PART FOUR
I have always felt that I came through my experience in Vietnam in good shape, but Hill 1000 did create years of intermittent nightmares for me.
—1st Lt. John A. Flaherty, Company D, 2d Battalion, 506th Infantry 101st Airborne Division
CHAPTER 10
The new mission was simple. As Lucas explained to Sergeant Granberry and acting assistant team leader John Schnarr, their recon element was to move off the firebase, past the next hill to the west—the battalion commander traced the route on the acetate-covered map in his operations center— then up onto enemy-occupied Hill 1000. Neither artillery nor air strikes had silenced the mortars dug in near the top. To employ the supporting arms to better effect, Lucas needed the recon team to pinpoint the exact location of the mortars.
Granberry and Schnarr exchanged dubious glances after being dismissed. What seemed logical to the colonel sounded reckless to the recon troops, and they basically decided among themselves that they weren’t going to rush into anything. They were going to take it slow up that mountain, and if it proved impossible to reach the mortars without being detected, so be it.
Taking a patrol trail down through the wire, Granberry had progressed six hundred meters by the time dusk fell, and his team set up for the night in the saddle below Hill 1000. When the shelling began again in the morning at the approach of a CH-47 bringing in a sling load of artillery ammunition—it was now the sixth day of the battle—the recon troops could hear a mortar tube some four hundred meters above them on the easternmost of the two small knolls at the top of east-west Hill 1000. The troops on the firebase could not hear the shells over the high mountain winds, so at the thump of each outgoing round, Granberry would alert the TOC duty officer, “You’re going to be taking incoming.”
Granberry also provided an approximate distance and direction for counterbattery fire. As far as the recon troops were concerned, they had done what they’d been sent to do. The duty officer instructed Granberry, however, to move up the hill to pinpoint and, if possible, actually destroy the mortar position. “Tell the sonofabitch to kiss our ass,” the usually levelheaded Schnarr said to Granberry. “We’re not going up that hill. They’re fuckin’ nuts.”
“We gotta go,” said Granberry, “but we’ll play it by ear.”
Doug Jacoway took the lead, because perennial point man and assistant team leader Mihalko was attending a leadership course at Camp Evans in preparation for taking over a team of his own. Granberry’s radioman and sniper also had business in the rear and had been replaced by men from other teams. Their Kit Carson was absent altogether, still shook from the wiretap mission.
The last seventy-five meters or so to the top of the hill had been blasted by arty and tac air, and the naked trees and churned-up earth offered little cover. The recon troops slipped into a large bomb crater at the forward edge of the remaining vegetation. As they were discussing their next move, the mortar crew atop the knoll dropped another round down the tube. Granberry was again on the radio to the operations center: “More incoming on the way.”
The team watched the shell impact over on Ripcord. “They’re right above us here. We can hear ’em talking,” Granberry reported. “The grid coordinates are three-three-four-one-nine-four.”
“Roger, understand,” answered the duty officer.
“I can adjust artillery or a mortar fire mission.”
“Negative on that. We want you to assault the position.”
Granberry restated his call sign to remind the duty officer that he had only a small recon team, adding, “but I can adjust fire. Over.”
“Negative. Take your element and assault the position.”
“That’s not a good idea,” Granberry objected, thinking of the enemy infantrymen who would be securing the mortar position.
The duty officer, speaking bluntly himself, replied without equivocation: “Your mission is to assault that enemy position.”
It was Schnarr’s impression that the duty officer was relaying instructions from Lucas, who had flown over the recon team at one point in his C&C. After all the high-caliber munitions that had been expended without apparent effect on the hill, one can imagine Lucas’s enthusiasm that a recon team had managed to maneuver within striking distance of an identified target. The team’s attack would have the element of surprise on its side. In addition, the duty officer assured Granberry that he was not as alone as he imagined: “We’re moving a platoon from Delta Company into position directly behind you to reinforce your attack if necessary.”
Captain Rollison and Company D had begun moving off the firebase early that afternoon, replaced by Company B, which had marched to Ripcord from Hill 805. The assault order was given late in the day, at which time Rollison’s grunts, coming over the little hill west of the firebase, were descending into the saddle leading up to Hill 1000. Sergeant Granberry nevertheless thought the attack order so unwise that he was willing to risk a court-martial over it. “The Army isn’t a democracy, but this team is,” he said after getting off the horn with the TOC. “If you guys want to turn around and walk off this mountain, then that’s what we’ll do, and we’ll just take our lumps when we get back to Ripcord.”
“Aw, fuck it,” Jacoway, a real wild man, finally said as they crouched in the crater. “Let’s give it a shot, let’s see what happens.”
