Going to Dak To #1
I didn’t often get too close to the actual war in spite of the fact that I was, as they say, “In Country” for almost a full year. I don’t know why the war didn’t come up to Engineer Hill very often in the months I was there. We were pretty much the most isolated American post in the area around Pleiku. Heading out from the city, you came to an ARVN encampment, then a major Air Force base and then a few klicks farther out, Engineer Hill, and then, even farther out, several klicks, a few Special Forces bases. After that: Cambodia. I confess that I would not have wanted to attack the Hill if I were VC: the engineers had done a hell of a job in protecting it with all that concertina wire and thousands of land mines. But still and all, I mean lobbing mortars over all that couldn’t have been terribly difficult and they only did that 2 or 3 times while I was there.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we were less significant than we thought. That’s an ego-shattering thought. They had to have known we were there. No base in the area had more antennae sticking up into the air than did the 330th. Those antennae surely screamed “Here we are!!!!!!!!!” and the VC couldn’t possibly have missed seeing them. If they did, some of the indigenous native personnel would surely have told them about us. “Lots of men in that there place speak Vietnamese, boss. Means something, no?” Among the barbers, bargirls, hootch maids, shit burners and others, some must have been VC in disguise, spying on us and reporting back to their superiors. And yet we were mostly ignored.
We were, also, pretty much ignored by the Army which frequently failed to believe or act on what we told them even though we were almost always correct. And we were ignored almost totally by the VC. Only one of those instances of being ignored was worthwhile: it was good to be ignored by the VC.
So, war did not come to the 330th. That means the C.O. would send some of us fairly close to the war, to Dak To. Let me explain very, very quickly, that the big battle of Dak To, 1967, was already mostly over. By November 22, nothing was left but the clean-up. The 173rd Screaming Eagles and elements of the 4th ID had fought terrifically and, often, heroically, in the hills around Dak To, especially on Hill 875. Enough people (on both sides) had died, been wounded, been permanently maimed that the VC had slunk back into the surrounding hills or across one of the borders that converged there into either Cambodia or Laos. When all the fighting was over, we had won — decisively. We had won? I’m not exactly sure now as I was not sure then of what that meant. “Do you know what you’re fighting for?”
What was the Battle of Dak To, one of the biggest and most celebrated battles in all of the war until that moment, actually for? PAVN forces gathered from all around to attack the camp, the worst fighting took place on Hill 875 (measured by its elevation above sea level and not named), and the 173rd and elements of the 4th ID drove them back. Or, they decided to stop fighting. Why? What for? We won…what? The right to stay there for a few more years? We “attrited” way more of them than they were able to “attrite” us. “To attrite”—wonderful word, isn’t it? Some referee somewhere counted their dead and then counted our dead (ours was a far more precise number) and declared victory for our side. Whoopee! Reminds me of the old W.C. Fields joke about Philadelphia. We got to stay in Dak To! And what happens in Dak To stays in Dak To.
Sidebar: Dak To’s current air strip was left behind by the Army and the Battle Monument to the North Vietnamese Victory sits on something called Charlie Hill. I wonder if Hill 875 finally got itself a name or if the battle monument is for 1975 or 1967.
Anyway, Jim Brow and I were sent to Dak To a week after the end of the battle because some small actions, mostly ambushes of convoys, continued for a few weeks after the main battle. We had, for some time, been translating messages from a VC observer who called himself “Bao” and mostly counted the number of jeeps, APCs, trucks and other vehicles leaving the base camp at Dak To. Sometimes, not always, those same convoys were ambushed a few miles out of camp, usually headed toward 4th ID HQ outside of Pleiku. Let me add that “Bao” was a man’s name (Jim Brow’s Vietnamese name was “Bao”; mine was “Hoang”) but that was also the word in Vietnamese meaning “reporter.” So that could either have been the name of the guy making the reports (unlikely) or his radio reporting handle.
We were flown off Engineer Hill on a Huey, lurching take-off, high ride. We sat in the open doors of the chopper hanging on to what were usually used to hold the door gunners who would fire machine guns if they were flying into a hot landing zone. We did sit on our flak jackets in case some VC fired up at the chopper, but it was an uneventful trip. I was a tourist, looking at place I had long seen on our maps, watching the highlands turn from cleared fields to dense jungle and mountains like Ngok Rinh Rua and others, seeing the pock-marked face of the land, craters made by artillery or bombs falling from B-52s or some other kind of weaponry. If you have read Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, the lakes that Christ-like man fished for souls in were made from similar craters.
The chopper pilot dropped us near the HQ of the Dak To camp and lifted off immediately. We reported in, explained out mission: to see if we could hear messages “in the clear”—meaning not encoded—and to locate Bao, the man reporting on convoys out of the camp. The C.O. sent us to an area of the camp near the closest hill. There we met Lieutenant Bernstein. “Call me Bernie,” he said, “unless regular Army types are around. You’re looking at the whole RRC unit at Dak To...me...and I’m so short you can’t even see me. Only a wake-up to go.” He pointed out the detachment bunker, a small foxhole with a few sandbags, and gave us a chance to look around. ASA was simply not very STRAC (maybe in larger ASA areas, but certainly not in Dak To and not very much in Pleiku). Bernie left Dak To the next day to go home and Jim and I became the whole detachment. After we left, two weeks later, there was no ASA detachment at Dak To.
[to be continued]
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