The Magnificent Bastards (9 page)

By 1330, Captain Williams was ready to assault Dong Huan. He spoke by radio with the new Foxtrot 6, Captain Butler, about the need for Foxtrot to hit Dai Do at the same time. Foxtrot’s Marines had not yet deployed from their amtracs when they suddenly came under RPG fire from Dai Do. Williams put his binos on the scene. Oh, my God, they’ve got the range on this guy, he thought, as he watched several RPGs ricochet off the amtracs.

There was a point beyond which Williams did not want to launch the attack, for it meant having to consolidate and conduct medevacs in the dark. He called Butler again and shouted, “Let’s get moving, we can’t keep sitting here!” But Foxtrot was not ready, and when Dixie Diner 6 called and pressed Williams to commence the attack, he answered, “Look, Foxtrot is taking hits. They don’t seem to be able to get off the dime and get moving!”

Williams finally felt sufficiently compelled to launch without Foxtrot. On his signal the tanks and recon team in Bac Vong increased their rate of fire into Dong Huan. Hotel Two and Three began the assault at a crawl across the naked paddies, but as HE and smoke continued to splash in, the NVA did not respond. The Marines got up on order, spread out into an assault line with about fifteen feet between each man, and pressed forward at a rapid walk. Williams lifted the supporting fires when they were within two hundred meters of the ville; when the NVA raised their heads from their holes they saw a line of eighty screaming, firing-from-the-hip Marines rushing at them from out of the smoke.

“When those Marines hit the ville,” Williams later wrote, “you couldn’t hold them back.” The attack “was so smooth that it looked like a rehearsed SDT [Schools Demonstration Troops] assault demo at Quantico.” Williams added that:

Williams added that when several Marines rushed to help a wounded buddy “part of that was just an excuse to get out of the fire, and it was killing us—literally—because once you lose fire superiority they gain it and you’re pinned down. I told them, ‘I don’t care if it’s your
mother
that goes down, you leave her lying there and you keep going.’”

That’s exactly what Hotel Company did at Dong Huan. Kills were made at eyeball-to-eyeball range. Lance Corporal Phil Donaghy of Hotel Two, under fire for the first time, was only four quick steps from that first hedgerow when an NVA suddenly rose halfway from his spiderhole in the vegetation. The man looked terrified. He was screaming. It sounded as though he was shouting the surrender call of
chieu hoi
, but he was still clutching his AK-47, and before Donaghy could think, he fired his M16 into the man. The entire squad seemed to zero in on him at that same instant, and the NVA was lifted backward out of his hole.

Captain Williams’s forward observer, Lieutenant Gibson, called in one fire mission too many just as Hotel Two and Three hit Dong Huan. Williams heard the artillery battery report
“shot out” over Gibson’s radio, and he shouted at Gibson to adjust the next salvo farther into the ville. Williams grabbed his own radio then to urgently instruct Hotel Two and Three to slow down. When he got no response, he double-timed forward, yelling like a crazy man, “Slow down, slow down, there’s rounds on the way!”

If the lead elements had been about ten seconds deeper into the ville when the salvo landed, they would have been caught in the splash. As it was, the timing had been perfect: The last rounds impacted as the first Marines went through the hedgerow.

Captain Williams caught up with Staff Sergeant Taylor, who was standing on a dike in front of the hedge, and shouted, “We still got artillery comin’ in! Stop your troops!”

“We can’t, we’re already started!” Taylor said.

Williams turned to Gibson. “You can’t let any more artillery come in because we can’t stop!” he shouted.

Williams had noticed an NVA in a spiderhole about fifteen meters to his left as he’d rushed up. He saw the NVA only out of the corner of his eye and, considering everything else, it really didn’t register—until a Chicom grenade suddenly exploded behind him. The blast was like a hard kick in the ass, and it sent him sprawling. By the time Williams regained his senses and thought to unholster his .45, the NVA had reappeared. He was holding up the overhead cover to his spider-hole in one hand and looking right at Williams. He had recognized this shouting, gesticulating Marine as a leader, and he pulled the string on another grenade. The NVA flicked the Chicom at Williams, then disappeared back into his covered hole.

