The Magnificent Bastards (20 page)

There were repercussions. Immediately after the battle, the division G4, a colonel with whom Forehand had had some well-chosen words over the long haul, had both Forehand and the ordnance captain standing tall before his field desk at the DHCB. The colonel was a heavy set, cannonball-shaped man whom Forehand referred to as Dong Ha Fats. The colonel was furious with them for going behind his back. He accused Forehand of insubordination and grand theft. “That really bothers me, Colonel, that gets me right under my cigarets,”. answered the hot-tempered Forehand, who was within days of rotation and who had already decided to resign his commission. “Look, Colonel, as big as you are, I couldn’t miss you at this range if I tried.”

“Major Warren had been doing a tremendous job running things at our Command Post at Mai Xa Chanh, especially hounding Regiment and Division for more air and artillery support,” wrote Weise of his radio-juggling operations officer. Warren himself wrote that much of the planning for day two at Dai Do had “involved trying to convince higher headquarters that BLT 2/4 was in fact engaging an enemy force of substantial size.” Warren did not consider himself successful in his efforts to bring down upon the NVA in Dai Do the amount of firepower that their numbers deserved. Division seemed singularly focused on the stretch of Route 1 above Dong Ha (during the day, 3/9 and the ARVN made significant contacts in that area), and regiment appeared overly concerned with possible enemy exploitation of the thinning line along Jones Creek. Except for ill-fated B/1/3, the BLT received no reinforcements. Warren wrote of the “slowness of various echelons of command to realize just how serious the Dai Do threat was,” and he later commented that, in his frustration, his radio conversations with regiment “were bordering on the irrational because I knew that Bill Weise was in a shit sandwich, and I was so emotional about the need to get reinforcements there immediately.”

During Golf Company’s grueling assault on Dai Do, Major Warren had spoken in harsh tones with his regimental counterpart, Major Murphy, about the need to at least get Echo Company and Foxtrot’s detached platoon back in the game. Murphy responded by invoking the regimental commander’s name: “The order from Colonel Hull is that Weise should belly up.”

The sight of the smoke over Dai Do, visible from the CP, caused Warren to explode at this hint that Weise was bellyaching and dragging his feet. “He’s so
goddamn
close that his belly’s getting split open!
We need some help!”

Warren was convinced that regiment never fully appreciated the intensity of the Dai Do action. He knew, however, that the tall, imposing, and intense Major Murphy was an intelligent, hands-on combat Marine. He also knew that Murphy and Hull were beholden to division, and it was division headquarters,
in fact, that appeared most disconnected from reality. Warren reflected that Murphy’s own frustrations with the powers that be must also have been substantial. Warren was correct. Major Murphy was particularly disenchanted with Major General Tompkins. Neither Tompkins nor any member of the 3d Marine Division staff visited BLT 2/4 during the entire Dai Do debacle, and Murphy later wrote that he and Hull believed that the general “had gotten very tired and aged a lot during the first months of 1968. During Dai Do he was more concerned about Khe Sanh, and one night after a long day on the river in the boat, Colonel Hull told him so in rather heated words. They were both physically beat so we calmed the situation with some coffee.”

Major General Tompkins had been a Marine for thirty-two years. He was a wiry, peppery, hawk-nosed man who earned his Navy Cross as a battalion commander on Saipan in World War II. Tompkins had performed superbly during the Tet Offensive and the siege of Khe Sanh. His frequent helicopter trips into Khe Sanh had been made at great personal risk, flown as they were through the rocket and artillery fire that pounded the airstrip at the surrounded combat base. The division that Tompkins commanded was itself overextended and undersupported. There was a lot going on and not enough help to go around. Dai Do was not an event that Tompkins completely overlooked. Captain William H. Dabney, an assistant division operations officer (and a former Khe Sanh company commander), noted that as the sun set on G BLT 2/4’s precarious, cutoff position on day two at Dai Do, Major General Tompkins walked into the division CP in the DHCB “and directed, without preamble, that all 3d MarDiv tubes that could range on Dai Do shift trails immediately and be prepared to fire at max Ammunition Supply Rate all night!”

