Chapter Sixteen
Only hours before Echo Company was alerted to move into Hiep Duc, 2dLt William Schuler of 1st Platoon was sitting on their hilltop, watching a Sea Knight trying to land in the river valley. He counted tracers from six 12.7mm positions snapping up at it. Schuler’s platoon was north in the LZ Ross AO, picking through the back door of the NVA battalions fighting in the valley. Their order to airlift into Hiep Duc was abrupt.
The company choppered in at dusk, landing a bit east of the 2/7 CP to avoid the antiaircraft guns. As Lieutenant Schuler and his platoon humped towards the battalion perimeter, Lieutenant Lindsey of Battalion Intelligence met them and led them in. Schuler liked Lindsey—an easygoing, humorous guy who’d spent seven months as a platoon leader. Now, though, his voice was edged with fear. He described the events of the day, and said Echo Company had been rushed in because Intelligence was afraid the CP might be overrun during the night.
Schuler had never seen Lindsey rattled before.
As for himself, Lieutenant Schuler had five months in-country; he had killed two men and been recommended for a Silver Star. He was a stocky, pugnacious man, at twenty-two the oldest in his platoon. He had an unauthorized red handlebar mustache, toted an M79 grenade launcher, and was not hesitant to sandbag “unwise” patrols radioed from above. He did not court-martial his men; if someone faked heat exhaustion or was caught sleeping on guard, he allowed the platoon sergeant and squad leader to take care of whatever punishment was required. Schuler thought he did a damn good job and his grunts agreed. He fit in well with the other officers of Echo Company; they led their grunts through comradeship, not by hard-assing them, and all took their turn on point. Like most of the men, however, although Schuler was proud to be a Marine and proud of the unlettered but gutsy kids in his platoon, he was not particularly motivated by the Vietnam cause.
Schuler had enlisted because the other alternatives his privileged upbringing allowed he saw to be ignoble. He wanted to do his duty, but he had no career intentions. At Basic School, most of the new lieutenants shared his outlook. They became known as the Zoo Platoon because of their unruliness; he lost count of how many times men answered the platoon leader with, “What are you going to do if I don’t clean my room? Shave my head and send me to Vietnam?”
Schuler did not lose count, though, of those men who became casualties in their very personal, forgotten war. During the flight into Da Nang with two Basic School classmates destined for the 5th Marines, they joked that, statistically, one would be killed, one wounded, and one would rotate home unscathed. As it turned out, Schuler, who took a blast of shrapnel in the face, was luckiest. Ted, one of the few professionals and a compassionate man, took an RPG in the head in the Arizona. Ken, who also led a platoon in the Arizona, was the one who didn’t make the casualty list. Mental wounds weren’t tabulated. One friend dead, the other an alcoholic; each name was like a drop of acid in the face of withdrawals. One of Schuler’s instructors at PLC, Karl Taylor, was killed charging a machine gun bunker on Go Noi Island. The honor man of his PLC platoon, Bobby Muller, was shot through the chest and paralyzed for life. The distinguished graduate of his Basic School platoon, James Webb, was wounded twice in the Arizona and medically retired. There were more names in Schuler’s history.
At first Schuler seemed to lead a charmed life. After several months with various weapons platoons during Oklahoma Hills, he joined Echo Company in June when they were on Hill 22 at the far edge of the Da Nang Rocket Belt. It was an area of villages, cultivated rice fields, rivers, and crumbling French forts; and it was one of the main infiltration routes to Division Ridge. The numerous contacts they made kept Echo one of the sharpest companies in the battalion; as far as Schuler’s platoon was concerned, they were kicking ass. They called themselves Schuler’s Slayers; their night ambushes and claymores often caught NVA rocket teams trying to slip down the trails. They found a few bodies, lots of blood trails, and bits of flesh. During that period, Schuler lost only two men: a corpsman knocked unconscious when a bullet hit his helmet, and a grunt injured when a claymore blasting cap detonated in his hand. The platoon tripped no booby traps and morale was high.
It unravelled on 15 August when the company convoyed from Dai La to LZ Baldy. During the mortar and sapper attack that night, Schuler and his men had taken refuge under a truck on the airstrip. It was stacked with 105mm artillery rounds; very hairy, he thought. He lost one man wounded that night. At dawn, they stuck chieu hoi passes in the hands of the naked, dead sappers in the wire and posed for photographs. They were trucked to LZ Ross that afternoon—toting liberated U.S. Army gear—then humped to OP Tiger atop a hillock in Happy Valley. Each man had a helmet, flak jacket, full pack, four canteens, thirty magazines of ammunition, six frags, and three mortar rounds.
