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Hill Is Danger To Infantrymen Walking in Field (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 |
The one which Company A, 2nd
Battalion, 8th Infantry (Airborne), looked over the day Capt. Theodore
Danielsen took them on a sweep and clear mission near the Song Cong
River was
an especially brutal-looking example.
I had been walking with a
fine lieutenant named John D. Hanlon and his third platoon since
leaving a
knee-deep rice paddy and walking along hedgerows and buffalo wallows in
the
field. The area was dotted with the
round graves of this country.
The grave mounds all have
little peaks of dirt in the center.
Some are surrounded by a stuccoed wall painted with blue, pink
and
yellow Chinese characters. Stones set
into the walls bear names and other information.
Most have no identification,
and sometimes the only sign that they are not simply a feature of the
landscape
is a little stick fence around them.
There are elaborate shrines here and there, on the other hand,
with
little statues and a pagoda roof over a vault.
In the area around Hoi Son
the 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry (Airborne), had found that the Viet
Cong had
constructed many fake grave mounds, digging holes, roofing them with
sticks and
covering them with dirt.
The little peaked mounds in
the middle had been raked aside by fleeing Communists, and the hidden
weapons,
ammunition, etc., inside had been pulled from the caches through square
openings in their centers.
It had been a peculiarly
effective arrangement, because neither the GIs nor the Vietnamese
troops who
had accompanied them were inclined to probe into grave mounds in search
of
hidden weapons.
On other occasions in the
coastal area, the Viet Cong had camouflaged prepared ambush positions
in the
same manner. I remember thinking as we
went through the graves here that one of those old-fashioned mine detectors would be handy on “search and
clear” operations such as this to detect buried caches, weapons, etc.
Sgt. Jose Maldonado, fire
team leader, and PFC William Butera, PFC Michael D. Fisher, Sp4 John F.
Terrell
and PFC Caniel Castillo were my immediate companions as we moved up
with S-Sgt.
Clark D. Sampson’s squad to a little gully.
It was lined with vines and saplings which separated the
grave-dotted
field from the head-high tangle which covered the lower slope of the hill.
I got an excellent chance to
study where we were going during the next few minutes.
Just as we got to the draw there was a burst
of firing just under the crest above us and I could hear the pop of
bullets
just over us.
We squatted down and the
answering fire from the “alphagators” (as Danielsen’s men call
themselves) made
a rippling smash of sound along the brush line.
I saw Danielsen smiling
happily and talking on his radio about 50 feet to our left and a little
ahead
of us where the gully made a bend. We
weren’t down in the ravine, but were spread out along a small earth
bank on its
edge, peering up through the brush and saplings.
Despite the sheet of bullets
which the Americans were sending up the ridge, bullets continued to rip
through
the leaves around us and I heard several heavy automatic weapon bursts
from the
ridge. I crouched deeply and almost
duck-walked over to the little group near Capt. Danielsen.
Sp5 Robert C. Olson, the
senior medic, and Sgt. Edward Dolphin, the radio operator who is always
near
Danielsen except when he has a chance to go prowling off on a patrol
with his
M-16 slung submachine gun style from his neck, were sitting down while
the VC
fire whipped overhead. Lt. Forrest
Spooner, the artillery forward observer, was busy on his radio a few
feet away.
“Hey, how do you like that
fire, Charlie?” Danielsen beamed as I came up to him.
“They have some automatics
up there, but you watch the system,” he continued.
“Alpha Company will be up that hill right on schedule. Listen to those bullets pop, would you!”
I looked at his happy face
rather sourly and muttered something about not wanting my attention
called to
the noises in the bushes around us any more than was possible. Then a tremendous explosion about 100 yards
in front frightened the breath out of me and I quit muttering.
“Bring it on in! Get
that smoke on them,” Danielsen shouted,
all high spirits and enthusiasm.
By the time I had figured
out the explosion - our own 105mm howitzers were getting into the fight
- a
whole line of blasts stretched along the hill and the patter of
friendly
shrapnel on the ground around us took the place of unfriendly bullets
zipping
around our ears.
“That’s right, just
right! When that stuff is coming on us
it’s just right. Keep them coming,”
Danielsen informed his artillery representative, who looked pleased
with himself.
I picked up a little
splinter of jagged, blue metal for a souvenir and managed to raise a
blister on
my finger and thumb - the shard was just less than red hot. I decided to join
Olson, who didn’t look any more enthusiastic over things
than I did.
“They are catching hell up
there on the ridge! I bet they didn’t
know what they were getting into when the opened fire on us,” Olson
told me
when I sat down behind his personal bush.
I realized that I wasn’t a
bit better off for sensible company than I had been before. Olson just didn’t show his happiness as much
as the other group.
The artillery pounded the
ridge with beautiful accuracy, then stopped, but Danielsen wasn’t quite
finished with the “system.” A volley of
LAW rockets, the deadly little one-shot antitank weapon which is also
handy as
portable artillery, whistled into a tree line below the ridge crest
where the
automatic weapons had been firing from.
Danielsen was standing up
now and yelling at his paratroopers.
“Come on, let me hear from
you! Go get ‘em. . .” he was yelling,
interspersing it with the kind of whoops that spur a pack of mean
hounds into a
bear fight.
He got his answer. It
was a surge of fast-moving infantrymen
shouting “Airborne” and less printable war cries. They
hit the tangle of jungle up the steep slope as if they were
running over a baseball field but much more cannily.
The squads shifted and
split. The men, taking advantage of
cover and folds in the ground and firing as they advanced, moved on up
the hill
fast but very intelligently. There
wasn’t a shot fired at them.
