thedrifter
03-22-04, 01:20 PM
'Sixtys Up!'
Mortarmen do one thing in the infantry better than anyone else. They hump equipment--carrying heavy loads everywhere riflemen go.
By Tom Evans
My tour in Vietnam did not get off to an auspicious start. First of all, even though I was a new guy, I was promoted to corporal soon after I arrived in-country in January 1967. I was given command of a three-man 60mm mortar squad in the 3rd Marine Division's Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. The problem was that two of the squad members, both draftees, were two years older than I and had been in-country for months as riflemen. Needless to say, they were almost in open rebellion.
Then my first combat outing began with a near disaster. I had been ordered into a heliborne assault in the Go Cong secret zone, 60 miles south of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. My first step off the rear ramp of a CH-46 Sea Knight twin-rotor helicopter was prompted by a crew chief's push as I hesitated 4 feet above a deep delta rice paddy with 90 pounds of mortar rounds and gear strapped onto my 120-pound frame. Jumping into the waist-deep mud, I became stuck, giving real meaning to the phrase "Vietnam quagmire." While the rest of the team raced to the edge of the landing zone (LZ), out of the exposed area, my section leader trudged out into the LZ, laughing, to pull me out of the mud.
That afternoon I witnessed the firing of the 60mm mortar for the first time. There had been no live ammo in training, and I had only fired the 81mm in the States. We were firing registration rounds at likely avenues of approach around our perimeter. The first round landed OK, but the second got barely 30 feet out of the tube, then nose-dived into the center of the perimeter. Two riflemen were hit, badly enough to be medevaced, but not seriously wounded. The rounds were dated 1952. I guessed some supply sergeant was using up the older stuff before he issued the newer rounds. Captain Don Festa, my company commander, did not allow any more firing of the 60mm mortars during the rest of the operation.
Later, I slipped while crossing a bamboo bridge that spanned a chest-deep stream. All I remember was how cool the water felt and my decision to hold onto the mortar and let go of my M-14 rifle. Luckily, I wasn't carrying the packboard with 90 pounds of ammo and gear--I probably would have been unable to spring the packboard strap in time and would have drowned. A Vietnamese farmer was spotting for us slightly downstream. He saved my rifle and pulled me out. My section leader pulled me up the bank.
My first duty as a squad leader was to attend a briefing for a convoy escort that would travel from Da Nang to Phu Bai. "If we're hit here," the staff sergeant said, "1st Squad will jump off the truck and face outboard, 2nd Squad will face inboard."
"What about mortars?" I asked.
"You fire from the truckbed," he said.
"Can't do that, Sarge, the recoil off the truckbed will be too much," I said.
"We'll put sandbags in the back of the six-by" [M-35 truck], he said. I looked at the sergeant's map and noticed that the contour lines were close together, denoting a cliff. "Sarge, we could start an avalanche and kill us all if we fire mortars here," I said.
"You're right," he replied. "Your mortar squad should jump out of the truck and face outboard along the road with 1st Squad." The convoy escort was uneventful.
Soon after we moved up to the demilitarized zone (DMZ), I slept through a mortar barrage, only waking up as my squad members Pete Hunter and Jimmy "Short Round" Shea ran out under fire and dragged me by each arm across the hillside to our mortar pit. "Nobody can sleep through a mortar attack," they both said in unison. I explained that I had always been a good sleeper.
Mortarmen do one thing in the infantry better than everybody else--they hump equipment. They carry heavy loads on their backs and go everywhere the riflemen go. The terrain in Vietnam varied from the sand dunes along the coast to foothills inland, to rice paddies in the lush agricultural areas, to the mountains and jungles near the DMZ. I was determined that I would not only hump as much as my men, but more. I carried the sight box on a packboard, as well as several mortar rounds.
