The Bonding of Warriors
A Unit History
The Early Years (1966-1967)
Ch 9
by Winslow "Rick" Stetson
The loss of the map was an accident so the sergeant was given the benefit of the doubt and allowed to remain with the unit. In fact, it appeared he might have the makings of a dependable patrol leader when on his next mission; he managed to bring his men safely home after receiving enemy fire. The sergeant requested an emergency extraction after his patrol had made contact, gun ships and a pickup aircraft were scrambled and the men were pulled out. When the patrol returned to Bearcat the sergeant said it had been a close call and as proof, pointed to his canteen that had a bullet hole through it. Reporters picked up on the story and the Old Reliable newspaper published a photo of the sergeant holding his canteen. The cut line below the photo said the long range patrol leader would be looking for a new canteen as 'the one he is holding won't hold water.' The caption continued 'During a recent patrol the team leader spotted an enemy soldier 50 meters behind him. The enemy fired his rifle but struck the canteen instead of the sergeant.'
Not long after the story was published in the paper, one of the men on the patrol came to Stetson with a troubled look and asked if he could speak with the officer. When asked what was wrong, the LRRP replied, 'Sir, that mission we were on did not happen exactly the way the sergeant said it happened.' Stetson both anticipated and dreaded the response when he asked the patrol member if there had been any enemy contact. 'No sir,' the soldier replied. 'Our patrol leader took off his web gear and fired a round into his canteen so we would have a reason to get extracted.'
With a knot forming in his stomach, Stetson thought about the pilots. The LRRPs had spent nine months in country developing a bond of trust with some of the Army's best aviators who would risk both aircraft and crew to pull a patrol out of danger even if the call came in the middle of the night. If that if that bond of trust was broken, if there was doubt in the minds of the aviators when they received a call for an emergency extraction, the relationship between the two units would be jeopardized. To prevent that from happening, the sergeant had to be removed from the unit immediately. No disciplinary action was taken because an Article 15 would slow down the out processing. Losing the privilege of wearing the black beret and the prospect of being sent to a line outfit would serve as the punishment. Fortunately, the personnel office understood the need for the LRRPs to have trustworthy soldiers in the unit and in the rare instances when someone did not measure up, there was no delay in cutting the orders needed to remove him.
Training was a continuous process for members of the long range patrol and some of their activities could not escape notice by soldiers stationed at Bearcat. For example, whenever the LRRPs trained on the McGuire rig which was nothing more than a long rope with a harness on the end that could be dropped into the jungle when an emergency extraction was called for. In such a situation, the patrol members could slip into the McGuire harness and be pulled up through the trees to the helicopter hovering above. Roy Nelson was supervising one of the training sessions while wearing a foot cast from a previous injury. The cast, however, did not prevent Nelson from demonstrating how the McGuire rig worked and after snapping on the harness, the first sergeant was yanked into the air and took off high above the dusty base camp. At the same time, the commanding general emerged from his headquarters, looked up and noticed a soldier being pulled by a helicopter while dangling at the end of a rope while wearing a gleaming white cast on one of his feet. The general ordered his aide to find the name of the soldier who was going through that type of training while wearing a cast but Nelson never heard any repercussions. Perhaps when the general learned it was a LRRP first sergeant at the end of the rope, it explained everything.
Rappelling was conducted on a regular basis. There were not a lot of trees on the base camp but fortunately the D Troop area had one that was suitable for rappelling training. The LRRPs constructed a platform about 30 feet off the ground, nailed some climbing boards on the trunk, and they were in business. Once the soldiers had mastered the basics of rappelling off the platform, they progressed to coming out of a hovering helicopter.
Physical training by the long range patrol was another activity that attracted attention. It was hard to miss a platoon of soldiers' double timing over the Bearcat streets while singing, 'I want to be an Airborne Ranger, jump from planes and live in danger.' Few of the units on the base conducted such activity yet the LRRPs realized fitness was essential in order for them to patrol with heavy packs and if the occasion demanded it, to outrun the enemy. Not all the men enjoyed running around the base camp during the middle of the day in high heat and humidity, but the runs helped build conditioning, mental toughness and a sense of unit esprit as soldiers trying to relax in the shade would shake their heads and mutter, 'There go those crazy LRRPs.' Of course the runners would rub it in a bit by shouting, 'On the right, sick call, sick call.'
