Well,  Bud and I travelled to Vietnam in different ways from the points in our lives at which one might say it was preordained that we would go. For Bud, that moment came with his decision in the United Kingdom to join the war and sail and hitchhike his way into enlistment into the Corps–though Bud might say it came sooner.

I think of my route as beginning from the moment I could explain myself in English (six, seven, or eight years old). Perhaps it was when I stood at the base of the sliding pond (that’s what I remember we called it in Bronx, NY), explaining my world view to another eleven-year old. The point I repeated over and over in different ways was that socialism and communism (at least in the developing brain I then possessed) was a great evil (there was no distinction in my head between them).

Marx and his Soviet bodies were out to rule the world and make us do everything by command, I would tell Jimmy. We would have no choice but to obey.  So what if I wanted to draw pictures, maybe illustrate a book, or design a grand building, I’d be made to drive rivets or Ladas (forgive the anachronism). They had to be stopped, said this budding Cold War fighter.

I had to work especially hard at this because I had other explaining to do–mainly justifying my father’s service in the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe.  In the Bronx, we lived in a predominantly Irish/Jewish neighborhood and linkages with the Nazis were things in need of explanation.  (In those days the question of what “your dad” did during the War was still a live one.) My response–and it was (and is) true: Estonia’s primary enemy was the Soviet Union and the “enemy of my enemy” bit usually brought sympathetic nods of understanding.

So naturally, for that and other reasons,  it was easy to gravitate toward a military career, first with a full Navy ROTC scholarship to the University of Rochester and then into the Marine Corps, as I described in my earliest “Rummaging” post. From there, after graduation, commissioning, and months of training in Quantico, Virginia, to become a Marine leader in 1966, it was off to Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base north of San Diego, California. With a Quantico classmate—Jim Williams—I drove my 1962 Chevrolet four-door, column-shifting sedan (hot stuff!) across country right after Christmas ’66. (My mother had bought it for me for $500! A nice Estonian blue in color.)

We had both been ordered, for a bit of additional preliminary  training, to a so-called replacement battalion. I don’t know about Jim, but I was given a platoon of raw Marines to command through a series of exercises in Vietnam-like settings–as though we were all going to go together. That was not to be, of course, because we soon found ourselves delivered via Okinawa to Danang in the Republic of Vietnam and dispersed throughout the two Marine divisions deployed across the northern-most military region of the country. I can remember seeing again only one Marine of that group. (Happily, the Marine Corps does it much differently now.)

My first order of business on arrival at the sprawling set of US military facilities in and around Danang was a perfunctory visit, with one or two other officers,  to the Commanding General of the First Marine Division—he took a few minutes to admonish us never, ever to allow the Marines we would lead to accidentally fire their weapons and hurt themselves or other Marines. So with that, aboard a southbound six-by (military-talk for a truck with six wheels, all powered), I pondered what seemed, from the general’s point of view, at least as big a problem , if not a larger one, than the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese we were expect to deal with.  The general’s priorities were made harder to digest by the discovery that same day that a classmate from Quantico, who had arrived in Vietnam (and joined the Fifth Marines) a short while before me was already dead, killed in a fusillade of enemy fire as he led a hopeless charge against an entrenched force in an operation well south of Danang .

After visits to the First Marine Regiment headquarters, where I and other replacement officers, actually watched briefings on the situation in the regiment’s area of responsibility (AOR), I was plunked into 3/1 and Lima Company–and first platoon, with Bud and some 30-35 Marines of that (my) generation.

Three-one’s headquarters occupied South China Sea beachfront property, as the following images show. And, being a relatively short distance from center Danang, we’d have opportunities to go urban–even visit a post exchange as large as any I had ever seen or would see (or so it seems in retrospect).

What was 3/1 doing there at the time? And what explains Lima Company’s wanderings, the wanderings Bud’s travelogue will highlight in coming posts? Three-one was one of several battalions that ringed Danang.

Our mission, was three-fold:

• Through constant patrolling in small units, we were to prevent mortar and rocket attacks on Danang and its facilities, including the Marine airfield on the city’s south edge.  This meant units, platoon- or squad-sized, were constantly in motion and constantly passing through villages occupied by uneasy or hostile citizens, some of whom were likely to have been hiding our enemies. Constant motion also meant Marines were always exposed to sniper fire and unending series of booby traps that were a defining feature of the insurgency we were trying to defeat.
• In the process, we were to disrupt and destroy any VC individuals or main force units that came into our AOR–whether they directly threatened Danang or not.

• 

  And, finally, 3/1  provided a strategic reserve force for the First Marine Division, a mission that had Lima Company moving from one relatively distant place to another and back again, as the map of areas in which the battalion operated suggests.

With that orientation for readers not familiar with Lima’s situation, I say, “Enough for now;  Please, patiently stay tuned.”

Andy V.