The Magnificent Bastards (54 page)

Specialist Woodward suddenly began shouting, “They’re comin’ up on the right! They’re comin’ up on the right!”

It was 1444. The figures coming out of the trees wore web gear and green fatigues, and some had steel helmets. They advanced at a trot in a loose, well-spaced skirmish line.

“Are those ARVN?” someone shouted.

The distinctive cracking of AK-47s was heard above the
general roar. “Those are goddamn NVA!” someone else bellowed.

The result was pandemonium. Staff Sergeant Dale, given his orders by radio from Osborn—who was retreating with his command group at that moment—shouted for everyone to pull back and jumped up to run with most of the troopers along the dike. Sergeant Stone was not one of them. Half his squad had taken off with Dale, but Stone and one of his team leaders, Sp4 Ron Nahrstadt, ended up scurrying over a dike to their left that offered some protection from the overwhelming fire on the right. Moving low to the ground, they had yet to see any enemy soldiers. There was a lull in the fire. Stone rose up slightly to look back over the dike—and there was an NVA standing less than ten meters in front of him. The enemy soldier, who had an AK-47, wore a bush hat that sported a red star. He was looking down at one of Stone’s men, Sp4 Allen A. Straus, who lay facedown and unmoving in one of the furrows of what had been a garden. Stone hadn’t even known that Straus had been hit. He appeared to be dead. He was. His body was later recovered from that spot.

Lying prone behind the dike, Sergeant Stone quickly sighted his M16 on the NVA’s chest and dropped him with a single shot.

Sergeant Stone, twenty-one, was a farmer’s son from Kearney, Nebraska, who had been in Vietnam for more than seven months. He was an excellent squad leader. As soon as the first NVA went down, Stone saw a bareheaded NVA rise up from a position about twenty meters away and to the right of the first one. The enemy soldier was trying to spot him, but after Stone squeezed off another carefully aimed shot, the head went down and stayed down. A third NVA suddenly stood up. He was farther away, perhaps forty meters, and was in the open, looking around with his AK at the ready. Stone dropped him with a body shot. The NVA were too close for him to miss.

Specialist Nahrstadt’s rifle jammed, and he shouted urgently, “Should I throw a grenade? Should I throw a grenade?”

“Yeah, throw a grenade, throw a grenade!”

Nahrstadt pitched one over the dike—and was spotted by two NVA who launched a running, shouting charge right at Stone and Nahrstadt. Dirt sprayed across Stone’s face from rounds striking the dike, but he stayed calm, remained prone, and increased his rate of fire. One of the NVA went down. The other disappeared in the furrows that ran up to the dike in neat rows. Stone couldn’t see any other GIs around them, and he shouted to Nahrstadt, “We gotta get outta here!”

“What about Alderson?” Nahrstadt asked.

“Where is he?” asked Stone, looking around anxiously.

Stone spotted Alderson—the twenty-five-year-old team leader in his squad who’d frozen up the first day in Nhi Ha because he was so uptight about his pregnant wife back in Texas. He was lying along their dike, just on the other side of Nahrstadt. Alderson, seriously wounded and unconscious, was barely breathing. Stone told Nahrstadt to take his M16. Nahrstadt answered, “It’s jammed, too!”

“We gotta get outta here,” Stone said again to Nahrstadt, indicating that they had no choice but to leave Alderson.

Alderson died there amid the rice stalks.

“You go—I’ll cover ya!” Stone shouted, and Nahrstadt took off, the NVA firing at him as if in a shooting gallery. Nahrstadt hit the dirt, then it was Stone’s turn. He made it the twenty or so meters to Nahrstadt before he too dropped down, losing his helmet in the process. Nahrstadt took off again. Stone retrieved his steel pot and ran up to where Nahrstadt had flung himself down. He lost his helmet again. He scooped it back up—he wasn’t going to let go of it. This might just be the time it saves me, he thought. He was so shook, though, that he never thought to buckle the chin strap. Continuing to leapfrog toward the rear, Stone was firing cover for Nahrstadt’s next move when he glimpsed his greenseed grenadier, Specialist Barnes, running in the same direction as they were. Barnes was closer to the NVA on the right, and he was yelling like crazy as he ran. Barnes suddenly went down as though he’d been hit. Stone, not seeing him reemerge from the rice, ran to where he thought Nahrstadt had ducked. Nahrstadt was
not there. God, where’s he at? Stone wondered. Well, I’m on my own now.

