George Moses – Battery Commander – Part Four
THE BOYS OF BATTERY B
GEORGE MOSES
BATTERY COMMANDER
PART FOUR
Fast on the heals of earning the Valorous Unit Award for its performance during the Tet offensive, B Battery experienced a tragic incident that could have been catastrophic had it not been for Captain Moses.
The Incident
I said I’d tell you about the one incident we had in March, after Tet. There was a small village next to us at LZ Judy. The population of that village was Catholic and Buddhist. The Catholics had moved south out of North Vietnam when they established the demarcation line separating North and South Vietnam after the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The negotiated settlement allowed people to move one way or the other. There was a Catholic priest that moved his parish from North Vietnam down to this little village. So half the village was Catholic, and half was Buddhist.
The Catholics were gathered on the west side of the village, and the Buddhists were on the east side. There was no formal demarcation, but it was clear there were two types of people there. In the village there was a regional forces infantry platoon led by a lieutenant, a former Viet Minh major who came south with the Catholics. Over time the Catholic parish had been winnowed down by snipers operating out of the tree lines around their rice fields. They were about half of their original members that came south.
The Catholic church had a steeple. We were asked to put a forward observer up there at night to be able to help protect the village. The only candidate I had was a sergeant who had come into the battery from Germany while we were up at Qui Nhon. He had made E6 staff sergeant while in Germany. He went in as a private over there and somehow came out a very short time later an E6. He exhibited some FO knowledge and claimed to have had some forward observer experience. But I was concerned about him from the beginning when he first came the battery. He was a section sergeant and I had trouble with him following orders to the tee. He kept wanting to make little changes. He had poor attention to detail, which made me nervous.
I said to Lieutenant Colonel House, “Sir, I’ve got this sergeant who’s got experience but I don’t trust him for that kind of operation.”
He said, “Well, you got to do it anyway, George.” It was clear Lt. Col. House did not have a choice in the matter either. So we gave this sergeant a PRC-25 radio, a map and a compass and put him up there. We ran a few drills to make sure we were all connected properly.
Typically whenever we’d get a mission from a forward observer I’d walk into the Fire Direction Center and just kind of check the geometry. If everything was in order I’d get out of the way. I never slowed anything down. Without disturbing anyone I could see what the call for fire was, the observer’s azimuth, the gun to target azimuth, where we were, where the observer was. I just looked at all of that and if it didn’t come together geometrically the way it should and mesh, I knew something was wrong.
Well this night the sergeant in the steeple had called in a mission and we were shooting white phosphorous rounds. I went in and I looked at where the church steeple was and I looked at the azimuth that the observer claimed to be observing, and it appeared the shot was going in the opposite direction it should. I immediately yelled. “CHECK FIRE.” This was the second volley and it went out before my CHECK FIRE command could get implemented. We ended up putting that second volley into the Catholic part of that village.
I don’t remember how many casualties there were. I don’t think there were any deaths. But that white phosphorous burned some people awfully badly. We brought the injured into the battery and had them medevac’d out.
Medevac of Villagers
Of course the First Field Force guys came down and had an investigation. The investigating officer got off the helicopter, looked at me and said, “Well, you screwed up the grid convergence, didn’t you, captain?”
Battery center sat very close to a grid convergence line, requiring special procedures when firing into the neighboring grid zone.
I looked at him and I said, “Sir, I think you’ll find we had the grid conversions totally under control.” And we did.
Then he interviewed our sergeant and determined that the sergeant had misread his compass. The sergeant had read the degree scale on his compass, instead of the mil scale.
A brief explanation is in order. In Vietnam the military used only metric scales for direction and distance. In a metric circle there are 6400 mils, as opposed to 360 degrees. Fire Direction Control would naturally interpret a reading called in by a forward observer as mils without a second thought. Were a forward observer, for example, to call in a direction of “180” FDC would dial its map instrument to just a little off due north. However in degrees a direction of “180” would be straight south. The compass used in Vietnam had on its dial an outer scale in 6400 mils, and an inner scale in 360 degrees, making it all to easy for an inexperienced FO to misread.
The Vietnamese lieutenant was there with our sergeant in the church steeple. I found out later that there was some pot being smoked, which could have been the root cause of the problem. To this day I couldn’t tell you if that sergeant was a trained forward observer or not. I didn’t want to put him up there, but he was the only one I had available that claimed he had FO experience. When I talked to him he was either a good bull-shitter or he had experience, I don’t know which.
I had a case of the ass over this incident, big time. I wanted that sergeant in prison. And I asked my fire direction officer who was overseeing the mission why he didn’t see it, and he didn’t have a good answer. I think he was taken up with checking the calculations and not looking at the geometry like I was, but that was his job.
There was a military program to reimburse people as best we could to help ease the pain of all that. To make amends the battery went back to the village and we worked at rebuilding the homes for the two families. The lieutenant that was in charge of them was very understanding and so was the Catholic priest. They worked with us, and it really brought us closer to that village than we had been.
Sergeant Joe Mullins remembers that night.
It was about two or three o’clock in the morning and I was a gunner that night. We had a forward observer out and he called in the wrong coordinates. We shot into a village and messed a bunch of women and children up with white phosphorous. They came down and said, “Do not touch nothin’, leave the guns as they are.” I thought, Oh-oh, one of us has done something wrong. I went over and looked through my scope to make sure I was on my aiming stake out there, and I was all right.
