CHAPTER 8
There exists no clear picture of Andre Lucas. Reserved by nature, he was different things to different people. “We had a good battalion and a good battalion commander,” said veteran platoon leader Steve Wallace. First Lieutenant Fred H. Edwards, the battalion engineering officer, described Lucas, a tall, slender, dark-complected man with dark eyes and black hair, as having “an unmistakable air of poise and authority about him. He had a very professional, quiet demeanor. I don’t think I ever heard him raise his voice. He was stern without being overbearing, and always seemed to be in total control. In short, a complete professional.”
Others found Lucas’s tactical judgment suspect and noted that he “led” his battalion from the uninspiring safety of his command ship. “We didn’t know who the hell the guy was,” said one grunt.
Andre Cavaro Lucas, son of a career officer, was born in Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D. C., on October 2, 1930. He spent his early years on military bases before his father retired as a colonel in Santa Monica, California, at the beginning of World War II. An aircraft manufacturer during the war, the elder Lucas moved his family to Le Pouligen, France, in 1946 to stay with his wife’s mother. The younger Lucas joined the army in 1948 and soon secured an appointment to West Point with the Class of ’54.
Lieutenant Lucas married his fiancée, a no-nonsense, upper-middle-class woman from New York City, on graduation day. Having earned his jump wings and ranger tab, he served a 1955–58 tour in Germany, including a stint with the 10th Special Forces Group. Lucas was subsequently assigned as an instructor at the ranger school in the snake-infested swamps near Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, in 1958–59, then spent two years with the U. S. Army Infantry Training School at Fort Benning in 1959–61, and a year with the Tactics Department at the U. S. Military Academy in 1961–62.
Captain Lucas went to Vietnam from West Point, a plum assignment in 1962. Advisor to an ARVN ranger battalion, he didn’t need an interpreter, able as he was to converse fluently with his counterparts in French. Lucas’s combat tour netted him the Silver Star and Bronze Star Medal for Valor. He next served as a company commander and staff officer with the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1963–64. On the fast track, Major Lucas attended Command & General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1964–65 and the L’Ecole D’Etat Majeur in Paris in 1966. Duty with European Command Headquarters and promotion to light colonel were followed by service as a brigade executive officer, battalion commander, and division operations officer with the 24th Division in 1967–69, first in Germany, then at Fort Riley, Kansas, when the division relocated to the United States.
Bidding farewell to his wife and two boys, Lieutenant Colonel Lucas began his second combat tour in November 1969, cooling his heels initially as a brigade exec before getting the 2d Battalion, 506th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division on March 4, 1970. “Lucas, Koenigsbauer, and Davis were obviously in sync with each other, and were a great team to lead any battalion,” wrote Chuck Hawkins, who thought Lucas brisk and to the point. “He wasn’t into lengthy discussions. You said what you had to say, and then you went about your business. If you made a mistake, Lucas would chew you out and that would be that. He didn’t hold anything against you afterward—but you’d better not make the same error again.”
Lucas found it necessary to relieve a number of officers in the battalion of their duties. He believed that to make such cold-eyed decisions, a leader must remain aloof from his subordinates. It was a command philosophy that fit Lucas’s personality, which his admirers describe as dignified and cheerful, though formal, his detractors as bland and uncharismatic. “Lucas was close with only two people—me and Sid Davis,” noted Koenigsbauer. Lucas might share a beer with his XO and S3 when back at Camp Evans, but never with a captain or a lieutenant. He never asked his subordinates about their families, never discussed his own personal life. “Lucas was a little more detached than most battalion commanders,” said Koenigsbauer. “He was nevertheless on excellent terms with his company commanders, clicking especially well with Williams, Rollison, Hawkins, and Vazquez. Lucas made a major effort to nurture those relationships. He would listen, and he never discouraged discussion during the planning of an operation, but once a decision was made he expected professional execution and loyalty. Much has been written about why units fight. It is my opinion that the company commanders in the 2d of the 506th fought hard for Lieutenant Colonel Lucas.”
The ace of spades being the informal symbol of the battalion, Lucas drew one on the side of his helmet and went by the call sign Black Spade. “Lucas liked being in command. I think he enjoyed danger,” observed Hawkins. Fond of quoting from his readings, the colonel once pronounced to his officers: “In our chosen profession, death is our handmaiden.” For all that, Lucas’s CAR15 submachine gun, the preferred weapon of battalion commanders, went unused and was actually rusty. “I wondered what sort of an example that was to set for soldiers,” wrote Hawkins. “Lucas never humped the boonies with me or my men. There was no reason for him to do so, and I think he enjoyed the freedom of his command ship more—or being able to quickly go where he wanted to. He seemed to be on the go a lot, but when your battalion is as far flung as ours was, you have a lot of places to check.”
Like the grunts who saw the battalion commander only in the rear or on the firebase, Capt. Jeffrey D. Wilcox was unimpressed with Lucas. Promoted to command of the battalion support company after duty as a rifle platoon leader, Wilcox, a West Pointer, took the opportunity to discuss tactics with Lucas. Wilcox expressed his concern that it might be wiser, given the withdrawals, to rely almost exclusively on firepower to avoid casualties instead of finding, fixing, and fighting the NVA. With an air of bravado that Wilcox found disturbing, Lucas tried to reorient the captain’s thinking by telling him that losing people was “all in the game.”
Black Spade had a point. The discussion nevertheless left Wilcox with the impression that the superaggressive Lucas saw the war as some kind of live-fire exercise, his chance to look good and move up the ladder. There is a little of that in most career officers. The issue was complicated in Lucas’s case, argued the colonel’s detractors, because he did not always make good tactical decisions, such was the disconnect between the war as it was on the ground and the war as it appeared from Black Spade’s C&C. The withdrawals also put a twist on the issue. While demonstrating their ability to destroy the enemy, unit leaders also had to avoid taking the kind of losses that would embarrass MACV. It was a real dilemma. There was, in fact, a desperate quality to the whole career game at that stage in the war. Whereas many so-called professionals who’d already gotten their tickets punched tried to avoid further combat duty lest something happen to wreck their careers, those such as Lucas who needed a combat command to survive professionally scrambled to impress their superiors and gather what laurels were still to be had before the war wound down completely.
The result was that Hawkins could write that “Lucas had courage, nerve, and was strong minded,” while also being of the opinion that he was “a bit of a ‘yes-man.’ I think I used the word ‘kowtow’ in a letter home to describe his attitude towards ‘senior brass.’ ”
“Lucas wanted to make general,” said Capt. Fredrick L. Spaulding of the brigade staff, “and his attitude was always, ‘Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir.’ It was kind of sickening sometimes.”
