Memorial Day 2009 - War Story

Here at Peninsula Pen Memorial Day will always have a special place. Previously, I’ve written about Memorial Days past, about heroes I’ve known, and about some I’ve never met.

Saturday, I published a link to an audio essay. Though the soldier “on the other side of the Wall” was a poignant image, it was the part before – the “P38, claymore mine, C ration cans in a sock” – that captured my attention.

Combat is slogging, back-breaking, sweat-running-into-eyes kind of work. It’s been said to be “long stretches of boredom punctuated by terror,” and so it is. Years later, you remember both, or rather, snippets of both. Now over forty years later, I’ve begun to revisit those days. The reasons are complex, but they certainly include a US Army Major – my daughter – teaching military history at West Point, and Jeannie, whose passing has forced me to confront my own mortality, and to cherish memories of my days – good and bad. Now remembering that long-ago war is easier than the constant and much more recent memories of great love and companionship. So maybe this is why old soldiers start remembering.

I’ve made contact with a buried past. There have been the “thank you for your service,” mostly sincere, I think, but often from those who cannot understand, and are not really interested. There’s no reason they should be, of course.

A few weeks ago I ran across a document amongst my papers, a copy of a recommendation for award of the Medal of Honor that I prepared (or rather completed) on behalf of Sp4 Allan J. Lynch for action on December 15, 1967. The Battle of Tam Quan, fought on the Bong Son plain in December, 1967 between the 1st Cavalry Division and the 22nd Regiment (NVA); the contact on the 15th near My An (2) was the last major engagement of the battle, which had begun on December 6, with the sighting from the air of a radio antenna.

Other units had carried the early December battles with the 22nd and its 8th and 9th Battalions, which had then, after a big scrap with the 8th Cavalry on December 10th, dropped from sight except for sporadic contacts with small elements. Radio intercepts identified the regiment’s headquarters on the 14th, and the officers of Company D, 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry were called from and outdoor showing of One Million Years B.C. to our LZ English orderly rooms. I never have seen the rest of the campy Raquel Welch classic.

Colonel French, the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry’s commander, had insisted the battalion now got the call for its Company C, which would lead the attack. There was a reason for that. Charlie Company – and the battalion – had a bone to pick with the 22nd Regiment that had attacked in the dark of night during the previous year’s Christmas truce. That battle is recounted in S.L.A Marshall’s Bird: The Christmastide Battle. Two platoons of the Cavalry company along with two under-strength artillery batteries – a total of 150 men – hung on at LZ Bird in the Kim Son Valley against the onslaught of 800 North Vietnamese Regulars. Staff Sergeant Delbert O. Jennings (now deceased) was a Medal of Honor winner that night. Now, a year later, we’d leave a well-earned firebase break to join C company in taking down the 22nd once and for all.

Contemporaneous records provide the background. This part of the battle of Tam Quan was fought at My An (2), Binh Dinh Province, Republic of Vietnam, on 15 December, 1967. Terrain, a large village surrounded by rice paddies and small, numerous, heavily grown hedgerows considerably restricting visibility. Enemy force exceeds a battalion in size. He is well equipped with recoilless rifles, light and heavy machine guns, and well supplied with ammunition. His position is carefully chosen and well fortified. Enemy morale is high. Company D’s morale is high after brief stand down (on LZ English), but the company is extremely under strength; just 85 infantryman are flown into battle on UH1B “Hueys” on that early morning in December.

I’d been in country for less than a month, and met newly-assigned 2nd Platoon Leader Lt. Roy Southerland at that officer’s call that night on English; he’d be dead before then next day’s sunset. Donald Orsini, a brave and talented OCS officer who had enlisted in 1956, was our Captain when we flew in a brace of Hueys in the morning to a blocking position, then at midday were sent on a march to an attack position we never reached, contact with the 22nd occurring first. In a square formation – two platoons abreast, two in trail – Lt. Southerland’s 2nd Platoon was left-front and took the brunt of the initial contact with the enemy. My 3rd Platoon was right-rear and unscathed; on order, we pulled back a bit to establish a perimeter for medivac, supply, and support.

