Chapter Seven

Ambush

In the late morning of 17 August 1969, the 110 men of Delta Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, 196th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, began moving back towards Landing Zone West. They humped single file, moving like sleepwalkers under a ferocious sun. It was 110 degrees in the Song Chang Valley and the grunts were humping a heavy load. They had the full rucks they’d left LZ West with four days before, and a full complement of ammunition: their searching had not uncovered the enemy.

The company “zapper” squad was on point. They were the elite of the outfit, all with at least six months in-country, who had volunteered to conduct the scouting and night ambushes. Their radio call sign was Destroyer 6. They followed a trail near the base of LZ West. Specialist Ferris was about three men back from the point, with the squad’s PRC25 radio strapped to his back. It weighed twenty-five pounds, a hefty addition to his rucksack and bandoliers, and Ferris trudged listlessly, dripping sweat. It was nearly 1700.

The point man suddenly opened fire.

Ferris snapped forward. There they were—three North Vietnamese with khaki fatigues, packs, and AK47 assault rifles. He got a quick look at their backs as they bounded down the trail. The two groups had almost walked into each other. The squad gave chase; Ferris jogged with the handset to his mouth, telling the company commander what was going on. The NVA kept running, pausing only to fire quick bursts, dashing deeper into the brush. The squad moved in behind them and was lucky enough to spot one crouched along a stream.

The NVA died in the abrupt explosion of several M16s.

GIs checked the body as others fanned out to secure the area. Ferris casually watched the grunts walk down a berm towards a thick tree line. Then those trees erupted. Ferris instantly dropped, shoving himself into the dirt behind a dike. He’d never experienced such concentrated fire. He forced himself back up, hand tight around his M16 pistol grip, spent shells flying out. He could see muzzle flashes and smoke. The rest of the company was in a grove back across the paddy. Some of them were firing too. Ferris and a buddy low-crawled to them along a dike, chins in the dirt. They shouted for ammunition and grenades from the guys, then started back. Ferris jumped off a berm and landed wrong; his back throbbed. The crawl under fire seemed to take forever. They finally bellied into position along the last berm and slung the bandoliers through an opening in the brush where the rest of the squad was pinned down and returning fire.

They shot it out for almost an hour before the shadows of dusk allowed them to crawl away. They got back to the company perimeter in the trees in absolute wonderment that they were still alive. One GI had been wounded; one had been killed. He was a tall, skinny country boy; his best buddy Harper, another quiet country kid, was an emotional wreck.

The body of James Hurst had been left.

It was already dark as Delta Company dug in. It was a small perimeter with a roofless hut in the center, nicknamed the French Hootch because it had cement walls. The shooting had petered out when the zapper squad pulled back and a resupply chopper, Rattler 26 out of Chu Lai, made its approach; as soon as it came within range of the tree line across the paddy, there was another torrent of fire. Both pilots were wounded in their armored seats, but managed to limp the Huey to LZ Center. Then, at 1900, the NVA made a probing attack on Delta Company. The blind exchange in the dark didn’t last long, but another GI was killed and two more were wounded. From the amount of enemy fire, it seemed they had walked into a NVA battalion. To say the grunts were stunned, tired, and scared would be barely to scratch at the surface of their emotions.

It was a long night.

In the morning, 18 August, Lieutenant Colonel Henry and Sergeant Major Gutterez stood on a bunker at the edge of LZ West with the crew assigned to fly the 4–31 C&C that day. They were charting their flight down to Delta’s position in the valley and, since it would be under fire, they were being very precise: “Okay, we’ll go around that tree, then.…” Delta Company was running low of ammunition. After an emergency resupply of it was stacked in the Huey, the men climbed aboard and the helicopter bore down the jungled hillside. There was not much fire on the way in—Henry thought the NVA were too stunned—and the Huey hovered quickly over a clearing beside the French Hootch. The crew shoved out the ammo, then the Huey orbited around and sailed uphill. This time, they took heavy fire. Henry had told the two door gunners not to fire since Delta’s perimeter was not well-defined in the bramble of trees and bushes; so he and they could just sit white-knuckled as several rounds punched loudly through the floor and out the metal roof. Back on Landing Zone West, they counted bullet holes in the rotor blades.

Henry was very concerned about Delta Company’s situation. The new company commander, the senior first lieutenant who had taken over ten days earlier, was too green. From monitoring the radio transmissions within the company net, Henry got the impression that the platoon leaders and troopers did not have the same confidence in him that they’d had in Whittecar and Mekkelsen. Captain Whittecar was having the exact same thoughts. From the LZ bunker line, he’d watched the entire action with binoculars and, since he knew both the terrain of the valley and the men of Delta like the back of his hand, he had been in radio contact with the new lieutenant throughout. The man sounded like he was in over his head and knew it: his voice cracked with fear, confusion, almost shock. The company had frozen in place. The North Vietnamese now had the upper hand.

That’s when Henry asked Whittecar to resume command of Delta Company. He eagerly agreed. Whittecar then radioed the lieutenant, noting that he’d be pulled back to LZ West as soon as he could get the helicopter in.

The sigh of relief in his response was obvious.

Whittecar had a Huey on the LZ West pad loaded with ammunition and water containers; then they made the short hop down the mountain. They kicked out the supplies in that grassy clearing beside the hootch, then he hopped out and headed for the command post. He walked fast, helmet on, M16 in his hands, pumping adrenaline. He was only vaguely aware of the lieutenant passing him to board the helicopter. Whittecar didn’t trust him enough for a situation report and they didn’t even exchange glances.^* Whittecar, who wore eyeglasses and had an angular jaw and was thirty-one years of age, was something of a hero to the nineteen-year-old grunts of Delta Company; as he strode through the high elephant grass, the looks of dejection turned to astonishment and relief.

One trooper was young enough, scared enough, and proud enough to exclaim, “My God, I’m glad you’re back!”

