THE ROAD TO DUONG SON 2
INTRODUCTION
Nearly everyone who has served in the military has an experience worth writing about, most of them go unwritten. The ones that do are somewhat predictable and usually relate, essentially, combat. But there is far more to war than heroes charging up a hill under artillery fire and hand-to-hand encounters with the enemy. Hopefully, some of that unsung hero stuff can be documented here.
Mess duty was no stranger to me. It followed me from duty station to duty station, from the minute I set foot on Corry Field in Pensacola to the first step through the gate at Camp Pendleton. Being enlisted didn't help the matter at all, everyone with more time in grade would skate from the mess hall. So the chores, the back-channel effort to feed the battalion, fell on my shoulders.
My first experience with mess duty came in 1966, fresh out of boot camp, at Corry Field in Florida, a class-A Navy communications training base. We were there to learn radio and Morse code, our detachment was Company K, Sub-Unit 1. The CO was RL O'Brien, a Captain when I first arrived but promoted to Major later. His immediate subordinate was Lt. Sepulveda, an up-through-the-rank former enlisted who really had an attitude directed at his former comrades, the enlisted. Then there was "Gunny" Wood, although I never saw him having anything related to being a Gunnery Sergeant, strutting around with that MacArthur corn-cob pipe all the time. His utilities were so starched he could barely walk in them and the recruits at the field had no nice words and some suggestions about the pipe and the reason he walked the way he did.
Command was merciless when it came to outclassing the sailors on the base, O'Brien was constantly showing off his company by making us do absurd things, like run in formation around the airstrip in 100 degree heat. The heat rolled off the runway in waves so we would run half-way out, fake it like we were still running, then turn around and come back in. Gunny Wood, looking through field-glasses, thought we were running all the way out to the fence line.
Mess duty came up as I was in "casual" company, some limbo a new recruit to the radio school would land in waiting for a security clearance to proceed to the next phase of training, the classified section known as "R-branch." All of this was very impressive and it was not difficult to be overwhelmed by it and follow orders to the letter. That is, until mess duty rolled along and I was assigned to it for 30 days. It wasn't until many years later when I discovered entries in my Service Record Book that my security clearance had actually been processed and command was just using me for the dirty work around the company, on mess duty, firewatch and barracks field days, to make them look
good.
Reflecting sunglasses was the trademark of the black petty officer in charge of the messmen. A mixed batch of sailors and Marines, we had a name for Charles Underwood Farley, it was "Chuck U Farley." Whether this was his real name or not, it didn't matter much, mess duty was a grueling ten to twelve hour daily shift that had us reporting in an hour before zero-dark-thirty and getting off long after the sun went down. Aside from the usual daily assignments of chopping carrots and celery all day long, we would wash down the dining area three times a day in a drawn out process of moving all the tables and chairs, flooding the tile floor, then mopping it all up. There was no AC, it was Devil's Island for real, with Farley watching every move from behind his reflecting shades.
Reflecting back on all of this, I had no idea just how valuable this tortuous lesson would be in the future, more valuable than anything I learned in radio school. I never finished the school, eventually literally fighting my way out with the usual reduction of rank and forfeiture of pay. But I was headed to the West
coast when new orders were cut, the 28th Marines infantry regiment at Camp Pendleton.
Reduction in rank, and forfeiture of pay, like mess duty, followed me around from duty station to duty station. My tenure at K Company in Pensacola came to an abrupt end one night when, drunk, I got into a fight with a sailor who promised he would deliver by,
"How do you want it, New York or Philly style?"
I replied,
"Here's Reno style,"
and I punched him in the face and broke his nose. But that wasn't what pissed off the CO RL O'Brien. I went back to the barracks and proceeded to punch holes into the bulkheads in a fit of rage over all that had been coming down ever since I'd been assigned to the training unit. In the blowback, it was, on 14 February, 1967, execution of yet another incident prior to that one, that the sentence of reduction-forfeiture was imposed.
On 10 March, 1967, under "Administrative Remarks" in my Service Record Book (SRB), RL O'Brien made an entry that I had been disenrolled from the CommTech "R" course. In the "Record of Service" section, the page shows 3 April '67 as the first entry for “H&S Co., 3rd Bn, 28th Marines.” I had been transferred, finally, to an infantry unit, at Camp Pendleton no less.
