John Podlaski's Blog, page 13

HOW A SEARCH FOR MISSING COMRADES IN VIETNAM LED TWO INFANTRY COMPANIES STRAIGHT INTO AN ENEMY INFERNO

The rugged scenery of the Central Highlands became the scene of numerous bloody battles during the war.

A LRRP team was missing. Two companies are out searching for their missing brothers in the highlands of Vietnam and walk right into a trap set by the NVA. The odds are overwhelming and one platoon is overrun. The number of dead and wounded continue to climb. Do any survive?

By WARREN WILKINS

Soldiers of the U.S. Army 4th Infantry Division move through a clearing in the Central Highlands of Vietnam near the Cambodian border in 1967, leaving behind the remains of a fallen comrade who lies where he fell, covered by a poncho. (AP Photo/Johner)

Assuming command of the 4th Infantry Division in early January 1967, Maj. Gen. William R. Peers understood that his new assignment in the Central Highlands was something of an economy-of-force operation. The 4th was to monitor the Cambodian border, sound the alarm whenever the North Vietnamese Army returned in strength, and respond accordingly.

Lt. Gen. Stanley Larsen, then the commander of I Field Forces responsible for the Highlands, recommended using spoiling operations to keep the North Vietnamese off balance. “If you ever let him get set,” Larsen had cautioned Peers’ predecessor, Maj. Gen. Arthur Collins Jr., “you’re going to pay hell getting him out.”

A Viet Cong detachment rushes into battle in January 1967. North Vietnam employed both conventional and irregular forces against American troops. The Central Highlands was a hotbed of enemy activity. (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Collins initiated Operations Paul Revere IV and Paul Revere V (later renamed Sam Houston), the latter just two days before he turned the division over to Peers, as part of the 4th’s ongoing efforts to observe and counter enemy infiltration in the Highlands. Collins warned Peers that the North Vietnamese were constructing a “fortified redoubt” in the Plei Trap Valley—a rugged stretch of jungle between the Se San and Nam Sathay Rivers in western Pleiku Province.

At first, Peers found little evidence to support those suspicions. By February, however, aerial sightings, long-range reconnaissance patrols, and communications intelligence had detected signs of enemy activity in the Plei Trap. That activity was likely connected to Gen. Chu Huy Man’s plans for a winter-spring offensive. A veteran of the Viet Minh war against the French and commander of the Communist B3 (Central Highlands) Front, Chu intended to attack west of the Nam Sathay to disrupt Operation Sam Houston and prevent the Americans from destroying his rear areas and supply caches.

Responding initially with B-52 strikes, Peers based Col. James Adamson’s 2nd Brigade between the Plei Trap and Pleiku City and pushed two of its battalions across the Nam Sathay on Feb. 12. Adamson would soon tangle with elements of Col. Nguyen Huu An’s battle-tested 1st NVA Division west of the river, prompting Peers to recall his 1st Brigade from Phu Yen Province on the coast. Commanded by Col. Charles A. Jackson, the 1st assumed responsibility for the area between the two rivers, while Adamson was to continue working west of the Nam Sathay to the Cambodian border.

An M60 machine gun is brought into action against communist forces near the Cambodian border in 1967. The 2nd Platoon used M60s to defend themselves against an enemy blocking force. (AP Photo)Men of the 4th Infantry Division clear a landing zone for helicopters amid the dense foliage of the Central Highlands in 1967. (AP Photo)

Over the next few weeks, the two brigades made regular contact with North Vietnamese regulars. Smaller skirmishes sometimes developed into much larger fights. While operating east of the Nam Sathay on March 12, the 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry attacked a bunker complex, but could not eliminate the enemy position despite air and artillery support. The daylong battle cost the battalion 14 killed and 46 wounded. Abandoning the complex that night, the North Vietnamese left behind 51 dead, though another 200 may have been killed in the fighting.

Four days later, the 2nd Brigade shifted to the Plei Doc, a heavily jungled area that abutted the Cambodian border south of the Plei Trap. When the brigade lost radio contact with a long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP) team late on March 21, Adamson ordered Lt. Col. Harold Lee’s 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry to retrieve the missing men. Lee, recognizing the urgency of the mission, dispatched two companies the following morning.

Breaking camp early on the 22nd, Company A—led by Capt. William Sands, a hardnosed Citadel graduate—moved west-southwest along a ridgeline, flanked by Company B to the south. Company A had only maneuvered a short distance through the dense vegetation when Sands halted the four-platoon column and instructed his 1st Platoon to move forward and join the 2nd Platoon up front. The 3rd and 4th Platoon were to remain in a column formation behind the two lead platoons.

Slipping out of the company column, the 1st Platoon moved abreast of the 2nd Platoon around 7:30 a.m. “The First Platoon was to the left of us, probably fifty to one hundred yards,” noted Sgt. Ron Snyder, a squad leader in the 2nd Platoon. “We barely got lined out, when the First Platoon was hit.” Snyder hit the ground as the roar of enemy rifle and automatic weapons fire reverberated across the jungle.

Struck in the groin, a young soldier wailed in agony while a torrent of fire sliced through the 1st and 2nd Platoons from hidden positions along the ridgeline in front and to the left of Company A. The two lead platoons, trapped in what appeared to be the kill zone of a large enemy ambush, were being cut to pieces.

“I would say within the first four or five minutes, we had 27 killed and 45 wounded,” recalled medic John “Doc” Bockover. “I heard ‘medic’ and started running like hell to the front. There were NVA all around us.” While Bockover raced to treat the wounded, North Vietnamese troops swept around the pinned-down platoons, most likely in an attempt to outflank and encircle the entire company.

A U.S. Air Force F-100 Super Sabre drops bombs on an enemy position near a rural outpost. Air support played a vital role in saving the lives of the men of Company A as gunships and fighter bombers rained U.S. firepower on the enemy. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Sands, moving with the company command group behind the 2nd Platoon, requested artillery fire and attempted to organize a defensive perimeter. He also radioed Company B on the battalion radio net. “You got to get down here!” he shouted over the radio. “We are taking heavy casualties and don’t know how long we can hold out!”

Sands was adjusting artillery fire when a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the command group. He was killed instantly. 1st Sgt. David McNerney, a tough career man on his third tour of duty in Vietnam, assumed command of the company and calmly rallied the shaken men.

Lee had spoken to Sands earlier in the battle and had directed Company B, commanded by Capt. Robert Sholly, to move at once to assist Company A. Company B, however, was already en route. Sholly had heard gunfire that morning. When he could not raise Sands over the radio, he immediately placed his four platoons online and headed west-northwest.

The sounds of battle grew louder as Company B made its way through the underbrush, hurried along by Sholly. Suddenly a pair of machine guns raked the 4th Platoon on the left flank of the company line. Pinned down in a bamboo field, the platoon returned fire. They could not silence the enemy machine guns nor the shadowy snipers perched in the trees above them. The North Vietnamese, later identified as a battalion from the 95B NVA Regiment, had positioned a blocking force between the two companies to prevent them from linking up.

North Vietnamese commander Gen. Chu Huy Man is pictured trekking through the jungles of the Central Highlands in this undated photo. Enemy activity in the Plei Trap Valley was likely connected to his plans for a winter-spring offensive. (U.S. Army)Artillery fire helped shatter the North Vietnamese assault. (AP Photo/Kim Ki Sam)David McNerney. (U.S. Army)

Worried he would not reach Company A in time, Sholly instructed his 2nd Platoon to flank the enemy force from the right. He hoped this would relieve some of the pressure on the 4th Platoon. Forming up quickly, the 2nd Platoon dashed forward and leapt into a dry creek bed approximately five feet wide and four feet deep. The bed provided a measure of cover. However, as the platoon prepared to scramble out of it to continue the assault, the startled troopers were met with a heavy volley of automatic weapons fire from enemy soldiers hidden on the opposite bank.

SP4 Victor Renza, one of two machine gunners in the 2nd Platoon, was setting up his M60 machine gun when a single rifle round whistled past his ear with an audible crack. Renza’s legs suddenly went limp, and he slumped back down into the creek bed without firing a shot. The color had drained from his face, and he could feel his heart thumping loudly. Convinced he had been targeted by an enemy sniper, Renza grabbed the M60 and, together with his assistant gunner, crawled along the bed in search of a new position for the gun.

The 2nd Platoon responded with M16s and M60s and was quickly drawn into a costly shooting match with the enemy blocking force. Stalled on the flanks, Sholly attempted to press ahead with the two platoons in the center of the Company B line, but the North Vietnamese refused to budge. “We could not see out of the brush and bamboo, so we were at a disadvantage,” he explained. “We set up fire in the trees but could not break the tie.” The advance had ground to a halt and the company had taken casualties. Facing the prospect of an even tougher fight, Sholly pulled his command post back and called on supporting arms.

Victor Renza. (Victor Renza)

Meanwhile Company A had been split into two separate perimeters. As the North Vietnamese maneuvered on its flanks, past pockets of pinned-down troopers from the 1st Platoon, they bumped into the 3rd Platoon as it moved forward to link up with the 1st. Firing from the hip, machine gunners from the 3rd and a handful of grunts armed with M16s succeeded in slowing the enemy advance.

Though no longer in any immediate danger of being overrun, Company A needed firepower—particularly close-in artillery fire, to shatter the North Vietnamese assault. McNerney recognized as much. After taking over command of the company from the late Sands, he skillfully adjusted artillery fire in support of the company to within 20 meters of friendly positions.

The storm of incoming artillery shook the surrounding jungle. “I can’t begin to tell you how many rounds landed around or on us,” Pfc. Tom Carty observed. “The artillery came screaming in and then exploded with a deafening roar. Shrapnel was hitting everyone and cutting vegetation like a weed eater. It didn’t seem like the artillery would ever stop.” He added, “Round after round after round of artillery came screaming in, exploding, and sending hot deadly metal in all directions, killing [North Vietnamese] and U.S. soldiers without discrimination.”

Soldiers of the U.S. Army 4th Infantry Division move through a clearing in the Central Highlands of Vietnam near the Cambodian border in 1967, leaving behind the remains of a fallen comrade who lies where he fell, covered by a poncho. (AP Photo/Johner)

Gunships and fighter bombers hammered the enemy as well, and before long the sheer weight of American firepower began to ease some of the pressure on the embattled company.

Flying overhead in a UH-1B Huey helicopter, WO1 Don Rawlinson of the 4th Aviation Battalion asked Company A for a visual aid so that he could align his approach. McNerney, aware that Rawlinson’s overloaded bird carried desperately needed supplies, climbed a tall tree under intense enemy fire and tied a bright orange identification panel to the highest branch he could find to mark the company’s location. Rawlinson spotted the panel and hurriedly searched for a landing spot. “My God!” he yelled to his copilot as the chopper cruised in. “Can you believe someone climbed up there in that tree and did that?”

McNerney clambered up the tree although he had been knocked to the ground and injured by an enemy grenade earlier in the morning. Throughout the battle, he offered words of encouragement to the troops, checked in on the wounded, and at one point helped clear a landing zone for helicopters. For his extraordinary leadership and remarkable bravery, McNerney was awarded the Medal of Honor at a ceremony held at the White House in September 1968.

As the battle raged around Company A, the number of dead and wounded continued to increase. Bockover treated a wounded radioman and then moved with a squad leader from the 4th Platoon to aid a recent replacement who was lying against a tree, covered in blood.

Chunks of flesh and bone had been ripped from his face, and he was having difficulty breathing. As Bockover prepared to perform an emergency tracheotomy so that the wounded man could breathe, the soldier gazed up at his squad leader and asked if he had finally earned a Combat Infantryman Badge, a highly coveted decoration signifying that the wearer had participated in ground combat. Heartbreakingly, when his squad leader replied that he had done enough to earn a CIB, the man inhaled one final time and then died.

The personal gear of U.S. soldiers belonging to a company of the 4th Infantry Division lies collected in a landing zone in the Central Highlands in 1967. As in our story, this company was nearly annihilated but was saved by air support and artillery. (AP Photo/Hong)An infantryman is comforted by a fellow soldier after witnessing the deaths of his comrades in the Central Highlands in 1967. (AP Photo)

To the south and east of Company A, Sholly summoned all manner of fire support to destroy or dislodge the enemy force blocking Company B’s advance. Sholly pounded the North Vietnamese with 105mm and 155mm guns, fighter bombers, and several flights of A1-E Skyraiders loaded with napalm. Bolstered by this support, Company B was able to maintain freedom of maneuver and establish a more defensible position.

“Saying the platoons were able to consolidate their positions is a cold and distant description of what really went on,” Sholly acknowledged in his book, Young Soldiers, Amazing Warriors. “Each man was looking for targets, moving and shooting, throwing grenades, trying to look out for his buddies, calling for more ammunition, and hearing that hated call for ‘medic.’”

COMBAT BADGE

Established on Oct. 27, 1943, the Combat Infantryman Badge or CIB was awarded to any U.S. Army soldier or Special Forces member below the rank of colonel who used his infantry skills in battle. Troops who did not see combat but who met the standards during specialized training could receive the Expert Infantryman Badge.

Combat Infantryman Badge. (Historynet Archives)

The cumulative impact of concentrated American firepower softened up the enemy blocking force. By early afternoon Company B was moving west-northwest again, carrying its dead and wounded. The firing tapered off as the North Vietnamese, battered by air strikes and artillery fire and fought to a standstill by Company A, withdrew from the battlefield.

Companies A and B eventually linked up later that afternoon. Taking command of both companies, Sholly met with McNerney, who informed him that Sands had been killed. Sholly, after lamenting the loss of his friend, advised McNerney that a perimeter large enough to accommodate two companies would have to be completed before nightfall. Company A would take up positions in the center of the perimeter. For the remainder of the day, the exhausted troopers evacuated the dead and wounded and dug fighting positions.

Fought for the most part at close range, the battle in the Plei Doc cost the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry 27 killed and 48 wounded. Company A suffered the lion’s share of the losses, including 22 dead. The missing LRRP team was never found.

Adamson praised the performance of the battalion without considering the number of North Vietnamese killed in the fighting. “That evening at about 2300, General Peers asked me for an enemy body count—I said I had no idea,” Adamson admitted. “He said Saigon wanted to know. Later I received a call from Swede [Stanley] Larsen by secure radio asking the same question. I was to provide a number. I said ‘150.’ The next day we found about 45 bodies and had the body count previously given withdrawn and ‘45’ reported in its place.”

Officially, the 4th Infantry Division reported 136 enemy killed. Whatever the final number—and it was almost certainly higher than 45, given the North Vietnamese practice of removing their dead from their battlefield—Company A had survived the deadly ordeal. Many credit McNerney. “I know that God saved us,” wrote SP4 Willis Nalls of the 2nd Platoon, “but Top’s bravery was what got us out of that firefight.” While undoubtedly a critical factor, McNerney’s heroism alone would not have been enough to save the company without the courage and determination of the young “grunts” holding the line.

Men at this U.S. base in the Central Highlands near the Cambodian border rely on the protection offered by sandbags, logs, and bunkers for defense. North Vietnamese forces launched constant attacks, including repeated mortar barrages, to harass American troops and gain control over the contested region. (AP Photo)

In May, Companies A and B moved into the remote Ia Tchar Valley in western Pleiku Province. On the morning of May 18, while investigating a well-worn trail near the Cambodian border, a platoon from Company B was ambushed and surrounded by a large enemy force. Company A received orders to reinforce its stricken sister company, even as some of its soldiers privately feared that the battle had all the makings of another March 22, only this time in reverse.

That night Company A stumbled around in the dark for hours searching for the “lost platoon.” Overrun and all but wiped out, the platoon was eventually found the following morning. “Those two days [March 22 and May 18] created a bond and a brotherhood between the two companies that has lasted for over 50 years,” said Renza, one of the “lost platoon” survivors. “When we got to them [Company A] in March, they were so happy to see us. We didn’t know who was coming for us. But when they found me on May 19, after the North Vietnamese had overrun us the day before, I couldn’t believe it was those same guys we’d gone to help in March. I know that they were determined to get to us.”

Warren Wilkins is the author of books and magazine articles about the Vietnam War and is a frequent contributor to Vietnam magazine.

From History dot com. This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Vietnam magazine.

https://www.historynet.com/central-highlands-search-rescue-vietnam/

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Miracle in the Sky

Here’s a notable story about an F-4E Phantom which tangled with a North Vietnamese MIG-21 during a mission in the skies over North Vietnam. It was truly a miracle!

By David Craighead (Clive 04)

Aircrew: 1Lt Wesley Zimmerman, Aircraft Commander
1Lt David “Bubba” Craighead, Weapons Systems Operator
Aircraft: F-4E, tail # 70-321
Unit: 4thTFS, 366TFW, Takhli, RTAFB, Thailand
Flight Location: Pack 6, North Vietnam

Our mission that day was to fly MigCap Patrol for another group of fighters flying from Ubon, RTAFB, Thailand. They would be releasing chaff over the Hanoi area in order to create a chaff corridor for the main F-4 strike force which would be 20 minutes behind us. Our route would take us north over Laos and then east across North Vietnam and into the Hanoi “Downtown” area. The strike target for this mission was the Gia Lam Air Base Communication Control Buildings which housed the main communication system for the North Vietnamese Air Force. I am sure the North Vietnamese were well aware of the American tradition of fireworks on the 4th of July because they expended as many weapons against our force that day as we had seen previously on a single mission.

Our chaff force consisted of sixteen F-4’s and as we set our eastern course for Hanoi, we were told by Red Crown that the MiGs were getting airborne in preparation for our arrival. From as far as 60 miles west of Hanoi, we began receiving heavy AAA barrages including radar-controlled 85mm & 100mm cannon fire. As we approached the Hanoi area and crossed the Red River into the flatlands, our flight was targeted by the surface-to-air missile crews and we became the subjects of the SAM firings. Many SAMs were fired at or towards our chaff force. At this time, our plane received minor damage to the right-wing aileron. The damage was only to the sheet metal portions of the aileron and we continued inbound with the fighter force, figuring no Master Caution light, then no problem.

We concluded our inbound course and performed a group 180* turn to a west heading in order to exit the area. Shortly thereafter, Clive 03, our element leader, made a radio call for us, Clive 04, to “break right, Migs attacking”. A break turn is a maximum performance turn in order to negate an immediate attack from an adversary aircraft. In our instance, Clive 03 had spotted our airplane being attacked by a couple of MiG-19s with 30mm cannons blazing away at us. In fact, the 30mm rounds did hit the vertical stabilizer area of our plane. The “break” turn was a complete 360* turn with us again heading west on our exit heading. But we were now separated from the balance of the chaff force and easily highlighted by their GCI as a single plane by the enemy radar. We had lost visual contact with Clive 03. Shortly thereafter, a MiG-21 snuck into our six-o’clock position and fired his two heat-seeking Atoll missiles at the tailpipes of our F-4E. The missiles scored a hit on our tail section resulting in heavy damage. We were two 1LTs over the Hanoi area taking a ride in what was now a heavily-crippled F-4E. All gauges, navigation gear, radios, and electronic systems were inoperative. The engines continued to churn but at a reduced capability. The cockpit intercom remained OK and we were both talking pretty fast!!

