We were only a few hundred meters from the LZ when we heard trackers behind us looking for our trail. We could tell they were in the search mode, because they were in a line formation, clacking bamboo sticks together to keep the line dressed. Fred veered us to the left and almost walked right into a platoon of NVA that were moving up to joint the chase. As we cut back in the opposite direction, Fred had a hurried few words with me.
"This smells like a trap, Jody, they were on us too quick for it to have been an accident. More than one platoon after us means this is a company sized operation, so there are two more platoons out there somewhere. Get Covey on the horn; tell him to find us an LZ and bring in some air. Have him turn the choppers around at Dak To and send them back for us pronto, I'm pulling the plug on this fiasco."
I nodded and unclipped the handset from my web gear. Fred wasn't one to abort a mission over some bullshit little thing, so if he was worried, we had stepped in it big time. I passed the message up to Covey. Our Covey rider was a big, rawboned former recon man named Jessie Caraway. Caraway was a hillbilly from West Virginia, aptly nicknamed 'Country'. Country rogered my message and told me to stand by. He was back on the radio in a few minutes.
"The only LZ close to you is about three klicks northeast of where you inserted. Estimate ninety mikes on the chopper turn-around, and no can do with tac air right now. Everything in the air is up north on a Bright Light for a downed F-4. Hillsborough says they have a pair of Sandies (A-1-Es) on the way to refuel in Thailand, but the turn-around is about the same as the helicopters. Looks like you are on your own for a while."
Hillsborough was the code name for the Air Force C-130 that orbited over Laos as a flying command post. Hillsborough had the final say on air operations, so we were shit out of luck for at least another hour or two. I trotted forward to give Fred the news. We were walking a quicker pace than normal, trying to put some distance on that pursuit, but still covering our trail the best we could. The enemy troops were about three hundred meters behind us now, and spread across a wide front. The incessant clacking of their bamboo sticks was making us all nervous.
When I told Fred about the lack of air support, he just nodded, but he looked thoughtful about the LZ situation. I thought Fred would be relieved that we were within three kilometers of an LZ, but my mind just didn't work on the same frequency as his.
"This don't smell right, Jody. What do you want to bet that the rest of this company is waiting for us between here and that LZ? They split the company and put two platoons on each LZ, then the bunch whose LZ gets landed on herds whoever landed towards the other group."
I saw no reason to doubt Fred's analysis, so we were between the proverbial rock and hard place. We could not make a ninety degree turn, because the commies were spread out too far for us to slip by then, and we had a force ten times the size of ours in front of and behind us. We might evade them by moving diagonally but that would put us further in bad guy country and allow them to reinforce. It was scary as hell to think that right now was probably as good as things were going to get.
Fred was maddeningly calm as he looked down at his watch.
"Let's go, we have at least an hour and a half to kill. We are going to move slow and I don't want to leave a sign we've been this way," he said.
We crept for another thirty minutes, covering five hundred meters at the most. We crossed a small creek and started up the other hill, when Fred suddenly called us to a halt.
I walked up to him to see what was going on.
"This is a good place to turn things around," he said before I could ask him anything. "They will probably stop before they hit the creek, to make sure they stay dressed when they cross. When they stop, we are going to attack right through them and haul ass back to the LZ we inserted on. If we have any luck, we will only have two platoons to deal with before the choppers can get here."
It was incredible too me that Fred could think up something as unexpected and boldly calculated as that while we had been running for our lives.
Fred put us down in a wedge-shape formation about twenty five meters up the hill. Fred would initiate the attack, and we'd all jump up and follow him. The ten minutes we lay there waiting for the NVA soldiers had to be the longest in my life. My adrenalin was spiked so high I could feel my heart try to jump out of my chest. It took every fiber of self control I had to lay still.
Just as Fred suspected, a team of two soldiers stopped on the far bank of the stream. One soldier had his AK-47 at the ready, while the other was clacking the bamboo sticks one against another. Three more pairs that were in our field of vision arrived a few seconds later. They were well spread out and were maintaining their line fastidiously.
After about a minute, a whistle trilled two blasts somewhere off to our left, and the men seemed to step forward in unison. Fred waited until the pair in front of him was in the middle of the knee-deep stream before he jumped up and greased them with a couple of controlled bursts. The rest of us leapt to our feet and did the same to the unlucky NVA soldiers near us. Then we all dashed across the creek, going right through the gap we'd blasted in their line.
