The Magnificent Bastards (51 page)

“Shoot that sonofabitch because he’s going to kill me!” screamed Leach.

The position was silenced with a LAW, but the fire continued from other entrenched, invisible enemy positions.

Charlie Tiger responded in kind. “We pounded the shit out of ’Em,” said Leach. Helix 1-5 ordered several more Skyhawk strikes, which utilized napalm and five-hundred-pound high-drag bombs. Each pass was made from a different direction so as to give the NVA less opportunity to organize the effective antiaircraft fire they had the day before. When the FAC departed to refuel and rearm with marking rockets, the arty was turned back on. “With all that shit rolling in, the sound level must have been a hundred-and-fifty decibels,” said Private Harp of Charlie One. “I mean your ears hurt.” Like every other man, Harp had found a piece of cover—in his case beside Pope, their machine gunner—and he poured fire across that clearing. They had no specific targets. Harp probably went through seventy-five magazines with his M16. “The receiver group on my rifle got so hot I could hardly hold the damn thing. The whole palm of my hand was blistered. The barrel was pouring off white smoke, and I used three bottles of LSA to keep the bolt from freezing up.” Pope’s M60 consumed ammo with equal vigor, and Harp ran back several times during the fight to get M16 bandoliers for himself and extra machine-gun ammo for Pope. “Pope’s gun literally glowed red from time to time. He burned out the barrel and had to start using his spare.” Harp was scared, hungry, and thirsty. He had run out of water the day before, and he was wobbly in the unrelenting, lip-cracking heat of the day. “All that kept me going was on one of my trips to the CP for ammo I fell in a shell hole with a little green water. I stuck my canteen down in the sandy mud and got about one-third of a canteen of something that was mostly water. Put six iodine tablets in it,
shook it up, and tried to chug-a-lug the shit as fast as I could in the hopes that I wouldn’t taste it too much.”

At 1325, Lieutenant Colonel Snyder went airborne over the battle in his C&C Huey. Thirty-five minutes later, Helix 1-7 arrived on station to control the seventh air strike of the day. It lasted twenty-five minutes. Under the cover of the snake ’n’ nape and automatic cannons, Captain Leach sent Lieutenant Hieb and two squads low-crawling across the right side of the clearing, where enemy fire was minimal. If they could blast out a foothold on the other side, they might break the stalemate.

Captain Leach, meanwhile, got on the horn with Black Death 6, whose fires seemed to be straying toward Hieb’s assault. “You gotta watch your fire to your right flank. You got to keep it in front of you because we got those guys up there.” The fire was not adequately shifted. Leach, who had already secured an M16 from a medic, shrugged into the harness of one of his RTOs’ radios—he wanted to move fast without his command group in tow—and started toward Black Death 6 on his hands and knees. His pucker factor was up, but he made it into Humphries’s crater and began pointing out exactly where Delta’s troops should not fire. Leach and Humphries were still talking when a rocket-propelled grenade crashed into the crater some thirty meters to their right, wounding several noncoms who were firing from that position.

In the continuing cacophony, one of Humphries’s medics, Sp4 Rollin D. Davis, twenty, of Grand Junction, Iowa, was killed. Captain Leach radioed ahead before crawling back to the berm where he had left his command group. Lieutenant Hieb called on the company net: He had reached the enemy side of the clearing but was under a massive amount of fire and could make no headway. Leach ordered Hieb to pull back, then asked Helix 1-7 to bring in the tac air to help the two squads break contact. Hieb popped smoke as instructed. Leach, after giving the FAC an azimuth, direction of fire, et cetera, said to him, “Okay, you’re going to be dropping it twenty meters right in front of ’Em, so you
got
to do it right.”

It was 1604. Lieutenant Hieb, wanting to cover the withdrawal with his CAR 15, sprinted by himself toward the next hedgerow. He stepped in a hole on his way across and fell heavily with his pack, knocking the wind out of himself. He jumped into a thicket of bamboo. The first Phantom made its strafing run a safe distance away, but fhen Hieb, whose ruck was hopelessly tangled in the bamboo, looked up to see the next jet lining up for a run right at his forward location. He couldn’t pull his ruck loose, so he frantically shrugged out of it and left it suspended in the bamboo as he sprinted away. The Phantom released its napalm canisters. Expertly applied, they sucked the oxygen from the air as they drove the NVA to the bottom of their holes, allowing Hieb’s platoon to crawl back without casualties. All that was later found of the lieutenant’s rucksack were a few little melted bits of the aluminum frame.