One day in March, our lead platoon was just cresting a hill in broad daylight when a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) unit passed below in a field to their front. We set up our mortars and fired over the hill, directed by the riflemen. The NVA unit was fresh from North Vietnam with no combat experience. After a one-sided fight, we captured several prisoners and much gear, including rocket-propelled grenades, 82mm mortars, AK-47 rifles and machine guns. Helicopters were brought in to extract the prisoners and gear. We strolled over to examine their brand-new mortars.
Captain Festa, who would be awarded the Silver Star for this operation, called in artillery and airstrikes to chase the NVA unit back up north. Then he headed us back toward trucks waiting six miles away. With the sight box and pack attached to my packboard, I carried one of the heaviest loads in the company. My men had expended all their ammo and were traveling light. Several times, Sergeant Eugene Blocker from the 3.5-inch rocket section (a future Silver Star winner) offered to carry my M-14 rifle. He and I trailed the column when we finally reached the trucks. I unstrapped the packboard, and one of my men hoisted it into the back of our six-by truck. Later that night, he said he could hardly lift it onto the truck, and couldn't believe I had humped it the entire distance. I never had any trouble with either of the "old-timers" again.
Bernard Fall, author of Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place, stepped on a Bouncing Betty mine while accompanying Alpha Company during research for a new book. He was 40 years old and well liked by the troops. When he died, he had been talking into a tape recorder, which lay mangled next to his body. A transcript of the tape was printed in his last book, Last Reflections on a War. It ended "...first in the afternoon about 4:30--shadows are lengthening and we've reached one of our phase lines after the firefight and it smells bad--meaning it's a little bit suspicious....Could be an amb...."
When we tried to medevac his body, a firefight broke out. The call went out, "Sixtys up! Sixtys up!" Our squad raced up the rice-paddy dike along the column to the front. Each rifleman who carried a 60mm mortar round handed it to us as we passed. We set up to fire our mortar next to Fall and the Marine gunny (gunnery sergeant) who had died with him.
The village was a former Viet Minh stronghold on the "Street Without Joy," so named by the French because they lost an entire armored column there some 14 years earlier during the First Indochina War. Engineers were flown in the next day with mine detectors to scan the "street," no more than a wide rice-paddy dike. They found several mines, and we remained in position overnight, waiting for a general to fly in to inspect the site where Fall had been killed. The following day the engineers scanned the area again and found several more mines in the same place, luckily before the general arrived. These events gave some credence to the grunt joke: What's the best mine detector the Marine Corps has? The Model Pfc, one each.
After three days, I became bored and wandered along a nearby tree line, probing with a makeshift machete. I noticed a perfectly straight crack in the ground, and used the machete to pry a camouflaged lid off a spider trap. I was transfixed by its workmanship--the lid fit perfectly into its slanted wooden frame. The corrugated fasteners holding the corners together were exactly like the ones we used in woodworking shop in high school. The lid was like a deep, flat-tray tomato planter, with vegetation growing on top. It was barely more than a foot square. I thought there might be rice stored in the hole, or perhaps weapons. Never did I suspect there was a Viet Cong (VC) soldier less than 6 inches from my nose. I thought it might be booby-trapped. Something told me, don't lift it up!
I ran around the old pagoda to our gun position, yelling, "Found a hole! Found a hole!" Later, everybody said I was completely unintelligible. We raced back to the other side of the pagoda with our rifles. The lid was off to the side of the hole, and we heard someone scampering through the tree line.
We all opened up with our M-14s. The riflemen cursed us because we were shooting from the inside of the perimeter out at them. The sound stopped. We raced to the spot in the tree line where the sound was last heard. Even with five Marines searching approximately 5 yards of tree line we could not locate the hole or tunnel into which the VC had escaped. In the spider trap were three M-1 carbines, two 30-round banana clips taped end to end, two 15-round straight clips, a poncho, a soft cover and a flashlight. This find revealed to our company commander that the VC were underneath us, which explained how the mines kept reappearing each day. That afternoon we moved out to an unpopulated area in some sand dunes.
continued......
