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—Sgt. Lonnie “Tallman” Caldwell
December, 1966: Platoon leader Lt. Joseph Callaway had just turned twenty-three when he arrived in Vietnam to lead forty-two untested men into battle against some of the toughest, most experienced, and best-trained guerrilla soldiers in the world. Callaway soon learned that most events in this savage jungle war were beyond his control. But there was one thing he could do well: take the best damn care of his troops he knew how.
In the Viet Cong–infested provinces around the Mekong Delta where the platoon was assigned, the enemy was always ready to attack at the first sign of weakness. And when the jungle suddenly erupted in the chaos of battle, the platoon leader was the Cong’s first target. Mekong First Light is at times horrific, heartrending, and heroic, but is always brutally honest. Callaway’s account chronicles a soldier’s painful realization of the true nature of America’s war in Vietnam: It was a war that could not be won.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307416032 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/18/2007 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 279,137 |
| File size: | 963 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE EARLY YEARS
My father was a young artillery lieutenant in the 81st Infantry Division (Wild Cats) stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and my mother was a beautiful young lady from the adjacent town, Enterprise. They were married on November 13, 1942. I was a war baby from a war marriage, and my father would soon be shipping out to the South Pacific islands.
On October 3, 1943, as I sucked in my first breath of Alabama air, World War II was raging in Europe and Asia. Events were also beginning to take place in Southeast Asia that would ultimately lead to America’s role in the Vietnam War and my eventual participation. Ho Chi Minh and his troops, the Viet Minh (the future North Vietnamese Army), fought with the Allies, repatriated downed Allied fliers to south China, and gave information to the Allies on Japanese troop movements. Their actions attracted the attention of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The OSS sent an American advisory team, code-named Deer Mission, to Vietnam, and the team, led by Archimedes Patti, gave selected troops of the Viet Minh army their first instructions in automatic weapons, demolitions, mortars, field tactics, and the like.
My father served overseas in Anguar, Pelilue, the Philippines, and the initial landings on Honshu, Amori, Japan, and fortunately survived the war. When World War II ended, the world split into two distinct philosophical and organizational blocks—the democratic capitalistic countries led by the United States, and the communist dictatorships led by the Soviet Union. Russia, our ally during World War II, became our enemy. These opposing ideological forces engaged in a cold war struggle for global supremacy that lasted more than forty years, until America’s industrial might finally collapsed the Soviet Union’s economy and empire in the late 1980s.
Both nations created highly developed nuclear military capabilities, causing the industrial nations to live under the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation on at least one known occasion, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
During this political, economic, and military cold war, geographic hot wars occurred in third world countries such as Korea, Laos, Cuba, Vietnam, and Afghanistan as the two military giants, often using surrogates, faced off and battled across the globe for world domination. For America and its combat soldiers, the most important hot wars were the Korean War, in the early 1950s, in which my father, Capt. Joseph W. Callaway, Sr., participated, and of course my 1960s war, which was Vietnam.
After World War II, my dad had stayed in the Alabama and Mississippi National Guard. As the Korean War expanded, his unit, the 31st Infantry Division, or so-called Dixie Division, was activated in 1950. He was separated from the division because he had already completed the Artillery Officers Advance Course. Ultimately, after being bounced around with his family from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, he was sent to Korea, where he spent almost a year. It was a difficult period for me, and I spent considerable time with my granddaddy and his black employees. My mother, little sister, and I lived across the street from my maternal grandparents in Enterprise, and we all waited patiently, praying for my dad’s safe return. In Korea, my father was a senior military adviser KMAG (Korean Military Adviser Group) officer to a Republic of Korean Army (ROKA) medium artillery battalion. His artillery firebase was overrun by the Chinese shortly after he left.
Finally, in 1952 my dad returned safely from Korea. While he was away I kept thinking about my friend Joe Tursic, whom I played with every day for months when my family was stationed at Fort Jackson, and how his family one day received a telegram notifying them of his father’s death in Korea. We lived across from them in old World War II barracks that had been converted into family housing. The Tursic family’s crying, sadness, and remorse was almost more than I could bear. And although I was happy my dad was home, it was tough to adjust to him, because I had gone almost a year with little supervision and discipline.