After the initial contact, 1Lt. Southerland and Sp4 Lynch moved forward, toward the platoon’s point element, which had gone down in the initial fusillade. As they did so, Lt Southerland was killed by enemy fire (posthumously awarded the Silver Star), but still Lynch continued, dashing over fifty meters of open, fire-swept ground, to the aid three of our wounded, who he moved to safety in the enemy’s trench line, which he then cleared and defended from repeated attack.

Over the next three hours the company made repeated attempts to reach Sp4 Lynch and his comrades, without success, even when finally assisted by the arrival of armored personnel carriers of the 1st Battalion, 50th Mechanized Infantry. On one of these last attempts, Captain Orsini, who had personally directed the battle from the front, including the numerous attempts to reach Lynch’s position, was wounded.

(Orsini was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and would retire as a Lieutenant Colonel, then pass away after a 14-year battle with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 1998. Captain Richard Kent, a West Point graduate who had been serving as the Battalion’s S4, took command when Orsini was evacuated. Kent – who joked that his only important experience at West Point was his membership in the Jewish Men’s Choir – one of our Company’s best and most popular commanders, was wounded south of Quang Tri on February 1st 1968, and retired as a Colonel. He was telling the truth about the Jewish Men’s Choir, I looked it up in the West Point Library in July 2008.) Sergeants William E. Gorges and Rudoph H. Ford were also awarded the Silver Star for heroism that day.

Finally, with the company – and the other elements of the 1/12th – continuing to take casualties, Aerial Rocket Artillery (ARA) gunships were called in, firing scores of 2.75 inch rocket salvos to our front, culminating with strikes by Air Force F-100 Super Sabres. That remains one of the most vivid memories of that tour – laying on my back in that small defensive perimeter to watch a bombing run come in straight over the top of us, the pair of bombs released hundreds of meters behind us as the jet began his pull-up, the two black, finned projectiles seeming to float, silently on parallel paths toward, then over us, seemingly just clearing our heads, then that lazy silence rent by deafening thunder, the ground shaking and dirt thrown up and on us, one soldier screaming, restrained by his buddies. Then, for the first time, it was quiet.

Sp4 Lynch had remained in the enemy’s midst, protecting his charges, first from the counterattacks of the North Vietnamese infantry around him – he killed at least five – then as best he could to shelter them from our own artillery and air strikes. Five hours after the battle had begun, after the last of the air strikes, he made three trips to carry each of the wounded to cover seventy meters to the rear of the position in which he had defended them. Seeing to their comfort, he then returned to the company’s defensive perimeter and led a rescue party forward to finally extract the three wounded soldiers.

The Battle of Tam Quan officially ended at midnight December 20th after a final battle for the 2/8th Cavalry, and 1/50th Infantry (Mechanized) near An Nghiep. US casualties during the Battle of Tam Quan were 58 killed in action and 250 wounded in action. In the 1st Brigade After Action Report, estimated casualty figures for the 22nd NVA Regiment casualties are listed as 650 killed in action. According to the Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division, General Tolson, “the Battle of Tam Quan had a much greater significance than we realized at the time. In that area, it pre-empted the enemy's Tet offensive even though the full impact wasn't then realized. As a result, that part of Binh Dinh Was the least effected of any part of South Vietnam during Tet.”