After a few heartbeats of dead silence, we started receiving fire from both sides as we sprinted up the hillside. We couldn't return the fire, for fear of hitting one another as we wove our way up the hill. We were about half way up, when my tail-gunner partner, Kai cried out as two AK slugs thumped into his side. Kai was alive when I reached him, but blood was spurting out of his side faster than I thought possible. I yelled out and Lum, the closest man to me, hollered something in his own language. In seconds, Lum and Kip the interpreter were carrying Kai's weapon and rucksack, while I was dog-trotting with his limp body over my right shoulder.
Up ahead, Fred had his own problems, as a round had caught Bing through his left knee. He was alive and conscious, but he couldn't walk. Bo and Thue were supporting Bing between them, hustling up the hill. The firing started dying out when we disappeared into some thicker jungle, but we could hear noncoms and officers yelling to organize a pursuit.
My lungs were on fire and my legs felt like lead by the time we reached the top of the hill. The adrenal rush that had been propelling me was fading, and I was starting to tire when we crested the ridge line and called a halt. I gently laid Kai down on the ground and Lum dropped the dead man's rucksack. I didn't feel any better that everyone else was gasping for breath also.
Fred and Bo walked over to where I was sitting and Bo knelt down to examine Kai. Once he confirmed Kai was dead, he called Kip over and the two of them redistributed Kai's ammo among the remaining combat effective Montagnards. While they were busy, Fred flopped down next to me, took a pull from his canteen and handed it to me.
"Bringing Kai's body out is the right thing to do, Jody, but you are going to have to slow those guys down by yourself so the rest of us can get to the LZ. Delay them any way you can, but don't be a hero. Fight smart, fall back when you have to, and don't let them encircle you."
I nodded and stood up. I took off my rucksack, but I pulled a claymore out of it and stuffed a half dozen magazines into my shirt before I headed back to the top of the hill. As I left, Fred was calling in a contact and status report to Covey. Fred did not declare a Prairie Fire, because we were still moving and trying to dictate the action.
The NVA force had regrouped and I could hear them carefully moving up the hill in front of me. I dashed forward for about thirty yards and emplaced the claymore in the middle of a patch of two foot tall ferns to camouflage it, and sighted it directly down the hill. I played out the firing wire behind me, covering the wire the best I could with dirt and leaves. I high-crawled twenty meters, and put a big-assed tree between me, the claymore and the NVA. I also pulled out a couple of grenades, flipped the safety clip off the spoon, straightened the bent wire on the safety pin, and laid them beside me. Then hugging the ground at the base of the tree, I stuck my head out just far enough to watch down slope.
About five minutes later, I spotted the NVA point man moving cautiously up the hill. He was about twenty meters to the left of my claymore, so I let him go and tracked him with my peripheral vision. I wasn't going to waste the claymore for one man. The point squad was maybe twenty-five meters behind the point man. They were in a staggered column of twos, with about five meters between men. I detonated the claymore when most of the squad was in the fifty meter kill zone, then chucked a grenade at the point man. As soon as I saw him go down, I heaved the second grenade down the hill, then jumped up and sprinted over the top of the hill.
I stopped twice more to fire up the NVA platoons, but they were wary now and spread way the hell out again. They made themselves less of a target that way, but they slowed down to almost a crawl. I managed to milk the trip back to the LZ for almost forty-five minutes.
Fred was happy to see me when I sprinted the last fifty meters to the LZ, and slapped me on the back as I sat there huffing and puffing.
"Good job, Opie! Covey says the Cobras are fifteen minutes out and the slicks and A-1's thirty out."
That was the best news I'd heard since my R&R. I found some cover and took my place in the perimeter, six fresh magazines of death and destruction stacked by my right hand. Fred had already set out a pair of claymores.
The LZ was a ragged, sloping jungle clearing about thirty meters in diameter, about a third of the way up a hill. It was encircled by a twenty meter band of fifteen to twenty-five foot tall young trees. Three and four foot tall elephant grass covered the cleared area of the LZ. The jungle was sparse single canopy down to the bottom of the hill, but thick and verdant upslope. The ground around the center of the clearing undulated unnaturally in a couple of places. When Fred brought me back my rucksack, I asked him about the strange LZ to keep my mind off the angry fifty to eighty NVA soldiers we could hear coming down the other hillside.
"This clearing doesn't seem natural, Fred. Who do you think made it?"
Fred shrugged and replied, "If I had to guess, I'd say it was a crash site from the French-Indo-China war. I think the plane slatted down right here and set the jungle on fire. The wind probably blew the fire mostly down hill."
Before I could respond, the radio broke squelch and Country Caraway's voice filled the speaker.
