During the whole year I was stationed in Vietnam, there were only a handful of times when I truly feared for my life. Most of the time I was surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of American troops in base camps that were as secure as any place was secure in that war-torn land.
Of this handful, at least three of them were occasions when the “enemy” was nowhere around and my big fear was being shot by “my fellow ‘Mericans,” as Lyndon Johnson used to say.
The first time I was scared shitless, it was totally unnecessary and was perpetrated on us by our superior officers either as a training device or just out of shear meanness. It was the day or two after we arrived on the coast of Vietnam. I was with a small unit of the Army Security Agency attached to the 198th Light Infantry Brigade. We had been shipped to Nam on a Navy transport ship fitted out to haul more than 2,000 of us soldiers, having crossed the Pacific Ocean in a peaceful three weeks.
Upon arrival in Danang harbor on the north coast of South Vietnam, we received no information from our officers about where we were going. All we knew was we were going to join other units of the Americal Division already in country somewhere.
The ship was anchored in the harbor there for most of the day or maybe two days – I forget exactly how long. I remember somebody had a radio and in surfing the AM dial for music came across a station beamed from Hanoi, featuring a female disk jockey, who had a sexy voice and spoke excellent English with a cute Asian accent. After awhile “Hanoi Hannah” as she was dubbed, made a special announcement. She welcomed the men of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade to Vietnam and gave a special welcome to the men of the 601st Army Security Agency unit – my unit.
According to one of the Geneva Conventions governing the rules of warfare, the U.S. wasn’t supposed to have our kind of unit in Vietnam and our unit’s name had been changed to the 601st Radio Research Group as a cover. But now we knew that Hannah knew our real name and therefore that Hanoi knew our true mission as well, which was to intercept radio transmissions of the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces and translate them into English to provide intelligence for our commanders.
Late in the afternoon we got the word to get our shit together and prepare to move out. That meant getting all our gear and clothing that we weren’t wearing into our duffle bags, donning our helmets and flak jackets and then climbing down a stairway onto one of two or three very large landing craft. These were much bigger landing craft than the ones used on D-Day, but they had the same flat bottoms and each had a huge door on the front that opened down into the surf or up onto the beach as the case may be.
We each were armed with an M-14 rifle and after we got onto the landing craft, the sergeants passed out 10 rounds of ammunition to each of us. That’s all – 10 bullets. We were ordered to put the bullets into our clips, but not to put the clips into the rifles until further notice. The sarge told us that we would be landing on a beach later on and that we might come under attack, so we needed to be prepared.
As we sailed south down the coast of Vietnam from Danang, the sun was getting low in the western sky. Luckily, it was a nice day with little wind, so it was a pretty smooth ride. I’ve heard that those LST’s would really rock-n-roll in heavy seas because of the flat bottoms.
We were all on the upper deck trying to enjoy the scenery along the coast and to keep our fear of our landing on those shores under control, when we started hearing some dull thuds up ahead. Pretty soon guys were shouting on the port side of the boat and we all went over to see what the fuss was about. Luckily, the boat didn’t capsize when we all rushed to that side.
There was a little gunboat out near a rather small rocky island firing shells at the island. In retrospect, I’m sure the vessel’s crew was just taking some target practice on a deserted island, but the sight of what we figured was our first glimpse of combat really put the butterflies to flittering in our tummies.
Then, all of a sudden, we were ordered by a disembodied voice on a loudspeaker to get all our gear and get down below immediately and be quick about it. I didn’t even realize that there was a lower deck until we were ordered to go there.
We soon found ourselves in the dank underbelly of the LST. It was like being in a metal cavern with very dim lighting. And we still had been told very little about what was about to happen to us. We were all milling around down there like bees suddenly shoved into an unfamiliar hive box. And we were left to mill around down there for what seemed like hours. There was nothing to do but worry about what would happen when the big door opened and we rushed onto that ramp and hit the beach. Naturally, when there is a vacuum, the rumor mill cranks up big time. Some guys claimed they heard there was a whole division of PAVN (North Vietnamese regulars) waiting for us. Others were sure it was only a battalion of VC. We were running amuck down there in the dark.
All of us grew up watching war movies, like The Longest Day, and film footage of World War II on TV shows like the Army-sponsored, The Big Picture. Visions of swimming to shore with exploding ordnance going off all around us, filled our brains. We got angry that we had only 10 rounds of ammo. Audie Murphy would never have won the Medal of Honor with 10 rounds, gawddammit.
Just as tensions seemed to be reaching the breaking point and the noise in the hole of that boat was deafening, the captain, or whoever he was, came back on the horn. He told us that we were approaching the beach, that we needed to shut up and pay attention. He told us to put our clips into our rifles and be sure they were ready to fire but put ‘em on safety until we hit the ramp. He ordered us to look sharp and to come running out of that boat ready for anything when the ramp came down. Then, he turned off all the lights and we stood there in utter darkness, shivering.
I felt like throwing up and I’m sure some guys probably did. Suddenly we could feel the boat grinding into the sand and lurch to a stop and we hung onto each other to keep our feet.
When the huge door/ramp came trundling down, the guys near the front – who were naturally the guys who most wanted to experience the thrill of combat – shouted “Ki-Ya!” over and over, like they taught us all in Basic Training, and charged up the ramp and out of the LST. Then, we in the middle of the pack, charged after them, our stomachs in our throats.
In shock and awe, we emerged not into a fire fight but into a brightly lit, but totally surreal scene, like we had stumbled onto the set of a Hollywood movie being filmed on location at night. All around us were military vehicles and other LST’s, like the one that brought us there parked on the soft sand. U.S. military jeeps and trucks were driving passed on the upper part of the beach where the sand was packed hard. There was a canvas tent city visible beyond the beach.
As it turned out, the joke was on us. We came out of the dark expecting to have to fight for our lives and into the light of a heavily fortified U.S. military base near the town of Chu Lai. I’m sure our commanders and the guys watching us emerge had a big guffaw about how the idiot “nugs” (new guys) were behaving so stupidly.
For our part, we felt embarrassed, ashamed, angry and helpless because we knew there was absolutely nothing we could do about it and that being in the Army, we couldn’t even complain because, if we did, our complaints would fall on deaf ears and only earn us more KP duty.
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