Conflict in The War
Q: In your memoir, you devoted a considerable amount of time describing the conflict between you and your commanding officer. Can you explain that conflict to us?
Sure. When I got to Vietnam,I went to a Motor Transport Battalion… I was trained to run Motor Transport resupply convoys. We ran Motor Transport convoys up and down highway 1, north to the High Van Pass to Hue Phu Bai, south to Hoi Ann and other points. I went in as a Second Lieutenant as a platoon commander in a transport company. When the president commander (1st lieutenant) left… I got promoted to first lieutenant and then I become the interim company commander. I was told at the time there will be a company commander coming in shortly… so for about two weeks I was the company commander. What I did was I just held staff meetings with the sergeants, I had to sign papers and memos and stuff like that … then one day I was called to a meeting with all the company commanders and then I met my new company commander.
My company commander was a very difficult man… to be perfectly blunt, he was the most despicable person I was ever around. He turned out to be a coward and a liar and this captain when I first met him, I thought he was going to be a pretty good company commander. Then came the June 10th convoy that he was on… it was a 120 truck convoy and we had to go down to operations and get briefed on it. We knew at the time… that we could tell by his mannerisms, one of the other Lieutenants looked at me and said … he mouthed it, I am sitting across from him and he mouthed it over to me … He said * Frank mouths words*… and I said what *Frank mouths words*. I figured out what he said… he doesn’t want to go. The captain didn’t want to take the convoy because we were going through a notorious High Van Pass, which was about 600 feet above sea level… climbing up the pass they called Ambush Prone and then we got to the top of the pass where there was an old French Fort… we had to take the convoy down to the other side, which was written with a lot of ambush sites and he knew that.
We tried to get the convoy broken up over a 3 day period into various serials… 1 serial, 2 serials, 3 …. over a 3 day period. Operations turned it down and they wanted the entire convoy going up. Once we got to the top of the pass, I thought it was going to be okay… we came down on the other side of the pass and about 5 minutes later, a big gap emerged and there were about three South Vietnamese village boys who were filling sand bags for a bridge security squad. The North Vietnamese soldiers came upon those three boys and immediately killed two of them… shot them both in the head… set up a mortar site, a 82 millimeter mortar site and claymore mines… so when the second part of that convoy moves through that area they were hit. It was a big ambush and I was the pace officer… I got on the radio and I told them where I thought the ambush site was. I tried to contact my company commander… he was missing off the radio net for approximately 12 minutes . We found out later… what he did was he got his jeep driver to get on the side of the road and he got out of there… he wouldn’t take any radio messages. As a result, I think we lost about four or five trucks… and we took eleven casualties.
When we got to Phu Bai, we staged at the air strip.. there was a big air strip there. The first thing I did is I went over to his jeep and I asked him why was he off his radio net for about twelve minutes… he looked at me and he said, “ We’ll talk about that later, I have to get over to operations”… so he told his jeep driver to drive him to operations. I looked at the jeep driver’s face and the expression on his face said it all… I just thought to myself that something happened. What happened was that he told his jeep driver to get out of the area. When we got back to Da Nang, I went to the communications shack… I pulled the jeep driver out and I asked what happened? He said I am sorry Lieutenant, I can’t tell you anything… I said why.. He said the captain ordered me not to say anything. I saw that and I remembered how he acted in office meetings… I remembered the incident with moving the bunker … and I knew I was going to have one hell of a problem on my hands… and I did. That was the start of my dilemma.