II.) PUSHIN’ TOO HARD
Naturally, the fact that I had already been reduced in rank to E-1, Private, having made PFC out of boot camp, didn’t sit well with command at Camp Pendleton. But the makeup of the battalion was far different than that at Corry Field. There were veterans from VietNam at Sub Unit 1, but at Pendleton, there were career enlisted veterans of all sorts and career NCOs, also of all sorts; and a far cry from the starched khaki Gunny Wood version.
Maybe O'Brien thought he was ridding himself of a pain in the neck, quite possibly true. The real truth was that the 5th MarDiv had been recently reactivated and was in need of every able bodied Marine it could muster, in spite of the negative entries in the SRB. Whether anybody over in that faraway Shangrila of Company K realized it, there was a shooting war in its second full year in Southeast Asia. In the Company K barracks, we used to sit around and mull over the possible duty stations we might get; Marine Barracks, Washington, DC, stand in front of Chopper One and salute CINC when he boarded. What about Cyprus, or Italy or some other far off exotic place where promotions happened every other month and you could be a Gunny, like Gunny Wood in a couple of years? The only place you were going from the 28th Marines, a line infantry regiment, was to Vietnam.
My first major assignments at H&S, Camp San Mateo weren't radio training, teaching others the rapid speed I had on Morse code I learned in Florida, but chopping back all the ice plant off the sidewalks in front of the quonset huts, firewatch and guard duty all night. Following that, although there is no entry in the Record, sometime between my arrival in April and my going AWOL to the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco in late July, I was again assigned to mess duty. It was after a field training exercise where, in the Sick Call Treatment Record, the entry shows my being treated for falling on a cactus on 29 April '67. The attack of the wild cactus happened when we, acting as aggressors, ambushed a convoy of tanks somewhere on a Camp Pendleton ridgetop road, and somebody tossed a smoke grenade into the lead tank. It was not well received and the rest of the tanks chased us down the side of the mountain and tried to run us over, I survived by diving into the cactus patch.
At San Mateo 3rd battalion messhall, the chief was Sgt. Dabney, a real slave driver but he laid off me and I was assigned the officers' mess along with CD Rossi, also from radio platoon. The star of the show, hands down, was the "bird" Pvt. Mertz who worked the GI cans out on the back landing. No matter what they threw at Mertz, it would roll off. After I'd gotten out of the brig in October for the AWOL junket to SF, we had just returned from another field exercise and were dead in formation one morning with MSgt "Top" Casella giving us the lowdown,
"What's the matter with you people, am I pushing you too hard?"
In the ranks, Mertz begin to sing the Seeds hit released in October, 1966,
"You're pushin' too hard, you're pushin too hard...."
Mess duty at Pendleton was no picnic, but it was by no means the brutal experience that I had endured at Corry Station under CU Farley. Ironic that the very day that the suspension order at Corry, February 14, was executed, there awaited an even bigger day the following February. It would be on Valentine's Day, 1968 we would depart from El Toro in C-141s with the 27th Regimental Landing Team to Danang.
(Image, December 1967; Cpl. Charles “CD” Rossi on the left and Pvt. James “JC” L’Angelle on the right, location unknown, but probably Camp Pendleton, California)
Here's where we hear all the talk about that training I had been getting for two years as a Marine paying off, converted from a "ditty-taker" (code) at Pensacola, to a bona-fide field radio operator at the 28th. None of that will matter as the business of going out on patrols and ambushes would be left to the grunts. There's a hundred books out today on all of them bragging about getting sprayed with automatic weapons fire and barely getting into the trench before the artillery round hit next to them. I'll leave all that glory stuff to the heroes, I had more important things to do in-country.
III. EL TORO
The unauthorized absence related to a trip to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to join in the “Summer of Love ‘67,” where I slept in basements with hippies and girls from Boston. I ate at the “Diggers’” spaghetti feed-ins in Golden Gate park, eventually hitchhiking back to Camp Pendleton to face charges of UCMJ Article 86, Absent Without Leave, popularly known as “AWOL.” Part of the punishment was confinement to the correctional center, also known as the “brig.”