In the early 1950s, Vietnam had already experienced nearly twenty years of almost continual warfare. The nationalistic struggle began in the 1930s against the French colonialists, who controlled Vietnam; it gained momentum in World War II with the Vietnamese’s tenacious resistance against the Japanese, who starved the Vietnamese by commandeering their rice supply to feed Japanese troops in the South Pacific.
When Japan surrendered to the Allies, the French, who had surrendered to the Japanese without a fight, returned to Vietnam to reclaim their colonial empire. The Vietnamese nationalists, led by Ho Chi Minh, aligned with the communists, the only option available to them, because the United States supported its European ally, France, and French colonialism in Vietnam. In 1946, Ho Chi Minh’s forces revolted against the French, and after years of warfare delivered them a stunning defeat at Dien Bien Phu in early 1954. The French government called for a Geneva conference to arrange a peace settlement.
President Harry Truman’s administration had financially supported the French during the war because Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was communist, and President Dwight Eisenhower had continued this policy. The decision in Geneva to divide Vietnam into two parts eventually led to civil war in Vietnam. It was America’s irrational fear of communism and intervention in the civil war that led to our Vietnam quagmire.
While these international conflicts were exploding around the world, I was just a happy little Alabama boy growing up and learning the art of survival in an agricultural environment. Southeastern Alabama in the late 1940s and early 1950s was rural and isolated. White people, as Alabama Caucasians referred to themselves, were skeptical of Yankees, completely distrusted the federal government but worked hard to manipulate it for personal advantage, and generally considered Alabama to be the center of the world. They were still not exactly sure they had lost the American Civil War.
You could buy a Coke for five cents at the store and a roast for fifty cents. We had no television, and the most notable entertainment and social events were the community radio station (WIRB), the Enterprise Ledger newspaper, the local class D minor league baseball team, Protestant churches, the picture show (movies), hunting, fishing, and an occasional trip to the beaches in Panama City, Florida. Local folks often sat together in their homes, talked about their problems and experiences, and told one another stories.
Sometimes at night we would sit around the radio and listen to programs. My granddaddy always listened to the New York Yankees baseball games when they were broadcasted. All the farm families came to town every Saturday to shop and socialize, and everybody knew everyone’s business. My family continued to live on North Rawls Street in a house across the street from my grandparents after my dad returned from Korea, and I roamed around town freely without any concern from dawn to dusk. I was Jo Jo Callaway and did just about anything I wanted.
My buddies and I, by the age of five, were traveling all over town on our bikes. At around age eight or nine, our little group of juvenile adventurers was so bold we would climb into the rafters of the local cotton and peanut oil mills, break into warehouses, and crawl over mountains of cotton bales and oceans of unhulled peanuts to hunt and catch pigeons. We would even sneak into the attic of the Coffee County Court House while court was in session to catch pigeons as they came in under the roof eaves. We stuffed the birds in a croaker (burlap) sack as we caught them. Sometimes we would use a flashlight to engage in these pigeon hunting activities at night; the birds were much easier to catch in the dark. We all had pigeon pens. Owning a large, colorful flock was a status symbol among us, and we engaged in constant trading. Most of our daily activities were dangerous; we were almost wild and completely fearless little boys. First grade was a real bore, and I felt very constrained. I had no interest in sitting in a classroom and wanted to be out in the world seeking new adventures.
Southern Alabama was the land of magnolia trees, azaleas, camellias, kudzu, persimmons, blackberry patches, watermelons, field peas, collard greens, fresh boiled peanuts, pecans, cotton, mimosa trees, mockingbirds, snakes, fig trees, Saint Augustine grass, red clay, brutal thunderstorms, and extremely hot, humid weather. Mules were still used for plowing fields because tractors were too expensive and labor (unskilled black Americans from poor families) was so cheap.
The streets of Enterprise were safe because there was very little crime, but the town had a rigid and well-defined social structure, and there wasn’t much economic mobility for anyone, white or black. It was a traditional southern, racially segregated environment. The African Americans, usually called “colored people” or occasionally “Negroes,” lived in a number of well-defined pockets around the periphery of town. These areas were referred to as the “colored sections.” The white population lived in the nicer areas near the town center, almost the reverse of our urban living patterns today.
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