Chapter Nine
Lieutenant Turpin of Bravo Company 3d of the 21st Infantry had the point on 20 August. At 0700 he passed word to his men to stay in their holes since artillery fire began pounding to the west. Hill 102 was in the process of turning from green to brown. Mild vibrations rolled back under the grunts. The arty stopped. Marine Phantoms rolled in.
Then Third Herd moved out with third squad on point.
Turpin trusted the third squad. Three weeks earlier, several Vietnamese had been spotted on a patrol and Turpin had radioed Cooper to volunteer his platoon to investigate. The men had crawled along terraced dikes to within thirty meters of a hootch in a lower section; a GI spotted two armed dinks. Turpin positioned Shimer and another grenadier on the trail to cover their attack, then he crept forward with Bob Boyd and Ray Wilcox. The two grunts rushed the hootch, flushing three NVA, and Lieutenant Turpin squared his M16 sights on them. He killed one Vietnamese and wounded another who managed to limp away with the third man. Shimer came up with the rest of the platoon and fired his M79 into suspected escape routes, but it was all over. Turpin summed up the action by recommending Boyd for a Bronze Star and commenting, “He’s the ballsiest guy I’ve ever known.”
In AK Valley, the NVA were ready. That’s why the grunts were spitting out bitter comments the second morning of the battle. Bravo Company had a strict policy of rotating platoons, squads, and even individuals on point. Third Herd had been in the drag position during the previous day’s hump, which meant they had at least another day before they were supposed to be moved to the front. They’re screwing us, Shimer thought. It was because they were reliable. A lot of guys wouldn’t even raise their heads to return fire, but that was not a problem in his squad. The men were not at all happy with their jobs, but they accepted the reality of what they had to do to survive. When Shimer had first joined them, they had said they had only two rules. They never left a wounded man behind and, if someone got killed because you decided to get stoned in the bush, well, you’d get a body bag too.
Lieutenant Turpin went to another squad first to take the point. They refused. It was not their turn.
Turpin walked up to Sgt Lowry Cuthbert, third squad leader, who argued and complained but then told his men to saddle up. They too argued and complained, but followed orders and moved out single file through brush. They were spaced out with a point man, cover man, Shimer with the M79, and Cuthbert leading the other three GIs of the squad. The rest of Bravo Company followed single file. Two hundred meters out, the thick vegetation gave way to a scrubby clearing around an old hootch. Sergeant Cuthbert got them on a hasty skirmish line but, as they were about to cross, an M79 popped over their heads and exploded to their front. Cuthbert shouted back to Turpin to stop the platoon’s firing. Shimer stood hunched with his buddy Wilcox, pissed that they were exposed and wanting either to press on or to pull back into the trees. He scanned the front for targets, which was proper; however, stopped and exposed, he should have been kneeling or at the prone. But he was too fatigued to get down if they were going to be moving soon, and his mind was working too slowly. The grenadiers in Bravo Company carried their M79s with the breeches open, so they wouldn’t have accidental discharges; anyway, no one would fire over a full platoon. The grenade must have been fired by an NVA. Shimer should have realized that. He should have been flat in the grass. But none of it really registered in his numbed brain.
For that, Shimer became Bravo’s first casualty.
What sounded like an M16 suddenly fired from ten feet behind him. Shimer was kicked in the back, face first into the grass, his half-empty rucksack on his head. There was no initial pain, but instant realization that he’d been hit badly. One round had drilled through his right arm, blowing out bicep and tricep, shattering bone. It hit his ribcage and tumbled horizontally like a ripsaw across his chest. It left a bloody furrow, hit his breastbone, sent fragments into his bronchial tubes, then punched out the left side of his chest. Shimer could sense all that had happened. He could also feel the blood dripping into his lungs and he knew that could kill him.
But his lungs were filling up slowly. He realized that if he stayed calm, he would live. That’s what he concentrated on.
There had been only one burst of enemy fire.
Everyone had ducked flat, then rushed into position. Some ran to Shimer. Someone got his pack off and rolled him over. Gary Knoll, the platoon medic, was quickly there; he looked like he was going to vomit as he stared down at Shimer, but then quickly went to work. There were shouts that Wilcox had killed the dink in the spider hole. Sporadic shots began cracking past them and everyone got down except Lieutenant Turpin—who always led by example—and his RTO. Turpin looked down at Shimer, called for a dust-off, and told the pilot to be quick, “He don’t look good. He’s gonna die.”
They rolled Shimer into a poncho, and George Beason and Ski, from another squad, hoisted him and started back. They passed the rest of Bravo Company, which was still filing forward through the trees.
Withering fire suddenly burst from the front and flanks.
