The Magnificent Bastards (48 page)

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder also had available to him a command-and-control UH-1D Huey from the 174th Assault Helicopter Company (the Dolphins) of the 14th Combat Aviation Battalion, 1st Aviation Brigade. Since Snyder commanded by radio from Mai Xa Chanh East, his C&C Huey was used for resupply and medevac missions. The wounded were quickly lifted out of Lam Xuan West, but within two hours the C&C bird had to conduct another medevac when Barracuda was again on the receiving end of friendly fire. This time three men were hit by the artillery propping Nhi Ha as the assault companies began moving in. One soldier’s kneecap was shattered. He sat upright on the floor of the Huey and smoked a cigaret that one of the crewmen had given him. He stared at his mangled leg in numb, painless shock—the morphine was hitting him—and although he appeared to realize that his leg would have to be amputated, he had a relieved, I’m-on-the-helicopter-I’m-outta-here expression. He didn’t say a word during the entire flight back to the DHCB. When they landed, a Navy corpsman who didn’t realize the severity of the man’s wounds grabbed him to put him on a stretcher. “Hold on, goddamnit—take it easy,” the GI shouted. “I want to keep my goddamn leg as long as I can!”

The assault got rolling at 1100. Captain Osborn had Lieutenant Smith’s Alpha Two on the right flank, and Alpha One, under 2d Lt. James Simpson, abreast on the left flank alongside D/3-21. Lieutenant Kimball and Alpha Three followed in reserve. The assault line was closing on the first hedgerow at the eastern edge of Nhi Ha when Sgt. Bernard J. Bulte, a squad leader in Alpha Two, saw three NVA pop up to his front and dash toward that wall of brush. Two of them were carrying AK-47s, and the third had an SKS. The hedgerow slowed them down, and they bunched up as they pushed through it, almost scrambling over each other’s backs. Bulte put his entire Ml6 magazine into them. All three enemy soldiers went down as other troopers to his left and right began blasting away into the brush. They moved cautiously to the hedgerow then, and Bulte saw that he’d hit one of the NVA in the head. The man had pitched forward and the top of his head lay inside his pith helmet like a chunk of melon.

The squad deployed along the hedgerow and the bodies were checked. One of the dead soldiers carried medical gear, and one had what appeared to be the insignia of an NVA lieutenant pinned to his gray fatigue shirt. One of the new men was unsettled by the scene, so to toughen him up, a team leader told him to search the body with the head blown open. As the replacement removed the pistol belt and then turned out the dead soldier’s pockets as instructed, he kept his face half-turned from the body.

“They got scared and they panicked,” Sergeant Bulte later said, explaining why the three NVA had been such easy targets in his rifle sights. Bulte had been in Vietnam for more than five months, but this was the first time he’d had a clear target. As he realized that he had just killed the three, he was numb for a moment, then he had a sense of absolute power. It felt good—but it lasted only a few moments. Bulte did not hate the enemy. He could not. He had seen them suffer too much. He had seen Kit Carson scouts, who seemed to be the most brutal soldiers on either side, use their boots on the faces of prisoners who had already talked, as well as place an M16 muzzle in the mouth of a man whose arms were tied. Once,
while their Kit Carson worked over another prisoner, Bulte had searched the NVA’s wallet and found a photograph of the soldier back home with his children. “You know, that guy was just like the rest of us,” Bulte said. “We were all there because we had to be. It’s one thing to fight a faceless enemy, but to see them as individuals—to see their faces and the fear in their eyes—that’s a different thing. Killing them was part of the game, and you really had to detach yourself to remain effective and do your job.”

The assault continued. Captain Humphries moved forward with Delta Two, under 2d Lt. Erich J. Weidner, on the right flank, and Lieutenant Skrzysowski’s Delta One on the left. Delta Three, whose lieutenant had been killed four days before, was being led by its platoon sergeant, SSgt. Robert E. Gruber, and brought up the rear of the company’s two-up-one-back formation. The assault platoons, operating slowly and cautiously in the blown-away, wide-open hamlet, used hand grenades on the entrenchments they passed over—all were empty—as they worked their way through Nhi Ha hedgerow by hedgerow. The NVA—in the tree line that divided the village—waited until the assault line was within fifty meters before their mortar crews began pumping out rounds. On hearing that signal, the foot soldiers in the spiderholes commenced firing with automatic weapons, light machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades.

