PART THREE
Ripcord was just another exercise for us. We were the swing battalion. We bounced from brigade to brigade, getting inserted into whatever area was hot at the moment.
—Lt. Col. Otis W. Livingston, Jr. Commanding Officer 2d Battalion, 501st Infantry 101st Airborne Division
CHAPTER 9
The exploration of the bunker complex ended when the enemy began mortaring Ripcord, and Lucas in response instructed Captain Williams to assault and seize Hill 805. Mission accomplished, the troops dug in and, as described, repelled a night attack of their own before watching in shock as the sappers overran Company C on Hill 902. The mountaintop literally glowed in the black void for all the illum popping overhead, and the satchel charges exploding all over it looked like an eruption of flashbulbs to Company B.
Even as the sapper attack fizzled, the enemy hit Company B again. The troops, having gone to 100 percent alert, were just starting to stir from their positions as the sky began to lighten and the NVA, unseen among the trees on the north slope of the hill, opened fire out of the twilight gloom with AKs and RPGs.
One startled grunt grabbed his helmet with one hand and his M16 with the other as rounds cracked past. He lunged for his foxhole, then disappeared headfirst into it with a furious, “Goddamniiiiiiit.”
Williams brought in mortar and artillery fire amid the crackle of M16s and M60s and, finally, Cobras, which rolled in on the now-silent north slope only to take fire from the southeast side of the hill. One Cobra made repeated passes, expending its entire load in an unsuccessful attempt to silence the single NVA firing on it with an AK-47. While a patrol swept around the hill, finding several hastily vacated bunkers where the fire had come from, tac air went in on suspected enemy positions around Hills 805 and 902.
Meanwhile, a rigger team from the division support battalion prepared to extract the CH-47 shot down the day before, but when a Chinook from A/159th Aviation attempted the hookup that morning, it was hit by .51-caliber fire and crash-landed next to the aircraft it had come to recover. It would be able to depart that evening, however, repaired with parts from the disabled Chinook.
The jets also prepped landing zones for the 2d of the 501st out of Phu Bai. Attached to Colonel Harrison that morning, Livingston moved a small CP into Lucas’s TOC—“Andre was a grand fellow to work with, very active, very aggressive,” Livingston recalled—and began assaulting his companies along the ridge running southeast off Hill 902. During the insertion of Company C, a gunship making suppression runs accidentally wounded three men. Company A landed on Hill 902 after the remnants of C/2-506th were lifted off, coming in through 82mm mortar fire. Two men were slightly wounded, including Lieutenant Kwiecien—“a shell landed pretty close to me and I picked up a scratch on the arm and a face full of dirt.” Because Kwiecien could hear the mortar tube from his position, the company commander turned their supporting ARA over to him. “The Cobras made a couple of runs and the mortar fire stopped,” Kwiecien later wrote. “I don’t know if we hit them, came close enough to scare them off, or if I was entirely off in my guesstimates and they had just had enough fun for a while.”
As the company began moving off the mountaintop, Kwiecien noticed on the ground a damaged photograph of “an older couple with a rather attractive Italian-looking young lady. It really made me sad to see that, because for the photo to be torn and discarded meant that its owner had been killed or wounded when the company we relieved was hit. Here was this nice looking set of people and the guy they cared about was either badly hurt or dead and they didn’t even know it yet. I regret not picking it up since I’m sure it ended up as a souvenir for some dink.”
The enemy continued shelling the firebase on the second day of the battle. There were several wounded who required evacuation, and there was much counterbattery fire. There was also more antiaircraft fire on the resupply Chinooks. One gunner set up his .51 in a dugout in a little clearing only a hundred meters northeast off the top of Hill 805. “I don’t know if he didn’t realize we could see him through the trees or what his problem was, but he didn’t pay any attention to us,” said Sergeant Judd. “He was totally focused on Ripcord.”
Private First Class Ramon Santiago quickly put the NVA in the sights of his M60. “He took off running, but I know he was hit at least three times,” said Judd. “You could see his body take the hits.”
Judd’s squad found a blood trail but no body. It is likely that the gunner had help getting away; though only the one NVA had been seen, three rucksacks had been left behind. The tripod-mounted .51 was evacuated by helicopter and put on display at Camp Eagle.
Company B was mortared from the slope of its own hill at dusk. A patrol was dispatched, but the enemy vanished. Another patrol found more fresh bunkers on another part of the hill. “We were constantly in contact and on edge around 805,” wrote Chip Collins. “Patrols moved very slowly, literally creeping along for safety’s sake, and the people walking point were scared to death.”
Company B had another tough night of mortar and RPG fire, then continued its patrols in the morning; they found an ammo cache. That same morning, gunships and smoke ships led an effort by C/159th Aviation to recover the disabled Chinook on Ripcord. While the Cobras suppressed the antiaircraft sites around the firebase, CH-47s flew off with each of the disabled aircraft’s rotors, at which point a third Chinook lifted out the aircraft itself. Major Koenigsbauer watched astonished as “the blade suspended underneath one of the Chinooks started to fly by itself as it got away from the firebase—that is, it started to rotate, pick up momentum, and actually rise up towards the bird. The pilot punched the blade just in time.” The CH-47 carrying its disabled sister set its load down at Camp Evans, noted the 159th journal, then “ran out of fuel on short final to POL and crashed[,] so we recovered one and lost one. Both aircraft [were] returned to Phu Bai by CH54 [Sky Crane].”
