Reflecting on Vietnam Part I: Col. John Anthony Cash

Ken Harbaugh:

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I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Colonel John Anthony Cash, who served in the Army as a Rifle Company Commander in Vietnam. In this first part of his interview, Cash recalls hearing updates about the devastating Battle of Ia Drang around a radio, serving in Operation White Wing, and several tragic stories from his tour.

Col. John Anthony Cash:

My name is John Anthony Cash, C-A-S-H. I'm from Atlantic City, New Jersey. I'm an ROTC graduate from Rutgers University, and I just completed 32 years and seven months in active duty service.

I was a rifle company commander of C Company. First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry. Third Brigade of the first day Calvary division.

I don't know where the word came from, but while we were at Fort Benning, the word came out that no one would take white T-shirts to Vietnam. And so in the Army and its infinite wisdom said that means everyone has to dye his t-shirts. I'm sure you've been to drugstore and looked and saw how many different color shades of green they have and the Rit dye I think is what we were using, and we had dyeing parties and BOQ rooms guys in the various neighborhoods would get together. And when we fell out from inspection, every conceivable shade of green from everybody's T-shirt, and I remember that by the time we got to Vietnam, most of us throw them away anyway because in my case, for example, we found that you're a lot more comfortable if you didn't wear a T-shirt, but it's once again, the Army's way of doing things.

But being on the ship together, we're very well organized. We had a training program. I can recall they would bring platoons up at a time and they would do actually PT, physical training, on the deck space that was available. I had the privilege being the ship newspaper's editor. I won't say there was any attempt to tell me what to write or anything. It was mostly training things. I remember I would have to give the final draft on the mimeograph sheet to Colonel Moore to look at to make sure the troops were getting the right word, and it was mostly bread and butter things, like how to call on airstrike, tricks of the trade.

We actually would receive communications from somewhere back in the Army, that would actually come in on the ship's communication system by radiogram or something, of lessons learned from the 173rd, which was already in Vietnam at the time, things to avoid and so on. We would redo those and put them in our newspaper. I remember we had the Air Force Air Observer team with us and they would write articles for us about how airstrikes can best help people and so forth and so on. And we had entertainment. I recall they put on a talent show and you got to know guys very well. We were all the officers of course, were in the few state rooms they had available on the ship and we were really crammed in there, but we had a chance to really get each guy in terms of personality and whatnot.

That proved to be traumatic for me later, when we had all the casualties in the eye drain affair because it's a cliche that you're not supposed to get to know a guy real well because he might get killed. But literally, by having come over on that ship together, we knew when we'd see names on the casual list of guys that we'd room with, that sort of thing.

But on the other hand, it was probably a plus for us because it showed that rather than just have guys sit staring at the sky while they were sailing across the Pacific, that we tried to make good use of our time and it also made the time go faster.

I can recall phrases like the, we called them the PAVN, people's army of Vietnam. We didn't call them NVA at the time and the Viet Cong, but they had entered the war in great strength and they were trying to cut South Vietnam in half at the juncture of the Central Highlands where we were, along Route 19 from Pleiku to Quinan. And that by putting us square in the middle of it and then later the fourth division came in at camp and narrowing near Pleiku, that those American forces would disrupt that plan.

And I can remember the phrase, I went to a division headquarters meeting one time and they were discussing the capabilities of the calvary to deal with the enemy and I remember a staff officer, Major Gibney saying something along the lines of, "We will use the concept of an elephant stamping out a flake with overwhelming firepower that we have to let the people here know that we mean business."

And that's just about what they did. And like I said earlier, this was before they begin to have constraints as to using excessive amount of gasoline for helicopters and ammunition for artillery. It was just you got anything you wanted. And so that's what we did and that's what we were told we were there to do.