At 1617, the ninth air strike plastered Nhi Ha. Meanwhile, the C&C Huey, without the colonel, conducted medevacs and ammo drops in Delta Three’s LZ. The Huey came in low and hot each time, with cover fire courtesy of the wounded Sergeant See, who still had two men left in his machine-gun squad, plus a half-dozen anonymous GIs who’d also been detailed to work the landing zone. They fired in the general direction of that invisible, dug-in sniper in the burial mounds on the left flank. The NVA was about a hundred meters away. Every time somebody moved, he fired. After one ammo drop, See, who’d run out to haul the stuff off the open LZ, ended up pinned down behind six cases of machine-gun bullets.

“Goddamnit!” he screamed at his pickup squad, which was not returning fire. “Give me some cover fire, I gotta get out of here!”

The GIs did not raise their heads from their holes. The sniper ceased fire on his own accord. Sergeant See, who was furious, got only apathetic looks from the anonymous GIs as he shouted at them about their inaction. They weren’t fools. They didn’t intend to die in this stupid war.

These GIs were not alone in their attitude. Two men were
medevacked during the day with combat fatigue, including a grunt who was so hysterical that it took several men to load him yelling and screaming onto the Huey. The other man crawled back to the LZ quietly and on his own, still wearing his helmet and web gear and dragging his M16. He was crying, “I can’t take it.…I can’t take it.…” The man was a Regular Army sergeant first class. See was shocked, and then angry. “He was the type of guy who was supposed to be hard-core,” See said later. “After all the crap we’d been given by E-7s during our training about how to be a role model—here’s this guy who just became a coward. Everyone wanted to climb on a helo and say the hell with it, but we had a job to do and that’s the way it was.”

At 1830, the C&C Huey was hit by the NVA sniper while it lifted up from the LZ. The pilot lost control of the tail boom, which swung wildly from side to side as the Huey smacked back down on the ground. Sergeant See, who had rolled away from the descending chopper, was joined in a flash behind the cover of his earthen berm by the chopper crew. They were understandably shook up. The first thing they wanted to know was whether the grunts had any extra steel helmets for them. “No, we don’t,” See said with an inward smile at how uptight the airmen were. Within ten minutes, another Huey bounced in and out of the LZ to take aboard the downed crew while the grunts fired away at the burial mounds.

Although few NVA had been seen, fifty-seven were reported killed. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had several conversations with Captain Leach about what the NVA had in Nhi Ha. Leach kept telling him that they were up against at least a full-strength company, but Snyder replied that it was “not nearly that many,” and that they seemed large in number only “because they’re so well dug in they can move back and forth.” On that they could agree. Their arty and tac air weren’t doing any good against the enemy entrenchments. Finally, at dusk, after nearly nine hours of stalemate, Leach said to Snyder, “Hey, listen, I don’t know how to attack this goddamn thing
any way but going right up the center. Now, we’ll go again if you want us to go.”

Two Gimlets had already been killed that day, and thirteen more wounded. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder did not believe that a frontal assault could be successful “at any reasonable cost of casualties.” He told Leach to “pull back to the laager position. We’re going to pound it some more with artillery and air.”

A tenth and final air strike was brought in at 1920 by Helix 1-5 to help Charlie and Delta break contact. But as the two companies leap-frogged back through Nhi Ha by fire teams, the NVA pursued them to the edge of the ville. Red and green tracers crisscrossed in the smoky dusk as troops fired and ran, then fired and ran again. Pandemonium reigned. When they reached the laager, Private Cox was approached by a buddy who exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, Cox, I almost shot you! As we were giving cover fire, you ran right into my sights. Why I stopped pulling the trigger at that time I’ll never know—but you came that close to getting shot!”

