CHAPTER 11
Per the colonel’s instructions, Captain Rollison got organized during the night for an early-morning assault on the easternmost of the two knolls atop Hill 1000. Following extensive prep fires, Rollison’s two full-strength platoons were to converge on the knoll, Delta Two from the southeast, Delta Three the northeast. The company command group would follow the assault platoons, trailed, in turn, by the reserve platoon—the understrength Delta One.
Before moving off the firebase, every man in the company had been resupplied with a full load of ammunition and at least eight fragmentation grenades. “We knew it was going to be tough,” said 1st Lt. James R. McCall of Delta Two, “but they were going to give us as much artillery as we could handle. We were going to follow the arty up and shift it across the top of the hill as we neared the crest, and we were going to move in quickly while we had the enemy stunned and dazed, eliminate any resistance, and take the hill.”
That the company prepared for the assault with confidence was due to Captain Rollison. “He knew his shit,” as Radford put it. “I served under five COs during a year and a half with Delta Company, and you couldn’t get any better than Captain Rollison.”
Rollison was the most combat-savvy company commander in the battalion during the battle for Ripcord. His lieutenants loved him. His grunts trusted him to get them home alive while kicking a little ass along the way. “Rollie talked the talk and walked the walk,” as Chuck Hawkins put it. Rollison was tall and lean and spoke with a deep southern accent. He was forceful, almost intimidating, gregarious, too, and colorful in his use of language; the NVA were “little devils,” and to call an air strike on them was to “bring some scunion on their ass.” Rollison packed a shotgun and operated with an aggressive flair that was legendary among the Currahees. “Rollie once set a trap with himself as bait,” recounted Hawkins. “He set out maybe a dozen small ambushes in a circular pattern around his position, then he and another guy plinked C-ration cans with a .22 target pistol he had. This went on for two or three days. The enemy never took the bait, but that’s the kind of thing he’d do.”
The son of a carpenter, Gabe Rollison had grown up poor on the outskirts of small-town Hinesville, Georgia. He enrolled in the ROTC program at North Georgia College and became a resident football star. He was commissioned in 1966, whereupon he married his sweetheart and volunteered for jump school, ranger school, and Vietnam.
Lieutenant Rollison pulled a 1966–67 tour as a platoon leader and company executive officer in a rifle battalion headquartered in the Michelin Rubber Plantation near Saigon as part of the 4th Division before being switched to the 25th Tropic Lightning Division.
Following his two years of service, Rollison got into the insurance business with his father-in-law. It wasn’t for him. “One day,” he told Hawkins, “I looked in the mirror when I was shaving and I saw a fat roly-poly insurance salesman staring back at me.”
Rollison went back on active duty. Returning to the war a captain, he was determined to secure command of a rifle company after reaching the Screaming Eagles replacement center at Camp Evans. He began his politicking with Andre Lucas of the 2-506th Infantry. Lucas informed him of an opening on his staff. “Colonel, with all due respect, I can’t use it,” replied Rollison. “I came back here to do what I do best, and that’s leading men in combat. I want a company. If you don’t have one for me, I’ll find a battalion that does.”
Lucas liked what he heard and told Rollison that he was going to send him out to Company D, then operating in the foothills from FSB Jack. “My guidance is very simple,” said Lucas. “Take care of your people and kill North Vietnamese.” Turning the tables a bit, Lucas then asked, “What do you expect of me, captain?”
“Sir, don’t run my company—let me run it.”
Lucas cracked a smile. “That’s fair enough.”
Captain Rollison took over Company D on March 6, 1970, his predecessor having been sent packing by Lucas. “I got off the helicopter and he got on it,” recalled Rollison. “He hadn’t taken care of his people. He hadn’t cared enough to set the standards and make sure his people toed the mark.” When Rollison walked around the muddy firebase, he found troops with “filthy weapons and machine guns that wouldn’t fire; when I went down in the CP, the chief RTO’s radio had C-ration cheese down the face of it and all over the knobs. It was obvious he hadn’t cleaned it in some time. They looked raggedy. My impression was that I’d taken over a pretty ineffective, poorly disciplined, rag-bag outfit.”
