Battle Ready

12,000 MILES FROM PHILADELPHIA

Tony Zinni never forgot the first time somebody shot at him.

It was at the end of April, in 1967. He was a green U.S. Marine first lieutenant, barely a month in Vietnam, where he was assigned as an adviser to the elite South Vietnamese Marines, that nation’s most effective fighting force.

The advisers’ job was not to give the Vietnamese Marines tactical advice (they had more fighting experience than most Americans, and it was their country). Rather, the obligation of the advisers was to apply American air and artillery firepower when that became necessary (which was frequently), and to provide American logistics, coordination with American units, and American intelligence. The Vietnamese were weakest in these areas. The job of the advisers, in other words, was to make the Vietnamese system work.

As the most junior adviser, Zinni was not assigned to one unit, the usual practice, but sent wherever he was needed. In his words, he was “the utility infielder.” He bounced around from unit to unit.

In his eyes, this was not at all a bad thing. He got a chance to see all kinds of different people and places, and soak up a wealth of varied experiences.

In his first advisory assignment, he’d spent a couple of weeks in the tidal swamps of the Rung Sat—“the Forest of Death”—near the Mekong Delta. Now he had been ordered to Binh Dinh Province in the northern part of the II CTZ (Corps Tactical Zone), where he was to take up duties with the Vietnamese Marines 5th Battalion, replacing an adviser returning home on emergency leave.

The 5th Battalion had long been heavily involved in an operation the Americans were calling “Pershing.” Its aim was to use the U.S. 1st Cavalry and the VNMC (Vietnamese Marine Corps) to root out and destroy the communist infrastructure: to clear and pacify, to interdict infiltration routes, and to reeducate the people (“win hearts and minds”). Pershing took up the better part of 1967.

It took Zinni three days to travel from the Rung Sat to Binh Dinh. The last leg was by helicopter. He arrived at the battalion position at sunset.

The helo landed in a dry rice paddy next to a tree line, where he was met by Jim Laney, the 5th Battalion junior adviser, now filling in for his boss on emergency leave. Laney was a mustang, a onetime enlisted man who had received a meritorious commission as an officer.

He led Zinni through the tree line and into the battalion command post, a half-destroyed hut (it was roofless, and the wall facing the line of troops and paddy area had been completely blown away). As they walked past the Marine positions, Zinni noticed that they were digging in at the edge of the paddies just a few meters from the hut, obviously getting ready for serious action. The battalion had been conducting a parallel sweep on both sides of a vast east-west open rice paddy complex.

“We’ve been in continuous contact since we began the sweep,” Laney explained, “and they’ve attacked us every night. They consider this area to be theirs. They’ve owned it for a long time. We’re intruders.

“You’ll move across the paddy area tomorrow morning,” he continued, “to join the battalion executive officer who has two companies on the other side.”

“Why can’t I just cross the paddy now?” Zinni asked.

Laney laughed. “You won’t get ten yards before they pick you off. In the morning, the Marines will clear the area just to our west. Then you can cross.”

Zinni stepped into the roofless, three-sided hut and met the battalion commander, a tough but friendly and wise old Marine major named Nha, and a combat legend. He gave Zinni a warm welcome, insisting that he join him for chow.

Later, as they ate, a full moon left an eerie glow across the paddies. After dinner, as Zinni was settling into a corner of the hut for the night, Laney reminded him that they surely would be hit; he should be ready.

That got young Zinni’s attention. Excited to be getting into a close-quarters firefight for the first time, he carefully laid out his M-16 and harness, figuring out how he would roll out of his poncho liner, grab his rifle and gear, and come up ready to shoot.

Sure enough, around midnight, the whole area erupted with fire.

Zinni bolted out of a deep sleep and spun into action, surprising himself with how quickly he rolled, grabbed the gear, and was down in a shooting position ready for action. There was one problem. It was dark as a coalpit in hell. What happened to the full moon? He heard the others on the radio and the return fire, but he couldn’t see a thing, not even tracers.

He shouted to Laney: “Can you see anything? I can’t.”

“You’re facing the wrong way,” Laney yelled back over the firing.

Zinni then realized that his planned “roll” into action had been in the wrong direction and he was facing the back wall of the hut. Red-faced, he crawled around. Major Nha was laughing sympathetically; he felt for the new guy.

Anyhow, Zinni’s embarrassment passed quickly when it hit him that rounds were whizzing overhead and slamming into the back walls. He could clearly see the enemy muzzle flashes and the outgoing tracer fire of the Marines.

In time, he would develop into an experienced veteran who could remain focused in the madness of a firefight. The sounds and flashes from the weapons would tell him what types were firing, at what distances, and how many there were. But at this point, all he heard was a cacophony of noises, flashes, and blasts.

After about twenty minutes, the firing trailed off and eventually ceased. The others crawled back under their poncho liners, but Zinni was still too excited to sleep. This was his first experience with a close exchange of fire. He was standing at the front of the hut, gazing out across the moonlit paddies and thinking about the attack, when a single round cracked, zinged right between his legs, and slammed into the hardened mud base on the hut floor. “Oh, shit!” he realized. “I shouldn’t be standing up!”

He dove back into the hut and slipped under his poncho liner. The next morning at first light his Vietnamese cowboy,[7] who had witnessed this adventure, handed him a cup of steaming coffee and the spent round he’d dug out of the floor. “Keep it as a reminder not to be stupid,” he said.

“Thanks,” Zinni replied, meaning it.

Meanwhile, the scouts and lead units had already started forward, and Major Nha determined it was clear enough for Zinni, his cowboy, and his radio operator to cross over to join the other half of the battalion on the south side of the paddies.

After the linkup, the battalion executive officer provided Zinni with a running description in fluent English of the area and the operation.

“The Vietnamese Marines have operated in Binh Dinh Province on and off for the last three years,” the executive officer (XO) explained as they moved out. “Our area of operations is on the Bong Son Plain, which starts at the coast of the South China Sea and spreads west into the foothills and mountains of the Central Highlands. It’s a critical area, with major seacoast cities, airfields, and ports; it’s a major rice-producing area, with many lakes and waterways; the principal north-south highway of Vietnam, Highway 1, runs through it; and it’s also the major food-producing area of the central region.

“In 1965, the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) moved into the area and remains the primary American unit operating here.

“This is a hard-core VC region; stay-behind cadres were left by Ho Chi Minh after the French Indochina War,” in violation of the peace treaty that divided Vietnam; “there are heavy concentrations of VC [Vietcong] sympathizers; and many homes and classrooms still have pictures of Ho Chi Minh. The dense forests and mountains in the western part of the province give sanctuary to the enemy and easy access from the Central Highlands near the Cambodian border to the populated areas on the coastal plain. You can expect almost continuous enemy sniping or hit-and-run attacks.”

Not long after Zinni moved out with the battalion XO and the two companies, they made contact with the VC again. They were at a crossing point between rice paddies and a line of trees when their point squads came under fire. The lead company quickly moved up on line and got into a heavy exchange of fire with dug-in VC. With only three to four hundred meters of paddies separating the VC from the Marines, the rounds were zinging all over.

In order to get a better sense of the fight, Zinni and the XO moved forward. The XO stood at the edge of the tree line and examined the enemy positions, then looked around for Zinni, signaling for him to join him. Zinni was soon standing beside him, anxious not to screw up.

“I’d like to put some artillery on the enemy positions,” the XO told Zinni, pointing at the area he had in mind, about five hundred meters away. At that moment, rounds hit a tree nearby and Zinni hit the deck. “Don’t worry,” the XO said, with a smile, “the VC fire is high. It’s okay to stand up.”

Zinni stood, then started his radio call for fire procedure. Though he had never before called in a fire mission, even in training, he knew basically how it was done, and he’d been tested on it. He carefully went through the remembered procedure. A few minutes later, artillery rounds smacked into the VC positions a few hundred meters away. While trees exploded all around from flying shrapnel, he stood, observing and adjusting the fire… without noticing that the VC were also adjusting their fire, bringing it down. VC rounds were starting to hit all around him; but this did not faze Zinni, focused as he was on the artillery.

After a time, the VC fire slacked off and he could tell they were breaking contact.

But when he turned toward the XO to get his take on that, he noticed that everybody was on the ground covering their heads. “Get down!” the XO was yelling. “Now they’re shooting low!”

Moments later, the Marines began moving across the paddies and pursuing the enemy. As they went by, they smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

Later, the XO told him how impressed they’d been that he’d stood up under the enemy fire and called in the artillery rounds “danger close” on his first mission. Zinni didn’t know what he was talking about (the term was new to him), but since he seemed pleased, Zinni didn’t ask questions.

He realized later what had happened: In his unfamiliarity with the whole process of targeting artillery, he had called the fire mission directly onto the enemy positions rather than creeping it in from behind, the usual procedure when the target was within six hundred meters—“danger close.”

Meanwhile, the Marines treated him like a fearless hero. God protects the innocent and the ignorant.

The rest of the sweep was a continuing series of hit-and-run gun battles:

At one point, VC burst up from camouflaged holes just as the headquarters element came by, but they were taken out by the security platoon almost before Zinni realized what was happening. The platoon leader, a big guy and half French, carried a Thompson submachine gun without a stock and was deadly with it.

After another firefight, they found several VC bodies, including — to Zinni’s amazement — two young women, obviously twins and beautiful. “This isn’t unusual,” a lieutenant told him. “The VC have a number of women in their ranks.”

“Strange war,” Zinni thought.

Tony Zinni had arrived in Vietnam a month earlier, on March 26, 1967, leaving behind a large and loving blue-collar Italian family in Philadelphia and a bride of only a few weeks, who stayed with her own family in Atlanta in Tony’s absence.

He had come to be a Marine by way of Villanova University in Philadelphia, where as an undergraduate he’d joined a Marine equivalent of ROTC, called the PLC—“Platoon Leaders Class.” He had received additional basic and officers training at Quantico, and graduated from Villanova as a Marine second lieutenant.

After additional training at Quantico, he had been sent to the 2nd Marine Division based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where he spent a little over a year as a rifle platoon commander, infantry company commander, and commander of an infantry training company.

After his stint at the Infantry Training Regiment, he returned to his parent unit, the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, where he expected to be a platoon commander. But because they were short of officers, he became a company commander… incredibly good luck, since it was a captain’s job, and he was still only a second lieutenant.

Meanwhile, the lieutenants in his battalion were getting orders to Vietnam. Soon, two-thirds of the Marine Corps were in that country fighting the first big battles. They were short of officers.

But there remained one lieutenant without orders to Nam — Tony Zinni. All of his contemporaries — his buddies — were going to be combat vets and he was going to remain a virgin. He wanted to go to Nam.

He got his wish after his wedding and brief honeymoon in Williams-burg, Virginia. When he returned to his battalion, his orders to Vietnam were waiting for him. They were strange orders. His buddies had all gone to U.S. Marine units, mostly to one of the two Marine divisions then in Vietnam. Zinni was to report to the Marine Advisory Unit, of the Naval Advisory Group, of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). He had no clue what this meant. He would only find that out in Vietnam.

But first, he was sent to attend the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg and go through the school’s Military Assistance, Training, and Advisory (MATA) course at Fort Bragg, where, among other things, he would learn to speak and write basic Vietnamese.

After a week of orientation in Saigon, Zinni was taken to the headquarters of the Vietnamese Marine Corps on Le Thanh Ton Street, a collection of old colonial buildings that had once been the headquarters of the legendary French Foreign Legion.

After the inevitable processing and issuing of uniforms (he thought the Vietnamese Marine tiger-striped camouflage uniforms and green berets[8] were very macho), he was taken to an assigned hotel room. Advisers were provided with rooms either in Saigon or in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon. Zinni’s, in the Five Oceans Hotel in Cholon, became his “home” when he was in town from the field, and was a welcome oasis where he could clean up and get a decent night’s sleep.

The first days at Le Thanh Ton were devoted to briefings on the unit and its mission.

These were condensed, technical, and very fundamental: the number of VNMC battalions, their structure, their locations, their weapons, their day-to-day operations, what the advisers were doing… but not much history, background, or military culture. Though Zinni was eager to pick up much more information about this fascinating unit, that had to come later — on the fly or in bars.

Here are a few basics:

The Vietnamese Marine Corps — the Thuy Quan Luc Chien (TQLC) in Vietnamese — was formed in 1954 and had its origins in the French Dinassault, the river assault units of the Indochina War. From small postwar detachments, the TQLC grew to become the premier fighting force of the South Vietnamese military. It saw combat during its whole twenty-one-year existence and won numerous battle honors. Along with the Vietnamese Airborne, the TQLC comprised the National Strike Force—“fire brigades” that were only committed to action where there was a critical threat or military emergency. The Marine battalions consequently saw action in all the Corps Tactical Zones in South Vietnam during the war (as well as in Cambodia and Laos), building a reputation as tough, courageous fighters and superb light infantry. They also had a reputation as a powerful political force whose support was necessary for any Vietnamese leader who aspired to seize or hold power.

In 1963, they were the force that engineered the coup that captured and later executed President Diem. They continued to play kingmaker in subsequent coups and what were called “elections”—including the one in 1967, which Zinni observed at close hand.

During 1967, the Vietnamese Marine Corps had five infantry battalions in the field (another, then forming, entered service that year). When the war ended in 1975, the TQLC had reached division size.

They were not desk warriors. Better than eighty percent of a Vietnamese Marine’s time was spent deployed in the field conducting combat operations. The remaining time was spent at the National Training Center or back at their battalion base camps where their families usually lived. These were all located near Saigon, except for the 4th Battalion whose camp was in Vung Tau, a beautiful seaside resort on the South China Sea.

Though they occasionally conducted amphibious operations with the U.S. Marines and more extensive riverine operations in the southern part of the country, most of their operations had them fighting as light infantry task forces comprised of one to three battalions plus support elements.

The heart of the TQLC was its infantry battalions, each with its own proud identity and colorful unit name — such as “Crazy Buffalo,” “Sea Wolf,” “Black Dragon,” “Monster Bird,” and “Killer Whale.”

They were much respected and admired by the Vietnamese people (anyone wearing their uniform — including Americans — was customarily honored in cities, towns, and villages throughout the country). And they traditionally marched at the head of the military formation in Vietnam’s annual National Day Parade, a place of honor that had to be earned each year from combat performance. A very different reaction came from areas controlled by the Vietcong — further confirmation of the respect they commanded.

Enlisted Marines were wiry, tough volunteers who’d earned the right to be Marines by going through a challenging boot camp. It did not take most of them long to develop the ability to accept hardships and pain and soldier on under extreme conditions that would break most men. Most of them had mottoes like “Cop Bien” (“Tigers of the Sea”) or “Sat Cong” (“Kill Communists”) tattooed on their forearms, thus ensuring their fate if captured and encouraging them to fight harder and never surrender. Many had been wounded, and most suffered from bouts of malaria. All had seen friends and comrades die in battle. Yet they were by no means grim; they looked for every opportunity to let loose their lively spirits and sense of humor. They were irrepressible practical jokers, never losing a chance to pull somebody else’s chain — yet never cruelly or meanly. It was always to share a laugh and not to cause pain.

The Vietnamese officers were no less tough, and no less lively. But they had also received serious professional training at the Vietnamese equivalents of our military academies, all graduating near the top of their class. Like the enlisted men, they spent more time in action in the field than at home bases. This experience had honed most of them into tactically competent leaders whose small unit skills and technical proficiency were exceptional; they all tended to lead from the front. Many older officers were highly decorated with both Vietnamese and American awards for heroism.

Discipline in the TQLC was predictably harsh.

The second-floor offices of the advisory unit at Le Thanh Ton overlooked the Vietnamese Marine brig where inmates were made to run in circles carrying huge rocks during the hottest part of the day. They were constantly harassed or struck if they faltered or failed to instantly meet a guard’s barked instructions.

They handled security with similar severity.

During a break one day, Zinni was standing out on the second-story balcony over the headquarters main entrance watching the traffic on the one-way street. A young man on a motor scooter was coming down the wrong way. The Vietnamese Marine sentry shouted for him to stop; but he just laughed and sped on. The sentry then aimed his rifle and shot him dead.

The incident shocked young Zinni, but gave him a quick insight into the Vietnamese Marines: They did not fool around.

THE ADVISERS

The Marine Advisory Unit traced its beginnings back to a U.S. Marine colonel named Victor J. Croizat. A fluent French speaker and World War Two veteran, Croizat had experience with the French forces in Algeria and in the Indochina War; served an initial tour in MACV as it formed after the Indochina War; and was directly involved in the forming of the Vietnamese Marines. He modeled the advisory effort to support the Vietnamese Marines after the French approach: Instead of American advisory “teams,” as was the usual American practice with Vietnamese units, there would be only two U.S. Marine advisers per infantry battalion, and specialty advisers for artillery, communications, medical, motor transport, and senior staff positions. The advisers completely immersed themselves in the units. They and the Vietnamese troops were essential parts of the same team; the Americans couldn’t isolate themselves. They wore Vietnamese Marine uniforms, ate their food, spoke their language, and shared their hardships. This forced total integration and dependence, and built mutual trust.

In 1967, there were thirty-five advisers total in the Marine Advisory Unit. The number would grow in later years as the VNMC grew toward division size.

Between two and three hundred U.S. Marines served in the Marine Advisory Unit during the war. Since they were generally among the top U.S. Marine officers, they were respected and valued by the Vietnamese (and called “covan,” a term of respect). Overall, the personal relationships between Americans and Vietnamese were superb, though now and again an adviser would suffer severe “culture shock” or experience a serious problem adjusting to the Vietnamese way of doing things and have to be moved from the unit.

The role of the adviser was not specifically defined. Zinni never received a briefing or written description of the duties he was to perform. He was expected to immerse himself in the job and figure out what he had to do.

This did not surprise him. It is the U.S. Marine way: You are given what you need and then the job is your responsibility; the assumption is that you can do it. Such an approach to life suited Zinni.

Though he didn’t receive much initial guidance, the specific military responsibilities of the advisers quickly became obvious to him: They coordinated all operational activities with U.S. units and with the support provided by U.S. units, such as airlift, logistics, and fire support. They controlled and directed all artillery, naval gunfire, and air support. Beyond this, each adviser contributed whatever else he could add, based on his own experience and the desires of the Vietnamese commanders.

Vietnam is a vastly diverse land. It has steep mountains, broad coastal plains, thick mangrove swamps, tangled jungles, and a vast flooded delta. Because the Vietnamese Marines moved all over the country, they had to adapt to a great variety of terrain, enemy, and operational characteristics that shaped the unique nature of the local conflict. The advisers saw it all.

