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Battalion Alerted, But Orders Changed(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 |
After a lot of hard,
detailed work by Ingram and his staff, the first notice of what has
become one
of the proudest chapters of the combat history of the 1st Cavalry
Division -
and the most significant chapter in the story of American involvement
in the
Vietnamese war - came into the battalion command post.
The word was that a Special
Forces camp in an obscure location 20 miles or so south of Pleiku was
under a
bitter siege by Communist forces and that the 1st Cavalry was on alert
to go to
the rescue.
The decision on exactly what
part the sky troopers would play seemed up in the air.
The 2nd of the 12th was alerted to two
possibilities: It would either take
part in actual relief of the camp or go to Pleiku and take over
security posts
around areas there (Camp Hollowell, New Pleiku base and the II Corps
headquarters) while Vietnamese forces were sent out to force the
siege’s halt.
Maps Pulled Out
The operations planners had
to pull out maps of both areas and put away their maps of the Boon Song
section. One overworked sergeant told
me “We’re not using maps now. We’re
just getting out the globe” at about midnight on the night the chance
came to the
battalion.
The Plei Me fight was the
center of attention then. American
Advisers
(Special Forces men) and the 360 CIDG troops there were surrounded by a
heavy
force of men with mortars, automatic weapons, recoilless artillery, etc.
Word came in that two A1E
Skyraider planes had been shot down by heavy machine guns hidden around
the
camp and that a helicopter attempting to land in the camp had been shot
down,
with heavy casualties resulting from all of this.
There was a definite air of
uncertainty about exactly what role the 1st Cavalry would play in the
Plei Me
fight at first. Sentiment at the
division itself was to move into the fight at once and to do it hard.
However, there seemed to be
reluctance at Task Force Victor, the newest of the headquarters
complexes which
blossom in Viet Nam with such profusion, to commit the Americans to the
fight.
I have since noted some
local resentment about that early reluctance expressed in
off-the-record
comments. The caution seems to have
originated at Task Force Victor, which is in the spider web of command
some
place between the 1st Cavalry Division and some other headquarters in
Saigon.
(I was able to track down
seven different headquarters which had to “coordinate” with each other
for a
mission which took two hours to accomplish one day.
The coordination - with Vietnamese officials and various
American
officials - took the best part of two days.
(When the raid was
accomplished, of course, it was so much wasted effort.
For the record, the mission had to be
co-ordinated with II Corps, 24th Special Sector Zone, Sector
Headquarters, Task
Force Victor, the province chief, the Special Forces C Team
headquarters, which
provided some of the riflemen who took part, and a headquarters which I
can’t
find in my notes but which had an interest in the entire thing.)
The decision which finally came was for the Vietnamese forces to be committed to relieving Plei Me and for the first involvement by U.S. forces to be as a reserve at Pleiku.
Nobody at the battalion knew
that, of course, so the preparations forged ahead.
I left the busy grease pencils and field telephones and went
over
to the tent occupied by Maj. Beau Blasingame, the chaplain, one of the
single
most interesting men I’ve met over here.
Blasingame’s tent sits
beside a small lake with a medium-sized but beautifully proportioned
banyan
tree on a flattened knoll above it. The
banyan tree shades his chapel area - a collection of seats made out of
empty
rocket launchers laid end to end in semicircles before the stand used
by the
chaplain.
It is a beautiful open-air location,
and rocks studding the sides of the knoll afford handy seats for the
congregation if the rocket launchers are all filled.
It is the kind of church in
which I believe Blasingame is particularly at home.
He is a chaplain who wears the Combat Infantry Badge from Korea,
for example, and there are several men in the 1st Cavalry Division who
remembered him as “one of the best company commanders who ever served
in
Germany.”
He resigned his commission
with an abruptness which had surprised his friends in 1957, as I recall
the
chronology, and had come home to Georgia where he attended theology
school and
was ordained as a minister. He came
back into the Army as chaplain in 1961.
He is both the toughest and
the gentlest man I have ever known. His
tent was always filled with officers and men who came by to “talk a
while.”
It was to be the first
operation for the battalion, and the atmosphere around a camp on the
eve of
such things is always one of impending events. The chaplain is apt to
be sought
out more than usual, in fact.
The atmosphere at the
battalion camp was especially charged on this night because of the
sudden
switch in plans and the fact that the Communist activity around Plei Me
seemed
especially ominous.
(Nobody knew what eventual role the battalion would fill, and the universal opinion was that it was on its way to lift the siege as quickly as helicopters could get it there.)
Sits in Tent
I sat in the tent talking to
Lt. William Siebert and Blasingame for a while. Bill
Siebert is a big youth who intends to become a Catholic
priest when he has finished his military obligation.
Siebert seemed eager to get
on with the war here when I talked to him that night (later meetings
proved he
was the kind to have that sort of inclination when the war was all
around him,
too) and he is very serious about his intention to study to become a
priest.
