The Magnificent Bastards Part 3

WHEN SOME CLOSE AIR SUPPORT BECAME AVAILABLE, CAPTAIN CAPTAIN Butler of Foxtrot Company, pinned down outside Dai Do, used it to support Lieutenant McAdams, who had a toehold in the hamlet itself. McAdams brought the napalm to within forty meters of his slit trench, then said, "G.o.dd.a.m.n, it's hot here-don't get it any closer!" Butler of Foxtrot Company, pinned down outside Dai Do, used it to support Lieutenant McAdams, who had a toehold in the hamlet itself. McAdams brought the napalm to within forty meters of his slit trench, then said, "G.o.dd.a.m.n, it's hot here-don't get it any closer!"

Captain Butler was working with both USMC and USAF Phantoms, and this-his first experience with the Air Force-proved that the pilots were all brave in the face of the NVA fire but that doctrine made the Marine aviators more effective. The Marines ran their strikes down the length of the NVA entrenchments and thus parallel to the opposite Marine lines, which placed them at maximum exposure to ground fire but gave them the broadest opportunity to hit their targets. The Air Force pilots came in from behind to flash for a moment over friendly lines and then for a moment over the enemy. This minimized their exposure to ground fire but allowed them to hit only a small segment of the enemy line-and increased the risk of friendly casualties. Butler complained about this to Weise, and later commented that "the Air Force put twenty-millimeter casings right down our shirts. It was new to us and a little bit disconcerting-we didn't know who they were shooting at."

Captain Butler's command group was under enough fire as it was. Lieutenant Basel, the FO, two weeks in-country and in his first action, was shot in the back of the arm. Basel refused medevac until the next morning. Once the bullet was removed by the battalion surgeon, he rushed to rejoin the still-embattled company.

Staff Sergeant Pedro P. Balignasay, the acting gunny, was another tough nut. Butler told him to move back to the amtracs and bring one forward to evacuate their wounded. When Butler later turned at the sound of an approaching amtrac, he spotted Balignasay walking in front to guide it in. The amtrac was a big target, but the gunny acted as if he were invincible.

Four hours into the a.s.sault, Lieutenant Colonel Weise called Butler to get a sitrep on how many people he had left. Butler reported that he was down to twenty-six effectives. Without a reserve platoon to renew the attack, Butler recommended that Foxtrot disengage because "with our casualties, even if we get in there, they'll counterattack and they'll kick our b.u.t.ts out of there. If I get in there, I can't hold it."

Weise agreed. He ordered Foxtrot to withdraw east to Dong Huan and establish a joint perimeter with Hotel Company. "If you encounter a lot of resistance," Butler later explained, "there's no sense in throwing good lives away just to take that position. That's what supporting arms are for."

It took two hours to break contact. Captain Butler used the 30-caliber machine guns on his four amtracs to cover Mc-Adams's pickup squad in Dai Do, then he had the Phantoms go in hot while that little group pulled back. "It was so close we could feel the air drawn from us by the napalm, but it was effective and got us out of there," recalled Tyrell, the platoon radioman. To keep the NVA down, the Phantoms also conducted dummy pa.s.ses that were even closer to the Marines. Butler brought in the artillery as his platoon commanders, Lieutenants McAdams and Lanham, got their troops backpedaling across the open paddies. The men were exhausted and a little demoralized, and events began to unravel as darkness approached. "It was disorganized. There had been a melee out there," Butler conceded. "The NVA had a good opportunity to really clean our clocks, but they didn't seize upon it."

Foxtrot straggled into Dong Huan, where Hotel Company had been too busy skimmer-boating its own casualties out to thoroughly clear the whole hamlet. Foxtrot was securing the section that would become its night position, when Corporal Tyrell noticed a sandaled foot under some hay in the deserted animal pen beside a hootch. He could see a human form under the hay, and imagined that a wounded NVA had crawled under there to die. Before bending down to search the body for anything of intel value, Tyrell gave the foot a good kick to ensure that the man was really dead. Before his eyes the NVA sat up amidst the hay, his right hand on the stock of his AK-47 and his left grasping the pistol grip and trigger. Tyrell shot first-one instinctive, unthinking squeeze of the trigger-and then his M16 jammed. He grabbed a .45 from a corpsman behind him, and wheeled back to empty the pistol at point-blank range.

Private First Cla.s.s Kachmar saw one of the new guys urinating into the open mouth of a dead NVA. Kachmar shoved the man away from the corpse and shouted, "You f.u.c.king a.s.shole, what're ya doin' that for?" The new guy just looked at him blankly.

Continuing on, Kachmar and the two Marines left in his fire team were pa.s.sing an NVA entrenchment when Kachmar suddenly saw something white move inside it. The white was the bandage on a wounded enemy soldier who was going for his weapon, and in that millisecond of recognition Kachmar, with his M16 still at his waist, fired two or three rounds into the man from ten feet away. Kachmar and his two stunned buddies pulled away the overhead cover of sandbags and-gra.s.s and discovered both an AK-47 and a Czech first-aid kit beside the body. "I don't think he could have actually even fired the weapon," Kachmar reflected, "but I didn't know that at the time. I just shot. I just fired. It was pure combat instinct. I probably wouldn't have done it if I had thought about it, but to think about it would have been foolish."

Bravo Company finally secured the embattled beachhead at An Lac, despite the loss of their company commander, thanks to a handful of Marines such as SSgt. Robert G. Robinson, a deep-voiced black platoon sergeant who was subsequently awarded the Silver Star for his actions there. When his radioman took an AK-47 round in his PRC-25, Robinson cut the shoulder straps and took the radio himself as he told the Marine to find cover. Robinson pulled down the telltale antenna and was calling for fire support when an AK-47 round hit his left shoulder and lodged in his flak jacket. He scooped up a handful of mud to cover the b.l.o.o.d.y rip. With sand-encrusted M16s jamming up, he collected what clean weapons and ammo he could find among their casualties, then distributed what he had gathered. By that time he could see puffs of smoke from where RPGs were being launched about two hundred meters away, and he could discern that most of the AK-47 fire on his platoon was coming from entrenchments beneath a small archway and gate in the hamlet. The fire support he was able to bring to bear silenced those positions.

Bravo Company also managed to seize part of An Lac about an hour before dark. At this point, Weise later wrote that he "ordered the company (now confused, disorganized, and with only one officer left) to halt, reorganize, form a defensive perimeter in the western half of the hamlet, evacuate casualties, and carry out resupply."

The only remaining officer was 2d Lt. Thomas R. Keppen, who was brand-new and floundering. Weise, trying to get the young lieutenant calmed down over the radio, sent Muter's eighteen-man reconnaissance platoon down to reinforce Bravo Company.

