Chapter Nineteen
At 0500 on 28 August 1969, 3d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division began moving towards the objective. The fog on the valley floor hadn’t yet burned off, and the men moved across ghostly green paddies. K and I Companies led the way with L and M Companies following two hundred meters behind; they were in a box formation.
They had gone a kilometer before the firing started.
Kilo One, on the far-right flank, came under AK47 fire; company commander Edwards ordered Kilo Two into an adjacent tree line to provide suppressive fire. Among the trees, Kilo Company overran a bunker and captured one of the NVA 12.7mm AAA guns; as the companies consolidated, Colonel Kummerow ordered Mike Company to continue the momentum of the attack.
Mike entered the paddies in front of the woods, 1st and 3d Platoons up, 2d back; then they wheeled to the right. The skirmish line swept towards the bouldered slope of Hill 381; seventy-five meters from the base, the NVA opened fire again. 3d Platoon on the right took the brunt of it and were pinned down behind the dikes when Captain Stanat ordered 2d Platoon into the fire. Mike Two, under 1stLt William Donaldson, moved quickly through Kilo’s wood line and across the paddies; they had just gotten tied in with the pinned platoon when the NVA snipers turned their sights on them. At the same time, preregistered 60mm and 82mm mortar fire began landing in the rice paddies.
Donaldson’s platoon sergeant was wounded. The lieutenant in command of 3d Platoon was wounded. So was a score of grunts, and the snipers on the high ground added to the toll, opening fire on the two platoons anytime anyone moved.
3d Platoon had taken it bad in the first bursts. An M60 crew up front had been shot, and a corpsman sniped trying to get to them. Donaldson’s platoon lay down cover fire to get them back, and one of his grunts shouted he’d seen smoke on the bouldered slope. An M79 grenadier ran up to fire on the spot, and was shot as soon as he raised himself over the dike. Two Marines moved up to pull him back, and one of them was shot. Two more Marines, one slung with several LAWs, crawled up. They blasted out enough fire to allow others to reach the casualties. Artillery began to hammer into Hill 381. Meanwhile, Captain Stanat radioed 1st Platoon, under 1stLt Anthony Medley, to move into the trees at the base of the hill in order to put the NVA on the slope between 2d Platoon’s fire and that of the two platoons in the open. Medley’s men moved in, yet they suffered the fewest casualties in the company: one man shot through the leg.
The rest of Mike Company had been hit hard—three KIA, thirty WIA—and Stanat called Donaldson for a status report. Donaldson said the snipers temporarily had been quieted, but that the NVA would chop them to pieces with mortars if they stayed in the open paddies. Stanat ordered a withdrawal to the trees behind them, which the platoon conducted in good fashion, bringing back all their casualties and all their gear except the M60 of the most forward team that had been sniped (it was recovered in the morning). Medley’s platoon provided the cover fire, coming back last, when they were almost out of ammunition. The NVA had been invisible in the dense vegetation of the slope, which is why Captain Stanat doubted that the air strikes coming in behind their retreat were doing much good. The jets killed at least one NVA, though: a radioman said he saw a body blown into the air.
During the fire, the battalion command post was several hundred meters away on a ripple of high ground. Among those with Kummerow were Maj Dave Whittingham, his S-3; SgtMaj Nick Gledich, his BSM; and Lance Corporal Monahan, his radio operator. They were like family. Whittingham was a sharp, incisive man, very cool under fire. Gledich was a Yugoslavian immigrant who had found his home in the Corps and was—thoroughly—a sergeant major of Marines. A month after Hiep Duc, when the jump CP was humping with India Company in the Que Sons, they had been hit by mortars in a preregistered spot along a ridge. Colonel Kummerow had been standing, his ear to the radio, when Nick Gledich suddenly shoved him off his feet, tossed his helmet to him, and dove across his legs. Kummerow had cradled his helmet on his head with one arm as a mortar round exploded five feet away; shrapnel punched a hole in his hand, and hit his arm, shoulder, elbow, and foot. But Gledich had absorbed most of the fragments meant for Kummerow—thirty-five pieces in all.
Lance Corporal Monahan was also to become a casualty. Back at LZ Ross after a night patrol, he was unhooking grenades from his flak jacket; the pin on one apparently was corroded, because the safety spoon suddenly popped off, and the explosion blew off his hand. He died of shock. But that was in the spring of 1970, a miserably wet time; this was the summer of 1969, also miserably hot, and Monahan was sweating his ass off. His face was chunky and red under his helmet brim, and his undershirt was soaked under his flak jacket and the tugging straps of his radio, canteens, and equipment. He had a tattoo on one sunburned arm. Monahan was not complaining, though; he was a bright kid from a broken home who had found his place in 3d Battalion, 7th Marines.