The top-heavy, stick-handled grenade bounced toward Williams as if in slow motion. It was taking so long that he knew it would explode just as it rolled to within lethal range. The grenade stopped. It was a dud. By then Williams was in a two-handed prone position with his .45 pistol aimed at the spider-hole. When the NVA popped back up, presumably with a third grenade, the captain began squeezing off rounds. The enemy
soldier dropped, apparently hit. Williams couldn’t tell for sure, but at least there were no more Chicoms.

Williams realized then that he’d been hit by the first grenade—a single, deep fragment wound in his left buttock. It was bleeding badly and the pain was starting, but he knew he had lucked out. An American grenade would have blown off my whole leg, he thought.
²

Others had also been hit by the grenade, including Staff Sergeant Taylor. His flak jacket was torn up badly, his helmet cover was nicked, and he had several fragments in his left thigh. Taylor was a tall, soft-spoken, twenty-nine-year-old country boy who had been a Marine since dropping out of high school at seventeen. His people were coal miners from Madison ville, Kentucky. He was on his second infantry tour in Vietnam and operated with a calm expertise.

Lieutenant Prescott, the exec, took command and led the well-trained Hotel Company Marines past their flattened leaders to press the attack. Williams was feeling quite alone and very helpless as he lay near Taylor, when to his horror he saw a bypassed NVA who had emerged from a spiderhole. The man was about twenty-five meters away, jogging purposefully through the dissipating smoke screen. He looked right at Williams and Taylor. It would have been easy for him to swing his AK-47 around and blow them away without a thought. Williams tensed. He knew that this was it. But the NVA never fired; he just kept moving. Williams turned to the Navy corps-man who had been bandaging them and told him to find an M16 and organize some security.

They were joined shortly by LCpl. Dale R. Barnes, who had moved up from the exec’s former position at the fording site. Barnes had carried Captain Williams’s radio for five and a half months, and he ran full tilt across the paddies with several Marines from the reserve platoon as soon as he heard his skipper
was down. They had not been ordered forward, but knew they would be needed. Barnes knelt beside Williams, who told him that they had wounded in the hedgerow. Barnes drew his .45 and started forward on all fours. A single shot cracked over his head from the hedge—stray or targeted, friendly or enemy, he did not-know—and he hit the deck and crawled on in as fast as he could. The first Marine he found was also lying prone. The man had been wounded in the arm and was terrified that if he moved he would be hit again.

“Everything is clear,” Barnes shouted. He didn’t really believe it, but he wanted to get the man up and out of there. He braced the man against him with his arm around his shoulder, and hustled back to the captain. Barnes went back in, hoisted an unconscious, wounded Marine on his back, and had just about cleared the hedgerow when he collapsed from heat exhaustion.

Meanwhile, Captain Williams instructed the corpsman to find their gunny and bring him forward. The corpsman ran back alone, and reported simply that the gunny was still at the fording site with the mortar section. Williams was perplexed: “Is he hurt?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, what’s he doing?”

“He’s hiding in a hole, sir.”

Son of a bitch, Williams thought. It seemed that every time the fighting started, the gunny would disappear, then reappear afterward. The gunny was on his second tour in Vietnam and was most unhappy to be back. Fawning and obsequious to officers, he was forever finding reasons to go back to the ship.

“You go back there and you get that gunny up here,” Williams shouted to the corpsman. “And you tell him that’s an order; I want him up here
now!
Get him up here even if you have to do it at gunpoint!”

The gunny finally appeared, ashen faced and trembling. Williams told him to make sure that the NVA he’d shot at was really dead. The gunny’s pistol didn’t work, so he borrowed Taylor’s, fired a few rounds at the spiderhole, and handed back the pistol. There was no response from the spiderhole. Williams
told one of the radiomen to go check it out, and to bring back the dead NVA’s gold-starred belt buckle if he could. He wanted it as a souvenir.