They set Shimer down at the night pos and Beason crouched with him. The morning cool had burned off and Beason pulled out his canteen for Shimer as the air turned hot and hazy. Beason kept him from passing out. Other wounded were being dragged back. Hueys were circling but not landing until all the casualties had been gathered in one place.
The North Vietnamese had waited until most of Bravo Company had filed unaware into their bunker complex; then they commenced their horseshoe ambush. Bravo was strung out and pinned down. As usual, only a handful were doing the actual fighting. Many of those on point couldn’t or wouldn’t return fire for all the rounds snapping above their prone bodies. The men at the rear of the column were head down in the bushes, unable to fire for fear of hitting comrades ahead of them in the tangle. The fight quickly disintegrated into mass confusion. From his CP, Captain Cooper ordered a pullback to allow firepower to be employed.
From his CP, Lieutenant Shurtz moved men to protect Bravo’s flank and to secure a medevac landing zone. Some of his men volunteered to crawl into the buzz saw to help drag Bravo’s casualties back.
Bravo Company finally inched back into the foxholes of their night position, and Captain Cooper stayed on the horn shouting for air strikes. Before the Phantoms came on station, one or two medevacs were able to come in for the most seriously wounded. Private Shimer was going into shock; his lungs were heavy with blood and his breath was labored, but he lay there, concentrating on the simple act of breathing. The unarmed medevac descended, a big red cross on its front, and Shimer’s buddy Beason shouted for assistance. Several GIs grabbed Shimer by his arms and legs and heaved him aboard the first Huey as soon as its skids settled in the grass. Fire cracked over the landing zone. Shimer was first aboard, flat on his back on the floor. Others were quickly shoved beside him; then there was the sensation of lifting off. Just then, Shimer felt a whip of heat as a round passed his face, and he saw the pilot jerk in his seat as he was nicked.
Phantoms rolled in after the medevacs.
Bravo Three had taken the brunt of the ambush and PFC Richard Senske, a sharp OCS dropout and acting platoon sergeant, had assumed command. From their point squad, only Lowry Cuthbert, Bob Boyd, and Frank Juarez crawled out physically unscathed. Rick Shimer and Lupe Tobias were wounded.
Ray Wilcox was killed.
Joe Paparello was killed.
Milton Mendoza, a medic who ran up from another platoon, was also killed. All together, Bravo Company lost five dead and twenty-four wounded. Alpha Company also took casualties helping get these men back: three volunteers themselves from PFC Goodwin’s squad—Ralph Poe and two green seeds, Harry and Diaz—were wounded.
Lieutenant Turpin was also shot.
The last medevac had sailed in and out under fire, and the jets were pounding in when Turpin was dragged into Alpha Company’s LZ perimeter with a sucking chest wound. While Cooper directed the air strikes, Shurtz got on the radio to B-TOC to request another medevac. He told the major on LZ Center that the jets were running north-to-south on the NVA bunkers to their front, and a medevac might land behind them in the paddy to the east. The wounded lieutenant was lying twenty-five feet from Shurtz and his RTO, under morphine and tended to by Doc Peterson.
The medevac was refused as too dangerous.
Lieutenant Turpin—Shurtz didn’t know who he was at the time—died in the dirt as the Phantoms dropped delay-fused bombs on the bunker complex.
Bravo died that day, and Alpha melted.
Several grunts came up to Shurtz, jerking the frightened medic along by his collar. One of them spat, “This guy was hiding in a foxhole with his hands over his ears! Keep him with you ’cause if he comes near us, we’re liable to blow him away!” The medic was mentally a million miles away. He wasn’t the only one. Private Goodwin had settled behind a banana tree; at each Phantom pass, the NVA turned their weapons skyward and he rolled behind the tree as bomb fragments slashed the surrounding brush. No resupply choppers could get through this crossfire, and Goodwin was down to half a canteen and a single bandolier of rifle ammunition. Most of the green seeds were completely out of water. Goodwin wouldn’t share his when they asked, but he did suggest they use their machetes to get into the banana trees and chew the tart but moist meat. Others were going a little crazy in the sunbake. They licked sweat from their arms, which only made them retch. Some stripped bark from the trees to eat. Everyone was almost out of food.
Finally, a water detail was organized; on Shurtz’s map, a well was indicated to the east along the route Bravo Company had humped in on the day before. The detail set out and was gone too long. Shurtz was extremely worried, until the GIs finally came back and reported that NVA were refilling canteens from the well when they got there. They laid low and snuck up to the well after the enemy moved on. As if to confirm that the North Vietnamese were everywhere in AK Valley, as A and B/3–21 shored up their perimeter, a platoon from C/3–21 was CA’d behind them atop Nui Lon and almost immediately came under mortar fire.
