Part III: War story

By Temple Ligon
November 22, 2013

(See Part l: War Story here)

(See Part Il: War Story here)

 
In the last week of September 1969 our infantry company moved from Fire Support Base Jackson, home of our battalion headquarters – a k a Second Wolfhounds – with its six 105mm howitzers, to Fire Support Base Harris, where we had small mortars but no artillery. As the company FO, of course, I had radio contact with all kinds of artillery whenever I needed to call it in.
 
From Harris we sent out two patrols every day and another two every night, rotating among the four platoons in Charlie Company. My radio-telephone operator or my recon sergeant or myself with one of the other two would accompany the patrols as their FO. Typically I wouldn’t go out unless there were at least two platoons together on patrol, and I would go out with my RTO every time our company commander went. Occasionally we went out as a company for three or four or five days and nights, but mostly we ran a daylight or an overnight patrol operation, regularly returning to the fire support base.
 
Since FSB Harris was practically on the banks of the Oriental River, we worked with the brown-water Navy up and down the river, inserting for short riverside patrols and overnight ambushes. Often the company commander and I and our RTOs would accept the navy’s invitation for lunch at their compound next to the village Go Da Ha, where Highway 1 crossed the Oriental – or Vam Co Dong, as it said on our maps. Compared with our GI existence, the navy lived well, at least where food was concerned. GI beans and GI gravy, gee I wish I’d joined the navy.
 
By early January, our company commander was my third since September. Our company was called Hard Luck Charlie, and my third company commander came in as the turnaround type, someone who could pick up the kill ratio and at the same time help hold down the casualties. And, of course, it didn’t hurt at all that he was a great guy.
 
That October 15 a student peace movement called the Moratorium was coming, all for just one day, but a full day of 24 hours. The idea was to lay down our arms for the 24 hours and just think about what we were doing. Back in the world it made all the sense in the world: Stop the war for a day to consider peaceful alternatives to the killing. In South Vietnam it made no sense whatsoever. Lay down our arms for what purposes? Let the enemy run over us? Invite the enemy to mortar us? Give the enemy a day and night of free movement to prepare an attack on us or to get past us for Saigon?
 
No way.
 
As plans for the Moratorium were heating up on college campuses, there was an impressive PR campaign in the push. Even South Carolina’s Jasper Johns, an army veteran of the time of the Korean War and America’s most important painter, altered one of his paintings for the occasion and called it Moratorium, still available as a cardboard poster at museum shops.
 
One night in late September after we had moved to Harris, one of our patrols opened up on a small group of unfortunates, killing all five. And all five were carrying professionally printed propaganda leaflets promoting the Moratorium. The leaflets were addressed to the American GI, urging us to follow the leadership of esteemed (maybe they didn’t say esteemed) Senators Ed Kennedy of Massachusetts, Charles Goodell of New York, and George McGovern of South Dakota. All three senators were famous for early anti-war positions, as were their three states, and all three didn’t agree with South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond on a whole lot, not even Republican Goodell.
 
I sent a blood-stained leaflet to Strom Thurmond. He loved it. He wrote me back, thanking me and showing me excerpts from the Congressional Record where he spoke in support of our efforts in South Vietnam. I had to assume he got a kick out of waving that leaflet in the air on the steps of the Capitol as he cited the bond between the NVA Regulars and the Kennedy-Goodall-McGovern triumvirate.
 
We stayed at Harris through Christmas. I think I remember someone saying Merry Christmas. That was about it. We left Harris for FSB Kotrc in early January, setting us up as bait one mile from the Cambodian border, just like the crowd before us at Kotrc who got attacked on the night of September 4.
 
I complained that my radio contact wasn’t all that good among the artillery batteries I needed to reach, and I requested an antenna called the 292, something far better than my little PRC25’s six-foot antenna. On patrol with a PRC25 on my RTO’s back, all I would ever have was the six-foot antenna, but back at Kotrc I said I sure would appreciate decent commo – even better, clear commo.
 
Within a week the response was overwhelming but that response came with unintended consequences. Instead of a 292, the battalion types thought I could put my PRC25 on top of a lookout tower and wire it down to my bunker, operating with a radio-telephone handset remote on the ground while my antenna was 20 feet in the air, comparable to the height of my requested 292. And from the top of the tower we could see everything between us and the Cambodian border.
 
When the engineers were finished with building the 20-foot tower, I mean that very night, we took incoming. The enemy in Cambodia had just discovered an aiming point, our new tower, and proceeded to aim 120mm mortars at us. These mortars had delay fuses, so if one hit the ground, we got a big hole, but if one hit my bunker, it would come crashing through before it exploded, killing me and anyone else nearby.
 
