TET 1969 - Aftermath

 

Bien Hoa wasn’t all that far from Cu Chi but by the time we arrived, it was getting light. Once we had landed, lined up on the side of an asphalt strip, we were told to meet at the mess hall. I was feeling uncomfortable because I had taken off with in only a T-shirt. The crew chief supplied a field jacket with Spec 4 strips on it. I thought nothing about the rank as we all headed toward the mess hall.

We found a table set up for four in the officer’s side and sat down. The mess hall was a little nicer than ours at Cu Chi. For one thing, rather than huge, floor mounted fans that were supposed to circulate air, they had air conditioning. The mess hall was done in a cherry looking wood, but I didn’t pay enough attention to know if it was actual cherry or plywood that had been stained cherry.

I noticed that some of the officer’s assigned there looked at me strangely, wondering what a Spec 4 was doing on the officer’s side, but I was sitting with three warrant officers, including Schaeffer and Overholt. They probably figured I was the crew chief or something and let it slide. I was fully prepared to tell them the situation, if they had asked, but no one did.

As we ate breakfast, which seemed better than those we got at Cu Chi, but was just a reflection of the new surroundings, the activities of the night, and the fact that it wasn’t our mess hall, Captain Downs circulated among the tables, giving us the news.

He said, “Muleskinners got hit last night. Charlie came through the wire near them and ran through the revetments tossing satchel charges into the Chinooks. Blew up a bunch of them.”

“How many came through the wire?” asked Shaeffer.

“Maybe a platoon, maybe a little less.”

“We got them all?”

One-six grinned and said, “There are a couple still running around inside the wire. Got everyone a little jumpy.”

“I hope we’re in no hurry to get back,” I said.

“We’ve got a couple of ass and trash missions to fly, but the early morning operations have been changed. Got the grunts in the field around Cu Chi. They just walk out the gate to begin their search.”

After we finished eating, our platoon leader, two-six walked over and asked me, “You ever been to the Air America pad?”

“You mean at Ton Son Nhut?”

“Yeah.”

“Once. I think I know where it is.”

“You have to enter through the main control tower and not Hotel Three,” he said, meaning that I’d have to land on the airfield proper rather than flying into the helipad near the biggest PX in the world just on the edge of Ton Son Nhut.

“We’ll all head back to Cu Chi, you’ll need to refuel and then fly over to the Muleskinners to pick up a flight crew and take them to Saigon. They’re going to pick up a new Chinook.”

“Okay.”

“Who’s your peter pilot?”

“Overholt.”

This surprised him. Normally, the junior aircraft commander was paired with the senior peter pilot, putting as much experience in the cockpit was possible. The problem here was that Overholt and I had been in flight school together, he’d arrived in country and at the company a week before I had, yet I had already made aircraft commander and he hadn’t. Although I wasn’t supposed to know, they, meaning the platoon leader and the other aircraft commanders thought that Overholt might resent the situation. They just didn’t want to put us together. Last night’s activities had overruled that concern.

“Okay.”

Once we finished eating, we strolled back out to the aircraft to await instructions. Flight lead, by default, was Downs. He rode up in a jeep, walked toward the nose of his aircraft and waved a hand over his head, telling us to crank.

We flew back to Cu Chi, stopped at POL, which hadn’t been damaged in the attack. The rearm point looked as if it had been hit. There were the remains of the 2.75-inch rockets, the wood from ammunition crates, cardboard, paper, smoke grenades, and other debris was scattered in front. The sign looked as if it had been hit by some of the larger ordnance. The remains still smoked but not everything had been burned.

The smoking remains of the Rearm Point. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

When the flight took off, out of POL, I broke away from the formation and landed on the Muleskinners’ company pad. As we passed over part of their flight line, I could see the remains of Chinooks in the revetments. Here were huge, twin rotor aircraft, capable of carrying forty soldiers, reduced to a small pile of smoking rubble. There didn’t seem to be enough material in the revetments for a Chinook. Just ash with partially burned rotor blades sticking out at strange angles.

