"Silent Night" - Part One

Christmas Eve, 1969: Our Company was picked up at LZ Stinson and taken back to Chu Lai for stand down. We couldn’t believe our good luck – stand down for Christmas!

Two of the infantry Companies in our Battalion were in the field this night, and they would be tomorrow. No holiday cheer out there. Then as now, the Army tried to bring a little Christmas to everyone, even those sitting in the pitch black night of war. Still, it was a crappy place to spend Christmas Day.

And the war went on. “A” Company found a booby-trapped artillery round and blew it up. Artillery fire was called in on a suspected group of Viet Cong. The Division Commanding General dropped into LZ Stinson for a quick visit.

In Chu Lai we were informed that our Company was one of the units allowed to go to the Christmas Day USO show. Bob Hope was there. Bob Hope! It was a strange, almost anachronistic, experience. Sitting far at the back, drinking beers we had snuck in, the show went on under cloudy, rain-threatening skies. It was not very entertaining, but it beat celebrating Christmas out in the countryside.

For absolute entertainment value, it was hard to beat the acts booked onto the stage in our stand down area. Bands, dancers and hoochie-koo acts. Some were American, but most were Australian and Filipino, with the occasional Korean group in the mix.

The artistic quality was sometimes dubious, but they were all enthusiastic. So were we. Of course, it was more or less an open bar during stand down, whether the Army wanted it that way or not, so our enthusiasm level was pretty easy to lift up. A little skin, a little rock and roll, a couple of beers, and everyone was pretty happy. I’m not saying we were easily amused. But then, I guess I’m not saying we weren’t either.

After three days of this – hung over, steam blown off – we were ferried back out to LZ Stinson. More good luck; we were staying on the Hill for a few days.

Word was sent around by someone at Division Headquarters, prohibiting celebratory shooting at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Waste of ammunition, scares the local populace, might give the VC cover to stage an attack. None of these caveats made much of an impression on us.

As 1969 came to a close, first one firebase, then another, started filling the sky with small weapons fire. To the south of us was another mountaintop post, OP-1, which had a quad-50 machine gun.[1] Promptly at midnight, they started firing it, loaded up with tracer rounds[2]. Whoever was at the trigger was moving it up and down, side to side, firing .50 caliber bullets in the night.

The eruption of tracers was a flowing, graceful fountain – rivers of fire and lead.

It was death – ecstasy - deafening madness.

It was incredibly beautiful.



And then it was 1970.

After ten days on Stinson, we walked north through the fields, moving in an arc towards the northwest. One of our tasks was so-called “rice interdiction”. Simply put, we looked for stashes of rice and confiscated them. We searched villages as we went along. In one place, we found 1,500 pounds of rice in clay pots, 55 gallon drums and other containers. It was all hauled off by helicopter, to be distributed to someone else, somewhere else.

Sometimes we found rice hidden in double walls of houses. Army logic deduced that hidden rice was being stored for use by the VC and NVA. The reality, I think, was a bit more complicated. From time to time, the Viet Cong came through villages, levying a tax to be paid in rice. They employed this tactic because they had little other sources of food supply. Sometimes they took the rice away with them, other times it was hidden.

The local people would also hide rice. However, they were hiding it from the Viet Cong, to ensure the village would have enough to eat. At the same time, they were hiding it from us, since we would confiscate any rice we found hidden. The peasants working in the fields, living in the villages, were caught in the middle of this circular Catch-22.

A day or two later, we moved into what we called Vinh Tuy Valley, after the village that occupied the center of it. We and the rest of the Battalion went through there frequently, since it was known as an area very friendly to the VC.

It was also what was known as a “free fire zone”. If anyone ran when you shouted “dừng lại” (“stop now”), you were free to fire on them. Guilty until proven innocent. We found several tunnels, some documents, and more rice. The tunnels were blown up, the papers sent to Chu Lai, and the rice taken away to a warehouse.

The valley itself was quite beautiful. It was shadier than most of our AO and was drained by a couple of small rivers that eventually flowed into the Sông Trà Bong (Tra Bong River). One day, we were moving through the valley and crossed a little stream on what looked like a log. As I approached the stream, I realized the log was actually a mid-to-early nineteenth century cannon barrel, set into the ground untold years ago, to serve as a convenient way of crossing the water.

How had this ended up here, in a small valley in central Viet Nam? Who had brought it here, and how long had the people of the valley trod that barrel, walking to and from their rice fields, going about their daily lives? There was no time to search for answers to these questions. We walked on. Caught on the anvil of immediate history, we were oblivious to the history that lay beneath our feet.

A day or so later, we were once again picked up by helicopters and dropped in another valley – the completely misnamed “Happy Valley”. We had been here almost a month before, on the same mission: look for VC, confiscate rice.

The next few days were fairly uneventful, until we got out of the valley and moved back through the rice fields, towards LZ Stinson. The lack of activity (read, “shooting”) in Happy Valley was replaced by a couple of days of run-ins with Viet Cong or North Vietnamese. One night we were hit with forty or fifty rounds of small arms fire, just about dusk. Thankfully, no one was injured.

The month wore on. We walked back north, crossing the path we’d walked earlier in the month, moving around into the northeast section of our AO. Although things were fairly quiet, two men were wounded during an exchange of gunfire with a small group of Viet Cong.

It was now late January, and talk was starting to circulate about Tet, the Chinese and Vietnamese New Year, which fell on February 6th that year. In 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army had launched a huge offensive all across South Viet Nam, in hopes of striking such a strong blow, it would bring the war to an end. That didn’t happen, but the fighting was bloody and protracted, and some places (such as Hue) were devastated. As a result, the American military had since been much more on edge when the Vietnamese New Year approached.

On January 23rd we were sent up to LZ Stinson, to provide security during Tet. Our delight at drawing this assignment, at this time, did not last long. Six days later, word came down that we were being pulled out of Stinson and sent to the village of Ðai Lôc. The Company that had been assigned there had created problems by shooting some of the villagers’ chickens. To us, it seemed like their bad behavior was being rewarded, and we had to take their place.

[1] Four .50 caliber machine guns: a very powerful weapon by itself, four mounted together, to fire simultaneously, was fearsome beyond description.
[2] Tracer rounds were generally every tenth round or so. They glowed in the dark – usually red – so you could see where you were shooting. However, this also tipped off the guys on the other side as to your location. Consequently, they were almost never used at night.