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Overview
This is the war as a LRP saw it. LRPs were the Long Range Patrol units that served as the eyes and ears of the infantry, who were dropped into enemy territory and given the responsibility of finding the hiding places of an elusive foe. It is not the story of massive battles and strategic operations, but rather depicts actual contacts between four and five man LRP Teams and unknown numbers of North Vietnamese or Vietcong.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780595423729 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 02/23/2007 |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.41(d) |
Read an Excerpt
For A Time We Were Titans
By Tom Reed
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2007 Thomas B. ReedAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-595-42372-9
Chapter One
LRP
Monday October 14, 1968
Dear Diary,
Our arrival in Ban Me Thuot was like a scene from Greek myth. As we walked into the LRP cantonment the earth quaked beneath our feet and the starry sky was rent with peals of unholy thunder. But it was not the wrath of ancient gods that greeted us; it was that of modern man reaching out for an unseen enemy. It was the booming of 175-millimeter Howitzers that shook the earth beneath us, and made it seem as if we were lifted off the ground with every step we took.
We were FNGs, fucking new guys, straight out of the replacement depot at Camp Enari in Pleiku. There were ten of us: Torres, Jackson, Jordan, Carter, Stotler, Hardy, Slusarz, Neugard, Murphy and me. I should give you their first names and Army rank, but most of the time I didn't even know their first names. We never used first names in Vietnam, you were either known by your last name or a nickname, like Festus, or Cueball, or Cookie. As for rank, you usually wore your rank, for the benefit of any lifers that were around, but among the LRPs it didn't mean anything. For the most part everybody was treated alike. Oh, there were some things, like guard duty and policing the area, that noncoms got out of but for the most part three stripers got treated just the same as Spec Fours and Privates.
Officers, of course, were always called by their rank and name, but among enlisted LRPs the only exception to the unwritten rule on rank was the Platoon Sergeant. He was almost always a Sergeant First Class and a career soldier. The men knew that the Platoon Sergeant was the glue that held a LRP platoon together and they gave him the deference of his rank. Unless you were really close it was Sergeant Blake, Sergeant Hinkle, or Sergeant Hooper. (But, at least with one of them, across the poker table, or over a beer in the Bunker Bar, it was just "Hink.")
It was the guy who was then Platoon Sergeant, Sgt. Blake that recruited us into the LRPs. He came to Pleiku, to the Fourth Infantry Division Replacement Center, called the Repo. Depot. This is where you had to go to get FNGs to replace troops that had gone home, or for that matter, those that would never go home. He was there, specifically, to augment the Second Brigade LRR platoon. The authorized strength of the platoon, the number of GIs the brass in the pentagon said should be in a platoon, was too few to do all that needed to be done.
An Army Division is divided into three Brigades. Each Brigade in the 4th Division had a LRP Platoon At the Division level they had a whole LRP Company. It was officially Echo Company, 58th Infantry, and it providing three more LRP platoons. But, E-58th was never at full strength, except on paper. To build up the brigade units they would borrow from Echo 58th. So, in truth, Sgt. Blake was recruiting for Echo 58th, although he knew the FNGs he recruited would go to 2nd Brigade.
Blake was an impressive figure, a dark complexioned bull of a man dressed in camouflaged jungle fatigues, and with a felt Australian bush hat set squarely on his head. "I want to tell youse about the Lerps," he told the FNGs that showed up to hear his spiel. "Lerp is L—R-P. It stands for Long Range Patrol.
"Our job is to go out in four or five man teams and find the enemy. Hopefully, we find them without them finding us. Now, youse guys may want to ask why any damn fool would want to do that, when you can have a platoon of thirty-five guys around you? Or when, if you go with a track unit, you could have a nice APC to travel in, and you don't got to walk? Well, think about it. APCs make a lot of noise going through the jungle. So do any platoon of grunts. They got steel helmets banging the brush, rifles hitting against ammo bandoleers, and guys talking at the top of their lungs. We don't do that. Lerps keep quiet. We don't talk above a whisper when we're out there, we tape down, or button down all metal that would bang against somethin' else, we don't wear steel helmets, we wear boonie hats instead, and we walk slow and quiet. There is an advantage to small numbers; you don't make as big a target.