Wes and I had flown together as a team for quite a while and we had briefed this situation at each preflight briefing. In addition, we were roommates and routinely discussed different scenarios of what could happen when flying into the Hanoi area. There was no panic in the cockpit as we agreed to turn to the southwest in order to overfly the least-populated areas of North Vietnam and Laos, so upon our probable ejection, we would have a better chance of not being captured.

At this time, a most unlikely event occurred: Off our left wing at about 1,500ft was the MiG-21 that had just shot his missiles at us! We were certainly glad his cannons, if he had any, were not loaded that day so he was Winchester after firing his two Atoll missiles. He stayed there flying formation with us for quite a while and obviously wondered why this F-4E was still airborne. We were wondering the same thing, but certainly not complaining. He stayed in formation with us for what seemed like a long time.

At this time, we could see Clive 03 in the distance closing in on us. The MiG-21 was directly between us and Clive 03. We were thankful we were not alone now and tried in vain to radio Clive 03 and tell him to shoot down this MiG-21 that was on our wing. MiGs are small and hard to see and being focused on our F-4E, Clive 03 never saw the MiG-21. The MiG pilot became aware of Clive 03, probably by his GCI, and made a rapid 180* turn back to the east, leaving Clive 03 to escort us to the nearest friendly area and to a successful recovery and landing should that be possible. Wes and I had begun preparing ourselves for ejection as we stowed stuff away into the zippered pockets of the G-suit and navigated toward the southwest. With Clive 03 leading us, we were just now starting to believe that #321 would continue flying. Numerous hand signals were traded with the crew of Clive 03 and we knew he was leading us to Nakhon Phenom (NKP) air base in Thailand. Although not home to the F-4s, NKP was a primary emergency recovery base and would serve us well if we made it that far.

We did not know our fuel status and did not attempt air-to-air refueling knowing our system would not operate properly. The flight across North Vietnam and Laos into Thailand was untimed but it was a fairly long time to wonder if landing would be possible. Wes had been careful with the airplane, not making any stressful flight moves, since the missile attack, and I knew he was having some difficulties with the control of the aircraft. Clive 03 escorted us to the NKP approach area and then he went ahead to land first, knowing our landing would shut down the airfield and he was already at Bingo fuel (or worse). NKP had a jolly-green rescue helicopter orbiting in their bail-out area and we could see him at our 2 o’clock position. As we continued our approach to the NKP runway, we were caught up in the jetwash from Clive 03 and determined we must make a 360* turn in order to make a safer landing.

As we began this turn out of traffic towards the bail-out area, we joked that the jolly-green figured he had some business coming his way! So we continued the 360-degree turn and got lined up for a long straight-in approach. We were out of utility hydraulics and used the emergency gear system and got the gear down-and-locked indication, that was good. Our next obstacle was the unknown of at what speed would be necessary for #321 to continue safe flying to the landing. NKP had the cable-arresting system and we planned to land so as to hook up with the approach-end barrier cable. The tail hook was down, we had the cockpits cleaned up for ejection and we were barreling down to the runway. Wes was fighting the aircraft control and I noticed he had the stick pegged far to the right as we maintained 220 knots airspeed. He proved he was an expert pilot as we touched down at 220 knots, the tail hook caught the cable and pulled the plane to a gentle halt.

As the hook released from the cable, the plane rolled into the grass infield and came to a halt. We both made a normal but swift exit from the cockpits and saw the damage for the first time, happy that she stayed airborne.

Photo 1: Craighead left, Zimmerman right, tail hook and cable are visible

Clive 03 gassed up and flew back to Takhli. Wes and I were at NKP with just our flight suits and a few bucks on us, since we had left all personal effects back at Takhli and now needed to hitchhike back to Takhli. It took us 3 days with a puddle-jumper to Utapao and another puddle-jumper to Takhli.

We arrived back at Takhli and resumed flying our sorties. The very next day, they scheduled me for my “mid-tour” check ride, what a bad joke! News and photos of this event traveled around the airbases and we were awarded numerous flight awards by the USAF. Wes was awarded the Koren Kolligian Award for the most outstanding flight safety event of 1972.

We were both transferred to Holloman AFB, NM in December 1972. Wes went on to fly commercial for Continental Airlines and fly F-16s in the Utah ANG. He’s now retired and living in Layton, Utah. I left the Air Force in 1976 and built a custom-homebuilding business in San Antonio, TX.

I again was able to see F-4E #70-321 in May 1974 in a hangar at Eglin AFB, FL. She was being cannibalized for her parts and it is doubtful she ever flew again after that time. On this one day, she took hits from SAM particles, 30mm cannons & heat-seeking missiles, what a fine beast!!

Photo 2: view of the damage

Photo 4: Good ol’ #321 is being towed away

This view begs the question why didn’t the Atoll missiles

continue their flight into the engine tailpipes?

Photo 6: Craighead inspecting the damage, Zimmerman at far right

Photo 3: lost

Photo 7: Craighead & Zimmerman on 26 October 1972, shaking hands after last mission

*****

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Our Second language in the Military

My friend, Neil Doc Keddie, posted this short piece on our Facebook group page – Brothers of the Nam. I found it hilarious and want to share it with you.

Warning: Rated for Mature Audiences. Lots of Foul Language.!!!!

F*&k!!!! Yes, you heard me right. Certainly, we all knew how to cuss and swear before entering the service. But once we reached Basic Training, we began to see it and use it like it was a second language, which, of course, it was. For many of us, the words and especially the phrases were something that before we had no idea existed. No longer were we a group of trainees. Now we were “every Swinging Dick.” Before we were in the service we used to gather in groups to talk and socialize, but now we were a “Cluster-Fuck, and that “one round would get us all.” Certainly Basic and AIT were like beginning courses, but once we landed in-country, we became fluent. F&*K was no longer just a declarative word, now it became every part of speech there was. So much so that we could make an entire sentence with just that word –so it was all at once noun, verb, adverb, adjective, exclamation mark – indeed the whole works.

Cussing became secondary in nature. I can remember pulling Sick Call at the Aid Station on Firebase Arsenal and taking care of a guy who was suffering from a case of “Jungle Rot.’ Apparently, this was not his first time suffering from it as he wanted to know if we could give him some of the “Shit” that he had used before. The Doc and I looked at each other and then at him and asked “shit?’ Yes, he said that “Super Shit” that he had rubbed on it before. Oh! we said, “The SUPER shit” In fact he really wanted some of the “Super Fantastic Shit.” So, while he sat there, I turned around, grabbed a tube of ointment, got a label, and wrote “Super Fantastic Shit” Use 3 F&*KING times a day.

While we were there we even came up with words that seemed rather far-fetched. While talking with one of the Medics one evening he began to tell the Doc and me about a movie that he had recently seen in which the female lead had “big-assed titties.” “Big-assed Titties? we asked —“Exactly what are those? I forget how he described them now, but it was funny to hear.

One of the great parts of Battalion Training was the fact that for a few days, there was a reunion of the Medics. One of the things that were always good fun was all of us getting together to pull “Battalion Sick-Call” in the morning. On one occasion we had a “Cherry” who we gave the job of writing up the “complaint” of those who came for treatment. We started getting charts that read “rash on balls,” boil on ass” and “pain in dick.” It was funny to read but we had to caution him that these charts were part of the patients’ permanent records and would go with them wherever they went.

Of course, the day finally arrived when we got to go home. In so many cases, we were out of the bush and back on the block in just a few hours. There was no time to detox before we returned to our homes and families, and this posed a problem. It was difficult to get back to speaking in a civilized manner. I found myself saying things like “Could you pass the fu-fu-fu, could you pass the mashed potatoes,” or “What’s on the fu-fu-fu-what’s on TV. After a couple of weeks my mother pulled me aside and asked, “when did you pick up that stutter?” I came up with some lame excuses, but it was a challenge to get back to my old primary language.

You can kind of tell by the photo below that the three of us were accomplished speakers of our new language.

What other examples can you think of? Leave them in the comment section below.

Taken on FB Birmingham. 1970–Doc Gardner, Doc Probst and Me–Doc

If you are interested in seeing more about the slang terms used in Vietnam, then check out the most popular post on my website: https://cherrieswriter.com/2014/02/13/military-speak-during-the-vietnam-war/

*****

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If you want to learn more about the Vietnam War and its Warriors, then subscribe to this blog and get notified by email or your feed reader every time a new story, picture, video and changes occur on this website – the button is located at the top right of this page.

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Baptism by Fire: Becoming a Marine in Practice and by Name

This is one Marine’s story that talks about that defining moment when he considered himself a Marine and fully understood the meaning of Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful. Do any of you feel the same?

By RONALD WINTER

Ask any Marine if they can remember the first day they actually became a Marine and you likely will be told it was boot camp graduation day. Whether it was Parris Island or San Diego, only when the senior officer in the graduation program proclaims the graduates “Marines” did the title apply. For officers, it would be a similar graduation from Officer Candidate School when their second-lieutenant butter bars were pinned to their uniforms.

The designation could not come at any time before that, and no matter how well the recruits or officer candidates did at the various stages of training that preceded graduation day, if they didn’t graduate, they were not Marines.

Ron Winter inside a hooch in Quang Tri, South Vietnam, four months and more than 100 missions into his tour. Photo courtesy of the author.

But as many Marines will also tell you, there are other defining moments in the journey to becoming a Marine veteran that eclipse the boot camp experience. These include the baptism by fire, when Marines enter combat for the first time and learn how they will react when the enemy shoots directly at them.

For me, that moment came on June 1, 1968, during an initial assault as we inserted troops into an area south of Khe Sanh where the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was building a road under the cover of a triple-canopy jungle. I responded appropriately and survived, yet while that was a personal milestone, there was something missing. Even if I couldn’t articulate it, I felt it.

Two more months would pass before I filled in that gap, even though those two months included my first medevacs, reconnaissance team insertions and emergency extractions, and night flights into hot zones—the gamut of missions that helicopter crews face in war.

During the summer of 1968, the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 9th Marine Regiments operated in northernmost I Corps and along the , and opened new firebases south of Khe Sanh near the Laotian border, including landing zones Torch, Robin, and Loon. By mid-August, I had completed nearly 100 missions as a door gunner in CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters in squadron HMM-161 (military helicopter transport squadron), many in that area.

Although my baptism by fire had occurred two months earlier in this same area, and it now was August, this day was different. While the initial assault in June had been the responsibility of the 4th Marine Regiment, later in the summer, elements of the 1st and 3rd Regiments also operated in the area. I could only tell which regiment we carried if the Marine infantrymen had written their unit identification on their packs, which they often did.

The reception we would receive when entering a hot zone was a toss-up, as the NVA was sly and often changed tactics. At times, they opened fire on the lead aircraft—“birds,” as we referred to them—and at other times, they waited for later arrivals who might be lured into thinking the zone was free of the enemy and might possibly be caught off guard by a burst of hostile fire.

Ron Winter stands at his post next to a .50 caliber machine gun inside a Marine CH-46D helicopter between missions in June 1968. Photo courtesy of the author.

On this particular day, they chose to open fire right away. I flew starboard (right) gunner in the fourth aircraft in the flight, and I had a brief-but-ever-so-appreciated advance warning of what waited for us. The crews in the earlier flights had pinpointed the enemy positions in a gully flanked by two ridges on the northern side of the zone.

As soon as the target section came into sight, I opened up with my Browning M-2 (Ma Deuce) .50 caliber machine gun. We usually flew with 100-round boxes of ammo attached to the side of the machine gun with a bungee cord. At a rate of 500 rounds per minute, I emptied the first box in slightly more than 12 seconds.

I should point out here that in the years after Vietnam when I met grunts at veterans events, they often said they hated being forced to sit in a helicopter waiting to land, unable to join in, while the enemy, the gunners, and the crew chief were firing. It was strange for us, too, because we rarely saw those grunts again or heard what they encountered on the ground, or whether our fire had been effective in giving them sufficient time to find cover and turn their fire on the enemy.

Regardless of which unit we worked with, any assault was nerve-wracking for those who wanted to fight but—due to safety concerns—had to sit quietly until we landed and lowered the ramp. This probably explains the actions of a grunt sitting right next to my machine gun that day in August.

When I ran out of ammo in the 100-round box, instead of loading another 100-round box, I reached into a much larger box below the gun mount, grabbing one end of a 500-round ammo belt.

As I reloaded, I noticed the grunt stand and turn toward me. I cocked the .50 and began firing—all this happening in mere seconds—as he grabbed the ammo belt and began to feed the machine gun with a smoothness that instantly spoke of long experience. Out the corner of my left eye, I also saw the crew chief grab his M-14 rifle, switch it to fully automatic, and start firing out the hatch on the starboard side of the aircraft, a few feet forward from my station.

Marines from Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, take five on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in northern Laos, in February 1969, as part of Operation Dewey Canyon. Photo courtesy of the author.

The crew chief and I were about the same size—five foot seven inches or so, less than 150 pounds—and the recoil from the M-14 threw him back a couple of steps each time he fired. But he charged right back to the hatchway and opened up again, oblivious to the force of the recoil. In retrospect, it was kind of funny, but no one was laughing then. We kept firing, and I expended another 200 rounds or so. I ceased firing as we settled into the zone and the crew chief opened the rear ramp using his remote control.

I watched as the grunts charged out to take up their assigned positions in what was a quickly expanding perimeter. But just as he was to turn in the direction of the battle, the grunt who had been feeding my machine gun stopped, looked back for an instant, and flashed “Thumbs up” to me, accompanied by the biggest grin I could have imagined. Then he was gone.

In that instant, for the first time, I truly felt like a member of the Marine air-ground team. I didn’t know the Marine sitting next to my position, but he instantly reacted, and we each did our part in the brief but intense firefight. And he obviously was grateful to have a part in the action rather than sitting still, enduring what we referred to as the “pucker factor.” Much later, I realized that a similar scenario could have occurred with myriad other participants, but this moment was our time on center stage.

A CH-46 helicopter from HMM-161 hovers over Fire Support Base Lightning, a forward artillery base manned by troops of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, in February 1969. The Fire Support Base was carved out of the wilderness to support U.S. Marine operations in the A Shau Valley adjacent to the Laotian border. Photo courtesy of the author.

I have heard it said that the entire course of our lives can change in an instant, and decisions we make in that time can affect everything we do thereafter. The time spent in that firefight was two minutes—tops—yet it caused a sea change in my feelings about my role in the war we were fighting.

I’m not talking about philosophical issues here, or weighty concerns about the justification for America’s involvement in Vietnam. I am talking about the simplest of factors: two Marines, side by side, helping each other stay alive for the foreseeable future, which could be less than another minute. Nearly a year and ultimately more than 300 missions after that firefight, I returned home, went back to school, and tried to reenter society. But the America I returned to, and I hope that grunt made it, too, was not welcoming, and I endured my share of physical and emotional abuse.

Lance Cpl. Ronald Winter aboard the USS Princeton, LPH-5, in May 1968, en route to Quang Tri, South Vietnam, with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 161. Photo courtesy of the author.

In the first half of a 20-year journalism career, I was mocked and denied promotions, advancement, and pay raises by people who had never served their country and despised those of us who had. Not everyone, of course, but enough to make an impact on my life.

But regardless of what I faced in the years after Vietnam, I never forgot that moment when two Marines seamlessly took the fight to the enemy—a team that was created on the spot but worked as though we had been practicing forever—and did the job that was required. I often passed that moment on to acquaintances who needed a boost, and who needed to remember what it was like back in “The Nam.”

During my journalism career, I developed a reputation for calmness under deadline pressure, and occasionally, when asked about it, I would simply say, “No one is shooting at me.”

The success and teamwork of that moment helped me be successful in later endeavors, and the reward was far better than any medal because, from that moment on, I knew without question that I had truly joined the brotherhood of Marines, and the expanded brotherhood of combat veterans from all services. And for the first time, I fully understood—not by definition, not superficially, but deep inside me—the meaning of Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful. 

Ronald Winter

​​Ronald Winter is a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran and author, including the recently released Victory Betrayed: Operation Dewey Canyon. He joined the Marine Corps in January 1966 and served four years on active duty, including 13 months in Vietnam, flying more than 300 missions as an aerial gunner. He was awarded 15 air medals, combat aircrew wings, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and numerous other decorations. Winter later earned degrees in electrical engineering and English literature, and spent 20 years as a print journalist, earning numerous awards for investigative reporting, as well as a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

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Mauled in Laos – Operation Lam Son 719

A bungled raid into Laos by the South Vietnamese Army in early 1971 exposed grave deficiencies in its operational abilities. The ARVN retreated from Laos before their targeted deadline and had already sustained almost 50% casualties. Only U.S. airpower prevented complete disaster.

WARNING, THIS IS A RATHER LONG AND DETAILED ARTICLE

By John Walker

The South Vietnamese rangers huddled in their trenches and bunkers at landing zone Ranger North throughout the day of February 19, 1971, as mortar shells crashed inside the perimeter. The deadly shells sent geysers of dirt toward the low-hanging, gray sky over eastern Laos. To counter the encroaching North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars, U.S. Cobra gunships and F-4 Phantoms took turns rolling in to blast enemy positions. The 5,000 enemy soldiers laying siege to the hilltop base outnumbered the rangers 10 to 1. By the 11th day of Operation Lam Son 719, U.S. air support was the only thing that separated life from death for the beleaguered troops of the 39th Ranger Battalion at Ranger North.

At dusk, a regiment of the NVA 308th Division began a steady mortar bombardment of the base. Fanatical NVA regulars, who were supported by Soviet-built PT-76 and T-54 tanks, charged the perimeter repeatedly and eventually broke through. Hand-to-hand fighting broke out in several places. The rangers suffered from a severe shortage of antitank weapons and were not experienced with those they had. The air swarmed with U.S. supply and medevac helicopters, as well as aerial rocket artillery. The ground around the hilltop base lit up periodically with flames from napalm canisters dropped by Phantoms that roared down on the jungle. UH-1 “Huey” helicopters zipped onto the smoke-shrouded hilltop bearing supplies and, when possible, removed wounded while the Cobras pumped rockets at NVA caught in the open. NVA soldiers desperately tried to knock the Hueys from the sky with their AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and heavy antiaircraft machine guns.

Dawn on February 20 revealed the contorted bodies of hundreds of dead NVAs both on the hillsides and within the perimeter. Crews of U.S. helicopters alighting on the hilltop did their best to keep back panicked rangers who tried to grab their skids, threatening to overload their fragile airships. In the fighting over a three-day period, the force of 500 rangers on the hilltop base had dwindled to 323.

