The Magnificent Bastards (3 page)

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, who placed a premium on thorough, detailed operations orders (inadequate briefings had been one of the problems in 2/4 when he first got the battalion), finally began to wrap up the chalk talk. In a war where the hours of darkness generally belonged to the enemy, a night attack made sense precisely because it was the response the NVA would least expect. Nevertheless, Major Warren could sense—and he knew that Weise could, too—a certain apprehension among their officers that was too subtle to have been detected by an outsider. The uncertainty was shared to a degree even by Warren. The battalion had never before conducted a full-fledged night attack (given the difficulty involved, few battalions had), and a lot of things could go wrong out there in the dark—to include Marines accidentally shooting other Marines. Warren’s doubts were short-lived, however. Weise had gradually prepared them for just such a sophisticated scheme
of maneuver, and Warren and the rest knew that Weise would be out there, too, with his own blackened face, and with his jingling rifle sling secured with olive-drab tape. It made a difference.

When Operation Night Owl got rolling after dark on 27 April 1968, 1st Lt. David R. Jones’s Echo Company platoon was in the lead, and Jones himself walked point. The column skirted the eastern side of Alpha 1, where the ARVN troops had marked a safe path through their perimeter minefield. Jones looked at Alpha 1 through his starlight scope, which gave the world a fuzzy green cast, and saw ARVN soldiers looking back at him through their own night observation devices. He figured that if the ARVN knew where they were, so did the NVA. He did not expect to find much in An My.

Farther back, Lieutenant Colonel Weise was just another bareheaded, blacked-out silhouette in the column. Along with Major Warren, the mini-CP included Sgt. Maj. John M. “Big John” Malnar, the battalion sergeant major, and Sgt. Charles W. Bollinger, who humped a PRC-25 radio and served as the battalion tactical net radio operator. Weise never went anywhere without Malnar, Bollinger, and his runner, Cpl. Greg R. Kraus.

After Echo Company moved north of An My and Foxtrot slipped to the east, the mini-CP settled in with Echo. At that point, the command group was just one more group of Marines in the dunes. “You lack control,” said Warren. “A night operation runs its course and all you can do is sort it out when it’s over.” It was time to stay close to the ground—until 0400, when Echo was scheduled to launch the attack on An My. The 0400 kickoff time was typical for a night attack. “The dog hours of the early morning,” Warren explained, “when the enemy’s sure the night’s over and nothing’s going to take place, and half the sentries are asleep.”

Some of the Marines were asleep, too. Captain Butler of Foxtrot came awake with a start in the shell crater where he had set up his command post. He had not known he was asleep. His radioman was asleep, too, and Butler realized why
he had awakened: Weise’s voice was a whisper on the radio. The battalion commander wanted to make sure that Butler was in position. Weise would chew Butler out the next morning for falling asleep, but Butler was not surprised that he had. His company had spent the previous night on a trial run with the handheld infrared scopes issued for Night Owl.

“There we were, up for the second straight night,” Butler recalled later. “As much as we tried to stay awake, as dark as it was out there, you thought your eyes were open but they weren’t.”

Captain Butler’s crater was atop a low sand dune, and he presently sat up at its edge with his infrared scope. Its range was short and he could not actually see An My, which was about a klick to the northwest. Butler knew that Echo was up there somewhere with Weise, ready to drive the NVA into Foxtrot’s fires. He also knew that Golf Company was about two klicks to the southwest, setting up their blocking position in Lai An. Suddenly, the muffled report of automatic weapons shattered the silence. It was too early for the assault on An My. Butler turned to see that the night was alive with red and green tracers where the map in his head indicated Lai An was.

This is nuts, thought LCpl. James R. Lashley, a machine-gun team leader in 1st Platoon, G BLT 2/4. Unable to leave helmets and flak jackets behind in their temporary position at Pho Con, the troops, who were already humping a lot of ammo, had to wear them, and Lashley thought they sounded like a herd of water buffalo with tin cans on their backs! Lashley was both angry and scared, but mostly he was exhausted. He had been in the bush for eight months. He was a short, wiry guy, blondish and bespectacled, and a proud, able Marine. He was also a bright young man—and a realist. It seemed to him that the powers that be were not. His platoon had been operating above the Cua Viet for eight weeks and had seen a lot of action. Given the heat, the humidity, their heavy combat load, and the soft, unstable texture of the terrain that made even a short patrol a real ass-kicker, their unrelenting schedule
of daylight sweeps and night ambushes, listening posts, and foxhole watch had taken a brutal physical and mental toll.

