Part I: War story

By Temple Ligon
November 8, 2013

 
 
Plenty of people hold regrets all their lives, little regrets and big regrets, harmless funny regrets and deeply disturbing emotional regrets, mostly connected to a failure to say thank you to a grandparent or a parent or a good friend who dropped dead at a young age. Young men have an especially tough time, if not an impossible time, saying I love you, Dad. My big regret is my failure to say thank you to Specialist 4 William J. Hurley Jr., and an even bigger regret is to not do anything about getting Hurley his recognition, his Silver Star.
 
In late summer 1969, after the Eagle landed on the moon and after Woodstock mooned the Establishment, I was an Army Second Lieutenant, a graduate of Airborne and Ranger schools, and I was on my first combat patrol as a forward observer with Charlie Company of the Second Wolfhounds in the 25th Infantry Division. I was too raw and too dumb to be scared, at least until the shooting started. My job was to know exactly where we were at all times, and should I have to call in artillery, I knew what to do and where to put it. As the company FO, I also directed air strikes by the jets and small rocket fire from helicopter gunships. I carried an M-16 rifle, but my job was not to shoot like a rifleman; it was to direct firepower like a forward observer. I had to keep the artillery close to us, where the enemy lay, but not too close. I had to keep the jets flying on top of the enemy, but the napalm had to scatter parallel to our position at a safe distance while still pouring lethal fire into the enemy bunkers and tunnel entrances. And, of course, I couldn’t call in the helicopter gunships if there was any chance of a collision with the jets. All this was part of my first day on the job.
 
The enemy knew all this, naturally, so their goal was to wipe out the FO, the guy talking on the radio handset connected to the radio connected to the 6-foot antenna, because that guy had access to America’s great battlefield advantages: its artillery and fighter jets and helicopter gunships.  
 
Another education gained early in my attachment to Charlie Company was the incredible capacity of the Cu Chi tunnel system, the enemy’s battlefield advantage. They just kept shooting at us once the artillery paused and once the jets lifted and once the gunships pulled away. In other words, all the enemy had to do to keep up the good fight was crawl back down and huddle while we showed off our strength and spent money like you wouldn’t believe.
 
While I was on my first combat patrol, Hurley was on his last combat patrol. He was set to move from our infantry company to our battalion’s headquarters company, for a combat troop a pretty placid assignment for his last couple of months in country. He probably had a week’s vacation in Sydney figured into those last two months.
 
He still had responsibilities. Hurley would have to work at a real job, probably working the radios inside the battalion bunker where he would interact with the battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, and the battalion artillery liaison officer, a captain who was my boss, David Smith, a Princeton dropout who knew Danny Love from Columbia. But Hurley would eat and sleep with the headquarters crowd, and they lived large, sleeping on comfortable cots and eating three hospitable hots a day, and maybe drinking a little 3.2 beer off-duty. Not bad.
 
The men who got down to their last months and who were not called into the rear base camp to live like a light colonel and like Hurley, well, they quietly carried around a little animosity when they talked about Hurley. They called him a REMF, an acronym for Rear Echelon Mother F’r. You have to remember, this was the army, the people who brought us SNAFU and FUBAR in WWII or maybe earlier.
 
Now, when you’re down to the last two months in South Vietnam, you develop an expected nervousness because you begin to believe you’re really going home. You damn did it. Fini Vietnam. And nothing can be allowed to stop you now.
 
Getting so close to leaving, called short, Hurley probably had a short timer’s calendar where he had marked every day with days spent in country and days left in country.
 
As I said, my job included precision map reading. I had to know within 10 meters where we were at all times. If an enemy ambush opened up on us, I was supposed to immediately call in the artillery where I wanted it and adjust the fire to exactly where we needed it. As the company FO, I was the most over-confidant and obnoxious map reader you ever saw. No one argued with Lt. Ligon when he had a map in his hands, which was all the time.
 
We had to sit through an inquiry at brigade headquarters at Cu Chi, what we called the rear with rumors of flush toilets, soon after one of our patrols wandered into Cambodia, which was a no-no. Our brigade commander, a full colonel, was standing in front of a wall-mounted map, pointing to where the patrol crossed the border, but he was wrong, and I had to say so. After all, I was the artillery FO in the room of infantry types.
 
