FWD CD//TACNET VIA JC COMMO BUNKER AMBUSH-PATROL NETS SUBJ N/A
(LZ410 Danang)-- The road to the permanent CP for the regimental command unit was saturated in mud from rain and craters from mortars and rockets. Our unit, the transplanted 28th Marines radio platoon from Camp San Mateo in Camp Pendleton was chopped to the 27th Regimental Landing Team staging battalion where we mounted out our gear and flew to Danang via Hawaii and Guam on a moments notice in February 1968. In the distance as we proceeded across the bridge over the Song Cau Do river, smoldering garbage dumps in the distance were visible by the streams of black smoke curling skyward. The road itself was on a railroad track bed where the ties and steel were removed. The abandoned road adjacent to it was far too muddy for the heavy six-ply convoys that traversed it daily.
The camp at Duong Son (2) itself had been built about two years prior as the 9th Marines moved south and expanded their TAOR into the rocket belt beyond the Song Cau Do, setting up the regimental CP in between the (2) and (3) hamlets. The radio section secured several hardback hootches on the lower eastern side of the perimeter and the platoon set about upgrading the area with reinforced sandbag bunkers, a shower and other amenities that were left undone by the 5th Marines (see notes & updates below) , the current tenants, as they moved north to Hue. I inherited Pvt SP Lane's corner bunk at the entry facing the compound along with a large ammo box to store gear. Lane and I were in the same unit at Pendleton before he shipped out and he was from Riverside, where he knew some very willing ladies. I went with him and met one of them one weekend liberty, I never saw her again. When Lane went north with the 5th Marines (see notes and updates below) , I never saw him again either.
There was plenty to do at the new regimental CP beginning with rigging mosquito nets for the racks in the hootch and ending with locating the mamasan with the girls and the smoke. We would borrow a radio jeep, drive it into the ville and fake engine trouble while we scored smoke, pre-rolled in plastic packets of ten. It was as good as any stateside and we could add menthol from small jars to cool it off as we sat in bunkers and smoked.
Our duty rosters were not kind at all including radio watch for patrols, ambushes and air-artillery cover, as well as guard duty on the perimeter at night. Some of the problems encountered early on at the CP were filed in the Command Chronology, Part III, "Significant Topics" dated 09 April 1968:
The water points were at the north end of the CP and it became a daily chore hauling it for the shower back to the area. The mosquito invasion as the weather warmed was checked by netting, the human waste would eventually become another endless chore. But the one that stood out, particularly for me, was the grease trap at the mess hall. As the patrols came and went around the clock daily, the mess hall, not the Command Operations Center (COC), itself became ground zero for keeping the 27th Marines in the war. All the heroes coming in from the rice paddies, having engaged in ambushes and hastily contrived operations to push the VC and NVA out of the rocket belt, would have to wait in the long chow lines because the grease trap was broken. But that wasn't the real problem at the mess hall, it was the pot shack, the scullery, where all the field cooking tins and bins had to be scrubbed constantly to keep the cooks in the galley prepping the meals.
The process was simple enough. Most of the chow was placed in large rectangular cooking tins and round pots, heated and cooked and sent out to the line where it was served as the troops moved through, patient and exhausted. The mess hall at the regimental CP was spacious, fairly new and could accommodate platoons and even companies at a time if the system worked according to Plan 303. That was based on the assumption that the hardware involved, the cooking containers could be cleaned properly and in time for the prep. The cooks dropped the containers off at the pot shack, they were usually caked and coated with dried, burned food or slippery half-baked scalloped potatoes, fish and meat. Outside the pot shack, there were GI cans full of water and heated by portable kerosene powered heaters to provide hot water for the cleaning process inside the pot shack; it had to be hauled in and dumped into the sinks where the cooking trays sat. The process was simple enough, except for one minor detail, nobody wanted to do it. The pot shack was where all the deadbeats landed, all the noncomfits and birds that were sent to mess duty because they were useless in their unit. Everybody wanted the cush serving job out on the line or mess hall detail cleaning up after the troops.
By no means a deadbeat or noncomfit, I was assigned to mess duty at the 27th Marines H&S CP a month after we arrived in-country:
They couldn't have picked a better man for the job either, having served under PO Chuck U Farley at Corry Field in Pensacola and Staff Sgt Dabney at the 28th Marines at Camp San Mateo just prior to deployment. Naturally, the last place I wanted to be in the war zone was in the mess hall but soon I found myself back to the up one-hour before zero-dark-thirty to down long after sundown shift at Duong Son (2). Initially, I was in the serving area and the galley but it didn't take long to notice a major breakdown in the system due to the deadbeats and birds in the pot shack malingering their way through three meals a day, the cooks wanted to lock and load on them. I was presented with an opportunity of a tour of duty and notified the mess sargent I would fight the war in southeast Asia from the pot shack, I volunteered and went in.
