The 13th Valley

CHAPTER 1: CHELINI-4

First you believe it, Chelini thought, then you don’t. Then you do again. First you think we should be here and then you think this is crazy and we’re ruining the country and then you think about the kids you’ve seen and how we keep the NVA out of the lowlands. He shook his head, cleared his mind, approached the tower and climbed the ladder to the small platform at the top. Ralston snapped more cynical comments but Chelini did not respond. As he stood on the helicopter skid fifty feet above the sandpit his heart pounded. The rappelling rope went through a Dring at his waist, around his side and over his shoulder. For one long second Chelini paused. Then slowly he leaned backward, feeling the rope take more and more of his weight, trying not to think of the long drop. As his body reached a 45° angle he closed his eyes and leaped backward, releasing twenty feet of line. He snapped the rope taut about him; the jute burned his gloved hands. His weight stretched the line but the system worked. He stopped ten feet off the ground, allowed more slack and descended.

“You snap the line on a bird like that, Troop,” the instructor cautioned him, “and you’ll flip the bird on top of you. You gotta be gentle.” His voice was tempered with approval.

“Wow, Dude,” Ralston quipped. “You gettin ta be a real gung-ho airborne-all-the-way-Sir soldier.” Chelini said nothing but smiled and turned from Ralston to take a second turn on the tower. “Dude,” Ralston called. “They gonna make a screaming bird out a you yet—a screaming yellow buzzard.”

Classes on the last day were concerned with NVA tactics and the Chieu Hoi or open arms program. For Chelini the very last class of SERTS was scary and sobering.

“The Hoi Chanhs, Gen-tle-men,” a senior instructor said, “are trained as scouts and interpreters. They work with platoons operating in areas from which they defected. In these areas they know the trails and cache sites. They know the booby-trap markers. They know the ambush sites. Gen-tle-men, a platoon with a Hoi Chanh or Kit Carson Scout is less vulnerable than it would be if it were out there on its own.

“We have with us today,” the instructor raised his voice and announced, “the Senior Kit Carson Scout of the 101st Airborne Division, Colonel Phan Trinh. Gen-tle-men, for twelve years prior to becoming a Hoi Chanh, Colonel Phan commanded a successful NVA sapper company.”

“Jesus!” Ralston snapped. “Look at that. A defective dink.”

Chelini listened intently as the instructor told Colonel Phan’s story. Phan Trinh’s father, who lived in a small village near Hanoi, was actively opposed to the war in the South. Allegedly he was incarcerated and then shot. The colonel’s sister and a brother were also killed, for according to tradition they came from corrupted blood and thus were or would be infected with the same thoughts as their father. Phan Trinh was warned by a close friend in a staff position that he was to be recalled to North Vietnam to be interrogated—to see if his blood contained the obsessions of his father. Instead of facing charges of being the son of a radical, Colonel Phan, with a heavy heart, knowing he would never again see his homeland, defected to the south by simply slipping through the wires at Camp Eagle at night and walking up to the Division Tactical Operations Center. There he waited for daylight then defected to the Assistant Division Commander.

For this class the students were instructed in the stringing of barbed wire and the installation of claymore mines, trip flares and rattles. The class was asked to construct a simulated perimeter defense. Chelini was one of six men chosen to build the position and he took extra care to make the wires taut and to keep the strands close to each other. In the wires they implanted trip flares and stone-can rattles. Behind the first set of tanglefoot and under a coil of concertina Chelini hid a claymore in a clump of grass. “That’ll get em,” he chuckled to the other volunteers.

After the perimeter was completed Chelini and the class watched quietly. Phan approached the exterior of the newly laid position. He was clothed only in a loincloth. With him he carried a small pair of wire cutters, a dozen sachel charges, a blade of grass in his mouth and on a string around his neck a small flat piece of wood. He lay very still in the grass before the wire. Slowly he moved his left arm forward then his right leg, his right arm, then left leg. As he inched forward like a lizard Chelini watched in awe. If Ralston was talking Chelini did not hear. They could come in like that anytime, he thought.

Phan reached the first wire which was about two inches off the ground; he removed the blade of grass from his lips. Slowly, cautiously he stroked the area before the wire, then above the wire and finally as far past the wire as he could reach. He was satisfied there were no trip wires for flares. Again, very slowly he slithered over the wire, one arm, one leg at a time. He slithered into the heart of the entanglement. Phan went over the lowest wires and under the rest, never seeming to touch any, always keeping his body suspended only minutely off the earth by his fingers and toes. He was incredibly agile—almost liquid. As he flowed through the defensive concertina strands his sinuous muscles rippled. Between each movement he placed the flat piece of wood on the earth, placed an ear to it and listened for the movement of the defenders. When he found a trip wire with the blade of grass he moved his cutters—first checking the wire for tension to insure that some alert GI had not spring-loaded the trigger mechanism—and snipped the wire in two.

He proceeded through the emplacement until he came face-to-face with Chelini’s claymore mine. The sapper removed the electrical blasting cap from the mine, turned the mine around and aimed it at the audience. Once inside the perimeter he crawled to the instructor and placed his sachel charges carefully about and between the instructor’s feet. Finally like a serpent Phan slid back through the wire, re-arming the claymore on his way out. Once out of range he threw several stones into the perimeter.

“GENTLEMEN!” The instructor screamed. Chelini jumped. “MOVEMENT IN THE WIRE! BLOW YOUR CLAYMORES!… You will eliminate your own life-support systems by aerating your lungs and heart group with six hundred tiny holes. Gentlemen, a hand for the master.” There was a long round of applause.

Most men received their unit orders the last day of the SERTS training course and reported directly to their units of assignment. Will Ralston was sent to division headquarters as a supply clerk. On 12 August Chelini was returned to Phu Bai to obtain his unit assignment which had been intercepted and audited because of the earlier loss and delay of his records. The new mimeographed orders—DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, Headquarters 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile), APO San Francisco 96383—assigned James Vincent Chelini to Company A, 7th Battalion, 402d Infantry.

* A glossary of military acronyms and terms appears on page 571.