Somehow, the CP’s flock of antennas drew no fire.
Colonel Kummerow was on the radio with Captain Stanat. Stanat was a handsome West Pointer and veteran of a previous tour with the 5th Marines, and Kummerow had allowed him to use his discretion in pulling back. Kummerow had his doubts, though; Stanat struck him as burned out and he wondered if the NVA had gotten the upper hand because of a lack of aggressive action.
He eventually transferred Stanat to regiment.
Kummerow ordered Lima Company to continue the frontal attack on Hill 381. There were those who called the Marine Corps the greatest invention for killing young American men, but that connoted that the commanders were stupid or callous. Kummerow was neither. There was no way to rationalize what the Marines were doing, he thought; you just have to do the job. Falling back was out of the question. From what he could tell, that’s what the Americal had been doing for the last ten days. He called it floundering.
Lima Company had pulled off to the right of the Old French Road. Ahead, the firing had grown into a constant cacophony, compounded by the roar of jets and artillery. Word came for two squads from Third Herd to continue down the trail; as always, the grunts had no idea what was going on and just kept walking until Lieutenant Ronald and Sergeant Fuller waved them off to the right. They hiked down a river bank, waded the stream which stank of napalm, then climbed the opposite shore and proceeded into the paddies. Private Besardi trudged along as his squad hiked through the banana trees and heavy brush, draining with each step. The woods were like an oven. The squad finally reached the tree line where Kilo Company had consolidated. Mike Company was firing ahead of them and they pressed on.
Seven bodies greeted the men in the next tree line. The dead were all Vietnamese, lying side by side and riddled with bullets, shot in the head execution style. There was an old man, a husband and wife, three children, and a baby. What in the fuck is going on, Besardi thought. It appeared to be the work of the NVA, an act of vengeance or a warning to the villagers that the NVA withdrawal was only temporary. The scene did not inspire revenge in Besardi, only revulsion at the cruelty, and fear that they were up against such ruthless bastards.
Ten minutes away, Lieutenant Ronald got off the radio and hollered, “All right, everyone on line!” The two squads swept on a skirmish line towards a brushy knoll on which they could see grunts from Mike Company. A kid grunt was wandering below the knoll.
“Hey, who you with!”
The kid was gripping a .45, dazed and helmetless.
“Where’s your company!”
He spoke slowly. “They’re around somewhere.”
The platoon continued into the tree line, past a large village well tucked among the trees, then walked out into the paddy. The boulder-strewn and forested face of Hill 381 faced them. The mud was knee-deep in the first field and Besardi trudged through it as fast as he could, sweating hard, not wanting to be caught in the open. The paddy rose in terraces ahead of them. His squad was behind a grassy knoll; the other squad was to the right of it. To his left, some of his buddies—Reevs, Bailey, Chico with the M60—trotted down a dry path. Besardi headed towards them and was twenty feet away when Bailey hiked up a berm. As soon as he came into view over the earthen wall, the slope of Hill 381 suddenly erupted with AK47 and RPG fire.
Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry rucked up as the sun rose; they were to lead the battalion’s push west to link up with the Marines. Captain Gayler held a quick briefing in their night bivouac—the brushy ditches running through the trees near the Old French Road—and Specialist Hodierne, the reporter, just off the morning resupply bird, photographed them. Hodierne looked around the ragged spot of poncho hootches. The grunts looked drained already, he thought; the heat was smothering in this windless valley and the dust from the ancient paddies practically clogged men’s pores.
He’d never seen a more miserable place.
Captain Gayler knew his men were wrung out; he knew they wanted only to sit there in the shade. But that’s not the way the game’s played. He put his helmet back on, and the company began a cautious hump. They stopped eventually in one part of a tree line facing a hillside of elephant grass dotted with overgrown hootches; that was where Gayler thought Delta 1st of the 46th had been halted three days before. With Lieutenant Maurel’s platoon on point, Bravo Company began moving into the sun-blasted paddy between their tree grove and the hill. The North Vietnamese—who were still in place—let them get halfway into the clearing. Then an NVA with a captured M60, tucked in one of the hedgerows at the base of the hill, opened fire.
