The Magnificent Bastards (42 page)

Almost all the M16s in Foxtrot were jammed, and Captain Butler saw that one of his Marines who’d picked up an AK-47 was having trouble with that weapon, too. The operating rod was bent, so it would fire only one round at a time. The Marine had to manually force the mechanism back each time to chamber the next round. Butler passed his still-working M16 to the Marine and took the AK in return. Behind the firing line, the wounded Tyrell, meanwhile, had reached an amtrac in Dai Do, which moved its load of casualties to the splash point on the Bo Dieu River in An Lac. There they boarded skimmers. When they reached the aid station on the beach at Mai Xa Chanh West, one of the casualties with Tyrell, a little machine gunner named Miller, became incensed at the sight of television crews filming the dead and wounded. “The bastards,” he shouted. “We kick ass and they don’t do nothin’—but when we’re gettin’ our asses whipped up here, they show up like a bunch of vultures. If they want blood, I’ll show ’Em blood!”

Miller tore away the battle dressing wrapped around his wrist to expose a hand that seemed to be hanging as though on a hinge. He thrust the red, wrist-shattered mess at the nearest lens and screamed at the cameraman, “You motherfuckers want some blood? Here’s some blood!”

Medevacked to the hospital ship
Repose
, Corporal Tyrell, whose wounds were not critical compared to those of Marines being immediately prepared for surgery, was instead escorted to a ward where a female U.S. Navy nurse assigned him a bed and then said cheerfully, “You’d probably like to take a shower, huh?” Yes, yes, he would, he replied. Tyrell walked to the shower room. There was no one else there. He had stripped to his utility trousers, exposing the battle dressing over
his right shoulder. Another dressing was wrapped around his right calf where the trouser leg was torn open. He spotted a mirror to his right as he came in “and when I saw my reflection I didn’t recognize it as me at first. It was dirt and blood and everything but the person I knew.”

God, Get Us Out of Here

C
APTAIN
V
ARGAS, CONCERNED THAT HIS FORWARD PLATOONS
might be outflanked and cut off, instructed Lieutenant Morgan and Staff Sergeant Wade to abandon their crater in the middle of Dinh To. Vargas wanted them to move with the remnants of their platoons to the left flank and set up a perimeter there with their backs to the creek. This was accomplished without casualties. Morgan then radioed Vargas to report that because of thick vegetation the fields of fire around their new position weren’t very good, and that he and Wade didn’t have enough men to hold if the enemy attacked.

Captain Vargas was about fifty meters to their rear in a natural irrigation trench that his company headquarters shared with Lieutenant Colonel Weise and his command group. Vargas told Morgan and Wade to move back to that pos. When they arrived with their radiomen, Weise said to them, “Let’s get our people together. We’ll put up a three-sixty and hold what we’ve got. How many men do you have left?”

Captain Vargas had twenty men in his headquarters, to include the mortar section. Morgan and Wade, however, had only nine men apiece, and Sergeant Colasanti of the reserve
platoon was down to eight. In the last two days, Golf Company had lost three-fourths of its Marines but none of its guts. After Morgan gave the colonel his single-digit head count, he added, “but we’re all good under fire.”

Two days before, Vargas had considered Morgan a typical greenhorn second lieutenant. Now he saw him as one of their stalwarts. The last two days had been a crucible for all of them. Vargas told Morgan and Wade to take the company mortarmen with them to reinforce their beleaguered two-platoon position. He said he would soon follow with the reserve platoon. As the meeting was breaking up, Morgan stood up in the trench just as the sharp report of a sniper’s shot rang out; he saw dust smack off the trouser leg of the Marine in front of him. Blood jetted from that spot in the next instant. The wounded man was the colonel’s regimental tac operator, and he was so flushed with excitement that it took a moment before he realized he’d been hit. He was quickly bandaged and directed rearward.

Lieutenant Morgan, meanwhile, started back for his platoon with the mortarmen-turned-riflemen in tow. As he approached the perimeter, he saw several Marines making a frantic run across the stream on their left flank. His immediate reaction was to shout at them to come back—but then he saw a dozen NVA coming out of the bushes in a frontal assault on their position.