“Well, let’s get this damn show on the road!”

John Whittecar had grown up in Glenrock, Wyoming, the son of an oil field worker. His early years were routine. He graduated from high school, did a hitch in the Navy, then joined the men in the oil fields. It wasn’t the life he wanted, so in 1961 he reenlisted, this time in the U.S. Army. His company commander in West Germany recommended him for OCS, and he was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1965. Whittecar was soon leading a rifle platoon of the 1st Infantry Division in III Corps, north of Saigon. That was a 1966–67 tour, and afterwards he contemplated taking his Silver Star and Purple Hearts and quitting the service. Things just didn’t make sense. The national leaders did not seem able to come to grips with what was necessary to finish the job they’d started. His platoon had operated near the Cambodian border and their observance of that imaginary line had aided only the enemy. That was just one example of their self-imposed restraint, and the enormous waste of it ate at him like acid. What hurt even worse was his homecoming; if he wore his uniform in public, there were strangers who’d call him a baby-killer and his wife a whore.

Whittecar stayed in the Army. He focused on doing a job and in November 1968 he was rotated back to Vietnam with captain bars and orders for HQMACV in Saigon. He pulled strings for another combat command in the Big Red One. The night before he was to ship out to them, an allotment came down from the Americal Division for captains, and he found himself on a transport plane to Chu Lai.

Whittecar had never even heard of the Americal, but he did know about the 196th Infantry Brigade. In 1966, his battalion of the 1st Division had been rushed in to bail them out after their disastrous operation in War Zone C. He was not impressed when he joined his new company in the bush, initially viewing his reluctant draftees with the thought: you guys aren’t going to get me killed, and I’m not going to let you commit suicide. He had learned his tactics from the hard-nosed Big Red One—and from the North Vietnamese Army—and this experience made him credible to the grunts as he began to tighten up the company. He fired one, young, scared lieutenant. He started operating at night. He organized the zapper squad to muster some esprit de corps.

He screamed, cajoled, consoled, and after awhile it began to pay off. The young grunts seemed proud to realize how good they really could be.

Delta Company became the best.

Whittecar knew his maps, his tactics, and his soldiers. He was respected by his grunts, and the mutual feeling was the cornerstone to their new spirit. He was not a buddy to his men. He loved them like a father, but it was a restrained feeling. He allowed himself to become close to only a very few. To know their personal stories and hopes would have drained him of the ability to push his young draftees into the aggressive mind set needed to prevail against an aggressive enemy. Whittecar was a promoted grunt. His loyalty channelled down to the GIs and he could bullshit easily with them. He could also be icy tough on them. He was brave. He won his second Silver Star during a routine patrol in Hiep Duc. The point man had spotted a hootch in a clearing and Whittecar lay with him in the tall grass along a path, discussing the best way to get to the hut without being spotted. Just then, two Viet Cong appeared on the trail. The point man hollered and sprang up in front of Whittecar. His M16 jammed. Whittecar instantly shoved him down, stepped forward with his AR15 automatic rifle, and chopped down both Vietnamese.

In June, he turned over the company to platoon leader Mekkelsen. In the seven months that Whittecar had commanded Delta Company, they had the highest body count and the lowest casualty rate in the battalion.

Not a single man had been killed.

The first order of business on 18 August was to retrieve Hurst’s body. Whittecar huddled with his senior RTO, SP4 Jerry Faraci, and his platoon leaders. He decided to leave a group in position at the French Hootch while two platoons swept into the tree line, the company headquarters in trace behind them with the last platoon. It was hot and unnerving crossing that field, but there was no firing and the GIs fanned out along the last berm, facing the woods. They found Hurst and zipped him into a body bag. It was then that Whittecar saw the movement: where a sixty-foot field of parched grass rolled into the tree line, he saw something move behind a screen of bamboo. He shouted a warning to his men, then heaved two grenades into the bamboo. There was no response, so he tapped a GI and they pushed forward on their stomachs. Twenty feet from the bamboo, a single shot cracked at them. The grunt took it in the leg, and Whittecar triggered a quick M16 burst into the bamboo. Again, there was only silence.

Whittecar helped the wounded man crawl back behind the berm. Then he deployed Delta Company for the counterattack; one platoon was to remain in place with the CP along the dikes while the other two moved around the tree line from two sides. The maneuver was to be like a horseshoe around the bamboo grove, the open end pointing to their paddy. Whittecar reckoned that whatever the company had bumped into the day before had pulled out, leaving only a delaying force; he hoped to sweep them into that open field in front of his berm. He kept in contact with the two platoon leaders as they slowly pushed through the thick underbrush of the woods. They had nearly closed the horseshoe when heavy automatic weapons fire suddenly erupted.

The platoon leaders screamed on the radio that NVA were suddenly materializing from spider holes amid the vegetation. Casualties were heavy.

It was 1210.

The firing was enough for a battalion, and Whittecar quickly ordered the platoons to pull out. They leapfrogged back through the trees, some firing and some running crouched and dragging the casualties, those dropping behind trees to fire cover for the others. By the time they crawled back into the paddy, the NVA were in the brush on three sides of them. It seemed there were hundreds of North Vietnamese around Delta Company, although none were visible as they seared the paddy with a barrage of AK47s and RPGs.

Whittecar ordered a pullback to the French Hootch.

They leapfrogged again, scrambling over dikes while others laid down suppressive fire. The NVA waited until they were in the middle of the field, then started walking 82mm mortar shells through them. The paddy was overgrown and deep with dikes for cover; still, it took a dozen more wounded to get back.

