John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis. Cold War Oral History Project Interview with Col. William H. Dabney, USMC (Ret.), by Jim Dittrich, September 8, 2005
About the Interviewer:
LTC Jim Dittrich (USA, Ret.), VMI Class of 1976, is Vice President of Operations for a Time Warner Publisher, Leisure Arts, in Little Rock, AR.. Jim is a former VMI Tactical Officer and Instructor of Military History in the Army ROTC Department. He was selected for the Army War College and promotion to Colonel following his Battalion Command. He retired from the Army with 22 years of service in 1999. Jim has a Master’s Degree from Boston University in International Relations.
Dabney: Before we start Jim, read this:
The Next Stop is Saigon By Colonel William H. Dabney, USMC (Ret) For the Marine Corps Gazette, June 1998
I met General Lewis B. Puller in the spring of 1957. I was a sergeant on active duty on leave after a Far East tour, and was near the end of my three year hitch. He had recently retired, lived near my home in Virginia, and was a friend of my father. We met at the funeral of a mutual cousin, to which I had worn my uniform because it was the only appropriate attire I had. Because the old church was too small for everyone, the ladies were inside, and the men were gathered around the grave site in quiet conversation. He spotted the uniform and introduced himself in his gruff way, asking me about myself and what I had done in the Corps. I was flattered by his interest, which I later learned extended to all Marines. After the burial, he asked me to come to see him. When I called to follow up on his invitation he asked me for lunch, after which the two of us repaired to the porch with some Virginia bourbon.
My impressions of that afternoon remain vivid. He was reading when I arrived, and there were books
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scattered all over the house. As we talked, he was unfailingly patient with my ignorance. I was impressed (awed might be a better word) by the breadth and depth of his thinking about geopolitics and military history, and my respect for this aspect of the man deepened as I pursued my own studies at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Marine Corps schools, and the National War College. In effect, I knew the man before I knew the legend.
The legend, then, does not portray entirely the Marine I knew. He was much more than the medals and 'one liners' for which he is remembered today. I have long felt that to be the Corps' loss because the young men who strive to emulate him today cannot know him for what he really was. God knows we need our heroes. We should not let them be remembered only because they were brave and, as he often described himself, lucky.
It is in that spirit that I have written out my recollections of the conversation, for whatever value they may have to the readers of the Gazette.
He had many questions about Okinawa, where the 3d Marine Division had recently moved from Honshu Island, Japan. He was particularly interested in how we trained and how much live-fire training we conducted. When he asked what my plans were, I said I'd been accepted at VMI and intended to return for a career upon graduation. I then asked what he thought was in store for the Marine Corps in the future. He replied that he thought a NATO war unlikely, and we'd probably fight next in Vietnam. He recalled his Marines singing about Saigon as they marched into Hungnam from the Chosin Reservoir in December of 1950. ("So put back your pack on/The next stop is Saigon/'An cheer up me lads/Bless 'em all," as quoted in Robert Leckie's The March to Glory, p. 192.)
Vietnam, he said, was essentially a colonial struggle, unresolved because of the Geneva partition. The Soviets were using it, through support of Ho Chi Minh, to extend Soviet hegemony in the area. In turn, the United States regarded a North Vietnamese attempt to conquer the south as a threat to American interests in accordance with the 'domino theory' - that the loss of South Vietnam risked the eventual loss
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of all Southeast Asia to the Soviets. The Vietnamese, he suggested, regarded the growing American involvement as offering little more than prospect of one colonial power replacing another.
When I asked how he thought the war would end, he replied, without hesitation, "The Red Chinese Army will win it without firing a shot."
That leap of military logic was a bit large for a young buck sergeant to understand, and I asked him to fill in the blanks. He began by regretting that he did not have good maps with which to explain. He then discussed Korea, saying that the decisive force in the war and the subsequent peace was the U.S. Seventh Fleet. This was so because the peninsular geography of Korea restricted the maneuver of large armies, whether North Korean or Chinese. They were forced to attack on narrow fronts where they offered good targets for the superior firepower that American industry could provide, and their flanks and supply lines were always vulnerable from the sea. He said that President Truman's decision to accept a partial victory rather than widen the war into China was correct. We could not have fought two continental campaigns at once, and Europe would therefore have been put at risk. Additionally, given our maritime superiority, widening the war was unnecessary to achieve our original Korean War objective. That objective, he reminded me, was to prevent a Communist takeover of South Korea by force, not as General MacArthur had later decided, to reunify Korea. He remarked that he considered General MacArthur's decision the classic example of Clausewitz' dictum that war tends to create its own momentum. (He would have agreed, I suspect, with President Bush's decision to stop after liberating Kuwait.)
All great powers want buffer states, and North Korea was precisely that to Red China. It could accept an American army in South Korea, but could not tolerate its approach to the Yalu. Its reaction was understandable and, he said, expected by most Marine and many Army officers at that time.
It was fortunate for Korea, he remarked, that President Rhee had placed South Korean forces under United Nations (effectively American) command. The ultimate right of command was the power to
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appoint and relieve subordinates, and we had left the South Korean forces in good shape by appointing competent officers who had proved their worth in battle. (I don't believe it occurred to him that we would not insist upon the same command relationship with South Vietnam.) He ended his discussion of Korea by saying that the Korean War was strategically necessary because, coupled with our military presence in Japan, it ensured our control of all straits leading out of the Sea of Japan, denying the Soviet Pacific Fleet unhindered access to the Pacific. It also gave us, in Japan, a secure offshore base from which to influence events in Northeast Asia as we chose. He reminded me that Admiral Mahan had called Japan "the England of the Pacific." Before discussing Vietnam, he said that wars should be fought only for vital national interests, and that those interests were few: survival, strategic position (as in Korea), resources/markets or access thereto, and in limited cases, cultural affinity. He suggested that "saving the world for democracy," however it was phrased, had never been acceptable as a vital interest by the American people. Had it been, we'd have joined the League of Nations after World War I. (He remarked to me in 1961, shortly after President Kennedy's inaugural address, that the President's "…we shall bear any burden, pay any price, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty," was grand rhetoric, but lousy strategy.) The domino theory was flawed, he said, because China and Russia were and always had been enemies (the Great Wall faces north, he pointed out). The Chinese would view Soviet control of Southeast Asia as an encirclement, and would either deny the Soviets supporting transportation links across China or march to prevent it. He explained that in redesigning our armed forces after World War II for the strategy of 'Massive Retaliation' made possible by nuclear weapons, we had neglected the forces and training to win a conventional war quickly and decisively. We would need time to reconfigure and retrain them, and would probably commit them piecemeal to Vietnam, which would give a resourceful and determined enemy like Ho Chi Minh time to adjust and fight on.
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General Puller believed that Korea and Vietnam posed similar strategic problems. Both were artificially divided. Both North Vietnam and North Korea were, with Soviet sponsorship, intent upon reunification; they both bordered Red China; they both were regarded by her as buffer states. But there were two critical differences. The strategic difference was that there was no vital American interest in Vietnam. It did not threaten American survival; it was not located where either American or Soviet bases would provide any strategic advantage; we depended on it for neither resources nor markets; we had no cultural links with its people. Consequently, there was even less justification for risking an all-out war with the Red Chinese over Vietnam than there had been over Korea. The operational difference was that Vietnam was not a peninsula. A large army can always outflank a small army if it has room to maneuver, and the long Chinese border with Vietnam, Laos, and Burma provides that room. Invading North Vietnam risked catastrophe by confronting the huge Red Chinese Army in a continental campaign where our fleet could not be decisive. Should we invade we would "Stand a damn good chance of being pushed into the sea" (his words). The North Vietnamese could not defeat us; but since we could not go north, neither could we defeat them. (When I later asked whether we could do so by bombing, he suggested I read the Strategic Bombing Survey done immediately after World War II, keeping in mind that North Vietnam was an agrarian nation.) Consequently, he said, should we commit forces to Vietnam, we would condemn our troops to a prolonged defensive campaign in South Vietnam in which North Vietnam retained the initiative. He cautioned that a salient characteristic of Asian peoples is patience. He then observed that democracies do not fight colonial wars well. Such wars tend to be long, he said. Absent a vital interest, the electorate of the democratic power eventually concludes that the marginal benefits of a victory are not worth the cost in casualties. Witness, he said, the British in India and the French in Indochina. The decision to withdraw was made in London and Paris, respectively, and not by force of arms in the field. He suggested that the same outcome was probable in Algeria and the other
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European colonies in Africa. In all cases, the defeat was (or would be) not military, but political. The North Vietnamese understood that reality, he said, having recently been one of its beneficiaries in the 1954 Geneva Accords. They would shape their tactics accordingly. Since a defensive campaign in a place with porous jungle borders would at best result in bloody stalemate, at some point the mothers of Peoria and Pocatello would grow weary of burying their sons and petition their elected representatives to bring them home. North Vietnam would then reunify the country on its terms, and the Red Chinese Army would have won the war without firing a shot. Note: In a later discussion (we had several before his health failed in the late 1960s) he remarked that an eventual rapprochement between America and China was inevitable and essential, and that if we withdrew from Vietnam rather than challenge China, we might create an opening to achieve it. Should that occur, he said, it would profoundly alter the strategic situation of the Soviet Union, which would then face the possibility of a two-front war against a steadily strengthening NATO and an industrializing China.
Dabney: I went into Vietnam assuming we were going to lose.
Dittrich: Based on just what you knew from discussions with General Puller?
Dabney: Yes, from discussions with him, the study I did and thinking about those things. So long as Red China and North Vietnam shared a common border, we could not go north and if we couldn’t go north we were condemned to a long defensive campaign in the south and since there was no vital American interest involved, eventually the American people would get tired of it and tell the Congress to bring us home – and they did. In fact, what happened was that every time we got feisty, the North Vietnamese army would withdraw into the shadow of the Red Chinese army where we couldn’t chase them and wait us out. We would draw down troops and relax and they’d come back. The NVA just kept doing that and eventually we went home and they took over. I could see it on a tactical level in the sense that – I’m not sure I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of critical objectives the unit I was associated
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with took and then abandoned. Then six months later or a year later, another unit would go back and do the same thing again. I was saying to myself we’re not making any headway here.
Dittrich: Kind of the story of Vietnam.
Dabney: Well, it was. That’s the problem Robert E. Lee had. You can’t win a defensive campaign. You’re got to destroy the enemy or his will to fight and we could do neither under the circumstances because of the presence of fifteen million men – the Red Chinese army – right up north. Their shadow cast all over Vietnam. Now, as Puller said, we had the same problem in Korea but the difference was Korea was a peninsula and that meant we could seal the flanks. A big army cannot outflank a small army if it can’t maneuver. There was no room to maneuver on the Korean peninsula, whereas on the Southeast Asian subcontinent – Indo-China – they had unlimited room to maneuver. Effectively that’s what the North Vietnamese did. We blocked off the DMZ and they went around it on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and went around the end of Vietnam and if we had blocked that, they’d have just moved a little further. They could go all the way through Thailand and Burma and all the way to the Bay of Bengal. We couldn’t block it all. All this was happening in the context of a serious confrontation between NATO and the Soviets on our Western front and that meant in order to be prepared to engage in a war with China, we would have had to draw down our forces in NATO which, of course, we wouldn’t do. That’s why we never went north. People who kept arguing that we should go north didn’t realize the broader perspective of what it would have cost us. In the first place, at that point in history, Red China did not represent any threat to the security of the United States of America and the Soviet Union most assuredly did, so where do you put your marbles?
Dittrich: You just shared with me your unit’s website (Warriors of Hill 881S) and showed me an article that you’d written for the Marine Corps Gazette some years back where General “Chesty” Puller had told you in 1957 what would happen in Vietnam. General Puller had a strategic side and saw the future of Vietnam seven or eight years ahead of time.
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Dabney: I went back over to Vietnam in 1970-71 and damned if they didn’t send me right back to Khe Sanh. This time it was for the purpose of sending the best South Vietnamese forces west from Khe Sanh to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Now, what General Westmoreland and General Abrams had in mind, I don’t know. This is triple canopy jungle, most of it. Yes, we sent our best ARVN troops out there (operation Lam Son 719). We cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail for about 48 hours. In the context of a 20 year war, which was the way the North Vietnamese looked at things, losing the trail for 48 hours was nothing. They just parked the trucks and waited until we left and kept right on rolling across. I could only guess – but we lost 10,000 men doing that – mostly South Vietnamese . I think you probably remember the images of the men falling off the helicopters.
Dittrich: I remember that as a big victory back here. Everybody heard that. Not true?
Dabney: No. It was a debacle of the first magnitude and I think it probably sealed South Vietnam’s fate because the best forces South Vietnam had came out of there convinced that they could not defeat North Vietnam. It was obvious their spirit had been broken.
Dittrich: And the next year was the Easter offensive.
Dabney: And from then on it was the NVA’s War.
Dittrich: Let me take you back, if I can. Let’s talk about your arrival and your first tour in Vietnam and what led to the hill fights.
Dabney: I had come back from a tour of duty at Marine barracks at Rota, Spain and went through the short course at the Amphibious Warfare School in the spring of ’67 and thereafter directly to Vietnam. I was assigned to the 3rd Marine Division. When I got there as an infantry officer, I was fairly senior as a captain and I wanted to command a company before I got promoted – a rifle company. This was my last best chance. So I went to division personnel and asked the personnel officer which battalions needed
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company commanders and he said, “Oh, several of them do.”
I said, “Well, where are they?”
He said, “Well, I can give you a list of who they are, but the operations officer can tell you better where they are because they do move around.”
I said, “O.K., I’ll walk over to operations with these battalion numbers and see where they are.” I looked at the operations map and there was one battalion that was down between Da Nang and Phu Bai. Another one was the "palace guard" at Phu Bai. A third one was convoy security between Quang Tri and Phu Bai. They were all up in the northern I Corps area. Then there was a fourth battalion, way in the living hell up – almost off the corner of the map – at a place called Khe Sanh. Khe Sanh, I’d never heard of it and I went back to the adjutant and said, “How about 3d Bn, 26th Marines at Khe Sanh?”
He said, “Sure, but why?”
I said, “Well, two reasons. One, I’ve always had the theory that an adequately commanded unit’s efficiency increases with the square of its distance from the next higher headquarters and two, this is far enough away from division headquarters so that you’ve probably got something useful going on.”
So, sure enough, they assigned me to 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines and I flew into Khe Sanh in a great cloud of dust. Nothing was going on up there. It was the 1st of September, 1967. The next day the whole battalion got ordered to the eastern DMZ, Con Thien. We mounted out that morning in a massive heli-lift and the battalion went into combat. Well, I had not even reported in yet. What they did was make me the headquarters commandant and in the course of the first six hours in the Con Thien area, my battalion ran into a well prepared North Vietnamese Army ambush. What the NVA did was canalize American units on the DMZ into their artillery killing zones. They had lots of artillery just north of the Ben Hai River and we couldn’t get back at them (they were north of the DMZ). In fact we could go north of the
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DMZ but for artificial political reasons, we couldn’t.
At that time, a U.S. Marine infantry battalion in full strength had about 1,300 men. Within four hours the battalion had lost between 450 and 500 of them killed and wounded. As the headquarters commandant, what I did was to superintend the arrival of these people back at the rear at Dong Ha where the medical facility was. I had to try and find out what was going on and make sure the wounded were being taken care of – recover their gear and all that sort of stuff.
I might add that I thought the triage used by the medical people was magnificent. There were some wounded men who obviously just weren’t going to make it. Some were shot in the head with brains leaking out, others with spinal cords severed, and the triage just eliminated them to take care of the guys whose real problem was, say, loss of blood. Now they got to these others eventually but by and large they were either dead or were going to die anyway. The medical system was quite overwhelmed. I remember one young PFC who was near death and ashen-face when he came in. They took one look at him, grabbed the stretcher, had him in the operating theater and maybe 45 minutes later I was walking through one of the surgical recovery wards and this same guy pulls a half-sit on his elbows and said, “Hey, Skipper, have you got a cigarette?” All he needed was some blood. They stopped the bleeding and he just needed some blood. I was impressed with the medical care.
Dittrich: Most of the injuries, then, were from artillery?
Dabney: Correct. Some gunshots, but the vast majority of them were shrapnel – 152mm howitzers and 130mm guns, firing from north of the DMZ, plus some rocket fire. The rockets were not that accurate. Rockets were area weapons. The NVA had obviously set up this area as an artillery kill zone.
Dittrich: So that was your exposure to Vietnam?
Dabney: Yes, welcome to Vietnam – and go on from here. Well, that evening the battalion commander
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came to me and told me to go take over Mike Company. Mike had lost all its officers and all but two of its Staff NCOs (Senior NCOs). I went up there just before dark in a helicopter and checked in. There was a gunnery sergeant in command. They had taken a lot of casualties. Their field strength should have been about 220 and it was down to maybe about 125 or 130 – something like that. Remember, field strength adds in things like battalion radio operators, artillery FO teams, medics, etc. I said, “Gunny, it’s not gonna be more than an hour ‘til dark and I want to walk around where you’ve got the lines set up so the troops can see me. So if you’d give me a guide to do that, it will be fine.” But I said, “Before I go, is there any major policy you want me to think about? If there anything that you think is really important?”
