I, Soldier - part 7

With the battalion trained and the enemy located, all that was left was fortify the outpost. We dug a trench around the whole outpost and village and filled it with razor wire. I managed to get Trautman to fork that over after I revisited the tunnel complex with a spy camera and photographed all the important documents. I was quickly becoming a minor celebrity in the war. Anyway, between the village and the trench, we built palisade out of live bamboo, which grows fast and tall. And behind that, we built a few guard towers. I thought about adding Claymore mines but was worried someone would set them off by accident. Mines and grenades are often more dangerous to the people who are trying to use them than the enemy. And tracer bullets work both ways. That is, it tells you where you’re shooting at and the enemy where you’re shooting from. And…well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

A direct attack wouldn’t work as we were greatly outnumbered. It would be a slow fight via attrition, also called Fabian tactics after a Roman general. When Hannibal invaded Rome, his troops were far from home and had to forage. Fabius concluded that if he could lead Hannibal and his army on a long, wild goose chase, they would weaken enough that the Romans could rally and defeat the invaders. In boxing, the same strategy is called rope-a-dope. Let your opponent wear himself out, then you can win with one punch. Hell, wear anybody out enough and you can knock them over with a feather. The general US approach at the time was called Search and Destroy. It seemed foolish to me, but I saw no point in arguing about it. The idea was that relatively small units would march or fly out somewhere, wander around for a few hours or days and hope they encountered the enemy. It was very wasteful in terms of fuel, ammo, and lives in addition to being free propaganda for the VC. Almost all the mid and senior US officers at the time were WW2 veterans who had been promoted quickly to fill slots left empty by guys who had been killed, wounded, or captured. As a result, few had much experience fighting on the level of a squad or a platoon which is the norm in guerilla warfare. In fact, the word guerilla itself is Spanish for little war. It was coined when the Spanish army was defeated by Napoleon and small bands of Spanish soldiers and civilians continued to resist.

The men in the battalion were hungry for battle and to get some notches on their rifles, so to say. Morale is the most important factor in war, so I needed to find a way to keep their spirits up. Since I had already gotten everything useful out of the tunnel complex, I decided it was time to let the men use it as a punching bag. By this time, I more less knew when the tunnel complex was occupied by VC, how many came in and when, etc. After talking things over with Binh, we decided to let every squad in the battalion search the tunnel complex one at a time. We’d also brief each squad beforehand and imply that they were an elite group chosen for a secret mission. Their only other instruction would be they would be allowed to take only one item from the tunnel complex as a souvenir. All warfare is based on deception, as Sun Tzu wrote.

I was surprised with how smoothly it went. one by one, each squad quietly sneaked through the jungle with all their combat gear (battle rattle is what I call it), boldly infiltrated an empty enemy position, and got a memento for bragging rights. I felt a little bad for the last few squads because by the time they went through, the whole place had been picked clean and it happened all in three nights. It was fun to imagine what went through the VC commander’s head upon discovering everything had been stolen. I never saw any more smoke coming out of that place and was sure they’d never come back.

Things had been going well so far but I was anxious to do more damage to the enemy. The problem was they were embedded in all the towns and villages around me, and I couldn’t just call-in airstrikes on them because of the civilian casualties that would cause. So, I decided to borrow a strategy the British used to stamp out the murderous Thugee cult in India in the 19th century. Basically, we’d kidnap lower echelon VC officers and tell them we’d spare their lives if they told us everything they knew, including the names of at least two other VC and where to find them. Over the next few months, we basically neutralized the VC in our area. Those who didn’t get with the program, we just disappeared them and let the jungle take care of the evidence disposal.

This sort of work is extremely stressful, and it was around this time that I started smoking marijuana and opium which was commonly consumed there. Yeah, I know nobody wants to hear that soldiers did drugs. I had plenty of company. Truth is, towards the end of the war, when it was very unpopular and the Army was full of draftees, there were many soldiers getting high all the time. I drank some beer in college, but since it was hard to find good beer where I was, I decided to go native. A lot of GIs over there had sex with whores too. I never did that. The last thing I needed to worry about over there was getting the clap or taking care of some pregnant woman I knocked up. Young men who think they might die soon often adopt a work hard, play hard, smoke ’em if you got ’em attitude. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. There is a certain logic to that when you see death every day and you can almost feel it like the wind blowing through your hair.