The Magnificent Bastards (7 page)

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, who was wounded three times in his six months with the Magnificent Bastards, was usually side by side with Big John Malnar, his six-foot-three-inch, shotgun-toting battalion sergeant major. No man in the battalion had more combat experience than Malnar, and no man was closer to the colonel. Like Weise, Malnar came from a hardscrabble background. He grew up in Sawyerville, Illinois, and enlisted in the Marines three weeks after his seventeenth birthday in 1943. He saw action as a tank crewman and infantryman on Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa, where his older brother was killed.

Malnar barely survived his next war, Korea, where as a sergeant and squad leader in G/3/1 in September 1950 he landed at Inchon. He was awarded a Bronze Star on D day for cutting a path through a barbed-wire obstacle despite enemy fire that killed the man who was with him. Two days later he earned the Silver Star when he climbed atop a tank and, with enemy fire bouncing off the armor around him, put its external .50-caliber machine gun to lethal use on a North Korean machine-gun crew. Just eight days after that, Malnar got another Bronze Star when his patrol took fire while passing under a railroad trestle on the outskirts of Seoul; he used a Browning automatic rifle to cover the recovery of their wounded even
though he was shot five times in the leg and had one of his testicles blown away.

Sergeant Major Malnar, who was hit two more times in Vietnam at the age of forty-one, had to wear a two-inch sole on his custom-made, all-leather boot to compensate for the bone he lost in his wounded leg. The mask he wore during their long, hard humps across those paddies and sand dunes could not completely conceal that his leg was hurting, but he never complained.

Sergeant Major Malnar had volunteered for duty in Vietnam. He never married. The Marine Corps was his whole world, and he was the kind of loyal, tough, battle-wise sergeant major a battalion commander had to love. Malnar got things done. He was a strong, forceful taskmaster. He was a sounding board. He was a fatherly counselor. He was a provider of impossible-to-find bennies, thanks to that unique network of senior noncommissioned officers that extended through battalion, regiment, and division, and all the way to the III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF) in Da Nang. Malnar had the reputation of being a gruff sonofabitch. He was not, nor should he have been, a buddy to any of the junior enlisted men, and he viewed lieutenants and captains as part of the necessary rabble. “He tolerated us captains,” remembered one officer. “Occasionally, if he remembered, he’d say ‘sir.’”

In rebuilding BLT 2/4 Lieutenant Colonel Weise had one other godsend in addition to the service of men such as Big John Malnar: The battalion was always employed just within its growing capabilities. Each operation required more than the last, but with a constant emphasis on lessons learned, it became that much more able. “We were just a really aggressive outfit, and the initiative was ours,” said Captain Williams. “Other units were always waiting for the enemy to do something. With us it was exactly the opposite. We were doing it to them. You have to put the credit right at the top. I witnessed this extraordinary evolution of a battalion that was on its ass in proficiency, morale, esprit, and discipline—the four indicators of leadership—as Weise turned it into probably the finest fighting outfit in Vietnam.”

Weise’s tactical right-hand man was his S3, Major Warren, a positive and personable Marine who was “gung-ho in a clean-cut sort of way.” Prematurely graying at thirty-five, Fritz Warren was one of fourteen children from a low-income Catholic family in Jacksonville, Florida. He had come to the Marine Corps via Parris Island at seventeen, after dropping out of high school and forging his parents’ names to the enlistment papers in a patriotic flush at the beginning of the Korean War. He never made it to Korea, but he did make sergeant and earn an appointment to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.

Warren graduated in the Class of 1957; one of his early assignments was as Wild Bill’s exec during the gung-ho F/2/1 days. They impressed each other enough that when they next crossed paths in December 1967, when Warren was assistant S3 of SLF Alpha and assisting 2/4’s conversion to BLT status, Weise instantly asked him to come aboard when his six months of shipboard staff duty were up. The S3 Weise had inherited from Operation Kingfisher was too inexperienced. Warren was the only officer Weise asked for by name and was able to get. “Warren was an unusually talented operations officer,” Weise wrote. “He could keep a dozen balls in the air and react swiftly to the changing tides of combat. A man of very high morals, he was also very brave.”

Because he did not join BLT 2/4 until 19 February 1968, Major Warren missed the battalion’s first two landings. Operations Ballistic Armor and Fortress Attack (22-31 January 1968) were fallow affairs, however, with only five friendly injuries and a dozen confirmed or probable kills. During the Tet Offensive in February, BLT 2/4 was opcon to the 4th Marines on Operation Lancaster II north of Camp Carroll. There it started running into NVA platoons, and during the month lost ten dead and ninety-eight wounded against thirty-five confirmed kills.

The tempo picked up again when BLT 2/4 was placed under the operational control of Colonel Hull’s 3d Marines during Operation Napoleon/Saline. The battalion replaced BLT 3/1 in Mai Xa Chanh West on 5 March. The NVA response was
immediate. That night, a mortar and rocket barrage preceded a ground attack that was repulsed with only two Marines seriously wounded. The enemy left behind thirteen bodies. The battalion followed up with a series of successful assaults to clear and reclear the evacuated hamlets above the Cua Viet River on berth sides of Jones Creek.