Mortarmen do one thing in the infantry better than anyone else. They hump equipment--carrying heavy loads everywhere riflemen go.
By Tom Evans
My tour in Vietnam did not get off to an auspicious start. First of all, even though I was a new guy, I was promoted to corporal soon after I arrived in-country in January 1967. I was given command of a three-man 60mm mortar squad in the 3rd Marine Division's Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. The problem was that two of the squad members, both draftees, were two years older than I and had been in-country for months as riflemen. Needless to say, they were almost in open rebellion.
Then my first combat outing began with a near disaster. I had been ordered into a heliborne assault in the Go Cong secret zone, 60 miles south of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. My first step off the rear ramp of a CH-46 Sea Knight twin-rotor helicopter was prompted by a crew chief's push as I hesitated 4 feet above a deep delta rice paddy with 90 pounds of mortar rounds and gear strapped onto my 120-pound frame. Jumping into the waist-deep mud, I became stuck, giving real meaning to the phrase "Vietnam quagmire." While the rest of the team raced to the edge of the landing zone (LZ), out of the exposed area, my section leader trudged out into the LZ, laughing, to pull me out of the mud.
That afternoon I witnessed the firing of the 60mm mortar for the first time. There had been no live ammo in training, and I had only fired the 81mm in the States. We were firing registration rounds at likely avenues of approach around our perimeter. The first round landed OK, but the second got barely 30 feet out of the tube, then nose-dived into the center of the perimeter. Two riflemen were hit, badly enough to be medevaced, but not seriously wounded. The rounds were dated 1952. I guessed some supply sergeant was using up the older stuff before he issued the newer rounds. Captain Don Festa, my company commander, did not allow any more firing of the 60mm mortars during the rest of the operation.
Later, I slipped while crossing a bamboo bridge that spanned a chest-deep stream. All I remember was how cool the water felt and my decision to hold onto the mortar and let go of my M-14 rifle. Luckily, I wasn't carrying the packboard with 90 pounds of ammo and gear--I probably would have been unable to spring the packboard strap in time and would have drowned. A Vietnamese farmer was spotting for us slightly downstream. He saved my rifle and pulled me out. My section leader pulled me up the bank.
My first duty as a squad leader was to attend a briefing for a convoy escort that would travel from Da Nang to Phu Bai. "If we're hit here," the staff sergeant said, "1st Squad will jump off the truck and face outboard, 2nd Squad will face inboard."
"What about mortars?" I asked.
"You fire from the truckbed," he said.
"Can't do that, Sarge, the recoil off the truckbed will be too much," I said.
"We'll put sandbags in the back of the six-by" [M-35 truck], he said. I looked at the sergeant's map and noticed that the contour lines were close together, denoting a cliff. "Sarge, we could start an avalanche and kill us all if we fire mortars here," I said.
"You're right," he replied. "Your mortar squad should jump out of the truck and face outboard along the road with 1st Squad." The convoy escort was uneventful.
Soon after we moved up to the demilitarized zone (DMZ), I slept through a mortar barrage, only waking up as my squad members Pete Hunter and Jimmy "Short Round" Shea ran out under fire and dragged me by each arm across the hillside to our mortar pit. "Nobody can sleep through a mortar attack," they both said in unison. I explained that I had always been a good sleeper.
Mortarmen do one thing in the infantry better than everybody else--they hump equipment. They carry heavy loads on their backs and go everywhere the riflemen go. The terrain in Vietnam varied from the sand dunes along the coast to foothills inland, to rice paddies in the lush agricultural areas, to the mountains and jungles near the DMZ. I was determined that I would not only hump as much as my men, but more. I carried the sight box on a packboard, as well as several mortar rounds.