The first order of the day was to toss out the deadbeats. They were gone in a muzzle flash, back to their sections to the total dismay of their superiors. The second was to set up a system to get the place in order with a procedure that was workable. What did the cooks need first, how long did it take to get the right cooking tins into the right places? What about keeping a supply of hot water in the GI cans out back? I remembered the brutal routine under CU Farley and the ship operation at Pendleton where we choppered a field mess unit onto the beach and set it up to feed a battalion in a moment's notice. Even with a pumped stomach from swallowing a jar of downers to kill a toothache, I was able to pull that one off as Sgt Dabney, another mentor, shouted orders even before the Chinooks touched down with the gear at Onofre. It paid off but not immediately. A sense of order gradually settled in and results were getting to be visible. But I handled it alone for the first week to ten days before another volunteer signed on; a big, very big guy who could throw pots around like tinker toys. Then we got a little Vietnamese commando from the ville who rounded out the team, adding lightning speed to the operation. We had all the tins cleaned before they were needed and pushed further into other assignments around the mess hall. Eventually, I could get long enough breaks through the steam and heat to fire up a menthol smoke from mamasan's personal stash.
Today, years later, I am asked to report my proudest effort in-country. Was it some patrol in the bush, charging into VC automatic weapons fire? Maybe camped out on the Ho Chi Minh trail with a recon squad calling in supporting arms, hardly. Leave all of that stuff to the heroes, they all looked the same when they got to the chow line at the CP. The pot shack detail was the high point of my tour of duty in Vietnam.
FWD: MERTZ, PVT, GI CANS, SAN MATEO CP..... "PUSHIN' TOO HARD..."
NOTE: The regimental CP may have been vacated by the 5th Marines, but it might well have been the 1st Marines, there is some checking up to do there....
UPDATE 001: (07/29/18/1010PDT) Initial look at the Command Chronologies of 1st, 3rd, 7th and 9th Marine Regiments shows only the 7th near the CP when RLT 27 arrived. There needs to be an overall inventory of locations of all the regiments and their battalions at the outbreak of Tet 1968.
UPDATE 002: (07/29/18/1049PDT) Following doc located at 1/27 CC for 02/69:
_____________________________________________________________
"HELL NO WE WON'T GO"--Essay by JC Langelle--(C) 2018 DUONG SON (2)
ENG 102-1105 Prof M Judd
University of Nevada, Reno Spring 2018
James C Langelle
“Hell No, We Won’t Go.”
History, if it does occur in cycles, can only be fully appreciated if it is possible to examine it through personal experience. A dry, antiseptic, scientific analysis does not give the culture a total understanding of, as the events unfolded, what happened to those involved. In “A Tale of Two Cities,” for instance, a social upheaval that parallels some of the greatest in mankind, although a fiction, still personifies the experience of the individuals swept away in the tide, pulled down in the whirlpool, of revolution. If revolution along with its counterpart, war, is the quantum explosion that propels man into a new era, it indeed has shown cyclic behavior. Following those of the 18th century, similar events occurred in the 19th century.
In the 20th century two major revolutions, the Bolshevik and the Maoist, brought Russia and China into the world theater as major international powers. One upheaval, one revolution and one war, led to another. Big wars led to smaller wars, in the middle of all of them the central player was the United States. In particular, a colonial war in Southeast Asia brought about the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Twelve years later, the 5th Marine regiment went ashore at Chu Lai in South Vietnam marking the entry of the United States in a new phase of that colonial war. The 5th Marines eventually moved north and set up camp south of DaNang near the small village of Duong Son (2).
Three years later, in January, 1968, a combined offensive of North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong soldiers surrounded the Marine base at Khe Sanh, while others attacked major metropolitan centers throughout South Vietnam. It was known simply as “Tet.”
“Back-in-the-World,” as Marines liked to refer to the United States, I had recently been released from the Camp Pendleton Correctional Center following disciplinary action related to an unauthorized absence. I was a Private in the United States Marine Corps, stationed with the 28th Marine Regiment at Camp San Mateo, near San Clemente in southern California. The unauthorized absence related to a trip to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to join in the “Summer of Love ‘67,” where I slept in basements with hippies and girls from Boston. I ate at the “Diggers’” spaghetti feed-ins in Golden Gate park, eventually hitchhiking back to Camp Pendleton to face charges of UCMJ Article 86, Absent Without Leave, popularly known as “AWOL.” Part of the punishment was confinement to the correctional center, also known as the “brig.”
