Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [223]
The captain's side of all this is not known, but as a disgruntled postscript he did comment that the Army had changed and the colonel hadn't, to which Vail, in full stride, shot back, “You're right, it has changed– in Vietnam. And I'm changing it back.”
Vail gave Bravo to 1st Lt. William McCauley, USMA 1968, his newly assigned S-3A, a solid, no-nonsense, career-minded officer, who within three weeks had turned things around. All the company needed was positive leadership.
Charlie Company, without the leadership that Vail thought measured up, continued to be his problem child.
By and large, though, the Triple Deuce got the job done, anonymously and quietly. In addition to two solid company commanders, who had a good influence on their lieutenants, Vail credited their shake'n'bake ser-geants. The battalion did not have the authorized E-8 first sergeants with each company, only E-7s and, in one case, an E-6. Their platoon sergeants and squad leaders were mostly twenty-and twenty-one-year-old instant E-5s and E-6s who, despite their inexperience, rolled up their sleeves and led the battalion's hundreds of small-unit patrols. Quiet war or not, it was still scary, and the grind continued, day after day. But as the recently promoted Specialist Ross, holding down a sergeant's job as a track commander–proud of himself and of his battalion–said, “You put up with it.”
At least up to a point. When Alpha Company was still operating around Krek, Lieutenant Yarashas's platoon was delayed and did not get to the company laager until dusk, and it was dark by the time they finished laying their claymores, tripflares, and rocket screens. The general understanding was that it was too risky to send out listening posts and ambush patrols after dark–they usually exited the perimeter at twilight with enough light to find good positions to settle into for the night– but Lechner radioed Yarashas that the patrols were to go out anyway. Yarashas respected Lechner, so, although the order showed poor judgment in his opinion, he supposed that it probably originated with battalion, and Lechner, having lost the fight with them, had transmitted it without comment. Yarashas passed the word to his grunts who, tired, filthy, in a generally pissed-off mood already, talked it over among themselves. They approached Yarashas, and Ross, trying to sound serious but not defiant, did the talking, “Joe, this is not right. It's not fair. There's no reason for us to go out there and risk getting blown away just because Captain Lechner didn't get us laagered on time. We're not going.”
Yarashas mulled it a moment and to keep the peace he answered, “First of all, I don't care what you do as long as you don't get caught. Second, if you do get caught, I'll deny that I had anything to do with it. Third, we never had this conversation.”
When it came time, the RTO of the ambush that Ross was with told the CP they were leaving the perimeter. They walked out fifty meters, then doubled back and slipped back into the laager between two tracks where they quietly spent the night, breaking squelch on the radio to indicate that no NVA had walked into their ambush zone when the CP requested sitreps every hour.
Lieutenant Yarashas's platoon faked no other missions during his watch, but the LPs and APs were frightening and fatiguing. The temptation to don't but say we did was intense, especially in a war where no one wanted to fill the last body bag. The feeling that certain patrols were faked was sometimes passed to Colonel Vail by his sergeant major– whom he considered an exceptional soldier, like most of the senior sergeants still in the bush at this late stage–but all he could really do was remind his troops that the battalion fire support plans were based on their patrol routes. If they reported that they had moved on to point B when, in fact, they were still hiding in the bushes at point A, they would have to run the risk of having U.S. H and I fire land on top of them.
There were ways to get around that. Private First Class Mike Daugherty's squad in Bravo Company