By Scott Longman
The adrenaline blasted through him: they weren’t supposed to have stopped yet.
But there they were, a terrifying short distance in front of him, just visible past the turn in the trail, through the foliage. One hundred and twenty North Vietnamese soldiers. Stopped for the night, a good hour before they were supposed to.
He silently turned, dropped, and worked back to his three teammates, whispering: “Stay low, stay quiet, and get the fuck out of dodge.”
We’ll call him Staff Sergeant Joe. It’s 1969, he’s in the Republic of Vietnam, and he’s a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, now in a Long Range Recon Patrol (“LRRP” aka “Lurp”) team. For those perhaps not acquainted, LRRPs are among the most unhinged soldiers ever. They went in teams as small as four men, deep into enemy territory, into the midst of maybe thousands of enemy, for the purpose of on-the-ground reconnaissance.
The United States military has built a magnificent combined arms system that is, among many other things, spectacularly good at supporting the grunt on the ground. Depending on the particulars in 1969, a grunt could call in fast movers, A1 Skyraiders, Spooky gunships, Hueys with miniguns, firebase heavy artillery, naval gunfire, medevac, ready reaction forces or even Arclight B-52 raids, capable of wiping out grid squares.
But Joe had none of that, for the horrible but basic reason that a team of only four Lurps couldn’t afford to carry the weight and bulk of a radio and batteries that were capable of the range necessary. At the time, it was usually a PRC-77, which is a massive beast that is its own rucksack load. So the four of them were well and truly on their own.
Which would have been just fine, had they succeeded in just ghosting out. But as the NVA stopped, they did what every force does, which is promptly put out security around the main force. So a team of NVA rear security was moving only a few yards away through the heavy jungle. And they heard the Lurps leaving. There was a flickering instant where both sides saw each other, and then it was Game On.
Joe and his team flat out sprinted. Their hoped-for salvation came in two forms. First and foremost was deep, thick, dark jungle in which to get lost. The second was that the NVA couldn’t know how big an element they were dealing with, and might be afraid that this was simply a lure to draw them into an ambush, so they’d limit the chase.
But right out of the box, they sure weren’t showing any hesitation.
7.62×39 rounds were cracking around the Lurps, and the NVA were pursuing hard.
Joe pulled out an M67 fragmentation grenade and heaved it at them. Whether they caught a glimpse of it in the air, or whether they heard it hit the ground, he couldn’t determine, but what they did do is drop flat and stop. That gave the Lurps about five seconds of slack.
But right after the grenade thundered off, the NVA was back at it.
So, moments later, Joe threw another one, and gained another five seconds of distance, with each increment closer to letting them disappear in the jungle.
And another M67.
And then another.
But Lurps travel light. LRRP patrols had to cover huge distances and they were not intended to have any contact with the enemy, let alone sustained contact. As Joe notes in his wonderful, understated way: “We really did prefer not to engage them.” Which meant they only carried a few grenades, and they were running low.
And then it occurred to him: the C-rats!
Technically by 1969, they were “Meal, Combat, Individuals” but everybody still called them C-rats. They were pretty awful eating. The only one Joe could stand was the fruit cocktail, so he consistently traded most of the other stuff for that, but they could be hard to get. But at that very moment, the buttpack on his web gear contained several.
He took one out and heaved it toward the enemy.
Not only did it work as if it were a grenade, it worked better, no doubt because the enemy was waiting for the explosion that never came. Was it a dud? Some tricky delay fuse? It bought Joe and the team something more like twelve or fifteen seconds.
Running.
And another can of fruit cocktail. Almost to a safe margin.
The last live M67, just to keep them guessing.
And then one final fruit cocktail.
At that point, the gap between the forces was big enough and the NVA had gone far enough from the safety of their main body that they dropped the chase.
As we concluded the interview, Joe gave this laconic lament: “The only problem was that my team wouldn’t let me go back the next day to collect them.”