The number of enemy they killed was impressive, at least until BLT 2/4 hit Lam Xuan East on 12 March. Weise described the engagement as “a fiasco from the start,” and wrote that “Foxtrot was sucked into a preplanned meatgrinder when the point squad chased a few NVA, who had deliberately exposed themselves, into a carefully-prepared fortified ambush.” The NVA held their fire until the Marines were so close that they could not employ supporting arms. “The forward platoon was chewed up trying to extract the point squad, and soon the entire company was involved,” wrote Weise. Eighteen Marines were killed. Golf Company was sent to relieve the pressure, as were elements of Echo and two tanks. The BLT’s attached recon platoon recovered the wounded, while Weise made the decision to break contact and regroup. The dead were left in the ville. “I hated to leave those bodies, even temporarily. It went against everything that Marines stood for, but I couldn’t see killing more of my Marines to pull back Marines who were already dead.”

Following prep fires, Hotel Company provided a feint and then a base of fire from the south, while Echo boarded amtracs to attack from the west across Jones Creek on 13 March. “The amtracs got stuck in the mud,” Weise wrote. “Only Captain Livingston and a few Marines were able to make it across into Lam Xuan East. The remainder of Echo couldn’t get across. I did not want to send Golf or Hotel into the ville from their positions because they would have been exposed to the same murderous enemy fire that chewed up Foxtrot the day before.”

Faced again with tenacious NVA resistance that included mortar, rocket, and artillery fire, and with darkness approaching, Weise again decided to withdraw. Lam Xuan East, thoroughly shattered by air and arty, was not actually secured until
15 March, by which time the enemy had retired with their casualties.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise was tagged by higher command as being unaggressive at Lam Xuan East. “Even though they almost relieved Weise, he did not come down on us company commanders who had made the recommendation to break contact,” said Captain Williams. “Weise could see that it was unjust criticism. It’s easy to sit back at regiment or division and point your finger, but all they were doing was showing their ignorance. If anything, Weise was a little overly aggressive.”

Weise’s vindication came during an 18 March assault on Vinh Quan Thuong. This time, the recon platoon discovered the NVA before a rifle company could be sucked in. Given sufficient time to plan, muster supporting arms, and get into assault positions, BLT 2/4 was able to conduct a coordinated attack with the initiative in its hands and the whole day to get the job done. Echo and Hotel overran Vinh Quan Thuong while Golf Company hit the enemy flank. The NVA were killed in their holes; as the mopping up began, Weise turned to Warren and said with satisfaction, “Well, they can’t say we weren’t aggressive this time.”

BLT 2/4 was credited with killing 474 NVA during the March 1968 battles, while losing the lives of 59 Marines and Navy corpsmen, plus 360 wounded. The tragedy was that, tactical excellence and sheer guts aside, those Americans died in vain. What was required was all-out war against Hanoi, plus pacification operations along the densely populated coast of South Vietnam. The first option, however, was denied by the politics of a limited war; the latter was denied by Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy strategy. Instead, the 3d Marine Division was forced to squat along a defensive, strong-point-and-barrier system facing the DMZ. This was a battlefield of Hanoi’s choosing, for it pulled the Marines away from the defense and development of the South Vietnamese people. Furthermore, their DMZ sanctuary allowed the NVA to generally pick the time and place of battle. Willing to absorb terrible casualties for the political goal of demoralizing the U.S.
home front with a seemingly endless stream of American body bags, the NVA played off the Marines’ superaggressive, storm-the-beach approach to battle. The NVA tactics had the Marines seizing the same hamlets time and time again. Ho Chi Minh’s taunt to the French also applied to the Americans: “You will kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.”

Actually, a ten-to-one kill ratio may have tilted the war of attrition in the 3d Marine Division’s favor. But such punishment was never actually inflicted, despite such crippling numbers as the 474 NVA kills reported by BLT 2/4 during the hamlet battles. That figure was false, as it turned so-called guesstimates of the damage delivered by supporting arms into confirmed kills. Major Warren considered such manipulations the most distressing part of his duties, and he would later comment that “Weise succumbed to this body count situation in reporting that kind of stuff.” Weise was certainly not alone. As Warren noted in a document prepared two years after his tour and originally classified for internal use only, “the actual operational necessity of survival in a command billet was a suitable body count ratio of enemy to friendly KIAs.” There was, Warren added, intense pressure from regiment “to submit estimates early in a battle when virtually no information was actually available… the early estimates were expected to be revised upwards as the battle progressed.” The result was that regiment “not only allowed but implicitly encouraged their subordinate commanders to become professional liars.”

Whatever career-enhancing juggling was done with the reporting of enemy casualties, the NVA thought well enough of BLT 2/4 to shift their infiltration routes west to the ARVN TAOR around Dong Ha. The Bastards made only infrequent contact during April 1968, usually at night with ambush operations Weise had begun implementing to compensate for the sudden paucity of targets. The lull gave BLT 2/4 time to break in the influx of replacements, and to analyze what had been done right and not so right in its first major campaign under Weise. The result was an updated, Ai Tu-style training schedule out in the sticks at Mai Xa Chanh West.

“People thought Weise must be crazy having us train out there,” Warren noted, although he did not agree. The battalion was surviving, he thought, precisely because of Weise’s exacting standards and unrelenting, train-train-train-to-perfection philosophy. “He believed that his most important responsibility was to make sure not a single life would be lost because the men weren’t properly trained. He never let up. He expected great things of people. He demanded the same things of himself.”

Round One

D
ESPITE THE HEAT MIRAGES BLURRING THE VIEW
through his sniper scope, LCpl. James L. O’neill could see movement five hundred meters away among the brush and hootches of Dong Huan. The hamlet sat on the far bank of the tributary the Marines were approaching, and O’neill turned to Lieutenant Boyle, the 1st Platoon commander in H BLT 2/4, to report, “Sir, I think we got a whole bunch of gooks in front of us.”