The third day of the battle was the final day of patrol for a recon team that Lucas had previously dispatched in response to the enemy buildup north of Ripcord. Led by Sgt. Robert O. Granberry, Jr., the team had been inserted two klicks east of the bunker complex discovered by Company B; it had found on its second day out a black commo wire snaking down the draw through which the recon troops were moving. It was Hai, the team’s Kit Carson scout, who actually spotted the wire in the thick underbrush. Holding it up with a look of sheer terror on his face, Hai moved his fingers like legs to indicate that the enemy would be patrolling the line. He sputtered that they should get out of there: “Beaucoup NVA. Di di mau, di di mau. Beaucoup NVA, beaucoup NVA.”
Granberry reported the find, expecting to be replaced by a line company; he was instead informed that a slick was being dispatched with a tape recorder and alligator clips to tap into the line. The team backtracked to its insertion LZ, which was against all the rules. After the equipment was delivered, the recon troops—wondering if higher command was setting them up for annihilation but hoping that they had found something important—tapped the line and took turns listening in with headphones. There were no voices, just static, and the team finally moved off to find a position on a hillside above the draw from which it could observe the wire. Their presence having been compromised by the helicopter, Granberry recalled that “we were convinced we were all going to have our throats slit before morning. I really had to calm everybody down. We posted watch like we did on any other patrol, but a lot of guys took it on themselves to try to stay awake all night.”
Another slick arrived in the morning to take out the first set of tapes and deliver more. All told, the recon troops maintained the wiretap for most of four days, from June 29 to July 2, waiting to be discovered and wiped out. They ventured from their cover only to change tapes. The mission was not the recon platoon’s way of doing things. “Line companies were too big and loud, but our little recon teams could cruise and bruise right in the enemy’s backyard,” noted Mihalko. “We initiated most contacts because the NVA didn’t even know we were there. We walked right into one of their little camps once and fired ’em up as they sat there cooking rice. They didn’t have guards out because they felt safe.” To men accustomed to operating with such stealth and cunning, “sitting in one place with helicopters coming and going was fuckin’ nuts,” concluded Mihalko. “That kind of stuff really gave us a case of the ass about Colonel Lucas.”
Sergeant Granberry was finally given an extraction point to the north late on July 2, and his team moved to it along a steep and narrow ridge, passing an old, overgrown LZ. Granberry called battalion, suggesting his team leave from there, but battalion was adamant that he move to the designated LZ. The team pushed on, hitting a high-speed trail. “It had fresh footprints on it,” noted John Schnarr. Following the trail downhill as dusk approached, Granberry stopped a hundred meters short of the designated LZ, then took Mihalko on a two-man recon. The LZ was on a small plateau at the foot of the ridge. “As we approached it, there was a bunker staring at us,” wrote Mihalko. No one was home, but the position was so new that when Mihalko pulled some leafy camouflage off the roof “sap was still coming out of the stems. . . .”
Extraction was set for the next morning. Mihalko walked point after sunup on July 3 but, upon reaching the south side of the LZ and just starting past the bunker there, he saw a bareheaded NVA in green fatigues, an AK-47 slung over one shoulder, standing at the edge of the trees on the north side. The enemy soldier had his head cocked, listening to a passing Huey. When he began walking unawares across the clearing, Granberry signaled the team sniper to drop him with his scope-mounted M14.
Three quick shots and the NVA was down, falling out of sight. Unbelievably, he began shrieking in pain. “My God, he’s not dead,” someone blurted to the sniper. “Where’d you shoot him?”
“I shot him in the stomach.”
“What? Why didn’t you shoot him in the head?”
“I wasn’t sure if my rifle was zeroed.”
“Well, shit,” came the disgusted reply.
With the gut-shot enemy soldier continuing to scream and moan—stomach wounds are agonizing—Granberry finally snapped at the sniper, “Hey, you shot him—you go finish him off.”
The sniper darted into the clearing and silenced the man with a bullet through the brain. Not sure if they were dealing with a lone trail watcher or something bigger, Granberry requested permission to pull back to the overgrown LZ. The request was denied; the extraction ships were already en route to the team’s present location. With no choice but to secure the clearing, Mihalko had his slack man, Doug Jacoway, do a little recon by fire with his M203—an M16 with a tubelike 40mm grenade launcher fitted under the barrel. Encouraged by the lack of response, the two started across the LZ.
Jacoway continued to fire grenades on the way across. Nothing moved. Mihalko felt himself relaxing, but as he neared the cover of the trees, an RPD machine gun opened fire from a hidden bunker. Dropping flat, Mihalko noticed that the center magazine in the ammo bandoliers crisscrossing his chest was blown open. He lifted the bandolier and saw to his mounting horror that there was a corresponding hole in the magazine underneath. He gingerly lifted the second bandolier, but there was no wound, no blood, only three bumps in the back of the second magazine where the three rounds that should have killed him had finally stopped.
The firefight turned into a stalemate. The machine gunner poured it on, as did several other enemy soldiers with AKs, but the clearing was slightly crowned; for all the vegetation being shredded right above Granberry’s head, his group was actually safe from the RPD. The enemy, too, was unreachable. “I don’t think we even fired back,” recalled Schnarr. “I know I didn’t because you couldn’t see low enough on the other side of the clearing.”
The enemy finally ceased firing. Granberry requested a Pink Team. Meanwhile, Jacoway and Mihalko, who amazed everyone when they called out that they were okay, hunkered down in a slight depression behind a felled tree, knowing that if they tried to run back they would be cut to ribbons. Mihalko heaved a couple of frags, cursed himself for letting the enemy know that he was still alive, then lay bathed in sweat under the noon-day sun, tormented by flies, for thirty to forty minutes before the arrival of the Pink Team.
Able to think of no other options, Sergeant Granberry, probably the best team leader in the recon platoon, proposed to the Cobra pilot that he fly straight at the RPD but not fire: “If you come in like you’re making a gun run, that machine gunner will probably get his head down—and I can get my two guys off the LZ.”
