CHAPTER 14
The prep fires resumed at eight in the morning. Captain Wilcox and Company C had been lifted only twenty minutes earlier into the landing zone secured by Company D on the hill between Ripcord and Hill 1000. Lieutenant Colonel Lucas had disembarked from his command ship soon thereafter and when the artillery began firing was in a huddle with Wilcox, Rollison, Campbell, and McCall. The plan that the battalion commander outlined for the second attack on the key piece of high ground called for both companies to move off the LZ on a trail that ran through the jungle along the northern base of Hill 1000. Company C, in the lead, was to move into position below the westernmost of the two knolls atop the mountain and Company D below the easternmost knoll. From there they were to launch a coordinated assault to the summit of Hill 1000.
Campbell questioned why Company C, down to thirty men, was being tasked to hit the far knoll, whereas Company D, with about fifty men, was to hit the knoll closest to the LZ. Campbell didn’t want Charlie Company to get cut off or bogged down with a lot of wounded that it wouldn’t have the manpower to carry back up the trail.
“Lieutenant Campbell, there are two bodies on that closer knoll,” Lucas said, “and Delta Company wants to get them back.”
Campbell could appreciate that, although he doubted that the bodies had survived all the shot and shell pounding the objective. The arty prep, which continued over the heads of the grunts as Company C, dropping rucks, led the way down the trail, involved 105mm, 155mm, 175mm, and 8-inch fire from Ripcord, O’Reilly, Barbara, and Rakkasan. Major Koenigsbauer controlled the artillery from the upper tier of Ripcord as the howitzer crews there, tubes lowered for direct fire, slammed shell after shell into the bald top of Hill 1000. The cannoneers had dubbed their target Hot Dog Hill, an irreverent reference to Hamburger Hill, and “took bets,” noted one trooper, “on who would knock the last tree down.”
In coordination with an orbiting forward air controller, Captain Lieb—the S3 Air—had Koenigsbauer, with whom he was standing, shut off the arty whenever another flight of F-4s came on station. The fighter-bombers dropped 250- and 500-pound bombs, plus napalm canisters, which blossomed like fiery red flowers. “It was so intense, you could feel the heat on Ripcord,” noted Koenigsbauer.
Rollison got into position first. When Wilcox reported that he too had reached his line of departure at the edge of the trees below the western knoll, Lucas gave the order to assault—the time was 10:30 A.M.—and Koenigsbauer lifted the prep fires after a final stinging salvo of CS shells was fired at the top of Hill 1000.
Brigadier General Berry presently joined the S3 on the windy crest of the firebase to observe the attack—battalion and brigade command, meanwhile, were airborne over the battlefield—and expressed concern that the artillery was not firing. To prevent the enemy from moving up additional troops, Berry wanted fire shifted to the reverse slope of Hill 1000. Koenigsbauer explained that the 105s and 155s were standing ready to provide observed fire as requested by the assault companies but that the prep barrage had diminished the ammunition levels on Ripcord to the point that he thought it unwise to continue any unobserved fire until resupplied.
“Okay, so you’ve reached a critical point with the ammunition on the firebase,” Berry replied sharply, lecture style. “In that kind of situation, use the other firebases, use the corps artillery.”
Koenigsbauer had, in fact, been doing that, but he had not thought to continue using the long-range 175s and 8-inchers with troops moving onto the objective. Berry assured Koenigsbauer of the accuracy of the big guns, and in short order more shells were rushing through the sky overhead to explode behind Hill 1000. “In any event, I didn’t think anything could have survived all the fire we put on the objective,” recalled Koenigsbauer. “The enemy bunker complex was so extensive that the preparatory fires actually did very little damage. When the two assault companies crossed their lines of departure and we shifted the fire to the backside of the hill, the enemy troops came out of their bunkers and put up the same stiff resistance we had encountered the day before.”
While getting organized, Wilcox had looked up the steep slope with Lieutenant Campbell. There was about 150 meters of deadfall between their tree line and the top of the western knoll. “It’s a long-ass way up there,” Campbell muttered. The company didn’t have any real platoons anymore, so Campbell suggested that they “divvy up into a maneuver element and a support element.” Wilcox said he would lead the maneuver element. “You’re the company commander,” Campbell objected. “You need to stay with the support element and direct the fire support if we get hit. You can always maneuver if we get pinned down.”