Lucas was unique only in the transparency of his careerism. Spaulding, an up-from-the-ranks mustang on his third tour, saw few career officers stand up and be counted when they disagreed with the party line: “I thought, this must be the New Army. It wasn’t the way I was taught by the World War II and Korean vets who were my officers and NCOs when I first joined the Army. The attitude of the officer corps in Vietnam was, ‘What’s in it for me?’”
The competition was fierce. It wasn’t enough for an ambitious officer to finish his six months with a good efficiency report. It had to be “immaculate,” noted Turner, the brigade ops officer, “to get that next promotion and that next command.” Lucas was considered one of the division’s stars, but his need to rise even higher above the rest resulted in another incident in which he crossed swords with Wilcox. Division was concerned that the rear was soaking up too many people, “so at a particular time one night each week,” recalled Wilcox, “every battalion had to send up a report declaring how many personnel it had on its firebase and out in the field.” The report was called the Foxhole Count. According to Wilcox, “Lucas’s policy was to load a Chinook on the reporting day with as many cooks, armorers, clerks, drivers, et cetera, as could be rounded up and fly them to Ripcord, where they would spend the night in a bunker before being returned to Camp Evans.” Wilcox thought it a dangerous ploy, given the vulnerability of Chinooks to ground fire, and questioned Lucas “about why we simply didn’t either tell the truth or give a false report without actually moving people around and putting them in jeopardy. Lucas brushed me off, saying that this was yet another dimension of ‘playing the game.’ ”
Major Koenigsbauer saw nothing of the self-serving careerist in Lucas; he admired him unreservedly as an “intense, focused, businesslike officer—very decisive.” Donning headsets, Lucas would ride on the right side of his command ship, with his S3 and artillery liaison officer (arty LNO) on the left, each of them wearing a flak jacket and sitting on another in case of ground fire. “Location was critical,” noted Koenigsbauer; the command-ship pilots knew the terrain, “but it was not convenient to be on the intercom with them, and Colonel Lucas wasn’t the type to constantly ask where he was, so he had a large plywood map-board made with a compass mounted to one side. That map always kept him oriented.”
Captain Williams recalled that “when you were on a combat assault, Major Koenigsbauer was there on the radio, talking you in. You trusted him, it was just there in his voice, and you knew if you ran into trouble, Lucas would back you up one hundred percent.
“Lucas was always correct in his manner,” Williams continued, “but he never talked down to you. He had a good sense of humor and did not make things unnecessarily tense like I’ve seen some commanders do. We were all very close. There wasn’t any animosity or intense competition between the company commanders. We weren’t just a numbered battalion, we were a team, and I was always impressed by how everyone from the top down would work together to accomplish the mission.”
Leadership throughout the division was superior. General Wright, survivor of three years in Japanese prison camps after the fall of the Philippines, and a veteran of the Korean War, was on his second Vietnam tour, as were most of his battalion commanders, brigade commanders, and key staff officers. Though the 101st was airborne in name only as of 1968, the army hierarchy was determined to keep it in top form. Colonel Hugh A. MacDonald, a veteran paratrooper, served as division chief of staff for an unprecedented three years, 1969–71, providing a strong sense of continuity. In addition, at the end of Wright’s year in command, May 25, 1970, he passed the colors not to a newcomer but to Hennessey, a fellow West Pointer promoted in-country to major general. Virtually every officer from captain up, and many of the lieutenants, too, wore jump wings, as did the majority of the senior NCOs. One of the top sergeants in Koenigsbauer’s operations shop had parachuted into Normandy with the 101st. Such men were members of a legendary airborne elite. Like the 1st Cav, the Screaming Eagles had a reputation such that hard-charging officers, be they new lieutenants or seasoned professionals coming back for more, fought to be assigned to it rather than end up in a halfsteppin’ outfit such as the 4th or 25th or, worse, the disaster-prone Americal Division.
The division was nevertheless not all it had once been. The war had gone on too long, and second-string players were arriving on the scene. Brigadier General Sidney B. Berry, USMA ’48, a two-war, three-tour man who served as assistant division commander for operations (ADC-O), 101st Airborne Division, during the Ripcord siege, wrote a letter to his wife decrying “the surprisingly low quality of the colonels who write to seek brigade command.” One such colonel was a West Pointer with “no CIB; no previous tour of duty in Vietnam; 25 years service and no combat. He must have worked hard to avoid combat. Now he wants to command a brigade of Screaming Eagle soldiers. Like hell he will.”
The change in the division’s character was most apparent at the platoon level, as described by Lieutenant Noll of A/2-506th:
The senior leadership was definitely hardcore airborne, but 99 percent of the lieutenants and troops in the field were draftees, myself included. We weren’t paratroopers. We weren’t professional soldiers. The troops were no different than those assigned to any other unit. They had gone through Basic and AIT, then were shipped over to Vietnam. A lot of them had a ninth- or tenth-grade education at best, and their training, rudimentary as it was, didn’t really sink in. Platoon leaders had the problem of trying to teach these kids in the middle of combat operations how to patrol, how to set up an ambush, hell, which way to point the goddamn claymore. . . .
The division’s line units nevertheless displayed a level of competence not often seen in other draftee outfits of the era. There was more to it than good leadership. Given its institutional mind-set, the 101st Airborne was the only division still aggressively taking the fight to the enemy during the withdrawals. The war in the jungle-covered mountains west of Hue was a “pure one, as wars go,” noted Chip Collins—no civilians, few booby traps, “just us, the elements, and the NVA”— and the troops had to be professional if they wanted to survive out there. “The mountains scared people,” explained Lt. Stephen Wallace. “In the mountains, you stayed one step ahead of the enemy or they would clean your clock.”
First Lieutenant John H. Smith, a gung-ho, career-minded platoon leader in D/1-506th, found that his men had little enthusiasm for the war or the 101st. “They often referred to the unit patch as the Pukin’ Buzzard,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, when we assembled on the helipad at Camp Evans to be CA’d into the jungle for another operation, you could see a determined look in everyone’s eyes—not because we were great, motivated soldiers, but because we knew it was us against them once we landed.”
Lieutenant Kwiecien commented along the same lines:
The people weren’t the hoods from the movie Platoon or the psychos from Full Metal Jacket. They were just a bunch of very ordinary young men who realized that the best way to stay alive was by being good at your job. There were very few gung-ho types, just a general determination that if we had to be out in the woods we were going to be good at it.
