Imagine a green valley, slightly long than wide. Weaving through the middle is the Song Re river, running shallow over rocks and rapids during the dry season but fierce and often impossible to ford in the rainy season. The floor of the valley has the terrain of a golf course, rolling into terraced rice paddies at the bottoms of the mountains ringing the valley. At one end of the valley, far in the distance, a waterfall pours off the top of a ridge, falling nearly halfway to the bottom before losing itself in the trees. Dozens of water buffalo graze near the streams and ponds. The fog and clouds roll and tumble and slide up and down the mountains all day long…never remaining stationary for more than an hour. Suddenly half the entire valley is invisible in misty white; an hour later only little puffs float halfway up the hills. Over there, a long skinny finger of fog flows down a narrow valley, finally wrapping around one of the hamlets and then curling itself into a ball and floating away. A dream world. The Hre Montagnard villages perch clean and tiny on little hills, looking like a child's story of fairy-tale houses in a fairy-tale valley.

This is Gia Vuc, about 80 miles southwest of Danang and about mid-way to Laos. The Special Forces camp is an old camp; the minefields in front still have some French mines in them and some of the Hre tribesmen speak a little French. The Hre are one of the large subgroups of the Montagnards with an estimated 150,000 people. Most do not have the epicanthal eye fold, and most have a straight though short nose, not the flatter nose of most Vietnamese. Most adults (especially the older) have had their front teeth either filed down or broken off, a tribal custom. A few French genes visible in some who have white skin and some who have red hair. Running through the middle of our compound are bits and pieces of an old French road that once linked Kontum and Quang Ngai. One day on patrol, I was amazed to see an old highway sign, rusty and full of bullet holes, that read "Kontum 25k."

Rice is the primary crop although tea, coconuts, cinnamon, honey, hemp and areca palm are grown. Growing wild are bananas, sugar cane, mangoes and a grapefruit-like plant. A typical hamlet has 50-60 people in 12-18 huts perched on hills. Favorite drink is a quite potent rice wine. Altogether about 1,000 Hre live in this one long valley. There is only one school in the valley, and it was built by an earlier SF team. A teacher was recruited from Saigon and is paid by SF. Hre have been fighting since the early 1950s, some with the French, some with the Viet Minh/Viet Cong. Our housegirl is a captured Viet Cong and recruited (we think) to our side.

Week of Sep. 12, 1965: Two patrols ambushed this week. Four Hre wounded by bullets; four Hre wounded by punji stakes; and then our XO Lt. Brown was wounded by splinters/metal shavings when a bullet shattered the stock on his carbine, sending dozens of splinters/some metal pieces into his buttocks. All the wounded were treated in camp; however, one punji stake appeared to have done serious damage to nerves in one Hre's arm, and I sent him to Danang.

Sept. 19, 1965: We have a captured VC document with a sketchy outline of a planned attack on Gia Vuc within the week. Other SFers say we get these periodically and not to worry. We are already at a high state of readiness. About 9 p.m., Viet Cong begin probing several of our outposts. A few rounds exchanged. A few murky figures seen. A few illumination flares fired. About 12:30 a.m. Capt. Hicks and the LLDB commanding officer, Lt. Tuey (not sure of name), get into an argument about whether to ask for air strikes. Voices raised. Bitter argument erupts. Tuey whips out a .25 pistol and jacks a round into the chamber. Threatens to kill Hicks. Then he leaves team house.
     1 a.m.: Our interpreter is in the LLDB teamhouse and hears discussion among LLDB. Tuey wants to kill Hicks tonight. LLDB first sergeant agrees but says they might as well kill all the Americans. They all agree; it's a fine idea. Our interpreter speaks up, and LLDB grab him and slap him around a bit. He escapes and runs to our team house. Repeats conversation to us.
     1:30 a.m.: We only have 6 USSF in camp; three of us go on guard immediately. One is outside our team house in a bunker that faces the LLDB team house with .30 machine gun aimed at the LLDB. We notify C-team on radio and tell them that if we don't contact them every hour, assume the worst.
     2-4 a.m.: My turn on guard duty. Misty, rainy, foggy, standing there leaning against an old French tractor, rain dropping out my hat on my black PJs. All night long, I see flashlights crossing back and forth from the LLDB team house to their commo room and to their arms room. Some of the Hre are up; many get into their own bunkers. But they're facing inward, not outward. Hicks is afraid that LLDB will simply open up with everything they have on our team house. No attempt made to talk. Discussion about what Hre would do in case of a firefight. Consensus seems to be that Hre would back the LLDB and then, later, kill all the LLDB at their leisure. No love lost between LLDB and Hre.
     Dawn: Fog lifts. Helicopter lands with Col. Ross and his LLDB counterpart from the C-team. Consoling, calming words passed around. Hicks requests that entire LLDB team be removed or that USSF team be lifted out. Ross convinces everyone to stay and be calm. Tension lifts. Ross, others return to C-team late in the day