“At times we were really sharp,” Lashley recalled, “but I could see the difference.” He had not blacked out his face, neck, hands, or arms before saddling up for the night maneuver, nor had he soundproofed his gear with tape. “We were losing the edge you need to survive in combat. We were becoming ambivalent and disinterested about the most elementary rules of combat discipline. We were just going through the motions.”

Moving out from Pho Con, Golf Company closed on Lai An at Captain Mastrion’s direction in two separate maneuver elements. Golf Three, led by 1st Lt. James T. Ferland, had the point and the mission of securing the burial mounds that dotted the approach to Lai An, from which the platoon could cover the movement of the rest of the company into their blocking positions. The company’s executive officer, 1st Lt. Jack E. Deichman, accompanied Golf Three, as did the 60mm mortar section from the weapons platoon.

Captain Mastrion moved with the lead platoon of the follow-up element, SSgt. Reymundo Del Rio’s Golf One, along with a composite machine-gun and rocket section from the weapons platoon. Golf Two, commanded by 2d Lt. Frederick H. “Rick” Morgan, brought up the rear. Their slow, cautious columns moved across the flatlands and through a wet rice paddy that seemed to be an unending, splashing obstacle in the otherwise still and silent darkness. When they finally closed on the east-west trail running along the bottom of Lai An, no one was more relieved than Captain Mastrion. No one had had a harder time on the move. Because of his injured back, it had become painful for Mastrion just to stand, and a numb sensation was creeping into his legs.

When Mastrion’s back finally gave out completely after Night Owl and he was medevacked, a rumor spread that he had been relieved of command. More fantastically, there was talk that the captain’s injuries had actually been the work of a grunt “doing him a job” with a hand grenade. Untrue on both counts, but widely believed. Mastrion had been with Golf
Company for only a month, and there were Marines who had come to some ugly judgments about their new skipper. One thrice-wounded grunt commented:

Captain Mastrion, a small, dark man with eyeglasses and a black handlebar mustache, was a jocular, straightforward product of Brooklyn, New York, and a Marine of much experience. Twenty-eight years old at the time, he had enlisted at seventeen and was later commissioned from the ranks. He served several short assignments in Vietnam between 1964 and 1967 before joining 2/4 as an assistant operations officer in late 1967. Mastrion had replaced a paternalistic and soft-spoken captain as commander of Golf Company. That, Weise commented, was the root of the problem. “Mastrion was a terrific company commander, but he was a completely different kind of personality from his predecessor, who was the kind of guy people did things for because they wanted to please him. People who worked for Mastrion were a little scared of him. He was a demanding, no-nonsense, you-do-it-this-way autocrat. He was a fighter, and he suffered no fools.”

Weise, who suffered no fools himself, added that Mastrion “handled his company extremely well when the shit hit the fan.” In fact, Mastrion earned the Silver Star on only his eighth day with Golf Company—after leading a twelve-hour-long assault on Nhi Ha in which he received two flesh wounds, and had his radio handset shot from his hand at one point.

Captain Mastrion soldiered through Operation Night Owl in stoic fashion despite his wrenched back. As Golf Company began assuming blocking positions south of Lai An’s raised trail, the battalion intelligence officer called Mastrion to report that he had an unconfirmed report that “two thousand NVA are coming down the west bank of Jones Creek at twenty-two hundred.” Mastrion looked at the luminescent dial on his watch. It was 2206, and Golf Company was precisely where the S2 had said the NVA would be moving. Mastrion was about to make a wiseass comment to their usually reliable S2 when there was a sudden commotion about fifteen meters ahead of him in the dark. Gunny Armer was up there, helping Staff Sergeant Del Rio of Golf One place one squad at a time into position. As best as it could be pieced together afterward, the commotion began when a Marine heard Vietnamese voices in the dark. Wondering if it was one of their scout interpreters, the Marine called out, “Hey, Gunny … hey, Gunny.…”

