Master Chief (18 page)

The twenty-third of September was a busy day spent in preparation for another operation. At about 1330 hours Lieutenant Fletcher, Roger Hayden, Son, and I drove to My Tho. While Dai Uy was visiting with 525, I went to the Embassy House to see Al. I requested his permission to allow Bai to reproduce organization charts and coordinates of the VC Mang, the NVA 111th Regiment, the NVA 9th Division offices, and units within Dinh Tuong province for me. Al readily consented.

Before I left, he mentioned that he was planning a type of Beacon operation and asked me if I was using this type of equipment. I told him that I had the equipment but hadn’t developed its capabilities due to my agent handler/interpreter problems. Al said that after the October third South Vietnamese national elections, he would contact me and go from there.

After my short visit, I went downstairs to see Mr. Bai at the translation office and asked him to draft the VC Mang, NVA 111th Regiment, and NVA 9th Division organization charts and the coordinates of their office and unit locations. Bai assured me that he would.

That afternoon, we practiced our tae kwon do from 1530 to 1805 hours with Captain Kim. Our workout had been particularly brutal because of the terrible heat inside the metal building. Afterward, everyone headed for our little bar for a few cold refreshments.

September twenty-fourth started off as a beautiful day for an operation. We were all well-rested and ready for a scrap with the VC—or at least we thought we were.

Trung Uy gave his warning order at 0800 hours, immediately after everyone had gotten back from the Navy mess next door. I was to be 2nd Squad leader, while Trung Uy would act as the 1st Squad leader and the patrol leader. Lieutenant Fletcher would go along with Kleehammer as his adviser. The rest of the morning was spent preparing our gear and weapons for a potential knucklebuster. In other words, we were going to carry a maximum amount of ammunition and ordnance just in case.

Killer gave his PLO at 1230. We were going to try to capture
Ba Tin, the commanding officer of the VC 341st Engineer Battalion (Dong Thap One Regiment). Ba Tin’s office was located within a reinforced bunker complex. As usual, the VC complex was very well camouflaged and was located in the midst of a thick jungle area adjacent to local farmers’ homes, rice paddies, and gardens on the Sam Giang and Cai Lay district border south of QL-4, just two and a half klicks west of Ba To’s hamlet near Song Sam Giang. Our guide was to be a VC POW accompanied by Chief Muoi and his four PSB operatives. This ought to be interesting, I thought—this VC grunt hadn’t even Chieu Hoied!

After the briefing, we went to the river and test-fired our weapons. Then we went on to the helo pad, where we rehearsed our SOPs until the Sea Lord slicks arrived.

At 1430 hours all fifteen of us—Tam and Son included—loaded our two slicks and headed for Cai Be to pick up Chief Muoi and his five men. Unfortunately, a severe thunderstorm struck while we were in Cai Be. All of us were shivering from the cold air and rain in the back area of the Huey slicks, and the pilots returned to Dong Tam, where we would wait until the rain slackened.

The rainy season had begun in earnest about the first of September and wouldn’t be over until the following April. The storms generally struck every afternoon and sometimes continued for several days, making it a tough time to operate. The whole delta and its rice paddies were flooded; the delta streams were swift and out of their banks, which made them hard to cross. It could get fairly cold, especially at night, and sometimes it was hard to get fixed wing and helo air support once the clouds dropped too low. However, a wet, cold, and nasty environment was our forte and the reason we were sent to the delta.

I grinned as I looked down at QL-4, the national highway, as we flew east rather slowly because of the heavy rain. We were no more than fifty feet above the paved surface.
I reflected back to 1961 when I was working at the Bridwell Hereford Ranch headquarters, which was located about six miles from a small German-Catholic village called Winthorst in north-central Texas. I enjoyed my stay there and lived in the bunkhouse with five other hardworking bachelors. Chores began at 0530 sharp for all hands. After Scotch and I had completed our initial chores—Scotch mixed specialized feed, while I fed it to the bulls—working with fifty two-year-old registered short-horn Hereford bulls, we went to the big barn, where I took my turn milking a big old long-legged Guernsey cow just prior to breakfast.