Nahrstadt made it to safety.

Barnes, unseen in the rice, was dying or already dead. Sergeant Stone, meanwhile, could see a machine gun atop a burial mound toward the rear, but not the face of the gunner. “Who are you?” he bellowed. “Who are you?” If there was an answer, he could not hear it over the roar of fire. All he could see was the gunner waving at him to come on in. Fearing that it was a trap, Stone cautiously worked his way closer. When he saw that the soldier behind the M60 was black, he let out a sigh. Well, that ain’t no NVA, he thought. Moving past the M60 gunner, who was from Alpha Two, Stone found the CP group flattened behind the raised footpath on the left flank. Captain Osborn immediately asked him, “Where’s Lieutenant Kimball—where is everybody?”

“I don’t know,” answered Sergeant Stone. “For all I know, they’re all dead. They give the word to pull back, and when they said pull back, Sergeant Dale and them up and took off!”
²

Captain Osborn was finally able to get Lieutenant Kimball on the radio. Kimball was still up on the right flank. He was trying to call for artillery when his transmission was cut off. Lieutenant Kimball and his RTO, Sp4 Curtis E. Bandy, had just been killed. Bill Kimball, a tall, handsome blond, had been in Vietnam for three months and had been wounded in the Que Son action. He was another OCS citizen-soldier—he had a wife waiting for him back in New Jersey—and a fun-loving extrovert who had been well thought of in his platoon. He had learned fast. He always listened to his grunts. Posthumous awards, especially for officers, seem to take on a life of their own, so Kimball’s Silver Star citation may or may not be an accurate reconstruction of his last moments: “… Lieutenant Kimball courageously charged an enemy bunker, killing five enemy soldiers. He then proceeded to another position when
he became wounded in the right arm.…While his men were maneuvering back, he courageously remained in an exposed position, placing accurate devastating fire on the enemy.… While performing this unselfish act, Lieutenant Kimball was mortally wounded…”

Alpha Three, completely disorganized, still had men pinned down on the right flank, including Sp4 Bill Eakins, who, al though wounded in the back, had tackled a panicked soldier and calmed him down in a crater. Also stranded was Sp4 Thomas E. Hemphill, a grenadier who had jumped in another crater with one of the replacements. The enemy fire was ringing right over their heads. The new man, who was petrified, kept asking what he should do. Hemphill, a country boy with a Georgia accent, told him to keep his head down, adding, “but if anybody comes over that hole, you shoot the sorry thang!” Hemphill, keeping his own head down, lobbed about fifteen M79 rounds toward the tree line on the right. There was a lull then, and he heard movement in the next crater over. He hollered to ask who it was. Luckily,
it
was some of his buddies, so Hemphill and his greenseed scrambled into the position with them. One of Hemphill’s best friends, David Betebenner, was among those in the crater. His steel pot had a hole in it. He’d been shot in the head and was unconscious and barely breathing. Betebenner, a soft-spoken, deeply religious man, had been up firing his M16 when he’d been hit. “It upset me real bad,” Hemphill remembered. “I cried for a minute—I did. He was a good friend of mine. He was a good old fella. He had a little girl.…”

No one knew what had happened to the rest of the platoon. They decided they had to pull back to the left. After throwing a smoke grenade in that direction, they ran through the colored smoke as cover and made it back to the black machine gunner on the mound. David Betebenner was dead when they moved out. They left his body in the crater. “I closed myself out to any new people that come in then,” said Hemphill. “You were friendly to ’Em and helped ’Em out, but I never got close to ’Em. You didn’t want to get close to somebody who could get killed. It was like losing a brother.”

Staff Sergeant Dale was shot in the back during the retreat. He went down with a gaping exit wound in his chest, and two grunts dragged him to safety. The NVA swarming through Alpha Three came on toward Sergeant Bulte and his squad on Alpha Two’s right flank. The enemy soldiers screamed and popped up to fire AK-47 bursts to cover one another as they advanced from crater to crater. Bulte’s squad was not returning fire. The grunts were as low as they could get behind their own paddy dike. The air was electric with enemy fire. They didn’t know what to do. Bulte shouted at his men to pull back to the raised footpath on the left flank, and by the time he himself made it to the safer side of the footpath he had lost touch with everyone in his squad except his radioman and one of his riflemen.

