A chance encounter on a steamy jungle trail begins a 40-year odyssey for tormented spirits seeking peace and redemption.
Two days before he would kill Hoang Ngoc Dam, 1st Lieutenant Homer Steedly Jr. went out in the field to deliver payroll to his company, new briefcase firmly in hand. He began the day, March 17, 1969, by catching a lift from Camp Enari on a helicopter flying food and ammo out to Fire Support Base 20, about 20 kilometers northwest, at the edge of the Plei Trap Valley. As the executive officer of Company B, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, Homer’s system was to pay the men in the rear areas at the battalion base camps first and then to make his way out to the troops at the firebases, armed only with his .45, and carrying his case filled with paperwork and Military Payment Certificates, the substitute bills issued to troops instead of civilian currency, called “funny money” by the GIs. Even though the men often would only take partial payments, letting most of their salaries either accumulate on the books or be sent home—where were they going to spend their money?—nearly everyone still took part of his pay, and Homer, who had been a combat platoon leader, was conscientious about getting it to them.
The helicopter rose out of the oppressive heat that lay over the base and Pleiku like a thick blanket, and he leaned forward, feeling the blessed coolness of the wind on his face, his teeth clamped tightly around the pipe in his mouth—the pipe a new acquisition, along with the briefcase. Even at 22, older than most of his men, Homer knew people thought he had a baby face; the pipe and briefcase, he hoped, would give him more gravitas. But his eyes, looking down at the thick-jungled mountains now, were not the eyes of a young man. The leaf canopies pressed down over a seething mass of vines and thorns, of leeches and misery and slippery red mud and bad memories.
Moments after the helicopter circled down to the pimple of red mud encrusted with filthy sandbagged bunkers, barbed wire and fighting holes that was Fire Support Base (FSB) 20, he was handed another opportunity to go back out into that jungle. Two squads from the company’s 2nd Platoon had gone out on ambush patrols, and another platoon had been sent back to Camp Enari—he’d missed them there—to be sent out on a road reconnaissance mission. Shortly after he landed, one squad returned, and he was able to pay the men. But the other squad remained out in the field. They had detected a large number of North Vietnamese moving toward them and had held their fire, figuring they were outnumbered and outgunned. When they reported the near contact, the battalion CO contacted Captain James DeRoos, Homer’s company commander, at FSB 20, and told him to send the rest of 2nd Platoon out to try to reinforce the squad that had spotted the enemy force. Homer decided to go out with them, pay the squad he’d missed and help with the ambush.
DeRoos and the platoon leader were happy to have him on the patrol. But DeRoos also told him that the platoon scheduled for the road reconnaissance mission had no officer, and the staff sergeant who was acting platoon leader was relatively inexperienced. Would Homer take on that mission also? No problem, he said.
But for now, he moved out from FSB 20 with 2nd Platoon, to rendezvous with the squad that had spotted the North Vietnamese. They were about six kilometers from the base, but it was not easy going to get to them. The jungle was dense, the terrain at times nearly vertical and slippery. When Homer and the rest of the platoon finally got to the squad’s position, they decided to move away from the place where they had spotted the North Vietnamese, in case they had been spotted in return. They would set up a new ambush site.
Meanwhile, they hunkered down, waiting for sundown to reduce the chance of being detected, and then moving into their final position along a trail the North Vietnamese had cut through the jungle. As they started to dig in along both sides of the trail, the platoon leader sent out a three-man listening post a little farther up, to act as an early warning system. The three had only made their way about 50 meters when an explosion and a barrage of bullets tore into them. Two of the Americans went down, severely wounded, and the other men in the platoon immediately rushed forward to their aid, pouring covering fire into the jungle. But the enemy was gone, with only some blood trails as evidence to the Americans that any of their rounds had hit. The blood trails went on for about 200 meters, but there was no other sign of the North Vietnamese. “It was just one of those situations where [the enemy] popped a claymore, fired off everything they had and then ran,” Homer remembers.
The ambush was now compromised, the mission effectively over, and the patrol had two seriously wounded men to take care of. “We had to put a tourniquet on [the leg wound]; he was bleeding really bad,” Homer said. “The other had gotten shot through the lung. He was in pretty critical condition because he had a sucking chest wound, and he couldn’t breathe very well. In that kind of heat you need all the lung power you got.”
