Alex Taubinger – Forward Observer – Part Two
PART TWO
Nobody Parties Going Over
I deploy out of Ft. Lewis, Washington and the first place I hit is the officer’s club, and who do I run into but a lot of my classmates from Officer Candidate School from different parts of the country. One of the guys refused to get on his flight to Nam because his bags had not shown up. Duh. What do you mean your bags didn’t show up? We were not supposed to bring anything with us but underwear, socks and a toothbrush. Now another guy, who was in my unit in the 6th Infantry Division, had a reason for extra luggage. He had orders to become a general’s aid. The letter from his sponsor in Saigon said, If you don’t know how to play tennis, be sure you learn. Bring your golf clubs, and if you don’t know how to play make sure you learn. And bring a lot of short sleeve civilian shirts and shorts.
We’re all sitting in the officer’s club. The general’s aid and two or three warrant officers were already drinking when I got there. On the plane we all five of us end up in the same row. After we take off somebody pulls out a bottle of Scotch. We land in Alaska and one of the warrant officers asks if anybody’s been here before and I say, Yeah I was here on the way to Korea and there’s a bar at the end of this walkway. We went and talked the barman into selling us more Scotch. On the plane we kind of tied one on. Everybody’s quiet on the plane except our row. We’re having a good old time. We asked the stewardesses for soda water and they said they couldn’t have anything carbonated on the plane. It might blow up and we’d get hurt. So they brought us plain water and ice, and as a matter of fact a couple of them wanted to join us. One of them said, “Everybody parties on the way back; nobody parties on the way over.”
Then this Air Force full colonel comes back from about six rows in front of us. He wanted to know our names. We got silly with him and asked each other what our names were. “What is my name anyway?” He turned us all in when we landed in Saigon. This Army captain calls us out of formation and wanted to know what happened on the plane and we told him we partied on the way over because next weekend we could be dead. He said, “The Air Force guys are clearing out in about a half hour. I’m supposed to be punishing you guys, so just don’t show your faces.”
Forward Observer School
Right off the plane I was assigned to the 5/27 Artillery headquartered in Phan Rang, which is part of the larger 1st Field Forces covering all of central Vietnam. The first thing they did was send me to FO school up in Pleiku run .with mostly Armored 1st Cavalry guys in it.
Artillery officers entered Vietnam with formal forward observer training from Officer Candidate School. The in-country FO school was a one week refresher on the protocol for calling in fire and basic map reading. It also covered conditions unique to Vietnam – such as the rules of engagement, how to call in Air Force support, and the details of calling for Naval gun fire, which used a different sequence and worked in yards whereas the Army did everything in metric.
It was a humbling experience for an artilleryman trained at one of the Army’s excellent schools to discover on entering Vietnam 1.) How much he had forgotten over the months between graduation and finally landing in Vietnam, and 2.) How little his formal training resembled the way things were done in Vietnam: protocol, slang like another language, and shortcuts both approved and invented – all this while under mortar, rocket and sniper attack.
I first met Hank Parker during my departure to FO school. Hank had already been in country a couple months. Me and Mr. Parker – they will never forget us. Because we were not part of the 1st Cav we got to go to town a lot. One day we went to this bar. It’s after 5 o’clock curfew and the MPs come in. We show them our 1st Field Force patches, meaning they had no authority over us because they were 1st Cav. Hank told them we were attached to MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam – the umbrella organization for all forces), so they let us go.
That night while we’re still in the bar Pleiku came under attack. Here we were with no weapons. What are we going to do? I hid underneath the couch in the bar. I don’t know what Hank did. In the morning we got a ride from the 1st Cav back to base.
Our last night in Pleiku there was a party. We’re in a hooch drinking away and all of a sudden we get hit with mortars and rockets. Our side of the base was 25 yards or so from the perimeter. We run out with our weapons, and I see the silhouette of one of our guys standing on top of a bunker with arms spread out and telling people to stop shooting because he is God. All these different colored tracers, green and red, were flying around him. He had to be high on drugs.
Five or six of us tried to cram into a little one-man bunker because we were getting hit with rockets and mortars. Then everything just stopped all of a sudden.