But the problem at my level was that you don't see the fruit of those efforts because at the General Kinnard level, at the division level, the strategic concepts began to formulate and you can see the fruit of your efforts. To me it was just patrolling and patrolling and patrolling and ambushing and a lot of times just writing letters to your wife and making sure nobody falls asleep. But it was only as I became when I got promoted and I was able to see those things that sometimes that in itself was a positive thing because it kept the enemy from doing something that you don't have to fight all the time in order to be effective as a military force, as we proved with NATO.

They never had a war, but the Russians finally threw in the towel. And the same thing with the first cav. I remember it was either before or after a white wing that the General Kinnard's headquarters put out a letter, which explained in statistics what we had accomplished about what the first three or four months, the numbers of villages were now free from Viet Cong control, the people could harvest their crops and so it seemed kind of public ionist to me, but at the time it was pretty effective because it was the first thing we saw which said, "Here's what we are doing." But the problem at the lower levels is you never really know. I presume you could probably ask a guy that participated in D-Day invasion. You hear all the stuff about the greatest military maneuver since the beginning of mankind and whatnot, but some young private down there, he doesn't know that. All he knows is that he was either shot at or his buddies got killed or they didn't got shot at, and all he was being told was to hurry up and wait and go over here and get on that helicopter, get on this helicopter, so forth and so on. And that presented a major leadership challenge to people like myself, to try to keep the troops motivated because they need to know that what they're doing is important. And sometimes that's difficult, but we still had that feeling that something was very special about the first cav and guys like Colonel Moore and General Kinnard, whenever they showed up, they exuded the kind of confidence that made you think you just weren't some run-of-the-mill infantry guy. So even though you may not have had any contact or close with the enemy, you felt that what you were doing was important.

I remember after I became a company command and my wife sent me a copy of Life Magazine and it had an article about the truths of Vietnam, and I remember there's one phrase in there, the splendid generation of young soldiers or something like that, fighting in Vietnam. Man, I took that thing and passed it around to every opportunity. I said, "I want all your troops to read this and say this," and so forth and so on. Morale was pretty good.

The only time we ever did any real serious walk was walking to the LZ or away from the LZ, to get to where we wanted to go. And it just sort of gave you... And this of course was because we weren't really up against any real serious anti-aircraft threat. A sense of, you just knew that when you got on the ground, you were going to be well-rested, well-fed, two canteens of water, and it wasn't going to last very long. You were in good shape. And then the other thing, I'm sure it was in the back of everyone's mind, those medevac pilots, you knew that if you got seriously wounded, we had medics that would tell us they'd get all the guys together and say, "If the guy hasn't been shot in the heart or in the head, we'll save that bastard's life." And they just about did that. And so that was a big morale booster.

As we got better at it, as far as coordination is concerned and using the helicopters to deceive the enemy, because you could hear them so many miles away, they give away positions and whatnot, and if they could be used intelligently where you could converge or you go in eight different directions like the bombers used when they used to fly over Germany, they try to hit the target at different altitudes coming from different directions so that the antiaircraft gun would be confused because all they got to do is drop the bombs and get away. We try to do that with helicopters. But there again, the VC tried to negate that by using, once again, minimum means, the maximum gains of punji sticks.

I can remember we had to land in the LZ which had elephant grass almost as tall as I am and so guys had to jump out while the helicopter was hovering. And I can remember inside a 10, 15 minutes later, 25, 30 guys had to put right back on the same helicopters and evacuate them because they jumped on punji stakes. I used to take these punji stakes, which are slivers of bamboo, sometimes two and three feet long, and coat them with human feces or dried human feces and animal dung and whatnot, and that stuff could give your blood poisoning. And we had to change our mission and not one shot was fired. Once again, minimum means, maximum gain. Very good.

