The Magnificent Bastards Part 12

Several men were still pinned down in the killing zone. To get them back, Lieutenant Skrzysowski, immobile in the trench, worked his radio to keep the arty on target while Sergeant First Cla.s.s Mathis moved among their positions to organize suppressive fires. Under this cover, the men in the killing zone made it back one at a time. Sometime later, after Delta One's casualties had been moved rearward to Delta Three's LZ, several GIs from the reserve platoon dropped into the forward trench and told Skrzysowski that they had orders from Black Death 6 to get him on a medevac, too. They carried him back in a poncho, and then hefted him aboard the C&C Huey-which landed despite the latest mortar attack. Skrzysowski was the only casualty on board. It had been two hours since he'd been hit.

Smoke hung in the air from the mortar explosions, as did the smell of gunpowder. The day was scorching hot, the noise of gunfire constant. Sergeant First Cla.s.s Mathis was in constant motion, checking the platoon positions with his radioman, c.o.x, crawling behind him on his hands and raw knees. The NVA fire over their heads sounded to c.o.x like angry hornets, and he made sure to keep his radio antenna pulled down. Mathis and c.o.x discovered three troopers who had found sanctuary in a bomb crater two or three hedgerows back. They refused to budge. Everyone else was doing his job, to include scared, sweat-soaked c.o.x, who at one point ended up feeding ammo belts into an M60 whose gunner blazed away like mad. When dirt started popping up behind them, c.o.x thought a trooper to their rear was firing wild. He suddenly realized that the NVA sniper on the left flank had zeroed in on the M60, and he and the gunner scrambled to a new position along their hedgerow. They resumed firing.

Fifteen minutes after Black Death ran into trouble on the left flank, Captain Leach and Charlie Tiger were engaged on the right by three NVA in an observation post on the near side of the contested clearing. Charlie Tiger GIs killed the NVA with grenades, then Leach's popular first sergeant, forty-two-year-old Sfc. William R. Brooks, of Morriltown, Arkansas, pulled an AK-47 from the enemy trench and held it up to show the captain. At that moment, Brooks was nailed in the forehead and killed instantly as heavy fire erupted from the NVA positions on the other side of the clearing. Charlie Tiger was at the last hedgerow with Lieutenant Hieb and Charlie One on the right flank, and Staff Sergeant Goad, the acting commander of Charlie Two, on the left. Charlie Three, led by 1st Lt. Dale W. Musser, who had been on an administrative run to the rear when the battle began two days earlier, brought up the rear. Musser was an excellent platoon leader, but Leach had him in reserve for the same reason he'd earlier sent him to the rear: Musser was furious about the b.o.o.by-trap death of Lieutenant Dunlap of Delta Company. Leach explained that he'd "yanked Musser's a.s.s out of there to give him time to cool down, but he was still smarting. He was so mad that I was afraid he'd pull a John Wayne. I didn't want him to get killed, so I put him back in reserve."

In the first moments of the engagement, Captain Leach, who wore a helmet and flak jacket and was swinging a CARI5, had to kick a couple of GIs in the a.s.s for having hunkered down out of harm's way. "Start firing your G.o.dd.a.m.n weapons!" he shouted. "And don't fire on automatic-fire on semi or you'll just eat up all your ammo, and we don't know what the f.u.c.k's in there!"

"When a firefight starts, it's pandemonium," recalled Captain Leach. "If you can get your guys just to return fire, you're doing well. We had guys who never fired their weapons. When a soldier takes fire, the first thing he does is take cover. If you can get that kid to get his G.o.dd.a.m.n weapon up there and just fire in the right direction, you got it made."

Having crawled forward to a mound, Captain Leach started pumping away with his CAR 15-until it jammed. He was enraged He was also receiving plunging fire from an NVA whose location he could not figure out. Lieutenant Hieb spotted the NVA in one of the surviving hootches and shouted, "Hey, they're Marines' down at you from the rafters!"

"Shoot that sonofab.i.t.c.h because he's going to kill me!" screamed Leach.

The position was silenced with a LAW, but the fire continued from other entrenched, invisible enemy positions.

Charlie Tiger responded in kind. "We pounded the s.h.i.t out of 'Em," said Leach. Helix 1-5 ordered several more Skyhawk strikes, which utilized napalm and five-hundred-pound high-drag bombs. Each pa.s.s was made from a different direction so as to give the NVA less opportunity to organize the effective antiaircraft fire they had the day before. When the FAC departed to refuel and rearm with marking rockets, the arty was turned back on. "With all that s.h.i.t rolling in, the sound level must have been a hundred-and-fifty decibels," said Private Harp of Charlie One. "I mean your ears hurt." Like every other man, Harp had found a piece of cover-in his case beside Pope, their machine gunner-and he poured fire across that clearing. They had no specific targets. Harp probably went through seventy-five magazines with his M16. "The receiver group on my rifle got so hot I could hardly hold the d.a.m.n thing. The whole palm of my hand was blistered. The barrel was pouring off white smoke, and I used three bottles of LSA to keep the bolt from freezing up." Pope's M60 consumed ammo with equal vigor, and Harp ran back several times during the fight to get M16 bandoliers for himself and extra machine-gun ammo for Pope. "Pope's gun literally glowed red from time to time. He burned out the barrel and had to start using his spare." Harp was scared, hungry, and thirsty. He had run out of water the day before, and he was wobbly in the unrelenting, lip-cracking heat of the day. "All that kept me going was on one of my trips to the CP for ammo I fell in a sh.e.l.l hole with a little green water. I stuck my canteen down in the sandy mud and got about one-third of a canteen of something that was mostly water. Put six iodine tablets in it, shook it up, and tried to chug-a-lug the s.h.i.t as fast as I could in the hopes that I wouldn't taste it too much."