It sounded suicidal, but the pilot agreed. He made an orbit to get his bearings, climbed to three thousand feet, then turned the aircraft on its side and started his dive, screaming in at top speed, to frightening effect. Mihalko looked over his shoulder at the Cobra coming straight at him and bellowed at the top of his lungs to Granberry, “Junior, don’t let him shoot—I’m alive.”
Granberry shouted that the gunship was a decoy, and Mihalko and Jacoway low-crawled back like frantic lizards. It was time to make a gun run for real, and Granberry popped red smoke to mark his position. “I can’t shoot,” the pilot said. “You’re too close to the target area. Can you move away from the LZ?”
“Negative, we’re pinned down,” Granberry explained. “We’re dead meat one way or the other. Just go ahead and fire.”
“Well, I need your initials,” the pilot said.
“Romeo Oscar Golf,” Granberry answered, thus officially relieving the pilot of responsibility in case of mishap.
The recon troops, at the prone, clasped their hands behind their heads to protect their skulls as the Cobra rolled in, unleashing rockets, then further chewing up the scenery with its minigun and automatic cannon. The racket was so fearsome that it was impossible to tell whether the enemy was returning fire. As the gunship pulled up, the lead extraction slick immediately started its approach into the smoky LZ. Everyone was uptight, having seen the NVA survive Cobra strikes before. Granberry asked, “Who wants to go first?”
Mihalko volunteered. He reached the Huey just as it settled into a five-foot hover. Mihalko grabbed a skid to pull himself aboard, but the door gunner suddenly waved him off. Mihalko couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the blades and didn’t know what was going on, but he let go, then stared for an instant in disbelief as the Huey climbed away before rushing off the open LZ.
“Junior, what the hell happened?” he shouted.
“The RPD shot the slick up,” answered Granberry. “Both pilots got hit and they made a command decision to haul ass.”
Granberry began getting desperate as he called in additional Cobra strikes, to no effect. When the Cobra finished a run, the LOH would buzz down to check the damage, only to draw more fire each time.
Battalion finally instructed Granberry to move back up the ridge to the overgrown LZ that he had wanted to use all along. The recon troops hit the high-speed trail at a trot and were soon climbing aboard the extraction slicks. The helipad at Camp Evans was crowded with people who had monitored the team’s fight on the radio, and Mihalko held up the captured AK in a victory salute as he jumped off his Huey. He was mobbed by giggling Kit Carson scouts who stuck their fingers in the bullet holes in his ammo magazines as Hai excitedly recounted the events of the mission to his friends in Vietnamese. Finishing the story, Hai grabbed Mihalko’s arm and, using the Vietnamese word for “kill,” exclaimed, “John, you number one GI— NVA no can cocadau you.”
Captain Wilcox, commander of the battalion support company, was hastily brought forward to replace Hewitt after Company C was hit by the sappers. Wilcox met the troops on the helipad at Ripcord as Lieb brought them in, then led his new command down the ridgeline pointing to Hill 805. After spending the night at the end of the ridge, Wilcox continued on to 805 with instructions to relieve Company B. Chip Collins was shocked at “how hollow the guys in Charlie Company looked when they came into our perimeter—like dead men walking. If any one thing ever showed me how hard combat was on people, it was seeing Charlie Company after they got overrun. They were just torn apart and it really showed.”
It was a clear, blazing hot day, though a storm front could be seen advancing over the mountains to the west. With Wilcox in position, Captain Williams gave the word for Company B to start moving down the southwest slope of 805. The first platoon in the column, Bravo One, started out only after a troubling incident involving Bob Judd, whose squad was to lead the way, and a certain Sergeant Johnson, whose turn it was to walk point but who refused to do so. Phil Tolson, for one, wasn’t surprised, remembering that Johnson, a cocky type, was generally regarded as a “lazy, worthless, do-nothing piece of shit. I don’t know how he kept his rank.”
Everyone was already uptight, and tempers flared as the platoon sergeant told Johnson to get his ass in gear. “I told ya I ain’t walkin’ fuckin’ point,” Johnson said hotly, not caring how loud he got.
It was a bad scene. Finally, Pfc. Robert S. Utecht, a normally mellow hippie type with beads and a peace sign around his neck and a headband under his helmet, snapped, “Fuck it, I’ll walk point.”
With that, Utecht stormed past Johnson. Judd fell in behind his friend in the slack position. Half a klick later, at which point Utecht was coming up out of a draw, Judd noticed a freshly sawed-off tree stump. He looked up to warn Utecht, and at that instant a muzzle flash blazed from a bunker at the top of the rise about fifty meters ahead. Utecht flew backward as if jerked off his feet by a cable. Judd emptied his M16 as he dove for a log. Changing magazines, he heard his grenadier fire two rounds almost simultaneously—thoomp-thoomp—an impossible feat with a single-shot grenade launcher. When one round exploded near the bunker and the other down in the draw, he realized that not only had the grenadier fired, so had a North Vietnamese soldier with a captured M79.
There was no more fire. Judd looked over at Bob Utecht. He was lying in a lifeless sprawl under his rucksack. “Bob didn’t see that stump because he was stomping and going too fast,” recalled a grief-stricken Judd. “He was still mad about Johnson. That was the only time we ever really let our guard down—and they nailed us.”
Captain Williams told his best platoon leader, Wallace, to take charge of the situation. Lieutenant Delgado wasn’t up to it, and his platoon was apparently frozen. Tolson wrote home that although a “few of us did what had to be done,” at least three GIs in his squad “hung back and they [will] get court-martialled for cowardice.”