Word got around that when it came to training, the 9th Division's long range patrol had things squared away. When the MACV Recondo School suspended operations in order to conduct training for their own personnel, arrangements were made for new in-country arrivals from the 101st Airborne long range patrol to be trained by the veteran LRRPs from the 9th. Roy Nelson conducted the initial briefing for a lieutenant and his men from the 'Screaming Eagle' division shortly after they arrived at Bearcat to begin their training. Nelson received the impression that because the lieutenant and his men were 'airborne,' and he and his trainers were 'legs,' (non-airborne) there was not much need to go through training with the 9th Infantry Division soldiers. The 101st soldiers were not particularly attentive when Nelson said although most of the training would take place close to the perimeter of the base camp, there was still a chance of enemy contact and the same noise and light discipline procedures would be followed as if they were far from friendly support. In addition, he stressed the need for safety since everyone would be carrying live rounds.
The first sergeant's safety message apparently did not reach all the airborne soldiers because as SP4 Daniel Salvatore helped teach a fast reaction drill just outside the berm at Bearcat, one of the new arrivals put a round through his leg. Nelson was furious when he learned of the shooting yet the airborne lieutenant acted as if it was 'no big deal' since Salvatore had 'only been wounded.' The first sergeant assured him that it was indeed a big deal because one of his best soldiers had been taken out of action. He informed the lieutenant that he needed to round up his men and prepare to report back to his unit.
Before the 101st soldiers left Bearcat, they went on one final training mission and it too, did not go well. The training exercise took place near a rubber plantation where some of the airborne soldiers opened fire and killed a woodcutter and his water buffalo. Roy Barley was on stand down back at Bearcat and was asked to take his team out to the area in a deuce and a half and load up the woodcutter's ox cart. They reached the scene but as Barley and his men struggled to lift the heavy wooden ox cart into the back of the truck, warning shots were heard in the surrounding woods. The men left and headed to the woodcutter's village where his widow was paid for the loss of life. Barley was surprised to find the woman received more for the loss of the water buffalo than she did for her husband. By the time they left the village it was dark so the men hurried back to the base camp. When he arrived, Barley asked about the soldiers from the 101st and was told they had packed their bags and left.
The 9th Infantry Division LRRPs continued to demonstrate they could find the enemy as indicated in an October 25, 1967 Old Reliable newspaper article with the headline, 'LRRP's count 9 VC after brief firefight.' The article's dateline is 'Long Thanh' and in it, SGT Hilan Jones was quoted as saying, 'Our patrol was nearing a landing zone where we were to be extracted when we noticed movement in a window of a house to our front.' Jones, from Thermopolis, Wyoming, continued, 'As we crouched in the thick brush watching the house we could hear men talking about 50 meters to our front and rear.' Team member SP4 Ed Beckley of Middletown, Conn. added, 'About that time two men entered the house carrying weapons.' The patrol leader then radioed for permission to move in on the house.' I called for them to come out and when they heard me I saw them run for their weapons,' recalled Jones. 'So I threw a grenade in and we opened fire.'
The firefight resulted in six enemy KIA and after sweeping the area before their extraction, the patrol detained a suspect found hiding in the bushes. In addition, four pounds of documents and six rifles were collected during the sweep. Jones and Beckley returned to the area with a reaction force from D Troop about an hour after the patrol was extracted. When fire was received from a house in the area, the reaction force opened up resulting in one enemy KIA. During the sweep by D Troop, two additional bodies were discovered, two suspects detained and two small arms, 50 pounds of military equipment and 500 pounds of rice captured. There were no friendly casualties during the operation.
