RT Montana stood down for a week after our successful mission on target Hotel-Seven. The stand-down was SOP for every team after every mission. The seven days allowed you to unwind from the stress that came with running reconnaissance behind enemy lines. Fred released our Montagnards on a five day pass back to their village, and us three Americans headed down to Nha Trang to sample the good life.
Nha Trang was a bustling city right on the South China Sea. It had a busy port that was one of the primary entry points for US military supplies and equipment. Nha Trang also had some pristine white sand beaches just north of the port complex.
We stayed at a small hotel near one of the beaches, instead of at the Special Forces compound. We did that because Fred and Rick didn't want to have anything to do with the Army while we were away from camp. I protested that I didn't have the money for living large and splurging on a hotel room. Fred laughed and Rick slapped me on the back.
"No worries, Opie, it's my treat," Rick said. Then his expression turned serious.
"Listen, Jody, I respect how you are about your family, but money is never, ever a problem for me. If you need something, it won't be a problem for you either ... understand?"
I didn't, but I nodded my head yes anyway. After all, even though he was an officer and single, he still didn't make enough money to burn it. Later that night, Fred told me what Rick really meant.
We had a very good meal in a French restaurant, then headed over to a local joint that featured a loud jukebox and scantily-clad Go-Go dancers. Rick went up to fetch us a few bottles of a not too bad Vietnamese beer called Ba Muoi Ba (33). I was reaching for my wallet to throw in for the beer, when Fred leaned over and held my arm.
"Let Rick buy the booze and anything else he feels like. The Pierponts are rolling in the dough, and from what I gather, Rick is the favorite son and heir apparent. I think Rick is in Nam to show his family he has a set of balls. They'd probably shit if they knew what he was really doing over here."
True to Fred's word, Rick insisted on paying for everything, including 'Saigon Teas' for three of the dancers who joined us at Fred's instigation. Soon enough, we only needed four chairs at our table, because Fred and Rick each had one of the skimpily clad cuties sitting in their laps. When I told the girl who sat next to me that I wasn't playing around, she seemed offended.
"You Cheap Charlie then," she huffed as she rose from her chair.
Rick caught her arm as she walked by him and whispered something in her ear. The girl's angry face broke into a sunny smile; she nodded her head and plopped back down in her seat.
"You lucky GI, Cheap Charlie. Your friend pay me to suck you-fuck you all night long."
I returned her infectious smile and shook my head.
"No can do," I said.
Then I switched to Vietnamese and told her why.
Her bar name was Suzie; Su-Lin was her real name. I called her by the latter, just to reinforce that, regardless what Rick paid for, there would be no hanky-panky. Su-Lin liked me calling her by her real name, and she liked me speaking to her in her own language. Those little things helped her forget for a while that she was a bar girl instead of the nursing student she wanted to be.
I was incredulous when she told me she was only sixteen. Until six months ago, she had been that nursing student at a local teaching hospital. Then her father, an honest and effective regional police captain, had been kidnapped and summarily executed by the Viet Cong. Now she was the sole supporter of her mother and younger siblings.
Su-Lin and I became friends, once she figured out that I wasn't trying to work her for a freebee. For the next three days, she was my tour guide to the real Vietnam. I met her family, and as had Su-Lin, we became friends when they figured out friendship was all I was seeking.
We returned to FOB Two on the fifth day. Our little road trip served its purpose of expunging some of the stress out of us. We burned out more of it with a trip to the PX in Pleiku. We went to the PX as a team, three Americans escorted by six small, fierce, heavily armed highland tribesmen. Needless to say, everyone, Vietnamese and American alike, gave us a wide berth.
I bought a resupply of legal pads and large envelopes at the PX. I wrote Megan at least two letters a week. In return, she wrote me at least as often. Her letters were precious to me. She often sent me pictures of herself and our daughter Shelby. Roxie was her unofficial photographer, so some of the pictures were quite revealing. I had a collage of the pictures she'd sent me scotch-taped to the door of my wall locker, along with the sentimental Valentine's Day card she sent me. The irony of those innocent pictures on the door of where I stored my weapons of war was not lost on me.
On our first morning back to duty, Fred ambled over to the Tactical Operations Center and picked up our next mission. He returned fifteen minutes later with the mission packet.