Wilcox agreed. He would follow with Charlie One, designated the support element, while Campbell led off with Burkey’s platoon, the most intact of the three, and what was left of Charlie Two.
As the assault element started out of the trees and up the hill, one of Burkey’s squad leaders, burly but gentle Frank Bort—a former divinity student with a degree in psychology who’d been drafted and sent to the NCO academy—began reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
Oh, man, I’m fuckin’ dead now, Burkey thought, the gravity of the moment sinking in as he listened to the prayer. This is it, this is the last thing we’re ever going to do. Burkey was so unnerved that he tore the staff sergeant stripes from his sleeves. The bastards ain’t gonna know who they got when they’re looking for targets.
Burkey moved out in front after the point team reached the top of the knoll, then turned left and started toward the edge from which they could fire on the opposing knoll, a hundred meters away across an open saddle. Burkey was about to step around a tree that had survived the prep fire when he heard the thump of an M79 being fired. The round hit the tree and bounced off without exploding. Burkey dropped flat, saved by a fluke, as an RPD light machine gun and several AK-47s opened up from the eastern knoll.
It was 10:50 A.M. on July 8, 1970. Lieutenant Campbell’s people, most of whom were still strung out along the side of the hill, hit the dirt as bullets impacted around them with ferocious spurts of dust. The assault element laid down cover fire as the support element leapfrogged past. Ascending the bombed-out hillside was like running up a sand dune; the pulverized earth was as loose as potting soil. Sinking and sliding with every step, the troops gained the crest only after much effort. Specialist Fourth Class Steven A. Riley of Charlie Two, a big, rawboned country boy from Alabama, took a round through his arm along the way, but because it missed the bone, he merely wrapped a rag around the wound upon reaching the top of the knoll and began returning fire with his M16.
Wilcox and Campbell ended up in the same crater at the very summit of the knoll. They placed one machine-gun team forward to their left and another to their right and along with the handful of others who had made it up front—Burkey, Bort, Riley, Bob Smoker, and Phil Lormand—popped up to heave frags and fire quick bursts at the opposing knoll, dropping back down as the RPD returned the favor with disconcerting accuracy. The two machine-gun teams kept up their fire through it all. “They were in an excellent position to bring direct fire on the enemy and were smokin’ the other knoll,” recalled Campbell. Layne Hammons and his assistant gunner, Chuck Damron, had the M60 to the left of the command group’s crater. “Hammons and Damron were incredible soldiers,” stated Campbell. “Before the fight was over, they had burned out their barrel and fired every belt of ammo they had with them.”
It was unclear what damage was being inflicted. Bort had an impression of where the enemy machine gun was but was frustrated that he could not silence it no matter how many shells he sent slamming into the area with his M203. There was no muzzle flash to zero in on, no tracers, no smoke, no dust. “That gun emplacement was perfect,” said an equally frustrated Paul Burkey. “I mean the fuckers were in the side of the hill. Their line of fire was straight across the saddle into the top of our hill, and we simply could not see the hole the fire was coming from. The man behind that RPD wasn’t some guy that went to the Ho Chi Minh School of Machine Gunnery—it was the fuckin’ guy that taught the class.”
The enemy had a clear view of their foe. Specialist Fourth Class Charles Schlueter, the machine gunner to the right of the command group’s crater, took one RPD round through his shoulder; another round hit the smoke grenade on his web belt, setting it off. “I don’t think his bullet wound was as bad as the burns he got from the smoke grenade,” noted Bob Smoker. “Either he or his ammo bearer managed to unhook the thing and get rid of it.”
Hanging tough, Schlueter resumed fire with the M60. Meanwhile, amid the intermittent AK and RPD fire, the enemy soldier with the M79 continued to lob rounds across the saddle. Captain Wilcox, hearing the shells—duds all—as they clattered down through the branches of a big denuded tree near him, initially thought they were taking long rounds from Company D. After Wilcox confirmed on the radio that it was not friendly fire, there wasn’t anything to do as the enemy rained dozens of shells on the western knoll except listen for the sound of the weapon and hope that the next round wasn’t the one that was going to explode.
