The Magnificent Bastards (24 page)
Read The Magnificent Bastards Online
Authors: Keith Nolan
Meanwhile, Captain Livingston, who had caught fragments from two grenades in his right leg, coordinated the evacuation of Echo Company’s approximately ten dead and sixty wounded aboard Otters. The severely wounded included one of the captain’s radio operators. As a corpsman worked on the prostrate radioman, Corporal Cardona’s squad happened to be passing by on its way forward. Livingston called to Cardona that he needed his radioman. This randomly picked replacement would prove to be a good one: He would very shortly help save the captain’s life. Dai Do had been secured, but the battle was not over.
1.
Although they had different styles, Captains Livingston, Vargas, and Williams had a lot of faith in each other. They were the mainstays of BLT 2/4 in terms of company leadership during the high-casualty, fast-turnover campaigns along the Cua Viet. As Vargas put it, “The three of us knew that if anything went wrong, the other guy was going to come hell for broke.”
2.
Del Rio was awarded a BSMv and his second Purple Heart for Dai Do. His first Purple Heart was the result of a booby trap encountered during his first tour.
3.
The metal shard that had lodged behind Lieutenant Ferland’s eyeball was too small and had done too little damage to warrant surgery. The doctors left it where it was, and within four days his eyesight began to return. He went back to BLT 2/4 and became an assistant S3. He later received an end-of-tour NCMv in addition to the BSMv and Purple Heart he got for Dai Do.
A Village Too FarA
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AY
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OMPANIES REPORTED
that Dai Do had been secured and that they were tied in and consolidating along the northwestern edge of the hamlet. One minute later, the NVA in Dinh To began mortaring Dai Do to cover their retreat. The sporadic shelling lasted for fifteen minutes, during which time Colonel Hull arrived by skimmer. Fire Raider 6 joined Lieutenant Colonel Weise and the BLT 2/4 Alpha Command Group in the forward edge of An Lac. While Hull and Weise were talking, the battalion sergeant major, Big John Malnar, raised his binoculars to investigate a lone figure he’d spotted in the paddies between An Lac and Dai Do. “Look, there’s someone running right across the front there—shit, it’s a fucking gook!” he shouted.
The NVA was in the open about a hundred meters away. The soldier, who wore green fatigues and carried an RPD light machine gun, seemed utterly confused and lost. He was trying to get away from Dai Do, but his escape route made him a shooting-gallery target for the Marines in An Lac. Sergeant Bollinger, the battalion commander’s radioman, asked, “Can I get him, Sergeant Major?” When Malnar told him to go ahead, Bollinger shouldered his M14. His first shot led the NVA too much, and his second was behind the running figure.
The third caught the man in the head, and he dropped like a stone. As another Marine rushed out to check the body for intel material, Sergeant Major Malnar looked down at his radioman-turned-rifleman and said with mock disgust, “Shit, Bollinger, took ya three comin’ shots to get ’im.”
Colonel Hull had meanwhile informed Weise that he wanted BLT 2/4 to maintain its “momentum” with an assault on Dinh To within an hour. Weise, who later said that he didn’t think his superiors “really knew what the hell was going on,” listened incredulously to the plan. While BLT 2/4 hit Dinh To, an ARVN unit was to hit Dong Lai, which sat on the opposite side of the narrow tributary on Dinh To’s western flank. With or without ARVN support, BLT 2/4 was in no condition to launch another assault into prepared enemy positions, and Weise was aggravated more than ever by Major General Tompkins’s failure to visit the battlefield. Weise wondered if regiment was providing division with accurate reports about the magnitude of NVA activity in the Dai Do complex, and he told Hull as bluntly as he could that his battalion had just about run out of steam. “We don’t have anything left. We’re worn out. We’ve been fighting here—continuous fighting—and every one of my companies is pretty well shot up.”
Hull was adamant. “I
have
to keep the pressure on,” the colonel said. “I want you to go.”
“Well, we’ll do the best we can,” said Weise resignedly. “You know, if you really want to catch these guys, land some battalions north of here and drive ’Em into us. We can occupy Dai Do and dig in. Drive ’Em into Dai Do and we can clean ’Em out.”
