World: INCIDENT IN SONG CHANG VALLEY

I am sorry, sir, but my men refused to go . . . We cannot move out.

Repeat that, please. Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?

I think they understand, but some of them simply had enough—they are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Viet Nam. They want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.

As it first appeared in newspapers around the world, that anguished exchange by field telephone between a battle-weary young infantry lieutenant on a Vietnamese hill and his battalion commander was disturbingly reminiscent of classic episodes of battlefield rebellion. Ground down to two-thirds of its original strength after five days of sharp combat, a U.S. Army unit—Company A of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade’s 3rd Battalion—had balked at orders to advance once again on well-bunkered North Vietnamese positions.

The incident, which took place in rolling, heavily jungled country in the Song Chang river valley, 30 miles south of Danang, came to light accidentally. Associated Press Photographer Horst Faas happened to be sitting in Lieut. Colonel Robert C. Bacon’s 3rd Battalion headquarters when it occurred. The brief episode spanned less than an hour, and it directly involved six of Company A’s 60 men: five fatigued and panicky G.I.s and Lieut. Eugene Shurtz Jr., 26, a green company commander whose basic error, as another officer put it, was that “he tried to reason with the men when the situation called for a boot in the tail.” At the present stage of the war, the Song Chang incident seemed symptomatic of U.S. fatigue with the continuing bloodshed. It hardly presaged, however, any general collapse of battlefield will, as some early reactions to the report seemed to suggest. In the field, in fact, Alpha Company’s travail was soon shrugged off as a curious but isolated incident born of unusual circumstances.

A Leadership Problem. The company’s ordeal began on Aug. 12, when Communist troops launched an assault on fire-support base “West,” an isolated U.S. post on a 1,000-ft. ridgeline overlooking the Song Chang valley. Reconnaissance probes determined that North Vietnamese soldiers, often disguised in South Vietnamese uniforms, were well-entrenched around the base, occupying elaborate bunkers emplaced in rice terraces and on boulder-strewn hills.

Early in the battle, Bacon’s predecessor as battalion commander, Lieut. Colonel Eli P. Howard Jr., was killed when his helicopter was shot down; seven others died with him, including A.P. Photographer Oliver Noonan. The 3rd Battalion troops, including Alpha Company, set out to fight their way to the crash site. In temperatures that rose to well over 100° F. in the heavy, stale air trapped among the hills, Alpha Company experienced its first violent contact with the enemy, suffering three dead and two wounded in a fierce firefight at the foot of a low hill called Nui Lon. The North Vietnamese left 20 bodies. There were more contacts during the next two days, then an evening barrage of 82-mm. fire, followed by a predawn fusillade of small-arm fire. After five days of fighting, Alpha Company’s mud-caked survivors were exhausted, thirsty, hungry—and scared.

Ordered to recover the bodies of two G.I.s who had died at the foot of Nui Lon, Lieut. Shurtz radioed: “We cannot move out.” Lieut. Colonel Bacon pressed him for an explanation. ”We have a leadership problem up here,” admitted Shurtz, an ROTC graduate from Davenport, Iowa, who had been in command of the company—normally a captain’s post—for just three weeks. When Shurtz told Alpha to advance, five of his G.I.s stepped forward and demanded a helicopter in order to see the Inspector General. “Everybody was afraid,” said one G.I. “We felt we should wait for some more support.” Bacon asked for a count of the men who would not go, but Shurtz begged off because “they all stick together.”

Under orders to “kick ass,” as Bacon put it in classic military terms, the battalion executive officer and a top NCO helicoptered into A Company’s hilltop camp. They found Shurtz emotionally wrung out; the five protesting G.I.s, draftees of 19 and 20, poured out a sullen catalogue of grievances: the constant fire fights, lack of sleep, hot food and mail, fear of annihilation by Communists in well-protected bunkers. “One of them yelled to me that his company had suffered too much and that it should not have to go on,” said Sergeant Okey Blankenship, a big, tough, 29-month Viet Nam veteran from Panther, W. Va. Blankenship replied that the enemy had abandoned the bunkers, and other companies far worse off than Alpha were still in action. “Maybe,” he barked, “they have got something a little more than what you have got.” Within minutes, Alpha was sheepishly moving out.

Caught in the Middle. Though Army spokesmen insisted that the problem was confined only to the five protesters, most of the company had in fact backed them up. “Nobody wanted to go back down the hill,” Private First Class Fred Sanders, a 23-year-old Alpha Company medic, later told newsmen. “I guess the lieutenant was caught in the middle between us and the battalion.”

No action was taken against any of the men. Bacon, who felt that the company had been “dragging its feet” all along—”I would tell them to move out at 0600 and they would move out at 0630″—promptly transferred Shurtz to an administrative post at battalion headquarters and brought in an experienced captain. The Army insisted that the incident was not unusual and certainly did not amount to a “whiff of mutiny,” as New York Times Columnist James Reston called it. Said Bacon: “I’ve seen similar things happen before.” So have the troops. Two weeks ago, Specialist Four Robert M. Ferris of Wildwood, N.J., assigned to another company in the Song Chang area, wrote home griping about a green officer. “If I think my life will be in danger by doing some of his crazy things,” he wrote, “I’ll just tell him I’m not going anywhere.”

The account of Alpha Company’s trial came from Photographer Faas and a fellow A.P. man, Reporter Peter Arnett, who were in the area, as Photographer Noonan had been, to cover the battle of Song Chang. Faas was with Lieut. Colonel Bacon when Shurtz’s call came in, and he took down the excited dialogue. He picked up the rest of the narrative when Sgt. Blankenship and Bacon’s exec returned from their visit to the company, then passed the details on to Arnett, who put the story on the wire. Neither man saw or spoke to anyone at Alpha firsthand; no reporters did until week’s end. Their basic account held up, but their report that “nearly all the soldiers of A Company broke” was plainly exaggerated.

So Senseless. It is true that examples of balking on the battlefield are plentiful in any war. In last May’s battle for Hamburger Hill, a series of futile attempts to take the summit brought one badly bloodied company to the point of refusing to move again because, as one G.I. said, “we felt it was all so senseless.” It is doubtful that such incidents are more common in Viet Nam than they have been in other wars. What does seem clear is that, given the war-weariness on the home front as well as the fatigue in the field, they strike a more sympathetic chord.