Because they moved from unit to unit or could be called back to their headquarters at any time, they saw more of Vietnam than any other group of U.S. military personnel. (They were given blanket travel orders that authorized them to travel anywhere in Vietnam at any time.) As the junior adviser, Zinni moved from unit to unit all over the country wherever a hole had to be plugged, scrounging rides from all sorts of military and nonmilitary means of transportation.

Each area presented a unique set of challenges for conducting military operations and for surviving from day to day. As an example, unlike with U.S. units, the Vietnamese Marines had to come up with their own food. Where they couldn’t buy it, they had to catch it. Food was plentiful in the delta region, where fat white grubs could be cut out of the mangrove trees and large iguana-like lizards were easy delicacies to come by. In the jungle, food was more difficult to acquire unless you knew what to look for and were patient enough to forage or hunt for such delights as monkeys, snakes, bamboo shoots, or breadfruit. In the northern mountains, food could be scarce, especially in the dry season, and bitter greens, dried fish, and a little rice could be all you ate in a day.

There were two seasons in Vietnam: wet, and dry. Each was extreme. During monsoon season everything was drenched by afternoon deluges and the constant damp made it hard to dry out. In the dry season, the heat was intense and unrelenting, even at night. The killer heat made field operations difficult. For Americans like Zinni, it took a while to acclimatize and learn how to survive.

South Vietnam was divided for the war into four Corps Tactical Zones (CTZS), the Rung Sat Special Zone (RSSZ), and the Capital Military District (CMD).

During his tour of duty in 1967, Zinni experienced what amounted to five very different wars. He served with the Vietnamese Marines in the mangrove swamps and river complexes of the RSSZ; the water world of endless rice paddies, canals, and rivers of the Mekong Delta (IV CTZ); the dense, steamy jungles near the Cambodian border (III CTZ); the broad coastal plain and high mountains of the central region (II CTZ); and the complex of villages and colonial plantations that surrounded Saigon (CMD).

In his second tour of duty in 1970, he completed the circuit by serving in the northernmost zone (I CTZ — better known as I Corps).[9]

The enemy in each of these regions could range from first-rate North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars to competent mainline, or full-time, Vietcong units, to guerrilla forces of varying fighting skill. They cleverly adapted their style of fighting to the environment and local conditions to add to the uniqueness of operating in each area. The style of VNMC operations differed greatly, depending on the type units assigned to the region and their own adaptations to the area.

Zinni learned very quickly that this was a war without consistency. There was no way to reliably characterize it. In the First World War or the Korean War, there had been battle lines and fronts — one side here, the other side there. In Castro’s revolution, the war had been won by guerrillas and insurgents, embedded in the people; they could be anywhere. In Vietnam, many different kinds of wars were fought.

Tony Zinni’s travels allowed him to experience most of them. The experience affected him deeply.

He has thoughts on the subject:

Back in the United States, those who considered themselves knowledgeable about the war tended to call it an insurgency, with all the usual props and trappings: clandestine rather than overt operations, political actions to win hearts and minds, acts of terror and intimidation, guerrillas — workers or farmers by day, fighters by night — no fixed battle lines, skirmishes and raids rather than pitched battles.

In Vietnam, there were times when we ran into guerrilla-type actions. But there were also times when we’d find ourselves in pitched battles with regular North Vietnamese forces. In fact, in the northern parts of South Vietnam, that was more often the case than not. In the south, the reverse was more usually the case. There we were more likely to encounter guerrilla action; but even there we ran up against different kinds of war. At times, we would be dealing with farmer by day, guerrilla by night, a very different kind of situation than dealing with mainline VC units, who were full-time guerrillas. But these were very different, again, from NVA soldiers, as was the nature of the combat with them.

And then to add to the complications, each environment had its own special requirements. If you were in the Mekong Delta in the Rung Sat Special Zone, you had a much different style of fighting than you might encounter patrolling in the jungle or in the large unit engagements we had in the north, along the coast, or on the open plains. And combat was different again up in the mountains.

The geography, the nature of the enemy, the style of fighting, and even the nature of some of the units all added their own particular character to what we might encounter. All tended to create different types of wars, if you will, or a different type of the same war.

Because I experienced so many different aspects of the war, I came back with a real understanding that this war was multifaceted; everything was all over the place. There was no clear and simple way to look at it. But most Americans who served in Vietnam had perhaps a year tour and saw only one geographical area. For them it was like the blind man and the elephant. The war they saw was real, but partial.

I remember talking to Marine friends who might have been up north in I Corps, where most Marines fought. They all thought their vision of the war was the true war. Yet I had to think, “Jeez, you saw only a small part of it.” I’d have the same experience talking with an army officer who’d served in the Mekong Delta or the Parrot’s Beak. Each man’s definition of the war would turn out to be completely different.

So my experience was almost unique. I didn’t see every possible way the war was fought, but I saw most of it.

What all this teaches is not how to deal with every possible situation. Fighting in delta swamps teaches you how to fight in delta swamps. Fighting in triple-canopy rain forest teaches you how to fight in triple-canopy rain forests. Fighting in mountains teaches you how to fight in mountains. Fighting in flat, coastal country where there are lots of rice paddies and villages teaches you how to do that. And you learn a lot simply shooting and getting shot at a lot, and working closely with others on a combat team. But there isn’t a great deal of carryover from any of that one to the other. The biggest lesson, in fact, is learning how to be open to surprising new experiences and then turning that openness into resourceful and creative ways of dealing with the challenges you face.

I was to rediscover these truths later in life when I began to be engaged in peacekeeping, humanitarian operations. After I’d gone through my first, I thought I’d learned everything there was to know about them. “These lessons apply everywhere,” I told myself.

But on the second one, it hit me that few of these lessons actually apply anywhere else. The previous experience helped, sure; it put me in the right frame of mind; but it didn’t tell me how to solve particular problems.

You have to be open to each new and very different reality. It’s wrong to use models and to think stereotypically about problems and issues.

Tony Zinni had come a long, long way from Philadelphia. He was to travel much farther.

THE FOREST OF DEATH

After Zinni completed his orientations in Saigon, Colonel Nels Andersen, the commanding officer of the advisory unit, decided that he should not wait for a hole to open up in one of the units, but immediately go out into the field to learn the ropes with experienced advisers. It was to be Zinni’s first taste of combat.

He was ordered to report to the Vietnamese Marines 4th Battalion, then conducting riverine operations in the Rung Sat Special Zone.

Rung Sat was a four-hundred-square-mile, strategically vital area southeast of Saigon — massive mangrove swamps and labyrinthine tangles of waterways. The shipping channels out of the South China Sea up to Saigon came through the Rung Sat Zone; and the Vietcong tried to interdict the shipping. They would pick people off the decks with snipers, shoot rockets or recoilless rifles at the ships, or mine the waterways — often attaching mines to ropes stretched from bank to bank. They kept it slack to let acceptable traffic pass and pulled the mines up when they spotted a target they wanted to strike.

Operating in the Rung Sat was tremendously difficult, with its tangled swamps and water levels at high tide so elevated that everything, including the villages, was under water. No place down there was dry all the time.

Advisers had “blanket” travel orders authorizing them to use any means of military transportation to get anywhere in South Vietnam if they weren’t moving with a unit. Usually this involved going to a nearby air base, such as Tan Son Nhut near Saigon, where you scrounged a ride to the region closest to your unit’s position. This could take days and involve a series of plane, helicopter, boat, and/or motor vehicle rides.

Even this basic knowledge didn’t much help Zinni. He had no idea how to get to the Rung Sat; he’d simply been told to go there, but was so green he had no idea about the best way to go.

He eventually found himself on a Vietnamese civilian bus overloaded with men, women, kids, grandmas, chickens, and bundles of possessions. The men, women, and kids all found this lone American in a Vietnamese Marine uniform, with all his combat gear, a puzzling curiosity. Americans in Vietnam didn’t travel on civilian buses.

He ended up at the gate of a small U.S./Vietnamese naval base at a place called Nha Be, not far from his destination. When he asked how to get to the 4th Battalion in the Rung Sat, he was led to the operations center, where he met the U.S. Navy operations officer.

“How did you get here?” the Navy officer asked, staring hard at Zinni, as though he had dropped out of the sky.

“I took the bus from Saigon.”

“You took the bus from Saigon?” he snapped. “You want to get yourself killed? You’ve got to be totally nuts! That’s offering yourself to the VC on a platter!” He then proceeded to chew the young lieutenant out for putting himself into such a risk.

Zinni tried to explain that he hadn’t realized taking the bus was dangerous, and besides it had been a pleasant ride and he’d met some nice people.

The Navy officer shook his head in amazed disbelief; and then cracked a tolerant smile. “Fools and children…”

“A resupply helo makes daily runs out to the 4th Battalion,” he said. “I’ll get you on tomorrow’s run. You’re welcome to spend the night here with the other officers in their hooch.”

The rest of the day Zinni met with other officers and NCOs learning about operations in the Rung Sat. They provided him with a wealth of knowledge about the local region, riverine operations, and the enemy.

Nha Be was home to U.S. and Vietnamese river patrol boat, helicopter, minesweeper, and River Assault Group (RAG) units (South Vietnamese units with U.S. advisers; the U.S. equivalent in the Mekong Delta was known as the Mobile Riverine Force). The RAGs used specially configured landing craft that were modified to move troops, control operations, and provide fire support on the complex of waterways in the southern regions of Vietnam. “Mother Ships”—really, barges — provided floating bases for these units. The Vietnamese Marines operated as the assault troops with the RAGs and had their own small boat units for these kinds of missions — high-speed fiberglass boats, called Dong Nai boats, with powerful outboard engines.

These operations were sometimes supplemented by air strikes using Vietnamese AD Skyraider aircraft. The ancient, prop-driven American planes were godsends to the guys on the ground. They carried huge loads of ordnance, remained on station for long periods, and flew slowly over targets to pinpoint their locations. Jets were sexier, but they couldn’t provide anything like the long-term satisfaction.

Spotter planes were also often used to cover waterborne movements and observe the areas in front and to the flanks of the Marine movements. The natural tendency was to run these parallel to the route, but the VC watched out for this. It tipped them off to which waterway the Marines were on and to their direction of movement. The best technique was to vary the route of the planes and to run them back and forth across the waterway.

The resupply helo the next morning touched down at a small village called Tan Hiep in the middle of the mangrove swamps and river mazes that made up the Rung Sat. The village’s thatched houses were perched on high stilts, with rickety ladders leading up to the doorways. Debris on the ground indicated it was low tide. Zinni couldn’t imagine what high tide would bring.

The two battalion advisers, Captains Joe Hoar and Bob Hamilton, greeted him as he scrambled off the helo. Soon they were explaining that Colonel Andersen had radioed instructions to “snap Zinni in” for a few weeks; but their skeptical looks told him they were wondering what a junior lieutenant was doing here.

They took Zinni to meet the battalion commander, Major Tri, and some of his officers, including the battalion operations officer, Lieutenant Hoa Dang Nguyen. Hoa was a slender young officer, about Zinni’s height (5 feet 9 inches), and a Military Academy grad. He spoke English well — as did many of the Marine officers — was very friendly, open, and outgoing… and very Westernized. He and Zinni hit it off instantly, and later became close friends.

Tri was just as Westernized as Hoa, but also very polished and smooth (having graduated from American military schools), and obviously intelligent. He was considered by his community to be one of their most brilliant and innovative commanders, with a more intellectual approach to less operations than some of the more instinctive, seat-of-the-pants types who’d gotten most of their experience in the field. By 1967, he had considerable combat experience and was highly decorated, including a couple of American Silver Stars. Tri was expected someday to be the commandant of the Marines.

Bob Hamilton then showed Zinni to the stilted house where he would sleep. It belonged to a hamlet chief, and the battalion doctor was also quartered there. Though Zinni could not believe this was not an imposition, the head of the house seemed genuinely happy to host him.

After he settled in, Hamilton gave him a rundown of their operations in the Rung Sat:

The mission of the Marines, he explained, was to root out the VC and keep the water routes open. The terrain was miserable, with slimy mud-flats at low tide and extremely high tides that flooded virtually the entire region. Because the tangled mangroves were almost impossible to move through, travel was difficult and slow, with snakes, huge saltwater crocodiles,[10] and swarms of mosquitoes adding to the dangers and misery.

The tactics used by the Vietnamese Marines involved patrolling the rivers and streams, launching surprise operations from the RAG boats against suspected VC bases, interdicting and inspecting waterborne traffic, and laying in ambushes on the waterways at night. Zinni was to start going on these missions the next day.

“What do the Vietnamese expect me to do?” Zinni asked.

“Look,” Hamilton replied, “you’re not going to give them any tactical advice. They won’t need it. But this is where you are of value to them, this is what their expectations are.” He went on to explain technical matters Zinni needed to know in order to help the Vietnamese Marines in the Rung Sat — things like operating with the river assault groups, calling in artillery, calling in air support, calling in medevacs, and how all that worked.

After Hamilton left, Zinni had a hard time containing his excitement at finally seeing action.

The next morning brought reports that a rifle company had made contact with the VC. During the brief firefight that followed, the Marines took casualties, and the company was requesting a medical evacuation—“medevac,” a U.S. medevac helo. The rule was that U.S. helos had to be under a U.S. adviser’s control going into the landing zone (LZ). Though none of the advisers had gone out with the company, the pilots agreed to pick up an adviser and take care of the LZ coordinates from the air. Since none of the Vietnamese Marines on the ground spoke English, the entire affair would be managed by the adviser flying in with the medevac helos.

Hamilton and Hoar decided this was a good time for Zinni to get his feet wet.

Zinni was nervous and excited as the helos touched down and he climbed aboard. As they took off, he briefed the pilots, trying his best to act professional.

Minutes later, they were over the LZ — a muddy clearing.

The radio was crackling with excited Vietnamese chatter. Zinni did his best to respond, yelling in his best Vietnamese, trying to translate quickly, and then giving instructions in English to the pilots.

The Vietnamese popped a smoke grenade, Zinni confirmed the color,[11] and they headed down toward a small opening in the tangled mangrove masses below. A little closer, he saw three or four Vietcong bodies in black pajamas strewn about the LZ and the poncho-covered bodies that were dead Marines. The wounded Marines were waiting for the helo at the edge of the zone.

As they touched down, the rotor wash from the helo’s blades sent debris flying. The Marines rushed to get the friendly casualties into the chopper and out of there before drawing enemy fire. The wounded were quickly loaded aboard, then the poncho-covered bodies were pushed in behind them. One landed in Zinni’s lap (he was sitting on the deck in the back, by the door). As he grabbed him so he wouldn’t tumble back out, the poncho flew open to reveal the pale gray-green corpse. They rapidly lifted off and headed for the evacuation hospital, with Zinni still holding the body, his eyes locked on the dead and wounded Marines. Halfway back he realized that his hand was still clutching the radio handset. He replaced it in its holder.

Cradling a dead body on the deck of the helo and staring at the bandaged and bleeding troops brought the war home for the first time. The high adventure he had imagined had a nasty side.

During the following days, Zinni went on several night missions with the Dong Nai boats and the River Assault Group craft, setting up ambushes. Some of these were successful; and in one instance they nailed a pair of VC sniper teams carrying Russian sniper rifles, scopes, and special ammunition in brand-new leather cases.

Zinni was in the Rung Sat from April 3 to April 21. He then received orders to report to the 5th Battalion in Binh Dinh Province (II CTZ) and Operation Pershing — the most fiercely contested of Vietnamese Marine combat operations. He was there three times: April 24 to May 13; June 20 to August 10; and November 8 to December 13.

By the midpoint of his second assignment to Binh Dinh Province — sometime toward the end of June — Tony Zinni had become technically proficient in the arts of combat.

These skills came from several sources: from the day in, day out experience of the firefights themselves — calling in medevacs, calling in artillery and air, coordinating with U.S. units, and doing it over and over again under great stress; learning from the more seasoned and experienced advisers (like Joe Hoar and Bob Hamilton); learning from the Vietnamese Marines, especially in those tactical operations they performed well; and finally, from his own passion for mastering the arts of war. He really wanted to figure out what went on in combat. When he got into firefights — especially firefights with North Vietnamese or hard-core Vietcong units — he was fighting an enemy who possessed tremendous fighting skills. They were a tough enemy (not ragtag, like the Iraqi Army). Trying to take this war apart, figuring out what worked and what gave his guys the advantage, meant imagining how somebody on the other side — a North Vietnamese captain or other commander — was deciding how he could get the advantage. It was a contest of wills, intellects, and experience. “What is he thinking? What is he trying to do? What do I need to do to outguess him, to outplay him on this field?”

By the end of his tours in Vietnam, Zinni had become a master of the combat arts.

OPERATION PERSHING

Though several factors made operations in Binh Dinh Province more difficult than in other areas, the worst of these were the deadly booby traps found virtually everywhere in the province. The VC were masters of every kind of booby trap, from the sophisticated to the makeshift; and for reasons that remain mysterious to Zinni, the Vietnamese Marines were especially vulnerable to them. Despite their well-demonstrated field skills and understanding of their enemy, the majority of Vietnamese Marine casualties suffered on Operation Pershing came from booby traps. In one instance, twenty-two Marines, including an adviser, were killed or wounded at a stream crossing where the VC had put in a “daisy chain” string of explosives under remote control.

The VC especially liked to rig booby traps along trails, paths, streams, and other likely movement lines. Sometimes small signs would warn other VC or civilians friendly to their cause. Zinni and his companions learned to watch for these — rocks or twigs arranged on a path or bent trees near a stream crossing, or the like. And they tried to avoid trails and obvious lines of communication. Since booby traps and the kill zones of ambushes tended to be oriented along these lines of movement, the best tactic was not to travel parallel to them but to zigzag across, always approaching from right angles. Zigzagging permitted the Marines to come in behind these positions.

Trails and streams were always crossed as danger areas, following a predetermined and rehearsed drill: The point signaled the trail ahead; a machine gun or automatic rifle was positioned to cover the crossing; the far side was checked; and when there was a “clear to go” signal, the Marines crossed in teams. The drill could be more elaborate for larger danger areas, such as clearings or paddies.

At one trench, hedgerow,[12] and trail complex in an area loaded with booby traps, it was decided to go one at a time. When Zinni’s turn came, he ran and jumped the trench, but as he landed, he felt his boot drag across a wire. He immediately went limp, hit the ground, and flattened out as a muffled explosion detonated behind him. He wasn’t hit, he realized, to his immense relief. But when he looked back into the dust-filled trench, he noticed movement at the bottom. A Marine was lying there, one of the company cooks, in obvious pain, his face mangled. Since they were crossing one at a time, he should not have been there; but he had rushed across right on Zinni’s heels, contrary to instructions.