Lieutenant Muter organized the evacuation of the wounded, and face-shot, tooth-shattered Gunny Doucette, weak from loss of blood but thanking the Lord, was finally loaded in an amtrac leaving the beachhead. When the ramp went down at Mai Xa Chanh West, Doucette, who didn't know where he was, was helped onto a Sea Horse. Medevacked to the DHCB, he ended up lying on a stretcher in a hallway at the base aid station. His turn for medical attention did not come; there were too many emergencies ahead of him. So his litter was carried to the airfield for a helo ride farther down the medevac chain to Da Nang. He was by then an unmoving form on his stretcher, with a haphazardly bandaged, ripped-open face. He overheard one of the crewmen remark that he must be dead. Doucette looked up bitterly at the man and gave him the finger.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise was furious. He had ordered Foxtrot to break contact in Dai Do based on Captain Butler's report that his two-platoon company had taken heavy casualties and was down to twenty-six effectives. At least that was what Butler believed after radio conversations with his two pinned-down platoon commanders. After getting reorganized and counting heads in Dong Huan, Butler had to call Weise to report that his casualties were less than reported. He actually had fifty-five effectives. It was a big difference, and Weise later said, "It was then that I realized Butler had lost control of his troops. He was fairly calm, but I got the impression he was kind of lost. He just didn't have a handle on things, just didn't know what he was supposed to be doing."

Weise was also upset because a dead Marine had been left behind in the confusion of Foxtrot's withdrawal. He wondered if the best option would be to relieve Butler in the morning. "Foxtrot didn't withdraw in a good tactical group," Weise observed. "There was a lack of control and organization, and Butler's troops pulled back individually. We found some of them straggling along the river bank during the night. In fact, the Navy thought they were enemy and asked for permission to fire. I wanted to be sure they were NVA. I looked through the starlight scope and saw that they were clearly Marines. Some Marines actually forded that little stream and walked all the way back to Mai Xa Chanh West."

In the end, Weise decided to give Butler another chance. It was, after all, his first engagement as a company commander after two months of staff duty with the battalion. Weise instead chewed Butler out over the radio for reporting too many casualties. He told him to get his act together and know where his troops were, and to make sure they were resupplied with ammo and ready to go. "We need you tomorrow," Weise told Butler. "I want you to be ready to fight. I don't want you straggling around."

Captain Butler's performance during the remainder of the Battle of Dai Do continued to be unsatisfactory, in Weise's opinion. Afterward, he zeroed out the young academy graduate's career with a negative fitness report. Most of Butler's peers in BLT 2/4 considered that best for all concerned. "Butler was in way over his head," remarked a fellow captain. "He wasn't stupid, but to lead Marines in combat you better have the b.a.l.l.s of a p.i.s.sed-off gorilla. He was too nice a guy. There's a time to pat somebody on the back and a time to kick some b.u.t.t. I don't think he ever figured out when was the time to do which. You have leaders, followers, and managers, and Butler was a manager."

Another company commander said that Captain Butler was "just a nice, decent, mild-mannered Clark Kent who never turned into Superman. Even at the point of life or death, he never had that particular spark."

Nevertheless, Foxtrot Company's Marines generally thought well of their urbane and amiable skipper. An acting platoon sergeant on his second tour called Butler a "h.e.l.luva guy and one of the best officers I ever had." The Marine who served as the captain's radioman after Dai Do spoke of Butler's "intelligence, courage, and quiet confidence." Considering that Foxtrot was required to attack Dai Do with no reserve platoon, no mortar section, and no prep fires ("It was clear that we couldn't generate the combat power to get into the village," wrote the company's artillery FO), one officer commented that Weise's rebuke of the inexperienced Butler at the end of day one revealed "a lack of empathy, a failure to realize what he really asked that company to do when he threw it into the heart of the enemy position early in the fight."

With the sun hanging on the horizon, Foxtrot and Hotel Companies registered artillery and mortar concentrations around their freshly dug fighting positions in Dong Huan, as did B/1/3 and Muter's recon platoon in half-secured An Lac. Lieutenant Colonel Weise, still coordinating from the Monitor on the Bo Dieu, did not antic.i.p.ate that taking the rest of An Lac would be a problem. The NVA had broken contact entirely with Bravo Company, and would presumably use the cover of darkness to get out of the hamlet. Dai Do was now the main concern. To secure the position, Weise planned to use the only uncommitted company available to him, Vargas's Golf, which was presently in its patrol base at Lam Xuan West. Helicopters were being organized to lift the company to the BLT CP at Mai Xa Chanh West. Weise wrote that from there he "hoped to move Golf Company to An Lac by Navy LCM-8 landing craft during darkness, to land at night behind Bravo Company, and launch a predawn attack on Dai Do."

Captain Vargas was a combat leader in whom Weise placed absolute confidence. Vargas had originally commanded Golf Company through the Tet Offensive and the beginning of the Cua Viet campaign. He had been automatically rea.s.signed to battalion after his second wound at Vinh Quan Thuong, but had bent the rules as soon as he'd learned about his replacement's medevac two days earlier: Colonel Weise was listening to the radio also. He didn't even have a chance to say, "You want your company back?" I was already packing my gear and moving out. Weise knew where I was going. He said, "Go on, go back," and I left the CP in about five minutes in one of those recon speed boats. It was a quick run up Jones Creek to Lam Xuan West. When the boat engine went off, h.e.l.l, I already had a bunch of young troopers coming over to greet me, saying, "We're glad to have you back."

At 1737, Major Warren radioed Captain Vargas to prepare to helilift back to Mai Xa Chanh West. Within two hours, twin-bladed CH-46 Sea Knights, which could carry a platoon apiece, were approaching Lam Xuan West. A clearing in the rubbled hamlet served as the landing zone, and Lieutenant Morgan of Golf Two, along with his radioman and one squad, went up the lowered back ramp of the first Sea Knight that landed. Before anyone else could board, the helicopter abruptly began to lift off. Morgan could hear nothing over the engines, but he was stunned to see enemy tracers pa.s.sing by the porthole windows of the ascending helicopter.

The NVA also began sh.e.l.ling the landing zone. Captain Vargas aborted the mission, then turned to Staff Sergeant Del Rio, his acting gunny, to say, "No free ride today. We have to walk back." Following the contours of Jones Creek, it was a three-kilometer hump from Lam Xuan West to Mai Xa Chanh West. Golf Company ran out of daylight very quickly. With the artillery and mortar fire continuing to crash in, the hot night air was heavy with smoke and the smell of gunpowder as the Marines began moving out. Although the men had discarded everything but their fighting gear, Del Rio had not gone far when he suddenly doubled back to the LZ-where he had left the waterproof olive-drab bag in which he kept his personal gear. He removed from it a small, framed photograph of his wife and three children, then started back up the column to rejoin the captain. He would keep that photograph forever.

