Jim Scavio – Radar Section Chief – Part One
The Road to Vietnam
My oldest brother had already been in and out of the service. The next oldest did not go in because he had bad feet. My next oldest brother joined the Air Force out of high school. However I was going nowhere fast, a poor kid from an Italian neighborhood. Rather than wait for the draft I went down one day and said, “Take me.” Sitting around waiting to get drafted was worse than not knowing. I was just 18 years old and never told my folks that I had volunteered for the draft.
I went to Ft. Lewis, Washington for basic training. I took the test for OCS (Officer Candidate School) and somehow passed. They gave you a choice of one of the four combat arms: Artillery, Armor, Engineering and Infantry. I talked to the other guys in my company who had passed the test, and of course not knowing anything about it we figured the Artillery was the place to be because these guys are way back here and the enemy is way over there, a WWII type of thing in our limited knowledge. The Engineers sounded way too much like work; the Infantry was not even in the conversation; Armor I could have gone either way; but Artillery sounded like the safest place to be because you weren’t in the front lines.
Out of basic I was promoted to Private First Class for no reason (The top third of basic training classes were automatically promoted to E-2, giving them a single stripe on their sleeves). From there I went down to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma into Advanced Individual Training, which was just basic fire direction control for guys going to OCS. Did you know that fire direction control at the time was the hardest specialty in the Army? In this class we had a bunch of college graduate types, all draftees with bad attitudes. I was one of the youngest.
Our classes are in the same building with the OCS guys and we’re watching them running around. And then the rumors start. A – if you go to OCS you have to spend another year in the Army. B – if you came out a second lieutenant you would become a forward observer in Vietnam and you wouldn’t live 30 minutes after you arrived. Then C – if you flunked out you were going to be a gun bunny, humping ammo the whole time. We’re sitting around strategizing and thinking maybe this OCS thing is not what we want.
They had just started the ACL program (Artillery Combat Leadership – intensive training to prepared non-commissioned officers for Vietnam). There had only been one class, and they were recruiting people for class number two. They came around with this alternative to all of us who were going to drop out of OCS, which was virtually the whole class of 50 guys. The only rule for getting into the program was we had to volunteer for Vietnam.
It was good training, they really did a good job, and that’s what kept me from turning into a banana case. I personally did not think I could make it through OCS anyway. I had an inferiority complex around guys four and five years older than me and with college degrees. I was worried about the academics. So this seemed like the right avenue for me. I made it through ACL about in the middle of the class. And there were bright guys in there, from Stanford and all over the place.
After graduation everybody got a short OJT assignment (on the job training). Mine was to teach the manual method of crater analysis to officer candidates and other upcoming ACL classes. You had to be able to look at a mortar impact site, do a best guess of angles and quadrants, and then do the math in your head to estimate where the mortar came from. When the artillery fires back the rounds cover a pretty wide area, so speed is more important than pinpoint accuracy.
A Radar Guy … But Not Really
When I got to Vietnam I was assigned to the 8/26 Artillery and I figured I would go into FDC (fire direction control). When I got there they said, We don’t have any guns here. We’re a target acquisition battalion, counter-mortar radar.
I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t know anything about radar, I can’t do this, it’s not me. I begged them to get me out. I said, “I’m not kidding, I can’t help you guys.”
They said I could. They wanted me to teach the same manual crater analysis from my OJT to radar crews because they came to Vietnam with none of that, and to new forward observers who probably slept through that part of their OCS class thinking they’d never use it. I wasn’t training anybody on how to operate radar equipment because I couldn’t even spell it. Back then there was a lot of Vietnamization going on (transferring operations and skills to the South Vietnamese Army), so I would try to teach them too, which was really hard because of the whole communication gap, and then trying to teach them trigonometry. We were never effective with the South Vietnamese, but we tried.
The radar units were down more often than they were up. And they had such a narrow bandwidth close in that you had to be looking right at the mortar to get a target. We seldom got a target during a mortar attack. Instead we would go out after an attack and do crater analysis and figure backward to where the mortar came from. We’d give a detailed target to FDC and say we’re pretty sure if an attack comes from this direction it’s going to be from right here. So that was the idea, to establish these likely locations. In a jungle area there are not many places you can launch a mortar from, because of overhanging branches. Frankly I enjoyed the hell out of that. I probably would have committed suicide if I had to sit in front of one of those radar screens for any length of time. It just wasn’t me.
Dak To
I had orders to travel to radar units throughout our area of operation. The worst place was Dak To (300 miles north of LZ Sherry near the border with Cambodia and Laos, where the three countries touch). Dak To and a Special Forces camp closer to the border were charged with interrupting traffic on a spur of the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran down through Laos and Cambodia, crossed into Vietnam at Dak To, and from there ran south. A few months before I arrived in Vietnam the NVA (North Vietnamese Army – seasoned regular troops) began building a huge force in the area (four battalions of infantry and artillery). Dak To and the Special Forces camp just down the road were their targets.
