Grunts (38 page)

Working with the PFs, then, was a constant process of accommodation, negotiation, and amalgamation. But when the Marines and the PFs clashed with the VC, or were attacked by them, they fought together as brothers. In the run-up to and during the major communist Tet Offensive of 1968, they made a point of attacking the CAPs with powerful formations. According to one study, almost half of all enemy attacks in I Corps from November 1967 through January 1968 were against the CAPs.

Even before the fighting intensified, many of the CAP Marines had picked up intelligence on the enemy offensive, as well as a foreboding mood among the villagers. “When we sent in reports” to higher headquarters, Private First Class Tom Krusewski recalled, “nobody believed us. That was one of the problems with the CAPs—we didn’t have any officers with us. They thought we exaggerated. And they distrusted the Vietnamese.” Indeed, NCOs had so much latitude and independence in running their CAPs that officers seldom had much impact on the day-to-day operations. To most CAP members, the officers were distant and out of touch, and generally held in contempt. “In our teams we were not listened to by higher command,” one sergeant asserted. “We watched [enemy] heavy weapons squads come in, platoons come in [before Tet], and we called these [in]. And nobody would believe us. We watched them move in with rockets . . . and heavy mortars. We were told by higher-ups that, quote, ‘we didn’t know what the hell we were talking about.’”

Thus, the average Marine sensed what was in the offing, even if those at headquarters did not. While walking through his village one day, Corporal Igor Bobrowsky noticed that people were building coffins. Sergeant Keith Cossey watched as his village “had suddenly been filled with strange young men in civilian clothes.” All of them carried South Vietnamese ID cards but they were actually the vanguard of a North Vietnamese Army regiment. “We had our hands full with literally hundreds of these characters just hanging around.”

When the attacks started, they were especially violent. With terrible suddenness one night, the VC hit Private First Class Thomas Flynn’s Tiger Papa Three CAP by bombarding their makeshift compound with RPGs. The tin and wood hootch where Flynn was sleeping collapsed on him. He got separated from his rifle. In the confusion, with bullets flying and the screams of Marines, PFs, and VC mixing together amid the noise, Flynn saw a Viet Cong soldier toss a grenade into an adjacent bunker, killing a Marine. “His body [was] twisted and his stomach was torn open from the explosion,” Flynn wrote. As Flynn approached the enemy soldier, he turned and pulled a knife. “Before he could react, I grabbed his wrist and his throat and kicked his legs out from under him with a large sweep. We both went down on the ground with me on top. I disarmed him. With both hands on the handle, I thrust the knife into his chest.”

Seconds later, a group of armed VC surrounded him. He lunged for one of them and, as he struggled for his rifle, another VC shot Flynn in the face. “My tongue was ripped. My mouth filled with blood, and I felt several teeth lying loose in my mouth.” He could also feel a hole in his left cheek where the bullet had exited. As he vomited blood, the VC dragged him several yards by the hair. They bayoneted him in the hand and exploded a grenade against his leg. But they were either too distracted with the resistance offered by other CAP members or were perhaps unwilling to finish him off face-to-face. Eventually they retreated, the battle died down, and Flynn’s buddies medevaced him. As was so common in these situations, the surviving Marines and PFs later rebuilt their compound and renewed their mission.

The enemy tactic was to strike swiftly with overwhelming force, attempt to overrun the compound, inflict maximum damage, and then withdraw before nearby conventional units could arrive on the scene. According to Lieutenant Colonel Corson, one 1967 assault was supported by “150 rounds of 82mm mortars, 40-50 rounds of recoilless rifle fire and multiple bangalore torpedoes to break the defensive wire. Once through the wire the assault forces moved rapidly against the pre-selected objectives of the dispensary, the command bunker and the ammunition bunker.”

This particular attack lasted seven minutes. During Tet, most were longer. Often the enemy trained for their assaults on exact mock-ups of whatever compound they had targeted. Because of these elaborate rehearsals, the average enemy soldier was very well prepared to kill at close range. “At times the attackers advanced to ranges so close that hand grenades were employed freely by both combatants,” one post-battle report stated.