It was clear that afternoon that the Rangers could not hold off the NVA. It also was clear that U.S. air units could not evacuate their allies under such intense fire. With no other option, the ranger commander ordered his men to fight their way out toward Ranger South just over three miles away. What followed was a running battle in the frantic retreat to Ranger South. Only 109 able-bodied survivors and 92 wounded made it to safety by nightfall. As for the NVA casualties, they lost at least 600 men, and perhaps substantially more. It was a scenario repeated at several other firebases established to support the South Vietnamese raid to temporarily sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail and disrupt NVA offensive operations.

A U.S. tank covers South Vietnamese troops as they prepare to enter Laos in early February 1971. The ambitious raid was conceived partly as a test of how the South Vietnamese would fare in a ground operation without American advisers.

By 1970, with the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia finally underway, it was apparent the long-standing American policy of supposedly respecting the neutrality of the bordering Indochinese countries of Laos and Cambodia while fighting a localized war of attrition inside South Vietnam had been a profound strategic blunder. As early as 1960, North Vietnamese ground forces, who established the Ho Chi Minh Trail as their principal route for funneling communist troops, weapons, and supplies into South Vietnam had invaded and occupied large portions of Laos and Cambodia. The restriction confining the ground war to South Vietnam did not apply to American aerial bombing; indeed, North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail were bombed extensively for years, yet the bombing campaign was not decisive in determining the war’s outcome. Since 1966, over 630,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, 100,000 tons of foodstuffs, 400,000 weapons, and 50,000 tons of ammunition had traveled south through the maze of gravel and dirt roads, footpaths, and river transportation systems that crisscrossed southeastern Laos and linked up with a similar logistical system in neighboring Cambodia known as the Sihanouk Trail.

Following Prime Minister Lon Nol’s overthrow of Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk on March 18, 1970, though, the new pro-American Lon Nol regime denied the use of the port of Sihanoukville to communist shipping. This was an enormous strategic blow to North Vietnam since 80 percent of all military supplies that supported its effort in the far south had moved through this port. Lon Nol also ordered the NVA and Viet Cong (VC) out of Cambodia. The VC were South Vietnamese communist insurgents, fighting mostly as irregulars under the banner of the National Liberation Front and under North Vietnamese control.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail began in North Vietnam and ran through Laos into northern Cambodia, with spurs branching into each of almost two dozen bases along the border. The eastern sector of the Laotian panhandle had long been home to many vital logistical installations and base areas. The main hub of the entire complex in this sector of the trail was Base Area 604, sited in and around the district town of Tchepone, Laos, roughly 24 miles west of the Laos-Vietnam border. After the Cambodian government’s closure of the port of Sihanoukville, Base Area 604 became even more vital to the North Vietnamese war effort.

The next largest supply base was Base Area 611 in Muong Nong Province, south and east on Route 914 from Tchepone. It was much closer to the Vietnamese border and was located on the western fringe of the AShau Valley, where it entered Laos. In late 1970, expecting an attack on Laos, the North Vietnamese created a field command—the B-70 Corps commanded by General Le Trong Tan, its nucleus the 304th, 308th, and 320th Divisions—specifically to fight in Laos and had substantial capacity to reinforce their original dispositions.

A further blow to the communist logistical system came in spring 1970 when U.S. and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces crossed the border into Cambodia in strength and attacked NVA/VC base areas during the controversial Cambodian incursion. That allied offensive into Cambodia is sometimes portrayed as a strategic failure, but it was not. Though hugely unpopular in the United States, the operation was in fact the key event needed to sever the enemy’s lines of communication and logistics in Cambodia, ease the American withdrawal program from the theater, and showcase the success of the Vietnamization program while also boosting the morale of ARVN soldiers.

The South Vietnamese established fire bases manned by Army rangers to prevent ambushes against the main column traveling west on Route 9.

The Cambodian incursion was a success by any measure. The allies seized enough weapons and ammunition to arm 55 battalions of an enemy main-force unit, killed 11,363 enemy soldiers, and captured over 2,000 soldiers. But the Allies failed to locate the military and political headquarters of the NVA/VC forces, and they also failed to encounter large enemy concentrations because the enemy had withdrawn deeper into Cambodia. Military activity increased after the operation in both northern Cambodia and southern Laos as the North Vietnamese attempted to establish new infiltration routes and base areas.

After the near destruction of the enemy’s logistical system in Cambodia, U.S. headquarters in Saigon determined the time was favorable for a similar campaign into the Kingdom of Laos (the coalition government of Laos had come to an agreement with influential North Vietnamese sympathizers that prevented them from objecting to communist operations inside their country). If such an operation were to be carried out, it would have to be done quickly while American military assets were still available in South Vietnam. Such an operation might create severe supply shortages that would be felt by NVA/VC forces for at least one year, and possibly two, thus giving the United States and its ally a respite from enemy offensives in the vital northern provinces for a year or more.

The allies discovered signs of increased NVA logistical activity in southeastern Laos, an activity that heralded just such an offensive. Communist offensives usually took place near the conclusion of the Laotian dry season (from October through March) after logistics units had pushed supplies through the system. One U.S. intelligence report estimated that 90 percent of NVA material coming down the trail at that time was being funneled into the three northernmost provinces of South Vietnam to prepare for offensive action. This buildup was alarming to both Washington and the American command in Saigon and prompted the perceived necessity for a preemptive attack to disrupt any attempted communist offensives.

On December 8, 1970, in response to a request from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, a highly secret meeting was held at Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) headquarters in Saigon to discuss a possible ARVN attack into southeastern Laos, across the border from I Corps in northern South Vietnam. The group’s findings were sent to the Joint Chiefs in Washington. By mid-December, U.S. President Richard Nixon had become intrigued by the idea of offensive actions in Laos and had begun efforts to convince General Creighton Abrams, supreme MACV commander in South Vietnam, and members of his own cabinet of the efficacy of such an attack. Nixon was well aware that another border crossing would severely inflame public opinion, but he and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were overly optimistic and believed a clear-cut ARVN victory would trump any political consequences. As promised, Nixon had begun the systematic withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam, lowering U.S. troop strength there to around 157,000 men by early 1971. (Nixon assumed office in January 1969 and troop withdrawals began in the summer of that year.)

On January 7, 1971, they authorized MACV to begin detailed, highly secret planning for an attack against Base Areas 604 and 611 in lower Laos. On the American side, they assigned the task to Lt. Gen. James Sutherland, commander of the U.S. XXIV Corps, who was given only nine days to submit it to MACV for approval. The operation would eventually comprise four distinct phases. During the first phase, the U.S. 45th Engineering Group would seize, rebuild, and secure Route 9, the main road leading east to and into Laos; the 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized) would reoccupy the abandoned Khe Sanh Combat Base, which would become the logistical hub and airhead of the ARVN part of the operation; and, in an operation dubbed Dewey Canyon II, the 101st Airborne Division would conduct diversionary operations into the AShau Valley near the Cambodian border, long a communist stronghold.

A North Vietnamese armored vehicle moves along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Hanoi’s initial response to the raid was gradual because it believed North Vietnam was in danger of being attacked either across the demilitarized zone or from the sea by an amphibious landing.

The second phase entailed a three-pronged ARVN armored/infantry attack west along Route 9 across the border into Laos, pushing for the town of Tchepone, the perceived nexus of Base Area 604. Total American air, artillery, and logistical support—but no U.S. advisers or ground troops, who were now prohibited by law from entering Laos—would support the South Vietnamese incursion. The column’s advance along Route 9 would be protected by a series of leapfrogging, heliborne infantry assaults on both sides of the highway, where rapidly erected ARVN firebases and landings zones would cover the northern and southern flanks of the road-bound main column. The operation’s third phase called for search and destroy missions within Base Area 604 and, it was hoped, against Base Area 611 if conditions permitted. Then, ARVN forces would retire, either going back along Route 9 or southeast to Base Area 611, through the part of the AShau Valley that jutted into Cambodia, and across the border.

Because of the South Vietnamese military’s notorious carelessness regarding security precautions and the uncanny ability of communist agents to uncover detailed information, the planning phase lasted only a few weeks, divided between the American and South Vietnamese high commands. At the operational levels, it was limited to the intelligence and operational staff of the ARVN I Corps, whose commander, Lt. Gen. Hoang Xuan Lam, would command the operation, and Sutherland’s XXIV Corps. MACV and the South Vietnamese Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed Lam in Saigon just days before the operation’s start. His operational area was restricted to a corridor no wider than 15 miles on both sides of Route 9 and penetration no deeper than Tchepone.

In the highly politicized South Vietnamese military’s command structure, where the support of key political figures was of paramount importance in the promotion to and retention of command positions, the issues of command, control, and coordination proved problematic. Lt. Gen. Le Nguyen Khang, South Vietnamese Marine Corps commander and protégé of Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, whose Marines were scheduled to participate in the incursion, outranked Lam, who was supported by President Nguyen Van Thieu. The same situation applied to Lt. Gen. Du Quoc Dong, commander of ARVN airborne forces also scheduled to participate. Rather than take orders from Lam, both commanders remained in Saigon and delegated their command authority to subordinate officers, which certainly did not bode well for the success of the incursion. They dubbed the operation Lam Son 719 after the village of Lam Son, the birthplace of the legendary Vietnamese patriot Le Loi, who defeated an invading Chinese army in 1427. The numerical designation came from the year 1971, and the main axis of the attack was Route 9.

The attempt at secrecy jeopardized logistical and communications preparations that required lengthy lead time, and a combined tactical command post was not established until the operation was well underway. Most units did not learn about their planned participation until January 17. The Airborne Division received no detailed plans until February 2, less than a week before the campaign was to begin. Some of the best and most experienced units, the paratroopers and Marines, had always deployed in their own areas of operation as separate battalions and brigades and had no experience cooperating in combined unit operations. The U.S. 101st Airborne Division’s assistant commander later said, “Planning was rushed, handicapped by security restrictions, and conducted separately and in isolation by the Vietnamese and the Americans.” U.S. helicopters, artillery, and supplies were moved at the last minute into the Khe Sanh Combat Base, where an entirely new airstrip had to be constructed. Because there were few possible locations for attacks in Laos, and the North Vietnamese were already expecting some kind of activity in the area, any attempt at secrecy failed.

On their own, for the first time without American advisers, South Vietnamese generals faced their biggest test yet. Lam Son 719 was ARVN’s largest, most complex, and most critical operation of the war. The lack of time for adequate planning and preparation, as well as the absence of any real discussion of military realities and the true capabilities of the ARVN, might prove decisive. Nixon gave his final approval for the mission on January 29 and the following day Operation Dewey Canyon II began (it was hoped the 101st Airborne’s feints into the AShau Valley might draw NVA attention away from what was going on at Khe Sanh). On the morning of January 30, as well, armored and engineer elements of 1st Brigade, U.S. 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized) headed west on Route 9 while the brigade’s infantry units were helilifted directly into Khe Sanh. They did not notify the government of Laos in advance of the intended operation; Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma learned of the invasion of his country only after it was underway (the same had been true of the Cambodian incursion a year earlier).

South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.

Tactical airstrikes set to precede the incursion to suppress suspected antiaircraft positions had to be suspended for two days due to poor weather. After a massive preliminary artillery bombardment and 11 B-52 Stratofortress missions, the incursion began on February 8, 1971. Spearheaded by M-41 light tanks and M-113 armored personnel carriers, a 4,000-man ARVN armor and infantry task force, comprising the 1st Armored Brigade, the 1st and 8th Airborne Battalions, and the 11th and 17th Cavalry Regiments, crossed the border and advanced six miles westward unopposed along Route 9.

To cover the northern flank, the 39th Ranger Battalion was helilifted into Ranger North while the 21st Ranger Battalion air assaulted into Ranger South. Meanwhile, the 2nd Airborne Battalion established FSB 30 while the 3rd Airborne Brigade Headquarters and 3rd Airborne Battalion moved into FSB 31 (both north of the road as well). These outposts were to serve as tripwires for any communist advance into the zone of the ARVN incursion. South of Route 9, units of the crack 1st ARVN Infantry Division simultaneously combat assaulted landing zones Blue, White, Don, and Brown, and FSBs Hotel, Hotel 2, Delta, and Delta 1, to establish the southern flank of the advance.

Lam Son 719 was underway. Although intelligence reports showed the terrain along Route 9 in Laos was favorable for armored vehicles, in reality, it was a neglected, 40-year-old, unevenly surfaced, single-lane dirt road with high shoulders on both sides that left no room for maneuver. The entire area was filled with huge bomb craters, undetected earlier by aerial reconnaissance, because of dense grass and bamboo. Tracked vehicles, jeeps, and trucks were, therefore, restricted almost entirely to the road, which threw the burden of reinforcement and resupply onto U.S. aviation assets. American helicopter units thus became the essential mode of logistical support, a role made increasingly more dangerous by regular low cloud cover and unremitting antiaircraft fire.

The mission called for the central column to advance down the valley of the Se Pone River, a relatively flat area of brush interspersed with huge swaths of jungle, dominated by heights to the north and the river and more mountains to the south. From the second day forward, the column was exposed to fire from the heights as NVA gunners fired down from preregistered machine-gun and mortar positions. U.S. Army helicopter pilots flying gunship and resupply missions—and later when they attempted to rescue ARVN troops from besieged hilltop firebases—encountered savage, accurate antiaircraft fire. The NVA’s favorite antiaircraft weapon, among others, was the 12.7mm Soviet-made heavy antiaircraft machine gun, which fired 600 rounds per minute and could damage an aircraft at elevations up to 3,000 feet. The highly accurate weapon helped bring down of hundreds of American helicopters during the war.

The ARVN column secured Route 9 as far as the village of Ban Dong, known to the Americans as A Luoi, 12 miles inside Laos approximately halfway to Tchepone. By February 11, A Luoi had become ARVN’s central firebase and command center for the operation. The plan now called for a quick ground thrust to secure Tchepone, but South Vietnamese forces found themselves stalled at A Luoi while awaiting overdue orders from Lam to continue. Abrams and Sutherland flew to Lam’s forward command post at Dong Ha to speed up the timetable. After the commanders’ meeting, Lam decided to first extend the 1st ARVN Infantry Division’s line of outposts south of Route 9 farther westward before the projected advance, which took another five days.

U.S. artillerymen near the Laotian border fire mortars into Laos in support of the advancing South Vietnamese. American helicopter units supplied the South Vietnamese throughout the operation.

Hanoi’s response to the incursion was gradual because North Vietnamese leaders believed their country was in danger of being attacked, either by an allied ground assault north across the Demilitarized Zone or a U.S. Marine amphibious landing off their eastern coast. When Hanoi’s leaders realized they were not going to be invaded, units of the B-70 Corps were ordered toward the Route 9 front. The 2nd NVA Division moved up from south of Tchepone and moved east to help meet the ARVN threat, while other units marched to the area from the AShau Valley. By early March, the North Vietnamese had massed some 36,000 soldiers in the area, giving them a numerical superiority of two to one over ARVN’s 17,000 men. The NVA committed elements of five infantry divisions (2nd, 304th, 308th, 320th, 324B) along with all their armor and artillery support, all the logistical units operating in the area, an engineer regiment, six well-camouflaged antiaircraft battalions, and six sapper battalions.

The NVA had massed its combat power for a larger purpose than defending its critical supply route. They were determined to seize an opportunity to fight a decisive battle on advantageous terms, destroy a large ARVN force, and thoroughly discredit and disrupt Vietnamization. The NVA opted to isolate the northern ARVN bases first, pounding those outposts with round-the-clock mortar, artillery, and rocket fire, as well as fierce antiaircraft fire against supporting air units. Although ARVN firebases were equipped with artillery, their guns were outranged by the enemy’s Soviet-supplied 130mm and 152mm pieces, which simply stood off and pounded ARVN positions at will. Massed ground attacks backed by artillery and armor would then finish the job.

While the NVA assault on Ranger North raged, Thieu visited I Corps headquarters and was notified of the attacks on the ranger bases and the overall major increase in enemy activity that made an advance on Tchepone questionable. Thieu advised Lam to postpone the main column’s advance on Tchepone and instead have the 1st ARVN Division, south of Route 9, begin a push southwest in the direction of Tchepone.

The North Vietnamese next shifted their attention to Ranger South. The outpost’s 400 ARVN troops and the survivors from Ranger North fought bravely for two days to hold the post, after which Lam ordered them to fight their way three miles southeast to FSB 30. Another casualty of the campaign, though an indirect one, was South Vietnamese General Do Cao Tri, III Corps commander and ARVN hero of the Cambodian fighting a year earlier. Ordered by Thieu to take over for the overmatched Lam, Tri died in a helicopter crash on February 23 while en route to his new command. That same day, FSB Hotel 2, south of Route 9, came under an intense infantry attack and was evacuated the next day.

FSB 31 was the next ARVN position to come under heavy enemy pressure. Dong, the Airborne Division commander, had opposed deploying his elite paratroopers in static defensive positions because he believed it stifled their usual aggressiveness. When vicious NVA antiaircraft fire made resupply and reinforcement of FSB 31 almost impossible, Dong ordered elements of the 17th Armored Squadron to advance north from A Luoi to reinforce the base. The armored force never arrived, however, because of conflicting orders from Lam and Dong, who halted the armored advance a few miles south of FSB 31. On February 25, the NVA pounded the base with artillery fire and then launched a conventional ground attack. Smoke, dust, and haze at first prevented observation by an American forward air control (FAC) aircraft, which was flying above 4,000 feet to avoid antiaircraft fire. When a Phantom was shot down not far away, the FAC left the area to direct a rescue operation, leaving the defenders with no one to direct fire support. NVA troops and tanks overran the base, capturing 3rd ARVN Brigade’s commander, while losing about 250 men killed and 11 tanks lost. The ARVN paratroopers suffered 155 killed and over 100 captured.

U.S. strategic and tactical bombers pulverized the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Laotian panhandle before the mission got under way.

A bit farther east, FSB 30 lasted almost another week. Although the steepness of the hill on which the base was situated prevented armor attacks, NVA artillery barrages were extremely effective, and by March 3 all the base’s 11 howitzers had been put out of action. ARVN armor and infantry from the 17th Cavalry moved north in a relief attempt, and within days, North and South Vietnamese tanks fought the first armored battles of the war. In the five days between February 25, the day FSB 31 fell, and March 1, three major engagements took place. With the help of U.S. airstrikes, the ARVN destroyed 17 PT-76 Soviet-built tanks and six T-54s at a loss of three of its five M-41 tanks and 25 M-113 armored personnel carriers. On March 3 the ARVN relief column encountered an NVA battalion without supporting armor, and with the assistance of B-52 strikes killed 400 North Vietnamese soldiers.

