Chapter Fifteen
The dawn of 25 August 1969 spread across the paddies with all the serenity of the inside of a steel mill. Lieutenant Larrison of Golf Company and Lieutenant Vannoy of Hotel Company, 2d Battalion, 7th Marines, brought Phantoms and artillery fire into the tree lines in front of their perimeter.
The battalion was preparing to push west.
Hotel Company, on the right flank, moved out first. They’d been detailed to run a squad recon up the southern slope of Hill 381. Considering the events of the past two days, Lieutenant Vannoy thought two platoons would be safer; Colonel Lugger approved the modification. Lieutenant Vannoy and his command group stayed in place with 2d Platoon while 1st Platoon (1stLt Charles Vallance) moved out on the right flank and 3d Platoon (2dLt William Brennon) moved out on the left. Farther to the left, Lieutenant Larrison of Golf was still bringing the firepower down on the tree lines facing them.
A senior officer cut into the net: “Golf Six, do you realize you’re holding up two infantry companies!” Brennon was stunned. Don’t they realize what’s down here? he wondered.
The situation got worse. Hotel One and Hotel Three began advancing after the airstrikes were stopped, filtering into the trees on the northern half of the battered wood line. A Sea Knight descended behind them, either on a resupply or medevac run, and a 12.7mm machine gun opened fire from the southern half of the tree line they occupied. Brennon could see Vallance and his platoon sergeant moving on his right, and he shouted to them, “I ain’t believin’ this!” They shook their heads back as if to say, yes, this is suicide.
The two platoons emerged from the trees into rice paddies that stretched two hundred yards across and five hundred yards to the next tree line. It was a little rice bowl right at the base of Hill 381, and jungled fingers rippled through the area and across the platoons’ front. Vallance’s platoon advanced through napalmed elephant grass at the base of the ridge line into the paddies themselves. They were rough to negotiate—overgrown and terraced, dotted with wild brush and boulders. Point men and flank men were out. Vallance was only a quarter way into the field when Brennon reached the halfway mark. They too were spaced out, ten men in the lead:
Point man
M79 grenadier
Rifleman
Squad leader
Brennon, his radioman and corpsman
M60 team
The North Vietnamese ambushed them halfway into the open paddy, the first burst a jolting thunderclap of at least five AK47s, five RPGs, an RPD, and two 60mm mortar rounds. The M79 man was killed instantly. The corpsman was seriously wounded with shrapnel in his back. The M60 team quickly started returning fire, but the gunner was shot dead and his two assistant gunners passed out with shock or heat exhaustion. The rest of the platoon quickly took up positions behind them; under the direction of the platoon sergeant—who’d been wounded in the sudden fusillade—they sounded like a small army. The point man, rifleman, and squad leader managed to crawl back under the cover fire; together with Lieutenant Brennon, his radioman, and the wounded corpsman, they crammed behind a boulder in the field.
They were completely pinned down. It was 1300.
On the right flank, Lieutenant Vallance had also ducked behind a boulder at the initial shots. But his platoon was out of the most blistering part of the crossfire and he was able to get his bearings more quickly. The NVA, about a platoon of them, were firing from the bouldered slope of Hill 381 up ahead, and from the tree lines on the left flank. More NVA were popping up from behind, in the tree line through which they had just walked. Fire seemed to snap at the Marines from every direction. The NVA were invisible in the vegetation, solidly emplaced with spider holes and trenches. Vallance’s men could make out only one muzzle flash and, although they exposed themselves to put M60 and M79 fire into it, it was impossible to tell if they did any damage.
Vallance had men pinned down behind boulders ahead. When they tried to crawl back, rounds chopped the grass above their heads. When the platoon fired to cover them, the NVA rained down AKs and RPGs. But when the Marines stopped shooting and stopped moving, the NVA were content to cease fire and just watch.
Fish in a barrel, fucking fish in a barrel.
