PART FIVE
Often times a special degree of valor is required to get yourself out of a situation that you wouldn’t have been in in the first place if not for command stupidity.
—Capt. Christopher C. Straub Company D, 2d Battalion, 501st Infantry 101st Airborne Division
CHAPTER 16
Chuck Hawkins was a true believer—in his country, the war, and, especially, the U. S. Army. He also believed in himself. His self-assurance was honestly earned. Hawkins had grown up on a homestead in Alaska, ten miles by way of a dirt highway from the nearest town, Ninilchik, a little hamlet by Cook Inlet. His parents, both college graduates, were school-teachers in town, but they liked the adventure of life in the wilderness and had themselves built the log cabin that was the family home. Hawkins and his brother learned at an early age how to fish, hunt, track game, and navigate the woods at night by the stars. After high school, Hawkins, wanting to do his duty and go to college for free—money became particularly scarce after his parents divorced when he was eleven—applied for and was accepted into West Point Class of ’68.
Hawkins found his calling as an infantry officer and was fervent in his desire to go to Vietnam. Like many of his generation, he wanted to be the man his father had been in the big war, and his father had been a lot, a highly decorated platoon leader and a company commander with the elite 10th Mountain Division.
Lieutenant Hawkins took over the 2d Platoon, C/2-506th, in early March 1970. “I want to fight,” he wrote home. “God help me but I want it so bad I would sell my birthright.” Rugged in appearance, Hawkins was cocksure in attitude—“he was a strong-willed guy, very independent,” said a fellow platoon leader—and he came on too strong for most of his draftee grunts. “My God, was that man gung-ho,” said one. “He didn’t fit in. He wanted to make a name for himself and we figured it was going to be at our expense.”
Paul Burkey served as Hawkins’s platoon sergeant. “West Pointers scared guys, and Hawkins had a definite gleam in his eye,” said Burkey. “He wasn’t just aggressive, though, he was smart, too. He had his shit together. I would have followed him anywhere.”
Equally impressed, Lucas pinned captain’s bars on Hawkins a week before his actual promotion date and placed him in command of A/2-506th as of May 30, 1970. Hawkins’s predecessor had become gun-shy, and the company, though full of good people, lacked esprit. Lucas expected Hawkins to turn them around. This he did. Major Davis would write in Hawkins’s efficiency report that “Hawkins was given command of the weakest company in the battalion and in two weeks time it was equal to the best.”
It was a matter of leading from the front. Four days after taking command, Hawkins was accompanying a two-platoon move up the hill between Ripcord and Hill 1000. The point man spotted NVA on the trail he was following, got off a shot, then fell back when he realized his slack man had deserted him. The lead platoon leader, Lieutenant Widjeskog of Alpha Two, called in arty, then instructed the point and slack man to head back down the trail. They refused. Private First Class Wieland C. Norris volunteered to take point instead, and someone else stepped forward to walk his slack.
Widjeskog would always regret letting Norris take point. “Norris was new and could not be expected to react properly,” the platoon leader later wrote. When Norris heard something, he did not instantly open fire like a veteran but glanced to the slack man for guidance. The enemy had set up an ambush, and Norris was shot through the heart as he turned; the slack man was shot through the shoulder. The platoon pulled back. “We again called in artillery, followed by gunships,” Widjeskog wrote. “Things were happening fast and there was much confusion. The gunships managed to fire rockets close enough to hit one of my men with shrapnel. . . .”
Captain Hawkins had instructed Widjeskog to assault the hill but upon rushing forward found the grunts hunkered behind logs and trees. There was no firing from either side. “No one wanted to go up the hill for the third time,” Hawkins wrote home, “so I grabbed one young fellow, put a grenade in his hand, and told him we were going to start crawling up the hill. I moved people to one flank and had them open fire, then I moved up to the kid with the grenade. The next man to join us was a wounded machine gunner, and I guess he made the others feel ashamed, because pretty soon I had two squads firing and maneuvering toward the enemy. By this time the NVA figured out that there were a few more of us than they could handle and were long gone. We secured the hill . . .”
Lieutenant Noll, the most experienced platoon leader in the company, had monitored the action over the company frequency and was impressed with Hawkins. Noll thought it important to let everyone know that. The new CO’s reputation had preceded him, and the troops were apprehensive about serving under The Hawk. With that in mind, Noll got Hawkins on the horn and, using the phonetics for CO, said, “Good job today, Charlie Oscar.”
“That was all he said, but it was enough,” noted Hawkins. “Every RTO in the company heard the transmission and the word would spread. Before that moment I had been the company commander in name only, but now I was the company commander in fact.”
Hawkins spent the night “giving a wounded man cigarettes and water and listening to him moan,” his letter continued. “Five feet in the other direction our KIA ‘slept’ without a stir. . . . Norris had a wife and kid. A wife and kid. And he died doing a dirty, stinking job because no one had sense enough to do it right...”1
The situation remained grim. On Hawkins’s eighth day in command, the enemy hit his NDP at dusk with AK-47s and RPGs. The platoon on that side of the perimeter, Alpha One, “reacted well,” Hawkins wrote, “and using . . . fire and maneuver . . . drove the enemy off. Another man wounded, another man killed. . . .”