I was at the assistant operations officer job at the time, and there were about a dozen, well, maybe nine or 10 guys in the brigade headquarters. We were all captains and there's only one assistant operations officer, but we all carried the same title and we were sort of stacked up there. I can recall we would read the intelligence reports and listen to the intelligence briefings and there was some talk about a buildup of NVA forces along the Cambodian border area in the Chu Pong Mountain region. And we know that the first brigade had already been sent up there to try to develop it when the Plain East Special Forces Camp was attacked and the Calvary, I think the first and ninth cav got involved and so forth and so on. And as a follow on to that, we, the third brigade, were told were gonna replace the first brigade to maintain the pressure on the enemy. And I can remember Colonel Brown, who was a brigade commander at the time, standing at the map and it was a big star right around the vicinity of what later became LJ X-ray up on the slopes of Chu Pong Mountain and saying, "This is where we have to go."

And I remember I was asked to come to the map with Major Mallet, that's M-A-L-L-E-T, he was the brigade operations officer, and we were asked to pick out LZs and we tried to look for a landing zone that could take in at least a company at the time. In other words, you can get a company on the ground at the same time. That gives you enough firepower capability, maneuverability potential with a rifle company instead of a platoon at the time. I remember we picked out one which later became X-Ray. There was another one called Lime and Albany and a few others. And I remember Colonel Moore coming in and looking at the map and talking to his people about how are they going to make the reconnaissance over this area and fly in a certain kind of… confiscating so as not to give away the plan to the VC.

They went out and conducted their recon and came back and we were told that X-ray was going to be it, and all the other LZs were decoys. And other than that, we just assumed that it would be like it was for the first brigade, a relatively dry hole, and then we'd go back to On K and drink beer and write letters and so forth and so on.

And when the first or the seventh hit that opposition at X-ray, I was on duty in the TOC, tac operations center, sitting there trying to keep interested. It's so much boredom involved in the military and we would hear radio messages, you knew everyone's voice and we realized these guys really on to something. And then Matt Dillon, who was the Gregory Dillon, we called him Matt Dillon, he was the operations officer for Colonel Moore. He was usually pretty cool. He was very excited and I could tell that they were running into something.

I went and got Colonel Brown. Sir, I don't know what it is, but they've hit into something big. And we all stayed glued to the radios for that next day and a half or so. And of course you know the outcome. And I had no inkling because of the level that I was at that they were going to run into anything like that. It was only after the fact when all these war stories started coming out about all the power that they'd run into and everything that we realized we'd hit something big.

We kept a little blackboard about the size of that picture over there and we listed the first or seventh, second seventh, we had KIA, WIA and MIA. And we started like you do tic-tac toe, make four and then cross it and then four and then cross it. And we had gotten used to the idea of casualties, in the sense that from the first days in Vietnam, there were sort of nickel and dime things like two KIAs here, three KIAs there, one WIA here, here's a guy stepped on the mine, here's a guy that got hit by helicopter blades, all and so on that you learn how to live with. But it was only after the second or seventh had its tragedy that it became overwhelming when we ran out of space on the black board. And you couldn't hear guy's voices over the radio that you knew that you're dealing with and we knew by then that something terrible had gone wrong.

It was particularly difficult because after we realized what the first of the seventh had done, we were just so filled with euphoria, an acceptable level of casualties, we'd done so well and so forth and so on. And I remember with the second or the seventh, it was the same thing. We were sitting around everybody saying, "When's the colonel going to call this damn thing off so I can get back On K and get a beer?"

And myself and Sergeant Russell were sitting there and we started hearing all this shooting on the radio. You can hear wiper sounds over radio. They have a distinct sound. And people's voices started to rise and then all of a sudden we couldn't hear the S3 anymore or the operations sergeant, Sergeant Bass, because he was the guy. He was a very strong, outstanding NCO, who actually ran the operations shop because the captain down there was relatively new. And it was pandemonium. Once again, either myself or Russell, we went to wake up Colonel Brown or get him, he was so busy doing other things. And before you know it, everybody was standing around listening on the radio and something horrible was going on. And there were other radio nets in the TOC and I remember we tried to go over the fire support net, which is what the arterial uses to call in fire handles. It was pandemonium. And we all kind of looked at one another and then Sergeant Russell looked at me, he said, "Have you heard Sergeant Bass on the radio?" I said, "No." I remember half the guys didn't even bother to eat their C-rations. We were just so glued to that radio.