"November-One this is Covey; we see some movement to your south. It looks like a couple of squads moving west, trying to flank you. The Cobras are five minutes out, so hang tough down there."
I was on the upslope portion of our small perimeter and was peering intently into the jungle, when a RPG round swooshed over my head and exploded about fifteen meters to my right. Right after the RPG warhead exploded, a couple of AKs opened up to our left. I ignored what was happening over there and kept my eyes moving as I scanned the area up the hill. Sure enough, I caught a few darting movements back in the edge of the thicker jungle. I had a hunch that the NVA were massing on the high ground above us, and that the shooting from the left was just to occupy us until they were positioned to attack.
Thankfully, the cavalry in the form of a pair of fully armed Cobras galloped up just then, and I had Covey vector one of them at the massing troops. By the time the Hueys arrived, the LZ was as quiet as when we landed.
I made a trip to the dispensary as soon as we returned to FOB, and had Doc Mitchell remove a couple of RPG fragments that were just under the skin of my right thigh. As soon as he was done, I showered and headed to the club.
I attended my first informal after actions meeting at the club that night, as we veterans discussed the new tactics the NVA were employing. The aggressive anti-recon units were making already tough missions virtually impossible. We were making them pay a steep price for their efforts, but the NVA didn't seem to mind sacrificing fifty to a hundred men just to get one of us. And the sacrifice was paying off for them right now, as we had lost two teams on the ground, and had four other American KIAs in the last month. We were down to eight effective teams, and it took six weeks to get a new team up and running.
A big part of the problem was that we ran the same targets time after time, because the trail was fixed in place and it was our only area of interest. At each target, there were only so many suitable LZs, so Charlie could pretty much watch them all and know the minute we hit the ground. To counter that, we were doing more mock insertions; fake landings on one LZ while the team sneaks into another. We also inserted behind air strikes and B-52 missions while the NVA had their heads down.
We took Kai's body to his village the day after we returned. It was only my second visit to the cluster of long houses on stilts that made up the village. It was a sad and somber affair as Kip translated Fred's account of what happen to Kai, and extolled his bravery.
Fred recruited us a new American as soon as we returned to duty from stand-down. Fred snagged the guy out of the commo bunker and he was as an unlikely choice for recon as you could find. The new guy wasn't even Special Forces qualified; instead, he was a speedy-four radio-teletype operator on loan from the group signal company. His name was Jim Whitcomb, but he looked so much like Fred, he could have been his son, so I nicknamed him 'Junebug'. Junebug was what folks in my neck of the woods called boys named after their father.
The resemblance between Fred and Junebug was uncanny, and the more time that Junebug spent with us, the more he sounded and acted like Fred. I knew that Jimmy Whitcomb was going to be a good one right off the bat. He was gung-ho and soaked up what we taught him like a sponge. I had no qualms about handing over the radio to him.
While we were training Jimmy, we also tried out a new zero-four to replace Kai. Fred had hired him from the Yard village. The guy had been on the Mike Force running in-country recon, so he had experience. He fit in with us and passed muster with Bo, so we kept him. Bing would be laid up for a while, but his leg wounds weren't severe enough to keep him from returning, so we didn't hire a replacement for him. Instead, we moved Lum to point and operated with five Yards instead of six. With Jimmy on the team now, that was no hardship.
We drew a mission as soon as Fred changed our status to mission ready. Our target was Hotel-Seven, another close to the border AO. Fred made it a ten day mission by having us walk in from the A Camp at Dak Pek. Whatever intel SOG had received that made them curious about Hotel-Seven proved to be right on, because the place was crawling with activity. We found so much we were having to radio in three sitreps a day. After four days, we were suddenly pulled back across the border and told to stand by. The next morning, a dozen B-52s carpet-bombed the area back to the Stone Age.
The contrails from the big bombers were still fading when Covey sent us back in to do a BDA.
The bombs being dropped since Rick's failed mission were delay fused, so the big thousand pounders exploded after they'd burrowed into the ground. The delayed fuse bombs were much more effective on dug in targets, but made navigating around the craters a chore. We snuck around for a day, and found nothing and saw no one, it was eerie how quiet it was, compared to the activity of three days ago.
We headed back to Dak Pek on day seven. All I could think about by then was a hot shower and a cold beer. We were about five klicks from Dak Pek when we spied a VC patrol moving not very quietly through the jungle. Rather than firing them up, Fred decided that we should be the stalkers for once. He put Bo, an excellent tracker, with Lum the point man, and off we went.