I was released on my 21st birthday in October, 1967. Back at camp, with liberty card in hand, I grabbed my guitar, found a pair of cutoffs, borrowed five dollars from CD Rossi, and hitchhiked to Laguna Beach. The Hatch Cover bar was my destination, on the ocean side of Coast Highway on the southern part of Laguna. A basic beach beer dive, it offered pitchers of draft for one-dollar. I could afford three and have enough left over for a pack of cigarettes, it had been a long dry spell in the brig.
Sitting playing guitar and drinking beer, I went unnoticed or at least I thought by a group of beach ladies in the corner booth where a hatch cover served as the table. One of the ladies soon hopped, with coin in hand, walked over to the jukebox, dropped the coin in and selected a song, drowning out my guitar playing. I went over to the table, confronted her about interrupting my guitar playing and she apologized. She introduced herself, Patti Dell, from Newport Beach. Patti Dell became my girlfriend for the next few months, before our unit deployed to South Vietnam, very suddenly, in February, 1968, “Tet.” I never saw her again.
At the White House in Washington, DC, LBJ was surrounded by his advisors and high-ranking military men from all branches. The president had received a request from US Army General Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, for two-hundred thousand additional troops to break the combined NVA-VC offensive. The advisors were at the moment more concerned with the rising tide of unpopularity of the war Back-in-the-World. At least one general wanted to crush the rebellion on the homefront, using any means necessary. Obviously this was not an option, neither was granting Westy’s request. Instead, LBJ opted for two units to go over, the US Army 82nd Airborne and another unit, a newly formed landing team out of Camp Pendleton, the 27th Marines.
One morning at the 28th Marine camp, at H&S company, 3rd battalion, word came down that the radio section was to be transferred to the 27th Marines for immediate deployment, mounting-out, to Vietnam. The first reaction was shock, we all had it made at the 28th; plenty of liberty, light duty, a field operation or two, we even had a beach landing off ships by landing craft and helicopters. It was all just one big training exercise. There wasn’t any time at all to recuperate from the shock. A few days later Patti Dell, driving her VW, dropped me off in the parking lot, the grinder, where the section was in formation. As I fell into the ranks, the Captain at the head of the formation said;
“Private Langelle, I didn’t think you were going to go along.”
Pausing briefly as Patti Dell drove off into history, I looked at all the apprehensive faces in the ranks and replied;
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, sir.”
In the ranks were married men who didn’t want to leave their wives and kids, there were green recruits who didn’t know a radio from a flare gun; white kids from the farm, blacks from the inner city, surfers from the coast. In one sentence I had done what the Colonel, the major, the captains, the lieutenants and the sargents couldn’t do. None of them thought I would go over to the war. I would skip out, hitchhike back to Haight-Ashbury and sleep in basements with hippies and girls from Boston. They were wrong. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I gave them all a reason, the reason for going. It was our duty, our time had come.
Soon we were at the newly activated area for the 27th Regimental Landing Team (RLT). The entire radio section would be deployed together, making it less stressful since we knew everyone in the unit. That’s when Corporal Danny Ledesma showed up. We didn’t have any Hispanics in our radio platoon; we had blacks, they were called African-Americans by some. We had one Indian, called Native American by others.. But this was our first encounter with an Hispanic, a corporal no less. In those days nobody called anybody Hispanic or Latino, the word Chicano was about as close as we could get to describing them, otherwise they all fell into one big category of “Mexican.” And Ledesma was a Mexican out of San Diego, who had already done one tour in Vietnam and was going back for a second time. Nobody could understand why anybody wanted to go back for another tour. All of the veterans we left behind at the 28th Marines wanted no part of another tour, but they were all white boys from Arizona who just wanted to go home. We didn’t know any blacks who did one tour and this was our first encounter with a Mexican, a newly promoted corporal already bucking to make sergeant. It was quite a while before we settled Ledesma down and accepted him into our tight group of whites, blacks and one Indian. In the end, it was just easier to refer to Ledesma as “corporal.”
