Under Fire

The voice, mocking and taunting, came through loud and clear on the field radio: “You die, GI.”

The enemy soldier’s jeering comment added to the confusion and fear that gripped us that day three decades ago in Vietnam.

Nobody on our six-man team of U.S. Army advisors nor the Vietnamese troops we fought and lived with had a clue about what was going on.

We were under attack. Highway I was cut off, and all communications were severed between our headquarters in Hue and our outpost at Phong Dien, 25 miles north.

We did not learn until later how completely our world had been turned upside down Jan. 31, 1968, the first day of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year.

Accustomed to being the hunters, we were the hunted, isolated and cornered. It was to be like that for the next four weeks in 100 of South Vietnam’s provincial and district capitals, including Saigon, Dalat, Pleiku, Danang, Nha Trang and Hue.

All Americans were threatened by the Vietnam War in some form. For those of us “in country,” the Tet offensive was the watershed event of our lives.

When I returned home to San Benito, Texas, in May, I was shocked to learn that Tet, clearly a military victory for us--58,000 Viet Cong were dead, compared with 3,893 American and 4,954 South Vietnamese--was viewed in the United Sates as a political defeat, and public protests against the war grew louder.

Tet turned out to be the first in a string of cataclysmic events in 1968 that altered U.S. history.

In March, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for another term. The following month saw the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., followed by Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in June.

In August, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago showed the world the deep fissures that the Vietnam experience had left in American society. It was that bitter division that led to Richard M. Nixon’s resurrection. Nixon’s “secret plan” in 1968 to end the war took five long years to come together.

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The men I fought alongside during Tet were all professional soldiers, members of Team 3, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV):

* Don Rampanelli was a sergeant first class and senior noncommissioned officer. He is now a business consultant in Phoenix.

“I really didn’t think that any of us were going to get out alive,” recalled “Ramp.” “I was scared. I wrote a letter to my family that, fortunately, was never mailed. It was going to be my goodbye to them. I hoped that someone would find it in the rubble and mail it if we got overrun.”

* Thomas O. Richardson was a sergeant first class and a member of the Army’s elite Ranger forces. “Rich” did a second tour in Vietnam as an advisor to a Vietnamese Ranger battalion. After retiring from the Army, he returned to college and earned a teaching credential. Rich taught fifth-graders for 10 years before retiring a second time and settling in Columbus, Ga.

Rich recalled that “we were hurting them, and they made us pay.”

“It seemed like we were getting hit three times a day and three times at night,” he said. “An experience like that brings you closer together. We stood together, and that’s why we survived.”

* Dick Powell was our warrant officer. An Australian Army advisor assigned to our team, he was scheduled to rotate home in February and had been reminding us that he was “short.” He is retired and lives in the Australian outback.

Powell, who was anchored in the bunker during the offensive, recalled, “until Tet came along, it hadn’t been a bad war.” Powell had also fought in the jungles of Malaysia in the 1950s, when the British and Australian armies battled communist guerrillas.

* Nick Goersch, our team leader, joined us a few weeks before Tet. After a rocky start with the team, the low-key captain proved himself in combat and was accepted as our commanding officer. We lost track of him after Vietnam.

* Cornelius Johnson was a sergeant first class and our team medic. Johnson, a San Francisco native, was sent back to the rear days before the offensive began because his tour of duty was almost over. His return trip home was delayed several weeks because he was trapped in Hue. We have also lost track of Johnson.

* I was a junior enlisted man and the team’s radioman. At 19, I was also the youngest of the group and not a professional soldier. After the war, I returned to college and began working as a newspaper reporter. I met the woman who was to be my wife exactly one year after the Tet offensive erupted, and we have been married for almost 29 years.

*

On that first day of Tet, I tried to call our headquarters in Hue to alert them that our outpost was under intense mortar attack. Except for that threat from the enemy radioman, the calls went unanswered.