Around the French Hootch, there was the semicontrolled chaos of medics rushing among the wounded and grunts rushing into place on the perimeter. The NVA fire had ceased and Whittecar stood beside the cement hootch with his radiomen, requesting fire support and an emergency resupply of ammunition and water. As the first Huey started its approach, a 12.7mm machine gun began pounding, and green tracers burned up from the canopy of the tree line. Then another opened fire, and another, until Whittecar had counted seven separate twelve-seven positions in a circle around his company. He screamed at the Huey pilot to get out, then cut to the 4–31 TOC frequency. He reported his estimate that Delta Company was surrounded by a regiment of 1,200 NVA. At that time, Whittecar had 109 troopers, and that included the 5 KIA and the 21 WIA.

 There was, indeed, a regiment around Whittecar and his men. The first two days of the battle were the bleakest for 4–31 Infantry as far as their being greatly outnumbered and not knowing what was going on. As the scenario was later pieced together, the NVA attack plan had two parts. The 3d Main Force Regiment, 2d NVA Division was dug in around Hill 102 in the Song Chang Valley; their mission was to attack LZ West and LZ Center. At the same time, the 1st Main Force Regiment, 2d NVA Division was dug in around Hills 381 and 441 (of the Nui Chom ridge line). While the base camps were being hit, part of the regiment would destroy the Resettlement Village while the rest formed a block across Route 534. This hard-packed dirt road (called the Old French Road) originated at Highway One on the coast and ran all the way to the Resettlement Village, slicing the Hiep Duc Valley horizontally. This would be a likely avenue of approach for any relief force. Supporting these efforts, U.S. Intelligence also placed various headquarters, sapper, mortar, antiaircraft, signal, and transportation detachments; they estimated a total of 3,000–5,000 NVA troops. It was thought that when D/4–31 bumped into the 3d Regiment on 17 August, and B/4–31 the 1st Regiment on 18 August, they accidentally preempted the NVA attack. All that had not become focused on the second morning of the battle. It was figured that D/4–31 had found the main NVA concentration that had hit LZ West a week before. In Hiep Duc Valley, therefore, it was business as usual.

 At daybreak on 18 August, Captain Gayler, CO, Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, had his men ruck up and begin their march across Hiep Duc Valley towards the mountainous spur, Nui Chom, which formed the valley’s northern frontier. Bravo had been in the bush since rotating off LZ security a week before, conducting a generally fruitless search for the NVA battalion which had assaulted their base camp. In that respect, it was similar to Gayler’s previous experiences in the war. He’d come in-country in January as the air operations officer and took over the company in April; he held a Bronze Star for the June fight in AK Valley, but most of the company patrols were merely what they called Hot Walks in the Sun.

This did not suit Gayler at all. He’d grown up in the rural town of Mineral Wells, Texas, where his parents owned a mom ‘n’ pop grocery store. He joined the national guard at seventeen, then joined the fire department after a few disastrous, beer-blasted semesters in college. When Vietnam began heating up, he volunteered for OCS and the Regular Army. Captain Gayler was thirty years old, had thirteen years in the military, and wanted his piece of the Vietnam War.

The evening before, Lieutenant Colonel Henry had radioed him with an impromptu mission: a chieu hoi, accompanied by two Vietnamese National policemen, would be choppered to his company to lead them to an NVA rice cache. Supposedly, the cache held enough rice to feed an NVA company for a month. The defector said it was tucked near Hill 381 of Nui Chom. By 1000, when Bravo Company was halfway to the ridge line, battalion radioed them to secure a bush landing zone for the arrival of the chieu hoi. As the Huey banked north after dropping off its passengers, a spot of AK47s snapped at it. They were too far away to go after and Gayler really didn’t give it a second thought; there was always a sniper or two scampering around.

The day seemed a repeat of so many others.

The temperature hovered well above 100 degrees and the grunts humped as listlessly as always. A berm cut through the desiccated, rock-hard paddies and they moved single file along it, five yards between each man. They humped full rucks, ammo bandoliers hung from shoulders and around waists, and faces and arms were slick with sweat. Fatigue shirts were stained darkly. Each man’s view was the same—a sun-bleached helmet bobbing along above the backpack of the grunt ahead.

The zapper squad was on point, followed by Bravo Two under 1stLt Doug Monroe. Gayler considered Monroe his steadiest platoon leader, who knew his tactics, was firmly in command, and at the same time enjoyed an easygoing rapport with his men.

Company headquarters was behind them. With Captain Gayler were his battalion RTO, company RTO, and senior medic. There was also a forward observer team from 3–82 Artillery—an FO lieutenant, his recon sergeant, and their RTO. Gayler had five Vietnamese with his CP, including his ARVN interpreter whom he did not trust, and his Kit Carson Scout who’d traded his AK47 for an M16 and had outgrown Gayler’s initial suspicions. The two National policemen had fatigues, bush hats, and M16 rifles, but no packs; they didn’t expect to be staying long. The NVA soldier turned defector walked with them. He looked about thirty, was not tied, and wore some anonymous old fatigues.

Gayler had placed Bravo Three, under Lieutenant Maurel, behind them in the middle of the column. That was mostly to keep them out of trouble. Gayler did not like Maurel; as far as he was concerned, he was an immature young man who harassed his troops, much to the detriment of morale, and who simply did not take the time to do things right, much to the detriment of performance. However, their platoon sergeant, SSgt Walter Sheppard, was sharp. He was a young black man who, like almost every NCO in the company, was a shake ‘n’ bake who had earned instant stripes at the crash course known as the Fort Benning NCO Academy. Such were the manpower requirements of Vietnam. Sheppard was a draftee but had graduated at the top of his class and was sent to the war as an infantry staff sergeant. He more than measured up, but there was sympathetic talk in the platoon that Sheppard was yet another victim of a young marriage straining hard due to separation.