Though he had taken a blast in his upper body, remarkably he was still alive. He’d been carrying a small cage with two doves in it, no doubt dinner. The doves were unharmed.

Zinni and other nearby Marines jumped into the trench to help him. Zinni then called in a medevac, but did not hold out much hope, since the man was bleeding badly from both eyes.

Several months later, Zinni learned that he had survived, though with the loss of his eyes.

At another path crossing one day, Zinni stepped into a shallow, camouflaged pit. He tensed, expecting sharp bamboo stakes to pierce his foot; but nothing happened. Puzzled but relieved, he climbed out, and the camouflage was cleared away, revealing the real nature of this booby trap — though fortunately, its shelf life had expired. At the bottom of the pit was a small dead snake, a krait, one of the most poisonous of all the vipers. (There had been no food in the pit, and it could not climb the pit’s sheer walls.)

The VC also placed booby traps in likely helicopter landing zones, making heliborne assaults sporty and medevacs dangerous. Since the American adviser ran the medevacs, Zinni had to check out the zones to ensure they were safe for the helicopters. He always performed this task with great care, concentration, and gingerly placed steps.

In placing booby traps, the VC did not distinguish combatants from noncombatants. Any kind of cooperation was punished. Civilians who assisted Vietnamese forces less often came home to bombs set to go off at their arrival. Even civilians required to gather in designated areas for processing of identification paperwork or for government information programs might find explosive devices in their homes or villages. Since the processing was compulsory, the ordinary people were once again caught between a rock and a hard place.

Their susceptibility to booby traps aside, the Vietnamese Marines were masters of fieldcraft.

The Vietnamese Marines traveled light. They lived off the land, partly out of necessity and partly out of the importance they placed on being light and mobile like the enemy. This points out the most significant difference between the Vietnamese Marines and their American allies.

Americans always took it for granted that the full might of America was behind them. Not only did they expect to get three squares a day, but American units always operated under the conviction that, no matter what, they would somehow get bailed out and that American firepower would prevail. Sure, there might be an occasion where you got stranded for a while before help came, but eventually help was going to get to you — rescue, firepower, or logistics.

The Vietnamese Marines did not have that certainty. They never knew if they were going to eat on any particular day. When they got in a firefight, there was no guarantee that the cavalry was going to come and save them. They knew they had to fight with what they had.

Thus they had no use for the heavy loads American soldiers carried, and their carelessness with weapons and supplies; and they were happy to do without the daily helo resupply lifts that gave away positions.

The Vietnamese Marines were masters of make-dos and work-arounds. They ingeniously prepared fighting positions, living facilities, early warning alarms, and many other needs from what was available in the bush. A premium was placed on quick reaction and agility on enemy contact. They were well aware of these qualities in the enemy they faced.

Their gear was not only light but practical. They slept in nylon hammocks tied with nylon cord, compact enough to fit into the cargo pocket of their tiger-striped field uniform. The U.S. jungle hammock, by contrast, was heavy and bulky and totally unsuitable for the field. Cooking stoves were small and made of lightweight aluminum, as were their food containers. Their packs were the original rucksacks that made stowing and carrying gear easy for infantry units on the move. They rarely wore flak jackets and preferred camouflaged soft hats rather than helmets, especially on patrols. Light, loose-fitting nylon rain gear was often purchased by the Marines to replace the heavy rubberized U.S. ponchos they were issued. They did, however, cherish the soft American poncho liner, which, along with the jungle boot, was probably the best piece of gear to come out of the Vietnam War.

Their weapons were a hodgepodge of World War Two American small arms, mortars, machine guns, recoilless rifles, and artillery pieces. These included M-1 rifles, carbines, submachine guns, and other vintage weapons.

During Zinni’s tour in 1967, the VNMC received the M-16 rifle and M-60 machine gun, but the process was closely controlled by the U.S. The policy was that no Vietnamese units could get them until every American unit had them, and then the Marines and airborne units would be the first to receive them. In reality, the Vietnamese already had a few M-60 machine guns before they were officially supposed to get them. They’d either been captured from the enemy or scrounged from U.S. units by the advisers.

Reports of the M-16’s unreliability preceded its arrival. The plan was to pull the VNMC battalions back, one at a time, to the national training center for two weeks to switch weapons and go through a training program on the new rifle.

U.S. Marines brought the weapons to the center and oversaw the delivery and training. But just as the first units to receive the new rifles began their training, an emergency developed in the Mekong Delta area. The units were pulled out and sent to engage a large enemy force there, even before they had actually fired their new weapons (they’d barely gotten the first classes on care and cleaning). They performed brilliantly, defeating a tough force in fierce fighting. The fact that no weapons jammed or malfunctioned drew considerable attention from the U.S. military command; and an investigation was launched. But the explanation was simple: The Vietnamese Marines cleaned their weapons. They were meticulous — almost obsessed — with weapons care, often complaining to Zinni about American carelessness with weapons and equipment.

They were just as meticulous about fire discipline. They were, for example, masters at hiding their crew-served weapons and not opening up in response to probes by North Vietnamese or mainline VC units (the idea was to get them to fire so they could pick out the key weapons they needed to take out).

The emphasis on care and conservation carried over to most other areas.

Like all Vietnamese, the Vietnamese Marines enjoyed the midday break. Unless operational necessity demanded otherwise, they would stop to string up their hammocks for a couple of hours during the hottest part of the day for a noon siesta. But they also took care to rest at any other time that offered itself. Whenever possible, they conserved resources, strength, and the energy of the unit.

Their endurance was remarkable. They could walk all day, day after day. But they were not especially strong. Rather, they tried to pace themselves and conserve energy.

American commanders were all in a hurry. They wanted to end the war on their one-year tour of duty. Vietnamese commanders realized they would be in it for the duration. Though they never backed down or failed to fight bravely, they did weigh risks carefully and approach battle methodically. Plunging headlong into battle, as Americans liked to do, was not an option for the Vietnamese.

Zinni had this truth pressed home on an operation in II CTZ. Here is how he remembers it:

It was summer, and our VNMC battalion had been operating for weeks in an area astride Highway 1 when we pulled back for a much-needed day of rest in a village along the highway. The battalion commander, the senior adviser, and most of the officers and troops went to a nearby city for an R & R break, while I stayed behind with the units that were the designated security element. The battalion operations officer, a lieutenant, was the officer in charge. He was a bright young officer and we had become instant friends.

On one hot summer day, with the stay-behind troops resting, cleaning equipment, or manning the small security guard, an excited, very animated woman came running up to our location.

“The VC are holding a meeting with local communist bigwigs in a nearby hamlet west of the highway,” she cried.

“We have to go get them,” I told the ops officer.

He was not so sure. All the commanders were gone and this was a big decision for him, especially since he only had bits and pieces of units available for the mission.

But he was an aggressive officer, and I knew I could get him to go. And that’s what happened. We quickly grabbed a group of Marines, saddled them up, and charged off.

As luck would have it, we caught the VC as they were leaving the hamlet after their meeting broke up. A running, chaotic gun battle followed, as we chased them into the countryside. The chase went on for several hours, and we moved farther and farther into the brushy foothills west of the highway.

During the pursuit, we managed to capture one VC and could tell from the blood trails that we had hit others. But in our excitement and enthusiasm we failed to realize how far we were moving from our base of operations. Enemy fire was also picking up, and the terrain was becoming more rugged. Though I didn’t realize it then, it was becoming distinctly possible that we would be drawn into a trap.

Eventually, we received a radio call from the obviously angry battalion commander, ordering us to break off contact and return to the base area.

On the way back, I realized I had put my Vietnamese lieutenant buddy in a bad position. He was not looking forward to seeing the battalion CO.

And sure enough, the commander had harsh words for him, and likewise my senior adviser had harsh words for me. Though I was upset that we’d had to break contact, I kept quiet about that. Instead, I tried to take the fall for the action, and explained that I had convinced my friend to go.

Later, the battalion commander asked to speak to me privately. He was a highly decorated officer, tactically brilliant and courageous; and I had great respect for him.

“Look,” he explained to me, “my unit is not a U.S. Marine unit. It’s smaller and less capable, we don’t have a steady stream of replacements flowing into it, and I can’t rely on the formidable arsenal of firepower that U.S. units have at their disposal.[13]

“My troops,” he continued, “have fought for years; they’ll fight for many more; and the enemy will still be there tomorrow. All of this means I have to carefully choose where and when I take risks that might bring me a disadvantage on the battlefield.[14]

“This is not,” he explained, “a matter of courage, aggressiveness, or fighting spirit; and I hope you’ve seen enough of those qualities in my Marines to know that wasn’t the issue.”

In this, I totally agreed with him. And I also fully understood all of his very valid points. Yet privately the U.S. Marine in me still found it difficult to pass up an opportunity to mix it up with the enemy, regardless of the circumstances.

“Do you have any idea why the VC didn’t break contact and fade into the countryside?” he then asked me. “After all, they’re masters of that sort of tactic.”

It was a good question. As I thought back on the firefight and chase, I realized how easy it would have been for them to break off the fight. Instead, they stayed engaged. They’d take a few shots, and then withdraw, leaving easy signs to follow.

That was when it dawned on me that we’d been in danger of getting lured out into the hinterland, far from our base and support, where they had forces positioned to ambush us.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “We were brash to chase them. But please be aware that doing it was my fault. Don’t take it out on your operations officer.”

“Don’t worry,” he said with a smile. “I’m satisfied that two young lieutenants learned something… without serious consequences, for a change.”

In time, Zinni became an expert in firefights and had a wealth of other experience about how to move in a fight, how to conduct a patrol, how to cross a road, how to deal with snipers in trees, how to build alert systems with bamboo and vine (the bamboo would clap). He became a collector of these techniques.

He quickly discovered that many of the techniques he had been taught were wrong — lessons learned from old wars. He had a passion to get such things right. The best fighting techniques bring an obvious advantage; they can keep you alive. But Zinni was also a committed professional. The best military leaders will play their units as the best conductors play an orchestra, blending and focusing disparate elements into a single, splendid “sound.” However this was done, Zinni wanted to practice and perfect it.

He has further thoughts on this:

Right from the beginning of my Marine Corps career, what most fascinated me as we would engage in tactical problems during field exercises is that it was all about facing an enemy, trying as hard as he could to do to us what we wanted to do to him… You didn’t just go into a patch of woods and that’s it, like a hiker. There’s an enemy somewhere in there, and here you are trying to use everything you know, have learned, and have trained for, in order to reach your aims… and stop him from reaching his.

You don’t get much more real than that.

I’ve always had a theoretical understanding of sports — offense and defense, how you organize plays, and what you’re trying to do. But, of course, the theory is one thing, and playing is another.

And in a firefight, you’re experiencing much higher levels of complication and risk — all the bullets flying, the rounds, the explosions, the confusion — and you’re trying to figure it out, trying to move quickly on a course of action that makes sense, and keeps you and your buddies alive.

What’s really going on? How do you organize yourself? How do you apply the fires? How do you move against your enemy? What are the techniques you need to use?

For example, if you’re out in the woods, and you’re trying to find your enemy, you don’t want him to find you. What techniques will best bring that outcome? What do you need to know?

I was always really interested in learning everything I could about that. I’ve always been a collector of small-unit fighting techniques. It’s always fascinated me… consumed me. I’m a Catholic. In my faith, we think of the priesthood as a calling — a “vocation,” requiring total dedication. I looked at the “call to arms” the same way. The warrior profession is a calling, and requires the same kind of dedication the priesthood does. That meant that I read books about it — history books about small unit warfare, books about Burma, Malaya, and Vietnam before our war (places where the fighting was similar to what we were experiencing).

Some of what I picked up from books, or from my instructors, turned out to be bogus. Even before I went to Vietnam, it didn’t make sense to me; it didn’t seem natural; it didn’t jive with what was really likely to happen. I don’t know where the people came up with it.

And then when I got out there in, say, the II CTZ, we were doing it for real; and a lot of what I’d been taught made even less sense.

But there I couldn’t have had better teachers. I would watch the Vietnamese, who of course had incredible battlefield experience, and I was able to see how they did things and really analyze their technique.

One great thing about being an adviser: You’re not commanding the troops. Sure, you’re busy; you have to be ready to apply fires and all the other responsibilities advisers had. But you also have a lot of opportunity just to observe, from a semidetached point of view. You could watch how the fighters moved, you could listen to what they were saying. And since you weren’t directly caught up in the action, you could think through it and analyze it.

Later, I’d ask the seasoned veterans about it: “Why did you do this?” and “What do you think about this?” And they would talk to me about their experiences.

It was from this seed in low-level tactics that my career started to grow, eventually leading to the construction of multinational strategies at CENTCOM and elsewhere where I’d be dealing with a part of the world where we were trying to develop a military relationship and a military policy.

One especially vital type of tactical knowledge is what we might call the “sense of a firefight.” That is, the sense from sound and visual cues of what is actually happening when the bullets are flying. Closely allied to that is a sense of what you have to do to respond and act. These can only be learned from experience. Tony Zinni also has further thoughts on this:

Though I had a lot of operational experiences from the beginning of my time with the Vietnamese Marines, it took about three months into my tour before I was at a level of competency where I had a real “sense of a firefight.”

At first, when there was shooting, it was a cacophony of sounds to me. I didn’t know what was going on. I had no idea whether I was in World War Three or a small firefight. At the beginning, I wasn’t even sure which direction the firing was coming from.

But by the end of three months, I could tell which kinds of weapons were firing, where they were firing from, and about how far away they were. I could also get a pretty good sense of what was happening by the way the firing was taking place: Was somebody just taking potshots? Or was the firing building up to a larger engagement? Was the enemy going to stand and hold in place (and all the implications of that)? Or were they simply going to engage us and then try to move away?

By three months, I could quickly process situations like these with just a few sensings.

Something similar goes on with really good athletes when the play is really intense.

I remember going to a playoff football game in which the Miami Dolphins were playing San Diego. I had a really great seat right down near the field, which gave me the best possible visibility; and I was able to observe Dan Marino, one of the greatest quarterbacks ever, at the very height of his powers. The San Diego quarterback (I forget his name) was a good, solid player, but he was several rungs down from Dan Marino.

Very often, Marino would come out of the huddle, go up to the line, and call an audible. You’d expect he would take a panning scan over the entire defense before he did that. But he didn’t work that way. He’d look at one guy in the defense and then make his call — and it was almost always the best call he could have made.

The other quarterback, though, would come up to look over the defense the way you’d expect. He’d have to look all over the place before he could make his decision. And I thought, “Dan Marino has reached a level of expertise that allows him to key on only one thing, and from that picks up what he needs to know. He has a much greater ‘sensing’ ability than the other quarterback.”

This has analogies with combat: The more experience you’ve got, the larger is your inventory of pattern analysis that allows you to pick up on what you need to know; and like Marino, you can make a solid decision based on a very few key indicators, rather than having to try to mentally process a complex or even chaotic set of inputs. So after I’d had sufficient experiences of firefights, I was able to process one or two indicators fairly quickly and come up with a satisfactory course of action.

I have to add that the kind of sensing I’m talking about is not just a matter of experience. It also involves understanding what you were sensing. There’s a strong analytical component, involving reading, research, and applied intelligence. If you don’t have a background of knowledge and understanding that allows you to appreciate these “sensings,” you might undergo these experiences and miss everything they’re trying to offer you. For example: Now that I know I’m hearing an AK-47 and not an M-16, I need to judge from the pattern of firing whether this is somebody who’s just taking a couple of random shots and moving away or somebody who’s hanging in there in a fixed position and plans to stay.

How is it that I can judge that the firing is coming from five hundred and not two hundred yards (in the beginning I couldn’t tell you if it was twenty or two thousand)? The answer: You estimate by means of the flash-bang method (as we called it): There’s a delay between the flash of a firing weapon and the bang. As soon as you see the flash, you begin counting seconds—1001, 1002, 1003. You then use a formula you’ve learned that lets you determine the distance of the weapon.

Why do sounds seem much closer at night? The answer: Because of atmospheric conditions and because activity levels are lower, creating less interference from white noise.

I gathered in information like this wherever I could find it — from reading, from Vietnamese Marines, from other advisers, from training.

There were times of course when what I’d learned did not compute with my own experience, and I had to come up with a different solution.

One example: In training, we were always told when you see a flare pop at night, you freeze. You don’t move. When they pop the flare, they’re looking for motion. When they detect it, they have your location.

This didn’t make sense to me. Your natural instinct is to go to ground and take cover. “Follow your instincts, go to ground,” I told myself. “Better they detect a motion but I end up under cover than me sitting there sweating and thinking, ‘Hope he didn’t see me.’ ”

You also have to understand that there are different kinds of flares, each sending a different kind of message: A hand flare or a grenade flare tells you something different from an artillery flare — though they all illuminate. An illumination grenade or a hand flare tells you your enemy is fairly close to you and he’s shooting it because he expects something, he heard something, or thought he heard something, so his senses are up. What do you do? Get your butt down.

My own processing of this information led me to a different conclusion from the one I received in training.

Later, I became directly involved in improving Marine Corps training — challenging much of what I had learned. I made several videotapes that are still used at basic school. Some validated what I’d been taught and some didn’t.

Zinni’s plunge into Vietnam was not confined to military operations. Along with his Vietnamese Marine companions he lived much of the time with ordinary Vietnamese in their villages and hamlets. Vietnam had a quartering law that required the people to allow troops operating in their area to move into their houses. This was not the burden on the people that it might seem. The Marines didn’t take a place over and throw people out of their houses. They treated the local people with respect, paying for their food and helping with the village chores. (The country-bred troops especially enjoyed helping out with the familiar tasks that reminded them of their own home villages.)

But for Zinni, moving into somebody else’s home was initially hard to get used to; he thought of it as an imposition and an intrusion. But after he saw that the villagers seemed to accept it, and in most cases welcome it, he began to overcome his own discomfort and realize that the kid from Philadelphia was onto a very positive thing. In time, he came to a further realization that all the hardships and extremes he and his companions had to endure were worth his interactions with the Vietnamese people.

Here are some memories of life in the villages — and of related encounters with the enemy:

Rarely did my contemporaries serving with U.S. units ever get to really know the Vietnamese; and then they viewed them with suspicion and even contempt. But living among the people gave me long-lasting insights into a very rich and wonderful culture… and into the impact of so many terrible decades of war and suffering.

When I’d talk with families at meals or during their daily chores, I always found them warm and friendly, yet shy, polite, and reserved. But once I took time to get to know them, they opened up. Making friends was harder, since they didn’t make friends easily. In their eyes, friendship was a serious long-term commitment — not lightly undertaken. But once you made a Vietnamese friend, you had a friend for life.