Weise and Major Warren had discussed this hammer-and-anvil plan the day before, and Warren had suggested it then to the regimental operations officer. Specifically, Weise and Warren proposed that the regiment’s two remaining battalions, 1/3 and the 1st Amtracs, be placed on either side of BLT 2/4. This would be the anvil against which the battalions inserted north of Dai Do would hammer the NVA as they swept south. Hull, however, could not move 1/3 or the Amtracs without permission from division, and it was doubtful that Major General
Tompkins, whose units were stretched thinly along the DMZ, could have come up with the forces needed to make a meaningful hammer. Weise later wrote that whether his recommendation “ever reached the commanding general, I do not know. I do know that no aggressive plan to destroy the enemy was carried out and that we lost a rare, golden opportunity to annihilate the crack 320th NVA Division.”
Lieutenant Colonel Weise, who would soon salute the flagpole and dutifully launch into Dinh To with the out-of-steam BLT 2/4, saw folly in the method of attack. He did not see folly in the rationale behind it. Weise was a conventional warrior, and he viewed the 320th NVA Division’s offensive within conventional parameters. The confluence of the Cua Viet and Bo Dieu rivers near Dai Do lent strategic value to this otherwise worthless terrain. If the NVA controlled the juncture of the rivers, they could cut resupply down the Bo Dieu to the 3d Marine Division at the DHCB, and down the Cua Viet to the provincial capital, Quang Tri City. The NVA had accomplished this first step, and Weise was of two minds as to what he suspected their next move would be. An attack against the division headquarters was one option:
Dong Ha was a sprawling combat support and combat service support base. Once a strong enemy got in close, penetration of the thin defensive perimeter, manned by and large by support troops, would have been relatively easy. Enemy assault units might take heavy casualties, particularly after the friendly maneuver battalions near Dong Ha reacted. Heavy casualties would have been a small price to pay for Dong Ha.…What could be a greater propaganda victory than destroying and temporarily occupying the largest Marine base in northern I Corps?
Another possibility was an NVA attack through the ARVN defenses at Quang Tri City. The capture of a provincial capital would also have resounding propaganda value. “Such a bold stroke would have been possible if the 320th NVA Division had not been stopped on the north bank of the Bo Dieu,” wrote
Weise. In stopping the NVA, BLT 2/4 had been forced to go nose to nose with them—taking heavy casualties in the process. Weise thought those Marine losses were justified. “Just think of the casualties suffered in World War II assaults on Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa,” he wrote. He further reflected that “if the 320th NVA Division
had
planned to attack Dong Ha or Quang Tri, then BLT 2/4 had conducted a successful, albeit unintended spoiling attack.… I have fought the Battle of Dai Do many times in my mind and always return to the same conclusion: We accomplished our mission against great odds. Whatever the enemy intended to do, he didn’t.”
1
There was another perspective to the Battle of Dai Do, however. This view held that the NVA had, in fact, accomplished exactly what they intended. They had wanted to kill a lot of Marines, and this they did. The NVA never actually attempted to cross the Bo Dieu River to reach Dong Ha or Quang Tri. It was the Navy’s TF Clearwater, not the NVA, that shut down logistical traffic on the river. The NVA had simply fired a number of recoilless rifle rounds at river traffic; and then readied themselves for the Marine response. The NVA in their camouflaged, sandbagged, and mutually supporting entrenchments had forced their opponents to fight on ground of their choosing. By plunging full speed ahead into the fortified NVA hamlets, the aggressive Marines aided and abetted NVA tactics. It was really the NVA who were playing the body count game.
