They Marched Into Sunlight (26 page)

F
OR MUCH OF THE PERIOD
that Welch was training Delta Company, the rest of Terry Allen’s Black Lions battalion were detached from the Big Red One and sent down to the Bien Hoa area where, under the temporary command of another division, they pulled relatively safe duty as part of Operation Uniontown. The assignment was to patrol the villages on the northern outskirts of Saigon and try to keep Viet Cong activities to a minimum just before and after the September 4 elections that would seek to legitimize the power of Nguyen Van Thieu and Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky. The elections were heavy with symbolism. South Vietnam was being pushed by its sponsor, the Johnson administration, into at least the appearance of a new democratic society, with a freshly minted constitution and nationally elected officials; all of that might make it easier for the United States to draw clearer lines of distinction between the government it was supporting and the communist totalitarian regime against which it was sending American soldiers into battle.

Along with persistent reports that Thieu and Ky were bribing and manipulating their way to election victory, there were also fears that the Viet Cong would undermine the election process and its aftermath. Keeping matters relatively quiet during that period, if not entirely clean, was one of the tasks given the Black Lions. Big Jim Shelton, Allen’s operations officer, was anticipating action from the local VC guerrillas, but it never happened, and the turnout for the elections surprised him. “I don’t know if they beat them or what, but people came out and voted.” It was quiet enough that Michael Arias’s platoon in Alpha Company spent some time guarding an engineering crew that was carving out a new golf course for officers and businessmen.

During their three weeks together in the comparative calm of Bien Hoa, Shelton and Allen stayed up late many nights talking about their lives, frustrations, and hopes. They were thousands of miles from their families. (Shelton had six children, on his way to eight, and Allen his three little daughters.) Shelton knew about Allen’s marital troubles and his failed mission back to El Paso to try to repair the relationship with Jean. It was obvious that Allen was disheartened by the mess, but he did not appear entirely undone by it. “I might say that he was never despondent nor did he ever let his concern for his personal problems interfere with his duties as a battalion commander,” Shelton wrote later. “I think I was the only one, with the exception of the chaplain, who knew about the problem within the battalion.” Allen still functioned, as a leader and a person. He still seemed to love a good cigar, a long story, a shot of whisky, and anything from Texas, especially the Las Palmas picante sauce that his mother, Mary Fran, would send to him by the pack. Shelton was a history buff, drawn especially to military history, and was awed by the fact that his boss was the son of the famous General Terrible Terry Allen. Twice during his own military career Shelton had heard senior officers say that Terry Allen Sr. was the best officer they had ever known. Eager to learn everything he could about the general, he pumped Terry Jr. for stories.

Allen was not the boasting type; he did not go around pretending that he was his old man, “punching guys in the chin and grabbing butts and bullshitting with the guys,” as Shelton later put it. He lived in his father’s shadow but did not seem overwhelmed by it. He loved his father and was not put off by requests to talk about him. He had some of his father’s traits but not all. General Allen believed that a good infantryman always wore his web gear, and that was something Terry Jr. was religious about; the belt and suspenders with the hooks were part of his uniform every day in the field. The general slept on the ground with a bedroll during wartime; Terry preferred a cot. He was more reserved than his father, less boisterous in showing that he was one of the guys. The father didn’t mind looking like he had been roughing it. The son was insistent about appearing clean shaven. Every morning, wherever he was, he shaved with a straight razor. If all he had was his helmet, he filled the steel pot with cold water, washed his face, lathered with a brush, and shaved slowly and carefully while looking into a little stainless steel mirror. According to Shelton’s recollections, if the son once aspired to reach or surpass his father’s rank, he had abandoned that dream by the time of their late-night chats. “I’ll never make general,” Shelton remembered Allen saying to him.

Shelton sensed, much as the estranged wife Jean Allen had during Terry’s emergency leave in El Paso, that the realization that he would not make general was accompanied by, or perhaps caused by, a certain disillusionment with the military and a desire to do something else when he finished his war tour. Allen and Shelton talked about setting up a deluxe concierge service: businesses that needed something done would come to them and they would find the right subcontractor for the job. “Terry thought it was a great idea,” Shelton recalled. He also talked about going into financial management.