The battle on December 15, 1967 between the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry, and the 22nd Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army at An My (2) in Binh Dinh Province, cost the lives of these 21 American soldiers:

B Company

SGT Juan S. Ozuna, Wapato, WA Vietnam Memorial Faces From the Wall (scroll)
SP4 Willie French, Pittsboro, NC Vietnam Memorial
SP4 Ronald L. Klausing, San Diego, CA Vietnam Memorial

C Company

SFC Robert Levine, Jamaica, NY Vietnam Memorial
SFC James E. Lynn, Kenosha, WI Vietnam Memorial
SFC John D. Roche, Bay City, MI Vietnam Memorial
SSG David P. Jewell, Owensboro, KY Vietnam Memorial
SGT Richard J. Boeshart, Sioux City, IA Vietnam Memorial
CPL Steven Matarazzo, Montgomery, NY Vietnam Memorial
SP4 Wayne D. Ryza, Houston, TX Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall
CPL Michael D. Sander, Oakland, CA Vietnam Memorial
PFC James J. Koprivnikar, Cheswick, PA Vietnam Memorial

D Company

1LT Roy E. Southerland, Morristown, TN Vietnam Memorial
SGT Robert L. Flores, Parker, AZ Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall
SP4 Ramon Cortes-Rosa, Hialeah, FL Vietnam Memorial
SP4 Charles W. Hicks, Butner, NC Vietnam Memorial
SP4 Omar Lebron-Domenech, San Sebastian, PR Vietnam Memorial
CPL James Tierno, Jackson Heights, NY Vietnam Memorial

HQ Company

CPL Richard A. Choppa, Hubbard, OH Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall
CPL Riley C. O'Neil, Kansas City, KS Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall
PFC Richard M. Proscia, New Hyde Park, NY Vietnam Memorial

I located Allan Lynch in April of this year and sent him the copy of the award recommendation I had kept since preparing it in the fall of 1968.

In writing this today, I’ve found that official citations for awards substantially deviate from other descriptions of the battle including the those given in eyewitness statements attached to the recommendations for award. I’m not sure why that should be; perhaps the Division’s Awards & Decorations clerks had a word limit and lapsed into habitual phrasing?

Second, few of the soldiers who died at My An (2) in December appear anywhere on the web except in lists of casualties. The Vietnam Memorial Wall records each of their names on Panels 31E and 32E. Each has an entry at the Memorial’s web site, each entry has three pages, one with basic personnel information (HOR, DOB, Marital Status, etc.), the second recording the details of the soldier’s death, and one to be used for personal comments and pictures. I’ve linked the second of those pages above. Where I found other information (Virtual Wall, Washington State’s Faces From the Wall) the link is also provided. Take a few minutes to visit their pages.

Memorial Day 2009 - 1

On this first day of the Memorial Day Weekend, here is a poignant audio essay.

This is the first Peninsula Pen entry for this Memorial Day, 2009. Uncharacteristically, the essay at the link is not my work, but there is enough in it that resonates (with me, anyway) I think it deserves attention.

Extortion

In criminal law, extortion is "the crime of obtaining something such as money or information from somebody by using force, threats, or other unacceptable methods."

Bonds, in law are "a document that legally obliges one party to pay money to another."

In finance bonds are more specifically defined as "a certificate issued by a government or company promising to pay back borrowed money at a fixed rate of interest on a specified date."

Senior debt is "a bond or other form of debt that takes priority over other debt securities sold by the issuer."

Investopedia tells us that “in the event the issuer goes bankrupt, senior debt must be repaid before other creditors receive any payment.” That’s the law. (Unless the court approves an ‘end run’ using Section 623, but though related, that’s a other topic.)

With the Chrysler corporation facing it ’”settle or go bust” deadline, President Obama made ‘hedge funds’ the villains. Hedge funds hold bonds. The Chrysler bonds they held were ‘senior debt’ instruments. Lest there’s any confusion here, those bad boy 'hedge funds' include Oppenheimer Funds and Fidelity, who manage a lot of 401k’s and pension funds. If they managed yours, the President was talking about you – and ultimately, his “committee” (the ones that managed the Chrysler bankruptcy filing) took your money and gave it to the UAW, which has “junior” debt, entirely derived from the monetization of their (bloated) retiree health care entitlements (benefits you probably don’t come close to).

The “big debtors” who folded so quickly? All TARP recipients. (Go back and read that definition of extortion again.)