Lieutenant Vannoy moved forward with 2d Platoon, and radioed Brennon and Vallance to stay put. Air support had been scrambled again. Brennon, still stuck behind his boulder, got in radio contact with the aerial observer orbiting the battlefield. The Phantoms laid napalm plus 250- and 500-pound bombs, first into the trees 150 meters forward, then—at Brennon’s insistence—the reluctant AO brought the fires in 75 meters closer. Brennon and his five grunts crammed tightly against the boulder as shrapnel chunks whizzed overhead.
Vallance, farther away from ground zero, was able to keep his head up. He could see tracers snapping skyward from the jungle canopy even as the Phantoms screamed right at them, letting loose their napalm and bombs. The grunts could see the tracers, too, and their spirits sank even lower. They were sewed up, the air strikes weren’t doing much, and the NVA even had the guts to take on jets.
Bullets cracked over their heads and from the rear.
The Phantoms ran eight or nine missions; then Cobras made two more gun runs. The NVA fire slackened a bit, and Brennon told two men to crawl forward and drag back the dead M79 man. It was thirty meters from the boulder to the body, and the two grunts went the entire way on their stomachs, tucked in tightly along a dike, NVA fire nipping overhead. They reached the body, but the dead Marine was a big man—more than two hundred pounds plus all his gear—and they’d have to at least rise to their knees to drag him. They crawled back to Brennon and told him it was impossible.
By then it was 1700.
Before the ambush was sprung on Hotel Company, Golf Company had also been moving west. Lieutenant Larrison was proceeding with extreme caution: he had the platoons of Lieutenants Page and Pickett raise a shattering cacophony of cover fire as 3d Platoon rushed the first tree line facing them. They secured it without contact, and the rest of the company swept in. They prepared to repeat the process on the next wood line facing them.
Then Hotel was hit and Golf was sent in.
Urgency dampened caution as they moved to their right, filing along a stand of trees. The point man was three feet from the first spider hole before the NVA signalled his presence by emptying his AK47. He killed the point man instantly and wounded the next man in line. The wounded Marine squeezed flat behind his dead buddy as a crossfire suddenly electrified the air above him, but he kept his head. He reached over the body to set in his claymore mine, then unreeled the firing wire as he scooted back. When the NVA raised from his hole to fire a fresh magazine, the grunt detonated the claymore. Its one-pound charge of C4 plastic explosive sent out six hundred steel balls like a shotgun blast. Man and brush were shredded.
A squad of entrenched NVA were still firing from the trees, and Lieutenant Page and his radioman ran towards the pinned-down grunts. They made it through a hundred yards of paddy before they too had to hit the deck. Lieutenant Larrison moved his other two platoons into position to provide cover fire; the Marines saw no one to line up in rifle sights, but any suspected firing position was battered with M79 grenades and teargas. The NVA fire did not lessen; Hotel was screaming on the radio that Golf’s stray fire was hitting around them. Golf was screaming the same thing back. It was boiling chaos.
Two North Vietnamese soldiers materialized in one of the tree lines and the Marines—almost dead from the heat in the open paddy—poured fire at them. The NVA appeared to go down in the hail of rounds. Or did they only duck into their trenches? The tree lines were honeycombed with slit trenches and spider holes, and the NVA moved along them—below the Marine rifle fire—until they were firing on Golf Company from three sides. The firefight had lasted two hours, and Lieutenant Larrison finally ordered everyone back. They were forced to leave their dead point man.
Hotel Company was still pinned down.
Meanwhile, Colonel Lugger was glued to his radios; his command post was in a tree grove on the northern bank of the Song Lau River, near a crumbling, concrete pagoda which sat incongruously in the high weeds. Lugger had yet to get G and H Companies out of harm’s way when F Company—which was providing CP security—was ordered on another mission. Colonel Codispoti (operating from his Forward CP in the 4–31 TOC on LZ West) wanted one platoon from Fox to conduct a reconnaissance a kilometer-and-a-half to the west. The mission was to link up physically with Task Force 4–31, a goal which Lugger could not understand. It seemed to play into the hands of the enemy. There were officers who thought he should have quietly ignored the directive from a distant headquarters. But Lugger did not have the advantage of hindsight, nor was he aware of the tactical situation on the Army side of the line.