While B/3–21 was being mauled, D/4—31 to the west—three days under fire, and Captain Whittecar, two days back in command—finally got their respite. Helicopters were able to shuttle in resupplies of food, water, and ammunition and take out the last of the wounded. By that time, the medics in Delta Company were using fatigue shirts for bandages. The dead went out last in body bags. One Huey took fire ascending LZ West’s mountain, banked sharply, and a body fell out and crashed through the jungle canopy. He was later located.
Then came Delta’s first quiet night. At 0500, however, a trip flare burst outside the perimeter and M16s chopped at the grass until 81mm mortar fire was directed in. At 0630, several RPGs were fired, but they exploded short of the ring of foxholes. Five minutes later, Charlie Company’s side of the perimeter came under heavy fire. It was returned. At 0700, the Blue Ghost Cobras came on station, pumping rockets and miniguns around the perimeter amid a crossfire of 12.7mm and AK47 tracers. It was enough to quiet the NVA, and at 0800 on 21 August, Delta Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, left the Song Chang Valley. The Cobras fired cover as the Hueys shuttled the GIs up to LZ West.
Whittecar and his command group were on the last chopper out; it was no less than a great relief. It was also the end of Whittecar’s command; within days, he was medevacked to Chu Lai with infected wounds.
In the aid station on West, Doc Kinman probed Whittecar’s leg for more shrapnel, but there was none and he began to bandage it. Whittecar sat there, trying to define his emotions. GIs from Delta, also in the aid station, looked at Whittecar and he looked at them. The pride and relief were palpable. They’ve given their all, and so have I, thought Whittecar. He was proud, sad, exhausted from three sleepless nights, almost overcome by his emotions. There was talk of a Distinguished Service Cross and he thought, goddamn, I did it. The next moment he doubted himself. The two GIs closest to him were gone—the medic with a bullet in his head, the radioman with a mangled foot. Seven of his men were dead; almost everyone was wounded. Could I have done something differently? he asked himself. One grunt came to him privately, “I wanted to thank you for coming down. I know you didn’t have to, but I wouldn’t be alive now if you hadn’t.” That meant a great deal to Whittecar, but it did not erase all of his hauntings.
The night of 20–21 August was a long one for Alpha Company. Some men with minor wounds had not been evacuated, and their occasional groans during the night were bad for morale; everyone realized there was no guaranty of a medevac if they were hit. Lieutenant Shurtz and Doc Peterson sat bleary-eyed in the grass, filling out medevac slips for the casualties and radioing them in on a secure net with scrambler. Battalion radioed back that one of the men reported evacuated with wounds could not be found in any hospital. As they pieced it together, the missing man had been hit while helping get Bravo’s wounded and, although this was reported to Shurtz who then filled out a medevac slip, in the noise and confusion of the fight, the man had not been dragged back. His body was recovered in the morning; reportedly, he had an old bullet wound in his leg and a fresh one in his head. His body and the body of the dead lieutenant were zipped into body bags, and Lieutenant Tynan detailed Private Goodwin’s squad to carry them as they saddled up that morning. Goodwin objected that they needed to maintain twenty paces between each man on the march, and a six-man cluster dragging a body bag was too dangerous. The platoon leader reconsidered in their favor and they left the two bodies hidden among some trees in the LZ, to be recovered after the battle.
The previous day, LtCol Robert C. Bacon, who had served as an ARVN advisor his first tour, was helicoptered from his new staff position at Chu Lai to assume command of the Gimlets. The battle between the 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry and the 3d NVA Regiment centered on pushing through to the C&C crash site to recover the bodies. Few grunts appreciated such reasoning—dying for the dead—and morale was sagging.
On 21 August, A Company took the point.
Machine gun teams moved across the paddy and secured the tree line without incident; then the rest of Alpha Company advanced from the banana grove. From there, they humped over one of the Nui Lon fingers with 2d Platoon leading the way; its commander, Lieutenant Kirchgesler, had told Lieutenant Shurtz that, as the most experienced officer there, he did not resent taking point consistently.
Lieutenant Teeple was in the middle.
Lieutenant Tynan brought up the rear of the column.
At the grunt level, these maneuvers were not seen in ordered terms. There was no rationale. The platoon had not been resupplied in two days, and had to function on a few sips of hot canteen water a day and the few C rations they’d had the foresight to jam into their claymore pouches before being CA’d in. Ammunition was precariously low. Captain Carrier noted what was beating them the most:
I remember standing on LZ Center thinking that this had to be the hottest I have ever seen it up this high. The windsock moved only when a bird flew in. I wish I could convey just how miserably hot it was. Ever stood in the thick woods in the summer and had your cigarette smoke float straight upward. Couple that with swinging a machete in briars and brush that take you thirty minutes to move thirty feet.
