CHAPTER 15
Captain Wilcox reckoned that he had gotten through to Lucas when informed that there was to be no second assault that afternoon. The colonel departed then, leaving Rollison to direct the air strikes while the two companies established a joint overnight position.
Three or four grunts approached Campbell. “L. T., we ain’t gonna NDP with these chickenshit bastards,” they grumbled. “They laid down on us up there. We’d be better off by ourselves.”
“Nah, we need numbers here, fellas,” Campbell replied.
As the air strikes continued, Wilcox sat against his rucksack, which was pushed up against a tree, boiling water for coffee in a pear can balanced atop another can in which he had lit a heat tab. The pear can shifted. Wilcox lunged forward to keep it from spilling—and when he did, a three-inch-wide, six-inch-long piece of made-in-the-USA bomb shrapnel slammed into his rucksack where his chest had been. Wilcox picked up the hot, jaggedy chunk of metal, wondering about the randomness of modern war.
Wilcox knew that Lucas considered him insubordinate, but he hoped the colonel did not equate his willingness to speak his mind with disloyalty. According to Colonel Harrison, Lucas had come to a much harsher conclusion about Wilcox. Harrison had landed to speak with Lucas shortly before the battalion commander flew back to Ripcord. “Lucas told me that Wilcox had refused to move back into the attack up the hill,” Harrison later wrote. “Lucas also told me that he had talked with Wilcox in private, and that Wilcox said he wanted to do the right thing, but he just couldn’t make himself go back up that hill. There didn’t seem to be any doubt in Lucas’s mind that Wilcox was just plain scared shitless. It happens.”
Lucas remarked in frustration that Wilcox was an academy grad. “He told me that he was really upset that a fellow West Pointer was a coward,” Harrison’s account continued. The brigade commander wanted to court-martial Wilcox. Lucas suggested instead that Wilcox be quietly moved to the brigade staff. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this with a court-martial. The quieter we can keep this the better,” Harrison quoted Lucas as saying.
“Lucas wanted the situation handled carefully,” Harrison wrote. “He did not want to relieve Wilcox right there where it would be obvious to everyone present that he was being fired because he would not lead his company back into the attack. Lucas thought it would be very bad for morale in the battalion if word got out that a company commander had caved in and had to be replaced under such circumstances. I agreed. Lucas said that he would make sure that Wilcox’s career was over in his efficiency report. I left how and when Wilcox was to be moved to brigade rear as something to be worked out by Lucas, a seasoned leader with good sense.”
Lieutenant Flaherty hitched a ride from Camp Evans to Ripcord aboard a log bird late that afternoon, but he missed the last slick taking ammo and water out to Company D. Lucas offered him a spare cot in his conex. When the colonel came in late that night to grab some sack time, Flaherty started to engage him in small talk. “Lieutenant Flaherty, please don’t, please don’t,” Lucas snapped with an intensity that startled Flaherty. “I really don’t want to know you any better than I do right now because I don’t want to feel any worse than I already will if your name turns up on the casualty list.”
It came as a shock to Wilcox and Campbell, who had spent the night turning over in their minds how to best proceed with the next day’s assault, to be instructed in the morning to march back to Ripcord. At the firebase, Lucas informed them that fifteen replacements had been brought forward for their company. Each cherry—they stood out in their clean fatigues and bright, new web gear—was paired off with a veteran as the company humped down the firebase ridgeline in the direction of Hill 805. “Battalion called that evening to confirm that we had thirty-seven troops,” recalled Wilcox. “We said, no, thirty-six, and they eventually figured out that the missing man was a new guy who got off the helicopter at the firebase, took one look around, and just got right back on the Chinook.”
Company C dug in at the end of the ridge, opposite Hill 805. It was a long night, the mountain wind conjuring up visions of approaching sappers as it whipped noisily through the trees. If the veterans were uptight, the cherries were completely freaked out, and the grenades they began lobbing into the darkness served only to heighten the hysteria. Wilcox requested illum from Ripcord. “It was like keeping a night light on,” he said. When a frag exploded inside the lines, Wilcox, concerned that maybe something really was out there, had the 81s start firing HE. It was finally determined that the explosion had been a grenade that hit a tree and bounced back at the cherry who’d thrown it. Wilcox wasn’t about to get up and start walking the lines in such a trigger-happy situation. Instead, he called out to the troops from his CP in the center of the perimeter and “told the company to just settle the fuck down,” he remembered. “I said we were going to continue firing illumination, and promised that if the enemy was moving towards us, we’d know. The guys started to get ahold of themselves at that point.”
