FIRST WEEK IN VIETNAM

My first week in Vietnam did not start well. My orders assigning me to the 25th Infantry Division in Cu Chi could not be found. I spent that first week in limbo, waiting for the paperwork to catch up.

It wasn’t wasted time. My body got a week to adjust to the tropical heat, and I got a week to study the layout of the camp and its defenses. Cu Chi was a base the 25th Infantry Division had built right in the middle of a Viet Cong stronghold. Our presence there annoyed the local VC, and they reminded us of it daily — 122mm rockets, 82mm mortar rounds. Deadly presents.

The sounds of war never stopped. Fighter planes and helicopters, arriving and departing. Artillery pounding enemy positions. In the distance, the endless rattle of small arms fire and the thud of exploding bombs.

By the third day, boredom had set in. I decided I’d rather risk a field assignment than get stuck with the stateside routines I hated — morning roll calls, inspections, troop harassment. Now I just had to figure out how to land a field assignment that wouldn’t get me killed.

Everyone I asked said the same thing: stay out of War Zone C. It was a smoking-hot area, avoid it at all costs. I didn’t much care where I went. I’d already seen a dozen filled body bags, and that was warning enough — in Vietnam, complacency and carelessness didn’t cost you a bad evaluation. They cost lives.

Somewhere in that first week, I pissed someone off. Maybe the brigade signal officer, maybe his exec — I never found out which. Whoever it was got his revenge. He assigned me to a unit in War Zone C.

My new job put me with a ten-man counterinsurgency team operating under the cover name “25th Division Forward.” The name was meant to confuse the local communists. It was our actions that would end up confusing us most.

I wasn’t thrilled the city was so close to the Cambodian border. But the Tay Ninh East countryside was beautiful enough to make up for it — flat land, rice paddies scattered to the horizon, and if you stared hard enough toward Cambodia, a glimpse of jungle. The countryside around Tay Ninh was also a major staging ground for enemy troops moving toward Saigon, and it saw its share of hard fighting during the war. I’d wanted excitement. I may have just found it.

Our team operated out of an old French fort, shared with three Vietnamese units — Rangers, Popular Forces, and the Civilian Irregular Defense Group. These units worked alongside the 5th Special Forces and the Phoenix Program. More on that later.

The fort had a ten-foot brick wall with shooting ports every ten feet, fortified bunkers at each corner, two Vietnamese soldiers per bunker. The main entrance had a steel gate and a guard shelter manned by two armed soldiers.

Inside the compound stood two large, two-story brick buildings that had housed French troops during the Indochina War. The first building had served a dual purpose back then — ammo dump on the ground floor, elite Vietnamese Rangers and Special Forces quartered above.

I never learned exactly how much ammunition that building held, but rumor had it the Tay Ninh Province Chief stored all the province’s munitions there. Behind the fort sat a small cemetery, and beyond that, the well-fortified B-32 Special Forces camp. And beyond B-32, rising almost 3,000 feet above sea level, stood the mountain the French called Nui Ba Den — Black Virgin Mountain.

Getting to my new post meant driving in through the fort gate and riding parallel to the main building. Artillery rounds stacked three-high on pallets ran the length of it. Through the windows, 500-lb. dumb bombs piled chest-high, and beyond them, racks of small arms and assorted weapons. At the end of the building you turned right, passed the second barracks, and there it was — our fenced-in compound. My first thought, looking at it, was that it looked like a POW camp.

Inside the wire sat a scatter of trailers for work and housing. The largest, twenty-four feet long, served as our meeting room and mess. Next to it, an eighteen-foot trailer housed the officers. Our signalmen had fortified housing on the right side of the compound, and for overhead protection we had an arched bunker built from concrete-filled sandbags, with a sixteen-foot trailer inside it that doubled as an officers’ meeting room.

I got little sleep those first weeks. I was convinced the Vietnamese would turn on us and overrun the place. Everyone knew the Viet Cong had infiltrated every ARVN unit in-country. It was only a matter of time before they tested us.

I was the new guy, but even I could see the other officers were too relaxed about security. Aside from a cyclone fence, we had nothing standing between us and a real attack — and somehow, none of them seemed worried. We’re guests of the Vietnamese, they reasoned. They’ll protect us.

Riiiiight.

It took a near-fatal incident — see “CIA Ambush” — to wake my senior officers up to how exposed we really were. Afterward, General Black put me in charge of our defenses. I didn’t waste a day.

I filled 55-gallon drums with water and welded them together around the fence line, so no one could dig underneath. I had the MP detachment post two men around the clock, their jeep parked as a barricade against any suicide bomber. I ordered the MPs to leave their M-60s back at camp — if we were overrun, the MPs would die first, and I didn’t want that gun turned around on us.

I scrounged a 5 KW generator and ten extra gas cans, and had the Army Engineers wire lighting across the whole compound — bright enough to blind anyone watching us from the dark.

But the real improvement came at night, during curfew. I had my men build a U-shaped bunker on top of the concrete one, big enough for three men to fight from, armed with an M-60 and camouflaged with plywood and netting so it passed for a storage shed by day. Inside it we stockpiled 1,500 rounds of linked ammo, ten grenades, three LAWs, two spare M-16s with thirty loaded magazines, and ten Claymore mines I hoped I’d never need — reserved, if it came to that, for a final stand.

We rotated the new position at night, and for the first time, we all slept a little better. We were finally helping each other survive. And we all understood the same hard fact: if the Viet Cong hit us, no one was coming to save our asses.

With security handled, I settled into the daily grind — managing ten radios, making sure none of them cooked in the 100-degree heat. By the end of the month, boredom had crept back in, and two infantry officers on the team noticed.

Both men had just come off six months humping rice paddies. They thought I was crazy for wanting more to do. Volunteering, they kept telling me, was how you got yourself killed in a combat zone.

I couldn’t help it. I’d been raised in a family business where time was money and the job always came before your own comfort. I wasn’t built to sit around playing cards all day, so I went to the intelligence officers and asked if they needed a hand.

Before long I had a second job — courier for the intelligence unit, running between B-32 Special Forces Camp, the CIA compound, and a rotation of “A” Camps. I never had a fixed route. Some days they flew me to Saigon, Cu Chi, Tay Ninh Base Camp — whatever aircraft I could hitch a ride on. Usually a Huey. Sometimes a Loach, the light observation chopper, or a twin-engine Caribou. Deliveries went out at random times, on purpose — never a pattern to catch.

I loved that job. I loved the freedom of it, and I especially loved the Special Forces camps, where I studied the layout of every fighting position I could find. Their team members treated me like one of their own, and I admired the hell out of their professionalism.

By the third month, curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to know what the “Phoenix Program” sign meant, hanging on the building next to our compound. If the intelligence officers had just lied to me — told me it was some Vietnamese housing project — my life would have been a lot simpler.

But no.

“You don’t need to know.”

That was not the answer an overly aggressive Army Signal Officer wanted to hear. Something was being kept from me, and I couldn’t put the pieces together — none of us were allowed to talk about our assignments. It took a grenade to finally show me the picture. See “Special Forces and the Phoenix Program.”

—

*The M-60 machine gun was what the military called a “crew-served weapon,” requiring a team of three soldiers to transport, load, and fire it. It was capable of several types of fire: grazing, plunging, flanking, oblique, and enfilading.