The elements had gotten the best of Private Kruch, for one, and he trudged along under bandoliers of M16 and M60 ammunition, hands wrapped around a battered and unreliable M16 rifle. He was half-delirious from an empty stomach and the heavy, stale air trapped amid the vinery of the windless valley floor; and he was completely terrified by the invisible enemy. Oh God, what a mess, we know there’s another ambush waiting! What are we doing! he kept thinking. The platoon crested a low hill. All Kruch could hear was a ringing in his ears, and the hair on the back of his neck seemed to stand up. NVA fire erupted from nowhere. The platoon was in a network of spider holes and bunkers covered with banana leaves and indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape. The return fire seemed only to chop weeds. Several men had been hit—one was screaming bloody murder that he was shot in the hip, couldn’t move, the dinks were right next to him!—and, as always, Lieutenant Kirchgesler started towards the hottest spot.
The lieutenant was shot dead.
Kruch and his squad had scrambled into a furrow off the path and were returning fire. AK47 rounds suddenly snapped from the rear. Kruch froze as dirt kicked up a yard away; then he dropped into the ditch and shoved his M16 back up, madly squeezing the trigger. The NVA seemed to be everywhere!
Lieutenant Shurtz was down in the crossfire with Specialist Hurley, his senior RTO; it seemed impossible to get Kirchgesler’s body back without sacrificing more lives. Shurtz radioed the point platoon to leave the body and pull back under cover of air strikes and artillery, an order for which he never quite forgave himself but he could think of no other alternative. The rest of Alpha Company was strung out behind the point of contact, having flopped into the vegetation along the trail. They lay there unmoving, unable to fire, ducking even lower as stray bursts clipped foliage overhead. Lieutenant Tynan and Private Goodwin lay beside one another, trying to figure out what was going on. They could hear two NVA machine guns and sporadic AK47 fire. Word came to send men back to secure an LZ for the medevacs, so Goodwin and Grove, the last men in their squad, set out with several others. They found a burnt-out clearing about fifty meters back; it was an old potato field on the opposite side of the terraced hill from the NVA bunkers. Goodwin commented that they’d found their landing zone, and at that moment the first mortar round crashed into them. Over the noise of the firefight, Goodwin hadn’t heard the whistling descent, but the sudden explosion sent him into a frantic run for boulders forty yards away. Several more rounds thumped in, but Goodwin and Grove made it safely to cover. Then Goodwin realized that, although he was still gripping his M16 in his right hand, his sleeve was soaking with blood. His hand was numb. Grove had caught some shrapnel too, but they were still on their feet and they headed back towards their platoon.
The rest of Alpha Company was pulling back to that potato field. A medevac with gunship escort tried to hover-land against the slope of overgrown terraces. The Huey glided into a hover and Kruch and another GI hefted a wounded soldier above them. They gave a final heave and got the man aboard. Kruch collapsed with a wrenched back.
Goodwin and Grove also boarded, and Goodwin’s biggest worry was that they’d be shot down as soon as they cleared the trees. Medevacs had no door gunners and the medic had taken away his M16. He heard the AK47s as they pulled up, but in seconds they were high and dry.
A good amount of ammunition, charlie rats, and water blivets had been shoved out the cabin door before the Huey banked away. Those items were more precious than gold, and it must have been a mob scene because the only thing left for Kruch and his squad was a can of peaches. They angrily split it; then the company dug in around the potato patch, expecting to be mortared, praying they wouldn’t be overrun. Gunships orbited them and illumination was fired when night fell, but there was no attack. The only reason the NVA don’t attack, Kruch thought, is because they don’t know how exhausted and undermanned—and green—we are. He did, however, hear Vietnamese voices only a hundred feet from their ring of holes; he crawled back to the company headquarters to report it. He noted with disgust that “… some of the officers had two or three full canteens, and I found empty C cans and everyone asleep.”
By dawn the next day, 22 August 1969, A Company, 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry existed mostly on paper; but they had really died on 4 August.
Even then, they were not all they could have been. The former company commander, Capt Dennis Chudoba, USMA class of 1965 and veteran of a 1966–67 tour with the Gimlets, was a decent enough guy but he did not have the aggressive nature required of a combat leader. If a squad was suspected of faking an ambush, or if Search & Destroy became search & evade, nothing was really done about it. This problem was most severe in 3d Platoon, which had been without an officer for too long. 2d Platoon was lucky to have had Lieutenant Kirchgesler. 1st Platoon had 1stLt Harvey Browne, who joined them after four months with division surveillance, and Staff Sergeant Cruse, who had risen from private to staff sergeant in his eighteen months with the company; they tried to convince their reluctant draftees that the only way to go home alive was to find the NVA first and kill them.
