CHAPTER 12
Lieutenant Colonel Lucas broke station after forty-five minutes to refuel and take aboard a resupply of fragmentation and smoke grenades for Company D. When the Loach shut down on the POL pad at Ripcord, Lucas and Major Koenigsbauer quickly discussed the situation, the operations officer offering to relieve a very wrung-out-looking Black Spade. “Grab thirty minutes and relax, sir,” said Koenigsbauer. “I’ll take the bird back up and keep the attack going.”
Lucas declined, insisting that it was his responsibility. With that the colonel flew back toward the hill. Though the range was too great to see any movement except the helicopters, the ongoing action was visible from Ripcord. “We could faintly hear the small-arms fire, and see smoke and occasional flashes on the hill,” wrote Fred Edwards, the battalion engineering officer. “We sat on the side of the firebase, following the course of the battle on the radio. You could get some appreciation for the intensity of the fire from radio background. The voice of every officer was astonishingly cool and professional in the face of the fire. I have always had the utmost respect for infantrymen, and this event solidified that respect.”
Lucas dropped several cases of smokes and frags to the troops from an altitude of about fifteen feet. The LOH accumulated several more bullet holes as it hung suspended between the trees. Losing oil pressure—something vital had finally been hit—it was forced to return to Ripcord.
The action continued. Running out of options, Rollison popped smoke on the right flank and had Flaherty do the same at his location fifteen feet to the left. “Can you make a gun run from one smoke to the other?” Rollison asked one of the LOH pilots.
“If you really want me to,” the pilot said doubtfully. The forward edge of Company D, as marked by the smoke grenades, was only a few meters from the bunkers that Rollison wanted strafed.
“Affirmative,” Rollison came back. “Keep your fire just as close to my side as you can, but see what you can hit in there.”
The Loach zipped by right on the deck, minigun blazing. “A couple of those rounds ended up six or eight inches in front of my smoke, which was getting a little bit tight,” recalled Rollison, “but the guy knew what he was doing and no one got hurt. I think he made two gun runs across our front, and did a lot of good for us.”
Flaherty, meanwhile, was working from position to position with several of his men, distributing the grenades and trying to get a handle on the situation. Everyone told him the same story: “No matter how many grenades we throw at these bunkers, no matter what we do, every time we stick our heads up, they’re firing at us.”
Flaherty crawled over to Rollison. “We’re up against it,” Flaherty said. “We’re not getting anywhere. We’re just expending ammunition.”
Rollison had a quick radio conversation with Lucas, then turned back to Flaherty. “Okay, that’s it, we’re going to pull back.”
It was time to bring in more of the heavy stuff. To help Rollison break contact, Lucas—quietly turning aside Koenigsbauer’s repeated suggestion that he, the S3, go aloft—climbed aboard a replacement aircraft that had arrived an hour after the first Loach had been forced down. Before departing, Lucas directed that a platoon from Company B move on foot from the firebase and secure for the medevacs the overnight position to which Delta Company would be returning on the bald hilltop between Ripcord and Hill 1000.
Strasburg had dragged Mike Grimm along as he withdrew to where everyone else was clustered, then lost track of the body as he helped Flaherty get the platoon back down the hill. Captain Rollison crawled up to get the dead man, but as he reached out to grab Grimm’s boot, an enemy soldier suddenly stood up from a bunker ten feet above him. Rollison took the individual for a Chinese advisor. He was big and tall and was wearing, in addition to khaki web gear, a distinctive khaki bush hat to which was pinned a big red star. He was gripping a drum-fed RPD in his right hand. In his left was a satchel charge. “He just looked straight at me and tossed it. It came arcing through the air,” recounted Rollison, “and before it landed, I shot him twice in the chest, and he dropped down to his knees, and I shot him in the face.” The adrenaline was such that Rollison crushed the walnut slide of his shotgun as he pumped off the shots, then, his left hand stinging with splinters, he “dropped the shotgun and plugged both ears and opened my mouth, and the satchel charge went off in my face. I woke up about twenty feet away. I’d lost most of the hearing in my right ear from the explosion. I also lost my shotgun. I got distracted by something, got turned around and never got turned back around. I loved that shotgun. That ol’ Winchester was a sweet-shootin’ gun.”
As Flaherty’s people edged away from the bunkers, one of his machine gunners maintained a forward position, laying down suppressive fire. The gunner presently shouted that he needed more ammunition, but his ammo bearer, Pat Dooley— not his real name—remained glued behind his cover. That was not surprising. Dooley, a nice guy and certainly no pariah among his comrades, always froze under fire. Bruce McCorkle, a radioman from the company command group, finally grabbed a box of belted ammo from Dooley and crawled up with it to the machine gunner.
