The Magnificent Bastards (27 page)

“They were all superb,” Lieutenant Taylor said later of his Marines. “They never gave the counterattack an inch.” The NVA outnumbered and outgunned Echo and Hotel, however, and while some enemy elements closed from the front, others used the creek bank as cover to slip into position on the left flank. Those NVA employed AK-47s and RPGs, while the enemy troops in the paddies on the right flank poured 12.7mm machine-gun fire into the ville. On the radio with Weise, Taylor explained that casualties were high, ammo was almost
gone, and that “we’ve got ’Em on three sides. I don’t think we can hold here. They’re wearing us down to the point that they’re just going to gobble us up.”

Captain Livingston came up on the net to affirm Taylor’s picture. “We can’t stay here and get all these kids killed,” he told Weise.

Neither Livingston nor Taylor wanted to retreat. They wanted reinforcements, but none were available. “Well, I’m going to help you, but you’ve got to help yourselves, too,” Weise told them. “I’ll try to get up there with you. I’ll send everybody I can spare, but in the meantime you’ll need to hold off the counterattack. Pull back to the best position you can and hold.”

“Get the wounded and as many dead as we can carry, and let’s get the fuck out of here,” Lieutenant Taylor bellowed at his Marines. “I’ll show you where to stop!” With that, a slight-statured Hotel Company Marine moved past Taylor carrying over his shoulder a wounded man who must have weighed 230 pounds. Another Marine moved rearward with his own weapon, two machine guns, and two radios. They soon discovered that there were still NVA to their rear, so they had to shoot their way out of Dinh To. Sergeant Devoe of Hotel One covered his squad with his M16 as the men started back along the creek. The grunts carried their wounded with them. When Devoe’s M16 jammed again, he threw it down and picked up an M79 grenade launcher. He fired its last three rounds, then relieved a wounded Marine of the shotgun he was carrying. He pumped its two remaining shells into the brush. Devoe was finally reduced to covering his Marines with a .45-caliber pistol.

“It was so perfect. It was just a turkey shoot,” recalled LCpl. Jim O’neill, a regimental sniper attached to Hotel Company. During the fighting withdrawal, O’neill had a clear view of the NVA machine guns and reinforcements in the open fields east of Dinh To. He went to work with his scope-mounted, bolt-action hunting rifle, and killed twenty-four soldiers and wounded approximately ten more, earning himself a
BSMv. O’neill fired from elevated, brushy cover near a pagoda at the forward edge of Dai Do. The range was about seven hundred meters. O’neill had been led to the area by a corpsman. Before the corpsman got him, a lance corporal from Hotel’s helicopter support team had moved past with the comment, “Hey, boy, there’s some machine guns out there—you can get some real good Marines’ in!”

Hearing that, O’neill had looked at the Marine next to him, and said, “Let’s go get ’Em!”

“No way, man. You want to get us killed?”

“But it’s a great opportunity—we’re gonna take it and get some real decent sniping in!”

“Don’t get killed,” said the man.

“Hey, if I’m movin’ out, you’re movin’ out with me!”

The Marine shook his head. “Not this time.”

When the corpsman ran back to them, he gave them no choice but to get cracking. He was very concerned about the wounded who had been moved to the cover of a pagoda at
Dai Do’s edge. They were within range of those 12.7mm machine guns, and the corpsman jumped on the inactive sniper team. “Hey, there’s gooks up front, and there’s lots of clear area that would be perfect for you! You gotta get them! They’re choppin’ everybody up!”

“Hey, we’re going,” O’neill said firmly to the other Marine, and then moved out with the corpsman. When O’neill looked back, the other Marine was following him, ready to fight.

When they reached the pagoda, Lance Corporal O’neill removed the towel that protected his Remington Model 700 from moisture and dust. The corpsman pointed the enemy positions out. There were three 12.7mm machine guns, each dug into the top of a burial mound. They were well separated among the numerous other mounds. O’neill could just about make out the facial expressions of the pith-helmeted gun crews through his telescopic sight. He began firing on them, and one at a time the gunners slumped over their weapons. As the assistant gunners pulled their comrades away and resumed firing, O’neill killed them in turn. The enemy was determined to keep those heavy machine guns in action, and other NVA quickly moved out to man them. There were enemy soldiers everywhere, in the burial mounds with the machine guns and in the open along a footpath between Dinh To and positions farther north in the rice paddies. Some of the NVA were carrying wounded comrades out of the battle area. Others moved forward with ammunition.