I was released on my 21st birthday in October, 1967. Back at camp, with liberty card in hand, I grabbed my guitar, found a pair of cutoffs, borrowed five dollars from CD Rossi, and hitchhiked to Laguna Beach. The Hatch Cover bar was my destination, on the ocean side of Coast Highway on the southern part of Laguna. A basic beach beer dive, it offered pitchers of draft for one-dollar. I could afford three and have enough left over for a pack of cigarettes, it had been a long dry spell in the brig.
Sitting playing guitar and drinking beer, I went unnoticed or at least I thought by a group of beach ladies in the corner booth where a hatch cover served as the table. One of the ladies soon hopped, with coin in hand, walked over to the jukebox, dropped the coin in and selected a song, drowning out my guitar playing. I went over to the table, confronted her about interrupting my guitar playing and she apologized. She introduced herself, Patti Dell, from Newport Beach. Patti Dell became my girlfriend for the next few months, before our unit deployed to South Vietnam, very suddenly, in February, 1968, “Tet.” I never saw her again.
At the White House in Washington, DC, LBJ was surrounded by his advisors and high-ranking military men from all branches. The president had received a request from US Army General Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, for two-hundred thousand additional troops to break the combined NVA-VC offensive. The advisors were at the moment more concerned with the rising tide of unpopularity of the war Back-in-the-World. At least one general wanted to crush the rebellion on the homefront, using any means necessary. Obviously this was not an option, neither was granting Westy’s request. Instead, LBJ opted for two units to go over, the US Army 82nd Airborne and another unit, a newly formed landing team out of Camp Pendleton, the 27th Marines.
One morning at the 28th Marine camp, at H&S company, 3rd battalion, word came down that the radio section was to be transferred to the 27th Marines for immediate deployment, mounting-out, to Vietnam. The first reaction was shock, we all had it made at the 28th; plenty of liberty, light duty, a field operation or two, we even had a beach landing off ships by landing craft and helicopters. It was all just one big training exercise. There wasn’t any time at all to recuperate from the shock. A few days later Patti Dell, driving her VW, dropped me off in the parking lot, the grinder, where the section was in formation. As I fell into the ranks, the Captain at the head of the formation said,
“Private Langelle, I didn’t think you were going to go along.”
Pausing briefly as Patti Dell drove off into history, I looked at all the apprehensive faces in the ranks and replied,
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, sir.”
In the ranks were married men who didn’t want to leave their wives and kids, there were green recruits who didn’t know a radio from a flare gun; white kids from the farm, blacks from the inner city, surfers from the coast. In one sentence I had done what the Colonel, the major, the captains, the lieutenants and the sargents couldn’t do. None of them thought I would go over to the war. I would skip out, hitchhike back to Haight-Ashbury and sleep in basements with hippies and girls from Boston. They were wrong. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I gave them all a reason, the reason, for going. It was our duty, our time had come.
Soon we were at the newly activated area for the 27th Regimental Landing Team (RLT). The entire radio section would be deployed together, making it less stressful since we knew everyone in the unit. That’s when Corporal Danny Ledesma showed up. We didn’t have any Hispanics in our radio platoon; we had blacks, they were called African-Americans by some. We had one Indian, called Native American by others.. But this was our first encounter with an Hispanic, a corporal no less. In those days nobody called anybody Hispanic or Latino, the word Chicano was about as close as we could get to describing them, otherwise they all fell into one big category of “Mexican.” And Ledesma was a Mexican out of San Diego, who had already done one tour in Vietnam and was going back for a second time. Nobody could understand why anybody wanted to go back for another tour. All of the veterans we left behind at the 28th Marines wanted no part of another tour, but they were all white boys from Arizona who just wanted to go home. We didn’t know any blacks who did one tour and this was our first encounter with a Mexican, a newly promoted corporal already bucking to make sargent. It was quite a while before we settled Ledesma down and accepted him into our tight group of whites, blacks and one Indian. In the end, it was just easier to refer to Ledesma as “corporal.”
Only Napoleon’s beaten army retreating out of Russia moved more quickly than the 27th Marines to its debarkation point at MCAS El Toro east of Santa Ana. We would fly in C-141s, the workhorse of the military transport division, as an entire landing team, becoming the first unit to be airlifted to the war zone, and subsequently the last. By today’s standards the speed at which the landing team was assembled and deployed is still to this day impressive, only the US Marines were capable of such a massive unrehearsed maneuver at a moment’s notice. By Valentine’s Day, 1968, the entire regiment was ready to board the aircraft, minus 1st battalion which would sail in ships to Danang. There was only one hangup, LBJ.