"There are other advantages too," he said. "General Westmoreland says that after youse guys run twenty-five missions you can go back to base camp, and take a cushy job for the rest of your tour. And besides that, instead of the usual one in country and one out of country R and R, as a Lerp you'll get two out of country R and Rs and one in country R and R."
It was not the most articulate pitch I had ever heard, but still Sgt. Blake had struck a cord. Shortly before I had washed out of Officers Candidate School, with full knowledge that I would be headed for Vietnam as a regular grunt, I began thinking about the type war I wanted to fight. Marching through the jungle with a platoon of men that were making more noise than tin cans being drug behind a newly weds car, didn't appeal to me. I liked the idea of small team missions. In fact I wanted to be a LRP even before I knew what one was. I filled out the paperwork and gave it to Sgt. Blake.
A day or two later when Sgt. Blake had had a chance to check out our records, he was back. My turn to see him came in the late morning. I was nervous. I didn't think that I would be anxious to get into any army unit, but I really wanted to be a LRP. When I entered Sgt. Blake started talking without any preliminaries.
"We'll catch a flight from here to Ban Me Thout. We don't have enough camouflaged fatigues right now but in a little while ..."
I interrupted him, he was talking like I was in, but he hadn't said so. "Does that mean I'm a Lerps," I blurted out.
"Oh, hell yeah," he said. "I looked at the test you took when you joined up. We ain't never got nobody with scores like yours before."
So that's how I got to the 2nd Brigade LRPs at Ban Me Thuot.
Every other firebase that I've ever heard of had a name, but if the firebase we were on had one I never heard it, or if I did, I've long since forgotten it. It was simply known by the same name as the Vietnamese city it was near. Ban Me Thuot is in Darlac Province, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The areas status as hill country must have been only in comparison with the Delta farther south. It was pretty flat. There were a few low rolling hills but they didn't seem very impressive, even when compared to the Ozark foothills where I had been raised. There was jungle here and there, really little more than little patches of woods but there were also large open plains. The firebase was in the middle of one of those plains. You could smell the Plains. It wasn't particularly rich soil, but there was a lot of it. The grass gave off a clean herbal smell that to some extent countered the earthiness of the soil.
Our official address was Headquarters Company, 2nd Brigade, LRP Platoon, APO San Francisco 26262, but where we lived was a small cantonment on the Northwest corner of that unnamed firebase. Three rows of tents and a small L shaped parade ground was the heart of the LRP area. The two rows of tents housed the enlisted men and faced a dirt road from one side. The headquarters tent, supply tent and armory faced the road from the opposite side. I was given a cot in the back of the first tent in the second row.
The FNGs had gotten to know each other back in Pleiku, and for the most part we stuck together, at least at first. Of the guys I came in with, I most often hung out with Neugard, Murphy and Torres. I guess that I was tightest with Murphy.
It was pretty easy to tell who was old and who was new. The new guys wore standard army issue olive drab jungle fatigues. The real LRPs wore camouflage fatigues called either Trees or Tigers. The Trees were loose fitting army issue fatigues that were mottled in shades of green, brown and tan. Tigers came through the black market, or by trading with South Vietnamese or Korean outfits. They were tight fitting and had slashes of black interspersed amid splotches of green.
Among the first things the FNGs were given were olive drab, canvas Australian Bush Hats. The brims buttoned to the crown on the right side and lay flat on the left. Throughout Vietnam they were generally know as LRP hats. They were like a badge; we wore them everywhere, with the exception of when we were on a mission. Sgt. Blake's was the only bush hat made from felt.
The first few days were pretty much getting acquainted time. Missions were being run, but the new guys weren't melded into the teams right away. They did have us do some army stuff. Things like walking guard duty. We were too green to be trusted to guard the perimeter, but were entrusted to guard spots like the motor pool that were inside the camp perimeter. That way we would less likely to screw up and let the V.C. overrun the place. For the most part though we just sat around waiting and talking.