So the Fox platoon advanced as ordered. They had gone a thousand yards when a sudden ring of mortar, rocket-propelled grenade, and automatic weapons fire slammed down around them, inflicting heavy casualties.
1st Platoon was surrounded.
At the same time, the 2/7 CP came under heavy fire from an estimated seventy-five NVA just across the Song Lau. Fifty meters separated Marines and North Vietnamese, and Lugger and crew hugged earth as RPGs and AK47s screamed in. Mortars began whistling down on their postage-stamp perimeter. Battalion staff officers and radiomen shouldered M16s and returned fire while Lugger worked his radios, trying to control four fights at one time.
Lieutenant Ehrsam, CO, F/2/7, was a former enlisted man with a handlebar mustache and a fighter’s nature. As soon as 1st Platoon was encircled, he ordered 3d Platoon to break through and bring them back. They moved out along the northern bank of the stream.
They too were ambushed.
RPD machine guns, dug in on the opposite bank, signalled the killing. The fusillade was unexpected so close to their lines, and the Marines in the lead fell dead in the shattered elephant grass. AKs joined the RPDs. Everyone tried to hide in the grass. There was no real cover if they were spotted. From behind the immediate crossfire, Lance Corporal Parr pushed forward through the razor-sharp grass with Cpl George Stickman’s fire team. They could see a machine gun position across the stream or, at least, the muzzle flash and smoke when it fired. Parr lay flat, pumping his M16 at it. His buddy, PFC Eddie Grusczynski, unstrapped a LAW and pulled out the safeties. He sat up in the tall grass—the LAW on his shoulder—and was instantly shot. Stickman yelled. He rolled through the grass to Ski’s body and tugged the rocket from his frozen fingers. He quickly rolled back to his original position, then bobbed up for a quick moment, the LAW flashing from over his shoulder, back-blast whipping the brush, the warhead screaming to impact. The RPD kept firing, and Stickman flung two grenades across the stream. The NVA machine gun was suddenly silent.
PFC Charles W. Norton was in the part of the platoon line farthest from the river, but when the ambush started, he ran towards his pinned-down buddies. You couldn’t even hear shouts over the din of automatic weapons fire; Norton thought they were going to be overrun any second. He ducked from tree to tree, lobbing M79 rounds in the direction of the AK47 fire, then he finally bellied up to a low dike. The platoon’s new lieutenant—who would be seen crying with frustration and grief that night—was pressed behind the berm with several men. Norton continued forward on his stomach through the elephant grass. The enemy fire had tapered off, but rounds still nipped overhead. He wasn’t wearing his flak jacket, but he had his helmet on. He crawled up to Ski. Ski was the most popular guy in the platoon—probably because he was so naive and bookwormish—and Norton grabbed him to pull him back. Ski’s head flopped. There was a blue bruise the size of a silver dollar at his temple, a bullet hole in the center of it. KIA. Herbie Heintz lay nearby and Norton reached out and shook his boot. No response. KIA.
Robert Ryan was still alive. He’d taken a round in the shoulder joint in the first burst—his arm just hung there—and he lay exhausted in the grass, propped up by the radio strapped to his back. Norton edged back to him. So did Stickman. They got the radio off and started pulling him back. Norton was on his stomach, Stickman on his back, and they both had a grip on Ryan’s belt, tugging, pushing with their feet against the sunbaked ground. Norton suddenly felt something snap past his wrist. A round punched through Ryan’s lungs and slammed into Stickman’s leg.
Ryan belched pink blood. KIA.