The enemy had strategically placed their forward observers. The NVA artillery, having already fired more than a hundred rounds into Lam Xuan West, presently shifted onto Lieutenant Ferland and Golf Three as the platoon led the company down the western bank of Jones Creek. Between the shouting, commotion, and explosions, the Marines could no longer hear the boom of the guns in North Vietnam. They could not antic.i.p.ate the next volley. Staff Sergeant Del Rio, along with Sgt. Robert J. Colasanti, the platoon sergeant, had to haul more than one flattened, shook-up Marine back to his feet and shout at him to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. The artillery fire, accurate and nerve-shaking though it was, was not lethal because the sh.e.l.ls burrowed several feet into the soft, wet earth along the creek before exploding.

"The troops were on the verge of panic," said Lieutenant Ferland, "but Captain Vargas kept good control of the situation."

Vargas and Del Rio spent most of their time with Golf Three on point, and Golf Two, which came next in the column. Lieutenant Deichman, the exec, had positioned himself at the tail end with Golf One to ensure that no one was left behind. Their artillery spotter, Lieutenant Acly, had been overlooked, however, and apparently was the last Marine to straggle out of Lam Xuan West. Acly had rolled behind an earthen berm near the LZ when the patrol base first came under fire. In the confusion, he missed the order to move out. All he knew was that when he looked back over his shoulder to check up on his FO team, it was gone. Everyone was gone. There was a moment of hard-breathing, sweat-soaked panic before Acly got his senses back, then he crawled south through the smoke-shrouded brush, under mortar fire the whole time. No one answered his shouts. Finally, after two hundred meters or so, he heard whispers and saw four equally lost Marines crouched in the dark. Acly called out to identify himself. He took a long drink from his canteen, then the five of them moved out to rejoin the column. Running and diving and shoving off again in the loose, sandy soil, they crossed hundreds of lonely meters before finally catching up with the bunched-up tail of the column.

"People seemed to be operating on their own," Acly said later. "Nothing seemed to be very organized." Ma.s.sive amounts of illumination went up at intervals over the Dai Do battlefield some six klicks to the southwest. Not understanding the circ.u.mstances over there, the Golf Company Marines were infuriated that their own artillery was making them a better target. "It was like broad daylight," said Acly. "It freaked everybody out because we were totally illuminated."

Captain Vargas had an artillery sh.e.l.l explode ten feet from him. It was another subsurface, lifesaving explosion, but the concussion knocked Vargas into the shallows of Jones Creek. Several young Marines helped him up. Although he saw that his right trouser leg was torn-he had sh.e.l.l fragments in his knee and calf-he felt no pain through the adrenaline rush. Likewise, Staff Sergeant Del Rio, who had been knocked down, splattered with mud, and otherwise scared to death by several near misses, didn't realize he'd taken a piece of metal in his right leg until after they reached Mai Xa Chanh West. Lieutenant Ferland had several fragment wounds in his right arm and lower right leg, and his platoon sergeant, Colasanti, was also stung but unfazed. More than twenty Marines had such superficial wounds, and another six had been hit badly enough to require medical evacuation after they finally secured inside the battalion perimeter. The worst of these was a black Marine whose right arm was blown off below the shoulder. The man was probably in shock, because he made no sound as a corpsman applied a tourniquet to the stump. Two Marines helped him walk back between them.

Golf Company took about three hundred rounds in the first kilometer of its march. The fire petered out then, and the Marines continued the last two klicks to Mai Xa Chanh West, where they arrived "exhausted and literally dropping in our tracks," as one grunt put it. It had been a three-hour march.

Captain Vargas climbed aboard a Mechanical Mule for the drive to Warren's command amtrac beside the Buddhist temple. The driver was Corporal Schlesiona, one of Golf's light-duty personnel at the BLT CP, who later recounted: One thing that stands out in my mind is driving around in a rather permanent state of panic. The weather had, for some time, been dry, hot, and sunny, baking the dirt "streets" of Mai Xa Chanh West. In daylight, you couldn't drive around without goggles and something over your nose and mouth. It was a blinding, choking struggle. That night, with all the activity in the compound, it was like a duststorm and, with no headlights, it was white knuckles on the steering wheel just to stay on the path and still find your way to some specific place.

Before hopping aboard the Mechanical Mule for this death-defying ride, Captain Vargas had one of his corpsmen pluck the fragments out of his leg and bandage the wound. Vargas traded his tatterdemalion trousers for a fresh, wound-concealing pair and swore the young corpsman to secrecy: "Boy, don't say a d.a.m.n thing to anybody, 'cause this means I have to go!"

At the CP, Major Warren briefed Vargas from his map board in the light and shadows of a kerosene lantern. He explained that two Navy LCM-8 landing craft, better known as Mike boats, would arrive shortly to transport Golf Company upriver to B/1/3's pos in An Lac by about 0300. They would be accompanied on the Mike boats by the battalion's two tanks, which had previously bogged down at Bac Vong and returned to the CP. The a.s.sault on Dai Do was to be launched at about 0400 so as to utilize the cover of the predawn darkness. Warren outlined the plan, then told Vargas, "You'll get your five-paragraph order from Colonel Weise, who's on a gunboat in the middle of this river. You will have to brief your troops as to what to do while you are afloat."

But the plan was never executed. Major Murphy, the regir mental S3, radioed Warren and informed him that the two Mike boats were not en route. The TF Clearwater commander would not release the craft from Camp Kistler because he considered a nighttime run too risky. Warren was incredulous. There had been no enemy activity on the Cua Viet River between Camp Kistler and the BLT CP, and the NVA positions in Dong Huan and An Lac that had fired on river traffic during the day had since been silenced. Warren later said that "knowing my nature, I'm sure I must have expressed concern and disappointment in the fact that the battalion commander, who wanted to use the cover of darkness in order to protect the lives of his people when he got his operation started, could not do so."

Warren told Vargas that he would have until daylight to get fitted up for the attack, then radioed Weise with the bad news. Dixie Diner 6 (who was getting his sleep in five- and ten-minute s.n.a.t.c.hes aboard the Monitor) was angry; but as Warren put it, "Once he realized that there was nothing he could do, he had so many other things going on in his area that he didn't worry about it."

