When I arrived at Dak Pek on December 5, 1965, I found a rather unusual place. Most of the A camps in Viet Nam were a single fortified position, most of them triangular or square. Those shapes provided a place that was relatively easy to defend. Of course, defending them depended on not allowing the enemy to have the element of surprise.
Dak Pek was different in at least two ways. First, it consisted of seven small hills in a space about 300 yards by 400 yards. Each of those hills were separately fortified, and each of the seven positions could support by direct fire at least two other hills. After dark, each hill closed up the entry ways through its defenses and became isolated for the night.
The second difference was the rain forest. Jungle grew right up to the barbed wire barriers around each position. The enemy could be in the wire before we knew they were there. So much for denying the enemy the element of surprise.
The Camp Commander, VNSF Captain Phuong, was happy with that arrangement. He and I talked about it quite a bit, but he adamantly opposed cutting the jungle back to open up fields of fire for the camp. He suggested that if we cut away the jungle, the VC could see us. That camp had been there from at least the early 1950s, and I felt confident the VC knew exactly where it was. I felt so vulnerable with jungle growing right to the wire that I arranged to have the jungle cut down.
The 12 Americans in camp were a totally inadequate labor force to accomplish this, and the strikers were busy training or on combat operations outside the camp. That left only the surrounding civilian population available to do the work.
There were at least a couple of thousand ‘Yards living in villages within a few hundred yards of the camp—they were snuggled up close to the camp for protection from the Viet Cong and NVA. My plan was to hire to locals to cut down the jungle.
The ‘Yards were a small but wiry and extremely tough people. A ‘Yard barely five feet tall, accustomed to running up and down the mountains in the area from childhood, could carry as much and keep going as long as any American six footer. I knew that they could do the job; the only problem was to figure out how to get them to do it.
We put the word out that we would pay 100 piasters at the end of each day for adults to cut trees. The first morning we had about two dozen show up with their tiny home made axes. We showed them where to start, and they got busy.
The ‘Yards were accustomed to the hard work necessary just to survive, and went to work with a will. Along about noon, the sound of axes was not nearly as loud as in the morning, so we took a look. Maybe eight of them were still working. Not surprising, since none of them had ever had an opportunity to “hire out” before. But at the end of the day, a few more showed up to get paid than had started that day. We had to find a way to insure we paid only those who had really worked.
The answer was poker chips. The next day, we gave a white poker chip to each person who started in the morning. Just before noon, we collected the white chips from those still working, and gave them blue chips. In the middle of the afternoon, we collected the blues and issued reds. Only those with red chips got paid at the end of the day. From then on, we had a more or less full crew working all day.
Within a few weeks, the jungle had been cleared to a distance of 400 yards or so. Now you might think that all the trees chopped down would provide excellent concealment for an attacking force. Not at all. As soon as trees hit the ground, the ‘Yards would start cutting them up and carrying them off to use for firewood. Now they didn’t have to go into the jungle and risk being captured or killed by the Viet Cong.
There was another important benefit. The ‘Yards raised rice as their dietary staple, but not the kind grown in paddies in the lowlands. The usual agricultural practice was called slash and burn, necessary on the thin topsoil in the mountains. The usual village in the mountains was a semi-nomadic one. They would move into an area, build their temporary houses of bamboo, clear an area of jungle, let the downed vegetation dry, then burn it. In the burned areas they would plant a kind of rice that grew on hillsides. In a year or two or three, when the poor soil was used up, they would move to a new area and repeat the process.
Eventually we had about 400 meters of cleared area around the camp, denying the VC concealment to get in the wire with no warning. As soon as the trees felled around the camp were removed, the villagers started planting rice. The cleared area around the camp increased many times the area available for planting, and they got paid to clear it. For them, that was a win-win situation.
But there were far more serious and corrupt attempts to milk the system for money.
Based on the information we were able to get, VNSF camp commanders had to buy their position, which was considered a way to get rich ripping off the Americans. Not only that, they were assigned a monetary quota of cash each month that had to be turned over to their commander. A day or two after pay day each month, a Vietnamese bag man came around to collect the loot from the VNSF camp commander for his superior. I can’t say for sure that was the case in every camp, but there was ample evidence at Dak Pek to convince us of its truth.
Americans paid the strikers in cash every month. Each company would line up its troops who were paid and the fingerprint of their right forefinger was taken. But with over 700 men to pay, there was no way we could assure that any man was not paid multiple times. We believed that the VNSF ordered the men to do this, and of course, they had to turn the overpayments over to the VNSF who used the money to fulfill their monthly quota.
Our solution was to use the big black magic markers on the back of the right hand of each person paid. There was no way they could completely obliterate before the end of the day the huge black indelible blob we put on their hands.
Copyright 1999
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