Parr scrambled over and helped Norton and Stickman drag Ryan’s body over a one-foot dike. A grunt named Danny Shields was there, but the rest of the platoon was along a seven-foot embankment to their rear. One of the Marines scrambled down to help drag the casualties up; a sniper nailed him in the legs as he ran.
Marine Air finally rolled in. The four survivors behind the tiny dike tossed smoke grenades, then hugged earth. Norton looked up—right at a Phantom screaming in off the deck, releasing its napalm canister behind them, the silver canister tumbling past and exploding dead ahead. Wump! The snap sucked the air from his lungs, singed the hair on his arms. Bombs were dropped and the concussion bounced him off the ground. He was terrified. He knew he was going to die. But the pilots knew what they were doing, and when they were finished only an occasional sniper round cracked at the knot of Marines behind that dike.
Norton blasted back with his grenade launcher, even as dirt kicked up at the impact of incoming bullets. He’d fire, roll to a new position along the dike, drop another round in the M79, pop up to fire again. He carried about sixty rounds and had fired half when the firing pin was jarred loose and fell out. He tossed down the M79. His holster was empty—he’d lost his .45 pistol somewhere when he was crawling—and he picked up an M16 rifle laying in the dirt.
It was over 100 degrees and he could barely move.
But Norton kept firing. He was raising up with the M16 to fire another burst from the same spot when an AK47 round hit the front of his helmet. The steel pot was blown off and he bounced back, unconscious, blood running from his nose and right ear. Norton awakened only very dimly. When they finally made a break for the high embankment, he didn’t know who dragged him to safety.
As 3d Platoon made its ill-fated rush towards 1st Platoon, the rest of Fox Company shouldered their gear and followed closely behind. PFC Lorne J. Collinson, of the company mortar squad, jogged blindly through the elephant grass. There were empty spider holes in the vegetation. The noise ahead was incredible. Collinson suddenly heard a sharp whiz in the air and instinctively threw himself to the ground.
A ragged chunk of made-in-the-USA shrapnel thudded into the dirt behind him. He was instantly back on his feet and moving towards the fire.
Corporal Bass, chief of the 60mm mortar section, was setting up his tubes in a small clearing. Collinson jogged over, dumped his mortar rounds from his pack, then ran to their hasty perimeter. He and his best friend, Ron McCoy, were about the only security the mortars had out there. The rest of the squad set up the two tubes, prepared the ammunition, then waited for firing directions. None came out of the chaos ahead.
A lieutenant appeared from the brush, jogging back with a wounded man leaning against him. The man’s trouser leg was stained red.
The lieutenant was shouting to get the casualties back.
Collinson left his pack with McCoy, started running forward, and in short order was forced to low-crawl through the grass as AK rounds whizzed past. He bellied up to the embankment where 3d Platoon had been pushed. Marines were spread along it, firing toward the stream. One grunt lay behind the dike as if asleep. But there was a hole in the back of his flak jacket and Collinson hefted the body into a fireman’s hold and took off for all he was worth. He made it back to the trees around the command post. It was a semicontrolled madhouse. Radiomen shouted into handsets, calling for more air, more arty, trying to maintain contact with the pinned-down platoons. Officers and radiomen were clustered near the dilapidated pagoda, a short, older man gesturing instructions and mouthing words that were lost to Collinson in the din. The air was clogged with the whine of jets. Corpsmen rushed among the wounded being dragged in. They had a dozen KIAs and WIAs in a row and Collinson laid his man with them, numbly noticing that blood was smeared on his T-shirt where his flak jacket hung unzipped.
He took off again. Corporal Bass shouted at him as he ran past the trees, “Get your ass back here! Your job’s with the mortars!”
“Yeah, I know, but the lieutenant said to help with the wounded!”
LCpl Craig Russel, a battalion sniper, found himself belly down in the high elephant grass. Right across the blue line, NVA were screaming fire over his head. He pumped his M14 into the brush, firing frantically and blindly like everyone around him, then popped up to fling a frag at a muzzle flash. The grenade was tossed right back at him from within the tangle and exploded in midair.
