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.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

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!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to