Only Napoleon’s beaten army retreating out of Russia moved more quickly than the 27th Marines to its debarkation point at MCAS El Toro east of Santa Ana. We would fly in C-141s, the workhorse of the military transport division, as an entire landing team, becoming the first unit to be airlifted to the war zone, and subsequently the last. By today’s standards the speed at which the landing team was assembled and deployed is still to this day impressive, only the US Marines were capable of such a massive unrehearsed maneuver at a moment’s notice. By Valentine’s Day, 1968, the entire regiment was ready to board the aircraft, minus 1st battalion which would sail in ships to Danang. There was only one hangup, LBJ.
The president decided he wanted to send the troops off with a personal farewell, he would travel to El Toro to inspect the unit and observe the deployment. We waited on the tarmac and in the hangers, squaring away our gear under the supervision of Danny Ledesma. The president did arrive, in a Cadillac convertible, wearing a big cowboy hat. He greeted the troops in formation, shook many hands, and issued numerous good lucks and well wishes. We were all very impressed by the president’s appearance; we weren’t the two-hundred thousand Westy wanted, but we would have to do it, and the president knew it. In fact, LBJ couldn’t send two-hundred thousand because we simply didn’t have them. Boarding the aircraft for the flight, I could hear a haunting chant in the back of my mind, as if the hippies from Golden Gate park were hiding somewhere in the cargo webbing of the fuselage,
“Hell no, we won’t go; Hell no, we won’t go.”
Our first stop was Hawaii for refueling and by that time the reality of the day was slowly sinking in. The recruits were acting more like Marines, checking out their gear, inspecting and servicing their weapons. Nobody cared about Back-in-the-World anymore, many would never see it again. Their wives would write, their girlfriends wouldn’t; they’d be down at the Hatch Cover in Laguna Beach drinking cheap beer before we even touched down in-country. The next stop was Guam for refueling.
We landed in Danang in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day unloading gear from the planes, zombie like, ten thousand miles from the World. I lit a cigarette on the tarmac and a Captain came running over hollering and pointing at a sign that read “Aircraft Fuel, No Smoking.”
“Put that damned cigarette out, you want to blow up the airstrip!!”
I snuffed the cigarette but didn’t care one way or another if the airstrip blew up as Country Joe’s song ran through my head;
“Well it’s one two, three what are we fightin’ for, ain’t no time to wonder why, we’re all gonna’ die..”
That night, exhausted, sleepwalking and shell-shocked even though we hadn’t yet been exposed to a single incoming round, we were billeted in some barracks overnight for transport to our Command Post, CP, south of Danang in the morning . All except Private Dowdell, Turk Dowdell, a wiry black from Cincinnati, and me. Ledesma placed us on guard duty of the radio gear in the trucks next to the billets and given real ammunition to load into our M14’s. There weren’t enough M16 rifles, a signature item of the Vietnam War, to go around, so we deployed with the weapons we had at the 28th Marines. Unknown to Danny, I had smuggled a couple of marijuana cigarettes and a pint of Bacardi 151 rum from the States. Turk and I celebrated our first night in-country high and drinking on guard duty, which would also become signature items of the Vietnam War.
We weren’t immediately deployed to our camps south of Danang but were allowed to pay a visit to the PX located in the sprawling Danang air base. This exchange was the size of a modern day Walmart and had everything from radios to musical instruments to clothing. Any currency we had needed to be exchanged for script to use in the PX. The first thing I noticed in the store were the Vietnamese women; gorgeous, in full makeup and wearing designer Southeast Asian style dresses and clothing. We had first noticed some women upon arrival but they were the poor ones, scrounging around the base and its outskirts for whatever they could find in the various dumps or doing some menial task related to upkeep or maintenance of the various facilities in the Danang complex. I had seen and known Asian women in the United States but nothing compared to these beauties, many having a mixed heritage of Asian and French. The PX ladies were fluent in English, very friendly and a sight for sore eyes after having been cooped up in the cargo hold of the C141, staring at anxious and angst ridden Marines, breathing jet exhaust that crept into the aircraft.
