The Last Ditch
Spotting Naval Gunfire and Myself in Vietnam
By Michael McCullar
Jose Hernandez (left) and me with South Vietnamese Marines, northern I Corps, summer 1972.
On July 11, 1972, just northeast of Quang Tri City in the Republic of Vietnam, Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Felix Hernandez found himself in a tight spot. He and 1st Lt. Steve Biddulph were assigned to a South Vietnamese Marine battalion delivered by helicopters into a landing zone teeming, as it happened, with members of the North Vietnamese Army’s 320-B Division. Leaping from the helicopter, Biddulph was shot in both legs, and the battalion adviser, Marine Capt. Larry Livingston, gathered him up and deposited him into a shallow depression as enemy fire swept the LZ. With his lieutenant painfully immobile, Hernandez took charge of the fire missions, laying round after round of naval gunfire into tree lines bordering the LZ.
The battle lasted three days, during which the enemy fire was so intense that no helicopters could come in to retrieve the wounded. Nevertheless, the perimeter slowly expanded, due largely to the momentum established by Capt. Livingston on the first day, when he organized scattered elements of the assault force and charged NVA trenches hidden in a tree line 50 meters away (Marine advisers were called covans, which means “trusted friend” in Vietnamese).
It was an epic struggle throughout, as close and personal as the Vietnam War had ever been, involving hand-to-hand combat, fire and maneuver and the complex play of supporting arms. By July 14, the LZ was finally secure enough for the wounded to be evacuated, including Lt. Biddulph, who lay on the floor of a U.S. Army helicopter with his M-16 rifle pointed out the door and a wounded Vietnamese Marine draped across his legs. For their efforts, Livingston would be awarded the Navy Cross and Hernandez and Biddulph Silver Stars, the second and third highest awards for American combat valor.
I know the details of the action from reading an official Marine Corps history, but the real-time event has been embedded in my memory for decades. I was on the same operation, a summer campaign to retake Quang Tri City after the NVA’s Easter Offensive that spring. I, too, was a U.S. Marine radio operator tethered to a forward observer and hunkered down in a ditch in Quang Tri Province. Our battalion was some distance away from the fateful LZ – several kilometers to the south – in an area beset by NVA artillery fire from the foothills to the west.
The action I witnessed during this three-day period paled in comparison to what Hernandez endured, but he was my friend, and I listened with alarm to the frantic chatter that flooded the radio frequency. We relayed messages and helped coordinate the naval gunfire support, and when it was all over I stood on a wooded rise and watched heavy Marine helicopters haul the wreckage of the battle away.
The photographer David Douglas Duncan entitled a book of his Vietnam War photographs War Without Heroes. I’m not sure what he meant by that, for all wars involve heroic as well as cowardly acts. Duncan could have been suggesting that the Vietnam War was unique in its futility and waste; his message seems to be that for courageous acts to count in war they must be validated by a higher national purpose.
Such a purpose was sorely missing in Vietnam in the summer of 1972. The attempt to retake Quang Tri City was a last-ditch effort in a lost war. At the time, of some 50,000 American troops remaining in Vietnam (down from a peak of 500,000 in 1969), only a handful were involved in combat operations. Most everyone else was packing up to go home -- this at a time when the Vietnam War had never been bigger. In a way, the few Americans still being shot at -- advisers, naval gunfire spotters, pilots and aircrews -- were more like mercenaries than citizen soldiers, wholly detached from the national will and willing to risk their lives for personal or professional reasons, not patriotic ones.
This experience has made me wonder whether patriotism, in the years since World War II, has become little more than a quaint cultural custom, something that really isn’t applicable to modern life. Is patriotism even a good thing? If it is, how does one demonstrate it in a shrinking, globalized world? Is it only for those among us who are less privileged and have fewer options in our commercial culture? Would speaking out against a misbegotten war be more patriotic than participating in one? Is patriotism only a feeling or should it involve a physical act? Was young Jose Hernandez an American patriot in Vietnam in the summer of 1972?
The first time I laid eyes on Hernandez after his ordeal in the LZ was about a month later, at a Navy enlisted men’s club in Da Nang. A group of us found ourselves on a serendipitous in-country “R&R,” and we behaved liked un-caged wild animals. It was not a happy occasion. We got drunk, stupid and maudlin, cursing the Filipino band as it played the Eric Burden anthem “We Gotta Get Out of this Place,” chewing on our drink glasses and otherwise making complete fools of ourselves.
At one point, Hernandez put his head down on the table and began to cry. I walked him to the head and sat with him by the shitter as he vomited and sobbed his guts out. I don’t remember how we got back to the Marine barracks. In a day or two we were all back up north, needing rest from our respite as the battle for Quang Tri City continued in all its fury.
Incoming Home
On Sept. 15, 1972, South Vietnamese Marines clambered over the rubble of the Quang Tri citadel in the heart of the city and declared the provincial capital “secured.” Two weeks later I was on a Pan-Am flight back to “The World,” a weary Marine corporal with battle ribbons on my chest and a constant ringing in my ears.
It was the end not only of my war but also the American one. By the fall of 1972, Nixon’s long draw-down was almost complete. The Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV) had shepherded the South Vietnamese military through the shock and awe of North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive that spring and summer. Most other American units were long gone as our “Vietnamization” policy entered its final phase: holding the battle lines without hands-on American support.
I was a straggler from a forgotten war, which was fine with me. I was out of there, eager to return to college and pick up where I’d left off some 17 months before. Like the rest of America, I was ready to be rid of Vietnam. Little did I know that Vietnam was not so ready to be rid of me.
