Chapter Eight
The battle which B/4–31 began in Hiep Duc, better known as Death Valley, became the responsibility of 4–31 Infantry. The battle which D/4–31 began in Song Chang, better known as AK Valley, became the responsibility of 3–21 Infantry. The 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry, its command standard recently passed to LtCol Eli P. Howard, was headquartered on LZ Center (seven kilometers east of LZ West) and was also responsible for LZ East.
The 3d of the 21st Infantry had been making contact since May.
The recent history of the Gimlets, as the battalion called itself, could be traced most actively through C Company. Its commander, Capt Ernie Carrier, was a hard-core Cajun who won his third Silver Star and third Purple Heart during Operation Frederick Hill. The operation began on 12 May 1969, when an NVA regiment overran a South Vietnamese militia outpost in the coastal plains of Tam Ky. The 3d of the 21st Infantry was committed, and Carrier—who’d come in-country as a second lieutenant in November of 67—had not seen worse. On 14 May, Charlie Company was moving across an open rice field toward a tree line pounded by Marine Air when they found themselves in the middle of an NVA battalion. They took withering fire from all sides, including mortar and recoilless rifle rounds; an assault sent them scrambling back. Carrier got the survivors into a hasty perimeter, and there they halted the attack. A medic named Shea ran out four times to drag wounded into their little island; crawling towards a fifth man, he was wounded, then finally shot and killed as he continued his efforts. A GI who was separated from his platoon in the paddy was dragged off as a prisoner. Helicopters carrying ammunition resupply were almost shot out of the sky above Charlie Company; they were driven away. With darkness, artillery and gunship fire shook around the miniature perimeter. Illumination splashed above the company but, in the seconds of darkness between each flare, the NVA scrambled closer with RPGs and grenades. North Vietnamese were gunned down within yards of the perimeter. They pulled out only when the dawn brought reinforcements; they left more than thirty bodies behind.
Charlie Company survived that night because the men had guts; but of the eighty-nine men who started the fight, only thirty-six were unscathed.
PFC Daniel John Shea won the Medal of Honor.
“A few days like this,” Carrier wrote home, “and it’s looney bin time.” But the action had routed the NVA around Tam Ky, and 3–21 rotated its bloodied companies through Chu Lai stand down. By mid-June, they were back in action again, this time closer to home—in and around AK Valley. Bravo 3–21 (Capt Arthur Ballin) took casualties in a bunker complex—from which the NVA evaporated during the night—and the battalion reconnaissance platoon also pulled out of a bunkered area with several wounded. Delta 3–21 (Capt Steve Sendobry) was CA’d in to relieve Echo Recon. Delta called itself Black Death, and Sendobry was a strong commander on his second tour, but they fared no better; when the Gladiator Platoon, under 1stLt Steve Maness, took point, they came under heavy fire. The point was shot in the head and the platoon sergeant at the rear of the column was shot in the leg. Lieutenant Maness crawled forward with two men and managed to throw grenades into several bunkers; Maness got a hand on the point man, but could not pull him back under the fire. The next day, Maness and a squad got the body, but took more casualties in an ambush.
That night, 10–11 June, Delta humped toward LZ East to reinforce for an expected ground assault; the company was still three hours away when the flares began popping above East. The men could see NVA flamethrowers arching through the black. On LZ East, 1st Platoon of Alpha 3–21 and a detachment of artillerymen from B/3–82 were fighting for their lives. At least one bunker was overrun by NVA; when the only officer on the hill was wounded, the Alpha platoon sergeant, SSgt Bill Cruse, took command. For forty-five minutes, he was everywhere along the bunker line, holding the men together.
The NVA pulled back before daylight, leaving twenty-seven bodies in the wire; Colonel Tackaberry choppered in to pin Staff Sergeant Cruse with an impact award of the Silver Star.
LZ Baldy was also penetrated.
Charlie Company—its members almost all green seeds now—stumbled into a bunker complex of its own. The point man fired on some moving bushes—the site of the NVA listening post, Carrier would later realize—and turned up two NVA bodies. They continued towards a hootch on the next hill, and an RPD suddenly opened fire from within it, gunning down the point man and the four grunts behind him. Under cover fire, Captain Carrier crawled forward with several men; one GI got close enough to report that three North Vietnamese were standing over the bodies and kicking each one in the head. The company pulled back to another hill and directed in the air strikes; then Charlie Company worked its way back up the blasted slope. There was nothing there: not the five GIs, nothing left of the NVA except a few shattered bodies and weapons. They did find bunkers on the hill, though, lots of them.
The NVA had done their damage and vanished.