In one such instance, a potent force of 150 NVA and VC assaulted a 3rd Combined Action Group CAP in the middle of the night. “As soon as the first [mortar] round hit the compound,” Lance Corporal Frank Lopez, a rifleman, recalled, “they just put cardboard boxes and blankets and mats on the wires.” This allowed them to breach the wire rapidly. They then set to work blowing up bunkers and exchanging shots with the Marines and PFs. “It looked like ants coming over a hill or just coming through the wire, towards the compound yelling and screaming,” Lopez said. “Everyone was just yelling and getting hit.” The CAP Marines and PFs had little illumination and no fire support because their supporting units were also under heavy attack. “The VC threw a lot of satchel charges that night,” another Marine said, “within half an hour the entire compound was set on fire.”

Men of both sides scattered in every direction, among bunkers and buildings, where they fought to the death in a personal fashion. The Viet Cong even taunted the Americans with bullhorns, naming individual Marines and promising to kill them (the VC often put bounties on the heads of CAP Marines). “They [VC] were every place,” Corporal Arliss Willhite remembered. He himself heard his name over the bullhorn. “They had the Compound almost totally destroyed in twenty minutes. Why they did leave, and why they didn’t kill everybody, I don’t know. They just turned around and left when the sun started coming up.” They probably withdrew for fear of getting annihilated by U.S. aircraft or rescue forces. As it was, they killed seven Marines and eleven PFs.

The next year, 1969, the communists launched another Tet Offensive. This one was not quite as potent as the one in 1968, but for the CAP Marines in the path of the attacks, this one was bad enough. Corporal Goodson’s CAP, for example, knew from their many local intelligence sources that the attack was coming. Before the fighting started, though, they had the surreal experience of participating in a bizarre eve-of-battle Tet holiday banquet with the VC and NVA. In a situation that was probably unique in the entire history of the war, Goodson, the seven other Marines on his team, and the PF leader visited the enemy’s remote camp, at their invitation, for a feast. “Every man in black PJ’s and NVA uniforms nodded respectfully as we passed, giving us forced smiles that made no attempt at camouflaging the contempt and hatred they held for us. Yet even past the hatred you could sense a fear and reverence for our presence.” At six feet three, Goodson towered over them, and made a point of stretching to his full height. Each Marine struggled to conceal his own fear, betraying no weakness in front of the enemy.

As the meal ended, an NVA officer stood up and spoke in English. “Welcome, gentlemen. I hope you have enjoyed your meal. You honor us with your presence as warrior honors warrior. You will all die tonight. Tonight, marines, some of our men will collect the bounty we have placed on your heads. Tomorrow we celebrate with same meal over our victory! But, today, enjoy yourselves. Eat as much as you like.” Corporal Goodson sat listening and thought: “Hope we see you personally tonight.”

When the banquet ended, the team left with little fanfare. The situation was nerve-wracking and strange in the extreme. Knowing full well that they would soon fight a battle of extinction, they had sat down for a convivial meal with the enemy, as if they were about to engage in nothing more consequential than a sporting event or a chess competition. Such were the psychological vagaries of combat, and the strong human connections that often existed between mortal enemies, even in this modern era when combatants sometimes cared little about old-world notions of honor.

Realizing that time was short, they retrieved their weapons, smeared themselves with buffalo dung to blend in with their surroundings, and settled into a predetermined ambush spot to wait for the communist attack. Sure enough, the assault came at about midnight. “It seemed like every tree and bush was alive with NVA and VC,” Goodson wrote. “Brazenly they stepped into the light and opened fire with their AK’s and machine guns. Green tracers and their deadly partners sliced away at the trees around us.” American fire scythed through the enemy soldiers. In the weird half-light, the Marines could see some of them stumbling and falling.

The battle ebbed and flowed like this for an indeterminate amount of time. The team was running low on ammo. Goodson called his company commander, several miles away in a firebase, for fire support. The enemy fighters were within fifty meters of the team now. “They were coming from all directions like a pack of wolves moving in for the kill.” Instead of arranging for artillery or helicopter support, the company commander accused Goodson of staging a fake battle for glory and medals. He refused to provide any help. Angry beyond description, Goodson hoped only to survive long enough to kill the CO. Once again, this was another troubling example of the disconnect between officers and enlisted men in the CAP program.