One GI fell dead. Everyone else scrambled for cover. Private Jandecka, under fire for the first time, blindly followed several GIs as they rushed forward and flopped along a bank at the base of the hill, only to find themselves directly under the machine gun which put bursts over them as they pressed against the berm. A second NVA joined in from somewhere on the hill, using a captured M79 to lob grenades across the paddy and into the tree line. Another one of the new guys caught it, a splatter of red-hot shrapnel ripping open his back.
Jandecka had never heard such screams.
The dike that shielded the forward elements of the command group in the trees was about four feet high. Hodierne pressed against it as the M79 rounds began crashing through the branches; he thought, well, at least I don’t have to be here. That always made him feel better. The North Vietnamese were so close that he could hear the man snapping open the grenade launcher to eject spent casings and load fresh rounds. He sensed that the NVA were playing for time, that they did not plan to counterattack. The GIs around him felt it too. Many tucked themselves behind a piece of cover, heads down, and that was that. Hodierne commiserated with them: it’s a bad war; this battle has no point; and why get killed for one more dried out, useless rice paddy?
Other grunts were carrying the fight to the enemy. Brave, he thought, just plain brave.
Jandecka was one of those doing more than sitting it out, although his actions were mostly the result of inexperience and nerves. Pinned down under the NVA gun, he imagined some of the men slipping around the flank. He crawled down the berm to their left to keep it covered, then pushed up to get a good look. Almost as soon as he did, he saw the brush stir ahead of him. In that instant, an AK47 cut loose. Jandecka tumbled backwards as the rounds slammed squarely into his chest; then he quickly swept his hand over his shirt and realized there was no blood. The NVA had fired low and he’d caught only a spray of ricocheting pebbles and rock-hard dirt. GIs beside him were returning the fire; they couldn’t see the M60 position for all the brush, but men across the paddy could see the smoke and muzzle flash and hollered directions as the men along the berm blindly pitched grenades. Jandecka threw a few at the spider hole. It seemed futile.
Captain Gayler personally fired two LAWs into the machine gun position, but they had no effect. It was a boiling day and the artillery recon sergeant, crouched with the company headquarters, finally muttered angrily, “I’m tired of this.” With that, he scooped up two hand grenades and clambered over the berm. He began easing up to the spider hole along the cover of the dikes. At the same time, Private Brantley—the soldier who’d been chased into the infantry for fear of a court-martial—was also moving forward. Along with his squad leader sergeant, he pushed through the hedgerow and, sweaty and scratchy, pulled the pin on a frag. He could hear the expended brass ejecting from the M60, but when he rose up, another hidden NVA pumped off a burst from his AK47. Brantley flung himself down as his squad leader emptied his M16 at the sound, either killing or cowing the NVA; then Brantley got up again. He was looking right at the North Vietnamese in the spider hole. The NVA was hefting the M60 towards him. In that instant of silence, the recon sergeant made his break; he dashed across the last clearing amid shouts of, “Get your ass down!,” then jumped the berm where Jandecka’s group was crouched. Brantley lobbed his frag into the spider hole and ducked, just as the sergeant pitched in his and spun around, diving back behind the berm.
There was a muffled explosion. Brantley didn’t even waste time to look; he was convinced he’d killed the sniper. Jandecka, however, heard GIs shout that they saw the NVA leap from the hole right after the grenades went off and run bleeding into the thicket behind him. As the grunts discovered later, the spider hole had a slanted floor that led to a small hole in the corner. The grenades had rolled into this angled chamber.
It was maddening.
The NVA may or may not have received a fatal wound. He stopped shooting, which was the break Jandecka’s group needed. Jandecka ran with his heart in his throat across the paddy, then jumped the four-foot berm. To everyone’s surprise, there was not a shot fired at them.
As Brantley and his squad leader shimmied back through the hedgerow, the NVA with the M79 opened fire again. Brantley crouched with Staff Sergeant Sheppard, returning a little fire, until he suddenly realized they were all alone. He sputtered out, “Shep, the motherfuckers’ve left us!” to which Sheppard calmly replied, “Yeah, man, it’s time we got out of here too.” Which is just what they did.
Bravo Company collected itself back in the tree grove; Sergeant Allison of 1st Platoon took a small party back down the footpath to secure an LZ in the elephant grass. The dead man had been left in the open, but thirteen others had shrapnel wounds or heat exhaustion. The LZ was a slight basin behind the trees; the GIs popped smoke, and a couple Hueys were able to come in quickly, take the casualties aboard, and kick out a resupply of ammo. Lieutenant Maurel of 3d Platoon was among those medevacked with light shrapnel wounds, and Staff Sergeant Sheppard took over.