The command group put its
head down and tried to keep up as best it could, and when we got to the
top I
was back into the old familiar state of winded exhaustion.
There was a radio message about
three Viet Cong being killed and signs of others having been hit, and
the
advance continued up the slope.
I felt a sting on my right
shin as I dragged that tired foot up for another step, and rather
disgustedly
saw that I had pinked myself on a pongee stick. The
top of the hill had been littered with them. They
were old, however, with the weathered
gray look bamboo gets after exposure to sun and rain.
The one which was dangling
from my trousers had broken off at the ground.
The point had made a little puncture in my trousers and then
raked my
shin down to the top of my jungle boot.
I cussed about it and somebody passed the word about pongees.
Olson gave one of his first
smiles as he proceeded to make me forget the way the pongee had stung
by pouring
medicine onto the puncture and scratch, making them really hurt.
“What we’ll do now is to
evacuate you,” he said pleasantly.
“Then the surgeon will split your skin open and clean out any
little
bits of foreign matter and sew it back up, and in six or eight weeks
you will
be as good as new.”
“What we will do now is roll
my trouser back down, put a cork back on that bottle of turpentine and
walk on
down the hill,” I said. “I’ve got a
thorn in my wrist that is worse than that.”
I immediately wished I had
not mentioned the thorn, because he quickly treated this too. It at least made me forget about the pongee.
The infantrymen pulled the
things up out of the ground and when the path was clear we went on down
the
slope and found that we had come in the right direction from us and the
wrong
one for the Viet Cong.
They had ambushed the rice
field on the other side of the hill from the one we had chosen for a
landing. Deep holes with tunnels
linking them were spotted in the brush over here.
Danielsen gave a
demonstration on handling these. He
used an M-16 to sterilize one entrance tunnel, tossed a couple of
grenades,
watched where dust flew from another tunnel entrance and repeated the
treatment. An entire section of a dirt
bank caved in after the second explosion.
“If anybody is in there they
have an earache and dirt in their nose, anyway,” he said.
The thud of grenades and the
bursts of automatic fire along the hill showed that the infantrymen in
his
company had been given the benefit of Danielsen’s previous experience
in Viet
Nam (he had been here as an adviser for a year and had volunteered to
return
with the 1st Cavalry Division), and when we got down to the hill’s base
I was
fairly certain it was deserted.
I mentioned this to
Danielsen but he shook his head.
“Don’t take anything for
granted in this stuff,” he said. “When
you are fighting these guerrilla types you have to assume that you
aren’t going
to have them cleaned out no matter how long you work on a position.
“The PAVN soldiers, regular
North Vietnamese Army troops, are usually out in battalion size, and
don’t
operate in small groups so much, but the North Vietnamese guerrillas
are
something else,” he continued. “Around
here, I think, we have those black-pajama boys, and there are probably
two or
three of them hiding in some hole up there right now, waiting to come
out and
snipe at us when they think we are getting complacent.”
Danielsen had another system
for this. As the company moved away -
and at a time I was fairly certain that if a sniper was going to shoot
he would
be taking aim - the craft of Spooner and his thunder and lightning from
the 1st
Battalion, 19th Artillery (Airborne), came into explosive evidence. A line of artillery shells smashed into the
area we had left. The explosions
continued for a long time.
“Variable timed fuses - you
get a little delay,” Danielsen said.
“Some hit and explode on contact and some just
lay there and, when the little guy sticks his head up again and
thinks he has it made, they go off.”
I realized then that I was
seeing something which some tactical books need to include. There are ways to use modern weapons and
support with as much craft and guile as any guerrilla.
Camouflage techniques, support methods, all
of these can be varied to suit the occasion.
I mentioned it to Danielsen.
“Everybody is saying you
can’t fight by the book over here,” he said.
“I think that the book is the way to fight.
You just don’t look for the answers in the back of it and you
don’t apply the solutions to the situation at the end of the chapter.
“You take what the book
teaches and apply it to the situation you have your hands on,” he
continued. “Military science is as
flexible as painting a picture.
Painting has its rules too.
Writing has rules. You obey
those rules and you use your imagination and you come up with a
solution.
“Maybe you use the book in a
different manner than it was used before, maybe in a different manner
than the
man who wrote it ever thought of even, but it is the way to do it,”
Danielsen
said. “Besides, there isn’t anything
which says you can’t write some new pages.
That is what we are doing - we are adding some to military
science with
air mobility.
“The Viet Cong have a book
and, just like ours, it has advantages for him and it can trap him,” he
said. “If he doesn’t take the lessons
and use them to suit this new situation, he is whipped.
“His book doesn’t have the
answer to this airmobile concept spelled out.
I don’t think he can adjust. His
book doesn’t give him room to adjust like my book does.
It spells out the situation, gives him the
answer, and that is that.
“My book tells me what I can
do, some of the ways to do it, how to use what I have which can help me
fight
and how to think out solutions to problems when they come up by using
all of
that,” he added. “It has room for some
new chapters, like we worked out at Fort Benning in the 11th Air
Assault
Division.
“It’s a good book and I’ll put it up against theirs every time,” he said, concluding, “The only time the book works against you is when you don’t use it to learn new things and when you’re not willing to bring out a new edition every now and then.”
Danielsen’s edition of the book, which includes helicopters, airmobile artillery, air support, armed helicopters and infantrymen who range out by air and are supplied on the battlefront by helicopters, proved to be a good one in the weeks ahead.
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Columbus Ledger-Enquirer