Blood: Into the Rocket Belt

Spooky aka Puff (AC47) working out of Pleiku, Vietnam in 1969

23

Interestingly, from the start of the war, incessant talking and shouting characterized most German small-unit offensive actions. Erroneously interpreted by Allied soldiers as a sign of poor discipline, it was later ascertained that such chatter was, in fact, a most effective means of dispelling individual loneliness and heightening group cohesion. 

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1968

On my first tour in Vietnam I lived in reasonable comfort as part of an advisory team in the city of Pleiku. Along with our other jobs, a duty roster assigned two-man teams as advisors to the local militia units, known as Regional Force/Popular Forces, shortened to the acronym RF/PF, and then, inevitably, turned into slang — “Ruff-Puffs.” The Ruff-Puffs were not regular army in either training or equipment and were used only locally, such as operations into the “rocket belt.” The rocket belt was a rough perimeter around the city from which, if they could get inside it, the VC or NVA could launch 122 mm rockets. An operation into the rocket belt was intended to prevent them from firing them from firing rockets into the city or the nearby bases.

For my first real combat operation I found myself packing gear into a rucksack and shaking hands with a staff sergeant about my own age but with a very different look on his face, SSG Jarvis. Not much later we got out of a jeep on the edge of Pleiku and joined up with a small crowd of ill-uniformed Vietnamese. This was a Ruff-Puff company and we were going on an overnight operation into the rocket belt. Almost before I’d made sure of our location on my map we were moving, strung out in a line and walking through an odd landscape of tall, thin trees and open spaces interrupted by clumps of bamboo. It was late in the day and the idea was to move to a location, set up a hasty defense, and run a few patrols.

I was not there as a leader. My job was to coordinate American fire support. So the really important tasks were to make sure that the radio was working, that I knew all the frequencies for units in the area, that I understood how to use the codes, and, most important of all, that I knew where the hell we were on the ground. It helped enormously that I knew exactly where I was when we started on our stroll. All I had to do was keep track of our path, be sure I knew where we were when we set up our final position, and where the patrols were planned for that night. Deciding where the patrols were going was not my job. That was the job of a Vietnamese captain, the dai-uy who commanded the Ruff-Puff company.

The operation was not what I expected, what I trained for, what my life as an infantryman at Ft. Benning, in Germany, and at Ft. Bragg had been. Instead of a practiced formation, the Ruff-Puffs moved in a straggling line, all chattering and joking. They looked like children with their oversize, antique American weapons — M-1s, Browning Automatic Rifles, and Thompson sub-machine guns. They were little spindly moving mushrooms in outsized American helmets. They smoked cigarettes as they walked along and the cooking pots tied to their packs clanked to the rhythm of their steps. I glanced at my sergeant who had not done anything more than introduce himself. He just shrugged, lit his own Marlboro and swung his CAR-15 into a more comfortable position. I followed and ran a radio check every fifteen minutes or so.

As we approached our final position the noise of the Ruff-Puff’s movement was increasing. By this time several live chickens had been acquired while passing through a hamlet along the way and were tied by their feet to the packs of the soldiers. I was surrounded by little people I did not understand. Their voices sang up and down and seemed incongruously cheerful. From time to time the dai-uy would talk into his radio, then shout something to his troops. The strung out line of soldiers would then shift its direction.

Eventually, about an hour before sunset, we stopped and the soldiers drifted into a loose circle around us. I noticed SSG Jarvis talking to our interpreter and handing him one of his C-ration cans. The sergeant came back and said, “Let’s dig in, sir. The Vietnamese’d do it for us, but maybe it will do some good to set an example for that dai-uy with the long fingernails over there.”

We opened our entrenching tools and dug a shallow fighting position, only about two feet deep. The soil beneath the leaves was full of fine roots that were easily sliced by the shovel. Not easy digging, but not too bad. The spoil was a deep brick red that we covered with leaves.

Just before dark the interpreter came back carrying a pot of rice with a few small fish on the top.

“Get your canteen cup out, Captain,” Jarvis said.

I did and he filled it with rice and added a couple of the fish.

“ARVN C-rats,” he said. “Sardines. Think they get it from the Koreans. They’re pretty good. Want some nuoc mam?” He offered a bottle of pungent fish sauce. ARVN would be the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the regular soldiers of the South Vietnamese army.

“Sure,” I said.

I poured some over the fish and rice and crinkled my nose at the smell. Jarvis pulled chopsticks out of a pocket of his shirt and began to eat. I used a plastic spoon from my C-ration box. We ate sitting on our helmets. All around us small fires were going and groups of Vietnamese were squatting around them waiting for rice to be ready. The next morning I would accidentally kick a small mound of feathers and watch them drift across the trail as we headed back to our pick-up point.

The interpreter sat near us, eating his share of the rice and sardines. Jarvis and he talked in an odd mixture of pidgin English and Vietnamese. Jarvis took a second canteen cup of rice from the pot and offered more to me, but I didn’t want any. I got a can of fruit from my pack and ate that. Then a can of crackers and a can of peanut butter. The sergeant wiped his chopsticks off on his pants leg and put them back into his pocket. Then he cleaned his cup with a mix of water and dirt. He picked up his entrenching tool and his rifle.

“C’mon, sir. Let’s go take a shit before these guys get settled in.”

I followed him to a place close to the perimeter where we dug a small hole.

“You first, sir. I’ll stand watch.”

I did my business and then picked up my rifle and looked out into the brush for God knows what while the sergeant did his. I crushed my C-ration cans by stomping on them and tossed them into the hole before I covered it back up.