The first real LRP that I got to know was Shaner. He was the assistant Platoon Sergeant. It was his job to see that we were equipped and settled. He was a good-looking guy with fair skin and reddish brown hair. Prescription sunglasses almost always hid his eyes; he'd lost his regular glasses while getting away from a bunch of bad guys. For some reason he took a liking to me, and took me under his wing.
"I don't run missions anymore," he told me. "Haven't run any for about a month now. This is my second tour, and I've got something over forty missions behind me."
"I thought you only had to run twenty-five missions?" I asked.
"They didn't make that rule until I was already well passed twenty-five. Some guys just keep running missions anyway. You get pumped up out there, especially when there are VC or NVA around. Old Festus probably has more than fifty missions and he hasn't quit."
"Why did you quit?"
He looked down and shook his head as if he were trying to clear it of the thoughts and visions that were in it. All he said was, "You know when it's time."
After a day or two, Sgt. Blake decided to take us out to zero in the weapons we had been issued. Some of the established LRPs came with us just for the practice, or just to get out of camp. All the FNGs had M-16s. Many of the LRPs that had been there a while carried shortened versions of the M-16 called Commando AR-15s, or more commonly, CAR-15s. One of these established LRPs, Adams, brought along a rifle he had just modified. It was an M-14, the rifle that had been the standard infantry weapon before the M-16. He had cut the stock off at the pistol grip, and shortened the barrel to the length of the gas piston. The whole weapon was no more than 18 inches long.
When the duce and a half2 we were riding in reached our destination the first thing I noticed was that it wasn't a rifle range. It was the camp dump. We were going to zero in our rifles on tin cans and empty bottles.
It was as if I was back on the farm again, plinking tin cans with my Winchester 22 pump. I don't want it to sound like I was raised in the back woods and had to hunt to put food on the table. Our farm was only two miles from town, and our food came from the supermarket, but I had been shooting a rifle since I was seven or eight. For a while, when I was in my teens, we raised pigs. Rats would dig under the concrete slab of the pig house, so that they could dart into the pig house at night to feed on the corn the pigs left behind. I honed my skills with a rifle by running water down one rat hole, and shooting them when they popped their heads out of another.
I was having no problem hitting the cans and bottles I aimed at on the first shot. The fact was, the area we were in was too small to present much of a challenge. None of our targets were more than fifteen or twenty yards away. I decided to make the target practice a little more challenging, and lowered the rifle to my hip. I chose as my target an empty can about five yards away. I didn't notice that Adams had raised his sawed off rifle, and with careful aim down the barrel was honing in on the same target.
We fired at the same time. The can jumped into the air at an angle indicating that the effective shot had been mine. The LRPs around Adams had been concentrating on his shooting, and were unaware that two shots had been fired. They began to congratulate him on his marvelous shot. Only Neugard had clearly seen that it had been my hit. He started to come to the defense of my shooting accuracy, but I raised my finger to my lips in a sign to keep quiet. My grin told him that it was our secret, and that I thought it not a good idea to begin our relationship with guys that had earned their tiger fatigues, with an argument over shooting prowess.
When we got back to base the first thing we had to do was to clean our weapons before turning them in to the armory. I was sitting on a wall of sandbags in front of my tent cleaning my rifle when Shaner came by.
"How did the target practice go?" He asked.
"Pretty good," I said, "but you couldn't get any shots over twenty or twenty-five yards."
"Well you probably won't get many shots at a greater distance when you get out into the jungle either."
I guess I looked confused.
"Those jungles can get pretty thick. There will be sometimes when you can't see five or ten yards."
"I noticed that some of the guys carry rifles other than the M-16 or CAR-15."
"You don't like the M-16?"
"I'd like something a bit more heft, something not as likely to rise up on full automatic."
"I know what you mean," Shaner said. "Some of the guys like different weapons for different reasons. I guess you saw Adams' sawed off jobbie. Miller carries an M-14 too, but he hasn't sawed his off. Hell, I've even seen him go out of here with a bayonet stuck on the end of it. I've known other guys who carry shotguns loaded with buckshot. I didn't carry an M-16 either."
"What did you carry?"
"I carried a M-60 machine gun. I wanted to be able to lay down a pattern of fire without having to change magazines every three seconds. Like you, I also wanted something with more punch than that 5.56 they load into the M-16."