The president decided he wanted to send the troops off with a personal farewell, he would travel to El Toro to inspect the unit and observe the deployment. We waited on the tarmac and in the hangers, squaring away our gear under the supervision of Danny Ledesma. The president did arrive, in a Cadillac convertible, wearing a big cowboy hat. He greeted the troops in formation, shook many hands, and issued numerous good lucks and well wishes. We were all very impressed by the president’s appearance, we weren’t the two-hundred thousand Westy wanted, but we would have to do, and the president knew it. In fact, LBJ couldn’t send two-hundred thousand because we simply didn’t have them. Boarding the aircraft for the flight, I could hear a haunting chant in the back of my mind, as if the hippies from Golden Gate park were hiding somewhere in the cargo webbing of the fuselage,
“Hell no, we won’t go; Hell no, we won’t go.”
Our first stop was Hawaii for refueling and by that time the reality of the day was slowly sinking in. The recruits were acting more like Marines, checking out their gear, inspecting and servicing their weapons. Nobody cared about Back-in-the-World anymore, many would never see it again. Their wives would write, their girlfriends wouldn’t; they’d be down at the Hatch Cover in Laguna Beach drinking cheap beer before we even touched down in-country. The next stop was Guam for refueling.
We landed in Danang in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day unloading gear from the planes, zombie like, ten thousand miles from the World. I lit a cigarette on the tarmac and a Captain came running over hollering and pointing at a sign that read “Aircraft Fuel, No Smoking.”
“Put that damned cigarette out, you want to blow up the airstrip!!”
I snuffed the cigarette but didn’t care one way or another if the airstrip blew up as Country Joe’s song ran through my head,
“Well it’s one two, three what are we fightin’ for, ain’t no time to wonder why, we’re all gonna’ die..”
That night, exhausted, sleepwalking and shell-shocked even though we hadn’t yet been exposed to a single incoming round, we were billeted in some barracks overnight for transport to our Command Post, CP, south of Danang in the morning . All except Private Dowdell, Turk Dowdell, a wiry black from Cincinnati, and me. Ledesma placed us on guard duty of the radio gear in the trucks next to the billets and given real ammunition to load into our M14’s. There weren’t enough M16 rifles, a signature item of the Vietnam War, to go around, so we deployed with the weapons we had at the 28th Marines. Unknown to Danny, I had smuggled a couple of marijuana cigarettes and a pint of Bacardi 151 rum from the States. Turk and I celebrated our first night in-country high and drinking on guard duty, which would also become signature items of the Vietnam War.
We weren’t immediately deployed to our camps south of Danang but were allowed to pay a visit to the PX located in the sprawling Danang air base. This exchange was the size of a modern day Walmart and had everything from radios to musical instruments to clothing. Any currency we had needed to be exchanged for script to use in the PX. The first thing I noticed in the store were the Vietnamese women; gorgeous, in full makeup and wearing designer Southeast Asian style dresses and clothing. We had first noticed some women upon arrival but they were the poor ones, scrounging around the base and its outskirts for whatever they could find in the various dumps or doing some menial task related to upkeep or maintenance of the various facilities in the Danang complex. I had seen and known Asian women in the United States but nothing compared to these beauties, many having a mixed heritage of Asian and French. The PX ladies were fluent in English, very friendly and a sight for sore eyes after having been cooped up in the cargo hold of the C141, staring at anxious and angst ridden Marines, breathing jet exhaust that crept into the aircraft.
By then, everyone was anxious to get to the command perimeter. We ate chow at a rather modern mess hall serviced in part by Vietnamese and the food met with approval by the platoon. Following some last minute checks on the condition of the gear that had been transported halfway around the world, we loaded onto the six-ply trucks that were the workhouse of logistics in Vietnam for the Marines. By mid-afternoon, we had moved out down a dusty, dirty road south past cardboard huts that served as quarters for the less fortunate refugees and transients surrounding the base at the gates. The convoy crossed the Son Cau Do at the Cam Le bridge, observing quietly the rising black smoke off to the west in the distance. Naturally, being rookies in-country, we all thought it was some camp that had just undergone a rocket attack, but more than likely it was just another smoking garbage dump.
(photo courtesy Charlie Bushnell, 5th Marines, perimeter at Duong Son (2), looking SE)
We arrived at our new destination which would become the headquarters for the regiment, the 5th Marines camp at Duong Son (2). War was full of paradoxes and ironies, this was yet another one. The 5th Marines, at Duong Son (2), was the first combat unit to arrive in Vietnam three years earlier. It was being replaced by the 27th Marines, the last combat unit to arrive in Vietnam.
(07/15/18)
ESSAY NOTES--This was the first draft for the essay submitted for the English 102 assignment. There are some redundant sections that were included in the final submission. Note the part about the 5th Marines being the first unit in country at Chu Lai. It may have been the 9th Marines at Red Beach in Danang, I am reviewing the records although the information is probably readily available on the internet.