The patrol led us right to their bivouac site, a little bunker complex with a couple of bamboo and palm frond sleeping hooches. Since we were within the effective range of the 81MM mortars at the Dak Pek A Camp, Fred called a fire mission and taught Junebug how to adjust indirect fire. Junebug gleefully walked the mortar rounds right into the bivouac, as a very surprised bunch of Charlies hid in the bunkers. We probably could have overrun the bivouac, but Fred reasoned that the guys at Dak Pek could clean up their own trash.
FOB-2 was back up to twelve operational teams by the first of October, and the pace of operations picked up. We were getting three and four day missions now, because with all the bad guys after us over there, that's about the max a team could survive. The Fob was launching three teams a week, so we naturally fell into a four week cycle. We had a week of mission prep, the week of the mission, a week of stand down and a week of Bright Light or some other duty.
Our next mission came the second week of October, and just for grins, Fred told me I was the one-zero for it. The mission was a straight area recon in target Kilo-Two, a target on the northern edge of FOB-2's area of operations. Surprisingly, I wasn't nervous about leading the team, because I knew Fred would be there to keep me from committing some huge fuck-up. And I guess luck was with us, because I got us in and out in one piece. We even managed to take some nice low-light photographs of a couple of Chicom tracked command vehicles tucked under some elaborate camouflage. We did make contact with a small patrol on the third day, but we called in a ton of air and used the cover of a napalm inferno to escape.
When we returned from our stand down, it was the second week of November, and I was a 'two digit midget', a soldier with fewer than a hundred days left in country. I ran my tenth and, although I didn't know it at the time, final mission across the fence on the week of Thanksgiving. It was a nasty going away present, because we drew trackers the second day, and had to E&E for thirty-six hours straight before we could get pulled out on strings.
When we arrived back at the FOB, my reassignment orders were waiting, and were they ever good news! I was granted a thirty day 'drop', so my new DEROS was 5 Jan 1969.
Fred Armitage did not get a drop. As a matter of fact, he extended for another six months, because the paperwork for his wife Kim to immigrate to the United States was still being processed. Fred was happy for me though, and so was Junebug.
Fred elevated Junebug to one-one and stuck me with the radio again, but all we did the first three weeks of December was pull one week of Bright Light duty. The Monday after we returned from Dak To, the sergeant major called me in to his office for a chat.
"You've done a good job for us here, Sergeant Jamison," he said, "and the commander and I appreciate it, so we managed to pull a few strings for you to get you home for Christmas. Here are your clearance papers; you are due in Nha Trang in two days."
I was speechless as he shoved the paperwork into my hand.
I was excited as hell about being home for Christmas, but sad about leaving behind some of the best friends I'd ever made. Out-processing took all of thirty minutes as I cleared the supply room, dispensary and orderly room. On my last day at FOB-2, I squared away my field gear for my eventual replacement and packed my duffle bag. I had very little that I'd accumulated, so I would be traveling light.
That night, my buds threw me one forevermore raucous going away party that lasted until two in the morning. Everyone on the compound was there and the booze was flowing like the Mekong River. The next morning at 0700, they poured my still drunken ass on a C-130 and threw my duffle bag in behind me. I fell asleep on the whistle stop flight as it stopped at two outlying A Camps and the Air Base at Da Nang, finally waking up when the crew chief shook me and told me end of the line.
I stumbled off the plane with a splitting headache and a mouth that tasted like the bottom of a birdcage. I caught a ride over to 5th Group headquarters and signed into the transit billets. Forty-five minutes later, I was showered, shaved and in a clean uniform, standing in front of Command Sergeant Major Mattox. Mattox waved me to a chair while he finished a telephone conversation that involved a lot of ass-chewing. When the conversation ended, Mattox looked at his watch, then hopped out of his chair.
"Come on, Jamison, I want a beer, and you look like you need some hair of the dog that bit you."
We walked over to the NCO club and Mattox led me to a table in a quiet corner. He ordered a Bud, but seltzer water was all my stomach would agree too. The sergeant major laughed when I blanched at the offer of a drink. Then he turned serious and leaned across the table.
"Listen, Opie, I haven't heard anything but good about you from our folks in the projects. You made my decision to send you up there look like a stroke of genius. So when Sergeant Major Bliss asked if I could do something for you, I said yes in a heartbeat. And it just so happens that helping you out is probably going to make me look good again. Here is what you'll be doing..."
I took a breath, looked at my odd traveling companion, and then pointed at the pallets locked into the C-141 rail system. Each pallet had two, flag draped aluminum coffins lashed to it.