It was 1645, and the NVA were counterattacking north to south down the length of Dinh To. Marines were screaming at Lieutenant Morgan to run because the NVA were right on top of them. Morgan and his radioman, who’d yet to be spotted by the enemy, quickly dropped into the cover of a ditch. Morgan got on the horn with Captain Vargas, who shouted that they should “pull back, pull back, pull back!” Morgan and Wade did just that. The two platoon commanders had completely lost contact with the Marines on the other side of the stream, but they were able to hastily organize those men still around them and get them back down a trench that paralleled
the tributary.
¹
That they made it out of there was due in large part to Lieutenant Deichman, their hard-charging exec, and Sergeant Colasanti of Golf Three, who had been moving the reserve platoon toward the blueline. Including the exec’s radioman, there were eleven Marines in this line, which was oriented in and along an abandoned enemy trench. Their orders were to provide a base of fire along with those in the command trench until all the forward elements had made it through and were well on the way back to Dai Do, where they would make their stand. The thin line produced a firestorm. “Grenades were being exchanged freely,” wrote Deichman, who was wounded in the process. “I remember how fanatical the NVA appeared to be, openly and unhesitatingly charging us with reckless abandon.”

Lieutenant Deichman was awarded the Silver Star. Sergeant Colasanti, who also won the Silver Star—and his fifth Purple Heart—during the holding action, wrote that “at one point we were involved in hand-to-hand combat. I got a couple with my K-Bar.”

Lieutenant Morgan didn’t know it then, but his platoon sergeant, Sgt. Richard F. Abshire, twenty-three, of Abbeville, Louisiana, had bought some of the time that the Marines splashing across the creek needed to escape. Morgan had left Abshire to honcho the men manning the perimeter when he’d moved back for the captain’s meeting. Sergeant Abshire died on position and was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross. Abshire, a good, low-key NCO with a shock of dark hair and a ruddy, pockmarked face, had, according to his citation, thrown several grenades at the attacking NVA before ordering
the retreat across the tributary. He remained behind and “resolutely provided covering fire, which enabled his men to reach positions of relative safety. After expending his ammunition, he was attempting to rejoin his unit when he was mortally wounded.”

Corporal Yealock of Golf One was one of those who escaped across the chest-deep stream. He had been firing his M16 from a crater along with two machine gunners whose M60s were doing the most damage to the NVA, when he was hit in the left leg; one of the gunners was hit in the hand. Someone who seemed to be in charge told them to pull back across the tributary. It seemed the only way out. Yealock’s wounded leg hurt so badly that it almost buckled under him as they rushed down the bank, but he made it to the water and started wading across with his M16 in one hand and a bayonet in the other. He could see rounds hitting the water. As they crawled up the opposite bank, the Marine to Yealock’s right was hit in the arm. They crashed through a hedgerow and tried to figure out where they were. By that time Yealock had lost his rifle and had only two grenades left. They started down the stream to find the rest of the company.

The NVA seemed to be everywhere. They were—including on the left flank, where individual enemy soldiers and squad-sized groups moved into position to place RPG and AK-47 fire across the narrow creek. An ARVN mechanized battalion was supposed to have moved up on that side of the blueline in conjunction with BLT 2/4’s attack through Dinh To. But the ARVN were not there. Coordinating and communicating with ARVN units was difficult at best, and it had been made worse in this instance because BLT 2/4 had neither the time nor the officers available to place a liaison team with the ARVN, as it normally did on joint operations. There had been no face-to-face meeting between the battalion commanders, only a series of quick radio conversations in which the U.S. Army adviser with the ARVN unit had said that his counterpart understood and agreed to the plan of attack.