No one was firing, so while the rest of Bravo Company flaked out under what passed for shade, Lieutenant Monroe and the platoon sergeants joined Captain Gayler; they were the only two officers left. They sat amid the trees, helmets off, soaked with sweat. They were going to hit the knoll again, but this time from another angle. The squad that was guarding their rucksacks at their camp was called up to reinforce. No Cobra gunships were available, and air and arty could not be employed because the Marines were only a few hundred meters away and their position was not clearly known.
It had been three hours since the fight began.
Bravo Company moved out again, treading cautiously. They came under fire from the hill as soon as they tried to outflank it. Staff Sergeant Sheppard’s platoon had the rear this time, with little to do except wait. Jandecka dragged himself under a small plant with large leaves to escape the sun’s blaze; he sipped water from his canteen top, sloshed it around his parched mouth, then spit it back in the canteen. Finally, word was passed to move forward and join the line facing the hill.
Another GI had been killed getting into position.
But the NVA had been quieted, and the lead platoon began its move up the brushy hillside of terraced dikes. The NVA let them get strung out, then laid down a withering fire which knocked down two GIs in their tracks and pinned down the fifteen men in the lead. The platoon sergeant was up front with them; he found himself pressed against a dike as the NVA with the M79 fired grenades down at him. M79 rounds spin-arm after fifteen meters of flight; the NVA was so close that his grenades were slamming against the dike above the sergeant’s head and ricocheting off without exploding. The sergeant threw grenades back at the thumping blast of the grenade launcher, but the NVA was crouched invisibly among some vines and the frags did not reach him. The sergeant hollered for more grenades.
Sergeant Allison collected frags by going from man to man in his platoon, which was watching the flanks. He carried the frags up a small rise; the crest was too exposed to get over, but he was able to toss the grenades to a GI on the other side. Allison did not see what happened next. Hodierne did. The GI nearest the stranded group was told to crawl to them with the grenades. He refused and moved back to where the medics had dragged the newly wounded. He was moaning to a medic about his nerves when an NVA M79 exploded nearby and he went down with a piece of shrapnel, a Purple Heart, and a ticket out. Nothing’s fair.
In the tree line, Brantley lay with his squad RTO as Captain Gayler polled his platoon leaders on the radio. Their consensus was that it was time to get out; there were probably only a dozen NVA, but they were dug in and held good fields of fire. Gayler wanted men from each platoon to flank the hill and provide cover fire so the stranded men could crawl back. Brantley got off the radio and called to the GI nearest him, Private Doughty, to join that group. “Keep your ass down and if you guys can’t do the job, get the hell back!”
Doughty was a steady dude. “Fuck it,” he shouted back, referring to the NVA fire, “it don’t mean nothin’!”
Doughty tagged Jandecka and they decided to crawl forward to the right of the point platoon. There was an old French hootch, with a sniper in the rafters. Doughty borrowed a grenade launcher and pumped two rounds into the hootch; then came the distinct clatter of a weapon hitting the hard-packed floor. They pushed off, Doughty in the lead as they crawled along a hedgerow that led up the hill. They reached a clearing. Jandecka slinked into a spider hole, feeling too exposed for comfort, but Doughty kept going and disappeared into the brush. A minute later, there was a burst of automatic fire, then the terrible racket of fire being exchanged. Then it was quiet again. Jandecka had squeezed a couple of bursts at the sound of the NVA weapons, then sat tight, weapon ready in his hands, glancing nervously into the thick vegetation around him.
Suddenly, Doughty dragged himself out of the bushes, yelling, “Charley, I’m hit, Charley, I’m hit!” He collapsed in front of the hole. Jandecka hollered back for help and Frank Eates ran up with two GIs; they grabbed Doughty and dragged him back, running in a fast crouch, while Jandecka came out last covering the rear.
Doughty had about eight rounds in him.
They were still trading M16 for AK47 bursts in the tree line when Brantley hustled back to where Doughty lay. He was on his back in the brittle grass, stripped of all gear except an M16 bandolier around his waist, breathing shallowly, eyes open but unfocused. He should have died on the spot; Brantley wondered if he’d forced himself to crawl back so he could die among his friends. A buddy knelt beside him, shirt off, cigarette jammed in his mouth, face streaked with sweat; with one hand, he clasped Doughty’s hand, with the other he held a piece of C-rat cardboard over Doughty’s face to shield him from the sun. There was little the medics could do. Hodierne kneeled there, photographing the scene.