As the firefight dragged on, Lieutenant Campbell was shocked at how little seemed to be happening with Company D. He could see a half-dozen figures just past the trees on the slope of the eastern knoll. Though still far short of the top of the knoll, one figure was ahead of the rest, urgently pitching grenades. The remainder of the company, however, hadn’t even left the cover of the tree line.
Lucas, orbiting the action in his command ship, thought to bring in gunships, but Wilcox alerted him to the fact that an east-west pass at the enemy-held knoll would put Company C on the gun target line, and a north-south pass would endanger Company D.
Instead, a White Team from the 2-17th Cav daringly buzzed the knoll, raising hell with their miniguns amid the enemy ground fire. One of the LOHs, hit in the engine, had to set down at Ripcord.
To break the stalemate, Lucas instructed Captain Wilcox to seize the eastern knoll once and for all with a bold frontal assault. Campbell came up on the net to try to explain that there was no cover, that they couldn’t even use the craters in the saddle because the enemy could place plunging fire into them from above.
“Get Delta Company to move up the hill,” Campbell suggested to Black Spade. “We can lay down a base of fire for them—”
Lucas cut Campbell off and, getting Wilcox back on the horn, confirmed the assault order. Campbell was aghast. “This is insane,” he exclaimed to Wilcox. “You’ve got to call the son of a bitch back. He doesn’t understand what he’s asking us to do. Tell him that we’ve got two machine guns up here, we’ve got grenade launchers, we can lay down all the support in the world for Delta Company. We’re in a great position to cover them if they’ll just move up the fucking hill, but we’re going to get our ass handed to us if we get up and try to go across that saddle. There’s just no way—it’s suicide.”
Wilcox made the call, and earned a sharp rebuke from the colonel for resisting a dangerous order under fire. “Jim,” Wilcox said, turning back to Campbell, “we’ve got to carry out the order.”
Campbell said he understood, and he began to quickly outline his plan to get his maneuver element across the saddle. Wilcox cut him off: “No, Jimmy, I’m going to lead the assault.”
Campbell argued that a company commander was supposed to coordinate fire support, not charge RPDs. Wilcox didn’t budge this time. “If I’m going to command this company for the next six months,” he replied, “I’ve got to show these men I can lead them.”
Before going over the top, Wilcox wanted to try once more to silence the machine gun that had them cold. Wilcox had Bort put his helmet on a stick and move it along the edge of the depression in which he had taken cover. The old trick drew fire, but Wilcox, ready with a LAW, could not get a bead on the source. “We did fire some LAWs, but just aimlessly,” he noted. Campbell, who was to keep the cover fire going during the assault, was moving from position to position, getting everyone ready. When he told Burkey what was going down, the best noncom in the company sputtered, “You gotta be out of your fuckin’ mind. How can we go after that RPD when we don’t even know where the fuck it is?”
Captain Wilcox, stripped to his sweat-soaked undershirt in the heat, was wearing a steel pot, a pistol belt with two canteens and a lot of frags and smoke grenades, plus a couple bandoliers of ammunition for his M16. He presently slung a few LAWs over his shoulder. “I had it in my head,” Wilcox recalled, “that if I could get close enough, I could put those LAWs in the right spot. . . .”
It was about 11:40 A.M. At a signal from Wilcox, their M60 gunners began laying a continuous stream of three-round bursts into the objective as the captain started forward with a group from Charlie Two and Three. The assault lasted all of fifteen seconds, just long enough for one man to be shot dead and three to be wounded. “The fire on us was just withering,” said Wilcox. “We got up, went down, then immediately came scrambling back.”
Specialist Fourth Class James E. Hupp, the man who was killed, had made it about twenty feet out into the saddle and had taken cover when he was shot as he raised up too high to fire his M79. “Hupp was one of my best friends,” said Frank Bort of the friendly, easygoing draftee from Darlington, Pennsylvania. “I was firing. Hupp was up ahead of me to my right, and he got up to his knees, which I couldn’t believe, to position himself to take a shot, and as soon as he did that he got machine-gunned right in the head.”
