Bud Domagata – Forward Observer – Part Three

Doings In Dalat

Dalat was a French colonial city that looked like it had been transferred from the French Alps to Vietnam. I mean it was gorgeous with paved roads, French buildings, Jaguars driving around, and even a few convertibles. It had three universities; their equivalent to West Point was one of them. ARVNs (South Vietnamese Regulars) loved this city; it was their Mecca. And it was a safe area. They really did not want Americans in there at all. There were some American units around it, but the only guys that could legitimately get in there were the MACV guys assigned to the ARVN units as advisors.

MACV – Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – commanded all military units in Vietnam. Those connected to it enjoyed special travel and access privileges, including ones they granted to themselves.

My ARVN regiment would rotate a company in for three or four days to pull security around the city. Squads and platoons would spread out around the city to keep out the enemy, who were never going to attack because they loved this city too. The Viet Cong took R&R in Dalat right along side the ARVNs.

I don’t know how this happened but I was assigned to the unit protecting Dalat. Wait till you hear this. By now I am really close to the ARVNs, we are buddies, we tell stories about our sisters and the girls we date and things like that. The CO (commanding officer) looks at me and says, “We have Dalat.” Then he winks a couple times. We get right on the edge of the city on the road, and the CO calls in all the platoon leaders and says, “Okay. We will meet back here in three days,” and he releases the men. Then he gets me, my radio operator, one platoon leader, and maybe a senior sergeant – and we all go into town and we check into a hotel.

Maybe three miles away on a hill Charlie battery has a permanent firebase (one of the artillery batteries organic to the 5th Battalion). Its job is to keep the whole city covered for artillery support. Charlie battery and the ARVN headquarters think we’re set up in defensive positions around the city. Instead we’re in town staying in a hotel and having a grand time.

We go up on the roof of the hotel where there is a bar with a balcony, and there’s Saigon girls serving tea. We set up our radios, and we call into Charlie battery with a bunch of fake nighttime defensive positions around the city. Of course there’s nobody at the coordinates we’ve called in. Then we give them a bunch of H&I (harassment and interdiction) targets to fire on. We say at 10 o’clock shoot these defensive H&I rounds, at 11 o’clock fire these H&I rounds, at noon fire these, and midnight these – then no more after that.

Then we tell them we are not going to move these fictitious defensive positions during the night, and therefore won’t be calling in new locations. With the ARVNs we’d usually set up nighttime positions, call in locations, and then we’d move. The Viet Cong had watchers to find out where we were set up, so we would have a 10:00 move. Moving into position we would not worry about making noise, but after it got dark we’d move as stealth and quietly as known to mankind.

We’d move maybe only 20 or 25 yards, but we were not exactly where we had set up. So if the Viet Cong attacked there’s nobody there. We tell Charlie battery we are not going to move during the night because it’s so quiet, we’ll call you in the morning, you can forget about us. And they say, “Yeah, we do this all the time.” So for three days we are checked into the hotel, we are eating like kings, we’re going to restaurants, and from the rooftop of the hotel we’re drinking tea from Saigon girls and shooting fake targets to make it look like we’re doing something.

It gets better. Dalat has a French jazz scene, berets and all. It wasn’t the Beach boys or the England sound. Jazz was a big part of the music in Vietnam from the French influence. The ARVN commanding officer says, “You’re going to love this.” He takes me and my radio operator down by one of the universities, we go down some steps literally underground into a little place with jazz band playing. There are guys with goatees and berets, all of them Vietnamese. He says, “No matter what you see, just relax and enjoy yourself.” It was a dark, smoke filled room with candles on the tables and a very mellow jazz band.

We put our M-16s up against the wall by us, and down the wall we see AK-47s. I don’t know who the AK-47s belong to because the VC could be in jeans dressed like college students. All I know is I did not want to make eye contact with any freaking body. I don’t know if we had coffee or something to drink, I was never a big drinker, but we had an evening just listening to the coolest jazz you can ever imagine with VC somewhere in the room. This I think is cool, so unreal I’m shaking my head and my radio guy is shaking his head. We say to each other, “We cannot tell anybody about this, because we’re not really here.”

The Beast

One of my most vivid memories when I deployed with the ARVNs did not involve them at all.

I was officially assigned to Alpha battery of the 5/27 even though I hardly ever saw those suckers. One time I showed up at Alpha when it was on a mobile operation down south near Titty Mountain. Maybe I went there to pick up my mail and briefly get out of the field, like I usually did. The guns were towed to this location, as opposed to lifted by helicopter, so there were deuce-and-a-half trucks, jeeps, ammo trucks and all that.

And they had a Quad-50 with them.

Quad-50 mounted on a deuce and a half (2 ½ ton truck)

The Quad-50 was four 50 caliber machine guns arrayed on a single rack that allowed all four guns to fire at once. The weapon was aimed and fired by way of electric motors fed from two batteries. The motto of Quad-50 units was “First To Fire” because of their almost instantaneous response to enemy attacks. At artillery firebases they were mounted on a  truck bed and placed on the perimeter to thwart ground attacks.

I wasn’t close to anybody at Alpha, but for some reason on this trip I buddied up with the Quad-50 guys. They said, “Do you want to fire it?” It surprised me that they would offer, but sure. First they wanted me to get used to the controls, aiming the thing up and down and all around without firing it. So I did and thought, This is fun. Then they said, “Okay, now we are going to load it up.”

We were located at a former French site with hard bunkers that the French had built and were still used as firing positions. So I didn’t kill anybody they told me exactly where to aim. As soon as I pulled the trigger the thing went wild on me, jerking straight up and out and I am shooting live rounds all over the place. The tracers are going everywhere, 50 calibers are all over the sky, and everybody is screaming and running. Finally somebody just turned it off. I think I crapped my pants. I was more scared than during a fire fight with the Viet Cong. I heard after me they never let anybody else touch it.