By then, everyone was anxious to get to the command perimeter. We ate chow at a rather modern mess hall serviced in part by Vietnamese and the food met with approval by the platoon. Following some last minute checks on the condition of the gear that had been transported halfway around the world, we loaded onto the six-ply trucks that were the workhouse of logistics in Vietnam for the Marines. By mid-afternoon, we had moved out down a dusty, dirty road south past cardboard huts that served as quarters for the less fortunate refugees and transients surrounding the base at the gates. The convoy crossed the Son Cau Do at the Cam Le bridge, observing quietly the rising black smoke off to the west in the distance. Naturally, being rookies in-country, we all thought it was some camp that had just undergone a rocket attack, but more than likely it was just another smoking garbage dump.
IV. THE POT SHACK
The road to the permanent CP for the regimental command unit was saturated in mud from rain and craters from mortars and rockets. Our unit, the transplanted 28th Marines radio platoon from Camp San Mateo in Camp Pendleton was chopped to the 27th Regimental Landing Team staging battalion where we mounted out our gear and flew to Danang via Hawaii and Guam on a moment's notice in February 1968. In the distance as we proceeded across the bridge over the Song Cau Do river, smoldering garbage dumps in the distance were visible by the streams of black smoke curling skyward. The road itself was on a railroad track bed where the ties and steel were removed. The abandoned road adjacent to it was far too muddy for the heavy six-ply convoys that traversed it daily.
The camp at Duong Son (2) itself had been built about two years prior as the 9th Marines moved south and expanded their TAOR into the rocket belt beyond the Song Cau Do, setting up the regimental CP in between the (2) and (3) hamlets. The radio section secured several hardback hootches on the lower eastern side of the perimeter and the platoon set about upgrading the area with reinforced sandbag bunkers, a shower and other amenities that were left undone by the 5th Marines, the current tenants, as they moved north to Hue. I inherited Pvt SP Lane's corner bunk at the entry facing the compound along with a large ammo box to store gear. Lane and I were in the same unit at Pendleton before he shipped out and he was from Riverside, where he knew some very willing ladies. I went with him and met one of them one weekend liberty, I never saw her again. When Lane went north with the 5th Marines, I never saw him again either.
There was plenty to do at the new regimental CP beginning with rigging mosquito nets for the racks in the hootch and ending with locating the mamasan with the girls and the smoke. We would borrow a radio jeep, drive it into the ville and fake engine trouble while we scored smoke, pre-rolled in plastic packets of ten. It was as good as any stateside and we could add menthol from small jars to cool it off as we sat in bunkers and smoked.
Our duty rosters were not kind at all including radio watch for patrols, ambushes and air-artillery cover, as well as guard duty on the perimeter at night. Some of the problems encountered early on at the CP were filed in the Command Chronology, Part III, "Significant Topics" dated 09 April 1968:\
The water points were at the north end of the CP and it became a daily chore hauling it for the shower back to the area. The mosquito invasion as the weather warmed was checked by netting, the human waste would eventually become another endless chore. But the one that stood out, particularly for me, was the grease trap at the mess hall. As the patrols came and went around the clock daily, the mess hall, not the Command Operations Center (COC), itself became ground zero for keeping the 27th Marines in the war. All the heroes coming in from the rice paddies, having engaged in ambushes and hastily contrived operations to push the VC and NVA out of the rocket belt, would have to wait in the long chow lines because the grease trap was broken. But that wasn't the real problem at the mess hall, it was the pot shack, the scullery, where all the field cooking tins and bins had to be scrubbed constantly to keep the cooks in the galley prepping the meals.
The process was simple enough. Most of the chow was placed in large rectangular cooking tins and round pots, heated and cooked and sent out to the line where it was served as the troops moved through, patient and exhausted. The mess hall at the regimental CP was spacious, fairly new and could accommodate platoons and even companies at a time if the system worked according to Plan 303. That was based on the assumption that the hardware involved, the cooking containers could be cleaned properly and in time for the prep. The cooks dropped the containers off at the pot shack, they were usually caked and coated with dried, burned food or slippery half-baked scalloped potatoes, fish and meat. Outside the pot shack, there were GI cans full of water and heated by portable kerosene powered heaters to provide hot water for the cleaning process inside the pot shack; it had to be hauled in and dumped into the sinks where the cooking trays sat. The process was simple enough, except for one minor detail, nobody wanted to do it. The pot shack was where all the deadbeats landed, all the noncomfits and birds that were sent to mess duty because they were useless in their unit. Everybody wanted the cush serving job out on the line or mess hall detail cleaning up after the troops.
