The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (9 page)

The week before graduation, I asked to speak to the range instructor, and I pleaded my case.

“Gee, Sarge,” I said, “more than anything I want to be a military policeman. I signed up for an extra year to do it. I turned down OCS.” If I wasn't an MP, I still had two and a half more years in the army, and they could put me anywhere. I didn't even want to think about that. “Can you do something for me?”

“Okay, come on, one more time,” he said. “This is your fourth time through. Normally, we don't do more than two.”

I finally managed to fumble my way through.

I had usually been able to sneak by on native ability, but here I'd almost lost something very important to me. From then on, I put in the effort on everything. Even though I'd passed, I went back and worked on that weapon until I could disassemble and assemble it blindfolded. I developed my marksmanship until it was acceptable.

I worked for eight weeks and then got my assignment. I had visions of putting on my spiffy uniform with the white hat and MP armband and
cross straps and providing military escorts in Europe or patrolling the streets of Saigon.

My entire one-hundred-man company got assigned to the 212th Sentry Dog Company, Eighteenth Military Police Brigade. It turned out that someone, somewhere in the annals of U.S. Army history, decided that handling sentry canines was a military-police function. K-9 Corps. For the next two and a half years, I was going to be walking a dog.

This was not my idea of military policing. I tried everything I could think of to get out of it, but I didn't have a hook. I was one in a million in the army, there was nothing I could do about it. I would gladly have traded with anyone else in the MPs, but there weren't too many people rushing to get into this line of work.

We trained for six weeks in Okinawa, where I met my dog, Duchess, a sixty-pound female German shepherd. Because we were going to be doing exclusively perimeter work, the dogs were trained to alert on motion and human scents. They were highly trained and highly skilled. They had one handler a year, and then they'd break in a new one. I learned how to handle Duchess and then, in May 1967, we got shipped out to Vietnam.

There was no air conditioning on the C-130 cargo plane we flew in on. There weren't any passenger seats, either. We all sat on canvas webbing along each wall of the fuselage and listened to the engines drone. This was one of those huge transport aircraft with the back door that lowers and it wasn't built for noise suppression. The dogs were cooped up in stainless steel crates, and they yelped nonstop.

It had just rained, and Tan Son Hut Air Force Base was thick and humid. As we stood on the tarmac, the country smelled moldy. Flatbed baggage carts were clattering to the outbound aircraft, pulling pallets of stainless steel coffins. Planes and helicopters were landing and taking off. The noise was phenomenal, and we were all sweating like crazy.

We took the dogs to the temporary kennels, where they were going to be housed for the few days before we got shipped to our final destination. The kennels were terrible, the dog runs were beat to hell. They were tough accommodations for the dogs. Then, my company climbed onto the back of some trucks and rode through the streets of Saigon to our compound. Our accommodations weren't much better than the dogs’.

Saigon was buzzing. I had never heard Vietnamese, and words in the street sounded very rat-a-tat-tat. Traffic was everywhere, nonstop and
shrill. Our truck was surrounded by a convoy of Vespa scooters with little carriages attached at the rear to accommodate four passengers. They trailed in our wake like pilot fish. People all around us rode bicycles, and the taxicabs were these crazy little French cars that looked like something the Three Stooges would ride around in.

My senses were overloading, everything bombarding me at once. Saigon had a powerful and inescapable smell all its own. The heat lay on me like a wool coat I couldn't shed. There was no breeze. I didn't feel danger, just excitement and a very fast pace.

But more than anything, the basic overriding presence in Saigon was military. Military trucks and gun jeeps, American military police in fatigues, Vietnamese police with their white hats, soldiers carrying weapons in the street, all the official buildings sandbagged, bunkers. It was a wartime capital.

There were easily a thousand of us stationed in the compound, a grouping of Quonset huts and barracks ringed by barbed wire, sandbags, and gun towers, sitting right in the middle of a Saigon neighborhood. We were issued new clothing, jungle fatigues very different from the formal uniforms we'd had back in the States. We were issued helmets and bulletproof vests and received several days training on the new M-16 rifles that were just coming into use. I spent about four days getting acclimated and then received my orders to report to company headquarters at Long Binh.

In 1967, Long Binh was the largest military installation in Vietnam and growing. From the time I got there until I was transferred out in 1968, its military population grew to the tens of thousands and its size grew to twenty-five square miles. Long Binh was about thirty miles outside of Saigon and sat up on a plateau with a good view of the surrounding area, which is probably why the army chose the location. We were assigned to guard the ammunition dump.

It was the largest ammunition dump in the country, a mile on each side. Long Binh supplied all the bombs for the planes, all the napalm, all the military hardware, you name it; if it exploded, it was at Long Binh.

The ammunition was housed in gigantic berms designed to contain explosions, thirty feet high on three sides with an opening on the fourth. Roads led in and out from one berm to another, and trucks were constantly driving back and forth, restocking the hardware as the war demanded more inventory. The entire dump looked like a series of giant, lethal anthills. Our compound sat right across the road, but on three sides the Long Binh dump butted up against the jungle.

The ammunition dump was ringed by twenty-six equally spaced guard
towers, each with searchlights and sixty-millimeter machine guns and teams of soldiers manning them. Vietnam is a beautiful country, but the army had knocked down every tree in sight. In daytime there was no shade—the whole area was a dust bowl. During the rainy season, the place turned into a swamp.

This was not a highly dangerous area. Military police and personnel were everywhere, and no guerrilla activity had been reported. There was a war going on, but that was someplace else. The town of Bien Hoa was a couple of miles down the road, and we ran around there without our weapons. A lot of guys had Vietnamese girlfriends and ended up spending most of their time in town. It was pretty easy duty.

