The Magnificent Bastards (4 page)

Lieutenant Acly ordered the arty to cease fire when the medevac and his wingman came into the area at 0130 with their lights off. The helicopters, Korean War-vintage CH-34 Sea Horses, were from Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 362 (the Ugly Angels), which was colocated with the BLT 2/4 rear aboard the USS
Iwo Jima
. The flight leader came up on the FAC’s air net and asked how far the NVA were from the LZ. Mastrion told the FAC, “Tell him I estimate it to be four hundred meters to my west.”

Mastrion turned again to his senior corpsman, who said that the man with the head injury was getting worse. That made up Mastrion’s mind about the risk, and he told the FAC to “bring ’Em in.” The lance corporal moved out then to light the four marking strobes. Brave man, Acly thought: The strobes made the FAC a target for the tracers zipping in from the distance. The helicopters planned to come in one at a time.
The flight leader approached first and was in a hover above the LZ when he flipped on his landing lights for just a moment to get the lay of the land before setting down between the strobes.

In the flash of the landing lights, Captain Mastrion noticed to his horror a small building directly to the south. He recognized the building from the afternoon recon as one on the outer edge of another small, unnamed hamlet that sat near the village to the west, where the NVA had retreated. According to Mastrion’s estimate of his position, that building should not have been to the south. It should have been to the southwest, and Mastrion recognized instantly that he had miscalculated his pos. He was four hundred meters farther west of Jones Creek than he had thought, almost on top of the hamlet the NVA were in. The fire he thought he had been taking from that hamlet had actually been from NVA even farther away.

It was too late to wave off the lead helo—it had already landed. At that moment, contact erupted between Lieutenant Morgan’s recon squad to the west and an NVA element out looking for the Marines. The NVA, at the edge of the LZ, began raking the medevac ship with fire. Mastrion later said with remarkable honesty:

Though Mastrion may not have called in a medevac had he correctly understood his nose-to-nose position with the NVA,
the flight leader, Capt. Ben R. Cascio, an experienced and aggressive pilot, would have attempted such a mission. The Ugly Angels had that reputation when it came to emergency evacuations. Cascio, however, would have handled the mission differently, pausing in the LZ only long enough to take aboard the man with the critical head injury before pulling pitch.

As it was, the misinformed Captain Cascio powered down to settle completely into the LZ and give the Marines rushing to his Sea Horse time to get all the casualties aboard. The crew chief and door gunner were just helping the first wounded man into the cabin when the NVA suddenly opened fire. The Sea Horse was taking hits as Cascio brought his RPMs up so that he could lift out of the LZ. It seemed to take forever. Green tracers were flying everywhere. Sparks shot out of the exhausts. The whirling rotor blades filled the air with sand. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded in front of the Sea Horse, shattering the Plexiglas windshield. A sudden scream came over the air net, then obscenities mixed in with, “We gotta get outta here.… We gotta get outta here …!”

Captain Cascio’s left eye had been blown out and everyone in the crew was wounded. When the RPG exploded, Staff Sergeant Del Rio, who was helping Lieutenant Morgan load the wounded, went prone in the blinding whirlwind. The helicopter blades were right above him. He just knew that the shot-to-pieces helicopter was going to roll over on its side. The blades were going to kill him. He started to scramble away on his hands and knees, but then, to his amazement, the Sea Horse lifted off even as bullets continued to thump into it. Everyone in Golf Company watched anxiously as the helo headed south, making it only about three hundred meters before coming down hard. The copilot somehow got it airborne again and, trailing sparks, made it all the way to the boat ramp at the 3d Marines’ CP at the mouth of the Cua Viet River. There the wingman sat down to take aboard the wounded crewmen and infantrymen and fly them to the medical facilities aboard the
Iwo Jima
.

The next morning, when Weise went to Camp Kistler to personally brief the regimental commander on Night Owl, he
inspected the damaged helicopter. It had bullet holes through the engine, some of the controls were shot away, and the cockpit was spattered with blood. “How that thing got off the ground, I’ll never know,” Weise said later. “It was just unbelievable. It was a miracle.”