The company had six heat medevacs in two hours.
The situation was changing for the worse. While the rest of the battalion was piecemealed into Hiep Duc Valley, Schuler’s platoon worked Happy Valley. The heat and humidity were ungodly, and their patrols were not as efficient as before. Their successful ambushing around Hill 22 had come about due to the intelligent plotting of Major Steele. He was aggressive, but prudent. His replacement, whom they quickly dubbed Cement Head, was aggressive, but incompetent. At least Schuler thought so and, for the first time, he began quietly sandbagging orders. They still made almost daily contact with the skeleton garrisons guarding the base camps of the NVA battalions fighting in Hiep Duc. Schuler had never seen anything like it—enemy supply trails wide enough for trucks, more rice caches than they could destroy. Even battalion rear on Ross took casualties from shellings.
The most frequent refrain from the villagers when 2/7 patrols moved into what previously had been a 196th AO was, “GI no come.” The extent of NVA infiltration was a sore subject in the 7th Marines, and the grunts’ angry question was: how in the hell did the gooks dig in so well without being spotted! Marines harshly referred to an armed truce around Hiep Duc, and many men in 2/7 blamed their mauling on the complacency of the Americal Division. To them, the Army had practically abandoned the countryside and hunkered down around their fire bases.
However, it should be taken into account that by any measure, 1969 was an odd year. If Hamburger Hill proved anything, it was that commanders in the U.S. Army were no longer rewarded for closing with and killing the enemy. Their goal, subtly dictated, was to keep casualties down for political reasons.
And, the Americal had more land than troops.
Officers in the Americal Division were quick to defend themselves. To begin with, neither the 1st Marine Division nor the Americal had the resources to secure the Que Sons or Nui Chom; thus, the NVA were afforded a sanctuary overlooking the very lowlands the Army was trying to secure. To the north, the 2d of the 1st Infantry had patrolled actively around LZ Ross until about March; then they were moved to LZ Baldy and an ARVN unit was moved in to replace them. Presumably, support and aggressive spirit were lacking more among the ARVN than in the Americal, and the situation around LZ Ross had deteriorated accordingly. To the south, the 4th of the 31st Infantry mustered a paddy strength of only three hundred men; tied down with static defense, they could not be everywhere in the valley at once. The NVA base-camped along Nui Chom could easily dispatch small groups to scout the valley for suitable defensive positions; when they chose, they could then move down en masse and dig their slit trenches and spider holes in a night or two of ant-like industriousness.
The 7th Marine Regiment was rushed in not because the 196th Infantry Brigade was necessarily incompetent, but because they were spread thin.
The Marines considered themselves to be in virgin territory.
Lieutenant Schuler’s platoon of Echo 2/7 made their biggest find near Nui Chom. Intelligence had targeted a hill as a possible base camp and they swept up after the air strikes, sweating hard under the canopy as they divided along the maze of trails running through the thick underbrush. They found several NVA who’d been killed by the prep fire; they were all young and muscular with crew cuts, and their equipment was first rate, their weapons rust-free. Regulars. Schuler and his radioman, Cpl Paul Bowen, walked up the path leading to the top. In the vegetation, they almost bumped into a North Vietnamese who was cautiously walking downhill on the same trail. The NVA had an AK47 slung over his shoulder. He smiled nervously. Schuler smiled back just as nervously. They both started backing away from each other. Sweathog Bowen was frozen, gripping his M16, screaming, “Shoot him, shoot him!”
Schuler motioned the man towards him and called for him to chieu hoi. The NVA, grinning the entire time, started to unsling his AK47 and Schuler instantly shot him just below the chin with an M79 buckshot round.
He tumbled dead down the hillside.
More NVA popped up in the base camp, all of them either hiding or trying to get away. Corporal McFarlan, a squad leader, found one in a cave. The NVA refused to surrender, so McFarlan ducked in and shot him in the forehead. The dead man turned out to be an NVA doctor. Cpl Ruben Rivera, the platoon sniper, nailed another one trying to slip down a trail. When the men searched his gear, they found dozens of snapshots of women and joked that he must have been a big ass man for the NVA. Schuler gave the photos to Rivera but Rivera, one of the bravest men in the platoon, was also one of the shyest, and he was too embarrassed to take them.
