The Magnificent Bastards (50 page)

“From that time on, Captain Leach could do no wrong by me,” said Sergeant Coulthard. Such confidence in his abilities was more valuable to Leach than the BSMv he got for rescuing Skinner, because he intended to reshape Charlie Tiger. The grunts were mostly draftees and the product of soft, unrealistic training. Leach told them that he would be proud to lead NVA soldiers; in comparison to the average GI, they were masters of jungle fighting. “Captain Leach made you do what the dinks did as far as camouflage, stealth, things like that,” recalled Coulthard. “He liked to operate at night. We had to hump, too, and if you were moving in daytime you had to have fresh camouflage on your helmet, your pack, all over. After a couple of hours you’d put on new camouflage made of the vegetation you were in. If you didn’t, he got hot.” The grunts responded. They did not want to be in Vietnam, but they wanted to survive—and superaggressive, superprofessional Captain Leach seemed to be one of the few officers around who knew how to react in tight situations. Leach was personable enough, but he was too hard, intense, and businesslike to have been loved. He was, however, admired. “If Captain Leach told you to march to hell, you would,” said Private Harp. “First, because if he said you could, you knew you could. Secondly, he would be on point, and, finally, if you did not obey his orders he would kick your ass so hard it would make hell look like a cakewalk.”

By 1830 on 3 May, A and D/3-21 had begun to withdraw from Nhi Ha. Specialist Hannan of Alpha Two was moving back beside a machine gunner who carried his M60 across his shoulders in an exhausted pose, when the NVA said good-bye with a burst of AK-47 fire. Exasperated, the machine gunner shouted, “You sonsofbitches!” as he turned on his heel to fire back into the hamlet.

In the night laager, Charlie deployed along the perimeter from twelve to four o’clock, Delta took four to seven, and Alpha occupied seven to twelve. At 1922 and 2035, the NVA shelled the laager—again without producing casualties—with 152mm field guns located in the DMZ. Between shellings, the grunts, occupying the same holes as the night before, ate C rations, reloaded their magazines, removed the safety tape from grenades they had ready in their positions, rearranged trip flares, and wired in claymore antipersonnel mines.

Just before dark, Specialist Hannan watched a silhouette walk into their lines, kneel beside the GIs three holes down—and begin speaking in Vietnamese. The thoroughly disoriented NVA, who was wearing green fatigues and carrying an AK-47, immediately realized his mistake and made a run for it. Though stunned himself, Hannan quickly shouldered his M16 and pulled the trigger on the man at thirty paces. There was a flash of sparks as his shot hit the magazine or metal parts of the man’s weapon, but Hannan lost sight of the figure in the dark. The NVA got away.

At 2120, before the flareship arrived to give the Gimlets some illuminated security, another NVA came out of the dark where B/3-21 was positioned near Lam Xuan West. He was a deserter unconnected with the fight in Nhi Ha. Captain Corrigan, who described the NVA soldier as “young, skinny, and scared,” had the prisoner blindfolded and tied with his arms behind his back until a helicopter came to get him in the morning. He was sent on to the 3d Marines, where it was determined that he “belonged to the 126th Independent Regt, whose mission was to send elements south from the DMZ to mine the Cua Viet River. Intelligence gained from the rallier included infiltration routes, unit base areas, and mining tactics.”

“Our morale was at its lowest and not one man wanted to go back in there,” wrote nineteen-year-old Pfc. Charles C. Cox of D/3-21 in a letter home regarding the third attack on Nhi Ha. The attack commenced at 0936, Saturday, 4 May 1968,
after two air strikes and the usual arty prep. “Dad, I was scared to death.…”

Captains Leach and Humphries, who were great friends, had worked up the attack plan during the night, placing Delta on the left flank and Charlie Company on the right. Moving through Nhi Ha, Black Death 6 again had Lieutenant Skrzysowski on the left with Delta One, and Lieutenant Weidner’s Delta Two on the right. Delta Three was in reserve. Something is not right, thought Skrzysowski, surprised that they had received comparatively little fire during their cautious approach to the hedgerow where the attack had bogged down the day before. Did the dinks pull out during the night, or are they going to suck us in the next time we move? Humphries instructed Skrzysowski to advance with his platoon across the clearing and into the tree line on the other side that the enemy had held the day before. Skrzysowski started out of the irrigation ditch running behind the battered hedgerow, then realized that no one else was moving. The grunts could feel that something was wrong, too, but when the lieutenant continued through the hedgerow they reluctantly came along.

The ambush began at 1020.

Lieutenant Skrzysowski was halfway across the clearing with the lead squad in a skirmish line when automatic weapons suddenly erupted from the tree line ahead. One of Skrzysowski’s sergeants was shot, and the grunt to his left, who was coming out of a crater when the shooting started, was knocked back in with a shattering shoulder wound.

Jumping into another shell crater with his radioman and a rifleman, Lieutenant Skrzysowski opened up with his M16 and threw all his grenades. To his rights his M60 gunner had also managed to find cover, and he too opened fire at targets heard but not seen. Most of the NVA seemed to be in a bomb crater at the southern end of the north-south tree line. At least one other enemy soldier was well ensconced among the burial mounds on the platoon’s left flank. The sniper was actually on the other side of the shredded east-west tree line that ran along that edge of the hamlet, and with an automatic weapon and great fields of fire he banged away at anything that moved.

The NVA also lobbed mortar fire on Delta Company.

Thirty minutes into the contact, the FAC ran in a flight of Phantoms on the NVA. Neither the air nor the arty seemed to have much effect on the entrenched enemy, however. Lieutenant Skrzysowski, his ammunition almost exhausted, finally shouted to his platoon, “We can’t sit here! We’ve got wounded! Let’s move!”

