CHAPTER 13
Captain Wilcox and Company C had also made heavy contact the day of the attack on Hill 1000. At that time, Wilcox had been in command only six days. “I was somewhat in awe of most officers,” said Bob Smoker. “They had the responsibility, and the perception I had was that they were a cut above. They were the elite.” Wilcox, bespectacled, possessed of a boyish grin, seemed “more low-key than the other officers, more friendly, somebody that you could talk to on your own level. He didn’t seem like a West Pointer.”
Smoker, temporarily assigned as one of Wilcox’s radiomen the day the thunderstorm hit them on Hill 805, would recall “standing in a few inches of water in a foxhole with the captain, and him turning to me and joking, ‘What a great day to be a soldier.’ ”
Jeff Wilcox had wanted to be a soldier, or, more precisely, to attend West Point, since his childhood in Gary, Indiana. It was a dream that meant a lot to a kid from a broken family who didn’t want to end up in the steel mills, and he was ecstatic when accepted into the USMA Class of ’68. The dream did not survive Vietnam. When the moment came to board the bus that would take Wilcox to the airport with his orders for Vietnam, his wife blurted that he didn’t have to go, that they could go to Canada. “She thought it was a stupid war, and I wasn’t so sure that she wasn’t right,” recalled Wilcox. Not going, however, was not an option: “I wasn’t gung-ho, but I wanted to see how valid our involvement was, and there was a part of me that wanted to prove myself. I also had to keep my word. I believed completely in Duty, Honor, Country.”
Arriving as a lieutenant, Wilcox replaced the platoon leader from Company A killed during the first assault on Ripcord. The unit was in a quiet state of crisis at the time. The company commander, having never recovered from the shock of the original Ripcord battle, had taken to hunkering down on hilltops for days at a time in an apparent attempt to avoid contact. To sit still was actually to invite attack, as Lucas repeatedly warned the captain. On May 14, Wilcox’s platoon was indeed ambushed and its point man killed as the men started down a ridge from the company position. Wilcox hit the deck, shrugged out of his rucksack, and was coming back up when he saw a grenade land in front of him. His glasses protected his eyes, but one fragment sliced the side of his head and another caught him in the forehead. First Lieutenant Jim Noll, the company’s most experienced platoon leader, rushed forward with one of his squads and linked up with Wilcox, who was stunned and half blind because of the blood in his eyes but still able to direct the 81s firing from the NDP. Some troops were returning fire; many others had their heads down. Noll kicked some ass to get everyone firing, then covered the withdrawal with an M79 while Wilcox and his platoon sergeant carried the dead man back to the NDP. Noll’s last shot was a smoke round to mark the enemy for the Cobras.
Wilcox hoped that when he was promoted—because of the war, lieutenants were putting up captain bars in only two years—he would get command of Company A. “I feel a tremendous devotion to these guys,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, adding that “because I am not gung-ho, they are safer with me in charge. I will absolutely refuse to take them somewhere I deem too dangerous. . . .”
Lucas thought to breathe new life into Company A by replacing the rattled captain not with Wilcox but with hard-charging Chuck Hawkins. Promoted with his class on June 5, Wilcox ended up in command of the battalion support company at Camp Evans. “[Lucas] said something about never placing a man who has been a platoon ldr in a company as CO of the same company,” a disappointed Wilcox wrote his wife. Jim Noll, who respected calm, methodical, levelheaded Wilcox, wondered whether the real reason Wilcox didn’t get Alpha Company was because “he was too smart, too devoted to his men, too able to see through bullshit, to successfully command an infantry unit, especially in Vietnam.”
Butting heads with Lucas over such issues as the Foxhole Count further disillusioned Wilcox. By the time the young captain took over Charlie Company after the sapper attack on Hill 902, he was thoroughly disgusted with the war and his superiors. “In the absence of any real purpose to the whole war,” he later wrote, “our operations had devolved into senseless exercises that benefited no one except officers trying to get the right career tickets punched.”