There tended to be more searching and avoiding during patrols than searching and destroying. Contact being rare in any event, the smell of marijuana drifted from many a position when the sun set on the platoon NDPs. Rollison set about rebuilding the company in his image. He had the help of a good first sergeant, plus two highly motivated lieutenants, Bud Romig in Delta One and brand-new Jack Flaherty in Delta Three. Jim McCall, another hard charger, got Delta Two after Rollison fired the previous platoon leader. “I gave the guy four hours to get ready for a daylight patrol, the simplest, most fundamental military mission, and he couldn’t get it together,” explained Rollison. Checking the patrol before it left the wire, Rollison was dismayed that the troops had dirty weapons and wore boonie hats instead of helmets, not to mention that “the radios weren’t on the correct frequency. Half the radios didn’t even work, which they tried to hide from me, and there was only one map and compass in the whole damn platoon.”
When Rollison visited Romig’s and Flaherty’s platoons in the field for the first time, he gave each the same speech he’d given the platoon on Firebase Jack. “He let everyone know that things were going to be different from then on,” recalled Flaherty. The rest of the battalion was committed at that time to the original assault on Ripcord. Rollison had three weeks before Company D went in. “That was our shakedown period,” he noted. Weapons were zeroed, and basic patrol, ambush, and river-crossing techniques were rehearsed under combat conditions. “Basically, I got ’em out in the woods and just ran their asses off,” said Rollison. “I told ’em, ‘We’re gonna winnow out the chaff here, and find out who can function and take care of his buddy, and who can’t.’ ”
Rollison went by the book, requiring his men to shave every day, believing that troops who looked sharp were sharp. The fundamentals were stressed to include moving every day and digging in, deploying claymores, and registering artillery every night. “Rollison knew every one of his soldiers by name, and could tell a man a joke and then chew his butt if he needed it,” recalled Lieutenant Flaherty. “Every man in the company knew exactly what was expected of him. Morale soared. I loved being a part of it.” Flaherty, an OCS man, decided to go career because he was so impressed by Rollison. “Rollison taught me how to be a platoon leader, and he expected me to teach my men as he was teaching me. The offense was touted as the best defense, and the troops carried lots of ammunition and grenades. Water and food had second priority in our rucksacks. The men were proud of how tough their company commander was. He was seen as hard but fair.”
However conventional his tactics, Rollison’s methods were anything but. If, after digging in, someone got too loud, laughing or goofing around, the captain would stand up in the center of the perimeter, his voice booming furiously: “Okay, you just told ’em where we are, so, c’mon, come and get us, you sons of bitches.”
Most of the guys quickly got the message. Rollison was checking the lines one night, however, when he saw a man sitting in full view at the edge of his foxhole, lighting what looked to be a joint. Slipping up behind the trooper, Rollison grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head, put his seven-inch Gerber fighting knife to his throat, and whispered some profound words in his ear about the importance of light discipline and staying alert on guard.
Rollison’s reputation began to flourish when Delta Company CA’d into the Ripcord AO and began killing more than its share of NVA. One of the many successful contacts began when the point squad of Lieutenant McCall’s platoon, which was leading a company move along a ridge, exchanged fire with a small group of North Vietnamese. “We were moving through the jungle just like Rollison had taught us, being very quiet, very cautious,” said McCall. The result was that the enemy, thinking they were dealing with a small patrol, ran right into a larger element they didn’t even know was there when they tried to maneuver behind the point squad. “I already had a bead on the lead NVA when he spotted one of my guys,” recounted McCall, armed with an M16, “and when he started to bring his AK-47 up, I squeezed off three rounds and dropped him right there.” That night, McCall was pondering the fact that he had killed a man “when I got word on the radio that the Red Cross had called to notify me that my wife had given birth to our second daughter, so it was sort of a double dose of emotions.”
