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By Root 959 0

LZ to resupply LZ, using the same trails, the same bivouac areas, the same old foxholes. These young leaders also failed to check the condition of their troops' ammunition or the amount of flares, grenades, and machine gun ammunition they carried. With security in numbers, there was complacency: The troops left trashy perimeters, and noise discipline could have been better. The platoon leaders were learning little because the company commanders generally handled everything. One of Ianni's first steps to get his lieutenants trained and his troops to police themselves was to raise the pucker factor by emphasizing platoon operations. Ianni was bespectacled and his voice high pitched. He could be found helicoptering into field positions to raise hell about every helmetless head and to collar grunts who humped cases of soda atop their rucks, “…to hell with that goddamned soda, you should be carrying grenades and ammunition!” When company commanders asked about creature comforts for their troops, he chewed them out royally, “My first job is to fight this war, and equal with that is to get you back alive–and we're going to do both. There's going to be some painful times in between, so quit worrying about the goddamned ice cream. That's going to be the last of your concerns!”

Ianni did things like give Article 15 punishments to any machine gunner he heard firing long bursts during contact, because prolonged firing was a leading cause of jams. As he saw it, he had to come on strong because, by the time he took over the battalion, “it was obvious to me that they had lost whatever military skills they'd ever had–or they'd never had them.”

Lieutenant Colonel Ianni's negative appraisal of his battalion was shared by few, if any, of his subordinates. It was, in fact, received with resentment by men who remembered conducting platoon patrols a full two months before Ianni's arrival and who had always considered the Gambler Battal-ion to be the best in the 1st Cav. In actuality, although their platoon patrols had covered a lot of ground, they hadn't stirred much up–the scattered enemy units in the area just didn't want a fight–so the Gamblers couldn't prove their contention that they alone could whip the entire North Vietnamese Army. Nevertheless, this confidence had been instilled by Ianni's predecessor as battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel named Iverson, who was so beloved that some men actually cried during the change-of-command ceremony. Iverson had had no personal quarters, choosing instead to work and sleep in the TOC, and he had never missed his company's log days. He would land his chopper and speak briefly with the company commander, then the captain wouldn't see the colonel again until he was ready to leave because he was out talking with his grunts. It had seemed that Iverson had known the first name of literally every kid in the battalion–he knew how to get people pumped up. If there had been a downside to this leadership, it was that Iverson, overly impressed by his good soldiers, had been soft on the ten-percenters. One of his company commanders described sending a man to the rear for punishment, only to have Iverson give him another chance, with the comment, “Aw, he'll be all right.” “The guy's a hoodlum!” “Naw, I talked to him. He'll be all right.”

It was the Gambler Battalion's opinion that Iverson left big shoes to be filled, and it was suggested that Ianni had problems filling them because while Iverson had generalized toward the positive, Ianni generalized toward the negative. Ianni had come to his infantry command after eight months among the rear-echelon types at Quan Loi and Bien Hoa, where drug and racial problems had been epidemic and often violent. It was further suggested that, thus tainted, Ianni made no real effort to get to know his infantrymen. Ianni later recalled:

They weren't as good as they thought they were. Happy, yes, but not ready for any serious fighting. The purpose of the battalion's patrols was to prevent enemy ground attacks and shelling. The NVA routinely shelled the base with a 75mm