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Tough Circumstances Prove Capt. Danielsen’s Command Ability(EDITOR'S
NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has been in the field
with 1st
Cavalry Division troops. Following is an account of the action and the
men
involved.) By CHARLES BLACK Enquirer Military Writer |
I have had occasion to learn
this through seeing him in at least three sets of tough circumstances.
Danny, an old friend, had
been in the 11th Air Assault Division in what was then the 1st
Battalion, 188th
Infantry, from which the 1st Cavalry Division battalion was formed.
He knew about Viet Nam from
a very tough and harrowing year as a field adviser with Vietnamese
units along
the Laotian border just before he became involved in the Fort Benning
air
mobility tests.
I saw Danny only a few days
ago, however, and once again marveled at his demeanor - he just doesn’t
seem to
bother about worrying.
A smiling, happy man who
jokes, exudes confidence and competence, he is inordinately proud of
what he
refers to as his “hoodlums” in Company A.
To say that the favor is returned is putting it mildly. Danny is practically idolized by his outfit.
Lt. Col. Kenneth Mertel, the
battalion commander, is quite well-blessed with company commanders, in
fact. He has one of the best
collections of captains available in the U.S. Army running his fighting
units.
Each of these men is an
individual and has a different personality and command technique, and
they fit
together into a team as handily as fingers and knuckles do into a fist.
The battalion - called the
“Mustangs” - has Capt. R. W. Ramsey in command of Headquarters and
Headquarters
Co. Capt. Ramsey has a second avocation.
He is one of the most dedicated workers in the Army’s in-service
educational program, and on his nights off at Benning was an instructor
in
evening classes for men furthering their education.
Maj. Guy A. Eberhardt, a
lean, tanned man grimly determined to win fights and hunt down Viet
Cong and
North Vietnamese infiltrators, is the executive officer.
Maj. John R. Herman Jr.
operations officer; Capt. Charles Stone, intelligence; Capt. William B.
Mozey
Jr., adjutant and Capt. Gerrell D. Plummer, supply, make up the rest of
the
headquarters staff.
Other Key Men
A roll call of other key men
included:
Capt. Richard Odom,
battalion surgeon; Lt. Irving C. Staton, medical platoon commander; SFC
Samuel G.
Conner, medical platoon sergeant; Lt. William J. Ellison, service
platoon
commander; SFC Robert D. Dever, service platoon sergeant; Lt. Thomas R.
Grant,
communications platoon leader.
SFC James A. Williamson Jr.,
communications sergeant; 1st Sgt. William J. Tucker, Headquarters
Company;
S-Sgt. David S. Bey, S1 sergeant; M-Sgt. Raymond Plaisted, intelligence
sergeant; M-Sgt. Norman C. Ashby, operations sergeant, and the
battalion
sergeant major, Herbert P. McCullah.
Senior medics include Sp6
Henry Agee and Sp6 Floyd Williford, and the mess sergeant is S-Sgt.
Thomas C.
Finnegan.
The team of infantry company
commanders which makes the battalion such an effective field unit
includes
Capt. Roy Martin, B Company, who is the holder of world records as a
skydiver;
Capt. William (Buster) Smith, a straightforward businessman who runs C
Company,
and Capt. Vandoster Tabb, who commands Company D.
I’ve always been partial to
this battalion, because I happen to be a long-standing honorary member
of
it. My name and that of Capt. George
Livingston, now an adviser with a Vietnamese airborne battalion, are
inscribed
on a plaque owned by Martin’s B Company.
This puts us on the company roster from now on.
Livingston, the former B
Company commander, had made a special trip from Kontum to An Khe to
look up
friends in the division, and I had missed him.
Capt. Peter Dawkins of
football and scholastic fame in the Army and another of the Vietnamese
airborne
battalion commanders whom I had seen at Pleiku, had promised to relay
greetings
to Livingston.
I had received a message
back so I assumed that the “Mustang” brotherhood was still close to
former
members of the outfit.
This kind of sentiment is
compliment enough to the command ability of Mertel, and I bring it up
because
at this particular juncture members of the battalion were worrying
about their
“old man’s” health.
I spent a night in Mertel’s
tent just before I went out with Danielsen’s boys and he had had a high
fever
and a headache and his neck was swollen, but he was toughing it out.
The battalion surgeon told
me that if the fever didn’t drop he would send Mertel to the hospital
at Qui
Nhom whatever objections the commander made.
That morning, the fever was still up and the protesting Mertel
was
evacuated. (He returned in a few days,
cured and in full charge, but we were all worried at this time.)
Eberhardt took over running
the outfit and proved to be as capable at it as anybody could ask - and much is asked of a battalion commander
- but the personal regard for Mertel
caused some glum faces when we heard he had been flown out.