After being assigned to the rear, I had a chance to talk with the E6 who’d taken over my platoon. He was a shake ’n bake and had heard the horror stories about the troops in Nam not caring anymore, smoking dope, et cetera. He said that the level of professionalism in the platoon blew his mind; they had good noise and light discipline, knew how to cross an open area, knew how to set up at night, automatically assumed defensive positions during breaks, et cetera, et cetera. I was proud as punch.
The soldiers were so good that Kwiecien came to appreciate how young they were only when he encountered two E6 platoon sergeants he knew in the company orderly room after Ripcord. In the field, “these guys were all business, very tough, serious, and professional,” but in the rear, “the pressure was off, and I was amazed to see that they were really just a couple of kids, kind of giggly and silly kids at that, like you might see at a college frat party.”
Such youthful sergeants were not unique. Given that many regulars coming back for a second or third tour pulled strings to avoid further combat—“the rear areas were full of E7s and First Sergeants running PX S, supply rooms, etc.,” wrote one disgusted lieutenant—most of the noncoms in the field were Noncommissioned Officer Candidate School grads out of Fort Benning. Despite their inexperience, “a remarkable number of these so-called shake ’n bakes performed quite effectively,” wrote General Berry. “We would have been in terrible shape without them, and many were actually better than the Regular Army NCOs they replaced.”
The shake ’n bakes did their best to fill the gap, though many felt that they were in over their heads. “I always thought that I would have been one hell of a fine squad leader,” mused Sergeant Rubsam of B/2-506th, “but I never served in that position.” Instead, Rubsam, a married man drafted out of college, ended up with a platoon. “I guess I was the platoon leader. Actually, it was more leadership by committee. There were three or four of us who talked everything over and planned things out. I remember staying up every night with my group, waiting our turn to call in defensive targets. It got everybody used to handling mortars and artillery. That kind of on-the-job training was a real boon for me. Luckily, too, we didn’t see much action my first two months, which allowed me to get my feet on the ground and get to know my people before Ripcord broke.”
Contact was infrequent for Lucas’s entire battalion after Ripcord had been established, and there developed a scripted pattern to its operations. “The enemy could read us like a book,” lamented Koenigsbauer. One company was always committed to firebase security. The rest would be out in the hills. Division had tasked the Currahees with constructing three landing zones per day, so while two platoons from each of the three companies in the bush ran RIFs, the third blew down enough trees to clear another one-ship LZ. “When the explosions went off, you’d hear monkeys whooping and hollering off in the distance,” noted a platoon leader. Meanwhile, those platoons on patrol basically trekked along ridgelines from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. At that point, each would grab a piece of high ground and begin digging in, hacking down fields of fire, and rigging claymores and trip flares. “It was a real project,” recalled Sergeant Judd, a shake ’n bake squad leader in Company B. “That was half our day’s work. Humping was one part, and setting up for the night was the other.”
There were moments of great beauty in the mountains. First Lieutenant Lee E. Widjeskog of Company A recalled that when his platoon crossed the Rao Trang River, wading across with the assistance of a rope, “the water was fast flowing, with rapids, and looked [to] all the world like a trout stream in the Rocky Mountains.” On another occasion, the platoon happened upon a fifteen-foot waterfall cascading into a clear pool of water. Unseen birds called to one another high in the enveloping canopy. “We used the area to clean up and eat lunch before continuing on,” wrote Widjeskog. “It was a peaceful and lovely respite from the war.”
Mostly, though, the mountains were a bitch. It was rough country, and the grunts, humping rucksacks that weighed up to a hundred pounds when full—units were resupplied every three days—were reduced to rubber-legged exhaustion as they chopped their way through vines and thorn bushes and dense thickets of bamboo. Hands were covered with cuts. Headaches buzzed under steel helmets. Shoulders and necks ached from the rucksack straps and ammo bandoliers cutting into them. Patrols were tormented by mosquitoes, plagued by leeches. “Whenever we stopped for breaks, guys would check all exposed skin to see if a leech had hooked on for a meal,” noted Widjeskog. If a leech went unnoticed, it would drop off when it had its fill, leaving a bleeding sore, “and it was not unusual,” Widjeskog added, “to wake up in the morning with dried blood on your face and hands where leeches had feasted during the night. Between the leeches and various scratches, it was no wonder guys caught bacterial infections like jungle rot and cellulitus.”
It was a brutal existence, but the troops tended to make the best of it. There was much comradeship among the grunts, and always an undercurrent of humor. What the troops did not have was an aggressive fighting spirit. It was too late for that. “Grunt logic argues that since the U. S. has decided not to go out and win the war, there’s no sense in being the last one to die,” wrote John Saar of Life. The 1st Cav and Screaming Eagles might have been the two best outfits still in-country, but neither was what their flaky brethren had been before the withdrawals when the leadership slots had been filled with pros and the troops had thought they were fighting to win. Saar interviewed a tough young cav sergeant who’d seen heavy combat in 1967–68 before coming back for a second tour in 1970. “We make a lot less contact now, and guys are a lot more afraid,” the sergeant said. No one wanted to die for nothing. Bunker complexes were found but not reported. Night ambushes were faked, sometimes with the collusion of sympathetic platoon leaders. There was also a lot of “reconning by fire”—shooting up suspicious areas with M60s, M79s, and 81s before moving in, the better to chase away the enemy without a fight. The mood of the troops was, fuck it, the war’s been going on for twenty-five years. We ain’t gonna win it today, so don’t go lookin’ for trouble.
It was a difficult time to be a commander. Consider the case of Lt. Col. Charles J. Shay, CO of the 2-502d Infantry (the O-Deuce) in the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division. Shay was the model for the “ass-kicking” battalion commander in John Del Vecchio’sThe 13th Valley, and General Berry described Shay in a letter home as a “strong, direct, aggressive, sometimes blunt and untactful soldier” and “the best battalion commander in the division.”
Chuck Shay was a New York Irishman. He was sixteen in 1945 when he lied about his age to join the Marines in an unsuccessful attempt to get into World War II. He joined the army the day after the Korean War began, and after OCS commanded a company in the 2d Division 1952–53. He was wounded by mortar shrapnel and finally evacuated with gunshot wounds to both legs. Shay was an ARVN advisor in 1960 and 1964–65, and after three months of staff duty with the 101st he commanded the O-Deuce from May to December 1970.