Golf Company's Marines crashed where they could amid the demolished hootches around the BLT CP. Most found a piece of bare earth on which to unroll their ponchos and that was it. It was, however, better than what Captain Vargas got. "I remember closing my eyes for maybe thirty minutes," he said later. Vargas briefed his platoon commanders at one in the morning, then woke his gunny up at about three to help him make sure everything had been lashed down. "I went around to check that everybody had plenty of ammo and to ensure that everybody was carrying two mortar rounds in their packs, including myself. I wanted to double-check the weapons, I wanted to double-check that everybody understood how and when and where we were going, and what we were going to be faced with-and before I knew it the sun was coming up."

Inside Dong Huan, cutoff NVA who had lain low until dark tried to slip through Hotel Three's side of the line. The Marines opened fire on the shadows, and at dawn they found two extra enemy bodies in front of their positions among the hedgerows.

Meanwhile, in An Lac, Lieutenant Keppen, the new, green commander of B/1/3, was getting shook up again. One of the problems was that the NVA had begun jamming his radio net with a high-pitched electronic tone that effectively shut down his communications with Lieutenant Colonel Weise on the Monitor. The jamming wasn't perfect, but Weise couldn't make Keppen understand through the constant buzz that he should switch to the BLT's alternate frequency. Weise finally felt compelled to put ash.o.r.e aboard a skimmer with his sergeant major and radiomen.

Weise spoke with Lieutenant Keppen, who was very relieved to see the colonel, and made sure they were straightened out on a new frequency; then Weise and his little group worked down Bravo Company's line in the predawn darkness. Weise wanted to ensure that the troops had enough ammunition and that there was a leader a.s.signed to each group, and to let the Marines in the shot-up company know that someone up the chain knew they were there and was concerned about them.

The grunts were keyed up. "We had to be very careful that the Marines didn't shoot us," Weise remembered. But by and large, "they were in pretty good shape considering that they had taken heavy casualties. They had gotten all of their wounded out. They had even gotten their dead out. We adjusted the lines somewhat, but they were in reasonably good positions. Had they been hit real hard, I think that new lieutenant would have been able to handle himself."

Lieutenant Colonel Weise and Big John Malnar were still working their way through Bravo's position when there was an explosion about ten meters in front of their command group. It was probably an enemy mortar round. Weise was wounded superficially in his right thigh. He had the wound bandaged but did not report it. He had been wounded before-taking sh.e.l.l fragments in his left thigh and shoulder during Operation Task Force Kilo-and that injury had likewise not been reported outside battalion channels. Weise knew that battalion commanders with two Purple Hearts had to give up their commands, so he reckoned that what division didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

Weise spent the rest of the night with Bravo Company. An hour before sunrise, he instructed Keppen to send a patrol into the eastern side of half-secured An Lac. The patrol reported that the NVA had withdrawn. Bravo Company reoccupied the remainder of the hamlet at first light, amid enemy artillery and recoilless rifle fire that killed one Marine and wounded four. Bravo Company got its payback two and a half hours later when thirty to forty NVA, including many wearing Soviet-style helmets, were caught in the open fields between An Lac and Dong Huan. Hotel Company in Dong Huan, the first to spot them and take them under fire, thought the NVA had slipped out of Dai Do in order to hit An Lac. Weise suspected that the NVA were what remained of the force that had held An Lac and had retired into the fields on order. It was unclear whether they planned to continue their retreat or await reinforcements and then double back and a.s.sault.

Whatever the case, the Marines excitedly tried to line up the small, bobbing figures in their rifle sights. "Look at all them comin' gooks," shouted one Bravo Company Marine. "Let's kill 'Em!" The NVA pulled back toward Dai Do, hounded by mortar and artillery fire. It was a real turkey shoot. "We caught them in the open before they could get their act together," said Weise later. "Some of them were moving and some of them were just standing or sitting there like they were waiting to do something before we opened up. We put a lot of fire on them. Some of them began running, some of them hit the ground-and, of course, you could see some of them drop."

High Diddle Diddle, Right Up the Middle

LIEUTENANT C COLONEL W WEISE BRIEFED C CAPTAIN V VARGAS, the CO of G BLT 2/4, on the situation in Dai Do at about 0945 on Wednesday, 1 May 1968. They spoke aboard Vargas's Mike boat, the leader of the two that had pushed up onto the beach at Mai Xa Chanh West some thirty minutes earlier to take aboard Golf Company and its two attached tanks. Vargas, who thought his company was going to be in reserve during the attack on Dai Do, was in for a surprise.

"The minute you hit, you're going for broke," Weise told him. "You're going to have to go right into the attack. The other companies in there have been torn apart."

Naval gunfire and artillery were already pounding the objective. Weise estimated that the NVA held Dai Do with a reinforced company. His plan to seize the square, hedgerow-encased hamlet called for Golf Company to put ash.o.r.e east of An Lac and then to pa.s.s around the right flank of B/1/3. Golf would then attack northwest across the seven hundred meters of rice paddies between eastern An Lac and the southeastern underbelly of Dai Do. Hotel Company, to the east in Dong Huan, was to provide a base of fire that would shift north as Golf progressed in the a.s.sault. Foxtrot Company, also located in Dong Huan, was to move out to where it faced the north-eastern edge of Dai Do and provide a second base of fire, while B/1/3 remained in reserve in An Lac.

Dai Do, with roughly three hundred meters to each of its four sides, was surrounded by paddies except along its southwestern edge, which was snug against the bank of the unnamed tributary that ran northwest from the Bo Dieu. Separated from Dai Do by a hundred open meters, the long, narrow hamlet of Dinh To was situated to the northwest along this blueline, where it merged with the equally thin village of Thuong Do. Viewed together, the three hamlets looked like a tilted "L," with Dinh To and Thuong Do forming the lean vertical leg along the blueline, and Dai Do the fat horizontal leg jutting into the paddies. Given the enemy's capacity to reinforce from the DMZ, it was a good guess that additional NVA units stood ready in Dinh To and Thuong Do. At the very least, these hamlets offered the NVA in Dai Do a covered escape route.

Dai Do was being napalmed and bombed by a pair of A-4 Skyhawks when the ramps of Golf Company's Mike boats went down on the sh.o.r.eline immediately east of An Lac. Nearby, a Navy Monitor sent a stream of 20mm automatic-cannon fire into the swirl of dust and smoke partially obscuring the objective. Lieutenant Colonel Weise disembarked with Vargas, who immediately placed his exec, Lieutenant Deichman, in the first wood line off the beach along with the company mortars. Vargas wanted Deichman to remain at the splash point to coordinate their supporting arms. The 60mm mortar section began sh.e.l.ling Dai Do as Vargas moved on to the forward edge of An Lac, where he deployed his Marines in a defensive perimeter with their backs to the river. The two attached tanks moved up with them, their main guns booming downrange.