“My guys were absolutely scared to death,” Bulte recalled. “They were just running for their lives. It was complete havoc. It was out of control.”

Clambering over the footpath, Sergeant Bulte swung his M16 back the way he had come—and was horrified to see Doc Richards of Alpha Three lying out there near a group of enemy soldiers. One leg was almost completely blown off below the knee, and he was waving an arm and shrieking, “Please, please help me … save me … help me …” Sergeant Bulte, a quiet, intelligent twenty-three year old, dropped all his gear except his M16 and a bandolier of ammunition and; when there was a lull in the fire, he rushed back over the footpath, weaving his way toward Doc Richards in a low crouch. Bulte dropped beside Richards just as the NVA began firing at him. When the roar eased off, he grabbed the medic by the back of his pistol belt and carried him like a suitcase. He’d made it only ten to fifteen meters before they started taking more fire. Bulte was too tired to move Richards any farther. He needed help. He told the medic that he was going to run back and get some of the men who were covering them.

Sergeant Bulte didn’t believe he could make it back again. Doc Richards saw the doubt in his eyes. “Don’t leave me!” he pleaded. “Don’t leave me! Will you come back for me?”
Bulte felt guilty as he promised Richards that, yes, he would come back. Bulte ran to the raised footpath. He didn’t know most of the GIs there—they weren’t in his squad—but when he argued, “C’mon, we can get this guy out of there,” two of them—Sp4 W. R. May and Pfc. J. W. Bell—agreed to give it a try. When there was another lull in the NVA fire, they made their move. On the way back, Bell brought up the rear, providing covering fire while Bulte and May dragged Richards by his arms and legs. They were moving fast and as the medic’s mangled leg bounced on the ground he screamed in agony. “Oh my God, it was a bloodcurdling scream,” recalled Bulte. “It was horrible.”

Doc Richards survived the ordeal.

Piling back over the footpath, Sergeant Bulte—who got the Silver Star for his part in the rescue—made radio contact with Lieutenant Stull in the command group. Stull couldn’t see the NVA from where he was, but Bulte could. He relayed adjustments so the FO could call for smoke rounds on Alpha Three’s former pos to cover their withdrawal, and HE rounds on almost the same ground to slow down the NVA. The enemy troops were forced to seek cover, but Stull and Bulte would always wonder if their fires might have hit some of their comrades stranded out there. The NVA, meanwhile, were working the area over with 82mm fire. Lieutenant Stull—who was also awarded a Silver Star for his actions that day—happened to look up and see two shells descending on the small crater his team occupied. He dropped down, and seconds later one shell hit the near edge of the crater and the other the far edge. Stull had his helmet and flak jacket on, but some metal fragments the size of shotgun pellets dinged him in the groin and under one arm. A bigger piece slashed across an ankle, ripping the canvas jungle boot and drawing blood. It felt like a sprain.

At 1540, the NVA attempted to envelop the pinned-down company on its left, where Sgt. Larry Haddock of Alpha Two had his squad deployed along Jones Creek. Haddock, a stocky, blond-haired twenty-three year old, was one of sixteen children to an Oklahoma oil-field worker. He was a taciturn, fieldwise
soldier. Haddock had directed his men into the streambed, and they were returning fire over the shallow embankment when he noticed movement to their rear. Turning, Haddock saw a line of hunched-over figures approaching through the tall brush on the other side of Jones Creek. For a split second he thought they were friendlies. The point man of the column was tentatively waving to him—apparently the NVA were also confused as to who was where—when Haddock recognized the NVA-issue camouflage nets on the pith helmets the soldiers wore. Haddock shouted a warning, and his grenadier and good friend Sp4 Larry R. McFaddin—a Kentuckian who took everything in stride—wheeled around and fired his M79. The round scored a direct hit on the pith helmet of one of the enemy soldiers, blowing him away. The rest of the squad, which actually had no cover to the rear in the sandy creek bed, desperately mowed the grass across the stream with automatic-weapons fire.