To reinforce 3–21’s hunt, elements of 4–31 moved in at the end of June. Delta 4–31 (Captain Mekkelsen) was the first into AK Valley. By this time, the NVA were breaking up into groups of three to five, toting full packs, and hiding what they could not carry. Delta uncovered more than two hundred spider holes and bunkers, connected by a maze of tunnels and trenches, plus rice, ammunition, and enemy documents. Their patrols also crossed paths with some of the evading NVA, and they got credit for twelve kills. Delta eventually secured an LZ for the arrival of Bravo 4–31 (Captain Gayler) and Echo Recon 4–31 (1stLt Barry Brandon); Delta departed on their lift birds.
Bravo took some wounded when they were mortared while crossing an open paddy; on 27 June, Alpha 4–31 (Captain Yates) was CA’d in to reinforce. Alpha unassed their Hueys and began humping off the LZ; almost immediately their point man was killed in an ambush. The company pulled back as Bravo advanced towards an adjacent hill to help direct their supporting air strikes. The men were stopped cold by a barrage of AK47 and RPG fire. The next day, the NVA let Alpha get within twenty feet of their hidden bunkers before dropping the point man with three rounds in the head. Alpha pulled back again as the jets shrieked in. Bravo, meanwhile, pushed uphill again; while most of the men hunkered in the vegetation, some heads down and some returning fire, a foolish few carried the fight to the enemy. They crawled close enough to lob grenades into two spider holes, killing the snipers; the rest of the NVA pulled out. The next day, 29 June, the fight was over. On 2 July, Bravo was to be flown to Chu Lai for stand down; Alpha moved out to secure the extract LZ for them, and an NVA command-detonated mine blew away two grunts and wounded two more. On 5 July, Alpha and Echo Recon were also pulled out to Chu Lai to rehab.
The 3d NVA Regiment had not been pinned.
A frustrating comment on the war of attrition was that the last position Alpha 4–31 secured before lifting out was Hill 102, which in August the NVA were using as a headquarters and an antiaircraft site. The June operation had not cornered the enemy, and by July activity had tapered off. The Polar Bears pulled out and the Gimlets resumed routine patrolling; the battalion commander rotated and the new colonel—Howard—arrived during the lull. At least on the surface, everything seemed secure.
It was 19 August 1969. Captain Carrier was on LZ Center, bags packed, finally going home. His executive officer, 1stLt James V. Gordon, had taken command of Charlie Company. They were rucking up—3d of the 21st Infantry was humping into AK Valley to relieve the pinned-down survivors of Delta 4th of the 31st Infantry. So Carrier was saying good-bye on a hot, frustrating day. The North Vietnamese had quietly slipped back in from the western mountains and resumed their positions in the bunker complexes. They had picked the time and circumstance to come out of the woodwork; this battle was to be on their terms, and their only goal was to stack up American bodies.
A Company, 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry, 196th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, under 1stLt Eugene Shurtz, Jr., was to lead the Gimlets into AK Valley. They were on a hill called the Birthday Cake, so named because it terraced to its low peak, the handiwork of rice farmers long gone. Alpha Company had humped up it the previous day with PFC Thomas G. Goodwin walking point. Halfway along, Lieutenant Shurtz had halted him to show him his map and confirm where they were.
Shurtz was brand new and trying hard.
Goodwin, on the other hand, was twenty-one years old and had been in the bush ten months. He was never exactly clear why he was there, but his father had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and his older brother had also done his time. He was from a solid, patriotic family, and when the government asked, he did not think to resist. Actually, Goodwin was a grunt because of a fluke. He dropped a class in junior college, knowing that cancelled his student deferment, but figuring he could slip by to the next semester when he’d resume a full load. Think again. After the draft finally deposited him in Vietnam, he decided what the hell, it was time to see what he was made of. He refused an assignment as the platoon RTO and instead volunteered to walk point. Because of heavy casualties in the recent heavy fighting, he’d even served as acting platoon leader. On the Birthday Cake, Private Goodwin was acting squad leader, first squad, 3d Platoon; of those men, he’d written his parents recently that he had, “… a good squad. In fact, it’s so good it makes the other squads look sick.”
Before Alpha Company departed for AK Valley, the 3–21 C&C landed on their hill. Lieutenant Colonel Howard was there to see Lieutenant Shurtz; A Company was to conduct an airmobile combat assault into the paddies between Hill 102 and the Nui Lon ridge line. The men would be going in with as much ammo as they could carry, but no rucksacks and only two canteens per man; there was no reason to carry C rations. Howard obviously was not expecting a prolonged fight; but as things developed, the Gimlets’s piecemeal response to the NVA attack was unwise. The cadre of leadership in their foe, the 3d NVA Regiment, was most likely unchanged from the battle in June, and their bunker tactics were the same as they had been then and many other times in the past. But it was extremely difficult for the U.S. Army to take advantage of this repetition because the leaders at battalion and company level changed so often.