At his home on Cumberland Circle in El Paso, Terry’s father knew nothing about his son’s apparent turn away from the life they had so carefully plotted together. The general, though suffering from mental deterioration, was not altogether gone. He understood when Mary Fran told him that Terry’s marriage had gone to hell. He still had hundreds of contacts spread across the military world, friends from the officer corps and former soldiers who had fought for him with the Big Red One and the Timberwolves, and he recruited one of them to check on his son. James A. Snow was in Vietnam working for Pacific Architects and Engineers, one of the large contractors employed by the U.S. military in its massive effort to pave and build over much of South Vietnam. At the general’s request Snow tracked down Terry Jr. during the Uniontown assignment at Bien Hoa. “It was a highlight of my life,” Snow wrote later of the meeting. He saw no signs of trouble. Terry seemed to be performing his duties well and “filling the ‘Allen Boots’ to the letter.” After taking over the Second of the Twenty-eighth under “adverse conditions,” replacing a fired commander, he had made his battalion “the first of the First.” It appeared obvious to Snow that Lieutenant Colonel Allen had won the “respect and high regard” of his men. “We talked long that night,” Snow recounted. “I must say that, short of being with his loved ones, he was doing what he wanted to do; what he was trained for; and doing it outstandingly!” At the end of the night Terry Jr. gave Snow a certificate naming him an honorary “Black Lion Extraordinaire—
Vincit Amor Patriae.
” Love of Country Conquers.

Nothing to worry about in this report. It could not have been rosier had it been written by the publicists at MACV headquarters or in Lai Khe.

The combat readiness test for Delta Company, its final exam of sorts, was supposed to take place on September 25, less than a week after Allen, Shelton, and most of the rest of the battalion returned to Lai Khe from the Uniontown operation, but it never really happened. Midway through the test, Delta was sent off to seal a nearby village where First Division engineers were repairing a bridge. They stayed at the village two days, and when they returned to Lai Khe, the brigade commander told Welch his company had done enough to pass the readiness test. At the end of a short critique Welch got an operation order. “We go out tomorrow as part of the battalion on a real hot operation,” he wrote to his wife that night. “This time we’re acting on real reliable recent information. We should be able to get something. Everyone’s really up for it…. I can’t say that I’ve done all I can—I can always do a little more right up to the time some of mine get into it. And then I can really help—once I know where Charlie is, I’m sure I can get him. I shouldn’t even say that—it’s silly. But if we are ‘successful in combat,’ that’s all and everything I can ask for over here.”

F
OR THE
U.S. Army rifle companies in Vietnam, combat usually took place during what were known as search-and-destroy missions. In later years this terminology would evoke images of soldiers searching Vietnamese villages and destroying them, thatched roofs set aflame with Zippo lighters or napalm. The original concept, when the phrase was coined by General Westmoreland and his aides at MACV headquarters, was no less violent but more precise in its military connotation. Search and destroy meant sending infantrymen into the jungle and countryside in search of enemy units and base areas, finding them and fixing them in place, engaging them if possible, and destroying them with massive firepower, preferably from a distance through artillery and air. Even though the larger American military objective in Vietnam was essentially defensive—to stop the North from overrunning the South—the search-and-destroy mission reflected an offensive strategy designed to reach that objective. Westmoreland and his staff believed that they could prevail through a campaign of attrition, much like General Grant won the Civil War. If they could pile up body counts in their favor, they thought, sooner or later North Vietnam would relent and pull back.