Brantley said he was sorry. Doughty’s eyes were open, but there was no way to tell if he heard.
No medevac was immediately available.
It probably wouldn’t have mattered. Doughty was dead within minutes. He just stopped breathing, his eyes still open, and Brantley slumped into the grass, eyes brimming with tears. He was awash in hurt and guilt, and anger.
In the big picture, Private Doughty might have died in vain; but he and the few others who’d moved forward had put out enough fire to allow the fifteen men pinned on the hillside to crawl back. They had left the two who’d been shot, and no one had been able to check on them. Captain Gayler didn’t want to pull back until he knew for-sure there was nothing else for them to do. Several troopers donned gas masks, heaved CS grenades at the knoll, and rushed forward into the cloud. They ran back within minutes to tell the captain that both men were definitely dead.
Gayler passed the word to withdraw.
The medics rolled Doughty into a body bag, zipped it up, and a strung-out Brantley helped carry it as they straggled back down the trail.
PFC Tom Bailey stepped atop the berm and instantly collapsed in the sudden torrent of AK47 fire from the facing hill. In the next moment, his squad leader, Cpl John Reevs, bounded forward to pull him back. He too was blown down. Their corpsman, Doc Johnson, scrambled up next and helped get the two Marines to cover behind the berm. He hunched low and wrapped bandages: Bailey had an AK round through his neck, Reevs had two in his gut.
The rest of the two squads frantically ran from the open paddy as dust kicked up around them. The bouldered slope ahead seemed to be blazing with a thousand rifles. More rounds cracked through the air from the tree line to their left. They threw themselves down along the grassy green dike.
They were pinned.
Besardi and his buddy Sterling found themselves to the left of the mound—where the worst of the crossfire was hitting—trying to practically burrow into the berm. The air above them was electrified. RPGs slam-banged in, shrapnel whizzing in all directions, and Besardi thought simply and horribly: Jesus fucking Christ. Marines along the berm returned fire, shoving M16s and, maybe, helmet and eyes over the dike; they’d squeeze off a second’s worth of fire, then tuck back down as the AK rounds cracked back. Besardi and Sterling emptied magazines in two or three bursts, getting quick glimpses of the NVA among the boulders, but having no time to aim at them. The sun was hard over them.
Besardi was hunched back down when a terrific explosion suddenly bounced him and Sterling back into the paddy. Besardi lay there, out of touch with his senses, ears ringing, eyes closed, his entire body numb. Only his mind was clear. Am I dead? His buddy Joe Johnson was screaming and it cut through the fog, “You guys all right, you guys all right!”
Besardi realized he was alive.
He also realized he was uninjured, and made a dash on all fours back to the protection of the dike. Chico was firing his M60, and Turner and P. K. Smith were firing theirs; Besardi noticed several men trying to bring back the wounded Bailey and Reevs. They were to the right of the mound, shielded somewhat from the crossfire.
Ball, Dean, and a third Marine were laboring with Reevs in a poncho, and they were hollering to Besardi, “C’mon, Charly, we gotta get John back!” To reach them, Besardi would have to scramble away from the cover of the dike and rush around the knoll. He froze. His buddies were stooped with their comrade, shouting for help; their faces were a mixture of anger and pleading. Well, fuck it, Besardi thought, here I go; and he jumped into the paddy, landed painfully, and scrambled up.
It should have been a five-minute walk back to the tree line with the village well, but it turned into a death march. Even with four men dragging the poncho, it was a load, and the paddy mud slowed each step. The sun soaked them. Reevs grimaced from within the poncho, his voice a strained mumble against the pain, “Leave me alone, leave me alone, I’m gonna die, go back and help those guys out.” They answered in labored gasps, “Naw, John, man, you’re gonna be all right.… We’re gonna getcha back, we’re gonna getcha back.”
They had just reached the trees when Reevs looked up and said calmly, “It was really nice knowing you guys.”
The tree line had been secured by other elements of Lima Company, and the corpsmen had set up a hasty collection point among the trees and terraced paddies. They hustled Reevs to a corpsman and set down the poncho; the man quickly went to work. He ripped off the bloody shirt, exposing the two small entry holes in Reevs’s side; he hooked up an IV and tied bandages. His four buddies stood in a huddle around the corpsman until he stopped and looked up.
“I’m sorry, but your buddy’s dead.”
