Part IV: War story

By Temple Ligon
November 29, 2013

 

In early spring 1970 I left my job as an infantry company’s artillery forward observer, where I had been on company-sized patrols, both daytime and night ambush, for about seven months. That was a typical timetable for a turnover to let someone else pound the ground through rice paddies, triple-canopy jungles and open fields. Most FOs stayed on the job with an infantry company for seven months and then got reassigned to an artillery battery for five months before returning to the world.  If I had a preference for wet weather, which I did not, my timing was perfect. As I left the infantry company the rainy season soon left, which meant socks and underwear became part of the uniform of the day. On patrol in wet weather, we never wore socks and never donned boxers because they never dried.

Besides perfect wet-weather timing, my departure was almost perfect in a survival sense. Only a few weeks after I left the FO’s slot, my former company took a serious hit in the Renegade Woods, a dense jungle area north of Highway 1 in Tay Ninh Province. According to the army’s official history of the occasion, my FO replacement was killed, as were 10 other Americans and another 35 wounded. The other side had it much worse: 101 NVA and VC killed during the five-day operation. Participating were two infantry companies besides my old Hard Luck Charlie in the Second Wolfhounds (A, B, C/2/27) and another two companies in the 2/22 (Mechanized) Infantry, all in the Third Brigade at the 25th Infantry Division. Mechanized meant armored personnel carriers and tanks, which replaced the horse cavalry early in the 20C. Speaking of such, their battalion commander at Second Wolfhounds was LTC George Custer III – connected to the same, I was told.

I joined a 105mm howitzer battery in an area about halfway between Saigon and Vung Tau, where we had an in-country R&R compound on the beach. Our battery commander, CPT Fred Sexton of Florida, was a seasoned veteran on his second tour, and he called me his new fire direction officer. As the battery’s FDO I was responsible for managing the half-dozen enlisted men who took the calls for artillery support from the infantry and determined the data to convey to the gun bunnies working the six 105mm howitzers, delivering the rounds exactly where they were needed. We never had an erratic round, neither short nor long.

As the battery’s new FDO I replaced Ken Wilson, an officer candidate school classmate of mine from Louisiana who had recently been fired by Sexton from the FDO job and returned to the boonies attached again to the infantry as an FO. Wilson might not have cut it as an artillery officer, but he was good-looking enough to make it as a model. In the summer of 1971, I think it was, I saw Ken in a full-page ad pushing the combination, Coffee and Kent. Only a little more than a year earlier Ken had been fired by Sexton and sent back out as an FO.

Sexton, probably around 30, knew people and Sexton knew his new FDO.

How long? he asked me.

Seven months, I said, and I was not only talking about time on patrol as an FO but time away from store-bought scents, as in Shalimar, and the real thing, as in freshly showered skin.

Sexton put together a small group with legitimate logistical needs to take a supply run to Vung Tau in a ¾-ton truck. They dropped me off at a storefront decorated like a barber shop, striped pole and all, but inside was no barber shop. Like a first-time visit to a barber shop, the prices were not negotiable and the services were conventional and predictable and presumably met some minimum standard. I had no idea how to ask for an especially good trim at this barber shop. But none of that really mattered. I didn’t take long – not long at all.

Maybe a month later we were part of President Nixon’s Cambodian Incursion, what could have been called an invasion. Nixon announced a 21-mile limit, I think it was, inside the Cambodian border beyond which we couldn’t venture. The bad guys knew that, so they corralled inside Cambodia at a point 22 miles, say, from the border with South Vietnam, and most of them waited it out. We trucked in with our six 105mm howitzers in tow just behind the 2/22 (Mechanized) Infantry. We didn’t mind having all that armor and firepower escort us up to the 21-mile mark. All those tracks, though, made all that noise. We felt a little like the Brits and their red coats and their drums marching into hidden Patriots all day. Our tracks got hit every couple of miles or so with delay-fused rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) with armor-piercing points.

The 2/22 was hit so many times we called them the Triple Dud instead of their nickname, the Triple Deuce. By the time we pulled out of Cambodia, the Triple Dud, a mechanized battalion, was down to just five armored personnel carriers, total, out of what they took into Cambodia.

With the 2/22 around mid-afternoon early in our incursion, we pulled into a Michelin rubber plantation, replete with Tara and mistresses. We were on the map between the villages Krek and Mimot, supposedly about where we were told we could find COSVN, the NVA headquarters. The two Michelin plantation managers, two Frenchmen, came to see us in their red-clay-stained tennis clothes. They asked us not to destroy their property, a fair expectation, but we had to say the crowd following us by about a day, the South Vietnamese, were probably not up to our standards. Rape, pillage and plunder were soon approaching in the forms of American equipment and South Vietnamese military morals.

That night a single-engine plane took off from the Michelin plantation, probably never to return.

We did return, though, to South Vietnam after less than a month’s incursion to follow the news at Kent State and campuses across America and later the Killing Fields in Cambodia.

I processed a transfer to the 173rd Airborne Brigade and an extension of duty in South Vietnam for another six months, planning get out of ‘Nam and out of the army in March 1971. To join the 173rd, a paratrooper brigade separate from any division, I had to chat it up at MACV headquarters, home of the commanding general. Just about every West Pointer, every lifer, every volunteer and every fool asked to be assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade. Read the part in The Long Grey Line about the 173rd. In The Long Grey Line the West Point class of ’66 takes its run through the army and its time in South Vietnam. Everybody wanted to fight with The Herd, as the 173rd was called. If we let all the men who wanted to fight with The Herd actually join up with The Herd, the MACV major told me, we’d have little more than a 173rd Army.