Dan Calabrese at paints a painful picture of what this all means to “real people” at http://www.northstarwriters.com/dc280.htm

This week, with GM next under the “settle or go bust” gun, the Obama Administration and GM have offered the holders of $27 billion of ‘senior debt’ a bit of cash along with common stock equivalent to 10% of the ‘new GM’ while handing the UAW 39% for cancelling $10 billion of the debt owed the retiree health care trust fund (the ‘new GM’ would still owe another $10 billion to the fund). The ‘offer’ is ‘non-negotiable,’ says the Administration.

So, if you’re the UAW, the Administration's committee of career (Geitner) bureaucrats hands you the second largest stake in the company (the US gubm’t takes 40%) for what? Helping to sink the company in the first place?In the coming weeks, be prepared to hear Mr. Calabrese’s Teresa Waller again villianized by the President as “greedy Wall Street,” but please remember that she is a 58-year-old with a bonds in a 401k who can no longer look forward to retirement anytime in the foreseeable future. Evil indeed. Now, go back and read that definition of extortion one more time.

Memory isn't just a song from Cats

I spent two very enjoyable hours today with an old friend. Chuck was my roommate in a Jacksonville, Alabama, apartment while at Fort McClellan in 1967 immediately before two young Lieutenants were sent to Vietnam, I to the 1st Cavalry Division by way of Panama, and Chuck by a more direct path to the 25th Infantry Division.

Ft. McClellan was OCS (Officer Candidate School) and OTD (Officer Training Detachment) for the no-longer-existent Women’s Army Corps, and a pretty good assignment for a pair of young (barely legal) officers. “The Club” at McClellan allowed all of the young women assigned to OTD and OCS. That made the bar, which overlooked the pool, and had a fresh oyster-bar happy hour, one of the great watering holes of the western world. All I got from that was a phone number for Elizabeth (all I can remember after forty years) and in trouble back in Minnesota (for nothing but the number - the story of my life). Chuck got a wife of forty plus years and counting.

My friend is the same person. The quick smile, all the mannerisms immediately recognizable. We age, but we really don’t change, do we? We shared stories about weekend jaunts in Chuck’s MG to Panama City, poker games, and, well, other things. Some things happened differently than I remembered; some the same.

We did useful work while we were at it, of course, running training committees and ranges for the Advanced Individual Training (AIT) Infantry Brigade. I went off on TDY (that’s bureaucrat for “temporary duty”) to the Benning School for Boys and brought back “reaction shooting,” while Chuck became a bit of an expert with fragmentation hand grenades. Hugh did other things. Glen was hard to miss in his shiny new canary yellow on black 396 Chevelle Malibu SS 4speed.

We shared some of our Southeast Asia experiences, but that wasn’t most of our conversation. We weren’t avoiding it, we just had other things to talk about. We laughed at his answer to his wife’s question about Oliver Stone’s Platoon, “Did you really swear that much?” “No...More.”

After Vietnam Chuck finished college at Wisconsin, earned a PhD at California, Berkeley (where he was a right winger) then took a job with the DOE’s National Labs in Idaho Falls, Idaho (where he was a left winger). That reminds me a bit of daughter Courtney, a US Army Major who got her baccalaureate from Columbia University (yes, that Columbia). The place you occupy on the political spectrum is very much geography-dependent.

This meeting was Chuck’s doing, he found me on the web, and planned his bird watching expedition with a stop here. I thank him for that. Though we spent only a few short months together at McClellan, the affinity is greater than I would have expected these many years later. I hope we don’t now lose contact.

(This has been a month of contacts from and with friends and aquaintences in my past, from Vietnam to Iowa. There will be more here.)

The "right war?" Or not?

The Bush Administration has been pilloried for its naïve acceptance of US – and Israeli, and Russian, and French, and – intelligence reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Subsequently, those whose span of attention extends beyond today’s price of gasoline have learned that Saddam himself perpetrated and supported that charade to appear stronger than he really was to friends and foes alike, dismissing out-of-hand the danger that it might invite an attack from the United States. After all, fatal attacks on a US warship in the Mideast (17 dead, 39 injured), on US embassies in Africa (223 dead, 4085 injured), and a bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 (6 dead, 1,042 injured), had gotten little response from the US administration, and all of that directed against “safe” targets. Certainly the dictator could assume – regardless of occasional bluster to the contrary – that an apparently powerful nation-state was safe from direct attack. The occasional small-strike-irritant in enforcement of the “no fly” regime, but nothing that might threaten his grip on power.