Besardi couldn’t accept it. He just stood there in a daze until one of them mumbled, “C’mon, let’s go back up and help out the rest of the guys.” They started plodding back towards the dike. The first person they saw was Turner, the machine gunner who didn’t have to be there. He was stumbling back between two grunts, arms over their shoulders, blood running from shrapnel wounds in his eye and throat. The entire line was falling back with them.
By the time Besardi got back to the tree line, the casualties of Lima and Mike Companies had been dragged there and the corpsmen were working frantically. Besardi slumped into an exhausted stupor by the well. Four Marines were coming back, carrying the body of a fifth Marine by his arms and legs, chest up, head hanging and flopping grotesquely as they walked. There was a gaping hole in his chest. Naw, it can’t be, Besardi thought. He looked closer. Aw, no. It was Big Red Davis of Alabama, a buddy from boot camp and infantry training. Besardi had just talked to him the day before on LZ West: he was with Mike Company and in good spirits because he was under the impression that his company was to be the reserve. Besardi wandered back among the casualties. One of the corpsmen, a kid, leaned in a crouch against a berm. He was sobbing hysterically. There weren’t enough corpsmen to help all the wounded, and for a second Besardi had the evil impulse to shoot the bastard. Instead, he tried to coax the kid back to reality. The corpsman couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t respond.
Two NVA 12.7mm AAA positions were firing from the vicinity of Hill 381, mostly at the Phantoms flashing past. The grunts of 2d Platoon, Kilo Company, 3d Battalion, 7th Marines—resting at the base of the ridge line after their bout with snipers that morning—had the misfortune of hearing one of the gun positions. The platoon leader, 2dLt Arnold C. Nyulassy, radioed the company commander and the report followed the chain of command, until it came right back to the platoon.
They were to find and destroy the gun position.
The grunts were fatigued to the bone, murdered by the heat. But when Lieutenant Nyulassy said to saddle up, they pushed themselves one more time with a courage born of pride, discipline, and numbness. They advanced towards the ridge, then slumped into the underbrush as Phantoms ran another mission against Nui Chom and the suspected location of the gun. The grunts didn’t know it but their attack was visible from Landing Zone West, and the command staff of the 7th Marines Regiment trained their binoculars northward. Colonel Codispoti, the ever-present cigar jutting from his jaw, was one observer; so was the reporter, Sterba, who’d hitched to West on the 196th InfBde C&C and who described the air strike:
Let me tell you a little about Marine pilots. They supported their grunts. I had never seen fighter pilots come in so low and stare down the .51s like these guys. The Air Force seemed to have a rule about not going below 2,000 feet to drop their napalm and bombs. These guys came in right on the deck. Or they’d dive straight into the .51 fire coming from the side of the ridge and unload their napalm at the last second. But each time, when they made another pass, at least one NVA would start shooting his .51 at them again. It must really have been dug in.
The last jet screamed over by 1400—the 12.7mm delivering a parting volley—then 2d Platoon of K/3/7 got moving again, trudging uphill through the thick vegetation of the ridge line. Fifty meters up, the AK47s commenced firing and everyone flopped in place as the bullets chopped the high brush above them. The fire seemed to be coming from one spot straight ahead. Lieutenant Nyulassy, who could have been no less tired than his men, was up shouting encouragement and directions, and the grunts fell into a ragged line again. They fired and threw grenades, and scrambled uphill. The NVA fire stopped; they found an abandoned bunker, a couple spider holes, and bloodstains, but no bodies.
The squads maintained their line, then bogged down in a field of shoulder-high elephant grass. Ten meters into the briar—as the grunts were shouldering through the sharp rows of blades, increasing their frustrated exhaustion, getting disorganized in the tangle—the North Vietnamese ambushed them from higher up on the ridge.
The 12.7mm and several AK47s scythed the grass.
Everyone scrambled for cover.
LCpl Danny R. Emery had wandered off to the right before the shooting started, humping his M60, his partner tagging along, humping the ammunition. When the NVA fire hit the center of the platoon, Emery and his partner were able to crawl uphill. The 12.7mm was firing from somewhere to their left, invisible amid the vines and trees; Emery cut loose at it from a crouch, raking his M60 back and forth, his assistant gunner keeping the ammo bandolier from jamming; both men were soaked with sweat. A piece of shrapnel hit Emery. He kept firing.