The jungle around the soldiers was too thick for a helicopter evacuation, and it was too dark to try to carry them back to the firebase. There was an area clear enough for an LZ a shorter distance away, but it was also too dangerous to try to get there during the night. Instead they dug in and waited, everyone staying on full alert, expecting the North Vietnamese would be back any moment. All night long the men had to listen to the wheezing of the wounded man, afraid the noise would draw the North Vietnamese, feeling the contradictory emotions of fear they would lose the man and terrible hope that after each breath, the next breath would never come.
But the man survived the night, and at dawn they put the wounded on improvised stretchers and carried them to the LZ, where a helicopter landed to take them to the hospital at An Khe. The mission was over. But Homer, sleepless and filthy, needed to get to the platoon going on its road recon mission; they were waiting for him back at Camp Enari. He jumped on the chopper with the wounded.
When the helicopter, low on fuel, stopped at Fire Support Base Mary Lou, Homer decided to get off and try to catch another chopper going to Enari. He stepped out of the hatch, ducking low as he always did; once he had seen a soldier decapitated when he’d saluted Homer, turned around, and stepped into the whirling blades. Filthy, covered with mud and blood, just minutes away from the killing jungle he’d just left, Homer stepped onto the relatively safe earth of a firebase with a name that sounded like a prom queen’s and found himself thrust again into a life and death situation. The helicopter took off. Homer looked around. It was very quiet. He saw a group of MPs, weapons drawn, closing in on someone, a soldier holding his M-16 at ready. The soldier was heading toward Homer.
If the man who confronted Homer when he got off the helicopter knew the officer was involved with disbursing payroll, he probably would have shot him right away. He was upset that someone had screwed up his pay; his wife was not getting her allotment money. So far he had registered his dissatisfaction with the situation by killing his payroll officer and wounding his first sergeant.
The man pointed his rifle at Homer’s chest now. Homer’s own rifle was slung infantry style, with its barrel pointing forward, toward the man’s waist. His finger lay right next to the trigger. They stood in a strange prefiguration of the confrontation he would have the next day, as if the American soldier who had swung his weapon around at Homer now would transform literally into the form of his Vietnamese enemy. Homer spoke calmly to the distraught soldier, pointing out how many other rifles were leveled at him—MPs had surrounded them by this point—and telling him that if he just let the MPs take him in, he could air his grievances and everything would be OK. “As we talked,” Homer recounts, “I thought that one or both of us would wind up dead before the conversation ended.” Homer walked closer and closer to the man. “When I got about 10 feet from him, he finally put the rifle down and raised his hands. The MPs jumped him roughly and handcuffed him. I told them to take it easy on him, because he had probably seen far too much combat, and they relaxed and quietly led him to a jeep and took him away. I continued to the helipad to try to catch a bird back to Pleiku.”
It was not, Homer thought, an auspicious way to start the day. So far it had been the kind of incident-packed, sleepless, adrenaline-charged night and day that made each Vietnam tour seem packed with a lifetime of events and emotions. But he was not surprised at the incident. It was the second time an American soldier had pulled a weapon on Homer; the first time he had butt-stroked the man. He had also heard stories about Americans shooting other Americans, troops eliminating the, to them, fatal problem of an incompetent or overzealous officer or NCO with a bullet or a grenade, sometimes officers drawing down on their men. He had heard that the brigade commander himself had pulled his pistol on a pilot, furious because the man’s helicopter had accidentally blown dust on him as he was taking a shower—the colonel had a “no hover” rule around his headquarters tent. The chopper was coming in after a mission during which its crew had frantically been trying to drop ammunition to a unit being cut to pieces in the jungle. The gunner and crew chief, Ron Carey, who would later write about the incident, had, moments before, been hovering at treetop level, dueling with and shooting to death North Vietnamese snipers lashed to upper branches of the jungle canopy. Carey and the rest of the crew, on edge themselves, had started laughing hysterically at the furious, red-haired colonel covered with red dirt sticking to his wet skin. It infuriated the officer more; he had started waving the gun around wildly, until Carey finally had gotten behind his own machine gun and pointed it at him. The sight of the gun barrel and Carey’s finger on the trigger had calmed the man down, and he had backed off, smiling uneasily. He never mentioned the incident again, and the crew never made an official complaint; they liked the colonel, passed the incident off to combat stress.
Not long afterward Carey himself, after carrying several loads of dead soldiers—the bodies stinking, not yet zipped into body bags—back to the same Fire Support Base Mary Lou, lost it when he landed and someone entered the chopper and pulled off the poncho Carey had draped over a body. He grabbed the man by the throat and put his pistol to his head, screaming that he was going to blow his fucking head off. At the time he experienced the incident as if he were watching a stranger, “this crazy person,” doing it. Later another crew chief also threatened to shoot one of the rear-area people who was taking photographs of corpses.