The beginning of the end for Alpha Company came on 3 August, when they and Echo Recon were lifted to Chu Lai for stand down. There was some animosity between those infantrymen and the reconnaissance troopers. The story was that their ineptitude in okaying an LZ actually covered by the enemy had resulted in the death of a popular Alpha short-timer. Whatever the truth of that, when a Filipino band started a shrill Beatles’ imitation during the floor show that night, the place suddenly erupted in a chair-throwing, fist-swinging donnybrook between Alpha GIs and Echo GIs. As punishment, Lieutenant Colonel Howard cancelled stand down and assembled Alpha Company at the Chu Lai helipad the next morning. Lieutenant Browne thought the punishment was a complete bust. Everyone expected to be sent to LZ Center, so some grunts had cases of soda strapped to their rucksacks. Others were still blitzed from the previous night. Still others were missing; they were at the beach and hadn’t gotten the word. They were hustled aboard a Chinook—then got word in flight that they were to make a combat assault. No one knew what was going on. They CA’d into a paddy secured by some headquarters personnel. Browne’s platoon was first in; as they came off the Hooks, the battalion operations officer grabbed GIs and rushed them into defensive positions. Kirchgesler’s platoon came in next, and the grunts suddenly realized they’d been landed next to an NVA company. Figures with AK47s and RPGs could be seen moving away through the trees.
Kirchgesler moved after them and, within fifteen minutes of disembarking, Alpha Company was in contact. Browne was sent to outflank the firefight. He got his grunts on line and asked them their names. They were almost all replacements out of the Americal Combat Center and handed to him just an hour before at the Chu Lai helipad! He was thinking with a weariness that did not allow irony, “Oh well, here’s another goatfuck.” They got into a tree line. The contact sounded to be a few tree lines away, so Browne crawled fifteen meters into the grassy paddy ahead, then got up to appraise the area. An AK47 instantly punched him down. The bullet drilled through his left forearm and through an M16 magazine in the bandolier across his chest, then thankfully stopped halfway into a green army note pad in his pocket. His spacey but occasionally valiant medic, Doc Sanders, quickly crawled out to him, grabbed his shoulder harness, and dragged him on his back as he pedalled with his feet. The operation sort of fizzled out as he was loaded on Lieutenant Colonel Howard’s C&C for medevac; in the meantime, the NVA unit melted into the vegetation.
Lieutenant Browne was given a Silver Star and Purple Heart, and he was medevacked to the United States.
Staff Sergeant Cruse rotated in days.
Captain Chudoba departed.
Chudoba and Howard mixed about as well as oil and water, and the confusion of the 4 August contact further deteriorated the battalion commander’s view towards this cautious, thin, bespectacled subordinate. On 6 August, Alpha’s night perimeter took fire; Chudoba wanted massive artillery, but Howard thought he was exaggerating and shouted at him to get his ass to the point of contact and determine exactly what was going on. In the morning, Lieutenant Shurtz—recently choppered to LZ Center as a replacement—was told to ruck up. He was the new commander. “What, did Chudoba get wounded?” asked Shurtz. “No, the colonel fired him.” A Huey lifted Shurtz down to Alpha’s bush position, and he disembarked from one side as Captain Chudoba boarded from the other.
Shurtz walked up to his headquarters group. The senior RTO introduced them, “I’m Chuck. This is Doc Peterson.” He pointed to their lieutenant from the Field Artillery. “This is the FO, Al. What should we call you?”
“Well you’ve got two choices. It’s ‘Lieutenant Shurtz’ or ‘Sir.’ ”
Their jaws dropped.
The company seemed lax, and this was a first step to bring back old-fashioned discipline. Shurtz was Regular Army, a distinguished military graduate of his ROTC class and Ranger-qualified, a man who intended to follow in the footsteps of his father, a career lieutenant colonel. But his first operation with Alpha Company was not a textbook affair, and the realities of the bush began to stun him. The company kept pushing for the NVA column, but the only contact they made was with snipers. They swept towards each one, only to find farm villages each time, complete with Vietnamese going innocently about their chores. Per training, Shurtz had the males of military age rounded up—the village children, meanwhile, were peddling plastic baggies of marijuana—and choppered out. The results were negligible and the colonel finally choppered in to administer a pep talk and ass-chewing. The colonel was in his best form.
“What’s your company nickname, lieutenant?”
“Alpha Annihilators, sir,” Shurtz answered.
“Do you know the definition of Annihilator? It’s not going to do any good to send these people in for interrogation, so they can come right back out here and shoot at you again.” The colonel raised his voice. He didn’t want any prisoners. He wanted body count!
Shurtz couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
The battalion commander promised the men hot pizza for kills and, getting none, it was as if they made the colonel’s shit list. Their resupply became sporadic, as if they were being punished.
It was all flaky.
Then came the battle in AK Valley when Alpha Company’s only experienced officer, Lieutenant Kirchgesler, was killed. That left Lieutenants Shurtz, Tynan, and Teeple as the untested leaders of a company with too many untested soldiers. Forty percent were green seeds, and they were simply not prepared for this battle.