During each of the enemy’s attacks upon FSB 30 and the ARVN relief column, communist ground forces suffered heavy losses from B-52 and tactical airstrikes, armed helicopter attacks, and various forms of ground fire. In each instance, however, the NVA attacks were pressed home with competence and determination that both impressed and profoundly shocked those that observed them. The NVA lost over 1,130 soldiers killed in the battle.

With their main column stalled at A Luoi and the rangers and paratroopers fighting for their lives, Thieu and Lam now launched an airmobile assault upon Tchepone itself. The Tchepone area was sparsely populated; the war had evacuated or destroyed most of the nearby villages and towns. There was not much of military importance within the deserted town of Tchepone; most of the NVA’s supplies and other war material had been moved to caches in nearby forests and mountains west and east of the town proper. A particularly large, lightly defended cache was located just west of Tchepone, but the ARVN was unable to reach it. But because the Tchepone road junction was near the center of NVA logistical activity in the vital Laotian panhandle area, the ghost town had become a political and psychological symbol of great importance, more than an object of military value.

American commanders and news media had focused on Tchepone as Lam Son 719’s main objective. If ARVN forces could occupy at least part of the city, therefore, Thieu would have a political excuse for declaring a victory, of sorts, and withdrawing his forces to South Vietnam, as well as gaining political capital for the upcoming fall elections and saving his elite units from destruction. Thieu’s orders called for an assault on Tchepone, not with the main armored column, but with elements of the crack 1st Infantry Division now deployed south of Route 9. The occupation of vacated firebases south of the road would be taken over by South Vietnamese Marine Corps units stationed back at Khe Sanh as the operational reserve.

To Thieu’s credit, with the main ARVN column still miles away at A Luoi, the air assault on Tchepone caught the North Vietnamese off guard. It began on March 3 when one battalion from 1st Division was helilifted into two firebases, Sophia and Lolo, and landing zone Liz, all south of Route 9. Eleven helicopters were shot down and another 44 were damaged. Three days later, in the biggest helicopter assault of the war, 276 Hueys, protected by Cobra gunships and fighter aircraft, lifted two more battalions into landing zone Hope, 21/2 miles north of Tchepone. They lost only one helicopter to antiaircraft fire and an entire regiment of the ARVN’s best soldiers, several thousand men, was now on the ground in and around Tchepone. The NVA had not anticipated the move and could not react quickly enough to stop it; they did, however, hit the four bases, notably Lolo and Hope, with long-range artillery barrages.

North Vietnamese ground troops break through the perimeter of a ranger firebase during Lam Son 719. The communist attackers were supported by Soviet-built PT-76 and T-54 tanks.

Not far from Tchepone were several large storage areas still stocked with weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, rations, and equipment. Other areas nearby were used for troop replacement and training. ARVN soldiers scoured Tchepone and the surrounding area for almost a week, methodically destroying everything in sight or using artillery, tactical air, or gunships to destroy depot areas. Several thousand NVA soldiers (ARVN claimed 5,000), mostly rear area troops or troops in rest areas, were killed and another 69 were captured. Almost 4,000 captured enemy weapons were airlifted out and returned to South Vietnam and several thousand tons of enemy equipment were destroyed.

With their goal in Laos seemingly achieved and with enemy resistance near Tchepone mounting, Thieu and Lam now cut Lam Son 719 short and ordered the withdrawal of all South Vietnamese forces to begin on March 16. A frustrated Abrams implored Thieu to reinforce his troops in Laos (with the 2nd ARVN Infantry Division) and continue the offensive until the beginning of the rainy season. Abrams believed the ARVN, if properly reinforced, could turn the tide, inflict a crippling defeat on the enemy, and seriously damage, if not sever, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Thieu waited too long, however, as the battle shifted to Hanoi’s advantage. Antiaircraft fire remained devastating, and the communists had no trouble reinforcing or resupplying their troops in the battle area, which they knew well. When it became evident that ARVN had begun a withdrawal, the NVA mounted efforts to destroy South Vietnam’s forces before they could reach the border. Antiaircraft fire was increased to halt or slow helicopter resupply and evacuation efforts, under-manned ARVN firebases and landing zones were attacked, and ARVN ground forces had to run a deadly gauntlet of ambushes along Route 9.

Only a well-disciplined and coordinated army can execute an orderly withdrawal in the face of a determined enemy, and South Vietnamese forces at this point were neither. The retreat quickly turned into a rout; one by one, isolated fire support bases and landing zones were abandoned or overrun by the NVA. On March 21, South Vietnamese Marines at FSB Delta, south of A Luoi and Route 9, came under intense ground and artillery attacks. During an attempted extraction of the Marines, seven helicopters were shot down and another 50 were damaged, ending the evacuation attempt. The Marines finally broke out of the encirclement with heavy losses and fought their way to FSB Hotel, which was then hastily abandoned as well. During the extraction of the 2nd ARVN Regiment and Marines from FSB Hotel, 28 of 40 helicopters participating were damaged. The armored task force fared a little better, losing 60 percent of its tanks and half its armored personnel carriers to fuel shortages, breakdowns, or deadly NVA ambushes. Some 54 105mm and 28 155mm howitzers were abandoned and had to be destroyed by U.S. aircraft to prevent their capture and reuse by the enemy.

The 1st Armored Brigade was assigned to the ARVN Airborne Division and ordered to cover the retreat on Route 9. When an NVA prisoner disclosed that two enemy regiments were waiting in ambush a short distance ahead to the east, the 1st Brigade commander, Colonel Nguyen Trong Luat, notified Dong. Dong responded by ordering the airborne commander to conduct an air assault to clear the road, but neither man bothered to inform Luat. To avoid destruction on Route 9, Luat ordered his column to abandon the road—just four miles from the South Vietnamese border—and move onto a jungle trail to find an unguarded way back. After the trail came to a dead end at the steep banks of the Se Pone River, the armored force found itself trapped. The NVA quickly closed in and savage rearguard actions ensued. Two bulldozers were airlifted into the ARVN perimeter to create a ford, and the 1st Armored Brigade’s survivors crossed into South Vietnam on March 23 after a horrific 11-mile detour through the jungle.

By March 25, 45 days after the beginning of the operation, almost all remaining ARVN soldiers and South Vietnamese Marines had left Laos behind. For more than a week, several exhausted ARVN soldiers, Marines, and American helicopter crewmen, separated from their units, straggled into American bases after walking out of Laos. For the first time, the ARVN found itself forced to leave behind a substantial number of dead and wounded, a devastating emotional blow to families whose sons had perished in Laos. (For the Vietnamese people, who traditionally held a special reverence for the dead, the inability to bury slain family members in their own country was profoundly traumatic.) Returning ARVN soldiers and Marines certainly did not look like victorious soldiers and, without exception, believed they had not won a victory. The forward base at Khe Sanh had come under increasing artillery and sapper attacks and on April 6 was abandoned as well. Operation Lam Son 719 was essentially over.

A downed U.S. helicopter erupts in flames at Landing Zone Lolo. The raid failed to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and emboldened the North Vietnamese to launch a major invasion of South Vietnam the following year.

Coming under increasing criticism for terminating the operation so far ahead of schedule, South Vietnamese commanders, in a face-saving gesture, claimed that the incursion into lower Laos to cut the Trail was not yet over. To prove it, ARVN mounted two small airmobile raids into the Moung Nong area, the heart of Base Area 611 that had yet to be touched during Lam Son 719, with a 200-man strong force of elite troops from the 1st ARVN Infantry Division. Neither of the raids, which took place on March 31 and April 6, accomplished anything of real military value.

Thieu flew to Dong Ha to address the survivors of the incursion and claimed the Laos operation “was the biggest victory ever.” During a televised speech on April 7, Nixon asserted, “Tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded.” In Saigon, the American command’s claims of success were more limited in scope. The operation exposed grave deficiencies in South Vietnamese leadership, motivation, and operational ability. The incursion had turned into a disaster, decimating some of the ARVN’s finest units and destroying the confidence that had been slowly built up over the previous three years. American airpower prevented a defeat from becoming a disaster that might have been so complete as to encourage the North Vietnamese to keep moving right into Quang Tri Province.

Though Lam Son 719 probably forestalled a communist offensive across the DMZ set for spring 1971 because they diverted enemy units slated for that offensive to lower Laos, truck traffic on the trail system increased soon after the ARVN withdrawal. Sightings averaged 2,500 vehicles a month within days of Lam Son 719’s termination. The North Vietnamese viewed their efforts on the Route 9 front as a complete success and sped up the expansion of the trail on its western flank that had begun in 1970. After anti-communist Royal Laotian troops withdrew westward in the face of the NVA advance, the logistical artery known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, 60 miles wide just a few months before, was expanded to 90 miles in width. In both Laos and South Vietnam, captured communist documents contained exhortations to the troops to exploit their victory in lower Laos. Thus NVA troops began moving radar equipment and surface-to-air missiles into A Luoi.

That the ARVN reached its objective of Tchepone was of little consequence. Its stay there was brief, and the supply caches it discovered were disappointing since most were in the mountains to the east and west. South Vietnam’s forces failed to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail; indeed, infiltration reportedly increased during Lam Son 719 when the North Vietnamese shifted traffic to roads and trails farther west in Laos. In addition to massive equipment losses, the ARVN reported nearly 1,600 men killed in action (a figure believed by many to be far below the actual total) and total casualties as 7,683, or 45 percent losses, while the Americans suffered 215 men killed, 1,149 wounded, and 38 missing. The North Vietnamese suffered massive losses, especially as a result of mass infantry attacks and B-52 strikes, and their casualties may have approached 13,000. With another 7,000 men wounded or captured, communist losses may have reached or even exceeded 50 percent of their total strength.

What the allies had envisioned as a limited search-and-destroy mission—ARVN had committed only two reinforced Army divisions, one Ranger and one Airborne, and their lone Marine division, about 17,000 men—had turned into an intense, combined arms battle that found ARVN commanders experiencing their bloody baptism of fire in large-scale, conventional armored warfare. In retrospect, the operation had revealed the Saigon government’s shortcomings. Like the late President Ngo Dinh Diem before him, Thieu had pursued a policy of preserving politically dependable military units and declaring phantom victories. In Thieu’s case, caution may have been justified considering the unexpected strength of the enemy response in Laos.

In the end, a key consequence of Lam Son 719 was the decision by the emboldened Politburo in Hanoi to launch a major conventional invasion of South Vietnam in early 1972 that was meant to win the war. The North Vietnamese called it the Nguyen Hue Offensive. In the West, it was known as the 1972 Easter Offensive. Like Lam Son 719, it also failed in the face of overwhelming U.S. airpower, but it brought the North Vietnamese one step closer to their goal of toppling the South Vietnamese government and reuniting the two countries.

This article originally appeared in the May 2015 edition of WARFARE HISTORY NETWORK. Here is the direct link: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/mauled-in-laos/

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VC/NVA Terrorist Doctrine

This is the second post in the series referencing atrocities committed during the Vietnam War. This article addresses some of the VC/NVA atrocities in the war. They are not unique and incidents like these have occurred all over the world throughout history; in fact, these “crimes” continue even today (reposted from 2017). War is Hell and innocents die on both sides!

Warning: Many of the written and visual examples shared within this article are graphic, disturbing and sometime revolting – if descriptions and photos of brutalized human beings bother you, then I’d suggest you bypass this post and select another to read while you’re here.

This article is about the VC/NVA atrocities that occurred in Vietnam. They are not unique and incidents like these have occurred all over the world throughout history; in fact, these “crimes” continue even today.  During the Vietnam War, United States troops were charged with ‘war crimes’ against humanity – most notable of all, the My Lai Massacre.  There are 320 incidents listed in the Army report, and another 500 alleged atrocities that were either unproven or were otherwise discounted – at least 194 civilians were killed. These exclude My Lai so the total civilian death toll is presumably about 694.  From January 1965 through August 1973, 36 cases involving war crimes allegations against Army personnel were tried by court-martial – 201 U.S. soldiers and 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese. Allied malfeasance and atrocities were rare exceptions, most due to simple human idiocy rather than policy.

The VC/NVA soldiers, on the other hand, terrorized the populace and murdered many civilians as a matter of routine and did so on a daily basis. This was not reported on the nightly news or posted in daily newspaper stories. This terrorism was an integral part of Communist strategy in Vietnam which was in line with the idiom: “Cut off the head of the snake and the rest will be easier to deal with”. In military jargon, this means to remove the most dangerous opponent or leaders first then those left standing will be more docile.  This extensive use of terror on a daily basis received comparatively little attention from Western journalists occupied with covering the big unit war.  Terror was meant to demonstrate that both the rural and urban dweller were powerless against the Viet Cong and that the government could not protect them.

This is not an all-inclusive list of atrocities from the Vietnam War, and is meant only to give readers a glimpse of what civilians faced on a daily basis.

The terror had its real beginning when Red dictator Ho Chi Minh consolidated his power in the North. More than a year before his 1954 victory over the French, he launched a savage campaign against his own people. In virtually every North Vietnamese village, strong-arm squads assembled the populace to witness the “confessions” of landowners. As time went on, businessmen, intellectuals, school teachers, civic leaders — all who represented a potential source of future opposition — were also rounded up and forced to “confess” to “errors of thought.” Their public “trials,” were followed by conviction and, in many cases, execution. People were shot, beheaded, beaten to death; some were tied up, thrown into open graves and covered with stones until they were crushed to death, Ho had renewed his terror in North Vietnam periodically. Between 50,000 and 100,000 are believed to have died in these blood-baths — in a coldly calculated effort to discipline the party and the masses.

To be sure, few who escaped Ho’s terror now seem likely to tempt his wrath. During the 1950s, however, he had to quell some sizeable uprisings in North Vietnam — most notably one that occurred in early November 1956, in the An province, which included Ho’s birthplace village of Nam Dan. So heavily had he taxed the region that the inhabitants finally banded together and refused to meet his price. Ho sent troops to collect, and then sent in an army division, shooting. About 6,000 unarmed villagers were killed. The survivors scattered, some escaping to the South. The slaughter went largely unnoticed by a world then preoccupied with the Soviet Union’s rape of Hungary.

With North Vietnam tightly in hand, the central committee of the North Vietnamese communist party met in Hanoi on March 13, 1959, and decided it was time to move against South Vietnam. Soon, large numbers of Ho’s guerrillas were infiltrating to join cadres that had remained there after the French defeat in 1954. Their mission: to eliminate South Vietnam’s leadership, including elected officials, “natural” leaders, anyone and everyone to whom people might turn for advice. Also to be liquidated were any South Vietnamese who had relatives in their country’s armed forces, civil, services or police; any who failed to pay communist taxes promptly; any with five or more years of education.

VC soldiers routinely left bombs in markets, hotels and restaurants within the larger cities to target civilians and soldiers who might be visiting.

A captured VC guerrilla explained how his eight-man team moved against a particular target village: “The first time we entered the village, we arrested and executed on the spot four men who had been pointed out to us by the party’s district headquarters as our most dangerous opponents. One, who had fought in the war against the French was now a known supporter of the South Vietnamese government. Another had been seen fraternizing with government troops. These two were shot. The others, the village’s principal landowners, were beheaded.”

On 25 December 1965, the Viet Cong massacred 25 unarmed workers who were helping build a government canal. They were sleeping in a Buddhist pagoda when the Viet Cong attacked. The same thing occurred in My Tho, but in that case those that survived the initial onslaught were marched 4 kilometers to a public highway and killed in a political act to frighten other Vietnamese workers and citizens.

In battles at Ia Drang (23 October to 20 November 1965), NVA troops slaughtered U.S. wounded. Most bodies recovered were shot in the head or back. At other locations, wounded American soldiers were tied to trees, tortured, and then murdered.

Marines spoke of Vietcong who came home to two other villages. In one case, a 15-year-old girl who had given the US Marines information on VC activities was taken into the jungle and tortured for hours, then beheaded. As a warning to other villagers, her head was placed on a pole in front of her home. Her murderers were her brother and two of his VC comrades. In the other case, when a VC learned that his wife and two young children had cooperated with Marines who had befriended them, he himself cut out their tongues.

During another Marine patrol, a village chief and his wife were distraught as one of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: “If he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

December 5, 1967, communists perpetrated what must rank among history’s most monstrous blasphemies at Dak Son, a central highlands village of some 2,000. Montagnards — a tribe of gentle but fiercely independent mountain people. They had moved away from their old village in VC-controlled territory, ignored several VC orders to return and refused to furnish male recruits to the VC.

Two VC battalions struck in the earliest hours, when the village was asleep. Quickly killing the sentries, the communists swarmed among the rows of tidy, thatch-roofed homes, putting the torch to them. The first knowledge that many of the villagers had of the attack was when VC troops turned flamethrowers on them in their beds. Some families awoke in time to escape into nearby jungle. Some men stood and fought, giving their wives and children time to crawl into trenches dug beneath their homes as protection against mortar and rifle fire. But when every building was ablaze, the communists took their flamethrowers to the mouth of each trench and poured in a long, searing hell of fire — and, for good measure, tossed grenades into many. Methodical and thorough, they stayed at it until daybreak, then left in the direction of the Cambodian border.

Morning revealed a scene of unbelievable horror. The village now was only a smoldering, corpse-littered patch on the lush green countryside. The bodies of 252 people, mostly mothers and children, lay blistered, charred, burned to the bone. Survivors, many of them horribly burned, wandered aimlessly about or stayed close to the incinerated bodies of loved ones, crying. Some 500 were missing; scores were later found in the jungle, dead of burns and other wounds; many have not been found.

The massacre at Dak Son was a warning to other Montagnard Settlements to cooperate. But many of the tribesmen, instead,  joined the allies to fight the communists.

General Walt, US Marines, tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These Communist atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.

TET 1968 – Battle for Hue

Months of meticulous planning and training had made the TET Offensive possible. The Communists had carefully selected the time for the attack. Because of Tet, they knew the city’s defenders would be at reduced strength, and the typically bad weather of the northeast monsoon season would hamper any allied aerial re-supply operations and impede close air support.

In the days leading up to Tet, hundreds of Viet Cong (VC) had already infiltrated the city by mingling with the throngs of pilgrims pouring into Hue for the holiday. They easily moved their weapons and ammunition into the bustling city, concealed in the vehicles, wagons and trucks carrying the influx of goods, food and wares intended for the days-long festivities.

Image/Picture produced and copyrighted by Citinomad.com

Like clockwork, in the dark, quiet morning hours of January 31, the stealth soldiers unpacked their weapons, donned their uniforms and headed to their designated positions across Hue in preparation for linking up with crack People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and VC assault troops closing in on the city. Infiltrators assembled at the Citadel gates ready to lead their comrades to strike key targets.

Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

At 3:40 a.m., a rocket and mortar barrage from the mountains to the west signaled the assault troops to launch their attack. By daybreak, the lightning strike was over and the invaders began to unleash a harsh new reality over the stunned city.  The Viet Cong set up provisional authorities shortly after capturing Huế in the early hours of January 31, 1968. They were charged with removing the existing government administration from power within the city and replacing it with a “revolutionary administration.” Working from lists of “cruel tyrants and reactionary elements” previously developed by Viet Cong intelligence officers, many people were to be rounded up following the initial hours of the attack. These included Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers, civil servants, political party members, local religious leaders, schoolteachers, American civilians and other international people.

As PAVN and VC troops roamed freely to consolidate their gains, political officers set about rounding up South Vietnamese and foreigners unfortunate enough to be on their “special lists.” Marching up and down the Citadel’s narrow streets, the cadre called out the names on their lists over loudspeakers, ordering them to report to a local school. Those not reporting voluntarily would be hunted down.

Phase one was a series of kangaroo court trials of local ARVN officials. The highly publicized trials lasted anywhere from 5 – 10 minutes and the accused were always found guilty of “crimes against the people.”

Phase two was implemented when the communists thought that they could hold the city long-term, and consisted of a campaign of “social reconstruction” along Maoistdogmatic lines. Those who the communists believed to be counter-revolutionaries were singled out in this phase. Catholics, intellectuals, prominent businessmen, and other “imperialist lackeys” were targeted in order to “build a new social order”.

The last phase began when it became evident that the communists could not hold the city and was designed to “leave no witnesses”.  Anyone who could identify individual VC members who participated in the occupation was to be killed and their bodies hidden.

The communists’ actions were based on a series of orders issued by the High Command and the PRG. In a 3500-page document issued on January 26, 1968, by the Trị-Thiên-Huế Political Directorate, the political cadres were given specific instructions of operating in close support of the regular military and guerrilla elements, the political cadre were to: destroy and disorganize the Republic of Viet Nam’s (RVN’s) administrative machinery “from province and district levels to the city wards, streets, and wharves;” motivate the people of Hue to take up arms, pursue the enemy, seize power, and establish a revolutionary government; motivate (recruit) local citizens for military and “security” forces .. transportation and supply activities, and to serve wounded soldiers, pursue to the end (and) punish spies, reactionaries, and “tyrants” and “maintain order and security in the city”

It was reported that on the 5th day of the Viet Cong occupation in the Catholic district of Huế, all able-bodied males over age 15, approximately 400 boys and men, who took refuge in Phủ Cam Cathedral were taken away and killed.  Some had been on the VC’s blacklist, some were of military age and some just looked prosperous. In an interview Ho Ty, a VC commander who took part in the advanced planning of a general uprising, recounted that the Communist party “was particularly anxious to get those people at Phủ Cam. The Catholics were considered particular enemies of ours.” It was apparently this group whose remains were later found in the Da Mai Creek bed. The murders of 500 people at Da Mai were authorized by PRG command “on grounds that the victims had been traitors to the revolution.

Three professors, Professor Horst-Günther Krainick, Dr. Alois Alteköster, and Dr. Raimund Discher, who taught at the Huế University’s Faculty of Medicine and were members of the West German Cultural Mission, along with Mrs. Elisabeth Krainick, were arrested and executed by North Vietnamese troops during their invasion of Huế in February 1968.

Two French priests, Fathers Urbain and Guy, were seen being led away and suffered a similar fate. Urbain’s body was found buried alive, bound hand and foot. Guy, who was 48, was stripped of his cassock and forced to kneel down on the ground where he was shot in the back of the head. He was in the same grave with Father Urbain and 18 others.

Alje Vennema, a Dutch-Canadian doctor who lived in Hue and witnessed the battle and the massacre, wrote The Viet Cong Massacre at Hue in 1976. He recounts numerous stories of murders. A 48-year-old street vendor, Mrs. Nguyen Thi Lao, was “arrested on the main street. Her body was found at the school. Her arms had been bound and a rag stuffed into her mouth; there were no wounds to the body. She was probably buried alive.” A 44-year-old bricklayer, Mr. Nguyen Ty, was “seized on February 2, 1968…His body was found on March 1st; his hands were tied, and he had a bullet wound through his neck which had come out through the mouth.”

At Ap Dong Gi Tay “110 bodies were uncovered; again most had their hands tied and rags stuffed in their mouth. All of them were men, among them fifteen students, several military men, and civil servants, young and old.” “Sometimes a whole family was eliminated, as was the case with the merchant, Mr. Nam Long, who together with his wife and five children was shot at home.” “Mr. Phan Van Tuong, a laborer at the province headquarters, suffered a similar fate by being shot outside his house with four of his children.”

Vennema listed 27 graves with a total of 2397 bodies, most of which had been executed. He cited numerous eyewitness accounts of executions by PAVN and VC troops and described the condition of bodies found in the graves. Many had their hands tied behind their backs. Some were shot in the head. Some had rags stuffed in their mouths and had no evidence of wounds, apparently having been buried alive. Some had evidence of having been beaten. A few were identified as PAVN or VC troops killed during the battle.

An eyewitness, Nguyen Tan Chau, recounted how he was captured by Communist troops and marched south with 29 other prisoners bound together, in three groups of ten. Chau managed to escape and hide in the darkness just before the others were executed. From there he witnessed what happened next. “The larger prisoners were separated into pairs, tied together back to back and shot. The others were shot singly. All were dumped into two shallow graves, including those who had been wounded but were not dead.”

The Battle of Huế began on January 31, 1968, and lasted a total of 26 days. During the months and years that followed, dozens of mass graves were discovered in and around Huế. Victims included women, men, children, and infants.

The estimated death toll was between 2,800 and 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war, or 5%-10% of the total population of Hue. The Republic of Vietnam released a list of 4,062 victims identified as having been either murdered or abducted. Victims were found bound, tortured, and sometimes buried alive. Many victims were also clubbed to death.

On April 5, 1968, the bodies of the executed professors along with many Vietnamese civilians also executed, were discovered in mass graves near Huế.  Khmer Rouge (Cambodian Communists) were particularly brutal; as guerrillas they slaughtered whole villages — after gaining power estimates of dead from their actions run into millions.

Some graves were found purely by accident. A farmer working in his field tripped on a wire sticking out of the ground. He pulled on it to remove it and a skeletal hand popped out of the ground. Other graves were found when people noticed suspiciously green grass in sandy areas. The Da Mai Creek massacre was discovered after three VC defected and told authorities about the murders.  An ARVN soldier on patrol south of Hue noticed a wire sticking out of the ground. Thinking it was a booby trap, he very carefully worked to uncover it. He discovered the body of an old man, his hands tied together with the wire. Two days later 130 bodies had been uncovered.

During the first seven months of 1969, a second major group of graves was found. Then, in September, three Communist defectors told 101st Airborne Division intelligence officers that they had witnessed the killing of several hundred people at Da Mai Creek, about 10 miles south of Hue, in February 1968. A search revealed the remains of about 300 people in the creek bed. Finally, in November, a fourth major discovery of bodies was made in the Phu Thu Salt Flats, near the fishing village of Luong Vien, 10 miles east of Hue. All total, nearly 2,800 bodies were recovered from these mass graves.

We may never know what really happened at Hue, but it is clear that mass executions did occur and that reports of the massacre there had a significant impact on South Vietnamese and American attitudes for many years after the Tet Offensive.

In total, from 1957 to 1973, the Viet Cong assassinated 36,725 South Vietnamese and abducted another 58,499, only several thousand returning, indicating tens of thousands others were assassinated. The VC death squads focused on leaders at the village level and on anyone who improved the lives of the peasants such as medical personnel, social workers, civil engineers, and schoolteachers. The 36,000 figure alone, given Viet Nam’s 17 million population, represents a national mortality proportion that would equal about 420,000 Americans assassinated, exclusive of combat fatalities, of which South Viet Nam’s military sustained 275,000 killed.

The perception that a bloodbath like the one that occurred at Hue would follow any takeover by the North Vietnamese cast a long shadow and significantly contributed to the abject panic that seized South Vietnam when the North Vietnamese launched their final offensive in 1975—and this panic resulted in the disintegration and defeat of the South Vietnamese armed forces, the fall of Saigon and, ultimately, the demise of the Republic of Vietnam as a sovereign nation.

After North Vietnam violated the Paris Peace Agreements and took over South Vietnam by bloody military force, they murdered thousands more civilians. Those that were not executed were taken from their homes and jailed for years in forced labor concentration camps. Some are still being held today. SEE MORE BELOW.

Sources:

Reader’s Digest (Nov. ’68), Uncensored History, HistoryNet, Wikepedia, U.S. Veteran Dispatch-1997,
http://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/15/archives/communist-atrocities-in-vietnam,
http://vnafmamn.com/VNWar_atrocities.html,
http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/1977/08b.html,
http://www.psywarrior.com/VietCongAtrocity.html

*****

THE FOLLOWING WAS PROVIDED BY MY FRIEND, BOB BAKER, FROM HIS NEW BOOK ABOUT VC/NVA ATROCITIES OCCURRING DURING THE EASTER OFFENSIVE:

The 571 st Military Intelligence Detachment of the 525 th Military Intelligence Group was the only US Army intelligence unit still operating in I Corps/First Regional Assistance Command in northern South Vietnam when the Easter Offensive of 1972 began on March 30, 1972. We were the only source for NVA Order of Battle and movement, and for terrorist activity throughout I Corps during the early phase of the NVA invasion. For years, reports about the VC using young villagers as manual laborers or as constant blood donors for their wounded, and sexually abusing the females, were common. These files made clear how sadistic and cruel most of the VC were to US personnel, soldiers of ARVN and Vietnam Marine Corps (VNMC), and the civilian populace (including women, children, and infants).

During the Easter Offensive, this wanton disregard for human life exploded; this time it was witnessed by numerous press and other eyewitness reports that were published in newspapers (albeit tucked well inside them). NVA troops were part of a blocking force south of Quang Tri that reportedly killed between 1,000 and 2,000 soldiers, old men, women, and children escaping southward along QL-1 (the national north–south highway) during late April and early May. The commander of the battalion told his troops that anyone coming south should be considered the enemy and they were to kill them all.

Throughout South Vietnam, VC execution squads quickly roamed the countryside in areas recently swept through by NVA troops.
These are a few examples of specific instances of what occurred in the first few months of the offensive.

In Quang Ngai, Local Force VC Sappers burned down 15 villages, adding to the 30,000 people made homeless in May.A “People’s Court” in Binh Dinh executed 45 people, after they dug their own graves sometime in the summer of 1972. The VC also engaged in bayonet practice of at least three men, as well. In another instance in what has been called the “Binh Dinh Massacre,” between 250–500 people were tried and executed from among 6,000–7,000 collected and executed or impressed into servitude by VC/NVA forces in the An Lao and An Hue areas.Forty-five people were buried alive in the Tam Quan District, as a local politician was beheaded in Bon Son village. As of May 8, 1972, 700,000 people had fled the communist onslaught, mostly from Quang Tri and Thua Thien Provinces, which created a massive refugee problem. Since the offensive began, it was estimated that 20,000 civilians were killed. The 571 st also had a key role in Brightlight reporting—sightings and other information on POWs, other military, and civilian personnel. I remember many such reports during my tour. Mobile VC Prisoner of War (POW) camps were also known to exist in the western areas of I Corps. Upon receipt of any such indications, everyone worked hard to ensure that the information was expedited via FLASH (the highest and most immediate priority message) that could interrupt all other message traffic and by personal message delivery, to everyone, especially the Joint Personnel Recovery Command (JPRC), MACV, XXIV Corps/FRAC and nearby units throughout I Corps. Looking at the 525th Staff Duty Officer (SDO) logs for February–April 1972, there were 13 instances of Brightlight reports sent to the group HQ in Saigon from all the country-wide detachments of the 525th MI Group.

Break in the Chain Intelligence Ignored is available in hardback and in Kindle through Amazon and elsewhere.

Break in the Chain – Intelligence Ignored: Military Intelligence in Vietnam and Why the Easter Offensive Should Have Turned out Differently: Baker, W. R.: 9781612009919: Amazon.com: Books

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Mỹ Lai massacre

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If we sweep this and other atrocities from the previous wars under the carpet, then we can’t learn from the mistakes and ensure they aren’t repeated. We don’t like to admit they happen, but happen they do. Humanity in war is horrible, but it still doesn’t excuse the individuals when it happens. This is a two-part series. Next week, I’ll present an article outlining those atrocities committed by the VC/NVA. We still don’t know the underlying facts of why this order was given in the first place. This article is lengthy but quite thorough.

WARNING: THIS IS A VERY DESCRIPTIVE ARTICLE. READ AT YOUR OWN DISGRESSION.

The Mỹ Lai massacre was the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by United States troops in Sơn Tịnh district, South Vietnam, on 16 March 1968 during the Vietnam War. Between U.S. Army soldiers killed 347 and 504 unarmed people from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children who were as young as 12. Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted. Found guilty of murdering 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence but served three-and-a-half years under house arrest after President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence.

This war crime, which was later called “the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War”, took place in two hamlets of Sơn Mỹ village in Quảng Ngãi Province. These hamlets were marked on the U.S. Army topographic maps as Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khê.

The U.S. Army slang name for the hamlets and sub-hamlets in that area was Pinkville, and the carnage was initially referred to as the Pinkville Massacre. Later, when the U.S. Army started its investigation, the media changed it to the Massacre at Songmy. Currently, the event is referred to as the Mỹ Lai Massacre in the United States and called the Sơn Mỹ Massacre in Vietnam.

Photo taken by U.S. Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on 16 March 1968, in the aftermath of the Mỹ Lai Massacre showing mostly women and children dead on a road

The massacre prompted global outrage when it became public knowledge in November 1969. The massacre contributed to domestic opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, both because of the scope of killing and cover-up attempts.

Initially, three U.S. servicemen who had tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians were shunned, and even denounced as traitors by several U.S. Congressmen, including Mendel Rivers (D–SC), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Thirty years later, these servicemen were recognized and decorated, one posthumously, by the U.S. Army for shielding non-combatants from harm in a war zone.

Mỹ Lai is the largest publicized massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in the 20th century.

Operation

Sơn Mỹ operations, 16 March 1968

Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division, arrived in South Vietnam in December 1967. Though their first three months in Vietnam passed without any direct contact with People’s Army of Vietnam or Viet Cong (VC) forces, by mid-March the company had suffered 28 casualties involving mines or booby-traps.

During the Tet Offensive in January 1968, attacks were carried out in Quảng Ngãi by the VC 48th Local Force Battalion. U.S. military intelligence assumed that the 48th Battalion, having retreated and dispersed, was taking refuge in the village of Sơn Mỹ, in Quảng Ngãi Province. A number of specific hamlets within that village – designated Mỹ Lai (1) through Mỹ Lai (6) – were suspected of harboring the 48th. Sơn Mỹ was located southwest of the Batangan Peninsula, a VC stronghold throughout the war.

Sơn Mỹ operations, 16 March 1968

In February and March 1968, the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was aggressively trying to regain the strategic initiative in South Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, and the search-and-destroy operation against the 48th Battalion thought to be located in Sơn Mỹ became a small part of the US military’s overall strategy. Task Force Barker (TF Barker), a battalion-sized ad hoc unit of 11th Brigade, was to be deployed for the operation. It was formed in January 1968, and composed of three rifle companies of the 11th Brigade, including Charlie Company, led by Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Frank A. Barker. Sơn Mỹ village was included in the area of operations of TF Barker. The area of operations (AO) was codenamed Muscatine AO, after Muscatine County, Iowa, the home county of the 23rd Division’s commander, Major General Samuel W. Koster.

In February 1968, TF Barker had already tried to secure Sơn Mỹ, with limited success. After that, the village area began to be referred to as Pinkville by TF Barker troops.

On 16–18 March, TF Barker planned to engage and destroy the remnants of the 48th Battalion, allegedly hiding in the Sơn Mỹ village area. Before the engagement, Colonel Oran K. Henderson, the 11th Brigade commander, urged his officers to “go in there aggressively, close with the enemy, and wipe them out for good”. In turn, LTC Barker reportedly ordered the 1st Battalion commanders to burn the houses, kill the livestock, destroy food supplies, and destroy and/or poison the wells.

On the eve of the attack, at the Charlie Company briefing, Captain Ernest Medina told his men that nearly all the civilian residents of the hamlets in Sơn Mỹ village would have left for the market by 07:00, and that any who remained would most likely be VC or VC sympathizers. He was asked whether the order included the killing of women and children. Those present later gave differing accounts of Medina’s response. Some, including platoon leaders, testified that the orders, as they understood them, were to kill all VC and North Vietnamese combatants and “suspects” (including women and children, as well as all animals), to burn the village, and pollute the wells. He was quoted as saying, “They’re all VC, now go and get them”, and was heard to reply to the question “Who is my enemy?”, by saying, “Anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him, sometimes even if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her.”

At Calley’s trial, one defense witness testified that he remembered Medina instructing to destroy everything in the village that was “walking, crawling or growling”.

Charlie Company was to enter the village of Sơn Mỹ spearheaded by 1st Platoon, engage the enemy, and flush them out. The other two companies from TF Barker were ordered to secure the area and provide support if needed. They designated the area a free fire zone, where American forces were allowed to deploy artillery and air strikes in populated areas, without consideration of risk to civilian or non-combatant lives. Varnado Simpson, a rifleman in Charlie Company, said, “We were told to leave nothing standing. We did what we were told, regardless of whether they were civilians.”

Killings

South Vietnamese women and children in Mỹ Lai before being killed in the massacre, 16 March 1968.  According to court testimony, they were killed seconds after the photo was taken. The woman on the right is adjusting her blouse buttons following an attempted sexual assault that happened before the massacre

On the morning of 16 March at 07:30, around 100 soldiers from Charlie Company led by Medina, following a short artillery and helicopter gunship barrage, landed in helicopters at Sơn Mỹ, a patchwork of individual homesteads, grouped settlements, rice paddies, irrigation ditches, dikes, and dirt roads, connecting an assortment of hamlets and sub-hamlets. The largest among them were the hamlets Mỹ Lai, Cổ Lũy, Mỹ Khê, and Tu Cung.

Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go… There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted.  David H. Hackworth

The GIs expected to engage the Vietcong Local Force 48th Battalion, which was one of the Vietcong’s most successful units. Although the GIs were not fired upon after landing, they still suspected there were VC guerrillas hiding underground or in the huts. Confirming their suspicions, the gunships engaged several armed enemies in the vicinity of Mỹ Lai, killing four; later, one weapon was retrieved from the site.

