“Find the Cost of Freedom”

5 December 1969:

LZ Stinson (also called The Hill) sat atop a small mountain, more or less in the center of our area of operations. The mountaintop had been bulldozed and stripped of any vegetation. The Battalion commander was there, along with support staff, a communications facility, artillery, heavy mortars and a mess hall. All of this was protected by a ring of bunkers, which, in turn, were protected by concertina wire, mines and a lot of lights. The Battalion’s infantry companies took turn defending Stinson, just as we took turns defending Ðai Lôc.



We spent eight days pulling guard duty at night and attending to chores during the days. Our time was occupied by cleaning weapons, replacing worn equipment and, of course, filling sand bags. We also had hot food once or twice a day and saw a couple of movies. Because we were a bit less likely to get shot at on the Hill, we were able to relax a little.

When another company was brought in by helicopter, we left Stinson, walking down the east side of the mountain. Now, for the first time, I was going out into the countryside … in the field … walking around, exposed, with nothing to protect me but thin air (and a steel helmet). Sure, we’d been at Ðai Lôc, and carried out a couple of patrols in the vicinity of the village. Mostly, though, we had been in the perimeter, guarding the local citizenry (who may or may not have wanted to be guarded by us).

This was different, though. Ninety or a hundred men were walking single file down the mountain, across the fields and rice paddies. Our platoon was at the rear of the column. It was mid-afternoon of another cloud-filled day – warm and humid, undisturbed by wind. The rain that came in torrents in November had lessened some, but not by much.

When we were moving across the land like this, whether as a company or smaller units on patrol, everyone walked well apart from each other. If the person in front of you hit a booby trap, it lessened the danger to you, at least a little. If you walked into an ambush, staying farther apart made it more difficult for the Viet Cong or NVA to hit several people quickly. Twelve feet was not an unusual distance. You developed a sense for this pretty quickly. If you didn’t, somebody would let you know. On this day, coming down off Stinson, walking through open country, we were probably strung out 800 to 1,000 feet.

Rarely did we know more than a day in advance where we were headed in the coming 24-48 hours. What we knew today was that we were walking east, towards the old railroad line and then, well, we’d see. Our platoon was hardly off the shoulder of the mountain when a rapid burst of rifle fire split the hot afternoon. One of the rounds went right over my head, 30 feet in the air. Immediately, there was return fire from the front of the Company. It was a sniper. He probably just fired a burst and ducked into a tunnel … or ran like hell.

That single bullet, made in Russia or China, sent speeding above my head by some poor Vietnamese peasant, fixed me with excitement and fear. It began the defensive tightening up inside that grew and burrowed deeper over following weeks and months.

The gunfire over, a cigarette or two smoked, we started moving eastward again. Near the end of the day we set up a night defense position two or three kilometers from LZ Stinson.

Morning came. Moving east again, we headed towards the village of Trà Binh Dông. The day was quiet, threatening rain. A villager came up to us with a sick child. He looked to be about ten years old. The company medic examined him and determined that the kid was suffering from what looked like malaria. A medevac[1] helicopter took the boy and his mother to a hospital in Quảng Ngãi city.

Three or four hours later, as we moved through some trees, a booby trap went off, killing one man and wounding three. The same medevac that had taken the sick Vietnamese boy to a hospital for treatment was now taking four American boys to a different hospital. The booby trap had been a hand grenade, hanging in a tree and set off by some sort of pressure device.

We set up a new night defense position. Around 11pm, the sky was lit by rifle fire coming out of the night, ripping into us - Viet Cong assaulting our position. We returned fire, but against whom, and where? All we could do was shoot in the direction we thought their firing had come from. This was the dark uncertainty that defined the war for us. Here, we were vulnerable, conspicuous, rarely knowing who our assailants were, or where they were.

In the morning, a patrol went out to check the area where the gunfire had come from. They found four dead Viet Cong, one who was wounded, some weapons, and a packet of documents.

According to the Battalion Daily Staff Journal[2] for that day, the documents included “1x award to Nguyen Thao for service, 1x travel pass to Troung Toh Nha in Binh Son, several propaganda leaflets, 1x notebook with an entry containing roster of VC and the number of Americans and ARVN’s[3] killed by each man, 1x notebook of songs and propaganda.”

Songs and propaganda. To keep spirits and morale up while they waited in rain-washed mountain forests, hiding among the people, hoping to strike a blow against the Occupiers and their Vietnamese allies … for that is how they saw it. And what became of Nguyen Thao and Troung Toh Nha? Were they local men, from Quảng Ngãi, motivated to join a guerilla movement? Or had they come from up north, leaving wives or girl friends or children hundreds of kilometers away? Did they survive the American War, and go back to their families, like all of us yearned to do?