During those milking times there were several cats and a multitude of playful little kittens hanging around begging for a squirt or two of milk direct from the tit. The little urchins would close their eyes and open their mouths wide to receive their portion of the white elixir with which I occasionally covered their faces. They never seemed to mind the mess—they just sat back and took their time licking it off their paws.

One morning an old mama cat got a little careless. Ol’ Bessie had wrapped her dung-laden tail around my face, causing me to spill from the milk bucket. While the cat was concentrating intently on licking up the puddle of milk, Bessie apparently decided she would get back at me by lifting her left rear hoof high enough to place it into the nearly full bucket. She never did have much of a sense of humor, especially after I told her what I thought of her and secured her tail to the hobbles on her back legs. At the early age of twenty, I was about to get my first lesson on feminine revenge. Bessie brought her hoof down dead center and hard on the top of that mama cat’s round head. It was a sight to behold—in less than a second, mama cat’s head went from four inches in circumference to something flatter than a silver dollar, with a diameter of a medium-sized frying pan. The cat’s reflexes took over, and the carcass started flopping against Bessie’s hind legs.
Bessie, sensing that something was wrong, got spooked, and before I could grab the milk bucket and get out of the way, she kicked the bucket over, spilling that day’s milk allowance and knocking me and my one-legged stool ass-over-teakettle. The rest of the cats had all of the milk they wanted that morning. Unfortunately, we bunkhouse boys didn’t get any fresh milk with our meals that day.

Such were the trials of a cowpoke sloggin’ through cow crap, I thought as our Sea Lord slicks started setting down on the Dong Tam helo pad. As I looked out the slick’s starboard door at the rapidly flooding quagmire surrounding us, I could see that not much had really changed in my life. The main difference was that the pay and benefits were better. If I got killed, Mom and Dad would get $10,000 and the government would bury me. A cowpoke never had it so good, I thought as I slapped at Same’s head to let him know that I was glad he was my friend and teammate.

The rain finally stopped at 1615 hours, and fifteen minutes later our two heavily loaded slicks were skimming the rice paddies at about one hundred miles an hour with two Seawolves slightly above us, covering our flanks. Kleehammer had decided against prepping the bunker complex before our insertion, in hopes that we might retain the element of surprise. Basically, he was hoping for a miracle.

Once the helos flared at about six feet altitude, 2nd Squad and I peeled out of our helo and quickly took left flank, while Kleehammer, Fletcher, and 1st Squad took the right. We didn’t even have time to find a good place to hide before we started receiving small arms fire. We were only twenty-five meters from the thicket of jungle that was at twelve o’clock, or directly in front of us. Mr. Ba Tin definitely had units of his VC 341st Engineer Battalion located in that thicket somewhere.

Both of our squads immediately returned fire and bravely set a classical frontal skirmish line as everyone
took cover behind a rice dike—in other words, we dove into the mud and called for our Seawolf gunship buddies to rain 2.75-inch rocket warheads and minigun projectiles on Ba Tin’s head. Nothing fancy, just effective; nothing heroic, just for survival.

On that day, all of us were reminded of what the Marine and Army grunts had to put up with, sometimes on a daily basis, against conventional VC/NVA forces.

On left flank, Chambo hosed down the source of the enemy fire with his M-60, while I threw in a few 40mm HE rounds to open up holes in the bush. Same, Waneous, and Compton opened up with their Stoners, and Little Bear carefully laid out a couple of 7.62mm bandoleers for easy access before he gleefully began expending his case of ammo.

On right flank, Hayden’s and Quear’s slow-firing M-60s were thump-thump-thumping at a measly 550 rounds a minute, while Chief Bassett’s and Eberle’s Stoners were filling in with chatter at a paltry 850 rounds a minute. Knepper, not to be outdone, kept a steady rate of 40mm HE rounds, blowing holes through the thick brush toward the sources of the VC rifle fire.

While the muzzle blasts from our firearms gradually reached a crescendo, Mr. K. was on his PRC-77 radio busily coordinating with the Seawolves for their first rocket and minigun run. The gunships’ first targets would be only thirty meters from our skirmish line, and Trung Uy knew that there would be no room for error. However, because we were situated out in an open rice paddy, the Seawolves had no problems locating us at all times.