At 1325, Lieutenant Colonel Snyder went airborne over the battle in his C&C Huey. Thirty-five minutes later, Helix 1-7 arrived on station to control the seventh air strike of the day. It lasted twenty-five minutes. Under the cover of the snake 'n' nape and automatic cannons, Captain Leach sent Lieutenant Hieb and two squads low-crawling across the right side of the clearing, where enemy fire was minimal. If they could blast out a foothold on the other side, they might break the stalemate.

Captain Leach, meanwhile, got on the horn with Black Death 6, whose fires seemed to be straying toward Hieb's a.s.sault. "You gotta watch your fire to your right flank. You got to keep it in front of you because we got those guys up there." The fire was not adequately shifted. Leach, who had already secured an M16 from a medic, shrugged into the harness of one of his RTOs' radios-he wanted to move fast without his command group in tow-and started toward Black Death 6 on his hands and knees. His pucker factor was up, but he made it into Humphries's crater and began pointing out exactly where Delta's troops should not fire. Leach and Humphries were still talking when a rocket-propelled grenade crashed into the crater some thirty meters to their right, wounding several noncoms who were firing from that position.

In the continuing cacophony, one of Humphries's medics, Sp4 Rollin D. Davis, twenty, of Grand Junction, Iowa, was killed. Captain Leach radioed ahead before crawling back to the berm where he had left his command group. Lieutenant Hieb called on the company net: He had reached the enemy side of the clearing but was under a ma.s.sive amount of fire and could make no headway. Leach ordered Hieb to pull back, then asked Helix 1-7 to bring in the tac air to help the two squads break contact. Hieb popped smoke as instructed. Leach, after giving the FAC an azimuth, direction of fire, et cetera, said to him, "Okay, you're going to be dropping it twenty meters right in front of 'Em, so you got got to do it right." to do it right."

It was 1604. Lieutenant Hieb, wanting to cover the withdrawal with his CAR 15, sprinted by himself toward the next hedgerow. He stepped in a hole on his way across and fell heavily with his pack, knocking the wind out of himself. He jumped into a thicket of bamboo. The first Phantom made its strafing run a safe distance away, but fhen Hieb, whose ruck was hopelessly tangled in the bamboo, looked up to see the next jet lining up for a run right at his forward location. He couldn't pull his ruck loose, so he frantically shrugged out of it and left it suspended in the bamboo as he sprinted away. The Phantom released its napalm canisters. Expertly applied, they sucked the oxygen from the air as they drove the NVA to the bottom of their holes, allowing Hieb's platoon to crawl back without casualties. All that was later found of the lieutenant's rucksack were a few little melted bits of the aluminum frame.

At 1617, the ninth air strike plastered Nhi Ha. Meanwhile, the C&C Huey, without the colonel, conducted medevacs and ammo drops in Delta Three's LZ. The Huey came in low and hot each time, with cover fire courtesy of the wounded Sergeant See, who still had two men left in his machine-gun squad, plus a half-dozen anonymous GIs who'd also been detailed to work the landing zone. They fired in the general direction of that invisible, dug-in sniper in the burial mounds on the left flank. The NVA was about a hundred meters away. Every time somebody moved, he fired. After one ammo drop, See, who'd run out to haul the stuff off the open LZ, ended up pinned down behind six cases of machine-gun bullets.

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit!" he screamed at his pickup squad, which was not returning fire. "Give me some cover fire, I gotta get out of here!"

The GIs did not raise their heads from their holes. The sniper ceased fire on his own accord. Sergeant See, who was furious, got only apathetic looks from the anonymous GIs as he shouted at them about their inaction. They weren't fools. They didn't intend to die in this stupid war.

These GIs were not alone in their att.i.tude. Two men were medevacked during the day with combat fatigue, including a grunt who was so hysterical that it took several men to load him yelling and screaming onto the Huey. The other man crawled back to the LZ quietly and on his own, still wearing his helmet and web gear and dragging his M16. He was crying, "I can't take it....I can't take it...." The man was a Regular Army sergeant first cla.s.s. See was shocked, and then angry. "He was the type of guy who was supposed to be hard-core," See said later. "After all the c.r.a.p we'd been given by E-7s during our training about how to be a role model-here's this guy who just became a coward. Everyone wanted to climb on a helo and say the h.e.l.l with it, but we had a job to do and that's the way it was."

At 1830, the C&C Huey was. .h.i.t by the NVA sniper while it lifted up from the LZ. The pilot lost control of the tail boom, which swung wildly from side to side as the Huey smacked back down on the ground. Sergeant See, who had rolled away from the descending chopper, was joined in a flash behind the cover of his earthen berm by the chopper crew. They were understandably shook up. The first thing they wanted to know was whether the grunts had any extra steel helmets for them. "No, we don't," See said with an inward smile at how uptight the airmen were. Within ten minutes, another Huey bounced in and out of the LZ to take aboard the downed crew while the grunts fired away at the burial mounds.

Although few NVA had been seen, fifty-seven were reported killed. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had several conversations with Captain Leach about what the NVA had in Nhi Ha. Leach kept telling him that they were up against at least a full-strength company, but Snyder replied that it was "not nearly that many," and that they seemed large in number only "because they're so well dug in they can move back and forth." On that they could agree. Their arty and tac air weren't doing any good against the enemy entrenchments. Finally, at dusk, after nearly nine hours of stalemate, Leach said to Snyder, "Hey, listen, I don't know how to attack this G.o.dd.a.m.n thing any way but going right up the center. Now, we'll go again if you want us to go."

Two Gimlets had already been killed that day, and thirteen more wounded. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder did not believe that a frontal a.s.sault could be successful "at any reasonable cost of casualties." He told Leach to "pull back to the laager position. We're going to pound it some more with artillery and air."

A tenth and final air strike was brought in at 1920 by Helix 1-5 to help Charlie and Delta break contact. But as the two companies leap-frogged back through Nhi Ha by fire teams, the NVA pursued them to the edge of the ville. Red and green tracers crisscrossed in the smoky dusk as troops fired and ran, then fired and ran again. Pandemonium reigned. When they reached the laager, Private c.o.x was approached by a buddy who exclaimed, "Jesus Christ, c.o.x, I almost shot you! As we were giving cover fire, you ran right into my sights. Why I stopped pulling the trigger at that time I'll never know-but you came that close to getting shot!"

