 |
Newsmen Prepare for Fight as Alert Sounds |
|
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has returned home after four months in Viet Nam. He was with men of the 1st Cavalry Division during many of their recent engagements with Communist guerrillas, and his articles on the war as he saw it will continue in The Enquirer daily.) By CHARLES BLACK Enquirer Military Writer |
|
The feeling was heightened
by the luxurious routine of going into the field for a day and
returning to a
cot - however hard it was - and a roof at MACV Compound at Pleiku. The transient quarters made available to
reporters and other itinerants had showers and indoor plumbing and a
handsome
arcade looking out onto a lovely patch of green grass, shrubs and
flowers.
The billets described a
series of squares. Patios were
available with lounge chairs and tables, clubs were available, the
dining room
served excellent food and had Montagnard waiters and waitresses. (Local tribal costume was not used. It is too sketchy for dinner wear.)
Sometime during the night, however,
an alarm bell suddenly sounded in our quarters, containing about 20
newsmen by
now, and Vo Hynn, the Vietnamese photographer for NBC who is usually
conceded
to be the “best combat television cameraman in the war,” came to his
feet.
Hynn is a powerfully built
man, short but with wide shoulders, and he seldom volunteers
conversation. This time he simply took
charge of the
rather bleary platoon of writers, photographers, TV correspondents, etc.
“Gentlemen, get
dressed. Hurry. It
is an alert. Get dressed and follow me,”
he said quietly.
He supervised the heroic
dressing efforts of one member of the corps who had not planned an
alert for
the night’s activities but who had taken stringent precautions against
snakebite.
Somebody advised Hynn to “.
. . just roll him under the bed. It
might be a false alarm and it’s a good place to keep him the rest of
the night,
anyway. If it is for real, he’ll make
it. He has slept through more alerts
than anybody I know in South Viet Nam already!”
Hynn and two others managed
to get the helpless one into some kind of attire and on his way to the
rallying
point. The Vietnamese then lined us up
in platoon formation and led the way to the officer of the day’s
quarters, a
heavily sandbagged building which served in times like these as command
post.
Joe Galloway of UPI and
myself had M-16 rifles and a sack full of magazines.
A portly magazine writer was slapping the holster on his belt,
never noticing that he had left his pistol under his pillow. Robin Mannick and Peter Arnett of AP were
carrying cameras and a couple of cans of assorted nuts which Arnett
said would
be missing if not carefully guarded. A
CBS-TV crew had a burp gun and, for some reason, a camera tripod.
Hynn drew his force up and
accosted a harried lieutenant wearing “OD” on his arm.
“Where is our post?” he
asked.
The lieutenant looked
horrified.
“Good gosh, how many of you
guys are there? Oh, my!
Look, go right down this walk to that Conex
box with the sandbags around it and on top of it. All
of you get in there,” he said.
We trotted down, all 20 of
us, and filed into the Conex container.
There was a little outside area sandbagged in like a storm
shelter, and
Arnett and myself wound up there. The
solid mass of journalistic talent inside of the steel box just couldn’t
wedge
any closer.
“Somebody give me a
flashlight,” I heard a muffled voice demand.
I passed one into the
wall-to-wall carpet of pressmen.
Somebody took it and shined it one some boxes which lined one
side of
the shelter.
“That’s why it’s so
crowded,” he reported. “They have all
these boxes of mortar ammunition and .50 caliber machine gun shells in
here.”
The light suddenly bobbed
and I heard some strenuous arguing as people shifted around, trying to
get away
from the stack of explosives sharing the mortar shelter.
A dark figure wearing a
steel helmet and carrying a carbine appeared.
‘I’m Your Security’
“I am to guard you people
here. I’m your security,” the figure
announced crisply.
He leaned his carbine
against the Conex box and took out a big .38, whirling the cylinder in
a
businesslike manner, slapping it back into his holster and patting the
pistol’s
pearl handles.
Then he suddenly whirled and
his voice rose an octave.
“Where is my carbine? What
happened to my carbine? I lost my
carbine!” he said.
I handed it to him.
“What do you do around
here?” I asked.
“I’m the file clerk in the
--- office. This is my first
alert. Do you fellows know the
password?” He reassured me.
I shook my head wonderingly
and asked Arnett if he would open the nuts.
“We might as well go ahead and enjoy it. We’re just as safe as if we were in a grave,” I told him.
The alert was secured with
an earsplitting siren which shattered my nerves far more than the tiny
tinkling
of the bell which had announced the danger, and we trudged back to our
quarters. Somebody forgot the immobilized
member of the platoon and he spent the night sleeping on top of the
mortar
ammunition boxes.
We were able, through putting
the unstinted efforts of 20 determined journalists to the task, to find
out
what happened the next morning.
Somebody at Camp Holloway
had shot at a shadow. Somebody at an
airstrip nearby called New Pleiku had shot back at Camp Holloway. A spirited but ineffective firefight was
then waged between the Vietnamese perimeter guards.
In the morning, I checked
out of the MACV hootch. Pleiku life was
too exciting. I caught a helicopter out
to Landing Zone Columbus where one of Lt. Col. Robert Tully’s companies
from
his 2nd Battalion 5th Cavalry was guarding 18 105 mm. howitzers
belonging to
the 2nd Battalion 70th Artillery.
The place had already been mortared and attacked by a PAVN company, but it was much less exhilarating an atmosphere than a Pleiku alert.
© Columbus Ledger-Enquirer