Prior to the Seawolves’ firing run, Trung Uy called for both squads to cease-fire and to stand by. That meant we were to get our heads and asses down behind the rice dike. Naturally, being young, stupid, and impatient, we peeked over the dike, looked to our right and watched the gunships as they started their run from right to left flank
in front of us. I watched the first two rockets streak toward the nearby VC bunkers, which were visible only from the air. The sight was awesome.

When the first two 2.75-inch rocket warheads detonated only thirty to forty meters in front of our position, I had a flashback to ’69 when a unit of the U.S. Army 9th Infantry Division’s Huey gunships tried to blow me and seventeen PRUs to bits one dark night. The only difference was that the rockets of ’69 were detonating closer than thirty to forty meters, and it took the housemaids a week to wash out all of the crap from my tiger-striped cammi bottoms and jungle boots. That was a dismal and soggy night in more ways than one.

When both of the Seawolf helos had completed their firing runs and were making a hard left bank over our left flank, we watched numerous green and red VC tracers streaking upward behind the helos. It was obvious that Ba Tin’s boys weren’t very intimidated.

Chambo looked at me and asked, “Now that we have brought our enemy to bay, what are we going to do with them?”

I grinned and replied, “Call in more helo strikes until they cry uncle, or drop a fifteen-thousand-pound daisy cutter on them.”

Chambo looked at me for a second, nodded his head and gave me a thumbs-up.

Again Trung Uy called in air strikes, and again the VC opened up with their AK-47s at the helos. Somehow those VC haven’t gotten the message, I thought.

I leaned over to my left and told Same, who was carrying 2nd Squad’s PRC-77 radio, “Now that we’ve got them entrapped, it’s time to request a few CBU-55B FAE bombs to clean the VC out of their bunkers.”

“Yeah, like we did in Binh Dai district,” Same replied sarcastically.

“We only have two options: go in and clear the bunkers, or call in our slicks and extract. Let’s see what Mr. K., Lieutenant Fletcher, and Chief Muoi decide,” I commented. I knew that if Trung Uy decided that we would go in after Ba Tin, all of us would obey and give it our best effort.

Trung Uy had a very difficult decision to make, because (1) our image was at stake, especially if Chief Muoi wanted us to go in and (2) we would probably take heavy casualties because our VC enemies were combat engineers and would be prepared for anyone stupid enough to assault their reinforced positions. In addition, certain staff members would have jumped for joy at November Platoon’s casualties because our loss would be their gain. Their existence and the personal awards they had been writing for each other would be justified in their eyes through our blood.

All of us knew it would only take one command-detonated claymore mine to wipe out the better part of a squad. We could expect to find booby traps used as blocking elements and VC riflemen positioned at well-concealed firing ports carefully cleared through the dense vegetation to ensure interlocking fields of fire from all avenues of approach.

It was during those times that the patrol leader really earned his pay and felt the terrible burden of combat leadership. The job carried with it awesome responsibilities, and during times of great decision, it was a very lonely position. The consequences of the patrol leader’s decision could haunt him for the rest of his life, not to mention the lives of his men and their families.

Sometimes, missions had to be accomplished regardless of the cost. When allowed to do so, Kleehammer would have to weigh his options carefully. Was the target worth the loss of some of the most highly trained men in the world in order to maintain our self-image or to save the lives of hundreds or thousands later? In this case, I didn’t think so.

Same soon passed the word from Trung Uy that we would not be going in after Ba Tin and his boys and to stand by for extraction. Without being too obvious about it, I let out a sigh of relief. In my humble opinion, I believed that Trung Uy had made the right decision.

Surprisingly, the only person who was mad about Mr. K.’s decision was Chief Muoi. For some reason, he wanted Mr. Ba Tin real bad. Some of my PRU were that way in ’69 because the VC/VCI had murdered members of their families. Acts of revenge carried their own special curses and had terrible consequences for those involved. Acts driven by such motives were dangerous, self-serving, and should never be tolerated, I thought to myself, as I reflected on a couple of PRU missions.