Shay was short, squat, and profane—“a fire-eater,” noted Fred Spaulding, “who carried a damn shillelagh around with him, banging it on things.” Correspondent Arthur Hadley found Shay—call sign Shamrock—a popular commander admired by officers and grunts. But for all that, taking care of problems that should have taken care of themselves, and trying to motivate troops who knew they were fighting to no useful end, had left the colonel “wasted, drained, almost somnambulant” by the end of his tour. “It’s different now,” Shay told Hadley one night on the battalion firebase. “When you praise a man for being a good soldier, he looks at the ground and shuffles his feet. It’s not much fun anymore.”
However low morale had slipped in the field, it was infinitely worse in the rear. “Camp Evans was sliding towards anarchy by the summer of 1970,” noted Lt. Blair Case, an artillery forward observer with the 1-506th Infantry. “The mood was ominous, almost hostile, and the rear-echelon types seemed to go out of their way to demonstrate a lack of military courtesy. At night, marijuana smoke would drift through the hootch areas like a heavy fog. Racial tension was near flash point. There were a lot of Black Power salutes and all-black hootches where whites were not welcome. Other hootches displayed Confederate battle flags.”
Discipline had been eroding ever since Tet, as the troops, increasingly draftees and part of a generation in revolt, brought to Vietnam as never before the very problems tearing the country apart. There was, for starters, the drug mess. Marijuana began to outclass alcohol as the drug of choice in 1968–69. Most platoon leaders, unwilling to ship half their guys to the LBJ Ranch, as the troops sardonically referred to Long Binh Jail, drew the line when it came to pot in the bush but turned a blind eye during stand-downs.
The grunts tended to police themselves in combat, though some refused to play by the rules. The problem became noticeable in Captain Hawkins’s company, for example, during the 2-506th’s deployment to the Firebase Rakkasan AO after Ripcord. There being a distinct lull in enemy activity as the rainy season began, some grunts saw no reason not to get smoked up in the bush; one GI from Company A was out on OP when he fired up a joint instead of staying alert, and for that he died, shot in the chest at point-blank range by the point man of a passing enemy patrol who swung up his AK-47 before the kid even thought to reach for his M16.
Such lapses were rare in the bush. It was usually on firebases that things got loose. One night on Rakkasan, Chip Collins of B/2-506th found “five consecutive bunkers with guards asleep or zonked out [on drugs].” First Lieutenant John R. Fox, a three-tour helicopter pilot with the 101st in 1970–71, reported that “when the sun began to set, the smell of marijuana would drift across the firebases.” It was disquieting in the extreme “to wonder if the man watching the wire was as high as a kite.” Unsure how much discipline they could enforce without starting a mutiny, most battery commanders just prayed that the sappers didn’t attack during their six months in the field. “They were getting their tickets punched,” said Fox. “They needed the command time for their careers, but they wanted to get it over with without making waves. There was no long-term accountability in Vietnam.”
That was one perspective. Another could be found in the case of Capt. Charles R. Brooks, USMA ’68, who commanded B/2-320th Field Artillery with the kind of informal, people-oriented approach that got results out of the new-style draftees. Brooks was aided immeasurably by First Sergeant O’Neill, who “looked like a Cro-Magnon man,” noted Pfc. Frank J. Parko, but who “was actually a pretty cool dude. He was a lifer and a taskmaster, but he’d sit down and shoot the shit with you—and he’d walk through incoming mortar fire, yelling orders, keeping things organized.” Brooks and O’Neill couldn’t make the drugs disappear, but they did get across the message that “there was a time to do it and a time not to do it,” as Parko put it. “Our battery was pretty tight. You had the rednecks who liked their beer, and the dopers who would quietly go off and do their thing, but nobody bothered anybody, and when the shit hit the fan, everybody was there. Everybody helped each other out.”
Not so in the rear, as Parko discovered when wounded on FSB Kathryn in May 1970. There had been a brief mortar attack earlier that day during a football game on the log pad. The fire came from a nearby knoll. Later, at dusk, as Battery B was finishing a hot meal delivered in mermite cans, “that whole hill lit up with mortar flashes,” recalled Parko. “The first attack had been a registration mission.” Amid the counterbattery fire, Parko, jumping into a perimeter foxhole, put up flares and popped away with his M16 until a near miss gave him a fierce concussion and peppered his arm with shrapnel. Parko was evacuated to Camp Eagle, where “everyone was uptight because of all the spit-and-polish lifer shit.” Benumbed by the monotony of their duties, and wired on pot, speed, and way too much booze, the support troops—known to the line troops as REMFs, as in rear-echelon motherfuckers—were literally at war with one another, lifers against draftees, blacks against whites, drinkers against the dopers. “It was nuts,” said Parko. “I mean, we were watching some Civil War movie, and a fight broke out between guys from the North and the guys from the South.”
Some officers were real hawks when it came to busting people for drugs, especially, and most justifiably, when checking the bunker line at forward base camps such as Evans. Many, however, prudently ignored the groups that gathered at night to pass the weed. “The officers and NCOs didn’t mess with the pot heads,” said a squad leader in the 2-506th Infantry. “They wanted to go home alive.”
The threat of fragging was always in the air, especially because the line companies dumped their duds and troublemakers in the rear. “Misfits were plentiful by 1970,” wrote Lieutenant Smith of the 1-506th Infantry. Reassigned to Camp Evans after serving his time as a platoon leader, Smith eventually requested a job on the battalion firebase, because “I preferred to take my chances with the NVA.”
There was another reason that the drug crackdown was not wholeheartedly enforced. The Regular Army runs on caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, as the saying goes, and many junior officers weren’t convinced that the marijuana preferred by the young draftees was such an unacceptable alternative. “It was hard to get too ugly about marijuana,” mused one gunship pilot, a West Pointer, “while we were polishing off bottles of Jack Daniel’s in the Officers Club.”
Another West Pointer, a career officer who commanded a mechanized infantry company from the 9th Division during the 1970 Cambodian incursion, told the author off the record that “if the guys were going to do anything when we came in on standdown, marijuana was preferable to alcohol. Marijuana mellowed guys out, while drinking led to violent brawls. It was a real dilemma for the leadership that what was legal was worse than what was illegal.”
Marijuana was one thing, but heroin, better known as smack, came on the scene big in Vietnam that summer, making it to Camp Evans around August or September 1970. “Guys were buying heroin right outside the front gate that was ninetyfive percent pure,” recalled Capt. James D. Harris, M. D., battalion surgeon for the 2-506th Infantry. Mainlining was not required with such high-grade heroin. It could be snorted or, more typically, smoked in a menthol cigarette. “They’d snort that stuff,” Harris said, “and they wouldn’t even be able to stand up. We had troops who were addicted, and we had some overdose deaths on base. It was a horrible situation.”