Captain Vargas, a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican American from Winslow, Arizona, held a platoon commanders' meeting to finalize the a.s.sault plan. They would launch with Lieutenant Ferland's Golf Three on the left flank, and Lieutenant Morgan's Golf Two on the right. Vargas counted Jay Ferland, a sandy-haired working man's son from Manchester, New Hampshire, as his best platoon commander. Rick Morgan, the son of a bank president in Charleston, West Virginia, was a similarly confident, forceful, and aggressive officer, but Vargas saw him as a greenhorn who questioned too many orders. Both lieutenants had gotten married less than a month before shipping out for Vietnam.

The two tanks would move between and slightly to the rear of the a.s.sault platoons. Captain Vargas and his gunny, Staff Sergeant Del Rio, would follow the tanks with the company headquarters. Stocky, dark Ray Del Rio was a thirty-year-old Mexican American from Texas. He had been with Golf Company for only two weeks. He was, however, a strong, up-front professional, and veteran of a tour with D/1/9-the company made infamous by Morley Safer and CBS News when its marines put their Zippo lighters to Cam Ne in 1965.

Staff Sergeant Wade, another pro, had the reserve platoon, Golf One, which since the Night Owl disaster had only two squads. Vargas also spoke with Lieutenant Acly, his forward observer, a twenty-two-year-old Yale graduate from upper-crust Stockbridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. Vargas wanted Acly to plaster Dai Do with a barrage of white phosphorus and delay-fused high-explosive sh.e.l.ls. He wanted to roll his company across those murderously open paddies while the barrage kept the NVA pinned to the bottom of their spiderholes. And he wanted an artillery-delivered smoke screen to cover them during the final few strides of their a.s.sault into the enemy entrenchments. Vargas basically wanted the same fire support that Hotel Company had enjoyed the day before during its successful a.s.sault, but he did not get what he needed. Acly explained why in a tape-recorded interview with the division historical team: Part of Captain Vargas's plan for the initial a.s.sault on Dai Do was to utilize a three-zero minute artillery preparation of the ville. Now there was air support in the area-Sky-hawks are flying in, dropping napalm and rocketing and using their cannons on the ville-so when I planned the artillery prep, initially [division headquarters imposed] a check-fire on the area due to the prevalence of aircraft. Not exactly sure why, but this check-fire was not lifted, with the result that we started our initial a.s.sault without having one round of artillery on the ville. Some system should be worked out so that check-fires on artillery are held to a minimum 'cause I'm sure it would have saved us a lot of grief if we had had our artillery functioning the way it's supposed to function.

The Skyhawk pilots flew low and slow to place their high-drag bombs and tumbling, fire-blossoming napalm canisters right into the teeth of the enemy entrenchments along the southeastern edge of Dai Do. They did a superb job and were not the source of the problem. The red tape that muzzled the artillery came from division-level fire support coordinators at the DHCB who were overly concerned about the one-in-a-million chance of an artillery round meeting an aircraft in midair. Air and arty were supposed to be able to work in unison. The proper application of doctrine would have had the arty check-fired only when the Skyhawks were actually conducting their firing runs. The total cessation of artillery fires in this case was completely unjustified, according to the infantry officers waiting to attack. From the time Golf Company landed at An Lac (1040) until it launched its a.s.sault on Dai Do at 1253, the Skyhawks came on station only infrequently. Weise later wrote that although BLT 2/4 had finally been given priority for close air support (CAS), the battalion still "didn't get all the CAS we requested, nor as quickly as we needed it.... We learned to operate without relying on CAS, the king of Marine Corps supporting arms."

Dixie Diner 6 added a bitter addendum: "... lives were lost because of inadequate or unresponsive support in critical situations."

The NVA were, at intervals, sh.e.l.ling Dong Huan and An Lac. Since Lieutenant Acly did not know how long the company would remain in the open area off the beach before moving out, he and his out-of-work FO team started to dig in. They were not successful. The day was getting hotter and the ground was brick hard. After a few rebuffed swings of their entrenching tools, they said the h.e.l.l with it and settled for the relative cover of a paddy dike. Acly was crouched behind the dike when a Skyhawk dropped another bomb on Dai Do. He heard a quick, hissing sound-zzzppppt-justas a metal shard ripped his left sleeve from shoulder to elbow and smacked into the dirt beside him. He hadn't even been scratched. Burning his fingers on the red-hot, two-inch fragment, he stowed it in his pack to take home as a souvenir. Acly was impressed. So were the NVA in Dai Do. The napalm especially got them stirred up. Lieutenant Prescott, the new Hotel skipper, said in his own interview with the division historical section that after the napalm hit, there were "gooks running through the ville, hopping out of various trench lines, and [we] were taking them under fire from our position. Foxtrot Company was working the back end of the village with a one-oh-six recoilless rifle mounted on an amtrac...."

Lance Corporal Lashley, the machine-gun team leader with Golf One, was seriously wounded only a few steps into the a.s.sault on Dai Do. Lashley, with eight months in the bush, was down to seventeen days before he was to leave the field and begin outprocessing at the end of his two-year enlistment. He had written home the night before with the good news ("I don't have to go out on anymore squad sized patrols or ambushes since I have so little time to do"), but he had, without objection, boarded the Mike boats with everyone else. Lashley did not think his dedication made him a standout. "All the grunts I served with were incredibly brave," he later wrote. "To saddle up and move out when you were inadequately supplied, undermanned, and outgunned is an inherently brave act."

Lance Corporal Lashley, who'd previously suffered two flesh wounds, was, nonetheless, totally unimpressed with their across-the-paddies scheme to a.s.sault Dai Do. It's crazy, he thought. He had some real doubts about his ability to survive, so while the Skyhawks worked out he turned to his gunner and good friend, Mike Zywicke, who was also a Kingfisher vet, and said, "We're gettin' too short for this s.h.i.t. Man, I just don't know know about this one." about this one."

When Golf Company started off, Lashley, to the rear with the reserve platoon, stood atop a burial mound to orient himself on the area.

"I was just standing on the mound, checking out the scene like a G.o.dd.a.m.n tourist...." A single round from the first heavy burst of gunfire directed at Golf caught Lashley high up on the left arm, shattering the humerus. He was left-handed, and his arm, which had been raised, dropped straight down like a piece of dead meat. Still on his feet but in terrible pain, Lashley stared in shock at the blood pumping out. I've been shot! he thought. He couldn't believe it.