"We are running with the big dogs now, girls," he said. "Our target is Kilo-Nine, right on the main part of the trail."
Fred took the map out of the packet and spread it on our card table. He pointed to an area out lined in red. The target area was eight grid squares long and six wide. There was an identical rectangle drawn to the North of our target.
"The Intel weenies think the NVA 802d Transportation Regiment displaced down to this general area from up north. RT Alabama is inserting into the northern area the day after we hit the ground. There mission is the same as ours, search for the 802d and try to snatch a prisoner."
RT Alabama was one of the elite three or four teams that drew the toughest missions. The one-zero of RT Alabama was Joe Webber. Crazy Joe Webber was a real gunslinger, and his exploits both in and out of the field were legendary. Where most one-zeros lived the recon mantra of 'break contact, continue mission', Crazy Joe would just as often stand and fight it out.
We studied the mission folder all morning, mostly bouncing around ideas on how to snatch an enemy soldier and how to avoid the counter-recon units known to be deployed with major regimental headquarters. The counter-recon units were a real threat, because they knew how we operated and had taken out a number of good teams using that knowledge. The counter-recon units used tracker dogs, surveilled likely landing zones and patrolled their area of responsibility aggressively.
Taking all that into account, Fred and Rick started listing equipment and munitions we'd need that I studiously wrote down in the pocket sized note book Fred insisted we all carry. From item one, it was an eye-opening list. Number one was a couple of packets of cyanide and number two was six ounces of riot control agent OC (pepper spray) in powder form, along with three each one-quarter pound blocks of TNT.
The cyanide would be sprinkled over some meat that Rick would carry in a sandwich baggie. If we were being tracked by dogs, he'd toss some of the meat on our back trail. The OC powder went into empty insect repellent bottles. Two of the bottles would be taped to each quarter pound block of TNT. A thirty second time pencil would fuse the explosives. If the meat didn't get rid of the dogs, Rick would activate one of the TNT bombs and drop it on the trail. When the TNT exploded, it would spread powdered OC over a large area. One good sniff of the OC would put a dog out of commission for days.
Fred's concoctions might not win him many friends down at the ASPCA, but the alternative was letting the dogs lead the NVA right to us.
Fred also wanted us to carry a second claymore, our protective masks (gas masks) and ten additional magazines of 5.56 ammo. I groaned when I realized that my rucksack and LBE (load bearing equipment) would now weigh about ninety pounds.
We trained for a week before the mission. We rehearsed our IAD's again, but mostly we concentrated on setting up a deliberate ambush and capturing a prisoner. I wore my ruck packed with the extra weight during the training. It was a back-breaking load at first, but by the end of the week, I was use to it.
Our plan was to spend four days looking for the 802d. If we didn't locate the regimental headquarters, we would find an extraction LZ near the trail. We would then set up a deliberate ambush within a klick of an srvicable LZ and wait for a small group of NVA to walk into our ambush. We would shoot the hell out of all the NVA except for the last man in the formation. Rick was responsible for wounding the last man. Once the man was down, Bing and Kai would grab the guy and all of us would haul ass to the extraction LZ. Rick was in charge of the snatch, because he had a match-grade, accurized M1911.45 pistol and he was a dead shot with it.
We rehearsed using a squad from the Hatchet force as aggressors. When we could carry out the ambush and snatch in under two minutes, Fred informed the TOC that we were ready to launch. Walker also announced that RT Alabama was ready, so the TOC green lighted our insertion for three days later, St Patrick's Day, March 17, 1968.
We spent the night of the sixteenth at Dak To and inserted across the fence into Laos early the next morning. The LZ Fred had selected was about seven miles from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and outside our target area. Fred was a master of finding remote landing zones just big enough for a helicopter. Fred said a long walk was better than landing in the middle of trouble. Fred was talking about the surveillance the NFA used on likely LZs.
We hustled off the LZ, moved about fifty meters into the jungle and set up a perimeter. Fred waited ten minutes and when all was still quiet, he gestured for me to hand him the radio handset.
"Team OK," Fred whispered into the handset, "but keep the gunships in the area for another fifteen, just in case."