That was right outside the 2/7 CP.
In the middle of the fire, a U.S. Army Huey pilot came on their radio. He was responding to their requests for ammunition, “I’m coming in. Pop a smoke, and get this shit off my bird!”
The helicopter barrelled into a bare patch behind the platoon. Corpsmen had a couple of the seriously wounded ready to go, and they rushed them to the LZ as Marines raked the opposite shore with cover fire. Russell sprinted towards the chopper. He could hear rounds cracking past, some impacting metal against metal, and the door gunner couldn’t fire his M60. He could just scream to hurry as Marines hauled off ammo cans, LAWs, a case of grenades, shoved the wounded aboard, then ran for cover as the Huey roared out in a blast of dust.
By the time Fox Company straggled back—unable to reach their lost platoon and forced to leave behind some of those killed in the attempt—the fight along the river had subsided to a cat ‘n’ mouse. Among others, Collinson and McCoy took up positions on the slope of the streambed. An AK would chop brush in their direction; they’d trigger a return burst, firing blind into the muggy heat, then duck back behind their trees, change magazines, and wait for the next shot. At one point, McCoy cranked off a hurried burst, then shouted he’d seen an NVA darting from one tree to another. He thought he nailed him. Behind them, up the creek-bed slope, other Marines were firing. A LAW flashed across the stream and was instantly answered by an RPG which exploded inside the lines.
Collinson could hear shouts for a corpsman.
The jets came in again. Collinson must have subconsciously heard their supersonic approach, because he happened to glance up just in time to see a silver napalm canister wobbling down. It seemed to be headed for the middle of the stream, and he bolted from his tree, scrambling up the bank. The sudden heat wave enveloped him, seeming to singe the hair on his face and arms, leaving him breathless. He threw himself behind a tree as a second Phantom rolled in low, splashing more nape among the trees across the thin stream. The air reeked with gasoline and smoke.
The NVA snipers were finally silent.
Air support—the Phantoms guiding down the Song Lau and expertly placing their ordnance within fifty meters of the battalion perimeter, close enough for expended 20mm shells to hit the grunts’ helmets—is what finally quieted the firing on the command post. Lieutenant Colonel Lugger grabbed a LAW in frustration and strode to an opening in the trees. He aimed at a hootch several hundred meters away. The LAW misfired, so he threw it down and picked up another rocket. It roared off across the paddies.
Lugger had not seen a single NVA soldier, nor could he tell if he even hit the hootch—a combination which seemed symbolic of the entire battle.
Colonel Lugger was simply boiling.
He had made staff sergeant before earning his commission and had volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam, but this battle—his first—was a mess. Lugger thought he was doing as well as any commander could, considering the circumstances, and he was bitter towards his detractors, who were many:
I was up to my ass in alligators with no help from above, and little or no help from below. I was trying to keep together and coordinate what few forces I had left while fighting an escalating battle on four or more fronts against an overwhelmingly superior enemy. An enemy who knew the area like the back of his hand and had prepared positions for years waiting just for this opportunity. Why do you think the Army avoided this area? I had no say in what missions I was assigned after the first three days. Codispoti was commanding my battalion—from a distance. His missions completely fragmented 2/7, sending its units off on wild goose chases to be ambushed by a waiting enemy. Simpson and Codispoti left 2/7 out there because they did not know what to do, or would not admit that they made a mistake in ordering one undersized battalion to get so entangled. Damn it, why didn’t they give me some help, or relieve me of command on the spot? Based upon what he wrote about me, Codispoti should have taken over command on the spot from his incompetent subordinate.