We had a little blackboard in the TOC. Oh, about 11 by 14, maybe a little larger. And we, as a way for everyone in the office, we were already of course putting it in reports and whatnot. For everyone that came in and out of the talk to realize the intensity of what was going on, you could look at the casualty figures, which we had listed by battalion and tell who was in contact and then you could go read the journals and you could listen to it on the radio. But this was a quick way to figure out who was getting hurt and who wasn't. And I remember by the time the second or seventh was being dealt with very severely at the LZ Albany that we literally ran out. We were doing it in columns, and we finally just had to erase the columns and put a total number for each battalion because we were running out of space because there were casualties were coming in so fast in 2nd and 7th. I remember that the reporting was coming in so fast and furious and there a lot of confusion. And we were reporting, of course, the General Kinnard's headquarters. And I don't think the reporting was accurate enough for them because, of course, they had to report General Westmoreland's headquarters down in Saigon. And so they sent a lieutenant colonel down to the talk, and I remember I was on duty at the time and he sat down beside me, he said, "John, what the hell's going on?" And I said, "Well sir, I better talk to the brigade commander. He wants me to check with him before we report anything to division." And I remember I went to get the brigade commander and he came into the talk and he had some words with lieutenant colonel as if to say, "The last thing we got to worry about is report to you. We're trying to sort out what was going on."

And very important in a period like this to figure out where the problems are so that you can assist units that are in heavy contact and, of course, emotions were running high because we knew people were dying and so forth and so on. I can't recall the actual timeframe because we were there for Lord knows how long, but I remember looking up and seeing General Westmoreland and he was there, as well as his aide, and then General Larson, who had what we used to call forced victory, the train, that was the intermediate headquarters between the division and General Westmoreland's headquarters. And these stars were standing around, they were looking over our shoulders. And then I don't remember exactly when I see Hanson Baldwin and Senator Tower, I think they both arrived at the same time. They had been traveling to Vietnam.

I remember Hanson Baldwin with this old reporters pad out saying, "What happened to 2nd and 7th?" When you can just ask anybody in particular. I had an additional duty as the information officer, which meant that I had to brief the press and I didn't particularly like talking to people at that level. I didn't want because the information was constantly being modified and refined. And I remember, thank God, Colonel Meyer, who later became Chief of Staff of the Army, Shy Meyer, Edward C. Meyer was a brigade executive officer. He was in second in command and he came over to me and I remember he told Mr. Baldwin, who kept banging away in my ear, he said, "I'm now the information officer." Captain Cash got many important things to do. And we had a briefing tent, which was a parachute that we used as an overhead cover. And then you had sawdust floor with ammunition casing, empty ammunition boxes as seats, and that's where most of the briefings would be conducted.

I remember with very grave looks on their faces, Colonel Moore and General Larsen, General Westmoreland standing in front of the map and the exchange got a little heated at times. It became obvious, as I said, as the time passed that a tremendous beating had been given to the 2nd and 7th. I became so distraught when the casualty figures went above 200 that I remember... All of us were tired and we were sleeping around the CT in pup tents.

And I can recall, I just got up and walked out of the tent when I realized that a good friend of mine, a captain had been killed trying to save another guy's life. I remember Major Malay came out to my tent and kicked it. He said, "You going to come back to work?" And I said, "Sir, I can't deal with it." I said, "I just got to get myself together." I wrote my wife a letter and I said, "I'm wondering whether I'm cut out to be a soldier. I didn't know it was going to be like this."

And then they brought in a refrigerated van at our CT location in which they... I suppose that was a transfer point to bring in the bodies and whatnot. It was just a very traumatic experience. We could just about see from where we were located, we were at a place called Catecka, which was an old French Vietnamese tea plantation. And off in the distance we could see the B-52 strikes going on in Ia Drang. And they would send them in in trail. We couldn't see the bombs drop, but you could just about catch the glint with the silver on the wings. And I remember the whole time we were there, all you heard were bombs being dropped, and explosions, and artillery being fired just constantly without let up. And if that wasn't enough, before the Albany debacle, we got attacked at the brigade headquarters.