All was quiet as Wallace rushed down to the point of contact; he suspected that the enemy had again hit and run. Taking no chances, however, he had a trooper cover him as he advanced on the log bunker at the top of the rise. The frag that Wallace threw glanced off the firing port and came bouncing back, forcing him to dive for cover.
Williams and his forward observer, Lieutenant Andrasson, had run up their long antennas, meanwhile, and were calling for fire support when the storm front finally closed in. As it started to rain, a tree near Captain Wilcox suddenly exploded with a crashing flash that turned the whole hilltop orange. “I felt as though I had been punched in the gut, and was doubled over at the waist,” recalled Wilcox. “Paul Burkey had been physically knocked down, and was sitting beside me with his legs sprawled out in a V.” The explosion was so loud that Wilcox thought an RPG had hit the tree, but “we quickly realized it was lightning . . . from brilliant sunlight, we went into a black, monsoon-like downpour within seconds.”
The long antennas attracted most of the charge of the lightning strike. The electricity that coursed down Williams’s antenna and through the handset he had pressed to his left ear blew out his eardrum and knocked him unconscious. “The next thing I recall was coming to under a poncho in the rain, and the medic picking the poncho up and looking at me,” said Williams, whose head was throbbing. Andrasson had also been knocked out. “They were really dazed,” recalled Wilcox. “It was scary because there would have been no way to get a medevac in if their hearts had stopped.”
As Wallace came back up the hill with Bravo One, he received some nonsensical radio messages along the way from Williams, who, unable to shake off the effects of the lightning, finally passed the word to Wallace that he had the company that night. “The captain was bald, and his head looked like a red lightbulb,” noted Sergeant Judd. “The veins were standing out. He acted like he was drunk, but, luckily, he wasn’t really hurt all that badly.”
People crouched behind boulders or in waterlogged foxholes, expecting more trouble. “It was raining so hard nobody had dry cigarettes,” recalled Wallace, who kept his in a waterproof plastic case. “I smoked Lucky Strikes and Camels, and a lot of people were so bad up—you get shaky, you want some nicotine—that they were bumming them off me even though they wouldn’t ordinarily smoke nonfiltered cigarettes.”
When the storm blew over at dusk, a medevac landed for a trooper who’d caught some M79 shrapnel. Sergeant Johnson also went out on the Huey. “Bob Utecht had been well liked, and everyone knew that what had happened was Johnson’s fault,” said Judd. Utecht was trussed up in a poncho to be evacuated on a resupply ship the next day, the evacuation of KIAs being a logistical—as opposed to a medical—responsibility. The times being what they were, an ugly mood was made absolutely incendiary by the fact that Utecht was white and Johnson black. Judd remembered that “no one said anything directly, but it was understood that Johnson wasn’t going to survive the night, and someone had the smarts to send him to the rear.”
Several stratagems, all relying on firepower, massively applied, were quickly developed to better defend Ripcord. One new procedure involved using the Quad-50 at the northeast end of the base for counterbattery fire, in addition to the 81s and 105s. “Many of the enemy mortar positions were ‘reverse slope,’ meaning that they were on the backside of the hills surrounding the firebase,” said Koenigsbauer, “requiring the Quad-50 to fire almost straight up in an indirect mode.” The torrents of fire arcing over the hills must have been effective as they rained through the canopy on the other side because the NVA made the Quad-50 a primary target. “You could watch mortar rounds being walked right up to the gun position,” noted Koenigsbauer. “The weapon was repeatedly damaged, and there were some casualties among the crew.”
Lucas was so impressed with the Quad-50 that he eventually requested a second one be flown out to Ripcord. To add additional bark to the perimeter positions in the interim, Koenigsbauer had the battalion transportation section send forward several .50-caliber machine guns from Camp Evans. The transportation section had them to spare; each of its two-and-a-half-ton trucks in the rear was authorized a ring-mounted .50, but they were rarely if ever installed, noted Koenigsbauer, “and usually lay rusting in the backs of the trucks.”
Trained as an armor officer, Major Koenigsbauer was actually more familiar with the .50 than standard infantry weapons, and he personally set up the additional machine guns on tripods and test-fired them at various strategic points around Ripcord.
By coincidence, one distant spot of jungle that Koenigsbauer blasted was occupied by NVA, who returned fire with a .51-caliber machine gun. The operations officer saw dirt kick up as one round, spent of energy—the enemy was also firing from maximum range—thudded harmlessly into the ground in front of his position. He picked up the still-warm bullet and pocketed it for a souvenir.
The enemy seemed especially active at night, lights blinking in the hills around the firebase, things rustling in the perimeter wire. The result of such nocturnal activity was “a very, very aggressive defensive-fire plan that was executed on a nightly basis,” said Koenigsbauer. Though the mortar platoon was split with three tubes on O’Reilly, the six crews on Ripcord managed to fire more than five hundred rounds a night. The mortar tubes never got cool during the battle.
Helicopters were a primary enemy target, and bringing in the daily resupply demanded close coordination between the 2-506th staff and the 159th Aviation Battalion. All of it was conducted on a secure net, given the likelihood that the NVA were monitoring the radios. When the CH-47s, sent in groups of two or three, were two minutes from the firebase, the ground-mounted .50-cals and the Quad-50s, plus the mortars, recoilless rifles, and 105s, would commence firing on the known or suspected mortar and antiaircraft positions around Ripcord. To ensure that there would be no interruption or gaps in the suppressive fires, which were continued until the aircraft had departed the area, the flight paths were carefully charted to avoid overflying if at all possible the friendly ground units in the hills.
