunn, was driving around him when Dunn hooked him around the neck, throwing him to the ground. He was angry and getting up in a hurry when Bob pushed him down again. Dunn moved quickly to stand over him and said, “Get up, asshole, and I’ll knock your fucking head off.”

I grabbed Dunn and said, “Hey man, save it for tomorrow. That’s a good guy. You gotta know the difference. This is just a game.”

  EIGHT