Chapter 3

Sometime in early March of 68, The USMC in its infinite wisdom decided to send in Armor to I Corps Area. MacV HQ in Danang figured maybe the sight of the heavy tanks would convert the heathen Communists into right-thinking citizens.

I have to admit, I was excited about the prospect of some real tanks being added to the mix even though I knew the terrain and the mission was not suited to heavy armor. I suppose this biased view came from spending a few years riding around Germany in stimulating kriegspielen exercises with the Army. The yellow scarves, the wind whistling through my red hair, the sound of thundering tank engines warming up on a foggy morning in the Fulda Gap.

The Company XO (Executive Officer, Second in Command) asked me to head up to First Marine Division HQ to see if they needed any help getting the tanks lined up for action. It seems mighty strange to be asking a lowly Sergeant to do a task of this sort, but the truth of the matter was that a lot of the guys assigned to the armored units were not trained as tankers. Most of them had been pulled out of the Infantry APC training (Armored Personnel Carriers) and stuck into these big boy 50 ton tanks. Now, that might work for, say, a driver; the gears were similar, the concept was the same and you could always make a weight and size adjustment. It did not work well for Gunners, Loaders, and Tank Commanders. I had spent years filling all these positions and was kind of knowledgeable about the nuances of getting tanks into combat mode.

Officers tended to consider the assignment to an armor unit in the Marine Corps as the “kiss of death” from a promotion standpoint. It was rare to see an officer in an armored unit rise to the top of the heap in Officer Land. The first thing I noticed was that the command was very reluctant to use armor in anything except a defensive position. This basically turned the greatest offensive weapon at that time into a fixed artillery piece with unsustainable logistical problems.

It is probably important to say the comparison of numbers is crucial to Marine Corps thinking and Army thinking when it came to Armor. That was the problem then and it is still a problem. I remember watching the first Marine assault into Fallujah. There were about 600 Marines and 400 more in reserve. In that initial phase there were only 2 tanks in the assault, against an enemy dug into an urban defense defined as house-to-house fighting. It was a situation better suited to an assault force of 6,000 with at least a full armored regiment in support. Problem was, at that time, 1 or 2 Infantry Battalions only rated 2 or 3 tanks for support. The paucity of Armor and the lack of training to employ Armor led to its defeat on the battlefield.

Approximately 2 Battalions or a Regiment (-) in old cold war terms. I only mention this, in the context of this chapter, because the ratios of actual tanks to the size of Infantry units, and the attitude of the officer ranks to Armor in general were the 2 primary reasons for the failure of Armor in the Vietnam conflict. I know this is way above my pay grade, but I had proposed some options and made some decisions that were way above my pay grade throughout most of my career. That was true of many Marine Corps Enlisted personnel involved in joint operations.

Getting back to the use of Armor, eventually the high command lost their sense of caution about using Armor only in a defensive mode. I know I was critical earlier about this obvious shortcoming, but in retrospect; I have to say the alternative of going into the offense in support of troops in the open was a very bad decision and led to the elimination of Armor from the battlefield in Vietnam. At least as far as the Marine Corps was concerned. The Army had a different outcome because of their superior logistical lines of re-supply.

One tank company in Quang Nam province lost 15 of 17 tanks in fewer than 120 days. Of course, in the Marine Corps case, there was no re-supply. Some of the Armor units stretched all the way from Danang to the Perfume River and the old city of Hue. Tank units were in heavy fighting in the battle for the Citadel and they helped evacuate most of the Marine Corp dead from those intense battles. Some of the tanks did make it inland to Hill 55, but their maneuverability was extremely limited because of the terrain. Once in deep, the way back from Hill 55 was extremely difficult because of expert mining by the North Vietnamese regular army. These were troops who had defeated the French in a campaign of thoughtful misdirection.

In the early part of April, 1968, I was following a mine sweep team on a back route just North of Hill 55. I remember the lead minesweeper signaling my tank to close it up; when we ran over an anti-tank mine that killed my driver and the rest of us were instantly temporary casualties. The loader, who was riding on the outside of the turret at that very moment, was peppered with shrapnel on both his knees. Blinded and totally deaf, I was unable to even hear my own voice for almost 72 hours. With help from another tank crew we got the tread repaired and got hauled back in to the Battalion base camp by a tank wrecker. A week later, I witnessed two Deuce and a half trucks get blown into smithereens in almost the same place. After that, we never paid no mind to the mine sweep teams and used our own judgment on the least risky route.