He thought they might start stringing just outside the perimeter, but instead they began down in the Cunt. One morning the radio operator in the TOC told him that the air force was sending a plane to drop a 1,000-pound bomb to clear out the initial landing zone in the jungle. He went up to the tower and waited with the guard. Soon the plane appeared, flying so high it was just a speck in the blue sky. When it reached the mountain it made a turn and circled the Cunt.
Jackson watched through armored glasses the plane’s slow circle over the Cunt, hoping he would be able to see the bomb fall. But the explosion took him by surprise, the tower guard tapping him on the shoulder and pointing down into the Cunt where a cloud of red dust rose silently, the deep roar reaching them in a few seconds later. Using the LZ as a base, the engineers with chainsaws, TNT, bulldozers, Rome plows, and thousands of gallons of defoliant attacked the jungle, creating a red scar on the Cunt. Then they started stringing wire.
Hale placed platoons in permanent positions at the LZ, rotating fresh ones into it every week. The engineers were choppered back to Little Tit each night. But work on the fence went slowly, the NVA sappers blowing up at night what the engineers had built during the day.
When the platoons were back at the firebase the men lived with rats in underground bunkers. After dark the big gray animals had no fear of the men, and some who had developed a taste for tobacco ate cigarettes out of the pockets of sleeping men, leaving only the filters. In their spare time they held rat-killing contests, shooting the animals with pistols. Someone had the chopper pilots bring up a cat from Pleiku, but the rats, some which were almost as big as the cat, cornered it in the ammo bunker one night and killed it.
“Alabama, you get Light to bring you a tiger in from the bush, waste these fucking rats,” a soldier said to Jackson one day.
“I got a cat at home that’ll take care of those rats,” Jackson said. “Gook cats are just like the ARVNs, no fucking good.”
“Shit, Alabama, you’d need a pack of cats. Call Light up on that radio you sleep with and tell him to get us a tiger,” the soldier said.
“He’s using them like tracking dogs to hunt down the dinks. Can’t spare any,” Jackson replied.
The soldier and his friends laughed. Jackson liked the attention, but no one got too close. They were afraid of Light. Jackson had spent the night in the bunker with Light and lived.
“We know it’s gonna happen,” a soldier finally told him. “No sense one of us getting wasted when you get blown away.”
And Jackson realized he would have done the same had he been in their place.
Jackson had watched Desolation Row go up in one day. At dawn the air force hit the mountaintop with 250-pound bombs. Then the helicopters inserted a platoon which encountered light resistance from the NVA, who chose to pull back and drop mortars in on the mountaintop. Jackson had been a member of that first platoon and had watched most of his squad die, killed by mortars. Engineers followed with chainsaws, and cut down the trees. Once a secure LZ was formed, a bulldozer was brought in by sky crane to finish the job of clearing the trees and leveling the ground.
A chopper brought in a 20-foot prefabricated steel tower and dropped it at the center of the LZ. The engineers tied a rope to the tower and used it to mark the circumference of a circle with a 250-foot radius. The bulldozer finished the job of clearing brush and trees out of the way. Then helicopters came and dropped concertina wire which the men strung on metal stakes in a pyramid pattern, two rows on the bottom and one on top. After that the choppers dropped sections of perforated steel plate and cratering charges at 20-foot intervals around the circumference of the circle. The men used the charges to blow holes for bunkers and the plate to provide support for overhead cover made out of sandbags. Mortars were brought in, two 81-millimeter tubes for illumination and three 4.2-inch mortars for close fire support. Jackson worked hard on his bunker and spent a sleepless night with three other soldiers staring out into the jungle, waiting for the ground attack that never came.
In the morning Hale arrived with the 105 howitzers, each gun brought in as a single load by a chopper. The howitzers were formed into three double emplacements. Recoilless rifles were put in position. A communications center bunker was built which would be the TOC and a fire support coordination bunker was constructed. Radar emplacements were installed on the perimeter along with searchlights. Rocket-propelled grenade screens of chain-link fence were set in place over the bunkers.
Two more circles of concertina wire were added. The men placed claymore mines along with trip wires attached to flares and booby traps. From the wire they hung beer cans filled with pebbles. It did not seem possible to Jackson that a man could get through the wire, but he had been told stories of NVA sappers dressed only in loincloths who could effortlessly pick their way through the tangle.
Machine-gun emplacements were periodically shifted to prevent the enemy from gaining a fix on them. Every night the men planted claymore mines in new locations just behind the first circle of wire. And small patrols of four or five men and sometimes single men were placed on listening posts out in the bush.
Soon after Jackson arrived Hale had ordered the men to plant electronic listening devices outside the wire. These responded to vibrations by producing a beep on a set of headphones worn by an operator in the TOC. But this plan was abandoned when it was discovered that small animals, the wind, and the mortar firing produced vibrations which were picked up by the sensors.
One night the operator, an Indian from New Mexico named Alfred Ten Deer, had thrown the headphones down after hours of trying to distinguish beeps produced by enemy movement from the others and had declared he preferred going back out in the bush to spending another second on the headphones.
“Goddamn ping-ping inside my head,” Alfred had said, holding his hands over his ears after he had thrown the headphones against the wall of the bunker.
Within the circle of wire there were ammo dumps, stores of C-rations, and an aid station. All supplies were flown in by chopper. Mail came every day, and once a week a chaplain flew out to hold services for those men who were interested.
Sometimes the mess sergeant at Pleiku sent them hot food on the choppers in mermite cans during a lull in the fighting. In the insulated containers was the same old army food that he had grown used to eating in the States. Most of the time they ate C-rations. Once, Jackson ended up with five straight meals of ham and beans, food that tasted terrible, making it impossible to trade for fruit cocktail or spaghetti. Sometimes they got a case of dehydrated rations. Jackson liked the chicken and rice.
Every day was the same, clear and hot. They were given beer, but it was always hot. Jackson would have given a month’s pay for a cold beer. There was plenty of drinking water but not enough for showers. One day Hale had fifty-five-gallon drums of water flown in and a shower rigged up using a drum with holes punched in the bottom. Everyone got to lather up and rinse off. Later they built a permanent water tank, the water heated with a diesel fuel fire. For a few days they all took hot showers until the NVA took out the water tank with a lucky shot from a 122-millimeter rocket.
Jackson knew it could have been much worse for him. He could be an RTO for one of the lieutenants stationed in the Cunt. One lieutenant had already lost three radio men. But Jackson wished he was back at one of the big base camps in Pleiku or, better yet, Cam Ranh Bay where they had movies, swimming pools, ice cream, and passes into town.