McCorkle was joined by Sgt. Stanley G. Diehl and, passing their M16s to some of the guys heading downhill, they went to get Mike Grimm. The machine gunner was pulling back himself by then. It seemed to McCorkle that he and Diehl were the last friendlies on that side of the hill. McCorkle grabbed Grimm’s arms, and Diehl his legs, but when they lifted him up, a machine gun fired into them. The rounds passed so close, the sensation was like that of being electrocuted, and they went to the ground, expecting to be killed in the next instant by the enemy soldier who had them in his sights. There was no NVA, however. Rolling over, McCorkle saw a Loach flash past over their heads and realized that the little helicopter had apparently been caught in a downdraft as it fired, putting a burst right through them. Miraculously no one had been injured, though McCorkle noticed a hole in Grimm’s wrist that he hadn’t seen before as they continued downhill with the body.
On the other side of the hill, Lieutenant McCall, pinned down again after another aborted attempt to move forward, was throwing the grenades that had been dropped to him in the gas-mask pouch to cover the withdrawal of Delta Two. Ranger Radford, controlling the move, was grief stricken that they had been unable to recover Lewis Howard, the platoon having progressed too far to the left of the bouldered area where the body of his friend was sprawled. Getting reorganized back among the trees, he was horrified to realize that Beals, the new assistant machine gunner, wasn’t there either. Someone said he’d been hit. It was unclear in the confusion whether he was alive or dead, and Radford headed back to get him.
Beals was lying facedown, unmoving, where he had been shot. The M60 that Beals’s gunner had been manning lay nearby, damaged and useless. Radford grabbed Beals but was suddenly knocked unconscious, his eardrums ruptured by a satchel charge. Radford snapped back to reality as Sp4 Joseph Gibson, his radioman, dragged him back behind one of the knocked-down trees. “Had Joe Gibson not followed me to find Beals,” Radford would later write, “I may have also been left behind on Hill 1000.”1
Out of frags again, McCall reported that he needed help, and Rollison turned over to him the Cobras from the 4-77th ARA, which had replaced the White Team at 12:45 P.M., shortly after Lucas had gone airborne again over Hill 1000. McCall used one of his last two smokes to mark the nearest bunker.
The fire-team leader of the Cobras asked, “How far are you from the smoke?”
“Fifteen feet,” McCall said.
“That’s not far enough,” the team leader answered. “We need more room than that to operate.”
“Okay, wait one minute, and let me see if I can pull back.”
McCall jumped over the log behind him. The enemy had been waiting for him to move, and AK-47 rounds cracked past all around him as soon as he exposed himself. “That’s about as far as I can go,” McCall informed the ARA. “Go ahead and roll in hot.”
As soon as the first Cobra unleashed its rockets, McCall was up and running, hoping the enemy was too preoccupied with the helicopters to open fire on him as he headed downhill through the deadfall, taking it in leaps and bounds. Only when he reached the safety of the jungle did he slow down long enough to notice that he had taken some light shrapnel in his elbows from the ARA.
If McCall wasn’t the last man off the embattled hill, then Sergeant Radford was, peppered along the way in the arm and leg by rocket fragments. The Cobras broke station at 1:15 P.M. to clear the way for a forward air controller and a flight of Phantoms. Rollison reported taking heavy AK-47 and RPG fire from boulders overlooking the saddle across which he was withdrawing, and Lucas spotted movement southwest of the LZ being secured by Bravo Three. To keep Rollison from getting cut off, Lucas, trusting that the jungle would absorb most of the blast, had the FAC put the air strikes within three hundred feet on either side of Delta Company.
The price of the battle had been heavy. Against nine enemy kills confirmed from the air, Rollison had one KIA, two MIAs, and, not counting all the lightly wounded, thirteen WIAs. There was little doubt that both missing men were dead when the company pulled back, but, as Sergeant Strasburg noted, “It really played on our minds that we hadn’t been able to get to them to make sure.”2
Company D linked up with Bravo Three about five hours after first making contact on Hill 1000. “When we got back and looked at our watches, I couldn’t believe we’d been up there that long,” said Flaherty. “It seemed like twenty minutes. Time is so compressed when you’re under fire. You’re not conscious of anything. You just do what you have to do. You don’t even think about it.”
For doing what they had to do, Rollison, Flaherty, and McCall would be awarded Silver Stars, as would George Strasburg. All had been wounded. Flaherty, in fact, had been hit twice. Forgetting about the splatter of shrapnel in his back, Flaherty, upon reaching the middle of the hill, suddenly became aware of a wasplike pain in his left leg. The trouser leg was dark with blood. “I pulled my pants up,” he recounted, “and there was a piece of shrapnel sticking out of my leg right above the top of my boot. It had hit the bone, but I never felt a thing when I was up on the hill. I don’t know whether it was a piece of a bullet that had ricocheted off a tree, or shrapnel from God knows what, but I pulled it, and it kind of popped out.”
Five seriously wounded men were quickly medevacked. Flaherty and seven other walking wounded were lifted out later that day by the log birds bringing in water and ammunition. “You got to go back and have them take a look at your back,” Rollison told Flaherty, who was busy getting his platoon positioned on the perimeter, Bravo Three having been ordered back to Ripcord.