Bort shouted for a medic. Private First Class Rickey L. Scott, a conscientious objector from Indiana who refused to carry a weapon, immediately left his covered position with the support element to answer the call. Only a day or two with the company, Scott was too inexperienced, however, to go about it the right way. “It was like I was in a surrealistic movie, not believing what I was seeing,” recounted Bort, “because this new medic just comes walking over, standing straight up when he should have been crawling, and I’m screaming at him to get down, but he doesn’t understand what the hell’s going on, and then he gets shot in the head just like Hupp.”
Captain Wilcox was deeply disturbed by Scott’s death. When the medic had climbed off a resupply ship less than forty-eight hours earlier, Wilcox had thought it ludicrous that a conscientious objector had been sent to an understrength rifle company engaged in heavy combat. Wilcox questioned Scott about his unarmed status. “He explained himself succinctly. He was the genuine article,” Wilcox recalled. “He was a very bright, well-spoken kid with deep political convictions about not killing people. He was also eager to fit in and do a good job as a medic. I liked him immediately.” Unfortunately, Scott seemed more disconnected from the ways of war than even the greenest replacement. “The guy was so completely out of his element,” noted Wilcox, “that the only thing I could think to do with him was to tell him to stay right with me. He got killed because he walked directly into a hail of fire, that’s how clueless he was. Why in the world did the army think it was a good idea to make Scott a combat medic? Couldn’t he have served his purpose as a medic in a surgical hospital back at one of the base camps? He had no place in a line unit in Vietnam.”
The fitful exchange of fire continued. The troops were almost out of ammo and water when one of the scout pilots brought the situation to a crisis point by warning Captain Wilcox that a large enemy force was threading quickly through the jungle in his direction from the west. Lucas, monitoring the net, immediately ordered Wilcox and Rollison to break contact and pull back. “If we move off this hill, the stupid bastards are going to make us do it all over again tomorrow,” Campbell said to Wilcox. “We’re in a good position up here. Goddamnit, if Delta Company would just move up and take the other knoll, we can all get resupplied, we can get the wounded out of here, and we can hold what we’ve got.”
“No, Jim,” Wilcox said calmly. “We gotta get off this hill. If those gooks get between us and the LZ, we’re through.”
It was now approximately 12:40 P.M. Lieutenant Campbell lobbed smoke grenades into the saddle to shield the recovery of the dead, dashing out himself to help a Mexican Indian trooper struggling to drag back the body of Rickey Scott. James Hupp’s body was brought in by Sergeant Burkey. Back under cover, Campbell noticed with a start that Company D was gone. Rollison had already pulled back to the LZ as ordered, “but he had a hell of a lot more men and machine-gun teams than us,” Campbell noted, “and we’d thought Company D was going to cover us as we worked our way back across the barren hillside to the tree line with our dead and wounded.”
From beginning to end, Company D had barely been involved in the second assault on Hill 1000. Only a handful of troops under Lieutenant McCall—the man whom Campbell had seen ahead of everyone else, throwing frags—had come under direct fire. McCall had moved up front because he felt that the situation demanded some leadership by example, and he had not stopped until reaching an open area, across which was an RPD emplacement as implacable as the one raising hell with Charlie Company. “Captain Rollison told us to hold in place,” recounted McCall. “He was discouraging any acts of glory that would get more people killed, so we ended up taking some defensive positions, and more or less getting pinned down. I think at that point Rollison felt that Charlie Company was making substantial progress and that they would shortly take some of the pressure off of us, which would allow us to continue to advance.”
Rollison never resumed the attack, however. Bruce McCorkle would recall “a prolonged shoot-out between our machine gunners and theirs,” but no maneuvering: “Most of us were back down the hill among the trees and boulders. We didn’t move forward and weren’t asked to. The second day was nothing like the first.”
How much of an effort Captain Rollison should have made to push Company D up his side of Hill 1000 after Company C secured the western knoll remains an unanswerable question. “Rollison wasn’t going to do anything stupid,” said McCall. “If we’d had a reasonable chance of success, we’d have taken it, but Rollison wasn’t about to send my guys across that open area where we were stalled. We weren’t going to get people killed and left out in the open again. We had learned our lesson the day before. We knew we couldn’t destroy those bunkers and tunnels with what we had.”
