The Magnificent Bastards (18 page)

As Bravo moved out of An Lac, Captain Livingston’s Echo Company began moving in. Livingston, who was super gungho, had monitored the battalion tac net since the battle began the previous morning, and had chafed at his role as guardian of the Dong Ha bridge under the opcon of the 3d Marine Division. Weise had sorely missed the presence of Captain Jim, as he called his longest-serving company commander, and had made repeated requests through regiment for Echo Company’s return. When Golf ran into serious resistance in the
opening moves of its assault on Dai Do, Weise’s requests became more desperate.

Division headquarters, which had its own concerns about an NVA drive down Route 1, finally relented, and Weise wrote, “My morale went up several notches when I learned that Echo Company had been released by 3d Marine Division and was en route to my position in An Lac.”
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It was a two-kilometer hump from E Company’s bridge position northeast to the stream it would have to cross to reach An Lac. Captain Livingston put his best officer, Lieutenant Jones, on point with Echo Three, and they started down a footpath that sliced through deserted hamlets and fallow farmland. The trail took them to the brushy bank of the creek, where it ran past Dai Do. Here, the point squad, led by Sgt. James W. Rogers, spotted an NVA squad on the other side. The enemy wore pith helmets and fatigues, and they were swinging AK-47s as they moved at a fast trot through the high grass in the hamlet. In seconds they would be gone. Jones couldn’t afford to wait to get permission from the captain to engage them, so he told Rogers to open fire. There were about a dozen ammo-heavy Marines in the point squad. They all cut loose, creating a terrific roar with their automatic weapons and grenade launchers.

The NVA disappeared into the brush without returning a single shot. Lieutenant Jones wanted to pursue, but Livingston pulled in the reins. “No way!” he shouted over the radio. “Our job is to get across the creek and hook up with battalion.”

Captain Livingston, following behind with 2d Lt. Michael L. Cecil’s Echo One and 1st Lt. James Sims’s Echo Two, began taking fire from Dong Lai, which was due north of them. A hundred open meters lay between the hamlet and the grassy
burial mounds behind which Echo One and Two dropped to begin lobbing M79 rounds and firing M60s in return. There were only a handful of NVA in Dong Lai, and the Marines could not see any of them through the cover of hedgerows and banana trees in the village.

The NVA could see them, though. Sergeant Elbert E. Cox, Jr., a machine-gun section leader, was shot in the back of the head. Cox was a big man, age twenty-five, from Chesapeake, Virginia. He was a veteran of Operation Kingfisher, but though a competent and experienced NCO, his men considered him abrasive and he was immensely unpopular. Sergeant Cox lay in the grass now, gasping for air and crying out, “Oh, mom, I’m hit!” The cry sent chills down the backs of the grunts who had run up to wrap useless bandages around Cox’s shattered head, and console this man they disliked. “Don’t worry, Sarge, you’ll be all right.…
Corpsman, up!”

Sergeant Cox died. Lance Corporal Anthony Taylor, a rifleman in Echo Two, was also hit by a sniper from Dong Lai. He died, too. Taylor had been an easygoing, twenty-one-year-old black from Newark, New Jersey.

Hey, this ain’t my war, right? thought LCpl. Van A. Hahner. The enemy fire had gotten heavy, and Hahner, who’d only recently been attached to Echo Company with a two-man regimental sniper team, had his head down and a cigaret lit. Hahner had been in-country nine months. He didn’t see any use in shooting at what he couldn’t see. This was a job for arty. The team sniper, for whom Hahner acted as cover man, was similarly uninvolved. An angry lieutenant shouted at them, “Throw some sniper fire back!” The sniper went first. He rose up from behind their mound with his Remington Model 700, but before he could focus the scope he had to drop back down to avoid the rounds suddenly cracking past his head. It was Hahner’s turn. He shouldered his heavy, hard-kicking M14 as he came up and fired into the hamlet about six feet over the heads of the Marines pinned down in front of him. Having killed a bush or two, he dropped back behind the mound. There, he thought. I’ve done my duty.

“Hey, you’re Marines’ right by us!”