After more than two months of hard campaigning in the mountains, Company D, which had inflicted many casualties but suffered a few, too, was trucked to Eagle Beach for two days of beer and sand during the battalion stand-down in June. A disconcerting incident occurred then that was probably related to the trooper whom Rollison had tried to scare straight with his fighting knife. The trooper was black. “There were two classes of black guys,” said Pfc. Bruce W. McCorkle. “There were the ones who were really good soldiers, and there were the street guys who hung together and were never really part of the unit.” The trooper whom Rollison confronted belonged to the latter camp. Afterward, the company commander heard through the grapevine that they were talking about fragging him. There were no attempts, and the issue seemed to have died a natural death until Rollison, on the way back to his hootch after a night of drinking at Eagle Beach, turned the corner of a barracks and was clobbered squarely in the forehead with a two-by-four. An officer from another battalion who happened to meet Rollison at that time observed that “both of his eyes were black and blue and swollen almost shut. He was trying to find out which GI had wielded the two-by-four. Maybe some of his soldiers considered him a little too hard charging.”
Rollison was not intimidated, as evidenced by his handling of a street guy who joined Delta One shortly after Ripcord. The trooper immediately began agitating about the white man’s war. When his platoon leader, a new lieutenant named Andrews—one of the few black officers of the day—told him it was his turn for LP, the trooper told Andrews that he’d better watch his back the next time they made contact. Given that the trooper had boasted of having done time for manslaughter, Andrews was concerned, as was Rollison.
Chewing the man out had no visible effect, so after the trooper threatened Andrews a second time, a fed-up Rollison took him on a little two-man RIF. Alone in the jungle, Rollison suddenly spun around, shoved his shotgun into the trooper’s gut, and, flipping the safety off, told him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t square away he was going to meet a hero’s untimely death.
The recalcitrant trooper injured himself some days later with a white phosphorus grenade while setting up a mechanical ambush. Packed off to the rear with painfully blistered buttocks, he sought out the battalion chaplain to describe the mistreatment he had suffered. He furiously threatened everyone up the chain of command with physical harm, to include the chaplain, apparently because he did not appear sympathetic, and soon went from jabbing his finger in the chaplain’s face to thumping him in the chest with it. The chaplain finally threw a right cross that laid the trooper out cold. The story spread like wildfire in the battalion and was great for morale, though there were repercussions in the form of a congressional complaint from the trooper’s gullible congressman.
Following the battalion stand-down, Rollison’s people took over the perimeter at Ripcord. On June 28, prop wash from a CH-47 blew sparks from the 105 area, where a fire mission was in progress, into the mortar section’s ammo bunker, igniting several powder bags. Fearing a major explosion, Rollison ordered everyone out of the area, then jumped into the bunker and began shoveling dirt on the fire. He was soon joined by one of his men who had rushed down the hill with the aviation fire extinguisher from the VIP pad. Disaster thus averted, Rollison was awarded the Soldier’s Medal.
When the battle began and Wilcox replaced Hewitt, Lucas asked Rollison for his best platoon leader to fill Wilcox’s vacated slot as CO of Company E. “Well, McCall’s the craziest, meanest one I got,” said Rollison. “Flaherty’s the smartest and most calculating, and Romig has the most experience and is the calmest under fire.”
Lucas took Romig. Shortly thereafter, on July 6, Delta Company moved out to support the recon team on Hill 1000. “When we turned the security mission over to Bravo Company, I was very happy and relieved,” recalled Flaherty. The jungle seemed preferable to “being stuck on the firebase with the work details and incoming mortar fire. We had no idea that we were going to run into a major enemy fortification within a kilometer of Ripcord.”
The morning of the attack was hot and cloudless. Lieutenant McCall and Delta Two advanced in column on the left flank, Lieutenant Flaherty and Delta Three on the right, the troops— rucksacks left behind in the overnight position—well spaced as they threaded uphill through the jungle. The pace was slow and cautious. It was three hundred meters to the top of the eastern knoll that was the company’s objective. The last seventy-five meters were the most vulnerable, the underbrush burned away by air strikes, the slope crowded with tree trunks broken off at various heights and littered with the tangled and splintered debris of the felled trees.
The prep fires were lifted as the assault platoons started across the deadfall. The lead troops were twenty-five meters from the top of the knoll when a single shot rang out and Pfc. Michael J. Grimm of Delta Three dropped to his knees and pitched forward onto his face.