Lucas had Company C helicoptered to Firebase O’Reilly the next day to replace Company A. Lucas and the battalion executive officer flew out eight days later and spent the night with Wilcox in his CP. Lucas said nothing about their previous confrontation, and Wilcox thought it likely that the colonel grudgingly respected him for the stand he had made at Hill 1000. Lucas did bring up the subject of politics, and Wilcox, taking the dialogue to be a good-natured exchange between colleagues, expounded on his disgust with the war. The whole thing was pointless, he opined. If democracy, the thing they were supposedly fighting for, were to suddenly descend upon Vietnam, the other side would win the election.
At one point during the conversation, the exec informed Lucas that he had recommended him for a Silver Star. Lucas was puzzled and questioned the exec, who reminded the colonel about his having flown through heavy fire to spot targets and deliver a resupply of grenades to Delta Company during the first attack up Hill 1000. Wilcox was impressed that Lucas, whom he had pegged as the ultimate careerist, seemed to shrug the whole thing off as nothing more than what was expected of a professional soldier.
Wilcox was not especially impressed with the exec. “Nobody liked the major,” he recalled. “He was an embittered fellow. Here was this guy with a lot of years in who wasn’t going anywhere, surrounded by other officers who were on the fast track.” The exec apparently hoped to salvage something for his troubles. After mentioning that he had started the paperwork to get Lucas a valor award, recalled Wilcox, “the major more or less suggested that since he had been so alert to making sure the colonel got the badges he needed for his career, some reciprocity might be in order.”
Wilcox, struck by the unseemliness of the major’s grasping, blurted, “I don’t believe you’re saying this in front of me.”
When Wilcox saw Lucas off the next morning, he thought the colonel had decided to let bygones be bygones and move on anew. He was mistaken. Lucas flew back in the next day with Capt. Kenneth R. Lamb, the battalion personnel officer. Wilcox, greeting them on the helipad, was summarily informed by Lucas that he was relieved and that Lamb was, as of that moment, the new commander of Company C. Wilcox felt as though he had been slapped. He asked why he was being relieved. Expecting to be blasted for insubordination, he was surprised when Lucas instead said, “I feel that the men have lost confidence in you.”
“Bullshit,” Wilcox said. “I think you should ask the men.” Lucas did not respond. “Do you mean I’m being relieved right now?” Wilcox asked.
“Right now, captain. Get on the helicopter.”
Wilcox, throwing his rucksack aboard, was the lone passenger on the command ship, Lucas having stayed on O’Reilly with Lamb.
Emotion washed over Wilcox during the flight. He was angry at the colonel and oddly embarrassed, but mostly he felt disloyal for disappearing on Jim Campbell and Paul Burkey. He had not been able to thank them for what they had done. He had not been able to explain the situation with Lucas. He had not even been able to say good-bye. Quit fighting it, Wilcox finally thought as the helicopter neared Camp Evans. You’re powerless here. It’s done. Let it go. What the hell, at least I know I’m not going to die in Vietnam.
Wilcox sent an audiotape to his wife, noting that although he thought Lucas had made a wrongheaded decision, he harbored no animosity about being relieved of duty. He followed the tape with a letter after ending up in the brigade TOC: “Inside I guess I feel really shitty about being taken away from my company. Life is so much more worthwhile when you are helping a bunch of innocent kids live—instead of pushing pencils and playing with big wall-sized maps.”
The animosity would come years later when Wilcox learned that Lucas had in his conversation with the brigade commander charged him not only with refusing an order but with confessing to being frozen with fear. Wilcox vehemently denies that he told Lucas any such thing and tends to view the accusation of cowardice as an attempt to scapegoat him for the failure of the attack. “Lucas had a right to relieve me,” Wilcox would write. “He had no right to defame me to justify to his superiors why his battalion had not taken Hill 1000.”
The incident defies resolution. It is difficult to imagine that Lucas would concoct so vicious a lie about one of his officers. It is equally difficult to imagine that Wilcox, who had led his company with great personal courage during the attack, had broken at the thought of facing those bunkers again. Neither possibility is inconceivable, however. Nor is it inconceivable that Lucas had decided to give Wilcox another look after tempers had cooled—whether Wilcox had suffered a momentary lapse of courage or had merely been insubordinate, his behavior was not unforgivable given the stress of combat—and for that reason visited him on Firebase O’Reilly. Perhaps their conversation that night tipped the scales against Wilcox. There is a theory, to which Lucas probably subscribed, that an officer who doesn’t believe in the cause won’t take risks, and an officer who won’t take risks can’t beat a determined enemy.