It was another long night in the three-company laager. At 0352, shortly after the enemy probed the perimeter with AK-47 fire and grenades, a Charlie Tiger listening post lobbed a few grenades of their own at two NVA who were visible in the paddy around the laager. The NVA went down as if dead, and the LP pulled back on order. At 0405, two more enemy soldiers walked right into Charlie's line. Specifically, they walked up to Sp4 Bill Dixon of Charlie Two, who was in a three-man position with Privates Fulcher and Fletcher, who were half-asleep behind a paddy dike. Dixon, awake and on watch, was sitting with his M79 when the two NVA, who must have been lost, appeared before him as silhouettes. One knelt down to start speaking to him in Vietnamese. Dixon, who had a shotgun load in his grenade launcher, shot the man in the head at point-blank range. While the other NVA spun away to run, Dixon slapped his hand on Fulcher who, startled awake, had instantly and automatically put his hand on his M16 rifle. "Stay down-there's another gook out there yet!" shouted Dixon.

The NVA fired his AK-47 as he escaped. When Fulcher exclaimed, "What the h.e.l.l's going on?" Dixon answered urgently, "I shot one!"

"Where?" asked Fulcher.

"Right there."

"Right where!" where!"

"Right there!" there!"

The first illumination round went up then, and Fulcher was shocked to see a nearly decapitated NVA soldier lying within an arm's length of them. Brains were splattered all over Fulcher's rucksack, and he barked, "What the h.e.l.l' dja let him get that close for?"

Specialist Dixon had not been taken completely by surprise. He had heard the NVA speaking in m.u.f.fled, definitely non-English tones as they'd approached, but he had a.s.sumed that it was the two Puerto Rican GIs in the position to their right who usually conversed in Spanish. The dead man wore black shorts and a gray fatigue shirt. Because he carried binoculars and a brand-new AK-47 with white parachute silk over the barrel, it was conjectured that the man had been an artillery spotter, probably a lieutenant.

Captain Leach, who had some hard words about the one that got away, took the AK-47 to replace his jammed-up CAR 15 and used it during the remainder of the DMZ operation. Afterward it was presented to the Helix FACs as a thank-you and ended up on a plaque in their Chu Lai club. Meanwhile, artillery ilium was being fired. The troops could hear the ascent of each round and then the pop, and they watched each flare sway on its parachute in its slow, smoke-trailing descent. The flares were timed so that as one hit the ground and went out, another would burst above them. If the timing was off, the plunge into darkness was instant and total. Private Fulcher, for one, would shudder at the thought of NVA rushing toward them. "But then another flare would pop and it'd still be blank out across the paddies. It was great having the lights on, as we used to say."

Alpha Annihilated

AT 0655 0655 ON ON S SUNDAY, 5 MAY 1968, 1968, TWO TWO USAF FACs USAF FACs AR ARrived on station to coordinate the preparatory air strikes for the 3-21st Infantry's fourth a.s.sault on Nhi Ha. This time, two-thousand-pound bombs were to be used. The suggestion to employ such heavy ordnance had come the previous evening when Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had spoken by radio with a frustrated FAC who said, "Let me lay on a couple of sorties tomorrow with two-thousand-pound fuse-delays. They'll penetrate the ground before they explode. The ground shock is tremendous. If there's anybody left in those dugouts then, it'll do 'Em in."

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had been enthusiastic about the idea. He had not suggested it himself because he had been unaware that such munitions were available. The FAC went on to advise him that if they used the two-thousand-pounders the men closest to the enemy positions would have to pull back as a safety precaution.

By 0715, Captain Corrigan's B/3-21, the company closest to Nhi Ha, had withdrawn approximately five hundred meters south of Lam Xuan West. Captain Leach and his three-company task force remained in their well-entrenched laager six hundred meters east of Nhi Ha. Snyder went airborne in his C&C Huey. When the two-thousand-pounders plunged into the hamlet, he had a ringside view of the spectacular subsurface explosions that erupted mushroomlike with much smoke and dirt. The effect was most dramatic at ground level. Even at a safe distance, it was like being in an earthquake. Foxholes seemed to sway and move as the shock wave rolled through, and metal fragments rained down to bounce off a helmet or two. The last bomb fell at 0930, and the ground a.s.sault commenced ten minutes later with Captain Leach and Charlie Company advancing toward Nhi Ha behind the artillery prep. Captain Osborn and Alpha moved out behind Charlie Tiger. It took twenty minutes to reach Nhi Ha, then ten more minutes to cautiously cross the first hundred meters inside the ville. At that point, Charlie halted and Alpha leapfrogged past to continue the a.s.sault up to the clearing that was the hamlet's no-man's-land. Despite the obvious destruction caused by the blockbusters, one lieutenant said later that "no one was optimistic that this was going to be a picnic."

By 1040, two of Alpha's platoons, expending ammunition freely as they reconned by fire, had low-crawled across the clearing without contact. Joined shortly by Charlie, both companies proceeded to sweep the western half of Nhi Ha. The troops were alert and cautious as they walked through the rubble. When an NVA soldier in a spiderhole tried to raise his AK-47 through his overhead cover, a sergeant in Charlie Tiger reached down and jerked the weapon out of the man's hands before dispatching him with a burst from his M16. There were no other live NVA visible. At 1132, after a lot of grenades had been wasted on a lot of empty entrenchments, Leach reported to Snyder that Nhi Ha had been secured. Along the way, the three bodies that Charlie Tiger had left behind three days earlier were recovered. "They were totally destroyed," recalled Lieutenant Smith of Alpha Annihilator. "It was one of those times that you swallow real hard because if you don't you're going to throw up. Some people did." The bodies had swollen and turned black, and the stench was terrible. Their bloated faces were unrecognizable. Their mouths were frozen open in death. Flies covered them, and their wounds were alive with maggots. "G.o.d, I hate f.u.c.king maggots," said Private Harp, who helped to gingerly place the torn-up remains into body bags. "Somebody grabbed one by his pistol belt, and the body broke in half. The bones in his rib cage popped out. I didn't know whether to puke, cry, or hide, so instead I just went back to work. You just kind of disconnect and do what you have to do. It wasn't really me picking up that mangled mess, it was me watching me. I was just an observer to someone else's nightmare."