By no means a deadbeat or noncomfit, I was assigned to mess duty at the 27th Marines H&S CP a month after we arrived in-country.
They couldn't have picked a better man for the job either, having served under PO Chuck U Farley at Corry Field in Pensacola and Staff Sgt Dabney at the 28th Marines at Camp San Mateo just prior to deployment. Naturally, the last place I wanted to be in the war zone was in the mess hall but soon I found myself back to the up one-hour before zero-dark-thirty to down long after sundown shift at Duong Son (2). Initially, I was in the serving area and the galley but it didn't take long to notice a major breakdown in the system due to the deadbeats and birds in the pot shack malingering their way through three meals a day, the cooks wanted to lock and load on them. I was presented with an opportunity of a tour of duty and notified the mess sergeant I would fight the war in southeast Asia from the pot shack, I volunteered and went in.
The first order of the day was to toss out the deadbeats. They were gone in a muzzle flash, back to their sections to the total dismay of their superiors. The second was to set up a system to get the place in order with a procedure that was workable. What did the cooks need first, how long did it take to get the right cooking tins into the right places? What about keeping a supply of hot water in the GI cans out back? I remembered the brutal routine under CU Farley and the ship operation at Pendleton where we choppered a field mess unit onto the beach and set it up to feed a battalion in a moment's notice. Even with a pumped stomach from swallowing a jar of downers to kill a toothache, I was able to pull that one off as Sgt Dabney, another mentor, shouted orders even before the Chinooks touched down with the gear at Onofre. It paid off but not immediately. A sense of order gradually settled in and results were getting to be visible. But I handled it alone for the first week to ten days before another volunteer signed on; a big, very big guy who could throw pots around like tinker toys. Then we got a little Vietnamese commando from the ville who rounded out the team, adding lightning speed to the operation. We had all the tins cleaned before they were needed and pushed further into other assignments around the mess hall. Eventually, I could get long enough breaks through the steam and heat to fire up a menthol smoke from mamasan's personal stash.
Today, years later, I am asked to report my proudest effort in-country. Was it some patrol in the bush, charging into VC automatic weapons fire? Maybe camped out on the Ho Chi Minh trail with a recon squad calling in supporting arms, hardly. Leave all of that stuff to the heroes, they all looked the same when they got to the chow line at the CP. The pot shack detail was the highpoint of my tour of duty in Vietnam.
V. CHINA BEACH
Record of Service entries for the entire tour with the 27th RLT in Vietnam shows just five entries. On 14 March 1968, the entry shows "messman", there is no entry for R&R, neither the Taipei one , nor the one for China Beach. Administrative Remarks lists the Taipei R&R on 1Aug68.
Obviously the 31Aug68 entry is incorrect as I did not spend a month on R&R in Taipei. I spent three days on R&R at China Beach in Danang after the Taipei leave, sometime in August.
Barry Coulter went with me to China Beach. Barry was a big African-American from radio platoon and possibly a wireman. Sometime that summer of '68, a new boot lieutenant thought he was going to pull a surprise inspection on the platoon and had us all in formation in front of the regimental COC. He waved a small bag in the air that contained some rolled marijuana cigarettes and announced he was looking for ,
"Dis shit.."
What the boot lieutenant didn't know was that we were the commo platoon and we always knew everything before everybody else. Everybody stashed the goods down in the bunker. Backing up a bit, there weren't that many of us who smoked; the white rednecks from the south in the hootch didn't, there were others who didn't. Turk Dowdell, the wiry black from Cincinnati smoked with me down in the bunker but not too many other people. It was a surprise that all of us were clean when the inspection went down, all of us except Barry Coulter. He didn't smoke, we drew the conclusion it was a setup, they stuffed a little bag of rolled joints in the bottom of his duffel bag and Barry was framed, for whatever reason other than to make the boot lieutenant look good. They couldn't bust a white boy so they busted Barry.