University of Nevada, Reno Spring 2018
James C Langelle
“Hell No, We Won’t Go.”
History, if it does occur in cycles, can only be fully appreciated if it is possible to examine it through personal experience. A dry, antiseptic, scientific analysis does not give the culture a total understanding of, as the events unfolded, what happened to those involved. In “A Tale of Two Cities,” for instance, a social upheaval that parallels some of the greatest in mankind, although a fiction, still personifies the experience of the individuals swept away in the tide, pulled down in the whirlpool, of revolution. If revolution along with its counterpart, war, is the quantum explosion that propels man into a new era, it indeed has shown cyclic behavior. Following those of the 18th century, similar events occurred in the 19th century.
In the 20th century two major revolutions, the Bolshevik and the Maoist, brought Russia and China into the world theater as major international powers. One upheaval, one revolution and one war, led to another. Big wars led to smaller wars, in the middle of all of them the central player was the United States. In particular, a colonial war in Southeast Asia brought about the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Twelve years later, the 5th Marine regiment went ashore at Chu Lai in South Vietnam marking the entry of the United States in a new phase of that colonial war. The 5th Marines eventually moved north and set up camp south of DaNang near the small village of Duong Son (2).
Three years later, in January, 1968, a combined offensive of North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong soldiers surrounded the Marine base at Khe Sanh, while others attacked major metropolitan centers throughout South Vietnam. It was known simply as “Tet.”
“Back-in-the-World,” as Marines liked to refer to the United States, I had recently been released from the Camp Pendleton Correctional Center following disciplinary action related to an unauthorized absence. I was a Private in the United States Marine Corps, stationed with the 28th Marine Regiment at Camp San Mateo, near San Clemente in southern California. The unauthorized absence related to a trip to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to join in the “Summer of Love ‘67,” where I slept in basements with hippies and girls from Boston. I ate at the “Diggers’” spaghetti feed-ins in Golden Gate park, eventually hitchhiking back to Camp Pendleton to face charges of UCMJ Article 86, Absent Without Leave, popularly known as “AWOL.” Part of the punishment was confinement to the correctional center, also known as the “brig.”
I was released on my 21st birthday in October, 1967. Back at camp, with liberty card in hand, I grabbed my guitar, found a pair of cutoffs, borrowed five dollars from CD Rossi, and hitchhiked to Laguna Beach. The Hatch Cover bar was my destination, on the ocean side of Coast Highway on the southern part of Laguna. A basic beach beer dive, it offered pitchers of draft for one-dollar. I could afford three and have enough left over for a pack of cigarettes, it had been a long dry spell in the brig.
Sitting playing guitar and drinking beer, I went unnoticed or at least I thought by a group of beach ladies in the corner booth where a hatch cover served as the table. One of the ladies soon hopped, with coin in hand, walked over to the jukebox, dropped the coin in and selected a song, drowning out my guitar playing. I went over to the table, confronted her about interrupting my guitar playing and she apologized. She introduced herself, Patti Dell, from Newport Beach. Patti Dell became my girlfriend for the next few months, before our unit deployed to South Vietnam, very suddenly, in February, 1968, “Tet.” I never saw her again.
At the White House in Washington, DC, LBJ was surrounded by his advisors and high-ranking military men from all branches. The president had received a request from US Army General Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, for two-hundred thousand additional troops to break the combined NVA-VC offensive. The advisors were at the moment more concerned with the rising tide of unpopularity of the war Back-in-the-World. At least one general wanted to crush the rebellion on the homefront, using any means necessary. Obviously this was not an option, neither was granting Westy’s request. Instead, LBJ opted for two units to go over, the US Army 82nd Airborne and another unit, a newly formed landing team out of Camp Pendleton, the 27th Marines.
One morning at the 28th Marine camp, at H&S company, 3rd battalion, word came down that the radio section was to be transferred to the 27th Marines for immediate deployment, mounting-out, to Vietnam. The first reaction was shock, we all had it made at the 28th; plenty of liberty, light duty, a field operation or two, we even had a beach landing off ships by landing craft and helicopters. It was all just one big training exercise. There wasn’t any time at all to recuperate from the shock. A few days later Patti Dell, driving her VW, dropped me off in the parking lot, the grinder, where the section was in formation. As I fell into the ranks, the Captain at the head of the formation said,
“Private Langelle, I didn’t think you were going to go along.”
Pausing briefly as Patti Dell drove off into history, I looked at all the apprehensive faces in the ranks and replied,
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, sir.”