The 4th Infantry Division had just pulled out of Dak To, to be replaced by South Vietnamese forces, again a part of Vietnamization. The South Vietnamese never shown up, leaving just a battalion of engineers, an artillery battery and an old radar unit. The engineer lieutenant colonel who commanded Dak To knew he was on his own and saw what was coming. He pulled his guys in from surrounding areas, reduced the size of the compound and fortified the perimeter with fighting bunkers and machine gun emplacements.
The NVA attacked in May of 1969 with a barrage of mortars, rockets, recoilless rifles and artillery. The defenders of Dak To held on – 600 engineers, artillerymen and a handful of radar guys up against 5,000 NVA regulars. For three months the NVA laid siege with daily attacks and nightly sapper probes of the wire. Only once did the enemy get inside the compound. When it was over three months later the men of Dak To had suffered a 45% casualty rate. It was only then that visiting senior commanders learned the South Vietnamese had never showed up.
I went to Dak To during the siege to get counter-mortar targets for them, traveling between our main radar unit at Dak To and the Special Forces camp scared as shit. It was a nightmare. In one 24 hour period we took 120 rockets, mortars and artillery. Some of the artillery they hit us with were big guns from across the border. The good news is I was only there for three weeks. The NVA suddenly quit and just went away. After the threat was gone I went on to other places.
Camp Radcliff
Camp Radcliff was a big, sprawling place. It held a large number of attack helicopters that supported the whole region and was also my battalion headquarters. The radar unit was on top of Hong Kong Mountain right beside the camp. The mountain was covered with double and triple canopy jungle, and there was nobody up there but us so we had to guard our own perimeter. Talk about scary. We would hire kids to cut back the foliage as far as we could to give us a line of sight. If you didn’t clear the jungle out the NVA could just walk right up on you. That was our greatest fear. Radar guys had absolutely no training in fighting and did not want to be in combat. Most of these guys had enlisted for air traffic controller.
We were looking down on the camp when sappers got through its wire and set a fuel dump on fire.
Sapper attack on Camp Radcliff
Helicopter gunships took to the air in pursuit of the sappers. They made their runs over the top of Hong Kong Mountain, so low we could almost touch their skids. They swooped down the side of the mountain, leveled off toward the camp perimeter, and fired their rockets. It was very cool to watch.
A Reluctant Promotion
After six months of moving around to a dozen locations they put me in for a promotion and somehow or other I came in number two on the test. They promoted me to staff sergeant E-6, but took me out of my primary specialty of artillery FDC and made me radar. I was at first opposed because I wanted to stay in the artillery. They said I could always go back to artillery later on, so I agreed to it. That’s when they said they were sending me to LZ Sherry.
Sherry had the worst reputation in the battalion – word got around you know – because its entire radar crew got wiped out in one attack. It was in the spring or summer of 1969 during a highly unusual daytime attack. Most attacks came in the middle of the night so during the day you were out and about. That day the radar guys were outside doing something together when a mortar round caught all of them. They all got shrapnel wounds bad enough to get medevac’d out. They all did come back. Other places were probably worse – they were all bad, you could interchange these places like a sweater – but Sherry was the only place where everybody got it all at once, something like five or six guys.
Another thing about Sherry, if we had a real malcontent up north he ended up down there. I had one guy up on Hong Kong Mountain I thought I was going to have to shoot one night. I had assigned him to a standard three hour guard duty shift at night. He came in one night and said to me, “I’ll be the one to decide if I do what you tell me to do.” He was that way not only to me but to a lot of people. You can’t have that when you’re at a place like Hong Kong Mountain and afraid to go to sleep. We ended up sending him to Sherry and he’s one of the guys wounded and I heard he maybe lost his legs in that attack.
When they said they were sending me to LZ Sherry I figured I did something wrong. I said,
“Take my stripes and leave me here.” The Army doesn’t work that way I found out. With the promotion they wanted me on a different assignment and the one they chose was at LZ Sherry. I never did get a decent explanation. They said as an E-5 you’re still one of the guys, but as an E-6 staff sergeant you are beyond that and can’t be one of the guys anymore, which meant I had to have a change of venue. I suspected the real reason was that I was not supposed to get the promotion. I think they threw me into the promotion pool because they needed to have a certain number of people apply. The top two of us on the test were so far ahead of the other candidates they didn’t have much choice. You were supposed to have six years time in grade before making E-6 and I had just over six months, plus I was barely twenty years old. They said the other guys would not respect me.
My new job was section chief of the counter-mortar radar unit at Sherry. Once again I am in charge of something I don’t know anything about, only now at the worse firebase in the battalion. Sherry really did have this horrendous reputation. Dak To was bad too, but at least it calmed down. Sherry never calmed down. “You’ll be fine,” they said.