And at night, this maybe happened about a day before the 1st or the 7th, or the 2nd or 7th debacle happened. It's been so long. And I think they put about 10 or 15 rounds in the air of 81 and 82 HE, high explosive rounds, before the first one hit the ground. Now I hate to say it this late date, but very few of us had actually dug in. We were laying in pup tents and we didn't think that that was going to happen to us. I recall we had about seven or eight guys killed and Lord knows how many wounded, and I remember we counted at least 50 or so tail fins still sticking in the ground trying to estimate how many rounds they had fired at us. I'll never forget that night because there was a young kid... I remember seeing a pup tent where a round that landed right next to it and you see the guy's boots sticking out where it obviously killed him. And we were running around trying to sort guys out and see who was seriously wounded, one was a young kid with blonde hair sitting there kind of dazed. So I walked up to him, I said, "You okay?" And he said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Here," and I took my canteen and gave him a drink of water. I said, "Wait right here and we'll get you back to An Khe." And I remember when... I forget when I think I went to check on him to see if the medics had gotten him and the guy was dead and I couldn't believe it. I said, "What do you mean he's dead?" They had him covered up in a poncho laying on the stretcher. And he said, "Well, he died of shock or something." To this day I didn't know that that could happen to a guy.

I remember Colonel Meyer sitting in the one building that we had at this location reading the Bible when it all quieted down a bit. He's a very, very religious guy. And the saddest look in his face about what had happened. We knew we were in a war. And then after it was all over, we loaded up on trucks, and Jeeps, and whatnot, and the decision was made for us to drive from Pleiku back to An Khe.

Now, the mode of transportation in those days was to put the troop strength guys in the rifle companies in what we called cattle cars because that's literally what they were just cram guys into them. I suppose a cattle car could hold maybe 50 to 70 guys, maybe a little more than a platoon, which would be what, maybe three or four... It's been so long. Two or three maybe cattle cars per rifle company. Now you got to recall that the fighting strength of the 2nd and 7th and the 1st and 7th were three rifle companies each. All that was left at the 2nd and 7th, I think it was in one and a half cattle cars, I'm not sure. But it was very, very small. And we drove back to An Khe and went through the gate and I remember General Kinnard was standing there with the division staff and the band was playing Gary Owen, and it was pitiful because we all looked back behind us. We were in the lead because we brigade headquarters and the 1st and 7th was right behind us and the 2nd and 7th was right behind them. I think they had about two cattle cars, and I can recall the duffle bags. Each guy, when you went out in the field, all your belongings were kept in the duffle bag on top of your bunk, on top of your cot. Usually, when the guy would get killed, they would appoint an officer to inventory his personal effects. I remember seeing right away, we all leaned out our vehicle. We wanted to go around and see who'd been killed and so on, looking for friends. And I remember seeing one of the lieutenants on one knee, checking out all the guy's personal belongings, inventorying because they were sending it over. They would also publish the names of KIA's in the Daily Bulletin. In any unit in the military, you always have a daily bulletin and it lists things of a professional nature, announcements that everyone will read, remember, or admonishments by division commander. And at the end of the Daily Bulletin, they would always have an appended page, which would list the guys who were killed by name, rank, and serial number, and if anyone had any claims against the state. They had so many casualties. I remember that thing went up to about four or five pages and then they started adding to it the congratulatory messages from the rest of the military, especially the Marines who think that they can do better than anyone for anything. I remember the Marine Commandant, I don't recall his name at the time, had this long glowing tribute to the first calvary guys of what they'd done.

