No light meant it wasn’t yet morning. Not even moonlight under the broken bamboo and soggy brush that cascaded down and over almost everything under it. I lay there, disturbed by the fact that I’d lost the ability to determine if I was asleep or awake. Had I slept or been awake for the whole night? Humans had to sleep. I’d read somewhere that the world’s record for going without sleep was only four or five days — about the same time I’d been in country. I didn’t feel rested or experience any of the relief I would have felt if I’d actually slept. It seemed that the night had been filled with one volley of green tracers after another plunging down on our position from the side of the untaken hill, followed by mortar rounds sent back by Lima Company’s on-loan mortar team.
For some reason the mosquitoes had let up. Had they taken in enough of the repellent to cause them to go soggy and inert? I wondered. I thought about the jungles of Vietnam — how they were nothing like I’d been led to expect from Tarzan and other Saturday morning shows from my youth. There was no “triple canopy” stuff, rising hundreds of feet into the air, with vines and liana strung everywhere. Tarzan would have had to walk like the rest of us in the lowlands of Vietnam, where lush green shoulder high brush and bamboo groves were interspersed with only an occasional large cypress, and there was plenty of mud everywhere. Reed clumps permeated every open area and allowed for hooches to be inhabitable with the monsoons approaching. The reeds could be easily cut and then laid under ponchos or the few air mattresses that weren’t filled with holes. I had no mattress since I’d never made it to supply.
My letter home was ready to go although I wasn’t sure I should send it. My wife was back home in San Francisco, waiting. My parents were in Florida doing whatever they were doing, what with my dad being a warrant officer in the Coast Guard. My brother was an army officer tanker serving in the Big Red One down South in a place called Bien Hoa. My letter detailed what was to be done when I didn’t come home. Ever. There was the government life insurance, the six month’s pay, a small private policy with a company called Mass Mutual and the pay I was owed but hadn’t been paid out yet. My list to Mary was eleven items long. I couldn’t believe that everything I had ever had could be easily described in eleven entries, wherein about six of them were rather meaningless.What to do with my Ace Double Science Fiction collection of books seemed idiotic. Would my wife react badly or understand that she had to do certain stuff without me in order to take care of herself and the baby? Would the contents of the letter be too much for her emotionally?
hello jim
i’m reading this out of sequence. a usmc friend sent me the ashau part. i find i can read for about 15 minutes and then i have to stop and do something else…even if it is just get up and walk outside.
i was patrol leader of partyline one (alpha co., 3rd recon bn). we were inserted onto the ridgeline bordering the southern ashau on 1 aug 67. a second patrol, monotype, was inserted 4 klicks east of us on the 2nd. lt. al weh (ran for gov. of new mexico) was the patrol leader. both 8 man patrols. like you mentioned, no arty support, comms via aircraft and a mountain top relay that was very sporadic, and lots of nva and montegnard spotters.
both patrols were in support of operation cloud. cloud was to be a raid into the valley by 2/4 (rein), a vietnamese bn, and the vietnamese black panthers (recon company). long story short, both patrols were hit, (partyline 3 aug, monotype 4 aug) and had casualties. 3 of my 8 man patrol and 1 ch-46 crewchief were kia, al’s patrol was shot up on extract and he was seriously wounded.
op cloud was cancelled on the 4th my III maf. hardly any references to it…you have to really dig. (hmm-164, 3rd recon, III maf, fmfpac). i had some written correspondence with the bn cdr. of 2/4 years later. he told me he wasn’t aware that any recon teams were in his area of operation, and that he had massive arty and air prep scheduled for the area around the old airstrip and lz. my patrol plan included reconing the airstrip and getting extracted with the birds that brought the lead elements (golf company) of 2/4 into the zone, however, we didn’t make it that far before we made contact. i have to assume, but still wonder, if that lz prep would have been caught by the higher-ups and cancelled or shifted.
those we left behind were finally recovered by the joint casualty resolution teams in ’96. they now rest in arlington and michigan.
bad place that lived up to its name.
afterthought…a section of army 175mm had moved into fsb cumberland the day before, but had not been registered. i called in a mission with a large offset. they fired a few rounds with no change on the guns and the splashes were widely dispersed. later told that the spades had not dug in sufficiently and that we were at their max range in any case.
semper fi…best vietnam writing i have read.
Thank you. Most sincerely. Alan Weh and I worked in Albuquerque New Mexico during the 80s.
He was DIA and I was CIA.
He had an air transport company and I had an insurance company.
Extraordinary that you should mention his name.
I was unaware of
his work in the A Shau just before I got there.
I knew he was a Marine Officer, of course,
and remained in the reserves (he didn’t get shot).
Thanks for the vital information you have provided and some of your own story.
Semper fi,
Jim
i passed this on to al
semper fi
bill
Thanks Bill. Always was proud of the work Alan did and his solid integrity.
Didn’t always agree with him but what the hell, this is America.
Thanks for that.
Semper fi,
Jim
Such good writing. I damn near got choked up reading this. Thank you for your service, and thank you for writing this.
Thank you, Dog,
Share the story with friends and have Merry Christmas.
Semper fi,
Jim
Anytime I talked to a Vietnam Vet about my regret that I didn’t go to Nam, ( USMC 0311 73-75) I hated when they said ” your lucky you didn’t miss anything “. After reading your experience I realize how true that is. I believe you didn’t choose the regrettable things that were done. They were there already waiting for you and you how to adapt or die. It’s despicable that you had to worry about getting killed by your own plus the Vietnamese. I’m glad you made it back to the World. Semper Fi
It was surprising more than dispicable. Not ready for that kind of stuff when you are so young.