The first casualty was Pfc. Paul L. Barker, an ammo bearer with the machine-gun squad in Delta Three, who fell in the blast of a mortar explosion before he had time to take cover.

Barker, hit badly in the chest, had been in-country just three weeks. He was a twenty-year-old draftee, and he hated the Army. A funny, well-built farm boy, he had run with some small-town toughs before dropping out of high school in South Paris, Maine. He became a father at sixteen, and finally married the mother of his daughter three years later between Basic and AIT. Barker had been befriended by an M79 man in another squad during his short time in Vietnam, and his buddy crawled to him to give him mouth-to-mouth, while shouting
at the top of his lungs for a medic. The platoon medic got to them, but Barker was already dead. His buddy, crying freely and nearly hysterical, refused to listen and kept trying to breathe life into Barker as fire snapped overhead.

The contact began at 1222. The NVA were entrenched across the narrow waist of Nhi Ha, in the tree line along the western edge of the rice paddies in the middle of the hamlet. Lieutenants Skrzysowski and Weidner deployed their platoons in the irrigation ditch that ran behind the hedgerow on the eastern side, and—earning Silver Stars in the process—they moved along the ditch firing themselves as they made sure their men kept their heads up and fired in the right direction. The NVA were impossible to see. Whenever smoke or dust rose from one of their positions, though, the target was engaged by M60s and M79s, as well as with LAWs.

Artillery worked the enemy side of the clearing and, between fire missions, the FAC in the Birddog rolled in to punch off WP marking rockets. The FAC brought the jets in one at a time. The Phantoms and Crusaders came in low and slow with wings tilting left, right, left, right, as each pilot lined up on the target in turn. The jets came in from behind the grunts, and the pilots released their 250-pound high drags just as they flashed over the row of upturned faces in the irrigation ditch. Fins popped from each bomb to retard the rate of descent as it dove toward the target, giving the pilot time to escape the blast radius. It was an incredible show. The bombs seemed to float as they went over the heads of the grunts in the same instant that the pilot hit the afterburners and pulled straight up. The multiple explosions were thunderous, with smoke mushrooming up thick and charcoal black above the flames. Smoking hot bomb fragments thudded down on both sides of the battlefield.

The napalm canisters burst like fireballs in the tree line. The NVA kept firing. Captain Humphries, a small-statured Texan who packed a CAR 15 and a 9mm Browning in a shoulder holster, had his trademark corncob pipe clenched sideways in his mouth as he lay behind a berm with his FO and RTOs and
helped adjust the air and arty. He was a former enlisted man—an OCS graduate—and he was Airborne and Ranger qualified. He was also a natural leader and a veteran of more than six months with the Gimlets. Black Death 6, as he was best known, used his reserve platoon, Delta Three, to establish an LZ in the eastern end of Nhi Ha—into which the C&C Huey landed to kick out ammo resupply and take aboard the four men wounded in the opening moments of the engagement. Humphries’s company suffered few additional casualties during the prolonged fight. He was an aggressive commander, but he never took reckless chances with the lives of his troops. He loved them too much. Humphries, exacting and hard-nosed, was also a personable, gregarious man who ruled with an informal hand. He knew his troops by name and would talk with each man as a patrol moved out. He joked easily with them, but he made it clear that each was an important part of the team. He told them that they were his family and mat he was going to write a book about them when he got home.

Delta Company was knocked for a serious loop when Black Death 6 was hit the following month after a tough, two-day action to secure an NVA hill in the FSB Center TAOR. Humphries was not wounded by enemy fire but by a “dud” U.S. hand grenade that sat unnoticed in the battle litter until a new man accidentally stepped on it. The explosion killed the GI. Humphries’s shoulder was torn up, and he lost his right eye. With a black eye patch in place, he soldiered through the rest of his career—including a 1970-71 Vietnam tour as operations officer of his old 3-21st Infantry.