Bringing up the rear was Bravo One, under Sgt Richard S. Allison, and his platoon sergeant, Sergeant Beaureguard. Allison was a city boy, Beaureguard a country boy; both were solid under fire. Allison was a twenty-year-old, blue-collar hawk. His last year in high school, he’d had horrendous arguments about Vietnam with one of his teachers, a young woman just out of college. He’d ended the debate by enlisting in the U.S. Army and volunteering for the infantry; he’d come in-country in November 68 as one of the replacements after the last battle on Nui Chom. Since then, he’d volunteered for the zapper squad, had been promoted to platoon sergeant, and had just been made acting platoon leader when his lieutenant rotated.

Bravo Company was undermanned, down to seventy-five men.

As they moved through the tree lines near a miniature hamlet below Nui Chom, a little Vietnamese boy ran up to Sergeant Allison’s platoon. Their Kit Carson talked to him at length, then caught up with the platoon several hundred meters down the road. The boy had told the scout a large NVA force was up ahead, and Allison immediately grabbed the phone from his RTO. Captain Gayler was not swayed by the information. Negative, he radioed back, we’ve got a mission. The captain received generally favorable reviews from his grunts, but Allison was a dissenter.

This lifer, Allison thought, is too damn reckless.

The platoon crossed the shallows of the Song Lau River and was moving across the several hundred yards of open paddies to the ville when an AK suddenly cut loose, sending everyone to the ground. Gayler, down the trail with his RTOs, radioed the buck sergeant in charge of the zapper squad, “Sick ’em!” The men were all volunteers and it didn’t take long; they spotted the sniper, pinned him down with M16 fire, then crept close enough to pitch a few frags at him. Then the stocky sergeant sauntered back to report a body count of one.

He held up the AK47 for Gayler’s inspection.

The company halted in the small ville, which was about a hundred meters square and raised several feet from the surrounding paddies like a brushy island. There was a handful of Vietnamese around the hootches—an old man, some women, a few children. As reward for the kill, Gayler told the zapper squad to secure an LZ in the ville for their evening hot meal and to haul out the rice cache. For totally different reasons, he also told Lieutenant Maurel’s platoon to stay behind to secure the area and guard their rucksacks, which everyone was gladly unshouldering.

The company continued along the path up to the foothills, approaching another tiny hamlet. Lieutenant Monroe’s point squad spotted two men with AK47s across the paddies and opened fire. The NVA disappeared among the hootches. By the time Gayler moved up, Monroe was down along a dike with one of his squads; they were firing cover for another squad as it maneuvered toward the ville through a tree line. One hootch was already afire from an M79 grenade. In the middle of this firefight, Captain Gayler suddenly received a frantic call from Lieutenant Maurel. His voice was two octaves higher than normal: he was taking fire from all sides, including automatic weapons, rocket grenades, and mortars, and had heavy casualties.

Gayler had Monroe rein in his attacking squad and, with Sergeant Allison’s platoon turned around to be point, they made a fast walk back down the trail. The NVA attack had ebbed back—all the time invisible in the trees and dikes leading up to the hamlet—and Bravo Company was able to reenter without drawing a shot.

Lieutenant Maurel’s report was not good.

After Gayler had moved on with Monroe and Allison, the zapper squad set up on one side of the ville. To escape the heat, they strung their poncho liners from bamboo and clustered under this pathetic shade. Some rested; some toyed with their captured AK. All in all, no one was paying attention when expertly camouflaged NVA moved right up to their perimeter. One of the survivors later told of seeing moving bushes a second before the NVA signalled their attack by sending an RPG through their poncho shelter. Two men were killed instantly and two others were wounded as the rest scrambled for weapons, or cover, or both. Then came the Chicoms and a complete ring of AK47 fire. A mortar tube was also employed, dropping accurate preregistered fire on the ville. Maurel and Sheppard kept their heads, got their platoon into a tight three-sixty, and raked the surrounding brush with fire. It was enough to keep the invisible enemy temporarily at bay.

Seven GIs had been killed in the initial assault.

The rest of Bravo Company was taking up positions on the ragged perimeter—and dragging in the bodies from the zapper squad—when the mortar began firing. Then the AKs and Chicoms began all over again. They were coming from all sides and, from what Gayler could discern in the cacophony as he pressed into the dirt, it sounded like an NVA battalion was around them. How had they been able to walk through this circle? The NVA would have been wiser to keep the platoons separated and overrun them in detail; but they had not, so Bravo Company was able to mass its fire. Gayler also got on the horn to request what he later reckoned saved his company from annihilation—Cobra gunship support. Henry answered, “Roger, it’s already in route.”

The French Hootch became the center of Delta Company’s defense. It had a twenty- by thirty-foot cement foundation, four feet of crumbling walls all the way around, no roof, and a battered front porch still overhanging a doorless door frame. The FO and RTOs set up their radios in it and the grunts dug foxholes in a thirty-meter circle around it. The medics treated the casualties there, the wounded lay in a row along an outer wall, the dead were beside them in body bags. After checking the miniature perimeter, Captain Whittecar talked with SP5 Kim Diliberto, his senior medic. He said one of the GIs would die from loss of blood if he were not immediately medevacked; during the ambush in the tree line, a Chicom had nearly blown off his arm at the shoulder. Whittecar was very hesitant to call in a medevac considering the circle of 12.7mm guns, and he walked over to see the man for himself.

The kid was propped against the hootch, his wound still gruesome to look at despite the bloody bandages over it. He looked pale and weak, but in good spirits. Whittecar knelt beside the soldier. “Do you think you can hold on?”

“Hell yes. We’re gonna kick their ass like before.”

“You got that right.”

His face suddenly drained and he mumbled, “I’m not feeling too good.” Whittecar reached to his shoulder to balance him, but the GI fell forward onto him. “Medic!” Diliberto was beside him in seconds, but the man was already dead. Whittecar stood there shocked as they put him in a body bag and laid him with the others.

They were outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded. Whittecar had never been in such a situation before, had never felt such dread before.

He always remembered this as his moment of truth.

