Life at the Dak Pek camp in Northern Kontum province was a bit like army life most everywhere: long periods of boredom sprinkled with moments of pure terror. Our daily routine in late 1965 and early 1966 was pretty tame. We kept one or two patrols in the jungle, mostly to the west and southwest in the areas where we figured that most of the infiltration in our AO was taking place. Life in the camp consisted of improving our defenses and training our ‘Yard troops. We and the ‘Yards welcomed any opportunity to get out of the daily grind.
As New Year’s Eve of 1965 approached, we got an indication of how our Special Forces predecessors at Dak Pek had celebrated that holiday. Some of the ‘Yards began asking us for permission to celebrate our New Year with a “mad minute” at midnight on December 31. A mad minute was a short period of firing all weapons as fast as possible. I wasn’t too keen on the idea for several reasons. First, letting over 700 troops open up with live ammunition when there was no way we could reliably supervise where and how they were shooting was not my idea of a safe and sane holiday. Secondly, we got almost all our supplies by parachute at that time, save for a few small items that came in on choppers. I had no idea how much ammunition they would be able to burn up, or how long they would keep shooting. I didn’t like the idea that they would shoot up all their ammo, then have the VC wander in through the wire while we were policing up the brass. I also knew that there were a few Viet Cong on our payroll, and disliked the idea that they would have a perfect opportunity to create mischief with live ammunition.
As the day approached, I was finally persuaded to allow it. I remembered something that my hunting buddy Jack Baker had told me about training a puppy. The trick is to find out what the puppy is going to do, then tell him to do it. I was pretty well convinced that whatever I said, it was going to happen anyway, so why not legitimize it by saying OK?
On New Years Eve day a new NCO showed up. His name was Daniel. Shortly after his arrival, he was assigned a bunk space in the team house and briefed on his alert position. We always assigned a new guy as an ammo handler in the 4.2 inch mortar pit right outside the team house until they had a chance to become fully familiar with camp defenses, and that is where Daniel was assigned. We had supper and turned in early because we knew that we would be up for quite a while in the middle of the night.
About 11:30, the team began to collect outside the team house to observe the celebration and to be available in the event of a problem. The only problem was that everyone thought someone else had told Daniel of the scheduled celebration.
It was a beautiful balmy night, but with no moon it was pitch dark. At a few minutes before midnight we heard a couple of rifle shots from the far side of the camp. It was only moments later when all hell broke loose. It took us only seconds before we jumped into the mortar pit, because the shooters were not too careful about just where they were aiming. A few bullets cracked overhead, and I’m not so sure that the team house didn’t take a few hits. The streams of tracers from rifles and machine guns were soon joined by illumination rounds from the mortars. It was quite a show.
Right in the middle of the show I heard a scraping sound coming from the direction of the team house. I could soon make out what appeared to be sparks moving through the gravel toward the mortar pit. I pulled my pistol thinking that a VC might be using the cover of all the firing to sneak up and roll a grenade in the pit with us.
Moments later, we all broke out laughing. The sparks were coming from the gravel being violently displaced as Daniel made his way in turbo mode toward the mortar pit at the low crawl with steel pot, flak jacket, M16 and all. He was convinced that his first day in camp would be his last if the volume of fire was any indication of the severity of the “attack.”
He took a lot of teasing about his low crawl, but he was doing exactly the right thing. I was as embarrassed as he was because we had not done our job in fully briefing him on the situation in the camp. His reaction caused us to review our procedures, and we did not make that error of omission again.
Copyright 1999
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