George Buck – B Battery XO – Part Four
Starting Over
I had been in Vietnam now for over four months as a Duster platoon leader, and now it was time to go home to field artillery. On May 1, 1968 First Field Forces assigned me to the 5th Battalion/27th Artillery at Phan Rang. (The 5/27 battalion headquarters had just moved from Tuy Hoa to Phan Rang a month earlier on April 13.) I reported to Lieutenant Colonel John Crosby who had just arrived in Vietnam and was taking charge of the battalion. Keep in mind this was the first battalion commander I had met in person other than those commanding the units we supported in our Duster platoons.
The colonel and I had a little chat about the things I had been doing, and then we got down to business. His operational plan called any new officer into the battalion to spend time as a forward observer. I was not surprised by this simply because that is the order of how things should flow. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. I had already spent four months in fairly heavy action, had been promoted to first lieutenant and executive officer of the Duster battery, and here I was starting all over again. Still it made sense in that I had already been in situations where I had called in artillery, and I had learned a lot about the enemy and his combat strategies. I made an attempt to sell that as a positive in support of my new assignment. I said that I had already shot a lot of artillery so I would be a good candidate for liaison type FO assignments. I think Colonel Crosby liked that I was on the same page with him. So off to forward observer school I went, and feeling like I was the only first lieutenant FO in Vietnam. (They were usually second lieutenants.)
I am not sure where FO school was but somehow An Khe rings a bell (correct). A few weeks of getting back into the flow of move-shoot-communicate, and off I went to my first assignment, which was really a creepy deal and the kind of stuff that never shows up on situation reports.
Shopping for Hammocks
I operated out of C Battery up at Dalat and had the official title of assistant XO of the battery, but trust me I was never near being the executive officer and was only at the battery once. I called in artillery fire mostly for non-U.S. operational forces: Australian Special Forces, Korean infantry, and ARVN (South Vietnamese) Rangers. The only exception was an occasional mission for U.S. Special Forces operations with the Montagnards (tribal forces who fought for the Americans).
My first FO operation was up in the southern Central Highlands with ARVN Rangers, commanded by a lieutenant colonel who was also the battalion commander. Joining us were a MACV captain (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and his sergeant. This seemed to be a good first operation since it was a fairly large battalion and I was glad to have the MACV company. Things went down hill from there.
The first night out everyone pulled out hammocks for sleeping. But my RTO (radio telephone operator) and I did not have hammocks, so on the ground it was going to be. I had never slept on the ground because of all the stuff that crawls around at night. I kicked a dead log apart to create a soft spot for my poncho liner and out crawls a bamboo viper.
The bite of a bamboo pit viper is extremely painful. Within a few minutes the surrounding flesh turns black and begins to rot.
I didn’t know what it was but when the ARVNs saw the snake they went nuts and chased it around with machetes. Finally they killed it. I think I slept that night sitting against a tree with one eye open.
The next day we got into a decent sized firefight that went on for an hour or more. Once my artillery landed on the enemy position everything calmed down. We went in to check out the site, and this is when my RTO and I got our hammocks – off dead NVA. The hammocks had a few holes in them but were quite serviceable and lasted me the next few months, the whole time I was a forward observer. After that snake incident there was no more sleeping on the ground.
Alone Again
A few days later I had to deal with one of the most difficult situations of my entire tour. We were moving along a saddle connecting two higher ridges. Below was a small hollow that contained an ancient farm with half a dozen outbuildings and a hootch or two. There was an old papa san out tilling a rice paddy with a water buffalo. The ARVN battalion commander wanted me to call artillery in on the field, the hootches and the outbuildings. I looked at my MACV captain and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Its their country, do as he says.
I refused the order. I told the battalion commander it was not necessary and a waste of ammo, which we would need if we ran into a superior enemy force – at which he went nuts. By now my MACV captain had walked away. I had no idea what was going to happen but felt I had to make the next move. I told the ARVN commander I would personally take a squad of his infantry down to the field edge, with the remainder of the battalion moving as a blocking force at the sides and the back of the hollow. I said if I got shot at I would call in artillery, otherwise we would simply move through the hollow and regroup on the other side.
The plan worked. We encountered no enemy and did not even see signs of activity. But the damage was done. I could not trust this ARVN colonel or my MACV team. I was on my own again, and it did not feel good.
A papa san and his water buffaloes
Picture courtesy Mike Lauricella
If I had blown this papa san up, it could have become known high up in the Vietnamese chain of command, and then would have spilled over to MACV and First Field Forces, which would have been catastrophic for our 5/27 battalion. Frankly I think every FO in Vietnam at one time was put on the spot to do something that he instinctively knew was not right or was immoral. Dealing with higher level field grade officers in conflicting situations were one the biggest challenges I had as a young combat officer. It was no fun for my RTO either. I went through five of them before I got the one I wanted.
Too Visible
This is a good spot to talk about my RTOs. I had more than a few because we made it a volunteer job and initially the first sergeant picked them for me. You can figure out what that meant. I got the newbies, the malcontents, and a couple who were overweight and in terrible shape. I told the first sergeant if I had another problem he would be my next RTO. So the next one was a good one, a kid from South Carolina. He was an athlete, a hunter and a good shot. He also was a volunteer who wanted the job, and he learned how to call in artillery himself, giving us a backup if I got disabled. I was really lucky and we were a good team.
Being an RTO with an FO assigned to non-U.S. units was extremely dangerous. He carried a big radio, had the hand set, wore a different uniform than the unit we were with, and in general stuck out like a sore thumb. For that matter so did I, carrying a map and always beside the unit commander. Our being so visible is what caused us to employ a technique called recon-by-fire. I would drop artillery rounds on a suspected ambush site in order to trigger ambushes before we ran into them. It was especially useful if we had been bumping into trail watchers (enemy spotters). As a survival technique recon-by-fire put us always on the offensive and killing at a distance.
