At ROTC summer camp at Indiantown Gap, PA, our Drill Instructor was an E-7 veteran of two tours in Vietnam. He had credited the Army with saving him because he thought that without military discipline, he would have ended up in prison. He loved talking about his experiences in ‘Nam, to include explaining how much fun it was to garotte some pajama-clad VC he had encountered on patrol. “That little c***sucker sure squirmed when I strangled him,” he laughed. In addition to the standard training, he gave us his own private course in VC combat techniques. To counter them, he advised, “Stealth and speed.”
On our field training exercise before graduating, we were up against the 6th Armored Cavalry, which had just come back from ‘Nam. For our first assignment, our platoon had to get off helicopters at a landing zone, march a few miles, sneak up on an encampment and take it. The Sixth Cav squad had a sniper waiting in a tree to slow us up and warn the encampment that we were approaching. But we moved with such stealth and speed that we got to the encampment before they could deploy the sniper. We caught the squad eating lunch, so it was a short fight. Later, we got word from our DI that we had pissed off a lieutenant colonel in the Sixth Cav. He seemed awfully proud of that.
That night we were supposed to go on a night march and trigger an ambush. Because of an eye injury I had sustained earlier that day, I was not with the platoon but behind the scenes with that light colonel from the Sixth Cav who was running their side of the exercise. He was not a nice guy – in fact, he was one of the most vicious officers I encountered in my entire Army experience – and he got nastier as the night wore on. He became more and more agitated because of reports that our unit had not come by.
I wanted to say to the colonel, “My platoon went through your ambush with such stealth and speed that your men didn’t even notice us. They thought it was the wind. If this had been ‘Nam, we would have snuck up behind you and garrotted the whole lot of you.” Of course, I kept my mouth shut.
The captain running the ambush assumed it had been called off and told his men to pack it in for the night. The colonel was absolutely livid and screamed at the captain over the radio to get his men back on line, and then my platoon was forced to march through the ambush zone again to trigger it.
The next night we had to deploy a defensive perimeter and prepare for an attack by the Sixth Cav. Our DI had earlier taught us a VC technique where they would send a small patrol to attack an American unit, withdraw, attack again, withdraw, each time pulling the Americans closer to a full blown defensive perimeter which would open up on them. Our cadet CO of the evening decided to pull this trick. We got their squad right up to the edge of where we would have opened up on them and blown them away – when a cavalryman screamed, “Abort! Abort! It’s a VC trick!” He must have had a flashback. They withdrew, the attack never came, and I knew that somewhere a poor captain was getting reamed by that colonel.
The next morning we set off to take a hill. Normally this would not have been a big deal, but the colonel was so steamed that he told us that instead of attacking a Sixth Cav squad, our departure would be held up until he could reinforce that hill with an entire platoon. If we didn’t take the hill, we would march twenty miles back to our barracks instead of riding in trucks. But we moved with such stealth and speed that we took the hill before he could reinforce it. His people never knew what hit them.
By the time the exercise ended, I saw two very different reactions to our performance.
Our DI said, “I would give my left nut to take you guys into combat.”
The colonel was in a fog, muttering, “Somewhere in that unit, there’s an evil mind.”
Love it!
I don’t think the 6th CAV went to Vietnam.