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(EDITOR'S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, is on his fifth reporting assignment in Vietnam, and en route to the war zone has visited various military hot spots in the world. This is another of his daily articles about combat missions on which he accompanied U.S. troops.)
CU CHI, Vietnam - It was hot, even in the shade of a covered walk out behind the hospital ward here where S.Sgt. Ira Holding was reluctantly calling home until the shrapnel wound in his left arm healed enough for him to come back to B Troop.
First Sergeant James Connolly cast a big shadow over us as we sat on some sandbags and took the day apart when we'd last seen each other out in the swamps along the Hoc Mon canal.
"You better come on down or you're going to miss the award ceremonies. You can talk to this bird anytime you want to. I'm not going to let him lay around over here in this hospital the rest of his tour. I'll have him back next week," Connolly said.
Holding had to go in and get some medical work done on his arm anyway. I went on down with Connolly, past two more quonset hut wards, and through a back door.
Ill at Ease
I don't like visiting hospitals. I feel ill at ease in them and I know too many people who wind up there just because of a second's bad luck or some small error they make in the big guessing game.
I stopped and talked to PFC Richard Edwards first. He looked comfortable enough, a thick bandage covering his right leg where an AK 47 bullet had hit. He was weak still, he'd lost a lot of blood and been unconscious during the wild ride back from the Oriental River where the LOH he was scouting in was hit.
Capt. Joseph Tuck was across the ward from him. His leg was in some complicated rig, both bones had been broken by the bullet which hit him. He was pale but still strong looking and cheerful as a man can be who has just been told he would keep the leg and that he would heal out all right.
Tuck Grins
He grinned at me between Lt. Col. John Phillips, squadron commander, Maj. James McManus, Troop B, 3rd Squadron, 17th Cavalry commander, and Col. James Smith, deputy commander of the 1st Aviation Brigade. Like Edwards, he had a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Purple Heart lying on the bed which Smith had just presented.
"Hey, Charlie, I'll tell you where you can find that war you are always hunting. Just go on northeast of here about ten miles. That's the place to get one," Joe said.
I told him I couldn't conceive of being able to fly his LOH in to Cu Chi as he had done, unable to use his legs, too weak to see out of the helicopter, so much blood lost it had shorted out a radio, unable to use all of the hand controls because Edwards was slumped against them. It sounded impossible for a man to accomplish.
"You do what you have to do," Tuck said. "That's about it, you just do what you have to do."
We agreed we would probably meet again, Army trails being what they are, and shook hands on it. Edwards asked me if I could get in a hospital if I got hurt and I told him I could.
'Got to Wondering'
"I got to wondering bout that when you came in, what they did if something happened to you," he said.
I told him they charged me $44 per day, however, according to regulations covering oddball wars like this one. He shook his head and said he's hate to have a deal like that but it beat having no deal at all, he guessed.
"Man, that would break me. I wouldn't get hit, if I was you, that's all," he said.
We shook hands and I drifted on down the ward toward the door, still feeling uncomfortable and uneasy, trying not to look at some of the kids with mutilating wounds but giving in, and then stopping to talk to them and finding, as always, that they were more cheerful about this than I was.
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Somebody called to me just as I was near the door and I looked over at a young man with both legs bandaged. It was Pfc. Robert Darnell, one of the scouts from Lt. Col. Joe Zummo's 51st Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol company. Sgt. Michael D. Frazier and Pfc. David Nichols were there, both from his LRRP team.
Hit Very Hard
Darnell had caused me worry. I'd heard he was hit very hard on the day I'd gone out with 10 members of Troop D to help Frazier's LRRP team, in some patch of scrubby swamp on the Oriental River.
I hadn't seen Darnell, things were fast and isolated that day, but I grabbed up some of his gear to carry out when we made it out of there on choppers from the 145th Aviation Company "Greyhounds." His LAW anti-tank rocket - used here as portable artillery, a bunker buster, etc. - and a red smoke grenade had both been holed by bullets. His blood was mixed in with the brilliant red powder the smoke grenade had scattered on the heavy rucksack, pistol belt and suspenders, which I'd grabbed up when he was hit.
"It was close. I thought I'd lose this leg, but it's doing all right. I'll make it, no sweat. I wanted to tell you guys thanks. Will you tell 'Blue Tiger' that, for me?" he said.
By "Blue Tiger" he meant Delta Troop of the 3rd of the 17th, in general, and these men from the 2nd platoon in particular: Lt. Stephen D. Henderson, S.Sgt. Richard Kirkpatrick, Spec 4s Patrick Smith, Warren Smith, Erin Greasham, James T. Mossner, and Pfc's Jimmy D. Young, Mile Limus, John M. Norm and Spec 4 Tom Slaton, a medic.
Strange Contrasts
I'd spent a week with the LRRP's and with Delta Troop in a world of strange contrasts. They lived in a part of Cu Chi deserted by the 25th Infantry division troops, near a battalion of the 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) attached to the 25th, but in almost complete isolation from their neighbors.
The area had hootches, dusty, full of the oddments left behind by some battalion, with the broken door hinges, etc., which vacant abodes somehow seem to accomplish without human assistance.
Capt. Joe Seery, Delta Troop commander, showed me to a hootch. There was a choice, the two units rattled around in a full battalion area, but here I had a full hootch to myself, occasionally hosting a mail clerk or a supply man up from the squadron area at Di An.
It was a dusty, splintery, half-screened one, but luxurious with a cot, shelves, pinups left by the former residents, even a guitar leaning in one corner with a broken neck and the strings snapped and a sentimental reference to "Elsie, Pasadena, Calif., The World" scratched into the varnish with a bayonet tip.
Helicopters landed about 50 feet from the hootch I chose, I found too late.
Gear Moved
A battery of artillery, invisible behind a rise of ground, seemed to have a direct connection between their six cannon and the hut's acoustics. After the first localized hurricane moved all my gear and the cot from one end of the hootch to the other as three Huey's beat the front yard into a dust storm, and those six howitzer crews decided that midnight was the best time of all to engage in gunnery, I understood my lonely splendor in that hut, but I stuck with it. A man had to pay something to have a whole hootch to himself in Vietnam.
Seery was about my height, short, but has 10 pounds more muscle going for him.
Delta Troop wore red berets, an old fancy of my own over here where hats acquire a kind of mystique for the owners, camouflage fatigues, and were piratical in appearance with mustaches, crossed cavalry saber insignia, various paintings of blue tigers filling in any overlooked color touches the berets and camouflage jungle suits missed.
They like coffee and keep it handy. I had one hell of a good time with them. We liked the same things.
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