He said, “Skipper, You want one ear or two? The last skipper wanted two ears to confirm a kill."
I said, “I’ll get back to you.” Hell, I'd been in Vietnam a whole day! I toured the line. The tactical dispositions were satisfactory and the troops got a chance to see who their new commander was. I said, “Gunney, I've thought about it. Forget the ears. We’re not going to be able to know how many we killed." I said, “I know I’m new in-country, but do we have a fairly good feel for it out there – in the broadest terms?”
He said, “Yes, normally we can pretty well tell how many we kill.”
I said, “Well, it seems to me, given the kind of firefights we’re having out here by the DMZ, it’s damned unlikely that any officer from the division staff is going to come down here and go out in the front of the front line and double-check our KIA count. Those people don’t go out in no-man’s-land very often. Let’s just try to be as honest as we can about this and if I need to adjust the numbers one way or the other, I’ll do it.”
He said, “Aye, aye, Sir.”
Well, after that we did a bunch of bumps and grinds and that sort of thing and I wound up in command of
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India Company in the same battalion within the next two or three weeks. We had a couple of reasonably successful county fairs. You remember what the county fair was?
Dittrich: No. Help me with that.
Dabney: Well, what happened was the American forces would go surround the purported Viet Cong village and bring a logistics tail that included medical, propaganda and Vietnamese police. The Viet police could supposedly figure out who was Viet Cong, NVA or friendly while we cordoned off the village to seal all escape routes. Together we would go in and do this sort of touchie-feelie about democracy, clean up the village, capture all the bad guys, search for weapons and that sort of thing. The objective, as passed down to us from higher headquarters, was to "win their hearts and minds."
I remember one of the big problems in Vietnam was there were never any front lines and that meant that weapon safety was a real, real problem because there was no clear demarcation of front lines. When do you carry your weapon loaded and when don’t you carry your weapon. We had frequent accidental discharges as a result. Well, my rule was if you’re inside the wire you keep your chamber empty. You’ve got your magazines, loaded magazines, and all that stuff with you, but you don’t have a round in the chamber when you’re inside the wire unless you get the order to lock and load. At the end of one of these county fairs I remember standing at the gate as my troops were coming in through the wire and, of course, they’re coming in one at a time, and I’m making each one of them, individually, come to attention and execute an inspection arms. In my view that achieves two things. One, I can make sure his weapon is safe and his grenade spoons are taped down. Two, I get to look at the kid and see whether he’s got a thousand yard stare – whether he’s physically or psychologically affected. After every firefight there are a bunch of physically wounded that are obvious. There are also, occasionally, physically wounded who don’t know it, and there are psychologically affected men that you have to keep your eyes on because they can act unpredictably. A psychologically traumatized man who is fully armed is dangerous.
Anyway, about halfway down the line this PFC came to inspection arms and said, “Sir, can I tell you
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something?” And he took that M16 and he shook it in my face and said, “Skipper, how in hell do you expect us to win the hearts and minds of anybody with this?” I couldn’t argue with him. Again, the best practical advice about Vietnam was what I saw on the backs of PFC flak jackets, which said, “Grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.” Anyway, he was frustrated because we’d taken a lot of hits and we’d had some people hurt.
What about his question? What had we accomplished? We were doing what we were told, but what had we actually accomplished? We’d leave and at night the Viet Cong would come back in and we were right back where we started. We’re not getting anywhere! I remember saying something to him like, “Maybe when this all blows over we’ll sit down and have a beer and talk.” Anyway, I had to send a detail out for convoy security between Hue-Phu Bai and Quang Tri – a convoy going up to Highway 1. As was always true with a convoy, the Vietnamese civilian traffic would mix in with us. We didn’t care – they needed security too. There was a Jitney bus – probably had 50 or 60 South Vietnamese civilians on it and chickens and pigs and all that sort of thing. The bus went over a culvert and there was a huge explosion, and about 40 of the passengers were killed. We sent patrols out from the road and found a nine-year-old boy hiding in the bushes. He said he was given two wires and told to touch them together when a vehicle with lots of people on it crossed the culvert. He had been given half of a 500 Piaster note and had been promised the other half if he succeeded. The people who planted the explosive were undoubtedly watching.
Dittrich: He probably had no idea.
Dabney: No. He was a nine year old boy, you know. That’s what we were fighting. My view, right from the beginning, was that if we couldn’t cut that sort of thing off at the source, which was North Vietnam, there was no hope.
Well, it’s November by this time. There was a place called My Chan, a little village about half-way between Phu Bai & Quang Tri. There was alleged to be a main North Vietnamese army infiltration route
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that ran through My Chan from out in the mountains to the west – an area called Base Area 101. We were asked to go up there with a company and seal off that infiltration for a period of time. I was warned by other Marines who'd been in the area that the area was heavily mined and booby-trapped and to be careful. Well, we got off our trucks at the village on the edge of this operating area and one of my troopers from Texas came up to me and said, “Skipper, there’s a whole pen full of ‘em.”
I said, “What.”
He said, “Water Boo (Water Buffalo). We’re gonna run through booby traps and mines. I know how to drive cattle. If I’ve got a couple of other Texans who know how to do it, let's drive them in front of us.”
Sounded like a good idea to me. The reason we didn’t have casualties was because as soon as the Viet Cong saw that we were driving their water buffalo, they just moved or disarmed the booby traps. What we did was go all the way to the end of the area and then turn around and come half-way back and set up a CP and dig in and all that sort of thing. Now, having said that, what I always did in those kinds of cases – and I wasn’t alone – we’d stop, say, around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon, set up the CP and antennas and all that sort of stuff and dig in and then as soon as it got dark we’d move them because sure as hell if you didn’t move them they’d hit you or mortar you. We often recon-ed two CP sites – picked one and then moved to the other – but we spent about eight days in there. We captured four, killed about ten, and we knew there were infiltrators because they were all wearing black pajamas and carried rifles. Had a pretty good idea they were Viet Cong. We didn’t lose a man.
Now, the other thing I’d say is that about day six we had a typhoon. I mean, 24 inches of rain in 18 hours. Everything was washed away and the wind was howling and the rain was driving and you couldn’t get any support because helicopters couldn’t fly. So the natural tendency for infantry in those circumstances was to hunker down. Instead decided to patrol, and got ten or so Viet Cong that were either killed or captured – eight of them killed. They were hunkered down too. When we caught four of them, they were sitting on one side of a fire and had rifles leaning against a patch of bamboo on the other side of the fire and this
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PFC jumped out of the bush right between them and their weapons. They had no choice. Two of them ran and he shot them and he captured the other two and all four rifles. They had no security. The wind was howling about 90 knots.
Dittrich: Ever thought Americans would be fighting in that?
Dabney: What the hell, Marines don't melt! On the last day of that we got this message to report back to Camp Evans immediately. Immediately in the military meant right now and we got out of the area and gave a few cases of C-rations to the village chiefs for the loan of a water buffalo. They were not very happy. When we got down to the My Chan River the water had risen so high that it knocked the bridge out and there was no way to get across the river. It was a French bridge and the girders were almost touching so we, essentially, rappelled the whole company across this damned raging torrent between the girders and the bridge to get to the other side. Then we made a forced march back to Camp Evans, the headquarters. The thing I would remark about is that it was the only time that I ever had to medevac a U. S. Marine for illness my whole time in Vietnam. We’d medevaced a whole lot of guys, but only one who was sick. He got some kind of fever while we were in that operating area above the My Chan and he got so sick he couldn’t walk and we had to carry this 200 pounder on a stretcher. We had to rig some sort of boson chair to get him across the river. We had to carry him all the way back because the water was just awful. We finally got him back to the other side of the river where there was a road from there to the base and we commandeered the first South Vietnamese military vehicle we found – there was a long line of them waiting at the bridge – and drove him back to the dispensary. During that whole tour, including the siege of Khe Sanh, that’s the only guy who got sick. If you stop and think about the conditions under which we were dealing – you’d go to sleep with the rifle across the corner of the foxhole and you’d rest your chin on the rifle so you wouldn’t drown in your sleep. Twenty-four inches in 18 hours – that’s a lot of rain. It doesn’t take much to fill a foxhole and it was a hummer of a typhoon. But even with all that, only one guy getting sick! I think it’s a magnificent testimony to American military medicine. Not only the way they handled the wounded but the way they took care of the troops.
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Dittrich: You must have had the policy that says hold sick call in the field. I had an infantry company way back when and that’s how we cured it by doing the sick call in the field and not let them go back to garrison or a bunch more would want to go back.
Dabney: No, it was quite the reverse. Up on the hill it got to the point where guys would refuse to go back to medical, even if they needed to be stitched up.
Dittrich: Loyalty to your buddy, right?
Dabney: Well, that’s part of it, but from a practical point of view up there it was just as dangerous to ride a helicopter down from the hill as it was to stay.
Anyway we got to Camp Evans and immediately were flown by helicopter up to Khe Sanh. They said big things were coming. We didn’t know what. We got to Khe Sanh and started patrolling – battalion size patrolling.
Dittrich: You had some Intel that told you there must have been a huge force out there??
Dabney: I didn’t, but yeah, there was intel that something was going to happen. We patrolled for a week south of the base, all the way out to the Laotian border and back by 861, 881, all that and back to the base. A big loop – maybe a 40 click loop or something over a course of three or four days and couldn’t find anything. Now, having said that, recognize that on patrol we were mainly on the ridge tops. I didn’t prescribe the patrol route, I just followed them. I was the point company. Even then it was a bitch. Coming back from the Laotian border toward Khe Sanh, the column stopped. The battalion strung out back two or three miles and the battalion commander kept bugging us with about the column not moving. Well, it wasn't, because the point man hacked into a bees nest. He and the platoon commander right behind him had been stung so many times they were blinded, and they couldn’t get rid of the bees. It was a huge bees’ nest, angry bees, swarming all over the place. We had a precipitous drop on either side of
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the trail, maybe a 75-80 degree slope, you know. Not quite a cliff but close, so nowhere to go around. Finally, the battalion commander said, “Why isn’t the back of the column moving?”
To which my XO, bless his heart, replied, “Because the front’s not moving!” That quieted him down. Eventually we got the column going by chasing the bees away with smoke grenades. That's all we could think of to do. We had to get these guys out; the point man, who had been stung worst, had gone into shock and started to twitch. We got them out by helicopter.
Dittrich: Good thinking. On a patrol like that, did you have to stop and clear every area? I mean, every time you came to a clearing, did you stop and clear?
Dabney: No, we just kept going. When you have a 1,500 man battalion, you keep moving. In any case, we did not go down the hills. I suspected at the time that if the NVA had troops around, they were down in the valleys.
Well, when we got back from that I had the sense that it was almost too quiet, because Khe Sanh, before that, had been a real beehive. And the only thing I did about it, that I can remember, was to order my troops to wear their flak jackets and helmets at all times. We were the only company at Khe Sanh that did this. I don’t claim any prescience about an indirect fire attack or anything like that but I figured, well, we’ll guard against that to some extent and at the same time get used to wearing the flak jacket and helmet for when things get tough. It seemed to me this quiet time was a good time to do this. We got a lot of teasing from the other troops about it. It didn’t bother me. Anyway, the battalion assigned me the defense of the hill 881South outpost, the farthest one out. Frankly, I asked to go there.
Dittrich: Less harassment from higher right?
Dabney: I didn’t figure we’d get a lot of visitors at the outpost. Probably the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. We went out there the 26th of December. We immediately started a regimen of aggressive
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patrolling. One platoon was out all day, every day.
Dittrich: Platoon size? Squad size?
Dabney: Platoon size patrols and then they’d break down into squads, always within range of our own mortars and artillery. One platoon would stay back and improve its positions and the other would train while the third was out patrolling. I generally sent the patrolling platoon down the hill in front of its assigned lines so that the troops could get thoroughly familiar with the terrain they'd have to defend.
Speaking of training, a lot of the new guys were not really comfortable throwing grenades. If they’d even had the grenade training in boot camp, it was the only one they had thrown They probably were scared to death of a grenade then, and they’re still scared to death and we’ve got to get them over that. Grenade-throwing skills were critical for two reasons: first, that the hill we were defending was convex – that is, it got steeper as you went down, which meant that we did not have grazing fire for our automatic weapons, which meant that for repelling boarders in close, the hand grenade was ideal. But we would be attacked at night, and at night under fire was not the ideal time to train a man to throw a grenade.
I also found – and I raised some hell about it – that a lot of the people were being sent up as replacements without a BZO ("Battle Zero") for their rifle and that shouldn’t be. We found several of those. Now, one of the problems you had in Vietnam was the weather deteriorated the ammo and you had to recycle it every couple weeks if it was unpacked. The cartridge cases would corrode and you’d get what they called obduration (also called rimshear) where the extractor would tear the base off the cartridge and the body of the cartridge case would stay in chamber. Of course, you had a jam. So you had to keep your ammo clean. But you had to have it broken out in case you got in a firefight. You couldn’t keep it in cases all the time. The nice thing about that is it gave us a little bit of training. There was always old ammo around to shoot up. We did a lot of training in fire discipline, in sectors of fire, machine guns with grazing or plunging fire and all that sort of thing. What I’d do is send a platoon out on a given day north of the hill and we would train south. Nothing but enemy out there anyway so we
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couldn’t hurt anything. Besides, we figured that the enemy would get the message about us from all the firing.
On the 18th of January the 3rd Platoon was up north patrolling about a click north of the hill, near 881N. About three that afternoon, I got a frantic call from battalion down at Khe Sanh base that a reconnaissance team had been ambushed up on 881 north. This was about a click north of the 3d Platoon's position at the time. The recon team needed help with emergency extraction because they didn’t have enough able-bodied troops left to carry their own wounded. So I called (2Lt) Tom Brindley, the 3d Platoon Leader. He was halfway there. I said, “Do whatever you have to do to get there as quickly as you can and try your best to get back to the hill by dark.” They shucked their helmets and flak jackets. Of course they’d been wearing them for a month. They booked to the ambush site loaded for bear. Whatever NVA had been there, probably just a small recon unit or something, were gone. Brindley got the recon troops out – no problem.
The next morning I got a call from regiment, through battalion, saying that the recon team, when it was first hit, had abandoned its radio and some shackle sheets (radio code sheets) and they wanted a platoon to go up there and see if they could recover them. They gave us some rough coordinates. Well, the platoon got about half-way to 881 north and ran point to point into a North Vietnamese army platoon coming south. Kind of a gun fight at the O.K. Corral. Both units were moving.
Dittrich: This was an experienced platoon leader?
Dabney: Yes, pretty much. We had maybe ten casualties – one KIA, point man – then we hosed the NVA down pretty well because, obviously, at that point we had a fix on them, and had our own mortars. We didn’t have to wait for the base artillery to shoot. So we, undoubtedly, did some damage – don’t know how much. Again, my mission was to hold 881 south, so I stayed there with the rest of the company throughout the engagement.
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That evening I was sitting there thinking that we'd been ambushed on the 18th and had a point to point contact on the 19th. There was something about to happen. I sent a message down requesting permission to take an entire company and recon in force to 881N the next morning. Battalion agreed to send Mike Company to reinforce and hold the hill while we were gone. We jumped off at 0500 the next morning and got about half-way to 881N, maybe about 1,000 meters from 881S when the shit hit the fan in every sense of the word. We lost seven KIAs and 40 WIAs evacs in a hot fire-fight. What happened, essentially, was we ran head-on into an NVA Battalion that was coming south. Well, again, we did have the advantage that we fixed the enemy and knew where they were. It was obvious that we weren’t going to proceed any further north with the attack. We were still in the midst of clearing out casualties, packing the wounded up, finding people that were lost, trying to consolidate and hold our position and that sort of thing. Personnel accountability is a bitch in jungle under fire. A message suddenly comes down through battalion from regiment directing us to break contact and return to 881S immediately. I sent back that, “(1) I’ll do the best I can. I have some MIAs, (2) I’ve got a bunch of wounded that I can’t carry through this country and back up the hill and still fight and (3), I’m still in combat. They’re shooting at me.” (You just can’t stand up and turn your back to the enemy.) "It may take a while. We’ll do it, but it may take awhile." It took about four hours to get back. You’ve got to understand that we’re talking about a very difficult climb – 881 meters is about 3,000 feet – like climbing House Mountain at dusk under fire.
Dittrich: How far down to the bottom of the valley do you think?
Dabney: To the gully on the north side which we’d had to cross that day, fifteen hundred feet. And then back up, with the casualties we'd not been able to get out by helo. Had a helo shot down, too. Anyway, we managed to do it and got back to 881 South well after dark. We licked our wounds. Of course we were utterly exhausted. We set in our lines. I walked those lines to keep the troops awake. We didn’t get hit. Every other position around Khe Sanh was attacked that day except 881S, including hills 861, 915, Khe Sanh Village, Lang Vei and the CIDG camp. To this day I’m convinced that they didn’t attack us because we found the NVA unit that was tasked to attack us and hosed it down. We kept that artillery and mortars coming on them all night. We knew where they were. We'd found them and just broken
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contact with them. About 2:00 in the morning, from hill 861, which was about two clicks to our northeast, there comes this frantic, “We’re being overrun! Command group is all down!”