That broke the spell. “We shouldn’t risk the whole team,” said John Schnarr. “I’ll take somebody, and we’ll try and get closer and see what the situation is, if it’s something we can do or not.”
Schnarr moved out with “Dixie” Gaskins, a quiet kid from the Deep South who had a rebel nickname despite the fact that he was black. There was no cover straight up from the crater, so with Schnarr in the lead, the pair worked their way into some vegetation on the right that arched to the left on its way to the top of that eastern knoll. Starting on his hands and knees, Schnarr ended up low-crawling as the brush gave way to burned, stubbly patches of undergrowth no more than two feet high. Gaskins prudently dropped back as Schnarr bellied through the stuff a few feet at a time, stopping to watch and listen before moving another few feet.
Schnarr followed the undergrowth to a point directly above the crater, then started straight up toward the top. He stopped again to see what he could see, thinking maybe we can pull this off, maybe the mortar wasn’t protected by any infantry. Suddenly he heard people speaking in Vietnamese. Peering through the brush, he saw the face of an enemy soldier. The man was wearing a pith helmet. I can take him, Schnarr thought, shouldering his M16. Before squeezing the trigger, however, he followed the eyes of the man in his sights and saw that he was conversing with a second NVA. Another half-dozen enemy soldiers seemed to materialize as Schnarr focused on the scene; their pith helmets were visible as they moved about in some kind of entrenchments dug amid the deadfall just below the bald top of the knoll.
Schnarr had the impression that there were even more enemy soldiers that he could not see. He was hugging dirt, totally exposed amid the low brush; had one of the NVA glanced in his direction, it would have been all over. He motioned to Dixie to start moving back. Gaskins scooted backward through the brush, then stopped to wait for Schnarr, who, joining him shortly, whispered, “There’s a bunch of ’em up there. We gotta get outta here right now.”
Instead of retracing their route through the brush, Schnarr and Gaskins rushed straight across the open area in their haste to get back to the crater where the rest of the team was waiting. It wasn’t a smart move. The top of Schnarr’s and Gaskins’s heads were exposed for only a moment before they dropped below the enemy’s line of vision, but that was enough. Schnarr and Gaskins had no sooner reached the crater and were crouched at the edge of it, ready to continue downhill— Schnarr was hurriedly telling Granberry what he’d seen— when the enemy simultaneously fired three RPGs down at them. One landed just below the crater, the other two just above. All seven recon troopers were wounded in the fearsome blast. Schnarr and Gaskins were blown into the crater. Schnarr took a piece of shrapnel in his chest, more in his upper back. Feeling something burning as he came to his senses, he reached for it and pulled the severed end of his dog-tag chain out of the side of his neck. Gaskins had taken the brunt of the explosions and was in worse shape, with big chunks of muscle blown out of his back.
Private First Class James D. Neff, the team radioman, had been sitting in the crater with his back to the top of the hill. Shocked dumb by the explosions—unaware, in fact, that he’d been hit in the face and leg—he tore out of his rucksack and started running down the hill so fast that he forgot the handset was still hooked to the shoulder strap of his web gear. The cord stretched tight behind him before jerking itself loose from the handset. In a blind panic, Neff got hold of himself when he heard someone calling for help and saw the team medic, a cocky new man, stumbling after him, blood squirting from a shrapnel wound in his jugular vein.
Neff pulled the medic back in the crater even as Schnarr shouted at him, “Get on the radio and get Delta Company up here.”
Neff rolled his rucksack over. The radio inside had a big shrapnel hole in it. At that, Granberry scrambled out of the crater and started down the hill. Schnarr shouted, “Junior, where the hell you goin’?”
“I’m gonna get Delta Company.”
“They’ll come up, they’ll come up.”
Granberry bolted down the hill anyway. Everyone just freaks out sometimes, thought Schnarr, who held nothing against Granberry.
“The idea that I might lose Dixie because I had obeyed an insane order was too much for me to handle,” Granberry later wrote of the incident. “When I went for Delta Company, it was because I needed to do something, anything to keep Dixie alive. . . .”
The medic started out of the crater, too, and Schnarr screamed at him, “No, we need you here.” The medic said he was hurt. “Put a compress on it,” Schnarr snapped. “You need to work on Dixie.”
To stop the bleeding, Neff had to secure a field dressing so tightly around the medic’s neck as to almost choke him. The medic had already lost so much blood that he repeatedly passed out as he bandaged the gaping wounds on Gaskins’s back and started an IV.
Granberry, meanwhile, reached Company D’s lead platoon. The platoon medic rushed up to him and told him to sit down.