In the ranks were married men who didn’t want to leave their wives and kids, there were green recruits who didn’t know a radio from a flare gun; white kids from the farm, blacks from the inner city, surfers from the coast. In one sentence I had done what the Colonel, the major, the captains, the lieutenants and the sargents couldn’t do. None of them thought I would go over to the war. I would skip out, hitchhike back to Haight-Ashbury and sleep in basements with hippies and girls from Boston. They were wrong. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I gave them all a reason, the reason, for going. It was our duty, our time had come.
Soon we were at the newly activated area for the 27th Regimental Landing Team (RLT). The entire radio section would be deployed together, making it less stressful since we knew everyone in the unit. That’s when Corporal Danny Ledesma showed up. We didn’t have any Hispanics in our radio platoon; we had blacks, they were called African-Americans by some. We had one Indian, called Native American by others.. But this was our first encounter with an Hispanic, a corporal no less. In those days nobody called anybody Hispanic or Latino, the word Chicano was about as close as we could get to describing them, otherwise they all fell into one big category of “Mexican.” And Ledesma was a Mexican out of San Diego, who had already done one tour in Vietnam and was going back for a second time. Nobody could understand why anybody wanted to go back for another tour. All of the veterans we left behind at the 28th Marines wanted no part of another tour, but they were all white boys from Arizona who just wanted to go home. We didn’t know any blacks who did one tour and this was our first encounter with a Mexican, a newly promoted corporal already bucking to make sargent. It was quite a while before we settled Ledesma down and accepted him into our tight group of whites, blacks and one Indian. In the end, it was just easier to refer to Ledesma as “corporal.”
Only Napoleon’s beaten army retreating out of Russia moved more quickly than the 27th Marines to its debarkation point at MCAS El Toro east of Santa Ana. We would fly in C-141s, the workhorse of the military transport division, as an entire landing team, becoming the first unit to be airlifted to the war zone, and subsequently the last. By today’s standards the speed at which the landing team was assembled and deployed is still to this day impressive, only the US Marines were capable of such a massive unrehearsed maneuver at a moment’s notice. By Valentine’s Day, 1968, the entire regiment was ready to board the aircraft, minus 1st battalion which would sail in ships to Danang. There was only one hangup, LBJ.
The president decided he wanted to send the troops off with a personal farewell, he would travel to El Toro to inspect the unit and observe the deployment. We waited on the tarmac and in the hangers, squaring away our gear under the supervision of Danny Ledesma. The president did arrive, in a Cadillac convertible, wearing a big cowboy hat. He greeted the troops in formation, shook many hands, and issued numerous good lucks and well wishes. We were all very impressed by the president’s appearance, we weren’t the two-hundred thousand Westy wanted, but we would have to do, and the president knew it. In fact, LBJ couldn’t send two-hundred thousand because we simply didn’t have them. Boarding the aircraft for the flight, I could hear a haunting chant in the back of my mind, as if the hippies from Golden Gate park were hiding somewhere in the cargo webbing of the fuselage,
“Hell no, we won’t go; Hell no, we won’t go.”
Our first stop was Hawaii for refueling and by that time the reality of the day was slowly sinking in. The recruits were acting more like Marines, checking out their gear, inspecting and servicing their weapons. Nobody cared about Back-in-the-World anymore, many would never see it again. Their wives would write, their girlfriends wouldn’t; they’d be down at the Hatch Cover in Laguna Beach drinking cheap beer before we even touched down in-country. The next stop was Guam for refueling.
We landed in Danang in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day unloading gear from the planes, zombie like, ten thousand miles from the World. I lit a cigarette on the tarmac and a Captain came running over hollering and pointing at a sign that read “Aircraft Fuel, No Smoking.”
“Put that damned cigarette out, you want to blow up the airstrip!!”
I snuffed the cigarette but didn’t care one way or another if the airstrip blew up as Country Joe’s song ran through my head,
“Well it’s one two, three what are we fightin’ for, ain’t no time to wonder why, we’re all gonna’ die..”
That night, exhausted, sleepwalking and shell-shocked even though we hadn’t yet been exposed to a single incoming round, we were billeted in some barracks overnight for transport to our Command Post, CP, south of Danang in the morning . All except Private Dowdell, Turk Dowdell, a wiry black from Cincinnati, and me. Ledesma placed us on guard duty of the radio gear in the trucks next to the billets and given real ammunition to load into our M14’s. There weren’t enough M16 rifles, a signature item of the Vietnam War, to go around, so we deployed with the weapons we had at the 28th Marines. Unknown to Danny, I had smuggled a couple of marijuana cigarettes and a pint of Bacardi 151 rum from the States. Turk and I celebrated our first night in-country high and drinking on guard duty, which would also become signature items of the Vietnam War.