The same patrol was described a bit more dramatically by A. F. Gonzalez and A. Bryan in an Article titled 'Flop Hat Jungle Rats' in the August, 1968 issue of Saga Magazine: It had been a stinking mission. Here, the floppy-hatted GI scouts were dozens of miles deep into Viet Cong Territory and their Cambodian guide was puking his guts out, too weak to continue the cloak-and-dagger patrol. Its leader, 26 year old Sgt. Hilan Jones, finally muttered, 'Screw it,' to himself and got on the radio to call in a chopper to get the team the hell out of there. They had been humping it out in the boonies for three days and hadn't seen a single Charlie.
The five men moved silently down toward the landing zone when suddenly Jones' hand went up for silence. From hooch along the trail came the sing-song sound of male Vietnamese voices. Charlie was having lunch, mistakenly thinking he was safe and sound, and a long way from Yank firepower. The patrol fanned out and closed in, knowing they would have to get rid of the VC before the choppers came into ground-fire range. The voices stopped as the Yanks tightened the noose. Jones crept toward the hut's back door, kicked it open, hosed down the luncheon scene with a whole magazine of M-16 ammunition and flipped in a grenade. As he hunkered down, a savage explosion tore the hooch apart and the Charlie's scampered through the hut's front door for safety. The other GI's M-16s opened up and savage streams of fire crowded the doorway with the twisting bodies of dying VC. Six men were chopped down in a welter of blood. Two dove into the woods and got away. Another pair, blood-soaked, quivering with terror, came out with their hands up, just as the chopper arrived and began to hover for the pick-up. A 10-man VC squad had ceased to exist in just 30 seconds.
'We surprised them so completely,' says Jones, 'that they never even got a round off at us. Out of the six rifles we captured- three Chicom pieces and three American M-2 carbines- only one had a round in the chamber. It was more an accident than anything else. We weren't actually looking for that sort of thing.'
In the 'Saga' account of Jones' patrol, reference was made to a 'Cambodian guide.' The 9th Infantry Division LRRPs starting experimenting with the use of native guides during the second half of 1967. In their article, Gonzalez and Bryan wrote about the practice of long range patrols using native guides: 'These guides used to be ARVN scouts, and for a time a number of mercenaries from border tribes-Cambodians for the most part- were assigned to the LURPS. 'We had our ups and downs with them' said Matsuda of the mercenaries. 'We had 12 of them assigned to us and four of them were real good. The rest sort of ruined the program for the four good one. Their endurance is very short and after three days humping in the field, they're just about shot. Some of them had a problem with noise discipline. Surprisingly, we had a few that just couldn't control themselves once they saw Charlie in the field. They panicked. So rather than jeopardize the team some of the team leaders refused to take the mercenaries out. Of the four good ones, I would say their sense and perception is better than ours. They pick up trails, signs, things we very seldom pick up.'
The LRRPs discontinued using mercenaries and instead, started successfully working with VC defectors called, Tiger Scouts or Kit Carson Scouts. The defectors were usually familiar with the AO and as Matsuda pointed out, 'they know the terrain, and they know how Charlie sets up the traps, where to look for them and where to look for caches.'
In November, a patrol's close encounter with the enemy again made Old Reliable headlines in an article titled, 'LRRP's slip away from VC dragnet.' When the patrol, led by SSG Emory Parrish of Fullerton, California, first moved into position, they heard a single rifle shot but then, nothing more except normal jungle sounds. After a couple of hours, PFC Thomas Perzanowski of Syracuse, Indiana began hearing increased jungle noises and sticks popping. 'The noises seemed to be coming from my left, then my right and rear.'
The LRRP's remained silent until the intruders began throwing sticks in their direction, 'trying to get us to give away our positions,' according to Perzanowski. One of the sticks hit a bush in front of Perzanowski and then struck him. 'The sticks were coming in from both sides,' he explained. The patrol leader used a night vision device and spotted two VC. One of them was carrying a Chicom carbine. Parrish added, 'They were just standing around eyeing our area like they weren't sure we were there.'
As the VC tightened their net, Parrish signaled back and moments later, two helicopter gun ships and an extraction helicopter were on their way. Then a VC who had advanced dangerously close to the LRRP position stepped on a stick which cracked loudly. The recon team quickly opened fire. 'We maintained a steady volume of fire,' stated Perzanowski. 'On about my 15th shot, I hit a VC to my front.'