How many of them can I kill before they swing those guns over and start aiming at me? O’neill wondered. At one point, he saw an NVA pointing in their direction. Nerve-racking as that was, the NVA never shifted their fire from the Marines in Dinh To. O’neill had a free ride and he worked his rifle’s bolt as fast as he could, killing ammo bearers and one replacement gunner after another. “It was just like watching TV,” he said later. “You would sight in on a gook, pull the trigger, and watch him fall. No noise, no screams, no cries. You just put the cross hairs on somebody’s chest or somebody’s face, and
never think a second thought about it. You just pulled the trigger.”

O’neill spotted a trio of NVA and dropped them one after the other. But the third enemy soldier, after some flopping around, got back to his feet. O’neill shot him again. The NVA flopped around some more before getting back up.

“I’ll fix you!” O’neill shouted. He chambered his next round with a vengeance. The NVA’s head exploded when he squeezed the trigger. “Flop now, you sonofabitch!” he exclaimed.

After firing about 120 shots in the ten to fifteen minutes he was in position near the pagoda, O’neill, who didn’t have earplugs, was half-deaf. He finally had to take several breaks to let the barrel of his rifle cool down. The heat coming off it was distorting his view. He also stopped firing on the two occasions that an aerial observer flew over the burial mounds. Each time the aircraft approached, the NVA manning the heavy machine guns would grab the brush-covered mats beside the open-topped gun bunkers and pull them over them. The camouflage was so effective that even O’neill lost track of which three mounds he’d been firing at.

When the plane departed, bingo, the NVA would suddenly pop up out of nowhere and resume firing on Dinh To. O’neill would also resume firing—until an RPG finally flashed in from the village. The fun was over. The NVA hammered the point home by walking mortar fire toward the pagoda. The corpsman had already gotten his wounded moved back, so O’neill’s group pulled back under fire into the cover of Dai Do. The three machine guns were still firing on Echo and Hotel. O’neill wanted to lay an air strike on them. With that in mind, he moved through Golf’s lines and on to where the battalion command group was kneeling around a map on the ground beside a hootch.

Being a lance corporal, O’neill didn’t know anyone there. He just grabbed the closest officer—it was Lieutenant Hilton, the BLT 2/4 FAC—and said, “Excuse me, sir, but we’ve got machine guns over there and we need something right now to take ’Em out. They’re chopping everybody up!”

“We’re working on it,” said Hilton, looking preoccupied. “We got air coming in on them.”

“Air
has
been coming in!” said O’neill, exasperated. He tried to explain how the machine guns were camouflaged. He offered to lead Hilton up to the pagoda to show him exactly where they were. Hilton turned back to the group around the map. “No, no, no, they already have them spotted—”

“Wait a minute! I just got through firing on those things!”

O’neill was still pumped up from his turkey shoot. He had a hot temper anyway, and it always angered him when the officers never had that extra thirty seconds to explain things to the “enlisted pukes.” There really was no time to draw pictures, though, and Lieutenant Colonel Weise cut O’neill off by saying, “Go over there and sit down till we’re done.”

The positions of the cleverly camouflaged machine guns had, in fact, been previously described to Lieutenant Hilton, and the air strike he’d requested placed its ordnance squarely on the burial mounds. With Echo and Hotel putting some distance between themselves and the NVA in Dinh To, supporting arms were finally being employed, to include artillery fire within a hundred meters of the retreat’s tail end. There were also air strikes on the fields to the right and Huey gunship runs up the tributary on the left flank. O’neill cooled down a bit and turned to the Marine with him. “Let’s go back to our guys and see what we can do,” he said. “We’re not doing anything around here.”

“Captain Livingston seemed to be everywhere at once. His coolness and calmness were what kept a lot of us from panicking,” wrote Sergeant Rogers of Echo Company’s fire-and-maneuver withdrawal from Dinh To. “Things did not look good at all, but he kept our spirits up and kept us determined that we were going to beat them.”