A couple of days later, December 9th, the reality of our war was made very clear. Around noon, we were suddenly fired on. Thirty or forty rounds of rifle fire and a couple of M-79[4] grenade rounds.

One man in our company was killed. He was going home, two weeks before Christmas. It was not the way anyone wanted to go home. Not him, not me, and not Nguyen Thao, either.

In the days following, the mood in the company was cold. We could go for two weeks and not be shot at. Just walk, search a village and walk some more. Now, though, two men had been killed and three others wounded, within two days of each other. The fear that no one talked about, that we all pushed inside to keep from thinking about, to keep from confronting as we walked from village to village, wound itself a little tighter and was pushed a little deeper.

We were being marched north, toward the Sông Trà Bong. Each day, for two days, we walked and ran into Viet Cong. We fired on them, called in artillery on them, and then found nothing except small craters in the ground where the artillery shells had landed. Blasted trees, destroyed rice paddies; hot empty days, searching for phantoms.

Near the river, we joined a Company of Army Engineers – bulldozers and tanks were their weapons. Our new task was to protect these guys while they ran their bulldozers over the Vietnamese countryside, on either side of the road that paralleled the Trà Bong River. The idea seemed to be that, by scrapping the land bare for two or three hundred yards out from the road, it would be easier to protect the road and defend the villages along it. The people who lived there, alongside the Trà Bong road, would probably have preferred to keep their homes and fields, rather than sacrifice them to the greater good.

The statistics from the Daily Staff Journal dryly tell the story. 13 Dec 69: “B Co. reports clearing 28,500 square meters of land”. 14 Dec 69: “B Co. reports clearing 30,000 square meters of land.” 15 Dec 69: “B Co. reports clearing 26,000 square meters of land.” And so on, for another two days. Over 100,000 square meters of land was scraped, laid bare - almost 1.3 million square feet. Who measured this? An area the size of seven or eight city blocks was flattened. We were destroying the country, in order to save it. Except, we didn’t save it.

Christmas was less than a week away. Everyone became a lot more cautious. We found a tunnel one day, and just blew it up, without looking inside. That day and the next, we also found two American artillery rounds that had hit but not exploded. We blew both of those up, too. When the VC found unexploded ordnance like these, they were turned into very deadly booby traps, capable of killing many people at once.

Five days before Christmas, just before dark, we ran into a large group of Viet Cong or NVA. They fired and ran, and we ran after them. In the end, twelve North Vietnamese lay dead. One of our men ran into a booby trap during the pursuit, was wounded and had to be medevaced out. Fear of dying just before Christmas was swamped by adrenaline.

Later that day, we were picked up by helicopters (the Hueys that ferried troops all over Viet Nam) and taken to the head of a valley in the far south-west corner of our AO[5]. For two days we worked our way down the valley. Few people lived there. It was a route for the VC and NVA to filter down from the mountains and fade into the dozens of villages set among the hills and rice paddies of northern Quảng Ngãi Province. Our task was to keep them from doing that, at least for a little while.

The day after being dropped off, moving down the valley, we suddenly came under heavy small arms fire. We returned fire, and then gave chase. Once again, one of our men ran into a booby trap during the pursuit. While we waited for the medevac chopper to take him back to a hospital in Chu Lai, one platoon searched the area of the firefight. They found several dead Viet Cong and some weapons. Their war ended in American graves, unidentified. Their families had only unanswered questions. We moved on down the valley.

24 December 1969:

Christmas Eve. We got lucky. Our turn for stand down coincided with Christmas. We walked back up to Stinson, were picked up by choppers, and ferried back to Chu Lai.

Trucks brought us from the Chu Lai helicopter pad to our stand down area along the beach. We were back where I had first met these guys, barely two months ago. It seemed much, much longer. Two or three men – replacements – were waiting there, to join the Company. A hot shower and a cold beer sounded really good.


[1] Medical Evacuation
[2] These were summaries of the daily activities and engagements of each unit in the battalion, kept by a Staff Duty Officer. These are now publically available through the Freedom of Information act.
[3] Army of the Republic of Viet Nam: the army of the South Vietnamese government.
[4] This was a short weapon that fired a large round. The projectile exploded like a hand grenade. Like an old shotgun, you flipped a lever and opened the weapon at the rear. It could also be used like a hand-held mortar, to fire over trees or buildings.
[5] AO: Area of Operations

"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).