Our battalion 3 (operations officer) gets on the radio and says, 'A Marine unit doesn’t get overrun! Now calm down and tell me what is really happening.'” So we eventually got it sorted out and found out the NVA were coming up the northwest side of the hill 861, which was masked from Khe Sanh artillery which, of course, was why they were coming up from that direction. The hill asked for our supporting fires. That required that we use the two 81mm mortars that we had in India Company because we could get at the NVA with them. Our fires weren't masked.
Now, it wasn’t all that simple at three and a half clicks (3500 meters) range. This was max range for the 81 and it was danger close for the troops we were supporting. What they wanted us to do was seal the breach. The target was in the dark and we were in the dark. Nothing conspired to make it easy. In the course of the battle we fired just under 1,000 rounds of 81mm high-explosive from two tubes.
Among other things for instance there’s no way an 81mm mortar section can break out that many rounds while firing the guns. They just don’t have enough people. So we had the rifle companies breaking out rounds. We also found that firing at max range the guns got so hot that you could see them glowing. Over time when the gunner dropped the round down the tube the increments would cook off before the got to the bottom of the tube. God knows where the rounds went then! But again, it was all enemy out there and we didn’t much care. Finally, we reduced ourselves to firing one tube at a time while cooling the other.
The other problem was that the subsoil around Khe Sanh is sort of a compacted red clay. The rock was crumbling where there was rock – there wasn’t much. When firing at max range the base plate sank, and at some point it sank down far enough so that the gunner could not see the peanut light through the sights. At this point he had to cease fire and dig the mortar base plate out and put the sandbags under it, re-sight, and start over again. We were firing dangerously close to our own troops on the other hill and
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we had to level the bubble every time. You can’t do that if you can’t see the aiming stakes.
As far as the tube cooling was concerned, we were on the top of the hill and the water was down at the bottom. So it wasn’t too long before we ran out of water to cool the tubes and had to use fruit juice and then ran out of that. We finally lined up all troops who weren't busy and had them piss on the damn tubes. Smelled a bit rank in the gun pits! Interesting what you have to do. The only casualty we took that night was a mortarman – 81 mortarman – who had, during a break in the action, lit a cigarette. When he finished he flicked it away and it landed in a pile of increments. Big flash, horrible burns. I’m not sure he survived.
From the reports coming from Hill 861, it sounded like we’d done good work. But we still had some casualties left over from the fight the day before, not emergency medevacs, but broken bones, flesh wounds requiring stitches and stuff like that who were going to live, but who required medical attention from a doctor, which we didn't have. We also needed re-supply because we used up a fair amount of our ammunition – including a thousand rounds of 81mm mortar ammo. So at first light the next morning we called for helo support. The first helicopter, a CH-34, came in and landed to pick up two or three stretcher cases and a couple of walking wounded. Just as it was starting to lift off a 120mm mortar round hit right in the zone and cut the tail off the helo and re-wounded or killed all hands in the bird, and my senior Hospital Corpsman (Medic) on the ground. We'd no sooner gotten that mess unscrambled when the second bird, a CH-46, came in – same damn thing – down in the zone and full of holes.
Dittrich: It was a big aircraft.
Dabney: And a 120mm mortar is a big round. Severed some hydraulic line or something but luckily the helo hadn’t lifted off yet so it didn't crash. But there were casualties, again, in the bird. Before that day was over we had lost two birds shot down and one crash-landed at Khe Sanh after getting hit leaving the hill. All told we sustained seven KIAs and maybe 25 WIAs. All this happened just as the sun rose.
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Just as the last bird left there was this Godawful roar – Katushka rockets like Stalin in used against the Germans in World War II – hundreds of them lifting off from several sites within a couple of kilometers of the hill. There was also 152mm and 130mm artillery – big stuff. We called down by radio to alert the base that the rounds were on the way, but they had no base-wide warning system yet, and given that there were five or six hundred rounds in that first salvo, it wouldn't have mattered much anyway.
The thing I should emphasize here is that I don’t think that since the Battle of the Bulge have American troops been under heavy artillery fire like this. That’s the last time I know of when U.S. troops were subjected to constant heavy artillery fire. These were big rounds: 120mm mortars, 122mm rockets, 130mm guns and 152mm howitzers, and there were lots of them. Anyway, the first salvo hit the Khe Sanh ammunition dump, and about 500 tons of ammo went up with a BIG bang. There were hot live rounds blown all over the base, and to complicate matters, several enemy rounds hit the berm in the dump that held the tear gas rounds and the whole base was gassed, so there was a mad scramble for gas masks. Many casualties. Hell of a mess!
Daily thereafter throughout the siege when they could see to shoot, the NVA fired their heavy artillery at the base, sometimes as many as 1300 rounds a day.
Dittrich: The Khe Sanh base wasn’t any more protected than you guys were?
Dabney: Luckily, it was the tail end of the monsoon season, which meant that during January and early February the base was often "socked in" and the NVA couldn't see to shoot. The base Marines used those days to dig in deep, using everything from shovels to bulldozers and backhoes. By the end of February, the only thing above-ground at Khe Sanh was the runway, and the casualties dropped off dramatically except during air operations.
The base at Khe Sanh was built around the runway, so it was rectangular in shape. A characteristic of both rocket and gun rounds is that they are quite accurate in deflection, but much less so in range. This
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was exacerbated for the NVA by the fact that the quality control for the Russian propellant gunpowder was poor. Together those two factors meant that there were many "overs" and "shorts" in any NVA artillery barrage. They mitigated that disadvantage by locating their gun and rocket positions to fire on the long axis of the Khe Sanh base. That way, overs and shorts still landed on the base. But they paid a price. Since the runway, and therefore the base, was oriented east-west and their supply support all came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the west, it meant they had to locate west of the base. But that's where we were on Hill 881S – eight kilometers west of the base. A further problem for them was that the 122mm rocket had an effective range of only 10 kilometers. That, in turn, meant that virtually all rocket sites they used during the siege were within two kilometers of our hill, several close enough for us to hit with machine-gun fire, and all within easy range of our mortars. We "hosed them down" regularly. As importantly, we always knew immediately when they fired – we could see the rocket rounds and hear the gun rounds going over (the 130mm guns, with a range of 27,000 meters, were located way out west of us, across the border in Laos, but we were still on the gun-target line. The rounds going over sounded like squirrels running through dry leaves.) In both cases, it took the rounds eight to ten seconds after they passed us to impact at Khe Sanh, which made it possible for us to call down as they fired and alert the base. Khe Sanh then sounded a klaxon system audible base-wide. It gave any troops in the open a bout five seconds to seek cover – an eternity if you're being shot at! Saved a lot of lives that way.
An aside here: We'd call down, "Rockets, rockets!” or "Arty, arty!" – no call signs, 'cause there wasn't time, and anyway, they were unnecessary. Occasionally we'd call down, "Rockets, rockets! Shot, over!" Then, as we saw the rounds hit, we'd call down, "Splash, over!" Of course, the rounds were landing right on top of them. They'd get upset. We'd chuckle. Black humor.
Digging in on the hill was another matter entirely. We had no bunker-building capability and it meant there was nothing we could do to stop big rounds. The smallest thing they threw at us was 120mm and you just don’t stop that with overhead cover made of barbed wire stakes and sandbags. There were a few trees lying around that had been blown down in previous battles, but they were so full of shrapnel that they immediately ruined any axe or chainsaw we tried to cut them with.
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I might also add that their 120 mortar is a better mortar than our 4.2in. ("four-deuce") mortar. At least it’s more accurate. Remember the four-deuce was designed as a chemical warfare weapon. It was designed before WW II as our weapon of choice for dispersing gas if we had to use it. Or if Tojo (Hideki Tojo, Japanese Prime Minister) decided they wanted to use gas we were going to retaliate with that so we always had the mortar and the gas rounds in theatre wherever we went. If you’re going to use it to disperse gas you don’t really need a hell of a lot of accuracy. Plus or minus a hundred meters doesn’t really make a lot of difference with gas. But the Russian 120mm jungle mortars the NVA had were apparently designed more for precision destruction. If they decided they wanted to hit a specific landing zone seven kilometers away, they could. Movement was the best way to avoid them, but since our mission was to hold the hill, we weren’t moving and it was easy for them to hit us. Those mortars caused more damage and casualties on the hill than all other enemy weapons combined. They had a super-quick fuse and the impact crater was often not much deeper than a coffee saucer. Given that the round was about four feet tall, that meant that the shrapnel effect was essentially horizontal, and any exposed Marine within 30 meters was a casualty – more often than not a KIA.
We requested bunker material and they sent some heavy timbers but we never got many because, for one thing, the helicopters had to come in at four or five thousand feet to avoid the anti-aircraft fire, and at that altitude in that humidity they couldn't carry much weight, especially with external loads. What little bunker-building material we got, every last bit of it was dedicated to the ammo bunkers because if they hit those, they’d blow us all off the hill. We had three 105s and a couple of 106s, 81s, 60mm mortars – we had eight of those up there – plus .50 cals and some demo. I’m talking about 105 ammo, we had 3,000 rounds of that alone, and perhaps 2000 rounds of 81mm mortar and 3000 rounds of 60mm mortar ammo. I’m talking big ammo bunkers
Dittrich: The hilltop was only 50 x 100? This right?
Dabney: Yes.
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Dittrich: And you had two companies plus the 105 and all that ammunition up there and the helicopters having to land – wow!
Dabney: It was absolutely critical that we fortified the ammunition bunkers, which is something that the average PFC who wanted a bunker for himself didn't understand. As the CO, I had to do what was best for the greatest number. We couldn’t afford to have that ammo blow. Anyway, that was the sort of problem we had in the company.
The other problem, from a personal point of view, was “tactical triage”. I know you know what medical triage is. Let’s give you a scenario that’s pretty accurate as to what happened. We had a bird come in to pick up casualties from incoming. We loaded the casualties aboard and the bird got hit by a mortar. We now had those casualties plus the air crew plus the stretcher bearers and here came a second bird which got hit by AA fire leaving our zone and one engine caught fire and it crash landed at Khe Sanh on the way down. The weather was still bright and beautiful and the enemy anti-aircraft was still very active and the ceiling was too low to bring in close air support and knock out the anti-aircraft guns, even assuming we could locate them. There was no way to get to them. See, they put their AA batteries in caves because we weren’t moving. They didn’t leave their batteries out long, so when the helicopters came they just rolled them out of the caves, fired a few bursts, and rolled 'em back in. About the only way you could shoot back at them was with a 106 – a direct fire weapon. The 106 could do that, but only if the 106 happened to be located in the right spot where we could bring it to bear on that particular gun at that particular time. The problem with that was the 106 was a six hundred pound weapon and it took a bunch of men to move it. It was too big to move through a trench line so you exposed an awful lot of men when you did it. I lost a couple of crews that way so I was limited to how much I was willing to use 106s for that purpose unless the gun could be brought to bear from where it was sited. Occasionally we could use the 105s in direct fire mode, but again, you had to expose a pretty good-size crew for a very large time-span.
In the case I'm describing, the enemy was active firing from both sides of the hill and we couldn’t get the
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helo guys a safe approach and retirement lane. Either way he was going to get shot at. Well, that second bird got off and we watched it go down in Khe Sanh and land hard on the airstrip. We could see through the binoculars that the troops got out. A big sigh of relief. We were glad that was over! Within a minute my senior doc came to me and said, “Skipper, we've got another casualty and I don’t think this guy will make it.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
And he said, “Well, the best I can tell he has severe brain and spinal injuries.”
I asked, "If he were medevaced, would he make it?”
He said, “I don’t know. Should we medevac?” I've never told anybody what answer I gave. I had to consider the risk not only to the wounded man but to the men who would be exposed in the landing zone to get him on a helicopter and to the five-man aircrew in the bird. That's tactical triage.
Dittrich: For the greater good as you said before.
Dabney: You’re responsible for all 400 men. You can’t make the decision without considering the others you put at risk. The first helicopter I called in got shot down. The second crash-landed in flames. It’s not simple, and you do what you have to do.
I used to tell my VMI cadets about that incident to give them some understanding of what being an officer means. Someday you may have to make this kind of decision. Just like a Navy ensign down in the bowels of the ship, when the round hits and he turns to the sailor and says, “Close that water-tight door.”
The sailor says, “But sir, there are men on the other side of that door, and if I close it, they'll drown!”
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And you say, “Sailor, close the door!” You’ve got to have the guts to make those kinds of decisions. If you don’t close the door, the damn ship is going to sink. That’s what the ensign gets paid to do. If you don’t think you can handle it, go find another line of work. I hope and pray that none of you will ever have to make that kind of a decision, but the history of this country is that the chances are pretty good that you will at some point. You just have to have the balls to be able to make these decisions. Live with the consequences. Either way, they are not pretty. If you’re in command, that’s what you’re getting paid for. Does that help any in giving you some idea of what it was like?
Dittrich: Yes. It’s amazing. It’s hard to imagine.
Dabney: It just was. There it is – get on with it!
Dittrich: You talked, on your website, about hunches. I thought that’s an interesting topic, if you wouldn’t mind addressing that for a second. You already mentioned that there were times when you just felt that you knew instinctively when something was going to happen and you took action – you shot some rounds into an area. You sent out a patrol.
Dabney: Well, our recon-in-force on the 20th actually started the siege of Khe Sanh. I just figured something was going to happen because of all the activity immediately north of us the preceding two days. If it was, I’d rather it be on my terms, in broad daylight when I’ve got air support, than be on their terms at 3:00 in the morning when they are coming through the wire. In daylight I could bring all my supporting arms to bear and use napalm – make "crispy critters", as the troops would say, of the NVA.
Dittrich: Did you have to fire your final protective fires (FPF) on that hill?
Dabney: No. Actually, I’m not sure. If they had come up the north side, which was the likely avenue of approach, I doubt that we would ever have used a FPF. The problem was that the hill (881S) was convex, which meant that we had no grazing fire until we got out three or four hundred yards from the hill.
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The first two to three hundred meters were masked from direct fire so, in effect, my FDF was indirect fire up to, and including, on really bad nights when it was foggy and dark. We used our mortars, our M-79 grenade launchers and hand grenades in close. I remember one night the Gunny and I were walking the line about three or four o’clock in the morning. Fog was so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face and the wind was blowing. Then a very nervous Marine said, “Skipper, I’m scared to say this.”
I said, “Say what?”
He said, “I smell pot coming from the north”. (He was reticent to report it because he didn't want us to know that he knew what pot smelled like!)
Anyway, we believed him, and we fired 1900 rounds of mixed mortar and artillery at the enemy. My theory was, don’t let them get close. Any hunch, any indication – I remember telling Gunny one day, “Gunny, the left cheek of your ass itches, tell them to throw 400 hand grenades. That’s as good an indicator as we’re going to get – let’s use it.”
You understand? That was sort of the approach we used to make sure that they never could close with us. Given the shape of the hill, there were several areas where the NVA would be masked from direct fire to within 25 meters of our defensive wire, so the trick was to keep him away. That meant a lot of random and hunch shooting, but that's OK. We had all the fire support we needed, if we just used it. I've always been a believer in the unlimited productive capability of American industry and at Khe Sanh, I used it.
I’ll grant you when the siege first started the fire support was not always responsive. I think it took higher headquarters a little time to understand what kind of a force we were facing and how serious it was because when we made contact on the afternoon of the 20th of January we had trouble getting enough artillery. You know, you’re talking to the staff officer back in the regimental bunker and you feel like saying, “God damn it colonel or major, you come out here and look! I’m standing in the middle of it. Get on with it and give me what I ask for!" Actually we got aircraft and artillery after that and it was OK.
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But when I first called them – remember I’m the furthest outpost. I can see things that nobody else can see. They’re in a bowl in Khe Sanh. They can’t see diddly. I keep calling down there and saying, “You’re getting artillery from the west. We can hear it going over!”
And they’d say, “Aw, they don’t have any heavy artillery out there! That's just rockets and mortars. I’m sitting here in a bunker and I know what I’m looking at." There was a mindset in the bunkers – there always is – that they know better than the unit in contact with the enemy. At Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese disabused them of that mindset pretty quickly.
Dittrich: Was the leadership there for you? I mean, you were pretty much on your own, but when you called and needed something were they supportive or were you challenged at times?
Dabney: I hoped you wouldn’t ask.
Dittrich: You had a Colonel who walked out of there – Col. Lounds, the 26th commander, who earned a Navy Cross. I know a lot of folks thought highly of him.