As such, Captain Wilcox was of the same mind as the grunts in his new company, to include Rodney Moore, who would remark, “The commanders wanted body count, but we really didn’t care if we killed anybody or not. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing there. We fought so we could get everybody home alive.”
Wilcox was on the helipad when the remnants of Company C were ferried to Ripcord from 902. Seeing Sergeant Burkey, platoon leader of Charlie Three, disembark from a Huey with the captured RPG launcher—made of mahogany, it was a beauty—Wilcox noted: “There was just something about the way he carried himself that I knew he was the guy to go talk to, and I was right, he was the ranking man in the company. I was the only officer, and I relied on him a lot when we went to relieve Bravo Company on Hill 805.”
With seven months in the field, Burkey was a good man for a new company commander to lean on. “Burkey was a balls-out motherfucker,” declared platoon leader Campbell. “He’s the bravest man I’ve ever known, and the best NCO I ever saw in Vietnam.”
Though Burkey never went regular, as some expected he would, he was a natural soldier. “He was born for it,” mused Campbell. “He loved it. He wanted to be there.” Burkey was the product of blue-collar Lowellville, Ohio. Volunteering for the draft, he made E5 out of NCOCS and E6 after the Khe Me Mountain action of March 1970, for which he was also awarded a Bronze Star. Burkey, smart, hot-tempered, and hardcore when it came to the discipline problems of the era, was almost twenty-one years old, but blond and dimpled he looked all of fourteen and initially had some trouble exerting the authority of his stripes. “I had to lead by example and show my people that I had my shit together,” he noted. Wilcox thought Burkey was “a little cocky, and it really worked for him.”
Wilcox was joined by another officer, Lieutenant Campbell, late on July 6, at which time the company was on a ridge that ran north from Triple Hill. Returning from R&R that day, Campbell, who’d done his time in the bush plus an extra month, was supposed to have a job in the rear waiting for him. When he checked in at the main gate at Camp Evans after hitching a ride from the Phu Bai airfield, however, the MPs had his name on a clipboard and placed a call to the Currahee rear. A jeep soon arrived to take Campbell to the helipad, and the driver informed him along the way that his platoon had been wiped out. After finding his weapon, ammo, and rucksack waiting for him, he was whisked out to the company without even stopping at Ripcord. “I think that most people would have become a nervous wreck after surviving as long as Campbell did in the field,” wrote Wilcox, “only to be returned like that to the line. He never missed a beat. It was clear to me that he was deeply devoted to the troops and that the feeling was mutual. I was really lucky to have Jim Campbell and Paul Burkey as my subordinate leaders. I was inspired and supported by both of them.”
On the morning of July 7, a Huey dropped Sergeant Judd from Company B, along with two of his men, Ramon Santiago and Dennis Bloomingdale, in Company C’s NDP. Judd’s team, escorted by a squad from Charlie Three, was to move to the north end of the company’s ridgeline, then disarm the mechanical ambush that Judd and Bloomingdale had set up on the next piece of high ground, Hill 707, when their outfit had been working the bunker complex in the area at the end of June. There had been no time to retrieve the claymores when Bravo Company was lifted out on the first day of the battle and combat-assaulted onto Hill 805.
It was imperative that the hazard be removed. Following a narrow trail to the end of the ridge, a five-hundred-meter march from the overnight position, the patrol moved down into the draw between the two hills, then up Hill 707. There were two enemy soldiers squatting on the slope—cooking rice, as the story was later told—but the squad from Charlie Three was moving in a quiet, well-spaced column, and its alert point team opened fire on the NVA before they had a chance to open fire on the squad from Charlie Three.
The enemy scampered out of sight. The grunts, moving uphill in pursuit, suddenly came under fire from a little bunker dug in at the crest of the hill. Sergeant Judd, who was left-handed, went to the prone position with his right shoulder against a tree and began firing his M16. Bloomingdale opened up from some boulders to his left. Santiago was to his right. “There must have been a bunch of NVA behind the bunker we were firing at,” said Judd, “because all of a sudden RPGs started raining in on us. We had these rockets tree-bursting above us, and we were getting shrapnel like crazy.”