The next day we caught a flight to the Phan Rang Air Force base on a C-123. As we were getting on the plane the pilot recognized Hank. He was Hank’s next door neighbor in Idaho. You know, Hank’s father was in the Air Force (Senior Master Sergeant, Load Master), so we got first class treatment, meaning we got to wear helmets hooked into cockpit communications and sat forward looking through glass partitions on the belly of the plane. We went out over the water on our way down the coast and all of a sudden the pilot asked Hank if he should try to dip his propellers. He flies right down over the top of the water and I swear to God the props were going to hit. It dawned on me if the props hit we’re going to go flying like a cartwheel. (No doubt a routine pilots pulled on new guys. The propellers on a C-123 sat well above the belly of the plane.) Then we buzzed a san-pan and as we approached you could see these guys standing up with their rifles shooting at us. We also buzzed a freighter as we flew over Cam Ranh Bay. The pilot came over the radio and said, “I hope they couldn’t read our tail number.”
We get to the air base to a little building, which was the passenger terminal. We saw a poster for an Australian all-girls band at the officer’s club – tonight. So we went up there and we were about as scruffy as you could get. We’re watching the show, which wasn’t worth much, drinking booze. I bought drinks for the jet jockeys with century patches, guys with 100 hours. This one major came up to Hank and called us filthy grunts. “Why don’t you oink like a pig?” Hank got into a fight with the guy, which led to them tossing both of us out.
As Hank Parker relates the incident …
Alex and I were pretty scruffy and hadn’t changed fatigues for over a week. We resisted turning our rifles in, which was the protocol at Cam Ranh at the time, but we did, however we continued to wear our .45 pistols. The major was a real jerk and finally I had had enough and said, Well let’s go outside and settle this. I was not going to strike a major and figured would come out and just order Alex and me to leave and that would be the end of it. Well holy shit he knocked the crap out of me, knocking me down. He was a big son-of-a-bitch. So I got up and charged and tackled him, swinging as he hit the ground and ripping off a shoulder patch that said, “Kill a Cong for Christ.”
It was over pretty quick. The Air Police pulled me off him and told Alex to get me to the hospital to fix my little finger, which he had nearly bitten off. At the hospital the medic said for a little guy I had really beat up the major: gave him a broken nose, two black eyes, front teeth knocked out and a broken rib. The Air Policeman butted in and said the major was a real pain in the ass, “Just list it as closing his finger in a door and hitting his head. Now hurry up, we need to get these guys out of Dodge.”
We get out to LZ Sherry and I’ve got a black eye and splinted finger. The battery commander says to Alex and me, “FO school looks like it was pretty rough.” Even though the official medical record was on my side, the battery commander did ding me on my evaluation for having poor tact. Of course Alex laughed his butt off at me.
I still have that damn patch.
The Toilet Bowl
Out of FO school I was assigned to B Battery at LZ Sherry. The day I got there – I didn’t even get to situate myself – a helicopter picked me up and took me to a fire support base called FSB Zewart with three guns from D Battery, 2/320th Artillery (a howitzer battery under the operational control of the 5th Battalion). I was their safety officer and I also FO’d off of that hill. We were on the top of a mountain in an area called The Toilet Bowl. It looked like an old collapsed volcano and took its name from the shape of the rim. We also had a platoon from the 3/506 Infantry. I was there just three or four days.
FSB Zewart on the rim of The Toilet Bowl
Zewart was in the middle of an active Viet Cong Training area. We were there because there was a lot of VC activity on the trail leading into the Toilet Bowl. Just prior to coming out there the 3/506 had set up a series of ambushes and that’s how they found out it was a heavy area. They were able to capture a few prisoners.
When they shut Zewart down I was told to get on the first helicopter picking up a howitzer and head back to Betty with it, because I was scheduled to go out with the 3/506 infantry. I am on this Skycrane helicopter, the only passenger. We can’t pull the gun up because of something going wrong with the cable mechanism.
Sky crane lifting a howitzer the right way
We took off with quite a length of cable hanging under the chopper. The faster we went the more the cable started swinging, and it got pretty close to the tail boom. The loadmaster told the pilot to slow down because the cable was swinging so wildly. All of a sudden we heard a BOOM, and had to auto rotate down (an emergency landing procedure). The cable had hit something on the helicopter, probably the tail rotor.
Talk about protection, I mean we had jets out there and gun ships. They shot up the whole area around us. On the ground waiting to be extracted were a major, a warrant officer, a Spec 5 and me. Fortunately we were close to Betty.