According to the operational plan, 1st Platoon, led by Second Lieutenant (2LT) William Calley, and 2nd Platoon, led by 2LT Stephen Brooks, entered the hamlet of Tu Cung in line formation at 08:00, while the 3rd Platoon, commanded by 2LT Jeffrey U. Lacross, and Captain Medina’s command post remained outside. On approach, both platoons fired at people they saw in the rice fields and in the brush.

Instead of the expected enemy, the GIs found women, children and old men, many of whom were cooking breakfast over outdoor fires. The villagers were getting ready for a market day and at first did not panic or run away, as they were herded into the hamlet’s common spaces and homestead yards. Harry Stanley, a machine gunner from Charlie Company, said during the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division inquiry that the killings started without warning. He first observed a member of 1st Platoon strike a Vietnamese man with a bayonet. Then the same trooper pushed another villager into a well and threw a grenade in. Next, he saw fifteen or twenty people, mainly women and children, kneeling around a temple with burning incense. They were praying and crying. They were all killed by shots to the head.

Most of the killings occurred in the southern part of Tu Cung, a sub-hamlet of Xom Lang, which was a home to 700 residents. Xom Lang was erroneously marked on the U.S. military operational maps of Quảng Ngãi Province as Mỹ Lai.

A large group of approximately 70–80 villagers was rounded up by 1st Platoon in Xom Lang and led to an irrigation ditch east of the settlement. They were then pushed into the ditch and shot dead by soldiers after repeated orders issued by Calley, who was also shooting. PFC Paul Meadlo testified that he expended several M16 rifle magazines. He recollected that women were saying “No VC” and were trying to shield their children. He remembered that he was shooting old men and women, ranging in ages from grandmothers to teenagers, many with babies or small children in their arms, since he was convinced at that time that they were all booby-trapped with grenades and poised to attack. On another occasion during the security sweep of My Lai, Meadlo again fired into civilians side by side with Lieutenant Calley.

PFC Dennis Konti, a witness for the prosecution, told of one especially gruesome episode during the shooting, “A lot of women had thrown themselves on top of the children to protect them, and the children were alive at first. Then, the children who were old enough to walk got up and Calley began to shoot the children”. Other 1st Platoon members testified that many of the deaths of individual Vietnamese men, women and children occurred inside Mỹ Lai during the security sweep. To ensure the hamlets could no longer offer support to the enemy, the livestock was shot as well.

When PFC Michael Bernhardt entered the sub hamlet of Xom Lang, the massacre was underway:

“I walked up and saw these guys doing strange things … Setting fire to the hootches and huts and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them … going into the hootches and shooting them up … gathering people in groups and shooting them … As I walked in you could see piles of people all through the village … all over. They were gathered into large groups. I saw them shoot an M79 grenade launcher into a group of people who were still alive. But it was mostly done with a machine gun. They were shooting women and children just like anybody else. We met no resistance and I only saw three captured weapons. We had no casualties. It was just like any other Vietnamese village – old papa-sans, women and kids. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place, dead or alive.”One group of 20–50 villagers was herded south of Xom Lang and killed on a dirt road. According to U.S. Army photographer Sgt. Ronald Haeberle‘s eyewitness account of the massacre, in one instance,

“There were some South Vietnamese people, maybe fifteen of them, women and children included, walking on a dirt road maybe 100 yards [90 m] away. All of a sudden the GIs just opened up with M16s. Beside the M16 fire, they were shooting at the people with M79 grenade launchers … I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Calley testified that he heard the shooting and arrived on the scene. He observed his men firing into a ditch with Vietnamese people inside, then began to take part in the shooting himself, using an M16 from a distance of no more than 5 feet (1.5 m). During the massacre, a helicopter landed on the other side of the ditch and the pilot asked Calley if they could provide any medical assistance to the wounded civilians in Mỹ Lai; Calley admitted, replying that “a hand grenade was the only available means he had for their evacuation”. At 11:00 Medina radioed an order to cease fire, and 1st Platoon took a break, during which they ate lunch.

An unidentified man and child who were killed on a road

Members of 2nd Platoon killed at least 60–70 Vietnamese, as they swept through the northern half of Mỹ Lai and through Binh Tay, a small sub-hamlet about 400 meters (1,300 ft) north of Mỹ Lai. The platoon suffered one dead and seven wounded by mines and booby traps. After the initial sweeps by 1st and 2nd Platoons, 3rd Platoon was sent in to deal with any “remaining resistance”. 3rd Platoon, which stayed in reserve, also reportedly rounded up and killed a group of seven to twelve women and children.

Since Charlie Company did not meet any enemy opposition at Mỹ Lai and did not request back-up, Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of TF Barker was transported by air between 08:15 and 08:30 3 km (2 mi) away. It attacked the sub hamlet My Hoi of the hamlet known as Cổ Lũy, which was mapped by the Army as Mỹ Khê. During this operation, between 60 and 155 people, including women and children, were killed.

Over the remaining day, both companies were involved in the further burning and destruction of dwellings, as well as the continued mistreatment of Vietnamese detainees. While it was noted in the later Courts Martial proceedings that some soldiers of Charlie Company did not participate in any killings, it was also noted that they neither openly protested against them nor filed complaints later to their superiors.

William Thomas Allison, a professor of Military History at Georgia Southern University, wrote, “By midmorning, members of Charlie Company had killed hundreds of civilians and raped or assaulted countless women and young girls. They encountered no enemy fire and found no weapons in My Lai itself”.

By the time the killings stopped, Charlie Company had suffered one casualty – a soldier who had intentionally shot himself in the foot to avoid participating in the massacre – and just three enemy weapons were confiscated.

Rapes

According to the Peers Commission Investigation, the US government allocated a commission for inquiry into the incident, which concluded at least 20 Vietnamese women and girls were raped during the Mỹ Lai massacre. Since there had been little research on the case other than that of the Peers Commission, which solely accounts for the cases with explicit rape signs like torn cloth and nudity, the actual number of rapes was not easy to estimate. According to the reports, the rape victims ranged between the ages of 10 – 45, with nine being under 18. The sexual assaults included gang rapes and sexual torture.

No U.S. serviceman was charged with rape. According to an eyewitness, as reported by Seymour Hersh in his book on the massacre, a woman was raped after her children were killed by the U.S. soldiers. Another Vietnamese villager also noticed soldiers raped a 13-year-old girl.

Helicopter crew intervention

Warrant officer Hugh Thompson Jr. played a major role in ending the Mỹ Lai Massacre and later testified in the military prosecution against the war criminals responsible.

Warrant officer Hugh Thompson Jr. played a major role in ending the Mỹ Lai Massacre and later testified in the military prosecution against the war criminals responsible.

Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., a helicopter pilot from Company B (Aero-Scouts), 123rd Aviation Battalion, Americal Division, saw dead and wounded civilians as he was flying over the village of Sơn Mỹ, providing close-air support for ground forces. The crew made several attempts to radio for help for the wounded. They landed their helicopter by a ditch, which they noted was full of bodies and in which they could discern movement by survivors. Thompson asked a sergeant he encountered there (David Mitchell of 1st Platoon) if he could help get the people out of the ditch; the sergeant replied that he would “help them out of their misery”. Thompson, shocked and confused, then spoke with 2LT Calley, who claimed to be “just following orders”. As the helicopter took off, Thompson saw Mitchell firing into the ditch.

Thompson and his crew witnessed an unarmed woman being kicked and shot at point-blank range by Medina, who later claimed that he thought she had a hand grenade. Thompson then saw a group of civilians at a bunker being approached by ground personnel. Thompson landed, and told his crew that if the soldiers shot at the villagers while he was trying to get them out of the bunker, then they were to open fire on the soldiers.

Thompson threatened to shoot any American soldier who continued to fire upon the civilians

Thompson later testified that he spoke with a lieutenant (identified as Stephen Brooks of 2nd Platoon) and told him there were women and children in the bunker, and asked if the lieutenant would help get them out. According to Thompson, “he [the lieutenant] said the only way to get them out was with a hand grenade”. Thompson testified that he then told Brooks to “just hold your men right where they are, and I’ll get the kids out.” He found 12–16 people in the bunker, coaxed them out, and led them to the helicopter, standing with them while they were flown out in two groups.

Returning to Mỹ Lai, Thompson and other aircrew members noticed several large groups of bodies. Spotting some survivors in the ditch, Thompson landed again. A crew member, Specialist 4 Glenn Andreotta, entered the ditch and returned with a bloodied but apparently unharmed four-year-old girl, who was then flown to safety.

Upon returning to the LZ Dottie base in his OH-23, Thompson reported to his section leader, Captain Barry Lloyd, that the American infantry was no different from Nazis in their slaughter of innocent civilians:

“It’s mass murder out there. They’re rounding them up and herding them in ditches and then just shooting them.”

Thompson then reported what he had seen to his company commander, Major Frederic W. Watke, using terms such as “murder” and “needless and unnecessary killings”. Other helicopter pilots and aircrew members confirmed Thompson’s statements.

For his actions at Mỹ Lai, they awarded Thompson the Distinguished Flying Cross, while they awarded his crew members Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn the Bronze Star. Glenn Andreotta was awarded his medal posthumously, as he was killed in Vietnam on April 8, 1968. As the DFC citation included a fabricated account of rescuing a young girl from Mỹ Lai from “intense crossfire”, Thompson threw his medal away. He later received a Purple Heart for other services in Vietnam.

In March 1998, the Soldier’s Medal, the highest the U.S. Army can award for bravery replaced the helicopter crew’s medals not involving direct conflict with the enemy. The medal citations state they were “for heroism above and beyond the call of duty while saving the lives of at least 10 Vietnamese civilians during the unlawful massacre of non-combatants by American forces at My Lai”.

Thompson initially refused to accept the medal when the U.S. Army wanted to award it quietly. He demanded it be done publicly and that his crew also be honored in the same way. The veterans also contacted the survivors of Mỹ Lai.

Aftermath

Dead bodies outside a burning home.

After returning to base at about 11:00, Thompson reported the massacre to his superiors.  His allegations of civilian killings quickly reached LTC Barker, the operation’s overall commander. Barker radioed his executive officer to find out from Medina what was happening on the ground. Medina then gave the cease-fire order to Charlie Company to “cut [the killing] out – knock it off”.

Since Thompson made an official report of the civilian killings, he was interviewed by Colonel Oran Henderson, the commander of the 11th Infantry Brigade. Concerned, senior American officers canceled similar planned operations by Task Force Barker against other villages (My Lai 5, My Lai 1, etc.) in Quảng Ngãi Province. Despite Thompson’s revealing information, Henderson issued a Letter of Commendation to Medina on 27 March 1968.

The following day, 28 March, the commander of Task Force Barker submitted a combat action report for the 16 March operation, in which he stated that the operation in Mỹ Lai was a success, with 128 VC combatants killed. The Americal Division commander, General Koster, sent a congratulatory message to Charlie Company.

General William C. Westmoreland, the head of MACV, also congratulated Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry for “outstanding action”, saying that they had “dealt the enemy a heavy blow.”  Later, he changed his stance, writing in his memoir that it was “the conscious massacre of defenseless babies, children, mothers, and old men in a kind of diabolical slow-motion nightmare that went on for the better part of a day, with a cold-blooded break for lunch”.

Owing to the chaotic circumstances of the war and the U.S. Army’s decision not to undertake a definitive body count of noncombatants in Vietnam, the number of civilians killed at Mỹ Lai cannot be stated with certainty. Estimates vary from source to source, with 347 and 504 being the most commonly cited figures. The memorial at the site of the massacre lists 504 names, with ages ranging from one to 82. A later investigation by the U.S. Army arrived at a lower figure of 347 deaths, the official U.S. estimate. The official estimate by the local government remains 504.

Investigation and cover-up

Initial reports claimed “128 Viet Cong and 22 civilians” were killed in the village during a “fierce fire fight”. Westmoreland congratulated the unit on the “outstanding job”. As relayed at the time by Stars and Stripes magazine, “U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle.“

On 16 March 1968, in the official press briefing known as the “Five O’clock Follies”, a mimeographed release included this passage: “In an action today, Americal Division forces killed 128 enemy near Quang Ngai City. Helicopter gunships and artillery missions supported the ground elements throughout the day.”

Initial investigations of the Mỹ Lai operation were undertaken by Colonel Henderson, under orders from the Americal Division’s executive officer, Brigadier General George H. Young. Henderson interviewed several soldiers involved in the incident, then issued a written report in late April claiming that they inadvertently killed some 20 civilians during the operation. According to Henderson’s report, the civilian casualties that occurred were accidental and mainly attributed to long-range artillery fire. The Army was still describing the event as a military victory that had resulted in the deaths of 128 enemy combatants.

Six months later, Tom Glen, a 21-year-old soldier of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, wrote a letter to General Creighton Abrams, the new MACV commander. He described ongoing and routine brutality against Vietnamese civilians by American forces in Vietnam that he had witnessed, and then concluded,

It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs. … What I have outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem that cannot be overlooked, but can, through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated.

Colin Powell, then a 31-year-old Army major serving as assistant chief of staff of operations for the Americal Division, was charged with investigating the letter, which did not specifically refer to Mỹ Lai, as Glen had limited knowledge of the events there. In his report, Powell wrote, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal Division soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” A 2018 US Army case study of the massacre noted that Powell “investigated the allegations described in the [Glen] letter. He proved unable to uncover either widespread unnecessary killings, war crimes, or any facts related to My Lai …” some observers later characterized Powell’s handling of the assignment as “whitewashing” the atrocities of Mỹ Lai.

In May 2004, Powell, then United States Secretary of State, told CNN’s Larry King, “I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for Mỹ Lai. I got there after Mỹ Lai happened. So, in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they are still to be deplored.”

Seven months prior to the massacre at Mỹ Lai, on Robert McNamara’s orders, the Inspector General of the U.S. Defense Department investigated press coverage of alleged atrocities committed in South Vietnam. In August 1967, the 200-page report “Alleged Atrocities by U.S. Military Forces in South Vietnam” occurred.

Independently of Glen, Specialist 5 Ronald L. Ridenhour, a former door gunner from the Aviation Section, Headquarters Company, 11th Infantry Brigade, sent a letter in March 1969 to thirty members of Congress imploring them to investigate the circumstances of the “Pinkville” incident. He and his pilot, Warrant Officer Gilbert Honda, flew over Mỹ Lai several days after the operation and observed a scene of complete destruction. At one point, they hovered over a dead Vietnamese woman with a patch of the 11th Brigade on her body.

Ridenhour himself had not been present when the massacre occurred, but his account was compiled from detailed conversations with soldiers of Charlie Company who had witnessed and, sometimes, took part in the killing. He became convinced that something “rather dark and bloody did indeed occur” at Mỹ Lai, and was so disturbed by the tales he heard that within three months of being discharged from the Army he penned his concerns to Congress and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President. He included the name of Michael Bernhardt, an eyewitness who agreed to testify, in the letter.

Most recipients of Ridenhour’s letter ignored it, except for Congressman Mo Udall and Senators Barry Goldwater and Edward Brooke. Udall urged the House Armed Services Committee to call on Pentagon officials to investigate.

Public revelation and reaction

Under mounting pressure caused by Ridenhour’s letter, on 9 September 1969, the Army quietly charged Calley with six specifications of premeditated murder for the deaths of 109 South Vietnamese civilians near the village of Sơn Mỹ, at a hamlet called simply “My Lai”.

Calley’s Courts Martial was not released to the press and did not begin until over a year later. However, word of Calley’s prosecution found its way to American investigative reporter and freelance journalist Seymour Hersh. My Lai was first revealed to the American public on November 13, 1969—almost two years after the incident—when Hersh published a story through the Dispatch News Service. The article threatened to undermine the U.S. war effort and severely damage the Nixon presidency. Inside the White House, officials privately discussed how to contain the scandal. On November 21, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger emphasized that the White House needed to develop a “game plan”, to establish a “press policy”, and maintain a “unified line” in its public response to the incident. The White House established a “My Lai Task Force” whose mission was to “figure out how best to control the problem”, to make sure that administration officials “all don’t go in different directions” when discussing the incident, and to “engage in dirty tricks”. These included discrediting key witnesses and questioning Hersh’s motives for releasing the story. What soon followed was a public relations offensive by the administration designed to shape how My Lai would be portrayed in the press and understood by the American public.

After extensive interviews with Calley, Hersh broke the Mỹ Lai story in 35 newspapers on 13 November 1969; the Alabama Journal in Montgomery and the New York Times ran separate stories on the allegations against Calley on the 12th and 13th of November, respectively; on 20 November, Time, Life and Newsweek all covered the story, and CBS televised an interview with Paul Meadlo, a soldier in Calley’s unit during the massacre. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) published explicit photographs of dead villagers killed at Mỹ Lai.

As members of Congress called for an inquiry and news correspondents abroad expressed their horror at the massacre, they tasked the General Counsel of the Army Robert Jordan with speaking to the press. He refused to confirm allegations against Calley. Noting the significance of the fact that the statement was given at all, Bill Downs of ABC News said it amounted to the first public expression of concern by a “high defense official” that American troops “might have committed genocide”.

In November 1969, the Secretary of the Army and the Army Chief of Staff appointed Lieutenant General William R. Peers to thoroughly review the My Lai incident, 16–19 March 1968, and its investigation by the Army. Peers’s final report presented to higher-ups on 17 March 1970 was highly critical of top officers at brigade and divisional levels for participating in the cover-up, and the Charlie Company officers for their actions at Mỹ Lai.

According to Peers’s findings:

[The 1st Battalion] members had killed at least 175–200 Vietnamese men, women, and children. The evidence shows that it confirmed only 3 or 4 as Viet Cong although there were undoubtedly several unarmed VC (men, women, and children) among them and many more active supporters and sympathizers. They reported one man from the company as wounded by the accidental discharge of his weapon. … a tragedy of major proportions had occurred at Son My.

In a 2003 US Naval Academy lecture Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson said of the Peers report:

The Army had Lieutenant General William R. Peers investigate. He conducted a very thorough investigation. Congress did not like his investigation at all, because he pulled no punches, and he recommended court-martial for I think 34 people, not necessarily for the murder but for the cover-up. Really, the cover-up phase was probably as bad as the massacre itself, because he recommended court-martial for some very high-ranking individuals.

In 1968, an American journalist, Jonathan Schell, wrote that in the Vietnamese province of Quang Ngai, where the Mỹ Lai massacre occurred, the air strikes and artillery bombardments destroyed up to 70% of all villages, including the use of napalm; 40 percent of the population were refugees, and the overall civilian casualties were close to 50,000 a year. Regarding the massacre at Mỹ Lai, he stated, “There can be no doubt that such an atrocity was possible only because several other methods of killing civilians and destroying their villages had come to be the rule, and not the exception, in our conduct of the war”.