Our relations with Hre: mutual toleration. I understand that this SF team earlier killed two Hre soldiers accidentally. Also because VC have infiltrated Hre troops, SF team has to boobytrap the Claymore and other mines. Several Hre troopers have been killed when they were fiddling around with the mines. The reason we boobytrap them is that we often find the wires to the claymores cut. One night, we found a claymore sitting at the front gate where none should have been and it was facing inward. Rumor has it that several teams back, one of the Hre put a claymore near the front gate and blew it when the SF CO started in. Apparently, he wasn't hurt badly. Relations with LLDB: grim. For example, we've issued more than 100 grenades to them; they claim not to have a single one now. Relations between LLDB and Hre: Even grimmer. Rumor is the Hre slaughtered a dozen LLDB several years ago.

Sept. 25, 27: One Hre trooper got mad at himself about something and shot himself in leg. More damage than I could handle. Med-evacced out. Two days later, we showed a movie to the Hre. It was a western, but I don't think a John Wayne western. Several hours later, gunshots broke out in the Hre area. We thought it was an attack, but found out that two brothers (drunk) got into an argument about the fast-draw techniques they had seen in the movie. They decided to try it with rifles. They started back to back, walked so many feet, turned around and open fire on each other. One brother's bullet caught the other in the elbow, which spun him around. A second went through his lower back, lopping off part of his liver as it exited. I operated and did the best I could. It was 18 hours before a Vietnamese chopper came for him. I kept him alive until the chopper took off, but he died on the way to Danang.

Sept. 29-30: Hammer and anvil operation planned. We were trying to trap VC in a known VC valley about 6 miles away. My group of 25 (Minnicks and myself) left at 12:30 a.m., and a second group of 60 left at 3 a.m. Leading our group was LLDB intelligence officer. The LLDB officer stopped us at 4 a.m., and said we'd go no further now because of danger of mines/punjis. Minnicks argued unsuccessfully that this wasn't the plan.
     At dawn, LLDB officer switches plans again and takes us up the side of a mountain, ignoring our arguments that this made no sense. The plan had been for the group of 60 to sweep through the valley at 10 a.m. We were to have been in position (at the other end of the valley) in order to pick off VC as they retreated.
     The group of 60 began their sweep on time (we could hear the firing), but we didn't get into position until early afternoon. Late in the afternoon, the two groups finally merge (as per the plan) with a few VC dead and wounded tallied up. This larger group would then cross the Song Re river and head back toward Gia Vuc. But the second part of the plan was that as the larger group began to cross the river, Minnicks, myself, and 13 Hre would slip into the brush and hide. The reason was that the VC were well known for following patrols and set up ambushes. Our job was to wait in the jungle up to two days to ambush any trailing VC. We slipped into the jungle as planned and had just gotten hidden when gunfire broke out on the river. We realized the VC had caught our men in mid-stream. We could hear a machine gun raking the river and splunk of lead hitting the water. We could hear the fast carbines and slow, burpy BARS and then the soft plunk and tearing explosions of the M-79s. In fact, we heard a VC less than 30 feet from us, shooting into the rear of our men on the river.
     Minnicks held us in place, saying we couldn't give our position away. Stray bullets from the gunfight kicked off pieces of bark overhead. Finally after 35 minutes, we got radio contact with the larger group. One striker killed, two wounded, one American slightly wounded. But our larger group had fought their way across the river, and the VC had retreated. They called for a med evac; we said, OK, we were staying on as per the plan.
     Dusk: Our Hre strikers tell us that they are not about to stay there overnight. They were going back down the river with or without us. The LLDB officer could do nothing with them. Minnicks cajoled, threatened, called them cowards…no dice. Then Minnicks said that, in that case, he and I were crossing the river, joining the larger group and going with them. The Hre followed us across. We couldn't catch the other group and stayed overnight without incident. Arrived back in camp late the next day.
     In camp, Commo SFer Brock told us that at one point while crossing the river under fire, the Hre wanted to quit and go back, and Brock got in an argument with them. Finally, Brock fired a bullet about two feet over one Hre's head. They began to race across the river then, screaming like savages.