“Lucas agonized over whether or not to relieve Wilcox,” according to Chaplain Fox. “That was a very difficult decision for him. He talked to me a great deal about it.” Rollison thought the relief entirely justified, suggesting that “it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wilcox was in the wrong place, physically and philosophically.”
Campbell thinks that Lucas did, in fact, misrepresent to Harrison what Wilcox said to him on the LZ. “To suggest that Wilcox was a coward is an act of greater injustice than the act of his relief from command,” Campbell wrote. “I do not believe that Lucas actually believed Wilcox to be a coward. I do not believe that Lucas would have left Wilcox in command of a combat line company in that environment for one minute, much less eleven more days, if he truly believed him to be a coward. I have no problem with Lucas relieving Wilcox for insubordination,” Campbell continued. “That is a commander’s prerogative. I have a big problem, however, with branding a man a coward because he is insubordinate, you don’t like him, or you think his views on the war are soft, especially when he had been fighting his ass off all day for you.”
When Campbell attempted to engage the colonel in a discussion about Wilcox’s relief, Lucas curtly dismissed him. Campbell thought it was Lucas and himself, not a new company commander such as Wilcox, who had something to answer for. “I hated Lucas for years for what he ordered us to do that day on Hill 1000,” he said. “I also spent years trying to blame Lucas for what happened, but, really, I was accountable, too. His order to assault across an open saddle in the face of direct fire without close-in gunship support was absolutely stupid—and I was stupid enough to order it carried out. I knew better. I knew that Lucas didn’t know what was happening on the ground because he had never spent a single day in the field with his troops. I didn’t have the moral courage to refuse the order, though. The result was that Hupp and Scott went to their deaths trying to carry out an attack that I knew didn’t have a chance in hell of succeeding. It was a needless sacrifice of brave men.”
Campbell thought Lucas the most able of the three battalion commanders he served under in Vietnam. “Lucas and Koenigsbauer ran superb combat assaults,” he stated, “but their refusal to get on the ground with the troops at crunch time was a real problem.” It made no sense to Campbell that Lucas, with the entire maneuver force of his battalion going up Hill 1000, did not direct the attack from the ground, leaving his S3 people and arty LNO to organize the fire support from the command ship. “Hell, Major Koenigsbauer and Charlie Lieb, the S3 Air, had their shit together and could have easily handled the fire support.” Campbell was convinced that Lucas, had he been on the ground, would not have ordered the disastrous assault across the saddle. “Lucas might also have been able to spur Delta Company into action,” Campbell said, “in which case we might have taken the hill.” Campbell did not doubt Lucas’s courage, “but he never understood that you can’t lead men from a helicopter. None of my battalion commanders did.
“The helicopter was the worst thing that ever happened to leadership,” Campbell added. “The troops didn’t hate the gooks. They hated the commanders flying around in their charlie-charlie birds giving orders without a clue as to what it was like on the ground. You need to be on the ground. You can’t lead men in combat and expect them to have loyalty towards you if they never see you. That’s why there was so much bitterness about Lucas among the troops. He was never there with a word of encouragement or a pat on the back, and he definitely wasn’t where he needed to be when we went up Hill 1000.”
Campbell’s own bitterness boiling over, he wrote a letter in longhand at O’Reilly and gave it to someone flying to Ripcord to deliver to Lucas. The letter set forth Campbell’s frustration with what had occurred at Hill 1000 and requested that Lucas either deliver as promised on a rear job or, alternatively, have him reassigned to another battalion. “I honestly don’t know whether I was fit to command troops at that time, even under another commander,” Campbell would reflect. “I wasn’t the same person after Hill 1000. I had lost confidence in myself and I think I had lost the confidence of my platoon because of that insane order to assault across the saddle. I knew that I did not want to die or order my men to die for Lucas, who at that point I had absolutely no respect for, and who I did not then, and do not now, believe gave the slightest shit about me or my men. I told Lucas that I didn’t want to serve under him anymore, that I couldn’t carry out his orders anymore. I’d had it. Relieve me, reassign me, do whatever. I wasn’t going to do it another minute for Andre Lucas.”