Though casualties on the firebase were initially light, Lieutenant Colonel Lucas himself was wounded on the Fourth of July 1970. Lucas and Koenigsbauer were standing thigh deep in the stairway leading down into the TOC, scanning the hills for mortar positions—the shelling that day had included tear-gas rounds—and calling in fire with the PRC25 radio that the ops officer had placed at ground level in front of them. Unheard over the high winds and the general din of outgoing fire as it came in, the mortar shell that exploded on the helipad about twenty-five feet to the right front of Lucas and Koenigsbauer startled them and splattered them with dirt. Koenigsbauer’s radio was destroyed, one piece of shrapnel smashing into the body of it, another clipping off the antenna a mere six inches above the major’s head. In the excitement, Lucas, on Koenigsbauer’s right and thus closer to the explosion, did not realize he had been grazed until Koenigsbauer noticed the blood running down his forearm. It was a superficial injury. After having it treated and bandaged by the battalion surgeon in the next conex over, Lucas, contrary to his image as a self-promoting careerist, made no attempt whatsoever to secure a Purple Heart.1
Captain Raymond A. Williams, the battalion’s artillery liaison officer, was also wounded on day four while conducting a crater analysis in front of the TOC. Diving back inside when a round exploded in his face, Williams realized he was still alive and merely peppered with little pieces of the shell casing because it had been CS, tear gas, not HE. The troops had only lightweight M28 gas masks that provided limited protection and quickly fogged up. “The NVA, of course, did not know how effective their tear gas was,” said Koenigsbauer, glad the enemy did not launch a ground attack behind the CS. Lucas had his exec, Major Davis, send forward on an emergency basis the bulky but reliable M17 gas masks kept in storage at Camp Evans. The masks arrived before the day was done. “We carried them from then on as the enemy began hitting us with CS on an almost regular basis,” noted Koenigsbauer. In return, brigade authorized the use of CS artillery rounds in the defense of Ripcord.
Captain Rich of B/2-319th FA, shrugging off additional flesh wounds received while doing some crater analysis of his own on day four, put his 105s into action late that afternoon when three 82mm rounds came in from Coc A Bo Mountain, more than four kilometers southeast of Ripcord. Rich, an expert artilleryman, quickly delivered counterbattery fire that resulted in several satisfying secondary explosions, as observed through binoculars.
Shortly thereafter, Major Koenigsbauer, standing near the pathfinder bunker at the top of the base as he continued to watch for firing positions—he would be awarded the Bronze Star for exposing himself thusly—turned toward Hill 1000 at the same instant that a recoilless rifle punched off a round from high up the slope. Koenigsbauer saw the smoke and was able to follow the round in flight, losing it only just before it impacted in the base trash dump. Koenigsbauer rushed to Rich— there was a second puff of smoke then, which they both saw—and the battery commander had two tubes lowered to return fire. The enemy got off two more rounds, then went silent as the cannoneers slammed a half-dozen shells directly into their target, either destroying the recoilless rifle or driving its crew into one of the many bunkers dotting the hills.
The reserve battalion suffered a demoralizing blow on day four when a platoon from C/2-501st, following a trail at the far end of the ridge running southeast from Hill 902, walked into an enemy-style mechanical ambush. The NVA had daisy-chained five 82mm mortar rounds together, three on one side of the trail, two on the other, and the resulting explosion wounded five and killed five, including 1st Lt. William L. Sullivan, the platoon leader.
Captain Wilcox and C/2-506th combat-assaulted that day onto Triple Hill. Though they didn’t find the recoilless rifle that had been firing on Ripcord from that location, they did come across several abandoned enemy positions near boulders that had been cracked by bombs or counterbattery fire. Fresh graves had been blown open, revealing two dismembered NVA.
Already shaken, C/2-501st came under attack during the night of July 4–5, taking satchel charges, plus AK and RPG fire, from all around its NDP. With a flareship lighting up the jungle and Cobras rolling in, the enemy was kept at bay, making a final abortive rush at dawn. Five NVA bodies were found, with weapons, but the company suffered one more KIA and twenty more WIA.
Following Wilcox’s departure, Captain Williams and B/2-506th ran several patrols, then set up for another night on Hill 805. “Staying in the same place four days was unheard of,” said Sergeant Judd. “We felt like we were a decoy for Ripcord.” The uptight troops watched, unamused, as star-cluster flares began bursting in the night sky as the REMFs at Camp Evans celebrated the Fourth of July. Meanwhile, the enemy fired a single RPG at Bravo’s NDP, which “hit the big boulder at the very top of 805,” recalled Judd, “and spiraled straight up into the air, spewing sparks. After traveling a certain distance, it self-destructed with a loud boom—and we cheered. It was our own Fourth of July fireworks.”
The reserve battalion ran into more trouble on the fifth day of the battle. Captain Donald R. Goates, the new commander of Alpha Company, moved out that morning with two platoons, leaving Kwiecien to secure a knoll five hundred meters southwest of the top of Hill 902, which was being used as the company patrol base. Cutting southeast from the patrol base, Goates’s element had moved eight hundred meters and was in the saddle between Hill 902 and Hill 975, a large mountain that was the object of that day’s patrol, when it came under machine-gun fire from a bunker not far up the opposing slope. Attempts to outflank the bunker resulted in more casualties, and Kwiecien, monitoring the radio, “could tell they were in trouble. Goates was bringing in Cobras, but they weren’t having any effect, and after a couple hours of this, he told me to bring my platoon down and to try to get them out of this mess.”
Lieutenant Kwiecien got word as the platoon began moving that a trooper in SSgt. Joe E. Ludwick’s squad had seen something. Hoping that the enemy hadn’t gotten between his people and the rest of the company, Kwiecien passed the word for everyone to sit tight and keep their eyes open. Sergeant Michael R. McCoy, another squad leader, shortly spotted a bareheaded figure moving through the brush outside the platoon circle and cut the man down with his M16.
