A patriotic tale of sacrifice and heroism

Prologue
IV CORPS TACTICAL ZONE
KIEN PHONG PROVINCE
REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM
9 MARCH 1968 0830 HOURS

In the morning heat, moisture on the surface of the Mekong rises slightly over the widening mass of water upriver in Cambodia and then, just after dusk, condenses on its lazy southerly journey through Vietnam. The following dawn, there is always a thin mist skimming the river, even in early March, well before the worst of the wet season, when the torrential sheets of rain have left the landscape a flat carpet of green. That spectral shroud follows the river and dances slowly with it on its trip through the Vietnamese delta, until the wide, muddy Mekong is swallowed whole by the South China Sea.

Just after sunrise on March 9, 1968, a few decrepit and dented assault craft nose slowly through the thin tropical fog, diesel engines chugging cautiously. Lesions of rust leach through the battleship-gray paint of the boats. They are packed with South Vietnamese soldiers bending under the weight of weapons, ammunition, and the weariness of combat. Since the beginning of the Tet Offensive less than two months ago, many of the battalion’s troops have been killed or wounded, and only about two hundred soldiers are on the boats.

I am twenty-two years old, rail-thin and infantry dark. At a shade under five feet four, I am shorter than most of the Vietnamese. My journey has taken me from an immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, to the 2^nd Battalion, 16^th Infantry of the 9^th Infantry Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, a universe away from home and in fear of my life in an alien land. I look like a child. I am a child.

There are three other Americans serving as advisors with these Vietnamese soldiers, but we aren’t temporary interlopers. The 2^nd of the 16^th is our battalion. We live with the Vietnamese, share their meager rations, fight at their sides, call them friends, and watch them bleed and die.

It begins as just another mission to reestablish contact with the Vietcong unit we have been fighting for months, and when the ragged old boats slide onto the muddy bank, we plan to pick our way slowly, tentatively, from one tree line to another, across wide, open rice paddies that will give any hidden enemy unobstructed fields of fire onto our unit. There are two of us Americans with the lead companies of the battalion. My NCO, Ray Ramirez, is five feet seven inches tall and strong as an ox, a brave, plainspoken staff sergeant with a thick Mexican accent and an even thicker bull neck. Ramirez is from Raymondville, Texas, near Brownsville—he says it’s close enough to Mexico to actually be in Mexico.

VIDEO   Col. Jacobs' courage and sacrifice Nov. 7: Vietnam War veteran Col. Jack Jacobs tells his story of courage and sacrifice in combat. Mara Schiavocampo reports on this Medal of Honor recipient. Nightly News

Ray and I are in the lead boat. With a gentle bump, the groaning old tub finally wedges against the mud on the north side of the river, and we trudge ashore through the eerie morning mist and the thick, smelly muck to the dense undergrowth at the river’s edge. We clamber noisily down the slippery embankment of a narrow canal and up the steep opposite side to a vast dry rice field to be greeted by the stinging glare of the newly risen sun. Cautiously, we straggle across the first paddy, almost a thousand meters of open field.

There is no cover here, I think. No concealment whatsoever. We are in the worst tactical position imaginable. We have several hundred troops in the open, marching slowly toward a specific, predetermined point, and we possess no element of surprise. Our only protection is one half-strength, half-trained scout platoon covering our nakedness to the front and flanks. Half of a half. One-quarter of the minimum protection we need, if it’s really there.

Well, the scouts are somewhere, but as we will discover to our surprise and great pain, they aren’t protecting us. They are to the rear perhaps, at home maybe, but they aren’t where they are supposed to be. We are where the scouts are supposed to be. We’re the leading edge of what is to become the juicy target of an ambush that was prepared for us by an enemy that has known long in advance that we are coming, and that we are coming in this strength, at this time, to this specific point on the ground. Three hundred enemy soldiers have spent days assembling themselves into the largest, best-armed, most cohesive Vietcong unit in the region. And now they wait for us.

This close to the equator, the sun leaps quickly from its berth just below the horizon to its place of business directly overhead. It is an insistent, fiery ball that refuses to relinquish its station until it is forced from the sky. By midmorning, we have been mooching toward our objective for several hours, and the sun has been pounding us, roasting us in our own salty juices that stain uniforms a starchy, brittle salt-white.

Dehydrated now. Tired. Head-heavy. Looking down rather than forward. Searching the ground and not the horizon, tracking the drops of perspiration as they fall and then splatter when they hit the earth. Glancing about for the scouts and hoping that they are protecting us forward and to the flanks. The VC will see the scouts first. Three hundred enemy guns will aim for the center of mass of the scout platoon, and we will maneuver the lead companies to destroy the VC, and Ray and I will survive yet another day and then go home without a scratch.

Though we don’t know it yet, two hundred meters ahead of us, about a battalion of Vietcong are waiting for us. They are not waiting for the scouts. They are waiting for me and for Ray. They are patient, quiet, disciplined, concealed.

One hundred meters now. I know how the VC feel, energized with the grisly knowledge that other human beings have only minutes to live and yet don’t know it.

