Chapter 7

RT Montana stood down for a week after our successful mission on target Hotel-Seven. The stand-down was SOP for every team after every mission. The seven days allowed you to unwind from the stress that came with running reconnaissance behind enemy lines. Fred released our Montagnards on a five day pass back to their village, and we three Americans headed down to Nha Trang to sample the good life.

Nha Trang was a bustling city right on the South China Sea. It had a busy port that was one of the primary entry points for US military supplies and equipment. Nha Trang also had some pristine white sand beaches just north of the port complex.

We stayed at a small hotel near one of the beaches, instead of at the Special Forces compound. We did that because Fred and Rick didn’t want to have anything to do with the Army while we were away from camp. I protested that I didn’t have the money for living large and splurging on a hotel room. Fred laughed and Rick slapped me on the back.

“No worries, Opie, it’s my treat,” Rick said. Then his expression turned serious.

“Listen, Jody, I respect how you are about your family, but money is never, ever a problem for me. If you need something, it won’t be a problem for you, either ... understand?”

I didn’t, but I nodded my head ‘yes’ anyway. After all, even though he was an officer and single, he still didn’t make enough money to burn it. Later that night, Fred told me what Rick really meant.

We had a very good meal in a French restaurant, then headed over to a local joint that featured a loud jukebox and scantily-clad Go-Go dancers. Rick went up to fetch us a few bottles of a not too bad Vietnamese beer called Ba Muoi Ba (33 Beer). I was reaching for my wallet to throw in for the beer, when Fred leaned over and held my arm.

“Let Rick buy the booze and anything else he feels like. The Pierponts are rolling in the dough, and from what I gather, Rick is the favorite son and heir apparent. I think Rick is in Nam to show his family he has a set of balls. They’d probably shit if they knew what he was really doing over here.”

True to Fred’s word, Rick insisted on paying for everything, including ‘Saigon Teas’ for three of the dancers who joined us at Fred’s instigation. Soon enough, we only needed four chairs at our table, because Fred and Rick each had one of the skimpily clad cuties sitting in their laps. When I told the girl who sat next to me that I wasn’t playing around, she seemed offended.

“You Cheap Charlie then,” she huffed as she rose from her chair.

Rick caught her arm as she walked by him and whispered something in her ear. The girl’s angry face broke into a sunny smile; she nodded her head and plopped back down in her seat.

“You lucky GI, Cheap Charlie. Your friend pay me to suck you-fuck you all night long.”

I returned her infectious smile and shook my head.

“No can do,” I said.

Then I switched to Vietnamese and told her why.

Her bar name was Suzie; Su-Lin was her real name. I called her by the latter, just to reinforce that, regardless what Rick paid for, there would be no hanky-panky. Su-Lin liked me calling her by her real name, and she liked me speaking to her in her own language. Those little things helped her forget for a while that she was a bar girl instead of the nursing student she wanted to be.

I was incredulous when she told me she was only sixteen. Until six months ago, she had been that nursing student at a local teaching hospital. Then her father, an honest and effective regional police captain, had been kidnapped and summarily executed by the Viet Cong. Now she was the sole supporter of her mother and younger siblings.

Su-Lin and I became friends, once she figured out that I wasn’t trying to work her for a freebie. For the next three days, she was my tour guide to the real Vietnam. I met her family, and as had Su-Lin, we became friends when they figured out friendship was all I was seeking.

We returned to FOB Two on the fifth day. Our little road trip served its purpose of expunging some of the stress out of us. We burned out more of it with a trip to the PX in Pleiku. We went to the PX as a team, three Americans escorted by six small, fierce, heavily armed highland tribesmen. Needless to say, everyone, Vietnamese and American alike, gave us a wide berth.

I bought a resupply of legal pads and large envelopes at the PX. I wrote Megan at least two letters a week. In return, she wrote me at least as often. Her letters were precious to me. She often sent me pictures of herself and our daughter Shelby. Roxie was her unofficial photographer, so some of the pictures were quite revealing. I had a collage of the pictures she’d sent me scotch-taped to the inside of the door of my wall locker, along with the sentimental Valentine’s Day card she sent me. The irony of those innocent pictures on the door of where I stored my weapons of war was not lost on me.

On our first morning back to duty, Fred ambled over to the Tactical Operations Center and picked up our next mission. He returned fifteen minutes later with the mission packet.

“We are running with the big dogs now, girls,” he said. “Our target is Kilo-Nine, right on the main part of The Trail.”

Fred took the map out of the packet and spread it on our card table. He pointed to an area out lined in red. The target area was eight grid squares long and six wide. There was an identical rectangle drawn to the North of our target.

“The Intel weenies think the NVA 802d Transportation Regiment displaced down to this general area from up north. RT Alabama is inserting into the northern area the day after we hit the ground. Their mission is the same as ours, search for the 802d and try to snatch a prisoner.”

RT Alabama was one of the elite three or four teams that drew the toughest missions. The one-zero of RT Alabama was Joe Webber. Crazy Joe Webber was a real gunslinger, and his exploits both in and out of the field were legendary. Where most one-zeros lived the recon mantra of ‘break contact, continue mission’, Crazy Joe would just as often stand and fight it out.

We studied the mission folder all morning, mostly bouncing around ideas on how to snatch an enemy soldier and how to avoid the counter-recon units known to be deployed with major regimental headquarters. The counter-recon units were a real threat, because they knew how we operated and had taken out a number of good teams using that knowledge. The counter-recon units used tracker dogs, surveilled likely landing zones and patrolled their area of responsibility aggressively.

