When the rest of the replacements had arrived the Cav placed us with the platoon
we would be working with. One thing I did notice that appeared strange to me
initially was the fact in a company of 100 men (usually less) everyone didn't
know everyone else. It just seemed odd because in a small town of that size
everyone would know everyone else and everyone would know everyone else's
business. That just wasn't the case in an infantry company. You knew who people
were in most instances but you never really knew men outside your own platoon.
Platoons were tight knit units their size averaging between 15 to 25 men most of
the time. You became very close to your squad within that platoon because you
lived with them just as a person lives with their spouse. The usual bickering
and arguing was there but it was held down to a bare minimum.
I guess the reason the tightness within a squad and platoon vs. the tightness of
the company was due to the fact that we didn't really want to be that close to
each man because you just never knew who was going to die or be savagely wounded
from one minute to the next.
So we trained in platoon and squad size. We stayed within a "secure" area (if
there was such a thing) to "learn the ropes" as it were. Having been assigned
initially as a grenadier (M-79) I walked second in the column. We seldom used
any other formation when moving through the jungle. During this training my
squad leader told me to fire at an imaginary target about 250 meters away.
Following my training I reached out to adjust my sight to 250 meters.
Immediately my squad leader snatched the weapon from my hand, dropped the sight
back onto the barrel of the weapon, put it on an angle that he thought the
trajectory would carry the grenade to the target and fired. He just laughed and
told me that all I had to be was close with that weapon and handed it back to
me. I fired and got to within about 20 meters of his round. He just patted me on
the back and said, "close enough, Kentucky windage and a decent judge of
distance is all I needed".
They worked a lot with the
riflemen because if you carried an M-16 you were going to walk point sooner or
later. They taught them how to walk as though they had 4 eyes. Keep their eye
movement forward, down, up, and to both sides all practically at the same time.
The biggest thing a point man had to worry about was booby traps. If there was
an ambush set up the NVA would wait until they had the main body in the kill
zone before springing the ambush. They had to be especially careful about booby
traps because one booby trap would usually take out 2-3 men at a time. We seldom
ran into punji stakes or any non explosive booby
traps since the area we worked in had nothing but main force Viet
Cong or North Vietnamese Army units. We always hit the nasty ones.
Nobody really trained on the M-60 because the gunner and assistant
gunner was always an older (someone that had been there longer, he
could have been 18) man with more experience. Everyone other than
the grenadiers and radio operators carried at least one 100 round
belt of M-60 ammo because of all the weight we always carried.
We were also taught how to rappel from a chopper. I never got that chance
because our unit was being replaced by another decimated unit and we had enough
men to get back out there and help. So, we checked all the gear we wouldn't need
in the field and left an address to send our personal things just in case. The
then piled us into deuce and a halves and drove us down to the "golf course". That
was the name given to our chopper pads.
I could feel it then. It was time, I was going out into the actual combat zone,
the boonies. I was going "camping" as we sometimes liked to call it. As the
chopper lifted off the ground nose down, tail up, gaining speed I began to think
about "what in the world have I volunteered for?" We gained altitude and I was
in the door of the chopper. I thought "what in the devil am I doing sitting 2
inches from a wide open door on a slick (Huey helicopter) at 2,500 feet in the
air?" As that was going through my head the chopper banked and started dropping
to the tree tops heading into the LZ. So many thoughts going through my head.
"Would the chopper get shot down?" "Would the LZ be hot?" "Would the chopper set
down on the ground?" "Would I have to get out on the strut and jump into a hail
of gunfire?" "Would I be killed on my first assault?" Finally the chopper set
down smoothly, I stepped out and ran to the edge of the LZ to set up security
for the rest of the company coming in.
As things progressed my first combat assault was uneventful. We set the company
off in a column formation, my platoon in the lead, me in the second squad back.
I had no idea what was coming up. We moved off into the jungle up a mountain.
The fun was about to begin.
We climbed the mountain one man behind the other and reached the summit with
nothing at all to speak of happening. We had about 2 klicks (kilometers) to get
through the jungle on the ridge line before we could set up for the night. We
were moving slowly through the jungle along side a barely noticeable trail
vigilant to the surroundings. About an hour and a half into the hump for the day
I heard and explosion. I hit the deck as did everyone else. I heard the cry I
would hear many more time during the next year. "DOC...DOC...WORD GET UP HERE".
Doc Word ran past me oblivious to anything else around him. Word filtered back
through the column that "XXXX (hell, I never knew his name)" had tripped a booby
trap, a grenade and torn his legs all to hell. We found a place to land a
medevac and had him picked up to be taken back to the hospital at base camp. I
thought "well, this is enough for today" but the word came up from the company
commander to move it out. We continued our trek to the point of the ridgeline we
had set out for to begin with. We finally reached our objective.
We then set up security for the night. We went down the hill a couple hundred
feet and set out trip flares then claymore mines up closer to us on the way back
up the hill. Took our entrenching tool out and dug a shallow fighting position.
We were set in three man positions. We took two ponchos and snapped them
together using strong sticks as a makeshift tents and laid out a place to sleep.
We set our guard timing for two hour shifts as we cooked some "c" rations for
supper. Noise discipline was observed to a degree (as if they didn't already
know we were there). I watched the night ambush/patrol snaking down the hill
looking for a place they might find some unsuspecting NVA trying to slip by us
in the night and thought "I'm glad I'm not going with them." I had the first
guard shift for the night so the men in my position laid down and got some
sleep. Hell, I didn't even know them yet. I didn't even know the names of the
two men that were wounded that afternoon.
I got through the night but that was my first night in the bush.