The man turned out to be Joe Ludwick, the tough, cocky squad leader having plunged into the jungle in pursuit of whatever it was his trooper had seen. It had been a brave but foolish maneuver, and though an anguished McCoy blamed himself for the mishap, no one else did. Ludwick, moaning loudly, in terrible pain—he would lose his spleen—was lifted out in a basket lowered by a hovering Huey. There was no fire during the long medevac process, forcing Kwiecien to conclude that the original sighting of an enemy soldier had “just been a case of nerves. On the other hand, a couple of NVA may have seen us and left to report our presence, but if I had to choose between the two, I’d say they were never there.”
Finally getting down the mountain, the platoon paused behind a rise while Kwiecien, concerned about running into enemy and friendly fire if they weren’t careful, coordinated the next move with Goates. Kwiecien was sitting next to a machine gunner named Ramseur and an ammo bearer named Hernandez, who had their M60 pointed over the top of the rise. They suddenly turned to Kwiecien: “Sir, we got two NVA comin’ this way.”
“You sure they’re not ours?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Ramseur.
“Kill them,” Kwiecien said, and returned to his radio. Ramseur and Hernandez looked at each other with smiles that really weren’t smiles, then wasted the two unsuspecting North Vietnamese.
Goates continued to direct a steady stream of Cobras on the bunker that was firing on his two-platoon element. Goates had a dozen wounded. Several medevacs were driven off by heavy AK and .51 fire that seemed to come from every direction. “One pilot was hovering overhead,” noted Kwiecien, “when he very calmly said that he had to break station because his peter pilot [copilot] had just taken a round through the chest and he wanted to get him to the hospital. We stopped trying to get medevacs in after that.”
Goates presently instructed Kwiecien to bypass his pinned-down element and take out the enemy bunker from the flank with LAWs. “Stupidly, I had only one LAW in the platoon,” Kwiecien wrote. “What it came down to was one shot, one chance, or else. . . .”
After crossing the saddle, Lieutenant Kwiecien told his best squad leader, Sergeant Bartlett, to push on up the slope with his men. If the way was clear, Kwiecien would bring up the rest of the platoon and the precious LAW. While moving uphill, Bartlett ran into NVA who were coming down the jungled hillside. “I don’t know if this force knew we were there, or if they were trying to outflank the company and unintentionally hit Bartlett’s squad along the way,” explained Kwiecien. There was a brief firefight, punctuated by the explosions of numerous satchel charges. The squad pulled back after one of the satchel charges went off in Bartlett’s face, damaging his eardrums and flash-blinding him. Kwiecien watched as “a very nervous-acting kid named Sims, whom I had been afraid would break when he experienced combat, hung back, exposing himself to both the enemy fire and our return fire to help his blinded squad leader back down the slope. You cannot tell ahead of time who will be brave and who will not. I put Sims in for a Silver Star.”
Two of the gunships strafing the bunker in front of Goates swung over to assist Kwiecien. When Kwiecien told the pilots to put their ordnance into the slope just above where he had popped smoke, they asked Goates for his initials. “It was going to be very close,” noted Kwiecien. Bartlett lay with his head almost in Kwiecien’s lap, helping him coordinate the Cobra fire even as the platoon medic got a bandage around his eyes. “The gunships rolled in with both HE rockets and flechette rockets,” recalled Kwiecien. “I later learned from some pilots how inaccurate flechettes were. The situation was even dicier than I had thought at the time.”
Following the gun runs, Kwiecien started forward with two squads up and one back; he encountered only a single NVA, who drew the fire of almost every keyed-up grunt in the forward element when he peeked out from behind a tree. As Kwiecien passed the body, he remembered the time when he was a kid and his father, an infantry veteran of World War II, “got very drunk and talked about going into a town which had just been shelled. He said that German bodies were scattered all over. The concussion from the shells had popped their heads open and lying next to each exploded head was a brain.” The dead North Vietnamese was in a similar condition: “It looked like someone had neatly removed the top of his head with a can opener and exposed his brain. The top of his head was lying next to him. The poor guy didn’t even have a weapon.”
Having moved far enough up the slope that Kwiecien thought a shot on the bunker possible, he formed the platoon into a hasty defensive perimeter and sent two men forward with the LAW. He followed. Keeping low, the two grunts peered over the crest of a small rise and whispered back that they thought they had the bunker in sight down below. Kwiecien asked if they were sure, concerned that if they wasted the LAW the platoon would have to attack down the slope to take the pressure off Goates. They said they were pretty sure. “Okay, go ahead and shoot, but make it count,” Kwiecien replied. The two troopers must have scoped out the correct bunker, because after their LAW flashed down the hill, there was no more machine-gun fire from the bottom of the saddle.
Alpha Company pulled back up the side of Hill 902. It was dusk by then, too dark and too risky to attempt to medevac the numerous wounded. As the company got reorganized, Goates asked Kwiecien for his position. “Seventy-five meters to your November,” he answered, but when he released the transmit bar on his handset, he could hear someone saying, “break, break, break.”
Kwiecien repeated his message, but again the transmission was covered with the chant of “break, break, break.”
It was Goates. “If you let ’em know where we are, they’ll attack us again,” he shouted. Kwiecien was dumbfounded. If you didn’t want to know where the fuck I was, he thought, why’d you ask?
Goates was on his second tour. Beefy and bespectacled, with a crew cut, he didn’t look like a model paratrooper, but he seemed to know his stuff. Kwiecien now wondered if Goates had been unnerved by what was the company’s first big action since he had taken command a month earlier. Actually, Goates would explain, he had attempted to cover Kwiecien’s transmission, “because I was taught that you gave a direction, never a distance, in the clear in an NDP situation, especially when you were pulling in after a firefight.”