As they secured the camp, Lieutenant Schuler and his platoon sergeant, Sgt Tim Lopez, walked up the trail to the summit. Just as they cleared the top, a couple of AKs cracked up at them. It seemed to be a parting volley and the platoon dug in. They popped smoke near a garden at the peak and a Sea Knight came in to a hover. A machine gun suddenly opened fire. The corpsman beside Schuler dropped with bullets in both legs, and the helicopter reared out as rounds tattooed across the fuselage. The GIs kept bumping into NVA the next few days as they worked the trails leading away from the camp. Several men were wounded and one grunt had his bush hat shot off his head. But the NVA always quickly disappeared; their main concern was Hiep Duc, so they let their bases be picked through. That was great for the morale of Schuler’s grunts: they found documents, rice, weapons, ammunition. They even chased a man with an AK into a tiny ville which turned out to be populated by only women and children—and which had stacks of laundered and folded North Vietnamese Army uniforms.
Then came the call to Hiep Duc Valley.
While F Company shored up the southern half of the perimeter along the river, E Company assumed positions in the trees along the northern half. The area was uncomfortably small and stuffed with people. Sergeant Major Black—a wiry man known as Old Blue—came up. In helmet and flak jacket, and with a creased, weathered face that most closely resembled an ancient hound dog, Black looked like a Marine NCO. He had a solid reputation, which started when he won the Silver Star as a private first class in Korea and culminated with his selection as sergeant major of the Marine Corps. But even he seemed a bit shaken as he spoke to the M60 crews, “If you see anything out there, open up with everything you have.”
Schuler disagreed. The NVA usually probed before an assault, hoping to get the machine guns to expose themselves by firing so they could knock them out first. He stopped the sergeant major with typical bluntness, “Stay away from my men. When an order’s to be given, I give it, not you.”
Schuler personally set each fire team and machine gun team into position and checked their fields of fire. They occupied some slit trenches which honeycombed the area—presumably the work of the NVA—and there was a nervous buzz in the air. Everyone remembered the antiaircraft fire and Schuler could see his grunts drawing together, talking about not leaving anyone behind. The feeling was to go down fighting. As it was, they never had that chance.
The 1st NVA Regiment had halted 2/7 Marines in their tracks on 25 August, and many of the officers and men put the blame on Colonel Lugger. With four battles blaring over his radios at once and rounds zipping over his head, the talk went, he did not know what to do. He was in over his head. Such talk was rippling through the battalion; rumors exaggerated at each level until the corporals and pfcs were mumbling about that chicken-shit colonel who froze and got a lot of good dudes killed. There was talk of fragging.
One rumor put the bounty on his head at $10,000.
Colonel Lugger was not aware of such grumblings, and the situation was not so black and white that anyone was really willing to kill a battalion commander. Most men had only the energy to keep themselves alive, and they followed orders. The immediate concern was to get through the night. G and H Companies had withdrawn to the foothills of Nui Chom on the right flank; E and F Companies were dug in around the Battalion CP, and their perimeter was small and bunched up. The concrete pagoda was a homing beacon to preregistered mortar fire. They were a fat target, but a night move to alleviate the congestion was also a prospect inviting casualties. If the NVA assaulted, perhaps it was better to be close in to maximize firepower.
But the NVA saw no reason to expose themselves.
At 0130, 26 August 1969, the first mortar round thumped through the black stillness. The raid was brief, perhaps a minute, but pinpointed, twenty-four 60mm rounds right into the CP and the LZ clearing behind it. It killed four Marines, seriously wounded twenty-six. Many men had been too exhausted to dig more than shallow holes and their equally exhausted lieutenants had not ordered them to dig deeper; many men had removed their flak jackets and helmets in the muggy heat and were simply sleeping on the ground under ponchos. Lugger blamed his junior officers. But in the eyes of General Simpson and Colonel Codispoti, the problem rested on the shoulders of Colonel Lugger.
By dusk, Private Norton had come to. He sat near the CP pagoda, tagged for a medevac, and talked wearily with some other grunts. Then suddenly, swoosh! swoosh! swoosh! Norton sprang to his feet and ran towards a palm tree. An explosion suddenly blasted him through the air and threw him to the ground like a rag doll. He lay there with a gash from his knee to his butt and shell fragments burned in his stomach and intestines.
He did not pass out again.
Lance Corporal Parr was asleep in the grass, wrapped in a poncho. The first explosion slapped him awake, and he put on his helmet, grabbed his M16, and was pushing up to run to a dike when the world exploded three feet in front of him. The next thing he knew he was mashed against a tree and thinking that the tree was fifteen feet from where he’d been sleeping and, oh Lordy, what the hell’s going on! He didn’t know it, but his entire body was riddled, helmet blown off, right eye blown out, the right side of his skull shattered. Only his left arm was unscathed.