On 22 August, it was Lieutenant Teeple’s turn to lead the way back to the bunkers, where they were promptly hit in the crossfire again. Sgt Derwin Pitts—a tall, thin country boy and a good squad leader—was killed going for Kirchgesler’s body. PFC Ray Barker—a married kid who’d been drafted after college and who wanted nothing to do with Vietnam—was shot in the head going for Pitts’s body.
The crossfire was withering, and the platoon fell back towards the potato patch, dragging Barker’s body and four wounded.
Pitts was left near Kirchgesler.
PFC Kruch, for one, was sitting in a dazed heap, unable and unwilling to move again. From the day he’d arrived, things had stopped making sense. He was one of the new draftees and all he knew were the ragged, last three weeks of Alpha Company’s history. The grunts were mostly new guys, not sure if they were doing anything right, unbonded yet; they were just targets for an experienced enemy. The only resolution Kruch made was that he wasn’t going to die for some stupid officer sitting in the TOC bunker. So, when one of the new lieutenants ran up and said they were going back again for the bodies, he argued that it was suicide. The lieutenant looked scared too, but orders were orders and he pointed his .45 pistol at him; Kruch brought his M16 to the lieutenant’s chest and said he wasn’t going anywhere. The squad was not budging and no one really was going to shoot the other; the lieutenant finally holstered his weapon.
Word was passed to pull back to Nui Lon, and what ammunition they could not carry was buried in the potato patch. The grunts were punch-drunk from the sun and their march fell apart into disorganized bands; Kruch was terrified they might get separated from the rest of the company. The North Vietnamese were following them on the trail, keeping their distance but watching the entire time. Kruch could hear them talking.
Delta 4–31—which had the best reputation in the battalion—had pulled out the previous morning and by that afternoon Alpha 4–31—which had the worst reputation—had humped down from LZ West to assume their positions. Alpha Company had been pulling LZ security since the battle began. They snaked down the trail in a heavily burdened column, with full rucks and full loads of ammunition, and finally married up with Charlie 2–1 in the late afternoon. The brush around the French Hootch had absorbed most of the shell and smoke of the last four days; the only sign to the newcomers of the ferociousness of the battle were the treetops.
Many were splintered from RPGs. Everyone made a point of digging deep foxholes. That night, the NVA dropped in fifteen mortar rounds.
The morning of 22 August, Alpha Company moved out.
Alpha 4–31 and Charlie 2–1 hiked towards Hill 102 through shimmering, hot paddies; muffled explosions drifted back to them as air and arty once again clawed at the trees on the targeted hill. Alpha Two, under 2dLt Stephen Moore, was on point. About a hundred meters into the hump, a tree line intersected their dike. Lieutenant Moore sent one squad around one side of it, while he and his platoon sergeant went around the other with SP4 Al Holtzman’s squad. The point man, SP4 Robert Jeans, hiked the last berm into the woods. Lieutenant Moore was up near him when the North Vietnamese killed him at perhaps ten feet with an M79 to the chest. An RPD and several AK47s opened fire too. Prune Jeans dove for cover and ended up in a shallow depression only yards from the NVA holes; he couldn’t even lift his head in the crossfire.
Behind him, the rest of the squad was scattering behind dikes, all except one big, dumb kid who spun around and started running back.
The NVA shot him off the dike.
In moments, the North Vietnamese had killed four men from the lead platoon and wounded four more. The rest were pinned down. Specialist Holtzman figured there was only an NVA squad dug in among those trees; the difference, he thought, was that they had their shit together and we didn’t. The NVA were between the two squads, so they couldn’t fire indiscriminately into the trees. Most of his squad had picked a piece of dike anyway, and were pressed firmly against it, heads down. Holtzman hollered at a GI near him to get his ass up and return fire. “No way,” he screamed back. “I’m not stickin’ my head up to get blown away!”
Assholes! It was an inexperienced company, Holtzman reckoned, with only a handful you could really count on; the rest wanted to go home alive any way they could.
The platoon sergeant shouted to him to fire cover for Prune to get back. From where Holtzman was, Prune was about a hundred feet ahead, only ten yards from the berm from which the NVA were firing. He hollered to him; Prune called back that he was okay but could not move. Holtzman stuck his head up long enough to blast a LAW rocket into the trees and fire his M16 over Prune’s head. It produced a lot of noise and dust, but the NVA were still invisible and still firing; Prune was simply stuck.