Lashley stumbled off the mound and collapsed, but Mike Zywicke quickly pulled him to cover and bellowed for a corps-man. Zywicke and the other members of the machine-gun team had to move out then with the rest of the platoon while the corpsman wrestled Lashley's flak jacket off, administered a morphine Syrette, and hooked up a serum alb.u.min IV. The corpsman also secured a battle dressing around the wound, which was still bleeding badly. When the pain wouldn't go away, the sympathetic corpsman cheated and administered a second shot of morphine. It didn't help. Lashley could only lie there, twisting in the gra.s.s as the battle was joined up ahead.

"Wow, man, these guys are crazy," LCpl. James Parkins of Golf Two muttered to himself on the way in, cursing the lifers. "They're so gungy, they're gonna get us all killed." Parkins, embittered by their earlier hamlet-to-hamlet battles above the Cua Viet, wondered if his own chain of command was as much the enemy as the NVA waiting for them in Dai Do. Both seemed pretty good at killing Marines. "Once again, we were real thankful to our leaders for taking us right into the open without too much fire support," Parkins said later. "There was a lot of animosity, but you couldn't say, 'This is stupid, I'm not going to do it,' 'cause if you weren't there and your buddy got shot, you'd think, Oh man....You kept those thoughts to yourself, just kind of mumbling as you went forward."

The M16 rifle was p.r.o.ne to misfire. Its reputation was such that many a Marine advanced toward Dai Do with his three-piece cleaning rod already screwed together and taped ready-to-go along the rifle's stock. The cleaning rod was used to pound jammed rounds out of the chamber. Golf Two and Three crossed about two hundred of the seven hundred meters between An Lac and Dai Do before the NVA began sniping at them, especially from one-man spiderholes that dotted the open field. Fire also came from the entrenchments hidden among the trees and hedgerows at the edge of Dai Do itself. The dry brown gra.s.s was about thigh high, and the grunts, returning fire, moved through it in a low crouch. No one in the lead platoons was. .h.i.t.

About fifteen minutes into the a.s.sault-at which point Golf Two and Three, still unscathed, had advanced to within three hundred meters of Dai Do-there was a sudden, decibel-doubling increase in the enemy fire.

Lieutenant Ferland and Golf Three took the brunt of it. The NVA were firing not only from the front, but from both sides of the tributary that ran past the western edge of the paddies from the direction of Dai Do. The NVA on the near bank were entrenched in hedgerows, and Ferland's squad on that flank was immediately pinned down. Ferland detached another squad to suppress the NVA fire, while pushing on with his one remaining squad, anxious to keep up with Golf Two. In short order, though, Ferland and his men became bogged down in the face of heavier and heavier automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade fire from the front.

Several Marines were wounded. The NVA had opened up with several 12.7mm machine guns-a heavy, much-feared weapon-and Captain Vargas instructed Golf Two to halt until he could get Golf Three moving again. Vargas ran back to his reserve platoon and found the grunts lying p.r.o.ne to avoid the rounds snapping overhead. Vargas ordered them into the attack, but by the time they were advancing in fire-team rushes, enemy mortars were pumping out rounds. Enemy artillery also opened fire, and the fields the Marines were advancing across had never looked so naked as they geysered with incoming rounds. Golf One's grunts had no choice but to keep leapfrogging forward, unable to even return fire for fear of hitting other Marines hidden in the tall gra.s.s ahead of them.

Lieutenant Ferland, meanwhile, received a call from his 1st Squad leader, whom he had put in charge of the two-squad action on the left flank. The corporal reported that he had two dead and six wounded. At the same time, Golf's backup company, B/1/3, which had a wide-open view of events from An Lac, reported that a hundred NVA were visible on either side of the blueline on Golf Three's flank. In response, Golf's 60mm mortar section in An Lac commenced firing. While Ferland adjusted the mortars onto the noisy but, to him, basically unseen targets on the far side of the creek (expending most of the mortar section's ammunition in the process), Vargas directed one of the supporting tanks to swing left and blast the NVA in the hedgerows. Immediately before the tank arrived, a pair of ammo-laden Marines made it up to Ferland's position in response to his call for more machine-gun ammunition. One of the men was Cpl. Richard R. Britton, an S2 scout with BLT 2/4 who had been attached to Golf that morning after eight months out in the bush with other companies. Britton described his dash up to Ferland: I slung my M14 on my shoulder, placed a couple of M60 ammo belts around my neck, and picked up two more M60 ammo cans. Another Marine quickly picked up more M60 ammo. The Marines laid down heavy fire, especially the M79 man and a machine gunner, and the other Marine and I raced towards the pinned-down squad with the ammo. Enemy fire hit all around us and RPG rounds screamed past us as we zigzagged our way forward. We dove face down into the ground several times because of the intense enemy fire, but finally reached the forward squad of Marines.

Then the tank arrived. Lieutenant Ferland wanted a fire team to guide it into position on the left. Britton said he'd go. Ferland asked for two more Marines to accompany him, and, as Britton wrote: Two men quickly moved toward the lieutenant and me, shouting to us they were ready to go. These Marines and I got into position and the lieutenant and his men laid down cover fire. I ran as fast as I could toward the tank. Heavy automatic fire erupted around me and I quickly dove behind a dike. I returned cover fire for the rest of my fire team as best I could, but they got only a short distance before being hit and pinned down. I was way out in the open and I realized if I stayed where I was any longer I would be killed. I burst from my position and ran toward the tank. A bullet struck the heel of my right boot and sent me spinning into the rice paddy. By then I had only a few yards to go to get to the tank. The enemy rifle fire directed at me finally let up. I think the NVA thought they had killed me. I took advantage of the pause and ran to the rear of the tank and took cover.

Corporal Britton climbed onto the tank and shouted instructions to the tank commander. Marines from Golf Three's 1st and 2d Squads also pointed out targets as the tank fired its 90mm cannon into the enemy entrenchments. Some NVA literally disintegrated in the roar, but others popped up with RPGs over their shoulders. Britton noted that twice as he directed fire he was "knocked off the tank by exploding enemy rockets, but I climbed back on. I was sure the tank would be knocked out of action if it stayed any longer."

The tank commander felt the same way. The tank had been damaged so that it could move only backward, and backward it went in a noisy, dusty beeline for An Lac. Captain Vargas ran to the retreating vehicle and grabbed the external phone mounted on the rear of the tank. Vargas threatened to court-martial the tank commander if he did not stop, but the excited tanker told him to go to h.e.l.l and kept on trucking. The tank did, however, make one stop before disappearing into the trees. It stopped to take aboard wounded. One of them was Lance Corporal Lashley with his shattered arm. After he was helped onto the tank's back deck, he was shocked to see his good buddy, Mike Zywicke, lying there beside the turret. He had no idea that Mike had been hit. Mike was hurt too badly to talk, so Lashley held his hands as the tank started rolling back, bullets ricocheting off its armor.