With the NVA fully occupied with B/1/3, which was caught in the open, Captain Vargas moved Golf Company a hundred meters back from the drainage ditch to an area with better cover in the eastern corner of Dai Do. An emergency ammo resupply mission was made by several Otters that came up from An Lac through the cemetery at Dai Do’s eastern tip, an
approach that shielded the vehicles from the majority of enemy fire. After his men finished loading up, Vargas moved Golf another hundred meters into the cover of those burial mounds. His forward observer, Lieutenant Acly, organized several simultaneous artillery missions on Dai Do and on NVA reinforcements reported to be east of Thuong Do and Dinh To. The roar of artillery was nearly continuous. The only breaks came when a check-fire was called to let in the occasional air strike.

It was getting dark, and the fire on Golf was reduced to sporadic sniping. During the lull, Vargas called up his platoon commanders. They decided to dig in where they were and ride out the night with continuous illumination above and a ring of artillery fire around their tight perimeter. Golf would have been too exposed had it tried to cross the open paddies east to Dong Huan or back south to An Lac.

Meanwhile, B/1/3, pinned down in the open, fire-swept paddies three hundred meters from Dai Do’s southern corner, was too shot up to effect its assigned linkup with Golf Company. Bravo Company was too shot up to even evacuate its casual ties. Lieutenant Colonel Weise instructed Lieutenant Muter to use his recon platoon and the cover of the gathering darkness to begin moving Bravo’s casualties back the two hundred meters to An Lac. Muter personally led the back-and-forth, under-fire expeditions into the paddy to drag the wounded rearward. Weise would have expected no less from the cocky, fearless, twenty-five-year-old Muter, who was a married man and a doctor’s son from Macon, Georgia. Weise wrote that Muter “seemed to be everywhere, always informed, and ready to do whatever was required without fanfare. Having Lieutenant Muter and his platoon was like having an extra rifle company.” Forehand added that “Muter was typical recon: ‘I can not be killed.…I am iron.…’”
²

The NVA were already pumping 60mm and 82mm mortar fire on Bravo Company, and a 12.7mm machine gun was burning
tracers over the Marines’ pinned-down heads when enemy artillery began to hit Bravo’s mixed-up, spread-out positions. Enemy shells also fell on Dong Huan. Weise, in contact with inexperienced Lieutenant Keppen, gave Bravo Company permission to pull back to An Lac if he could account for all his casualties. The dead were to be left where they had fallen. Otters assisted with the evacuation of the last of the wounded, then the company straggled rearward under the light of flares and assumed defensive positions.

Captain Livingston spoke with Bravo Company’s few surviving NCOs, who looked shell-shocked, and with Lieutenant Keppen. “The lieutenant had had about all he could handle, but he was fairly responsive. I sort of took the fatherly approach. I spent a lot of time trying to get him calmed down, get him organized, and remind him that he was a leader and he had to take responsibility for his actions and the actions of his outfit.”
³

Captain Livingston then helped reorganize Keppen’s lines, as well as the two isolated Golf Company squads previously pinned down on the left flank, which had been able to fall back with Bravo Company. “Those kids were all in a state of near shock,” Livingston said. “They’d really had the shit beat out of them, but I told them they had to get their stuff together because they might be back in this thing and we might have to depend on them.” During the night, Bravo Company heard something to the front; Captain Murphy, in command of the An Lac perimeter, described how “one or two men on the lines opened up with AK-47s. The rest of the men on the line, being acclimatized to the very familiar and peculiar sound of an AK-47, thought they were under attack—and we had an entire company just firing wildly at no particular enemy at all.”