The C&C also dropped off Ollie Noonan of the Associated Press; he had been covering the 11th Brigade at Duc Pho and had just returned to the Da Nang press center when the action broke. He and his partner, Richard Pyle, were the first reporters on the scene, having choppered up only that morning. Pyle went to LZ West while Noonan went to LZ Center and thumbed a ride aboard the C&C to get to the bush. He was a tall guy with a handlebar mustache and a Boston clip, who was affable to the curious grunts. Men were shouldering ammunition bandoliers and checking rifles as they talked, getting ready. Hueys began orbiting their green hill. Smoke grenades were tossed out.
Alpha Company left the Birthday Cake in intervals.
The first lift was greeted by AK47 fire from the trees as the Huey settled into a sun-blasted paddy in AK Valley. Lieutenant Shurtz disembarked from the second lift. One of the birds was coming out when an RPG shrieked past it; the pilot veered to avoid a possible second shot, the tail rotor smacked into a palm tree, and the Huey did an uncontrolled spin at fifteen feet before crashing to the ground. The crew grabbed their M16s and scrambled aboard another Huey that had just off-loaded its grunts. Shurtz hiked to the abandoned Huey to turn off the engine before it caught fire. He couldn’t figure out how, and the engine pumped away until it ran out of fuel at dusk. Before retiring to the cover of a banana tree grove, Shurtz made a point of spinning the radio dials to get them off the frequencies, and he policed up the maps and code books the rattled pilots had left behind.
Coming in on the next lift, Private Goodwin and part of his squad were crowded into a Huey with their new platoon leader, Lieutenant Tynan, and the hitchhiking Noonan. Starting their descent into the LZ, they could see the downed chopper. Noonan leaned past the door gunner, taking photographs, and Goodwin shouted to his new lieutenant over the thump of the rotors, “Boy, is this a hot LZ!”
Lieutenant Tynan just smiled.
Then Tynan hollered back in the vibrating cabin: as soon as they landed, Goodwin was to lay down some cover fire from the edge of the paddy. They dropped in with the door gunners firing into the far brush lines. The skids touched the dry paddy and everyone tumbled out, unable to distinguish NVA fire amid the racket of M60s and jet turbines. Goodwin tagged Donny Anderson and they jogged towards the far end of the paddy. When the Hueys roared out over their heads, they were abruptly aware of the enemy fire.
“Hey, Donny, let’s just get out of here!” yelled Goodwin.
They ran back to the brushy banana trees where the company was gathering. The NVA strafing had evaporated as soon as the last chopper had beat it out of the landing zone; the nervous pilots in the final lift had dumped the grunts from a six-foot hover.
Then, with the noonday sun frying them, they began the sweep. It was Goodwin’s squad’s turn to be on point, and he already had a volunteer point man. A green seed named Mack had recently received a Dear John and commented apathetically that he had nothing to lose; he’d never walked lead before so he joked, “Yeah, I wanna walk point, I’m going to sniff those dinks out!”
Mack took the point.
Anderson walked cover man.
Goodwin was third; the other five were in line behind them.
They started down a trail which ran from the banana trees into an open patch of waist-high brush with tree lines on three sides. No one really knew what was going on, and Lieutenant Tynan said to be careful because friendlies were in the area. That meant that the point man could not just wheel and deal at the slightest noise. That was fatal because—as it was pieced together later—Mack and Anderson walked right up to two North Vietnamese regulars sitting beside their bunker in the parched scrub brush. The NVA wore standard fatigues, web gear, ammunition pouches, and pith helmets. Mack the green seed—who thought the enemy wore black pajamas—probably wondered if they were ARVN. For his hesitation, Mack and Anderson took a burst of AK47 across their chests.
Goodwin threw himself into the brush off the footpath at the first shots. Another AK opened up from the left, putting full auto bursts over him. Goodwin could hear the rounds snapping over his head. When the NVA changed magazines, Goodwin fired back from the prone—single shots—trying to walk his rounds into the tangle from where he could hear the enemy. He screamed for his point men, but there was no answer. He began crawling back. Down the trail he found Randy Grove and Ralph Poe, his only old-timers besides Anderson. One of the green seeds was shot; the other two were passed out from shock or heat exhaustion.
Goodwin, Grove, and Poe got out on their bellies. The rest of the company was still in the banana tree grove, everyone crouched behind cover from all the stray rounds slashing through the foliage. The men were wilted from the heat. Goodwin came up to his knees and waved at a medic, “We’ve got some dead and wounded, I need you to give us a hand!”
