“Hey, Top,” I replied, “we’ve fought bigger wars than this without destroying our NCO corps.”
“Yes, sir, but never by ourselves! Before we’ve always had the Reserves ‘long side of us, had our citizen soldiers taking up the slack. Shit, even in Korea we had ’em sharing the… uh.”
He paused introspectively, then continued. “I tell you, sir, if you’re an NCO, grade E-5, -6, or -7, and carrying an eleven prefix [infantryman’s military occupational specialty], there ain’t no end to this war for you.
I mean this is where our infantry is, so you’re either gonna be here or getting ready to come back here till this thing’s over—and who the hell knows when that’s gonna be? Shit, it’s just simple mathematics; there’s only so many of us folk. Fact is, you’re gonna find yourself coming here more often, ‘cause your peers—what with them and their families understanding these mathematics—are retiring or just plain getting out ‘bout as fast as they can sign the papers. So, sooner or later, odds are… Well you know what snuffie says.”
“No, Top. What does snuffie say?”
“Says you can lead a horse to water, but if you do it too many times, Charlie’s gonna shoot his nuts off!”
I laughed. What my first sergeant foresaw as the demise of our infantry’s NCO corps in Indochina was a sore point with him, one he would return to time and again. With the passage of time, much of what he prophesied would come to pass.
“Also understand this is your third tour over here,” he continued, in another vein.
Again I nodded.
“Then we have something in common.”
“This your third tour, Top?”
“No, sir, my third war. And, by God, it’s my last one, too! Ain’t gonna make war no more; gonna go back to the States, get me some ROTC duty, and teach others how to do it.”
It was now dark, and we were carrying on our conversation in whispers just loud enough to be heard above the low rushing sound—a paltry constant static—emitted by the company’s radios. After talking a bit longer, mostly about the war, previous assignments, the Army in general—what was right and wrong about it—families, and snuffie, we made our way to our separate holes and tried to find a few short hours of comfort in a parcel of Vietnam’s freshly dug soil.
Later, wrapped in my poncho liner, I realized we had spent far more time philosophizing and simply shooting the bull than discussing company specifics. Our nightly ritual would continue in that vein, first reviewing the “state of the command” and then touching on virtually every subject under the stars. There was plenty of time for talking in the Nam.
With the exception of radio checks between us and battalion and between the platoons and their trick-or-treat sites and LPs, the night’s passage was uneventful.
At before morning nautical twilight (BMNT) the company stood to, LPs were pulled back into our perimeter, and just before first light we fired our “mad minute,” an exercise in which everyone on the NDP’s perimeter fired their weapons simultaneously at the highest sustained rate of fire, covering defensive sectors to their front. The primary purpose of this morning tactic was to dissuade an enemy force that might have penetrated our outer defenses during the night from initiating an attack at first light. As such, it was most appropriately used in densely vegetated areas where Charlie had the least difficulty positioning himself around the NDP under cover of darkness. In addition to this tactical practicality, the mad minute provided us an opportunity to test-fire our weapons.
As the sun rose over Bong Son’s plain, we repacked our rucks, stacking them on cargo nets left behind by the log bird, and washed and shaved.
In the Cav, you were always expected to shave even if there wasn’t enough water to wash.
Around eight o’clock the morning log bird arrived. After quickly dropping off our morning “C&D” (coffee and doughnuts, although the fare normally included other portable breakfast items such as fresh fruit, hard-boiled eggs, toast, milk or juice, and so on), the helicopter took on water cans and food containers from the previous night’s meal and then, hovering six to eight feet above the ground, had the cargo nets containing our rucks hooked beneath its underside. Once these were in place, the log bird lifted off en route back to the battalion’s trains area. Another day in sunny South Vietnam was under way.
Shortly thereafter, Three Six departed our NDP, traveling in a northerly direction. At approximately three klicks (kilometers) out, they would turn to the east, move in that direction for two or three klicks, and then turning south, move another six klicks before changing direction again, this time moving due west toward the mountains. In this fashion, they would sweep our outer perimeter at a distance of about three kilometers to the north, east, and south. In the meantime, One Six, as planned the night before, would test our claymore concept in the mountains on our NDP’s western flank. I, along with the rest of the command section, accompanied One Six as they departed the NDP.
Quickly discovering another, shorter access route up the mountain’s eastern slope, we reached our well-traveled northsouth trail within an hour or so of departing the valley floor. There we set up what was to become a pretty standard two-point, northsouth claymore ambush—an ambush in which one man armed with a claymore mine (the “hit” man), accompanied by a two-man M-60 machine-gun team, established a killing position on the trail to the north, while an identical three man team did the same to the south. The remainder of the platoon went into a tight perimeter defense across the trail midway between the two ambushes, thus prepared to reinforce either of the committed positions.
At each killing position, the hit man emplaced his claymore to the side of the trail, often securing it to the trunk of a large tree.
After covering the claymore with loose vegetation, the hit man moved down the trail, on the “friendly” side of the mine, a distance of fifteen or twenty meters and then concealed himself in a position from which he could electrically detonate the claymore upon observing an approaching enemy. The machine-gun team concealed themselves similarly, usually on the hit man’s uphill flank. Upon detonation of the claymore, they engaged the enemy with machine-gun fire, fixing him (denying him the ability to maneuver) until the rest of the platoon moved forward to reinforce the killing position.
Our weapon of choice was the M18A1 claymore mine. Weighing 3.5 pounds, it contained 700 hardened steel balls of 10.5 grams each, embedded in a horizontally convex face, behind which was a 1.5-pound layer of composition C-4 plastic explosive. When detonated, this plastic explosive hurled the steel pellets outward in a 60-degree arc, usually killing everything therein up to a distance of 100 meters. In other words, it produced a killing zone roughly equivalent to the area encompassed by an entire football field.
Ambushing an enemy is a lot like fishing: 98 percent waiting and 2 percent executing. Moreover, for every successful ambush, there are many others where the enemy never shows up. On this occasion, however, the gods of war were with us. Forty-five minutes or so after setting up our ambushes, two North Vietnamese regulars walked unsuspectingly into the north killing zone.
Whoom! The claymore exploded.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! The M-60 opened up as the claymore’s detonation echoed through the mountain’s draws.
Lieutenant Norwalk and I had been carrying on a lazy, whispered, somewhat disjointed conversation about families, kids, careers, women, or some such when the mine’s explosion shattered the noonday silence.
Accompanied by our RTOs and one of the lieutenant’s rifle squads, we moved rapidly to the ambush site.
“Lookie here, lookie here… holy shit!”