Taking all that into account, Fred and Rick started listing equipment and munitions we’d need that I studiously wrote down in the pocket sized note book Fred insisted we all carry. From item one, it was an eye-opening list. Number one was a couple of packets of cyanide and number two was six ounces of riot control ‘Agent OC’ (pepper spray) in powder form, along with three one-quarter pound blocks of TNT for each of us.

The cyanide would be sprinkled over some meat that Rick would carry in a sandwich baggie. If we were being tracked by dogs, he’d toss some of the meat on our back trail. The OC powder went into empty insect repellent bottles. Two of the bottles would be taped to each quarter pound block of TNT. A thirty second time pencil would fuse the explosives. If the meat didn’t get rid of the dogs, Rick would activate one of the TNT bombs and drop it on the trail. When the TNT exploded, it would spread powdered OC over a large area. One good sniff of the OC would put a dog out of commission for many days.

Fred’s concoctions might not win him many friends down at the ASPCA, but the alternative was letting the dogs lead the NVA right to us!

Fred also wanted us to carry a second Claymore, our protective masks (gas masks) and ten additional magazines of 5.56 ammo. I groaned when I realized that my rucksack and LBE (load bearing equipment) would now weigh about ninety pounds.

We trained for a week before the mission. We rehearsed our IAD’s again, but mostly we concentrated on setting up a deliberate ambush and capturing a prisoner. I wore my ruck packed with the extra weight during the training. It was a back-breaking load at first, but by the end of the week, I was use to it.

Our plan was to spend four days looking for the 802d. If we didn’t locate the regimental headquarters, we would find an extraction LZ near the trail. We would then set up a deliberate ambush within a klick of a serviceable LZ and wait for a small group of NVA to walk into our ambush. We would shoot the hell out of all the NVA except for the last man in the formation. Rick was responsible for wounding the last man. Once the man was down, Bing and Kai would grab the guy and all of us would haul ass to the extraction LZ. Rick was in charge of the snatch, because he had a match-grade, accurized M1911.45 semi-automatic pistol, and he was a dead shot with it.

We rehearsed using a squad from the Hatchet force as aggressors. When we could carry out the ambush and snatch in under two minutes, Fred informed the TOC that we were ready to launch. Webber also announced that RT Alabama was ready, so the TOC green lighted our insertion for three days later, St Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1968.

We spent the night of the sixteenth at Dak To and inserted across the fence into Laos early the next morning. The LZ Fred had selected was about seven miles from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and outside our target area. Fred was a master of finding remote landing zones just big enough for a helicopter. Fred said a long walk was better than landing in the middle of trouble. Fred was talking about the surveillance the NVA used on likely LZs.

We hustled off the LZ, moved about fifty meters into the jungle and set up a perimeter. Fred waited ten minutes and when all was still quiet, he gestured for me to hand him the radio handset.

“Team okay,” Fred whispered into the handset, “but keep the gunships in the area for another fifteen, just in case.”

Fred handed me back the handset and shot the compass azimuth he had plotted for the first leg of our movement. Bing led us off at a brisk pace. Our first priority was to put some distance between us and the LZ, in case the helicopter activity attracted the bad guys’ attention. We moved a thousand meters in an hour, with Rick and two of the yards erasing our back trail. In those thousand meters, we waded up two streams to make it tougher for tracker dogs to follow us. After a thousand meters, we looped back a hundred yards and set up a hasty ambush on our back trail. We hunkered down for an hour before Fred was convinced we had inserted undetected.

For the rest of the day, we zigged and zagged through the jungle in a broken indirect route towards our objective. Fred had us crawl into a thick stand of bamboo at night fall. We were all bone tired, but we were within a mile of the trail, and as far as we knew, the NVA did not have a clue that we were in their midst.

Recon teams picked the worst possible places for their RONs, because comfort took a back seat to security. We put out Claymores, then Fred encrypted a situation report and I called it in, to Leghorn. Leghorn was a mountain top radio relay site in Cambodia, accessible only by helicopter.

When we were across the border, we only had two means of communications. During the day we had radio with Covey, the Forward Air Controller in a small airplane that flew constantly back and forth between the teams on the ground. Riding with the FAC was a recon guy called a Covey Rider. It was comforting for us to know that someone who understood what it was like on the ground was with the Air Force FAC. At night, we had Leghorn. Leghorn did not have access to air assets to come to our aid like Covey, so a good hidey-hole at night was imperative.

We moved out at the butt-crack of dawn the next morning. Our movement was slower and more cautious as we snuck up to the major north-south roadway.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was not one single road. Instead, it was a complex network of roads, high speed trails and foot paths. The major axis of the system was north-south, with numerous branches running east into Vietnam, and a few roads and trails that led into the interior of Laos. The North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao allies exerted complete control over eastern Laos. There were probably thirty thousand NVA permanently stationed along the trail. The only challenges to their control were the few dozen SOG recon teams, only five or six of which were on the ground at any one time, and the hell we could cause to be rained down on them.

At a few minutes after eight, we stopped and listened intently to the radio as RT Alabama was inserted. We breathed a sigh of relief when we heard ‘team okay’ and continued our mission.

We reached a well-concealed one-lane truck road near noon. The road snaked its way beneath the triple canopy jungle, completely invisible from above. This was my first glimpse of a part of the trail capable of truck traffic, and I was less than impressed. To me, it looked like any of the dozens of old logging roads I’d seen when I worked as a lineman for Georgia Power. It was hard to believe that this was the main avenue for resupplying half a million soldiers.