A Baptism by Fire

A Baptism by Fire

Thomas Steckman, Sergeant, US Army, 173^rd Airborne Brigade,

Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam, February 1970

I arrived at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam on 2 February, 1970. After a week of orientation and acclimatization I was assigned to the 173^rd Airborne Brigade. I was airborne qualified, so I was proud to be serving with the elite paratroopers of the 173^rd, also known as “The Herd”. The Herd Patch is known everywhere. The Herd was the only unit in Vietnam on jump status so the extra jump-pay each month was sure appreciated. I arrived at LZ North English, the 4th Battalion of the 173^rd and was further assigned to First Platoon, Charlie Company. After a few days of processing, I was flown to the First Platoon position out in the field, a front-line position. The platoon was situated on a small hill that used to be a Vietnamese cemetery. The hill lay next to two villages, one northwest and the other northeast of the platoon position. Like every new trooper in Vietnam, I was called Cherry until I earned the respect of my fellow soldiers. On the morning of February 15^th, 1970, I was told come on, you’re going out. I was assigned to a routine mail run to the Charlie Company Command Post which was about one kilometer away. This would be only my second patrol in country. You talk about cherry, I did not even have scuffs on my boots, so I did not know what to expect. This was all new to me. Since the patrol was supposed to be routine and short, I took only one bandolier of ammunition for my M-16.

We left our hill and as we passed the Village northeast of our position, I noticed the villagers, all the mama sans and papa sans, smiling at us as we went by. Right as we passed the village, I heard clatter, what sounded like a firefight or enemy contact, but again I was new and not sure of anything. It was far to the north in the Second Platoon’s area of operations. I would later learn that one of our patrols was ambushed there and one of our soldiers was killed in action. I could see our Lieutenant who was leading the patrol immediately get on the radio that was carried by his RTO, radio-telephone operator. We were ordered to react to the site of this enemy contact. We started to move quickly along a rice paddy dike that took us between the two villages next to our hill. Out in the open, between the two villages, I experienced combat for the first time. All of a sudden, bullets are flying at me and I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. We were taking enemy AK 47 automatic rifle fire from both villages. The AK has a distinctive Klak Klak Klak sound that I had not heard before but I will never forget. The patrol was ten men strong and my position was mid-patrol, about 5^th or 6^th in line. We all dove behind the dike and lay in the mud and dust trying to get as low to the ground as possible. The paddy dike was no more than two feet high. You could hear the rounds whizzing overhead and see them kicking up dirt as they hit the dike in front of us and all around us. To fire back, it was almost like the old Cowboys and Indians where you pick the gun up and go boom, boom, boom, firing without really aiming. I would lean the gun over the paddy dike and try not to expose myself to enemy fire. You couldn’t put your head up to look around because there were so many bullets in the air. I couldn’t hear anything other than the gunfire so I did not know what the plan was to get us out of there. Just when I thought it could not get any worse, an enemy grenade was tossed from the village right at us and somehow missed everybody. Being in a firefight is something you never forget and this one was intense. I remember thinking, Holy Shit I just got here. Is this how this whole friggin year is going to be? It also stuck with me that one minute the villagers were smiling at us, and then in the next, we were taking fire from that same village.

Early in the fight I remember that the trooper next to me had an M79 grenade launcher. He yelled over to me, “Cherry, watch this”. He fired at a figure, somebody in the Village, and it was just gone, disappeared. Although we were taking constant fire, that was the only enemy I saw. But we were being hammered, taking fire from the villages to our right and left and also one behind us. We also were getting ricochets from our own troops on the hill in front of us as they fired into the Villages. I remember thinking hey guys I am new here, cut me some slack. Our Company Command Post about 700 yards to our rear was also firing over our heads into the Villages. Notably they were firing a .50 caliber machine gun, and you don’t want to be anywhere near the thump, thump, thump of those big rounds.

We lay in that rice paddy all day, to me it seemed like two days, and I was running out of ammunition. The reason we were there so long was that the Lieutenant was receiving orders to assault the Villages and he was refusing to move unless he had air support, meaning he would only move under the cover of our helicopter gunships. It was easy to order an assault when you are sitting in a bunker somewhere. We saw things very differently pinned down in the mud of that paddy. The Lieutenant’s refusal was a good thing because it was suicide to stand up where we were. You couldn’t do it. Weapons fire seemed to be coming from literally every direction around us. Normally air and artillery support were available very quickly to US troops in Nam. But that all changes when the enemy is firing from what was supposed to be a friendly Village. The request for air support went all the way to the Commanding General of the 173^rd and was finally approved late in the day with darkness approaching. I remember, by the grace of God, a flight of three Huey helicopter gunships arrived and just lit the place up as they began their rocket strafing runs. As the gunships strafed, we backed away from the dike, were able to reconnoiter, moved off to the left and somehow made it back to our Platoon position on the Hill. I can’t believe that nobody went ace duce during that day, unfrigging real, and the only injury to our soldiers was one guy accidentally shot himself in the hand. I heard later that our actions that day made the Stars and Stripes, the newspaper of the Armed Services. This was my introduction to Vietnam, on practically my first patrol I got to experience a day like this. A day you never forget. I did not know what to expect about my year in Vietnam, but I knew after this, it was going to be one hell of a year. Welcome to Vietnam.

One more thing, the next day we went on a recon into the Villages where the enemy fire came from and to this day, I have nightmares about it. I was mesmerized, there were no dead bodies, no trace of blood, no animals not even a dead chicken, there was nothing. It was like it never happened, a ghost town. There wasn’t jack shit there to explain what happened the day before, where did they all go?