When he left I told the
chaplain that Siebert reminded me of his own unique qualifications as a
soldier’s preacher.
“Well, I’m not a fancy man in
my beliefs,” Blasingame said. “I have
an infantryman’s belief about theology.
It simply adds up to this: You have to be prepared to die.”
The way he made his decision
about the ministry provided insight into the personality of the man for
whom
these soldiers have such respect.
He told me that he had his
company in the field in a bitter winter maneuver in Germany and that he
left
his command post and went to an abandoned chapel.
“I simply stayed there in
the dark and the cold, and I knew finally that I had made a decision,”
he
said. “I went to see my battalion
commander and told him I wished to resign my commission, and from that
morning
on I have known what my place in this world is.”
I went to sleep in his tent
that night on a borrowed cot and air mattress, thinking about the
chaplains I
have met over here. I remembered Capt.
Billy Lord, who had organized men to bring the wounded out under fire
when the
1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, landed at Hoi Son on operation Shiny
Bayonet. I remembered him leading those
men and crying once as he conducted last rites in a rice paddy.
The morning the troops came
up to the scene of the fight, I saw Capt. Lord standing knee deep in a
rice
paddy (we were going single file along a slippery paddy wall in the
rain), a
sort of shy smile on his face, saluting men and speaking to them as
they filed
by, then tag onto the column himself.
He and Blasingame are
different personalities, but each has a very strong tinge of iron in
his
system.
For example, a lieutenant
had told me at supper that after he had discussed a few personal
matters with
Blasingame the chaplain had brusquely moved into a professional
critique of an
effort by the lieutenant’s platoon during the day.
“He told me about 10 things I
did wrong and how to do them right, and told me not to let it happen
again when
he was around - that he just can’t stand bad infantry work,” the young
officer
told me.
Chaplain Lord isn’t an
expert infantryman, but is highly qualified to receive the respect of
infantrymen for his courage at Shiny Bayonet.
Blasingame talked about him quite a bit during the evening.
I probably shouldn’t mention
it, of course, but one of the items which came up on the conversations
about
Capt. Lord here and there was the fact that he had been writing to his
wife
that he had a very dull schedule and didn’t take part in any of the
operations.
(This is such a common
practice that I am in constant jeopardy when I mention names in some of
these
stories. Somebody comes over and tells
me about once a week that I have just ruined an elaborate cover story
he has
been building up in letters home.
(Since the division has been
in headlined actions lately, of course, this sort of thing has been
less of a
problem. At first, when the operations
were fewer, a man could get away with it, but not since the 1st Cavalry
has set
the Vietnamese war on fire.)
Capt. Lord got into Shiny
Bayonet quite by accident, having landed in a chopper on what was
believed to
be a perfectly quite landing zone and having the fight just build up
around him
- but this didn’t impress Mrs. Lord.
She wrote him a letter about
seeing him on a television report of the fighting and noted that what
she had
seen was at complete odds with the kind of day’s work he had written
home
about.
I thought it was a nice
touch for a chaplain named Billy Lord, who incidentally used to live on
Christian Lane at Fort Benning to get that kind of letter.
I thought it was even more
appropriate that the young captain had gone around to see another
chaplain and
ask him to write a letter explaining what had happened and that he
really
hadn’t been fibbing.
I don’t remember what time
Blasingame and I finished talking, but it was suddenly daylight and
word had
come around for everybody to “saddle up.”
The battalion was going to Pleiku to stand by for whatever the
top
echelons should decide concerning the Plei Me action.
We went out and got on 2 1/2
ton trucks about 9 a.m. We stayed on
them for more than an hour, jammed into a solid mass of men, equipment
and
weapons, waiting to be taken to the strip to board Caribous from the
17th
Aviation Company which would fly us to Pleiku.
Then everybody was told to
get off and just stand loose.
“So far was we can tell, the
thing is all off and we are just on a two-hour alert status,” Ingram
said.
It was all very frustrating
to the soldiers. They made some
comments which were rather embarrassing to a man who was living down at
the
chaplain’s tent, but I felt quite a bit of sympathy for the language
they
chose. In fact, I made certain
Blasingame wasn’t around and used some myself.
It all appeared to be over,
and I had heard that the 1st Brigade, commanded by Lt. Col. Harlowe
Clark, was
going into some technically interesting operations around Binh Khe,
east of An
Khe on Route 19.
I told everybody goodbye and
hooked a ride over to the helicopter pad, got on a Chinook carrying
ammunition
crates and landed in the field near where Task Force Hansen had
headquartered
so many weeks ago when I first came up here.
It was now a kind of central location for operations in the Song
Con
river area.
I paid a visit first to a group of men doing one of the most important jobs in the 1st Cavalry Division - the doctors and medics.
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