The medic simply shook his head no.
Since the company headquarters medic, a conscientious objector named Doc Peterson, had an excellent reputation, this man was most likely the 1st Platoon medic, another conscientious objector who refused to carry a weapon and made no bones about his reluctance. He was, all in all, a nice, spacey kid who dabbled in oriental religion and culture and who was literally shaking in his jungle boots every minute the company was in the bush. Sometimes this medic did his job and sometimes he hid in a foxhole; there were grunts who wanted to blow his head off.
Goodwin suddenly noticed that everyone, including the officers, was looking at him from behind the trees. He barked at them, “Yeah, we got some real bad shit up there! They ambushed us!”
Alpha 3–21 combat assaulted into AK Valley, and Bravo 3–21 was close behind on foot. They’d started out from Hill 352 after a platoon from Charlie 3–21 was brought in to pick up their rucks—Bravo Company was being sent in fast and light. At least one man kept his rucksack, though. PFC Eric R. Shimer, a grenadier in third squad, 3d Platoon, dumped the paraphernalia from it and reshouldered it with only his last can of warm beer, a can of charlie rats, and thirty rounds of ammunition.
Private Shimer was one of the new breed of grunt that came when the rules governing student deferments were changed. He was drafted out of law school at Villanova University. On his helmet cover, he had opted for something “ethnic, esoteric, and double entendre,” namely a penned-in Iron Cross with the words Gott Mit Uns. Shimer was a conservative, but also a sardonic realist. It was perhaps cynically appropriate that his Purple Heart was the result of what was euphemistically called “friendly fire.” A Marine Phantom had accidentally toggled a 750-pound bomb within twenty meters of his squad during the June bunker fight, and Shimer caught a two-centimeter piece of steel in his leg.
Shimer had been in-country five months.
Shimer’s platoon, under 1stLt Gordon J. Turpin, had the drag position as they humped down the jungled ridge line and then toward AK Valley to the west. The platoon used the main trail not by choice—it was easily ambushable—but for speed. It was more than five kilometers as the crow flies. No one really knew what was going on, the men were hungry and fatigued, and the sunbake practically finished them. By the time they approached Alpha Company’s noisy perimeter, Shimer thought they were a bunch of zombies.
They’d been pushed too hard, too long.
Bravo Company had not had a respite from the field since right after the May battle. Finally, on 6 August, they had been lifted to LZ Center via Hueys, then were loaded on Chinooks bound for Charger Hotel, the brigade’s stand-down billets in Chu Lai. They turned in their gear, were issued fresh fatigues, then straggled off in little groups to the Americal PX and the USO. Bad rumors were afloat, all of which the company commander, Capt Ronald V. Cooper, confirmed that night. Most of the company had gathered, some stoned, some drunk, for the floor show. Captain Cooper came on first, looking very distraught. “I hate to tell you this, but …” Stand down was cancelled. Bravo was going back to the bush in the morning.
The grunts burst into shouts and obscenities.
On 7 August, Bravo Three was lifted to LZ East, the rest of Bravo to LZ Center. More wire had been strung since the sapper attacks, and the nightly artillery barrages around the perimeter were close enough to send everyone ducking their own shrapnel. Nerves were clicking.
On the 9th, Bravo airlifted to abandoned LZ Prep.
On the 11th, the men conducted a predawn patrol which found nothing, then spent the rest of the day dismantling the LZ prior to abandoning it again.
On the 12th, the artillery was lifted off by Hooks and the infantry in Hueys. LZ Center had just been mortared and Bravo Company was sent to augment Delta Company on the bunker line. That night they watched flashes light up AK Valley; the concussions came ten seconds later. Marine Air was clearing the way for a group of planes spraying Agent Orange. The fire base mortar crews fired parachute flares all night and, in the light of one, Shimer and his buddy Ski suddenly noticed an NVA strolling through the wire below their bunker. The flare burned out before they could “fire him up.” Mortars were employed.
On the 13th, which was Shimer’s twenty-third birthday, Bravo got the good news. Stand down had been rescheduled for the 16th. Then to prove how really fragile the grunts’ existence was, orders were changed and they humped off Center in a driving rainstorm. Again, they had no idea what was going on. Crossing a swollen stream, Shimer slipped on the rocks and nearly drowned when his pack got up over his head. Halfway to the company’s destination, Hill 352, Lieutenant Turpin took out a short patrol to investigate some hootches. He told Shimer to recon by fire; Shimer blasted some of his misery out the barrel of his grenade launcher.
Bravo Company chopped out a mini LZ atop 352, a mortar tube was airlifted to them, and Shimer wrote home, “… our position is right under the landing pad, and the hooch comes down when the birds come in. The ants regard my air mattress as a freeway.”
