'A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit'

 “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.]