Where the war touched them, they were enigmatic and stoic. I never encountered self-pity; and this was hard to get used to. Where did they find the resources to stoically accept the pain and anguish I often saw them endure? Why did they so rarely show emotion even after the most traumatic experiences?

Though American units passed through the villages in large numbers, there was little contact. Neither the Americans nor the Vietnamese wanted it. So a lone American taking up residence in a Vietnamese village was a novelty — a curiosity to be checked out. In fact, the local kids were often initially unsure if I was real. They liked to give me a poke, to test if I was.

Though I always had a wonderful time with the Vietnamese, and was always treated with respect, it was hard to know what they thought of Americans in general or of our part in their conflict.

One memorable insight into that came during a warm, friendly conversation with the family of a village chief (I was sharing his house). It was a welcome cool evening in a picturesque hamlet, and we were sitting outside the house after an enjoyable meal.

“Show me pictures of your family and of your house in the USA,” the chief’s wife, an elderly lady, asked. “Do you have any?”

All I had was a picture of my wife and me taken in front of her parents’ home. I pulled it out, the old lady stared at it for a while, and then she looked up at me with a deeply penetrating expression.

“Why are you here in Vietnam?” she asked me.

I gave her the standard answer about stopping communism and protecting democracy and our Vietnamese allies.

She shook her head. “It’s sad that you have to leave your family and get involved in this tragic mess,” she said.

I continued to offer the party line.

“But what are you going to do to protect us from ‘them’?” she asked, her hand pointing toward the south.

At first I thought she had made a mistake — the enemy was to the north, after all. But then I realized she was saying exactly what she meant to say. She was talking about the corrupt South Vietnamese government. As far as she was concerned, the enemy was both to the north and to the south.

These people, I was just coming to understand, were trapped between two options, both bad. And that was when I began to realize that the “center of gravity”[15] was the people… and that winning hearts and minds was not just a slogan; it was the only route to winning the war.

Meanwhile, they had to do whatever they could to survive.

Eventually, the winning of hearts and minds was thought to be important enough to engage the Vietnamese Marines in it — engaged specifically in running pacification programs in the II CTZ. The mission involved going into villages to ID, interrogate, and win over the population with civic action projects; and the Marines did not initially warm to it. They thought of themselves as fighters and not civic action wimps.

Usually the operation entailed setting up a “county fair.” They’d put up a series of tents, booths, and stations where the questioning and identification processes were mixed in with medical treatment, food distribution, and entertainment. Some political propaganda was also added in order to win “hearts and minds.”

It turned out that the people actually enjoyed these events, and the Marines soon learned the benefits of these efforts, became more receptive to them, and actually enjoyed running the fairs. Most of the Marines were kids from the country and villages. They liked connecting with folks who were very like themselves. And as time went on, the Marines developed a positive relationship with most of the population in II CTZ.

This did not please the VC, who began to threaten villagers who participated in the fairs.

But despite the intimidation, more and more villagers began to come forward and provide intelligence on enemy activity.

In one incident, a mother in a remote village brought her baby — its face hugely swollen — to a medical station we’d set up. When it turned out that the Marines’ medical personnel weren’t equipped to handle the baby’s infected abscess, she was brought to me.

I called the U.S. Army unit nearby, and they agreed to arrange a medevac and treatment at a hospital in the city of Qui Nhon. The anxious and frightened mother and baby, together with an aunt, were then assembled in the landing zone to wait for the chopper. By the time the helo was actually touching down, they were on the edge of panic. The mother immediately squatted down and peed right there, with the shocked helo crew looking on. But then she somehow mustered up the courage to scramble onto the helicopter. And off they went. Though I wished them well, they quickly slipped out of my mind.

Several months later, I was again in this village, but now with a company from another battalion.

The company commander told me a lady from the village wanted to see me. And I said, “Sure,” though I had forgotten all about the incident.

But when the lady approached us, proudly showing off her now chubby, healthy baby, I immediately recognized her, and I was of course pleased and happy for her as she thanked us for saving her baby. She then chatted with me about the care she’d received and her trip back to this remote village. Later, as she got ready to leave and was about to say good-bye, she turned to me: “There are VC hiding in tunnels nearby,” she whispered, “and I’ll show you where.”

We immediately mustered the troops and went to the location she pointed out to us, just outside the village. There we found the camouflaged entrance to a large underground complex.

As we began to clear the complex, we realized there were people inside. Our troops talked them out by threatening to blow up the holes.

Soon — to my amazement — a group of VC emerged, clad in pinkish uniforms. They turned out to be a regimental medical unit whose aid station was located in the tunnel complex. And then by some kind of wild coincidence that was not really surprising, once you thought about it, our battalion doctor recognized the VC doctor. They’d both attended medical school in France together and had once been friends. A friendly lunch and chat followed (strange but interesting to me), with the old friends bringing each other up to date about their lives and careers since they’d last seen each other. At the end of the meal, friendly good-byes and handshakes were exchanged; and the VC were handcuffed and moved out as POWs.

As they moved off, I recalled that similar events had occurred in our own Civil War.

The VC and NVA were masters at constructing well-hidden underground tunnel systems. We discovered elaborate networks connecting large, furnished subterranean rooms, fully equipped with handmade cloth gas masks with charcoal filters, and carefully booby-trapped dead-end wings.

When the deep rice paddies dried up in summer, the entrances to some of these complexes, submerged during the rainy season, would often be exposed.

We once stopped for a noon break and meal by one of the deep paddies where a tunnel entrance was visible near one of its corners, big enough to walk into standing up. Since it was the dry season and the entrance was exposed, we assumed the tunnel was empty. But while we rested, some of the Marines began poking around the entrance, and then suddenly became alerted when they detected noises from inside. We quickly surrounded the opening and ordered whoever was inside to come out. After some coaxing and threatening, we got an agreement to surrender; and out of the entrance came two young men dressed in sharply pressed khaki uniforms, with close-cropped haircuts. One was a NVA lieutenant and the other an NCO [noncommissioned officer]. When the lieutenant spotted me, he called the NCO to attention and snapped me a very sharp salute. And to the delight of the Marines, I returned it. The two were then taken off as POWs.

Other captures were much tougher. In the following, the VC tried to hide among fishermen on a lake, using them as human shields:

The area along the coast of Binh Dinh Province was filled with lakes, tidal inlets, and swamps, with fishing villages all around them. (Many of the villages in the area had been abandoned because of the resettlement program.) Since the availability of food and the population concentration made the area a favored objective of the VC, we never had any problems making contact with the enemy. We ran any number of sweeps in the region and never failed to end up in a firefight.

One day we had a big one on the Dam Tra O, the region’s major lake.

During a major sweep two of our battalions were conducting with the 1st Cav, we got into a running gun battle as we pushed eastward toward the lake with the lead element of our battalion. The other battalion was moving toward the lake from the south.

As we closed on the lake, rapidly forcing the VC toward the water, we could clearly see that we’d trapped them in one of the swamps. There was no way they could slip out to our flanks. Their only way out was into the lake.

When we made our initial contact, the Cav sent us an observer helicopter and a gunship (called a “a Silver Team”). They came on scene as we reached the villages near the water. I directed them over to the swamp where we’d last seen the VC, and they spotted several of them lying in the shallow water breathing through hollow reeds. The gunship fired into the water and killed a number of VC; and the others there surrendered to us. But the majority of the VC had reached the lakeshore, grabbed boats, and moved to the center of the huge lake, mingling with the civilian fishing boats.

We then gathered on the shore to decide what to do. As we were talking, I could hear on our radio net the senior adviser from the battalion to our south calling in an artillery fire mission — a VT (variable time fuse) mission, meaning the rounds would explode overhead and rain deadly shrapnel on the boats. I immediately jumped on the radio and called a check fire. “Wait a minute,” I shouted into the mike, “you can’t call in artillery. These are innocent people out there. The VC have gone in among fishermen. If they try to get away, the VC will shoot them.” While I was doing this, the VNMC company commander with me was pleading with his own chain of command not to fire.

This brought on a heated argument with the other adviser, a captain, who kept insisting that the boats were all VC. Since I was a lieutenant, it was a touchy moment. Soon a task force adviser, a major, came on the net to sort it out.

Meanwhile, dozens of panicked civilians had crowded along the shore, all anxious about their relatives out on the boats. “These are our fathers, our brothers, out there fishing,” they kept pleading. “They’re not Vietcong.”

Even when I pointed that out to the major, he seemed to be leaning toward the captain’s version. At that point, since I was sort of a wiseass anyhow, I let it all hang out. “I’ve got to tell you, sir, if we shoot this mission, in my mind we’re killing a lot of innocents, and I’m on record for that.”

“So do you have any other ideas?”

When I threw this question at the VNMC company commander, he knew what had to be done: “My men will go out in boats and get the VC,” he answered.

This was dangerous, but he and his troops did not want to see innocents killed. When I passed on the proposal, the adviser from the other battalion broke in to say that he and his Vietnamese counterpart didn’t think much of it.

“Stay out of it,” I told him. “It’s not your ass on the line.”

I knew I would pay for that comment, but I didn’t care.

Though I knew that a lieutenant can never be sure he is doing the right thing when he’s challenged by seniors, I’d already run into a number of situations like this, when my only recourse was to stand up for what my gut told me was right and take the flak for it. After seeing the results of doubting myself and backing down, I’d sworn I would never cave in once I’d reached down inside and determined that what I needed to do felt right.

Though this position did not endear me to the others on the radio, no one was ready to challenge me.

As the Marines began to climb into the boats, my mind fixed on the likelihood that many of them would be killed or wounded in this risky attack. Even though the Marines assured me we were doing the right thing, and I certainly agreed with them, I knew that any deaths would be on my conscience.

What unfolded next was just amazing — a scene right out of a pirate movie.

The Marines sailed onto the lake. Soon they’d chased down the VC boats, started firing, and then boarded them. Moments later, they’d taken down every enemy boat and killed or captured every single VC… all without a single Marine or civilian casualty.

Afterward, a few prisoners suddenly fell “very ill” with a high mortality rate disease. Our Marines were not happy they had used civilians as human shields.

By then I’d experienced dozens of incidents that made me proud of these courageous fighters, but this one definitely made the top of the list.

Because of the demonstrated competence and fighting ability of VNMC units, American commanders gave them ever tougher jobs. In July, U.S. units in II CTZ began moving their operations out toward the Western Highlands, where there was especially heavy fighting, leaving the coastal plain more exposed. This move was feasible only because the VNMC were available to pick up much of the action.

II CTZ headquarters specifically proposed that the Marines begin more aggressive night operations (promising full support, to include helicopter lift and fire support — a big plus in the eyes of the Marines). The Vietnamese were game for that.

The proposed operations involved a series of night helo raids, to be triggered by hot intelligence… a challenging but exciting mission for the VNMC (we had no night vision goggles then). It also excited me. By then I was confident I had my act together where fighting was concerned. I had become good at it.

We ended up conducting four of these raids. I was the adviser on three of them, but only one resulted in enemy contact.

That raid began on the twenty-fifth of July with an urgent call from U.S. Army command: A hot intelligence tip claimed that a squad-sized VC unit was moving a U.S. Army POW through the villages, using him for propaganda and recruiting. Army command thought a well-conducted raid might successfully rescue him. Since we were the only unit able to react quickly enough, we were tapped to conduct it.

The Army immediately sent an intel team to brief us: The tip had come from a local villager who had additionally reported that the VC squad was heading for a deserted village along the coast to spend the night. The intel team were not certain about the accuracy of the tip, but it seemed worth a serious follow-up. They then provided a description of the prisoner and his suspected identity.

We quickly began planning.

Raid planning had to be very precise and exacting, taking deception into account (we knew the VC were watching), and intel had to be very good. We worked hard on all this.

We decided on a raid force of eighty Marines. In order to deceive watchers, this force would move as part of a larger unit headed out that day for a routine relief of one of our mountain village outposts. The raid force would peel off from the larger unit in a remote area of the bush on the approach to the mountain villages and wait at a prearranged landing zone for night pickup by U.S. choppers. We coordinated all this with the pilots to minimize their time on the ground in the remote landing zone.

In those days we didn’t yet have M-16s, so we took Thompson submachine guns, grease guns, carbines — all automatic weapons — with extra ammo magazines, to ensure plenty of firepower for this relatively small force operating in very hostile territory. We wanted to make the raid as violent as possible. Our idea was to really shock them, hit them fast when they were sleeping (or so we hoped), and just open up. Machine guns would cover our flanks.

We knew the deserted village that was our objective from previous sweeps in the area. It was on the coast of the South China Sea and had a several-hundred-foot-high rocky ridge projecting out into the water to its north. We decided to land the helos up on the rocks; small, cleared areas there could take one helo at a time; and landing on the side of the ridge away from the village would mask the noise. We could then climb down the rocks and attack the village from the sea side — an unexpected route. (We were assuming that the enemy would be orienting their defenses inland.) There was one potential problem: Though we could cut off the north-south routes out of the village (the routes along the coast), we could not do much to cover escape routes to the west, which went out into vast, open rice paddies that led to more villages and wooded areas. Since our assault was going in from east to west, we didn’t want to put teams out west of the town into our potential fire zones. Instead, we hoped to put teams quickly into the western side of the village. This was another reason for instant violence. Without that, the VC might be able to melt away into the paddies.

The move out and helo lift went perfectly. The pilots flew well out to sea (thus promoting surprise) and came into the ridge area from the north as planned. We did have problems when some of the LZs proved too small for a helo landing, requiring troops to jump out of the helos from four or five feet up. A few of the guys got a little banged up with twisted ankles and the like, but not enough to take them out of action.

Our climb down the jagged rocks was tricky and painfully slow, but everyone got down with only a few bruises and cuts and moved quickly to our objective rallying point at the base of the rocks. From there we dispatched the four-man security teams that would cut off the village from the north and south. To avoid premature discovery, we tried to synchronize our movements to place the security teams and the assault force in position at the same time.

I moved with the attack force down the beach toward a long, north-south-running sand dune we were using as our line of deployment. This was an ideal place for launching the assault. It was about a hundred meters from the edge of the village and allowed us to come up on line for the attack from a covered and concealed position, with the crashing surf providing noise cover.

Things went well as we moved to our release points and began coming on line at the base of the dune. I hoped both of our main assumptions were correct — that the enemy’s defense would be oriented inland and that we were facing only a squad-sized unit.

Both assumptions were wrong.

We weren’t facing a squad but a reinforced company; and their defense was either oriented toward the sea or out over a full 360 degrees.

We crossed the crest of the sand dune and slowly started down, waiting for the signal to start the assault — the firing of the machine guns on our flanks. This was to lead us by fire to the edge of the village, then the machine guns would displace forward to join the attack and protect our flanks.

But before that happened, the enemy spotted us and opened up with machine guns and everything else they had. We immediately responded and went into the assault.

As we raced down the dune firing away, I saw the enemy tracers streaming over our heads, flying everywhere. Too many for just a squad, I realized. I also realized that their defense was facing the sea… and us. I could tell it was a well-organized defense, with the fires interlocking — a wall of flame, not something you want to move into — but, fortunately, all the fire was high. This can happen when a defense is oriented on a piece of terrain, like the dune, that slopes upward. In those seconds it took us to close on their lines, I said a quick prayer of thanks for that. Another prayer of thanks came a couple of seconds later, when it became clear that our fire, unlike the enemy’s, was effective, and their line was breaking.

As they retreated back into the village huts, we began a house-to-house fight, trying to stay on line so no enemy would get behind us. This meant we had to scrap our plan to race some troops through the village to the western end to cover the paddies, but there were too many bad guys and too many places to hide to take a chance with fire from our rear.

Meanwhile, I could also hear firing from our security teams covering the north-south trails.

The systematic clearing of the village took the remainder of the night (we fired flares to illuminate the area).

We were scheduled for a helo pickup at first light, and I hoped we wouldn’t be hit by VC reinforcements before then (though we had a plan to bring in a reaction force of Vietnamese Marines if we ran into a tough spot).

By sunrise, we had cleared the village, consolidated our position, and secured the landing zone for the helos.

The Vietnamese Marine captain who was our raid force commander then received the reports: We had taken a considerable number of wounded, but remarkably none had been killed, and none of the wounded had life-threatening injuries. We counted nineteen enemy killed and thirty-two captured. From these we learned that the American POW had indeed been with them, but he had been moved out across the paddies when the shooting started.

I immediately requested that air observers try to pick up any fleeing VC, but they saw nothing, and when our reaction force came in to search the area later that morning they also had no luck. A disappointing end to an extremely well-executed raid.

The key to the Vietnamese Marines’ success was their superb set of battalion and company commanders. At one time or other, I operated with most of the infantry companies, so I had a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses.

Only one commander failed to reach the high operational standards I’d learned to expect. His leadership ability was poor and his tactical skills were marginal. He was also unusually vain and prissy for a Marine (he always had much more “stuff” with him than the normally lean-traveling Marines); he seemed to have the “privileged” attitude that you more usually found in ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers. But his major problem was his inability to handle more than one thing at a time — a critical requirement for a combat leader. A combat commander in a fight has to do twenty things at once. This almost cost me and his men our lives.

At that time, we were operating among the deserted villages near the coast, continuously moving a company through them to keep the VC from establishing a base of operations — and to keep the former inhabitants from sneaking back home. Though we rotated companies every couple of weeks to give them a break, junior advisers were scarce, and I stayed out to join each company returning to the area.[16] After a while, some company commander must have noticed that I was looking haggard and mentioned to the battalion commander that I should get a break. I didn’t like that idea. A lot was going on out there that only an adviser could take care of.

But on the next turnover the commander ordered me to come back to base. “You come in with the company coming in,” he told me, “and we’ll just put a company out there without an adviser.”

“No way,” I said. “I’m staying. We can’t have a company out there with no adviser.”

“Well, look,” he said, “come in with a company. Get cleaned up. Take a break. We’ve got mail back here for you. Just take a day, at least, and then you can go back out. We’ll hold a platoon commander and a squad back from the company going out to accompany you back to the unit.”

“Okay, I’ll come in and take a day,” I said. I had to admit that a break was tempting; it didn’t seem like there was a hell of a lot going on; and a day was not a long time.

I had one major concern, however. The company going out was the one commanded by the weak officer. It was actually a good company with good platoon commanders, but the short time I’d already spent with them had given me worries about his competence in a tough situation on his own.

At any rate, I came in and cleaned up, got my gear squared away, ate a decent meal, got caught up on my mail, and had a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

About midday, I got together with the lieutenant platoon leader to go over the patrol route and review the procedures for our move. This was bad guy land, and we took no chances. I was impressed with this savvy young man; he was mature and proficient beyond his years.