It was 9:40 A.M. on July 7, 1970. George Strasburg, the platoon sergeant, instantly sought cover amid the deadfall. Returning fire, he didn’t notice for some moments that Grimm was lying beside him, unmoving, facedown. “All of a sudden, the medic was there, pulling Grimm’s shirt open, and he had a bullet hole in his chest directly over his heart,” recalled Strasburg. There was no blood, Grimm’s heart having stopped pumping when he was shot. The medic tried to find a pulse but finally looked up despairingly and shook his head. Grimm, married, age twenty, from Carthage, North Carolina, was dead. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Strasburg. “Grimm was a good friend of mine. He was right beside me as we were going up. It was like, we’re talking one minute, and the next he’s just lying there, and I didn’t even know what had happened to him.”
Flaherty got an excited radio call from a trooper in the point squad who reported the KIA in the clear: “L. T., Grimm is dead.”
“Okay,” Flaherty answered matter-of-factly, shocked that in the heat of the moment he didn’t feel anything, couldn’t think of anything to say, about losing one of the best soldiers in Delta Three.
Moments later, as the fire grew heavy on Flaherty’s platoon, the enemy also hit Lieutenant McCall’s platoon on the left flank. “We all basically knew what we were getting into when we saddled up that morning. Nobody wanted to walk point,” noted Gary Radford, the rangy, blond-headed platoon sergeant of Delta Two. Specialist Fourth Class Lewis Howard, Jr., ended up as the platoon point man through an unfair process of elimination. “We were going to draw straws,” explained Radford, “and a couple guys threw ’em down. They said they weren’t walking point, they just flat-out refused. I didn’t argue with them. What it came down to was if nobody would go, I’d have to do it, but other guys were willing to draw straws. Howard came up with the short one. He didn’t say a word. I knew what was going to happen. I knew he was going to get it.”
Radford was a white guy from Pittsburgh. Howard, a big, strong, soft-spoken kid who never complained and always did his job, was a black draftee from Macon, Georgia. Recently reassigned to a rifle squad, Howard had carried Radford’s radio the previous six months. They were close friends. “I’ll come and get you if something happens,” Radford said, trying to reassure Howard.
Lieutenant McCall, after passing the crater where the recon team had left its equipment the day before, equipment that had since vanished, halted his platoon at a rock formation before pushing on to the top of the knoll. Howard and his slack man, Sgt. George McIntosh, got behind a boulder until McCall passed the word to move out. The point team hadn’t gone another fifty meters—firing broke out at that point on the other side of the knoll—when several RPGs came whooshing in, the first one hitting the tree that Howard was moving past. Taking the brunt of the explosion, he dropped on the spot. McIntosh was badly wounded in the hip. As he scrambled for cover, he heard Howard cry out for a medic, but that was it. Howard neither answered those who called to him nor tried to crawl back toward the platoon. He might have only been unconscious, but, given the massive injuries he must have suffered, the impression his buddies had was that probably he had died almost instantly.
As the lead troops returned fire, Sergeant Radford moved up to join them. Radford, wounded and decorated with a Silver Star during the big battles of the previous summer, had extended his tour an additional six months, such was his loyalty to the men in his platoon. Seventeen months in-country, he had only a few weeks to go, however, when they went up Hill 1000. “I had short-timer’s fever,” said Radford, who had drifted all the way back to the tail end of the column after Howard took the point. “Hell, I think I placed myself next to the last guy in the platoon. I don’t know if I was losing it or what, but I wasn’t the same NCO I had been in the past.” Feeling guilty, Radford led a squad uphill to drag Howard back but had to withdraw when the enemy began “firing RPGs into the trees above us, trying to get the shrapnel to spray down on us.” Radford and his squad next tried to outflank the entrenched enemy. “We were able to move fifty or sixty meters over to the left, but we weren’t able to advance up at them at all. As soon as they saw movement, they would start lobbing satchel charges down at us.”
The situation was the same on the right flank. “The enemy positions were well camouflaged to begin with, and the prep fires added to it,” noted a frustrated Lieutenant Flaherty. “With all the deadfall you couldn’t see anything at ground level. We were returning fire blindly, but they were aiming at specific people.”