“He’s not hitting you, so don’t worry about it!” the lieutenant shouted at the Marines caught in the middle. He then turned his attention back to the sniper team. “I thought I told you to return fire!” he shouted.

Hahner got off several more quick shots before two bullets from the other side smacked into the headstone atop his burial mound. The rounds hit with dusty blasts about an inch below his eyes, and he went down quickly. Man, I’ve had enough of this, Hahner thought. The lieutenant kept bugging him, so he decided he was going to be cool. He wasn’t going to go over the top again. But as soon as Hahner put his left knee out, before he could even fire from around the side of the mound in a crouched position, the NVA marksman shot him. The round went through his leg in a straight line from shin to thigh, and zipped on out to graze his rib cage. Hahner let out a scream as he was knocked down. Two Marines, under fire themselves, quickly pulled him back behind the mound. The pain was immediate, but so was Hahner’s relief that he had not been shot in the stomach. It was his first thought. He knew he would live.

Hahner had the presence of mind to hand the shoulder rig for his .357 Colt Python to his partner and ask him to get the pistol back to one of the men in their sniper section. It was a commercial handgun, and Hahner had not finished paying the man for it. A corpsman tore open the bloody trouser leg and gave him an encouraging grin. “Hey, you got a million-dollar wound, baby—you’re goin’ home. You’re okay.…”

The sniper made one more go of it with his long-barreled, bolt-action rifle, but was dropped by a round that went through his arm. Unable to get artillery support, Captain Livingston had his 60mm mortar section pump a barrage of white phosphorus (WP) and HE on Dong Lai. While the NVAs’ heads were down, Echo One and Two pushed past the fortified hamlet and joined Echo Three along the creek, which ran southeast another five hundred meters to the Bo Dieu River. Echo Company followed it down, using the four-foot bank as cover. When the Marines were opposite An Lac, Sergeant Rogers’s point squad forded the sluggish, muddy, hundred-foot-wide
obstacle. Lieutenant Jones dropped his helmet and unshouldered his flak jacket and pack in the hasty perimeter that Jones established, then waded back into the water. Livingston followed him and, joined by a half-dozen other tall Marines planted at intervals across the neck-deep tributary, helped the rest of the company across. Everyone felt terribly exposed out there. The line moved fast.

“I don’t think we were really keeping anything too dry,” recalled Lieutenant Jones. “We were just moving ’Em across, shoving ’Em across—and keeping ’Em from going under.” The NVA fired an occasional sniper round at them without effect. At one point Jones, who was facing north in midstream, saw a slow-moving RPG coming right down the creek at them. He ducked under the water. “I think I counted to a thousand.”

At 1745, when B/1/3 was still three hundred meters short of its linkup with Golf Company, the amtracs atop which the Marines rode became the targets of AK-47 and RPG fire from NVA entrenched in Dai Do’s southern corner. The effect was immediate. The Marines dismounted and sought shelter behind the burial mounds in the high grass of the open field. Bravo Company’s new commander, 1st Lt. T. A. Brown, who had transferred from D/1/3 only that morning, tried to organize an assault on the hamlet. When he realized that no one but his radioman was following him, he started back—only to have a rocket-propelled grenade explode behind him. Brown was seriously wounded in the shoulder.

Lieutenant Keppen, the greenhorn platoon commander, was again the only officer left in Bravo Company. He was losing people very quickly to the devastating NVA fire, and he screamed hysterically on the radio, “You gotta help me! We’re surrounded out here! They’re all over the place! They’re going to kill us all!”

Captain Vargas came up on the net. “Now listen to me, Bravo, take it easy. I’m right over here. You’re okay. Just pull your line in and talk to your people and stop yelling. Stop yelling and calm down and you’ll be all right.…” Vargas explained to Keppen that if he pulled Bravo Company back to
An Lac, as he was shouting that he was going to do, outnumbered Golf might be overrun. Keppen came around as Vargas kept talking. He was confused and inexperienced, but he was no coward. Given some direction, he did the best he could in a desperate situation. Vargas could offer Keppen no more than moral support at the time, though, because as noted in the battalion journal, “The CO of Company G reported that NVA troops had moved between Company B and his position, making it difficult for either Company B or Company G to take the enemy under fire without endangering friendly troops.”