The roots of disaster ran deeply, not only in the clashes at command level, but in the character of the battalion itself. The recent history of 2/7 had been a harsh one. They saw heavy combat around Da Nang during Tet 1969, and from that time until they came off Operation Oklahoma Hills, 2/7 had been the division’s special landing force. They were sometimes rushed from one hot spot to another so quickly that they didn’t get maps of the new AO until well after they were in the bush. When Lugger took over at the end of April, the lieutenant colonel he was replacing looked drained.
The 2/7 Marines had relocated to Dai La Pass; there they worked with the 26th Marines in the Da Nang Rocket Belt to stem infiltration towards the city and the ridge line housing division headquarters. This was the other type of extreme; it was a quiet time, the battalion was stationary—thus, stagnant—and it was only a ten-minute drive to notorious Dog Patch. The more Lugger looked, the less he liked what he saw. The previous hectic pace of operations had left 2/7 in an administrative shambles, and he had to have his CP reorganized and physically cleaned up. He also had to have the drifters rounded up. Dog Patch offered plenty of diversions, from prostitution to a flourishing black market and drug trade, plus Division Ridge had the Freedom Hill PX and other assorted service clubs. It was a real struggle for Lugger to sort out all the Marines wandering around his CP who had no real jobs and get their asses back in the grass.
The battalion’s line companies were spread out in independent, wire-enclosed perimeters, running routine patrols and ambushes in the local villes. Virtually all the company commanders and platoon leaders were young lieutenants. Isolated as they were, as far as Lugger could discern, on little hillocks for what became months on end, most fought the war according to their personal interpretation. This meant a certain number were looking for no trouble. That mood trickled down to the grunts. There were some men any unit would have been proud to claim, and a few wild men who took ears from their kills and prodded villagers in front of them during minesweeps. But most were just counting the days until they could get out of the Nam and the Crotch. They were stale and unenthusiastic, fighting a war of “surprise firing devices”—booby traps—in the mind set of withdrawal.
There was another reason for Lugger’s bitterness. One of the men’s jobs was security for Division Ridge, where the living was quite comfortable. Only a few hundred meters away, the grunts were sweating out night ambushes.
Lugger sensed that his orders were often sandbagged.
He repeatedly requested regiment and division to send his battalion on a defined combat operation. That would have increased casualties, but it made sense. The average Marine in a dangerous situation, where his skills must be sharp and where buddies are depending on him, can be a warrior. That same Marine, when hot, bored, and idle, when exposed constantly to the corruptions of the rear, can respond with the restless immaturity of most nineteen year olds.
So it was in 2/7 Marines. The most volatile problem was race relations. If the blacks’ anger could be honed down to one immediate concern, it was that they were being used as cannon fodder in a war that was of no concern to them.
PFC Norton had originally served in the Fox Company mortar squad; he gave up that skating job and volunteered for one of the company’s rifle platoons because the racial situation at battalion rear was intolerable. As far as Norton was concerned, the white corporal was the leader only on paper. He had finally acquiesced to the black bullies in the mortar squad; and their only aim was to “get over.”
Maj Jim Steele, operations officer at Dai La and one of the most respected officers in the battalion, commented on one of the racial outbursts:
It was just before 2300 and there were rifle shots fired within the camp. I called the CP Security Officer to see if sappers were inside the wire with us. I was advised that the shots had been fired by one of our people—a black soldier—at his platoon sergeant but that he had missed. Shortly after I heard more shots. The next report said that the man was shooting at lights and cans in the company billeting area. This had been going on for approximately thirty minutes so I went down to the company area to see why they hadn’t stopped the guy. As I approached the tent area the only Marines I saw were on the ground hiding behind the two-foot high sandbag walls that honeycombed the area. As I approached, voices yelled at me to get down. “He’s still shooting,” they called as if powerless to do anything. I asked if anyone had been shot. The answer was that no one knew. I really exploded; I told them that if someone might be on the deck needing medical attention while they were all hiding this would be the most sickening spectacle I had ever seen. I moved in the direction they had indicated until I found the guy. He was standing between two rows of tents still holding the rifle, talking to two other blacks. I walked up and the other two became highly agitated and told me to get back because the guy hated honkies and might shoot me. I couldn’t believe my ears! I told the shooter I was counting to three and if he hadn’t dropped the rifle, I was going to blow half of his guts out of his back with my .45. I assumed the classic movie gunfighter stance; I counted to two and the turd suddenly came back to reality and dropped the rifle just in time.