It is not surprising that men trained and praised for their ability to kill with deadly weapons, and who are used to doing so, will reach for them in moments of great stress. It was a habit they might not lightly shake off when they come home from war, as Homer would one day discover about himself.
Finally back at Camp Enari, Homer met the platoon he was to take out on road reconnaissance. He promptly paid the men—perhaps more than ever considering it prudent to do so. Then he turned in his payroll and got some sleep.
The next morning, March 19, 1969, he was once again on a helicopter. The recon patrol was inserted at a point on Route 19, the main civilian and military artery between Pleiku and An Khe, on the west (Pleiku) side of the Mang Yang Pass, just before the road curved and meandered down into a large valley. Their orders were to ascend to the ridgeline on the southern side of the road and then follow that ridge all the way through the pass, checking for trails the enemy might use to move troops or to ambush the road. But the slope where they had been dropped off was too steep, and Homer decided to take them down the road a little farther, looking for a better place to climb. He was exhausted from the events of the past days and nights, running on pure adrenaline and second wind.
The troops trudged down the road, looking at the steep slopes of the mountains pressing in on both sides of them for the easiest place to climb. The ridgeline stood about 6,000 feet above them.
It was very hot. Homer would remember that. He would be certain of that. But in later years the memory of how he had finally gotten up to that ridgeline became nebulous. It was sometimes as if the intensity of the emotions he felt that day would stir with the heat, the sting of sweat that blurred his vision, and crowd out the details and then, finally, the emotion itself. Sometimes the events of both patrols on those two days edged into each other, the soldiers in both trudging through the same jungle terrain, the ambush, the wounded men—Was that on the first patrol or the second? Was it a leg wound they’d gotten the tourniquet on? He remembered the sucking chest wound. The sound of it. He remembered seeing a tall tree on the ridgeline that they could spot on. He remembered this: that when he finally ordered the patrol to start climbing, the men had refused.
It was not something that had ever happened to him before. But it was 1969, a time when most soldiers had realized that their presence in Vietnam was a holding action; the peace talks had started on January 25 in Paris, and for most GIs, the main goal had become survival. No one, in John Kerry’s words, wanted to be the last man to die for a mistake. Besides, Homer was new to them; they knew he had combat experience, but not in their platoon. The men hung back, muttering to themselves. Homer knew he could appeal, threaten or scream, but in the end, what could he do to them if they didn’t go—make them grunts and send them to Vietnam? And how would the incident look on his fitness report: What kind of officer could not get men to follow him?
In any case, his southern stubbornness was aroused. He was going up to that ridge, with or without them. The men looked at him and then looked at two other soldiers, their medic and the NCO who had been their acting platoon leader. Homer understood that if those two obeyed him—each with his own kind of moral authority—the others would follow. He began trudging up the slope, hoping both men would join him.
They did. “I looked back down line after about 150 feet or so and they were coming, one foot in front of the other,” he remembered. “The thing was, I was not even the platoon leader. The NCO that was acting platoon leader because we didn’t have an officer for that platoon was kind of just standing back and letting me do my thing. But it was his platoon, he was still in charge. I knew that. Everybody else knew that. So when I got this gung-ho attitude and said we gotta go do it and everybody was wanting not to, and they turned to him to see what he would say. And thank goodness he was a good NCO and he backed me up. And so we went up and did our job.”
Years later, he came to see what the sergeant enabled him to do as the opposite of goodness, seeing that balking on the part of his men as an opportunity fate had given him to change the fatal outcome of that patrol, one that the man he was at that time would have found impossible to seize.
The recon patrol struggled up the jungled slope. Homer’s intention was to make the ridgeline, turn left, check out the first part of it, and then retrace their steps and go on toward the eastern side of the pass. When they reached the top, they found a well-worn path running along the ridge, just the kind of trail they were supposed to check out. They began moving cautiously down it. But again there was a small rebellion: The two squads that Homer ordered to walk flank security—that is, make their way through the jungle partway down, on either side of the ridgeline trail— refused. It was a treacherous job. Besides having to hack through the foliage, they knew that flankers would take the first blow of an ambush. They were not inclined to do so. Homer again insisted, and again they finally obeyed.