Whittecar was standing beside the crumbling front porch, talking with Diliberto and several others, when the cracking reports of AK47s suddenly blasted from the edges of their grassy perimeter. Everyone dove to the ground or disappeared into foxholes as Whittecar quickly jumped back up and sprinted into the hootch to join his FO and RTOs. The North Vietnamese were attacking. The GIs returned fire, flattening the grass with M16 and M60 bursts and M79 grenades, while Whittecar and his FO brought in 105mm artillery as close as they dared. At the same time, Whittecar cut to the frequency of his platoon leaders and ordered a counterattack. He didn’t want his men sitting in holes dying, perhaps even panicking in their helplessness. Some probably couldn’t face that order and stayed in the womb of their foxholes, but other grunts attacked like the NVA, individuals crawling through the elephant grass on their stomachs, M16s in front of them, tossing hand frags up and over the high grass. Few, if any, of the GIs even saw an NVA in the tangle, even though they were within yards of each other at times. But the maneuver shocked or confused the NVA enough that they withdrew to the paddies and surrounding wood lines.

It was only as the firing slacked off that Whittecar noticed Diliberto. He was sprawled outside the French Hootch where they’d been talking, a bullet hole in his temple. He’d been killed instantly in the first burst.

The FO kept the artillery thundering around them, close enough so that U.S. shrapnel whizzed over the heads of the men in the foxholes and bounced inside the perimeter. At the same time, Whittecar talked in the gunship pilots. He described the location of one 12.7mm position in the bamboo grove, and the Huey bore down on it. The gun crew did not fire—perhaps not seeing the gunship, perhaps afraid to pinpoint themselves—but other 12.7mm guns began snapping tracers at it from hundreds of yards away. The pilot punched off a cluster of rockets, then pulled up, the bamboo erupting, shattering in his wake. Whittecar thought he saw an arm spinning up from the explosions.

As the Huey banked around, Whittecar radioed the pilot to clear out for the antiaircraft fire. The gunships cleared the airspace, and he talked in the Phantoms who laid nape in the tree line across the paddy and on suspected mortar locations. The NVA barely fired now, trying to become invisible in the thick greenery. The Phantoms came in Danger Close over the canopy, close enough for the grunts to read the aircraft markings, to see bombs disengaging, to hear the drag fins snap out, to feel the whump of bursting silver napalm canisters. The FO kept up the arty bombardment too, ceasing fire only long enough to allow the gunship and jet passes. Whittecar would line up a Phantom with a target, tell the FO to cease the arty, the napalm would burst, the jet would pull up, and the arty would be turned on again until the next strafing run.

The grunts of Bravo Company meanwhile had formed a tight ring around the hootches of the ville. They hunkered behind boulders or stubby trees in the tall grass and dug foxholes. They M16’d or flung grenades at every noise or rustle in front of them. Few, if any, NVA offered themselves to rifle sights, but they kept crawling closer along the dikes and hedgerows. Chicom stick grenades suddenly bounced next to GIs from out of nowhere. A bush stirred and M79 grenades were pounded into it. RPGs slammed back.

The NVA fired their mortar again. It was close enough for the grunts to hear the pop of the outgoing round and to flatten even more in the dirt. Every round landed inside the ville, jarring the earth under their chests.

There were lulls and two heavy flare-ups.

Captain Gayler was in the center of the perimeter, set up in a tapioca field. The garden had eighteen-inch-deep furrows, and he was pressed flat into one, facing Lieutenant Shortround—his arty observer who earned the nickname because of his short, stocky build—who was also stretched out in the ditch. A map was spread between them. The arty recon sergeant was down in the furrow to one side of them; their RTOs were in the furrow to the other side. Gayler had never been so scared and, most likely, neither had Lieutenant Shortround. But the young FO was a cool head; he tapped the map as if he were discussing the weather, “Now, if I was the dink commander, I’d put my mortar over there.…” He was on the radio to the artillery batteries on LZ West and LZ Siberia, walking their bombardment through the trees across the Song Lau.

It silenced the mortar for then.

Cobra gunships of F Troop, 8th Air Cavalry, Americal Division had been scrambled and Gayler directed their fire. Their call sign was Blue Ghosts. The pilots sounded skeptical that hundreds of NVA were around Bravo Company in the broad daylight. They could see none in the thick vegetation, but Gayler wanted their fires within twenty meters of his perimeter. The grunts were pitching smoke grenades to mark themselves.

“Ah, we’re sure getting pretty close to you.”

“That’s affirmative,” was Gayler’s taciturn reply.

One Cobra made a low run parallel to the line, shattering the hedgerow in front of the grunts with his 40mm chin-turret grenade launcher. His wingman, zipping in next, shouted excitedly, “Four NVA just broke from that bush! You got dinks all over you!”

“Tell me about it!”

It was about then that the Cobras started receiving 12.7mm fire. At 1840, Marine Phantoms began dumping napalm across the river. They also reported antiaircraft fire. Also in the air was Colonel Tackaberry, orbiting in the 196th InfBde C&C; during one of the heavy flare-ups, he cut into Captain Gayler’s company net to demand a situation report. Before Gayler could answer the brigade commander—who was considered a spit ‘n’ polish glory hound by the Polar Bear battalion—Lieutenant Colonel Henry cut in from his CP, “This unit’s in contact. If you want a status report, you call me on my push. Out.”

Gayler always had the highest respect for Henry.

The villagers had disappeared into their family bunkers at the first shot. The Vietnamese police hustled their chieu hoi into a bunker also. The ARVN interpreter joined them. The Kit Carson Scout, however, stayed near the company headquarters. For his devotion, he fell dead with an AK47 round through the neck. Another Vietnamese died inside the perimeter. During a lull, a little village girl wandered up to Gayler’s group, crying and pointing to her head with bloody hands. The medic pulled her down. She had shrapnel in the base of her skull and died in minutes.