It was Campbell’s impression that Rollison had felt himself going up against impossible odds and had deliberately held back so as not to get his company chewed up again. Campbell could sympathize. “Hell, man, if Rollison had told Wilcox when we were starting out that, hey, we’re gonna lay down on this one, we’d have had Charlie Company laid down in that tree line, too,” Campbell said. “It didn’t make a shit to me. I wasn’t that gung-ho. All we’d have had to do was fire off some ammo, throw some grenades, and report that we were pinned down. The colonel wouldn’t have known the difference. That’s what Delta Company was doing.”
The problem, according to Campbell, was not that Rollison held back to save his own men but that he let Company C proceed up the hill unaware that it could expect no support from a bloodied and discouraged Company D. “He didn’t tell us because he would have had to get on the radio to do so, and then Lucas would have known he was being bullshitted,” Campbell wrote. “The goddamn mission that morning was to attack the hill in a coordinated two-company assault,” he continued, noting that a single company had no chance of securing the objective. “I didn’t like the mission any more than the next guy, but Charlie Company made every effort to carry out its orders. Men died in vain because Charlie Company went forward while Delta Company remained for the most part in the tree line with no intent to maneuver and carry out its part of the attack. I’m not on a vendetta for Rollison,” Campbell concluded. “He was a great soldier and a great combat commander. He was everything people said he was, but he wasn’t that day. . . .”
It is possible that Rollison, still suffering the effects of the satchel charge that had blown up in his face the day before, simply wasn’t in shape for the second assault on Hill 1000. Rollison would deny such an explanation, writing that although “in considerable pain and bleeding periodically from the nose and ears, I do not think my judgment was impaired.” In Rollison’s version of events—refuted in every particular by Campbell—the inexperienced Wilcox failed to heed Rollison’s warning about the location of the RPD and thus got Company C pinned down in an exposed position from which it could not adequately support Company D’s attack with covering fire. Rollison would also speak about a loss of communication between him and Wilcox that contributed to his reluctance to press on, the concern being that without proper coordination Company C might accidentally inflict casualties on Company D. For his part, Wilcox did not at the time feel himself abandoned by Rollison. “I had great respect for Rollison’s abilities and looked up to him,” he would write. “I had always assumed that Company D was just stuck like we were in an untenable position. Jim Campbell contends that we would never have been given the order to cross the open saddle if Company D had maintained its assault. I’m not so sure Rollison would have actually accomplished anything by continuing forward. Charging up a hill into machine-gun fire would have been as costly for Company D as our assault across the saddle. Given what had happened the day before, it seems reasonable to me that, without anyone being explicit about it, everyone in Company D would be instinctively reluctant to get back into the same fix. In retrospect, I’m not surprised that things worked out the way they did. . . .”
Captain Wilcox, concerned that they would collide with the enemy force maneuvering toward them if the company went straight back down the hill, instead directed his men to traverse the slope at an oblique angle from west to east, making sure to stay below line of sight from the crest at all times to avoid the continuing fire from the eastern knoll. More smoke was popped to shield the move. It was as tough going down as it had been coming up because of the loose soil and suffocating heat. Wilcox was at one point standing above everyone else on the hillside, shouting directions, when he realized that his head was exposed. With the cold feeling that he was about to go lights-out—he could almost picture the RPD gunner lining up his skull in his sights—he immediately ducked down.
Lieutenant Campbell remained on the knoll, alone, to return fire and pitch smoke grenades, for which he was later awarded the Bronze Star. When the withdrawing troopers got beyond range of his throwing arm, he clambered to a new position between the enemy and the rest of the company to keep them covered with more smoke.
The enemy fire petered out when the company reached the trees, at which point Wilcox cranked up the artillery. As the company regrouped, Sergeant Burkey—to win his third Bronze Star—went back up to help Campbell get off the hill. They linked up in a bomb crater. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Campbell blurted.
“Hell, L. T., I wasn’t going to leave you on the hill by yourself.”
Campbell and Burkey crawled down the hill to rejoin the rest of the company in the tree line as U. S. shrapnel whizzed overhead from the artillery barrage impacting atop Hill 1000.