On 14 August, Turpin took out a night ambush to the main trail below the ridge. The men dropped their rucks in the company pos, put on war paint, and set in behind a dike. As soon as they got their M60 and claymores in place, everyone promptly passed out from exhaustion. Only Lieutenant Turpin and his RTO stayed awake. As Shimer noted, the platoon leader “could have had us all court-martialled for dereliction of duty, but, being a realist and a decent guy, he just kidded the hell out of us.”
At dawn, the men learned the rest of the company had been mortared during the night and some men had been dusted off. There was an NVA regiment around them, somewhere in these jungled ridge lines.
They patrolled and patrolled, but found nothing.
On 17 August, at dusk, Third Herd went on another wild goose chase while the rest of Bravo Company humped to Hill 200. Third Herd had to make a forced march to rejoin the rest of the company and arrived after dark with no time and little energy to set out their trip flares and claymores.
On the 18th, at dawn, the platoon set out to secure a day laager at the base of Hill 434. The platoon took a helicopter resupply there, then higher sent a change of orders. There was talk of a company from 4th of the 31st Infantry being pinned down, and the platoon was to rejoin the company back at Hill 352. They humped across a stream, then got snarled and lost in the thick brush of the ridge line as darkness fell. Turpin told Shimer to fire an M79 illumination round. This pinpointed them to any lurking NVA, but it was a beacon for Captain Cooper to radio them directions. It was brutal going. When they finally broke into a clearing at the top of the ridge line, they had to medevac one man for a suspected heart attack from the heat. They finally dragged into the company pos one hour before midnight.
On 19 August, Bravo Company filed through the river flats of AK Valley as word filtered down the line that Alpha Company had fifteen dust-offs. They’d finally found the NVA, or the NVA had found them; details were never clear among the grunts. Bravo linked up with Alpha on a hillside of cane and elephant grass. The firing was up ahead, invisible through the brush, and a fire crackled and rolled smoke back over their heads. Shimer donned his gas mask, found a spot of shade to sit in, and figured that at least the smoke was concealing them.
From within the banana trees, Lieutenant Shurtz was on the horn with Lieutenant Colonel Howard who was orbiting in his charlie-charlie bird.
The two men did not get along.
It was a matter of style. Howard was a hot-tempered taskmaster. His enthusiasm, or rather what the grunts thought of it, was noted by Private Shimer when they returned to LZ Center after one particularly exhausting patrol. “… The first sergeant met us with two garbage cans full of cold beer. We needed that. The new battalion commander, a distinguished looking black man, also met us at the wire. We were required to unload our weapons and salute with a snappy, ‘Gimlet, sir!’ We did not need that.”
Captain Carrier—who was called Outlaw and who gave his men nicknames like the Butcher Platoon—was more in tune with Howard, who was called the Skull because he shaved his head. After Carrier lost five men in the bunker complex, Carrier pushed hard and bumped into two NVA platoons on the run. He gave pursuit with revenge in mind, and stumbled over a gut-shot North Vietnamese soldier. The battalion commander—Howard’s predecessor—was overhead in his C&C and radioed Charlie Company to secure an LZ to medevac the wounded prisoner. Carrier argued, “Aw shit, sir, this dink’s going to be dead in ten minutes, and we’ve still got a chance to catch his buddies!” Carrier’s Kit Carson Scout ended the argument by shooting the NVA in the head, and Charlie Company continued their hunt. Howard liked such aggressiveness, especially when it racked up the numbers. Lieutenant Shurtz was, by comparison, a husky, crew-cut ROTC graduate from Iowa who—only twelve days in command—came across as an earnest, green kid. His troops liked him, but they had not seen enough of him in combat to respect him.
In what was Shurtz’s first real firefight, Alpha Company had just been humping out of the LZ when the point squad was machine-gunned. Lieutenant Tynan sent PFC Goodwin back down the trail with another squad. Randy Grove crawled as close as he dared to that first NVA bunker and kept the NVA’s heads down with his M16 while Goodwin fired his M16 from a crouch and hollered directions. The rest of the men began dragging the wounded and the heat casualties back down the path.
A machine gun squad was fed in to help them. It was under PFC Robert Kruch, and if Goodwin thought his squad was the best in the company, Kruch thought his might be the worst. Kruch—who was drafted during his final term in college, and who was antiwar but curious—had been in the bush all of three weeks. He was in charge of five even newer men only because the real squad leader had, in his opinion, shammed his way out; he was a short-timer who, sensing what was about to happen, claimed to be sick. He had been medevacked the day before.