Major General DePuy, one of Westmoreland’s top infantry strategists, and himself commander of the Big Red One from March 1966 to February 1967, had been the godfather of search-and-destroy missions as the best way to fight a war with no front lines against an enemy whose favorite tactic was the ambush. DePuy often used Thunder Road as an example. If U.S. troops remained defensive and merely tried to protect supply lines along Route 13, they could be subjected endlessly to ambushes unless they lined twenty battalions up and down the road. Mere defensive protection was a “forlorn strategy,” he told Associated Press correspondent Malcolm W. Browne. “The only way to keep the road open is to attack the Viet Cong units which in turn have been attacking the road.” This same military theory was applied to the larger war. But the problem was in finding the enemy forces and getting them to stand and fight. In a moment of frustration DePuy once said that while the VC were skilled at staging ambushes, “that was kind of a coward’s way of fighting the war.” He could not have meant this literally, for if he did he was calling every American company cowardly. They sent out ambush patrols every night—and was it not an ambush when Clark Welch’s recon patrol staged its surprise attack on the
L
-shaped trail in the predawn darkness? What he meant was that the VC were not making it easy for American forces.

At their First Division base camp in Lai Khe, the 2/28 Black Lions sat smack in the middle of the Big Red One’s 5,700-square-mile area of operations. It was prime search-and-destroy territory. To the east was War Zone D, to the west War Zone C, to the southwest the Iron Triangle, to the north the Long Nguyen Secret Zone. Enemy forces operated in all of them, part of a region known to the war planners in Hanoi as the B2 Front. Along with several indigenous Viet Cong guerrilla units, the three regiments of the regular army Ninth Viet Cong Division, starting with Vo Minh Triet’s First Regiment, had been roaming the fields and jungles of the B2 Front for several years, joined later by other regiments and the Seventh Division of the North Vietnamese Army, all supported by a string of logistical units. As disparate as these elements seemed, they were thought of as one seamless operation, controlled by political and military leadership from Hanoi, which had set up mobile forward command posts run by the Central Office for South Viet Nam (COSVN) and its military affairs department in the dense jungles of the Fishhook area near the Cambodian border north of Tay Ninh.

By the time Terry Allen Jr., Jim Shelton, Jim George, and Clark Welch reached their respective positions with the Black Lions battalion, the First Division had been searching for these units for more than eighteen months, since early 1966, undertaking two massive operations, Junction City and Cedar Falls, and a score of lesser ones. The enemy had not been destroyed, not even by the most optimistic American account, but there had been claims of victories large and small. Three hundred and eighty-nine Viet Cong killed in Operation Cedar Falls. Seventeen hundred tons of rice captured in Operation Tucson. A cache of 350 weapons and 450 rounds of ammunition found in Operation Manhattan. Nearly eight thousand acres of jungle cleared by the huge Rome plows in Operation Paul Bunyan. In all, they killed (or claimed to have counted the bodies of) more than four thousand enemy soldiers, captured thousands more documents, and unearthed dozens of base camps and vast tunnel complexes with underground hospitals, sewing rooms, and mine factories. Every body count, every cache of war materiel, every enemy document, was used by MACV as proof of progress and evidence in the case against the claims of stalemate. If the war in Vietnam could be decided by statistics, no doubt the Americans would win.

T
HE OTHER SIDE
was fully aware of the American search-and-destroy strategy, according to Vo Minh Triet, deputy commander of the First Regiment of the VC’s Ninth Infantry Division. His response was:
If they can’t find us, how can they destroy us?

There was a touch of bravado to his boast, for his First Regiment had been roughed up in several major battles with the Americans over the previous two years, but it was valid in one sense. The Viet Cong had a far easier time finding the Americans than the other way around. Their advantage was obvious long before the moment of combat. Among the Vietnamese living inside the village of Lai Khe were people who secretly worked for the Viet Cong and regularly provided information. One such informant, whose loyalties were misjudged by the Americans until they killed him in an ambush firefight, was the man who had served as the barber for Jim George’s Alpha Company. Some VC supporters inside Lai Khe communicated with the Ninth Division by leaving messages in a bottle at a pickup point in the jungle nearby. There was also a special reconnaissance team from the VC Ninth Division that worked stealthily around the perimeter of the Lai Khe base camp. Soldiers on this team climbed trees to observe the Big Red One’s daily operations and relayed reports over hard-line telephones hidden in the dense brush. They counted precisely how many soldiers were leaving camp every day. “They saw them and let us know,” said Triet.