"So here I am, Mike, escorting fallen soldiers home. It is sobering to realize that if not for the Grace of God, I could as easily have been in one of those things."
Mike gave me a gentle smile and put his hand on my shoulder.
"I'll tell you right now, Jody, it was absolutely the Grace of God, but it was grace you earned by how you have lived your life. And it's grace Megan earned too."
I wanted to ask him how he could be so sure of something like that, but the crew chief interrupted us.
"We are about to drop the ramp, Sergeant, so you need to get ready."
I nodded and thanked him, surprised that I had been so engrossed in my conversation with Mike that I hadn't felt us stop moving. I made my excuses to Mike, shrugged into my Summer Green coat, put on my beret, and pulled on the white dress gloves I'd been issued at the same time I'd received these spiffy tailored Summer Greens.
When the ramp was completely lowered, I walked down it and stopped three paces in front of the Marine Captain in charge of the pall bearer detail. I snapped him a salute and reported.
"Sir, I place in your custody the mortal remains of twenty-four fallen comrades, their final mission completed."
He returned my salute and replied, "Thank you Sergeant, you are dismissed."
I stepped to the left in marching, and moved over to the graves registration NCO waiting off to the side. I handed him the manifest for the twenty-four casualties and shook his out stretched hand.
"Welcome home," he said with a smile, "now go see your family, they are waiting in the hanger for you."
I found this story in a footlocker my husband, Jody Lee Jemison, had stored in our attic. Sadly, my precious Jody was killed in 1988. He died in a convenience store parking lot while preventing a couple of gang members from carjacking a woman with a small infant. Jody lost his life the same way he lived it, he did what was right and didn't worry much about the personal consequences.
Many a soldier lost a good friend when Jody was taken from us. The Special Forces Chapel was overflowing with them at his funeral. Of course, there were others whose lives Jody touched at the funeral as well. One of them was Su-Lin Carlson, the chief surgical nurse at a teaching hospital in Richmond, Virginia. Jody worked for three years to get Su-Lin and her sisters out of Vietnam.
And our children, Shelby Jane and Jason, lost an irreplaceable role model. Shelby is a senior at the Duke University now, majoring in marine biology. Jason is a second year plebe at West Point. Jason received his appointment to the US Army Military Academy from Senator Richard Pierpont of Delaware.
Steve and Roxie Pleturski and their four kids flew down from Chicago to help me through Jody's funeral. Roxie is still my best friend, even though we only see each other a couple of times a year. Steve went back to college, completed his degree, and went on to law school. Roxie is a stay at home mom and civic volunteer. She is on the board of half the charities in Chicago.
Jerry 'Squirrel' Smeltzer was devastated by Jody's death. Jody was like a son to Jerry, and Jerry's emotional health had always been precarious. Jerry disappeared after the funeral and next thing we knew, he was arrested for blowing up a bar frequented by members of the gang to which Jody's killers belonged. Jerry refused any defense based on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, so he is serving five to ten years in a federal prison in Kentucky.
Fred Armitage also took Jody's death hard; he couldn't get over the fact that Jody survived a year in recon, only to die at the hands of a street punk. Fred and his wife Kim owned a couple of pawn shops, and used car lots right outside the front gate of Fort Bragg. They are the proud parents of three over achieving geniuses, all aiming towards medical school.
Except for cleaning up some spelling mistakes and explaining a few military terms, Jody's tale is exactly as he wrote it. I must say that I considered editing out the parts about me and our personal life, but in the end, I left it as it was. After all, If Jody thought it was important enough to put on paper, who am I to change his words?
Most of what he wrote about Vietnam was news to me, because Jody never talked about anything having to do with what he actually did over there. I do know that in typical Jody fashion, he understated his own accomplishments in his accounts. Jody was a highly decorated soldier when he returned, having been awarded the Silver Star and three other medals for valor, to go along with three purple hearts.
Oh yes, and I guess this story would not be complete without mentioning 'Mike', the person Jody supposedly told this story to. I say 'supposedly', because Jody never could decide whether the man really existed, or if he was a hallucination. Either way though, Jody swears he finally figured out the man was Saint Michael, the patron saint of paratroopers. Jody firmly believed that Saint Michael was there to make sure he wasn't one of the men in the coffins ... and the only reason Mike had for doing that was the strength of the love Jody and I shared.
Call me crazy, but looking back on it, I now believe that too...
Megan Jamison
Valdosta, Georgia
June, 1991