Dabney: He had his own problems, I'm sure. Let me give you an example of the kinds of problems Lounds had. Here we have a 6,000 man Marine regiment, reinforced with a South Vietnamese ARVN battalion of 400-500 men and surrounded by a corps of around 20,000 enemy soldiers plus heavy artillery and tanks. The NVA has pretty good logistics and they have the ability to fire at us every day – a bunch of big rounds daily. They had trucks and they had tanks. You start thinking about that. Well, the main avenue of approach to the base from the west and the one that would be logistically supportable for them was Route 9, which ran into Laos from Khe Sanh. Sitting along Route 9 was this Special Forces camp at Lang Vei about eight kilometers outside the base defenses. It was comprised of a bunch of native troops, Montagnard Tribesmen, and about 50 Americans in maybe four units. There was Special Forces, CIDG, maybe Phoenix, etc. You’re talking about a flaw that was close to fatal. Each of these groups was run by
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somebody back in the Pentagon. I mean some of these people didn’t even answer to Westmoreland. You remember that Colonel Lounds is sitting there with a regimental area of operation that extended to the Laotian border, a North Vietnamese Reinforced Corps about to attack and 50 guys sitting in the middle of the main avenue of approach over whom he has no operational control. You see?
Dittrich: You thought he should have been screaming for control??
Dabney: Well, he was. They just weren’t hearing him. There wasn’t anybody to hear.
Dittrich: How do you talk to them?
Dabney: These are rear groups that you can’t talk to and some of them are commanded by CIA and some of them are commanded by Westmoreland and some of them are commanded by Alain Entoven back in the Pentagon. Who knows who’s in command. I mean, you ever try and draw a wiring diagram for all those weirdo groups? And yet, since they couldn't patrol, what that meant was that all they did was screw up Col Lounds' fire support plan. We’ve got 2,200 B52 firefight strikes available – 2,200! – but we can’t drop them on the main avenue of approach because the God-damn Special Forces types are there, doing absolutely nothing. All Lang Vei did was button up. A lot of Khe Sanh folks were saying, “Get those people out of my God-damn way or put them under my operational control and I’ll get them out of the way.”
Dittrich: Could you see the tanks overrunning Lang Vei?
Dabney: Yes. I could see them. Not a damn thing we could do. At six kilometers distance, we couldn’t tell friends from foe, so we couldn't shoot. Finally one tank parked right on top of their bunker. We didn’t know where anybody was – didn’t have any communication or plan. There was nobody in overall command there among four different groups that answered to four different chains of command, and no overall defensive plan. They wound up fighting from three or four different perimeters! And it wouldn't
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have mattered anyway. Fifty men are not going to hold off 20,000 men who have artillery and tanks! They should never have been there.
For Lounds, it was a foregone conclusion there was going to be a tragedy. I believe he saw it coming, but he lacked the authority to do anything. Once Lang Vei disappeared and we started bombing that corridor, things got better. I expect privately in North Vietnam there was a great sense of relief that they had succeeded in taking Lang Vei, but in the long run, they did us a favor. From that day forward we could bomb, shell and strafe wherever we found the NVA. In other words, the fall of Lang Vei substantially eased our fire support coordination problems and resulted in a lot more bombs and shells landing on the NVA.
Dittrich: From that point on the battle turned anyway. That was early February and by April you were gone.
Dabney: Yes. But we could bomb any God-damned place we wanted to – from Khe Sanh to the Laotian border. That’s why Route 9 was so important. Route 9 went the border up to Tchepone on the Ho Chi Ming Trail. It was vital to the NVA. They needed Route 9 especially for heavy stuff like tanks and logistics and artillery guns and ammunition. Until the 7th of February we couldn’t do a damned thing about it because one of the rules, if you remember, was that B-52 Arc Lights could not be dropped within three clicks of friendly troops. Well, that pretty ruled out dropping anything between Lang Vei and Khe Sanh. It was only about seven or eight clicks distance from the base. The North Vietnamese knew the rule, too. I often wondered why the NVA took Lang Vei. I think they made a tactical error. They should have just isolated it and left it there. They would have avoided the massive denial bombing that followed its capture.
Dittrich: Were they looking for another Dien Bien Phu?
Dabney: They might have, but they made a mistake. They couldn’t make any headway against our fire
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support.
Dittrich: Did Colonel Lounds ever come visit you when you were on the hill? Didn’t you get any visitors?
Dabney: The battalion commander was up on the 20th of January and Col Lounds came up briefly on the 21st. After that we saw no one except replacements the helos brought in and, of course, the NVA.
Without secure communications we had to be careful in what we talked about and asked for. You’ve got to be very circumspect in talking on the radio.
Dittrich: Even so, you tried speaking Spanish, right?
Dabney: Yes and sometimes I’d sing. They’d call me up and ask me what I needed and I’d sing, “Give me some men, some stout hearted men – dah, dah, dah – or whistle it!” I figure the North Vietnamese probably didn’t know the song. We had under 250 men for a while on a 400 man position.
Dittrich: How did you keep track of folks? You had so many folks coming in and out. How did you ever keep track of your people?
Dabney: That was a difficult problem. The men would report into Khe Sanh and check in at a nice secure bunker. Then they were added to the company roster and scheduled for pick up by helo and brought to the hill. Well, as soon as they lifted off, the first sergeant down at the base would check them out as being on the hill. The problem was, sometimes they’d get hit while they were still on the bird, be retained aboard, and go to the hospital, sometimes all the way back stateside. The rear folks would claim we had them and we’d never laid eyes on them. So all of a sudden we’re talking MIAs, you see? Well, he really isn’t an MIA.
Several times we had near misses in the landing zones with heavy mortars that would wound stretcher
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bearers so they’d just stay on the bird. Well, I mean, the bird wasn't going to sit there getting shot at while you filled out casualty cards and all that. You didn’t have time for that stuff. This bird has got to be out of here in the next 20 seconds when the next round is going to land, and I mean 20 seconds! If you don’t launch him now you’re going to lose the bird and everything else, so you just go.
Dittrich: Are there MIAs there you think?
Dabney: Oh no. Well, one guy disappeared and we knew who he was, we just didn’t know where he was. He’d been out on a LP at night and come in at dawn. Just as he came in we had a medevac and apparently he had volunteered as a stretcher bearer on his own recognizance and gotten hit while up in the bird. In the confusion we didn’t realize that. He was somewhere between the listening post and the wire and we looked the best we could for him, under fire, and couldn’t find him. We reported him as MIA. About two weeks later we got a postcard from St. Albans Naval Hospital, Long Island, New York from him to one of his buddies in his squad saying, "Hey, I got a million dollar wound. How about sending me my personal gear. Looks like I’ll not be coming back." So we dropped him from our rolls. But he was MIA for two weeks.
The other problem that made the MIA thing possible is that there was no way for the troops to get to know each other. Units get tight after awhile, but this was not exactly a socializing environment. As a matter of fact I had a rule that if I found more than three men in the same place at the same time in the daytime in a trench, the senior man got busted. We had to keep them from bunching up.
Dittrich: You talked, in your website, about Supergaggle. Tell us about that.
Dabney: Well, what I’ve been describing to you is what I call the "daisy chain" system for hauling supplies. Initially, they were sending all the supplies up internally – that is, loaded inside the helos. When you’ve got something like artillery ammunition, it takes a while and a lot of men in the zone to unload artillery ammunition loaded internally in a helicopter. Meanwhile the bird and the men were
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"mortar magnets" sitting in the zone. So I said, “Knock off this internal loading. We know it's going to take twice as many helicopters to external load and the bird can’t carry as much, but we are going to lose everything we’ve got by doing it internally. We don’t have but 20 seconds in the zone. You can load wounded in 20 seconds, but you can't unload artillery ammunition.”
Maybe a week or so later another bird got shot down on the hill and the pilots had to spend the night with us. They got to watch the problem we had with daisy chaining. Among other things we were directed to have everybody up in the trenches firing suppressive fire at the anti-aircraft batteries. You put 250 men up in the trenches, under heavy mortar fire, and you’re going to lose a bunch. I told these pilots, and they could see, that if we continued this way then we just created a requirement for more helicopters, 'cuz we always took casualties. "There’s got to be a better way. I don’t know what it is but there’s got to be a better way."
One day about a week later they called us up and said, “Stand by for re-supply.”
We replied, “We have some casualties to go out.” They said to designate a zone. I said, “Give us a heads-up for inbound.”
They said, “You don’t need to know.” (They didn't want to tell us because we were talking in the clear and the NVA was listening.)
They told us to mark known enemy anti-aircraft sites with Willie-Pete (White Phosphorus). I had eight mortars and could mark eight sites. As soon as I did this, (four) A4s came in, two on either side of the hill and systematically attacked each site, strafing as they left. About a minute later two A4s came in to the north of the hill and two came in to the south of the hill and dropped napalm about 75 meters from our defensive wire. That’s because the North Vietnamese would lie on their backs and use palm shelters on the hillside and fire up into the undersides of the aircraft when they would come in and hover. Once the napalm burned off (and it came pretty damned close and was hot – you had to duck or you’d lose your
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eyebrows) then the last set of attack jets birds would come in, two north and two south of the hill with WP smoke, laying a smokescreen to the north and south, between us and the NVA anti-aircraft guns. As soon as those birds departed the first echelon of helicopters would come in from the south, drop external loads, and disappear into the smoke. Perhaps 30 seconds behind them was the second echelon. It would come and drop loads, and one bird would land in the pre-designated zone, drop off replacements and mail, pick up casualties and stuff like that – batteries and that sort of thing we needed daily – and then take off. I always shifted the landing zone from day to day to a new location because we knew it took the North Vietnamese about 10 seconds to re-register the gun and added ten seconds to the flight of the shell which for a 120 mortar was about 25 seconds. It gave us enough time to load casualties and get replacements into the trenches and get the critical supplies in. All the external loads that were scattered around the hill, sometimes close, sometimes outside the wire, sometimes on top of a bunker, would stay there 'till dark when we could bring them in without getting shot at. I remember one load of 106mm ammo hit right on top of a 105mm howitzer. It was confusing. They flew birds very close together, five birds coming in under fire within 150 yards of each other.
Dittrich: And there’s still smoke around?
Dabney: This big smokescreen is blowing down around and the NVA can’t see to shoot accurately, but they’re blazing away anyway. Rounds flying all over the damn place. Kind of a circus. I might add that after the last (four) A4s came in and dropped their smoke – or laid their smoke as it were – and before the first echelon of helicopters came in – during that time we would fire four or five more rounds of Willie Pete from each of the mortars on the same target they were already laid on, figuring that if the fast-movers hadn’t gotten that anti-aircraft site we could at least blind it by dropping a bunch of Willie Petes smoke in front of it.
Now that doesn’t mean they didn’t shoot. They shot anyway, but they were shooting blind and it was just sort of a "big sky, little airplane" approach to the helicopters and yes, they’d hit one now and then, but after the Supergaggle began, but they never shot one down.
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Then, as it ended, we had two more A4s coming in just in case one of the helo boys got hit and went down, to give him air support. We had some UH1E chase birds and then we had the UH1N (two engine) ready to pick up the crew if they ditched. Then everyone disappeared and the smoke blew away.
Dittrich: About every third day?
Dabney: If the weather was good. It didn’t work exactly on that schedule since we had several bad weather days and then we’d have maybe two on succeeding days to make up for it.
Dittrich: How did they coordinate it? You had an awful lot of airplanes in an awful small space in a very short period of time.
Dabney: How did they coordinate it? It was so simple it was absurd. They sent back to Pensacola and got a TA4F – an A4 trainer with a back seat flown out to the 3d Marine Air Wing at Da Nang. The A4 squadron commander was the front seat driver and the helicopter squadron commander was in back seat and they had all the radios they needed. Coordination was a piece of cake – hell, the two squadron commanders could touch each other!
Dittrich: That became SOP for all the hills?
Dabney: Yes. I might add that we had a constant problem with the replacements getting up in the trenches to see the show. Had to have my Gunny patrol the trenches to keep 'em down. Given the Air Metal Density Index on that hill during helo ops, being exposed unnecessarily was a bad idea! Old hands knew that and stayed covered; newbies had to learn.
Dittrich: Had things slowed down after Lang Vei?
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Dabney: No. Not for us. They did for the serious problems on the base once we could carpet bomb with B52s, which we did. How many Arc Lights did you watch?
Dittrich: I know it would take your breath away.
Dabney: Mark off on the map, one click by three clicks and when it was over nothing left. Their sorties were up to 16 planes and each plane was carrying 120 500 lb. bombs and they dropped from 30,000 feet. They called it “Rolling Thunder.” We had some fairly close and we had one Arc Light danger close that I demanded because there was a big movement of troops on a ridgeline about 1,200 meters south of us. We saw a whole line of lights – at least a kilometer long
Dittrich: So that one came in one click away from you.
Dabney: About 1,200 meters. I knew my Marines were danger close but this was an emergency. There were no friendlys on the bomb line which was parallel to all of us. Remember that we had an air support radar at Khe Sanh. The target was about 10 clicks out from the radar. At that range it’s a pretty tight vector so they could vector the B52s pretty damn quickly and very accurately. Were we trying to vector off Quang Tri or some place fifty miles away it wouldn't have been safe. I remember that night, we put the troops down in the trench and had them put their thumbs in their mouths and bite down on the knuckle. Gunny asked me why. “Well, Gunny, I grew up in Panama during World War II and I remember that going to school as a young lad I was required to wear a big gum eraser on a string around my neck. We had regular ‘bomb drills’ – what later became known as ‘fall-out drills’. You remember them? We had those drills all the damn time and they’d require us to put the gum eraser in our mouth and bite on it. And they taught us that the reason for that was, that if your mouth is open the concussion won’t burst your eardrums because the overpressures could equalize." I figured if that’s what they taught us in 1942 in Panama, it probably would work pretty well for the 881 too, so I just had them bite on their knuckle.
A B52 was the best close air support anybody ever had. The troops used to say you could make
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Christians out of anybody with a B-52. That night we had bomb fragments and tree stumps and all sorts of things flying around the hill.
You know that every explosion has an over-pressure. Those over-pressures tend to reinforce each other when the 500 lb. bombs fall all over the place. They’d look at me and say, “Get some, Skipper, get some.”
My company XO was Rich Foley. It just happened that his father owned a factory in the Philadelphia area that made the fuses for VT rounds so, with my urging, every mission we’d ask for mixed VT and super quick or something like that because a lot of targets were moving troops or troops in bomb craters, without overhead cover. VT’s perfect for moving troops.
I might add that’s a round they didn’t have. At least they didn’t use it at Khe Sanh. They had point detonating and delay, but I never saw or heard of an air burst. You didn’t really need VT in jungle. You just used super quick and got tree bursts – same thing. But by the middle of February there weren’t any trees left around Khe Sanh. I don’t know whether you looked at the pictures or not, but you can see what we did to the real estate. Over-lapping bomb craters was all that was left.
Dittrich: It started slowing down toward April and Operation Pegasus?
Dabney: Yes, by the time Pegasus came…
Dittrich: Was there anybody to rescue? It was pretty well over by then wasn’t it?
Dabney: At least as far as the ground troops. We weren’t getting the anti-aircraft anymore. We were getting heavy artillery, but from Laos, but we were not getting the rockets and we were not getting the anti-aircraft so we could run with a hell of a lot impunity. Now they had some units out there with 82mm mortar but they left us alone. We were pretty well immune to 82s on the hill. We’d been pounded with
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120s so long that the 82 was just something you brushed off.
I’ll give you a thought. It may sound technical. This being the Khe Sanh base. The base was rectangular because it had to secure the runway. 881S was eight clicks west. What they did with their heavy artillery, because of the B52, was to deploy them in single-gun positions along the gun-target line about 500 meters apart. They had six guns. They’d fire them in volley fire but each gun had a fixed range adjustment. Well, that meant the shot fell all over Khe Sanh – these 120 and 130mm guns. So long as they were firing at the base, the fixed adjustment for each gun worked fine. The problem for them was that once we got off the hill and started maneuvering, they couldn’t adjust. Any target off the gun-target line required that each gun be adjusted individually, and they had neither the communications or the forward observers for that. So once we started maneuvers we were immune to their heavy artillery. The only thing we had to worry about then in maneuvering troops was their 82 mm mortars. Once we started maneuvers we didn’t hear from those big guns.
Dittrich: As you said before, the mobile offense was the reason you got out of Khe Sanh in the end wasn’t it? Just because of the realization that it’s better to be mobile than in a fixed position.
Dabney: Well, initially when you got one regiment surrounded by reinforced corps, there’s a limit to how much you want to get mobile and if you’re entrenched and prepared defensively with good fields of fire, you’ll maybe just want hold what you’ve got for awhile until you even the forces a little bit. We did that with bombs and shells. We had plenty of those. I used to tell my supporting arms troops that they did not need to worry about how much ammunition they used until the Cadillac production line closed back home – that as long as America could produce both simultaneously, there was no limit on ammunition expenditure.
Dittrich: You wear them down.
Dabney: Well, Lang Vei’s sitting down here, and this being the Laotian border, and these guns are way
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out in Laos and then there’s another group of guns close by. This is the main avenue of approach, coming in from the southwest. Once Lang Vei went, we could just carpet bomb all the area around us. Beats hell out of doing it with bayonets!
Dittrich: But you never avoided firing into Laos?