Thanks to tac air and the blockbusters, Nhi Ha looked like Hiroshima. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder instructed Captain Leach to hold the village with Charlie Tiger and Captain Os-born's Alpha Annihilator, which would remain in his task force and under his command. Captain Humphries's Delta Company was detached and ordered to occupy Lam Xuan East as the battalion reserve. Captain Corrigan's Bravo Company, never part of the task force, reoccupied Lam Xuan West. Sections of 81mm mortars from HHC/3-21 were attached to both Leach and Corrigan, and resupply was carried out during the afternoon. Water, always in short supply, was obtained from bomb craters. Nhi Ha smelled of death, and there were plenty of small, stiff enemy corpses to be seen as the troops began selecting their positions and digging in. There were NVA who'd been burned black by napalm, and NVA whose heads had been removed standing up in caved-in, chest-deep trenches. A grunt described one of the more memorable corpses, which was found "down in a bomb crater about thirty feet deep. He was floating in the water and had turned the same putrid green color as the water. The body was swollen to about twice normal size. Looked like something from a Hollywood horror movie-I mean the guy did not look real."

The official body count was forty-four. To celebrate the victory, Major Yurchak, the S3, had the bell removed from the village's Catholic church in the western half of Nhi Ha. "That'll be our war booty-whenever the Third of the Twenty-first has a reunion, we'll ring the bell!"

The bell, which bore the raised inscription NHI-HA-1925, made it back to FSB Center but was subsequently donated to an orphanage in Tarn Ky. Meanwhile, Captain Leach christened his patrol base in Nhi Ha "Force Tiger." Leach set Charlie Company in along the northern half of the perimeter and gave Alpha the southern half. As the men dug in they were subjected to sniper fire, which slowed the process as GIs knelt to use their E-tools instead of standing up to dig. Although many of the NVA entrenchments were still intact, the GIs did not use them because, as one grunt put it, "the little man would have known exactly where to put his incoming." Because of the threat of enemy artillery fire, timber and masonry from the hamlet's blown-down buildings were used to reinforce foxholes and provide overhead cover. One trooper joked to the new guys in his platoon, who were taking turns digging in, "No shift for me-give me that shovel! I've been here longer than some of you guys, and I know enough that I like my hole in the ground real well. One of my favorite things when I'm getting shot at is a hole!"

The NVA did not sh.e.l.l Nhi Ha during Force Tiger's first night there, but it was a long, hairy night nonetheless-especially for the fire-team-sized listening posts that the two companies established after dark for early warning. The LPs were set up in bomb craters. Each had a starlight scope, as well as a sack of hand grenades and an M79 to cover their withdrawal if detected by the NVA. At 2205 on 5 May, the first sighting was made east of Nhi Ha: seventeen NVA moving south across the paddies and sand dunes two klicks away. Artillery fire was worked along their route. Thirty minutes later, a company of NVA, two hundred strong, was spotted two klicks to the west on the other side of Jones Creek, and another fire mission was initiated.

Artillery fire echoed through the pitch-black night.

At 0050 on 6 May, a Charlie Tiger LP spotted five NVA moving toward Force Tiger in a slow, cautious fashion. An hour later, two more NVA with AK-47s were seen walking right at the LP. The GI with the M79 waited until they were within fifteen feet before he fired them up with a canister round. One NVA was blown away, and the grunts in the LP returned to the perimeter. There was an uneasy lull punctuated by an enemy soldier with a captured M79 who fired on Charlie Tiger.

At 0425, contact was made where Sergeant Stone, a squad leader in Alpha Three, had established an LP in a big crater in the dark, unfamiliar lunarscape. The LP was within a hundred meters of their line. Stone had been instructed to go out farther, but as he told his grunts, "No way, you know, we'll never make it back." Stone, awakened by Private King, whom he was to replace on watch, had just edged up to the lip of their crater when he saw two NVA with AK-47s and khaki fatigues coming in their direction. One had halted, and the other was catching up with him. They were only twenty meters away. Stone could see them clearly in the eerie white light of the latest illumination round, but he had not asked King where the detonators were for the two claymore mines they had set up in front of the crater.

Sergeant Stone woke his four men one at a time, whispering to each as he began to stir, "Be quiet-don't move-we got gooks right in front of us." He bent over King and asked, "Where're the detonators?" King said they were by the tree limb lying in front of their crater. Stone, feeling around with one hand while he kept his head down, could not find them. Jesus, they're gonna be in the hole with us pretty quick, Stone thought as he broke squelch on his radio handset to indicate that they were in trouble. He tried to whisper in response to the CP's questions about how many NVA there were, how far away they were, et cetera, but he finally signed off with a hushed, "They're too close, I can't talk," and placed the handset aside as he went back up with a fragmentation grenade. He lobbed the grenade toward the two NVA he had seen-he could sense others out there-then opened fire with his M16 on automatic. He slid back down, ejected the empty magazine, and fumbled for a fresh one in his bandolier. He was so scared that he put the magazine in upside down. He finally thumped it in correctly, then realized that his four charges-all new replacements-were still lying where he had awakened them, doing nothing more than looking up at him. He had told them not to move, and they were following orders. Stone screamed at them, "Get up and shoot, get up and shoot!"

Specialist Four Allan G. Barnes did most of the shooting as he lobbed M79 rounds toward a muzzle flash behind a tree stump. Reloading, Barnes turned to Stone, "How's that?"

"Closer, Barnes, closerl" closerl" Stone answered. Stone answered.

