Loon - Jack McLean [49]
Certainly the tepid U.S. response to the seizure provided a morale boost to the hordes of North Vietnamese soldiers who were quietly pouring across the border into South Vietnam, within miles of us, to commence the Tet Offensive.
What was up? we wondered. Those in command wouldn’t let us go up to Hanoi to finish the job for which we’d been trained, and now eighty-three of our navy and Marine Corps brothers were being held somewhere in North Korea with the United States powerless to take action.
The United States Marine Corps was founded on November 10, 1775, in Tun Tavern in Philadelphia. Its purpose was to provide onboard defense to American naval vessels against the rising scourge of the Barbary pirates. Now, some hundred and ninety years later, we gave up a United States Navy vessel to a hostile foreign power without firing a single shot in defense?
Were we the paper tiger?
Would the United States government and Robert McNamara give us up as well?
It was beginning to feel that way to the boys of Charlie Company.
On Tuesday, February 7, Peter Arnett, a reporter for the Associated Press, went to view the ruins of the embattled South Vietnamese city Ben Tre. In his dispatch, he quoted a U.S. Army officer as saying, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
To many, the quote became symbolic of the looming American failure in Vietnam.
Days after the beginning of the Tet Offensive, I accompanied a sergeant on a trip down to Cam Lo to get a situation report on some recent activity. Two squads from Delta Company had been sent down from the Washout the previous afternoon to bolster security following the NVA ambush of an army convoy.
We had stood lines in Cam Lo for several days shortly after my arrival, so I was familiar with the layout. Nothing, however, could prepare me for what I saw on this sunny February morning. Coming into the tiny village, we spotted six U.S. Army trucks on the side of the road, still smoking from the rockets that had leveled them the previous afternoon. Their frames were twisted. Several were on their sides. Blackened bodies lay in the cabs, burnt into the seats, all but irremovable.
We paused for a brief moment, and then moved on. There was nothing there for us to see and nothing there for us to do. As we drove around the corner, another horrific sight came into view. There before us was a pile of dozens upon dozens of dead bodies stacked as high as they could be thrown.
Gooks?
Yes, thank God.
The marines from the two squads of Delta Company that had come down from the Washout the day before to provide security were now methodically grabbing body after body off the barbed wire that encircled the small perimeter that they had established. The only sound was that of our idling motor. The only smell was the omnipresent stench of cordite—the detritus of modern battle. The bodies had been dead for only hours. It was a remarkably surreal scene—indescribable and instantly etched into my permanent memory.
Years later, I was sure that it had been only a dream.
The previous evening, those two squads from Delta Company had held off a vastly superior force of NVA that had targeted the previously defenseless Cam Lo village as part of the Tet Offensive. In one night, these thirty-five boys confirmed one hundred sixty NVA dead (with dozens of others certainly carried away). Enemy body counts in Vietnam