The tank still on line between Golf Two and Three exhausted its basic load of sixty-seven 90mm HE rounds. This tank also started to retreat, and Captain Vargas, again feeling insanely exposed as he used the external phone at the rear of the tank, chewed out the tank commander. "You can't leave me out here! Just keep driving for the village!"

"I'm outta ammo! I don't have any need-"

"There is is a need," Vargas interrupted, "because the psychological effect of a piece of armor coming across the rice paddy, whether it has any ammo or not, is a tremendous weapon!" a need," Vargas interrupted, "because the psychological effect of a piece of armor coming across the rice paddy, whether it has any ammo or not, is a tremendous weapon!"

The tanker was unconvinced. "I'm getting the h.e.l.l out of here!" he shouted. Suicide was not part of his game plan.

"No way," Vargas barked. "You're going in there with us, or I am personally going to shoot a three-five in your tail!"

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, who was monitoring the radio in An Lac and intended to get more ammo up to the tank, finally got the tanker turned around with a no-nonsense affirmation of his company commander's threat. "I don't know what the enemy's going to do to you, but if you come back here I'm going to blow you away. I'm back here where I can see you, so turn that G.o.dd.a.m.n tank around!"

In the thick of the fight was, of all people, 1st Lt. Judson D. Hilton, the battalion's forward air controller. Hilton should have been back in An Lac with Weise, but had mistakenly thought the colonel intended to accompany the a.s.sault and had thus tagged along. Hilton shouldered his M14 and sprayed those treetops where he thought snipers were located. Nearby, Staff Sergeant Del Rio caught a glimpse of several NVA who had stood up in the brush to fire on the Marines. They were about sixty meters away, with their backs to Del Rio, and he a.s.sumed a sitting-kneeling firing position as he squared his M16 sights on the first of the fully exposed enemy soldiers. Del Rio, previously a compet.i.tive shooter, squeezed off a single shot. The NVA pitched face first into the brush. He never knew what hit him, and his overly excited comrades, firing on their own targets, never realized that a Marine marksman was shooting at them from the rear. Del Rio did not fire on automatic. Fire superiority was great, he thought, but he doubted that all the wild, ammo-burning fire of his young Marines really ever hit anything. Del Rio instead fired single shots down the line, dropping the enemy soldiers one at a time as though they were bull's-eyes on the shooting range.

From the positions their platoons had a.s.sumed in the thigh-high gra.s.s east and northeast of Dai Do, Lieutenant McAdams of Foxtrot One and Lieutenant Lanham of Foxtrot Three delivered fire into the hamlet to support Golf's a.s.sault. Neither friend nor foe was visible, but Golf marked its progress at intervals with smoke grenades, and Captain Butler made sure that his men fired to the right of the smoke. At one point, though, Butler saw .30-caliber fire from one of the amtracs impacting on Golf's side of the smoke. Unable to get the amtrac commander on the radio, Butler realized that the young, hard-charging lieutenant was blazing away with a machine gun. Butler shouted at him, "I need you to be a commander commander, not a gunner! You have somebody else who can do that! I need you on the radio so you can control your troops!"

Enemy soldiers became visible in the distance as they moved back and forth between Dai Do and Dinh To in small groups, and the 106mm recoilless rifles on the amtracs fired at them. In the smoke and dust of the explosions, the effect was not clear, but the recoilless rifles barked until they were almost out of ammunition.

By that time, the missing body of the Foxtrot Marine killed the day before had been recovered, and Lieutenant Colonel Weise instructed Butler to return to the cover of Dong Huan. Shortly thereafter, at 1445, as Foxtrot was just starting to move, the NVA artillery batteries in the DMZ that had been placing intermittent fire on Golf shifted the fire of two of their tubes onto Foxtrot. The enemy did not need to make a single adjustment in their accurate, twenty-round barrage, which-delivered two rounds at a time-whipped sh.e.l.l fragments over the heads of the helpless grunts while showering them with dirt clods and debris.

Eight men were wounded, including Lieutenant Lanham and Staff Sergeant Balignasay, the acting gunny. Balignasay, at forty, was a crewcut, pineapple-shaped Filipino who had fought the j.a.panese in World War II as a teenage member of the Hukbalahap guerrillas. He was also a Korean War veteran, and was on his second tour in Vietnam. Balignasay was. .h.i.t when he and seven other Marines sought shelter behind a big boulder, only to have an NVA artillery round land ten feet from them. Balignasay caught a large sh.e.l.l fragment in his upper left thigh. It was a bad, blood-gushing wound. It also happened in a moment of ma.s.s confusion, and Balignasay and the men wounded with him were left Where they lay. Most of the Marines were already lying p.r.o.ne. Others jumped up between salvos to put some distance between themselves and the amtracs, which the NVA seemed to be using as registration points, or to lead the retreat into Dong Huan. It was nearly an hour before anyone returned to where Balignasay had been left to bandage himself. Balignasay, on the verge of bleeding to death, was finally loaded into an amtrac.1 The artillery fire also killed three Foxtrot Marines. Private First Cla.s.s Kachmar ended up evacuating one of the dead grunts, whose head had been blown off, leaving behind just a flap of b.l.o.o.d.y, hairy scalp. Kachmar first tried to carry the body out, but could not. He was too hot and tired. He finally began dragging the dead Marine behind him, holding the feet under his armpits. When he stopped to catch his breath, he looked at the dog tag laced into the dead man's jungle boot. It was common practice to wear one dog tag around your neck and one on your boot, the premise being that whatever killed you probably wouldn't remove both your head and your legs. Kachmar realized that he knew the headless Marine. He saw the man's face in his mind. He had been a funny little guy, blue eyed and sandy haired, who always seemed to be in trouble with the powers that be. Kachmar couldn't drag him anymore. Tired as he was, he hoisted the body over his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Ignoring the blood and body fluids that gushed nauseatingly onto his face and down the front of his flak jacket, he started marching.

Lieutenant Morgan and Golf Two had been ordered to halt when they were 150 meters from Dai Do. The platoon was hunkered down and blindly returning fire against the entrenched enemy when a black Marine was suddenly shot through the throat. The wound was mortal. Next, Lance Corporal Parkins, who was firing his M14 from behind a burial mound, saw his good buddy, Mitch, who was about eight feet to his right behind another mound, get shot in the head. Mitch's head dropped against the M16's sights, and blood pumped out onto the plastic stock.