The patrol, flankers out, followed the ridgeline path to a point where the troops could see the entire valley at the other end of the pass spread beneath them. The sight of the country, stretching out for hundreds of miles, awed the men, even in their state of exhaustion. Their war was fought under the jungle canopies, in gloom, the trees and foliage and shadow pressed around them in a visual reflection of their ignorance about where they were, where they fit into some overall diorama of the war that made sense, they presumed, they hoped, to someone. Now the country was spread out below like a map: the patchworks of fields in the valley, the spines of mountains, smoke rising, flashes here and there from distant firefights. After a few moments, Homer got the patrol turned around. He would report the existence of the trail; for now they needed to go back to the tall tree he had spotted on, descend and check out the other side.
They were almost at the tree when he saw that the men were played out. He decided to let everyone take a short water and rest break. “We just moved a few meters off the trail on either side and dropped our packs and lay down,” he recalls. “I had rear security out, but no point security, except for the point man, who was facing forward. As I walked up to the front of the column, checking on the condition of the troops, I spoke to the point man, who turned to face me.”
At that moment, Hoang Ngoc Dam, his weapon slung over his shoulder, rounded the trail, strolling as casually as if he were on a nature hike. It was the kind of encounter called a “meeting engagement,” a phrase that in other circumstances might sound like a courtship ritual, but in American infantry jargon refers to a situation in which a unit, on a reconnaissance mission, accidentally runs into the enemy. A meeting engagement: There is a sense of arbitrary fate suggested by the term, an element of surprise that in fact was true to the situation.
“Chieu hoi,” Homer shouted, thinking the phrase meant surrender. But the North Vietnamese soldier continued to bring his weapon up. A second later he was on the ground, his chest stitched with Homer’s bullets. “It was the first time I’d shot someone. I’d been in firefights, but firefights means I hear noise, I shoot at it. I see muzzle flashes, I shoot at it. I call artillery in on it. When I get through, we might find bodies, we might find blood trails, but I never saw someone….This guy, I saw him jerk when I fired. We were close enough that, if I had been looking at his eyes I would have seen directly into his eyes. Fortunately, I wasn’t looking at his face, I was looking at the weapon because I waited as long as I could and in the split second before he had it actually aimed at me, I had no choice. As far as I knew, he was going to pull the trigger and then I was gone, so I had no choice. This is the first time, eyeball to eyeball, I saw someone and I pulled the trigger and I knew, beyond any doubt, I killed that person. And—it’s pretty traumatic. The only thing that kept me going after that was the fact that we had to finish the job we were assigned to do, and I just immersed myself in details. I worried about my men. I didn’t think about it.”
He did think, for only an instant, of taking the body down with them. But his patrol was on an enemy trail, in an exposed position, and he knew he had to get the men down quickly, off the ridgeline. Let the enemy take care of their own. He knelt down and went through the dead soldier’s pockets, extracting two small notebooks and some loose papers.
“I took his identification papers and will send them home,” he wrote to his mother that night. “Please put them up somewhere for me.”
Finally finding peace and burying the old war
Homer did send the papers he took from the body of Hoang Ngoc Dam home to his mother, where they remained untouched in her attic for many years. Steedly went on to become an infantry company commander, and spent two tours in Vietnam, engaged in heavy combat in the Central Highlands. He returned home deeply affected by the war; the killing he had seen and done, and the deaths of his own men, haunted him. It wasn’t until 2004 that he tried to confront his memories, and it wasn’t until then that he remembered and retrieved the documents kept in his mother’s attic. After he saw the papers again, he became determined to find the family of the man he’d killed and return the documents to them, seeing it as a way he could bring them and himself to peace. In the course of his quest, he would find that Dam was a 25-year-old medic sergeant from the village of Thai Giang in northern Vietnam who had been in the war five years at the time of his death. To Dam’s family and widow, he was one of 142 from his village and 300,000 from the North whose remains were never found and returned. In 2005, at Homer’s request, I took the documents to Dam’s family in Thai Giang, and in 2008 Homer went there to meet them. He was greeted warmly, and he traveled with the Hoang family to Pleiku, where he helped locate and bring Dam’s remains back to his home village. At the funeral, which was attended by hundreds of people, Homer threw the first handful of dirt into Dam’s grave. He and the family and the entire village understood that what they were doing was burying the old war along with Dam, a task they could only do together.
From the book Wandering Souls: Journeys With the Living and the Dead in Viet Nam by Wayne Karlin. Excerpted by arrangement with Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, © 2009.
Originally published in the December 2009 issue of Vietnam Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
