“A 21-year old Marine Corporal leading his first patrol — a 10-man Reconnaissance Team — kept a cool head in a tight situation.”
Long before
he was a poet and publisher, R.L. Barth in 1968-69 was a Marine serving as a
patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. Bob recently
found the 1,100-word dispatch written about him and his men by a stringer; that is, a freelance
journalist writing for various publications. The stringer was Albert W. Vinson
and his story was published on the Week End Feature Page of the Cincinnati Post & Times Star on Saturday,
November 16, 1968. Vinson’s dispatch carries the dateline:
“10
November, 1968 [five days after Richard Nixon was elected president]
Camp
Reasoner, Headquarters
of 1st
Reconnaissance Battalion,
1st Marine
Division — Da Nang”
Barth was from
Erlanger, Ky., across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio. The story made him briefly
a hometown hero. Bob remembers: “Fortunately, I wouldn’t return home until
mid-March [1969], when all the hullaballoo had died down. (I was told that
between my parents, my various aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, the
newsstands were wiped out of that issue.)”
Vinson’s
prose can get a little fulsome, hardly unusual among journalists, but he's a dutiful chronicler. He credits
Bob with having “a frontiersman’s sense of smell for danger and [he] knows how
to cope with it.” But the story is compelling:
“On October
28th, their first day out, the team was inserted by helicopter in a zone just
below a ridge in Antenna Valley, a few thousand meters south of An Hoa. By
sundown they had reached a high point on another ridge where they set in for
the night. Two days later in the early afternoon they had located the landing
zone from which they were scheduled to be extracted.”
The Marines
heard voices and single rifle shots not fired in their direction, and assumed
the NVA were hunting or “horsing around.” The following morning, Barth called for artillery on the
enemy position. Vinson quotes Bob:
“‘I felt the
landing zone wasn’t safe anymore. So we started moving northeast through the brush.
Rain was pelting down so hard that it drowned out the noise we made breaking
through the bamboo and vine thickets. I didn’t want the men following the trail
because of the possibility of detection and booby traps.”
They happened on a large tunnel opening. A Marine entered and found it was empty but large enough to hold twenty men. “The [Marines] had only gone another 15 or 20 meters when they sighted about 15 NVA soldiers in and around three bamboo shelters with ponchos slung over the top. A blackboard with Vietnamese chalked on it indicated a possible tactical briefing. Two AK-47 rifles were leaning up against one of the bamboo huts.”
Ernie
Pyle-style, Vinson includes the names, ages and hometowns of all the men in
Barth’s patrol. Barth decides not to open fire because he senses the Marines are
heavily outnumbered. Bob tells Vinson:
“We called
on the radio for an aerial observer plane to come over. It came in a hurry and
fired its 20 millimeter guns at the NVA and dropped a white phosphorous marker
to show the jet bombers where to strike. The Phantoms raced in and dropped 250-
and 500-pound bombs. They had to come in close. We laid down to avoid any possibility
of getting hit by shrapnel.”
After the
airstrike, with surviving NVA following them, the Marines moved quickly, avoiding
booby-traps, to the new extraction zone. “This was on a ridge amid elephant
grass and brush,” Vinson writes. “They set up for the night. Voices and
movement were heard until dawn when for some unexplainable reason the NVA left
the area.”
Vinson concludes his dispatch by assessing the Marines’ action: “The mission of the reconnaissance patrol had
been accomplished; detection of enemy’s presence, determination of size and
whereabouts. Because a recon patrol is a small unit, the men try to avoid a
firefight when necessarily taking considerable risks to gain information.
“The performance of this patrol had been outstanding because of the leadership, water and food conservation and security measures carried out.”
Bob has been
working on a three-poem suite he calls “unambiguously autobiographical,” tentatively
titled “In the Mountains,” subtitled “in
the vicinity of Antenna Valley, RVN / 31 x-1 xi 1968.” The third poem in
the sequence, “Morning,” can serve as a sort of coda to Vinson’s dispatch:
“‘Wedding
Ring, Wedding Ring: choppers are inbound;
ETA fifteen
minutes. Over.’ ‘Roger;
This is the
actual; do not send a team
To follow up
or to assess bomb damage
Or try to
take a body count. Last night,
The Charlies
probed us and now, I’m convinced,
They’ll lie
in ambush, waiting your mistake.*
You
understand? Over.’ ‘Team boarded. Out.’
“Damn it,
stupidity still rules the rear,
So hastily I
write a note to pass
To their
team leader; ten men disembark.
I count my
team as they move up the ramp,
And then
embark myself, happy to board
And leave
our last night to dark memory.
Returned, we
hump the last hill to HQ
And two warm
beers; I head for my debriefing.’
“*Historical
note: the second team was in fact ambushed, and we had to saddle up and return
as part of the reaction force to extract the WIA.”
[If anyone
out there knows anything about Albert W. Vinson, please let me know.]
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