Sergeant Lin L. Bashford, company clerk for D/2-506th:
The dopers in the company rear knew I didn’t tolerate drugs, so they hid it from me. Once, though, I walked into the barracks when I was putting together duty schedules, and I caught them snorting smack. I threatened to turn them in, and they got right in my face: “Go ahead and report us— you’ll never make it back home if you do.” It wasn’t an idle threat, and I said, “Just get rid of the shit, I don’t want it around.”
The worst encounter I had was with the company’s Kit Carson Scout. He was well respected, but after Ripcord he was so scared you couldn’t hardly trap him into getting on a helicopter—and then I caught him bringing heroin in to sell at Evans. He was on his little Vespa motor-scooter, and I don’t remember if he was showing the package to somebody, or what the deal was, but he had a white brick of the stuff under the seat—it wasn’t broken down yet—and I took him into the orderly room and called the MPs. They took the evidence and hauled his ass off. On his way out, in cuffs, he told me in that Vietnamese lingo, “I kill you, sonofabitch, I kill you.” He was ousted from the Kit Carson program, but I didn’t sleep very well for a long time because the Scout was an ex-sapper who could have gotten through the wire any time he wanted.
Drugs and live ammunition did not mix. Del Vecchio wrote in The 13th Valley of “Demented Fuckers” who settled scores by “plantin[’] frags.” Chip Collins bitterly noted that “you never knew when you were in the rear when some asshole was going to get drunk or drugged up and start rippin’ off with his ’16.”
Collins saw his first dead American before he’d even cleared the replacement center at Cam Ranh Bay on his way to the 101st: “A guy was shot in the back of the head with a .45 while watching an outdoor movie. It had been dark, hot, and crowded. No immediate suspects. Drug deal gone bad? Race related? Jealousy? What?”
Like drugs, race relations were a problem that got worse the further removed a unit was from combat. “We never had racial problems in the field,” wrote Lieutenant Case, FO of A/1-506th. “Once the helicopters landed, nothing mattered except survival and everyone eagerly did their part.” As a sign of the times, one platoon did have an all-black squad. The company commander, Capt. Harold Echols, a black officer known as Spartan because he’d gone to Michigan State on a football scholarship, frowned on that kind of separatism. The white GIs, however, noted Case, “didn’t take it as a sign of racial animosity. They thought the blacks wanted an all-black squad simply to demonstrate solidarity.” Case continued:
As soldiers got short, it was customary to find them a job in the rear. One night in the field, my radioman brought two black soldiers to me. They complained that the first sergeant, an Hispanic, would accept only white soldiers for jobs in the rear, and that black soldiers had to stay in the field right up to their DEROS [date eligible for return from overseas].
The first sergeant, they said, claimed he picked soldiers who could best handle the clerical work back at base camp, and it was not his fault that the best-qualified usually turned out to be white. They felt anyone, no matter what their level of education, could handle most of the base camp jobs, and they wanted me to intercede with Spartan. It might seem strange that they would come to me since I’m white and Spartan was black, but infantrymen seem to treat FOs as someone outside the chain of command who can act as an intermediary.
I talked to Spartan, and he called all the black soldiers in the platoon together. They sat talking in the dark for a long time. Spartan repeated the process each time the CP rotated to another platoon on resupply days when helicopters were available. I don’t know what was said in the black caucuses, but I do know that afterward soldiers rotated to the rear based solely on the number of days they had left in-country.
A serious racial incident erupted when Company A returned to Camp Evans on June 4, 1970, prior to the 1-506th’s deployment to the Ripcord AO. When six blacks took over an entire tent for themselves, a white GI shouted a racial insult at them from the company street. The tent’s occupants promptly punched out the GI. As reported by David Warsh of Newsweek:
[T]he next hour saw rumors fly and tension mount until a second scuffle sent at least two hotheads—one black, one white—rushing for their weapons. For a time, black and white troopers faced each other across rows of barracks in a confrontation that threatened to flare into a racial fire fight.
In the end, no firing occurred, but before peace was restored, some whites told the blacks that the next day’s training session in ambush techniques would turn into the real thing—with black troops as the sitting ducks. The next morning, as the company began its trek to the nearby gullies [outside Camp Evans] where the ambush practice was to take place, fifteen black enlisted men flatly refused to go. “We were threatened,” [a black GI] told me. “We asked the officers to get the people who threatened us. They didn’t.”
Captain Echols convinced six of the GIs to rejoin the company; the other nine would not budge. By making their stand when they did, the nine were left safely behind when the 1-506th assaulted into the Ripcord AO. As Warsh wrote, the battalion commander, tempted to charge them with mutiny, instead filed charges for “simple failure to obey an order, a much milder rap.” Then, to make a point, he had the “Evans Nine” shipped to the LBJ:
After five days at Long Binh, the defendants were returned to their base for a court-martial. All of the men pleaded guilty, but only three—those with records of previous offenses—received jail terms . . . The other six defendants received suspended sentences and fines and were reduced in rank.
Last week, as the Evans Nine waited for their sentences to be reviewed, tension ran high at Camp Evans. To the distress of whites from other units . . . their black comrades performed elaborate, black-power handshakes [the Dap] in the mess halls before sitting down to eat. “[Dappin’], that’s just another way the brothers have of showing unity, of coming together,” one black told me. Meanwhile, except for the Evans Nine, the troopers of Alfa Company, black and white, were back in the field, laying ambushes for the North Vietnamese in the tortured mountains near [the] A Shau [Valley].
There were troops “rumored to be Black Panthers,” noted Case, “who acted as agents provocateurs, trying to persuade black GIs to refuse to return to the field.” The Black Power movement had indeed come to Vietnam, and Chaplain Fox recalled that when the 2-506th received an influx of in-country transfers after Ripcord from units being pulled out of the country, they included “a group of black militants who immediately set about intimidating the black guys in our unit not to associate with the white guys. They really made it tough on the black guys who weren’t with their program.”
The results of such agitation were spectacular. Like many others, Sergeant Rubsam of B/2-506th was shocked by the number of black replacements who angled for medical profiles that would keep them in the rear, or simply refused to function and ended up being reassigned as cook’s assistants in the battalion mess hall. “If nothing else,” added Rubsam, “they would just buy some marijuana, turn themselves in to the first sergeant, and say they wanted a dishonorable discharge. They wanted out of the Army. As they told us, they had a war to fight when they got home.”
