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An Incident on Hill 34

By Richard Brummet

It was lunch time, so the column of tanks and ACAVs stopped on the top of a modest hill for a meal of C-rations and water. Since there were two cavalry platoons on a joint patrol, the troop commander led the patrol.

It was a hot day during the dry season in Quảng Tin Province, with good visibility. We could clearly see across the flat valley. A village was nestled right up against the foot of Hill 34, and another was about two kilometers across the flat rice paddies.

I had enough months in the field in Vietnam to feel I could read the situation. I felt no threats. I could always be wrong, but VC lurking in the bushes just did not compute that noontime. Twenty-one years old and full of overconfidence.

So we ate our chow in the heat of a lazy midday in VC land's countryside.

That day, I was the loader on tank A-35. I should have been the driver, but there was only so much the tank commander could endure from a young man who was sometimes at the controls of his very first motor vehicle. Growing up in New York City, with its extensive subway system, made it pointless to insure a teenage male driver. Driving that 52-ton tank was great fun, but a bit rough on the three soldiers up in the turret. When driving down National Highway One, people did get out of my way, which was very gratifying.

Our troop commander was a West Point-educated captain, which inspired confidence in me that he knew what he was doing. He had an awesome amount of deadly power at his disposal. An armored cavalry platoon mounted three 90mm direct fire cannon, ten .50 caliber machine guns, seventeen 7.62mm machine guns, ten 40mm grenade launchers, one 81mm mortar, plus all the personal weapons of 55 soldiers. Since there were two platoons present, double that death-dealing gear.

So, lunchtime complete, it was time to return to our sweep of that bit of countryside. But first! The troop commander had an idea. He said: "You guys with the .50 cals hose down that ville at the base of the hill. You guys with the 90s do the same to the ville across the valley."

There were no overt signs of danger. No VC flags flying. No sniper fire. Just two Vietnamese villages in the mid-day heat, likely doing just what we were: lunch time when the heat in the fields was at its peak.

A .50 caliber round is not really needed to disable a person. The 7.62mm rounds are quite enough. A .50 will rip an arm off. So "hosing down a ville" of families having lunch is, as it were, overkill. The 90mm high explosive rounds hitting the distant thatched-roof village were worse.

Yes, I did not feel right about this whole business. I had been trained to follow orders but not trained to refuse illegal orders. Wanting to be an effective soldier, I put all my barely sufficient upper body strength into slamming those 90s into the breach. The gunner would fire a round, and before the cannon had totally recovered from the recoil, I had the fuse end of the next round poking into the breach. "UP," I would yell into the intercom, which told the gunner and tank commander that the next round was in and the breach block of the cannon was up. Also meant that the loader (me) was out of the way and the gunner could immediately fire another serving of death to the distant ville.

Tanker helmets had microphones and headphones. Being on the platoon sergeant's tank, I could hear what the captain was saying. He was looking at the ville with his binoculars and giving us a running commentary of what we were doing to that ville and the humans in that ville.

"You got arms and legs on that one Three Five!"

What he said next pushed me just over the edge: He called for 90mm white phosphorous rounds. That did it. I had read about the effects of that material on human flesh. No Wooly Pete rounds went into the breach, nor any other types of rounds. What I did was reach up where the gunner could not see and throw the manual lock on the cannon. Then I climbed out of the turret and sat there.

Naturally, the tank commander ordered me back into the turret. I did not move, which surprised me. It also surprised the tank commander. Normally, I would not do such a thing, but my disgust overpowered my fear of authority.

So I sat on the turret, my back to the sputtering tank commander, and focused on the troop commander, who was sitting on his command track a short distance away. I picked up a .45 submachine gun lying on the turret and cradled it in my lap. I fixed my gaze on the troop commander. The pros and cons of walking over to his track and cutting him in half with the .45 sloshed around my brain. Never taking my eyes off him, I decided that spending the rest of my life in Fort Leavenworth military prison was not what I wanted. So the criminal captain lived, and so did I.

Fifty-seven years have passed since that horrid day in Quảng Tin. The captain and I both survived the war and have grown old. The past, however, is utterly unchanged.

Richard Brummett is a life member of VVAW. He has spent three years of his life in Vietnam. One as a soldier in an armored cavalry squadron; one as a civilian photojournalist; and one in peacetime doing good works in the province where he did bad works in 1968.