So I told them I would return as a forward observer, something I was awfully good at and somebody any infantry company in The Herd would be happy to have. A first lieutenant FO with one year’s experience in South Vietnam actually had value. They took me.

After a month’s leave, where I spent most of my time in South Carolina and Bermuda, I went to the field with Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry, commanded by CPT Jim Yarrison. Yarrison left the military not long after I returned to college, which is what he did. He finished with a PhD at Princeton.

Yarrison and I and our Charlie Company went out to the field for long patrols, 15-day patrols, in the Central Highlands, where on a moonless night there was no light whatsoever for any purpose. Every five days we were resupplied. On a 15-day mission, then, there were three 5-day segments, while at the same time the other three companies in our battalion held to the same rotation. For the fourth 5-day segment, each company spent five days behind the wire, something of a down time for relaxation and hot food and, in my case, one heluva lot of reading. So, as a management timing tool, the five-day segment was absolutely brilliant, keeping three companies in the field and one in the rear every five days.

Our battalion commander, Citadel graduate LTC Jack Farris, liked to call his four company commanders to come to his headquarters for one five-day segment once a month, all sitting in on the same five-day segment. So when Yarrison had to leave us for the regularly scheduled 5-day company commanders’ meeting with the old man, I was appointed company commander in the field because I was the lieutenant with the combat experience. I was not from West Point. Hell, I was not even a college graduate. And I was not a lifer, a career-oriented type. But I was experienced, and that meant a whole lot when we got into trouble or when we wanted to stay out of trouble in the first place.

And my people appreciated it. Somehow they saw to it I became the only non-infantry officer in the army to get awarded the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

My temporary job as both FO and CO (commanding officer) gave me a high profile, and the enlisted ranks knew me more than I realized. When we all eventually processed out of the 173rd and out of the army, I was talked about. One reason I was tossed about in conversation was because I left early. Since I was in there for just another six months and not the usual one-year stint, when I left without much fanfare, many of the men thought I had bought the farm.

What happen Ligon? I don’t know. I hear he went to battalion and became their artillery liaison officer (LNO), and his chopper flew into a mountain.

Or something like that.

What happened was I left when I was supposed to in March 1971 and went back to the freshman class at the University of South Carolina. Roughly speaking, I had three years in the military, 18 months in school and 18 months in combat. And that was that.

Eleven years later in November 1982, I was the project director for Houston-based Texas Development Group. I was overseeing the design, construction and leasing of a 54-unit student condominium project in College Station, Texas, almost across the street from Texas A&M University.

I had followed closely the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, particularly its placement on the Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The Yale undergraduate, Maya Lin, I thought, did a brilliant job and deserved to win, and I wanted to go there on Veterans Day at the dedication to tell as much to everybody around me and hopefully to her, too. I was used to being the only art history major in most of my circles, and I had to assume I was a rarity in Washington among my fellow combat troops on Veterans Day in 1982.

When I first arrived in Washington the night before the dedication, I needed to change clothes for dinner at the Jockey Club in the Ritz where President Reagan took his wife Nancy the night before for her birthday dinner. But before dinner I wanted to go to the National Cathedral where they were reading the names of the 58,000 dead. I checked into the Ritz, what used to be the Fairfax when little Al Gore lived in his daddy’s suite and attended prep school at St. Albans next to the National Cathedral. After college Gore was a journalist in the army at Long Binh, a huge rear-area compound near Saigon, probably safer than Detroit or Camden, N. J. On the other hand, at least he showed up. Where was Clinton?

The subway fare machines under Dupont Circle wouldn’t take my twenty or my American Express, so I rode the escalator back up to find a small liquor store on Dupont Circle, where I bought a half-pint of Remy Martin cognac. I didn’t want a drink, I just wanted some loose change to take the subway. I put the half-pint in my suit pocket, a three-piece grey flannel job I planned to wear the next day in the parade and at the dedication.

As we were gathering around in our home-state sections, I walked by Texas to see if I recognized anyone. I then found South Carolina and I found General Westmoreland, my father’s Boy Scout buddy in Spartanburg. He was telling us South Carolinians how he would prefer to march with us, but he was told he had to lead the parade. I introduced myself and invited the general to share a snort out of my half-pint of Remy I kept in my suit pocket. He took a sip. I took a sip. And Columbia’s Robert Morgan, a Grand Strand developer, still has the bottle. I gave it to Morgan for doing such a good job on my war stories for a class at A. C. Flora.

The 173rd veterans put together a plan to circle back after each state crossed the finish and form a 173rd contingent. I circled back and after a while we had a hundred or so members of The Herd. A Native American from the Dakotas, Robles, who was Yarrison’s radio-telephone operator on patrol with us, ran up to me, yelling, What the hell are you doing here? I came all the way to Washington to see your name on the Wall. You S.O.B. You made it. Everybody said you bought it. GD glad to see you, lieutenant.

 

 

---

Sign up here to receive MidlandsLife weekly email magazine.