The remains of a Chinook. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

The Chinook pilots climbed into the back. They didn’t look any worse for wear. They were both in fresh flight suits. One carried a black brief case, flight bag and a revolver in an old west style holster. The other carried a flight bag and wore a shoulder holster with a .45. Neither said a word to me, but one of them talked to the crew chief. With the turbine running, even at flight idle, conversation was difficult.

“They want to know if you know the destination?” said the crew chief on the intercom.

“Yeah. Ask them how everything is.”

A moment later he said, “They lost one man, SP4 Isaac Stringer, Jr. He was killed by an RPG in the maintenance area. They lost a bunch of their airplanes.”

He told the crew chief, who told me, that the VC had punched their way through the wire, blowing up a bunker to do it. They ran toward the Muleskinners’ area, stopping just long enough to blow up the aircraft, and then spread out, over the Cu Chi base camp, looking for targets. Apparently, they had attacked the POL, but the hit the refueling points rather than the storage area and destroyed a couple of hoses which reduced the capacity to refuel aircraft but doing no real damage. They found the rearm point and tried to blow it up, but with only moderate success.

By the time they had moved beyond that, most of the aircraft had been evacuated. The 25^th Infantry, either with their infantry companies or with the military police, had begun searching the camp for the sappers. As we took off for Saigon and the Air America pad, they thought there might be as many as twenty-five or thirty of the enemy still hiding on the camp.

As we took off, I looked back at Cu Chi. I didn’t see much. The fire that always burned on the northeastern side still burned, throwing up a column of smoke that helped us navigate. I didn’t see any real damage, other than that to the Muleskinners’ Chinooks and the minor damage around the rearm point.

It wasn’t long before we had made our way to Saigon, following the standard practice of flying low level to avoid aircraft taking off or landing at Ton Son Nhut, got permission to land directly at the Air America pad, and had touched down. Sitting on the pad was what looked like a brand-new Chinook.

Saigon from the air. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

The two pilots climbed out, thanked us for the ride, and disappeared toward the hangar. I called the Ton Son Nhut tower to take off, explaining that I was in a UH-1, at the Air America pad, and that I wanted a straight out exit to keep me out of the traffic pattern filled with jet fighters, four-engine transports, and a variety of other fixed-wing aircraft. I had to argue with the tower, operated by Vietnamese who didn’t have the best command of the English language. We finally got our instructions and took off.

We arrived at Cu Chi, refueled, and then headed for the Hornet’s Nest. I parked in the revetment, shut down, and got out of the aircraft. In operations, I learned that the enemy soldiers had all been eliminated. There had been few American or South Vietnamese casualties. The damage had been limited to the Chinooks and the rearm point, through there was some minor shrapnel damage in our company area from the mortars and rockets. That meant something had poked a couple of holes in the corrugated tin of the buildings, ripped up some of the bamboo matting, put holes in some screen, and a few more holes in the tail booms of some of the aircraft.

Our mission on the day after changed slightly, but only because the infantry conducted searches around Cu Chi rather than flying out into the Hobo Woods, the Iron Triangle, or the areas along the Saigon River. We were fully prepared to fly the next day and certainly could have met all our mission requirements. Our only problem was that the pilots had been flying from early morning and had very little sleep the night before. That was not an unusual circumstance.

Of course, TET 1969, was nowhere near as dramatic as that the year earlier. The media seemed to believe that fewer troops engaged and the scale of the attacks had been reduced significantly. In reality, the numbers were about equal, but there weren’t the initial successes of 1968. The news media was surprised in 1968, but, in 1969, they were waiting for something to happen.

Reporters said there was heavy damage at Cu Chi, but I saw nothing to support that idea. Instead, minor damage and disruption, and, of course, the death of Isaac Stringer. About the only difference I noticed was that everyone was armed on the camp. Normally, upon return from the day’s missions, the sidearms and rifles were stored.

The day after that, everything returned to normal, or as normal as it ever got. The reports I read today bear little in resemblance to the facts as I saw them then. While the attack was reported in a long paragraph in a news magazine, the situation, as reflected in that paragraph was less dramatic. The attack, while certainly disruptive to the Muleskinners had no real impact at all on the outcome of the war. It might be classified as a non-event except for those of us who participated. In the history of the Vietnam War, it will probably be little more than a footnote.