At twilight, a medevac was attempted inside Bravo Company’s perimeter. The medics had the most seriously wounded gathered in the garden, and Gayler stood in the middle of it watching the Huey come in while Cobras orbited the ville, pumping out cover fire. He shouted to pop smoke and Sergeant Allison tossed a smoke grenade out. The Huey descended and slowed to a hover. There was the sudden cracking of a machine gun, a blur of green tracers as everyone ducked, the sledgehammer pounding of the chopper taking hits. The cables controlling the rear rotor were severed. Gayler looked up horrified to see the Huey in a wobbly hover ten feet above his head, spinning on its axis. The pilot expertly fought to regain control, eased the ship up over the trees around the garden, then flew away sideways. An hour later, at 1930, a second medevac was attempted. In the dark, Gayler tucked a strobe light into a furrow, then scooted out of the way as the Huey landed right on top of it. He tensed, expecting mortars. The wounded were quickly loaded on; the pilot did a torque check and radioed he could carry one more. An eighth GI was put aboard and the ship pulled out without drawing a shot.

At about 2200, 2dLt James Simms of 3d Platoon, Charlie Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry linked up with Captain Gayler and Bravo Company.

By then, Bravo had ten men dead, twenty wounded.

Charlie Three had been in the bush near the Resettlement Village when the ambush began. Their sister platoons and company commander Murphy helicoptered down from LZ Siberia. They all linked up and NDP’d near Hill 118, popularly known as Million Dollar Hill (denoting the cost of helicopters shot down on the knoll in one day during the campaign to reclaim the valley). From there, under Lieutenant Colonel Henry’s direction, Captain Murphy sent Lieutenant Simms’s platoon to link up with Bravo and lead them back to their haven. He was reinforced with a squad from Charlie One under a GI named Williams.

It was about a four-kilometer hump to the east, an increasingly nervous march in the dead of a moonless night. The only sound was the scrape of dry grass as they moved, then the muffled exchanges from Bravo’s besieged perimeter. When they got close, shell casings from strafing Cobras fell among them, and they noticed they were walking through patches of bloody grass. They filed into Bravo’s perimeter during a lull.

Both groups were very glad to see each other.

Captain Gayler and Lieutenant Simms hashed over plans for getting out. Simms’s group had crossed the Song Lau and walked up the trail unopposed, which relieved Gayler: the back door might be open! Everyone was in need of rest, but he wanted to get out as soon as possible. His position was untenable, zeroed in. He told Simms that his platoon would be carrying the bodies out. Some of the GIs standing there muttered, “Aw shit, carry your own bodies.” Gayler was in no mood for it. “I know your people are tired, lieutenant, but we’ve been fighting all day, and either your people are going to carry them or you’re going to have to deal with me in the morning.”

It took an hour of confusion in the dark to chop down bamboo poles. The dead were wrapped in ponchos, tied to the poles with GI bootlaces, and shouldered between two to four soldiers. The rucksacks and gear of the casualties were also distributed. PFC Rocky Bleier, an M79 grenadier who had come with the attached squad, saw one corpse laying unnoticed in a ditch. He turned to one of the other GIs from Charlie Company, “C’mon, let’s take this guy.”

“Hell no, our platoon’s got rear security.”

“But there’s nobody left to take him.”

“I don’t give a shit. Let him lay there.”

Another grunt, however, said he’d help and they lashed the KIA to a bamboo pole. Bleier handed his M79 to another GI. They had just started into the paddy when Bleier’s partner slipped off the dike, splashing into the water, the dead man yanked down onto him. He instantly scrambled out from under the stiff corpse and jumped on the berm, looking at Bleier with horror. It was the first time Bleier had seen a dead American, and probably the same for his buddy.

The column moved across the open paddies from the village to the tree lines along the Song Lau. Monroe’s platoon was on point, followed by Gayler’s headquarters; Maurel’s platoon; Allison’s platoon; Simms’s platoon with the bodies; and, finally, Williams’s squad covering the rear. The point squad was cautiously approaching the stream when a USAF prop plane droned to the south on the other side of LZ West, above where Delta Company was also fighting for its life. The plane suddenly started dropping basketball flares, which turned the paddies into shimmering stadiums for miles around. Everyone jumped behind the berms and Captain Gayler radioed Captain Whittecar, asking if he could hold the illumination until he’d crossed the paddy.

“Okay, Hank. Make it fast, though.”

The stream was only ankle deep and they moved across it quickly. The last of Maurel’s platoon and the point of Allison’s were crossing when the thickets to the left abruptly exploded with AK47 fire. Chicoms were flung in. Sergeant Allison instantly dropped flat, triggering his M16 into the black. He could see nothing. Up ahead, everyone had rolled into the brush at the first shot. Gayler nervously noticed a rise about thirty meters off the trail, and could just imagine NVA popping over the crest to fire down on them. GIs around him prepared grenades, but nothing happened. All the firing was at the stream; occasional bursts, shouts, and grenades were tossed back and forth. The firing had halted the entire column. Gayler radioed Allison: “What the hell is going on?”

Allison said they were pinned down and needed ilium.

Gayler said no. His men were strung out on the trail with only some brush for concealment, and flares would be like turning spotlights on fish in a barrel. He was anxious to escape the battalion or regiment around them, and told Allison to get his damn platoon across.

Allison said his men were hesitant to cross the open river.

Gayler’s reply was a harsh Texas bark, “Sergeant, if I have to come back there myself, I’m going to whip your ass.”

Allison did not like officers in general, and Gayler in particular. In a fit of courage born of anger, he unslung his ammunition bandoliers and dropped them and his grenades in front of him. Then he cut loose into the black tangle to his left, screaming at his men to move it. Which they did, jumping five feet down the bank, splashing across, then scrambling up the ten-foot berm on the other side. Allison emptied his M16, pitched a frag, crammed in a fresh mag, kept firing. He suddenly felt a strong thud against his chest—then the Chicom bounced to the ground, rolled over the embankment, and exploded. If he had not been so close to the edge, the grenade would have gone off at his feet. He’d already been wounded once that day; during the mortaring, a piece of shrapnel had pierced two packets of Kool Aid in his pocket and stuck in his chest. It burned but barely bled, and Allison did not report it.

