Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
reorganizations. Major Nagata came back to the United States and I replaced him as adviser
to the 20th Engineer Group. The 41st now had changed its designation to become the 201st
Battalion, and we had a 202d Battalion and a light equipment company.
My motivation was not to get caught up like Nagata had by being the assistant Corps post
engineer in the main compound, which by now was up to 400, 450 people. It was getting to
be a sizable responsibility, and I didn't want to get captured by the headquarters. I figured I'd
better stay out with the troops, so we established a compound near the engineer group
headquarters at a place called Suoi Doi. That was at a crossroads that was about one-third of
the way from Pleiku toward An Khe.
We operated from Suoi Doi. The group commander was Major Chan, and that was an
interesting four months because, as much as I had to cajole before, I now had a completely
different kind of person to deal with. I now had a very political counterpart who spoke
relatively good English, but it wasn't just a matter of persuading and making it seem his idea.
There were these agendas and intrigue because he was tied into the Vietnamese political
chain. He was tied close enough that he could follow what the Vietnamese command wanted
to do, and it was not always easy to decipher what that was. There were lots of "I agree," and
then lots of nonaction.
What became apparent was that maybe some of the nonaction I'd seen down in the battalion
earlier had been because his instructions to the battalion commander were, "Don't do that."
So, this was a period where we were often arguing, often persuading--very interesting kind
of period.
It also marked another episode that had historical ties to what later happened when the
country collapsed because, if you remember, the collapse was precipitated when the II Corps
commander decided to withdraw his Corps to Nha Trang. They started overland, down
toward Cheo Reo, then Cung Son and down to Tuy Hoa. Years later when I read that was
happening, my comment was, "They'll never make it." They didn't. They were really carved
up by the Vietcong as they made that withdrawal. In the late fall of '62 when I was an
engineer group adviser, we were told to open that road, the same road that the Corps was
going to try to withdraw on later on.
I made the initial recons. It was not bad as far as Cheo Reo. From Cheo Reo on to Cung Son,
though, it was basically a trail, and then we had the Song Ba River, which came south from
An Khe and flowed through Phu Ban Province. The Song Ba was quite wide and flooded
considerably in the spring and needed a lot of bridging. Beyond the Song Ba River on the
way to Cung Son--this is where I said I knew they'd never make it, later on--the old road
was no longer even two beaten wheel tracks. It had overgrown down to one sandy path. As
we cut the road, we would have to send people in to clear and grub by hand and by dozer as
we would try to just scrape away the tremendous growth that happens in the highlands during
the rainy season.
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