Parkins and Mitch had been trading bursts of automatic fire with a pair of NVA who were somewhere in the hedgerow to their front. The fire that had dropped Mitch gave Parkins a feel for where those two were specifically. Parkins turned his M14 on its side so that the recoil wouldn't send the barrel up, but would instead allow him to scan side to side with his burst, then began firing into that spot. One of the NVA, wearing a pith helmet, suddenly jumped up to run away. Parkins couldn't tell if he'd hit the man. Maybe the NVA made it to safety. Probably not: The whole platoon seemed to be shooting at this one and only visible target.

The second NVA who had had Parkins and Mitch in his sights ceased firing, too-the Marines later found him dead in his hole-and Parkins rolled over to his grievously wounded buddy. The side of Mitch's face was a b.l.o.o.d.y mess. It looked as though he'd been shot in or along one eye socket, and there was an exit wound behind his ear. Mitch wasn't screaming. He was in shock, and he asked Parkins if he remembered the words to the song that he'd been trying to teach him before they'd started across the paddies: "I'm on a little vacation in South Vietnam-an expense paid trip for one-I've got my own little rifle..."

"Don't worry about it, Mitch, I got 'Em," Parkins a.s.sured his delirious friend. "Everything looks good. It's no problem."

"Am I bleeding?"

"Just a little bit. I think you got grazed on the side of the head."

Mitch's voice was small and tentative, as though he was a little scared and not sure what was happening. He kept saying that he was cold and thirsty. The blood was pouring out. Parkins, a nonsmoker, removed the cellophane wrapper from Mitch's cigarets and used it as a protective cover over one of the wounds before unsnapping Mitch's first-aid kit and securing a bandage around his head. He did not believe that what he was doing would make a difference.

Golf Company was bogged down for two hours before Captain Vargas was able to position his reserve platoon between his two battered a.s.sault platoons and suppress enough of the enemy fire to allow a renewed a.s.sault. This time the Marines were able to leapfrog right into Dai Do. Captain Vargas, who carried an M16 plus a .45 pistol in a shoulder holster, caught sh.e.l.l fragments in his right arm while maneuvering toward an NVA machine gun firing from inside a bunker that resembled a burial mound. The bunker was located about a hundred feet in front of the hamlet's hedgerow edge, and had been bypa.s.sed by the first Marines to get into Dai Do. The NVA gunner inside had opened fire on the Marines following them in. Vargas and one of his radiomen got behind the bunker, and the captain flipped the brush-camouflaged top off of it. There were three enemy soldiers inside. Before they could react, Vargas swung his M16 on them, shooting them all at point-blank range. The radioman tossed a grenade in for good measure.

Lieutenant Ferland of Golf Three crawled past a freshly killed NVA on the way in and, because he hated the guaranteed-to-jam M16, took his dead foe's AK-47. Ferland also pulled the extra ammo magazines off the body and stuffed them in his cargo pocket. Moving to the berm at the hamlet's edge, he spotted a bare-chested NVA with black shorts and an SKS carbine turning to crawl away from the trenchlike depression that ran down the enemy's side of the berm. The NVA was about twenty meters away and had his back to both Ferland and a black sergeant who had moved up on the lieutenant's right. Ferland quickly shouldered his AK-47, sighted in, and squeezed off a single shot at the same time that the black noncom let fly with a burst from his M16. The back of the NVA's head popped open from what appeared to be a single hit, and Ferland and the NCO jumped over the berm, continuing the a.s.sault with the hard-chargers who were up with them, shouting and firing and throwing grenades.

Other young Marines hung back in the tall gra.s.s.

Staff Sergeant Wade, the commander of Golf One, reached a ditch beside a trail in the ville. He stopped there with several of his Marines to get reorganized. From a culvert under the ditch an NVA, who must have been hiding inside, suddenly jumped up and began running away from the Marines. Wade cut him down with his M16.

There was little return fire as the Marines worked in teams to clear each entrenchment they encountered in the vegetation. The NVA were in retreat, and could be seen bobbing between hedgerows as they ran. The grunts blasted away at them as Golf Company began sweeping through the right flank of the village. The vegetation was thin enough in spots to see all the way to the paddies on the other side. There were still enough hootches, trees, and hedgerows left that Lieutenant Morgan and Golf Two, anchoring the right flank, had worked forward only about fifty meters when they lost touch with the platoon on their left. The NVA chose that moment to begin lobbing in 82mm mortar rounds on Morgan and his men. One Marine was killed. The other eleven bunched-up Marines in the dead man's squad were seriously wounded by the first round of what became a five-minute barrage. The attack stalled out. The senior corpsman moved up to help treat the casualties, who were then carried back and loaded aboard the lone tank that was still with them. One man required a tracheotomy. When he was hoisted onto the tank in a poncho, the Marine had a plastic tube sticking from the hollow of his throat and his eyes were crossed. The casualty-stacked tank, never resupplied with ammo, headed back for An Lac.

Captain Vargas, juggling radios, became aware that the 1st and 2d Squads of Golf Three, on the far left flank, had been pinned down again fifty meters short of Dai Do by NVA holding their ground in the hamlet's southern corner. Vargas got Golf Company moving again. The Marines completed their sweep across the hamlet, then swung around in as even a line as the vegetation allowed to push through to the two pinned-down squads. The forward elements had gone only thirty meters when they came under heavy fire.

The NVA were counterattacking. They could be seen by an aerial observer as they crossed the open s.p.a.ce between Dai Do and Dinh To. The aerial observer also reported that he had NVA in the open and likewise moving south from the vicinity of True Kinh, which was about two klicks to the northwest. Artillery and naval gunfire worked them over, as did helicopter gunships with rockets and machine guns. Jets also flashed in to drop bombs and napalm. Enemy in the open in broad daylight was a rare sight, and the pilots were excited as they coordinated with each other on the air net. "Hey, there's a whole bunch of 'Em down there, over there by that tree on the north end of the village. I'm going in!"

"Let me get in there, let me get in there!"

"No, wait your turn!"

"There's thirty of them over here in this graveyard. I see some and they got weapons on their shoulders ...!"

The situation was not nearly so clear to thinned-down and ammo-light Golf Company. Captain Vargas had his men pop green smoke to mark their positions for the pilots. The Marines thought the air support had allowed their two pinned-down squads to break through, because figures soon became visible running toward them through the brush. A grunt shouted, "Hey, Gunny, more Marines coming on our left!" Del Rio also thought they were Marines-until they got closer. They were NVA, lots of them.