Dabney: Never. What would they do, send me to Vietnam? I didn’t have, on the hill, any weapon to reach into Laos. I mean the 105s could maybe get close but there’s no way they could reach Laos. Can’t do it. Besides I was prescribed as to how much I could use the 105 because their main mission was to provide final defensive fires for the base. But I could direct air strikes as far as I could see.
Dittrich: That’s why you had the 105s to start with?
Dabney: I could use them, but only, usually direct fire. If there was an all-out attack on Khe Sanh it was presumed it would come from the south and there was some dead space in there that Khe Sanh needed to cover, but couldn’t do it with their own artillery. Instead, we had a perfect shot. It was only three guns because only three guns would fit. We could have given them a couple thousand rounds.
Dittrich: Did you ever have a map – or maybe you have it and I missed it – a map of 881 and where it is. It must have been so congested you couldn’t move.
Dabney: There’s one on the website. But the congestion on the hill was manageable in all respects but one: ammunition. On any given day we had about 2,500 rounds of 105mm, perhaps 500 rounds of 106mm, 3,000 rounds of 81mm, 2-3,000 rounds of 60mm, 300 rounds of 3.5in rocket, and numerous assorted demolitions and grenades, plus tens of thousands of rounds for small arms and machine guns. The net effect, given the size of the hill, was that we lived in our own ammo dump! They tried, but they never hit one of our main ammo bunkers. Had they done so, they'd have blown us all off the hill!
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Dittrich: So by the time Pegasus came there wasn’t much to rescue. Did you ever talk to General Irby about that? He had come up with the Army contingent on that.
Dabney: I talked to him a lot. I never realized he was with them.
Dittrich: He talked to me about it one time briefly.
Dabney: I understand they had some pretty stiff fights, opening the road to Khe Sanh. But once they got to Khe Sanh there just wasn’t much because the main force units had disappeared into the mists of Laos. “Mists of Laos” is a good term because of the weather. The locals called it the "Crachin".
Dittrich: How did you feel about – here you’d just spent the worst four months you’d ever had – on Hill 881 and then you gave it up and it was time to head out. Folks were happy to get away I guess, but after you look back, do you say was it worth it?
Dabney: No. I think most Marines accept the fact that none of it makes sense. They say, O.K. – on to the next one, you know.
Dittrich: Now you talked about, on your website, that race wasn’t an issue that you saw. What about drug use?
Dabney: We would not tolerate it – not the command, but the troops. Their lives depended on the alertness and visual and aural acuity of their comrades, and they were brutal in eliminating any drugs that came up. Some few got roughed up, but the command didn't have to get involved officially.
Now mail – we didn’t get mail for 30 days – nothing. Troops wondering whether their child had been born. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Enemy tactics and the weather were the main causes of the delay. Initially, they brought the mail up. From Khe Sanh, mail was sent out to the hills when the replacements
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were flown out. Well, the weather was bad for much of the time – maybe five, six days at a time – and by the time the weather got good, the incoming was so bad. Obviously the enemy had built up ammunition. The incoming was so bad that they made the decision that the re-supplies and specifically the supergaggle would be staged out of Dong Ha because it wasn’t safe to keep helicopters at Khe Sanh – couldn’t keep them whole. Several were destroyed there and they said, hey, no way can we protect them.
The helicopters came from Dong Ha, but the mail was at Khe Sanh, so we had to retrograde the mail back down to Dong Ha and wait for the next weather break and the next supergaggle. All of this added together and we got some mail that was 30 days old, and a lot of it damaged because it had sat on the runway at Khe Sanh getting pounded by NVA artillery. It caused some complaining.
I describe another mail incident on the website. We would put the out-going mail in sandbags. Usually we had envelopes and paper, but not always, and if we didn’t, we'd take the top off a C-ration meal box, open the box, take the tabs off the side and write whatever we wanted to write and pin it shut with a grenade pin and drop it in the mail. In any case, we threw a bag of mail on the bird one day and the bird took a bunch of fire going out. We had loaded several serious casualties on it. About a week later we got this bag of mail back – couple of sandbags of mail back – with a notice from the post office saying the mail could not be forwarded because the post office was prohibited from forwarding mail that had human blood on it. What had happened was the mail and the wounded were all rolling around in the floor of the helo at the same time as it was getting shot at.
That sounds like a nice, neat postal regulation when you’re sitting fat, dumb and happy in an air-conditioned post office in Da Nang. The problem was, two of the letters were from a guy who had been killed between the time he mailed the letters and the time we got them back – you see? It’s not that simple. That’s why I said two or three times in the write-up, the kind of people who write regulations have never been any place like Hill 881S.
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Dittrich: You talk about some things on your web site like you had to be treated by a doctor to get a Purple Heart.
Dabney: Yes. That was the regulation. Treatment in the field by the Corpsman didn't count. But it was so dangerous to ride down to Khe Sanh and back by helo to get treatment that many troops opted not to go for light wounds, so they didn't get Purple Hearts that they rated.
Dittrich: You also told the story of loading the remains onto the helicopter…
Dabney: There wasn’t much left. Well, there’s only so much you can allow your troops to watch – the rats crawling in the innards of a body bag. These were two gunnery sergeants. I sent a message down saying I want permission to bury them and I get this bureaucratic bullshit back saying, “Field regulations prohibit burial.”
I sent the message back to a higher echelon, not entirely polite, saying, “I didn’t ask you what the field regulations were. I asked for permission to bury them.” Permission denied! Another day goes by and it is worse and smelly, and more rats (we didn't have any body bags, so the corpses were wrapped up in ponchos). Well, I sent a final message down – what we call a UNODIR. (Unless Otherwise Directed.) UNODIR, I will bury them at 1800 tonight. I heard nothing back to that message. I buried them.
Bureaucracy doesn't work on the front lines. Only common sense does.
Dittrich: I hadn’t heard that before.
Dabney: UNODIR is a very handy message sometimes, as you can well understand. Very useful. I guess the higher command could always claim he didn’t get the message. The next set of birds came in after four our five days. Regulations – the damn bureaucracy again – prohibited evacuating bodies in external loads. Headquarters needed nets and slings. But we didn’t have any new casualties, and I was
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not going to take the risk of landing a helo for cadavers, so we disinterred the bodies and put them in the bottom net and piled all the other nets and slings on top of them. After the bird got airborne, I called the pilot and told him he had bodies in his external load. He delivered them at a medical facility and said nothing. The pilots understood – they flew to those hills every day.
And there is another issue. I sent several messages to Headquarters saying, “For Christ sakes, send back to the States and tell Dupont to send you 1,000 nets and slings.” You don’t realize what it’s like to hook up a helicopter up there. Some poor grunt had to stand on top of that load, under fire, and hook that thing to the bird while it hovered and yawed back and forth in a 20-30 knot north wind. You could see the AA rounds hitting the bird! There had to be an easier way to do it. What’s the net and sling cost? $100.00? Couldn’t be much more than that. We’d already lost three helicopter support team men and had a bird torn up getting those damn nets and slings out. I don’t know what a CH46 costs – probably up close to a mil – and God knows what the life of a PFC costs with his leg blown off. If you want bang for the buck, go back to Dupont in Wilmington (DE) and get some more nets and slings. They’ll be happy to put on an extra shift to produce them. They like overtime. But no, we had to retrograde nets and slings under fire. Dumb!
Another problem that was enraging to me then and still is today – I couldn’t get stretchers to carry our casualties. These were logistic birds, not "dust-off" birds, and the log birds didn't carry stretchers. We didn’t have any "dust off" birds. Anyway, we were getting logistic birds in any time we could fly, to bring in re-supply and replacements. Why use a dust off? And besides, we could get a lot more casualties in the log birds.
There were two issues. One, put some stretchers in the log birds and have a standard rule that if a stretcher comes aboard, you throw one out. It’s not real complicated. How does a crack unit wind up without stretchers, which is what happened to us. I sent messages out – send us up a load of stretchers – and got a message back saying – this is the height of Tet and of course – they said, “None available.” Never got them. And we’re loading badly wounded men – gut shot, open wounds, through and through,
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sucking chest wounds – all that sort of thing. It takes twice as many people to evac a non-ambulatory man in a poncho as it does to carry him on a stretcher. Two men can carry the stretcher. It takes four to carry the man in a poncho, which doubled the risk of casualties in the zone, you see. Next, its beastly horrible if the guy is badly hurt because he kind of swings and sways in the poncho and then you plunk him down hard on the metal deck of the bird. There is no stability in a poncho. I’ve carried a bunch of them. Men screamed, God how they screamed!
When the siege ended, I went down to Khe Sanh and I didn’t know where the battalion CP is so I had to put my head into several bunkers and while I was looking, I found stretchers everywhere. They were using them as bunks! You get the picture now.
Dittrich: Obviously the staff guys weren’t ex-commanders.
Dabney: They rarely are once the shooting starts. At least in the Marine Corps, if you can command under fire, that's what you do.
Dittrich: You spent two years in Vietnam on two tours – was there somebody that really impacted you leadership wise?
Dabney: General Ray Davis. We had a morning brief just before first light because everything that was going to happen that night would have already happened. He’d listen to the brief, then walk out and get in his bird and fly immediately to whatever unit had the most contact the night before. He’d go to the lead platoon and walk up and down the trenches and talk with troops and get the lieutenant or staff sergeant to explain to him what had happened the night before and what the enemy was doing to get a picture. Then he’d ask several of the troops, “With all the fighting, who made the difference?” The troops would say that they wouldn’t be there without this guy, PFC Schmukatello – he did this and that and made the difference. General Davis would reach into his pocket and pull out a Silver Star and pin it on Schmukatello, on the spot. Then he turned to his aide and say, "Get the facts and write him up."
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Dittrich: So he made sure somebody was giving him a citation.
Dabney: Right, he'd pin the medal on the Marine's flack jacket first, then turn to his aide and say, “Get some statements.” Two hours after a fire fight General Davis was there and pinning on a Silver Star.
The other great leader I saw was the new battalion commander who came up towards the end of the siege, John Studt, who took over the battalion, 3d Bn, 26th Marines. He toured all the battalion’s positions. It was awkward because the battalion had a sector of the Khe Sanh trenchline, and had units on hill 861, 861A and 881S. The commander had no way to get anywhere except by helicopter. He got up to hill 881S and took one look around the hill (one of the problems was that nobody who hadn't been there really understood what was happening on the hill). So the new arrivals would get off the helicopter and would stand around with their hands in their pockets looking around as if it were a tourist site. Like they were looking up at the arch of Natural Bridge. So we had a flying squad of linebacker types who, as the newbies got off the bird, would tackle them and throw them in the trench – we’d sort 'em out later – but get them under cover first because we knew there was incoming, it was just a question of where and when. With a hill that small, it didn’t matter with a 120mm round – it was going to get you anyway, so get them under cover first and then we’ll figure out who they are and where they’re going and what they’re doing here and all that sort of thing. Well, using that system, inevitably, one of my troopers did a beautiful flying tackle on the new battalion commander and knocked him ass over tea kettle into the trench. But this was John Studt and he immediately understood perfectly what had happened. Didn’t bother him in the least. He took one look at that hill and he never left. He put his CP there. He could see we needed all the help he could give us.
Dittrich: You still had a couple months to go?
Dabney: Yeah, but I lost the company because I got promoted. I got promoted the day I left the hill. I was already on the list for major. But there were already two majors in the battalion, so I was a fifth
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wheel. I have to be honest. Physically I was strong as an ox; emotionally I was draggin'. I had only (inadvertently) left the hill for two hours over that entire period – that day I saw the stretchers. God-damn – excuse the language – I got mad. I'll explain the inadvertence – here’s how I ended up back at Khe Sanh. The birds had to go up pretty high coming in to avoid all the anti-aircraft fire, often as high as five or six thousand feet. Well, of course, at that altitude they got cold, and as they descended, condensation formed on the ramps, bulkheads, decks and all, and the birds got as slippery as glass. Well, this new kid with a heavy load – mortar base plate or something – was the last man out of the bird and as he came down the ramp he slipped and hung his leg in the hydraulic lift of the ramp and couldn’t get off and couldn’t get on. I ran onto the bird and extricated him and shoved him off the damn bird, but by the time I finally got all that done the bird was 50 feet in the air. I couldn’t have jumped. I went forward to the cockpit and told them to turn around and take me back. "Who the hell are you?" they said. I told them I was the hill CO. I didn’t have rank insignia on. I didn’t wear any due to snipers. All I had on were my boots, flak jacket, pistol strap and a pair of trousers I’d had on so long the crotch stank like hell and had split so my balls were hanging out. Three and a half months without a shower is a long time – bearded – and the pilot just sort of blew me off. Can't say I blamed him. It was dicey enough flying in to 881S once, and he was damned if he wanted to do it twice in one trip! Well, hell, by that time we were damn near to Khe Sanh. It was only eight clicks away. At Khe Sanh, I got cleaned up and went back that afternoon.
Dittrich: Did they wonder what the heck happened to you?
Dabney: Yeah, they thought I’d gone MIA – blown off the hill or some damn thing. I was at the LZ and the XO was at the CP. Never let myself and the XO be in the same place at the same time outside the bunker. So I could have been any place.
Dittrich: What did you do between the two tours? You went back to Headquarters, Marine Corps?
Dabney: Yes – didn’t like it. Felt funny. To give you some idea – different realities. I got leave – maybe 10 days – and then I came back. I finally got settled, moved in my new house and all that sort of stuff at
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Headquarters, Marine Corps, and it was time to report in for duty. I’d been back from Vietnam – what – 10 days and I got all shined up in my uniform and went through the gate into Marine Corps Headquarters Compound. You come in the gate and then you walk by the Commandant’s office and there’s the main entrance to the building. As I was walking from the gate to the main entrance, the damn saluting battery at Arlington National Cemetery, which was on the other side of the fence, cut loose. The tube just happened to be oriented directly toward Headquarters and that sound was the sound I’d heard too many times. I hit the deck and rolled, over the hedge in front of the building. Screwed my uniform up. I was a mess. And all these Headquarters guys were looking out their doors. Had grass stains all over my uniform, dirt on my face, ribbons all askew. I picked myself up and went on back home and got another uniform. You know, you didn’t stop to think – you hit the ground first and worried about where it came from or whether it was going to hit you later, because you didn’t have a lot of time in the field. You didn’t mess with rockets and especially not with a gun. The only reason Khe Sanh itself got some warning was because we could hear the rounds going on over the hill and call down a warning – we were eight clicks out. We could give them six or seven seconds notice – six or seven seconds doesn't sound like a lot of time, but it's an eternity under heavy artillery fire.
I was assigned to the G3 section in the training branch writing course syllabi and stuff like that. I guess my talents were put to some use, but I didn't feel so. I knew a lot that needed to be known – things I'd learned at the hard-knocks school. One day – I’d been there about 14 or 15 months – a good friend of mine, Bill Keyes, the majors assignment officer in Personnel branch, and I had lunch together. He said, “Well, in Vietnam the 3rd Marine Division was just withdrawn and those who had not completed at least six months in the Far East got retrograded to Okinawa and couldn’t come back to the States. I just got the word a couple of days ago that the Vietnamese Marine Corps had formed another brigade – three infantry battalions and one artillery battalion – and I need advisors.”
One of the requirements for advisors was that they be volunteers. The other was that they be combat veterans so as to be of some use. It was late enough in the war that those were not hard criteria to meet. He said he'd sent a message out to CG, 3rd MAR DIV in Okinawa because CG, 3rd MAR DIV had a
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bunch of guys who still had six months or more to go on their overseas tour and who had just come out of Vietnam. They were qualified and could go back in as advisors and all we needed was for them to volunteer. We went down the roster and found about 25 captains and majors who met the criteria with the kind of fitness reports we like to see – combat fitness reports – so we sent a message to all these men and asked, from among those, send me a list of volunteers who want to go back in and finish their tour in Vietnam. Not enough answered to fill the billets. I told Bill to put my name in the pot.
Dittrich: What was that experience like?
Dabney: Lonely. The Vietnamese field Marines and field ARVN were pretty good men, but the upper command structure was entirely political and absolute bums. That resulted in tragedy at Lam Son 719. Westmoreland had always, apparently, had this dream of going out from Khe Sanh to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos to disrupt the North Vietnamese supply system. Of course by this time, there weren’t enough Americans to do it – we were in the midst of the Vietnamization fiasco. So MACV chose the four best divisions in the South Vietnamese armed forces: the Rangers, Airborne, Marine Division and the 1st ARVN Division. The difficulty was these units had only worked before as battalion units and as battalions they functioned pretty well. But now they had to form into brigades and divisions and operate as a Corps, and they had to do it for the first time in the face of enemy. The second difficulty was that all of these units had their fire support provided by the United States of America and they relied utterly on their advisors for fire support planning and coordination – air strikes, artillery, whatever. We had the four best divisions in Vietnam, but most never even worked as brigades before, let alone as divisions. We formed them into a corps, which had never existed, then took away the advisors because of the political aspect. That is, Americans could not go into Laos.