Plans were quickly made. Wilcox would take the trail back to the landing zone with the wounded and the main body of the company, with security deployed on the flanks, while Campbell and Burkey and a small detachment brought up the rear, carrying the KIAs. Campbell hefted Scott’s body over his shoulder. Burkey was too worn out to do more than drag the stocky, heavyset Hupp along by his wrists. The rear detachment quickly lost sight of the others. “We couldn’t keep up. We were really dragging ass,” said Campbell. Rollison’s people had been back at the landing zone for almost an hour by then. “I was pissed,” noted Campbell, “that no one in the chain of command had thought to send an element from Delta Company to secure the trail and help us carry our dead back to the LZ.”
Sergeant Burkey was in a state of temporary insanity by the time they reached the overnight position. He was angry that they’d lost two men for nothing, angry at the sight of the Company D grunts sitting around looking rested, smoking cigarettes, and eating Cs. Burkey stormed up to one kid in a foxhole and, brandishing his M16, shrieked, “You motherfucker, get over there and carry that goddamn body. I need some fucking help.” The kid scrambled to action, as did several other nearby grunts. “I probably would have blown the sonofabitch away if he hadn’t gotten out of that hole,” Burkey recounted. “I was so fucking exhausted, it didn’t connect in my head that he was on security. He was doing what he was supposed to do. I was the one who was wrong. Good thing I didn’t shoot the bastard because it turned out I had four inches of mud in my barrel from stumbling and falling on my way down the hill. If I’d have pulled the trigger, we both would have been in trouble.”
On his last legs, Campbell went down hard upon reaching the overnight position below the landing zone; he dropped the body of Rickey Scott in a heap. Someone handed Campbell a collapsible two-quart canteen, from which he greedily drank before lying down and lighting a cigarette. His exhausted reverie was suddenly interrupted by a trooper who ran up to him to announce, “The colonel wants to see you up on the LZ right now.”
Campbell could not have gotten to his feet if he wanted to. “Go fuck yourself,” he mumbled. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Lieutenant McCall knelt beside Campbell to check on his friend. “What the hell happened to you all?” Campbell asked.
“I did the best I could to get up that hill.”
“Was that you out there in front of everybody?”
“Yeah,” McCall said, getting up to rejoin his platoon.
Having been requested ahead of time, a medevac clattered in when Campbell and Burkey reached the perimeter (the time was 2:15 P.M.) and took aboard four WIAs—three from Company C and a lone wounded man from Company D who had been peppered in the face by U. S. shrapnel during the prep of Hill 1000.
There was a fifth casualty, Steve Riley, who walked over to where Campbell was lying after the medevac departed. “They done shot me in the arm,” the slow-talking country boy drawled, holding up his arm to show Campbell the rag he’d wrapped around the wound. “The colonel told me to get on the medevac, but I told ’im I wasn’t goin’ nowhere till I talked to L. T. I think I can still fight, L. T.”
“You’re the dumbest fucker I know,” Campbell barked. “Get the fuck out of here.” Riley trudged back up to the landing zone like a whipped dog, not understanding the concern behind the harsh words. He went out aboard a resupply ship that landed a few minutes later. Riley was one of Campbell’s best, a high-spirited soldier willing to do anything asked of him, and Campbell would regret for many years that he had spoken so harshly to the young man the last time he would ever see him in Vietnam.
Lieutenant Colonel Lucas had alighted from his command ship almost as soon as Wilcox reached the landing zone, some fifteen minutes ahead of Campbell. The colonel strode briskly over to Wilcox and Rollison and, without preamble, barked out in a voice of confident bravado, “Okay, men, when can you be ready to go back up?”
The question completely broadsided Wilcox. “Back up?” he blurted. “Sir, we’d be crazy to go back up in the condition we’re in.”
McCall joined the huddle at Rollison’s side. It was Wilcox, however—still in a fever pitch from the battle and offended that Lucas had not even bothered to consult his company commanders before ordering another attack—who did most of the talking. Another assault, he said, would be futile and would result in needless casualties. He advised Lucas that he had only twenty-two men left in his company, not counting him and Campbell, and they were exhausted and dehydrated. He heatedly suggested that his troops be allowed to rest for the night and the hill be subjected to another round of prep fires, particularly tac air, before they went back up.
