At ROTC summer camp at Indiantown Gap, PA, our Drill Instructor was an E-7 veteran of two tours in Vietnam. He had credited the Army with saving him because he thought that without military discipline, he would have ended up in prison. He loved talking about his experiences in Nam, to include explaining how much fun it was to garotte some pajama-clad VC he had encountered on patrol. “That little c***sucker sure squirmed,” he laughed. In addition to the standard, by-the-book Army training, he gave us his own private course on VC tactics.
On our field training exercise before graduating, we were up against an armored cavalry unit that had just come back from Nam. For our first assignment, our platoon had to get off helicopters at a landing zone, march a few miles, sneak up on their encampment and take it. The armored cav squad had a sniper waiting in a tree to slow us down and warn the encampment that we were approaching. But we moved with such stealth and speed that we got to the encampment before they could deploy the sniper. We caught the squad eating lunch, so it was a short fight. Later, we got word that we had pissed off the cav lieutenant colonel who was running the exercise. Our DI seemed awfully proud of that.
That night we were supposed to go on a night march and trigger an ambush. Because of an eye injury I had sustained earlier that day, I was not with the platoon but behind the scenes with the cav light colonel who was running their side of the exercise. He was not a nice guy – in fact, he was one of the most vicious officers I encountered in my entire Army experience – and he got nastier as the night wore on. He became more and more agitated because of reports that our unit had not come by to trigger his ambush.
I wanted to say, “My platoon went through your ambush with such stealth and speed that your men didn’t even notice us. They probably thought it was the wind. If this had been Nam, we would have snuck up behind your people and garrotted the whole lot of them.” Of course, I kept my mouth shut.
The captain running the ambush assumed it had been called off and told his men to pack it in for the night. The colonel was absolutely livid and screamed at the captain over the radio to get his men back on line, and then my platoon was forced to march through the ambush zone again to trigger it.
The next night we had to deploy a defensive perimeter and prepare for an attack by the cav. Our DI had taught us a VC tactic where they would send a small patrol to attack an American unit, withdraw, attack again, withdraw, each time pulling the Americans closer to a full blown defensive perimeter which would open up on them. Our cadet CO of the evening decided to pull this trick on the armored cav. We got their squad right up to the edge of where we would have opened up on them and blown them away when a cavalryman screamed, “Abort! Abort! It’s a VC trick!” He must have had a flashback. They withdrew, the attack never came, and I knew that somewhere, some poor captain was getting reamed by that light colonel.
The next morning we set off to take a hill. Normally this would not have been a big deal with our platoon pitted against a squad, but the light colonel was so steamed that he told us that instead of attacking a squad, our departure would be held up until he could reinforce that hill with an entire platoon. If we didn’t take the hill we would march twenty miles back to our barracks instead of riding in trucks. But we moved with such stealth and speed that we took the hill before he could reinforce it. His people never knew what hit them.
By the time the exercise ended, I saw two very different reactions.
Our DI said, “I would give my left nut to take you guys into combat.”
The lieutenant colonel was in a fog, muttering, “Somewhere in that unit, there’s an evil mind.”
LOL