We weren’t immediately deployed to our camps south of Danang but were allowed to pay a visit to the PX located in the sprawling Danang air base. This exchange was the size of a modern day Walmart and had everything from radios to musical instruments to clothing. Any currency we had needed to be exchanged for script to use in the PX. The first thing I noticed in the store were the Vietnamese women; gorgeous, in full makeup and wearing designer Southeast Asian style dresses and clothing. We had first noticed some women upon arrival but they were the poor ones, scrounging around the base and its outskirts for whatever they could find in the various dumps or doing some menial task related to upkeep or maintenance of the various facilities in the Danang complex. I had seen and known Asian women in the United States but nothing compared to these beauties, many having a mixed heritage of Asian and French. The PX ladies were fluent in English, very friendly and a sight for sore eyes after having been cooped up in the cargo hold of the C141, staring at anxious and angst ridden Marines, breathing jet exhaust that crept into the aircraft.
By then, everyone was anxious to get to the command perimeter. We ate chow at a rather modern mess hall serviced in part by Vietnamese and the food met with approval by the platoon. Following some last minute checks on the condition of the gear that had been transported halfway around the world, we loaded onto the six-ply trucks that were the workhouse of logistics in Vietnam for the Marines. By mid-afternoon, we had moved out down a dusty, dirty road south past cardboard huts that served as quarters for the less fortunate refugees and transients surrounding the base at the gates. The convoy crossed the Son Cau Do at the Cam Le bridge, observing quietly the rising black smoke off to the west in the distance. Naturally, being rookies in-country, we all thought it was some camp that had just undergone a rocket attack, but more than likely it was just another smoking garbage dump.
We arrived at our new destination which would become the headquarters for the regiment, the 5th Marines camp at Duong Son (2). War was full of paradoxes and ironies, this was yet another one. The 5th Marines, at Duong Son (2), was the first combat unit to arrive in Vietnam three years earlier. It was being replaced by the 27th Marines, the last combat unit to arrive in Vietnam.
(07/15/18)
ESSAY NOTES--This was the first draft for the essay submitted for the English 102 assignment. There are some redundant sections that were included in the final submission. Note the part about the 5th Marines being the first unit in country at Chu Lai. It may have been the 9th Marines at Red Beach in Danang, I am reviewing the records although the information is probably readily available on the internet.
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Sunday, July 15, 2018
THE ROAD TO DUONG SON (2)--
Savoir Faire
“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.”
The opening line of Arlo Guthrie’s hit single released in October, 1967 personified Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the Summer of Love of that year. There were hippies from all over the United States, spaghetti feed-ins at Golden Gate Park adjacent to the district, flower children, many of whom were underaged runaways. There were drug peddlers, hangers-on, groupies, girls from Boston, rich kids from Sausalito who wanted to be in the be-in. Psychedelics flowed in the streets along with heaps of trash, a guitar player huddled in every alcove and alleyway, tour busses passing by to give outsiders a glimpse of the the turned-on and dropped-out generation.. There were basements, freezing basements, to sleep in if one didn’t have the means for more comfortable accommodations.
As I waited for the jeep to pick me up following my PR, permanent release, from the Camp Pendleton Correctional Center on my birthday in October, 1967, I thought about the freezing basements and I remembered the words from First Sgt. “Top” Cassella,
“They all come back when it gets cold.”
I was going to miss the girls from Boston but not the freezing basements. Upon my return from an Absent Without Leave, AWOL, visit to Haight-Ashbury, I was reduced to the rank of Private, given a forfeiture of pay and sentenced to four months in the “brig.” I did not have to serve all four months, however, and returned to the 28th Marines at Camp San Mateo where I was on duty as a radio operator. Needless to say, the release was related to the upcoming holidays and since I usually volunteered to take the married Marines’ duty so they could be with their families, my brig time was cut short.
As holidays went, across the Pacific Ocean in Southeast Asia, the United States was currently in full-scale combat in Vietnam. At the end of January, 1968, a combined North Vietnamese Army-Viet Cong “Tet” (new year) offensive laid siege to the Marine combat base at Khe Sanh, while other units invaded the major metropolitan centers such as Saigon, Danang and Hue city. The commander of the Allied military forces, Army General William Westmoreland urgently requested two-hundred thousand additional troops to counter the offensive. LBJ didn’t have that many in reserve, instead he sent the Army 82nd Airborne Brigade and the 27th Marines out of Camp Pendleton. Our radio unit at 3rd battalion, 28th Marines was detached, “chopped”, to join the mounting-out of the 27th.
Having enjoyed plenty of liberty following my stay in confinement, and having met Patti Dell, a young blonde girl from Newport Beach, I was shocked to hear the news we were being deployed. My first instinct, like any good soldier who valued his life, was to drop my rifle and run for cover. But then I thought of all the married men who had a lot more at stake than me; I thought of the battalion commander who signed the papers ordering my early release from the brig. Then I remembered all that stuff about duty, the flag and the Marines. It would have been too easy to say, along with the countless draft dodgers and protesters at Golden Gate Park,
“Hell no, We won’t go..!!”