Coming up from behind, Captain Mantell placed the other two platoons so that their firepower would allow Alpha Two to pull back. As the company separated, more NVA emerged from the tree lines. The lead squad of Alpha One almost immediately came under fire and radioed their platoon leader, First Sergeant Price, that they were pinned down. At the same time, Price received another call from Sergeant Causey, the platoon sergeant, who was with their rear squad: he had seen two NVA walk into the French Hootch area they’d just vacated. Top Price called back the point squad and sent back an M60 team to cover their rear. He also got on the horn to the artillery battery on LZ West; the barrage to their front allowed the platoon to move undetected from their paddy up onto a brushy finger of land that overlooked the ambushed paddy. From there, they could see 3d Platoon moving into position along the dikes to help 2d Platoon get back. Top Price, crouched on the forested finger with binoculars, was on the radio with Captain Mantell; both agreed that an assault would be suicide. Therefore, their concern was to get back the stranded men. Under 3d Platoon’s cover fire, 2d had been able to crawl back, dragging three of their wounded and two bodies. Two KIAs were still in the paddy.
So were Prune and a medic shot in the jaw.
It was a hot, dangerous day and the grunts were glad to slump among the trees on the ridge, out of harm’s way. Top Price asked for a volunteer; he needed someone to fire LAWs down onto the bunkers so the two men could get back to their lines.
Specialist Parsons stepped forward. He was a draftee who’d been introduced to marijuana in Vietnam and who was just doing his time; but he couldn’t stomach the thought of another grunt lying out there.
Price asked how many times he’d fired a LAW.
“Once,” Parsons answered, “back in basic.”
That was not very inspiring, but Price thought the kid looked sincere, so they collected all the rockets in the platoon and moved to the edge of the woods. Tom and Shorty accompanied them with the M60, as did a 2d Platoon GI who’d been sent to point out the exact locations of the NVA bunkers. The GI looked scared and pissed, Parsons thought, but also anxious to help out his buddies.
Parsons and his guide positioned themselves behind a banana tree at the edge of the high ground. It was a clear shot down, maybe fifty yards from the bunkers, but Parsons was extremely anxious: he could see a GI huddled in a depression only yards from the North Vietnamese. The man seemed to be moving, but Parsons found it hard to tell through the shimmering heat and the sweat pouring down his face. There seemed to be invisible steam in the brush around them. Parsons prepared the first LAW, then remembered about back-blast from basic training and glanced behind himself. Two grunts were standing there. He hollered at them to get out of the way. He shouldered the rocket, sighted in on where his partner was pointing, and squeezed off the shot. It exploded near the earthen berm. Parsons could barely make out an NVA squeezing from a spider hole; he scrambled on all fours through some elephant grass and seemed to disappear when he reached the berm. Was it a tunnel? Parsons wondered. He fired another LAW at where the man had vanished and it blew up from within the berm, sending debris whizzing. He was feeling more confident, and his guide was excited. “Blow ’em out! See that red banana leaf, that’s where they are!”
Shorty was firing the M60 across the paddy, but the red tracers snapped about ten feet above the embankment. Parsons thought Shorty was a cocky bastard, and screamed at him to bring his fire down. At the same time, a medevac descended behind them. Two Huey gunships bore in ahead of it, door gunners firing cover with their sixties. They managed to strafe both the finger and the bunkers, luckily hitting no GIs and probably no NVA either. Top Price hollered in his radio at them.
Behind them, the medevac clattered in under fire.
The platoon had passed up numerous LAWs and Parsons stayed in place, slamming them down. With each explosion, pieces of the earthen spider holes and bunkers were ruptured, exposing their form. The NVA were dug in among the roots of bamboo trees, with a tunnel dug to the berm behind them. A couple of NVA were still firing from undiscovered holes; at least Parsons could hear the reports of their AKs, although he could see no one and heard no passing rounds. Both M60s were firing by now, raising dust around the berm. Others fired M79s into the elephant grass around it.
But Prune and the medic were still pinned.
Captain Mantell finally passed the word to retire to the tree line behind them. The two men were still stuck in the paddy, but it would be unwise for the rest of the platoon to spend the night in this maze of NVA bunkers. So they broke faith with two of their own and began digging in amid the trees, expecting a ground assault. They were still digging when Prune Jeans stumbled into their perimeter. He said the NVA had picked up and left with the darkness, and he had just walked out of the paddy. The wounded medic followed him out. They’d been pinned down half the day and looked it, but Parsons almost cried with relief when he saw them. In a letter of recommendation for Parsons, First Sergeant Price described it this way: “… the last 2 men were recovered alive and well. The first thing they asked was who fired the L.A.W.’s. I called Spec 4 Parsons over and they both hugged and slapped him on the back for saving their lives. They were both the happiest people I have ever seen. They had lain under the guns of the N.V.A. for 12 hours in an open paddie in the blistering sun with tracers and rockets passing over their heads. A few days later, upon our return to LZ West, I recommended Spec 4 Parsons for the Bronze Star with ‘V’ for valor.”
