SERGEANT WILLIAM SMITH

The round that killed Sergeant Smith was ours. Early June 1969, 1:00 a.m., bunker twelve, eastern slope of Nui Ba Den — a short round from our own 81mm mortars.

It started with a perimeter guard who thought he saw movement in the wire. He opened up with his M-60, and within seconds the whole line was on full alert. Our mortar crew answered with two high-explosive rounds aimed at the suspected target. One landed short.

By the time I reached the bunker, Sergeant Smith had a rag pressed to the back of his head, blood running down his neck in the dark. I couldn’t see how bad the wound was, so I bandaged him as best I could and we got him to Doc’s bunker. When Doc pulled the bandage back, neither of us was ready for what we saw — part of his skull was gone. There was nothing left to do but keep him comfortable. No medevac would risk a landing on that mountain at night, not with the enemy holding most of it.

Smith surfaced for a moment, then went into shock. Doc and I worked to bring him back. He never did.

I grabbed my .45 and went down to the mortar bunker for an explanation. The place smelled like weed. My first thought was that the crew had been high when they fired — that this was on them. But the four of them just stared back at me, confused, like they hadn’t caught up to the fact that a man was dead. I told them there’d be an investigation, a court-martial for whoever was responsible. Got nothing but blank looks. I left, wrote the incident report, and fell asleep at my desk before I finished it.

That’s when the grenade came through the door.

Someone yelled it first — “Grenade” — and I saw it rolling across the floor before I was fully awake. I hit the ground. It didn’t go off. Just filled the bunker with red smoke.

Major Campbell was rooming with me that night. I’ve always believed that’s the only reason it was smoke and not frag. Somebody in the mortar platoon didn’t like being threatened with a court-martial, and this was how he told me to let it go.

The next morning, the three of us — Campbell, Sergeant Meyers, and I — went through what we knew. The mortar rounds had no extra propellant charges. Nobody had rigged anything. It was most likely a bad round straight from the factory, the kind of defect no one on that crew could have caught. I called the mortar teams together and told them there’d be no investigation. I wasn’t after blame. I wanted to understand what happened, and stop it from happening again.

Eight months in-country by then. All I wanted was to go home in one piece, and walking out of that meeting, I figured my odds had gotten a little better.

We held a memorial for Sergeant Smith. Everybody on that mountain liked him. He was a career soldier, and a good one — the kind of man the 25th Infantry Division was better for having.

None of this happens without the mountain itself. Nui Ba Den was a war zone dressed up as terrain: gradual slopes giving way to sheer drops, boulder fields with rocks the size of an Abrams tank. The Viet Cong had learned every inch of it fighting the Japanese in World War II and the French before us, and by the time America showed up, they controlled 95 percent of it. We held the summit — enough for our signal gear and eighteen bunkers spread along the perimeter, manned around the clock, no exceptions. A twelve-man Reaction Force stood ready to hit any point on the mountain within fifteen minutes.

Isolated the way we were, with the enemy probing constantly, false alarms were routine. But you couldn’t afford to treat any of them that way — not after 1968, when the mountain was overrun. Twenty-five Americans killed. Twenty-five wounded. Every piece of signal equipment destroyed, and communications for all of III Corps knocked out with it.

That’s the kind of pressure that never lets up. Sooner or later, it finds a way to cost you.