(5 of 16)
I jumped to the ground, looked around and felt as if I had been propelled backward in time. Shimmering in the heat of the sun was an earth-and-wood fortress ringed by pillboxes. But for the greenness, A Shau had a French Foreign Legion quality, Beau Geste without the sand. I stood there asking myself the question I am sure Roman legionnaires must have asked in Gaul-What the hell am I doing here?
A Vietnamese officer saluted and put out his hand. "Captain Vo Cong Hieu, commanding 2nd Battalion," he said in passable English. Hieu was my Army of the Republic of Vietnam (arvn) counterpart, the man I would be advising. He was short, in his early 30s, with a broad face and an engaging smile. But for the uniform, I would have taken him for a genial schoolteacher.
Directly behind A Shau, a mountain loomed over us. I pointed toward it, and Hieu said with a grin, "Laos." From that mountainside, the enemy could almost roll rocks down onto us. I wondered why the base had been established in such a vulnerable spot.
"Very important outpost," Hieu assured me.
"What's its mission?" I asked.
"Very important outpost," Hieu repeated.
"But why is it here?"
"Outpost is here to protect airfield," he said, pointing in the direction of our departing Marine helo.
"What's the airfield here for?" I asked.
"Airfield here to resupply outpost."
I knew our formal role here: we were to establish a "presence," a word with a nice sophisticated ring. More specifically, we were supposed to engage the Viet Cong to keep them from moving through the A Shau Valley and fomenting their insurgency in the populated coastal provinces. But Hieu's words were the immediate reality. The base camp at A Shau was there to protect an airstrip that was there to supply the outpost.
I would spend nearly 20 years, one way or another, grappling with our experience in this country. And over all that time, Vietnam rarely made much more sense than Captain Hieu's circular reasoning on that January day in 1963. We're here because we're here, because we're...
Two weeks later, Powell got the news he was waiting for: he and his 400-man battalion would embark on Operation Grasshopper, an extended patrol down A Shau Valley. The journey marked Powell's introduction not only to combat but also to its deadly consequences.
It happened on the sixth day out as we were coming down a steep hillside. I was a quarter of the way back in the column, the customary place for advisers. As usual, we were moving in single file, which meant that the V.C. could halt the entire column by picking off the first man. I had urged Hieu to break the battalion into three or four parallel columns, but the forest was so dense and the passes so narrow in places that Hieu let this bit of American wisdom go politely unheeded.