One piece hit the funny bone of Judd’s left arm, straightening the arm right out—he felt as though it had been hit with a baseball bat—and sending his rifle flying out of his grip. In a flash, Judd dove onto his M16, then back behind his tree, realizing only after he resumed fire that there was a small hole in his elbow. “That was the first injury. I got thirteen different shrapnel wounds from different explosions,” noted Judd. “I was lying on my right side, firing up the hill, and I got hit in my ass and my left leg, and in my back, although I didn’t know it at the time. I got some shrapnel in my left foot, too. I think that was from a grenade. There were grenades rolling down at us.”
The patrol pulled back under the onslaught. Bloomingdale, badly wounded in the leg, shouted to Judd that he couldn’t move. Judd, unable to drag his buddy back but unwilling to leave him as the rest of the guys edged back, kept blasting away with his M16.
Sergeant Burkey was at that moment rushing down the trail from the overnight position with Rodney Moore’s squad, also from Charlie Three. Burkey linked up with his ambushed squad at the base of Hill 707 and, trading his M16 for an M79, started uphill on the trail with his radioman. Ramon Santiago tagged along to show them where to find Judd and Bloomingdale.
Burkey could hear someone—it was Bloomingdale— yelling at the enemy in the bunker to surrender: “Chieu hoi, chieu hoi.”
“Me no chieu hoi,” the answer came back.
“Chieu hoi, you motherfuckers.”
“Fuck you, GI.”
“Come and get me, motherfucker.”
Burkey’s group reached Judd, and the wounded sergeant pointed to where Bloomingdale was hidden among the boulders: “I’m not the one that’s hurt the worst. It’s Dennis over there.”
Burkey scrambled over and bandaged Bloomingdale’s bloody mess of a leg even as the wounded man, in terrible pain and going into shock, continued to scream at the NVA.
Burkey couldn’t use his M79. The shells spin-arm only after traveling ten meters. The enemy bunker was too close.
The call went up for Moore, who had an over-and-under M203. Moore hustled up the path, then crouched next to some of his guys who were downhill to the right of Burkey’s forward position and asked if they could see the bunker. One who could heaved a frag, but the grenade came bouncing back and rolled onto the trail about ten feet from Moore, who went flat just before it exploded and peppered the buttocks of the man next to him with fragments.
Moore could hear the enemy soldier firing from the bunker but couldn’t see a thing for the trees. The man ahead of him said he had the bunker in sight. “Let me in there,” Moore shouted, and as the man slid back, Moore crawled forward. He still couldn’t see the bunker. He got up on one knee to fire anyway but had no sooner shouldered his weapon than “a damn RPG exploded right in front of me, blowing the thump gun out of my hands and throwing me like ten feet back down the hill. I got hit in my legs and my left foot, and there was a hole in my right forearm the size of a dime. It was black. It didn’t really bleed because the shrapnel was so hot it kind of cauterized the wound. I caught the biggest chunk of shrapnel right on top of my steel pot. The helmet had a dent in it the size of your fist, like someone had hit it with a sledgehammer. I was stunned. I was also lucky to be alive.”
There was a lull in the enemy fire. Sergeant Burkey passed the word to pull back, then started dragging Bloomingdale down the hill with the help of Santiago and his radioman, Bernie Brown. They had to take it slow so as not to injure Bloomingdale further. “The enemy threw a couple Chicoms at us along the way,” recalled Burkey. “They rolled on down the hill. We didn’t get a scratch.”
