The Magnificent Bastards (28 page)

Half of the exploits that later got Lieutenant Jones, late of Echo Three, the Silver Star were performed after he’d been wounded, relieved of his weapon and gear, and directed to an evacuation point along the creek. Jones could no longer walk with his fragment-peppered legs and buttocks, and neither could any of the other half-dozen Marines who were also waiting for an Otter or a skimmer. None of the casualties had been bandaged. They were unarmed except for a box of grenades, which had apparently been thrown on the creek bank from an Otter and had yet to be carried forward. Lieutenant Jones spotted the NVA as they came around a bend in the stream. They hugged the bank, using the brush to conceal them as they tried to outflank the new line that Echo and Hotel were forming in Dai Do. The NVA were about fifty meters away. Jones rolled toward cover and began heaving hand grenades at the surprised enemy soldiers. The other wounded Marines also threw grenades. The NVA fired back, then disappeared the way they had come. Jones was wildly relieved. The NVA could have killed them all. He could only figure that the enemy, unable to see them, had mistaken the motley collection of wounded Marines for a real squad deployed along the creek.

Lieutenant Taylor stood up and turned his head to say something to one of his Marines when a bullet clipped him across the mouth. The impact knocked his head back and laid open his lower lip but did not slow him down. With Lieutenant Boyle, the only other officer left in Hotel Company, he made a final, cover-to-cover run through their deserted positions. They shouted to see if any Marines had not yet gotten out, and
they checked bodies to ensure that no unconscious Marines had accidentally been left behind. On the way out of Dinh To, Taylor and Boyle bumped into machine gunner Barela of Hotel Two. Barela was heading back in by himself. Taylor called to him to ask where he was going, and Barela answered, “I saw this M60, Lieutenant. I’m going to get it.”

Taylor, Boyle, and Barela, too pumped up to consider what they were doing, turned around to go back into Dinh To. Just as they reached the abandoned machine gun, a dozen NVA burst into view through the bushes. Taylor later wrote that “caution prevailed. We let them have the gun.”
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Lieutenant Taylor caught up with his radiomen, who had been waiting for him a bit to the rear, and the group ran back along the streambed, which made for easier going. They could also make out their surroundings better from the relatively open creek. They popped up over the bank at the edge of Dai Do, where they saw ten to fifteen Marines and could hear others nearby in the vegetation. The Marines were scattered around the well, where Hotel’s 60mm mortar section was set up. The first Marine whom Taylor recognized was Sergeant Jones, who was cautiously leaning around the side of a mound to fire his M60 back into Dinh To. Taylor ran up beside him. He thought he could see movement in the brush that the sergeant was blasting.

“My guys really did a bang-up job in getting up those creeks,” said Lieutenant Muter of the reconnaissance platoon, who controlled the skimmer operations from An Lac. “The NVA were all over the place, and our little boats all had bullet holes in them.” Additional skimmer support was provided by Captain Forehand’s boat platoon. This was an ad hoc organization that used Marines who were assigned to light duty because of various infirmities. On the third day of the Battle of
Dai Do, its newest member was Corporal Schlesiona of Golf Company. Schlesiona had remained at the BLT CP instead of departing with the rest of Golf the day before because of severe ringworm and jungle rot that had spread over his stomach, groin, thighs, and buttocks. Schlesiona, feeling guilty, had asked to be returned to duty. “The company corpsmen said I’d have to get released by the BLT chief corpsman. The chief was against it and said I’d be of more help down on the beach, loading supplies and helping with the wounded. I could easily have put on my pack and headed out with the company, and my own corpsmen wouldn’t have stopped me. But I didn’t and it’s not been an easy decision to live with.”

Actually, Schlesiona could barely walk.

The next morning, as the casualties piled up, Schlesiona learned that the Marine who had taken over his fire team in Golf Three, a man whose name he never knew, had been blown away. Two of the three riflemen in the team, Ralph Peralta and Ed Smith, had also been killed. They were men whom Schlesiona had spent months with. He felt absolutely useless.