Captain Humphries got his second Silver Star for Nhi Ha. His effect on morale was such that the recon sergeant with his FO team, Sp4 Terrance Farrand, who did not have to be in the battle, made sure he got there. Farrand, fresh from a Bangkok R and R, had rejoined the artillery liaison officer at the Mai Xa Chanh East CP only after the battle had been joined. When he asked about getting back to his company, the liaison officer said, “Listen, the situation’s hot. The only thing we’ve got going in is ammunition and radio batteries. We can try and get you in tomorrow.”

Farrand wouldn’t take no for an answer. The idea of giving Captain Humphries less than 100 percent was unfathomable, and he pressed the liaison officer. “Well, I’ve got to get there, that’s all there is to it.”

Specialist Farrand went in with the next ammo drop. The C&C Huey landed in Delta Three’s LZ, and, after helping unload the ammo under fire, Farrand ran, crawled, and ducked his way forward. He slid in beside a prone and very busy Captain Humphries, who said, “What in the hell are you doing here?” Farrand replied, “I heard you people got yourself in a mess, and I thought I’d better show up.” As he began working with the FO lieutenant, Farrand cracked one last grin and said, “Hey, Cap, can you believe that two short days ago I was lying up in a bed with sheets? And
I
had lobster!”

On Black Death’s right flank, Lieutenant Smith of Alpha Two radioed his platoon sergeant, Sfc. Alan Dickerson, who was in another crater. Smith had told Doc Fennewald to stick with Dickerson, and he asked to speak with the medic. “He’s dead,” Dickerson said.

“What?
He can’t be!” exclaimed Smith.

“He’s dead.”

“I never did see his body,” recalled Lieutenant Smith, who thought the world of Doc Fennewald. “I probably wouldn’t have looked at it anyway.” Fennewald had been shot in the forehead while moving in a fast crouch toward a soldier shouting for a medic. “It was a senseless death,” added Smith. “Whoever was wounded wasn’t badly hurt, but Fennewald probably perceived that he was.”

Specialist Four Daniel F. Fennewald, twenty-four, of Spanish Lake, Missouri, was awarded a posthumous BSMv and Purple Heart (as were all KJAs in the Gimlets, regardless of the circumstances of their death). Fennewald was the kind of genuine, sincere guy whom anyone would want to have as a friend for life. He was stocky and sandy-haired, with an articulate, quiet, and gentle manner. He never cursed. He never complained. He also never carried a weapon. He was a conscientious objector, and although he would hump a ton of medical
gear and water for the casualties, reserving only one canteen for himself, he would not join in the killing.

Lieutenant Smith commented that Fennewald was “a wonderful doc and a prince of a fella. He knew about every sore on every man in that platoon. He was that conscientious and helpful.”

The volume of fire rose and fell as the battle dragged on. During one of the lulls, Sp4 Neil E. Hannan of Alpha Two crawled out of his squad’s big bomb crater and worked his way back to the LZ to get more ammo. Hannan, a wiry, brown-haired kid, was an intelligent, intense, and typically insecure nineteen year old from blue-collar Versailles, Ohio. He was determined to be a good soldier, and he was. He had been in Vietnam for two months. Hannan was dragging a crate of grenades in one hand and a crate of small-arms ammunition in the other on his way back to the crater when a mortar fragment caught him in the right thigh. It went through his trouser leg and left a red slash up near his groin. Hannan clambered back into the crater. The rope-handled ammo crates were cracked open. Everyone was firing like crazy. Hannan himself went through thirty magazines, and had to repeatedly use his squeeze bottle of gun oil on his smoking M16. The squad grenadier lobbed so many M79 rounds across the clearing while sitting cross-legged at the edge of the crater that he finally said in a bored voice, “Hell, give me that .45 for a while.” They fired everything they had, including LAWs, and they heaved grenades when they saw NVA advancing among the trees on their right flank. “You know, it’s not easy to stick your head up and fire at those bastards when they have machine guns firing back at you,” Hannan wrote in a letter home the next day. “Hell, I was throwing grenades like a maniac too. I was in a bomb crater digging with my damned hands and I was scared as hell. I was just hoping that a mortar wouldn’t land in my hole. And to think that I used to pity the Marines.”