In May 1970, a sergeant who took part in Operation Speedy Express wrote a confidential letter to then Army Chief of Staff Westmoreland describing civilian killings he said were on the scale of the massacre occurring as “a My Lai each month for over a year” during 1968–69. Two other letters to this effect from enlisted soldiers to military leaders in 1971, all signed “Concerned Sergeant”, were uncovered within declassified National Archive documents. The letters describe common occurrences of civilian killings during population pacification operations. Army policy also stressed very high body counts, and this resulted in dead civilians being marked down as combatants. Alluding to indiscriminate killings described as unavoidable, the commander of the 9th Infantry Division, then Major General Julian Ewell, in September 1969, submitted a confidential report to Westmoreland and other generals describing the countryside in some areas of Vietnam as resembling the battlefields of Verdun.

In July 1969, the Office of Provost Marshal General of the Army examined the evidence collected by the Peers inquiry regarding possible criminal charges. Eventually, Calley was charged with several counts of premeditated murder in September 1969, and they later charged 25 other officers and enlisted men with related crimes.

Court martial

On 17 November 1970, a court-martial in the United States charged 14 officers, including Major General Koster, the Americal Division’s commanding officer, with suppressing information related to the incident. They later dropped most of the charges. Brigade commander Colonel Henderson was the only high ranking commanding officer who stood trial on charges relating to the cover-up of the Mỹ Lai massacre; They acquitted him on 17 December 1971.

During the four-month-long trial, Calley consistently claimed that he was following orders from his commanding officer, Captain Medina. Despite that, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on 29 March 1971, after being found guilty of the premeditated murder of not fewer than 20 people. Two days later, President Richard Nixon made the controversial decision to have Calley released from armed custody at Fort Benning, Georgia, and put under house arrest pending appeal of his sentence. The Army Court of Military Review upheld Calley’s conviction in 1973 and the U.S. Court of Military Appeals in 1974.

In August 1971, the convening authority reduced Calley’s sentence from life to twenty years. Calley would eventually serve three and one-half years under house arrest at Fort Benning including three months in the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In September 1974, he was paroled by the Secretary of the Army, Howard Callaway.

In a separate trial, Medina denied giving the orders that led to the massacre, and was acquitted of all charges, effectively negating the prosecution’s theory of “command responsibility”, now referred to as the “Medina standard”. Several months after his acquittal, however, Medina admitted he had suppressed evidence and had lied to Henderson about the number of civilian deaths.

Captain Kotouc, an intelligence officer from the 11th Brigade, was also court-martialed and found not guilty. They demoted Koster to brigadier general and lost his position as the Superintendent of West Point. His deputy, Brigadier General Young, received a letter of censure. They stripped both of Distinguished Service Medals which were awarded for service in Vietnam.

Of the 26 men initially charged, Calley was the only one convicted. Some have argued that the outcome of the Mỹ Lai courts-martial failed to uphold the laws of war established in the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals. Telford Taylor, a senior American prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote that legal principles established at the war crimes trials could have been used to prosecute senior American military commanders for failing to prevent atrocities such as the one at Mỹ Lai.

Howard Callaway, Secretary of the Army, was quoted in The New York Times in 1976 as stating that Calley’s sentence was reduced because Calley honestly believed that what he did was a part of his orders—a rationale that contradicts the standards set at Nuremberg and Tokyo, where following orders was not a defense for committing war crimes. On the whole, aside from the Mỹ Lai courts-martial, there were 36 military trials held by the U.S. Army from January 1965 to August 1973 for crimes against civilians in Vietnam.

Some authors have argued that the light punishments of the low-level personnel present at Mỹ Lai and unwillingness to hold higher officials responsible was part of a pattern in which the body-count strategy and the so-called “Mere Gook Rule” encouraged U.S. soldiers to err on the side of killing suspected Vietnamese enemies even if there was a very good chance that they were civilians. This, Nick Turse argues, made lesser-known massacres similar to Mỹ Lai and a pattern of war crimes common in Vietnam.

Survivors

In early 1972, the camp at Mỹ Lai (2) where the survivors of the Mỹ Lai massacre had been relocated was largely destroyed by Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) artillery and aerial bombardment, and remaining eyewitnesses were dispersed. They officially attributed the destruction to “Viet Cong terrorists”. Quaker service workers in the area gave testimony in May 1972 by Martin Teitel at hearings before the Congressional Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees in South Vietnam. In June 1972, Teitel’s account was published in The New York Times.

Many American soldiers who had been in Mỹ Lai during the massacre accepted personal responsibility for the loss of civilian lives. Some of them expressed regrets acknowledging no personal guilt, as, for example, Ernest Medina, who said, “I have regrets for it, but I have no guilt over it because I didn’t cause it. That’s not what the military, particularly the United States Army, is trained for.”

Lawrence La Croix, a squad leader in Charlie Company in Mỹ Lai, stated in 2010: “many people talk about Mỹ Lai, and they say, ‘Well, you know, yeah, but you can’t follow an illegal order.’ Trust me. There is no such thing. Not in the military. If I go into a combat situation and I tell them, ‘No, I’m not going. I’m not going to do that. I will not follow that order, well, they’d put me up against the wall and shoot me.”

On 16 March 1998, a gathering of local people and former American and Vietnamese soldiers stood together at the place of the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam to commemorate its 30th anniversary. American veterans Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn, who were shielding civilians during the massacre, addressed the crowd. Among the listeners was Phan Thi Nhanh, a 14-year-old girl at the time of the massacre. Thompson saved her and vividly remembered that tragic day, “We don’t say we forget. We just try not to think about the past, but in our hearts we keep a place to think about that”. Colburn challenged Lieutenant Calley “…to face the women we faced today who asked the questions they asked, and look at the tears in their eyes and tell them why it happened”. No American diplomats or any other officials attended the meeting.

More than a thousand people turned out on 16 March 2008, forty years after the massacre. The Sơn Mỹ Memorial drew survivors and families of victims and some returning U.S. veterans. One woman (an 8-year-old at the time) said, “they killed Everyone in my family in the Mỹ Lai massacre—my mother, my father, my brother and three sisters. They threw me into a ditch full of dead bodies. I was covered with blood and brains.” The U.S. was unofficially represented by a volunteer group from Wisconsin called Madison Quakers, who in 10 years built three schools in Mỹ Lai and planted a peace garden.

On 19 August 2009, Calley made his first public apology for the massacre in a speech to the Kiwanis club of Greater Columbus, Georgia:

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in Mỹ Lai”, he told members of the club. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry….If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a 2nd lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them—foolishly, I guess.”

Trần Văn Đức, seven years old at the time of the Mỹ Lai massacre and now resides in Remscheid, Germany, called the apology “terse”. He wrote a public letter to Calley describing the plight of his and many other families to remind him that time did not ease the pain, and that grief and sorrow over lost lives will forever stay in Mỹ Lai.

Here’s the link to the original article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre

If you are interested in reading more about the massacre and aftermath, then check out this second article on my website. Click here for access: https://cherrieswriter.com/2018/03/20/my-lai-a-stain-on-the-army/

*****

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SOUTH VIETNAM’S THERMOPYLAE

[image error] The Spartan-like defense and tragedy of Xuan Loc, April 1975.

After fighting for twelve straight days, the valiant stand at Xuan Loc by heavily outnumbered ARVN soldiers echoes the famed sacrifice of King Leonidas’ 300 Spartans facing Xerxes’ Persian masses at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Greece. The Persians then marched south and captured Athens. Read about the last major battle of the war.

By DAVID T. ZABECKI

The last major battle of the Vietnam War was fought at Xuan Loc, only 37 miles east by northeast of Saigon. In April 1975 the town was the eastern anchor of South Vietnam’s final line of defense against the North Vietnamese rush to the capital. That line ran west through Bien Hoa, just north of Saigon, to Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border. Once it broke, Saigon was doomed—and with it the Republic of Vietnam itself.

When the North Vietnamese Army attacked Xuan Loc (pronounced Swan Lock) on April 9, the communists and almost everyone else expected the Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s 18th Division to collapse like a house of cards, as had so many other ARVN units during the NVA’s massive Spring Offensive of 1975. But ARVN forces under Brig. Gen. Le Minh Dao fought fiercely in a last-ditch effort to save their country. By the time Xuan Loc did fall 12 days later, most of the world was amazed at how well the ARVN had fought, and the NVA had paid a far steeper price than it expected. Indeed, the valiant stand at Xuan Loc by heavily outnumbered ARVN soldiers echoes the famed sacrifice of King Leonidas’ 300 Spartans facing Xerxes’ Persian masses at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Greece. The Persians then marched south and captured Athens.

Xuan Loc, the capital of Long Khanh province, had always been a strategically sensitive place. The town sat astride the French-built Highway 1, near the junction with Highway 20. From Xuan Loc, Highway 1 ran almost 40 miles east until it reached the South China Sea, where it turned north and went up the coast past the Demilitarized Zone and on to Hanoi.

From March 1967 to January 1969 the U.S. 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment’s Blackhorse Base Camp was some 4 miles south of Xuan Loc. During that time, Highway 1 was relatively secure from Xuan Loc west toward the northern edge of Saigon. But since 1962 the road east to the coast had been shut down completely, as it ran through the heart of the May Tao “Secret Zone,” a mountainous area where the Viet Cong 5th Division was based and U.S. intelligence hadn’t penetrated. From November 1967 to early 1968, Operation Santa Fe, conducted by the U.S. 9th Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade, the 1st Australian Task Force and the ARVN 18th Division, attempted to open Highway 1 to the coast. Although the road was eventually opened, the VC 5th Division mostly avoided contact as it positioned itself for the Tet Offensive in late January 1968.

During the war, North Vietnam launched three major offensives against South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive of 1968 and the Easter Offensive of 1972 were military failures. The 1975 Spring Offensive would succeed. By that time, all U.S. forces were out of Vietnam, and legislation passed by Congress in June 1973 prohibited the use of government funds for military operations in Southeast Asia without congressional approval.

In 1975 North Vietnam, which had organized its army divisions into four corps, committed all four to attacks on the South. The NVA force in South Vietnam totaled 270,000 troops, 1,076 artillery pieces and mortars, 320 tanks and 250 other armored vehicles.

After successful probes in early 1975 in the northern sector of the South Vietnamese III Corps Tactical Zone (a military region encompassing Saigon and provinces to the north), the NVA on March 8 launched Campaign 275, directed at Ban Me Thuot, a provincial capital in the Central Highlands, part of the II Corps zone. The ARVN held out for eight days. When Ban Me Thuot fell, Pleiku and Kontum, also in the Central Highlands, were outflanked and cut off from the south. NVA forces quickly drove toward An Khe and the coast—effectively cutting South Vietnam in two. The NVA then took the northern I Corps zone cities of Hue and Da Nang, which fell on March 29.

VIETNAM (South). Da Nang. 1975. A soldier of the North Vietnamese army guards discarded US helicopters, after the city was occupied by the Communists.

ARVN units in those areas had quickly collapsed during the relentless NVA advance. They abandoned their positions and joined tens of thousands of panic-stricken refugees trying to escape to the south, bringing widespread looting and destruction in their wake. By the end of March, the NVA effectively controlled the entire northern half of South Vietnam.

Ignoring frantic pleading from South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, the United States would not intervene, despite security guarantees given to Saigon in the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Even if the president wanted to provide military support, the War Powers Act, enacted in November 1973, severely restricted his ability to commit U.S. forces on his own.

The NVA, meanwhile, positioned its forces for the Ho Chi Minh Campaign, the final phase of the conquest of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese IV Corps advanced on Xuan Loc from the northeast, while the NVA II Corps converged on the town from the northwest. The ARVN 18th Infantry Division was essentially all that stood in their way.

Earlier in the war, the 18th Infantry Division had the reputation as one of the ARVN’s worst units. That changed rapidly in March 1972, after 39-year-old Dao assumed command. Dynamic and aggressive, he was one of the best officers in the ARVN. Unlike so many other ARVN senior officers, whose careers had been built on family, social and political connections—even on bribery and corruption—Dao advanced on sheer ability. Despite the youthful good looks and large dark sunglasses that gave the impression he was just another playboy from the elite, privileged class of South Vietnamese, Dao had an inner core of steel and one of the finest tactical minds on either side of the Vietnam War.

The general eschewed a palatial villa in favor of a modest two-story house close to where his troops were billeted. During the battle, Dao spent much of his time moving among his frontline troops rather than issuing orders from a secure command post bunker. He insisted that all his officers maintain close contact with subordinates at least “two levels down.” It was an unorthodox style of leadership in an army characterized by a rigid class stratification between officers and enlisted men. Dao’s troops repaid their commander with unstinting devotion and loyalty.

Before the fight at Xuan Loc, Dao defiantly told foreign journalists: “I am determined to hold Xuan Loc. I don’t care how many divisions the communist will send against me. I will smash them all! The world shall see the strength and skill of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.”

Dao and his commanders prepared well. First, they evacuated the soldiers’ families to the relative safety of the huge logistical base at Long Binh, close to Saigon, enabling the men to focus on the fight because their families were out of immediate harm’s way. Dao also had the foresight to establish two fully functional alternate divisional command posts. 

After studying the approach routes the communists had used to attack Xuan Loc during the 1968 Tet Offensive, Dao moved his 36 divisional field artillery pieces to positions where they could mass their fire into a triangular kill zone on the western side of the town. He placed his guns in reinforced revetments, stockpiled with ammunition, and had them adjusted for pinpoint accuracy on enemy artillery positions and all potential routes of attack. He sent infantry patrols to occupy key pieces of high ground the NVA could use as artillery observation posts.

One of the most important pieces of high ground was Nui Soc Lu, known as Ghost Mountain, astride Highway 20 and just outside the northwestern edge of Xuan Loc’s defensive perimeter.

Dao positioned two long-range 175 mm M107 self-propelled guns at Tan Phong, his first alternate command post, near the southern edge of Xaun Loc’s defensive perimeter. He had his communications and intelligence troops monitor all known NVA radio frequencies, and he studied the intercept reports daily.

In addition to the 18th Division’s own 43rd, 48th and 52nd Infantry regiments and the 181st and 182nd Field Artillery battalions, Dao’s attached forces included troops from South Vietnamese militia organizations—four Regional Force battalions and two Popular Force companies.

The NVA’s IV Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Do Van Cam, whose nom de guerre was Hoang Cam, moved toward Xuan Loc with its 6th, 7th and 341st Infantry divisions, supported by two armored and two artillery battalions, an anti-aircraft artillery regiment, two combat engineering regiments and a signals regiment. Cam’s forward command post was at Nui Chua Chan mountain, outside the eastern end of the Xuan Loc defensive perimeter. The NVA attackers numbered some 20,000, the ARVN defenders about 12,000.

To disrupt the NVA deployment, Dao sent a battalion-sized blocking force from the 52nd Infantry Regiment north along Highway 20 on March 28. For two days those troops held off the NVA 341st Division. By April 1, however, the South Vietnamese soldiers were pushed back to the Xuan Loc perimeter. They brought with them several prisoners of war, and interrogations revealed that many of the 341st Division POWs were barely 16 years old and largely untrained, although all were carrying modern Soviet bloc weapons.

The battle for Xuan Loc started at 5:40 a.m. on April 9 with an intense artillery barrage. The NVA gunners’ well-targeted very first shell hit Dao’s house and exploded in the bedroom. It was followed by 2,000 more rounds. At 6:40 a.m. the barrage ended, and NVA tanks and infantry moved against the town from three directions. When the shooting started, Dao was in Long Binh, where he had gone the previous day to coordinate logistical support for his division. Alerted to the attack in a phone call from his chief of staff, Dao left by helicopter for Xuan Loc. En route, he received situation reports by radio from regimental commanders.

The communists were certain Dao’s troops would break and run as soon as the artillery barrage lifted, but the ARVN soldiers held their ground. The NVA’s 7th Division carried out the main assault, attacking from the northeast without tank support. It was slowed by eight belts of barbed wire and minefields, then pummeled from the air by the South Vietnamese air force A-37B Dragonfly attack planes and F-5E Tiger fighters.

Later that morning the North Vietnamese reinforced the 7th Division with eight T-54 tanks. ARVN soldiers destroyed three of them but lost seven of their own M41 Walker Bulldog tanks. The attack from the northeast finally stalled, but not before the 7th Division overran Dao’s main command post. The general, however, had already shifted his divisional headquarters to the alternate command post at Tan Phong.

The NVA 341st Division, attacking from the northwest, entered Xuan Loc and captured an ARVN communications center, along with a local police station. But the untrained North Vietnamese teenagers could not exploit their initial gains. They were driven back by the ARVN 52nd Regimental Task Force, supported by a South Vietnamese C-119 gunship.

The 6th Division made the only significant NVA gains. Attacking from the south, its troops interdicted Highway 1 east of the Dau Giay intersection with Highway 20, cutting off Xuan Loc from Saigon. When the battle’s first day ended, the NVA had suffered about 700 dead and wounded, the ARVN 18th Division fewer than 50. 

The battle seesawed back and forth for the next two days. At 5:27 a.m. on April 10, NVA artillery opened up with a 1,000-round barrage. The NVA 7th and 341st divisions attacked in their respective sectors but were driven back repeatedly by ARVN counterattacks, sometimes in hand-to-hand fighting. The communists lost five more tanks. Dao ordered two battalions to attack two 341st Division regiments that had reached the heart of the town, and many of the teenage NVA troops broke in panic, scattering into Xuan Loc’s sewers and ruined cellars. Some captured later had not fired a single bullet from their 72-round basic load.

Meanwhile, fighter-bombers in South Vietnam’s 3rd and 5th Air divisions, operating from the Bien Hoa and Tan Son Nhut air bases on the outskirts of Saigon, flew more than 200 sorties in support of the besieged garrison. That night, North Vietnamese artillery fired 2,000 rounds into Xuan Loc, but Dao’s gunners kept up an effective counterbattery fire.

Early in the morning of April 11, NVA artillery opened fire with a 30-minute barrage. The 7th and 341st divisions then resumed their attacks, but again without success. IV Corps commander Cam, who had led a battalion of Viet Minh independence fighters against the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, later wrote: “This was the most ferocious battle I had ever been involved in! My personal assessment was that, after three days of battle, even after committing our reserves, the situation had not improved and we had suffered significant casualties.”

Cam estimated that during the battle’s first three days his 7th Division had suffered 300 casualties, and the green teens of the 341st Division 1,200. Virtually all of the NVA’s 85 mm and 75 mm artillery pieces had been knocked out by ARVN counterfire. 

Despite Dao’s strong defense of Xuan Loc thus far, the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff knew it had to reinforce him. The 11th Armored Brigade was committed from the west on April 11 to clear Highway 1 to the Dau Giay intersection, but the brigade’s 322nd Armored Regiment lost 11 tanks and could not dislodge the NVA.