It was 1120. Leading the way, an act that earned him a BSMv, Lieutenant Skrzysowski—a blunt, patriotic, twenty-five-year-old college grad from Manchester, New Hampshire—clambered out of his crater after calling for covering fire. He planned to run to the tree line on the left flank, then work his way forward to the NVA tree line to their front. Unfortunately, as soon as Skrzysowski cleared his cover, an AK-47 opened up on him with a burst that seemed to go on forever and blew him into another bomb crater, shredding his rucksack in the process. He was by himself and in excruciating pain. He had taken a round through his upper right thigh and buttocks, and the sight of the meat hanging from his leg made him think he had lost his testicles. His other leg, although not bloody, was paralyzed and numb, and he thought he had also been shot in the spine. He felt as though he’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer, but that was actually the least of his injuries: A bullet had hit one of the last magazines left in his bandolier and peppered his chest with metal fragments.

Lieutenant Skrzysowski’s M16 had been hit and rendered inoperable, but he thanked God that he still had his .45-caliber pistol. Groggy with shock, he suddenly realized that his medic was in the crater with him, administering morphine and wrapping his wounds with battle dressings. “Shit, we gotta get you out of here,” the medic said urgently.

“How in the hell
did you
get out here?” asked Skrzysowski.

“Let’s go,” the medic answered, taking charge.

Crawling out of the crater with rounds cracking over their heads, the medic led the way. Skrzysowski was right behind him, barely able to use his legs to push but able to pull himself along with his hands. Exhausted, he made it back through the hedgerow and into the cover of his platoon’s trench, where he
checked his wounds. They were bad, but not as bad as he’d first thought. His testicles were still there, and his back was not hit: The pain in his unwounded left leg was actually from a spinal disc damaged by the weight of his pack when he’d bounced into the crater.

Several men were still pinned down in the killing zone. To get them back, Lieutenant Skrzysowski, immobile in the trench, worked his radio to keep the arty on target while Sergeant First Class Mathis moved among their positions to organize suppressive fires. Under this cover, the men in the killing zone made it back one at a time. Sometime later, after Delta One’s casualties had been moved rearward to Delta Three’s LZ, several GIs from the reserve platoon dropped into the forward trench and told Skrzysowski that they had orders from Black Death 6 to get him on a medevac, too. They carried him back in a poncho, and then hefted him aboard the C&C Huey—which landed despite the latest mortar attack. Skrzysowski was the only casualty on board. It had been two hours since he’d been hit.

Smoke hung in the air from the mortar explosions, as did the smell of gunpowder. The day was scorching hot, the noise of gunfire constant. Sergeant First Class Mathis was in constant motion, checking the platoon positions with his radioman, Cox, crawling behind him on his hands and raw knees. The NVA fire over their heads sounded to Cox like angry hornets, and he made sure to keep his radio antenna pulled down. Mathis and Cox discovered three troopers who had found sanctuary in a bomb crater two or three hedgerows back. They refused to budge. Everyone else was doing his job, to include scared, sweat-soaked Cox, who at one point ended up feeding ammo belts into an M60 whose gunner blazed away like mad. When dirt started popping up behind them, Cox thought a trooper to their rear was firing wild. He suddenly realized that the NVA sniper on the left flank had zeroed in on the M60, and he and the gunner scrambled to a new position along their hedgerow. They resumed firing.

Fifteen minutes after Black Death ran into trouble on the left flank, Captain Leach and Charlie Tiger were engaged on the right by three NVA in an observation post on the near side of the contested clearing. Charlie Tiger GIs killed the NVA with grenades, then Leach’s popular first sergeant, forty-two-year-old Sfc. William R. Brooks, of Morriltown, Arkansas, pulled an AK-47 from the enemy trench and held it up to show the captain. At that moment, Brooks was nailed in the forehead and killed instantly as heavy fire erupted from the NVA positions on the other side of the clearing. Charlie Tiger was at the last hedgerow with Lieutenant Hieb and Charlie One on the right flank, and Staff Sergeant Goad, the acting commander of Charlie Two, on the left. Charlie Three, led by 1st Lt. Dale W. Musser, who had been on an administrative run to the rear when the battle began two days earlier, brought up the rear. Musser was an excellent platoon leader, but Leach had him in reserve for the same reason he’d earlier sent him to the rear: Musser was furious about the booby-trap death of Lieutenant Dunlap of Delta Company. Leach explained that he’d “yanked Musser’s ass out of there to give him time to cool down, but he was still smarting. He was so mad that I was afraid he’d pull a John Wayne. I didn’t want him to get killed, so I put him back in reserve.”

In the first moments of the engagement, Captain Leach, who wore a helmet and flak jacket and was swinging a CARI5, had to kick a couple of GIs in the ass for having hunkered down out of harm’s way. “Start firing your goddamn weapons!” he shouted. “And don’t fire on automatic—fire on semi or you’ll just eat up all your ammo, and we don’t know what the fuck’s in there!”

“When a firefight starts, it’s pandemonium,” recalled Captain Leach. “If you can get your guys just to return fire, you’re doing well. We had guys who never fired their weapons. When a soldier takes fire, the first thing he does is take cover. If you can get that kid to get his goddamn weapon up there and just fire in the right direction, you got it made.”

Having crawled forward to a mound, Captain Leach started pumping away with his CAR 15—until it jammed. He was enraged
He was also receiving plunging fire from an NVA whose location he could not figure out. Lieutenant Hieb spotted the NVA in one of the surviving hootches and shouted, “Hey, they’re Marines’ down at you from the rafters!”