Each time Stone rose up to fire his M16, the NVA behind the stump would also pop up with his AK-47 on full auto. They were firing right at each other, but they kept missing. Barnes found the claymore detonators and blew one of the mines, but it had no visible effect. Stone decided they'd better pull back before it was too late. Wasting no time with a radio call to the CP to request permission to withdraw, Stone simply shouted at his team, "Okay, you guys take off. Go for the perimeter. Me and Barnes will cover for you, then we're comin'!"

Sergeant Stone squeezed off another M16 magazine and Barnes another M79 round as the three replacements clambered over the back side of the crater, then they dropped, reloaded, and started after them. They were scared and moving fast, and they left their radio and grenades. Clearing the crater, they were stunned to see the three greenseeds lying p.r.o.ne on the other side. Stone shouted at them to get moving. Running for the perimeter, they hollered their catchall pa.s.sword-"ALPHA GIMLETS!"-and screamed at the men on the line not to open fire. This was a real concern as RPGs had begun flashing past them. No one was hurt, though, and no one fired. As soon as the men from the LP were safely inside the perimeter, their platoon leader, Lieutenant Kimball, hustled over to Stone and asked, "What's out there, what's out there?"

"There's gooks all over all over out there!" out there!"

Referring to Captain Osborn by his call sign, Lieutenant Kimball said, "Cherokee says he might send you back out, so keep your squad together."

"s.h.i.t, we ain't going back out," back out," exclaimed Stone. "There is gooks exclaimed Stone. "There is gooks all over all over out there!" out there!"

"Oh, no problem, no problem-"

"Well, don't tell me to go back out. We ain't going back out. We're a listening post listening post, and I already toldja: They're out there!"

The LP was not reestablished. Later, when it was light, a patrol sent out to retrieve the radio from the LP's crater discovered a slit trench behind the tree stump. The three badly wounded, barely moving NVA in the trench were finished off at point-blank range, and two AK-47s and an RPG launcher were recovered, along with a blood-spattered machine gun found in the open paddy behind the trench.

Meanwhile, at about 0500 on Charlie Tiger's side of the perimeter, Private Harp of Charlie One, occupying the center of the line, spotted several NVA on the left flank directly ahead of Charlie Two, which at that moment was reporting movement somewhere to the front. The NVA were close, and Harp could see their silhouettes-they were wearing Russian steel helmets-as they started to set up a machine gun at the lip of a crater. Harp's squad leader, Specialist Burns, was in position with him but could make out nothing where Harp pointed. Burns whispered to Harp that he was "full of s.h.i.t, as usual," but Harp pressed his squad leader to let him "fire a '79 round on their position to pinpoint them for the other platoon."

Burns considered Harp a punk and a screwup, and his response was, "You stupid s.h.i.t, if you fire the '79 it'll give our position away."

"They're pointing a machine gun at us, Burns-they have some idea where we are. Besides, a '79 gives away a lot less than a '16 would, and I can't reach them with a frag." Somebody in the dugout suggested that Burns call the CP to advise them of the situation and let them decide. When Burns did, Captain Leach told him to recon by fire with an M79. Before letting Harp shoot the grenade launcher, Burns barked in a low, angry whisper, "If the captain wants to use a '79, it's smart. If you do, it's stupid. f.u.c.k you, Harp."

The M79 round exploded within ten meters of the NVA machine gun, which opened fire in response. Charlie Two actually had about twenty-five NVA to its front, as did Charlie Three on the right flank. As illum and HE were delivered by artillery-the NVA could be heard screaming as the sh.e.l.ls exploded-individual GIs engaged individual NVA with M16s, M60s, and M79s. Hey, we can finally see the sons of b.i.t.c.hes, thought Sgt. Roger Starr of Charlie Three, who was too excited to be scared as he pumped M16 bursts at NVA maneuvering forward from burial mound to burial mound. They were fully exposed in the flarelight. Starr saw several bareheaded NVA, who were swinging AK-47s and wearing shorts, go down in his rifle sights, and when he couldn't make out any live ones, he shot the dead ones again. Some were less than fifty meters away. There were, however, a lot of muzzle flashes and RPG sparks in return. Sergeant Starr's shooting gallery ended abruptly when a small, buckshot-sized piece of metal from an explosion he wasn't even aware of pierced his right eye like a hot needle. The pain was sudden and intense, and it immediately rendered him completely blind as his uninjured left eye watered up, too. Starr, clutching his face, dropped to the bottom of his machine-gun team's dugout and screamed for a medic. There was little bleeding as the medic taped pads over both of Starr's eyes. Starr, who had been in the company for ten months, figured that his right eye would heal up fine-he was wrong, the eye was permanently blind-and as he was led back to the company CP all he could think was, This is the trip back home!

The NVA, crawling in the shadows, pulled back at 0530 but, apparently reinforced, they came back for more thirty minutes later. The final cost was two Americans and one Kit Carson scout wounded; the NVA lost thirty-four soldiers and sixteen weapons. Trapped behind burial mounds, the last NVA were killed after the sun came up. "It was a G.o.dd.a.m.n turkey shoot," said Captain Leach, who moved elements of Charlie Two out into the paddies on the flanks to keep the NVA pinned down while Charlie One and Three picked them off from the front. "We were just killin' 'Em-we were Marines' the s.h.i.t out of 'Em-but they fought to the last man. That took a lot of guts." The fight finally boiled down to one NVA behind a burial mound, and two more in a bomb crater. At that point, Specialist Burns earned the Silver Star when he muttered something to the effect of "f.u.c.k this s.h.i.t," and launched an impatient charge on the NVA in the crater. "Burns ran straight at them," said Private Harp. "He caught the first NVA with a single shot from his M16. Apparently he thought the other one was already dead, because he just started walking toward their crater." A Chicom came flying out of the hole and Burns backpedaled a few steps before falling backward into another crater. "Now Burns was really p.i.s.sed. He jumped in the hole with the d.i.n.k and shot him or stuck him, or both. I'm not sure. Burns was so p.i.s.sed off by then he was liable to have ate him."1 Captain Leach shouted at everyone to cease firing on the sole survivor behind the burial mound, and he had his Kit Carson scout attempt to talk the man into surrendering. Meanwhile, Sergeant Coulthard of Charlie Three was joined in his position by Specialist Green, a machine gunner. Green borrowed his M16 and sighted in on the last-stand position. Green was a tough, stocky GI from Alabama described by Coulthard as "a good old boy who enjoyed gettin' it on with the NVA." When the enemy soldier answered the calls to surrender by rearing up with his arm back to fling another Chicom, Green squeezed off a single round. The NVA had a rag of a bandage around his head. The bandage went flying as Green's shot blew off the top of his head. "Who the h.e.l.l shot him?" Leach exploded. Green theatrically blew smoke away from the rifle barrel, and answered, "I did. I'm not going to f.u.c.k around and get somebody killed up here."