Gunny Armer said, “Who’s that?” just as an NVA potato-masher grenade came out of nowhere to bounce off his chest and explode at his feet. Someone screamed, “Jesus, gooks!” and in the first crazy, confused seconds, Cpl. Vernal J. Yealock’s squad took devastating AK-47 fire at virtually point-blank range. Only Yealock and his grenadier were not hit. The other eight men in the squad were dropped, and one who’d been hit in the head began an incoherent keening. Del Rio ran to his men and flung himself beside Armer, who’d taken a lot of small shell fragments in his face and chest. The gunny kept mumbling, “Son of a bitch, I’m hit… son of a bitch, I’m hit…!”

Captain Mastrion was still on the radio, talking to the intelligence officer. “You’d better upgrade that report a little because they’re here!” he shouted. It seemed that Golf Company’s north-moving column had inadvertently intersected a spread-out NVA column moving northeast to southwest in the open paddies. The two lines had formed an irregular X in the dark, which was suddenly exposed as the NVA’s green tracers erupted along one leg and the Marines responded with red tracers along the other. There were shouts and shadows and
chaos. The weapons section moving with Mastrion instantly went into action. Two 3.5-inch rocket-launcher teams began shooting at nearby NVA muzzle flashes to disrupt that fire, and to give the four M60 crews they were teamed up with time to get into advantageous positions. The machine guns then suppressed the closest enemy positions.

There was a thirty-second crescendo of fire from the NVA soldiers closest to the center of the X, and then it seemed that they had scattered under the heavy return fire. The NVA farthest away were still blazing away. Their AK-47 automatic rifles had a cracking, bone-chilling report. Mastrion tried to count the number of tracers burning over his prone figure, but gave up. There were NVA strung out to the southwest from the point of contact, and still more to the northeast, although he could not get a feel for how many there were in that direction. He estimated that he was up against two companies, and called for reinforcements.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, in position to attack An My, returned to radio silence after a quick reply: “This is Dixie Diner Six. You’re on your own. If I come over there with Foxtrot or Echo we’re gonna be Marines fighting Marines.”

Having been told by Captain Mastrion to bring in the artillery, Lieutenant Acly lay on his stomach with his radioman, fumbling in the dark to find his map and his red-lensed flashlight. The red lens preserved a man’s night vision. The light was not invisible, however, and Acly tried to work up the mission as fast as he could—before the NVA phantoms could spot him. Acly got a fire mission from A/1/12, a 105mm battery at Camp Kistler, as well as 81mm fire from BLT 2/4’s prepositioned tubes at Alpha 1. The rounds whistled overhead, flashbooming in the dark as Acly walked them to within two hundred meters. A platoon radioman reported on Mastrion’s company net that several NVA had broken from cover. Acly copied the grid coordinates and adjusted the arty. The voice on the radio said that it was right on target.

Golf Company was later credited with eight kills. Meanwhile, Marines were shouting and still shooting, and sporadic, ineffective NVA fire was zipping in from a distance as Golf
consolidated in an area of low mounds about fifty meters west of the contact area. The company’s senior Navy corpsman approached Mastrion then and told him that the man with a head injury was most likely going to die “if we don’t get him out pretty quick and get him to a doctor.” Mastrion turned to his forward air controller (FAC), a young lance corporal instead of the lieutenant normally assigned to the job, and said, “Okay, have ’Em get an emergency medevac. Call me when he gets here, and I’ll try to find out between now and then what the situation is. If we can, we’ll get the head injury out; if not, we’re going to wave the medevac off.”

The FAC placed four unlit strobe lights at the corners of a fifty-by-fifty-meter square to mark the landing zone. The wounded were gathered there with designated litter teams. A night medevac in a potentially hot landing zone (LZ) was risky, and the FAC had argued against it. Mastrion, however, thought they could pull it off. He calculated that Golf Company was about four hundred meters east of an unnamed hamlet they had reconned that afternoon. He figured the NVA to have retreated to that cover, and he instructed Lieutenant Morgan of Golf Two to dispatch a squad-sized patrol to confirm that the NVA were actually at this relatively safe distance.