Ambush at Outpost 2 Bridge: Vietnam October 1 1968
<b>(Note: This account of an ambush that occurred in Vietnam on October 1st., 1968 is, of course, a faithful reproduction of what was given in response to my questions, relayed over the phone during 2009. No name given in the narration is that of the person concerned. Extracted from pp. 78-82 in T. Wignesan. …the smell of piss an’ shit in his pants: The Vicarious Memoir of a Vietnam War Veteran. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2015, 120p. )
The Vietnam Combat Record
Ulixes was drafted on April Fools’ Day in 1968, a fact that amuses him in no simple fashion – in view of all he had had to undergo in the Army. He went through basic training in Fort Jackson, Carolina, and further training in Fort Gordon, Georgia. He was trained in military police duty, in particular. He was given a month’s leave, after the training, so that he could go home to New York and await the call to arms. Then, he got his orders to serve in Vietnam. He flew to Oakland in August to be shipped from there to Saigon, and then to the Long Bean base, about 150 miles north of the capital and about 30 miles or so from the Cambodian border.
In all, Ulixes spent 14 months and 7 days in Vietnam. The first two months and the last two are normally spent on Observation Posts. In Ulixes’s case, although the captain put him - at the end of his tour - on OP duty, a sergeant who didn’t quite take to him put him back on reconnaissance duty.
Ulixes was demobbed on November 4, 1969.
- Ambush at Outpost 2 Bridge – October 1st, 1968
One month after his arrival in Vietnam, Ulixes was posted on observation duty at Outpost 2, a distance of some half a mile from Outpost 1. These observation outposts were confined in what could be called “mini-forts”, once constructed by the enemy and then of course later deserted by them for some reason or other. Just before entering OP1, one had to cross a bridge over a rivulet. All around, rice fields and wild lush jungle foliage did abound. There was a road connecting OP2 to OP1.
OP1 was occupied by three soldiers: Ataokoloinona, 20, and Polydorus, a Puero Rican, and 20 Vietnamese militia; OP2 by Corporal Cadmus (a special 4), Meleager, Alpheus, and Ulixes, together with 22 Vietnamese militia, who – according to Ulixes – fell asleep often. This contingency was a mortar platoon which kept firing mortar tubes and the popping ricocheting noise kept almost everybody up, except those used to the thumping din. They slept in cots with mosquito nets draped on top. Ulixes was new to the combat scene, and the boys pulled his leg by wishing him: “How’s it going, Cherry Boy?”
At the time of the ambush, Meleager was away for the day drinking, and Ulixes was having his shower. The latter consisted of huge 255 litre drums which took about two hours to fill, but when the water was turned on, it only came down in a trickle.
All of a sudden, Ulixes heard a deafening bang. He grabbed his shorts and got out of there. He heard Cadmus cry out: “Grab your ammo and come on!”
The corporal shot an order to the radio man. “Alpheus get the radio!” Alpheus couldn’t move. He was stuck in his place, just looking at the radio and the hectic cross-talk going on on the air.
The others rushed in the direction of the blast, that is, along the road to OP1. When they got to the bridge which was by then a devasted scene of a jeep simmering in half a wreck, Cadmus and Ulixes jumped into the slump by the road, for they drew flak from AK47s firing from some bushes in the nearby rice field.
The first thing they saw was Ataokoloinona’s eye-ball hanging loose out of his head, his hand and leg blown off. He was groaning, “My wife, My wife!” Cadmus took off his T-shirt and tried to turn it into a tourniquet to keep Ataokoloinona’s arm in place.
The VCs - seven of them - kept up their fire. Then, as Ulixes slid into the lower bank of the road to take cover, he saw Polydorus’s mouth moving. An instant later, he saw that the lower part of his body, from the waist down, was missing. Polydorus and Ataokoloinona had just then been returning by jeep from OP2 after delivering the mail.
The Viet Cong had managed to set up a 105 Howitzer shell on a wooden board with a nail in such a way that, when the jeep hit the board, it would trigger the Howitzer off. Later, they found the jeep’s motor some hundred yards away in the rice field. Ulixes was so stunned he couldn’t move.
“I curled up in the womb position hugging my M16 and lay there numbed beside Polydorus.”
Cadmus shouted out for more fire support, and hearing no fire coming from Ulixes, he came over and snapped him out of his stupor by slapping him in the face. Corporal Cadmus, a big burly muscular black from the South, then retorted with his M16 and pistol. Ulixes emptied two rounds of his M16 in the direction of the VCs. Cadmus called for more fire, but seeing that Alpheus wasn’t around, bid Ulixes to go back for the radio.
“I get up and haul ass.”
Cadmus later said, “Ai ain’t never see a white boy run so fast and so low to the ground.”
At OP2, Alpheus was still mesmerised watching and listening to the radio. Ulixes picked up two more rounds of ammo and grabbed the radio and headed back to the bridge. Cadmus called for Bridge Security. He then came out of his hiding position and with pistol and M16 firing from the hip, drove the Viet Cong from their ambush positions. The Medivac helicopter personnel arrived with a stretcher to fetch Ataokoloinona first.
“Cadmus grabbed him under the arm and I under the knee. Just as we lifted him, the leg came off in my hands.”
We loaded Ataokoloinona into the helicopter and came back for Polydorus with body bags. Then, when the helicopter took off, we scoured the terrain for the rest of the body.
“I found one boot with the leg still in it.”
They walked back with it to OP2. On the road back, they encountered some Vietnamese school children, around ten to thirteen years old, walking in single file in the opposite direction. As soon as they passed the soldiers, the school kids “lowered their heads and put their hands together in prayer fashion. That really touched my heart; it really got me. I started crying. They didn’t turn around to look. Just kept walking.”
Back at OP2, Cadmus who never cursed, according to Ulixes, “ripped into Alpheus’s ass.”
“What the fuck did you do?”
Just then Meleager got back, “drunk as a skunk”.
“You guys alright,” he wanted to know.
Ulixes arrived in Vietnam on August 28, 1968. This incident took place hardly a month after. He had just then turned twenty.
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2009.</b>
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