As the radioman approached the spiderhole, an NVA suddenly jumped up. Perhaps Williams had only wounded the man, or perhaps it was a different enemy soldier. Either way, the man took off in a panicked run as the radioman hastily opened up with his M16. He missed, and Williams bellowed, “Gunny, get that damn gook—
you
let him get away!”

“I’m not running after him!” the gunny shouted back.

“Goddamnit, I told you to get that gook, and you’re going to get him!” But the gunny still didn’t budge. Williams finally told him, “You get out there and provide some security for us or you’re a dead man!” The gunny reluctantly got back up, which was lucky for him. “I’d have shot him. There’s no question in my mind,” Williams said later. “The adrenaline was pumping; it was a life-or-death situation for all of us, and I wasn’t in any frame of mind to fool around.”

While things bogged down temporarily on Hotel Three’s side, Staff Sergeant Ward kept things moving fast on Hotel Two’s flank. That was not surprising, for the profane, loud, and forceful Ward was an absolute madman in combat. He was a tough guy from New York who had dropped out of high school at sixteen to join up. He used forged permission papers and ID to fool the recruiters. Ward went on to fight in Korea, and was on his second tour in Vietnam.

The wiry, tattooed, abrasive redhead sported a crew cut and always wore a red bandanna around his neck. He carried a shotgun, pistol, eight grenades, a hatchet, several knives, and an entrenching tool. His troops called him Sergeant Knife. He was thirty-four, and a real character. He was also a hard old pro. Ward had left his platoon sergeant back with the mortar section because the man was due to rotate in two days. As Hotel Two charged into Dong Huan, the squad leader on the left flank, Sgt. Robert J. Enedy, went down with a blood-pumping belly wound. Enedy was a popular, respected Marine, and when he went down his men began diving for cover. Ward
pivoted his other two squads to bear down on the NVA to their left, and had just gotten his people moving again when a Chicom potato-masher landed right in front of him. He tried to kick it away, but missed. The explosion peppered his face and jaw with metal fragments, knocking him down.

“Sergeant Ward’s hit!” someone screamed.

Realizing that morale was flagging all around him, Ward jumped back up, pissed off and in pain, shouting, “comin’ let’s go!”

Staff Sergeant Ward ran to the NVA position that was holding them up. There were dead NVA in it—and a couple of live ones. Fucking pricks! he thought as he emptied his shotgun into the slit trench. He put the twelve-gauge down and threw hand grenades at the next trench full of NVA. He suddenly glimpsed an NVA out of the corner of his eye. The man was leaning around the corner of a shattered concrete house. Ward turned and saw another Chicom coming at him. He reached for his shotgun before rolling out of the way, but the grenade went off, blowing the weapon out of his hands, and his diver’s watch with the jungle band and compass off his wrist. It also stung Ward’s left hand with shell fragments and slammed him down so hard that his head was spinning and his eyes wouldn’t focus.

Ward tried to stand, but couldn’t. After the platoon corpsman bandaged his hand, Ward said, “Slap me in the face!” That seemed to set his equilibrium right. Ward stood and un-holstered his .45, but he couldn’t chamber a round one-handed. He gave the pistol to his radioman and told him to pull the slide back. The Marine did so and handed the weapon back as Ward, moving forward again, bellowed amid the din: “comin’ let’s go, Second Platoon.…”
³

The north-to-south plunge through the approximately three
hundred meters of Dong Huan’s hedges, tree lines, houses, and drainage ditches was a madhouse of some fifteen minutes’ duration. Lieutenant Prescott brought up the reserve platoon, Hotel One, to support Hotel Three. In short order, the platoon commander, Lieutenant Boyle, picked up shell splinters in the arm, and Staff Sergeant Kelleher was hit badly enough to qualify for a medevac. One of their men, LCpl. Robert A. McPherson, was killed. Hotel Company’s charge-Charge-CHARGE maneuver had bypassed entrenched NVA pockets, which had to be methodically reduced by light antitank weapons (LAWs) and M79s as Lieutenant Prescott turned the show around to consolidate what they had. This took a good hour or so. The Marines killed every NVA who did not run or hide well. They took no prisoners. The company was credited with thirty confirmed kills. It also captured the recoilless rifle that had started the donnybrook.