The previous company commander, steady, cool-headed Captain Mitchell, had been beloved by Alpha Company. Like many officers who replace a respected predecessor, Goates was being viewed with an especially critical eye by his command. Kwiecien never thought he measured up. One of the company radiomen also had his doubts about Goates. During a subsequent stand-down, the radioman and Kwiecien fell into a conversation about Goates with Captain Mitchell; according to Kwiecien, the radioman said that “ ‘Goates almost got us all killed out by Hill 902 [on July 5]. If it hadn’t been for Lieutenant Kwiecien and his platoon, we all would have died out there.’ Jim Mitchell just turned and looked at me. I think it was the proudest moment of my time in the Army.”
Alpha Company pushed uphill to its patrol base in the morning and a medevac lowered a jungle penetrater through the canopy. Sergeant Bartlett was being placed aboard when the Huey suddenly took fire and banked away. There was no choice but to leave the blinded squad leader behind. After arty was called in, another medevac settled into a hover overhead. It too was driven away, as was a LOH that tried to dart in. All three helicopters took hits. “We could distinctly hear three AK-47s,” wrote Goates, “and they seemed to be no more than two to three hundred meters away. I wondered if Charlie was moving parallel with us, and we could not see him or he us because of the density of the jungle. From the sounds of the gunfire[,] Charlie was on the same level as we were on the slope of Hill 902.”
There was a small clearing below the patrol base. To give the medevacs a chance to avoid some of the fire by landing instead of hovering with a jungle penetrater, 1st Lt. Richard W. Driver secured the clearing with his platoon. Goates requested chain saws to remove a huge tree that would have blocked any attempted landing. Kicked out from a Huey, the saws did no good, the chains quickly clogging up with wood shavings. Goates placed charges around the tree—it was now late in the afternoon—but the enemy attacked before he could detonate them. Goates told Kwiecien to move down on the flank of Driver’s platoon to cover the withdrawal to the patrol base. Goates recalled being concerned that enemy sappers might attack as night fell and shouting to his men to have grenades ready because it would be virtually impossible to see the enemy well enough in the dark to hit them with M16s.
According to Kwiecien, what Goates actually shouted as his platoon moved to support Driver’s was, “These are sappers— M16s won’t kill them—you have to use grenades to blow them apart.”
It was a dubious call to battle. “Here’s Goates telling his men that we’re fighting Superman and our weapons are worthless,” recalled Kwiecien. “I was kind of pissed, so I just stood up in full view of anyone who wanted to take a shot at me and started firing my supposedly worthless M16 to cover Driver’s movement.”
Alpha Company re-formed at the patrol base, and under sporadic fire from all sides from an unseen enemy who got close enough to lob satchel charges into the perimeter—fifteen men were hit—blasted back into the darkening jungle. It was Goates’s impression that the NVA were “testing the perimeter in preparation for an attempt to overrun us during the night.” Goates requested tac air. The Phantoms came in at dusk. “The enemy fire dropped off dramatically after the air strike,” wrote Captain Goates. “I believe the air strike is what kept Charlie from coming in that night. . . .”
The action petered out completely two hours later, after dark. A flareship was overhead, and gunships were making rocket runs. The next morning, a lone enemy soldier was brought under fire within fifty meters of the perimeter. Goates appeared on the scene and shouted at the NVA, who was slumped behind a tree, to “chieu hoi.” Getting no response, Goates, armed with a pistol, worked his way to a vantage point from which he could see that the man was not holding a weapon, whereupon he moved in on the NVA. It turned out that the enemy soldier, slung with satchel charges, his AK-47 dropped nearby, was dead. “Goates was as happy as a little kid,” recalled Kwiecien, who thought it highly irresponsible that the company commander had personally gone after that NVA. “If there had been a sizable enemy force out there, instead of just one private, or whatever he was, the entire company CP could have been wiped out as they stood at the edge of the perimeter.”
If Goates wasn’t on the verge of coming unglued, thought Kwiecien, he was rushing into battle without thinking, so eager was he “to look good and get the decorations that would enhance his career. The men thought he was insane. I was running scared under Goates,” Kwiecien admitted, “and I know it negatively affected my performance as a platoon leader. I couldn’t see dying because the guy in charge didn’t know what he was doing. . . .”
Recalling the incident with the enemy soldier, Goates offered a perspective that Kwiecien lacked when he noted that “the platoon CP on that side of the perimeter told me they thought they had an NVA who was wounded. I told them to make sure. No one was willing to check him out, so I did. If I wasn’t willing to take that kind of risk, how could I expect the troops to? It might have been a stupid move all things considered, but the next time I said, ‘Check it out,’ somebody might think back to the time the Old Man checked out that NVA on Hill 902. . . .”