The 12.7mm kept firing too, keeping the platoon pinned. LCpl Jose Francisco Jimenez, a small, wiry fire-team leader, got up. No one had ordered him to. He simply crashed through the elephant grass, rushing uphill right into a North Vietnamese who popped from a spider hole to shoot him. Jimenez cut him down in an instant with his M16, then was upon two more of them. He blew them away in their spider holes. He was near the 12.7mm, and he dropped on the tangled slope; yanked the pins from one, two, then a third grenade; and hurled them into the spot of brush from where the gun seemed to be firing, rushing up after the explosions, firing on the run. The 12.7mm gun was in a shallow pit on a tripod, its gunner slumped dead. Lieutenant Nyulassy was on Jimenez’s heels, shouting the platoon up the fifty meters to the gun pit. Then another group of AK47s screamed from the right flank. Lance Corporal Emery fired his M60 at them as Lance Corporal Jimenez charged again. He threw frags, then ran up to pump his M16 into two North Vietnamese.
In a matter of moments, Jimenez had killed six NVA regulars and silenced the machine gun. He paused for a second near the last two victims when an AK47 suddenly cracked from the left, hitting him in the side of his head.
Jimenez was killed instantly.
Under the renewed fusillade, Lieutenant Nyulassy got most of his men back behind a knoll. He tried to sort out the situation. The parched elephant grass had caught fire, probably from their tracers, and burned out of control. The NVA were firing from above them; they seemed to have a slit trench along the ridge which allowed them to avoid the Marine fire and pop up anywhere along the hill. The NVA were not using tracers, so it was virtually impossible to zero in on them. Jimenez’s body was sprawled by the gun bunker, and the Marine Corps does not abandon their dead. Nyulassy silently cursed the Americal Division for allowing the NVA to dig in so well, then called for volunteers to get Jimenez back. He was mightily impressed by the response. Seven men joined him.
Campos
Bosser
Sherrod
Davis
Jones
Dirken
Doc Sampson
They crawled uphill on their hands and knees, Nyulassy up front and Doc Sampson coming last, heads down under the AK fire and the hot smoke of the brush fire. The NVA went mad behind their guns as soon as the Marines neared the clearing where Jimenez lay, sending everyone down except Sherrod. He fired into the snipers—it looked as though he got one—then tumbled with an AK47 round through his neck. In the next moment, Chicom grenades were thrown downhill onto them. The explosions bowled over Nyulassy, tearing his right arm with shrapnel; Campos was also wounded. They scrambled back. The AKs and Chicoms kept coming. Their return fire seemed to have no effect.
Bosser tried again and was shot in the head.
Sherrod was hauled behind a spot of cover and Doc Sampson patched him. He was dying, and Jones and Dirken sat with him talking simple, reassuring things to him.
Davis was killed trying again.
The fight was in its second hour when they finally pulled back, leaving Jimenez’s body under the guns. An M60 team on the right flank suddenly opened fire; the gunner hollered that he’d seen two NVA creeping up on them. He had nailed one, and chased them both off.
2d Platoon consolidated on the slope as two squads from 1st Platoon, under Sergeant Frank, came up. Lance Corporal Emery and another M60 team blasted uphill, while two men with M79 grenade launchers crept forward and lobbed HE and CS rounds along the ridge. Sergeant Frank led his men up through the burnt patch of elephant grass. Then the wind suddenly shifted and the blaze sprang up behind, driving them forward. They stumbled confused in the smoky tangle right into the snipers’ sights; two Marines were killed and one was wounded in the sudden popping. They fell back, dragging their casualties, as soon as the fire burned down. Another Marine was wounded during the retreat.
Lieutenant Nyulassy noticed that the corpsmen with the re-act platoon seemed stunned. They hid in the deep grass and treated only those who were dragged to them. Doc Sampson, however, was rushing out to help carry back the wounded. Nyulassy got in radio contact with an aerial observer in a Bronco, who fired WP rockets along the ridge. They exploded in a smokescreen of thick, white clouds, and the Marines raised a cacophony of M16, M60, and M79 fire as another team rushed forward. Jimenez’s body was on fire; a grunt got close enough to grab him but Jimenez tore loose in his hands.
1st and 2d Platoons finally fell back as Phantoms came in; between each pass, they could hear one or two AK47s firing into the sky.