Oct.8: Junior medic wounded. It was a recon/medical patrol lead by Sgt. Dominick Tantalo of Waterloo NY. Sgt. Norman Bircher of Topeka, Kan. (my junior medic) and Sgt. James Harrison of Baltimore were the other USSFers on the patrol along with about 15 Hre strikers. Also along was Gene Basset, a cartoonist who worked for the Scripps-Howard chain and who was visiting Gia Vuc. Reconstructed story: The patrol was at its deepest point and about to turn around. They were on a rocky half-dry creekbed. Both sides were sheer cliffs covered with dense jungle vines and scrub. Suddenly a BAR opened up behind them. Gene turned and saw a line of bullets kicking a straight line down the column toward him. He dove behind a rock. A Hre striker in front of him turned for cover when suddenly his forehead exploded as a tracer bullet still glowing red tumbled out with about half his brains. The Hre dropped. The next round hit Bircher. It went through his left thigh and through his right leg, missing the bone but doing considerable damage. We decided the bullet had been cross hatched to make it spread out. It took a huge portion out of Bircher's right thigh as it exited. The BAR was so close that Harrison said they could hear the VC talking. Finally, our boys got return fire going and the VC quit. Bircher couldn't be moved. They called camp and for a med evac. Hicks, Minnicks and myself took off on a forced march and arrived a few minutes before the choppers. Under covering fire, I checked Bircher. He already had a shot of morphine in him (Harry had pinned the needle to his pants leg as we were instructed) but was asking for a second one. I gave it to him and pinned my needle beside the other one. Bircher said that when he went down, he didn't move on purpose, pretending to be dead. That probably saved his life. The morphine was doing its job because at one point Bircher shouted to Minnicks, "Hey Skip, no offense or anything, but fuck that extension."
     The choppers arrived and in as heroic as anything I'd ever seen dropped straight down this narrow ravine (they had less than 40 feet of extra clearance on each side of the blades) to pick up the dead and wounded. They got sniper fire coming and going but made it out OK.
     By the way, about half of the Hre strikers in the patrol had fled sometime during the firefight.
     We got hit twice more on the way back to camp. The first time, we were crossing a rice paddy when the familiar ratp-ratp-ratp of a BAR opened up from across the paddy about 300 feet away. We dove behind a two-foot dike at the edge of the rice paddy. I was lying there trying to hit the BAR (I could see the flashes) when Gene the cartoonist suddenly shouted. I thought he was hit. It turned out that hot, spent shell casings from my carbine were scorching his bare back. Finally, the VC broke off. Gene picked up his sketchpad and found a bullet had creased the back of it.
     About 30 minutes later, Hicks decided to cross a wide creek (maybe the Song Re) first with a striker behind him. As soon as they were on the other side, we heard gunfire. Minnicks shouted across, "Hey captain, are you getting fired on?" Classic understatement. Hicks shouted back, "Hell yes, we're getting fired on."
     Skip, barechested and big, leapt into the creek, shouting, "Let's go, men." Gene the cartoonist hit a deep hole in the creek and flipped head over heels in it. We joined Hicks and the VC broke off. Returned finally to camp.

(Note: Gene Basset later wrote about this incident and I have a copy of the article that was in the Washington Daily News.)

Oct. 25: A grandmother brought her granddaughter in to the camp dispensary yesterday. The baby who was about 2 years old had a gunshot wound on her right arm. The bullet missed the bone but took considerable flesh away. As I worked on the little girl, I asked how it happened. The woman said that her daughter and granddaughter were working in a rice paddy when our Hre strikers opened fire on them. The mother was killed with the same bullet that hit the baby.
Later, I asked Hicks about the incident, and he said he had not seen any report on this. This morning, the Hre turned in a completely contradictory report, saying that the patrol had been fired on by a sniper and in returning the fire had accidentally killed the woman. I don't believe the Hre report for a second.

Note: About a month before I arrived at Gia Vuc, Hicks started to pull out his desk drawer in camp when he noticed a tiny string attached to it. He stopped. The string ran to a paper clip that had replaced the firing pin in a grenade.

These are the big events during my short stay. They are typical of the types of fighting/ambushes we ran into on almost every patrol. I have lots of little stuff (fishing with grenades, tricks I played on the Hre strikers, etc.) that maybe I'll send along later. Thanks again for creating the web site. If we all tell bits and pieces of our stories, it'll come together in a real history of that time in our lives and that time in Vietnam.