We met early the next morning at the agreed time and departed friendly lines.

As we got closer to the company’s position, we heard firing. That was a surprise. There had been no reports of their contact with the enemy; and when I called back to battalion to check, they didn’t have any reports, either. Since it was obvious we had to find out what was going on, we stopped the patrol close to their lines and got hold of the company commander on the radio.

“I have VC on three sides and am under heavy fire,” he told us. The volume of fire we could hear seemed to confirm this.

A lot of questions instantly ran through my head: The VC and the NVA were a very sophisticated enemy. They almost always initiated contact — always probing and testing to see how good you were. If you responded and you nailed them hard, they’d break off quickly and fade away. But if they saw they weren’t getting hit hard, they’d press the attack and bring in reinforcements, hoping for an easy kill. My experience was that if we burned them right at the start, they’d break off. No way were they going to get into a pitched battle with somebody who seemed have their stuff together and could get on them quickly with fires. For that reason, I always tried to get artillery and air on them as soon as they hit.

But that was clearly not happening here. “Why?” I asked myself.

The bad guys could certainly see that they were facing a good company that was well dug in. But they were not getting pounded. There were no helicopters, observer aircraft, or jet fighters up there, and no artillery slamming in. And when they realized that, they said, “These guys don’t have it together, or else maybe they don’t have access to their heavy stuff. And we have enough forces in position to take them on. Let’s do it.”

The company had dug in at a deserted hamlet. Because they were surrounded on three sides, the only clear route in was from the west. So we had to carefully work our way around to that side and then slowly close on the company position. The young lieutenant platoon commander handled this tricky move extremely well. We could have easily run into the VC or (just as bad) been mistaken for them and drawn friendly fire, but his coordination and deft handling of our patrol were superb.

When we finally entered the company lines, the scene was intense. Marines were firing from cover at the attacking and ever-probing enemy. The fighting was at close quarters; the enemy were everywhere. (What I didn’t realize then was that the fighting had also been going on for quite some time. This fact came back to bite me.)

As I made my way through the mud huts to the company command post, the lieutenant broke off to join his platoon. They could use him… and I had a sudden wish that he was the company commander.

At the command group, several Marines were chattering away on radios propped up against the mud walls of the huts. From what I could tell, the company commander was talking to his platoon commanders and seemed to have the defense under control. Yet I still couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t reported the contact or requested fire support. The fighting was heavy and the VC were obviously working to encircle him.

About the time I was approaching the command group, the company commander decided to call in artillery. But typically for him, it was an afterthought. He hadn’t given any specific direction to the forward artillery observer, who was — as it happened — confused about our coordinates. As it also happened, I had just checked the coordinates of our position, and when I heard the Vietnamese artillery forward observer calling in the fire mission, it dawned on me that he was giving our location and not the enemy’s.

I grabbed my radio handset and called a “check fire” back to our U.S. artillery adviser, but was too late. The “shot out” return call indicated rounds were on the way. “Get down!” I yelled, as two rounds whistled in and exploded behind us. Remarkably, they hit in the open to our rear, and the Marines, under cover, were not hurt.

At this point, the U.S. Marine artillery adviser, our battalion senior adviser, and the task force senior adviser were all screaming on my radio, trying to find out what was going on; and from the activity on their radios, the Vietnamese chain of command was equally energized. I tried giving my command a quick explanation, asking them for time to sort this mess out, but they were not having it. Since they were hearing about the problem from me, I had to be the problem. But at least they trusted me enough to listen to my requests for help, and I managed to get control of things enough to have them bring in an Air Force spotter plane over our position and cancel the artillery mission until I was ready for it.

Since the company seemed well organized in their defense, I was confident there wasn’t an immediate problem with the maneuver units.

I then grabbed the company commander and asked him for a heads-up.

“We’ve been hit three or four times,” he said. “Each time has been harder and from more directions than the last.” Though he had, as I had thought, concentrated on the fight and maneuvering of his units without also reporting his situation or calling in fire support or air observers, I felt I could get these last under control when he hit me with an “Oh, by the way”: “My men are very low on ammunition.”

At first I wondered when he intended to do something about this (that should have been done long before I showed up), but it was quickly obvious he was dumping the problem on me.

“How low?” I asked.

“A few rounds per man,” he answered.

“Great!” I thought.

Fortunately, the VC fire was dying off just then. They seemed to be regrouping.

I immediately put in an emergency request for ammo, which drew more yelling from the rear echelon, who were still on my ass for what was happening.

“What kind of ammo do you need and how much?” They asked after they’d calmed down a little. But they were still thinking that this should be a “by the book” request. I didn’t have time for that.

“Thirty caliber, forty-five… just get anything you can out here.” The Marines of course had a grab bag of old weapons, and no M-16s. “I can’t give you an ammo request. This is an emergency. We’re down to three or four rounds per man and we’re getting hit hard.”

This was just minutes after they’d become aware of our fight. So it didn’t sound right to them. You don’t normally get in so much trouble so fast. “Where the hell’s this coming from?” they were asking. It was clear that the seriousness of our situation was not sinking in back there and they thought they had an overly excited lieutenant on their hands. The fact was none of the guys in the rear had enough true combat time to understand the situation; I had more trigger time by then than any of them.

Meanwhile, I told the company commander to get on his radio and give his battalion a full situation report, and to be accurate and detailed on his ammo status.

Just then the U.S. Air Force 0–1 Birddog light observation plane came on scene. They were called “Herbies” after their call sign, and we loved these guys. I can’t praise them enough.

“Thank God for the Herbies,” I thought. I gave him our position and the direction the last enemy contacts had come from, and asked him to check those areas.

A few minutes later, he came back up on the net: “You have enemy massing on three sides of you,” he said. “You’ve also got VC on foot, bicycle, and motorbikes all heading your way. I’ll work up an air strike, but you need to get ready for a big hit soon. They may get to you before I can bring in our air.”

He was right. The VC hit us before the air strike hit them. When they saw the Birddog, I’m sure they knew they had to attack before fire was rained on them.

When they closed in, the fighting was fierce, but the Marines were careful with their shots. They had to be. During the close-quarters fighting, a few VC broke through. A red hand flare signaled that we had an enemy penetration of our lines.

At that moment I was concentrating on the Herbie, who was feeding me coordinates for an artillery mission on the enemy positions. My head was pressed against a wall of one of the huts, with a finger plugging one ear and the radio headset over the other. The firing and yelling made hearing difficult. But before I could complete the fire mission, I was spun around by my radio operator, trying to warn me down.

As I turned, I saw an old man in khaki shirt and shorts with a Thompson submachine gun firing directly at me from about twenty yards away. Fortunately, his rounds were smacking into the mud wall just above my head. But then when I reached for my.45 caliber pistol, my holster was empty. My radio operator already had it and was firing at the old man. So was my cowboy. Everybody was “spraying and praying”; but no one was hit.

A moment later, the old man’s magazine was empty, and as he tried to put in a new one from the magazine belt around his shoulder, my radio operator and cowboy bolted over and tackled him. They whacked him around a bit, then dragged him over to the wall.

“Great!” I thought. “Now we have a POW to deal with along with all the problems I’m trying to sort out.”

As my guys were tying up our prisoner, I noticed the fire dying away. We had beaten back another attack — the fourth. That was the good news.

The bad news: The company commander came over to tell me that the troops had only one or two rounds apiece remaining. He then gave the order to fix bayonets.

“Great!” The effect of his order on everybody in the company was chilling.

At that moment, I got a radio call from a U.S. Army helicopter inbound with our ammo resupply. I gave the pilot a quick brief on the situation: “Come in from the west,” I told him. “Quickly kick out the ammo, and get out the way you came in.”

Meanwhile, the Herbie spotted the VC regrouping. They were getting ready to hit us again.

It was looking like a very close call coming up. If we could bring the helo in and get some ammo out to the troops, we might buy time for the air and arty missions to hit.

The helo came in low and pushed out the crates of ammo. The Marines were on the crates quickly, and runners raced the ammo out to the troops on the line. So far so good.

But then the helo pilot came up on the net to say he was about to go out to the east to “take a look around.”

I screamed into the radio: “The east is full of bad guys! Go out west!” But he blew me off and started east. He instantly took heavy fire as he cleared our lines, barely missing him. He then went into a steep climb out of there, with the Herbie pilot cursing him as he flew out.

The helo pilot then reported to our task force headquarters that I’d led him east and almost got him shot down, which brought the task force advisers down on me like a ton of shit. By then the arty and air strikes were coming in, so I told them I didn’t have time to deal with all that. (They still hadn’t caught on about how bad the situation was.[17])

These hit just as the VC hit us.

For a tense moment, I wondered if the ammo had made it to the troops, but that worry quickly disappeared: the heavy volume of outgoing fire was music to my ears. By this stage of my tour, I could distinguish the types of weapons firing, whether the firing was incoming or outgoing, even at these close quarters, and which side had the advantage in a firefight. It was clear that we were beating them back and that the air and arty were breaking the VC attack. This was the VC’s fifth and final attack.

The enemy was fleeing in all directions on every mode of transportation they had, the Herbie reported excitedly. He chased some of them as they tried to scatter away from the air and helo gunship strikes he was calling in.

Not long after that, we were able to evacuate our casualties and regroup for what we hoped would be a quiet night. Fortunately, it was; and I was able to settle the company commander down and make sure we had a solid night defensive plan. I also spent a lot of time that night trying to explain what had happened to higher headquarters. They were still confused and angry. I was the guy they were talking to, so I was the guy who got yelled at. That’s just the way things are.

Later that night, I told my radio operator and cowboy that I was proud of how well they had performed under fire. “But we’re going to be getting some shooting practice very soon,” I told them, “and no one is ever to take my weapon!”

Several months later, the company commander was relieved, arrested for corruption, and jailed. I never got the details, but his departure was no loss to the VNMC.

It’s often hard to think of the enemy as human beings. But sometimes I’d run into a situation that powerfully demonstrated that that is what they are.

One morning, I went out with another company into the hills west of Highway 1 to block for a 1st Cav sweeping operation. We moved over the crest of some low hills to set up positions above a few small hamlets. As our lead elements began working down the hill toward the villages, they suddenly stopped and gave the hand signal for “enemy ahead.” The Marines quickly and quietly came on line toward the direction indicated by the point men.

As I came up with the company commander, I could see about seventy-five meters below us a small gathering around a cooking fire among the village huts — probably a family eating the morning meal. At the same time, I noticed two AK-47 assault rifles on the ground next to two young men.

Just as this registered with me, the people around the fire noticed us. The young men grabbed the weapons and made their way toward a shed or barn, firing as they went. They never made it. The Marines cut them down in a hail of fire. One was hit so many times his body literally skipped along the ground.

Meanwhile, the rest of the family — women, kids, and old folks — had scattered in the opposite direction.

We quickly moved down the hill, rounded up the family, and put them in a covered animal pen for safekeeping, while our troops continued searching the area. They discovered uniforms, equipment, and papers belonging to the two young men — including a diary, the work of the senior of the two, a lieutenant in the NVA… the one we’d hit so many times by our fire. The other was his assistant.

Later we learned from the family that the lieutenant was a platoon commander home on leave, and this was his family — his mother, father, wife, and kids. He’d traveled from the west near the Cambodian border back to his home village.

During our noon meal on the stoop of the family’s house, the company commander and I read selections from the diary and other papers. Soon rain started coming down, so we moved back under the palm frond overhang of the roof.

The diary was a fascinating and incredibly meticulous account of the young lieutenant’s life as a platoon commander. He seemed to leave out nothing — from personal details about his wife and family, to the money spent on food for his troops, to the money he’d allotted for his troops to hire prostitutes. There were photos of his graduation from the military academy in North Vietnam and photos of his wife and children. He was an idealistic young man, caught up in his cause — as committed to his “faith” as we were to ours… a sobering realization.

As I read, I had a disturbing sense that I was being watched. When I looked up, the family was standing in a shocked, emotionless cluster, like zombies, just staring at me through the rain pouring off the thatched roof of the animal pen where they were confined. Though they were stoic, like all Vietnamese, their gaze was a powerful judgment.

There were many dizzying and disturbing moments in this seemingly senseless and confusing war that shook my certitudes. This was one of the most disturbing.

Zinni was promoted to captain in July. The war had shortened the old time-in-grade requirements.

UTILITY INFIELDER

As the advisers’ utility infielder, Zinni never stayed long in one place. Here is how all that traveling broke down chronologically:

• April 3 to April 21: Rung Sat Special Zone

• April 24 to May 13, June 20 to August 10, and November 8 to December 13: II CTZ — Operation Pershing

• May 15 to 19, September 2 to 9, and October 19 to November 15: Capital Military District (CMD)

• May 24 to May 31: Mekong Delta

• June 7 to 17, August 11 to September 2, and September 9 to October 10: III CTZ — Jungle

• October 24 to 30: R & R in Hong Kong

• December 13: Evacuated to Qui Non

Zinni saw constant action during his times in II CTZ, but his times in the jungle — III CTZ — were every bit as memorable.

He operated there for three periods during his tour: for ten days in June (when he was still comparatively green), and for most of August and September. The specific area of operations was called the Ong Dong Forest, a classic triple-canopy rain forest, thinly populated, but containing immense varieties of exotic flora and fauna — elephants, tigers, all kinds of biting insects, poisonous snakes, and other nasties. Operations in the jungle were exercises in survival as well as military operations to find the enemy. Zinni loved it. His most fascinating times in Vietnam were in the jungle.

He takes up the story:

Truly, when you’re out there in the jungle, you’re in a strange, new world — a world that feels untouched by humans… totally alien. Nothing seems familiar. You have a real sense of uncertainty about what might confront you. There were constant surprises. And even though I went in with savvy, experienced companions, I always felt as though I was on my own. The jungle does that to you… it makes you feel solitary.

Our operations in the jungle were known as Operation Billings by the Americans, and Operations Song Than and Dong Nai by the Vietnamese. The U.S. unit in the area was the 1st U.S. Infantry Division, “the Big Red One.” Though we conducted a few coordinated operations with the U.S. forces, the jungle was too dense for large operations. You had to literally hack your way through vines and thick foliage, moving very slowly, mostly in small units — squad-sized, platoon-sized, maybe company-sized patrols. I learned a great deal about jungle craft, patrolling, tactics, and survival from the skilled Vietnamese Marines on these patrols.

The aim of Billings was to interdict the enemy coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia and infiltrating through the mountains and rugged terrain of the jungles into the populated regions near the coast. We didn’t actually encounter large numbers of the enemy in the jungle, but we knew they were there. Our job was to search for indications of them, their infiltration routes, or base camps or other places they might be using as sanctuaries; and we frequently found unoccupied VC positions — often clever bunkers tunneled under thick bamboo clumps, providing them with a natural cover.

Because of the difficult terrain, the Vietnamese command wanted top troops there, and that meant the Marines.

We operated out of a small village on the edge of the jungle called Tan Uyen, where the Marines had a base. From there we’d send a company into the jungle for six or seven days at a time to look for enemy moving eastward from the Cambodian border.

Under the thick jungle canopy, we were on our own; we could not expect reinforcement or resupply, and we carried little food. We had no field rations, for example (such as American C rations). With the exception of a few balls of precooked rice packed in small aluminum cans, a chicken or two bound and gagged over our packs (to be killed and eaten the first or second day out), and some nouc mam, Vietnamese fish sauce, everything we ate had to be foraged (like breadfruit or bamboo shoots) or killed (like monkeys and snakes) in the field.

Once in the jungle, the Marines knew how to use materials found there to enhance their living conditions and improve their security.

I learned how to quickly build bamboo platforms for my gear, how to set up alarms and booby traps around our night base, and how to read tracks and signs in the jungle from our expert scouts. The most important lesson I learned was how to travel light. Before each patrol, I found a new way to lighten my load and leave behind another previously “indispensable” piece of gear.

On my first patrol, I carried a heavy U.S. jungle hammock and a “rubber lady”—an inflatable mattress. As I settled in for the night, the Marines warned me not to sleep on the ground. “Set up your hammock in a tree,” they told me.

I thought that was a bad idea. “We shouldn’t sleep in the trees,” I answered. “We have to be ready in case the enemy attacks.”

They shook their heads knowingly and slept in the trees.

Just in case, I tied my hammock up in a tree, but went to sleep on my rubber lady.

In the middle of the night, my mattress suddenly deflated like a tire blowing out, and I was stabbed by hundreds of burning hot stings. Slapping wildly at them, I jumped into the hammock. I didn’t need further persuasion. In time, the pain subsided and I was able to sleep.

The next morning, my skin was a red mass of bites. And when I poked my head over my hammock, I could see my mattress — or what was left of it — being devoured by thousands of ants. Only a two-foot square remained.

The Marines gave me an “I told you so” look. Then advised me to get rid of my heavy hammock and grab one of their light nylon ones (they folded up small enough to be stowed in a pocket). I did.

The fieldcraft of the Vietnamese was impressive.

Every activity on the patrols was a preset drill. Before we set out, we rehearsed everything — occupation of a patrol base; getting water; acquiring food; setting up our night defenses; crossing danger areas such as streams and clearings; setting up ambushes; and even using the field sanitation pits. Nothing was left to chance or improvisation. No one did anything alone (some Marines’ only function was to maintain security while others fetched water or gathered food). And no one did anything until the order was given. Anyone attempting otherwise did so at his peril.

On one patrol, we lost a new recruit who went off to get water from a nearby stream before the order came to go. All we found after a search was his helmet by a stream.

In the jungle, it wasn’t only the enemy you had to worry about; other dangers could easily strike. I awoke one morning to hear an obviously upset company commander chewing out his men for some nighttime security breach. This was strange, since the Vietnamese Marines were reliably vigilant, especially at night. When I asked him about it, he showed me a huge steaming pile of dung in the middle of the patrol base. It was tiger shit.

The Marines swore that they’d been alert; and I believed them. The tiger had come in without tripping any of our bamboo clapper alarms or claymore mines and had been undetected by our security. I didn’t sleep too soundly after that.

On another morning, I was awakened by a group of Marines around my hammock, chattering excitedly and pointing above the poncho I had rigged over it. Pulling back the poncho revealed a gigantic snake curled on a branch a few feet above my head — a twelve-foot python with a big bulge in his middle. He had recently eaten.

To the Vietnamese this was gold. They quickly cut down the snake, twisted the lethargic reptile around a makeshift pole cut from a branch, and sewed up the snake’s mouth with a rawhide-like chord. Though the snake seemed half-dead, I assumed that condition had been brought on by his recent meal.