We went back and, of course, Thanksgiving Day was a few days away and I remember that Thanksgiving dinner, very, very somber. Very, very somber. And I remember there was a joke among some of the survivors of the 2nd and 7th. I remember Captain... He was later killed on another Vietnam tour. I remember him walking and said, "You want a rifle company?" He said, "You can have mine right now." Because so many guys had been wounded. One guy showed me his rifle had been shot out of his hands and we just kept hearing war story after war story. I remember everybody was talking about Lieutenant Marm and what he'd done and they said, "Well, he'll never be Adonis because they shot him in the face or something."

And then after all that was over, Colonel Brown and Colonel Moore went off to, I think it was a three-day weekend, R and R to Dalat. And Colonel Moore had grabbed me and said, "We had our moment in history." I said, "Whatever you say sir." He said, "I want you to write up the after action report." And so we loaded up a Jeep on a Caribou that used to be in the Army inventory type aircraft, but now it's in the Air Force. And I remember the two pilots and I and crew chief was sitting there waiting for these guys to show up and they showed up, both colonels. And on the flight to Dalat, which is a big resort up in the Highlands. Colonel Moore would yell in my ear about, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. And he'd show me stuff. He'd written it all down on about 10 pages of yellow legal paper. And then we landed at the airstrip at Dalat and the contingent of people showed up and Colonel Moore looked at me and winked and said, "I'll see you in a couple days." We went back in a couple days and picked him up. He showed me some corrections he'd made to the manuscript and I took that manuscript and I remember holding onto it. And when I got back, we got the word that they were going to put the 3rd brigade in for Presidential Unit Citation. And once again, since I had been talked to by Colonel Moore, Colonel Brown said, "You're going to write it." I said, "Yes, sir." So I started writing it and then I was later told that I think JD was coming down from division that they decided that they put the entire division in for the PUC because how can you separate out the units that were not in the 3rd Brigade that supported the 3rd Brigade. Said, "Well, for example, the Air Force contingent, the general support helicopters, other artery battalions who didn't normally support the 3rd Brigade." And so the decision was made to put the entire division for the award. And even then, even though we knew that we had done something big, the enormity of what we had accomplished didn't really hit home until my wife started sending me newspaper clippings and things. And then, thereafter, when I came back to Vietnam, or rather to the States, I was stunned to listen to the military history that I began to realize that something real big had happened. Like I said, you could have been in the Battle of Gettysburg and not know that there was the most bloody battle in Civil War. If your worldview was just to your left and to your right.

And then, when I was doing research on the battle for the chapter in Seven Firefights, I remember going to the Defense Intelligence Agency to try to get any intelligence on what the enemy perception of what they did. And I found out that they lied as much as they say we do in terms of what they accomplished. They killed the first Cav division 20 times over and so forth and so on. I remember that we had a lessons learned conference where we would sit around and talk about, "Well, what have we learned about this operation or are our artillery techniques good? How about our maneuver capabilities?" And I remember Colonel Moore and Colonel Brown, both saying one of the lessons learned was an American troops are too aggressive. I never thought I'd hear that. That we have all these advantages. We had artillery all kinds of firepower capabilities and maneuver, being able to move the helicopter so fast that don't be too aggressive where you put yourself in a position where you lose your advantage.

Case in point, if you get less than 50 meters away from the enemy, you're going to be pretty darn crazy to call in your own artillery because of what they call a circular area of probable. That means that any round, the closest it can get to the target is within a 50-meter circle. So you always try to stay outside the 50-meter range to make sure you could use it. And the VC knew that, and so they would try to hug us knowing that we couldn't use the artillery and that, therefore, they could then say, "You just like we are. We have rifles and you have rifles and all who sees whom first."

But I later became a company commander, in January I think it was, and morale was sky-high because of the accomplishments. And we started getting all kinds of VIP press, people coming over to talk to us. I remember Howard Tuckner, NBC News, going out with my company a couple of times. We had a guy MIA who later found out he was kidnapped by the VC and executed. But I remember we went out with him and he wanted to be right up in front with everybody and it was just a good thing.

