For U.S. grunts who served 12 or 13 months in Vietnam no word can describe the particular terror and misery of that war like “contact.” For REMF POGs, War was hell; but for grunts, contact was a motherf__ker, to use the crude argot of the infantrymen.
Oddly enough, both sides sought contact to achieve their war goals. The North Vietnamese wanted to make contact to wound or kill as many U.S. servicemen as possible, to drain U.S. morale and weaken U. S. resolve to support the Republic of South Vietnam. For them, contact meant anything from a boobytrap encounter, a one or two-man VC ambush, to a battalion-size PAVN assault.
U.S. leadership was constantly seeking contact, planning and executing search and destroy missions around the length and breadth of South Vietnam. The goal was to find and entrap as many communist troops as possible and pile on with as much combat power as possible. MACV used the body-count metric to determine the success or failure of a mission, so bringing in firepower to develop a contact into something meaningful in terms of enemy killed was commonplace. Sometimes it worked; often it didn’t.
For most U.S. Army 11bs and USMC 0311s contact most often went something like this:
The company is humping through the bush. It’s hot. Very hot. We’re trying to move quietly, but we’re not quiet. We’re loaded down. Equipment rattles. Guys cough and grumble and stumble. And we stink, like tobacco smoke and sweat. Still, not much is moving, and the forest is still. We know the area is full of VC and we expect to get hit.
Then it happens. The stillness is smashed by sudden small arms fire. Contact! An AK-47 firing on semi-automatic from 20 meters away does not sound like small arms. The rhythmic sound is deafening, and even if you’re half expecting it, it still scares the crap out of you; your blood runs ice cold and terror threatens to overwhelm you. The firing increases. The sound reaches a crescendo as our M-16s build in. You feel paralyzed with terror as you burrow into the forest floor. But you’re not paralyzed. You can move and look for a target. Your heart is pounding with fear and adrenaline, but your mind is clear.
Through the din you hear screams for a medic. The medic rushes forward. So does the M60 gunner and the big machine gun starts pounding the forest, adding to the incredible noise level. The company commander is on the radio calling in artillery support. In what seems like seconds, artillery rounds rush overhead and crunch into the forest ahead of us. The captain adjusts the rounds and more crash into the forest.
Then the cries to ceasefire reverberate with increasing intensity along the line of olive-drab-clad grunts. A few M-16s spasmodically continue to fire and then it’s suddenly quiet. Only voices and cries of anguish from the wounded can be heard. The metallic squelch of a radio transmission cuts through the immediate quiet. It’s over.
Who won this encounter? Who knows. Both sides may have gotten what they wanted. The VC chipped away at U.S. morale, and the U.S. Army traded a few WIAs for a possible body or two. As the U.S. grunts move forward to secure the area, they’ll look for dead enemy soldiers. All the ordinance expended must have hit something. Right?
This type of contact happened almost daily throughout South Vietnam. The Vietnamese assumed the United States would lose patience with such a war; the U.S. assumed that the Vietnamese could not keep fighting while taking so many casualties. Both sides underestimated the other.
The Vietnamese were correct. The U.S. lost patience, but the Vietnamese did not reckon with how many casualties U.S. modern killing power could inflict. VC units in the south were obliterated in 1968’s Tet Offensive; and PAVN units suffered shocking casualties during their long route to the staging areas in the south, and when confronting the multitude of U.S. killing power in the attack. From 500-pound B-52 bombs to USMC bayonets, PAVN soldiers came face-to-face with the horrifying reality of U.S. conventional killing power in South Vietnam.
Also, the United States authorities underestimated the Vietnamese society’s ability to suffer horrific combat casualties and continue to fight. U.S. war leaders expressed often the frustration of seeing Vietnamese units in the south destroyed only to be repopulated with recruits from the north. How much could they, or would they take?
So, the killing went on. Such was the calculus of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese got what they wanted when the U.S. turned the war over to the Republic of South Vietnam, but the damage to generations of Vietnamese civilians and former soldiers was incalculable. In the U.S., millions of young men were scarred permanently by the terrible killing their government asked them to perpetrate.
As usual in war, neither side really won. Only the Grim Reaper was satisfied.
Military History Topics 