"..In the Beginning" 404th RRDet Story by Don Collins dcollins@gte.net

When we left Bangkok the plane flew to Saigon from Udorn, and I was the only one to get off. I could feel 150 people wondering if I was brain-damaged, or what. As I started to process into the 3rd RRU I learned that there was an opening in Detachment D, which was supporting the 173rd Airborne Brigade. It seemed one of the 286's had stepped on a punji stake, and had to be evacuated. I arrived at Detachment D in Bien Hoa the day that a sniper killed one of the sergeants, nice to get off to a good start.

During the next couple of months I went out on a few operations with them. The CO had a thing about having one of every type of radio being used on his jeep. This upset one of my co-workers, because he was always assigned to drive the CO, and when the shooting started anything with an antenna usually drew immediate fire. The CO's jeep normally had five or six antennas on it. He worried about that a lot. One day, while in a convoy, a truck backfired. No big deal. Then the CO noticed that the jeep was beginning to roll backward. He looked over, and found the jeep was in neutral, and the driver, my co-worker, was gone. The CO put on the parking brake, went looking for his driver, and found him hiding in a ditch. He did get an Article 15 for that one.

Then a chance came along to go on a battalion team, and I took it. We were assigned to the 4th Battalion 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment on their first operation. Initially one battalion of the 173rd had been Australian. When they pulled that unit out to form an Australian regiment, the 4th Battalion was sent in, originally being part of the 82nd Airborne.

A Colonel that was apparently new at the job commanded the battalion. The first day out he got us lost. On the morning of the second day, he shot-up one of his own companies. That afternoon he managed the unique feat of mortaring his own headquarters, killing one, and wounding four. There is a well known picture, that is still seen from time to time, that shows two soldiers in a small misty clearing, looking up, and waiting for a helicopter to come in and pickup the body bag at their feet. The guy in the body bag was the one killed in the mortar "attack". My partner, Rick Dawes, and I were 20 to 30 feet to the left of the photographer when the picture was taken.

Things settled down after that. Presumably, the Colonel delegated the map reading to someone who knew how. We spent the next four weeks chasing the 5th North Vietnamese Division around the jungle, without any solid contacts. Got to make a couple of air assaults, did a lot of walking, and spent a lot of time being wet.

When we got back, things had changed. They completely revamped the way we operated, and we no longer would send out battalion teams. In addition, a headquarters battalion had arrived at Long Binh, and we now reported to them. Our unit name was changed to the 404th Radio Research Detachment.

One thing battalion decided to do, was have a full-blown IG inspection. We really didn't have time for this bull%$#t, but there wasn't much we could do about it. The trouble was that over time we had acquired quite a few things that we felt we needed, but weren't in the Table of Organization and Equipment. We had to do something, and finally decided to load the stuff in trucks, and hide it. When the time came for the inspection, the inspectors, who were supposed to be conducting a very thorough inspection, never caught on to the fact that there were five trucks missing, five men missing, and about once an hour a little five truck convoy was driving by, with the drivers all looking in to see what was going on. It all worked out.

We had a helicopter pad across the road from us, containing all of the Brigade's gunships. The other side of the pad was the perimeter and a large minefield. On the other side of the valley was a South Vietnamese fort, and the town of Bien Hoa. At one end of the valley was the airbase. It was felt that the Viet Cong would not be dumb enough to enter a valley that had military installations on three sides, and the gunships were considered secure.

One night they came through the wire, and blew up the gunships with claymores. As soon as the shooting started, our extremely gung-ho XO fixed his bayonet and went charging out the door, bayoneting the company clerk, who was running in the door. Before it was over shrapnel would wound three other sergeants. In addition a truck coming back from town, loaded with 173rd soldiers on pass, was hit with a claymore, killing four and wounding thirteen. I don't remember how many gunships had been on the pad, but only two survived the attack, and one of those was heavily damaged. The gunships were never parked there again.

On another night, we were sitting in the club watching TV, and the whole room just lit up like brilliant sunlight. As we turned around, the sound wave of a huge explosion hit us. They had blown up the Long Binh ammo dump. There was a column of fire about 1,000 feet in the air. We were about five miles away as the crow flies, and could read a small print paperback book by the light of the fire.

Over at battalion things weren't going well. They were near the ammo dump, and the explosion blew down two walls of the communications center, sweeping every piece of paper out into a field. When things settled down they had everyone in the headquarters unit out in the field with flashlights, trying to find all the classified documents, that were blowing in the wind.

The Long Binh ammo dump was blown up two more times while I was in Bien Hoa, but the first time was the most spectacular.