But it was an incomplete miracle. In the confusion, the man with the head wound had not been placed aboard the medevac. He continued to cry out incoherently. “There was this mournful yowl, like a banshee crying,” said Lance Corporal Lashley. It sent chills down his spine. Lashley was sitting in a little hole of scooped-out sand, with his extra machine-gun ammo un-shouldered and ready for use by his nearby M60 team. They wanted the head-shot Marine put out of his unholy misery. They wanted him to die fast. He was going to die anyway. They wanted the corpsman to take him out with a morphine overdose so he would stop giving away their position.

“That was the thought that night,” Lashley remembered. “It may have been me who said it. I know I thought it.”

At that point, Lieutenant Colonel Weise instructed Captain Mastrion to pull out of Lai An and move back to Pho Con. Mastrion agreed. Golf Company had a paddy strength of only about 150 men, and he was convinced that they were terribly outnumbered. But Lieutenant Ferland, the company’s longest-serving officer, with six months in the boonies, was flabbergasted when Lieutenant Deichman, their exec, passed the word to him. Ferland wanted to hunker down in their freshly dug holes among the burial mounds, call in artillery around them, and ride out the night. He did not like Deichman. “I want to stay here,” Ferland said angrily. “When you’re in an ambush zone, whenever you move, there’s great potential of being hit again. As far as I’m concerned, we’re surrounded. If we pull back we’re going to run into more shit.”

Lieutenant Deichman, who had a pretty strong personality himself, and who respected Mastrion, told Ferland to move out. Ferland then called Mastrion directly to make his case as respectfully as he could with a skipper he did not like. “We’re okay here, we have to stay here,” he said. Mastrion, thinking
of the S2’s report of two thousand NVA, which his platoon commanders did not know about, replied, “No, you have to pull back. I understand you’re okay there, but the fact is we’ve been told to withdraw.”

Mastrion doesn’t have it together, he just isn’t rational, thought Lieutenant Morgan, who also believed that the order to move was crazy. Mastrion’s compliance with the order to pull back could certainly be second-guessed. The man was not, however, flipping out. Mastrion conferred with Acly. He wanted artillery called in behind them and adjusted at hundred-meter intervals as they withdrew; he also wanted artillery fire worked along their flanks. Acly complied. Mastrion then turned to Del Rio, telling him to get a head count and ensure that no one was left behind. Del Rio was the acting gunny: Armer had accidentally been medevacked when he jumped into the shot-up Sea Horse to help a wounded man aboard.

Golf One, now commanded by its platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Wade, moved out behind Lieutenant Ferland’s Golf Three, which again had the point. Moving east until they hit Jones Creek, the two platoons then swung south and reached Pho Con without incident. Lieutenant Morgan’s Golf Two remained with the company headquarters, which was taking care of the man with the head wound. When Ferland informed Mastrion that they were in position at Pho Con, Mastrion told Morgan to start moving. Morgan’s first two squads disappeared into the darkness, but Morgan and his third squad stayed with Mastrion and the senior corpsman. They were not going to move until the wounded Marine died. They didn’t want to carry him when he was still alive because every time they tried to lift the poncho in which he lay, he let out a terrible groan.

Mastrion hoped that the NVA would not discover their vulnerability. The young Marine finally died about five hours after having been shot. When one of the men helping carry the body fell and twisted his ankle, a limping and disabled Captain Mastrion took his place. Lieutenant Morgan sent his last squad ahead to secure the litter team, then positioned himself at the rear of the column with a young grenadier. Morgan had also
picked up an M79, and the two of them operated their single-shot, breech-loading weapons as fast as they could, pumping a barrage into the hamlet behind them. The NVA did not return the fire.

Golf Company completed its withdrawal to Pho Con by 0300. Meanwhile, the rest of the op was on schedule, and at about 0400 on Sunday, 28 April, Echo Company crossed the line of departure north of An My and commenced an on-line, firing-as-they-walked assault into the tiny, blacked-out hamlet. There was no response. The NVA had bugged out. All that remained were the still-warm coals of doused cooking fires, indicating that the NVA squatters had only recently vacated the premises. They left behind nothing of value.

