A Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry 25th ID - Vietnam

Personal Experience Narratives (War Stories)

"Charles Allen, ABC News, Somewhere West of Saigon"
by John G. Jerdon

     By early June in '68, the fighting started to die down.  The beginning of May saw us in several fights from an alley in Cholon to the Hobo Woods, but by late that month we were mostly sweeping west of the MSR, between Saigon and Cu Chi.  The rainy season had started, so we didn't go too far off the roads. 

    The Lieutenant picked up the reporter along with a camera guy and a third man.  We rode out of the Troop laager and headed out west of Hoc Mon pushing toward Duc Hoa along what we called the Oriental River.  I got down with the rest of the dismounts when the ground got a little too squishy, we were only to go out about three or four hundred yards.  It was the most open country I'd seen over there.  Just long stretches of rice paddies with some greenery on the berms of the paddies and tiny villages and hamlets off in the distance.  There were also some patches of what looked like islands; small circular areas that rose a few feet above the paddy berms with heavy growth of bushes on top.

    I had Mario and the Bird with me.  I don't remember if it was Bird or Mario, but one of them spotted three young men who were trying to hurry away from us without running.  Someone shouted, "dong lai" but they broke into a run.  The three of us told the other guys to sit tight and then we chased them through the knee deep rice paddies, firing and tripping as we ran.  Mario or I hit one of them in the back of his shoulder, he got up and kept running with the other two.

    We lost sight of them as they rounded one of those islands, we edged up to it and circled it without seeing a trace of the three runners.  We were stumped.  The island was about ten yards in diameter and heavily overgrown.  Not one of us wanted to risk crawling in there after them, so we reasoned that they probably went further and ducked behind a berm.  We looked at one another and knew that they had to have ducked into the bushes on that island and we didn't want to crawl in there.  Thinking deeply of this tactical conundrum, we resolved it by backing up and tossing a few grenades into the bushes and started back to the other dismounts and the vehicles. 

    As we sloshed back, the TV news guy was standing in front of the platoon with the Lieutenant and he had the camera man film us as we returned.  The news crew were all worked up over the gun fire and the grenade explosions, they probably figured that they earned their scotch for that day.  The reporter asked us to come straight at the camera.  The water in the paddies was only about knee deep; but the stream that fed into the paddies was about waist deep.  Naturally, the reporter wanted us to go through the deeper water.  The Lieutenant told us to shut up as we started a bit of verbal playing using some of our best profanity.  The newsie doing a voice over got pissed and looked at the Lieutenant.  The Lieutenant gave us the same kind of look and told us to go back while they did it again.  They still weren't satisfied.  The reporter walked out about twenty yards or so and started feeling around with his foot.  When he found a deep hole he had us line up again and spread out so he could have us in the background wading one by one through the now almost chest deep water.  He even suggested that we hold our rifles over our heads.  I suppose that the visual effect made for better graphics.  It must have looked very World War II.

    Bird was behind me and I could hear him mumbling but the camera crew couldn't.  One by one, our guys waded toward those fools.  The news guy had a deep, stentorian voice.  I couldn't make out what he was saying to the camera, but I walked along, the water getting deeper as I entered the hole.  I was  coming out of it just as the news guy was doing his wrap up, the Bird hit the hole.  The newsie was saying, "This is Charles Allen, ABC News, somewhere west of Saigon".  Bird hit the bottom of the hole about in the middle of the voice over and surfaced sputtering and screaming. 

    The camera crew packed up their gear in no time.  They were almost gone before the Bird got out of the hole.  He was laughing like the rest of us.  The Bird was short, I mean really short, maybe five four, maybe five five.  I swear he could have kept his head out of the water, he wasn't that short.  But he figured he could get away with screwing over the news crew and he did.  What was he screaming about? Well most of what I heard were standard four letter words, the occasional three letter one, and some deeper questions about the reporter's parents, and grandparents, and weather the legitimacy of their marriages were valid.

     Who knows, maybe it's just another war story.  Maybe I got the names and news outfit wrong in my memory.  But I sure wish the Bird and Mario get to the next reunion.  We could drink a lot of beer arguing who said what.

     John G. Jerdon
     Earleville, Maryland.