The NVA finally seemed to fade away.

With Sergeant Allison’s platoon across, Lieutenant Simms’s men followed. First, though, Captain Gayler passed word to leave the bodies in the paddy.^* PFC Bleier, coming across with the last squad, retrieved his M79. The men were moving down the embankment when an AK47 sprayed around them. Bleier dropped into a patch of wet, muddy weeds, then propped up and started slamming grenades in return. They exchanged fire for fifteen minutes, then the NVA once again just stopped. The squad got back up, very anxious not to be left behind, and filed slowly and quietly across the stream. They bunched up nervously on the opposite bank: where did everyone go! No one was in sight. The footpath veered to the right and, after a brief, hushed argument, they decided to follow it.

It was pitch black and they trod slowly, tensing up, expecting another ambush. They had little idea where they were. Within five minutes, the pop of a mortar burst the silence, and four rounds crashed right into the crossing site. It had taken the NVA ambushers too long to relay the coordinates to their mortar crew, and they merely shelled empty space. But it sent Williams’s group into a headlong run, with Williams himself leading the panicked stampede. They could have easily stumbled into another ambush but, luckily, what they ran into was the back of their own column.

The shooting was sporadic all evening around Delta Company’s perimeter, getting concentrated once more around midnight. Whittecar was taking a quick sleep on the cement floor of the French Hootch, head on his helmet, when the first RPG crashed in. It slammed into a tree limb above him, exploding with a rain of hot shrapnel. Whittecar snapped awake. His helmet was shattered, his head nicked, and a long sliver of shrapnel was burning in his leg. He yanked it out and flipped it away, then called in the dark, “Is anybody else hit!”

SP4 Faraci answered and he crawled quickly to him. The front of the young GI’s jungle boot was torn open, a couple of toes blown off. A medic tied field bandages around Whittecar’s leg and Faraci’s foot; Whittecar asked Faraci if he could still handle the radios.

“Sure,” Faraci said, “I don’t need my feet for that.”

Faraci had been Whittecar’s senior RTO during his previous command of the company, and that’s why he had picked him. The kid was solid as a rock under fire. So was Whittecar. He had the line open to Major Lee in B-TOC and, after getting the wounded taken care of, he laughed into the radio, “That goddamn guy knocked the helmet right off my head!” AKs and RPGs kept flashing from the thick elephant grass thirty meters from the GI foxholes. The NVA also employed a captured M79. At dusk, Whittecar had ordered his men to dig new holes on the assumption that the NVA had observed all their original positions during the day. The ploy worked; most of the RPGs were slamming around the old, empty holes. Whittecar was on the horn to his platoon and squad leaders: fire only if you’ve got a target; don’t give your positions away unless you have to.

He prayed there would be no panic.

Out on the line, Specialist Ferris crouched in a foxhole with another grunt from the zapper squad. They triggered quick bursts at the muzzle flashes. A Spooky gunship orbited them, a brilliant red line of gatling gun tracers stitching a wall around the perimeter. Chunks of ruptured sod pelted back around Ferris. He’d never been so scared. Around the two of them, it was a dark nightmare, silhouetted by quick flashes and weird shadows. There were movements, bursts of fire, shouts.

“Medic!”

“We need more ammo up here!”

Men screamed in pain. Ferris knew he was going to die. Behind him, he could hear AK rounds ricocheting off the cement hootch.

In the middle of it, something exploded near his hole. Ferris was so scared, it took him a few moments to realize that his back, arms, and legs were burning from fragments. He stayed in place, hands tight around his M16. Nearby, Cocoa hollered that he’d been shot through the hand. He too kept firing. All around the perimeter, very frightened men, some with wounds or concussions from the RPGs, were tight in their foxholes, managing to keep the North Vietnamese back.

There was a lull as the NVA, forever invisible, seemed to ebb back into the elephant grass. That’s when Whittecar decided to gamble with a medevac; some of his wounded were near death. He talked one Huey in, lights off, coming in low over the treetops, several GIs flicking on flashlights in the LZ clearing beside the French Hootch. The pilot flipped on his landing lights at the last moment, flashing on the stark scene of flattened elephant grass and helmet tops in holes. He settled in the low brush. Major Lee had ridden the Huey down from LZ West to get a feel for what was going on; ammunition was quickly shoved out, wounded were taken aboard, then the chopper roared out from its hover and disappeared into the blackness.

There had been no NVA fire. Why not? Whittecar reckoned that the NVA were maneuvering into new positions for a renewed assault and didn’t want to expose themselves. Which didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t think those chopper crewmen were among the bravest men on earth.

It started all over again, AKs and RPGs.

Whittecar was too aware of the desperation welling in his chest. There was no doubt in his mind they were going to be overrun and killed. He decided to break up the company, every man on his own to get back to LZ West any way he could find. He almost passed that order, but the wounded gnawed at him. There were still casualties around the hootch who couldn’t walk. He couldn’t abandon them. Hell with it, he finally resigned himself; we’re going to die, but they’re going to pay too. It was no small solace to him that he thought his men would fight to the last man.

All night, Whittecar was on the radio to Lee; this was his umbilical cord. Inside the TOC bunker, under fluorescent lights, Lee was urgently working several radios to bring their firepower to bear. He had gotten the USAF Spooky gunship over Delta Company only after much arguing with brigade operations to convince them he was not exaggerating. Once the Spooky came on station, Whittecar took over and brought the minigun fire in a circle around his perimeter, thirty meters out. He joked over the radio to Major Lee as calmly as he could, “I finally got the sonsabitches where I want ’em. They’re all around me and they’re not going to get away this time!” Lee laughed, as did the CP GIs in the hootch. Which is exactly what Whittecar wanted; keep their spirits up, because it’s not going to do these men any good to know they’re going to die tonight.