Reaching the draw, Burkey, to be awarded his second Bronze Star for the rescue, turned Bloomingdale over to a medic, then got on the horn with the 81s on Ripcord. Burkey started the mortar fire behind the enemy, then walked the rounds up to the top of Hill 707. Sergeant Judd reached the draw shortly before the mortar rounds began dropping in. “When they teach you low-crawl in Basic, you think you’re never going to use it, but I did the hundred-yard dash on my belly,” Judd later joked. His main concern was not the enemy but getting wasted by a keyed-up, trigger-happy grunt. Accordingly, Judd bellowed, “Currahee, motherfucker, Currahee, motherfucker” the whole way down the hill, recalling later that “those guys from Charlie Company, their eyes were as big as cue balls when I came crawling into their little perimeter. They were looking at me over the tops of their M16s.”
Hearing the fire in the distance, Lieutenant Campbell, who had moved down the side of the ridge from the overnight position with the five men left in his platoon, moved back up and rushed over to Captain Wilcox. The new company commander was getting ready to join the action with the last squad from full-strength Charlie Three. “Your place is here,” Campbell objected. “Let me get a team together, and we’ll go over there and see what we can do to get Sergeant Burkey’s people back to the LZ. It’s better that you stay here and get us some gunships and medevacs on call.”
Wilcox reluctantly agreed. Leaving his five survivors behind, Campbell crossed the landing zone in the center of the NDP to the side where that last squad of Burkey’s was dug in. “All right, I need some of you guys to saddle up and go with me down the ridge here,” Campbell announced. “Sergeant Burkey’s in trouble.”
Jim Campbell had previously commanded Charlie Three. He knew most of the men there, and they him. “Yeah, fuck it, L. T., I’ll go with ya,” Sp4 Gerald L. Risinger, a bead-wearing, hippie-style country boy from Kentucky, said without hesitation, popping off the log where he’d been sitting. “It don’t mean nothin’.”
The amazing thing, and Campbell would not have let the man volunteer if he had known, was that Risinger, a veteran of almost ten months in-country and the best point man in Charlie Three, was supposed to go in on the next resupply helicopter, slated for R&R, after which he was to finish his tour at Camp Evans. As Campbell recounted, he took off with Risinger in the lead, “and several of his buddies followed us. I didn’t order ’em, I didn’t say you, you, and you. I didn’t have to. That’s just the kind of guys they were.”
Moving quickly to the end of the ridge, Lieutenant Campbell placed his volunteers along the trail to secure it for the return trip. “Risinger, I want you right here,” he said, indicating a spot forward of the others that overlooked the draw between the ridge and Hill 707. “Keep your eyes open,” Campbell instructed. “If the gooks move up, they’ll be comin’ up from this direction. Whatever happens, whatever you gotta do, you can’t let ’em get up here because if they do everybody in the draw is going to be cut off.”
As Campbell proceeded alone into the draw, an RPG whooshed over his head and exploded above him on the ridge. Campbell turned and called to his security team, “Is everybody okay?”
“We’re all right, L. T.,” someone yelled back.
Campbell hurried on. Sergeant Burkey was still calling in mortar fire when Campbell hooked up with him in the draw. The walking wounded were directed to move back up the ridge. Rodney Moore, trudging up the ridge, was shocked to see Risinger at the top and blurted, “What the hell are you doin’ here?”
“I heard you guys needed some help.”
“Yeah, but you’re supposed to be out of here,” Moore exclaimed, concerned. “You’re supposed to be on that bird out of here.”
Risinger sat down ten feet to Moore’s left, disappearing from view in the heavy vegetation. A moment later, another RPG flashed straight across the draw from the crest of Hill 707.
Moore was peppered in the face with little bits of shrapnel. Bob Judd, who’d also made it up the ridge, was sitting, drinking from his canteen, when he saw the heat trail of the rocket coming at them. The blast sent him sprawling. He already had so many flesh wounds that he didn’t know if he’d picked up any more, but he was unnerved upon retrieving his canteen to see that a big hole had been punched through the canteen cup. He flung the canteen away.