Those assumptions were reinforced by the prevailing policy among western democracies that attacks were crimes, not acts of war, so the laws (and rights) which applied to the perpetrators were the same used to prosecute convenience store holdups.

Given all that, the administration’s invasion of Iraq was initially more applauded than not by the likes of the New York Times' Thomas Friedman and our current Secretary of State. All “blood under the bridge,” (to mix a metaphor). We haven’t been very doctrinaire here in Peninsula Pen, nor have we been particularly angry…at anyone. But we are interested.

Now we’ve got a flat-out war between the Taliban and the Pakistani government (such as it is, or ever was). Barack the Pres. was fond of saying while running for office that we were “fighting the wrong war.” He often reminded us in soaring rhetoric that George Bush had not captured bin Laudin, that he’d failed to prosecute the “right war,” the war in Afghanistan. He told us that Obama “would go after Osama.” He made much political hay, especially when he told us he’d attack the Taliban in Pakistan – if that’s where they were. Well, here we are.

It’s perfectly clear the Taliban are in Pakistan. Really, that’s never been in doubt. Only two things really are. First, was the Bush administration right to pursue its Afghanistan/Pakistan aims carefully, even weakly? The Soviet Union's experience from December 1979 to February 1989 should strongly inform the answer, and current events provide the rest of what we need to know.

It seems clear now the bravado of the campaign has morphed into today’s tentative policy – as of course it had to. The previous administration was careful not to carry the fight in such a way that it might endanger the government of a nuclear power. Has this one been too quick to suggest pursuit of wider goals? Has that contributed to the widening of the conflict we now see? Could this end with a nuclear armed Islamic Republic – not in Iran, as expected, but in Pakistan? What happens if Pakistan falls to the fanatics, while the fanatics to their west achieve their weapons goals?

We know that the current United States government will “talk to them.” What happens after that?

Now what? Nothing again?

They’re fighting wind turbines in Eastham and Milford, Massachusetts, and in Tyrone, Pennsylvania. There’s a petition against a Florida Power and Light wind turbine farm. Such sentiment is widespread; it contributed to the 53% drop in renewable energy investment in the first quarter.

T. Boone Pickens has abandoned – for now, anyway – his wind farm project in the Midwest plains.

Ford passed Toyota in auto sales in April; it’s a fact that small cars don’t make a dime for their builders – Toyota’s Prius included. The mantra that “Detroit hasn’t built the cars we want to buy” is pure falsehood. The fact is that they did build the cars we wanted to buy – pickups and SUV’s – and that seems to be the sin of which they are now accused.

Coal-fired generation is under attack from the Sierra Club to the White House. Congress and the coastal states have combined to block offshore oil drilling. Drilling in newly discovered gas fields in Pennsylvania and New York is encountering local opposition.

California Senator Diane Feinstein announced her opposition to solar power development in the Mohave desert. Other opposition to desert development (anywhere) means any significant solar contribution to the electric grid unlikely in the near future.

Congress has managed to kill all attempts to settle on a safe storage site for nuclear waste, and states have legislated bans – and renewed previous bans – on nuclear plants, Minnesota being the most recent.

The US has steadily reduced the amount of water-generated electricity, and there are lawsuit filed at any hint of a new damn. Recent rulings in favor of the Salmon constituency in the Northwest threaten the shutdown of the mega megawatts there. There’s a powerful movement to abandon the Hetch Hetchy reservoir.

You can argue all you want for or against nuclear, wind, and solar power; for and against hybrid vehicles. My question is different, though. If, as a practical matter, there are enough of us against each alternative, so nothing gets built, what then?