When the team was almost out of ammunition, and about to be overrun by the enemy, a sensible colonel got on the net, overruled the company commander, and came to the rescue with Hueys and helicopter gunships. The intense fire of the gunships kept the NVA and VC at bay, while the Hueys landed and resupplied the team with ammo. By dawn, the battle was over and the enemy was gone. The team had lost one man killed and another wounded. “Everyone was physically and mentally drained,” Goodson later wrote. “Battles such as this one simply do not end with the last bullet. They are lived time and again in your mind as your senses attempt to cope with the horrors and the highs.”
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Mobility, Agility, and Finality

In response to the Tet battles, the CAPs adopted new mobile tactics. As the furious onslaughts piled up, the program’s senior commanders, such as Colonel Theodore Metzger, came to believe that the stationary CAP compounds were too vulnerable. After all, they were fixed targets. The VC knew exactly where they were and could easily gather intelligence on their defenses (as evidenced by the mock-ups they often built). Nor was it difficult, as Tet proved, for the enemy to amass powerful attacking forces to overrun a compound. If the CAPs became mobile, though, and never planted themselves in one widely known spot for any length of time, the VC lost the initiative. “With its mobility, the CAP can keep the VC guessing,” Colonel Metzger said in early 1970. “They don’t like to come after you unless they’ve had a chance to get set and do some planning. Mobility throws this off. It . . . means that the CAP can be found anywhere outside a village or a hamlet, and they [VC] don’t like this when they’re trying to come in for rice, or money, or recruits, or just plain coordination.” Moreover, the mobile CAPs did not have to tie down a substantial portion of their limited manpower to the job of defending a compound. Instead they became stalkers, roaming daily and nightly throughout an area of operations, insinuating themselves into many villages, frequently clashing with the equally mobile VC.

By the middle of 1969, almost 90 percent of the CAPs were mobile. As Metzger put it: “CAP Marines literally went to the bush for their entire tours.” At first, this could be quite a daunting challenge, especially for the newer men, who felt comforted by the false security of a compound. For many of the Marines—and all Americans in Vietnam, come to think of it—a compound, firebase, or perimeter meant security. This was actually one of the major problems with the war effort—namely, that not enough Americans were in touch with the people, or engaged in the job of providing them real security. Base camps were designed to offer safety to the Americans and no one else. Leaving that dubious security, plunging into the jungles, paddies, and villages among the people, seemed to augur great danger, if not guaranteed death. So the idea of permanently plunging into the world outside the wire was frightening indeed, a counterintuitive nightmare that portended a sort of bogeyman-inspired doom.

Perhaps this trepidation also stemmed from the natural human impulse to have a home, even in the most dangerous of situations. “I saw the mobile CAPs as extremely scary,” Gene Ferguson recalled. “I didn’t have the safety to run back to.” He liked the idea of having a barbed-wire compound with mortars, machine guns, and bunkers around him. “In the mobile CAP they could just slaughter us like flies. I was so scared. When the weather got bad, we didn’t get resupplied. There were times when we would go three days without any food.” Like most newcomers, Barry Goodson was taken aback when he first joined his CAP and realized it was mobile. “You mean you don’t have a compound to hide in case of an attack?” he asked his new friends. They assured him that they lived in the jungle full-time, moving to different ambush positions every night. A deep apprehension settled over Goodson and he wondered what he had gotten himself into. “Here I was with only five other men [Marines]. The
jungle
was our home!”

Goodson, like most of the other Marines, got used to the new ways, and came to embrace them. The mobile CAPs were indeed a potent weapon. In practice, they acted as stealthy hunter-killer teams, putting the VC on the defensive, forcing them to react to the Marines and PFs rather than the other way around. For the sake of sheer survival, they learned to blend in well with their surroundings. They were masters at patrolling because that was all they did.

They suffered fewer casualties than the stationary teams, and they inflicted more damage on the VC. “It was darned tough on the CAP Marines,” Metzger said, “but it saved many lives and greatly enhanced our security capability.” In 1969, at the cost of 117 Americans killed and 851 wounded, they killed 1,952 VC and NVA (by actual body count), while capturing another 391. They conducted about twelve thousand patrols or ambushes per month, most at night. They initiated two-thirds of their firefights (compared with a 10 percent rate in the line companies). In the first few months of 1970 alone they killed 288 enemy soldiers and captured 87. All of these numbers were improvements from the 1965 to 1968 phase of the program, when most of the CAPs were stationary.