I was still the assistant operations officer, and by this time, Colonel Moore had been promoted to full Colonel from Lieutenant Colonel. Had taken over the 3rd brigade. Colonel Brown had gone down to work in [inaudible]. And I was sitting in the talk, White Wing was in operation at the time, and I remember Dylan came over to me and said, "You have your field gear with you." I looked at him like he was crazy. I said, "Man, I'm in Vietnam. What do you think?" He said, "You're now C Company commander. I said, why?" He said, "Captain Kroger was seriously wounded in action." He was the C Company commander. He'd been my bunk mate over on the boat. And I remember they told me, "Get on that helicopter, take some sea rations."

And they flew me out to the C company and I could tell the pilot was taking fire because you can tell out of where they fly and he was evading and whatnot and he just hovered and I jumped out and I hit the ground and Lieutenant Applegate was the C Company commander crawled over to me and he handed me a compass, binoculars, and his what we call SOI, signal operating instructions. It has all your code words for you call signs and whatnot. Then he tried to get back on that helicopter. I said, "Wait a minute. I don't even know anybody's name." I said, "Let's figure out what's going on." He told me that they had had two KIAs, two guys killed, two sergeants, and they were trying to retrieve their bodies. I later found out that the reason why he got relieved and they didn't give him the company after Kroger got shot up was because in the army you never leave an American dead or wounded on the battlefield. And when they call you up and say, "All your people president accounted for," he said yes and didn't tell the battalion commander that there were two guys that still had not been retrieved. And so that was my first mission to go get these two sergeants. And they being other leaders in the company didn't want Lieutenant Applegate around and one Lieutenant said, "Get him out of this company, Sir, quick," and so on and so on.

I found out everybody's name and the different call signs and I said, "Go ahead and continue on your mission." And we had one platoon trying to approach where the bodies were. They'd been laying out in the rice paddy a couple of days, all bloated and stiff and whatnot. I remember the first one we got to, the guy's wallet had been, obviously, looked at and you see pictures of his family and his kids and whatnot laying all over the place and there were about three or four dead enemy by him.

But that was my first introduction to White Wing, and thereafter, it was just one thing after another. We were always moving. We never stayed, as I recall, in any one place longer than three or four days. We just moving all over Northeastern Bình Định Province. And if you weren't in contact yourself, that is to say that when the rifle company went out, you always were within mutually supporting distance. What do I mean by that? That means that although you may not have been able to see the other companies you were in radio contact with them so that you could be either airlifted to support him, say B Company if they got into contact or vice versa if C Company, my company, got into contact or you try to stay within mortar range so that our mortars, if he ran into trouble, could support him.

We had a particularly rough operation one day. I don't remember exactly when. I know we were working in concert with B Company because I saw the best demonstration of used artillery I'd ever seen or heard of. When he got into trouble in a village with... He made contact with a heavy pavan on North Vietnamese force. And I remember just through the use of artillery, they were able to break contact. That orchestrated artillery was the best use of it I've ever seen. And I remember after that happened, you could actually look through the binoculars and see the enemy over in the building. We also see women and children and we were in one part of the village and maybe there was a 100, 150 meter open space of rice paddy and I was sitting down eating lunch and they had these big earthen jars all situated throughout the village where the Vietnamese store rice in them. And we saw one of them moving and kept looking and all of a sudden the guy jumps out. It was a [inaudible] he had on a khaki uniform. He obviously was disheveled and whatnot, and he had his hands over his head and was chatting away in Vietnamese. And about four or five of them all of a sudden came out of hiding. They were right in among us. And I remember calling the battalion commander and telling him. And a few days later we found five or six, what they call 12.7 millimeter heavy machine guns. Two of them still packed in cosmoline that they had set up and they were equivalent to our 50 caliber. We actually used them that night and put them in our perimeter defense. I remember they had green tracers and a helicopter pilot saw us firing one of them, test firing. He said, "Man, if they was shooting one of those things at me, I think I'll order rotate” which is a way you can get on the ground and resign from the army and go back and be a farmer or something.