We went to China Beach; I smoked there but Barry didn't. What we did do was go to the beach, drink a lot of Carling Black Label and one night we visited the mamasan and her girls. To get there we had to walk through the small ville adjacent to China Beach along a path that was laced with concertina wire on both sides. We passed an ARVN bunker fixed with a mounted machine gun and they waved us through in the dark. They knew we were going to see the mamasan. Nobody else in the radio platoon would go visit mamasan, they were all worried about their girlfriends back home finding out. As if their girlfriends back in the world weren't out visiting papasan. True blue got you nothing, Barry knew it, I knew it.
True to the scuttlebutt at China Beach, mamasan delivered the ladies for Barry and me and they delivered for us. The only photo I have from China Beach is included. In the background is the water tower, the photo was taken by Barry; when we were transferred out after RLT 27 went back to the world, I never saw Barry again.
VI. HILL 55
The usual routine around H&S at Duong Son 2 included guard duty and with some off time, we had a small tape deck to record. Rossi was good enough on the guitar and between the two of us and some talented singers, we managed to record some fairly good sounds. The tape still exists today, but that is also another story. In May, 1968, the 27th Marines was to spearhead an operation onto Go Noi Island south of Danang, in an area known as “Dodge City,” where the enemy had entrenched itself; the initiative was called “Operation Allen Brook.”
The 27th Marines was set to drop in on the VC south of their positions on Go Noi Island and push the enemy North, from Cu Ban and Le Bac into the Song Thu Bon just below Nui Dat Son, Hill 55.. It didn't quite work out that way. The enemy was well entrenched on the so-called "island" and wasn't giving an inch of swamp. Part of the radio platoon from regimental H&S company was assigned to the north side of Liberty Bridge to coordinate the operation between the units in the bush and command back at Duong Son 2.
Several very important events took place in the operation, at least from a personal standpoint. The first was saturation bombing using C-130s dropping 55-gallon drums of napalm into those enemy fortifications hoping to dislodge them. Following the dropping of the drums, the area was hammered with 155 artillery and the entire island lit up like New Year's Eve, in the middle of the day. That was followed by a huge rain squall forming from the black cloud that rose from the ensuing fire caused by the combined napalm-artillery saturation. Must have dumped an inch of rain in less than an hour. Still the helis kept coming in, dropping off body bags and picking up ammo, water and rations for the companies pinned down by enemy machine guns from bunkers tactically placed to maximize the kill zone. One Marine charged those bunkers, managed to shut them down for a little while, lost his life in the process, and was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valiant effort.
Change of command in Saigon resulted in the new boss who replaced Westy, US Army General Creighton Abrams, to show up unannounced in the bunker at Liberty Bridge where the radios were buzzing with the sounds of the firefights and calls for air support and arty. One of the line officers was hollering something about casualty reports and it might have been Abrams who commented, or was told;
"You're in the game with the big boys now..."
Later on, the radio operators took a break and dodged the relentless downpour by huddling in a makeshift shower, smoking some pot and philosophizing on what was coming down. It was Cpl. Morze, a hefty Marine who looked more Chinese than White, and who could speak fluent Chinese, summed it all up;
"Who picks up the tab for civilization?"
Before the unit wrapped up the forward setup, I was fortunate to spend one night in a radio relay jeep overlooking the island from Hill 55, on the AT map at 970620, Nui Dat Son.. There are many things I remember about the war, but that's one I will never forget, for several reasons. It was the one and only time I was free from the regiment back at Duong Son 2; I had some cans of beer, some pot, some cigarettes, and a radio jeep tuned into a Danang station.
Late in the night, I could look out over the island and beyond as flares randomly lit up the night sky way off in the distance to the south. It was the only night that I had no one to tell me what to do, where to go, and report to whom. There was nobody else around, just the jeep, the flares way off in the war somewhere, the necessities of Black Label beer, mamasan's pot and Pall Mall cigarettes. On the radio came a song I remember to this day and every time I hear it, I go back to that one night on Hill 55.