At least not me. I am glad you didn’t have to go so we can enjoy this communication together.
If you’d gone witb me then it would be likely you would be fairly silent.
Semper fi,
Jim
James I just wanted to say how much I am enjoying reading about your Viet-Nam experiences. I was born in 53 and had a draft number of 39 got my draft notice and physical but Nixon stopped the draft and I wasn’t inducted. Even so this was my generations war and I was touched by it in many ways. I remember going to see the movie Green Beret with a friend and his brother who was shipping out to Viet-Nam and how gung ho he was but when he returned he was different. Another memory is of my neighbor across the street, a young sergeant of 22 with a pregnant wife, he used to play ball with us younger kids and we all looked up to him as our hero. I was home when the notification officer delivered the notice that he had been killed in action in a place called Long An in 1968.I still remember hearing his wife sobbing from inside their home. You are a talented writer who is touching the lives of many from that era in our nations history, glad you survived to tell your story.
Thank you so much Ken. I am working at it. The writing, I mean.
That war snatched some of our best young men and snuffed them out.
And there were so many ways to die out there in that damned jungle.
I write of many of them, many of the undiscussed and unmentionable ways.
Hope it helps some. I didn’t set out to help. The comments have made me want to.
Comments like your own. Thank you for the continuing motivation.
Semper fi
Jim
James–Enjoying your narrative. I was in M/3/9, 1968-69. I see you were also in a ‘Mike’ Company. Maybe I missed it, but what was your Regiment?
Go Noi Island….Brother do we have some memories there…in and out of the Arizona Territory…along the “trail of tears’…working up into the throat of the A Shau….waiting…knowing what was coming….climbing ropes hand over hand in the night, up the mud soaked, vine infested hillsides of the Que Sons…into the teeth of the 57 calibers they pointed down hill instead of into the sky because they knew the planes wouldn’t be coming til dawn…. glad my 81’s stayed with you…S/F
Well Larry, it’s strange to consider the Island without the misery and discomfort of the physical part of all that. You portray some of it like it was.
Air cover was so iffy in those times. The Phantoms were too fast and inaccurate, the B-52 strikes always so far away. Only the Skyraiders would come above at times and then orbit for hours and hours of God blessed droning quiet. But then they had to go home too. Thanks for your comments and so happy your life is anything but a ‘trail of tears’ now. semper fi, jim
Stories never before told. Riviting.
Thank you Tim. I’ve not seen any of this stuff or I guess I would be reading it avidly instead of writing it! Platoon touched a bit on a slight bit of it.
Full Metal Jacket and Fields of Fire caught some too, especially the training and in some ways the way it is supposed to be. This is just about how it
really was. But only in my little area of Gonoi Island in that time and with that outfit.
Semper fi,
And thanks Tim,
Jim
Jim,
When you re-read “Devils Guard,” you’ll see they did the same thing. Same sad necessity, same sad place, just different times and faces. I think it’s part of the unspoken “burden of command” they couldn’t tell us about at Quantico. If I had faced the same situation, I hope I’d have had the courage to do the same.
From the “for what it’s worth department,” I hope any guilt and nightmares have ceased for the brave warriors who performed this sad act of kindness in the midst of the unspeakable madness and survived… I’m sure those they helped do, too.
S/F,
Tim
Thinking back on Quantico Tim is interesting. We went through most of our
classwork at Presley Obannon Hall listening to the Tijuana Brass. It was
Major R.I.K. Kramer’s favorite music. We got no discussions or instructions about
what Vietnam was really like and nobody came back from there to be interviewed. In fact, now,
in retrospect, it’s not surprising. Who among us would have gone? If we had gone whom among us
would have allowed ourselves to be sent to the front line units in the shit?
Semper fi,
Jim
Amazing stuff….my Uncle was in Cu Chi ’66-67, 25th Div 2nd Brig 1st Bn Mech 5th Inf Reg, still won’t talk about it to this day. The realness you bring to my mind is unsettling and yet for me, necessary. He did tell me once when I was a teenager that the only way to have survived was to make yourself truly believe you were already dead and just waiting for the actuality of it to happen. I went into the USAF in ’76, I do not have the words to express the amount of respect I have always had for you guys, and the sadness for you at the same time. GOD Bless you all…
The ‘realness’ Richard. I have to be careful of admissions in this war odyssey. There are those who might feel that my conduct
was pretty piss poor in that I lived in such fear and ignorance of reality. I hope the revelations do allow for more people who were there
to read and ‘open up.’ So many war stories need to be told and so many of them are anything but self-gratifying or heroic, which makes them
pretty hard to tell. And some of them are down right incriminating! War includes a loss of law and decent human behavior but that does
not mean that laws and rules of behavior are not retroactively applied.
Semper fi,
Jim
Gripping to the point feel almost there.
Thank you Pete. I’ve worked at the writing over the years in many genres. I didn’t expect to
do quite so acceptably well, so far, in laying this out. I was re-writing my diaries and letters back there
and the ‘filler’ just came rushing at me.
Semper fi,
Jim
Hard times
I didn’t know those would be about the hardest times of my life. I was so young. And it wasn’t the circumstance that
was so very hard, although the circumstances were dire indeed. No, it was the social side that was so hard. The “Lord of the Flies”
decent into near anthropoid behavior on the part of my fellow man, Marine, civilian and enemy alike. That was hardest of all Jon.
Thanks for the comment and Semper fi,
Jim