The Marines decided we should take the snake back to the village, since killing and eating it in the field would be a waste (food spoiled fast and had to be consumed shortly after killing it). We had three days left on our patrol.

Toward the end of the patrol, the snake grew increasingly active, but we made it back with him and enjoyed a grand meal.

The marines were as careful in their departures as they were in their preparations. They tried never to leave any trace of their presence behind. When we pulled out of our bases, we meticulously cleaned them. The aim was to leave behind as little evidence of our presence as possible and to prevent the VC from getting their hands on anything they could use… a discarded C ration can and a grenade could quickly be turned into a booby trap.

Several times we came across positions once used by U.S. or South Vietnamese units. Since these were always booby-trapped by the enemy, I was glad our policy was never to occupy a position used before. The Vietnamese were always angered by the carelessness of U.S. forces. Abandoned U.S. bases or night positions normally had claymore mines still in place and discarded or forgotten equipment strewn about.

Though enemy contact on jungle patrols was rare, it was not never:

On one patrol our base was hit for several nights in a row by indirect fire. Fortunately, the heavy canopy and ground cover kept us from suffering casualties, but we knew it was only a matter of time before our luck ran out.

Since it was small-caliber fire and always right on us, somebody nearby had to be calling it in. That meant somebody was following us. We decided to set in a stay behind ambush the next day to try to nail them.

The plan was to find a clearing (an ideal killing zone) and set up the ambush with our lead elements on the far side, as the rest of the patrol crossed it (we always crossed clearings carefully, as danger areas). Once they had passed through the ambush area, they’d set up as a reinforcing element behind it.

The plan worked. A four-man VC team came into the killing zone a few minutes after our patrol had supposedly left. The Marines killed three of them, and wounded and captured the other. Though the prisoner was in bad shape and not in the best of health to start with, we were able to learn from him that the four VC were a forward observer team who tracked and called in fires on units patrolling the jungle.

Since enemy prisoners in this region were hard to come by, III Corps headquarters wanted this guy right away. We were ordered to secure a landing zone and I was told to bring him and the equipment the VC had with them back to a rear location.

When the U.S. helo came in, I loaded him and the equipment aboard and we took off for wherever they wanted him. We landed on an LZ near some buildings, where a group of officers and troops in starched uniforms and spit-shined boots were standing around. When the helo touched down, I picked up the VC with the equipment, carried him to where the group was standing, and dumped the load at their feet. I was sure this was the closest they would ever get to the enemy. I looked at their startled faces and walked back to the helo and asked the pilot to get me back to my unit right away. On the flight back, I wondered how many of them would get combat decorations for their rear echelon jobs. I was glad I was not one of them.

My twenty-fourth birthday came in September, during one of my times in the jungle. It wasn’t exactly a lead item on my mind. But during the day a helo dropped off resupplies and some welcome mail that I knew would have to be quickly read and destroyed.

In the mail packet was an envelope with my name on it and nothing else. Inside was Miss September, the Playboy Playmate of the Month, naked and lying in a hammock. Written in the margins of the foldout were birthday greetings from the advisers back at the task force headquarters and a list entitled, “9 Things Wrong With This Tactical Picture”:

1. No Overhead Cover

2. Flanks Exposed

3. No One on High Ground

4. No Probing Patrols

5. Not Tied In with Friendlies

6. No One on Duty

7. Not Expecting Immediate Attack

8. Reserve Committed

9. Susceptible to Penetration

I shared the centerfold with the delighted Vietnamese Marines as we set up our hammocks in the patrol base that evening. I still have it to remind me of the little things we did to pump each other up.

THE BATTLE OF THE BONG SON PLAIN

The battle that became known as the Battle of the Bong Son Plain in II CTZ is regarded by some as the first battle of the Tet Offensive. Although it was fought a month before the January attacks of Tet, it signaled a change in the enemy’s strategy.

Tony Zinni continues:

It began in a strange way. By the later months of 1967, things had become very quiet, and fighting seemed to be limited to the border areas of South Vietnam in places like Khe Sanh and the Ia Drang Valley. Many of us thought the VC and NVA were now incapable of large-scale attacks outside of areas along the Cambodian and Laotian borders near their bases and supply routes.

We were, of course, mistaken. The series of attacks that became famous as the Tet Offensive was forming up. The targets of Tet were the cities of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese command under General Giap believed that if the attacks battered the allies enough to make them seem to lose control, the people would rise up and the war would end, as it did with the French decades before.

One of the target cities was Qui Nhon, a coastal city in II CTZ.

One morning an aerial observer on a routine flight over the area north of the city spotted what looked like a field expedient radio antenna. A local ARVN division dispatched a patrol to check it out. The patrol was never heard from again. A company sent to the area ran into a large VC force and was wiped out.

These events launched a major U.S.-South Vietnamese military operation. The ensuing fighting was fierce, with the friendly units taking severe casualties. Our two-battalion task force of Vietnamese Marines was alerted and designated the II CTZ reserve for the battle that was raging.

At this time I was again with the 4th Battalion. The old battalion commander, Major Tri, had gone to the U.S. to attend a military course, and the executive officer, Major Voung, was now the commander. Captain Kinh, a colorful and much revered old warrior (he had many wounds and many wives), was now the executive officer. Bob Hamilton was now the senior adviser, and I was filling the junior adviser position. As the battle raged, we did what we could to monitor it, but had no way of knowing how serious the fighting had become until a call came that we (the reserve) would be committed.

As the battalion got ready to go, the task force advisers and some officers from the Corps headquarters showed up at our position to brief us. “The situation’s bad,” they told us. “The ARVN division is in desperate shape and the U.S. unit from the 1st Cav has also taken serious casualties. It’s urgent that you reinforce these units as soon as possible.”

The plan was for our battalion to conduct a helicopter lift in two waves directly onto the ARVN position. I would go with Captain Kinh and two companies as the lead. Then the helos would lift the remainder of the battalion to join us. The other battalion and our task force headquarters would move by trucks up Highway 1 to join our battalion. The task force was put under the operational control of the 22nd ARVN Division, the unit fighting the battle.

What we were to do once we landed was unclear, which left all of us uneasy. The fighting was heavy and our mission was hazy. Because no one seemed to have a good handle on what was happening, it was left to us to make contact with the units on the ground and work out the scheme.

From the briefing and the maps, I could tell the VC held a group of villages, while the ARVN and U.S. forces were on high ground overlooking them. The battle had gone on for days with lots of air and artillery fire and several unsuccessful ground attacks launched by the forces we were to join.

I knew the villages well from previous operations — beautiful places with postcard scenes of thatched houses, palm trees, and rice paddies… and prosperous (they made rice wine); so life was good. I’d enjoyed my times there and truly liked the people. I was anxious to see what the fighting had done to them.

I met Captain Kinh in the pickup landing zone as we waited for the helos to come in. I would coordinate with the pilots and wanted to be sure we were ready for a “hot” zone in case the situation had worsened. I was not confident that our briefs had given us a clear picture of the conditions on the ground.

I was glad to see my best Vietnamese friend, Captain Hoa, and his company would be one of the two companies going in our lead helo lift. The other company was also a good unit, and I felt reassured with this team of experienced fighters. Everyone seemed somber; we all shared the uneasy feeling about this mission.

The helos landed, we went through our briefs, and then lifted off toward the north and whatever awaited us.

As our helos started their descent into the landing zone, I looked out to get a quick sense of the situation on the ground.

“There’s no sign of hostile fire,” the pilots told me. But I could see the devastating aftermath of truly fierce fighting. The once lovely villages were totally destroyed, and the terrain where the ARVN were located looked like a moonscape, pockmarked by shell craters and scoured of trees and brush. I had a quick flashback to the beauty and serenity of the area not long ago.

As the helicopters slowed close to the ground, we got another disturbing sight. Panicking ARVN soldiers were running for the birds, many discarding their weapons and equipment in their dash for the helos. Though a few officers made halfhearted attempts to stop them, they couldn’t check the stampede. Our pilots, meanwhile, were very unhappy about the safety problems this mad dash was causing.

Our Marines glared at the ARVN soldiers in disgust as we debarked from the helos and rapidly took up defensive positions around the LZ. My immediate concern — as well as Captain Kinh’s — was that the VC might be aware of the apparent mayhem and see it as an opportunity to attack.

The helos lifted off with ARVN troops clinging to the skids and frustrated helo crew chiefs giving up on trying to push off the frightened soldiers. It was clear that this ARVN unit was beaten and useless in any action that might follow.

Kinh, Hoa, and I looked around in disbelief, our grim expression mirrored on the faces of the other Marines.

Kinh instructed the company commanders to quickly get their positions prepared to protect the zone for the follow-on lifts and not to depend on the units already there for security. He then told me to join him. “Let’s try to find someone in charge,” he said.

It seemed strange that no officer had approached us by now.

We moved from position to position, until we came to a very deep hole with radio antennas sticking out of it. To my surprise, an ARVN brigadier general was inside. When he realized we were there, he jumped out and started screaming at Kinh. He was so frightened and panicked it was difficult to understand what he was saying. He was clearly over the edge. But the gist of it was orders to Kinh to launch into the attack.

Kinh yelled back at him. “We will attack,” he said, “but given the size of the enemy, we should wait for the rest of the battalion, and preferably wait for both battalions of Marines to get on the ground.”

The general kept screaming, “No, you have to attack now! You have to attack now!”

Kinh glared at the general with such total disdain that I feared he’d hit him on the spot.

At this point, I decided to walk away from the confrontation. I didn’t think it was my place to be there as these two Vietnamese commanders were screaming and yelling at each other. My job was to do what I could to help Kinh and the Marines. I knew another American unit was in the area. I wanted to get a fix on them to see if we could link up with them. I also wanted to check to see when the rest of the battalion was going to arrive.

But the first thing I did was hook up with Hoa, who told me that the flank of his company was reporting U.S. armored personnel carriers a short distance away (the American unit I’d wanted to link up with). He and I walked over to take a look. As we got there, U.S. soldiers were making their way toward us, led by an Army captain whose company had shared a security position some weeks back with one of our Vietnamese Marine units. He was a good officer and I was glad to finally see something positive in this mess.

After we greeted each other, he told me that his mechanized infantry company was supporting the ARVN regiment, but had suffered some casualties, including losing a couple of their M-113 armored personnel carriers in futile attacks that were poorly conducted by the ARVN. The ARVN infantry had held back in the attacks and then fled, leaving his tracks exposed to VC “spider traps”—camouflaged holes from which the VC would spring up and hit units after they’d passed by. In this case, the VC had fired rifle-propelled grenades (RPGs) into the rear of the M-113s.

Just then, the Marines behind us began to pick up their equipment, preparing to move out. After checking in on his radio, Hoa confirmed that.

This seemed crazy. The VC were dug in below in strong positions at the edge of the village. There were a lot of them, and they were in good shape (we thought), while we were not yet up to full strength. The three of us hurried toward Kinh’s location to find out what was happening.

Kinh was furious: The ARVN general had persisted in his order to attack the dug-in VC.

“This is insane,” I told Kinh. All the air and artillery strikes and ground attacks had so far failed to break the VC. Two light infantry companies would be slaughtered.

“You’re right,” he shrugged angrily. There was nothing he could do. He then gave me a bitter look. “I don’t want you to go in this attack,” he said.

I looked at this man whose warrior spirit I greatly admired. “There’s nothing on this hill worth staying for,” I told him. “I want to be with our Marines.”

He smiled.

Then the U.S. Army captain added his two cents. “If you attack,” he said, “my company is going with you. I agree. Nothing on the hill is worth staying for.”

Kinh smiled again.

We quickly coordinated plans and made preparations for the attack.

As we walked away, the Army captain asked me to make sure the Vietnamese Marines stayed in front of his tracks this time.

Hoa had overheard him. Before I could answer, he’d shoved himself inches from the captain’s face. “We are Marines,” he said. “We will always be in front of you.”

The captain smiled at me. “I like this guy,” he said.[18]

After issuing orders and coordinating our attack, we formed up and moved out.

It would have been nice to lay down air strikes before we hit the VC, but we were out of luck this time. Though we had some air on station, we did not have any discernible targets for them. We knew the VC lines were at the base of our hill and on the edge of the village complex beyond it, but I could not see any indications of the enemy. Since they were masters of camouflage, this was not significant.

It turned out that our worries were groundless.

As we moved closer to the base of the hill, I expected heavy fire; but we were met only by light, sporadic shots. Our lead troops returned them.

Moments later we were on top of the VC defensive positions, and there was still no serious fire. They were withdrawing. They did not intend to fight. The light fire had obviously come from their rear units trying to delay us and protect their retreat.

At that point, we made three quick assumptions: that they had not observed the ARVN chaos, that the sight of the helos landing had convinced them that reinforcements had arrived, and that they were in no condition to handle another attack from fresh troops.

A short time later, these assumptions proved to be true. They’d taken far more casualties than we’d thought: Our Marines had uncovered mass graves behind the enemy fighting positions — large pits containing piles of bodies hastily covered with palm fronds. We estimated there were as many as eighty bodies in one, and the others contained perhaps ten or twenty apiece. (I learned later that a total of 650 VC had been killed before the Marines arrived. This had been a major battle.)

By then I was up on the radio reporting our situation to our task force headquarters. Though Kinh did not want to be careless with such a potentially large force in front of us, he was an aggressive commander and eager to move out fast to catch the retreating VC.

In the light of this chance to grab more enemies, the reply from the task force was incredible. “The Corps command wants you to count the bodies in the pits,” they told me. Americans had a fixation on body counts. It was some mad managerial types’ way to “statistically” measure battlefield success. And it was senseless. Counting dead bodies was always nuts, but in this case it was triple nuts: Many of these corpses been in the pits for days; the intense heat had made the stench unbearable. But far more important, our troops were ready to move on. There was enemy out there that was reeling and vulnerable.

When I told Kinh what Corps command had ordered, he quietly said, “We don’t count bodies,” and gave the order to move out. That was good enough for me; and I happily told higher headquarters we weren’t going to do it. I took a lot of grief for that; but I’d been in Vietnam for ten months by then, and telling the rear to go pound sand no longer bothered me.

Soon we were moving into the remains of the village I remembered so well — an eerie scene that will always haunt me. The once-beautiful village was now rubble, the houses blown apart, the palm trunks snapped and twisted. There was a strong stench of dead bodies and animals; and a gray fog-like mist hanging over the place at treetop level made it difficult to see beyond a few dozen meters. (I guessed it had been caused by dust stirred up by the bombs and shells that had impacted in the area.)

The ghastly scene spooked the Marines. The VC didn’t scare them; but their highly superstitious nature was clearly convincing them this was a bad place.

We slowly moved on line across the destroyed village, staring intently into the mist. At one point we noticed a large portion of an animal hanging in a tree — a section of a water buffalo that had been blown apart. A little later, we came upon a man’s body, his face pale gray and the top of his head blown off. As we stared at him, we were startled by a sudden movement — a snake crawling out of his open skull.

To the Vietnamese troops, this was definitely a bad omen.

We nervously pressed on.

A little later, I dimly made out a motionless figure in the haze. The Marines, seeing it too, began to ready their weapons. The figure remained motionless. As we got closer, we began to realize it was a small boy. He was frozen, just staring straight ahead, totally unaware of us. When we reached him, a Vietnamese Marine took his hand and brought him along with us. He trotted along, still mute.

We continued on for several days[19] through many more equally horrific scenes.

Though we made occasional contact with the enemy, the VC was not interested in a fight. They’d just throw out a few shots to slow us down. We took some wounded from these small contacts, but nothing serious.

An officer lying next to me during one exchange of fire was hit by a round that penetrated only about an inch deep into his thigh — evidence that the enemy was shooting at us from a great distance, desperately hoping to keep us off their back. He easily popped it out.

After a time, intelligence reports from prisoner interrogations and accounts of villagers who had made their way out of the battle area began to filter down to us. The enemy unit we were chasing was identified as the 22nd NVA Regiment, augmented with some local VC elements. Badly mauled, the remnants were cut off by other U.S. and South Vietnamese units and further hammered as they fled for the hills to the west.

Some reports claimed the NVA commander was a woman, but that was never verified. We often got similarly crazy reports: A commander was seen riding a white horse or was a Chinese officer or a Russian. I put this report in the same category.

Our mission ended when we reached Highway 1, the western boundary of our assigned zone of action — now cleared. The enemy escaping to the west were now in zones of other units. We’d suffered a few wounded and bagged a number of the enemy; but, overall, the fighting was a lot lighter than we’d anticipated. Our troops were drained from several days of continuous movement and running firefights, but even more from the horrible sights they’d witnessed. The small boy, though, was still with us, cared for by the Marines. He never spoke a word. Later, we turned him over to civilians on Highway 1 who knew him.

Much of Highway 1—as the main thoroughfare of South Vietnam — was a commercial strip, with small shops, cafes, market stalls, and restaurants all along it. Normally there was heavy traffic on the highway; but this had been swelled by crowds of refugees who had fled the fighting, many of them injured.

As we started heading south along the highway, we came upon an ARVN mechanized unit at a semidestroyed railroad station who didn’t look like they’d done any fighting. When our Marines spotted the unit, I sensed some bad blood; but didn’t think much about it.

Meanwhile, we learned that trucks were on the way to take us back to our original bases to the south. Since no one knew exactly when they would arrive, the commanders decided to let the troops take advantage of the cafes and soup stalls along the road for a rare time-out from more serious business. Hoa invited me to join him for noodle soup and a beer in one of the shops. It sounded great.

Hoa and I were enjoying our bowls and beers when we noticed Marines in combat gear moving past the shop’s open entrance, stealthily creeping forward as though to an enemy target. Curious, we went to the doorway to see what was going on. Kinh was directing the Marines, getting them in position for an attack.

“Kinh,” I called to him, “what’s going on?” But he ignored me.

Suddenly the street erupted in fire.

Hoa and I ducked down inside the shop, and I grabbed my radio to find out what was going on. The shopkeeper repeatedly motioned for us to get into the family protection bunker he had built into the floor. “No, no, you go in,” we told him. We had to try to sort out what was happening.

When I contacted Bob Hamilton, he told me that the Marines seemed to be deliberately attacking another South Vietnamese unit. I could see from the doorway that the Marines were firing at the ARVN mechanized unit we’d seen earlier. By now the firing was heavy and rounds were zinging all over. We were at the point of contact between the two units.

The task force senior adviser came up on the radio, really energized. “I’ve got the U.S. Army adviser of the ARVN unit on the radio net,” he told me. I acknowledged that. “What we’ve got to do is get our units to stop this intramural firefight,” he continued.