Captain Vargas and the other forty-five Golf Company Marines cut off in Dai Do were hunkered down behind burial
mounds or in holes they had hastily scooped out with their entrenching tools. It was a tight, virtually back-to-back perimeter. The NVA attacked under the cover of darkness. Acly, the forward observer, adjusted fire missions to within fifty meters. The NVA were most active on Golf Three’s side of the line, and they came at the grunts there as shadows that leapfrogged forward in the moments of darkness between illumination rounds—darting, dropping down, then popping up to fire AK-47s. Their tracers were bright green. Their RPGs thumped in with white flashes. Hilton, the misplaced air officer, had recovered an M79 from a medevacked grunt, and although he had never handled a grenade launcher before, he quickly became an expert. The artillery fired a salvo of variable time rounds, which delivered devastating airbursts and turned night into day above the open fields—catching a group of enemy soldiers in startling, freeze-framed clarity as they walked through the tall grass in a fast crouch, helmets on, automatic weapons held in both hands at the waist.

Hilton started lobbing M79 rounds. Nearby, an M60 gunner laced the field with a stream of red tracers. Marines who hadn’t seen a thing liberally expended ammo where the machine-gun fire was impacting.

Golf Three later counted ten dead NVA to its front. Golf One didn’t get any clear shots. Golf Two spotted an NVA soldier carrying a light machine gun as he walked out of Dai Do. The man did not fire, and he made no attempt to conceal himself. He was apparently unaware that he could be seen. The Marines dropped him.

Weise had made an emergency request for a flareship, and at 2030 one came on station to orbit Dai Do and provide nonstop, parachute-borne illumination. The flareship turned the battlefield into a brightly lit stage, and the NVA probes petered out. One NVA, however, attempted his own personal banzai charge. “He looked like he was delivering the L.A.
Times,”
recalled Captain Vargas. “His arms were full of grenades, and he was just throwing them and walking around.” Marines fired on the NVA and he went down—but then he got back to his feet. Incredulous, Vargas shouldered his Ml6 and put two
rounds into the man’s chest. The NVA was unfazed, and kept throwing grenades. He finally collapsed after multiple hits. “He must have been on drugs,” Vargas said later. “There’s nothing else that can psyche anybody up that way to take that much punishment and just keep bouncing back up.”

Captain Vargas requested an emergency ammunition resupply during the relative lull in the enemy action. The Marines, although they had liberally expended ammo on every half-seen bump in the night, still had a fair amount left—just not enough to repel a major attack. An Otter made a daring run up from An Lac, but someone had been under the impression that Golf still had tanks in support: The Otter carried only 90mm rounds. Vargas gripped his radio handset and shouted, “Hey, Dixie Diner Six, we got a bunch of tank ammo out here! What the hell am I going to do with that?”

“Oh,
shit
. We’ll get you some ammo—”

“What the hell am I going to do with these ninety-millimeter rounds? Hit them with a hammer? I can’t shove them in a goddamn M16, sir. For Christ’s sake! I need some ammo.”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ll get it to you. Hang in there—we’ll get you ammo.” Weise then turned to Captain Forehand, who was even angrier than the colonel when informed of the mix-up. “Well, I’ll be a goddamned sonofabitch!” Forehand cursed in the night. “What asshole did that?” Weise told Forehand to hustle some small-arms ammunition up to Golf Company ASAP. He did not expect Forehand to do it himself, but Forehand swung aboard an Otter after making sure that it was loaded with the right stuff, and roared off across the wide-open, flare-lit paddies. “We got fat on grenades, and we got fat on M16 rounds,” said Vargas. “Then they drove off into the darkness. How the hell they ever got through there without getting shot, I’ll never know.”

“Thanks for the ammunition!” Vargas told Weise. He was laughing like hell. “You can’t imagine who just came here!”

“Yeah, it was the Four.”

“How’d you know?”

“Well, he heard about what happened, and he went out and unscrewed it.”

Lieutenant Acly, who had called in ninety minutes of continuous artillery to break the back of the ground attack, kept the NVA off balance during the lull by shelling Dai Do in thirty-minute intervals for the rest of the night. The shellings were configured as a TOT, or time on target. A TOT involved several artillery batteries firing on the same target, but at different times based on their different distances from the target, so that their rounds were coordinated to all impact in the same second. Each battery computed the time of flight to the target, and when a countdown was given each knew at what point to commence firing. The result was a devastating, twenty-in-one explosion that smothered a target and gave the enemy no time to react. It did, however, give the exhausted grunts time to get some sleep.