Shouting directions over the din, Flaherty had the platoon work its way to the left until they had a fifty-meter front coming down the hill at an angle from Strasburg, who was the farthest forward on the right. “At that point, we started to maneuver over and around the deadfall to see if we could get at the bunkers,” recounted Flaherty, who, like the captain, carried a pump shotgun. “We were shooting, throwing hand grenades, just trying to get a fix on where they were, when we started taking fire from additional positions. It sounded like we had four or five bunkers directly in front of us.”
It was impossible to crawl under the felled trees. The only way to advance was to lob a frag and, as soon as it exploded, scuttle over the next log in your path, hoping the enemy had ducked at the blast. It didn’t always work. Flaherty’s radioman, Sp4 Thomas E. Gaut, started over one log only to be shot and knocked backward into Flaherty, who pushed him back over the log and came crashing down on top of him. They landed in a crater, which saved their lives because the enemy soldier who shot Gaut—from a bunker only ten feet farther up the hill that no one knew was there because he had waited for the right moment to reveal his position—couldn’t depress his weapon low enough to finish off the two as he furiously hosed down everything around and just behind the crater.
When the enemy soldier finally stopped firing, Gaut looked at his bullet-shattered arm. “Aw, shit,” he said in a stunned whisper.
“Don’t look at it,” Flaherty exclaimed, afraid the man might go into shock. “Don’t look at it, it’s going to be okay.”
It was a terrible wound. The round had smashed into Gaut’s hand, destroying the radio handset he was holding, then tore down his arm. His forearm was hanging on by only a few strands of muscle.
“Gaut’s hit,” Flaherty shouted to some troops who had been moving up on the right. “I need a handset for the radio.”
“Hold on, we’ll get one off another radio.”
Meanwhile, Flaherty got a bandage around Gaut’s arm, then tied a tourniquet above the radioman’s elbow to stop the bleeding.
Someone was heading up with a spare handset, but Flaherty shouted, “Don’t come up here because you’re gonna get hit.”
The trooper instead crawled to within five to six feet of the crater and tossed the handset to Flaherty. “Give me the radio,” Gaut said, in a lot of pain but hanging tough. “I’ll use my other hand.”
Lieutenant Flaherty began lobbing grenades at the enemy soldier who had him pinned down. “Every time my arm came up, he would fire, which actually gave me a better fix on where he was.” Flaherty’s first few frags seemed to have no effect, but as his aim got better there were long lulls in the enemy fire after each explosion. “Frankly, I think I killed five or six people. I think the enemy positions could be reinforced from the inside with tunnels, so no matter how many you killed, they just sent somebody else in to pull the body out of the way and keep up the fire. That’s my impression. I don’t know for sure. I never saw a single NVA.”
Spotting a bunker, George Strasburg, a low-key, absolutely dependable shake ’n bake who had been drafted out of college, rose from the depression where he had found cover, squeezed off a burst, dropped down, came up to fire again, and was shot in the head from a bunker he had been unaware of. “My helmet flew up, landed on the ground, and was sitting there rocking with a hole in it,” remembered Strasburg. “I thought this is it, this is that split second between life and death, the moment before you leave your body. I hoped I was going up. It was the strangest sensation.”
Coming to his senses, Strasburg realized he was on his back, his rifle across his chest, his legs pointed downhill. Not sure how badly he might be hurt, given the little fragments that had peppered the side of his head, he moved his feet back and forth, making sure they still worked, then held up his hands and did the same. Everything seemed okay. Retrieving his helmet, he saw how lucky he had been. An inch or two lower and the bullet would have gone through his forehead instead of tearing open the top of his steel pot.
Strasburg was lobbing grenades, careful not to throw too hard lest the frags go over the top of the knoll—the fight was that nose to nose—when the enemy sent a satchel charge his way. “It landed about ten or fifteen feet away on my left,” he recalled. The satchel charge, a yellowish orange block of dynamite, “just kind of laid there, smoking, and I thought, good, it’s a dud. I wasn’t paying much attention to it, and all of a sudden the thing went off, and my ears were ringing worse than when I caught the bullet in my helmet. I couldn’t hear anything in my left ear at all, but the satchel charge was all blast effect, no shrapnel, and I was basically okay.”
