Working Draft: February 6, 2002 Thirteen Echo: Field, Firebase, and Base Camp Vietnam, 1969-1970 By Lloyd C. Irland Lloyd C. Irland Page: 1 To the memory of the men of the 101st Airborne Division who fell in Vietnam. 13echo.doc: February 6, 2002 lciirland Page: 2 Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) 13E Field Artillery Operations and Intelligence Assistant. Assists in Fire Direction Center Operations and serves as RTO or Reconnaissance Sergeant with Forward Observer parties attached to supported units. _________________________ Cover: Infantry securing perimeter on arrival at FSB Zon, November, 1969 13echo.doc: February 6, 2002 lciirland Page: 3 101st Airborne Division Area, 1969-70 (Contemporary Sketch by Lloyd C. Irland) 13echo.doc: February 6, 2002 lciirland Page: 4 Table of Contents Preamble ............................................................................................................................ 5 1. Arriving....................................................................................................................... 17 2. To Battery B ............................................................................................................... 27 3. Sent to the Field.......................................................................................................... 50 4. Monsoon...................................................................................................................... 72 5. To the Edge of the A Shau and the DMZ............................................................... 108 6. Back to the Battery .................................................................................................. 130 7. Tet and After ............................................................................................................ 159 8. Finally a REMF........................................................................................................ 191 9. Back to the World .................................................................................................... 212 10. What I Learned...................................................................................................... 217 Epilogue ......................................................................................................................... 223 Note on Sources............................................................................................................. 229 The Author .................................................................................................................... 236 Footnotes........................................................................................................................ 237 13echo.doc: February 6, 2002 lciirland Page: 5 Preamble Every summer, July 20 brings newspaper filler clips and TV news blurbs recalling the first time men ever landed on the moon. If the night is clear and the moon is bright, I am often outside looking upward at it. After 32 years, looking up at a bright midsummer moon on July 20 usually reminds me of where I was standing when we first learned that the Apollo 11 landing had succeeded. The place was a tiny point of land known to the Army in Summer 1969 as Fire Base Roy. This firebase looked out over a large lagoon, the Dam Cau Hai, which was sheltered by a long barrier island beyond which lay the blue South China Sea. This is the story of how I learned what war is. It is the story of the treadmill we were on. This short book emerges from a wish to recount and preserve my experience of war, illustrating it from my own recollections, letters, and photos taken at the time. My parents retained many of my letters home; I quote bits from these here and there. Most of my journal entries were rubbish, but I use a few excerpts here. It is often said that war is weeks and weeks of drudgery and boredom punctuated by moments or hours of sheer terror. It is so. For me, the moments of sheer terror were few and brief. So there is little in here would inspire a Hollywood movie. This memoir, fortunately for me, recounts what was perhaps a more typical experience for many GIs, even those in combat arms. This is not a diary, based on detailed notes of the time. It is not a history of or commentary on the operations in which I participated. Those operations and skirmishes would hardly be mentioned in even the most detailed histories of this war. Obscurity is our lot, well deserved, one might say. There is no record to 13echo.doc: February 6, 2002 lciirland Page: 6 correct here, nor any commentary on the larger moral, policy, or political issues raised by the war. Things that happen to somebody else... − somebody is hurt in a car accident; − somebody drowns in a boating accident; − somebody’s girlfriend gets pregnant; − somebody dies young of a rare disease; − somebody gets drafted; − somebody gets sent to Vietnam; − somebody gets killed in Vietnam. These things happen to somebody else. You’re used to reading about them in the paper, or hearing them from a friend or relative. Born in Chicago in 1946, I was a middle-class midwestern kid, an Eagle Scout with four summer’s service on Boy Scout camp staff. I was patriotic enough. During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, most young men who would pass the physical would be likely to get drafted -- they had even drafted Elvis! I built plastic models of airplanes and had a huge collection of tiny model tanks. I read the books of the day about our nation’s military history; these naturally fanned a youthful patriotism further. The press coverage of the time gave us sympathy for the South Vietnamese and offered a favorable view of both our obligations to help and our prospects for succeeding. With our track record and technology, how could there be any doubt? I entered college at Michigan State in September 1964, a month after Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, to study forestry. I entered ROTC, making the usual 13echo.doc: February 6, 2002 lciirland Page: 7 assumption for the time that later service was unavoidable. In the spring of my freshman year, 1965, I became more interested in pursuing graduate studies and dropped out of ROTC, not wanting to consider even more distant commitments of my time. That spring, none of us guessed how vast the Vietnam War would become or how long it would last. I did not drop out of ROTC as a result of sentiments of doubt about the war. I completed my studies at Michigan State and went to the University of Arizona to pursue doctoral work. At MSU, several departments had provided training to South Vietnamese government agencies and police forces. A political science professor, Wesley Fishel, had been a personal advisor to Diem. He gave a short talk one evening at our dining hall. Agriculture experts had been over to help develop Vietnamese agriculture. The student protests heated up fast, and with southern Michigan’s large defense-related industry, there were plants aplenty to picket. The “teach-ins” gathered strength and drew larger audiences. I ignored most of this, focusing on my studies but I avidly followed the news. My views were strongly shaped by two books I read. Harrison Salisbury’s book reporting on his trip to Hanoi convinced me that we were being stalemated. Worse, our methods, so sanitized in TV news and in magazines, were causing considerably more hardship, death, and injury to innocent civilians than I had realized. Jonathan Schell’s compelling and detailed reporting on operations in Vietnam became a book, “The Military Half,” which I devoured as soon as it was published. Schell depicted a military machine that had lost the old fashioned soldierly ethic of shielding civilians from harm. With the VietCong infrastructure so fully woven into village society, the distinction between combatant and civilian became hard to follow. 13echo.doc: February 6, 2002 lciirland Page: 8 So, apparently, it was abandoned entirely. Schell’s ghastly depictions of civilian casualties and ruined villages, of indiscriminate use of firepower, persuaded me that however laudable the objective of South Vietnamese independence might be, our methods were terribly wrong. It became evident that Ho Chi Minh did not have a staff of PhD’s doing benefit- cost analysis on the war. He was oblivious to casualties and property damage. I read his biography. To his leadership group, reunifying Vietnam and ejecting the U.S. was not just one option on a spectrum of possibilities. It was the sole driving purpose of his government and society. Plainly, we were not going to bend such men to our will by “raising the cost” they would have to pay. In September 1967, I started graduate work at the University of Arizona. After Tet 1968, graduate student deferments were ended. I was ordered to my draft physical. So I finished my Master’s work. I interrupted graduate school and left home to enter the Army deeply disaffected with the war. I did feel an obligation to serve -- I was no better than all those other guys already over there. But I was not obligated to agree with what was being done. Was there a way out for us, a way to end the continued blasting of the Vietnamese landscape? In summer 1969, as I was heading overseas, President Nixon said, “Yes, there is.” He called it Vietnamization. Service in the field artillery is an accidental tradition in my family. My great grandfather, Louis E. Irland, served in Btry K, 3d New York Artillery during the Civil War. He entered service at age 18, and was mustered out in 1865 from a Philadelphia hospital, from wounds or