The NVA leapfrogged forward as the Marines retreated. Captain Livingston saw a 12.7mm machine gun that had been brought forward and set up behind a berm about seventy-five meters back the way they had come. Livingston was standing and firing his M14 at the weapon’s crew when one of the
machine-gun rounds hit him squarely in the right thigh. Livingston went down hard and fast, with the bone cracked a bit and a lot of muscle blown away where the bullet exited. His whole leg went numb. He couldn’t stand on it, and blood was pumping out of the wound.

It was approximately 1430, and Lieutenant Cecil was the only able-bodied officer left in Echo Company. He was, however, a new lieutenant in a hell of a firefight, and Livingston instructed his combat-tested radiomen to find Cecil “and help him run the company.” The radiomen moved out as ordered and Livingston rolled onto his stomach to resume firing. He intended to cover his Marines’ withdrawal, and then somehow get out himself. It never crossed his mind that he was going to die. He probably would have, though, if not for the fact that one of his radiomen, the black Marine he had borrowed from Echo Two, ran back to his position. The radioman moved with a bowlegged stride because of fragment wounds in his buttocks. He was accompanied by another black Marine who’d been wounded in the arm, and they called to Livingston, “We’re takin’ you out!”

“Get the hell out of here!” Livingston shouted back.

“We’re not leavin’ you!”

Captain Livingston finally hobbled out of harm’s way with his weight on his good foot, and a wounded black Marine under each arm holding him up.

Panic set in when the skipper went down. Sergeant Rogers saw one young Marine jump up and bolt rearward while screaming, “The captain’s been hit! Oh my God, let’s get out of here!” When Rogers made it back to Dai Do, he saw the grunt’s body among those that had been dragged back. The word in Dai Do was that the skipper was still out there, and Rogers headed back into Dinh To with three other Marines.

Livingston was coming their way between his radiomen.

Someone produced a poncho. “Hey, get everybody else out of here first!” Livingston protested as they lifted him onto the makeshift litter. Two of the litter bearers started hassling about something, and Rogers snapped, “Goddamnit, quit fucking around—let’s get the hell outta here!”

Captain Livingston looked up at him with fatherly calm. “Sergeant, just take it easy. We’ll get out of here, we’ll get out of here.…”

“I was really scared because I didn’t see anyone else behind me,” recalled Lance Corporal Cornwell of Echo Two, who had found an M16 to replace his empty M60. He fired the last of its magazine to cover his retreat as he dragged a wounded Marine out of the ditch where they’d been pinned down. “I firmly believe that it was the killer-survival instinct hammered into me by Marine Corps training that helped me to survive.” When Cornwell reached an area where he didn’t seem to be taking any more fire, he looked at the wounded man he had been dragging along. He was stunned to see that the guy was a high school classmate, Art Tharp, who had been among the eleven of them who had enlisted right out of school and gone through Parris Island together. Cornwell had not seen Art since. He covered the bullet hole in Tharp’s chest with the cellophane wrapper from his cigarets, then wrapped the small, clean wound with a battle dressing. Cornwell helped Art onto his back piggyback style, then moved out again. He stooped down to pick up an abandoned weapon, and, firing one-handed while he held onto Art with the other, emptied the magazine. Art was pleading for water, and Cornwell veered over to the stream on the left flank and scooped up a helmetful of muddy water for him. Cornwell knew that he was not supposed to give water to a badly wounded man, but it didn’t matter. Art’s wound looked mortal, and he figured he was going to die, too. Cornwell got moving again and proved himself wrong. They both made it.

During the withdrawal, Sergeant Jones, the acting commander of Hotel Three, realized that some of the young grunts in his platoon were too scared to remember they were Marines. Jones, a career man, was so angry that he “hated the Corps,” as he told the division historical team. Jones, who was providing
covering fire with an M60 machine gun, had managed to get two able-bodied men to carry each of their seriously wounded. The litter bearers were exhausted and needed all the help they could get. They didn’t get it. “Other guys were standing around with a little wound and they wouldn’t even try to help you out. When we did get to relative safety back in the rear, then everybody wanted to pitch in and help us. When help was really needed we couldn’t get it.”
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