Fred handed me back the handset and shot the compass azimuth he had plotted for the first leg of our movement. Bing led us off at a brisk pace. Our first priority was to put some distance between us and the LZ, in case the helicopter activity attracted the bad guys' attention. We moved a thousand meters in an hour, with Rick and two of the yards erasing our back trail. In those thousand meters, we waded up two streams to make it tougher for tracker dogs to follow us. After a thousand meters, we looped back a hundred yards and set up a hasty ambush on our back trail. We hunkered down for an hour before Fred was convinced we had inserted undetected.
For the rest of the day, we zigged and zagged through the jungle in a broken indirect route towards our objective. Fred had us crawl in to a thick stand of bamboo at night fall. We were all bone tired, but we were within a mile of the trail, and as far as we knew, the NVA did not have a clue that we were in their midst.
Recon teams picked the worst possible places for their RONs (remain over night) because comfort took a back seat to security. We put out claymores, then Fred encrypted a situation report and I called it into Leghorn. Leghorn was a mountain top radio relay site in Cambodia, accessible only by helicopter.
When we were across the border, we only had two means of communications. During the day we had radio with Covey, the Forward Air Controller in a small airplane that flew constantly back and forth between the teams on the ground. Riding with the FAC was a recon guy called a Covey Rider. It was comforting for us to know that someone who understood what it was like on the ground was with the Air Force FAC. At night, we had Leghorn. Leghorn did not have access to air assets to come to our aid like Covey, so a good hidey-hole at night was imperative.
We moved out at the butt-crack of dawn the next morning. Our movement was slower and more cautious as we snuck up to the major north-south roadway.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was not one single road. Instead, it was a complex network of roads, high speed trails and foot paths. The major axis of the system was north-south, with numerous branches running east into Vietnam, and a few roads and trails that led into the interior of Laos. The North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao allies exerted complete control over western Laos. There were probably thirty thousand NVA permanently stationed along the trail. The only challenges to their control were the few dozen SOG recon teams, only five or six of which were on the ground at any one time.
At a few minutes after eight, we stopped and listened intently to the radio as RT Alabama was inserted. We breathed a sigh of relief when we heard 'team OK' and continued our mission.
We reached a well-conceal one-lane truck road near noon. The road snaked its way beneath the triple canopy jungle, completely invisible from above. This was my first glimpse of a part of the trail capable of truck traffic, and I was less than impressed. To me, it looked like any of the dozens of old logging roads I'd seen when I worked as a linesman for Georgia Power. It was hard to believe that this was the main avenue for resupplying half a million soldiers.
We skirted the edge of the trail using the slow silent movement technique that was becoming natural to me. Although my steps seemed slow as molasses, I was constantly looking around me, I was learning to be 'situationally aware'; automatically scanning for answers to questions like: Where was the closest cover? Which direction would I run if we had to beat feet? Where did the jungle offer some cover and concealment as I moved?
We slinked along for maybe seven hundred meters before Bing, the point man, signaled for us to stop. We dropped to one knee, alternately facing left and right, as Rick and Kai watched our back trail. Bing motioned Fred forward and the two of them crept silently towards the edge of the trail. We stayed frozen in place and alert to every sound for the forty minutes Fred and Bing were gone.
When Fred returned, he walked back to Rick's position. He tapped me on the shoulder as he passed and motioned for me to follow him. When we reached Rick, we huddled our heads together.
"There is a commie work detail up around the corner a few hundred meters from here. We are going to watch them to see what they are up to," Fred whispered.
There were ten khaki-clad soldiers and eighteen laborers in the familiar black pajamas and conical straw hats. The laborers were manning shovels and pick mattocks, while the soldiers hacked down vegetation with axes and machetes. They were busy hacking a turnout off the side of the road. The area they were working in was under deep canopy where no sunlight ever reached. A turnout was a spot where trucks going one way could pull over to allow a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction to pass. The turn outs kept traffic flowing in both directions on the single lane road.
We observed the workers for a few minutes and Fred snapped some photographs, then we pulled back into the jungle for a powwow.
Running into the work party this early in the mission had been an incredible stroke of luck, as they might lead us straight to the regimental headquarters. On the other hand, the work detail might be part of a small unit that was stationed along the trail to maintain it. After some discussion, Fred decided that it wouldn't be a waste of a day to follow the work detail back to where they came from.