On Monday, 6 May, Lieutenant Colonel Snyder instructed Captain Osborn to conduct a reconnaissance in force along the enemy's route of withdrawal. The immediate target of the sweep was Xom Phuong, twelve hundred meters northwest of Nhi Ha on the eastern bank of Jones Creek. A raised footpath connected Nhi Ha with the southern tip of Xom Phuong. The terrain in between was wide open, and Captain Leach, who was to remain in position at Force Tiger, was convinced that the order to cross such vulnerable terrain was "very poorly conceived." Noting that he "didn't want to bad-mouth Snyder," whom he respected, Leach added that "we never had the combat support wired before Osborn went out. We had no tac air on call, and we didn't even have a good target list for our artillery fire support plan. I talked with Snyder about this, saying, 'Our mission is to defend, so let's do our reconnaissance, let's start patrolling at night and setting up ambushes along the hedgerows and along the creek bed because we know that's the way they're coming down.' Instead, Osborn was going right across the open, and my question was, 'Why in the h.e.l.l are we doing this?'"

The mood in Alpha Annihilator was extremely uptight as the men saddled up. The squad leaders in Alpha Two had a heated debate about whose turn it was to be on point. Specialist Four Sydney W. Klemmer, who was in the squad that lost the argument, told his good friend Sergeant Bulte, who was in a different squad, "I don't like this. I don't like this at all. We know know they're out there." they're out there."

Bulte was angry. He was also very concerned for Klemmer. "Just keep your head down," he replied.

The sweep commenced at 1330 with Lieutenant Smith's Alpha Two on the left flank and Lieutenant Kimball's Alpha Three on the right. Captain Osborn moved in their trace, keeping his newest platoon leader, Lieutenant Simpson, in reserve with Alpha One. The well-spoken Osborn was a handsome Texan who had been awarded a Silver Star for the body count his company had run up when attached to the division cavalry squadron in the Que Son Valley. Despite such accolades from above, there were grave doubts about the captain in the rank and file. "Osborn blundered into stuff," was how the battalion operations officer put it. Osborn was, in fact, a quartermaster officer involuntarily detailed to the infantry. He had not asked to command a grunt company in combat, and young, inexperienced, and unsure of himself, his command style was harried and overbearing. He never listened, and he never seemed to learn from his mistakes. His troops hated him. His lieutenants resisted him. Lieutenant Smith had frequent shouting matches with Osborn over the radio and would "wind up doing the normal tricks," such as pretending that transmissions were garbled or giving short answers that failed to provide a clear picture of what was happening. In a letter to his wife, Smith wrote that Osborn "is not too swift. He gives me a case of the a.s.s just about every day. It's bad enough fighting the elements without putting up with an Old Man that doesn't really know what he's doing."

"Alpha Company had a reputation in the battalion for always being on its a.s.s, which was a G.o.dd.a.m.n shame because Osborn's soldiers were good kids," said Captain Leach. "They were just under bad leadership."

As the sweep kicked off across the paddies between Nhi Ha and Xom Phuong, Lieutenant Smith shared a grimace with Lieutenant Kimball. "This is going to be fun," Smith said disgustedly. "This is going to be crazy.'" crazy.'" The day was hot and bright, and their a.s.sault line was well s.p.a.ced because of the openness of the terrain. Smith's left flank was bounded by Jones Creek and was relatively secure (Barracuda had moved a platoon up on the other side), but Kimball was extremely concerned about the tree line that paralleled their line of advance on the right. Both lieutenants were concerned about the tree line that ran across the far end of the paddy, shielding Xom Phuong, which lay some two hundred meters on the other side. The village cemetery was on the near side of the tree line. The paddies were dry and hard, full of golden, thigh-high rice that was ready for harvest. The day was hot and bright, and their a.s.sault line was well s.p.a.ced because of the openness of the terrain. Smith's left flank was bounded by Jones Creek and was relatively secure (Barracuda had moved a platoon up on the other side), but Kimball was extremely concerned about the tree line that paralleled their line of advance on the right. Both lieutenants were concerned about the tree line that ran across the far end of the paddy, shielding Xom Phuong, which lay some two hundred meters on the other side. The village cemetery was on the near side of the tree line. The paddies were dry and hard, full of golden, thigh-high rice that was ready for harvest.

Alpha Annihilator was still more than a hundred meters from the cemetery when someone spotted an NVA sprinting rearward from an individual burial mound ahead of the rest. The GIs blazed away at the man as Smith and Kimball, convinced that an ambush force was waiting in the tree line, quickened their pace toward the cover of the mounds. The running soldier had been a lure, however. As the a.s.sault line approached the mounds, an enemy machine gun opened fire on Alpha Three from an inconspicuous hole dug in the forward slope of one of them. The enemy gun crew was inside the earthen hump. Sergeant Stone's squad, deployed across Alpha Three's front, dropped along a paddy dike while the other two squads in column behind it found cover of their own. The platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Dale, was lying behind the dike to Stone's right. Dale shouted instructions to Specialist Henry, their machine gunner, who engaged the NVA bunker with his M60 while his a.s.sistant gunner, Private Melindez, fired two LAWs at the mound. Each time Melindez rose up to fire, Stone and his squad increased the volume of their covering fire.