“What?” Granberry said, dazed and confused. “Why?”
“Take your shirt off and sit down,” the medic repeated.
Granberry was shocked upon peeling off his shirt to see that it was soaked with blood across the shoulders and down both sleeves. Though he hadn’t felt a thing, Granberry’s back and the backs of his arms were thoroughly peppered with little fragments.
The grunts were organizing a patrol to pull the recon team back. Granberry wanted to lead it because he knew exactly where his guys were, but someone replied, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere but to the aid station. We’ve got a dust-off on the way.”
Granberry was evacuated on the spot. Back up the hill, Schnarr and Jacoway, who had taken shrapnel in one hand, hunkered down at the forward edge of the crater, ready to pop anyone who started down toward them from the top of the knoll. Concerned that the enemy might be trying to outflank them, Schnarr had Neff use their thump gun to lob high-explosive shells not only along the crest of the hill but also into the brush off to the right. No enemy appeared, however. There was no additional enemy fire, so Jacoway and Neff argued with Schnarr, who wanted to stay put until the grunts got there, that they had to get back down the hill before the enemy thought to cut them off.
Schnarr asked the medic if Gaskins could be moved. “Yeah, we gotta get him out of here,” the medic said. “I can’t do anything else for him. But I’m not sure how we’re going to move him.”
“I’ll carry him,” said Schnarr. Hefting Gaskins on his back, he led the way down the hill, calling out, “Currahee, Currahee.”
Moving toward the answering shouts from the grunts, Schnarr, walking slowly under his load, was almost at the bottom of the hill when he ran into the point man of the patrol starting up the hill.
Neff glanced back at Jacoway, who was bringing up the rear, as they were about to slip into the cover of the trees below the crater and saw that his buddy had stopped to fire his M203 thump gun back up the hill. “What the hell are you doing?” Neff exclaimed. Jacoway was furious. “They ain’t gonna get away with this,” he spat. Neff, not wanting to bring anything else down on their heads, pulled him along. “C’mon, let’s just get the hell outta here.”
After forming a hasty defensive position in the saddle, Captain Rollison instructed SSgt. Gary A. “Ranger” Radford, a highly respected platoon sergeant who was airborne and ranger qualified—rare for a young shake ’n bake—to run a patrol up the hill to retrieve the radio, rucksacks, and weapons left behind in the crater by the recon team. Of special concern was the team’s scope-mounted sniper rifle. The scope was a classified item, and Radford was to make sure he either recovered or destroyed it.
It was almost dark. The last thing Rollison told Radford before he moved out was, “Don’t get in any firefights. Just get the gear and get back. We’ll deal with whatever’s up there tomorrow.”
Easier said than done. As soon as the patrol reached the crater, it became engaged, and Rollison barked to no one in particular, “That goddamn Ranger never listens to a fuckin’ thing I tell him.”
It wasn’t much of a firefight actually. Accustomed to fighting an enemy that hit and ran, neither Radford nor another platoon sergeant who’d tagged along, SSgt. George K. Strasburg— he was the one who actually low-crawled out to the crater after the patrol got into position—expected trouble. Strasburg was utterly shocked when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded against a nearby tree as he reached for one of the rucksacks. Thinking himself seriously injured—the concussive force of the blast was that strong—he rushed back behind cover. The enemy atop the hill opened fire in the next instant with AK-47s. “Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Radford shouted when he heard a round hit the bottom of the mortar tube. Radford bolted downhill in a panic, followed by the rest of the patrol, only one or two members of which paused long enough to return fire. The enemy hurried them along with a second RPG. The mortar crew also put three quick rounds in the air, trying to catch the patrol as it rushed down the slope.
Rollison questioned Radford when he got back as to why he had made contact. “I didn’t,” Radford replied. “They hit us. The good thing was they didn’t have time to set up a real ambush. I don’t think they expected anyone to go back up there so quickly.”
Rollison pulled his people back up onto the middle hill and coordinated some 81 and Quad-50 counterbattery fire from Ripcord. It was dark by the time he was ready to bring in another medevac. The pilot had to break away when the flare used to mark the landing zone blinded him, but he was able to land on his next attempt and take aboard the four most seriously wounded recon troopers, leaving Schnarr and Jacoway.
When Granberry’s medevac landed, the team leader vented at the first sergeant who was anxiously waiting on the helipad at Evans. “There’s an officer on Ripcord that’s gonna die,” Granberry raged, thinking not of the colonel but of the duty officer who’d actually given the assault order. “If I ever find out who he is, I’m blowin’ his fucking brains out.”