"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.

"Momma told me don't come ... "

14 October 1969:

Sai Gon was hot and quiet. The air was tense - jarring voices and dank smells pushed and jabbed. I walked into the night, not wanting to think about what would come next.

It was very late and we were tired from flying so long. The rest of the night passed in fitful sleep, troubled by unclear dreams.

The next day, weak sun pushed through the clouds filling the Viet Nam sky. It quickly became hot. We were sent to an empty building, where we were sorted and divided, and assigned to various units. I was being sent to the Americal Division[1] in I (Eye) Corps, the northern-most section of South Viet Nam. We spent the rest of that day filling sand bags, and other vital military tasks.

The following morning found me and a couple of dozen others on a C-130, flying 600 miles north to Chu Lai, Americal Division headquarters. The big prop-driven plane dropped down quickly through the low clouds and landed on an airbase surrounded by ragged buildings, fuel storage tanks, and sand. To the east, as we cut through the clouds, the South China Sea glittered. It was a clean, open counterpoint to Chu Lai.

For the next two weeks, we were at the "Americal Combat Center", where we were given additional training in fighting a war amidst rice paddies, water buffalo and Vietnamese peasants. I was lucky. As a newly-minted Sergeant, I received two weeks of training (and reprieve). Lower ranking enlisted men were only there for one week before being sent out to a combat unit.

Innocent faces look out from fading photographs.
How soon, how radically, our lives would change.

Halloween, 1969:

No trick-or-treating, no party. Four or five of us were sent to join “B” Company, 1st Battalion, 52nd Infantry[2], part of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade. The Company was out in the field, but they were returning the next day for stand down[3]. Halloween wasn’t much fun that year.

We were trucked over to the 1/52nd stand down area, where we waited for the Company to arrive. The day was cloudy and threatening rain. Monsoon season had arrived. In the late morning a couple of deuce-and-a-half trucks[4] pulled in.

Men spilled out. Loud, dirty, laughing, unwinding as they laughed, they lined up at a nearby shack to turn in their weapons. The first thing done when a Company came in for stand down was to lock up all the guns.

Looking at these wild, filthy men, I thought, “My god, these are the people I’m going to live with for the next year!” And, “Am I going to become like them?” How little I knew.

We tried to talk to these guys, introduce ourselves, but mostly they were interested in showers and cold beer. There was certainly little interest in spending valuable time talking with some newly-arrived “shake-and-bake” sergeant like me. They went off to take a shower and we were lead away to meet with the Company commander.

The next three days were an immersion course in the realities of the war (as opposed to things we’d been told back in the States, or the Combat Center, for that matter). It was also a quick lesson in the social structure, rules and mores of an infantry company.

One thing was pretty clear: we, just arrived, brand new fatigues, shiny boots, wide-eyed wonder, we were pretty much useless. “And figure it out quickly, without getting somebody killed.” Yeah.

The rain began in earnest as stand down ended. We were sent to guard a village that was part of the so-called “Pacified Village” program. The goal was to protect the Vietnamese peasants from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army by up-rooting them from their hamlets and villages, and collecting them in one place. American and South Vietnamese forces built bunkers and strung concertina wire, turning a cobbled-together village into a fortified point. The people were given some building materials (mostly corrugated steel panels for roofing), but otherwise were left pretty much to their own devices.

The village was the ages-old foundation of life in Viet Nam. Sixty years ago, 85% of the country’s population lived in the countryside. Twenty years later, many people had moved into the cities, primarily because of the wars afflicting Viet Nam, but the country was still overwhelmingly rural. Pacification, as it was also known, was very unpopular with the Vietnamese people. As a result, it probably drove a number of people to support the Viet Cong who might not have otherwise.