Bravo Company linked up with Charlie Company around three in the morning. Captain Murphy told Captain Gayler to get his exhausted GIs inside the perimeter; his men would handle all the security watches. The grunts spread out in the elephant grass and fell into a comatose sleep. Before passing out himself, Gayler called up his platoon leaders to check that everyone had been accounted for after their long, confused march. Everyone had been.

In the morning, however, Lieutenant Maurel said there’d been a mistake. One of the RTOs, PFC Marion Feaster, a black kid from Florida, was missing. An angry Gayler radioed Lieutenant Colonel Henry to alter his initial report. He’d just gotten off the horn when AK47s cracked from outside the perimeter, and a lone GI came crashing and hollering through the brush, diving into the perimeter as others returned fire.

It was Private Feaster himself.

He reported to Gayler. As it turned out, he’d been coming up the stream bank when the ambush was sprung. He spun back to seek cover in the water, dropping his M16, and the GI ahead of him thought he was dead and grabbed the rifle. Feaster hugged the bank during the fight, finally slipping into an exhausted sleep as the cat ‘n’ mouse dragged on. He was jolted awake by the mortaring. Armed with only two fragmentation grenades, his ruck, and a radio ruined by shrapnel, he waded down the Song Lau in the general western direction the column had been moving. He came upon two NVA chattering on the bank. Feaster tossed a frag in their laps as he scurried up to the trail. He was walking down the path when AKs suddenly cut loose from behind; apparently, the NVA had let him pass through an ambush, realizing too late that he was not the point man for a bigger catch. Feaster paused long enough to hurl his last grenade at a party of NVA coming after him, then ran back to the stream and moved quietly along it until dawn. Then he returned to the trail and had almost made it back to his unit when he saw a couple of NVA about the same time they saw him.

That was the firing everyone had heard. Feaster, who was built like a black bull, pounded down the trail as fast as he could, bellowing out the battalion’s running password, “Polar Bears, Polar Bears, I’m a comin’ in, Polar Bears!”

Feaster shook like a leaf as he told his tale.

Gayler smiled, “Well, looks like you’re going to have a good story to tell your grandchildren!”

Medevacs were called into Charlie’s perimeter for the last twelve of Bravo’s seriously wounded. One of those going out was Lieutenant Shortround. His recon sergeant told Gayler that he’d taken a piece of shrapnel in his heel while directing arty from the garden. He hadn’t even told Gayler. The sergeant also said that during the night march, the lieutenant was toughing it out but was almost delirious with pain; several times he had to grab his ruck to keep him from passing out on his feet.

Also going out on the medevacs were the National policemen and their chieu hoi. Grunts were mumbling bitterly that that fucking dink had led them into the ambush with his tale of a rice cache. Perhaps, perhaps not, but if Gayler had not put his foot down, they would have executed the NVA on the spot. Some men never quite forgave Gayler for not allowing them their revenge. Their ARVN interpreter also tried to leave on the medevac. Gayler was on the radio with the pilot who said no way, he was already overloaded. The arty recon sergeant was near the Huey. Gayler pointed at the deserter and signalled to keep him back. The sergeant shoved him back three times, but the man kept trying to edge around. Finally, the husky sergeant cold-cocked him, dropping the little ARVN like a sack of oats. The ARVN retreated back to Gayler, screaming that he was going to report the incident.

“Go right ahead.”

The survivors of Bravo Company—about 40 percent of the company had been medevacked—were ferried to LZ Siberia aboard two Chinooks.

Delta Company was not in a position to be extracted that morning, but they did not die as Captain Whittecar had feared. At 0700 on 19 August, there was another attack, but this one was less fierce and another barrage of artillery and mortars ended it quickly.

Reinforcements arrived, in the form of Charlie Company, 2d Battalion, 1st Infantry, airmobiled in from the vicinity of Hawk Hill. Battalion had requested reinforcements from brigade, and these were the first to be piecemealed in. They had landed on LZ West on 18 August and Henry conferred with their CO, Capt Rudolph Yap, an Oriental-American. In the morning, they pushed downhill and Delta Company fired a Mad Minute, a deafening, small-arms barrage designed to keep the NVA down while they hiked in. Whittecar met briefly with Captain Yap, then Charlie Company dug in adjacent to Delta Company, expanding the perimeter around the French Hootch.

Medevacs came in too, landing unopposed in the LZ clearing. Specialist Ferris got his reprieve, climbing aboard a Huey in ripped and bloody jungle fatigues. It was a crowded ship, but only a short flight up to Landing Zone West.

Relief had come, but the battle was not over. From positions around their base camp, LZ Center, the 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry was making a helicopter combat assault into the Song Chang Valley. The CA was hot. Whittecar saw the 3–21 C&C Huey buzzing around the gun positions on Hill 102 to the east. He screamed at his RTOs to tell that ship to clear the hell out. He didn’t know 3–21 radio frequencies, so he could only call the 4–31 TOC and tell them to relay the message to the pilots. It was too late. He watched the Huey corkscrew down, a body falling from the open cabin door, then impact in flames behind the tree lines.

Captain Whittecar screamed at no one in particular, “How goddamn stupid can you be! This ain’t a sightseeing tour!”

* The lieutenant was very concerned that his career was ruined. On the assumption that the man was not incompetent, only unprepared for such a fierce fight, Henry later gave him command of B Company and noted that he did “an excellent job.”

* Major Lee commented, “Lieutenant Colonel Henry and I decided not to sacrifice the live for the dead. We got all the bodies later. The pressure to carry them under any circumstances came from Division and Brigade Headquarters. We said no—it wasn’t worth it.”