The word finally trickled down that they were bringing the injured in. They made make-shift stretchers, and they took ammo plastic and wrapped it around them to try to keep out the oxygen as much as they could. It was mostly women and children. I remember one woman was pregnant, and she had a lot on her stomach. Finally we got them medevac’d out. The word that got back to us later about that forward observer, they say he had been drinking pretty heavy. That was the word, and it might be totally wrong. I never saw him after that.
Later on in life somebody sent me something about the area we shot into. I noticed that they went in and spent money on that village, but they didn’t state what they done it for.
Bad Water … Really Bad Water
In early April we had a big outbreak of diarrhea in the battery. My immediate thought was that we were not washing things well enough in the mess hall. So I supervised getting that water hot enough to make sure all the utensils were boiled and the pots cleaned. We did that religiously and it still did not improve things. I finally got ahold of the taskforce command staff and said I have a problem here and I’ve done everything I can do to get rid of this based on recommendations from the medic.
We’d get a bladder of water every so often out of a lake near Phan Rang. The engineers chlorinated and purified the water, but it turned out that during Tet two months earlier the VC or the NVA had dumped a lot of their dead into that lake. We were just now feeling the effects. So they started heavily chlorinating the water. It was so damn chlorinated that you’d try to brush your teeth with it and it burned your gums. But that cleared it up – another combat zone event.
Welcome to LZ Sherry
Our last move was in late April to LZ Sherry about five miles east, and directly north of Phan Thiet city. It was a road march, and I had gotten reports that on this road we might get ambushed. We had helicopter gunships on the move, and as an added precaution I went to every section and said that on the prime movers (trucks) I want rifles loaded, I want the muzzles up and ready to fire, and I want people back to back so you could fire in either direction. If we get ambushed, if the road’s not blocked, the first vehicle is going to speed up and every vehicle is going to speed up behind it.
Sure enough we did get ambushed, along a berm that was only 15 yards from the road. There was a lot coming at us. The gunships went into action and the battery responded beautifully, just absolutely beautifully. I was the lead jeep, and my driver sped up and moved out, the trucks behind us doing the same thing, all the while us and the gunships returning fire. Finally it was the gunships that shut the attack down.
Several hundred yards down the road we stopped. I went along the convoy to inspect damage and saw a lot of bullet holes in metal. One driver said he had a sore neck. I looked at his helmet and saw that a bullet had entered into the left side of his helmet, spun around between the outer steel pot and the helmet liner, and come out the other side.
I said, “Son, take your helmet off.”
He looked at it and said, “Holy shit.”
“That’s why you got a sore neck. It’s better than the alternative.”
He said, “I agree.”
Another odd thing happened on this attack. One soldier had emptied his magazine and had lifted up his M16 to load another magazine when an enemy bullet hit dead center on the side of barrel. It drilled a hole in the barrel and bent it 30 degrees. I said, “Man, the chances of that happening are so small.” A lot of metal had holes, but fortunately nobody was wounded. We moved on and set up at LZ Sherry.
We dug our cots into the ground about a foot, so that the cross hinge on the legs was at ground level and you were sticking up about six inches, then we put up a couple rows of sandbags. If you needed weather protection you could take your poncho and put it over the top to keep the rain off. Of course the howitzers had their parapets and powder pits and ammo bunkers sandbagged.
We were at Sherry only two or three days when one night I was awakened by a swizzling sound. Then I felt a thud, something hit the ground; I didn’t hear it so much as I felt it. It was not close to me, but it was in the battery area. Then immediately mortar rounds started exploding on the perimeter short of the compound. The quad-50s started up and began to fire into areas where they had seen lights. After the attack one of the commo section guys came to the first sergeant and said you got to come look at this. We went over and saw a mortar round stuck in the ground, with its fins sticking up, right next to this commo guy’s cot. The round did not have a fuse on it. Whoever had fired it had failed to fuse it. The thing launched, and when it came into the battery area that was the swizzling sound we heard. It stuck in the ground right next to this guy’s cot, and he nearly crapped in his pants when he saw the thing. I would have done the same. I looked at the first sergeant and said, “I don’t think we’ve got these cots dug in far enough.”
We eventually brought the base piece howitzer into action, but not until well after the attack was over. And of course once they got off three or four mortar rounds they would un-ass the area. I knew there would be more mortar attacks to come because of our location, in the middle of an open rice paddy with stream beds running through it and a tree line a thousand meters out. We needed to be able to turn that base piece and have a standard setting that put a round out immediately, and then adjust in pre-set increments. We tried that two nights later when we observed lights in the tree line. We were not under attack but we shot the hell out of the area where the lights were.
Pre-emptive defensive firing and quick reaction from the howitzers became a standard procedure for B Battery at LZ Sherry.
I remember we had a Navy gunship called El Toro with five-inch guns that also fired into our sector. Our guys used to get on a helicopter and go out to that gunship for ice cream. The Navy always had good ice cream.
A few weeks after setting up at LZ Sherry I gave up the battery to Captain Ridgeway. He had been my executive officer, a first lieutenant. He went to battalion headquarters for awhile in a staff job, and then came back as a captain to command the battery.
My tour with B Battery was a life forming event, and one of the most rewarding things I did in the Army. You trained to be an artilleryman, and this was the ultimate of what an artilleryman does. I felt fortunate to work with Lieutenant Colonel Munnelly and Lieutenant Colonel House, and all the soldiers of B Battery. They were all good. I mean they would have done anything for that battery. The morale when I got there was excellent, and when I left morale was still good, but people were tired. I know I was tired, and I know they were too. What we did was hard work, awfully hard work.