Kruch’s squad had been in the last helo lift; in the confusion generated by the downed helicopter—it was impossible to determine the source of enemy fire in the racket—he and his two riflemen jumped behind a dike and became separated from their machine gun team. They finally scrambled into the banana trees, then hustled down the trail to help get the casualties back. They found their gun team holed up in a cluster of trees, the machine gunner firing his M60 into the green tangle. There was a shout to pull back. The machine gunner—who had previously bragged about being an enforcer in a Chicago street gang—was visibly shaken. As they got up to go, he grabbed the M60 barrel and burned his hand. Back at the LZ, he told Kruch he had to see a medic. Kruch never saw him again.
Mack and Anderson were lying on the trail, and the grunts clustered around them. Kruch knew Mack; he was from a different platoon, but when you’re new and scared shitless you latch onto buddies. Mack reminded him of one of his younger brothers. The kid’s chest was blown open; you could see the heart beating. A medic crouched beside him, “C’mon, man, hang on, a chopper’s coming!” Mack turned ashen very quickly, then just stopped breathing. Kruch vomitted into the brush along the footpath.
Captain Carrier was on the chopper pad at LZ Center when the medevacs and battalion command ship landed. Among those lifted out of Alpha Company’s perimeter were four heat casualties. They lay like statues in the LZ. Lieutenant Colonel Howard eyed them suspiciously; Alpha had flown into the valley, but Bravo, which had humped in, didn’t have any heat medevacs. The battalion had an unscientific method to sort out malingerers: a dousing of ice water on a genuine heat casualty would have no effect, but a faker couldn’t help but flinch.
With satisfaction, Carrier watched as Howard had a bucket of water fetched and poured it across the men himself. They jerked painfully. All four of the malingerers were black, and Howard was black, and he turned on them with contemptuous wrath. The impression one got from Lieutenant Colonel Howard—who had fought in Korea when the military was barely desegregated—was that he was very sensitive about and proud of his race. He wanted no one to think they couldn’t hack it.
“Get ready, we’re going back in!”
The four were up now, three of them tight-lipped, one arguing back until he decided it was best to shut the hell up. Howard looked to be on the verge of unholstering his .45 and shooting the coward.
Meanwhile, Howard’s RTO edged over to Captain Carrier. He’d just recently been sent to battalion from Charlie Company, and he hoped to find some consolation with his former commander. He was a stocky, sharp kid named Richard Doria, and he was horror stricken. “My God, we can’t go back in there! This colonel thinks he’s King Kong, but the dinks got a ring of .51-cals. Ask the helicopter crew …”
“I ain’t asking the pilots nothing!”
Carrier was Airborne Ranger and he did not like that kind of talk, but Doria was not going to let it die. “If they weren’t black,” he pressed, “we wouldn’t be going back in. He just doesn’t want the guys to think he lets the blacks welch.”
“If you don’t go, there’s no doubt you’re going to jail,” threatened Carrier.
Doria had been Carrier’s RTO during the nightmare in May; he had served ably and, after much time in the bush, everyone was glad when he was selected as battalion radioman. It got him out of the grunts. Carrier finally relented and went to the colonel. But Howard was adamant: he was going to put those shirkers where they belonged! Carrier put his arm over Doria’s shoulder, “You’ve done this before. We’ve been on CAs under fire. You can do it again. I’ve been scared, I’ve been so afraid I’ve cried on the radio. But you gotta do the job.” Doria said nothing. He just resigned himself and climbed back aboard the command helo, but his face was a mask Carrier had seen before. The man was seeing his own death. The Huey rose from the helo pad and dipped into the valley. From the bunker line on LZ Center, Captain Carrier saw what happened next.
As the 3–21 C&C bore in towards Alpha Company, Colonel Tacka-berry was in the 196th InfBde C&C, orbiting one aerial tier above battalion’s airspace. Tackaberry monitored the radio and heard Shurtz request Howard to take out their civilian photographer because he did not want to spend the night in the valley. Tackaberry broke in on the transmission and said he could pick up the man since he was returning to LZ Baldy for the nightly briefing. Howard said no problem, he was going in anyway.
Howard radioed Shurtz and his RTO, SP4 Chuck Hurley, “Zulu Alpha Niner, I’m inbound into your position with replacements.”
Shurtz and Hurley guided in the battalion commander. The NVA were coming out of the woodwork all over the valley, but seemed mostly concentrated to the west near Hill 102 and south along the Song Chang. The C&C should come in from the east, from along Nui Lon ridge; land in the paddy adjacent to the tree grove; then pivot one-eighty and go back the way they’d come. That’s exactly what the pilot did, pausing long enough to kick out the four malingerers and take Noonan aboard.
