Alex Taubinger – Forward Observer – Part Six
The day I exchanged my bullet ridden helmet for a new one, that afternoon I went to an armored cavalry unit, Charlie Troop, 2nd Squadron of the 1st Cavalry. (A troop was made up of nine tanks, over 20 APC armored personnel carriers, and a total of about 100 soldiers – broken into three platoons.)
Charlie Troop M-48 medium tank
Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) of Charlie Troop
My troop commander was Captain John Abrams, whose father was General Creighton Abrams, then commander of all US forces in Vietnam. I had daily contact with Captain Abrams for the three months I was with the 1st Cav. He was a real nice guy; we were on a first name basis, even though he was a captain and I was a lowly lieutenant.
He was a hands-on guy and in the middle of everything. The first time I met him he was just coming in from the field and his right hand was all bandaged up. I saluted him and he said, “I can’t salute you back or shake your hand. This is what happens when you try to change your 50 caliber machine gun barrel without the glove.” He did not hesitate to get behind that 50 and start shooting things up.
The 50 caliber machine gun barrel could get hot enough to glow in the dark, sometimes hot enough to melt itself crooked. “The glove” was an essential piece of 50 cal crew gear.
Abrams knew everything about his troops. Let me put it this way. If you got a letter from your wife saying one of your kids was really sick, you could talk to him about it. He was a good one. I never felt like I was in any danger when I was with his unit. He knew his tactics and was the type of guy who told you to dismount your tank and charge with your bayonet, I’d say 90% of the guys would do it. I think a lot of that came from his father’s guidance over the years.
He told me once he applied to West Point but was not accepted. For the admission interview he had his hair cut short, wore a suit and tie. McNamara’s son and another VIP’s son interviewed at the same time, and both of them came in looking like hippies with long hair. They were accepted for West Point and he wasn’t. He said it didn’t bother him that much, except it was hard to make general without going to West Point. But he did alright. He retired a four-star general with nothing but praise from the people who worked with him throughout the years. He still keeps in contact with the people from Charlie Troop.
Everybody loved him. He was always out front with the troops. Sometimes he pushed the Abrams thing a bit. My first night there firing harassment and interdiction (H&I), he had me plot a bunch of targets along with def-cons (defensive concentrations) and friendly forces. I called them in for clearance and somebody called back and said because of the low ASR (ammunition supply rate.) allowed to us we couldn’t fire H&I. When I told the captain he went out to the commo van, got the guy on the line and said, “Listen. My name is Abrams: Alpha … Bravo … Romeo … Alpha … Mike … Sierra. My father is in Saigon with four stars. When my FO here calls in for anything, I don’t want anyone to tell him that he can’t do it.” After that if I wanted toilet paper delivered to the field they’d ask me how many helicopter loads did I want.
About two weeks later Abrams sent a platoon leader up to Cam Ranh Bay to be the liaison for supplies. Somehow word got to him that I’d spent some time with the 69th Armor down at Ft. Bragg, so he had me replace that platoon leader and put me in the platoon leader’s tank.
We are going through a wooden area and I am standing up through the copula, the hatch on the top of the tank where the platoon leader stands to look around outside the tank as its moving. I turn my head to the side and then look to the front just in time to see the tube catch a branch and the branch coming back at me. It has short spikes all over it, like its smaller branches had all been broken off. I raise my arms and it catches me on the inside of both arms, scraping off the skin and leaving spikes in my flak vest. Not a very dignified thing for a new acting platoon leader.
This is hilarious. We get a call one day from the liaison sergeant in Cam Ranh whose platoon I took saying the PX was throwing away pallets and pallets of Ballantine beer because nobody was buying it. (Ballantine was an acquired taste.) He said they were going to dump it into the harbor, or would sell it very, very cheap. Abrams called a meeting and said, “Officers ten bucks, sergeants five bucks, enlisted men zero. We’re gonna buy all the beer.” I don’t know how he did it but we had a convoy of lo-boys with tank protection all the way from Cam Ranh Bay down to us close to Titty Mountain. We’re brushing our teeth in beer. The water canisters hanging on the tank turrets are filled with beer.
Ho Chi Minh Footprints
Every day we did mine sweeps to clear the roads. We would look for a certain footprint from a Ho Chi Minh sandal (made from tire treads) we knew belonged to one guy. As soon as you saw it you knew there was a mine somewhere in the area. Then we looked around for loose dirt. His detonator was made from a split piece of bamboo with wires wrapped around each half and a spacer to keep the two contact points apart. The wire ran to a flashlight battery and the whole thing was buried about an inch in the ground. Anyone stepping on or driving over that spot would collapse the spacer and complete the circuit. The explosive was usually an unexploded 105 mm howitzer round or a mortar round. Except for the bamboo everything was US made.
No Good Deed Goes Uncriticized
We got a call that there was a booby trap on QL-1, the main highway into Phan Thiet, and that buses were refusing to move. We went up with our three Kit Carson Scouts (North Vietnamese Regulars who defected and acted as scouts for US troops). All three were ex-North Vietnamese officers. One of them even had his own separate NVA company. After they had defected they went back to North Vietnam and got their families and came back to work for Abrams. All three spoke English well enough that we did not need interpreters.
We found a 500 pound bomb laying in the culvert off the highway. Everybody looked at me, “Take care of it, will ya.” I packed it with C-4 plastic explosive and ran hundreds of feet of wire away from it. When we got all the people away from it, which was hard because they were curious, I set down behind Abrams’ APC thinking we’re plenty far away. I hit the clanker (hand detonating device) and when the bomb blew we had chunks of asphalt road dropping behind us.
Our scouts later told us, These people are really pissed at you guys. They want to know why couldn’t you have pulled it out with one of your tanks.
We Like You … But
I loved to drive the vehicles, but only got to drive two. Every time I drove something, the next day that vehicle would hit a mine.
Kit Carson Scout with APC Taubinger had jinxed
In background one he had never driven