It was another long night in the three-company laager. At 0352, shortly after the enemy probed the perimeter with AK-47 fire and grenades, a Charlie Tiger listening post lobbed a few grenades of their own at two NVA who were visible in the paddy around the laager. The NVA went down as if dead, and the LP pulled back on order. At 0405, two more enemy soldiers walked right into Charlie’s line. Specifically, they walked up to Sp4 Bill Dixon of Charlie Two, who was in a three-man position with Privates Fulcher and Fletcher, who were half-asleep behind a paddy dike. Dixon, awake and on watch, was sitting with his M79 when the two NVA, who must have been lost, appeared before him as silhouettes. One knelt down to start speaking to him in Vietnamese. Dixon, who had a shotgun load in his grenade launcher, shot the man in the head at point-blank range. While the other NVA spun away to run, Dixon slapped his hand on Fulcher who, startled awake, had instantly and automatically put his hand on his M16 rifle. “Stay down—there’s another gook out there yet!” shouted Dixon.

The NVA fired his AK-47 as he escaped. When Fulcher exclaimed, “What the hell’s going on?” Dixon answered urgently, “I shot one!”

“Where?” asked Fulcher.

“Right there.”

“Right
where!”

“Right
there!”

The first illumination round went up then, and Fulcher was shocked to see a nearly decapitated NVA soldier lying within an arm’s length of them. Brains were splattered all over Fulcher’s rucksack, and he barked, “What the hell’ dja let him get that close for?”

Specialist Dixon had not been taken completely by surprise. He had heard the NVA speaking in muffled, definitely non-English tones as they’d approached, but he had assumed that it was the two Puerto Rican GIs in the position to their right who usually conversed in Spanish. The dead man wore black shorts and a gray fatigue shirt. Because he carried binoculars and a brand-new AK-47 with white parachute silk over the barrel, it was conjectured that the man had been an artillery spotter, probably a lieutenant.

Captain Leach, who had some hard words about the one that got away, took the AK-47 to replace his jammed-up CAR 15 and used it during the remainder of the DMZ operation. Afterward it was presented to the Helix FACs as a thank-you and ended up on a plaque in their Chu Lai club. Meanwhile, artillery ilium was being fired. The troops could hear the ascent of each round and then the pop, and they watched each flare sway on its parachute in its slow, smoke-trailing descent. The flares were timed so that as one hit the ground and went out, another would burst above them. If the timing was off, the plunge into darkness was instant and total. Private Fulcher, for one, would shudder at the thought of NVA rushing toward them. “But then another flare would pop and it’d still be blank out across the paddies. It was great having the lights on, as we used to say.”

Alpha Annihilated

A
T
0655
ON
S
UNDAY
, 5 M
AY
1968,
TWO
USAF FACs
AR
rived on station to coordinate the preparatory air strikes for the 3-21st Infantry’s fourth assault on Nhi Ha. This time, two-thousand-pound bombs were to be used. The suggestion to employ such heavy ordnance had come the previous evening when Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had spoken by radio with a frustrated FAC who said, “Let me lay on a couple of sorties tomorrow with two-thousand-pound fuse-delays. They’ll penetrate the ground before they explode. The ground shock is tremendous. If there’s anybody left in those dugouts then, it’ll do ’Em in.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had been enthusiastic about the idea. He had not suggested it himself because he had been unaware that such munitions were available. The FAC went on to advise him that if they used the two-thousand-pounders the men closest to the enemy positions would have to pull back as a safety precaution.

By 0715, Captain Corrigan’s B/3-21, the company closest to Nhi Ha, had withdrawn approximately five hundred meters south of Lam Xuan West. Captain Leach and his three-company task force remained in their well-entrenched laager six hundred meters east of Nhi Ha. Snyder went airborne in
his C&C Huey. When the two-thousand-pounders plunged into the hamlet, he had a ringside view of the spectacular subsurface explosions that erupted mushroomlike with much smoke and dirt. The effect was most dramatic at ground level. Even at a safe distance, it was like being in an earthquake. Foxholes seemed to sway and move as the shock wave rolled through, and metal fragments rained down to bounce off a helmet or two. The last bomb fell at 0930, and the ground assault commenced ten minutes later with Captain Leach and Charlie Company advancing toward Nhi Ha behind the artillery prep. Captain Osborn and Alpha moved out behind Charlie Tiger. It took twenty minutes to reach Nhi Ha, then ten more minutes to cautiously cross the first hundred meters inside the ville. At that point, Charlie halted and Alpha leapfrogged past to continue the assault up to the clearing that was the hamlet’s no-man’s-land. Despite the obvious destruction caused by the blockbusters, one lieutenant said later that “no one was optimistic that this was going to be a picnic.”