The song drifted out across the entire valley below, across the island where the VC and NVA were servicing their weapons, getting ready for the battle the next day. In the morning, I drove the jeep about five miles north back to regimental command at Duong Son 2 and to this day wonder why I wasn't ambushed and KIA on that brief drive back into the DaNang TAOR, through territory called "Dodge City." I received credit for participation in Operation Allen Brook in my Service Record Book.
The following was an article written up on Allen Brook:
“VC Staging Area Is 'Hairiest' Place in All of South Vietnam,” by Father Michael V. Gannon (NC News Service) The Belleville, IL Messenger, 23 Aug 1968, Page 9.
"This is a staging area for the VC (Viet Cong) and NVA (North Vietnamese Army," Col. Adolf C. Schwenk, commanding officer of the 27th Marines, had explained to me the evening before at regimental headquarters in Duong Son. The Colonel is a lanky, soft-spoken Marine veteran who is much admired by his men for his "cool." He sat in his green T-shirt on the edge of a table and played his finger over an operations map displayed against a wall of his heavily bunkered Command Operations Center. Radio messages crackled in the background.
"Operation Allenbrook on which we're engaged is designed to destroy the area, to deny it to the enemy as a sanctuary and as a staging area for an attack on Da Nang. Our 3rd battalion was hit hard when we began on May 17, but we've kept pushing and we've uncovered all kinds of enemy installations--arms caches, rice caches, mess hal;l and so on. And as soon as we clear a section of the area our combat engineer comes right behind us with Rome plows to knock the countryside flat. They level everything--trees, buildings, bushes. The whole island will be a desert when we get through."
The colonel put his finger to the map again. "This area," he said, outlining Go Noi Island, "is probably the most booby-trapped area in all Vietnam. We've suffered a lot of casualties from mines and booby-traps, including some KIAs (killed in action) and a lot of double and triple amputations. It can be very demoralizing for the men. They have no way of knowing if their next step is going to blow them 45 feet in the air. It's a vicious phantom war. There's nothing to shoot at. You walk scared all day long. Today we took 11 booby-trap casualties, seven of them in Golf Company."
U. S. Marines, Warplanes Hit North Vietnamese Force Hard
By EDWIN Q. WHITE Associated Press Writer SAIGON (AP) - U.S. Ma- rines and warplanes hammered Friday at an elite North Viet- namese force fighting with its back to a river 18 miles south of Da Nang, Leatherneck head- quarters in the North. It was the second straight day of furious fighting there and field reports said casualties numbered 130 enemy and 25 Marine dead. This put the toll for two days at 261 North Viet-namese and 51 Marines killed. “Allen Brook” The battle is part of a mission named Operation Allen Brook launched May 4 aimed at crush- ing strong North Vietnamese forces threatening Da Nang and I-Ioi An, provincial capital to the south. The strength of the North Vietnamese was shown Sunday when about 5,000 oi them over- ran the fortified outpost oi Kham Duc, about a dozen miles southwest of the present battle. I
Associated Press correspondent John T. Wheeler reported from Da Nang that the Marines had identified the enemy south of Da Nang as elements of the 308th North Vietnamese Division, crack outfit that took part in the final assault on Dien Bien Phu in the closing stage of the French war in Indochina. The North Vietnamese were fighting from bunkers in a vil- lage complex with their backs to an arm of the Thu Bon River. Despite the heavy pounding, they were still blazing away with rockets, machine guns and small arms as night fell. To get into position to attack, the Marines were forced to pick their way through a thick mine field laid down on the ap- proaches to the village complex. While the Marine action was the heaviest reported across the country, it was disclosed by the U.S. command that the month- long allied drive into the A Shau Valley had been ended. The valley about 55 miles west of Da Nang, stretches for 25 miles along the border of Laos southwest of the old capi- tal of Hue. It has been the ene- See MARINES on Page 2
Caption: Aerial view of strategic Liberty Bridge under reconstruction by Seabees of the 3rd Naval Construction Brigade shows, in the center, the temporary vehicle ferry, and to the left, guarding the bridge’s southern approach, the 5th Marines compound at Phu Lac (6). (Marine Historical Collection)
VII. THE GREEN LOSERS
TBC–