These were not isolated incidents, and Private Norton, an eighteen-year-old country boy, finally volunteered for the grunts. Out there, they needed each other to survive; hatred was pushed below the surface. Some men forgot it altogether.
In the bush, they were a team.
A marijuana subculture also existed in the battalion; it was a fixture among the support personnel, something which affected the rifle companies whenever they came to rehab at Dai La. It was the race problem or the drug problem which resulted in a fragging on Lugger’s eleventh day in command. At 0200, an unknown person or persons tossed two fragmentation grenades under a raised hootch used by officers and staff NCOs of H Company. One grenade was a dud, but the other exploded through the plywood floorboard, wounding a captain, first sergeant, and gunnery sergeant, and killing a staff sergeant under whose cot the grenade went off. From what could be pieced together, the first sergeant—a hard-core lifer who liked to ream out grunts for being unshaven the minute they came in the camp gate from patrol—had been the intended victim. The staff sergeant was an innocent bystander.
The 2/7 Marines had one of the highest crime rates in the division.
Colonel Lugger had indeed inherited a mess, and he busted his ass trying to pump up morale, decipher the troops’ discontent, and punish those who refused to reform. His methods would never have won him a popularity contest; he never had a positive word for anyone, only red-faced screaming over the problems he found.
Lugger thought things were improving slowly. Perhaps they were. Others thought the mutiny had only been shoved beneath the surface. There was talk of military justice being meted out by throwing Marines in barbed wire cages or beating them with rifle butts. “The steps Lugger took to help morale just didn’t work,” said a staff officer. “He used strictness to the point of harassment. This was applied arbitrarily in such a manner as to appear irrational. The troops responded by retaliation. There was a reward on him before we ever went to LZ Ross.”
If any one man ould take credit for being the battalion’s rock as it sat rotting on the Da Nang line, it was Major Steele, who was on his third tour. Unfortunately for all concerned, Steele was rotated to the Division Surveillance Reconnaissance Center the day 2/7 trucked into LZ Baldy.
The battalion was not a cohesive fighting force.
The men had sat stagnant too long. Too many of their officers were brand new, and too many were considered “crap” by the enlisted men. LZ Baldy was their first real operation in months, and the Hiep Duc Valley was no place to clean off the rust they’d accumulated. They were not prepared for the hornets’ nest they’d walked into and, despite the heroism of many of the players, all in all, the battalion was getting its ass kicked. There was no maneuvering, for no matter in which direction a unit moved, it was pinned down. Each platoon of each company—and sometimes each individual—was literally on its own.
1stLt Lloyd L. Lindsey, Battalion Intelligence officer, summed it up when he said they fought the entire battle in a state of shock.
At 1800 on 25 August, Lieutenant Vannoy radioed Lieutenant Brennon to pull out of the paddy. It was getting dark and the Phantoms were coming in one more time to cover their retreat. Lieutenant Vallance’s platoon on the right flank would also be firing cover, then coming out after them.
The men crawled away from the protection of the boulder one at a time, and the NVA on the high ground opened fire with a renewed fury. The point man and rifleman went first, then the wounded corpsman, the squad leader, and finally Brennon and his radioman. They rolled over the first dike under heavy fire, then crawled through a wet paddy to the next dike. The point man jumped quickly over it, then reached back to help the rifleman hoist the seriously wounded corpsman over the berm.
In seconds, NVA snipers killed the first three men.