They didn’t even have English speakers – most battalions didn’t have anybody who could speak English. You could talk to them in French. Most of them could speak French because they’d been in the colonial forces. I had a couple years of French at VMI and it put me in pretty good stead. It was pretty elementary French, but it helped me along. I could make myself understood and if I couldn’t I could bring
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out a French dictionary and show them and they could read it. I had one guy in the battalion who could speak, sort of, English – but just sort of. It was ripe with possibilities for error in a tactical sense. Now, with that kind of problem, the difficulty was that the corps and division headquarters for all these units except the First ARVN Division were back in Saigon and had been throughout the war because they never worked as Divisions. First ARVN division headquarters was at Hue, in the city. All the rest were down in Saigon.
What had occurred over the years was that the forward battalions had shipped their bums back to Saigon because they weren’t worth a damn in the field. Also, the people who had connections and didn't care for combat had wrangled Saigon cushy jobs. The result was that we had a corps made up of battalions, formed into brigades that had never worked as brigades before, formed into divisions that had never been in the field before, formed into a corps that had never even existed before and virtually all of the higher headquarters officers were people with money – political appointees or trash from the field – worthless. They were only capable of the most rudimentary tactical maneuvers. So what do we do – the U.S. Army and the Advisory system? We set them up eleven different fire support bases, lining both sides of Highway 9 from the Vietnamese border to Tcheponne in Laos. It does nothing but subject them to defeat in detail.
The North Vietnamese army simply invested those fire support bases exactly the way they had 881S. You see, we couldn’t “Supergaggle” them. We had U.S. Army helicopters and U.S. Air Force fixed wing support supporting Vietnamese ground positions we couldn’t talk to because they didn’t speak English. We sent out our artillery – 105s and 155s up to those fire support bases. I was never able to discover an instance in which any of that artillery fired a round (we lost virtually all of those guns). And the Viet units could not talk to each other because they didn’t know each other’s frequencies – there was no effective corps Comm-Elect plan. Six clicks apart on those fire bases and they could look at each other but they didn’t know each other's frequencies and had no fire support plan – they couldn’t coordinate. On top of that, because they were six clicks apart it means you couldn’t use B52s because you couldn’t drop within three clicks of friendlys. Are you beginning to see the problem? We weren’t allowed to go in ourselves.
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There were no U.S. advisors in Laos. A couple got shot down but that’s about it. We were specifically prohibited from going into Laos. So I and a couple of others volunteered to be airborne fire support coordinators and when the weather was OK we would fly over in slicks and talk to our counterparts on the ground and try to coordinate as best we could. We had to fly above 2,000 ft. AGL to avoid being shot down by the NVA AA guns so we couldn't see much, and the Viets on the ground had no marking capability – not even WP mortar rounds. An exercise in futility.
What the North Vietnamese army did was simply to invest one of these fire bases at a time – or maybe two at a time – one north and one south – and destroy them. When you saw those pictures of guys coming back hanging from the helicopter skids – yep – that’s how we had to get them out.
Dittrich: And then they were wasted for next year when the Easter Offensive came?
Dabney: Sure, they were decimated. Just in my battalion we lost, I think, a third of them killed on the mission and about 200 more wounded and these are only 600 men battalions.
My frustration with it was that it didn’t have to be that way. Alright, I’ll grant you that maybe it was a poor mission, but if we were going do it, we had a four division Corps with engineers, artillery and everything else. We could have put it on the road and marched it to Tcheponne as an integrated unit with each element in physical contact with the other. Coordination should not have been a problem where you could walk over to your flank and talk to the guy and where we could just ring them with B52s. It doesn’t take a lot of sophistication to move a blob a click at a time. We could relieve any unit that got tired because we’ve got internal lines. What we did instead was give ourselves external lines and effectively subject ourselves to defeat in detail.
We exacerbated the tactical stupidity by taking away their advisors and thus their fire support, and we didn't give them any secure communications gear – all they had was PRC-25s – which meant that they had to communicate in the clear in the same language as the enemy!
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Dittrich: All the Americans had to see that – I imagine all the advisors will tell you the same thing – that it was just frustration to you all. You were in your own little world from each other.
Dabney: We didn’t see the other guys much. I got so mad about it when I saw the scheme of maneuver. I went down to see the CG of the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force down in Da Nang and laid it out to him – this was a couple of weeks before it happened – I said, “We’ve got a tragedy in the making. For example,” I said, “where the South Vietnamese are putting one of the fire support bases is right where the NVA had 130mm artillery battery before and my bet is, being Orientals, they’ll put another battery back there, so what we’re going to wind up doing is trying to insert a Vietnamese battalion right on top of a North Vietnamese heavy artillery battery.” Good luck!
Dittrich: Well, that is a different picture for me. I always thought that they went in and claimed victory and that was that.
Dabney: In 1975, I ran into a Vietnamese lieutenant friend who said the perception among his contemporaries was that the United States Army was using the Vietnamese as training fodder. This was the perception in his ranks. He was right.
Dittrich: Next year the South Vietnamese melted away and a couple of years later they didn’t put up a fight and the war was over.
Dabney: I don’t know who white washed (Lam Son 719) but it was a disaster.
Dittrich: How much longer were you in-country after that? Did you have to do the whole year?
Dabney: Yeah – 13 months. I’m on a fire support base near the DMZ in the fall of 1971, a place called Nui Ba Ho. We don’t have communications to the advisors at our Headquarters in Saigon. We had to
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rely on Vietnamese communications because we didn't have a long-range radio. What they had for a long-range radio was the old AN/GRC-9s. Do you remember the "Angry 9s"?
Dittrich: Oh, God, yes.
Dabney: We were using Morse. Five hundred miles. That’s a long line to communication from the DMZ to Saigon – no way. So I get this message from the Vietnamese battalion. Essentially it said to report immediately to ASNMRA. Of course, my first question was what in the hell is ASNMRA and where is it. Number two, it was in the middle of monsoon season and I’m in a fire support base on the DMZ. What does “report immediately” mean? It means report within 24 hours in the technical sense. Come on. It was three days before I could get a helicopter and even then I couldn’t leave without my relief. Had to wait for somebody to come up from Saigon to relieve me. So three days later I finally get off the FSB and literally hitch-hike to Saigon. That’s all you can do. Get to the nearest air field, stick your thumb up and hope it goes in the right direction and doesn't get shot down along the way. Well, I get to Saigon and they explain my orders are to report to the Assistant Secretary of Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. Oh, that’s what ASNMRA means! A Four Star equivalent – for duty as the Marine aide. I’m going to be an aide to a Four Star. I said, “Well, it said to report immediately. Can you get me a plane out?”
“Well, yeah, we can get you a plane out, but you’ve got to go through clearance first.”
I said, “What’s a clearance?”
He said, “You’ve got to have a urinalysis.”
I said “What do you mean, a urinalysis?”
He said, “We’ve got to make sure you’re drug clear.”
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I said, “You mean that I, major of Marines, William H. Dabney, had got to go stand in front of some God-damn pissant seaman deuce Corpsman so he can certify that major so-and-so pissed in a certain bottle so he can check it? Huh? Horse shit. I’m not gonna do it.”
Dittrich: That’s ridiculous.
Dabney: I said “I won’t do it." I said, "I’ll tell you what. If you want me to piss in a bottle, you’re going to have an officer senior to me stand and watch me do it. When we get to the point in the United States military where E-3 enlisted are certifying officers doing something or not doing something, it’s not my military any more and I’m not going to stay in it anyway. Now you either get me an officer senior to watch me piss in a bottle or I stay here.” Eventually, the advisor XO watched me piss. He was on my side. God-damn I was angry! To this day I’m angry about it.
Dittrich: I didn’t think they did urinalysis that far back.
Dabney: The assholes in the Pentagon think they know everything. And what they’re doing is literally questioning our integrity. God-damn bastards! And they’re still doing it.
Dittrich: Oh yeah. I guess I could justify it when you’re doing it to show the example to the troops.
Dabney: At the headquarters of the Marine Corps, I commanded Henderson Hall. It's the barracks and administrative support command for Headquarters, Marine Corps – sort of like Ft. Myer for the Army. I would always require an officer be senior to the man being tested to watch him piss in a bottle. I don’t know whether anybody got the message or not. You didn’t having junior enlisted certifying senior officers.
Dittrich: That’s the way it was with me all the time.
Dabney: I’ll flat out refuse. I’ll stay here.
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Dittrich: I understand your rationale.
Dabney: I had such a horrible taste in my mouth since Lam Son 719. These were my people. I’ve been living with them for a year. It came close to destroying them.
I’ll give you an example of the kind of problems which thwarted us. At one point during LS 719 the weather had socked in a little bit so we couldn’t get air support. There wasn’t any point in going up as an airborne coordinator because there wasn’t anything to coordinate – the ceiling was only 1,000 feet or something like that so we couldn’t use fixed wing. But we had the helicopters, so we’d gone out to take chow to a battalion. Well, they ate native chow rather than C-rations. We got over a battalion area and they were in the midst of a heavy fire fight and we could see the rounds hitting the zone and all that sort of thing and we realized we couldn’t deliver the chow to this battalion. We were going to go bingo fuel way out in Laos before too long. I mean this was way the hell out. Well, we called down to the next battalion over and got in contact and told them we’re going to bring the chow in there. Well, the problem is that they had, in the Vietnamese armed forces, a procurement system within each unit, like the system that’s used in wardrooms on Navy ships and they refused to take the chow in the other battalion. So they both went hungry. Stupid stuff like that.
Do you understand?
Dittrich: Oh yeah. I didn’t experience Vietnam, but I was stationed in the Philippines and everybody got a cut, from the colonel on to the general.
Dabney: I’ll tell you a little side story that might be interesting. I can’t vouch for the facts, but I sense that it’s true – to give you some idea of what kind of war this was. We had a lot of Caribou support in Khe Sanh – the C-123s. Even after they quit using the C-130s, the C-123s were coming in to Khe Sanh. They could get in and out fast. After a while, even they were taking some pretty heavy hits. We lost a
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bunch of people.
At the same time, I was aware that the C-123 was designed for, and used for, the support of isolated Special Forces camps throughout Vietnam – like A Shau Valley. I never could figure out, having watched how vulnerable they were at Khe Sanh, how the hell they did that. You know, the average Special Forces camp usually didn’t have more than perhaps 50 Americans in a very heavily fortified compound with wire around it and concrete bunkers and usually on low ground so they could have an air strip of some sort, and then a long barbed-wire perimeter manned by local indigenous troops, and mountains all around. "No way they could fly the damned planes in without the North Vietnamese shooting them down," I'm saying to myself.
After my second tour, I was at Ft. Myer for a wedding reception. The wedding and reception went off fine, and when it was over and a bunch of us repaired to the local o’club there to sip a few suds and shoot the breeze – Marine types, you know. I could hear snatches from the next table over and I realized that the occupants were a bunch of Army Caribou (C-123) pilots (the Army doesn’t fly the Caribou anymore, but during the first part of the war they flew it as an Army plane.)
Anyway, these were Army Caribou pilots, so I went over, introduced myself, and bought them a round. I said, “I know you guys did a lot of flying for the Special Forces camps. How did you do it without getting shot down?”
One of the majors looked up at me and said, “Marine, believe me, we had flight insurance.”
I said, “Don’t give me that bull.”
He then explained, “Well, we’d fly into the Special Forces camp with a load of maybe four or five Americans coming back off R&R or dental appointments or the like. The Americans would jump off and a working party of indigenous troops would form up to off-load the bird and distribute the supplies. As all
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this was happening, a line would form to the rear of the airplane and at the head of the line was, usually, not more than two or three Americans that had to go someplace. Behind them was a long line of Vietnamese. They were in uniforms and half uniforms and quarter uniforms and no uniforms.” (With all the uniforms you never could tell who the hell it was anyway. You’ve got so many forces: the Rangers, the Airborne, the Straightlegs, the Marines, the provincial forces, the local forces etc...) Anyway, he said this line was always quite orderly, and “when we’d loaded the Americans on board and got them strapped in we would hold up our hands – the crew chief would hold up his hands – to indicate how many more passengers they could take back to Da Nang or Cam Ranh Bay or wherever they were going, that number of Vietnamese would move forward, load up and get strapped in, and off we’d go.” He went on, “The crew chief couldn’t speak Vietnamese and we could never find anybody among the Vietnamese who could speak English and generally the Americans that we were taking out didn’t know who these people were. Nobody had I.D. cards anyway, so we’d just load them up and take them out. They were always well behaved and always did exactly what we told them. They seemed to have some system for assigning the boarding priority. We’d fly them back to Da Nang or wherever we were going, they’d get off the airplane and disappear down the road, and that was the end of it.”
I said, “What you’re telling me, major, is that you were Teenie-Weenie Airline for both sides?”
He said, “Precisely! And it kept us alive."
Dittrich: That’s the craziest darn thing I ever heard. Wow.
Dabney: Does that give you some feel for what kind of war we were fighting?
Dittrich: Take me back to St John, New Brunswick, your birthplace. How did you start out?
Dabney: I guess the obvious answer was that’s where my mother delivered. Mother was from St. John. She was married to a man who was, at that time, a labor relations expert with General Motors Export
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Corporation. They sent him wherever they needed him in the world and before I was born they had lived in Kenya, Chile, Zanzibar and Madagascar. When the time came for me to be born they were in Kenya, so mother went home to have a baby because, you know, mothers do that. I was born an American citizen because of my father’s citizenship and I was registered at birth at the American Embassy. We left for Hawaii and then Cleveland, Ohio for a couple of years and then wound up in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1939. Dad was doing work for GM, setting up dealerships or something like that.
I was sort of under foot, as five year old boys tend to be, and there was a kindergarten down the road, so they packed me off to the kindergarten. I stayed there about six months until I came home on the occasion of my mother’s birthday, walked into the kitchen, clicked my heels together sharply and said, “Happy Birthday Mother, Heil Hitler.”
They had been indoctrinating us into the Hitler Youth in the German Kindergarten in Costa Rica! Obviously, I never went back. My mother and father, I’m told, went back to demand that the director of the school explain himself. He said, “Now look, all our education dollars come from Berlin, and Berlin dictates the syllabus. I therefore have no choice but to teach what they tell me to or lose my funding.” I’ve often thought of that as the best argument I know of for making damn sure the federal government doesn’t get control of our education.
World War II came along. Father had been an ensign in World War I so he offered up his services and wound up in Panama, first in Panama City. There weren’t a lot of dependents due to German submarines. A lot of the families were sent back to the States because of the war. One ship had been torpedoed. Most of the Canal was run by Americans and there were a lot around.
I went for the first five years to a Spanish Jesuit school in Panama and then to the Canal Zone schools. At both, we had those erasers I talked about previously, because it was expected that the Japanese would try to attack the canal. Anyway, I remember once we moved on to the Naval Base in the Canal Zone I was always envious – I was about 10 years old – I was always envious of the boy down the street
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because I had a 40mm Bofors in my back yard and he had a barrage balloon in his back yard. We were right at the Pacific entrance to the Canal.
We came back to the U.S. in 1945 and Dad was asked to go back down there and do some more work in 1946. We finally settled in Gloucester County, Virginia from which I later matriculated at VMI. The public schools in Gloucester County in those days were for farmers and fishermen. There were no college prep courses. If you wanted your child to go to college you had to go someplace else to school or you wouldn’t be ready. You couldn’t pass the exam.
I might add, for whatever it’s worth, not a heck of a lot of guys went to college. There weren’t many colleges to begin with and maybe 5% of the graduating class, nationwide, in a given year, went to college – very few of the girls, for whom there were a few finishing schools. Most of the major colleges were male only, including most of the big state universities. The girls tended to go to places like Randy Mac (Randolph-Macon) or Sweet Briar, or to one of the teacher's colleges like Madison or Radford. One of the few co-ed universities in the south was William and Mary. But there were darned few. Virginia Tech and UVA were, like VMI, all male.
I got educated pretty well, partly by the Jesuits but mostly at our dining room table. I applied for and got a full scholarship to Yale, matriculated, and had a wonderful time. Unfortunately, I didn’t maintain my grades at scholarship level, so was politely told at the end of my freshman year that I ought to go do something else for a while. I joined the Marine Corps. Enlisted and went to Parris Island in 1954.
Dittrich: Was General Shell there at that time?
Dabney: He came after I left. I knew who my DI was. I don’t remember ever seeing an officer 'till the graduation parade.
Dittrich: Why the Marines?
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Dabney: Growing up all around Naval bases during World War II, I was in contact with a lot of Marines. Panama had, among other things, the best tropical medicine hospital in the world. Had to have it to build the Canal. They built this fantastic medical system for the purpose of getting the Canal built and then, of course, to maintain it, so a lot of the troops – the Marines – from the South Pacific who were recuperating from dengue and malaria and stuff like that would be sent back to Panama for recuperation because they could treat them better there than they could anyplace else. After they got better they were given things like gate duty and stuff like that. It didn’t tax them very much.
My dad was commanding officer of the base and I kind of had the run of it on my bicycle. I was nine or ten years old and the troops were a long way from their families. The ice cream truck would come to deliver and they’d take a gallon off and give some to me and to my buddies. We could gorge ourselves. A ten-year-old in the tropics can eat a lot of ice cream!
Dittrich: That’s one way to get know Marines.