The men had shown a lot of guts taking out that 12.7mm, and they’d paid the price. Six Marines were dead, nine wounded. Although the subsequent morning sweep found two NVA in a shallow grave, the platoons were credited with a total of only twelve kills. The sweep also found the burnt body of Jimenez. For their valor in dying to recover a dead buddy, LCpl Johnny S. Bosser and PFC Edward A. Sherrod were posthumously awarded Silver Stars; PFC Dennis D. Davis was awarded a Navy Cross. LCpl Jose Francisco Jimenez—who was from Mexico City and nicknamed JoJo by a squad that considered him one good dude—was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
For a moment, as he sat atop the paddy dike, Besardi thought he might be going insane. He slumped head down, his weapon heavy in his hands, hair soaked with sweat, face dripping. The heat was incredible. So was the stench. The corpsmen had lined the wounded and dead below the berm in preparation for the medevacs, and Besardi stared at the bodies. They’d been covered with ponchos, so only battered jungle boots showed, but he knew Big Red and John Reevs were among them, and they’d been good dudes, damn good men. A group of villagers tramped down a nearby dike, herded along by Gunny Martinez. The company gunnery sergeant, a ferocious-looking and respected man, had cleared them out of the family bunkers of some hootches discovered in the woods. Besardi looked at the bodies and the villagers, his mind burning up. Oh what the fuck, what the fuck are we doing, all these dead and you fucking cocksuckers are helping the NVA! Besardi was eighteen and couldn’t cope with what he was experiencing. He wanted to blow them all away, shoot them off the dike. He didn’t.
A wounded grunt walked up and told him, “Hey listen, Bailey wants to talk to ya.” Bailey lay in the paddy, a thick bandage around his neck. His voice was scratchy. “You were right, I should’ve listened to you,” he whispered to Besardi, who was kneeling beside him. Bailey was a spunky kid who always wanted to walk point. He was too reckless, though, and Besardi had tried to slow him down. Now he lay there, tears in his eyes, thinking he had somehow walked his platoon into the ambush on the dike. His voice cracked. “You told me to go slow, you told me to go slow.”
Most of Besardi’s squad were casualties.
Reevs was dead. Bailey was shot in the throat. Turner had shrapnel in his eye and throat. Roy Lee Hammonds from Texas had a bloody, ten-inch gash down his arm. Vaughn was hit by shrapnel. So was P. K. Smith. P. K. had taken a blast while he and Turner were manning their M60 on the dike. He moaned, sounding very frightened and very homesick, “This is it, this is it, I’m going home, this is my last one, I’m going home, I’m going home.” It was P. K.’s third Purple Heart and everyone was glad he was going home, but grunts aren’t very maudlin and Besardi chided him, “Fuck you, Smith, that’s just a little scratch. You ain’t goin’ nowhere!”
The truth was he wasn’t out yet. Mortar rounds began exploding around their position. Grunts and corpsmen rolled for cover and the wounded lay terrified and immobile, but the NVA didn’t have their exact location. None of the rounds hit home.
Finally, a Sea Knight came in behind the tree line and landed in a dry paddy, rotor wash swirling dust high; the back ramp was down and grunts hustled through the whirlwind, humping in the loaded ponchos. No sooner had they gotten the last casualty inside than the mortar tube began thumping again. The overloaded Sea Knight pulled pitch, then banked to gain altitude and passed too near the side of Hill 381. Green tracers began whizzing past the helicopter, but somehow it rose through the fire and flew out of sight.
Besardi stood rooted, amazed, thanking God.
Lieutenant Ronald came up with the platoon’s reserve squad. He’d taken some RPG shrapnel but had refused evacuation. He told Besardi he was the squad leader and that they were moving back towards Hill 381. Besardi didn’t have much of a squad left—only Ball, Dean, Johnson, and Sterling—but they scrounged what ammunition they could from that left in the LZ by the casualties and got going.
Lieutenant Ronald said to move out.
“Okay,” Besardi replied, “I’ll walk the point.”
“No, I’ll walk the point.”
Lieutenant Ronald led the way, Private Besardi walked slack, and they worked their way into a tree line about forty yards back from where they’d been mauled. They set into some dugouts that appeared to be abandoned NVA positions. The grunts in the reserve squad asked questions while the survivors of the first two squads sat shocked and silent. The sun was orange along the ridge line as more Phantoms crashed their bombs and napalm into the crest. Artillery rounds slammed against the bouldered slope. Between salvos, the men could see NVA moving along the face in groups of six or eight, toting AK47s and RPGs, leaves secured to their pith helmets. Oh shit, Besardi thought, don’t tell me they’re going to assault. But they didn’t.
In fact, the 1st NVA Regiment was pulling out.