Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [181]
In fact, as soon as he took command, Ianni gathered his company commanders in the TOC–they had all been brought in from the field for the change-of-command ceremony–and proceeded to tell them what a sorry outfit they were.
Rector, who had commanded a rifle company in the battalion before becoming the assistant operations officer, finally stood up to object. After this unfortunate introduction, Diduryk, the incumbent operations officer, took Rector aside for a mild ass-chewing: “Keep your mouth shut. Let the man do his job.”
During Rector's first tour as an ARVN adviser, the men in the 1st Cav units that he saw had not even carried rucksacks because they were resupplied by helicopter at least once a day. When Rector got his own company, Bad Bet Bravo, though, the jungled terrain would not accommodate such frequent resupply–natural clearings were too few and far between–so, since in those temperatures a man could carry only three days' worth of supplies and remain effective, they operated on a three-day log cycle. Every third day an LZ would be found or cleared to allow in the helicopters, and each man would receive twelve quarts of water, eight charlie rat or lurp meals, whatever ammunition needed to be replenished, and a six-pack of either soda or beer to make up his ration of two cans of either per day. To minimize log time, one man might hump a case of soda or beer to the NDP, where it would be broken down and distributed. In addition to the three-day log cycle, the battalion adhered to the fifteen-and-five rule: After fifteen days in the bush, each company, on a staggered schedule maintained by the operations officer, would rotate for five days on the battalion firebase as perimeter security. This benefitted the health and morale of the command, since fifteen days in the bush in the same clothes was tough, especially in the rainy season, and splotched with bites, blisters, and jungle rot, everyone needed to dry off and clean up. These cycles had been strictly observed by Iverson. Ianni, however, had gone on two-week operations without resupply while he was an advisor. He knew the troops could endure more than they were, and he viewed the troops' psychological dependence on this routine as a resounding weakness. Ianni screamed at whatever poor troop happened to be humping his squad's case of soda. Stories circulated of Ianni leaving one company in the bush for twenty days while bringing into the firebase another company that had been relieved of palace guard only five days earlier. The fifteen-and-five rule no longer applied. Ianni's biting comments on the battalion's lack of aggressive zeal finally caused one of his officers to remark bitterly that such a view was proof of “how little he understood what the fuck we were doing.”
There existed a school of thought, however, that a commander like Ianni–aloof, impersonal, unrelenting in his demands–was able to squeeze a bit more out of his subordinates than a less stressful commander. This approach, of course, would do nothing for a commander's popularity. In Ianni's case, hard feelings had intensified after an incident soon after he had taken over. Ianni and Diduryk, his operations officer, had taken their artillery liaison officer as well as a platoon leader and a platoon sergeant in the C&C to brief them on a new operation. They happened to pass a recently evacuated FSB, and the door gunner machine gunned an NVA he saw nosing around the position.