One of the Bravo Company corpsmen was screaming for help. Crawling as low as a snake, Pfc. Paul F. “Birdshit” Roughan, ammo bearer for a machine-gun team—and a tough, rough-edged eighteen year old from Worcester, Massachusetts—worked his way up to the corpsman’s burial mound from the cover of his own. Roughan was not with his team because their M60 had been disabled by a direct hit. He left
his own weapon and ammo with his team so he could get closer to the earth. There was a paddy dike to the left of the corpsman’s mound, and the corpsman—barely able to get his head up for all the fire—pointed out the casualties he had spotted on the other side, the side facing the invisible enemy in the hedgerows. Roughan could see both casualties. One of them, a black Marine, was obviously dead. The other, a white Marine named Blakesley, was sprawled across the dead grunt. Blakesley had multiple wounds and was moaning deliriously, “Corpsman … corpsman …”

What an eerie, ungodly call, Roughan thought. He and the corpsman spent several minutes behind the mound, trying to figure out how to get to Blakesley. The corpsman, completely unnerved, handed his medical bag to Roughan. “It’s impossible, we can’t get to him! Don’t even try it, it’s crazy!”

The corpsman bounded rearward. You skinny little shit! Roughan thought, enraged. The sonofabitch asks for a volunteer, and then
didi maus
when the shit gets too hot! Blakesley was still moaning for a corpsman. Oh shit, how am I going to do this? Roughan figured the only way to get Blakesley was in an unburdened fireman’s carry. He kept his helmet on, but shrugged out of his hot and heavy flak jacket. He also left the corpsman’s bag as he shoved off on his belly toward the dike that separated him from the wounded man. He had covered about fifty feet when something exploded a few meters to his left. When he came back to reality, he felt no pain. He was just numb, except for the warm sensation of blood running down his neck. He’d been hit on the left side of the back of the neck, and he felt along the painless edge of the pockmark, trying to determine the extent of his injuries. He did not discover the exit wound on the other side.

Roughan bellowed for a corpsman. He could still hear Blakesley’s delirious groaning. When he realized that no one was coming for them, he crawled back to the mound. Too tired to keep pushing along on his belly, he continued rearward in a stumbling crouch with his head tilted to the right, cradled in his right hand, to staunch the flow of blood. His team leader’s helmeted head popped up from behind another mound. “Hey,
Birdie, whataya doin’ comin’ back here? I thought you volunteered to help the doc?”

“I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit!” Roughan shouted.

After pulling Roughan behind the mound, the gunner secured a battle dressing around his ammo bearer’s neck. The last thing Roughan said to the four-man M60 team with which he had spent the four best and worst months of his life seemed very important at the time: “Any more pogey bait packages I might get while I’m doing time in the hospital, just open ’Em up and share ’Em.”

Crawling again until that became too tiring, Roughan completed his under-fire maneuver to An Lac in an exhausted, zigzagging stagger. He was placed aboard a skimmer—the driver had one hand on the throttle, and a .45 in the other—and taken downriver to Mai Xa Chanh West. The beach there was crowded with casualties. Roughan, numb and spent, lay on his back and called to a corpsman, “Can I have some water?”

“Sure you can,” came the reply.

“Can I have a smoke?”

“Sure, no problem.”

Oh shit, he thought. This is not a good sign. Roughan had been taught that casualties should not even ask for these things because they could adversely affect them. He was afraid that he was so far gone that the corpsmen weren’t even observing the usual precautions. Mustering his best John Wayne drawl for the corpsman, Roughan said, “Well, Doc, whaddya think my chances are?”

“Hey, where there’s life, there’s hope.”

A Sea Horse landed and two Marines lifted Roughan’s litter. He did not know that other Marines had pulled Blakesley to safety. All he knew was that he had failed. He thought he had left the man to die. He felt guilty and angry—and sad, too. He knew that the camaraderie of Bravo Company was something he would miss forever. As they lifted his stretcher into the chopper, he realized he was crying.