But we were quite proud of that because they put them all on a helicopter or two helicopters. I remember we flew back to division headquarters and I went up to G2 with the lieutenant platoon leader and his platoon sergeant who had found him first and we presented him to said, "Get me to General Kinnard and tell him that C Company says, what else do you want done for your country?" And we were disheveled, we stank, and hadn't shaved this, that and the other, and the MPs were looking at us because we were kind of scroungy and said, "Let's get on back to where the real war is troops." And we just walked on back to our company and got on the helicopter and went back out.

But they mounted two of those machine guns in front of the division headquarters, and I remember they didn't say where they came from. There was some guys in the company. This was later actually went out there and put a sign them and said, "A courtesy of Charging Charlie the C Company." But the morale was high. I remember that was where I had my first experience with how KIH can really affect you other than the previous experiences that I had.

I had a young kid named Douglas Weiss who had tried to get home by making up a bogus story that his mother was deathly ill. And, of course, Red Cross checked it out and found out that she was not ill. And I called him in. I said, "Look Weiss, I said, "Everybody's going to come back. I'm the most cautious company commander in the world." I said, "All of us going to go home." And he kind of looked at me and said, "Well, I tried." I said, "Just stay cool and be careful." When we got into our first firefight and watched Masher/White Wing, he was kneeling on one side of a banyan tree firing at a rifle. And I kept looking at him and I said, "Well, he keeps that up, maybe can put him in for medal or something." I turned around to talk on the radio and I was standing up, turned back around, half his head was gone. And I remember we wrapped him up in a poncho it was raining so we couldn't get him out. And he laid there in the jungle off in a little distance while we waited for a helicopter the next day. I've never forgotten him. And when I got back here to Washington and they finally finished the Vietnam Memorial, his was the first name I went to look for because I remember I heard, but I didn't get directly involved, that there was a big argument between his parents. I'm not sure whether they're separated or not, who got the insurance money or something.

And then another big experience we had, we had a young kid named Vance who was kidnapped by the VC. We got to this town, they gave us about a three-day break where we'd go get some showers. They set up a shower point at a stream near this village and we were told, if you go through the village, don't ever go by yourself and always carry a weapon. And the MPs would even travel around in threes and fours, and we had this young whipper snapper named Vance. He had been in the 82nd Airborne and to come from Dominican Republic and he had the CIV couldn't have been more than 19, 20 years old. And he used to give us hell about carrying on and everything, and it sort of created a friendly rivalry and he'd lost a friend of his or whatever, but apparently he disobeyed orders and took a rifle and just went on and said he was going down to the village, I forget the name of the village, and get drunk and get laid. And it was only about five or six hours after he was missing that the platoon had enough guts to come and tell me that the guy was missing. And so I got most of the company together. The guys were taking showers all over the place and we went out and tried to figure out where he was, couldn't find him. Then I decided before it was getting dark, I better go tell Colonel Moore and I don't have to tell you what kind of reaction I got for that. The next day, we took the entire battalion out looking for him and never found him.

I remember that's when Howard Tuckner joined us and he wanted to be up front. Can't forget him because he'd always comb his hair before he'd get in front of the camera. And I told the point man to recon by fire when we move through the jungle, which means if you see something worth shooting at go ahead and do it. And Howard Tuckner couldn't tell the enemy fire from the friendly tire. And every time he'd hear a burst of some fire he'd dived down on the ground. He had on this real sharp looking expensive jumpsuit. And we'd all kind of look at him.

And I came back to the States and about a year or so later, the casualty branch called me up. I used to check with them and Colonel Moore was station at the Pentagon used to do the same. They finally told us they found Vance's body. And when I looked at the coordinates said was not too far from where we'd been looking for him, he'd been riding a motor scooter with a Vietnamese woman holding on back behind him. The VC kidnapped him and executing on the spot and buried his body.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Col. John Anthony Cash. Next week, we’ll hear the rest of his interview, where he tells more incredible stories, reflects on the war as a whole, and talks about coming home.

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