We spread out about two hundred meters above them and settled in for the afternoon. When they moved out somewhere around five, we were right behind them, shadowing them from up on the hillside. We had to move faster than our normal deliberate pace to keep them in sight, but thankfully, the work detail was tired enough not to be in any big hurry.
The NVA soldiers turned off the road onto a path on the side opposite us. Fred spread us out again, then he and Bing crawled down to the edge of the road for a closer look at where the work detail had turned. The two were gone for a much shorter period this time.
Fred moved us further up the hillside away from the road then put us in a tight perimeter. Fred took Rick and me aside and told us how he planned on crossing the road so we could reconnoiter the area the work detail disappeared into. We had a drill for crossing a danger area, but Fred did not want to cross the road any where close to where the soldiers entered the jungle. The NVA were sure to have security out, even if it was minimal here in what they considered their back yard.
We back tracked five hundred meters and found a place to hole up for a few hours. At ten o'clock in the coal black night, we moved down to the edge of the road. Using our IAD for crossing a danger area, Fred sent two men rushing across the road. The two men split up and checked the other side for a hundred meters up and down the road and two hundred meters into the jungle. When they were satisfied no one was over there, they came back and gave Fred the all clear signal. Fred then gave the go sign and we all jumped to our feet and rushed across the road. From jungle to jungle, we were probably exposed for fewer than ten seconds.
We moved due east across the small flat valley the road meandered through. We weren't more than a couple of hundred meters off the road when we heard the distinctive sound of diesel engines firing up. At least three trucks rumbled onto the road and drove past us headed south. We moved up the ridgeline on the east side of the valley and found us a tangle of vegetation to crawl into for our RON.
Fred and I encrypted a Sitrep that included the trucks, and I radioed it to Leghorn before dropping into an exhausted sleep.
We were up and moving the next morning as soon as Covey was on station. We were at our sneaky best as we homed in on the area where the trucks had started. Fred figured it was probably a truck park instead of the regimental based camp, but it would make a nice target for the Air Force anyway. The truck parks along the trail were heavily camouflaged jungle clearings where the trucks hid during the day. The trucks moved almost exclusively under the cover of darkness.
About an hour and a half later, our string of luck ran out, when we walked right up on an expertly conceal NVA two man outpost. The NVA were as startled as we were when we appeared as if by magic right in front of them. Before they could react, Bing hosed them down.
Bing's burst of 5.56 MM alerted the next OP located about seventy-five meters behind the first, and the guards in it lit the jungle up with AK rounds. Fred initiated our break contact IAD, and we peeled off, heading back the way we'd come. Bullets whizzed over head like angry hornets as I knelt down and emptied my magazine, firing full auto. When my bolt locked to the rear, I rapidly reloaded then stood up and followed Fred's retreating form. By the time the volume of fire from what ever we'd run into increased enough to be effective, we were long gone.
We ran along our back trail for about a hundred meters then Fred had us veer left so we could put distance between us, whatever we'd run into, and the road. After another labored hundred meters, we slowed to a quick but cautious pace. As soon as we weren't running, Fred pointed at me then pointed up in the air. I nodded, unclipped the handset off my web gear and keyed the mic.
"Covey, Kilo-Nine is evading after contact," I said as calmly as I could.
"Roger, Kilo-Nine, we are headed your way," the Covey Rider replied.
We hustled the three hundred meters across the narrow valley then climbed straight up the hillside for a hundred more before Fred called a halt. We took up a defensive position facing downhill and listened for any pursuit. It was thankfully quiet down in the valley. Fred waved me and Rick over to him and briefed us on what he suspected.
"No one chasing us makes me think that we walked up on the perimeter of a truck park with no combat troops. That will change as soon as they contact their headquarters. We need to be well away from here before they can get a search organized. We'll move north and have Covey call in an airstrike on that truck park. Maybe we'll get lucky and hit something."
Fred sent Rick and a few of the Yards up hill to leave a false trail, then we turned north and paralleled the road, moving our stealthiest. Fred called the coordinates of the truck park to Covey as we snuck along. Thirty minutes later, a pair of F-100s screamed down the valley and unloaded a crap load of napalm and cluster bombs behind us.