One day in March, our lead platoon was just cresting a hill in broad daylight when a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) unit passed below in a field to their front. We set up our mortars and fired over the hill, directed by the riflemen. The NVA unit was fresh from North Vietnam with no combat experience. After a one-sided fight, we captured several prisoners and much gear, including rocket-propelled grenades, 82mm mortars, AK-47 rifles and machine guns. Helicopters were brought in to extract the prisoners and gear. We strolled over to examine their brand-new mortars.
Captain Festa, who would be awarded the Silver Star for this operation, called in artillery and airstrikes to chase the NVA unit back up north. Then he headed us back toward trucks waiting six miles away. With the sight box and pack attached to my packboard, I carried one of the heaviest loads in the company. My men had expended all their ammo and were traveling light. Several times, Sergeant Eugene Blocker from the 3.5-inch rocket section (a future Silver Star winner) offered to carry my M-14 rifle. He and I trailed the column when we finally reached the trucks. I unstrapped the packboard, and one of my men hoisted it into the back of our six-by truck. Later that night, he said he could hardly lift it onto the truck, and couldn't believe I had humped it the entire distance. I never had any trouble with either of the "old-timers" again.
Bernard Fall, author of Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place, stepped on a Bouncing Betty mine while accompanying Alpha Company during research for a new book. He was 40 years old and well liked by the troops. When he died, he had been talking into a tape recorder, which lay mangled next to his body. A transcript of the tape was printed in his last book, Last Reflections on a War. It ended "...first in the afternoon about 4:30--shadows are lengthening and we've reached one of our phase lines after the firefight and it smells bad--meaning it's a little bit suspicious....Could be an amb...."
When we tried to medevac his body, a firefight broke out. The call went out, "Sixtys up! Sixtys up!" Our squad raced up the rice-paddy dike along the column to the front. Each rifleman who carried a 60mm mortar round handed it to us as we passed. We set up to fire our mortar next to Fall and the Marine gunny (gunnery sergeant) who had died with him.
The village was a former Viet Minh stronghold on the "Street Without Joy," so named by the French because they lost an entire armored column there some 14 years earlier during the First Indochina War. Engineers were flown in the next day with mine detectors to scan the "street," no more than a wide rice-paddy dike. They found several mines, and we remained in position overnight, waiting for a general to fly in to inspect the site where Fall had been killed. The following day the engineers scanned the area again and found several more mines in the same place, luckily before the general arrived. These events gave some credence to the grunt joke: What's the best mine detector the Marine Corps has? The Model Pfc, one each.
After three days, I became bored and wandered along a nearby tree line, probing with a makeshift machete. I noticed a perfectly straight crack in the ground, and used the machete to pry a camouflaged lid off a spider trap. I was transfixed by its workmanship--the lid fit perfectly into its slanted wooden frame. The corrugated fasteners holding the corners together were exactly like the ones we used in woodworking shop in high school. The lid was like a deep, flat-tray tomato planter, with vegetation growing on top. It was barely more than a foot square. I thought there might be rice stored in the hole, or perhaps weapons. Never did I suspect there was a Viet Cong (VC) soldier less than 6 inches from my nose. I thought it might be booby-trapped. Something told me, don't lift it up!
I ran around the old pagoda to our gun position, yelling, "Found a hole! Found a hole!" Later, everybody said I was completely unintelligible. We raced back to the other side of the pagoda with our rifles. The lid was off to the side of the hole, and we heard someone scampering through the tree line.
We all opened up with our M-14s. The riflemen cursed us because we were shooting from the inside of the perimeter out at them. The sound stopped. We raced to the spot in the tree line where the sound was last heard. Even with five Marines searching approximately 5 yards of tree line we could not locate the hole or tunnel into which the VC had escaped. In the spider trap were three M-1 carbines, two 30-round banana clips taped end to end, two 15-round straight clips, a poncho, a soft cover and a flashlight. This find revealed to our company commander that the VC were underneath us, which explained how the mines kept reappearing each day. That afternoon we moved out to an unpopulated area in some sand dunes.
continued......