The best antidote for this,
according to any Army’s tradition, is hard work, and Eberhardt applied
it
immediately. He set up an operation
which cleared an area which had been VC domain, pushing it so hard that
the
local Communist organization is probably still wondering where all of
those big
American soldiers came from.
Danielsen’s itinerary for
the day called for his company to make an assault landing in a flooded
rice
paddy, move out of it and comb the surrounding jungle, assault over a
thorny
hill and down the other side where a linkup would be forged with B and
C
Companies, then to sweep on through a pair of deserted villages which
were
known as Viet Cong hangouts.
The walking involved was a
tough menu in itself. The terrain
offered a choice of rice paddy mud and water or jungled, steep hills. The opportunities for violence seemed endless,
from the helicopter assault until the final tour of thatched-hut
hamlets.
I got aboard a Huey with Lt.
John B. Hanlon, third platoon leader; Sp4 Roger E. Redd, his radioman;
Platoon
Sgt. Kenneth Riveer; Sp4 Ulysses R. Laguer, assistant radioman, and Sp4
Raymond
Ortiz, the platoon medic, to make the initial assault.
It wasn’t a very long ride
from the battalion camp to the flooded rice paddy where the day’s work
started,
but it gave me a look at what we were up against and some doubts as to
whether
a man really ought to have to do things like this.
The landscape below just
didn’t present a tidy picture. Hill
slopes cut through the muck of paddies, hedgerows ran in menacing lines
at
regular intervals, and the brush where the land hadn’t been farmed was
a solid
tangle.
The rain of the previous
days had stopped during the night, and the climate of this valley area
was
sultry when we swooped down over a line of trees into the mud of the
big
paddy. Everybody leaped out in a series
of splashes and ran across the paddy to secure the landing zone.
We left trails of muddy water
behind us, and when the helicopters pulled off they beat the surface of
the
paddy into waves, flattening the green stalks into the water.
I remember thinking “we’re
making a mess out of this rice paddy, and it sure is making a mess out
of us”
just as I caught my left boot in a particularly mucky area and sprawled
full
length into the knee-deep water.
The infantrymen stayed in
the paddy water, crouched along banks on either side of it, peering
through the
bushes. On the east, a trail was beaten
down and the bank up to it was a mess
of mud and a tangle of thorns.
I don’t know what the west
side was like because I was uninterested in anything except leeches,
mud, water
in my shirt pockets and the general
situation caused by sudden total immersion in a rice paddy. I remember some solicitous questions from
PFC William Butera and PFC Michael D. Fisher which didn’t help any.
“You been skin diving very
long?” was Butera’s offer.
PFC Fisher simply offered to
loan me soap and towel if I wanted to go back and do it again.
“When that mud dries you
aren’t going to be able to walk. You’ll
be one big brick,” he added.
I told them that it was an
experiment in camouflage techniques, and we crouched by the paddy wall,
trying
to figure out what might be two feet away from us.
They were both sweating, so I at least had the advantage of
being
wet and cool.
I finally spotted wary
little groups of our riflemen working out the area in front of us and
felt more
relaxed. These patrols had worked in
from the flanks and they made me feel less vulnerable as I crouched
under the
bank and wished I was out of the paddy.
A paddy is a dangerous place.
The VC have a penchant for
digging into the brush and dikes around it and suddenly opening fire on
men
caught out in the muck. There isn’t
much of a solution available to this situation, either.
The men hit by such
resistance usually overpower it and move on, but it isn’t an ideal
arrangement.
Progress through the jungle
is tuned to the pace of one man with a machete, and hopes of surprising
anybody
while chopping trail are pretty slim.
The usual avenues of
approach are also the usual places where farmers put rice paddies, and
a rice
paddy seems designed as much for defense as for growing a Vietnamese
dinner.
The villages are equally tough
affairs. Ditches, groves, hedges and
the hodge-podge architecture all form a kind of maze which gives the
advantages
to the man who can sit and wait.
The fact that our troops
have cleared every rice paddy and every village in their path during
the operations
speak sufficiently for their professional attainments and personal
courage.
By the time the patrols had
screened the area and sent word back and we moved out of the paddy into
a field
approaching the hill, the next major obstacle, I was dry and hot. The mud was flaking off my upper clothing,
although from the knees down we were all soaked, and I had already gone
through
one of the two canteens of water I was carrying.
Danielsen waved me over to
his command group out in the field and I got an insight into why his
company
knows him so well.
He ranges from one end of it
to the other in a kind of happy lope which makes the day quite a bit of
exercise if you try to follow him around.
He meets a lot of riflemen that way -every man in the company on
each trip
- but it isn’t any way to conserve energy.
I was tired before we even got to the tough part of the walk.
© Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