Melindez put both LAWs right into the hole. The enemy fire ceased, then an NVA appeared, staggering toward the tree line behind the burial mounds. Everyone blasted away at him as Staff Sergeant Dale, just off the radio, shouted at Stone to a.s.sault the bunker with his squad. "Jesus Christ, this is looking right into the gun," Stone yelled back. He was very concerned that the bunker might still be occupied. "Call Cherokee back and tell him to send a squad from Second Platoon up to the bunker on the left flank! They're already over to that side!"

Surprisingly, Captain Osborn agreed. He instructed Lieutenant Smith to conduct the flanking maneuver in support of Alpha Three. Smith, who had halted Alpha Two when Alpha Three was engaged, was behind a dike with his RTO and the left flank squad. He moved up to Sgt. Thomas F. Crews's squad, which was deployed across their front, to lead the rush into the cl.u.s.ter of mounds ahead. At twenty-five, Terry Smith was known for such up-front leadership. He was a big, strong country boy from Galena, Illinois, who had grown up toting hay bales. He enlisted for OCS after graduating from college because he figured that the draft was bound to get him. He had been in Vietnam for three months. "As Smith would say, he'd rather be back home with his wife, seeing his baby son for the first time," a fellow lieutenant observed. "But he also said that he was paying his debt back to the country, and when the s.h.i.t hit the wall he was right up there, front and center."

It was about a hundred feet to the next burial mound, and Lieutenant Smith sprinted toward it by himself. He wanted to see what kind of position and view the mounds would offer to their flanking maneuver.

Smith was shot before he could reach the mound. The round, which came from the right, caught Smith in the right thigh about two inches above the knee, and exited with a hot, painless flash that spun him around and knocked him down. The bullet hole was small, but the exit wound on his inner thigh was ma.s.sive.

Lieutenant Smith lost his helmet but kept a grip on his CAR 15 as he crawled past the mound to his left and sought cover behind the mound directly ahead of him. Smith was still trying to figure out what had happened to him when an NVA gun crew in the mound to his left, undetected until that moment, opened fire across his platoon's front. The firing hole was concealed by a big, battered rice pan that lay halfway up the slope of the mound. The NVA were firing right through the thatch pan.

Lieutenant Smith, stunned that the NVA would so desecrate a grave, was twenty feet from the bunker's blind side. Before Smith could do anything, Sp5 Terrance W. Allen, the gung-ho machine-gun team leader in Alpha Three, suddenly ran toward him from the right flank, shouting, "I'll get it, Lieutenant-I'll get it!"

Specialist Allen had a grenade in his hand. Smith, screaming, "Get down, get down, you idiot!" watched Allen, who was either overly excited or confused about where the firing hole was. He jumped right in front of the rice pan and was immediately blown backward by a burst across his stomach.

"No, no, no!" no!" Smith roared. Smith roared.

Allen was moaning terribly as Lieutenant Smith, enraged, pulled a fragmentation grenade from his web gear, crawled to the side of the burial mound, reached around, and threw it in. He quickly rolled away. The grenade went off with a m.u.f.fled boom. Smith always carried four grenades-two frags and two smokes-and he pulled the pin on his second frag, rolled over to the mound again, and tossed it inside. The bunker fell silent. Smith wanted Sergeant Crews's squad to take advantage of the situation and move up to his position so they could start their flanking maneuver. Smith urgently motioned to Crews.

"I wanted him to crawl, but d.a.m.nit-d.a.m.nit-they got up and did an a.s.sault, which totally blew my mind," recalled Smith. "Crews came across that d.a.m.n killing zone with his squad, and they were firing every time their left foot hit the ground-just like they were taught in basic training. I couldn't believe they did that." Short, stocky Sergeant Crews, age twenty-five, who spoke with a slow Alabama drawl, was one of the platoon's old-timers and a good squad leader. "He misunderstood what I wanted him to do. I didn't have my radioman at that moment, and Crews didn't have a radio. It was mostly hand signals and shouting, and shouting was useless because of the noise."

Sergeant Crews was mortally wounded in the sudden eruption of fire from the other camouflaged, previously silent positions among the burial mounds. The rest of the squad members rushing forward with him over the cover of their dike were also dropped by the sudden wall of fire. Most were wounded, but Bulte's worried buddy Klemmer, along with Sp4s John A. Johnson and Richard F. Turpin, were either killed outright or mortally wounded. They went down right before Smith's eyes, even as he frantically screamed at them to get down and crawl. "If they had crawled forward we could have gotten in among the burial mounds and beaten those G.o.dd.a.m.n d.i.n.ks," Smith recalled. "It was terrible. It was defeat. I felt like a failure. Before, I had really felt that I could go through the whole d.a.m.n war and not get hurt. I was gung-ho and confident. I didn't take unusual chances. I used my head, I thought. I can't believe I let my men get in that position. I got them killed in a way that should never have happened."

Although Lieutenant Smith was awarded a BSMv for his bravery, he would never forgive himself for his perceived failure. Smith was alone among the enemy positions, except for the gut-shot, mortally wounded Allen, who was screaming, "Put a bandage on me, put a bandage on me!"

"Shut up, we'll get one on you," Smith answered. "Just shut up."

The NVA fire had grown in intensity from the right flank-Smith had no idea what was going on over there-and, in response, he could see one of his GIs behind a dike prepare to fire a LAW. The LAW malfunctioned. It would not fire. "s.h.i.t, this is useless," Smith muttered. He grabbed hold of the dying Allen and, pushing with his good leg, started back across the clearing on his belly. "We were in that field of fire. If you stuck your head up, you were dead." The NVA were lobbing in mortar rounds, 82mm stuff, and Smith took a fragment in his left leg. It was red-hot. He could feel it. His bladder was bursting, and he p.i.s.sed in his pants. He didn't care. Someone crawled up to him, grabbed Allen by the shoulder straps of his web gear, and said he would take over. Smith kept crawling rearward by himself. "I absolutely went into shock. I thought I was stronger than that. I muttered to myself what a bad soldier I was-ineffective-I got too many people killed. I muttered all kinds of things. I totally lost control."