“I saw what was happening as wasteful of American lives,” wrote Lt. Gen. Victor H. “Brute” Krulak, commanding general of the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific. Krulak was headquartered in Hawaii, and although a frequent visitor to the war zone, he did not have operational control of the Marines in Vietnam. Operational control rested with General Westmoreland in Saigon. Westmoreland saw battles such as Dai Do as
victories. Krulak did not. Since June 1966, when Westmoreland formally announced his search-and-destroy strategy—which sought battles such as Dai Do—Krulak had been trying to change the direction of Westmoreland’s war horse. The search-and-destroy strategy was aimed at bringing the NVA to battle anytime, anywhere, until overwhelming U.S. firepower had inflicted such heavy casualties on Hanoi’s army that it could no longer field a meaningful force. Westmoreland intended to pound the NVA into submission. Krulak understood the folly of this. Search and destroy was a war of attrition, and it was a game that Hanoi was destined to win. Hanoi had time, and it had men to expend by the hundreds of thousands. Washington did not. The North Vietnamese embraced the DMZ battles as a chance to bleed the Americans in empty, meaningless terrain that favored their dug-in forces. Krulak understood, as did his counterparts in Hanoi, that victory did not hinge on the big battles, but on which side could provide security to the villages of South Vietnam’s densely populated coast. Westmoreland’s strategy pulled U.S. units away from pacification efforts in these areas, and Lieutenant General Krulak, unable to focus U.S. efforts back where he thought they belonged, would write bitterly that “we were pitting American bodies against North Vietnamese bodies in a backcountry war of attrition, while the enemy was free to make political speeches in the hamlets and villages.…However valiant, however skillful were the Army and Marine operations against the large formations … in terms of doing what we came to Vietnam to do, the costly, blood-sapping, grinding battles were blows in the air.”
“We knew the odds. After being there so many months we were all very realistic. We knew a certain number were going in, and a certain number were coming out,” said 2d Lt. Vic Taylor of Hotel Company. “We were going to prevail—that was not a question—but it was a matter of going up and doing it.”
Hotel Company had been issued orders for the attack on Dinh To, and Lieutenant Taylor, the acting commander of Hotel
Three, walked his line in Dong Huan to make sure that his Marines had their gear and were ready to go. Taylor, a reader of history and a romantic, had grown up watching such movies as
Battle Cry
and
The Sands of Iwo Jima
, and there was a certain dramatic and familiar ring to the things he saw and heard as they saddled up. He thought of the Marine “Devil Dogs” advancing through the wheat at Belleau Wood, and of the next generation of Leathernecks wading through the bloody lagoon at Tarawa. Of his own Marines about to go into battle across the rice paddies, Taylor later wrote:
Some were standing watch, some readied equipment, many slept or lounged, but all were quiet. No nervous jabbering, no false bravado, no whining, no melodramatics—they were professionals. Most were teenagers, many with far less than a year away from home, but they were seasoned by months of fighting with a determined enemy. Despite their youth, despite their short time in the Corps, they were as willing and serious—as professional—as anyone who ever wore a uniform. I was proud to be among them.
Lieutenant Taylor had rejoined Hotel Company only the previous evening from his XO billet aboard the USS
Iwo Jima
. At twenty-eight, Taylor had more experience and confident, soft-spoken maturity than the average second lieutenant. Originally from Chester County, Pennsylvania, he had done three years as an enlisted Marine following high school. After college he soon became bored with the life of a junior business executive, so when Vietnam cranked up he went back in as an officer. It was in Vietnam that he decided to make the Marine Corps his career.
“Taylor was a real handsome, studly kind of guy, and a great, heroic-looking Marine,” said Captain Williams, the former Hotel Company skipper.
Hotel began moving out of Dong Huan at 0955 to cross the five hundred meters of exposed ground between their position and Dai Do. The Marines in the column were well spaced so
there would be no mass target on which an NVA artillery spotter could adjust fire. Lieutenant Taylor wrote:
We plodded forward in our attack formation—H Company, all seventy-five of us. The day was still, the heat intense. We had guzzled all the water we could hold and had refilled canteens in Dong Huan, not knowing when there would be more. Now the sweat poured out, and uniforms were soaked. Little puffs of dust rose from the dry rice paddy at each step. The metal of weapons was almost too hot to touch. Up ahead, I could see the hedgerows and thickets of Dai Do, burning and smoking from earlier attacks. The firing had ceased. Maybe this would be easier than I expected.