Map reading near the border utilized recognizable shapes to give nicknames to geographic and political features or to forms drawn by nature.  In that area of South Vietnam we took boats down the Vam Co Dong, a k a the Oriental River, negotiating our way through a shape called the Eagle’s Beak, named such because from a helicopter that’s exactly what the bends in the river looked like, a closed beak on the face of an eagle. Miles north of our basecamp, well above Highway 1, was the Fish Hook on the right and the Dog Face on the left, both shapes illustrated by the Cambodian border, and on September 5 we were patrolling at the bottom tip of the Angel’s Wing, where a stream flowed to the Vam Co Dong. At the intersection of the stream and the river was the village An Ninh, which lent its name to the An Ninh Corridor, famous for enemy infiltration from the Ho Chi Minh Trail at the bottom tip of the Wing downstream to An Ninh and on to Saigon.
 
More than a mile north of the bottom tip of the Wing, running up to the Wing’s halfway point, and maybe a mile east from that point was Fire Support Base Kotrc, a weak underdefended outpost that attracted North Vietnamese Regulars to leave their safe haven inside Cambodia, cross the border and attack Kotrc. On the night of September 4, 1969, that’s what happened. Kotrc was attacked. Unbelievably brave enemy sappers blasted their way inside the wire at Kotrc, which had one infantry company and half of an artillery battery, just three 105mm pieces.
 
The enemy was repelled, and Kotrc stood under American control the next morning. That’s when our company commander got the word we would take helicopters to the An Ninh Corridor as a blocking force.
 
Here’s what happened on September 5, 1969, near the Cambodian border with South Vietnam.
 
This is a real war story, all witnessed and participated by the writer. Keep that in mind as you finish these few pages. To lend authenticity, not necessarily credibility, to a war story, you have to say no shit at the beginning. We’re a little late here, but at least we got it out. This really happened the way I’m telling it. No shit.
 
I can’t remember how many of us took the helicopters to the An Ninh Corridor, but I can guess three platoons plus our company’s command and control. C&C included the company commander, a captain, his two radio telephone operators (RTOs), the company FO (me) and my RTO, Spartanburg’s Glenn Chapman, if I remember his name right. Actually Chapman’s job title was recon sergeant, but he was my RTO that day.
 
We had a peaceful insertion, no shooting at us while we landed and jumped off the helicopters. We moved spread out up the An Ninh Corridor towards the Wing, paralleling the stream coming from the bottom tip of the Wing.
 
I called in a white phosphorus artillery round to explode 200 feet in the air above us, just to confirm my faultless map reading and to get the attention of the artillery battery. The chances of walking into something bad seemed all to real to all of us, from first patrol, like me, and all the way across the experience spectrum to last patrol, like Hurley. Everybody was on edge due to the news of the night before from Kotrc.
 
Sergeant Donald N. Cartland, whose picture taken the week before hangs in my hallway on Terrace Way, was the first to take it. The bullet went clean through his helmeted head, and he dropped immediately just 10 feet in front of me. He fell from automatic weapons fire: AK47. There were plenty of bullets coming at us, but Cartland took just one. The others missed me, as you can see, but they came awfully close. Frightfully effing close.
 
In all I have experienced for all of my life so far, the most frightening and most disorienting thing was that first blast of automatic weapons fire. Bullets are like little jet planes in that they break the sound barrier when they fly past your head. At first, you hear the sound barrier business close to your head, not the rounds going off at the source, inside the AK47. After a couple of seconds you realize you can locate the source of the shots – you actually hear the rounds go off – and you return fire on fully automatic, or rock&roll, as we late ’60s sorts called it.
 
Having survived the first two minutes, which is the big event of a firefight – that’s when most get hit or get past the opening rounds – I proceeded to coordinate a firepower demonstration. I called in the world.
 
The jet pilots wanted to see some smoke farther than I could throw it, but fortunately for all of us I had a rifle-launched smoke grenade David Smith gave me almost out of his sense of humor. The grenade was designed to be fired from an M14, the rifle the army called its basic personal weapon from the Korean War until the M16 began to replace it in 1965 or so. David showed me, however, where the old grenade could fit over the flash suppressor of the M16, and with a blank cartridge, I could fire the M16 and send the grenade downfield. David had never done this himself, of course, but he said he saw it work in a training film. He got the grenades in surplus storage from another Princeton dropout who was with the California National Guard. Well, why not? Even if I hadn’t seen the training film, I had passed enough IQ tests and entrance exams to figure it out.
 
I fit the grenade over the M16’s flash suppressor (many would call it a muzzle), inserted a single shot blank, held the M16 resting on my right shoulder, and I pulled the trigger, almost taking out my shoulder. The force knocked me to the ground on my back. The smoke grenade hit where we wanted it, and the troops around me applauded me for providing such slapstick comedy in the middle of a firefight. The FO FU.  No shit.