The magnitude of the problem is revealed in a letter that Sergeant Bashford wrote home in September 1970 in which he bitterly noted that of the twenty black GIs assigned to D/2-506th, twelve were on profile or awaiting court-martial for refusing to go to the field. “In a situation where a lot of guys were looking for a way out of the bush,” concluded Lieutenant Case, “it made you admire the black soldiers who resisted the temptation and went back to the fighting. They had an out but didn’t take it.”
If camaraderie still knew no color in combat, there was mostly fear and hatred between the races in the rear. “Most of the blacks hung together, and most of the whites felt intimidated to some degree,” wrote Lieutenant Smith. They had reason to be. The Black Power movement was, at its core, thuggish, and gangs of black REMFs would “try to start fights with us whenever we came in on standdown,” said Frank Marshall, a laid-back white M79 grenadier in A/2-506th. “I still don’t understand it.” The gangs would also jump the line at the mess hall; on one rare occasion, the Currahee recon platoon blocked the door en masse. Collins remarked that “that kind of everyday tension in the rear was nerve-wracking.” He thought the command structure was intimidated by the militants: “The officers and NCOs had a see-no-evil-hear-no-evil attitude, and would only react to the most significant incidents for fear of stirring up more trouble.”
As bad as things got sometimes, the 101st “shined in comparison to other units,” said Capt. Michael S. Lancaster, USMA ’67, a Cobra pilot with D/158th Aviation during Ripcord and Operation Lam Son 719, the push into Laos in early 1971. “We teamed up with the 5th Mech and the Americal Division during Lam Son 719, and they just didn’t have the same set of rules we did. It was spooky how bad they were. It was like something out of Apocalypse Now.”
Lieutenant Fox recalled that when the 101st displaced the 5th Mech at Quang Tri during Lam Son 719, “there were people who had not moved out with their units. They were still there, wandering around, doing drugs, just hanging out. No one was in charge of them, and nobody came to get them. They had total disrespect for anyone in authority.” In fact, two majors from a 5th Mech armor battalion had recently been shot in the head, one fatally, by a pistol-toting REMF when they tried to shut down a disruptive all-night party in an all-black hootch. “Our sergeant major had to go into some of the hootches with a baseball bat to clear the stragglers out so we could move in and get set up for the operation,” said Fox. “I was in a hootch by myself one evening, and this young black soldier walked in and wanted to know where ‘Buddy’ was. I told him that Buddy wasn’t there. He got belligerent—he wanted to know where Buddy was. He had an M16 slung over his shoulder and a six pack of beer in one hand. He was obviously high, and I finally drew my .38 and advised this individual that he had better leave. I kept that pistol loaded and ready beside my cot at all times when we were at Quang Tri.”
Thus did the American military straggle out of Vietnam. In distinct contrast, the North Vietnamese Army was a professional force from beginning to end. “I respect every man I killed over there,” one Currahee platoon leader would reflect. Draftee grunts at that stage of the war tended to admire more than hate their foe. The NVA were in for the duration. They were seasoned soldiers, and they were willing to die for their cause. “I have nothing against that little man out there,” a black trooper told John Saar. “They’re fighting for what they believe in, and you can’t knock that. I lie on my air mattress at night and I say, what am I doing here?”
Despite horrific losses, the enemy kept coming. “They fought hard and they won, that’s all there is to it,” said Captain Michaud of the 2-319th FA, who was particularly impressed with the sappers his cannoneers killed on Firebase Granite. “They penetrated the wire and came on in knowing there was no way back out. You’ve got to respect someone who has that kind of bravery and determination.”
The communists were willing to live a primitive existence in the jungle. They made it their home. Second Lieutenant Sheldon C. “Barney” Wintermute, USMA ’69, FO, D/1-506th, recalled “pushing through some incredibly thick triple-canopy, and thinking to myself, God, we must be the first human beings that have ever been here—and then all of a sudden there were these beautifully cut steps going up the side of the mountain.”
The enemy had spent years preparing their positions, and some were truly impressive. “We found a large hospital complex built into a natural stone formation,” said Sergeant Rubsam of B/2-506th. “It had running water piped through bamboo to the different rooms. It was solid rock, so we backed off as I recall and destroyed the place with long-range fire from a battleship or cruiser in the South China Sea.”
The jungle hid the enemy, nullified the allies’ firepower. No matter how many bombs were dropped, noted Chuck Hawkins, the jungle “just sucked them up like so few drops of water into a dry sponge. There was an eerie, mystical quality to those jungle-covered mountains. To watch the sun rise and begin burning off the fog, each mountain peak an island, is absolutely breathtaking . . . and frightening. I still get cold chills when I think about the terrain and what we and the enemy did there. . . .”
Captain Lancaster, the gunship pilot, recalled that “when you flew down those twisting, turning valleys leading to the A Shau, the air sort of turned green and you had this feeling that we don’t belong here, this is not our turf.” Lancaster was leading a two-ship recon down a river when “we flew over a bunch of people who were in the water swimming. They were not civilians. There were no civilians out there.” There was, however, the occasional U. S. Special Forces team with Cambodian and Chinese Nung mercenaries, “so we swung around to see what the hell we had,” Lancaster recounted. “Those guys were scrambling out of the water by then, and as we came back by, we saw little gardens and cornfields and marijuana patches. The NVA used to grow that shit. I said, ‘Out, now.’ We marked it on the map, reported it—and left.”
Both sides were preparing for the battle to come. When Lucas and the division artillery (div arty) commander flew out to recon Firebase Bradley, a position at the north end of the A Shau Valley that was to be reopened to support Operation Chicago Peak, artillery rounds began hitting the mountaintop. The div arty colonel, concerned that the premature prep fires would tip off the NVA, ordered a cease-fire. It developed, however, that the fire was actually coming from camouflaged 152mm howitzer positions in nearby Laos. “The NVA knew we were coming,” noted Hawkins, “and were pre-registering their heavy weapons.” It was a chilling development. 1
As Lucas established a foothold to the north, Lt. Col. Roy J. Young’s 2-502d Infantry, from Col. John D. White’s 1st Brigade, reopened FSB Veghel in the mountains east of the A Shau Valley. Young was soon engaged in a four-day battle to take Hill 714. The NVA had bunkers on top of the mountain and more on the three knolls leading to it. “Each time we forced them off one complex, they simply fell back to the next one, set up, and waited for us,” said a frustrated company commander. In the end, for all the fire support called in, it came down to grenades. “[W]e were killing NVA still in their bunkers,” a sergeant told a division combat correspondent. “They had everything their way and we beat ’em.”