As Alpha 3–21 humped up the bald, cratered knoll on Nui Lon, which was secured by a platoon from Charlie 3–21, they suffered several heat casualties. Guides from Charlie Company led Alpha Company through their trip flares and claymore mines, then set them into position on the perimeter. It was taking forever and men were bunching up; as Private Kruch’s squad finally straggled into the lines at dusk, he noticed Lieutenant Shurtz standing there with a glazed look, as though he couldn’t believe what was going on. Kruch did not dislike the company commander; he just thought Shurtz seemed to be swallowed up by events.
Kruch screamed at the GIs to spread out. The sun was beating down and he was boiling mad over the resupply and the every-man-for-himself attitude gripping the survivors. He picked up an empty canteen cup laying in the dirt, then threw it down, cursing, “This is the stupidest goddamn place to be!” He bent down to pick it up again when the first mortar round hit. It all happened in a sudden burst of noise and motion, but Kruch saw it in freeze-framed clarity. He was bent over. Then came a sudden, slow-motion eruption of rocks and dirt, bowling over a GI in his squad who was opening a can of charlie rats. The GI standing beside Kruch, who’d joined the squad ten days earlier, was blown onto him, the explosion engulfing Kruch in that instant like a baseball bat against his head.
Kruch was blasted into an old crater, the new kid landing on him. Kruch couldn’t breath, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get the kid off him. He felt two more rounds exploding. GIs were screaming. Then it was quiet and Kruch realized he was numb. No pain. Grunts clambered down into the hole and hauled him up. He reached back and his hand slipped into a hole the size of a grapefruit blown out of his lower back. That chunk of shrapnel had destroyed his kidney. He’d also been ripped by fragments in his butt, lower back, and legs.
Four men had been hit, and they were dragged to a level spot on the ridge as medevacs were called.
Kruch lay flat on his back in the dirt. He could see another man from his squad sitting there with light shrapnel wounds. The kid had taken the brunt of the explosion, inadvertently saving Kruch. He was dead. The fourth GI, the man kneeling with the C rations, lay beside him. His face was hamburger, but air gurgled in his throat and he seemed coherent. A grunt crouched beside the man, trying to keep him out of shock. “You’re going to be okay, just hang in there.”
A medevac was orbiting the peak in twenty minutes.
A smoke grenade was tossed out and the Huey began descending. Then came the whine of incoming mortar rounds. The GIs around the wounded dove for cover. Kruch was lying in the open, unable to move as the second salvo crashed in, but he was not worried. All he felt was a wonderful release of tension that it was all over, that he was getting out. He couldn’t even imagine that he could be hurt again or killed.
Cobras came in, clearing their guns around the hill, and the Huey darted in. Grunts grabbed Kruch by his arms and legs and hefted him into the cabin. The GI with the mashed face was shoved in beside him and, in seconds, they were lifting off, the metal floor vibrating fiercely under their backs. Then the pain began, and the medevac medic gave Kruch a shot of morphine. The GI beside him stopped his gurgling, labored breathing. Kruch watched as the medic quickly moved to his side and slid a plastic trachea tube down his throat.
In the joint perimeter of A and C/3–21 atop Nui Lon, Lieutenant Shurtz sat with his artillery lieutenant and his two surviving platoon lieutenants. The platoon leaders were frustrated, and commented that what they were doing was stupid and suicidal. The conversation drifted into an angry search for reasons why any of them were even in Vietnam. Shurtz couldn’t believe what he was hearing; it was like some leftist bullshit on a college campus. By the standards of 1969, Shurtz was either a superpatriot or a cornball; they had to follow orders, he countered, and don’t you think you owe it to the nation to serve here, perhaps even die here?
“That would be the biggest waste,” one of the platoon leaders said bitterly; Shurtz finally understood how culturally isolated he was from his young grunts and officers.
He was alone in many ways.
Sometime during the hours of darkness, an NVA 60mm mortar tube began lobbing rounds onto their hilltop. Chicoms and M79 grenades started exploding too. Lieutenant Shurtz had not had time to dig a foxhole and had not ordered anyone to do it for him; he ended up on his back in a one-foot sleeping trench with a radio to each ear. One was to his platoon leaders, who had their men returning fire; the other was to battalion, which got a Spooky on station. Most of the Chicoms thrown into their circle were duds, but the captured M79 rounds exploded against boulders and sent fragments whizzing through the darkness. Two GIs were wounded, but when the miniguns started screaming from above, the NVA fell back downhill. Alpha Company found their blood trails at dawn.
On 22 August, Private First Class Shimer awoke in a hospital in Da Nang and watched the Armed Forces Vietnam News on television. He recounted later: “There was this clean, well-trimmed, well-fed SP5 in a freshly starched uniform, looking square at the camera and, with a straight face, saying, ‘… and there was light contact reported throughout the Eye Corps area.’ ”