I guess it was one or two in the morning when our company commander, Capt. Bill Schuler of Wisconsin and Ripon College, yelled in my face, Killer we got incoming. I was nicknamed Killer because my mustache and overall blue-humored attitude reminded everybody of Beetle Bailey’s sidekick Killer. And it might have had something to do with the effectiveness of artillery.
 
It was only a week or two earlier when I shared with Bill my position on crater analysis, how to read a mortar or artillery crater to determine its direction of origin. We had never seen any artillery come our way from the NVA, but they carried an adequate supply of mortars. Mortars, though, were tougher to determine direction of origin because they tended to come in almost straight down, while an artillery round came in at an angle, maybe 45 degrees, say. At that angle the explosion of any artillery round left a hole with wings, a spread of wingtips that set up an line of radiating dirt displacement exactly 90 degrees to the direction of the round’s origin.
 
A mortar round, however, left a round hole with just a hint of wings.
 
I was the one who had been to artillery officer candidate school which meant I was the expert, so I had to be the one who ran out of my bunker and through the triple-concertina wire to where the mortars had just landed. I hoped like hell the enemy was doing the expected and bracketing the target, our FSB Kotrc. If one round landed beyond the target, the mortar men needed to try for a slightly shorter trajectory. If one round landed to the left of our little outpost, the mortar men would be expected to aim more the right, and so on. In other words, like lightning, I had to guess no round would land where the last one just hit. That’s a guess, mind you.
 
The 120 mm mortar with a delay fuse created a crater big enough to swallow a standard-sized office desk. And that was to my advantage. While rounds were landing all around, I could analyze two or three craters of such size, about five feet in diameter, and manage to make out the wings, where a string could be stretched across the crater from wingtip to wingtip, showing me a straight line exactly 90 degrees to the direction of origin.
 
My RTO Jimmy Langley of Greenville, N. C., ran up in his bare feet and olivedrab drawers just in time to hold the string I asked him to bring while the other end was held by our company top sergeant John Farmer, an old pro who was impressed with our technique to figure out were the rounds were taking off in Cambodia.
 
We Americans had an agreement with Prince Sihanouk and his neutral Cambodia, and we could not fire into Cambodia unless we could see the enemy firing at us. Well, we couldn’t say we saw the NVA mortar crew, exactly, but I called in a twice-determined direction – or azimuth as military types say – off my compass at 90 degrees to the string held by Jimmy and Top on two different craters. I didn’t see any sense in screwing around with my usual direct support, the105mm howitzers or even the 155mm. I started with the biggest we had, the 175mm guns and the 8 howtizers. With 120mm incoming, I would have called in the 16 rounds from the USS New Jersey if we were close enough to the ship at sea. I said to the big guns I recommended they start shooting for the Cambodian border at the intersection with my direction and hit every 50 meters, as I remember it, walking the rounds into Cambodia until the incoming stopped. Soon enough it did.
 
And the enemy never tried that again before I left the company and Kotrc in February. 
 
The next day we had visitors at Kotrc, NFL players. I remember meeting three football players as they got off their helicopter, all about three or four years older than I, but obviously the right age to have been drafted in the latter half of the 1960s. Somehow they weren’t. Maybe they had Reserves or National Guard connections, but none mentioned it.
 
They were nice enough guys doing what the USO asked them to do. I wasn’t much of a a pro-football fan – I didn’t recognize any of their names – but they weren’t visiting the officers. They were visiting the enlisted ranks. They walked around Kotrc shaking hands and talking about the past season and the upcoming Superbowl. The men, by and large, appeared to appreciate the visit.
 
Some of us were singularly unimpressed. There were two big questions with the visit: (1) How did these guys dodge the draft? Were they three Joe Namaths where knees or some such physical complaint saved them from military service but somehow the joints and muscles worked fine on the football field? They didn’t look like Black Muslims, but maybe that was it. Mohammed Ali dodged the draft, claiming a Muslim would never take up arms against a fellow human being. Tell that to the families of the 9/11 occupants of the World Trade Center. (2) Whose idea was it to send us three guys? We needed to smell women – at least look at women and smile at women and hope for a return smile. Why in the world would anybody in the rear among the clerks and jerks and bottle washers think we wanted to see three well-paid football players with no military past?
 
One dumb idea. I never spent much money on sensitivity lessons, but I could readily see the outrageously rank insensitivity.
 
Just before the football players began to talk about their busy schedules and how they needed to get back to Saigon, I walked two of them outside the wire to see the 120mm mortar craters from the night before. They explained to the third and to their USO handler it was time to go.

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