Next came a three-day battle to take nearby Hill 882. Chuck Shay assumed command two days later, on May 6, when Young replaced Dyke as G3. Defeated in open battle, the enemy stung the O-Deuce in ambushes and night attacks before the battalion was pulled out on May 24. By then, it had accounted for two hundred NVA but had itself lost approximately thirty KIA and two hundred WIA.
The O-Deuce was replaced by the 1-327th Infantry, which found itself shadowed by unseen enemies as it pushed on from Hill 882. A Huey pilot asked the element it was extracting after dark to mark its position with a strobe light. Four strobes went on at various points. The extraction was canceled. Another night, an English-speaking NVA got on a platoon’s internal frequency and “asked who they were, where they were, what they were doing,” noted the battalion journal. The platoon “answered all questions[,] giving false info.”
A platoon from B/1-327th, in deep bush with no available landing zone, arranged to have a Huey kick out its resupply of water, rations, and ammo at treetop level. A smoke grenade was popped to mark the platoon. The slick never arrived. The platoon leader asked about the delay. “I requested green smoke,” the pilot answered. “It was popped, and I delivered— activity was observed on the ground.” The resupply had, in fact, gone to NVA who had been monitoring the radio and popped a green smoke of their own.
Company B was ambushed the next day when it unknowingly approached another bunker complex on another hilltop. It took four days to take the position. The final act was a napalm drop, which hit both sides. “Moving forward after the napalm burned itself out, we were within the bunker complex before we knew it,” wrote Pfc. Ted McCormick, a grunt in the lead platoon. “Two dead NVA lay half-buried in their exposed bunker, which had taken a direct hit from a 500-pound bomb. Burned fatigues and equipment lay everywhere.” The complex was impressive, complete with ammunition caches, rows of concertina where sappers practiced their skills, and “a ‘highway’ as wide as a city street that cut through the triple-canopy jungle,” noted McCormick, “the very top of the canopy left intact to conceal it from the air. After the battle, we moved off the hill and set up in the valley below. At night, we could plainly make out red flashlights as the NVA spotted a trail, moving into position we know now to attack Firebase Ripcord.”
The war in the mountains did not breed atrocities. The enemy there was made up of regulars, not the despised guerrillas who sowed booby traps and hid behind villagers. If captured, a wounded NVA could expect to be treated by a Screaming Eagle medic with the care that a good infantryman deserved. Such attitudes could not diminish the raw brutality of the war. The claymore mine is inherently brutal. So are white phosphorus and napalm, which sucks air from the lungs and adheres to human flesh “like shit to a blanket.” The M16 delivers rounds with such supersonic velocity that a dime-sized hole in an NVA’s forehead meant the back of his head had disappeared in an explosion of gray matter. People hardened, became numb, found humor in the grotesque. During the rainy season after Ripcord, A/2-506th was holed up above the flooded O Lau when a dead North Vietnamese “from a shallow, up-river grave was washed loose and floated by our perimeter,” wrote Hawkins. “Got hung up on a branch in the middle of the torrent, and swayed there like a drunk until a couple of [M79] thump gunners decided to use the corpse for target practice. Does that sound gross and despicable? Maybe it does. It certainly wasn’t the niftiest thing the company ever did. But if the tables had been turned, I’m sure Mr. Charles would have done the same for us.”
That the enemy could be ruthless was confirmed to the Currahees when one of their reconnaissance teams made contact on Triple Hill on the morning of May 28, 1970. Two recon men were wounded by rocket shrapnel from a supporting Cobra. In response, a medevac from the 326th Medical Battalion, 101st Airborne Division, came to a hover over the team and lowered a jungle penetrater through the canopy. The casualties were strapped onto the little seats attached to the jungle penetrater, but as they were being hoisted back up, the North Vietnamese fired an RPG at the medevac, ignoring the red cross on the door of the Huey.
The RPG scored a direct hit, igniting the helicopter’s fuel cell. “My God, they’ve hit the medevac,” the recon team leader called out on the radio. “It’s on fire, out of control, and going down.”
The crew chief operating the hoist had the presence of mind to fire the system’s explosive cutter, which blew the cable and dropped the jungle penetrater back to the ground like an anchor. That saved the lives of the two men strapped to it, because a moment later the Huey crashed into the side of the hill and went up in a fireball.
The entire crew of four was killed. Two other recon teams had linked up and were presently rushing to the scene. “[W]e were all numbed by the reality of what had just happened,” wrote Sp4 John Mihalko. They pushed on in a fury: “Saving [the other team] was of the utmost importance, but we also wanted to exact a measure of revenge. The loss of the Medevac set a lot of angry and determined Screaming Eagles in motion. Radio traffic was hot and heavy. A line unit was being prepared for insertion into the fray. . . .”
Recon got there first. Ralph Motta was on point and Mihalko was walking slack as they came up the hill on an enemy high-speed trail. “There was a huge boulder just off the side of the trail. Just as we reached it, we both saw the NVA gunner with an RPG pointed right at us,” wrote Mihalko. They dived behind the boulder an instant before the RPG slammed into it. The RPG gunner fired again. Doc Speed rushed up— another rocket hit the boulder at that moment—peeked quickly around the boulder, then lobbed several frags up toward the rocks from which the gunner was firing his RPGs. No more rockets. Company D was clattering in at the base of the hill, meanwhile, and shortly assaulted past the recon element. Following the grunts up, Mihalko cautiously checked the RPG gunner’s position. The gunner had been killed by the grenades. “I took a very long look at the face of the man who had calmly and deliberately destroyed an unarmed Medevac.” There was another dead enemy soldier at the top of the hill, and “a very terrified NVA prisoner. He looked almost pitiful, standing there stripped down to his underwear, pondering his fate. There was talk of blowing him away for what had happened to the Medevac, but cooler heads prevailed. A bird flew in with an interpreter. He was questioned for a while and then whisked away, much to his relief.”
Based on intelligence reports of an enemy buildup in the area, Lieutenant Colonel Lucas inserted Captain Williams and Company B onto Triple Hill at the end of the battalion standdown at Camp Evans. The first six days of the mission were unproductive. Twenty bunkers were found on the seventh day. Lieutenant Delgado and Bravo One pushed north the next morning, June 22, to a hillock from which Sergeant Tolson’s squad was dispatched to check a trail. While following it, “one of the guys noticed a trail marker cut into a tree,” Tolson wrote home. It was identical to a marker found near the bunker complex, and further investigation revealed a small pile of mortar rounds tucked between the roots of a big tree “with a small thatched roof over the top of them to keep them dry. They were laying on a raised platform made out of twigs woven together[,] and [what] looked like a seat [was] on top of that where the gooks could leave a trail watcher to guard the stuff.”