They collapsed in the mud, shot through their heads and throats. Brennon, his radioman, and the squad leader crawled back to the cover of the boulder. They crouched, exhausted and dirty, and called in more air strikes. The Phantoms came in low and put their ordnance right on the NVA, but it didn’t stop their fire. In the bushes to their left, only fifty meters away, they could hear men moving towards their rear. The NVA were trying to surround them in the dark. Brennon had only two men with him. They’d used M16s, M60s, M79s, Cobras, Phantoms. Well, he thought with a combination of irony and terror, I’m all out of tricks.
There was, however, one more ploy. Brennon radioed the jet pilots to scream in as low as possible, but not drop any bombs. Hopefully, the NVA would duck long enough for the three Marines to jump a dike at each pass. It was slow and scary and some of the snipers continued fighting—one shot the magazine right out of Brennon’s M16.
When the last Phantom made its last pass, the pilot radioed Brennon, “Hey, buddy, today it looks like you’re just SOL.” Shit Outta Luck.
But the maneuver worked; once out of the worst of the crossfire, the three grunts low-crawled the last hundred yards along the dikes into the sanctuary of the tree line behind them that had been secured by the CP and 2d Platoon. They lost the platoon leader lieutenant in the process; he took a bullet in his shoulder. Lieutenant Vallance and his platoon were able to pull back without drawing a shot. Perhaps it was getting too dark for the NVA to see them.
The fight had lasted more than eight hours. Five dead men were left in the field; one man was missing. In Hotel Company, both ammunition and spirits were very low.
The men headed back to link up with Golf Company.
Golf had also pulled back with a dead point man left lying in the dirt. They’d finally consolidated on the main trail and secured the area for Hotel’s withdrawal. While they were waiting, there was movement in the roadside brush, then a shout for help. Golf Two’s corpsman was about to run towards the call, but Staff Sergeant Clements stopped him, “No, stop doc. Think a minute. Might be some turncoats out there.” Clements shouted for the men to show themselves. Two grunts stumbled onto the trail, one shot in the leg and leaning against his buddy. They were pissed. “Those sonsuvbitches! They run off and left us!” The doc bandaged the man’s leg in an abandoned hootch, then directed them down the road to where the Golf CP was set up in another dilapidated hootch. It was doubtful that the two Marines were actually left behind. It was more probable that they were separated in the confusing night move, because the main body of Hotel did not pass through Golf for another thirty minutes. The company filed past in the dark, casualties carried in sagging ponchos between bent figures.
At least one thing went right on 25 August: at two hours before midnight, while Cobras buzz-sawed around their ragged perimeter, Sea Knights touched down with Fox Company’s surrounded platoon. The survivors, almost out of ammunition, quickly dragged their dead and wounded aboard (leaving only one dead man behind in the darkness); the helos departed with lights off before the NVA could coordinate their fires.
The rest of Fox was still on the firing line.
Lorne Collinson and Ron McCoy were dug into a two-man hole on the battalion perimeter. A hedgerow ran across their front and the ground fell away to the stream. The Battalion CP was behind them in the trees, across a paddy which seemed especially open and wide in the dark. Other Marines were dug in at ten-meter intervals down the line. Collinson and McCoy had their M16 rifles resting on the edge of the hole, ammo magazines and frags spread out within easy reach, knives stuck into the dirt before them.
They were sure they would be overrun.
Collinson was twenty years old; he was a Canadian immigrant who believed very strongly in the Marine Corps and the Vietnam War. McCoy was a rich kid who gave the impression he’d signed up on a lark, and was enjoying the hell out of the experience.
But that night, none of that mattered. It was obvious that the NVA had enough men to attempt an assault, which is exactly what Collinson thought they were going to do—with him sitting in a little hole in the front row. McCoy felt it too and mumbled, “We’re not going to see the sun again.” In the dark they exchanged glances which did not need words: we’re dead so forget it and just kill as many of them as you can when they come through that hedgerow. Their whispered conversation drifted to other things. Collinson was surprised at their calm. The situation was beyond their control, so they might as well just relax.