By early afternoon, Goates had blown down the tree that was blocking the clearing and was bringing in medevacs. Most of the wounded were finally lifted out, but eleven more men were hit in the process, Goates among them, as the NVA plastered the LZ with 82mm mortar fire at the approach of each Huey. The medevacs kept coming. Livingston ordered Goates aboard one so he could see the extent of his injuries—a single fragment buried in his shoulder muscle. After being treated on Ripcord, Goates went back out on a resupply slick. “I insisted on returning to my unit,” he wrote. “I knew that if I could keep down any infection with penicillin tablets, I could stay with my company and get the command time I desperately wanted and felt I needed for my career.”2
Livingston wanted to combat-assault another company in to reinforce Goates, but brigade denied the request. Instead, and the word came straight from General Hennessey, Goates was to make a rapid march to the north the next morning to clear the area for an impending B-52 Arc Light. Goates tried to get out the last of his wounded at dawn on July 8, but the medevac took hits and pulled off. An attempt to back-haul the rucksacks and weapons piled up on the landing zone from those casualties that had already been evacuated, as well as a 90mm recoilless rifle previously brought out to the company by helicopter to help it defend its position, was also unsuccessful. Incoming mortars set fire to one of the packs, and as the flames spread to others, ammo and grenades began cooking off. Goates ordered several GIs to recover the weapons, but they balked in the face of the exploding ammunition. Goates tried to get the recoilless rifle himself, “but just as I reached around a tree for it, there was a major explosion and I quickly backtracked. I couldn’t reach the recoilless rifle, and lacking an incendiary grenade, I couldn’t destroy it. We were forced to abandon it intact.”
Alpha Company moved the half klick to the top of Hill 902, then swung onto a high-speed trail that dipped into a saddle before it ascended the ridge knifing down from the top of Coc Muen Mountain. It is a two-kilometer trek as the crow flies between the two peaks. The route took the column—which included walking wounded, who had to keep up as best they could—past a bunker complex on the side of the ridge facing Ripcord. “The enemy had a beautiful shot of the base from that spot,” wrote Kwiecien, “and the site was littered with spent casings from a Chicom recoilless rifle.”
The column proceeded without flank security, risking ambush in order to move more quickly. The tension was terrific. At one point, the sergeant ahead of Kwiecien in the file turned to him and said plaintively, “We’re not going to get out of this, are we, sir?”
Looking the sergeant in the eyes, Kwiecien, who was convinced they’d had it, lied: “Sure we will; don’t worry about it.”
The top of Coc Muen would have put Goates just at the edge of the safety zone required around B-52 strikes, but because the company was still pushing uphill as the appointed hour neared, the Arc Light had to be diverted to less lucrative targets farther south. Goates halted on a small rise as dusk fell and sent 1st Lt. Rex Gerlinger’s platoon to the next rise up the ridge to secure it for an NDP. Before Goates could move up with Driver and Kwiecien, the NVA slipped between the main body and Gerlinger. Cut off from each other, each element set up where it was. Goates, informed by brigade to expect an attack, told his platoon leaders to keep their people on alert all night. “If we snooze, it will probably be our last snooze,” he intoned. Lieutenant Kwiecien was angry and wrung out, unfairly blaming Goates for the decision to withdraw under fire from the patrol base below Hill 902. “We were out there to fight, not run,” as Kwiecien would put it. “Running and hiding is not good for a unit[;] the men lose confidence in themselves and their ability to fight. A couple of people came to me and told me there were discussions going on among the men about refusing to go back out in the field if we ever got out of there.”
Kwiecien was monitoring the radio around one that morning when he heard Gerlinger’s platoon sergeant trying to raise the company CP. According to Kwiecien, no one at the command post answered the radio. Convinced that whoever was on radio watch had fallen asleep—Goates would deny this—he finally got on the horn himself with the platoon sergeant. Speaking in a whisper, the sergeant explained that there had been a possible penetration of his perimeter. He wanted some illum so he could sort out the situation. Kwiecien went looking for Goates with murder in his heart, but in the pitch-black night he stumbled not across the captain but the company FO. The artillery lieutenant, busy calling in artillery on the trail they had followed to their present position, brought in the requested illumination. It developed that there had been no penetration, only a GI having a nightmare inside the NDP.
The pressure eased the next day. Alpha Company cut a landing zone on the slope of Coc Muen, got all the wounded out at last, then continued its forced march, making it two klicks northeast to a bit of high ground adjacent to the knoll between Ripcord and Hill 1000. The B-52s came in behind them, dropping strings of five-hundred-pound bombs. “You could feel the ground shudder as those big babies slammed in,” noted Goates. Meanwhile, tac air went in on the patrol base—one suspects that the enemy had already recovered the recoilless rifle abandoned there—and the bunker complex where the expended shell casings had been found. Alpha Company spent two nights in Ripcord’s shadow, getting resupplied. “Morale went up, but was still on the low side,” wrote Kwiecien, who was relieved when “someone came over to me and said that the men had dropped their plan to refuse to go back out in the field. They were concerned that if they followed through on it, their platoon leaders would get in trouble, and they didn’t want that.”
To clear the way for the Arc Light, Livingston pulled Companies B and C up to positions near Hill 805. When the bombs stopped falling, the battalion reconnaissance platoon, led by 1st Lt. Victor E. Arndt, combat-assaulted atop Coc Muen late on the afternoon of July 9 with a platoon from Bravo Company. The insertion, made amid high winds, came under fire from the surrounding high ground. As the two platoons moved down the ridgeline running northeast from the top of the mountain, an attached sniper team zapped a North Vietnamese spotted above them on the LZ.
Eager to verify the kill, the snipers got permission from a reluctant Lieutenant Arndt to run a patrol back up to the landing zone with some of his recon troopers. The rest of the two-platoon force continued downhill, stopping at dusk to set up a night defensive position. It was dark by the time the patrol returned; no enemy body had been found. Tragically, the patrol walked into one of the mechanical ambushes that had been rigged around the NDP. The point man, one of Arndt’s people, was killed instantly, his legs blown off. Two other men were seriously wounded in a mishap that could have been avoided with better communication between the separated elements. The medevac that landed took aboard the wounded and flipped out a body bag for the KIA. When the patrol continued the next day, recon had to carry its dead comrade along the way, two men in front, two men in back, with the sticks that had been slipped through the loop handles of the body bag over their shoulders. The body was finally taken out on a resupply slick.