“Gotta be regular in the field,” Jarvis told me. “Take a piss whenever you can. An’ don’t never put nothin’ off if you don’t have to.”

Back at our foxhole we went over the fire plan. I wanted to be sure Jarvis approved, although all I got was a few grunts and nods. We agreed on a watch plan, two hour shifts, but both of us awake between 2300 and 0100, the usual time for rocket attacks. In the swift darkness fires still flared and the bobbing ends of cigarettes could be seen. Wood smoke and the smell of boiled chicken drifted past us. Then there was the clatter of a group getting ready for a short patrol. Eventually only the hiss of the radio was in the night.

SSG Jarvis rolled himself into his poncho and poncho liner and went to sleep sitting up, his hands on his rifle. He came instantly awake when I touched his arm to wake him for his shift.

For me it was as if an alarm clock had gone off when my eyes snapped open at exactly 2300. I glanced at my watch glowing in the moonlight to confirm. I smelled tobacco smoke in the faint breeze. I shifted in the hole and sensed the sergeant beside me.

“Wish I could smoke,” I said.

“Aw, go ahead, sir. Just light up under your poncho and keep it cupped down below the edge of the hole. And duck down when you take a drag. There’s little guys all around us. They’ll get shot first anyhow.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, but I really did want a cigarette. So I got under my poncho, feeling like a child hiding under his blanket reading a comic book by flashlight. I held the Zippo with both hands as I opened it so that it would not be able to click, and I closed one eye before I spun the wheel so that I would not lose night vision in that eye. I came out from under the poncho with my lungs full of smoke and night blind in the other eye.

“Just about rocket time,” the sergeant said.

He was right. A moment later a light streaked across the sky, like a shooting star on a warm summer night, like a fire arrow in an old western. Then another and another and another. I damn near shouted as a cold flare of fear went through me.

I felt an intense isolation, as if I were the only man in the world. The calm voice of Jarvis talking into the radio steadied me.

“I can’t even give you a decent guess about the distance, but I put the launch point on an azimuth of 330° from my position...roger...out.” He snapped his compass closed. He looked at me. “They’ve got another bearing from another bunch of Ruff-Puffs. So they can triangulate. We’ll hear some outgoing 175 in a few minutes. Hope to hell we’re not on their GT line.”

The GT line was the gun-target line, the thin path on the earth between an artillery piece and its target. 175 mm’s were famous for their short (and long) rounds. Something to do with the length of the barrel, the flexing of the steel as it warmed up from being fired, and, sometimes, sheer negligence because the crews were Americans and the troops under the GT line were not — except for me and SSG Jarvis.

Soon we heard the whiffling sound of outgoing artillery. We could not observe the impact of the rounds. Jarvis was back on the radio. “No...not observed...roger...out.”

He turned to the me. “They’re putting a Spooky up.”

Spooky was an old airplane, a C-47, with a modern weapon,  7.62 mm “mini-guns” mounted in the door.

The Vietnamese dai-uy slid into our hole and was almost gutted by the nasty-looking, serrated Randall that appeared in Jarvis’ hand. The dai-uy had his map with him and a flashlight with a red lens on it. We two captains studied the positions to confirm where they could and could not fire. Vietnamese and American artillery was firing. Spooky was coming in. We needed to be sure. I called in the information to the American side of the Province command post. The dai-uy did the same to the Vietnamese side. Everyone was talking to everyone else. I knew the voices on the radio. I felt less alone. And yet in the darkness all around me, in the moving, helmeted shadows, who was my friend?

The radio crackled. Jarvis gestured toward the sky. “Spooky’s coming on station,” he said. We looked up and saw the lights of the airplane begin to circle, roughly over the area where the rockets had been launched from.

A mini-gun was a six-barreled contraption that seemed to defy the ordinary laws of mechanics and physics. It looked, at first, very much like the old, hand cranked Gatling gun. It had an electric motor that drove the six barrels in a whirring circle. In the space of a minute, a complexly-curved mechanism fed thousands of 7.62 mm cartridges into the barrels and a cascading shower of bullets spewed out. Even with a standard mixture of one tracer to five plain rounds, what was seen from the ground was a great shining stream of fire falling from the night, like God was taking a piss. The weapon fired so fast that the sounds of the rounds firing canceled each other out and what was heard was a deep buzzing sound, like a muffled chain saw or the ripping of a giant zipper. “Rrrrrrrrruuup! Rrrrrrrrruuup!”

And then the dai-uy was screaming for it to stop, to cease fire, to turn off the mini-gun in Spooky. He was screaming that the rustling swarm of bullets falling from the sky was landing on his outposts.

I called it in, but it was five long minutes before the aircraft turned slowly away, far too late for the poor souls in the outpost.

What was strange to me the next morning, as we walked out with two limp bodies strung beneath bamboo poles, as if they were game bagged on a Central Highlands safari, what was strange was how little anyone seemed to care.

Jarvis, who’d waited till dawn to light his cigarette, shrugged it off. He seemed mildly surprised that I would even bring it up. It was as if he expected the Air Force would fuck it up — especially if there weren’t any real Americans on the ground. “We ain’t Americans no more. Not when we’re out with the little guys.”

Jarvis’ breakfast had been more rice and nuoc mam. I was beginning to understand that he, with his worn rucksack and array of carefully fastened accessories — knife, grenades, strobe light, and all the rest — was within himself, had gone somewhere beyond the ordinary comradeship of the infantry. Two or three back-to-back tours will do that.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow him.