Lieutenant McCall was also convinced that the enemy positions were interconnected with tunnels. Having pinpointed one bunker, the platoon leader and several of his troops worked their way close enough to toss grenades through the firing aperture. “I know we eliminated that bunker,” said McCall. “The explosions actually blasted a body out of it, and we fired down in there to make sure nothing was left alive, but when we pressed on towards the next position, we started receiving fire from that same bunker.”
During an attempt to get around the enemy on the far left flank, McCall saw Sp4 Dwayne H. Pace’s gun team start across an open space, only to run into point-blank frontal fire from an unseen bunker. Pace began returning fire from the prone position, but the assistant gunner, Pfc. Charles E. Beals, a new guy from French Lick, Indiana, took a burst in the chest as he lay there feeding the M60.
“The machine gunner was stuck out in the open,” said McCall, “trying to take care of Beals, who was actually dead, and keep his weapon in action. He kept firing until he ran out of ammo. . . .”
To get the heat off the machine gunner, Lieutenant McCall, who had the platoon radio on his back so his RTO could fight as an infantryman, worked his way to within fifteen meters of the bunker from the right and let fly a frag. The NVA inside responded in kind. “I wasn’t behind much. In fact, my steel pot probably saved my life,” said McCall. He could see the stick-handled Chicom grenades flipping toward him; all of them landed to his front. He would squeeze flat behind his helmet, tucking his arms under him, then heave a grenade of his own after each explosion. Losing his helmet as another Chicom grenade sailed in, McCall “reached out and grabbed my helmet and put it back on, and the grenade went off while my hand was still on top of the helmet. Shrapnel hit me between my trigger finger and thumb, a deep, jagged graze right in that fleshy part. It was painful, but it wasn’t critical. I started shooting with my left hand, and I could still throw grenades.”
To move was to draw fire, so in short order the assault had bogged down. The lead troops could do no more than lob grenades as they hunkered, heads down, amid the deadfall. Captain Rollison started forward himself with part of the reserve platoon. Along the way, the company commander and the single radioman he had taken along, Rick Rearick, stopped behind a tree that was lying at an angle, pointed downhill. When Rollison jumped over it, a machine gun suddenly opened up, stitching the trunk and narrowly missing Rearick. Rollison vaulted downhill to get away from the fire. He landed on his shoulder and rolled into a shallow depression, where he kept his head down as the machine gunner fired all around his hideaway, spraying him with dirt.
From behind the log, Rearick blasted away, to no effect, with his M16. “Get your head down,” Rollison finally shouted to the radioman, “ ’cause I’m going to cook off a couple frags for about two and a half seconds, then I’m coming out of this friggin’ hole.”
Rollison pulled the pins on two grenades, one in each hand, released the spoons, counted off, flipped them over his head, then sprang up the instant they exploded. Madly pumping shotgun shells at the machine-gun position, he dashed back up toward Rearick. In the blur of dirt and debris flying in the air, it looked as though he got an NVA who stuck his head up to return fire. Making it to cover, Rollison grabbed the radio and excitedly reported, “I got the sonofabitch with my shotgun. I got him with my shotgun.”
Continuing up to the right, Rollison got on the horn with Flaherty, who, still pinned down by the enemy dug in above his crater, reported that he was out of grenades. Rollison, who had plenty, crawled to a log about ten feet to the left rear of the crater.
It was approximately 10:45 A.M. Lucas had arrived by then in a LOH, better known as a Loach, and directed Rollison by radio from his perch as the captain began to blindly lob grenades.
Boom!
“Three feet to the right.”
Boom!
“Okay, two feet to the left.”
Boom!
“Not so close next time,” Lieutenant Flaherty chimed in on the radio, his voice calm but pained. “You got me with that last one.”
“Bad?” Rollison shouted back.
“I don’t think so,” Flaherty answered, unaware that his entire back had been peppered. “I got it in the back, but I seem to be okay.”
Rollison’s next two grenades were on the money, and Flaherty scrambled from the crater as soon as the enemy stopped firing, to thoroughly blast the position with his twelve-gauge shotgun.