“I’ll go out into the street to try,” I said. I thought that if I went out and both sides saw my uniform, they might stop this thing.

“I’ll go with you,” Hoa said. I passed that on to the senior adviser.

I also linked up with the Army adviser to the ARVN unit. But when he chimed in that he didn’t get paid to stop friendly firefights and refused to leave his bunker, I decided I wouldn’t get anywhere arguing with him. I had better things to do.

When Hoa and I looked out into the street again, we realized that many of the rounds whizzing past were.50 caliber rounds from the ARVN armored personnel carriers. And the Marines were firing recoilless rifles. Really heavy stuff was whizzing back and forth through the space we intended to occupy. We looked at each other, shrugged, then went slowly out into the street yelling in Vietnamese: “Cease fire!”

As we moved farther out into the street, and the guys on both side saw who we were, they all sobered up, and the fire began to drop off a little… though not before some.50 caliber slugs had zinged by my ear. At that moment, a figure came running toward us from the ARVN unit and met us midway. It was a black U.S. Army staff sergeant, one of the advisers.

“I was cleaning up,” he said, “when I heard the firing. I rushed out as soon as I could.”

When I told him what his officer had said, he rolled his eyes. “It figures,” he said.

The three of us then huddled between the forces, yelling to our respective sides to stop firing. After a few minutes, thankfully, the shooting stopped.

The situation remained tense until Major Voung and the other Vietnamese commanders (as well as Bob Hamilton) came screaming up the road in jeeps and drove into the railroad station. Moments later, a helicopter landed. A Vietnamese major general climbed out and joined them — obviously sent there to sort out the mess and get the units separated. When Major Voung passed us on the way in, he looked angrier than I had ever seen him.

We waited to hear what was being decided inside. The discussion was obviously heated; and there was a lot of yelling.

While this was going on, Hoa had a few moments free to explain what was going on. “We’ve hated these guys for a long time,” he told me. “Years ago, the ARVN unit bugged out in a firefight and abandoned us. Seeing them spurred the old hatred; and some of the troops got into a brawl that boiled over into this mess.”

A little later, I began to sense something was coming to a head. Kinh was moving troops around, positioning our battalion to surround the train station. When he completed this movement, he went inside and whispered something to Major Voung. The major immediately stopped the discussions. “The station is surrounded,” he announced. “The Marines will attack unless the commander and executive officer of the ARVN unit are turned over to the Marines for execution.”

The major general couldn’t allow that. But the situation was almost out of his control; and Kinh wanted to attack in the worst way. Voung remained open to reason, though, and, after a lot of jawboning, he was persuaded to back off.

The arrival of our trucks helped the situation. The troops were anxious to get back to our bases. And so we boarded the trucks — to my enormous relief — and got out of there. We arrived back home late that night; and I slept until midmorning.

After breakfast, when I joined Bob Hamilton in his bunker, he told me he was putting me in for a Navy and Marine Corps Medal (given for heroism in noncombat situations, normally for saving lives).

“Thanks,” I told him, “I appreciate it. But the Army staff sergeant should also be nominated for the Soldier’s Medal [the Army equivalent].”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, after I’d described what happened.

Though I never received the medal, I did get a letter some months after I left Vietnam from a U.S. Army colonel, the senior adviser of the 22nd ARVN Division. “Your timely intervention during this confrontation,” the last paragraph said, “prevented a situation which could have been extremely embarrassing to the Vietnamese government.”

It was obvious the brass wanted to bury the incident without the publicity of awarding medals. That was fine with me.

MEDEVAC ONE

In the tenth month of his one-year tour, Zinni was with the 4th Battalion, operating in a remote and heavily vegetated area of the hills near the Central Highlands in II CTZ. It had been a good ten months; he was thinking about extending for another six.

He was caught up in this conflict. It had become his life. He knew this was where he belonged. He knew exactly why he was there and what he was doing… and felt absolutely confident about that. He knew he could handle himself in a firefight, or in any other tactical situation he might encounter. He had a very close relationship with the Vietnamese Marines. They were his buddies and friends; he’d seen a lot of them die. “My purpose for being was right there,” he explains now.

The bad news: He felt terrible. The rigors of constant field operations had taken its toll. Though other advisers were commenting on his weight loss — about forty pounds (and he was small to start with) — that didn’t bother him much. They had all lost weight. He was sick with something he couldn’t shake. All the advisers had bouts of dysentery, but his latest round didn’t go away. His urine had turned black as coffee, his skin was turning yellow, sleeping was difficult, he was having trouble eating (everything he tried made him nauseous), and he was growing weaker by the day. Something had to be done. But what? He wanted to hang on until he got back to a rear area, but he knew he needed to see an American doctor (the Vietnamese doctor had given him shots that had no effect). He thought an American doctor would have medicine that would work better and get him back to full strength faster.

One day the patrol he was with passed close to an American Army forward logistic base set up on a mountaintop (making it easy to defend and to support troops in the field by helo).

“I’d like to go up to the base and pick up some medicine,” he told the patrol leader.

“Let’s go,” he agreed.

As they approached the hilltop position, the soldiers providing security challenged them. “I’m an American Marine,” Zinni announced. That did not compute with them. He was accompanied by Vietnamese troops; he was wearing a Vietnamese Marine uniform, tiger stripes, and a green beret; and he was carrying a grease gun. Since the Army troops didn’t know that Marines were in their Corps area and were unfamiliar with advisers, they decided not to take any chances. They didn’t ask for the Marines’ weapons, which remained slung, but they weren’t about to welcome them like friends.

“I need to see a doctor,” Zinni told them.

They contacted their officer, who told them it was okay to take him to the medical aid station — but under guard. They did that.

As they approached the field hospital, a voice yelled out to Zinni. “Stop. Hold it where you are.”

A captain with medical insignia came out of a tent with a bottle and handed it to Zinni. “Piss into this.”

As black urine filled the vial, he said, “I don’t know who or what you are; but if you’re an American, your tour is over and I’m medevacing you.”

“I can’t go now,” Zinni answered. “Just give me some pills, and I’ll be okay.”

He gave Zinni a quick visual once-over. “Listen,” he said, “if you don’t get to a hospital soon, you could die.”

That got Zinni’s attention.

As the doctor went about arranging a helicopter evacuation to the U.S. Army hospital at Qui Nhon, Zinni called the task force headquarters to tell them what was happening, then turned his gear over to the Vietnamese Marine captain who was the patrol leader.

“I’ll be back,” Zinni told him, and as the helo came into the landing zone near the aid station, he and the captain said good-bye.

When he arrived at the hospital at Qui Nhon, he was immediately put through a series of tests. At that point, force of will failed him, and his body gave out completely. He could no longer eat. Simply looking at food sickened him. The little strength keeping him going in the field was now gone. He didn’t have energy enough even to get out of bed.

A doctor brought in his test results. “You now weigh 123 pounds,” the doctor told him. “You have a severe case of hepatitis, dysentery, mononucleosis, and probably malaria. The good news,” he continued, “is that all of them require the same treatment — lots of rest and food, even if you have to force it down.”

He was put on intravenous hookups to increase his strength and fed six meals a day. The medics brought tempting cheeseburgers, fries, and milk shakes at all hours, but stomaching more than a few bites of anything proved nearly impossible.

Tony Zinni was a very unhappy young Marine. He wanted in the worst way to get back to the advisory unit; and lying in a hospital bed was not his idea of how he wanted to spend his time.

His mood was not much improved when he started feeling a little better. “Well, let’s see what I can do,” he said to himself and tried some push-ups near his bed. He collapsed after three.

The biggest blow came a few days after that. “You’re going to be evacuated to the Naval Hospital on Guam,” the doctor told him, “and then back to the States.” That was when he realized that return to the Marine Advisory Unit was not in the cards.

An Air Force evacuation plane carried Zinni and a number of other evacuees to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where they spent Christmas Day. Another plane carried him to Guam, where he spent several weeks regaining enough strength for his return to the United States.

The stay at Guam was even more difficult than at Qui Nhon. Though the staff was caring and supportive, Zinni felt isolated — the only patient on an officers’ ward. His morale plummeted further as the Tet Offensive unfolded in all its gut-wrenching fury. The VC and NVA were mounting coordinated attacks against the major cities of Vietnam. And all Zinni could do was lie in his bed and impotently watch the TV.

The Vietnamese Marines, always at the heart of the action, were fighting in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon.

On one occasion, Zinni watched his Marines bring a captured VC before the Saigon police chief, where he was summarily executed. Zinni had accompanied one of the Marines he saw there, a platoon commander from the 4th Battalion, on many operations.

Other Marines went on to fight in the desperate battle for Hue City, distinguishing themselves in the hard fighting to take the city and its citadel.

Eventually, he was brought home to a hospital near Philadelphia, and was soon well enough to be made an outpatient — meaning that he only had to report in every day; otherwise, he could stay at home with his parents (where Debbie, his wife, joined him).

It took a while to decompress. On the drive home, on his first night out of the hospital, he gave his brother a scare. “Why are we going down a road at night unarmed and with no security?” he asked him.

In February 1968, he received orders to Quantico as an instructor at the Basic School, where the Marine Corps trains its new officers. He spent the next two years teaching scouting, patrolling, and counterinsurgency tactics at the Basic School, then attended the career-level school for captains, graduating in the summer of 1970. During that time, he also worked hard (running, lifting weights) to recover the strength he had lost. By 1970, he had fully recovered, and was ready to return to Vietnam.

He received orders for the 1st Marine Division based in Danang, and once again prepared to go to war, assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, known as “the Pacifiers.”

THE PACIFIERS

During the process of Vietnamization, it was expected that the NVA would try to press the withdrawing American forces and cause serious harm. To counter that threat, the division wanted a quick reaction force — a powerful unit that could act as a “fire brigade,” troubleshooter (something like the Vietnamese Marines, but with a far more localized area of operations), and rescue unit (that could bail out anybody who needed rescuing).

That job went to “the Pacifiers” (the code name for their special mission). The Pacifiers, as their official description put it, provided “a swift striking, highly mobile heliborne task force which is able to react to any situation on short notice.”

The battalion was under direct control of the 1st Marine Division and had a dedicated air package that consisted of command and control helos, troop transports, helo gunships, observer aircraft, and attack aircraft. Its four companies rotated through four levels of alert. The highest was Pacifier 1—requiring a company to be ready to lift out on ten minutes’ notice. The second level was one hour, the third twelve hours, and the fourth twenty-four hours.

A company usually stayed on Pacifier 1 for a couple of weeks, and it was tough. Pacifier 2 was tough, too. Pacifier 3 was a little easier, and you provided security for the division headquarters. And if you were on Pacifier 4, you provided security for the base camp.

The battalion’s rifle companies were very large and specially organized. Unlike most other units, they were kept at Table of Organization strength, with the full complement of officers and NCOs — over 260 Marines and sailors. This was probably two to three times the size of other rifle companies during the Vietnam War.

In addition, they had extra machine-gun and mortar squads, as well as some experimental weapons, such as an automatic grenade launcher (the XM-174, called “the Super-Blooper” by the troops) and a flamethrower (the XM-202).[20] And each company had its own engineer unit, scouts, Kit Carson Scouts,[21] and scout dog units.

Pacifier units were only committed on hot intelligence of enemy contact, or to rescue crews from downed aircraft, with the mobility of the helos being the key to their movements. They did not pursue the enemy on foot unless in direct contact. And in order to facilitate identification from the air, each platoon had their own color patches sewn on their helmets.

Tony Zinni continues:

The battalion’s commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Bernard E. “Mick” Trainor (later a lieutenant general and noted journalist), one of the smartest officers the Corps has ever produced. Trainor would demonstrate his tactical skill and genius many times while I was with the battalion.

When we met, he jumped on the fact that I had been to school and had a previous tour as an adviser. He wanted me to be his assistant operations officer. I begged and pleaded for a company; I did not want a staff job. I wanted to be out in the field doing real work. He agreed to think about it.

After I went through the check-in procedure, I moved into the captains’ tent where the battalion staff officers lived — a great bunch who quickly brought me up to speed; the battalion operations officer, a big, smart, calm major named W. M. Anderson, really knew his stuff. We quickly hit it off.

When I blurted out how badly I wanted a company, he told me not to worry about it. “I’ll see what I can do. Relax for a couple days and get your feet on the ground. I think you’ll be more valuable to the battalion in a company. And I’m sure I can convince the CO of this.”

I loved the guy.

After two days of anxious waiting, I was called to Lieutenant Colonel Trainor’s hut, where I was informed I would be the commanding officer of Company A, 1st battalion, 5th Marines.

I was ecstatic.

When I took command, the company was on Pacifier 3 on Division Ridge, providing security for the division base area. If we were alerted and moved, other non-Pacifier units took over its security mission. The mission was relatively easy and allowed the troops to get a break after their stretches on the more demanding Pacifiers 1 and 2.

Danang is on the seacoast, with a massive mountainous ridge area just to its west. Since the division headquarters was on the eastern side of the ridge, protecting that — as well as the division rear, the logistics area, and the air base — meant occupying Division Ridge.

That job was given to the Pacifiers on lowest levels of alert, and it was pretty good duty. During the day, we only had to keep a platoon up there, which allowed us to get our troops down into some of the base areas for rest and cleanup — impossible to do when they were out in the field.

The change of command took place on the ridgeline on September 8 (we remained on Pacifier 3 status until the twenty-first). It was a bright sunny day, and my first act after walking through the ranks to shake hands with every Marine and sailor was to meritoriously promote several deserving Marines.

“What a day!” I thought.

I spent the two weeks we had left on the security mission getting the company in good shape. Because there’d been no enemy contact for months at that position, the permanent support units and the South Vietnamese militia units on the flanks had gotten sloppy. We dealt with that problem.

On September 21, we moved to Pacifier 4. And from October 1 to November 3, we were on Pacifier 1—ten-minute alerts: A siren went off, and the Marines grabbed their gear and formed up, double-timed past the ammo bunkers in a predetermined order to get their prestaged and sorted ammo load, ran in formation to the pickup zone, and embarked into the helos in the preplanned order. Securing of the landing zone at the other end also went according to a drill, as did the actions in a “hot” zone.

Life in the base camp during Pacifier 1 was relaxed when we weren’t training or on alert. Each squad had its own SEA hut; the lieutenants’ hut, called “the Silver Bar,” was where we officers spent most of our time planning… but also playing cards. I wanted the company to fight and train hard and well, but I also wanted them to know there was a right time to take a break. We tried to find one day during the week to barbecue the noon meal and play team sports between units. Though these days were rare, they were appreciated.

Since the Pacifier alert could come out of the blue, we had to be constantly prepared. Though it could begin with an immediate launch (as in the case of a downed aircraft), more often I’d get a call to come to the battalion combat operations center for a brief. I liked the op center briefs; they gave us time to plan. If I was to be the guy going in, I wanted to know what I was facing, and what I had to do. I never wanted to have to wondered what the hell it was like out there or whether I could do it. That meant, for instance, that I tried to stay abreast of ongoing operations nearby, since they were the most likely triggers for our commitment. The morning ops and intel briefs were also obviously important for us.

Though I didn’t know it then, my last and most dramatic operation in Vietnam had already started. Over a month earlier, one of the companies on Pacifier 1 had reacted to an intelligence report of a VC cadre meeting in a small village. Soon after landing nearby, the company had engaged fleeing enemy. During the short firefight, one of the Marines took matters in his own hands and ran out to tackle one of the VC. He ended up capturing Nguyen Dac Loi, the VC intelligence chief for the Quang Da Special Zone, and reputedly the highest-ranking enemy intelligence officer captured during the war.

The significance of our catch was not evident to anybody in our battalion until the first days in November, when we were notified to prepare for a very special mission. Loi had agreed to lead us to his headquarters in the Que Son Mountains.

While I was at the op center for a brief on the mission, my company got ready to move. According to the briefer, Loi had offered our intel guys a wealth of information, much of it implicating senior South Vietnamese government officials in the region as VC collaborators.[22] This made things difficult: Though the South Vietnamese had gotten wind of a major capture, they didn’t yet know who we had or how important he was. The U.S. command wanted to keep them in the dark as long as they could, so we could fully take advantage of Loi’s cooperation before the South Vietnamese became involved. Once that happened, they’d almost certainly compromise any further operations.

The plan was for Loi (escorted by a Marine Interrogator-Translator Team — ITT) to lead my company to his headquarters — a massive cave complex in a deep draw. Because he was unclear about its exact location, Marine Recon teams would cordon the general area, while Company B, along with our battalion command post, took and occupied a dominating piece of high ground.

When all this was briefed, the number of “heavies” there was a pretty good indication of the importance they were giving to this operation.

I met Loi in the landing zone before the birds arrived. He was studying a map. He was obviously intelligent and educated, but also nervous. “Can you point out your headquarters on it?” I asked him.

“I can’t be sure,” he told me, pointing to a general location. “Our maps differ from yours. But I’m sure I can spot it if I fly around the area.”

I didn’t like flying around without a definite, preplanned landing zone; but it was obvious we had to go along with Loi.

When all units for the assault were ready, we took off. Loi, sitting next to me, tried to orient the map to the ground below; but got even more confused and uncertain when we reached the area he identified. We circled — a bad idea; it gave away surprise.

I kept pressing him, but that didn’t do much good.

“I’ve never been in a helicopter,” he said. “It’s hard to pick out landmarks from above.”

At last, he seemed to recognize something. “There,” he pointed down. “I know that place.”

We radioed the other helos and set up for an assault into the zone he’d indicated. The landing was uneventful. We set down into a large muddy, grassy area. Though Loi assured us that he could pick up the trail into his headquarters from there, the terrain didn’t look right to me: We were some distance from any deep draws.

As Loi and his ITT went off to look for his trail, I directed my platoons to spread out and search the area.

A short while later, a platoon commander called me to his position. When I got there, he showed me a wide muddy patch of ground covered with fresh boot prints — lots of sneaker-tread NVA boots. A big NVA unit had recently moved through.

I immediately reported our discovery to the battalion and then called my other platoon commanders and organized the company into a hasty defense. It was a good but unnecessary precaution; there was no enemy contact.

Meanwhile, another platoon had found a dud five-hundred-pound bomb. After my engineer officer, Lieutenant Bill Ward, looked at it, we debated what to do with it. After some discussion, we figured we had already lost any tactical surprise; and no one wanted to leave this potential booby trap behind. So Bill’s engineers rigged up the explosive charges and we blew the bomb.

Loi returned during this diversion — empty-handed. He hadn’t found anything recognizable. All we could do was bring in the helos and start the search again.

After a few minutes in the air, he gave a shout and pointed toward trails at the base of a large hill. “Those trails lead to my headquarters,” he announced.