Lucas was having none of it. Frustrated that the colonel seemed unwilling to accept the realities of the situation, such was his desire, as Wilcox saw it, to look aggressive to his superiors, Wilcox angrily threw his helmet on the ground.
The colonel’s order spread like wildfire. An acting squad leader in Charlie One, a spec four, ran over to Lieutenant Campbell. “That stupid goddamn colonel,” he exclaimed. “They’re talking about us reassaulting the hill right now.”
“Aw, bullshit, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m not bullshittin’. The crazy bastards, we ain’t gonna do it. You gotta get up there and take care of it, L. T.”
Campbell could feel the tension in the air when he joined Wilcox, and was taken aback when Lucas informed him of his intention to mount another assault. “C’mon down here, colonel,” Campbell said. “You want to see these men? They’re dead on their feet. Give us a chance to rest, and we’ll do it tomorrow.”
Wilcox nodded. “We’ll get these men rested, colonel,” he said. “We’ll have a better chance of taking the hill if we do it tomorrow.”
Lucas said he understood that they’d had a rough time of it but they had to keep the pressure on, that it was essential to the security of Ripcord that the enemy be pushed off Hill 1000. Turning from Campbell and Wilcox, Lucas asked Rollison for his input. Rollison replied that he fully understood the importance of taking the hill and quietly affirmed that he was ready to make another assault whenever the colonel gave the word. “It was the only thing Rollison said while I was at the meeting,” commented Campbell, “and I think I made some sarcastic remark about whether that next assault was going to be like the one they made that morning. Lucas directed the conversation back to reassaulting the hill.” Campbell was appalled that Lucas did not press Rollison for an explanation of why most of Company D had failed to leave the tree line. “Lucas was totally fooled about what had occurred even though he had been overhead and could see who had attacked the hill and who hadn’t,” wrote Campbell. “I suspect the problem was that Rollison was his favorite company commander. Lucas seemed unable to even distinguish the difference between the physical condition of Charlie Company and the physical condition of Delta Company.”
In his rush to resume the attack, Lucas said nothing about bringing up reinforcements or working out a scheme of maneuver in which one company could call in Cobras without the other being on the gun target line. The objective was going to be secured only if both companies moved forward aggressively with close-in gunship support.
“Goddamnit,” Campbell snapped in a tone that a lieutenant did not use with a battalion commander, “we’ve only got a few hours till dusk. It’s going to take an hour and a half just to get resupplied and get back into position to attack from the tree line, and then what, are we just going to make the same assault from the same direction? It didn’t work the first time with a twelve-hour arty prep and all those air strikes. What if we’re still trying to fight our way up the side of the hill when the sun goes down? We’ll never be able to get into a strong defensive position for the night and get our dead and wounded out. It’s not worth the risk. We can take that damn hill tomorrow morning.”
“Lieutenant Campbell, you’re getting out of line here,” Black Spade snapped with restrained anger. “You go back with your men on the perimeter, you sit down—and you cool off.”
Wilcox grabbed Campbell by the arm and walked him part of the way back down the hill from the landing zone. “Jim, don’t worry about it,” Wilcox reassured Campbell. “I’ll take care of this.”
Seeing Campbell, the squad leader from Charlie One who had first alerted him to the problem rushed over to ask if the assault order had been rescinded. Campbell said that it had not, and the kid exploded: “We ain’t goin’ up that goddamn hill again today.”
Campbell wheeled on the man. “Let me tell you something, you motherfucker. If I tell you to go up that goddamn hill again, you’re going up that goddamn hill, you understand? What are you gonna do, let me and the captain and Sergeant Burkey go by ourselves?”
“Hell, L. T., we wouldn’t do that, we wouldn’t let that happen,” the squad leader said, abashed. “If you say to go, we’ll go, but we ain’t going just ’cause that stupid fuckin’ colonel says to go.”
While Campbell had been on the LZ arguing with Black Spade, the acting squad leader and several like-minded troops had been rushing from man to man, trying to organize a full-scale combat refusal in Charlie Company. They were mostly ignored by their buddies, and it is unlikely the dissidents themselves would have refused a direct order to attack. “They were talking hard, but it was all bullshit,” said Campbell. Sergeant Burkey agreed. “Going back up was fuckin’ crazy. It didn’t make sense. We didn’t have anything left in us, and the guys were grumbling, but there’s no question that push come to shove every one of us would have gone back up there and done what we had to do.”