The 1st Airborne Brigade, taking off from Bien Hoa in 100 UH-1B Huey helicopters on April 12, landed near the Bao Dinh rubber tree plantation south of Xuan Loc. CH-47 Chinook transport helicopters brought in the brigade’s supporting artillery and 93 tons of ammunition. On their return to the base, the choppers evacuated wounded 18th Division troops and local civilians in the last large-scale helicopter operation of the war.

Two marine battalions were ordered to form blocking positions between Xuan Loc and Bien Hoa, while ranger, infantry and artillery battalions provided reinforcements against an NVA attack toward Dau Giay. Meanwhile, the air force continued to pound the NVA, dropping several huge 15,000-pound BLU-82 “Daisy Cutter” bombs from C-130 Hercules cargo planes.

By the end of the fourth day, NVA dead totaled close to 2,000. Col. Gen. Tran Van Tra, the NVA officer who commanded the Viet Cong and the southern region, assumed personal control of the battle on April 13, and IV Corps was reinforced with additional troops, tanks and artillery. That same day, Dao was hit in the arm by artillery shell fragmentation. Tra shifted the NVA’s main thrust away from the center of Xuan Loc. He ordered the 6th and 341st Infantry divisions to concentrate instead on hitting Dau Giay, the linchpin of Xuan’s Loc’s defenses, from the north and the south, while establishing blocking positions to the west along Highway 1.

In Saigon, Thieu declared that Dao’s successful defense of Xuan Loc had ended the long string of communist successes and the ARVN had “recovered its fighting ability.” He spoke too soon. The NVA reinforcements included the 95B Infantry Regiment, one of North Vietnam’s elite units, which had been in the Central Highlands.

Tra quickly recognized the mistake of the original attack strategy: The NVA had not been interdicting South Vietnamese aircraft taking off from Bien Hoa. Communist gunners shifted their targets from Xuan Loc and began shelling the air base with heavy rocket and artillery fire on April 15. Almost immediately the 3rd Air Division at Bien Hoa was forced to suspend flight operations. NVA commandos infiltrated the base and blew up part of the ammo dump.

The South Vietnamese tried to shift air support operations to the 4th Air Division, flying out of Binh Thuy Air Base in the Mekong Delta, a switch that in the end didn’t matter. That same day, the NVA 6th Infantry Division and 95B Infantry Regiment captured Dau Giay. During the next two days the 6th Division beat back all ARVN attempts to retake Dau Giay. Simultaneously, the 7th and 341st Infantry divisions relentlessly hammered the defenders all around Xuan Loc, inflicting especially heavy losses on the 1st Airborne Brigade.

Xuan Loc was now cut off from reinforcement by land. Air support from Bien Hoa was drastically reduced. And the North Vietnamese II Corps was moving down from the northwest. The capture of the town was inevitable. Yet, the fierce and skillful ARVN resistance had shaken the NVA and disrupted the schedule for a final assault on Saigon. Hanoi postponed a planned April 15 attack to allow more forces to converge from the north and finally overrun Xuan Loc.

On April 17 the Senate Armed Services Committee rejected President Gerald Ford’s request for $722 million in emergency support for Saigon. On April 20, South Vietnam’s Joint General Staff ordered Dao to evacuate Xuan Loc and withdraw to Bien Hoa to establish a new center of resistance.

The withdrawal began that night under cover of heavy rainfall. In a skillfully coordinated maneuver, Dao’s troops pulled out by echelon, south through the rubber plantations, along the dirt-road Route 2. The 1st Airborne Brigade acted as the rear guard. NVA troops, taken by surprise, could do little to disrupt the withdrawal.

Unlike so many other ARVN generals who had flown out by helicopter during the 1975 communist offensive, Dao marched out on foot with his troops. In the early morning hours of April 21, the NVA scored its only success against the withdrawal when it destroyed the rearguard 3rd Battalion, 1st Airborne Brigade, near Suoi Ca hamlet. Later that day Hanoi’s troops moved into the deserted Xuan Loc, then little more than a pile of rubble.

In Saigon, Thieu resigned as president and was replaced by Tran Van Huong. The air force, however, still had one final blow to strike. On April 22 a C-130 dropped a 750-pound CBU-55 fuel-air bomb, approaching the explosive power of a nuclear bomb, on the headquarters of the 341st Division. The bomb sucked the oxygen out of the air and killed an estimated 250 NVA soldiers in the only time a CBU-55 was used in Vietnam.   

South Vietnam’s 18th Division had suffered 30 percent casualties in defense of Xuan Loc. Its attached Regional Force and Popular Force units were virtually wiped out. The division spent three days at Bien Hoa preparing for the final defense of Saigon. On April 23 Huong promoted Dao to major general. The 18th Division was in defensive positions near the National Military Cemetery close to Bien Hoa when Saigon surrendered on April 30.

Dao wanted to keep on fighting. Dressed in civilian clothes, he made his way south into the Delta, trying to reach Can Tho, the ARVN headquarters for the IV Corps Tactical Zone. Before he got there, however, the corps commander, Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khoa Nam, and his deputy, Gen. Le Van Hung, committed suicide. Dao surrendered on May 9 and spent the next 17 years in brutally repressive “re-education camps.” In May 1992 he was one of the last four senior ARVN officers freed. Dao arrived in the United States in April 1993. 

Throughout the war Americans asked themselves how the North Vietnamese could fight so well and the South Vietnamese could not. The Battle of Xuan Loc indisputably proved the ARVN could fight. The key was leadership. The ARVN’s great weakness was that it never had enough generals like Dao, who at Xuan Loc went head-to-head with far more experienced NVA generals, Do Van Cam and Tran Van Tra. Le Minh Dao was the Leonidas at South Vietnam’s Thermopylae.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. David T. Zabecki is editor emeritus of Vietnam magazine.

 This feature originally appeared in the April 2020 issue of Vietnam magazine. 

*****

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Silencing fire from above

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THE VIET CONG WERE SHOOTING DOWN AT AMERICANS FROM A CAVE ON A NEARBY MOUNTAINSIDE UNTIL THIS SOLDIER, WHO STOOD OVER A MILE AWAY, STOPPED THEM. READ HOW HE ACCOMPLISHED THIS…

Jim Liles used his 106mm recoilless rifle to take out an enemy machine gun crew.

By JIM LILES

I joined the Army on June 27, 1965, at age 17, two weeks after I graduated high school in Newport, Ky. I went through basic training at Fort Knox, Ky., and took AIT at Fort Dix, N.J., where I trained as heavy weapons infantry. I qualified with the M40 106mm jeep-mounted recoilless rifle, the M67 90mm recoilless rifle, and the 3.5-inch Bazooka rocket launcher.

I went through jump school at Fort Benning, Ga., and was sent to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. I went weekly to the captain’s office and asked to be sent to Vietnam until finally I was called to his office and told that I would be going. I was first assigned to the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Lewis, Wash. Once there, I was assigned to Company C, 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. My job was to be a gunner on the 106mm recoilless rifle.

We left in July 1966 for a 17-day trip on the USNS General Nelson M. Walker transport ship. After arriving in-country, we spent about a month digging bunkers for our future base camp in the Pleiku area. Our first operation, Operation Seward, took place in the vicinity of Tuy Hoa. My 106mm recoilless rifle squad comprising of our squad leader, a Sgt. E5, a PFC driver, a Spec 4 assistant gunner, and myself, the gunner, then a Spec 4. Our first assignment was to guard engineers running a water purification plant on a river next to a bridge on Highway 1. Most of the area consisted of rice paddies.

Over a mile away loomed a large mountain we soon named Purple Heart Mountain—our company had several soldiers killed on missions around that summit. In fact, one of my best friends was killed on Sept. 27, 1966.

Several weeks later, we were at the water purification site listening to the radio when we heard the second platoon in a firefight. I looked through the scope on the 106 and could see Purple Heart Mountain. In the middle of the mountain, about two-thirds of the way up, I observed three Viet Cong coming out of a cave.

The VC pulled a machine gun mounted on a wheeled cart, using this improvised device to shoot down at our soldiers while using the cave as a hiding place. When, eventually, helicopter gunships came and tried to take out the machine gun, the VC ran back into the cave only to come back out after the helicopters left. Then jets were called; they also attempted to take out the machine gun, but the VC again hid inside the cave and came back out to fire at our soldiers after the jets left.

I TOLD MY SQUAD SERGEANT I THOUGHT I COULD FIRE A 106 ROUND INTO THE CAVE. HE GOT ON THE RADIO AND I WAS GIVEN PERMISSION TO TRY.

The 106mm recoilless rifle is a flat-trajectory weapon and its main purpose is to engage tanks. In Vietnam, it was used to take out bunkers and even buildings. To fire a round into the cave, I had to elevate the recoilless rifle upward and fire the round in an arcing trajectory, more like an artillery piece. I could line the shot up perfectly vertically but had to guess horizontally. Once I had the shot lined up, we loaded a 35-pound white phosphorus round into the gun.

I fired the 106. Looking through the scope, I could see the round traveling in the air and watched it fly over the mountain. We reloaded another white phosphorous round. This time I cranked the gun down two clicks and fired the second round. I saw it fly through the air, and this time I saw it go directly into the cave. After observing for about 30 minutes, we saw no one come out of the cave.

A little while later, I saw soldiers from the second platoon on the mountain near the cave. The following day, I asked a guy from the second platoon if they went into the cave and if I had taken out the VC machine gun crew. He said they could not go inside the cave due to the white phosphorous but could smell the burnt hair and flesh. That was a very unusual way to use a 106 recoilless rifle, but it did the job.

In October, we were moved to the jungles of the Central Highlands. Since there were no roads, I was assigned as a squad leader on the 81mm mortars. I did not like that job and soon volunteered to go out with the infantry as a forward observer for the mortars.

On Feb. 16, 1967, I was wounded while taking part in Operation Sam Houston in Kontum Province. After recovering from my wound, I taught basic trainees at Fort Knox. I was promoted to Staff Sgt. E6 while there. I served in the Army for three years.

This article originally appeared on History.net 4/24/23. Here’s the direct link: https://www.historynet.com/vietnam-recoilless-rifle/?r&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=hnt-hnn-new

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PTSD is an Honorable War Wound!

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My friend and fellow author, Robert Kuhn, forwarded this article to me for consideration and publication. After reading it, I found I shared many of the same thoughts as those expressed within the piece. I wondered how many more of us feel this way. Mr. Kuhn broaches the subject in a casual manner – like a discussion between two friends over a cup of coffee. How many of you are with us on this?

By Robert Kuhn

Did Do you have PTSD?

What is it like? How does it feel? What did you do about it?

Yep, I have it and I live with it.  It’s not a good feeling and I’ve tried a lot of different ways to avoid and ignore it. HA! Impossible!

As I sit here writing in my basement AO, (“Area of Operation” for the non-veteran readers), I thought I’d begin by describing my recluse/hermit room so that you may learn a little bit about me. Looking around, I wonder if it is a place to escape PTSD or is it a PTSD enabler? Regardless, this is the room where I spend the majority of my time and where I do ALL of my writing. I have the room divided into two sectors. One side of the room is my war memories area and the other side is my sports and other memorabilia area.

In a prominent position in the room, I have my four Vietnam Veteran hats on display sitting on top of my locked gun cabinet. I don’t wear the hats very often, but I sometimes wear the U.S. Army hat when I go to the VA Medical Center for treatment of various service-connected disabilities.

Inside the gun cabinet that the hats sit on are about a dozen rifles, shotguns, and about a half dozen handguns. In addition, there are also my two AR15s. One of the ARs is a heavy barrel rifle that I added a bipod and a scope and zeroed for longer distance shooting if the need ever arrives. The other AR is a lightweight “grab and go” rifle if the need ever arises. Both have fully loaded magazines locked in them but no rounds chambered. Alongside the two ARs, I have three 7-pocket cloth bandoliers of fully loaded 20-round magazines. Just like I carried in Vietnam. And next to that I have a military-style model 1911 .45 caliber handgun with several loaded magazines at the ready. I asked my therapist if that preparedness is a crazy symptom of my PTSD? Am I crazy? I received no comment, no reply, no expressed opinion from him as he quietly continued writing his notes.

On the next wall, I have a shadow box display of my Army ribbons, badges, and awards along with my framed award citations. Draped over the desk chair is a camo poncho liner like the one I used to sleep with in Vietnam, and hanging on a hook in the bookshelves are my dog tags. My old worn-out jungle boots are in the closet. All constant reminders of my Vietnam service. Not that I need a constant reminder, the PTSD works diligently and efficiently at that.

Recently my daughter unexpectedly discovered that I had secretly published my Vietnam memoir, “Rucksack Grunt.” Why did I hide the fact that I wrote a book? PTSD avoidance maybe? After discovering and reading my book she called me and said that she wanted to bring the kids (my grandkids) over to see my Army stuff. I replied, “you know where that is downstairs and you can see it anytime you want.” She replied, “Yeah, but you know we NEVER go downstairs into your room! We want to come over while you are there.”

On the other side of the room, I have a Pittsburgh Steelers plaque hanging on the wall, and on the fireplace mantle, there are a few trophies that my motorcycles have won at the motor shows and car cruises. One of the bikes I built is an Army tribute bike.

So what causes PTSD to develop in the first place?

I went into the Army at 18 years old. Right there… that should tell you something, Why the hell is the United States military accepting 18-year-old kids in the first place? Their brains aren’t even fully mature and were no way in hell ready to be sent to war. I fully completed my service obligation and my Vietnam tour as a teenager! Is there any wonder that I came home nuts?

In my opinion, a Vietnam tour of duty was an experience of “extremes.” Extremes that ordinary everyday citizens rarely experience. Well, maybe a few do experience a few of them, but not like we did in a never-ending ongoing series of extremes. We were thrown into an extreme humanitarian culture shock by the Vietnamese lifestyle and standard of living or lack of it, which apparently was the Vietnamese “norm” for them. Certainly nothing at all like suburbia Pennsylvania. Then there was the climate shock of overwhelming Jungle heat and humidity and extreme amounts of monsoon rainfall. There was frequent extreme exhaustion. Times of extreme anger and times of extreme loneliness and homesickness, along with times of extreme boredom. Periods of Extreme fear when facing the unknown dangers of going on to the next mission. More times of extreme fear that goes along with coming under small arms rifle fire or under larger incoming explosions. There was the extreme fear for your life and the real possibility that you or your buddies may die, and some did. 58,000+ did.

 Is there any wonder that some of us came home from the war with our heads all messed up as a result of the cumulative effect of the extremes? In my opinion, being exposed to some of the types of extremes that I described is enough to inadvertently and unknowingly to us, rewire our brains and cause PTSD, just the same as our exposure to agent orange inadvertently and unknowingly to us caused deadly damage to our bodies years later. These are the things that we now live with.

But I put up a good front. I came home and tried to bury all of those thoughts and memories the best I could. Got on with my life, went back to school, got married, got a job, and did all of the things we were supposed to do. Sucked it up… right? But how do you stop the damn dreams and the night sweats and wide-awake insomnia that follows nightly? Easy… a lot of beer for a lot of years. Get numb. Self-medicate. Another better way was to keep myself constantly busy with work, not allowing any idle time for those disturbing intrusive thoughts while avoiding anything that triggered the memories that induced the thoughts.

I pretended for a whole lot of years that those methods were working. I managed to temporarily suppress some of the extreme emotions and memories. But they always eventually resurfaced again and again. And there was no way in hell I was going to admit the problem and seek treatment for the “mental weakness” that I had. I’m a tough Vietnam Vet, right?

I thought that as time passed and I got older, the symptoms would eventually subside, but just the opposite happened, After I retired from work, the PTSD symptoms surprisingly began to escalate, to the point that I felt like I had to seek help or die. It was literally killing me. The anxiety, depression, heart palpitations, blood pressure, sleeplessness, and so forth, was causing a downward spiral in my physical and mental health. I honestly thought I would have a heart attack or stroke.

Decades after the war, I finally sought help from the VA and was quickly officially diagnosed with “moderate” PTSD. Fortunately, I was never suicidal. The psychologists and psychiatrists offered treatment choices of medication, talk therapy, or both. I wasn’t ready to talk, so I chose medication. Well, I found that there was a trade-off with that choice. Yes, it helped to reduce the anxiety, but the accompanying brain fog and lethargy were unpleasant, to say the least. Over time my body has somewhat adjusted to the medication effects. It was really nice to be able to sleep through most of the night for the first time in many years. I found though that the meds were not enough, so a year later I began some intense individual talk therapy. What a trip! That’s a whole ‘nother interesting story that I will write about in a future article. As I said, the meds helped a little bit and so did the talk therapy. The worst of the symptoms have improved a bit, but I honestly can’t say that I believe my PTSD will ever be fully cured. However, even incremental improvements are welcomed! I’ve lived with it and managed it for 50 years and will continue on.

After reading one of the other articles that I wrote, a person close to me offered his opinion regarding my open discussion of PTSD “mental health.” He suggested that I should tone down the talk of being nutso and crazy as I sometimes half-jokingly write. “You don’t want to broadcast to the world about your mental health problems, do you?” Well, I thought about that for a bit and came to the conclusion that YOU, my friend, are actually part of the problem! Just like when we Vets came home 50+ years ago to an unwelcoming society that didn’t want to hear about our war. That is exactly what exacerbated and contributed to the problems that many of us suffer with still today. No, I am not going to tone it down, and no I am not going to hide my PTSD any more than I would try to hide my agent-orange cancer. Think what you will.

I realize that the Purple Heart recipients are a whole other class of wounded warriors that have my and our entire nation’s most sincere grateful respect, honor, and empathy. Our PTSD war wounds are of a different nature of course. However, it is my hope that someday all disabled veterans may be acknowledged by this nation with the same dignity. Even those of us with the types of delayed wounds that have developed over long periods of time. Until then, personally, I will not tone them down or hide from the stigma. I wear them and think of them as a badge of honor and a tribute to the price that we paid for proudly serving our country.

In closing, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that one of the most therapeutic and productive results that I have found in dealing with PTSD is writing. And that is exactly why I am writing this article. It helps me and hopefully reading this will help others too. Surprisingly and thankfully, when I started writing my stories my nightmares finally ceased. I would encourage others with PTSD to write about their war experiences. I can help you with that if you like. Writing helped me probably more than the meds and therapy did.

Always remember; In most cases, PTSD is treatable. No need to suffer unnecessarily.

Thank you for reading, and may God’s Grace be with you all.

Robert Kuhn, author of Rucksack Grunt, A Vietnam Veteran’s memoir.
Co-B, 1st Battalion 22nd Infantry, IFFV.
https://rucksackgrunt.com

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Thank you for taking the time to read this. Should you have a question or comment about this article, then scroll down to the comment section below to leave your response.

If you want to learn more about the Vietnam War and its Warriors, then subscribe to this blog and get notified by email or your feed reader every time a new story, picture, video and changes occur on this website – the button is located at the top right of this page.

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