Dabney: And they were combat-hardened. I watched them a couple of times with people who weren’t cooperative. You didn’t want to mess with these guys. They took their duty seriously. I was impressed and the impression stayed with me. I liked boats and the water – still do – but I tended to get sea sick so didn't consider the Navy.
I either had to go to some jerk-water college or get my draft obligation out of the way. I knew if I got drafted they were going to make me a private in the Army and I didn’t want to be a private in the Army, so I went down and joined the Marine Corps at 100 West Broad Street, Richmond, and they took me.
Funny, I walked in and went through all the preliminary stuff. There were six of us that went in that day. They put us in this van to drive us down to Petersburg where the AFEES (Armed Forces Entrance Examining Station) was for the physical and psychological testing and to take what we called the AFQT
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(Armed Forces Qualification Test). That was the entrance exam. I was put in charge only because I was bigger than any of the rest. I was 6 foot 4½ inches in those days.
We got down there and took the tests and came on back up to the Richmond recruiting station. A couple of the young men were rejected – I don't know why. Then one by one, the other three of the six of us were called in and raised their right hands to be sworn in. They got tickets for that night for the train to Parris Island. I was quite prepared for the same thing. Had my toothbrush in my pocket and I figured that was all I needed.
Then they got to me. The sergeant called me into the office and said, “Dabney, you’re qualified but we can’t send you to Parris Island until November.”
I said, “Why not?”
He said, “Well, you’re a mental group one.”
I said, “What does that mean?”
He said, “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. The problem is, the Army got so mad because the Marine Corps is getting so many men in group one, that it put a quota on us because the Army can’t get any radio and electronic repairmen because the Marine Corps is getting all the smart ones. Anyway, we’ve used up our quota for September and October and the first month we can ship you is November.”
I looked at him and said, “Well Sergeant, I’m sorry, because I wanted to be a Marine, but I have to get out by the first of September three years from now,” because in those days the only time you could matriculate in college was the beginning of the first semester. There were no mid-semester and second semester matriculants. You started at the beginning of the year and that was it. You certainly couldn’t enter VMI in the second semester.
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He said, “Well, I don’t know. Not much we can do before November.”
I said, “Well, thank you very much. I’ll take a walk across the street and join the Navy.”
As I was getting up to leave, he said, “Wait a minute. Let me go back and look at that paperwork again.” He was gone about half an hour. All of a sudden I heard this eruption. He came storming out again, just livid with rage, and said, “You know what happened while we were talking? That dumb civilian secretary!" He went on and on and on and he said, “While you and I were talking the dumb bitch lost your test results! We can’t find them any place.” Then he thought for a moment and said, "What I want you to do is come in tomorrow morning and get on that van and go on back down there and take that test again.”
I thought about it and I figured I understood what he was saying. If I didn’t understand what he was telling me I didn’t deserve to be a mental group one anyway. So I went down there and took the test and deliberately missed enough questions to be rated a mental category 3. I took them back to the sergeant and was on the train to Parris Island that night.
Dittrich: How much of a jolt was it? Were you prepared for what you got into?
Dabney: Parris Island? Well, let me take it a step beyond that. When I graduated from VMI, Col. Dillard walked up to me, stuck his hand out and said, “Congratulations.” He said, “You did it. I and the most of the rest of us didn’t think you would.”
I said, “What do you mean, sir?”
He said, “Well, anybody who’s gone through Parris Island, to come through the VMI Rat line and stick it out – we didn’t think it was going to happen.” He said, “How the hell did you do it?”
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I said to him, “Colonel, frankly it not difficult.”
He said, “What do you mean, not difficult?”
I said, “I didn’t find Parris Island difficult and I didn’t find the Rat line at VMI difficult.”
He said, “Why not?”
I said, “Because for the first five years of my education, I was taught by Spanish Jesuits.” By God, under them, you learn. I still do my multiplication tables in Spanish. (I didn't tell him about the Hitler Youth – I thought that the less VMI knew about that the better.)
Dittrich: Do you really? I was going to ask you. Your Spanish has got to be pretty good.
Dabney: Yes, it’s pretty good. I mean, I’m rusty now. When I first came back to Virginia in ’46, talking in the family I used to substitute Spanish words for English ones that I didn’t know. But yes, I speak without an accent and can think in Spanish. And it's good Spanish as only the Jesuits can teach it. When I was stationed in Spain they couldn't figure out how an American could speak so correctly – thought I was German.
Dittrich: You mentioned life as a PFC Marine in 1955?
Dabney: $40 bucks a payday and you stretched that any way you could. You’re talking about a fellow’s take-home pay was about $40 a month. It was about $60, but by the time they took out the razor blade money and the social security and that sort of stuff, the take-home was about $40. Slept in flop-houses in Chicago and USO digs in Milwaukee and places like that. I was stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. We went to every free thing we could find. Went to a lot of the old Milwaukee Braves games. Remember, this was when the Braves were there, before the Brewers.
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Dittrich: That’s back when they had Henry Aaron and Eddy Matthews.
Dabney: If you were in uniform, you’d get in free and the breweries gave you free beer. You’d pick your free tickets up at the USO and go on down to the game. We never missed a game if we were off.
Dittrich: So what of your experiences early on?
Dabney: That’s one of the reasons they sent me to Rota, Spain after my commissioning. I could speak fluent Spanish and it was handy there as the liaison to the Spanish Marines – it was a joint base. If you ever had to get a kid out of a Spanish jail, I could help.
Anyway, what I was not prepared for in the Marine Corps was to encounter such a large and cohesive group of competent and dedicated men. I was flat-out impressed with the officers and enlisted men. They seemed to be truly dedicated to what they did and were very good at it.
I said to myself that this might be a pretty good way to make a living, so I decided then and there that I wanted to get a commission and come back in. They had offered me an appointment to the Naval Academy, but I turned it down because the Naval Academy would not accept any credits from Yale so I’d have had to go through four full years – would have to repeat the freshman year. Well, I talked to several officers whom I thought highly of, and to a man they recommended that I go to VMI.
I don’t remember for sure, but I think Jim Morgan was Director of Admissions. I’ve got the letters somewhere. He wrote me back and said, “Based on your scores and your military record, we’d be glad to have you as long as you are re-accepted at Yale first.” I guess they needed to ensure that I hadn't left Yale for an honor offense.
So I wrote to Yale, sent them my enlisted records and explained the situation. Yale replied, “Sure, we’ll
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be glad to let you come back, but you'll have to pay your own way. We won’t give you back the scholarship or anything like that, but based on your military records and your previous record here, you're welcome back.” I sent that letter to VMI and they sent me a letter of acceptance.
Told me to report for matriculation on the 3rd of September. So I went to my Marine commanding officer at Quantico said, “I’ve got to be out on the 3rd in order to matriculate at VMI in Lexington.” I knew there was an early out program for up to 30 days.
He said, “I understand you have to be in Lexington at 3:00 of the afternoon of the 3rd?”
And I said, “That’s correct, sir.” He said “Be here in a uniform, fit for discharge, at 9:00 on the morning of the 3rd.” So about 9:30 that morning I’m handed my discharge papers and I have to be at VMI at 3:00 – typical Marine Corps!
I was still in uniform. I didn’t have time to change. In those days enlisted men were not allowed civilian clothes and everybody, including for liberty, went out in uniform. I got on the Greyhound bus, rode down to Lexington, walked through the Ratline in a uniform of a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. Had no choice.
Dittrich: Was that a good thing or not – at VMI?
Dabney: I don’t remember it being a problem. Some of the childishness of the thirds would upset me now and then, but I kept saying to myself, these are 19 year old kids – they’ve never seen anything. In those days the Rat line went ‘til April – not like you have today.
I stepped out of the rat line only once. A third stopped us and started haranguing this kid in front of me who I knew was not a weakling, but he was having trouble – homesick and all of that – and the third had him in tears, which was ok. Well, he then started saying things that were demeaning to his family and his
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mother and that sort of thing. I mean he was crossing a line that shouldn’t have been crossed, including casting aspersions about the ancestry of the rat's mother. The kid was just kind of dissolving. So I stepped out of the line and told the rat to drive on, then turned to the third and told him to back off. I was about twice his size. He did. Never heard any more about it. I think the third probably thought about it and decided he'd been wrong, and let it go. No harm done.
Dittrich: You said Colonel Dillard was your influence. Was he your main influence at VMI?
Dabney: Probably more than any other one. But I was impressed with Col Johns, the Commandant, too. He acted like I thought a colonel was supposed to act.
Dittrich: How so? What made Dillard stand out?
Dabney: He was alive and a joy to be with, and he truly cared about the cadets. Yeah, he was an odd duck. But I expect from the standard view of society most Marines whom I enjoy are odd ducks too. Virginia’s father was surely an odd duck. Dillard could make learning fun. Is that a good way to say it?
Dittrich: I was in his class. He was a nut, but he was fun. You didn’t go to sleep in his class.
Dabney: He came alive and he knew – you know – you couldn’t stump him. If someone was sick, he could teach an engineering class. Let me give you a thought. We’ve not had a Rhodes Scholar since Dillard died (until 2004).
Dittrich: What about Ty Wilson as an influence?
Dabney: Ty Wilson I liked, but he never taught me.
Dittrich: Yeah. He’s a Yale guy, too.
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Dabney: And Admiral Parrish.
Dittrich: I’ve heard that name, but I don’t know him.
Dabney: He taught Math and he got me through Math. He was retired, U.S. Navy – Rear Admiral. He had the patience to understand what I didn’t understand. I couldn’t pass it the first time. I just didn’t grasp it. I don’t have that kind of a mind to begin with. I didn’t want to be an engineer. I just couldn’t get a handle. Of course, by that time, I was three or four years out of school and that didn’t help. The problem was that the teacher I had was brilliant. He used to sit in the canteen and write formulas out on the back of an envelope and mail them off to IBM and they’d send him a check for $10,000 – that kind of guy. In class, he’d go through a long, complicated formula. I’d try to stop him at the point at which I missed a step but he’d keep right on going ‘til the end and then I’d tell him what I didn’t understand – and he’d start all over again. I didn’t have a clue. He couldn’t seem to grasp what I didn’t grasp. Maybe he didn’t have the patience. Maybe he didn’t have the sense to know that. I muddled my way through as best I could because I really didn’t understand derivatives and I still don’t understand them. But Parrish made me understand it well enough, so he got me through it. He’d stay up ‘til 2:00 in the morning with me on this.
Other than that – I didn’t like chemistry but it was something I had to take, but it was something I could, at least, get my brain around. So Graham King and I sat down at exam time and just memorized the whole damn thing – every formula he’d ever talked about. We quit studying around 7:00 in the morning, took the exam at 8:00, were the first two to finish it, walked out and both made A’s on it. And I don’t remember a damn thing, but I passed chemistry. That’s all that mattered. Pure memorization.
Dittrich: How about dykes, roommates, folks that meant a lot to you or influenced you?
Dabney: Yeah, roommates. I got along real well with all three of them. We roomed together pretty well
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all three years. My dyke – and the guy who dyked me – they gave me one my first class year. It was awkward for him to be on the second stoop. It was awkward for me. His heart really wasn’t in being at VMI and he wasn’t studying and I tried to help him. He was an engineering major so I couldn’t help him much with the curriculum. He wasn’t mature enough to be at VMI. Nice kid. Finally, he told me he wasn’t going to come back the next year and I don’t think he could, academically. My understanding is he went to a college down in North Carolina and got his credits back up and came back a year later. I think he eventually graduated but we have not kept in touch. I liked him but we were too far apart – I was six or seven years older.
Dittrich: When did General Puller come in the picture? That was during the VMI time wasn’t it?
Dabney: Well, no, I met him before I came to VMI. I had been in Okinawa for almost two years and, again, I didn’t have any civilian clothes. A couple of days after I got home for my leave the local judge died. He was a cousin and a close friend of father’s and his son was a friend of mine. The only thing I had to wear was a Marine Corps uniform. It was a huge funeral. He was the circuit court judge. It was at a little colonial church in Gloucester County – built in 1690 or so.
One of the results was that there wasn't room enough in the church for a big funeral and over the years a custom had grown that for weddings and funerals the ladies all went into the church and cried and the men stood around the gravestones telling jokes and talking quietly, then everybody joined at the church door either to march the casket to the grave or salute the bride and groom, as the case may be. The men stayed outside because there wasn’t room enough for them. I was leaning against some ancestor’s gravestone and this bantam looking, cocky man in a suit came walking up to me and he said, “How’re you doing Marine. I’m Lewie Puller.” He wasn’t a legend then. This was before then, but I knew who he was and that’s about it.
I said, “I’m Hugh Dabney’s son.”
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Aand he said, “Where have you served?” I told him and we talked about what it was like on Okinawa, how much live-fire training had we done and the like.
Then the funeral casket came out and he introduced me to Mrs. Puller and she looked me up and down and said, “I have this tall daughter. Won’t you please come to call?”
Dittrich: She didn’t waste any time.
Dabney: Well, she’s like that. I mean, as Southern as they come. Of course, at that stage in your life, if you’re an eligible young man and a mother says something like that to you, the first thing you say to yourself is, "I wonder what else is wrong?" I accepted graciously and in due course of time, a few weeks later, I got myself shined up – still in uniform – I didn’t have any decent civilian clothes. I had out grown everything. I presented myself at the door and we had a wonderful Southern lunch – fried chicken and all that. Then the General took out on the front porch to talk.
About the time we settled down on the porch Virginia came in from wherever she’d been and, of course, my immediate reaction was, “Yeah!”
Her immediate reaction was, “Well, you’ve never let me date an enlisted man before so he must be visiting him on a professional matter.” Well, she went off and we, the general and I, got to talking and that’s when he told me what would happen in Vietnam. I never forgot.
Dittrich: And he was retired?
Dabney: Oh yes, he’d been retired for two years.
Dittrich: Radio repair?
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Dabney: Yes. That was my enlisted specialty. It was a year-long school. I could have probably passed the sophomore year EE at VMI. I had worked with wiring diagrams and schematics and figuring out how to go around what I couldn’t solve. I could draw a sine wave in my sleep. This was in the days before transistors.
We’d gotten two typhoons in Okinawa. Being raised on the Chesapeake where there are hurricanes, I understood that I had to be careful to reinforce my antennas and set up my generators so when the power went out I could still run the radio. This was at an isolated engineering camp, way up in the northern end of the island. In both typhoons I had the only station on the island that stayed up the whole storm. I was promoted, meritoriously, to corporal the first time and sergeant the second time. Took me about a month to go from PFC to sergeant,
Virginia and I dated for five years. She came down to the basic school where I was going through officer training in the fall of 1960, for the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, which of course was a big deal. There wasn’t any place to be alone so we left the ball and ended up at the machine gun range. I figured nobody would be using the machine gun range that night – I was right. I proposed to her and we've been married ever since. She graduated from college in June ’61 and we were married that fall.
Dittrich: I’ve heard your name for years and I’ve always wondered how did somebody be the son-in-law to the guy who is a legend in the Marine Corps and go in yourself. Did people say things to you?
Dabney: Yeah, but not too often. Troops would know it, but I found the most awkward time was when I reported in to a new command. When I first got to Rota, Spain, we’d only been over there a few months when General and Mrs. Puller decided they’d come over. I told my boss that her parents were coming over. Got a royal ass-chewing.
Dittrich: Oh boy, I can see the problem. You can’t win either way.
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Dabney: That got awkward. You just had to muddle through. There was no right answer and whether I handled it right or not, I don’t know. I did the best I could.
Dittrich: How much did he influence you? You’ve already said some.
Dabney: A great deal, mainly leadership. Even in retirement, I watched how he handled himself. He left me with the conviction that leadership cannot be taught. It might be useful to put young officers in the classroom every once in a while, but in this age they should be on the ground. Leadership is 95% example.
For example: Point man was a PFC’s job. I told you about the net and sling extraction where you had two-man helicopter support teams to provide terminal guidance for the infantry. They had radios and air panels and smoke grenades and were well trained. Much like your pathfinders. But on the hill, their casualty rate was pretty high so every time I’d lose a team, when the new team came up, I did the first subsequent terminal guidance and hook-up myself.
I think they always knew that anything I was going to ask them to do I was willing to do myself. I wasn’t going to do it often – that wasn’t my job. I was commanding the whole unit. I think as a general rule the men appreciated it pretty well.
That’s what my Vietnamese battalion seemed to think. I tried to set them up a machine gun school. Again, we had a lot of ammunition that was getting bad so we might as well use it for training. The problem with the Vietnamese was they didn’t train in combat, which meant they’d be out in the field for six months and never fire a weapon if they hadn’t had a firefight. Well, of course, if they did get ambushed or something, either the weapon didn’t work or they’d forgotten how to use it. I was always harping on training. We had to get them shooting machine guns so they wouldn’t mess up in a firefight.
Dittrich: Was General Puller always a cheerleader for you? Always the encouraging type or giving you
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his opinions?
Dabney: Well, I think, frankly, he was very sensitive that Virginia was no longer his daughter. She was my wife and he stayed out of our personal affairs. He was awesomely patient, marvelous to grandchildren. He’d look at those boys and say, "That’s my immortality!"