Then the C&C hopped over to Bravo Company; they were set up in a thick plot of elephant grass and trees south of Alpha Company and closer to the river. Captain Cooper and his RTO, SP4 Robert Munson, were with their FO, Sgt Bass, and his RTO, PFC Roland Lasso. Howard came on the radio to request landing directions. Things were chaotic now and—as Private Lasso recounted it—the first landing attempt was waved off as enemy fire suddenly cracked at the descending helicopter. Howard said he was going to give it another try. Cooper argued with him on the radio, “This area is too hot! I’m not going to have one of my men shot off a paddy dike trying to guide you in! If you’re still coming in, you’re on your own!”
A second attempt was aborted under fire.
The C&C finally banked away, but then darted towards Hill 102. It buzzed low, and Howard and his sergeant major were knocked out the open cabin doors as the chopper was hit by 12.7mm fire or an RPG. The Huey nosed towards the valley floor as the fuel tanks ignited, and it was a ball of fire and coming apart even before impact. Howard did not seem the kind of man who believed in premonitions, but something odd was remembered later by his battalion staff. A young ocelot had been caught on LZ Center; it was nicknamed Skates Two, which was Howard’s radio call sign. The night before the colonel’s death, the ocelot had escaped from its cage and been killed by the pet dogs of the headquarters company.
Colonel Tackaberry, flying back to LZ Baldy as dusk approached, had been monitoring the battalion net. Howard was talking, but he suddenly blurted, “Oh!” as though he’d been punched in the chest. An excited voice came through the static hiss, “Looks like they’ve been hit!” Tackaberry told his pilot to turn around and, in ten minutes, they were over the crash site. There was a smoky imprint on the vegetation, the tail section was still intact, parts were strewn about, the rest was melted magnesium. There were no signs of survivors. Until the bodies were recovered, the U.S. Army would carry those aboard as Missing In Action:
LtCol Eli P. Howard
WO1 Johns D. Plummer
WO1 Gerald L. Silverstein
SgtMaj Franklin D. Rowell
SP4 Richard A. Doria
PFC Stephen L. Martino
PFC Stewart J. Lavigne
Mr. Oliver E. Noonan
Lieutenant Shurtz did not see the crash. He had watched the Huey crest the hill, wondering why the colonel was going the wrong way. Then he walked over to his platoon leaders. 2dLt David Teeple, Alpha One, was new. 1stLt Dan Kirchgesler, Alpha Two, was the most experienced officer there. 2dLt Bob Tynan, Alpha Three, was also new but learning fast. They’d been monitoring the battalion net, and one of them commented to Shurtz, “The C&C is down.”
“Yeah, I know, he just dropped off four guys.”
“No, they’ve been shot down.”
“What!”
“The colonel apparently spotted a .51 on the ridge and went down to take a look.”
The 3d of the 21st Infantry had gone in expecting to clear up a spot of trouble, but had walked into a regiment. The confusion started there and was capped when the battalion commander was suddenly blasted out of the sky. That night in the Song Chang Valley was a mess, hard to piece together; but a picture—probably flawed in parts—emerged. Bravo Company had been ordered to secure the crash site. The order was issued either by Maj Richard Waite, BnXO, or Maj Richard Smith, BnS-3, but they should not be labelled incompetent. Their place was properly in the TOC bunker on LZ Center, but with the command ship gone so were their eyes. They could not gauge the true field picture, which was that the wreck was well inside enemy lines.
Captain Cooper gave the mission to 3d Platoon.
Lieutenant Turpin, Bravo Three, resisted the order. Turpin was no timid college draftee but an OCS mustang lifer considered a bit crazy by his grunts because he loved the bush. He’d previously been a sergeant first class in the special forces. He was aggressive but also realistic, and he argued that, with darkness falling, it was useless to risk ambush to recover a cabinful of corpses.
Cooper agreed and radioed LZ Center to respectfully decline the mission; to listen to another version, the order was pressed and Cooper snapped, “If you want it so bad, major, you walk point!”
Captain Cooper may have said that; he was a hard man to define. The captain he replaced was a stocky supply type who loved his creature comforts, hated to hump, and didn’t seem to be looking for a fight. When Cooper, who was tall and lean, took over after the June bunker fight, he kept resupply to a minimum and kept the company moving hard. He was looking for the enemy. He was respected throughout the Gimlets. Even Captain Carrier noted, “… He was the best thing to hit the battalion since me. He looked out for his men and showed a lot of command presence.” But he was no lifer. He was a young man who was easy to talk to, and who flashed the peace sign and seemed very plugged into the bitterness of his grunts. Sometimes at night, after hacking out a spot in the bush, some guys would pass a joint to mellow down from the day’s hump. Captain Cooper seemed the kind who would, in a moment of weary comradeship, say fuck it, and take a hit. There was talk to that effect; others thought that was bullshit.