Parr could feel nothing, only a numbness pulsing with hot sensations. The right side of his head seemed hottest of all; he touched his hand to it, feeling neither his head nor hand, thinking, Aw hell, you done it this time!
That was his last thought.
Shields ran up to Norton and got a tourniquet around his leg. Norton was terrified that his crotch had been ripped open, and he argued with his buddy to strike his lighter in the darkness. He finally did. “Naw, man, it’s all right!” Gunships rolled in; then a Sea Knight thumped down. Shields and another Marine rolled Norton onto a hootch door, then laid him on the back ramp of the crammed helicopter. As it lifted up, the crew chief sprawled across him to pump his M16 out the open hatch, and burning hot brass bounced onto Norton’s neck and chest.
The helo flew to Da Nang and Norton finally ended up on a freezing, steel table in the X-ray room, next to a Marine who’d been hit in the chest. Norton suddenly started shivering and yelled for a blanket; then he realized he was going into shock. He’d seen it before and told himself, take it easy, lay back and let it roll.
Norton woke up three days later, in intense pain, tubes sticking out of him; when it was all over, he’d lost part of his intestine.
Parr woke up twenty-seven days later and, when it was all over for him, his skull and face had been reconstructed with plastic surgery and his right kidney and spleen had been removed, as had parts of his right lung, liver, intestinal tract, and stomach.
It was pitch black when the first 60mm mortar round thunked from its tube, but Collinson and McCoy were still awake in their foxhole. Collinson saw the sudden flash across the stream and, before the round impacted, he was shouting, “Incoming, incoming!” and shouldering his M16. He fired rapid, single shots, peppering the brush all around the mortar tube flashes. But he didn’t have tracers and couldn’t tell if he was hitting a thing. The NVA kept pumping and the explosions seemed to walk towards his position. The closest one exploded twenty meters short of his hole, then a few more rounds were lobbed in on the command post area.
The NVA mortar crew ceased firing on their own accord.
Collinson could hear shrieks for corpsmen as he continued to fire his M16 into the darkness. He screamed frantically at McCoy to get the M60 crew, and McCoy hollered for them.
An M79 man ran up, and Collinson, in his excitement and frustration, tried to take the weapon from him. The Marine wouldn’t let go, so Collinson shouted and pointed across the river. The grunt popped off an M79 round but, in the dark, it clipped a tree limb on their side of the stream. They had to duck under the abrupt spray of fragments. They decided not to try a second shot. Collinson stayed in place in his hole, eating at himself—I saw the bastards, why couldn’t I have killed them before they killed my buddies!
Lieutenant Schuler did not hear the thump of the tube, nor was he conscious of the explosion. But he instinctively knew it had been a mortar round which sprayed shrapnel down after hitting the treetops. He grabbed an M16 and tumbled into a slit trench as more fragments stung him, thinking the NVA were going to overrun them. He thought he was dying. He was dizzy from the concussion and blood poured down his face. He realized he was not going to die only when the mumbles and screams of the men around him became intelligible again through the fierce buzzing in his head.
It was black as pitch and blood was in his eyes. Schuler could make out only a few of the faces around him. Sweathog, his radioman, was wounded. Newton, one of Schuler’s fire team leaders, was clutching his leg; it was almost severed. Rivera, his sniper, was slumped beside him in the trench. He was dead. No fire followed the shelling, so Schuler took the radio. He told the company commander they’d taken a direct hit and, in short order, personnel from the company headquarters hustled over to help carry casualties to the LZ.
The landing zone was chaos. Schuler staggered to a spot in the elephant grass, sat down, and mumbled to the corpsman bandaging his head, “I ain’t leaving.” He had shrapnel lodged in his skull, face, shoulders, and back. But he didn’t want to leave his platoon if there was an attack that night and, remembering the ring of 12.7mm guns, he didn’t want to be a sitting duck in a big, lumbering Sea Knight. Colonel Lugger stopped briefly to check on him. A mustached officer came by minutes later, talking hatefully about fragging Lugger. He said the colonel didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and he was collecting a bounty to get rid of him.
It took thirty minutes for the first chopper to arrive.