Leaving his squad at the cache site, Tolson was hiking up the hill to get Lieutenant Delgado when “the bushes started moving to my left rear,” his letter continued. “I dropped down into the bushes and made it back to the squad as fast as I could. They had seen the same thing and were all hiding behind bushes and trees. . . .”
Even as Tolson braced for a firefight, Lieutenant Delgado, on his way down the hill to refill canteens from a nearby stream—he had not alerted Tolson, totally confusing the situation—spotted a line of figures moving briskly through the trees. Two Vietnamese with steel pots and M16s, apparently Kit Carson scouts, were in the lead, followed by a shirtless, blond-headed individual with an M60.
Someone in Tolson’s squad let out a whistle. Delgado answered with a booming “Currahee,” thinking that Tolson couldn’t identify him in the heavy vegetation. Tolson thought the answering call had come from the element rustling the bushes—apparently another squad was coming down to join them—but was perplexed when the shout of “Currahee” was answered from the bushes with “Okay.”
After a pause, Sergeant Tolson shouted, “Who are you?” There was no answer. Delgado, in fact, was no longer there; the lieutenant had assumed that the “Okay” was confirmation from Tolson that they had heard and identified him. Thinking that he had just missed being killed by his own guys, Delgado had hurried back up the hill.
“We whistled again,” continued Tolson’s letter, but “nothing happened except the bushes kept moving down one ridge and up and over the other one until they were out of sight. We figured there were six people in all but didn’t know who they were.”
The incident produced conflicting versions. Whereas Delgado reported that the white machine gunner was third in line behind two Vietnamese, a brigade-level report, echoing the lieutenant’s account that the enemy had U. S. gear and U. S. weapons, placed the blond man himself on point, adding that the other five “were wearing helmets and their nationality could not be determined.”
Sergeant Judd had his own perspective. “I could see pith helmets bobbing along in the brush,” he recalled. “There were maybe five uniformed NVA soldiers—and behind them was a light-skinned blond with his shirt off, carrying an M60. He had it on his right shoulder with his right hand on the muzzle, the butt of the weapon up in the air. He was head and shoulders taller than the five little NVA in front of him. He wasn’t tied up or anything. He was at the tail end of the group, trotting right along with them.”
Judd would have opened fire but for the startling apparition. “It didn’t compute,” he said of the white NVA. “They were already moving at a good pace, but when Delgado yelled ‘Currahee,’ they instantly broke into a dead run and disappeared without even looking back.” The Caucasian was apparently the one who yelled “Okay,” hoping to give the GIs pause as the strange group made its getaway. Tolson’s squad hustled up to Delgado—that’s when the pieces of the puzzle were put together—then went back down “to look at the tracks those guys left and some were bare footed and the others were sandal prints,” wrote Tolson. “We called the C. O. on the radio and he said there weren’t any G. I.s out there except us.”
Lieutenant Delgado and part of Tolson’s squad took off in hot pursuit, splashing across a nearby creek. They found stumps where the enemy had cut down trees to build bunkers, then a trail with fresh tracks. “[T]hat was enough encouragement because we were off and running down the trail,” wrote Tolson. Following the trail up a hill, “[w]e found a bunker but the tracks went past it.” Delgado handed Tolson his flashlight to check the bunker, then continued the pursuit alone. Delgado came pounding back down the trail in short order and, jumping behind a tree, swung his weapon back the way he had come, shouting, “The gooks are coming back.”
The patrol waited for five tense minutes as the enemy moved around them, heard but not seen. When it seemed safe, Delgado gave the word to pull back. Delgado returned as quickly as he could with the entire platoon, but the enemy had vanished. It will be forever unknown if Bravo One had spotted an American defector or an East Bloc advisor to the NVA. “We made a joke out of it with some of the black guys,” recalled Lieutenant Wallace. “We joked about firing up the Honkey, or Getting Whitey.”
Captain Williams brought the whole company together the next day, and they went in the following morning, June 24, with a very uptight Sergeant Judd on point. “I felt like I was leading a company of country peddlers for all the noise we were making,” he recalled. Fanning out in the hushed cathedral gloom under the canopy, Company B found twenty-five bunkers. The company was also on the lookout for the blond individual with the NVA. Williams had passed the word to his troops that higher command wanted the man taken prisoner if possible, prompting Pfc. Donald E. Colbert of Bravo Three to write home: “Our Capt. said if we see him [the white NVA] not to shoot to kill[,] but I’ve got news for him. . . .”
Running out of daylight, Williams dug in on another hill, then resumed the sweep the next morning. Finding still more bunkers, the troops also “mistakenly checked bunkers that we’d already cleared the day before,” said Judd. “The NVA used leafy branches for bedding, and we found fresh green leaf beds in the bunkers. They had blatantly come back and slept in the bunkers below our NDP.” Sometime during the afternoon, the enemy stole into the vacated overnight position and, looking for discarded ammo and food, dug up the foxholes that the grunts had filled in before moving out. They didn’t find anything; Williams was death on policing night positions, requiring his troops to cup up empty C-ration cans so the enemy couldn’t use them in making booby traps. “We decided to leave a little present for them in case they came back,” said Judd, who helped set up an elaborate mechanical ambush—six claymores daisy-chained together where two trails crossed at the top of the hill. “It was a masterpiece.” The troops heard the claymores thunderclap in the dark from their new NDP. Williams called in artillery. “We went over there the next day,” recounted Judd, “and found hamburger and shreds of clothing embedded in the trees—but not a single body or piece of equipment. They couldn’t get all the spattering up, but they had cleaned up everything else.”
Three days later, another NVA patrol in U. S. gear was spotted. It was, all in all, a decidedly spooky area. “[W]e have found a total of 75 bunkers,” Tolson wrote home. The complex was “so big you can get lost in it, I know because I was lost for 3 hours yesterday. We have uncovered small quantities of rice and marijuana. We have seen gooks but can’t get them because they keep a pretty good distance and when you raise your rifle they disappear in the bushes. They have been around our perimeters at night but we never find out until the next morning when we send people out looking for signs of gooks and they find footprints. The people in the know seem to think that there is a Bn. of gooks heading this way from the south and there is just a small party up here trying to fix things up before the Bn. arrives. If this is true I certainly don’t want to be around when they get here. . . .”