NUI BA DEN FIRE MISSION - DIRECTING ARTILLERY ON ENEMY POSITIONS

When I wasn’t chasing gremlins out of the radio systems, I worked on defense. One idea stuck: an experimental Starlight Scope, aimed down at the flatlands, hunting for movement in the dark.

The scope was new enough that most units hadn’t seen one. It took whatever ambient light existed — starlight, a sliver of moon, a match struck two miles away — and turned it into a grainy green world through a single eyepiece. No batteries to speak of running down mid-watch, no sound, just me and the glass and the flatlands laid out below like a photograph developing in real time. Above the clouds on Nui Ba Den, that world came and went on its own schedule. Some nights the overcast socked us in completely, and I sat there watching gray nothing for three hours. Other nights it cleared enough to see for miles, jungle canopy running flat and dark all the way to the Cambodian border.

I worked midnight to 3:00 a.m., four or five nights a week, weather depending. It was a solitary kind of duty — the compound quiet behind me, everyone else asleep or on perimeter watch, and just this one green circle of world in front of my eye. Most nights gave me one thing: a single stationary light. A cooking fire. A lantern in a hooch. Nothing moving. I called a few fire missions on those lights early on, when I was still learning what the scope was good for and what it wasn’t. No secondary explosions, no confirmation, nothing. Just artillery into the dark and silence afterward, and me wondering if I’d wasted rounds on a farmer boiling rice.

So I changed the method. Instead of firing on the first light I saw, I started plotting it. Mark the position on the map, note the time, wait thirty minutes, check again. If the light hadn’t moved, it probably wasn’t worth the guns. If it had, I followed it as long as the scope held it and started a second map — a track instead of a point, a line instead of a dot.

Months went into it before the pattern showed itself. One light, every night, on at 1:00 a.m., moving the same route through the jungle until the atmosphere swallowed it around 3:00. Same time. Same path. Every night, like a shift change at a factory. I got to know that route better than I knew some roads back home — where it slowed, where it seemed to pause, where it always vanished into the same fold of terrain.

I sent it up to brigade intelligence. Their answer wasn’t what I wanted: keep watching. Follow it a few more weeks. Does it stop anywhere? Do other lights join it? They wanted a pattern, not a hunch, and I understood why — but it meant more nights with my eye against rubber and glass, watching one man walk the same stretch of jungle while I sat on my hands, already sure of what I was looking at and unable to do anything about it yet.

Eventually brigade came around to the same read I had: troop movement, or a resupply route.

I had plenty of time to think about what that single light might have been leading. A resupply column made the most sense to me. The route ran north to south, originating a few miles inside what I took to be Cambodian territory and pushing toward our side of the border — the wrong direction for refugees, the wrong direction for anything except men bringing something to someone.

If it was a supply run, the light out front would have been the point man, the only one who needed to see the trail. Everyone behind him would have moved blind, one hand on the pack strap of the man ahead, trusting his feet more than his eyes. Twenty men in a column like that could carry a lot — mortar rounds broken down and lashed to A-frames, crates of small-arms ammunition, maybe a disassembled recoilless rifle split three or four ways across different backs. Rice, too, probably, since an NVA unit staging for an attack needed to eat as much as it needed to shoot. None of it fast-moving. None of it needing to be.

Or it could have been the men themselves — a platoon or more moving up to reinforce a position, walking at night for the same reason we watched at night: because daylight got you killed and dark got you home. If that was the case, the light out front wasn’t guiding cargo, it was guiding replacements, fresh rifles headed toward whatever unit was already dug in on our side of the mountain, waiting for enough strength to make a move against us.

They didn’t want to guess wrong, so brigade didn’t send one battery — they sent three. Fire bases triangulated on the light with 155mm and 8-inch guns, enough iron converging from three directions to make sure that if we were right, it would matter.

When the mission finally got approved, I called it in the way I’d called in dozens of missions before — coordinates, ammunition, request for a spotting round. The waiting between the call and the first round landing was its own kind of strange, knowing that after months of watching, this was it.

The white phosphorus round landed about a hundred yards short and fifty yards left. Not even close. In daylight it would have been an embarrassing miss. In the dark, through the scope, it was something else entirely.

The moment it went off, that one light broke into twenty, all of them running, spreading out from the hub like spokes on a wheel. For one or two seconds I could see exactly what I’d been watching for months without ever quite seeing it: not one man with a light, but a column of them behind him, twenty strong, walking the jungle at 1:00 a.m. because they thought no one could see them do it.

I adjusted fire and called “troops in the open” — the code that swaps ground bursts for air bursts, the shells detonating overhead instead of on impact, because that’s what kills men caught with no cover to run to. Within minutes the sky over that stretch of jungle lit up with twenty air bursts in a row, one after another, the whole grid working at once.

Then one secondary explosion, bigger than the rest. And every light went out at once.

Brigade never sent anyone to walk the ground and confirm it. We never got a body count, never got a captured weapon, never got anything but the silence after the last burst faded. I’d like to believe it was a supply route out of Cambodia — weapons and men headed for us on the mountain. I’ll never know for certain.

I never had a way to know which it was — supply or reinforcement — and brigade’s refusal to reconnoiter the ground meant nobody ever would. But the timing worked on me for a long time afterward. Six months on that mountain, watching that same light take that same path at that same hour, and then the sapper attack that killed four of my men. I have no proof the two things were connected. I only know that whatever walked that route for months, in the end, walked toward us.