Corporal Schlesiona got his weapon and gear then and limped aboard the first empty skimmer he saw. The driver, however, said that since Schlesiona had no real destination there was no point in taking him. Things were so chaotic, he explained, that the boats often had to make several passes up and down the streams before they found Marines to deliver their supplies to. Schlesiona, anxious to get into the fight, asked the driver to let him ride shotgun if nothing else. The driver, who had the smallest type of skimmer, was concerned about Schlesiona taking up extra space, but he finally relented.

After they dropped off their supplies, six combat-loaded Marines got aboard despite the driver’s warning that they should wait for a larger boat. The Marines had been instructed to cross the river and establish an outpost to prevent the NVA from setting up mortar tubes to their rear. About three-quarters of the way across, the engine stalled out. Without forward momentum to help keep it afloat, the small, overloaded craft began to sink. When the Marines jumped into the water, the
boat came back up. As the driver climbed back aboard to get the engine going again, everyone else dumped their gear to stay afloat; one Marine lost his rifle as he tried to get out of his pack. With two men hanging onto the sides and the rest back aboard, the driver returned them to their starting point. Schlesiona gave his M16 to the Marine who had lost his, figuring that he could replace the weapon back at the Charlie Papa.

When they got back to the BLT CP, the driver told Schlesiona that his extra weight was a problem and that he was going to go it alone again. Schlesiona then teamed up with another skimmer driver, who before the battle had been assigned to the company office aboard ship. They lightened their load by removing their helmets and jungle boots and stripping down to undershirt, flak jacket, and bush hat. Because of the heat, they cut their trousers into shorts. Schlesiona was unable to get another M16 because the wounded either came back without one, or had traded theirs before leaving for one that was unserviceable. The new driver, however, had an M16 and a .45, and they made dozens of trips between the CP and An Lac, stopping only for gas. They pushed as far as they dared up the inlets to Dong Huan and Dai Do to take aboard casualties who had not yet been transported to An Lac. Three or four times enemy fire struck the water beside their boat. On two occasions they saw NVA in the brush on shore. They returned fire once, but Schlesiona wrote that during the other sighting “we were too far out in the river to be effective with the M16. Frankly, we had misgivings about firing at all since we didn’t know where our people were.”

Because of the overwhelming number of casualties, the skimmer crews had to put ashore and move inland to help carry the wounded back to the boats. Running around barefoot in that terrain was no fun. The wounded were stripped of excess gear to conserve weight and allow the maximum number to be lifted into each boat. Schlesiona later wrote that although they tried to make the wounded as comfortable as possible, “there wasn’t much we could do. We left it up to the less seriously wounded to care for those with severe wounds until
we could get them back. We traveled as fast as we could, but this was never fast enough. At high speeds we couldn’t see floating debris until almost too late. Plus we had to watch for the swells of the other boats. These people were in no condition to take a lot of bouncing or jolting.”

Corporal Cardona was the only NCO left in Echo Two. He was the only unwounded survivor of his squad. The other two squads in the platoon could muster only nine Marines between them. Lieutenant Cecil was the only uninjured officer left, and the company was down to about forty men. Captain Livingston, wounded three times and unable to walk, refused to be carried out. Echo Company needed him, and the normally icy Echo 6 was somewhat upset as he spoke briefly with Weise. “I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right. Let me stay!”

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, who was also a very reserved man, put his hand on Livingston’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself, Jim. We’ll take care of it here. You did a good job.”
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Lance Corporal Cornwell had thought highly of Captain Livingston until that day, but no more. “They destroyed us. There were so few of us left it was unreal,” he said later. “The guys were angry, and the word was out that the captain was shot by one of our troops because he led us into a slaughter. I’m glad he got capped—by our men or the gooks it doesn’t matter. At least we were getting some payback for him almost getting everyone killed.”