What we did not know then was that Hue was occupied by North Vietnamese Army troops. Our headquarters in the city, which had been a relatively safe rear area, was hanging on despite repeated ground attacks.

Before ducking into a bunker that afternoon, I watched in disbelief as exploding mortar rounds “walked” through the wire defensive perimeter. The enemy usually attacked at night in such strength, rarely striking in the daytime unless they knew they had the advantage.

A special concern at the time was that if we fell we would go down under South Vietnamese colors. Phong Dien was a Vietnamese camp, under the command of a Vietnamese captain, and the yellow and red South Vietnamese flag flew over our outpost.

“That never would’ve happened,” Rampanelli said. “If it came to that, I would’ve taken the American flag I kept in my footlocker and draped it over the command bunker where we planned to make our stand. There was no way we were going to go down under South Vietnamese colors.”

As scary as the situation was, it became more frightening when we began to question the loyalty of the Vietnamese troops we were fighting with. One day after the offensive began, we learned that five of our troops were missing, including a teenage soldier named Lieu, whom we liked.

Three days later, three of the missing soldiers, including Lieu, were killed when their Viet Cong patrol was ambushed by our troops.

Although we patrolled aggressively and led numerous combat operations, we were never under any illusions about who controlled the countryside around us. Saigon’s influence did not extend beyond our camp’s defensive perimeter.

A nearby area known as the Street Without Joy was designated a “free fire zone,” where anything living was a “target of opportunity.” The Street had been a Communist stronghold since the French Indochina War, which ended in 1954.

A week after the offensive began, we picked up a weak radio transmission from our advisory team at Phu Loc, a coastal village about 50 miles north of us. A team of five Americans was at the outpost when it was overrun by the enemy.

The Americans escaped unharmed through a trench that led to a cave on the beach, where they had hidden a boat. They paddled it out into the South China Sea.

At first we were skeptical of their plea for help.

The picture of five U.S. infantrymen adrift in a small boat in the South China Sea seemed too pathetic to be true. The five bobbing grunts symbolized the chaotic and unreal turn of events in America’s longest war.

We convinced the 1st Cavalry Division at nearby LZ Evans to launch an ocean rescue, and the seasick Americans were flown by helicopter back to our outpost. Although we were hunkered down, their presence boosted our morale.

By this time, several of our friends had been killed and wounded in Hue, including Frank Doezema, a close friend who was mortally wounded in the first minutes of the offensive.

Doezema, a Michigan farm boy, killed more than two dozen North Vietnamese soldiers before losing his legs in a rocket-propelled grenade explosion. I did not learn of his death until the middle of March. The MACV compound in Hue, which Doezema died defending, was named in his honor.

At our outpost, a young trooper from the 1st Cavalry died in one of the attacks. The Cav had placed a three-man team with a radar at one end of our camp in order to detect the location of the mortar tubes that were hitting us.

Our team was spared any casualties during most of the offensive, but our luck ran out on Feb. 25, in the waning days of the enemy drive. Rampanelli and Goersch were on patrol with two squads of our troops when they were ambushed.

The Vietnamese teenager carrying the radio for Goersch took the brunt of the explosion from a remote-controlled mine. Goersch was unhurt, but Ramp took several pieces of shrapnel in both thighs.

When Ramp was brought back to the outpost, we showed our concern for him by asking the most important question: “Are the family jewels all right?”

They were fine, he assured us.

Ramp refused to be medevaced to the rear and was still recuperating when I rotated home in May.

Despite the constant fear, there were moments of laughter.

We were low on ammunition and food, except for 200 pounds of pinto beans and dozens of cans of asparagus. We ate both for a month, supplemented by rice.

Before the offensive began, Ramp had scrounged up several cans of cherry pie filling and bags of flour. Ever resourceful, he taught Ba, an old woman who weathered the offensive with us and did our cooking, to bake a cherry pie.

We had pie and C-ration fruitcake for breakfast every morning. Thirty years later, I still don’t like the taste of cherry pie.