ROAD TO NOWHERE

One of the more significant projects I completed on Nui Ba Den was a roadway around its perimeter.

The idea wasn’t mine. I was just on watch when it got finished.

Eighteen bunkers lined the perimeter. Two helipads supplied them. Without a road, every case of ammunition went by hand through boulder fields — slow, exhausting, dangerous for men already stretched thin on the line.

When I got there, the project was dead. Had been for a year. Two boulders blocked the only route, and the route couldn’t move, so the road bent into the shape of a “C.” The 25th Division wouldn’t issue us a jeep until the road was finished. Half a road, for a vehicle we didn’t have. (I got one anyway. Reconnoitered it from another unit. Different story.)

I needed men from a lot of units. I laid it out for the other four officers on the mountain. None of them knew engineering, but they knew how not to get people killed, and with the explosives this called for, that mattered more. We agreed to rotate as safety officers.

The hard part was getting the Engineers assigned. Major Campbell was CO, I was his XO, and the normal channels weren’t moving. I didn’t have the patience for that game. I didn’t need it, either — fifteen units answered to me on that mountain, American and Vietnamese, and every one of them knew their safety came first with me. That was worth more than my rank.

So I skipped Campbell’s channels and went to the NCOs directly. Told them what I needed. They went back to their units and started scrounging explosives.

Fifty years later, I couldn’t tell you which unit gave what. But between them and the Engineers, we had enough. We blew both boulders. One mishap — no one hurt. Three weeks, done.

The road mattered to me. What it did mattered more: ammunition that took an hour of scrambling over rock now took minutes on a jeep trail.

That’s the only math that counted.