Within the first few months, I achieved the rank of specialist four, was chosen soldier of the month, and drew the assignment to escort a lieutenant on a pay run as he delivered monthly pay to the 212th in a dozen locations around the country. I got a fine tour of Vietnam. We flew cargo planes and helicopters the length and breadth of the country, from the beaches of Cam Ranh Bay and Vung Tau up to the awe-inspiring mountains of the Central Highlands, then down to the Mekong Delta, south of Saigon. I fell in love with the beauty of the place.

I saw the Bob Hope Christmas show. Twenty-five years earlier, my father had seen Bob Hope entertain the troops during World War II, and I felt a good connection. But mostly my tour of duty was pretty boring.

Our job was to walk the dogs on the perimeter of the ammunition dump between the guard towers. Between the dump and the jungle tree line was about 150 yards of no-man's-land, completely flattened and covered with row upon row of concertina wire and trip lights. It looked like something out of World War I.

Each shift we lined up with our dogs, passed inspection, and were issued our ammunition. (We were supposedly in a war zone, but when we were not on guard duty all our ammunition was locked up.) The supply sergeant counted out seven clips of ammo, and when each tour was over, he counted them back in.

We patrolled three sides of the dump; there was so much activity on the side facing our compound that it didn't make sense to have the dogs there. Fifteen of us were assigned to the posts: Whisky, X-Ray, Yankee, each with five substations. The handler and his dog were dropped off at their post, relieving the sentry before him, and six hours later were themselves relieved. The guy who had the good job was the driver: All he had to do was tool around in the truck. That plum duty was rotated.

Patrolling the perimeter meant that we and our dogs walked back and
forth for six hours along a lighted road with the jungle on one side and a drainage ditch on the other. Of course, we stopped by the towers and shot the breeze with the guys behind the guns. Every one of us had our own little AM radio with an earpiece, and, though we weren't supposed to, we tuned in to Armed Forces Radio just to pass the time. Once per shift, a truck came by with coffee and Kool-Aid.

One time, Duchess caught wind of something out at the perimeter. She stopped and alerted, and I got very nervous. I looked out there and … some crazy porcupine was just walking along the line.

Occasionally, a two-man perimeter jeep patrol rode by and lobbed a couple of grenades from an M-39 grenade launcher into the jungle just to try to catch whoever might be out there off guard. Sometimes, they shot off flares to light up the area, but nothing ever came of it.

Someone in charge decided we dog handlers should go out on patrol. Without any warning, one afternoon they led a group of us outside the post and into the woods. This was real foolishness. We weren't trained as infantry. The noncommissioned officer who was leading us had the same training we did. We were out there in the jungle—it wasn't very deep jungle, but it was jungle—toting our M-16s, twenty-five guys with animal training. We were moving along in a line without our dogs, but we didn't know what we were looking for.

We spent six hours wandering around in the woods. God forbid we ever encountered anything. We weren't trained as infantry. What were we going to do if we ran into some Vietcong, arrest them?

I had just finished the six-to-twelve shift at Whiskey Four one midnight in late January 1968. My replacement had hopped down with his dog. I had just heaved Duchess onto the back of the truck and been relieved when the world lit up. Mortar rounds screamed, rockets came tearing in from the jungle, and the ammunition dump started to blow. The noise was incredible, it shook inside you. Everything was bedlam. The machine guns in the guard towers opened up, men were hollering and firing. I looked behind me, and I could see Vietcong sappers coming through holes in the concertina wire.

My replacement and his dog jumped back on the truck, and we took off. We weren't dropping off dog handlers anymore, we were barreling sixty miles an hour down the pocked and dusty road, picking them up.

Berms were blowing up as we shot by them. The sky was orange. Night had become day. As each new handler pulled himself onboard, he started cursing; the explosions were so near that the metal truck was heating up,
and guys burned their hands as they grabbed onto the sides. In the back, we had to muzzle the dogs so they wouldn't go after each other, everything was so crazed. They were jumping and howling; the bed of the truck was so hot the pads on their feet were frying.

We were being rocked by the explosions. Flying down the road, I thought I heard stones rattling around the floor of the truck, maybe debris from the berms that had blown hundreds of feet in the air. I looked down and saw three U.S. Army issue grenades rolling on the metal truck bed like giant pinballs. They must have come loose from someone's belt, and now they were careening against the sides of the truck. This wasn't the movies, no one fell on them.

We roared around the side of the ammunition dump and into the main post, unloaded the dogs into the kennels, and ran to our battle stations in the bunkers. We spent the rest of the night sitting there, locked and loaded, watching the dump blow up, listening to the mortars and machine guns. Gunships flew overhead and pounded gunfire wildly past the perimeter, out into the jungle.

The camp itself was not attacked, only the ammunition dump. We waited all night for an assault that never came.

I didn't feel fear, which was strange. The noise, the heat, the flash of the rockets exploding—there was certainly enough to be scared of. What I felt was excitement, exhilaration, a great rush of adrenaline. Afterward, when I had time to consider what might have happened to me, that was scary. Too much time to think will do that to you. While it was going on, I was simply doing what I was trained to do.

The kid at the post next to mine got killed. He was new to the com-pany. I don't remember his name. I should, but I don't. I've always felt kind of guilty about that. Ours were the posts farthest from the compound and closest to the jungle. The Vietcong had concentrated their resources to get into the dump and do their damage. They had set their charges, trained their mortars, and overrun the Whiskey Three guard tower. I was one guy removed. That kid was the only dog handler we lost, at that time the only dog handler killed in Vietnam.