Before the enemy could regroup, Flaherty grabbed Gaut under his arms, pulled him up onto his hip, and, pushing with his other foot, crawled around the log behind the crater and started down the hill. “I dragged Gaut ten, fifteen meters, then turned him over to a couple guys,” said Flaherty. “By that time the medics had established an area down the hill where they weren’t taking any direct fire, and people were bringing the wounded to them there.”
Flaherty grabbed the radio, hustled back up the hill, and jumped behind a log with Rollison, who instructed him to keep up the fire while he, the company commander, tried to outflank the enemy on the right with the men he had brought up from Delta One. As Rollison’s group started through the deadfall, an RPD opened up from a low-profile bunker that would have been impossible to see except that the machine gun was at ground level and the muzzle blast spit up dirt whenever the gunner pulled the trigger. “I kept my eye on the spot and asked somebody to hand me a LAW,” said Rollison. “I hit the son of a bitch dead center. I think the LAW actually went through the aperture, but they apparently replaced the gunner through those damn tunnels we think they had because not more than two or three minutes later they were firing again from that position. I knocked it out again with another LAW.”
Rollison’s maneuver was soon stopped by heavy fire. Lucas orbited the knoll at fifty feet, the little observation helicopter taking multiple hits as the colonel radioed corrections to Rollison and others who were lobbing grenades and firing M79s.
Two LOHs from a White Team came on station at 11:25 A.M. and, buzzing around like angry bumblebees, delivered minigun bursts whenever they identified a target amid the deadfall on top of the hill. The enemy returned fire with AK-47s and RPDs, and at one point an RPG went sailing past the battalion commander’s Loach.
One of the scout ships, probably the colonel’s, dropped a gas-mask pouch full of grenades to Lieutenant McCall, who was still pinned down but out of frags, after the platoon leader heaved a smoke grenade to mark the bunker that was firing on him and gave his location in relation to the smoke. McCall explained the difficulty he was having eliminating the NVA in the bunker. “We’ll hover over the bunker,” the LOH radioed back, “and when he comes out to take us out, you take him out.” The enemy soldier, unable to fire at the hovering Loach from inside his bunker, stepped out into an adjoining trench, exposing himself to McCall from the chest up as he blasted away with his AK. “The Loach was taking some pretty good hits,” said McCall, who frantically threw the grenade he had ready. “Before the grenade even went off, I was firing my M16 to make sure I took that guy out completely before he got me or actually shot the helicopter down. It was a crazy moment.”
George Strasburg was ordered to try to close with the enemy, an order that made sense to him because none of the grenades he had thrown had done any apparent good. Telling the closest troops, two guys he did not know from the reserve platoon, to follow him, the platoon sergeant crawled to the top of the knoll. There was a trail there that would have to be crossed to outflank the bunkers. Strasburg went first, exposing himself for a split second as he rolled across. Having crested the knoll at that point, he slipped downhill into the tall elephant grass on the reverse slope, realizing with a start that the other two men had not followed him across the trail. Strasburg could hear the scout ships buzzing around, ripping off an occasional minigun burst. For cryin’ out loud, he thought, if they think I’m a gook out here, I’m going to get blasted.
Pushing down the grass around him so the pilot could see clearly that he was on their side, Strasburg waved at one ship that whipped past, then continued working his way through the elephant grass, staying low in a ravine. Moving uphill from the enemy’s rear, Strasburg broke out of the elephant grass on his hands and knees and spotted the bare earthen top of a bunker about thirty feet above him. He put down his M16 and reached into the cargo pocket on his left trouser leg where he kept his map and grenades. He came up empty. He had already thrown all his frags. Oh, shit.
At that moment, an enemy soldier wearing a pith helmet stuck his head up from the bunker and looked in the general direction of Strasburg. Thinking himself a dead man, Strasburg slowly reached down for his M16 and slowly, in time-expanded suspended animation, brought it to his shoulder and sighted in on the enemy soldier’s head. He squeezed off a three-round burst. The man disappeared in a flash, apparently hit. Before the enemy could figure out where the fire had come from, Strasburg scooted away through the elephant grass. He thought he’d find the two reserve-platoon guys back at the trail and together they could take out the bunker with grenades. The two turned out to be nowhere in sight, so he continued backtracking until he ended up in the same depression where he’d spent most of the battle.