Push did not come to shove. Wilcox did not let it. “I don’t think that hill’s worth another soldier dying,” he finally said to Lucas. “In fact, I don’t think this whole war is worth another soldier dying.” After some further comments about the utter waste and futility of the war, Wilcox went on to state that he could not in good conscience launch the second assault the colonel wanted. Wilcox would not later be able to recall the wording of his refusal; nor would Rollison and McCall, who were stunned. Sergeant Bort had been called into the huddle at that time, Lucas wanting to question the squad leader about the RPD emplacement he had seen. According to Bort, what Wilcox said was, “Sir, if you want to send me back up there, fine, I’ll go alone, but I will not ask my men to go back up there. They are simply in no shape for another assault.”
Bort was impressed. “The captain stood up for us,” as he would later say. “He saved our lives. I thought he was one hell of a guy.”
Black Spade was disappointed. “Captain,” he said, dismissing Wilcox, “why don’t you go over there and wait by my helicopter.”
The meeting continued. Lucas again sought Rollison’s counsel, and Rollison again emphasized that he was ready to launch another attack up Hill 1000 if the colonel so desired. Rollison added, however, that like Wilcox he thought it unwise to proceed that afternoon. “Sir, let’s keep the artillery going all night long and just hammer the hell out of that damn place,” he said. “We’ll move up under the artillery as far as we can at first light and go from there.”
McCall was surprised when Lucas next turned to him, a young lieutenant not normally consulted by colonels, and said, “What do you think?”
“I’m Captain Rollison’s platoon leader,” replied McCall, “and if you want us to go back up there, we will—but I’m not sure we can take that hill, to tell you the truth, sir. They’re dug in deep. Instead of taking more casualties, I think we ought to neutralize the hill with arty and tac air. We should turn it over to the Air Force, and just bomb the shit out of it every day. If we can get the fire support we need to reduce Hill One Thousand down to Hill Nine-ninety-seven, that should take care of it.”
It seemed to McCall that Captain Rollison, with a reputation that did not allow him to offer such advice, was visibly relieved that his platoon leader had, in fact, suggested they back off and call in the F-4s. “We didn’t want to go back up any more than Wilcox,” said McCall. “I think if we’d made a third attack, we probably would have shook hands good-bye. It was that bleak up there.”
Lucas said he would think the situation over and get back to them momentarily. The meeting broke up. Wilcox had felt himself backed into his dramatic outburst. Rollison and McCall basically agreed with the points Wilcox had been making but were taken aback by the manner in which he had addressed Black Spade, a commander for whom they both had enormous respect. They also found Wilcox’s veering into politics disconcerting. “The fact that Wilcox denounced the whole war indicated that he was suffering from fatigue and was distraught over his losses,” stated McCall. “Any company commander watching his dead and wounded being loaded onto helicopters is going to get emotional, but it wasn’t the time to philosophize about the war and debate whether or not we should be there. We had to neutralize that position, and we had to accept that like it or not we were going to lose some people. If Wilcox had confined his remarks to the tactical situation, he would have had much better results with Lucas.”
Lucas had walked off from everyone else and sat down on a log. Rollison noticed that something was wrong with the colonel and, thinking he might have been injured somehow, walked over to him. “I felt a little uncomfortable, like I wasn’t supposed to be there, and I looked at him, and I finally sat down next to him, and he was crying,” remembered Rollison. “He had tears coming down his face. He was hurtin’.” Rollison told Lucas that if he decided on another attack, the colonel could count on him. Lucas looked up at him and said, no, they weren’t going to lose any more people but were going to instead attempt to reduce the enemy positions with firepower. “Lucas hadn’t asked for that sonofabitch of an objective,” said Rollison, “and that’s why I didn’t fight him. I knew that what he had to do as a battalion commander was unpopular. He was my boss and there was a job that had to be done, but he was incredibly compassionate. He had a tough veneer, and he had to have it, but he cared about every single man there. There was never any doubt in my mind about that.”