Staff Sergeant Dale of Alpha Three, a stunned witness to the ma.s.sacre of Alpha Two on the left, kept Sergeant Stone and his men firing forward from the p.r.o.ne positions they had a.s.sumed along their paddy dike. Dale, a stocky, confident, twenty-six-year-old career NCO, was on his second tour, but he had been with Alpha Annihilator for only about two weeks. Dale's RTO, Specialist Woodward, kept shouting at him about the tree line that ran down the length of their exposed right flank. "Don't you think we need to put out some security? We need to put out some security....You better put out some security!"

Specialist Woodward suddenly began shouting, "They're comin' up on the right! They're comin' up on the right!"

It was 1444. The figures coming out of the trees wore web gear and green fatigues, and some had steel helmets. They advanced at a trot in a loose, well-s.p.a.ced skirmish line.

"Are those ARVN?" someone shouted.

The distinctive cracking of AK-47s was heard above the general roar. "Those are G.o.dd.a.m.n NVA!" someone else bellowed.

The result was pandemonium. Staff Sergeant Dale, given his orders by radio from Osborn-who was retreating with his command group at that moment-shouted for everyone to pull back and jumped up to run with most of the troopers along the dike. Sergeant Stone was not one of them. Half his squad had taken off with Dale, but Stone and one of his team leaders, Sp4 Ron Nahrstadt, ended up scurrying over a dike to their left that offered some protection from the overwhelming fire on the right. Moving low to the ground, they had yet to see any enemy soldiers. There was a lull in the fire. Stone rose up slightly to look back over the dike-and there was an NVA standing less than ten meters in front of him. The enemy soldier, who had an AK-47, wore a bush hat that sported a red star. He was looking down at one of Stone's men, Sp4 Allen A. Straus, who lay facedown and unmoving in one of the furrows of what had been a garden. Stone hadn't even known that Straus had been hit. He appeared to be dead. He was. His body was later recovered from that spot.

Lying p.r.o.ne behind the dike, Sergeant Stone quickly sighted his M16 on the NVA's chest and dropped him with a single shot.

Sergeant Stone, twenty-one, was a farmer's son from Kearney, Nebraska, who had been in Vietnam for more than seven months. He was an excellent squad leader. As soon as the first NVA went down, Stone saw a bareheaded NVA rise up from a position about twenty meters away and to the right of the first one. The enemy soldier was trying to spot him, but after Stone squeezed off another carefully aimed shot, the head went down and stayed down. A third NVA suddenly stood up. He was farther away, perhaps forty meters, and was in the open, looking around with his AK at the ready. Stone dropped him with a body shot. The NVA were too close for him to miss.

Specialist Nahrstadt's rifle jammed, and he shouted urgently, "Should I throw a grenade? Should I throw a grenade?"

"Yeah, throw a grenade, throw a grenade!"

Nahrstadt pitched one over the dike-and was spotted by two NVA who launched a running, shouting charge right at Stone and Nahrstadt. Dirt sprayed across Stone's face from rounds striking the dike, but he stayed calm, remained p.r.o.ne, and increased his rate of fire. One of the NVA went down. The other disappeared in the furrows that ran up to the dike in neat rows. Stone couldn't see any other GIs around them, and he shouted to Nahrstadt, "We gotta get outta here!"

"What about Alderson?" Nahrstadt asked.

"Where is he?" asked Stone, looking around anxiously.

Stone spotted Alderson-the twenty-five-year-old team leader in his squad who'd frozen up the first day in Nhi Ha because he was so uptight about his pregnant wife back in Texas. He was lying along their dike, just on the other side of Nahrstadt. Alderson, seriously wounded and unconscious, was barely breathing. Stone told Nahrstadt to take his M16. Nahrstadt answered, "It's jammed, too!"

"We gotta get outta here," Stone said again to Nahrstadt, indicating that they had no choice but to leave Alderson.

Alderson died there amid the rice stalks.

"You go-I'll cover ya!" Stone shouted, and Nahrstadt took off, the NVA firing at him as if in a shooting gallery. Nahrstadt hit the dirt, then it was Stone's turn. He made it the twenty or so meters to Nahrstadt before he too dropped down, losing his helmet in the process. Nahrstadt took off again. Stone retrieved his steel pot and ran up to where Nahrstadt had flung himself down. He lost his helmet again. He scooped it back up-he wasn't going to let go of it. This might just be the time it saves me, he thought. He was so shook, though, that he never thought to buckle the chin strap. Continuing to leapfrog toward the rear, Stone was firing cover for Nahrstadt's next move when he glimpsed his greenseed grenadier, Specialist Barnes, running in the same direction as they were. Barnes was closer to the NVA on the right, and he was yelling like crazy as he ran. Barnes suddenly went down as though he'd been hit. Stone, not seeing him reemerge from the rice, ran to where he thought Nahrstadt had ducked. Nahrstadt was not there. G.o.d, where's he at? Stone wondered. Well, I'm on my own now.

Nahrstadt made it to safety.

Barnes, unseen in the rice, was dying or already dead. Sergeant Stone, meanwhile, could see a machine gun atop a burial mound toward the rear, but not the face of the gunner. "Who are you?" he bellowed. "Who are you?" If there was an answer, he could not hear it over the roar of fire. All he could see was the gunner waving at him to come on in. Fearing that it was a trap, Stone cautiously worked his way closer. When he saw that the soldier behind the M60 was black, he let out a sigh. Well, that ain't no NVA, he thought. Moving past the M60 gunner, who was from Alpha Two, Stone found the CP group flattened behind the raised footpath on the left flank. Captain Osborn immediately asked him, "Where's Lieutenant Kimball-where is everybody?"