A journalist who joined Bravo Company in the bush two weeks later caught the flavor when he recounted conversations in the company headquarters at dusk:
“Someday we’re going to get together and all of us are going to say we aren’t going. The only thing that is stopping us now is Long Binh Jail, but if we all stick together, they can’t lock us all up.”
“Right on,” said another.…
Captain Cooper came over and joined the circle. “Hiya Coop,” said one of the men. Munson, the radio man, took a boxing stance and pretended to hit the captain, “You wanna take a picture of us kicking the shit out of the captain?”
Cooper sat down and we continued talking. “He knows what it’s like out here, not those generals and colonels with their grid maps and grease pencils,” said Munson. “There are no lifers out here.”
Like them, Cooper was in the Army because he had no choice, and like them he had no love for the war. He didn’t care about “body count” or about “making major.” All he wanted was to get as many people out alive as he could.
Bravo Company did not move from their night defensive position, but it was not a quiet night. The North Vietnamese were up and moving with the darkness and, from within the center of the company, the Bravo CP worked with B/3–82 Artillery on LZ Center. The shells slammed into suspected targets around the grunts; most of them simply ignored it. Claymores and trip flares were in place. PFC Shimer noted, “I discovered I could sleep through any commotion as long as it did not affect me or my defensive sector. But as soon as anything happened on my part of the line, I was instantly awake and taking appropriate action. This honing of the nervous system took over ten years to wear off.”
It was almost midnight before the North Vietnamese attacked again the French Hootch and the joint perimeter of Delta 4–31 and Charlie 2–1. Movement was heard all around the circle. Then came the crashing of RPGs and AK47s, the eruption of return fire, and the lull to sporadic shooting. Fifteen men were wounded, most of them from Charlie Company. Several grunts from Charlie carried one of their wounded buddies to the medics in the French Hootch. When they checked on him, one grunt mumbled, “Aw hell, he’s dead.” Captain Whittecar couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t a mark on the kid. He started mouth to mouth, then banged the man’s chest until he could hear a heartbeat. In a couple of minutes it stopped again, and Whittecar put his hand under the GI’s head to give him artificial respiration again. The back of his skull was mashed, blown away. Whittecar let him drop. Only later would he reflect on how cruel his reaction had been: Goddammit, I haven’t got time to waste on a dead man!
Spooky was on station again, miniguns funnelling thousands of rounds a minute around the perimeter. Whittecar’s only strobe light had been damaged by an RPG, so he had to constantly hold the on-switch. The French Hootch was in the center of the perimeter, and Whittecar lay on his back in the center of the floor. He held the strobe across his chest, had the radio beside him, and told the gunship pilot to hit everything thirty yards outside the light. RPGs slammed against trees and branches, raining down shrapnel. More than one RPG sprayed inside the hootch, kicking up gravel and dust, while the GIs pressed against the inside walls, hands over their faces. Whittecar, stretched across the floor with his strobe and radio, was amazed that he was only scratched in the explosions.
They went on all night.
Alpha Company 3–21 was probed. For Private Kruch it was a long night of blacking out, then coming to an adrenaline high at every noise in the dark. His squad was on the side of the line facing the paddies. In the far tree line, things seemed to be moving, but when flares popped there was only stillness in the harsh shadows. The man with the M60 fired—giving away his position just as the NVA probers wanted—but the antique weapon kept jamming.
On Private Goodwin’s side of the line, the men had dug shallow holes among the banana trees. A hootch sat in a clearing and the shrill screams of an arguing Vietnamese woman echoed from it. The voices of her antagonists could not be heard, but Goodwin instinctively thought he knew what was happening: the NVA were forcing her boy to walk at them to trip a flare or claymore. An AK shot suddenly rang out and the woman stopped shouting. A few minutes later, the men heard footsteps approaching. Randy Grove pulled a hand frag from his web gear, and Goodwin whispered not to pop the spoon before throwing it. That way the kid would hear the midair pop and beat it. That’s what they did, and the figure scampered away.
Thirty minutes later, there was a sudden, earsplitting crash outside the perimeter. A grunt bellowed, “Incoming, incoming, incoming!” Goodwin thought it was really a damaged tree that the NVA had shoved down to snap trip-flare and claymore wires, and he hollered, “No, man, that’s an incoming tree!” The tension was released in a burst of laughter down the line. Someone threw a frag towards the shadows.
Two hours later, the NVA dropped mortars around them, and at daylight, they discovered the downed Huey had been stripped of all salvageable gear.