I had served as a radio operator with Sub Unit 1, 1st Air and Naval Gunfire Liaison Company (ANGLICO), a Fleet Marine Force detachment consisting mainly of forward artillery observers, close air-support specialists and radio operators that had been in South Vietnam since 1965. I had been part of a Marine reserve artillery unit as an unmotivated freshman at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, and after the Kent State shootings and attendant anti-war brouhaha in the spring of 1970, I decided that I needed to take hold of history and do one of two things: either join the demonstrators at the ramparts or join the grunts in Vietnam. Volunteering for active duty in the Marine Corps seemed to be the right thing to do, so that’s what I did. There was absolutely no patriotism involved in the decision. I simply wanted to be in the arena before it was too late.
ANGLICO was an unusual Marine outfit. It was created during World War II to facilitate naval gunfire and close air support for any allied military force other than the U.S. Marine Corps (which has the organic expertise). In some form or fashion, ANGLICOs were involved in the Korean War, Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm, only to be disbanded in the 1990s and recreated in the early 2000s, when it became clear that coordinating supporting fires was an integral part of the Marine Corps skill set and should be merchandised in today’s joint environment. I imagine that the current American war in Iraq will wind down very much like the Vietnam War did, with U.S. combat formations pulled out first and with advisers and units like ANGLICO training and supporting the indigenous forces as they continue to battle the bad guys.
To my knowledge, naval gunfire has not been employed in Iraq (most of which is some distance from the Persian Gulf), but it was important in the defense of South Vietnam, which had a sweeping coastline encompassing more than half the county’s length, from its northern border with North Vietnam to its southwestern border with Cambodia. Offshore, naval vessels with the U.S. 7th Fleet provided a perpetual presence from the South China Sea to the Gulf of Siam. For almost 10 years, attack aircraft were launched from carriers and sea-based artillery was fired from battleships, cruisers and destroyers. To coordinate this fire and air support, boots on the ground were filled mostly by ANGLICO Marines working in spot teams and fire control parties no farther inland than the range of the guns (usually about 15 kilometers).
ANGLICO Marines were considered a cut above the average grunt, though this wasn’t always clearly evident. According to the unit’s table of organization, most of its members were supposed to be parachute-qualified and thoroughly cross-trained in forward artillery observation, close air support and radio communications, though the needs of the service during the Vietnam War created a hodge-podge of personnel whose skill levels varied. Many Marines assigned to Sub Unit 1 underwent jump training as an afterthought at the Vietnamese airborne training center in Saigon or at U.S. Army jump schools in the Philippines or Okinawa.
When I arrived at ANGLICO headquarters in Saigon, a wiry little master sergeant named Heim asked if I would be willing to parachute out of a perfectly good airplane and I said, “Sure.” Jump-school slots came open from time to time but I never pursued them. The Easter Offensive halfway through my tour made parachute training, along with exotic R&Rs in Hong Kong and Bangkok, recreational luxuries. (After my return home, just to see what I had missed, I took a civilian skydiving course at a small private airstrip in the Missouri River bottoms outside St. Louis. I managed to survive five static-line jumps from a Cessna at 2,000 feet, though I sprained my ankle on my third jump and it has never been quite the same.)
During my tour in Vietnam, driven by an intense and occasionally almost fatal curiosity, I spent as much time in the field as I could, including five months with the South Vietnamese Marines and their beloved covans in northern I Corps (Thua Thien and Quang Tri provinces), where some of the heaviest fighting in the Easter Offensive occurred. After I rotated home, in spite of my eagerness to return to civilian life, I had a nagging sense that I had at least seen – if not done – something fairly significant; it would take me more than 30 years to figure out what. It began to dawn on me the day my 17-year-old daughter asked me a question I could not refuse: “Daddy, what exactly did you do in Vietnam?” She was taking a class on the war as a high-school senior, and she wanted me to be part of a panel presentation on what it was like to “fight” in Vietnam. Three fathers had been tapped to speak. I was one of them.
It was as if she had awakened me in the middle of the night with a camera crew and asked me to summarize my Vietnam experience in a one-minute sound bite. Actually, I’d been intermittently putting down reminiscences of my time in Vietnam since Emily’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 and I found the exercise selfishly therapeutic (as she fought her war I re-fought mine). Emily’s request caused me to reopen my dusty Vietnam notebook and begin reflecting again not only on the experience but on how I should recount it.
“I’d be happy to contribute some thoughts to your class discussion,” I told Emily. “Just give me a couple of days. I need to think about it.”
What Emily really wanted to know was: Did I “see the elephant”? I associate this curious phrase with the American Civil War, when it was used as a metaphor for experiencing combat, but I understand it originated with the California Gold Rush. To “see the elephant” meant to behold something unimaginable and sufficiently perilous to last a lifetime, then go home – if that was an option – when you’d seen enough.
The phrase “seeing the elephant” is similar to the parable about the elephant and the blind men, who are asked to describe the creature. That’s exactly how I feel about describing Vietnam. I can’t get my arms totally around it. I can only touch and feel some of the form and texture, and what I come up with may bear no resemblance to the whole, visible thing.
Perhaps that’s how most war veterans feel about their experiences. The problem was, 33 years hence, I didn’t know if I was a real war veteran or not. Had I seen the elephant? Well, yes, part of it. I had gotten shot at, endured a few close calls and seen people die. But I was not a trigger-puller at the tip of the spear. Although my position on a naval gunfire spot team put me in harm’s way on a somewhat regular basis, I took no chances. I did what I was told, kept my head down and endured.
If anything, the war changed me for the better, allowing me to confront the elements and feel like a survivor. I certainly felt no shame for my involvement, which was expected of me in the 1970s, and this created a confusing ambivalence. I could write the experience off as a brief, inconsequential interlude in my life; bury it as a bitter regret; or (God forbid) embrace it as an achievement, something actually to be proud of. What I couldn’t do was turn it into a morality tale, for Emily or anyone else.