I have lain in ambush, too, and I know how the Vietcong soldier feels when he sees Ray and me and the Vietnamese troops move cautiously forward. We are almost close enough, but not quite, and he suddenly realizes that in his excited anticipation he has been holding his breath and needs precious oxygen. A slow, deliberate inhale of thick air, but the sound is startlingly loud to him. We will hear his straining lungs fill, will fall to the ground, and will pour withering fire into his foxhole, tearing him apart. His mouth is cotton-dry, and surreptitiously he tries to swallow, but his throat reverberates deafeningly. The point man will hear him breathe, hear him swallow, hear him blink. The telltale heart is slamming wildly inside his chest. He will be discovered in ambush, and he will become the prey, and he will be destroyed.

Fifty meters. When we get to the tree line, maybe we can take a break, relax, light up, take a drunken slug from our canteens.

All experience inoculates us with the ability to sense the environment in indefinable ways, and nothing is better at honing the senses than armed combat. The wind is a messenger: a whisper, a falling leaf, even silence becomes palpable. They are urgent messages that bypass our consciousness and are transmitted directly to those secret places in the heart that can see what the eyes cannot see, the places that understand passion, euphoria—and danger. The unforgettable smell of death before the first insult to the body. The paralyzing cold of abject fear even in the warm caress of the sunshine.

And in the heat of the tropics, I suddenly feel the cold. It’s not a breeze, for the air is calm, even sweet, and just ahead the palm and banana fronds hang limply in the heavy air. But I can feel the penetrating cold of approaching fear, and it is a wind boring through me. An uneventful day so far, and yet my heart is racing. Maybe I can hear the VC breathing, swallowing, blinking, and I don’t even know I can hear it.

Suddenly the universe erupts with rifle and machine gun fire, and in seconds dozens of soldiers are thrown to the ground by the enormous energy of high-powered military bullets. My friends don’t grasp their wounds and slowly slink to earth in a theatrical, ceremonious ballet. There is no stirring Hollywood score. These notes are the shattering cracks of thousands of bullets and the nauseating thumps as they hit the flesh and bone of my comrades. They are marionettes whose strings have been cut, lying dead or hideously broken. A few of us are lucky so far, and we hug the ground like desperate lovers, unscathed in the initial seconds but scared witless.

We learn as young soldiers that an ambush is best defeated by rushing directly into the teeth of it, by suspending fear and disbelief, by getting off the killing ground, by assaulting directly into the withering fire to overrun the enemy position. And surely there have been ambushes that didn’t succeed because soldiers in the killing zone did just this, just as they had been taught.

But today, there will be no concerted effort to rush the entrenched enemy because this is a battlefield on which almost everybody is in the open and already dead or wounded.

We manage to crawl a bit to the left and out of the most direct enemy fire, to a place where there is a tree or two and a bit of protection. Some soldiers, wounded in the first seconds, are on the ground there, their lives leaking onto the dark earth while the enemy fire splits the air and tears into the dirt around us.

Some people say that you can’t hear mortar rounds until they hit because mortars are high-trajectory weapons and most of them are stabilized silently with fins. Unless the firing battery is close enough for you to hear the rounds sliding down the tube, before they are propelled out of the barrel in a slow arc to your position, you don’t know you’re a target until the rounds hit the ground. Quiet death, they say.

They’re wrong. In the last second before the round hits and disintegrates, before the explosive inside the shell shatters the steel casing into thousands of jagged, knife-sharp shards, I can hear it whooshing through the air. After the whoosh comes an explosion so loud that it overloads my hearing and seems silent.

A quiet, warm, gentle rush of air lifts me, and then I am on all fours, looking at the ground and the widening lake of my blood. An 82-millimeter mortar round has smashed into the ground a couple of meters away, killing two soldiers nearby, wounding Ray and me, and killing two or three more behind us. Shrapnel has torn through my face and into my skull. I can only see out of one eye.

Then more mortars rain on us all.

There is no fear on earth like the fear of combat, and people who say they were not scared in battle are either lying or deranged. You are in fear of losing your life, of losing your limbs, of losing your courage. In the heat of battle, everyone is scared. But here is the paradox: when you’re hit, when jagged foreign objects rip painfully through your body, you’re surprised, even shocked.

Beside me, Sergeant Ramirez is very badly hurt, with wounds to his chest that are deflating his lungs, shrapnel in his abdomen, blood pouring out of his nose and mouth.

Despite his devastating wounds, Ray grabs one of the radios.

“This is Three Two Charlie,” Ramirez barks into the handset. “Three Two Alfa is hit real bad, and I don’t think he’s going to make it.” He then sags under the crushing insult of his wounds and falls over, painfully immobilized, eyes lolling backward. I snatch the handset from him.

“This is Three Two Alfa,” I’m saying. “Three Two Charlie is hit real bad, and I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Someone on the other end of the radio says, quite calmly:

“Hey, you jerks. This is no comedy routine. Get to work.”

I patch up Ray as quickly as I can and set him in a place where I hope he’ll be safe. But he is badly wounded. My greatest fear is that he won’t make it....

Excerpted from “If Not Now, When?: Duty and Sacrifice in America's Time of Need" by Col. Jack Jacobs and Douglas Century. Copyright © 2008. Excerpted by permission of Berkley Caliber. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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