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(EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of articles explaining the encounter which lasted from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m.)
TAN AN, Vietnam - The 2nd Battalion 60th Infantry lives in a kind of a permanent flood disaster area here on the west edge of the Rung Sat Zone, south of Saigon on the river which feeds ships into that inland port.
Helicopters working this area refuel at Due Hoa, a nice enough area where the ARVN 25th Division has a compound but an oily, dusty, muddy, fuel smelling junk heap of a place at the refueling pad. A kind of estuary has been heaped up with a truck road down the center and fuel tanks and hoses on either side, a line of chopper pads by them.
Water, dappled on the bottom with ammunition cans, brass, other litter from choppers, and with the white plastic packing used for rockets floating like little boats on its surface, surrounds this strip of whirling rotors.
The crew chiefs and doorgunners jump out and pull back armor and open doors. Usually the pilot will get out and stretch and walk and smoke, the bird idles while it is refueled by the crewchief. One man stays at the controls.
Major Restless
Maj. John D. Jenks was restless when we landed there. He got out and walked up the line, past Cobras and Hueys and LOH's. His rifle platoon was back from its first tour, some of the men stretched in the shade of the three UH-IH choppers they ride. They were down at the end, parked in a line, ready for takeoff, the crews and infantrymen already on standby for whatever came next.
I was already tired I noted when I got out and stretched. He came back and we took off again. The morning had been high tension all the way so far, a kind of kaleidoscope violence and human tragedy whirling by the chopper. Jenks flies low and violent. I felt as if I had been on a wild horse since sunup.
The rhythmic flap of the rotors put me into a kind of a stupor. We settled in on the dirt pad at Tan An and I stripped off the flight gear and walked up with Jenks to the sandbagged dungeon of the Tactical Operations Center. It's secret in there and it isn't proper to go inside without an invitation from the landlords so I sat on some sandbags and smoked.
Somebody poked their head out.
"We've got some coffee in here if you need some," he said.
Unique Warhorse
I went into the gloom, maps and bare light bulbs, telephones, radios, men in T-shirts sweating, crouching at tables and around charts and maps, talking, arguing, tense - a low mutter of a unique kind of war noise always fills a TOC.
I sat on a water can out of the way and drank a paper cup of coffee. Jenks had a map and was following what a couple of officers said on the map.
"I think it's peaceful there, a dry hole, but I'll check it out. I'm going to put my sniffer ship right over there on the creek while we're doing it, though, just to see what we can stir up. Maybe they've come back in there. We'll see what we can find for you in both places," Jenks said.
The "people sniffer" is one of those science fiction gadgets which keep showing up in this war and even sometimes work. This one works. Not as it was designed to work, but as it commenced to be used over here.
It was an idea drummed up to help a point man scout out an ambush, I suppose. A kind of vacuum cleaner nozzle poked out of a plastic suitcase that sniffs the air and detects chemicals, men, animals, or smoke into the air. It turned out to be too tricky for a walk in the bush, the wind had to be just right and it kept being overwhelmed by the friendly aroma when it wasn't, but mounted on a low flying helicopter, it is a genuine marvel. It give readings of various intensity and men get skilled at deducing what it means with various reactions to what it sniffs out on the ground.
I've learned to deeply distrust gadget claims over here, but the Sniffer works. I've seen it work. Most of the gadgets don't do nearly as well as publicity would have one think, but this one does better. It isn't any help around villages or such, but it's good around lonely spots where humans are an automatic enemy. Jenks was sending it in a place like that.
I finished my coffee and went back out in the sun. Jenks was going to be busy for a few more minutes as the next events of the battalion's day were plotted. I saw the prisoner we had captured early in this day, an intelligence specialist and an interpreter talking to him over at the little confinement area, a circle of concertina, a kind of shed roof for shade and shelter.
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Felt Man's Fear
The enemy isn't faceless at all on some days of this war. I'd felt this man's fear, shared it with him, seen his despair, his hope at hiding and escaping the inevitable fall apart, even assisted in spoiling it in a kind of supportive role.
He was dry now. He wasn't sullen and frightened but he was still wary and had the quick, animal moves of a man not yet through with the reaction to bad combat luck. He recognized me, he put up his hand to the back of his neck where I'd twisted his collar, but the recognition was simply in the look he to me, no expression on his face showed it, just the quick, hard study he gave me when I went over.
He squatted, smoking, looking the other way. A lean man, in his twenties, slight as an American boy half his age, Oriental handsomeness under the bristling shock of crow black hair, still muddied from the paddy he'd burrowed into to try to get away from the helicopter.
Where wasn't much to be learned from him, really.
He'd been born in the village. A long time ago he'd become angry at the dead end lot of a young country man. He wanted his own land, not that owned by the landlord around his village, mostly, he said. He saw nothing in how things were going that spelled out an answer to any of his restless dreams. He couldn't define what he really wanted.
Some men came to the village when he was 15 and a Viet Cong band was recruited. The political debacle in Saigon caused it to be undisturbed. It was a group of village heroes, strutting and strong men with weapons. He listened, watched, envied, was recruited.
Was Made Chief
He did well. The experienced men in the group died during the Tet ['68] offensive. He was made chief and he recruited new men and trained them.
He had a wife and two children, a boy and a girl, very young children. His parents, cousins, the village was his family, his world, they were all there.
There was a veneer of sophistication to him, you could feel it, put there by the men who educated him to their ends - but he was a village man, a farmer, and a peasant under it.
A prisoner...
But at about the time he struck sympathy, questions commenced coming about executions, assassinations, the grip of terror he had held on the village where he was born, raised, fought and lost.
"They've terrorized that town a long time. We've had word on them. Our Civil Affairs Officer and our Two (Intelligence Officer) have sweated over that village and he is why. He ran it like a small Al Capone," the man asking the specific question told me.
The man answered the questions, no hesitation at all.
Jenks came out, I left before the answers got into any details of how a policeman had been cut to pieces with rice sickles or how the school teacher in the village had been shot and buried head down.
We went down to the chopper. Another ship was just settling in. There was an old man on it with an officer with him.
Owner of Hooch
"That old fellow owns the house those guys took over and built the bunker and ammunition magazine in, the first one we hit. They took it away from him. He lived with some relatives, his family was moved out. We'll pay for the hooch, but the Viet Cong ought to," Jenks said. "At least he'll be able to build one he can use for himself and keep now."
I was still very tired when I got back into the armor and helmet and strapped into the steel-plate cushioned seat in the back of the Huey, but it was cooler flying than it was on the ground and the next hour was simply a low level tour of a peaceful part of the country, looking at the men and women at work in the paddies or moving around the villages, kids moving, water buffaloes stretching their necks out low on the water at the chopper noise. The war had been fought and gone on by in the sector we went over.
Then the radio brought word.
The sniffer ship had a "reading of 50... and the scouts went down and there is verification, they saw six people running for a bunker."
The war was starting again someplace . . .
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