DAIWI. Chuck Pfeifer
This book is dedicated to the Nungs, who valiantly served under my command, all the other brave soldiers who fought alongside me, and to my wife, Lisa, to whom I owe heartfelt appreciation for her love and support.
I also express my heartfelt appreciation to authors Bartle Bull, Sr. and John L Plaster, for their invaluable help in the final edit of this book.
D A I W I
A Personal And Poignant Account of
A MACV Special Forces Hero
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“Silver wings upon their chest
These are men, America’s best
One hundred men we’ll test today
But only three win the Green Beret”
“Ballad Of The Green Berets”
Written by SSgt. Barry Sadler and Robin Moore
1966
INTRODUCTION
Hanoi 1993. The best and the brightest were in Vietnam again, and so was I.
Twenty-five years earlier, in some ways, this phrase described me. In 1968, I may not have been the best or the brightest, but I was certain I stood next to them. Not because I was a Special Forces Captain, a West Point graduate, football player, Ivy League dropout, or that I came from a Park Avenue penthouse. It was because in Vietnam I was free. In 1968, virtually without constraint, I roamed the jungles, cities, and mountain towns of Vietnam and Laos for nine months. I picked up scraps of newspaper in Da Nang whorehouses or the Saigon Bachelor Officer Quarters and read about the Summer of Love in the USA, about this or that—live and laugh.
I spent years earning the right to be there: Airborne, Ranger, and Pathfinder schools, at Fort Benning, and with the U. S. 10th Special Forces in Bad Tolz, Germany. I trained alongside the British Special Air Service (SAS), French Marine Commandos (the equivalent of U. S. Navy SEALS), Deutsch Kampfschwimmers (German Special Forces), Special Forces Legionnaires (French Foreign Legion), Danish Jaeger Forces (Elite Special Forces Unit of the Royal Danish Army), and the Hellenic Raiders (Elite Greek 1st Raider/Paratrooper Brigade). These were the killer elite of every western war from Hitler on. For me, freedom came down to one word: meritocracy. It made every human construct from politics and economics to ethics and metaphysics seem pale, powerless, and virtually without value.
Only a few top military or government officials had heard of a top-secret group that became an important part of my life when I graduated West Point’s “Long Gray Line” in 1965. In 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff created an organization named SOG, as a subsidiary to the Military Assistance Command. An unconventional warfare task force, this group would be used in top-secret and cross-border reconnaissance operations in Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War. SOG consisted of soldiers from all branches of the military, including recon men and special operations pilots of the 90th Special Operations Wing, but predominately Army Special Forces. However, in March 1965, just a month or so before my graduation, SOG’s Saigon headquarters very quietly celebrated finally being allowed to penetrate the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a highly strategic and important move. I had no way to know I would become a part of the secret forages and battles in forbidden Laos under the SOG banner. Had I known, my core would have recoiled in protest and fear, but I would have gone and done what I could for my country. General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, World War II, said: “I want an officer for a secret and dangerous mission. I want a West Point Football Player.” I was.
On March 8, 1965, the very first American combat troops from the 3/9 Marine Battalion came ashore on the beaches just Northwest of Da Nang. The event was televised and the arrival was met with a boisterous show of support from sightseers: South Vietnamese officers, Vietnam girls with leis, and four American soldiers with signs reading, “Welcome Gallant Marines.” General Westmoreland, Senior U.S. Military Commander in Saigon was appalled. He had hoped to keep the landing as quiet as possible.
When I finally arrived in Saigon and went to war, the campaign that America called the TET offensive was winding down. Vietnam called it The War Against Americans To Save the Nation, or the American War. The Communist TET offensive was two-fold: To create unrest in South Vietnam’s populace and to cause the U. S to scale back its support of the Saigon regime, or cause complete U. S. withdrawal. In an attack planned by General Vo Nguyen Giap, over 100 cities in South Vietnam were attacked by over 70,000 Communist troops. General Giap was thought by many to be one of the greatest politicians and military strategists of the 20th Century. Militarily, TET was a failure for the North Vietnamese Army and the rebel Viet Cong, although it was a strategic victory. American media wrongly portrayed the TET offensive as a Communist victory. Liberal propaganda was instrumental in turning the American populace against this long and bloody War. TET was not just about winning short-term battles. It proved to be an American political turning point in the war, leading to the slow withdrawal of United States troops from the region.
Warfare had gone from permanent (Uncle Ho’s) to ugly (ours) to unconditional. There is simply no greater meritocracy. I was headed to the very unconditional I Corps, a member of SOG: the Project. SOG was a typically polite acronym (Studies and Observation Group) for a network of reconnaissance, saboteurs and assassins led by Colonel (later Major General) John Singlaub. The Joint Chiefs of Staff implemented the Project in 1964, as a subsidiary of the Military Assistance Command (MACV), during the secret war against Laos. The enemy terrain, and the obscure nature of civil war made it clear we badly needed covert activity. SOG had since become one of the backbones of the official war as well (it was a SOG operation, for example, that precipitated the Gulf of Tonkin), with Vietnam as our official mandate. To bastardize Melville, it was always Laos, though, that was my “Yale and Harvard.”
The Americans named the Ho Chi Minh Trail after the North Vietnamese president. The Communists called it the Truong Son after the Annamite Mountain Range in central Vietnam that runs from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, through Laos and Cambodia. The Trail was strategic for enemy communications and the transport of supplies during all wars in Vietnam. Part of what became the Trail had existed for centuries as primitive footpaths to facilitate trade in the region. The U. S. National Security Agency’s official history of the Vietnam War stated that the Ho Chi Mihn Trail was one of the greatest achievements in military engineering.
Vietnam was divided into four corps of tactical political and military jurisdictions. I Corps, in the northernmost region of the country, covered 10,000 square miles and abutted Laos on the west and enemy bases supplied via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The number of North Vietnam troops was estimated around 78,000 in I Corps, with about half of them around the DMZ. The next largest number was massed around Da Nang and could attack from either direction and could shell northern Quang Tri from North Vietnam and Laos. I Corps bordered the DMZ as well. Of the four tactical zones, I Corp, because of its location, was most likely to be attacked and hardest to protect or defend.
I was assigned to I Corps, close to Marble Mountain. Marble Mountain has approximately 156 steps to the top, and I commanded soldiers up those steps many times. The terrain around I Corps favored the enemy. Rolling piedmont gave way to flat wetlands, mostly covered with rice paddies. Beyond that, the sands of the South China Sea stretched long and hot. Most of the Vietnamese inhabitants in the I Corps area lived in the hamlets and villages interspersed around the rice fields or in the large cities of Hue and Da Nang. The enemy’s political agents and guerrilla fighters were living and operating among the citizens and could easily obtain recruits and supplies. They still lived there, but I am certain it became much harder for them to obtain supplies after we showed up to interdict their operations. Much, much, harder.
II Corps comprised the Central Highlands, III comprised a densely populated region between Saigon and the Highlands, and IV comprised the marsh Mekong Delta, in the southernmost region.
As a direct result of the Geneva Conference, in a peacemaking effort between North and South Vietnam, the DMZ (demilitarized zone) was established and finalized in July 1954, at the end of the