War Story 7: The Ghosts of War

We met on the battlefield at Kham Duc. They lost.

Exhausted, I laid back in my flimsy hammock to rest. My rifle lay across my stomach.

I remember marveling at just how dark it was as I lifted my hand in front of my face and could not see it. It was pitch black.

As I slowly closed my eyes, BAMMM! “Whaat the hell was that?” It was so close and so LOUD. The massive blasts seemed like they were nearly on us.

I rolled out of the hammock in an instant. Clutching my M-16, I tried peering out in the darkness trying to see anything and seeing nothing.

“Do not move, I said to myself, “don’t even breathe.”

My platoon of 23 young soldiers, nearly all teenagers, had spent the entire day slowly hiking down a valley, a steep slope, cutting through jungle, conducting a dangerous river crossing, and then climbing up the other side. It took over six hours in the heat. We sweated every inch of ground as we knew we were only a few meters away from the Laotian border and the NVA enemy was known to be crossing through this area as they came south from North Vietnam through Laos on the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail to hit our positions in I Corps.

The enemy’s trek down from North Vietnam for hundreds of miles to South Viet Nam via Laos had to be terribly grueling. They did so for months on the move through mud and jungle without all the support and supplies Americans routinely received. They also had to dodge attacks from the air, especially those invisible but death-from-above B-52s we called Arc Lights. Then there was the disease, the bugs, lousy food, rubber tires for sandals, and no Medevacs if you got hit.

There were just so many ways for them to get sick or die, and many did, and few of the dead ever returned home for honorable burials.

Waiting for those who made it were US Army and Marine infantry platoons on the search for them.

Platoons like mine, “The Third Herd”, Bravo Company of the 2/1st, 196 Infantry Brigade, Americal Div.

When we crossed the river and reached the top of the valley on the other side, we could see the trail. Well used and wide enough to prove that this was a major infiltration route.

It was getting dark so I organized a circular night position, or “night laager”, just off the trail in the thick jungle, and ordered the placement of “claymores” on either side of us along the trail itself. Some of my soldiers had cleared shallow holes around the perimeter or simply formed a sleeping position on the jungle floor using their rucksacks for a pillow.

Claymores are very powerful anti-personnel mines used with a trip wire that ran across the trail. Anyone coming down that trail was sure to trip it and the results would be devastating.

Again, another explosion! BOOM!

Needless to say, we did not sleep that night. We felt like the jungle was crawling with the enemy coming all around us. Controlling fear is not easy as all I could think about was that we arrived in Kham Duc two years after the battle of Tet Offensive II in 1968. That was when a company of local militia and American advisors, numbering over 140, were overrun. President Johnson himself gave the order to General Westmoreland to evacuate.

This was just one night in a tour that lasted one year, 1970.

At daybreak, we learned we had caught two NVA soldiers by surprise. Fully loaded with equipment and weapons, the unsuspecting enemy soldiers ran into our “Mike-Alfa’s” or mechanical ambushes.

Searching their bodies, I was struck by what I found. Pictures, drawings, and poems all showed that they were just like us in some ways. They missed home.

The pictures were just a few of the many faces of war: young, full of energy, ambition, and pride.

The drawings were penned with ballpoint ink, mostly blue ink, but some with color. The fancy poems and pictures were done on thin, fragile strips of paper.

To this day, I don’t know all that they mean, but the penmanship and drawings reflected excellent talent  - a talent that would be lost forever.

In pensive moments, I sympathize with their families knowing their bodies never made it back home.

I kept their pictures and those of many more that would meet the same fate by my platoon in the months that followed. For this was our mission – to stop them in their tracks. We knew if we did not get them, they would surely not hesitate to get us.

We were all in a race to kill or be killed.

When I look at these faces, a feeling comes over me that they wasted their lives.

But then, when you see the names of our American soldiers on the Vietnam Wall, or on the Movable Wall that visits towns all around the USA, you trust that ours did not waste their lives.

One fact remains, they all died young and away from home on a dark trail to nowhere.