This was more like it. The trails led up a huge mountain combed with deep draws. One draw in particular looked capable of holding the vast cave complexes Loi had described.

When we set down, the zone was again quiet; but the trail network nearby looked well used. “There haven’t been U.S. or South Vietnamese troops in this area for years,” Loi told us. “The VC and NVA use it freely.”

“That’s great,” I thought, remembering my experience with the Vietnamese Marines. “That means they’ll be ready for us.” I badly wanted to attack Loi’s headquarters, but I didn’t want to try to get there on those trails.

I then formed the company in a column, with the first platoon in the lead, and my scouts and our Kit Carson Scouts moving out ahead. I had Loi with me at the head of the first platoon. Because of the possibility of booby traps, I told my scouts to take it slow and careful.

Loi still could not make up his mind where he was. He’d start us up one trail, back up, and off we’d go on another. This tended to make my company bunch up like an accordion; it was hard to keep the troops properly spaced. My scouts were meanwhile reporting hasty booby traps strung across the trails, as well as recently abandoned outposts in the rocks, with cooking fires still burning. After I’d gone forward to check them out, I made an appeal to get off the trails; but I knew the answer before I asked: Loi’s confusion had already wasted half a day; and the VC were well aware of our presence by now. We needed to get on them before they could destroy what we were after and slip out. Moving off the trail would be safer, but take more time. We stayed on the track. I knew that was a difficult call for my boss; but I had to agree that it was correct.

In order to keep a handle on Loi’s direction changes, I moved him up to the head of the company, with only the scouts and the point team in front of us. I was determined to get on his ass and stop his confusion. And, in fact, things started to move more smoothly as soon as I started pressing him hard.

My scouts (led by Corporal James, a black Marine from Washington, D.C., with an uncanny ability to read tracks and detect booby traps) were doing a magnificent job. This was very rough terrain — high mountains with flanking ridges.

In time, we approached a prominent ridge. On its other side, I was certain, lay the draw containing Loi’s headquarters. It was clear we were pushing against security forces for something important. We could see little cuts down in the rocks, which were obviously listening posts and sentinel posts. In one case, we found a little cup of rice, still warm, left there when they ran out ahead of us. My scouts were also coming across hastily strung booby traps — wires with grenades and the like.

I wanted to get to that high ground as quickly as possible, since it was only a matter of time before we made contact with the enemy. I expected first contact would come from some security outpost firing at us to hold us up or perhaps from one we’d overrun before the enemy troops could fall back.

I was wrong. About two hundred meters from the top of the ridge, Loi stopped and looked at me, “They won’t let you go any farther,” he said, then shifted his gaze again toward the trail to the top.

“What are you talking about?” I asked him.

“A VC and an NVA company are defending this ridge,” he said. “They will not let you get within 150 meters of the crest.”

That was information we had to check out. I called up a pair of scout Cobra helos we had up above the ridge to get their view. I was talking to them when the enemy opened up.

I had turned sideways to give the handset back to my radio operator, Lance Corporal Franky, when I was hit. Three AK-47 rounds at fairly close range, close enough to easily pass through my flak jacket. It felt like I’d been whipped across the side and back with a burning hot, wet towel. I went down. As I rolled into a shallow erosion ditch, I tried to get a sense of what was happening. Moments later, Lieutenant Bob Myers, my 1st Platoon commander, and Lieutenant Pete Metzger, our battalion intelligence officer, who was with our company, both rushed over to me.

I was still conscious… I never actually lost consciousness until I was medevaced out. Neither did I feel overwhelming pain. But I could feel the energy draining out of me, and I could tell I’d been badly hurt.

This couldn’t have come at a worse time. My company was under heavy fire. I knew they’d need me as long as I could stay lucid.

“Get the platoon spread out and return fire,” I told Bob Myers. The enemy was well hidden; the Marines were having a hard time picking out targets, but I just wanted to get the enemy’s heads down as we moved troops around. A Marine with a multishot flamethrower was nearby. When I told him to fire, he asked, “At what?”

“I don’t give a damn,” I told him. “Just fire.”

He did, and it slowed down the enemy’s shooting.

Bob then helped me get my flak jacket off. I hated these heavy things; but it was the policy to wear them. The Vietnamese Marines never wore them, nor did our advisers with them; and I was convinced the added weight and discomfort worked to wear down the troops and make them less alert.

“Great,” I thought, “now that I’m shot.” The flak jacket had been useless in stopping the rounds.

As he peeled off the jacket, a bloody piece of flesh fell out. Not encouraging. Bob then started to apply a battle dressing; the look on his face told me the wound was bad. While he was doing that, I called Colonel Trainor to give him a situation report. By then, one of our corpsmen, Doc Miller, was working on me. I was now feeling so weak I was afraid I would pass out.

“You’ll have to take over the company if I lose consciousness,” I told Bob. “Or worse,” I added. Bob was a good man, and capable. The officer who would normally have taken over for me, my company XO, Dan Hughes, was at the battalion command post on some coordination task. He’d try to get out to us as soon as he could, but I knew that until he came, it would be up to Bob to run the company.

All the while, I still had a company to run. I’d been on my stomach while they had dressed my wound. Now I raised myself up a little so I could see what was going on. I noticed a rise of high ground off to our left, and sensed the enemy was trying to get up to it. From there, they could fire down our flank with devastating effect. At the same moment, it dawned on me that we could do the same to him if we got there first.

“Get a squad with a machine gun on the hill,” I told Bob. He immediately tasked one of his squad leaders, Sergeant Bamber, to take the rise. The squad rapidly moved out and took it in a quick fight.

Meanwhile, calls of “Corpsman up!” were coming from the point team in front of us. They were taking hits.

At that point, Doc Miller gave me a rundown of what was wrong with me. “Your back is a mess,” he told me, “I can see your spine. I don’t know whether or not that’s been injured. If it was, then we’ve got to be worried about paralysis. Keep pinching your legs to be sure you have feeling. You’ve also lost a lot of blood, so there’s a good chance you won’t stay conscious.” And finally: “I don’t know how bad your pain is. I can give you morphine, but you’re better off without it unless you absolutely need it.”

The pain wasn’t actually excruciating. And besides, I really didn’t want to use the morphine, because once I did I knew I was no good to Bob Myers or anybody else.

The calls for a corpsman were growing more insistent. I looked into Doc’s eyes and said, “Doc, they need you.” The area between us and the point team was being raked with fire.

He looked up from me, stood up, and yelled “Fuck!” then charged off toward the wounded.

“We have to get the point team and the wounded back,” I told Bob. “Send a squad to get them.” Corporal Rocky Slawinski, the squad leader whose team was on point, had heard me. He came over to us. “I’ll get them. They’re my Marines,” he said. He and the remainder of his squad then ran up under fire and carried back the wounded.

It looked like we had several wounded, including my Kit Carson Scout, who was shot in the shoulder.

During the excitement, Loi had somehow grabbed a rifle (which really pissed me off), worked his way forward toward the enemy, and then crouched down in no-man’s-land, looking desperate. His former comrades had obviously seen and recognized him, and this had brought on a crisis of conscience. “They are calling my name,” he kept saying, over and over. It looked to me like he was about to make a crucial decision about which team he was going to play for.

“Take the rifle from him,” I told the ITT and Bob’s platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Lambert. Though he was initially reluctant to give up the weapon, his hesitation died when Staff Sergeant Lambert jacked a round into his shotgun. His “crisis of conscience” over, he gave up the rifle and moved back in our direction.

We had another serious problem.

There was no way we could get medevac helos in. There were no landing zones, and the enemy was tightly mixed in with us in the thick brush.

Just as this was sinking in, two Marine CH-46 helos came up and identified themselves as our medevac birds.

“We didn’t call for you,” I told them, “and we can’t take you now.”

The pilot said, “I know. I just want you guys to know we’re here, and we’ll come in whenever or wherever you ask.”

By then, a couple of hours had passed since I’d been hit, and I was feeling weaker than ever, and cold from the loss of blood.

Bob, who had done a great job of consolidating our position, had also found a possible LZ for the medevac helos farther down the slope. There was a rocky outcrop butting out over a cliff (the drop was several hundred feet). The pilots thought they could back up the helos against it and lower the helos’ end ramps. The wounded could be loaded while they hovered. It might be a sphincter tightener for some guys, but it should work.

I was determined to walk down to the helos in front of my Marines; I didn’t want to be carried. Though I knew I wasn’t going to last much longer, I managed to march/stagger, with help, down the trail to where the other wounded were gathered. Before I moved up the ramp, I gazed out at my troops. The looks of comfort, reassurance, and concern for what lay ahead from those grim faces will always stay with me.

As the helos hovered next to the cliff, a VC raised up to take a shot at them with his RPG (rifle-propelled grenade) launcher, but a Marine spotted him and opened fire, and the VC had to duck down before he could take the shot.

The helo crew chief strapping us into the stretchers noticed that I was shivering on the bare canvas. He took off his white, fleece-lined flight jacket to wrap around me.

“Don’t do that,” I told him. “It looks new. The blood will ruin it.”

“I don’t give a shit about that,” he said, and laid it over me.

Before I got on the chopper, the excitement and my adrenaline kept the pain manageable. But by the time it lifted out, it was coming on full force. I felt worse than I ever had in my life — in body, mind, and spirit.

Several weeks later, I received a letter in the hospital from Colonel Trainor. It read:

“I don’t know if Lt. Hughes [Dan Hughes, my XO] or any of the others have written you about the events subsequent to your evac. At any rate let me fill you in. Dan and I went down to Red’s pos [my first platoon’s position] and Dan took command of the company. We shifted Becket [my second platoon] to the low ground. You trained your team well, Tony, they performed magnificently. We stayed on the operation for two weeks and had a real war going. Alpha [my company] had most of the action. The VC tried to prevent us from penetrating, but when Bravo [Company B] came down on them from above, they skied [ran]. After that they kept firing at us from outside the cordon. Obviously they were trying to draw us away from the area. In this they failed. It was a grand war for a while.”

He went on to add that we had suffered three killed and nine wounded during the operation, and we had killed forty-one VC of the enemy’s C-111 Company.

The day after I was hit, my company found Loi’s cave complex and eighteen thousand pages of documents: dossiers, pay rosters for agents, and agent lists with names and photos of senior South Vietnamese officials. Weapons and food caches were also discovered. The intel find was the largest and most important of the war.

“It was a pleasure having you in my command,” Trainor added. “I have put you in for the Bronze Star.”

Though Trainor liked to give medals to the troops, he didn’t easily give them to officers. This endeared him to all of us, and made a medal he’d recommended a special privilege. It was a great honor to receive it.

MEDEVAC II

The medevac helo took the wounded to the 85th Evacuation Hospital, a U.S. Army field hospital south of Danang.

Zinni’s wounds were serious enough for an immediate operation. After the pre-op X ray (rounds were still in his back), he was cleaned up and prepped, and IVs were inserted. As he lay there on his stomach after the prep, he noticed an unexpected flurry of whispers and huddling among the doctors and nurses. Something was up.

After a time, the huddles broke up, and a nurse pulled a chair up to his gurney, turned it around, and sat down backward, with her face almost touching Zinni’s.

“I’m the senior nurse,” she said. “Can you clearly understand me?”

“Yeah,” Zinni said.

“We have recently received an experimental drug called ketamine,” she continued, “and we’d like to use it on you. An officer like you can give us good feedback on its effectiveness.”

Zinni gave her a tentative nod. These were medical people. He trusted them to know what they were doing.

“The drug is experimental,” she added. “We’ll need your permission before we can use it. You should know that you’ll remain conscious throughout the operation and won’t have tubes jammed down your throat, the way you normally might in an operation of this kind.”

“That sounds good,” Zinni said. “But how can I be conscious?”

“It’s a hallucinogen,” she said, “but it’s an effective anesthetic without the ill effects of normal anesthesia.”

“I guess that’s okay,” Zinni answered, “and not having tubes jammed down my throat is appealing. So let’s do it.”

“That’s a good decision,” she said. “I’m sure you won’t regret it. And you’ll be helping us.”

The Ketamine turned out to be living hell. Though there was no physical pain, he had nightmares so vivid that he actually felt he was living through them: One was like an out-of-body experience — floating above his body as the surgeons were cutting into it. In another, he horribly relived the chaos, carnage, and deaths of the battle where he had taken his wounds. In another, he was dead and in a box, returning to his wife and family back in the States. The nightmares were so present, powerful, and fierce that he started thrashing around wildly during the operation, and had to be tied down and heavily sedated.

He woke up in a sweat, strapped to a bed in the intensive care unit.

With him was his first sergeant, Alls, with tears in his eyes, grasping Zinni’s hand. He’d been holding Zinni’s hand since he’d arrived in intensive care (Zinni had been vaguely aware of the squeeze; it had been a small and welcome comfort). After giving Zinni a heads-up about his company — who had been hit and evaced — he left.

“You went through a really rough trip,” the nurse told him after he had gone.

“I know,” Zinni told her. “I still remember it.”

At that moment, he tried to move. And that was when he began to realize something was wrong. Not much above his waist worked right — like his arms.

Later, the surgeon explained why. “As we removed the rounds from your back,” he said, “we couldn’t just clean the wound and put you back together. The injury had wrecked too much. What we had to do, in order to prevent infection, was to debride the wound. That is, cut away about a third of the muscle tissue on your back and side. You’ve got a pretty big crater back there,” he added sympathetically.

“What’s going to happen,” the surgeon went on, “is we’ll keep you here for about a week, then we’ll send you to Guam for extensive physical therapy. There they’ll also take skin grafts taken from your legs and butt to cover the hole in your back.

“I have to be honest with you,” he concluded. “I doubt if you’ll regain full use of your arms and back.”

This was a shock. “What will this mean for my family and my future?” Zinni asked himself.

On his way out, the surgeon gave Zinni one of the rounds he’d dug out of his back.

The next week was tough. Twice a day the medics literally ripped the bandages off the wound, with the most excruciating pain he’d ever known. Before this ritual, any troops on the ward who could move left the area. It was too painful to witness.

“Sir, you’re really fucked up,” a wounded lance corporal told him. “You should see your back.”

“No, thanks,” Zinni thought.

After a few days, he was able to get up and walk a little. It wasn’t easy, but he was able to get himself upright and to shuffle around the ward. The troops on the ward did everything to help.

One day, a nurse came in with disturbing news. Zinni’s Kit Carson Scout (wounded in the same engagement and now in another ward of the hospital) was in bad shape.

“He has a shoulder wound,” she said. “It’s not serious. So there’s no reason he should be doing so badly. But we don’t think he’s going to make it. It’s as if he’s lost his will to live.”

This did not surprise Zinni. He’d experienced the fatalism of the Vietnamese many times before when he was an adviser. But that experience also gave him an idea how he might help his scout. “Can you move him into the bed next to me?” he asked.

“We really shouldn’t,” she said. “Our policy is to keep the Vietnamese patients separate. But,” she added, “in this case we can make an exception.”

Zinni spent the next several days keeping his scout going. His family on their visits also helped.

After days of touch and go, he came out of his funk.

One day, Zinni felt strong enough to try to find the troops from his company who’d been medevaced when he was; but after a search of the wards he only found one still confined to the hospital — Lance Corporal Maui, a big strapping Hawaiian kid from the point team. He’d been hit in the ankle and had a badly screwed-up leg. He and Zinni had a good talk, but it was clear he was depressed; he didn’t know if he would fully recover.

But that wasn’t the only thing bothering him. Something larger was on his mind; and after the two men had talked for a while, he blurted it out. “Sir, why are we here?” he asked.

Zinni gave him an answer, but it was the “party line” response; and by then he realized that was “piss-poor,” as he thinks of it now: “I knew we were fighting a war that neither the South Vietnamese nor the American people were backing, and we were doing it with a lousy strategy, the wrong policies, and terrible tactics. After I walked away from Corporal Maui, I swore that from then on no troops of mine would ever again get such a shitty answer from me. They’d know from me why we were fighting. And if I felt something was wrong that put the lives of our troops in needless risk, I swore I would speak out, never hesitating to put my own career on the line for doing what was right by my men.”

After a week, Zinni’s time in Vietnam came to an end. His stretcher was loaded on another medevac plane headed for Guam.

Several hours later, lying on his bed in the ward of the Guam hospital, he began thinking about the dressing on his back. It had been there for two days. Removing it was going to be agonizing.

Later, a corpsman came in to discuss his injury. “You’re lucky,” he said. “The finest surgeon in the Navy will be handling your case.”

At that moment, a doctor appeared at the side of Zinni’s bed. “Let’s take a look at this guy’s wound,” he said gruffly.

Zinni began his ritual of rolling slowly over on his stomach and putting a death grip on the bed rails.

“What the hell are you doing?” the doctor said.

Zinni explained the procedure back at the hospital in Vietnam.

“You’re shittin’ me,” he said. And then he said to the corpsman, “Make him happy.”

Zinni got a shot in each shoulder that made him very happy. Then the corpsman soaked the dressing in a solution that loosened the adhesive. A few minutes later, he simply lifted off the bandage.

“I wanted to kill the other medics who’d ripped it off twice a day,” Zinni says now.

After examining the wound, the surgeon explained what would be done. “In a couple of days, I’ll close the wound,” he said. “I’m going to reattach muscles in your back.” In other words, he saw no need to take muscle tissue from elsewhere in Zinni’s body. “If you’re willing to do serious physical therapy afterward, you can be back to normal. But it’s going to take a lot of work… not to mention good luck in avoiding infection.”

That was very good news. Zinni’s morale was instantly raised higher than it had been since he was wounded; and he began to give serious thought to recovering and getting back to his company.

Two days later, he was wheeled into the operating room. The operation was a total success, and the physical therapy soon started paying off — though he knew he had a very long way to go. His body was doing strange things; muscles and nerves were all mixed up; when something touched his back, he felt it on his chest. He had to get used to all kinds of new muscle “hookups.” But they worked!

During the next month, Zinni endured a few localized infections, requiring massive doses of penicillin, but at the end of the month he’d recovered enough to leave the hospital.

Zinni begged to go back to Vietnam. He knew that was where he belonged. His time in the hospital had convinced him more than ever of that. Though the doctor was very reluctant, he liked Zinni’s drive and his eagerness to get back with his guys. He gave in and released him to full duty, but with a promise to continue to work out.

Zinni promised.

His orders sent him to Okinawa… “a stop off on the way back to Nam,” he thought.

In the spring of 1975, Vietnam collapsed, abandoned by the U.S. whose people could no longer support the war.

The Vietnamese Marines were badly mauled in the final battles. The remnants fought on in the hills for a time, and then the Marines ceased to exist.[23]