Weise considered the ARVN vital to the operation’s success.
“Were it not for assurance from Colonel Hull of the ARVN support, I would not have agreed to another attack,” Weise later wrote, although it remains unclear why Dixie Diner 6 would place the fate of his battered battalion in the hands of so untrustworthy an ally. “The assurance that I had was that if we got into something we couldn’t handle, the ARVN, with their 90mm tank guns and .50-caliber machine guns, would move ahead of us on our left and blow the hell out of the enemy facing us.”

The ARVN, however, were opcon to neither BLT 2/4 nor the 3d Marines, and when the joint maneuver encountered heavy resistance, the ARVN commander, either on his own initiative or on order from his superiors, withdrew his unit in the direction of Dong Ha. The U.S. Army adviser came up on the BLT 2/4 net to apologetically report that his battalion was peeling away from the Marines’ flank, and with that the ARVN vanished from the battlefield. The Marines never forgave them.

There were dead Marines in the part of the trench that Lieutenant Acly, the Golf Company FO, reached with his radioman, Lance Corporal Prill, before the NVA counterattack. Acly moved up to the trench on his hands and knees, rushing from cover to cover. It was almost impossible to force himself forward through the hail of fire. He felt too heavy to move. He felt as though he was on a ladder that was too high, but on which he had to keep going up. The trench was sanctuary. There were four or five live Marines in his part of it. A thick, concealing hedgerow ran along its northern edge, and bamboo grew up along both sides.

Captain Vargas, who was down to the right, shouted at Acly to get some arty going, but Prill’s radio malfunctioned. They couldn’t raise anybody.

Panicked, one of the Marines in the trench bolted rearward—and immediately dropped with the loud, distinctive
smack
of a bullet hitting meat. The Marine had been shot in the upper thigh. Acly leaned out of the trench, grabbed the man’s feet, and pulled him back in, then used his K-Bar to cut
away the trouser leg so he could apply a battle dressing and get the bleeding stopped.

The NVA fire suddenly became more intense. Lieutenant Acly could see puffs of dust coming off a nearby hootch; the bamboo above their trench bucked back and forth from explosions and automatic weapons fire. Acly was cut up by splintered bamboo. The hedgerow along the forward edge of the trench kept grenades from bouncing in with them, but the explosions were so close that the concussion was like being punched in the stomach. The bamboo to the rear of the trench caught fire, and smoke filled the air around them. Prill, remaining in a crouch, lifted his M16 above the forward edge of the trench to spray anything that might be rushing them, but the hand guard was knocked off the weapon by enemy fire. When Acly shoved his M14 through the hedgerow to open fire, it too was hit almost immediately. He pulled the rifle back and was astonished to see that the barrel had been bent at a forty-five-degree angle behind the flash suppressor. He threw down the M14 and took up one of the abandoned M16s lying in the trench. A Marine was shot in the arm and began whimpering and raving. He tugged on Acly’s arm as Acly tried to shoot, and mumbled that they were all going to die. The wound in the man’s upper right arm barely bled, but it appeared as though the muscle had been turned inside out. It was bright red and jiggled—like Jell-O, Acly thought. Acly was becoming more and more unnerved by the man’s keening. When the wounded Marine started to climb from the trench, Acly stopped him by barking, “Just stay down and keep your mouth shut and you’ll be all right!”

After a terrible two to three minutes the enemy fire slackened. It seemed that they had survived. But then Prill suddenly started pounding Lieutenant Acly on the back. “Sir, everybody’s takin’ off!” he shouted. Acly could barely make out through the smoke the figures of Marines running to the rear. He and Prill grabbed the shell-shocked Marine, hauled him out of the trench, and pushed him ahead of them as they joined the retreat. Acly had lost his helmet, and his secondhand M16 was out of ammunition. They immediately hit some old barbed
wire in the flaming, chest-high bamboo at the rear of the trench, and they tore their hands and arms as they forced their way through it at a run. Nobody cared. They didn’t feel a thing. “It didn’t look like a fighting withdrawal,” Acly said. His group had caught up with other Marines as they crashed through a hedgerow. “There wasn’t a lot of firing and maneuvering going on. People were just trying to get the hell outta there.”