Instead, when I joined the formation out on the parking lot that early morning, as Patti Dell dropped me off and drove off into history, the Captain noticed me in the ranks and remarked,
“Private Langelle, I didn’t expect to see you here this morning.”
Neither did the married Marines, they were certain I was out on Coast Highway, hitchhiking north, back to San Francisco.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, sir,” I replied.
Call it discretion, the better part of valor, courage, or just plain common sense; it all fell into the category of “savoir faire”, meaning to do what was right.
It didn’t take us long to pack up all our gear, join up with the 27th and be transported by truck and bus to MCAS El Toro, where we waited for C-141 aircraft to fly us to the war zone. Somewhere along the way, we picked up Corporal Danny Ledesma. We had Italians from Philly, whites from Alabama, blacks from Cincinnati and an Indian from New Mexico in our unit, but this was the first Hispanic, or Latino, or :
“Chicano” as they were lately being called. Nobody quite knew how to address Danny, most of the blacks like Keeton, Coulter and Dowdell were African-American; Henderson was a Native-American, whites like Rossi and Shepard weren’t really referred to as Caucasian. It just didn’t seem right, lacking any formal politically correct protocol back then, to call him a Mexican, so Danny became simply a “corporal.” Everyone had issues with Ledesma, but nobody really understood the context of the term “issue” as it is used today, he was simply a pain.
We waited for several days following our drop off on Valentine’s Day as LBJ was scheduled to pay the regiment a visit and give us a send off. True to his word, the Commander-in-Chief arrived in a white Cadillac convertible, big cowboy hat; got out, made a speech, shook hands, inspected the ranks and watched us fly away. Two days later we were in-country, exhausted from being cooped up in the cargo hold of that big jet. That night as everyone finally settled in at some sideline barracks at Danang airfield, Ledesma assigned Private Dowdell, a wiry black from Cincinnati, and me to guard the radio gear in trucks next to the barracks. Unknown to Danny, I had smuggled two marijuana joints and a bottle of Bacardi 151 rum from the states, or “Back-in-the-World.” Dowdell and I spent our first night on guard in the war zone high and drinking rum.
A brief stop at the big WalMart type PX on base the next morning allowed my first glimpse of South Vietnamese women. Dressed in bright flower patterned dresses, loaded with makeup, nails painted and all smiles, these women were the epitome of cross-culture upbringing with Asian and French heritage. They were a variable I hadn’t expected and one that would surely make life in the combat zone bearable. Fresh off the airplanes, we were already reconnoitering for possible R&R, rest and relaxation, opportunities, which included, but was not limited to, China Beach up on the other side of the sprawling Danang airstrip.
Later in the day, we boarded trucks with our radio equipment, in full combat gear and ready for action even though the TAOR, tactical area of responsibility, had been secured for some time. Off in the distance smoke curled skyward, we were all certain it was the result from an attack in this notorious area known as the Rocket Belt, immediately north of Dodge City. We proceeded south across the Song Cau Do river at Cam Le bridge and eventually reached our destination, the 5th Marines regimental command at Duong Son (2). The 5th had moved on and were busy mopping up Hue city, ”chopped” to Task Force X-Ray, to take out the VC holed up in the Citadel. Modern Vietnam War historians mark the Citadel as the turning point in the war. It was ironic that the 5th had been given the task, it was the first Marine unit to set foot on Vietnam soil in 1966. They were replaced by the 27th, effectively the last Marine unit to be deployed in-country.
Shades, not the kind found hanging on the window in the living room. Shades, like the kind Odysseus encountered when he visited Hades in Homeric legend. That’s all any of those people are to me years later, looking back on all of it and to this day, still completely baffled as to how I survived. They’re all gone, out there guarding the gates of Heaven like it says in the Marine Corps hymn. Rossi is still around, he showed up on my Facebook page one day asking if I still remembered him. We played guitar together in the war, I still have the reel-to-reel recordings, with Earl Keeton, the African-American, doing a Stevie Wonder version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Keeton is gone, Coulter, Henderson, the Southern whites, gone. And Danny Ledesma, never saw him again. All that stuff about reunions after the war, just movie stuff.
If I could get anything I wanted at Alice’s Restaurant, it would be to have them all back again.
(07/15/18)
ESSAY NOTES: The 5th Marines may not have been the first USMC in-country at Chu Lai, the 9th Marines may have deployed on Red Beach in Danang before that. I am still checking the command chronologies.
I received an "A" for this essay from Professor Judd.