“No, I’ll stay, I’m all right,” Flaherty said, not realizing how banged up he was. “I’ll have the medic take a look at it.”
The medic who was there checked Flaherty’s back, then looked at Rollison and said firmly, “No, he’s got to go back.”
Flaherty and Radford flew out on the same resupply ship, along with the body of Mike Grimm, which was wrapped in a poncho on the floor of the Huey. “I remember staring at him and just crying and crying,” Flaherty later wrote. “I tried to stop when we landed on the pad at Ripcord but couldn’t. I’m sure I was quite a sight.”
Treated by the battalion surgeon, hastily debriefed by Lucas and Koenigsbauer in the operations center, Flaherty, dazed and suddenly exhausted, was next led to a helicopter heading back to Camp Evans by a lieutenant in crisp fatigues and polished jungle boots. He was wearing a branch insignia that the platoon leader did not recognize. The cabin of the Huey into which Flaherty climbed was loaded with communications equipment; he assumed that it was Lucas’s command ship. Strapping himself in alongside the strange lieutenant, Flaherty found himself blanking out as they banked away from Ripcord.
The lieutenant suddenly nudged him and shouted over the noise of the helicopter, “Put the headphones on.”
“What, what?” Flaherty shouted back, greatly irritated.
“Put the headphones on.”
Donning the headset, Flaherty got on the helicopter’s internal intercom, whereupon he was questioned in great detail about the fight on the hill. What the hell, Flaherty thought. Who is this goddamn pilot? My back hurts, my leg hurts, I just got one of my guys killed, we got a bunch of people wounded. Not a good day. All I want to do is get patched up and get back to my platoon, and this guy wants to dissect the battle like it was a field exercise.
The questions seemed endless, and Flaherty, providing only grudging, monosyllabic answers at first, was finally drawn into an extended description of the attack on the hill. The voice signed off then with, “Well, Lieutenant Flaherty, thank you very much.”
“Hold it,” Flaherty said. “Who are you?”
“This is General Berry.”
Looking up with a start, Flaherty saw BG BERRY stenciled on the back of one of the pilot’s helmets and realized that their new assistant division commander was flying the command ship. The lieutenant at Flaherty’s side was the general’s aide-de-camp.
Berry dropped off Flaherty at the medevac pad at Camp Evans. First Sergeant Thompson, the outstanding first sergeant of Company D, met Flaherty there and, meaning to encourage the disheveled lieutenant, gave him a big slap on the back, not realizing that’s where he’d been hit. The pain drove Flaherty to his knees. Grimm’s body, having already arrived on the log bird, was on a stretcher laid across the back of a jeep parked to one side of the pad. The man’s shirt had been removed, and Flaherty could see the one neat, little hole over his heart that had killed him. “I said a prayer by the jeep because he was a great guy,” recalled Flaherty.
He went into the aid station and lay on his stomach as a surgeon dug the fifteen biggest pieces of shrapnel from his back. A like number of medium-sized pieces still needed to come out, but the doctor told him he’d been through enough for one day and they’d finish in the morning. The doctor added that he saw no point in cutting out the constellation of little speck-sized fragments embedded throughout Flaherty’s back: “You’re going to go through the rest of your life with that stuff in your back, but it shouldn’t be any problem. Most of it will work itself out over the years.”
Lucas landed to talk with Rollison. “The colonel was very agitated that we hadn’t taken the hill,” said radioman Bruce McCorkle, who could empathize to a degree. “We were in a position to take the hill. It was like we were on third base, and when push came to shove the order was never given to assault the bunkers with the standard fire-team rushes we had been taught in Basic and AIT.”
Though frontal assaults had gone out of style with the restrictions on casualties, there was more to it than that. With the war as good as lost, not even troops led by a dynamic officer such as Rollison were prone to take the risks necessary to seize an objective such as Hill 1000. “While there were numerous acts of individual bravery on the part of the American soldier,” noted McCorkle, “by and large they were related to rescuing others or providing cover fire, not risking life and limb to successfully overwhelm the enemy.”
There was probably only a platoon, at most a company, occupying the bunkers at the top of Hill 1000. “The reason we did not take the hill was very simple,” concluded McCorkle. “The NVA were willing to die for what they were fighting for. We were not.”
Lucas ordered Rollison to launch another attack as soon as possible. “Rollison said there was no way we could do it that late in the day,” recalled McCorkle. “He wasn’t disobeying a command, but he was arguing his case.” Rollison said he understood that taking the hill was key to the security of the firebase, but his troops needed rest and it would be wise to continue the prep fires through the night, given the strength of the enemy bunkers. Lucas relented, indicating that he would bring in Company C the next morning to reinforce the second assault. “There was a sergeant sitting there, and I guess a satchel charge had gone off near him because he was temporarily deaf,” noted McCorkle. Before Lucas departed in his Loach, “he kind of insinuated that the sergeant was faking it, then came up behind him and shouted or clapped or something to convince himself that the guy really couldn’t hear.”