"A machine gun can eat up a lot of ammunition, how did you carry enough ammunition to keep an M-60 fed?"
"I carried a couple of belts of ammunition wrapped over my shoulders. The other guys on the team carried additional belts."
"How do you get something better than an M-16?" I asked.
"Well you can bet the Army's not going to give you anything else, maybe a M-79 Grenade launcher, but that's only good as a secondary weapon. You still need something that's capable of firing on fully automatic. You've just got to keep your eyes open and watch for opportunities to make a trade."
"Well, I guess I'll just have to do that."
"Until then you'll just have to put up with the M-16, starting tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow you guys are going out with Festus. He's taking you on a training mission."
"All right!" I said.
"I don't know about that," Shaner said. "Festus is tough, but ten FNGs might just put him over the edge."
Chapter Two
Friendly Fire
Wednesday, October 16, 1968
Dear Diary,
Tomorrow we go out on a practice mission. I guess I'll get my first taste of the jungles around here. I know it's just a practice mission but still I am a bit nervous. I know it's not a real mission. We aren't going in by helicopter, we are walking. The place we're going is a patch of jungle less than a kilometer away from here.
We drew our weapons and ammunition from the armory. The armory wasn't really a building, or even a tent, it was a large steel shipping crate called a Conex, protected from enemy fire by sandbags on three sides and the top. We were now ready to set out.
"Damn," I heard Murphy's voice behind me.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"Look at this," he said thrusting out the grenade launcher he held in his hand.
"It's an M-79,"1 I said. "Every team carries one with them."
"It's a fucking single shot," he said. "I don't want to carry this damn thing."
"It don't mean nothing," I said taking the M-79 from his hand and giving him my M-16. "We're just going for a walk in the woods." We headed out from the firebase in single file, across the open fields and toward the tree line.
Festus' real name was Gibson, but everybody called him Festus because of his resemblance to the character in the TV show Gunsmoke. The resemblance was strongest after he came in from a mission with a five day growth of beard, unkempt hair and sweat soaked fatigues. With more missions than any active LRP, he was a legend even among the giants.
When we reached the tree line we stopped, and Festus gathered us around him.
"Now, when you leave your helicopter the first thing you do is head for the tree line," he said in a soft southern drawl. "Once inside the tree line you stop and lay dog. There will be four or five of you out there and you'll all be looking in different directions. There's no rule about how long you stay in that location. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe two hours. You just want to be sure that no enemy saw your insertion, and if they did, you want them coming after you while you're in a defensive position. You don't want to walk into them when they're set up in an ambush, and you want to be close to the landing zone. There will be times when you make contact in the middle of the jungle, and have to hightail it to a LZ, but anytime you can set up close to a landing zone you're that much closer to a safe extraction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from For A Time We Were Titans by Tom Reed Copyright © 2007 by Thomas B. Reed. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword....................ixPrologue....................1
Chapter 1 LRP....................5
Chapter 2 Friendly Fire....................12
Chapter 3 Friends Gained....................18
Chapter 4 Friends Lost....................25
Chapter 5 What Happened?....................35
Chapter 6 In the Field Again....................39
Chapter 7 The Field Hospital at Nha Trang....................44
Chapter 8 Back to Bam Me Thuot....................48
Chapter 9 Firebase Mary Lou....................53
Chapter 10 Conflict Between Brothers....................61
Chapter 11 Contact?....................66
Chapter 12 The Holidays 1968....................80
Chapter 13 The New Year....................89
Chapter 14 A Jug of Wine and a Cow....................92
Chapter 15 Festus Runs into Trouble....................98
Chapter 16 Neugard Gets his Nose Pierced....................100
Chapter 17 What a Deal!....................105
Chapter 18 The Giants Are All Gone....................108
Chapter 19 Tac-E....................112
Chapter 20 The LRP That Cried Wolf....................118
Chapter 21 Lookout....................124
Chapter 22 A Bronze Star for Massoletti....................129
Chapter 23 The Ones That Got Away....................134
Chapter 24 Ambush....................140
Chapter 25 Hotel Two Alpha....................147
Chapter 26 Final Mission....................155
Epilogue....................163