Fred kept us moving for another seven hours without a break. By the time we crawled into our RON, my legs felt as if they were made of rubber and my rucksack weighed a ton. We had covered about two and a half klicks during the move. We constantly changed direction and looped back twice, so we were actually only a kilometer or less from where we'd made contact. We were at the north end of the valley and the valley floor narrowed considerably.
It was an active night for truck traffic on the road somewhere below us. We counted at least a dozen headed south and half that many going north.
The next morning, we moved down hill to find the trail again. We didn't have to go far to find it, because it was at the base of the ridge we were on, not three hundred meters below us. It was no wonder the trucks had sounded so close.
We moved out of the valley over a ridgeline into a second valley that was wider than the one we left. From our map study, Fred thought this area was our best bet for finding the 802d in this AO. We crossed the road again that night and spent the next two days dodging enemy patrols. There was a lot of NVA activity in the valley, but besides a few long houses and another truck part, we didn't find much.
RT Alabama was having about the same luck we were, as far as finding anything. However, they had been in heavy contact twice, and had to evade for a full day and night to shake trackers.
On day five, Covey told us to find a place to hide because Crazy Joe was about to attempt a POW snatch, and had already called for an extraction. He was cutting his mission short, because he had a wounded American and the team was running low on munitions.
It would have been foolish for us to risk getting into trouble when everyone was concentrating on pulling Alabama out, so we found us a hidey-hole up on the ridge and waited. All three of us Americans huddled around the radio. We could hear Covey's side of any air to ground traffic, so we had a good idea of what was happening as RT Alabama's exfil turned into a gigantic mess.
Webber and his team ambushed a small patrol and actually had a prisoner in hand when they made a dash for their extraction LZ. The trouble was that a full company of NVA regulars was ten minutes behind the patrol Webber ambushed, and before you could say spit, the company was hot on RT Alabama's heels. Webber made it to the LZ and set up a hasty defense with the helicopter inbound, twenty minutes away.
The first Kingbee flared into the LZ as two gunships chewed up the jungle around the beleaguered team. The CH-34 was about twenty feet above the LZ when an RPG round blew it out of the air. It took two hours of nonstop airstrikes and gunship runs before the team could finally be extracted.
We found out later that Alabama's prisoner was killed during one of the NVA attacks. The team's One-one was also KIA, as were two of their Montagnards and all three VNAF crewmen of the shot down Kingbee.
When we called in our Sitrep that night, we received orders to stay on the ground two more days, and to continue reconnoitering to the north, on into what had been Alabama's target area. The brainiacs back in the puzzle palace decided that Alabama must have been close to something to garner all that attention.
Fred moved us back across the road to the west side at 0400 the next morning, because the terrain was better for us to maneuver. We cautiously moved through the jungle, knowing that with Alabama out of the field, the dinks would now concentrate on us.
Sure enough, we made contact with a squad-sized NVA patrol later that morning. We fired them up and sent them running back down the mountain. That contact was the first time I took an aimed shot at an enemy soldier. I didn't hesitate or even think about it as I fixed my sights on him and sent him to meet his maker.
We were in contact again that afternoon, as the increasingly heavy enemy activity forced us to loop further west. For the next twenty-four hours, we dodged patrols and twice shook off trackers. Fred was masterful in the way he anticipated and stayed ahead of our pursuers. By early morning on the seventh day, Fred had had enough, so we set up a mechanical ambush with the extra claymores we'd brought with us. Half of an NVA platoon obligingly walked into the kill zone less than an hour later.
We ambushed the patrol to bring all the searchers into this area, so we could change direction and get behind them. As soon as we blew the claymores, we put out booby-traps, using Rick's TNT and pepper powder concoctions attached to trip wires, and snuck away heading south. We hustle southwest for a couple of klicks, found a suitable LZ and called for an extraction.
I realized as I sat in the door of the helicopter headed back to Dak To, that I was one lucky son of a bitch to be on Fred's team. Even though we were being chased by probably a battalion of hardcore NVA regulars, Fred had calmly out-foxed them repeatedly. We'd taken out at least thirty of them without a scratch among us, and Fred called in an airstrike that left them with a lap full of napalm as a parting gift.
We hadn't found the 802d, but we had narrowed the search area down to about five grid squares for the next team they sent.
I think that I finally proved that I belonged on the team while we were out there in Kilo-Nine. Yeah, I was scared out of my gourd most of the time, but I kept my composure and did my job.