Five Cobras rolled in first, one right behind the other, pumping 2.75-inch rockets and 40mm rounds around the perimeter, covering the landing of the medevac. The firepower eased Schuler’s fears—like the cavalry in a war movie, he thought—and he allowed a couple of his grunts to help him aboard. Spooky came in after the Cobras and the two Sea Knights made it in and out without drawing a shot. The interior of his bird was dark, vibrating, and crowded. Schuler noticed one of the chopper crewmen looking at the wounded with tears running down his face. He couldn’t see what that man saw until they unloaded on the flood-lit tarmac of the Naval Support Activities hospital in Da Nang. They were all bloody. Their forward observer stood with a bandage around his face; a corpsman unwrapped it, exposing a hollow, red eye socket with tissue hanging from it onto his cheek.
The wounded were carried or helped into a large room with rows of stretchers over sawhorses. Schuler ended up on one, still dizzy, blinking at the caked blood and the bright lights overhead, hearing screams, crying, orders being shouted. He faded out, then woke up as a corpsman used long surgical scissors to cut away his flak jacket and fatigues. He began shouting when the man clipped the laces of his prized, battered jungle boots. He suddenly started shivering in the hot box, and a corpsman hooked up an IV. Then he realized he was waking up and a Navy chaplain was beside his stretcher, giving him last rights.
“Get the fuck outta here. I have no intention of dying.”
The aid station became so crowded that Schuler and several others were transferred to the Army’s 95th Evac on the other side of Da Nang. He walked to the Huey, naked, freezing, carrying his own IV.
In the 95th Evac, an Army medic gave Schuler a shot of novocaine, then an Army doctor used pliers to dislodge the fragments in his skull. Another doctor complimented him on his twist; uh-huh, Schuler thought; he must be talking about a good tennis backhand. When the medics were finally done, Schuler looked in a mirror. His handlebar mustache and chest were caked with dried blood, half his head was shaved and marked with stitches, bandages were around his shoulders. All he had on were some pajama bottoms which didn’t fit, perhaps because he’d lost almost thirty pounds in the bush.
During the night, Golf and Hotel had hiked back a kilometer to the denuded knoll where their battle had started. Lieutenant Brennon sat in the dirt. He had never felt worse. They hadn’t put in enough prep fire, they were spread too thin, and five of his men were dead in that paddy field. Another man was missing—dead, wounded, or passed out from the heat, he did not know which. Brennon wanted to go back under cover of darkness and find those men. But battalion denied permission; Brennon thought the denial devastated what little spirit the grunts had left.
What are we doing, everyone was mumbling. No real mission. NVA everywhere. Little food or water. Intoxicating heat. Heavy casualties.
The result was mass confusion and mass frustration.
At first light on 26 August, Lieutenant Brennon asked for volunteers to retrieve the bodies. In nine months in Vietnam, he’d never seen such spirit. Six men immediately stepped forward. That was Brennon’s only satisfaction from this battle, that most of his men—even ones he’d previously had doubts about—were courageously bucking up. With Phantoms running more air strikes, the seven Marines moved into the paddy. There were only a couple of snipers this time, and Brennon pumped three M16 mags at one muzzle flash. Others fired M60s and M79s on the spot and the aerial observer radioed that he could see a dead North Vietnamese soldier.
Good, Brennon thought, I hope I killed the bastard.
The men found their MIA unscathed. He’d been pinned down and, when he saw how close the fire was coming to Brennon’s escaping group, he thought it best to hunker down and hide. They humped back to the denuded knoll and medevacked him along with the bodies. He was a young, wiry kid named Medina. He ended up at the division psychiatrist; reportedly, the NVA had come out that night to loot the Marine bodies and had kicked him as he played dead.
We’re right back where we started from, Brennon thought; every time we gain something, we pull back to consolidate. Three solid days of contact and we haven’t gained one inch!
This operation, he thought bluntly, is a fiasco.
While Hotel Company was recovering their abandoned casualties, Lieutenant Larrison of Golf Company brought in his own Phantoms: 250- and 500-pounders at a hundred meters, napalm parallel to his lines at thirty meters. Under that barrage, a squad and gun team rushed forward to retrieve the body of the point man killed in the previous day’s ambush. The Marines had just gotten into the trees when four North Vietnamese walked past. They had green pith helmets and fatigues; carried packs, ammunition bandoliers, and AK47s; and they moved through the wood line as though it were private property. The Marines’ first volley dropped two of the NVA in their tracks. A short, sharp firefight broke out, but the squad was able to recover the body. They hustled back across the paddy as Lieutenant Larrison brought in the nape again, covering their withdrawal.