“There was a great feeling of disappointment,” said Major Warren. There was also suspicion about the ARVN at lonely, vulnerable Alpha 1. The ARVN were only trying to survive, not win, their endless war. One does not live to hide another day by picking fights with a better-led, better-equipped opponent. Weise and Warren were convinced that their allies had forewarned the NVA about Operation Night Owl. The troops had other explanations. “We had to tape everything down to make it silent,” commented a regimental sniper attached to Echo Company, “but if you ever heard a Marine company going through the night, especially when they’re tired, you’d know we were fooling ourselves.”

Come daylight, the companies returned to their patrol bases. Just east of Lai An, the Vietnamese scout with Echo Company talked a wounded NVA out of a bunker in which he’d been discovered. Skirting on past Pho Con, Echo came under a thirty-two-round barrage of 130mm artillery fire from the DMZ while crossing the big, calf-deep rice paddy. It offered no cover, and Echo made a run for it. “Hell, the CP group got in front of the platoons,” remembered the company’s forward observer (FO). “We were really humping to get out of that goddamn place.” The soft paddies absorbed the shells before they exploded. “You’d hear these things come in and you’d dive under water with your mouth open for the concussion,”
commented the attached sniper. “The thing would blow up, then you’d hear shrap-metal just raking overhead. You’d get up and run again—and then you’d dive underwater, get up, and run again.…”

Marine artillery fired counterbattery missions, followed by three air strikes on suspected enemy gun positions. There were seven secondary explosions. Echo Company had one man slightly wounded. Before Echo pushed on for Nhi Ha, a medevac landed for the wounded prisoner they had in tow throughout the barrage. Talk was that the enemy soldier had been hit again by his own artillery. Whatever the specifics of his injuries, he did not survive, as was recorded in the BLT journal: “POW was DOA at DHCB.”

Captain Mastrion did not make Golf Company’s early afternoon hump back to Lam Xuan West. After bringing in a Sea Horse for the last of the wounded—and their one poncho-covered killed in action (KIA)—Mastrion wanted to get in a quick catnap before they saddled up to depart Pho Con. He woke up in excruciating pain. His back muscles had spasmed, and he could neither feel nor move his legs. Mastrion was finally medevacked.

Lieutenant Deichman, the exec, got Golf Company moving again after taking some twenty rounds of flat-trajectory artillery fire—and after Lieutenant Acly laid in a smoke screen to cover their movement. Golf’s hump back to Lam Xuan West and Echo’s return to Nhi Ha relieved a squad-sized detachment that had been sent up from battalion to guard the footbridge between the two hamlets during the night. The Marines had set up on the Nhi Ha side with a dangerously thin half-moon of one-man fighting holes.

“Without a doubt, this was the most hair-raising night I spent in Nam,” wrote Cpl. Peter W. Schlesiona, late of Golf Company. He had been sent back to battalion with severe jungle rot and ringworm, and was the man in charge of the detail. He and another corporal alternated between radio watch and walking the line to keep people awake. During the night, they heard the sounds of Golf’s fight and of the helicopters. “As
it was night, we rightly assumed these were medevac choppers,” wrote Schlesiona. “This made us particularly bitter the next morning as we helplessly watched Vietnamese civilians looting the personal effects that Golf Company Marines had left at their positions in Lam Xuan West. The most we could do was fire, uselessly, over their heads, as any direct action would have meant deserting our positions.”

The battalion’s assistant operations officer, Capt. “J. R.” Vargas, took command of Golf Company after its return to Lam Xuan West. His was only an interim command—until a full-time replacement could be found for Mastrion—but Golf was glad to have him aboard. More precisely, they were glad to have him
back
aboard: Captain Vargas had previously commanded the company for more than two months and was, in fact, the soft-spoken, paternalistic skipper whom Mastrion had replaced. “When the word circulated that Vargas was coming back, people were ecstatic,” Acly said later. At the time, Acly wrote in his pocket notebook, “Everybody loves him, and he seems to be a rather charismatic personality.”