Risinger had been killed. Moore heard him scream and found that his buddy had literally been blown in half at the waist. His head, torso, and one arm were still connected to one another but not to his legs, and his other arm had been sent flying. It looked as though the RPG had landed right in Risinger’s lap. “I can still see his hip bones sticking out of him,” said Moore. “I had written a letter and given it to Risinger that morning because he was going back to the rear. He was a good friend of mine. His nickname was Chicken Man because he had long, skinny legs and kept his trouser legs wrapped tight around them with boot laces to keep out the leeches. His wife used to send him care packages with white chocolate. He was a helluva nice guy, and a great point man. He always called me ‘sergeant,’ I don’t know why. He treated the rank with respect. Some of those guys did and some of them didn’t over there.”
Two badly wounded men were still in the draw. Getting them up the ridge would have been extremely difficult, so because the enemy fire had ceased after that last rocket, Campbell and Burkey decided to risk bringing in a medevac. There were no landing zones in the area, however. The medevac pilot had to instead hover, at eye level with the high ground to either side, and lower a litter basket through a small hole in the canopy. Both casualties could have been lifted out together on a jungle penetrater, but they were in no shape to hang on. They needed to go out in the litter basket. The medevac thus had to remain in its vulnerable hover for fifteen agonizing minutes, slowly lowering the litter basket, slowly bringing it back up with the first casualty—at the rate the winch unwrapped and rewrapped the cable, it seemed to take forever—then repeating the process for the second man. Burkey kept the mortar fire going the whole time, and a pair of gunships maintained a protective orbit around the medevac Huey.
There was no enemy fire. “Let’s go,” Campbell shouted after the medevac banked away. “Everybody, let’s go. We’re out of here.”
To make sure no one was left behind, Campbell and Burkey were the last ones up the ridge. As everyone regrouped, Campbell asked about Risinger, who had not popped up with the other troops he had deployed along the trail. “Chicken Man’s still over there where you put him, L. T.,” one of the security troops said, unaware in the confusion that Risinger had taken a direct hit from an RPG.
Campbell, horrified at what he found, had several men remove their shirts to wrap the mangled body parts. “I didn’t want anybody to see that,” said Campbell, who took some meager solace in the fact that “I think we got all the pieces of Risinger’s body out of there.”
As Campbell’s group started back down the trail, the gunships began rolling in on Hill 707. Sergeant Judd limped painfully along, a piece of shrapnel in the bottom of his left foot, using an M16 as a crutch. “When we were almost to the LZ, a big redheaded guy met us,” said Judd. “He handed me a five-quart collapsible canteen. That was the best-tasting water in the world. I was stone thirsty.”
The action had cost one dead and fifteen wounded. They went out a few at a time on medevacs and resupply ships. One of the troopers who had been left at the overnight position during the firefight, a lackluster soldier in the best of times, disappeared amid the hustle and bustle. “That sorry bastard climbed on a fuckin’ helicopter and went in with a bunch of wounded soldiers,” recalled Campbell. “He claimed afterwards that he was a conscientious objector. What he was was a no good son of a bitch.”
Sergeant Judd was loaded aboard one of the Hueys. “The door gunner had a peace sign around his neck, and so did I,” he would remember. “He held his out to show it to me and gave me an encouraging pat on the back—and that’s when I knew I’d been hit in the back. I reached back there, and it felt like half a hardball on my back where it was swelled up around a shrapnel wound.”
The slick landed at Camp Evans. When Judd climbed out, his left foot crumpled under him without warning. Two of the medics rushing to meet the helicopter caught him before he went face first into the tarmac. Laid out on a gurney in the aid station, Judd was surprised to see a friend of his appear to check on how he was doing. The friend, formerly a medic in the company, had already said his good-byes—his tour was over—but he was still in the rear, awaiting transport, when he heard that his old outfit had taken casualties. “We’ll have you fixed up and back to your unit in no time,” an aid-station medic said as he cut away Judd’s ragged fatigues, getting him ready for surgery. At that, the medic on his way home slapped his hands over Judd’s ears and jokingly admonished his colleague: “What are you trying to do, put this boy in shock?”