The village we were sent to protect was Ðai Lôc, in Quảng Ngãi Province. Vietnamese villages were spread out, generally consisting of several hamlets. If you looked at a map, you would see Ðai Lôc (1), Ðai Lôc (2), Ðai Lôc (3); each of them three or four kilometers apart. The families living in these hamlets had been gathered up and moved to a new location, not far from Ðai Lôc (3), that was thought (by the United States Army) to be more defensible. The “new” Ðai Lôc was twenty-five kilometers south of Chu Lai and six or seven kilometers west of the highway, QL-1.

Highway One, as we knew it, was the only paved road in our part of the province. It was also the umbilical cord that tied Sai Gon to Quảng Tri Province and the DMZ[5]. We didn’t drive to Ðai Lôc, of course. Helicopters picked us up in Chu Lai and dropped us just outside the village perimeter.

Low clouds muffled a landscape marked by leaden sheets of water. It was a sad-looking place, this improvised village. There were 80 or 90 houses, straggling around a small hill. Bamboo structures with thatched or corrugated steel roofs were set about in no apparent order. On the south slope of the hill were two structures, one larger than the other. They were built of bricks, covered in chipped white stucco, and looked like they had occupied that hill for a long time. The larger building appeared to be a pagoda or shrine. A tiled roof, turned up at the corners, was in two tiers. The smaller structure was a short distance away. It had an alcove, perhaps to leave offerings or burning incense. No one ever came to burn incense, though.

The village had been established only a month or so before we arrived. Not much had been done in the way of bunkers, wire and other defensive construction, so that was our first task. Corrugated steel culvert halves and a lot of empty sand bags were provided for the purpose.

Chickens and small children ran all around while we filled sand bags and strung wire. The smallest kids were barely clothed. All of them wanted to help, or at least beg something off us. Gum, cigarettes - almost anything had appeal. Some of these kids could just as easily steal C-Rations … or something more dangerous, like a hand grenade.

The village well was included in our perimeter, of course, and all the strung out houses. The villagers were busy, too, building enclosures for their animals (especially the water buffalo, who didn’t seem to like Americans very much), and preparing their homes for the rains. As I soon discovered, each family was also digging a bunker in the earth beneath their homes. They kept what valuables they had there. The families also slept there every night, seeking a little protection from potential danger.

We stayed in Ðai Lôc three and a half weeks. The days passed slowly. Rain fell ever more heavily as the days went by, filling the rice paddies, seeping into everything. In lower places, only a few dikes between fields were above water. We patrolled the surrounding area, but saw little of the VC we knew were nearby. They fired on us at night a couple of times. On patrols, we found tunnels and some booby traps, which we blew up.

We played with the village children, and gathered closely beneath shelters with their parents, trying to stay dry and warm. One evening a family in the village invited me to have dinner with them. The meal was mostly rice. On top of the rice were tiny fish that had been caught in weirs placed between rice paddies. They were crunchy, and very salty.

Toward the end of November we were moved to the Battalion firebase, LZ Stinson[6], while another Company took over defense of Ðai Lôc. The 1/52nd was responsible for a section of Quảng Ngãi Province bounded by two large rivers, 14 or 15 kilometers apart. Sông Trà Bong was on the north and Sông Trà Khúc on the south. Both flowed east into the South China Sea. An abandoned railroad line, four or five kilometers west of Highway One, was the eastern boundary. Eighteen kilometers or so west of the rail line lay mountains, some of which rose over 800 meters above the paddies and fields where we spent most of our time. Here we lived our lives, and tried to stay alive.

[1] Also known as the 23rd Infantry Division.
[2] B-1/52nd
[3] Stand Down was a three-day break from being in the field, and fighting the war. Our unit’s stand down area was alongside the beach, in Chu Lai.
[4] Two-and-a-half-ton trucks.
[5] Demilitarized Zone: the boundary between South Viet Nam and North Viet Nam.
[6] LZ: Landing Zone. This term was applied to a great many places that were not just landing places, but semi-permanent military bases. “Firebase” was interchangeable with LZ, meaning, as the name suggests, a place from which to fire (weapons, especially artillery).