Dittrich: Do they remember him?
Dabney: The older one does. The younger one was three when he died.
He loved to talk the profession – usually it would start out as a tactical discussion and wind up with a geo-political one. You understand what I’m saying?
Dittrich: Yes.
Dabney: He was a very broad-brush kind of guy. You read that Saigon article I gave you and you’ll see what I mean. He tended to step back and look at the big picture. At the same time he was always unfailingly generous to anybody who ever wore a Marine Corps uniform. I remember one time when I arrived at the house at about eight in the morning to pick Virginia up, and here was General Puller, flanked on one side by a three-star general, Lew Walt, and on the other side by a recruit right out of boot camp. Scattered around that dining room table were about six other Marines of all ranks and ages and persuasion and he didn’t care. They were Marines and that’s all that mattered. His love of Corps – you could just sense it. I think Virginia said it best when she described the way he carried himself, the way he took the time to explain, to persuade, to do it himself. You wound up with the feeling that the one thing in your life that you didn’t want to do was let this man down, and I think that’s probably the way his troops felt.
Dittrich: That’s the best kind of leader, not the kind that you fear, but the kind that it kills you when you
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feel you’ve let him down.
Dabney: Maybe I didn’t explain it well, but that’s the best I can do and that’s the way I felt about it. You just didn’t want to come up short with this guy. He deserved better.
Dittrich: You weren’t intimidated by him?
Dabney: Not at all.
Dittrich: Was he “dad” to you, or “general”?
Dabney: General. We grew up in a fairly formal South. My father was the same. No different from Arkansas, right. And Virginia’s the same way. We say, “Yes, sir” and “No sir.” After Vietnam, I essentially wound up being regarded in the Marine Corps as strong in other than staff billets. About the only thing they could do with me if they were going to keep me around was to put me in command.
Dittrich: I see it in your bio.
Dabney: Yes. Thirty years of commissioned service, 17 in command. Frankly, I was good at it. I could make a decision. I knew how to turn rocks over, open a broom closet and stuff like that and somehow, in most cases, I was able to get my staff and subordinate officers to come along. And I think the other strength, frankly, was the ability to discern those subordinate officers and non-commissioned officers who either couldn’t or wouldn’t hack it. I told it like it was. When I wrote a fitness report, they read it. I ended some careers and I meant to. If I discerned a man wouldn’t make it on the battlefield, I said so. Conversely, there were some guys that other people didn’t think much of and I said, “You know, there’s something underneath here.” Now I’m not saying I was always right, but I got a reputation for being able to do that which led to things like the VMI assignment. No, I'll rephrase that – it led to my being given the VMI assignment when I asked for it.
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Let me give you an example at VMI. As you know, in the Marine Corps we put great stock in the physical fitness test, not only when I was coming along but nowadays as well. I think the Army probably does too. Anyway, one of the things I did with the NROTC unit, particularly the Marine Corps side (the Navy standards weren’t particularly high) was to test the cadets just before summer break, and record the scores. As soon as they came back in the fall, we tested them again. Everybody whose score dropped over the summer, we dropped. These guys were aspiring for a Marine Corps commission. Sometimes they’d say, "Well I had a job in retail," as their excuse.
I’d say to them, “You know, what we’re looking for in a Marine officer is not the guy who looks good. I would have hoped, having all that time free from studies and since you knew what the Marine Corps wanted, that you'd whip yourself into even better shape than you were in to begin with. I’m not sure you want to be a Marine because what we want is a man who will do the right thing when he's on his own and no one is checking.” That got rid of a bunch of them. Dropped them from the program. I didn’t care where they went. My job was to try and make them understand what being a Marine officer was all about.
Dittrich: How did you end up as VMI Commandant? You were the first Marine Commandant.
Dabney: And the last. Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to get into the details of why my predecessor left. He did leave on very short notice on the first of October. General Knapp was Superintendent. He called me in and asked me if I’d take the job as acting commandant. I said, “No sir.” I said, “I will take the job as commandant. I will not be "acting". Acting implies that all you do is keep in place the policies of your predecessor. I was unwilling to do that. "The second thing is I need to call my admiral and get his permission. Since it, obviously, is going to detract from my attention to my primary duty, I must have his o.k.”
The next day I went back and asked my admiral and he said, “Yes, if you think you can handle it”. I told him I could.
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Dittrich: You held both positions (commandant and NROTC head)?
Dabney: Yes. I made absolutely clear to General Knapp that if there was a conflict between my commandant duties and NROTC duties, then my NROTC duties would take precedence. He kind of raised his eyebrows about that. I said, “General, they are paying me and you are not. I need to do what the Secretary of Navy wants first. What energy and time I have left over I’ll devote to being commandant.”
Dittrich: How long were you commandant?
Dabney: The rest of the year until the 30th of June.
Dittrich: Was that retirement for you?
Dabney: Yes. Well, not only retirement for me – the Commandant’s job went civilian and away from the active duty. I did what I could in the leadership role. Here’s an example. If there was going to be a drum-out, it was usually at 2 o’clock in the morning. I'd get dressed up in uniform, drive in, and stand silently on the stoop of the class with the drummed-out cadet. Maybe the perceptive ones got the message.
Dittrich: What did you think of Corps when you came back after all those years?
Dabney: Well, one, I thought it was a bit less mature but to be honest with you I don’t think it was so much the Corps' fault as it was the fault of the absence of the draft. In my day, everybody was going to serve if he was physically qualified and they all knew it, so all of them, to one degree or another, made an effort to get ready for military service. They tended to take things like drill and uniforms and ROTC a little bit more seriously. There’s always an individual who's the exception, but as a group there was a more
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seriousness. I think in terms of capabilities VMI hadn’t changed much – but in terms of dedication, maybe. We knew what was coming next and thought, well, maybe I’d better get myself together. Does that make any sense?
Dittrich: It sure does.
Dabney: That doesn’t mean there weren’t lots of fun and games – there were.
Dittrich: The “Panty Raids” and all that kind of thing…
Dabney: So there was a fair share of fun and games. But you’ve got to remember something else. We had winning football. We tied two games and lost three in my three years, and won the rest. Not only that, we were 13th in the nation.
Dittrich: That’s hard to imagine. We sat through all my years and it was terrible.
Dabney: It doesn’t have to be that way and it may not be. We may get something here.
Dittrich: We had successful basketball during my two stays at VMI.
Dabney: To answer your question, I think in terms of intellectual capability, it probably hasn’t changed much. In terms of eye on the objective and seriousness about the future, it has changed substantially. We didn’t drink to get drunk as the cadets nowadays do. Rarely would you see a drunk cadet anytime. And sexual shenanigans were kept private.
Dittrich: I’m not sure that probably didn’t start around my time in the early 70s.
Dabney: We had good parties, but falling-down drunk? No.
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Dittrich: I think I could honestly say we had some falling-down drunks in my day.
Dabney: We had those too, but they were rare.
We went to Norfolk for the Oyster Bowl game with Navy. Graham Claytor, who was President of Southern Railways, sent a special train up to VMI. Actually he got it to East Lexington, but couldn’t quite get it across. The bridge was damaged. We marched across the East Lexington bridge and rode Southern Railways to Norfolk. We had very little beer. It was cheaper to buy hard stuff. I might add there was not as much beer-drinking in those days anyway. Beer was for pool halls and the like. But anyway, all of a sudden we’re down between Richmond and Crew – somewhere along in there – and a couple of cadets fell off the train. One was killed.
We didn’t have automobiles very much then. First classmen were allowed to have a car in Lexington after they finished their last exam.
Dittrich: I saw the change when the services went from the good old drinking days to the emphasis on driving responsively and zero tolerance for DUIs.
Dabney: It was traumatic for a lot of people. Frankly I've never bought into the modern view of alcoholism as an illness. As far as I’m concerned it’s a lack of self-control. I’d bring in guys to talk about a DUI and tell them they had a choice – stop drinking or end your career. They had to square themselves away, not me. I told them next time I would court-martial them. I even had this talk with lieutenant colonels.
Anyway, back to a Puller story. I recall hearing the story that the division commander was looking for Puller at his CP during the height of the battle and was told that he was up with his lead platoons. That’s the way he was. General Puller was one of the wisest gentlemen and one of the wisest leaders in
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modern times in the history of the Marines.
Dabney: During the Korean War, Syngman Rhee had the common sense to put the Korean army under American command. Gen Puller told me that by the time Ridgeway got through we had cashiered every incompetent or cowardly officer from the Korean armed forces and what was left was the foundation of what is now the best armed force in Asia. The commanders who were originally selected for those armed forces were all battle-proven and tested, and nobody cared about their political connections or anything else. It was how they performed on the front line. When we left them in ’53 we left them in pretty damn good shape in terms of leadership. They’ve been that way ever since.
Dittrich: When you were on the hill, did you write General Puller?
Dabney: I was writing to Virginia and always put two or three paragraphs in about what was going on, which she shared. When I got back in ’68, he was starting to fail. When I finally came back from my second tour of duty in '71, he'd had a massive stroke.
Dittrich: Were you close to your brother-in-law (Lew Junior), if you don’t mind me asking?
Dabney: Yes, of course, but he was way younger. He was about 12 when Virginia and I married. I was 26 then.
Dittrich: How did you get your regimental command on Okinawa?
Dabney: Well, frankly, in the Marine Corps I wasn’t always initially assigned to command. I’d go to a new command and they’d assign me to a staff billet. I remember when I went to the 3rd MarDiv. I was a brand new colonel. The CG had already picked his regimental commanders and the only job left was the division inspector. I figured I’d make it fun. I got myself a couple of good, big sergeants and we got in civilian clothes and hit the bars and watched the goings on like drug deals and wrote about it. They
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asked me how I knew…
Dittrich: And you were the guy who had to go around and do the inspections.
Dabney: No the CG did that.
It was inevitable that some colonel was going to go through a mid-life crisis. Sure enough, one got in trouble and I got the regiment. There was a saying that officers on unaccompanied tours in the Far East often became either alcoholics, shopoholics, runoholics or erotoholics.
Dittrich: That was on Okinawa?
Dabney: That was on Okinawa, Hong Kong and the Philippines.
An interesting story. There was a particularly viral strain of hepatitis going around and the amphibious task force commander – the admiral – put the word out that he would not tolerate tattoos because you got hepatitis from tattoo needles. I passed the word out to battalion commanders in the regiment to check their troops' health and service records and make sure all tattoos were recorded (they were recorded anyway for identification.) We recorded them all so we knew exactly who had what tattoos.
We also got the surgeons into the troops’ faces and gave them lectures on hepatitis B and the strains they couldn’t cure. The sergeant major and I attended some of the lectures. Troops were bored stiff, many of them sleeping. They were going to Hong Kong for five days of liberty and they couldn't have cared less about something called hepatitis B. After one of the lectures, he looked at me and said, “Colonel, will you let me handle this?” Well, among those 3,200 men we didn’t have one tattoo in the whole regiment. I heard he told them through the senior enlisted chain that you could catch AIDS from tattoo needles. I didn’t know whether it was true or not – it didn’t matter. But it worked. Troops didn't care about getting sick, but they damn well didn't want anyone to think they were queer!
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I remember as a company commander – I got in trouble when I took my company on a Med cruise out of Camp Lejeune. We got to the first liberty port in Naples – this was in the 1960s. This was just before the economy took off and the Italians were still recovering from WW II. If I had not seen Port-au-Prince I would have said that Naples was the rectum of the universe. But I’d already been to Port-au-Prince.
Dittrich: Worse at Port-au-Prince?
Dabney: Much, much. Naples was bad enough. So I put the word out to my troops that before they could pick up their liberty card and go ashore, they had to be briefed on prophylactics and they could not get off the ship without showing both liberty card and the prophylactic kit. It wasn’t long before I got this steaming letter from the Office of the Cardinal of Chicago about the ways in which I was leading the young astray. This nice young Marine had written his spiritual father that he was required to carry these prophylactics with him when he was on liberty. I wrote the cardinal back – luckily he'd written directly to me rather than through the chain of command. I wrote him back and I said, “I am neither condoning nor encouraging immoral behavior. As the Commanding Officer it is my duty to keep my men healthy. I’m not saying that the guy has to use the thing, but at least he’s got it. It’s his decision.” Again, I don’t think any other commands were doing this. I didn’t care. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Still does!
Dittrich: That’s how we did it in my day as well.
Dabney: One sergeant caught the clap – the only one of my men in the whole Med cruise. We were steaming from Villefranche to Barcelona when he was diagnosed. By this time the armed forces had gotten to the point where you couldn’t restrict a man's liberty for venereal disease. I knew the sergeant was married. I called him in and said, “Sergeant, how did you catch the clap?” He hemmed and hawed. I said, “You mean you had sexual intercourse with a woman?”
He said, “Yes sir.”
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I said, “Well, sergeant, I find you guilty of adultery and sentence you to two weeks restriction aboard ship.” Well, we got back to Lejeune and the division legal people came to see check our records. They saw this entry and went bananas.
"What did you do?" they asked.
I said, "It’s a perfectly valid charge and he admitted guilt, so I sentenced him to two weeks restriction. It solved my problem. He didn’t go on liberty. And the word got out – you can’t go ashore without a prophylactic in Dabney's company. I always enjoyed doing crazy things like that, but always to a purpose. Usually I got away with it. It sure went over with some of the truly magnificent men I served with – both as a commander and a subordinate.
Dittrich: You still stay busy with your web site?
Dabney: Yes, and with occasional articles for the Marine Corps Gazette. One of the things that came out of this was work on the Marine Corps Museum. Marines are going to do it right, which means the money appropriated by the Congress is about a quarter of what they need for what they’re going to do. They must do it by private subscription.
For World War II they will build a beach with a landing craft. For Vietnam, they will depict Hill 881 south.
Dittrich: Well, knowing how the Marines are, I’d say it will be 1st class.
What was the hardest thing you ever had to do?
Dabney: A couple days into the siege of Khe Sanh, we spotted five or six men moving on a ridgeline about 5,000 meters out. Couldn’t see them very well because they were moving in and out of vegetation,
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so we couldn’t get an ID on them. I reported it up the chain and was told by higher headquarters to bring fire down on them as soon as I could. We were taking incoming at the time and said I’d just as soon wait until it died down a bit. Didn't want to lose a gun crew to the incoming mortars. I called the OP sergeant. He said, “They’re moving in this direction – slow – it’s pretty heavy country out here.” He’s the sergeant and he’s got them in sight – I don’t. I’ve got to let him make the decision, and he was not sure they were not friendly.
I reported that back down to regiment, who assured me that there were no Marines anywhere near our sighting, then, "This is a direct order. Take them under fire.” I refused. It was only six men, I thought. We can handle them. No big thing if they get close. But we’re not shooting and we’re not going to shoot until we’re sure.
About two hours later, six tired, scared and hungry Reconnaissance Company Marines walked into our lines. Of course, it wasn’t fifteen minutes until a helicopter was there to pick the six men up.
You’ve got to stick to your guns. I could easily have taken them out and technically been correct for doing it. I was ordered to do it. Well, it’s a combination of hunches and trusting the guy you gave the job to. He was out on the OP and he could see them. Until he gave me the green light, I wasn’t going to shoot. Now the further you get away from the front, the harder it is to understand it. They had reinforced concrete bunkers, 20 feet underground, at Khe Sanh. That’s where they were calling from. They just didn’t understand. Damn, if you can't listen to me, come up here and look for yourself! But until you do, you’ve got to get along with me. You know, it’s just a gutsy Marine that had the courage of his convictions and wouldn’t let anybody push him. If I want to second-guess my sergeant, then I ought to go out there on OP and see it for myself. I had other duties to perform so I couldn’t go out there and I’m not supposed to be an OP. I’m the commanding officer. But if I’m going to put him out there and give him the responsibility, I’d damn well better listen to him. If I stop doing that, I shouldn’t be a commander. But having refused an order from the regimental commander, I fully expected to be summarily relieved. Anyway, I hope that helps.
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Dittrich: It sure does. Did you notice a difference after that, with your relations with headquarters? Did they back off a little?
Dabney: Yeah, they did.
Dittrich: Maybe that was your credibility test.
Dabney: I don’t know about a credibility test, but they came awfully close to killing six Marines! That’s a funny way to run a credibility test.
Dittrich: I know that from my own experience. It shouldn’t be that way.
Dabney: They didn’t have the guts to call me back later and say they screwed up. You know, things like that, and the desperate messages I put through for stretchers and nothing came and men coming in – there are some things I don’t forget and still think about. That’s what war’s about. I can understand that. That doesn’t make it any easier when you are on the front line.
Read Puller’s article, “The Next Stop Is Saigon.” Read it and think about it. I’d have to honestly say that my life with the Marine Corps was a really awesome. I’ll treasure those associations and I meant exactly what I said at the ceremony, that serving with men like those under fire was the greatest honor of my life.
Dittrich: I’ll read that. I missed it when I read through the first time. You can treasure that association by doing what you’re doing – especially with your web site. This is probably a good way to end this interview. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.
Dabney: Anyway, good to have you.