The Americal Goes Home

The wind-driven rain slanted in from the northeast and kept building until the eye of typhoon Hester passed over Chu Lai. home of the Americal Division. At one point, the officers' handball-court roof was seen flying end over end through the air: the roof of the officers' club went piecemeal. The house of Major General Frederick J. Kroesen, the division commander, simply blew apart. In the confusion of crumbling buildings and hangars, one man died, eleven were injured and 33 helicopters were damaged beyond repair. In all, Hester wreaked more havoc on the base in 24 hours than the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese army could have done in six months. It was a sadly appropriate sendoff. Last week Kroesen pulled the lanyard on an artillery piece and officially fired the last round of the Americal in combat.

After four years in the field, the Americal is standing down. It is none too soon. Every war produces its hard-luck units, and the Americal, for all the bravery of most of its men, was the G.T. Joe Btfsplk of Viet Nam. It is not only dropping out of the war as part of the U.S. withdrawal, but dropping out of existence in the U.S. Army. Soon after the division's headquarters returns to the U.S. this month, the colors will be officially retired and the books closed on the ill-fated outfit.

Spectacular Mistake. Throughout its existence the division behaved as though plagued by some unknown malignancy. Most notoriously, there were Lieut. William Galley Jr. and the Americal's Task Force Barker at My Lai. In 1969 men of the Americal's Alpha Company balked at orders to advance on NVA positions. Later followed the discovery of the Americal's use of the defoliant Agent Orange after it had been banned by the Defense Department. This spring came the massacre at Fire Base Mary Ann, where enemy sappers ravaged the outpost, killing 33 and wounding 76 of 200 Americans. Admits General Kroesen: "When the Americal makes a mistake, it is a spectacular mistake."

The first mistake, however, seems to have been General William Westmoreland's. As commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam in 1967, he created Task Force Oregon, a pastiche of units, to relieve Marines in I Corps. Several months later the task force received a new commander, Major General Samuel W. Roster (later demoted because of My Lai), and was incarnated as the Americal Division,* composed of the 196th, 198th and 11th Light Infantry Brigades and others. The union was unfortunate.

From the beginning the units were very difficult to meld together. The 196th, for example, considered itself the 196th Brigade, and its men did not even want to take off their old shoulder patches. Size alone--at times as many as 24,000 men--made the division unwieldy, and it had some of the worst soldiers in the Army.

Cradle of Revolution. Lieut. Calley's outfit, for example--the llth Infantry Brigade--was supposed to have 30 days' training "in-country" before it went into serious combat. But within two weeks it was attacking in the My Lai area. "There wasn't a veteran in the outfit," recalls one general. The case was not unique. The 198th was deployed only five months after it was activated. The artillery units were brought in and, like much of the division, trained under combat conditions.

The Americal fought none of the big TV battles, like Khe Sanh, or the seemingly more glamorous war of the helicopter-equipped Airmobile units. Rather, it slugged it out day by day, village by village, in one of the largest, most hostile areas of Viet Nam: Quang Ngai and Quang Tin provinces, Viet Minh strongholds since World War II and, to the V.C., the "cradle of the revolution."

"This division had some of the most violent combat in the country," says Kroesen. "When I was here before, there never was a day that some unit didn't have major combat in which men were killed." Notes another officer, Colonel Reamer W. Argo Jr.: "They saw more of the enemy and less of the enemy than any other division. They were sitting on top of that huge area, grinding it out, never really in contact with the enemy, and always suffering from him." The casualty toll was tremendous. More than 100,000 men wore the Americal patch. Of those 11,500 were wounded and hospitalized, 11,000 were wounded and returned to duty, and 3,400 killed.

Fading Away. There is, of course, another tragedy of the Americal Division, that of the thousands who fought bravely and well, many for a cause that they barely understood or in which they did not believe. Militarily, the division did accomplish its objectives--pacification and Vietnamization--as well as any unit in the U.S. Command. But in the years to come, it will likely be My Lai and the other disasters that come to mind when the Americal is mentioned, not the far more numerous acts of valor and sacrifice.

Meanwhile, the Americal seems incapable of pulling up stakes and quietly fading away. Late last week a group of soldiers was playing football on the beach at Chu Lai when one was caught in an undertow and swept out to sea. In an attempt to rescue him, eight more were caught. Four of the men were pulled to safety aboard helicopters, but the others are still missing and presumed drowned.

*The original Americal Division was created in New Caledonia in 1942. Its name was derived from the phrase "American troops in New Caledonia." Following World War II, the division was disbanded, and the name was not revived until the Viet Nam War.

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