Marines such as Sergeant Rogers and Corporal Cardona would never have signed on to such an assessment, but there was no doubt that Echo Company was demoralized. It was evident to Major Warren, the S3, who after two frustrating days of juggling radios at the CP had finally been ordered forward. Warren’s skimmer landed him at An Lac about the same time that Livingston was being loaded into another boat.
When Livingston’s skimmer motored off, Warren realized that the captain’s litter team and a good number of Echo Company stragglers were ready to jump onto skimmers themselves. “Livingston’s troops actually wanted to leave the battlefield with him,” said Warren. “The challenge was to convince those guys that had seen all this terrific combat that Golf Company was still up in that ville, and if they left it was possible Golf would get wiped out. My job was to challenge their loyalty to those other people. The only thing I knew that would motivate them was this guilt trip that I wanted to give them. I wanted to reenergize them to their responsibilities as Marines. I grabbed people who I thought were capable of listening and would respond. I appealed to them and got them moving, and they got other guys going.”

Major Warren, with stragglers in tow, joined Lieutenant Colonel Weise in Dai Do as Echo and Hotel Companies regrouped and tied in with Golf Company under sporadic fire from Dinh To. The Marines returned fire with everything they could still muster. About every fourth weapon on line was a captured AK-47 or RPD light machine gun. Ammunition and water, both invaluable, were resupplied and distributed. Enemy fire came in from the vicinity of Dong Lai, which was across the tributary on the left flank. The ARVN were supposed to have secured that area but had not. Marines at that end of the line called for Lieutenant Taylor, shouting that they had “gooks in the open.” Taylor could see what looked to be a platoon’s worth of NVA moving along the stream. He could just make out the silhouettes of their helmets and weapons through the spaces where the leaves had been ripped away from the trees that grew along both banks. He was not absolutely sure that they weren’t ARVN, but he was taking no chances. He directed his mortar section to shell them.

Captain Livingston was using a walking stick to hop around the beach at Mai Xa Chanh West when Gunny Thomas of H&S Company brought him a cigar and a big steak sandwich. Thomas had been Livingston’s gunny in Echo Company before being wounded and reassigned. Livingston was glad to
see him, especially since they had a problem on the medevac beach that needed to be squared away. A television camera crew was filming the dead Marines lined up there on stretchers, and Livingston said that they were “taking off the ponchos from the heads of some of the kids, exposing their faces and taking photographs. That really jerked my jaws. I’ve never been so jacked in my entire life!”

Captain Livingston and Gunny Thomas angrily ordered the camera crew from the beach.

The number of wounded and dead Marines lined up on the beach was appalling. To fill the gaps up front, untested men were being shuttled to the battlefield. Weise wrote that before Major Warren had come forward, he had “stripped headquarters units of personnel to replace casualties in the rifle companies. A number of these Marines came from the elements at Mai Xa Chanh. Others had come from aboard ship.…They were truck drivers, cooks, clerks, supply people, and others. They fit right in and did an admirable job.”

Lieutenant Colonel Weise needed every rifle he could get. Colonel Hull had issued an order for BLT 2/4, in coordination with the ARVN on the left flank, to immediately launch another assault on Dinh To.

The Second Wave

A
T
1613
ON
1 M
AY
1968,
THE
3d B
ATTALION
, 21
ST
I
NFANTRY
, 196th Light Infantry Brigade (LIB), Americal Division, began airlifting into Mai Xa Chanh East and West.

When the NVA offensive began, BLT 2/4 had companies in Nhi Ha, Lam Xuan West, and Mai Xa Chanh East monitoring the infiltration routes along Jones Creek and screening the BLT CP at Mai Xa Chanh West. On 30 April, after the last of these elements had been committed at Dai Do, Lieutenant Colonel Weise expressed concern to Colonel Hull about the sudden vulnerability of his support elements at the BLT CP. Regiment forwarded a request through 3d Marine Division to III MAF asking that a battalion from the III MAF reserve be placed opcon to Hull to defend Jones Creek. The III MAF reserve was an opcon Army unit, the 196th LIB, and brigade selected one of its battalions, the 3-21st Infantry, for deployment to the 3d Marines. The 3-21st Infantry had only recently moved 150 kilometers north from Fire Support Base (FSB) Center to Camp Evans. The battalion was in the process of building Fire Support Base Belcher near Camp Evans when III MAF airlifted it another fifty kilometers northwest to the Mai Xa Chanhs. This last move placed the far-from-home Army battalion within nine klicks of the DMZ.

By 1250 on 2 May 1968, the 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry, 196th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, was heavily engaged in Nhi Ha and Lam Xuan West.