Following the big battalion stand-down, Lucas, wanting to give Hawkins some space to put his stamp on the outfit, sent Company A to Firebase O’Reilly. “I love every one of [my soldiers] and I don’t want them to die any more,” wrote Hawkins, who was twenty-three years old and suffering from migraine headaches. “So I push and I drive them . . . I will not lose more men. And when I leave this fire base I will have a company of killers who know how to survive.”
Hawkins, meanwhile, chafed at sitting on a mountaintop in what seemed like the backwaters of the war as other units slashed into Cambodia. “This daring operation,” he wrote, energized, “. . . has the flavor of victory. And a victory will bring us home. We will not win this war, the free peoples of Southeast Asia will win it[,] but we shall have laid the ground work for success. The Vietnamization concept will now have a chance to move ahead at a faster and more efficient rate. The South Vietnamese are capable soldiers. I am quite pleased with Cambodia and quite upset with student unrest at home. None of us here can understand it.”
To Hawkins the anguish over Kent State seemed an insult to forgotten soldiers facing unheralded deaths in Vietnam. “[B]y not supporting us,” he wrote in one angry letter from O’Reilly, the protesters were “aiding the enemy. I’m sick all right but let me tell you how I feel. There aren’t enough grenades and bullets in my rucksack to kill the Gooks I’d like to see dead in a day. Nixon is OK. I’ve got men in my company who would extend to stay in the Army and in V. Nam if we were to make a thrust into Laos, Cambodia or North Vietnam. Can you imagine a beach landing in the Haiphong harbor or an airborne assault into the farm fields near Hanoi[?] I’d extend to take a company on something like that. As much as I love my wife and all you folks at home, I’d still extend . . .”
When Hawkins’s old outfit, Charlie Company, was overrun the first night of the battle, the new commander of Alpha Company wrote his wife that it made him ill as he helplessly listened to the action over the radio. “I wish the NVA would hit O’Reilly,” he continued, furious. “It would give me a great deal of animal pleasure to watch them die; tangled ribbons of flesh in the wire.”
Hawkins was not displeased when Lucas instructed him to prepare for a combat assault onto the rocky hill immediately east of Ripcord. The LZ was to be secured by Company C, which would then depart on the lift ships to assume control of Firebase O’Reilly.
After Hawkins and Company A had progressed to the end of the ridgeline, Lucas explained, the battalion’s extra rifle company, D/2-501st, under Captain Straub, a highly regarded infantry officer on his second combat tour, would be CA’d into the area, and together the two companies were to assault and seize Hill 805.
Hawkins’s objective was the LZ on the western slope where Company B had landed on the first day of the battle; Straub’s objective was the crown of Hill 805. Though the strategic hill mass had been hit with tear gas and subjected to numerous air strikes since Company B had marched off, it could be assumed that the enemy had reoccupied it. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” Hawkins wrote home.
Hawkins got a new artillery forward observer before the assault, 2d Lt. Steven A. Olson, to replace 1st Lt. Thomas J. Brennan, USMA ’69, who had been reassigned to the 105 battery on Ripcord.
In the line platoons, Hawkins placed most of his confidence in Lieutenant Noll of Alpha Three. Jim Noll, age twenty-four, from Wabasha, Minnesota, drafted after his first year as a high-school teacher and sent to OCS, was calm, steady, “extremely savvy,” noted Hawkins, “and not shy about sticking his face in a firefight.”
Lee Widjeskog of Alpha Two, though green—he had joined the company after the first battle for Ripcord, commissioned by way of ROTC—was a smart, low-key individual with a lot of potential.
The situation was the same in Alpha One. The platoon leader, 1st Lt. William A. Pahissa, USMA ’69, and the platoon sergeant, SSgt. Gerald B. Singleton, had just joined the company on O’Reilly, but both were sharp and highly motivated. “Bill Pahissa impressed me immediately,” recalled Hawkins of the tall, athletic Mexican American from Tucson, Arizona. One of Pahissa’s best friends at the academy, Tom Brennan, had sent Pahissa a number of exciting letters about life in the Currahees. When Brennan informed him that Jeff Wilcox was to be promoted out of Alpha One, “Pahissa pulled whatever strings necessary to get to Vietnam ASAP,” noted Hawkins. “On his assignment preference sheet he was very specific—he wanted to be assigned to 1st Platoon, Company A, 2-506th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. He got his wish.”
The assault was scheduled for July 10. “I am looking forward to it in a way,” Hawkins wrote his wife. “It’s funny, but I still find myself proving me to myself. Major Davis says to be careful and the Bn. CO talks to me like a son. You know they are worried too. . . . There are four officers and 70 enlisted men trusting in me and looking to me for guidance. They must have confidence in me, they must do as I say if they expect to survive and I can’t show any signs of weakness. None. That’s the hard part . . .”
Hawkins wrote in a last letter home of “look[ing] away from my map and grease pens. The sky is clear. Clean fresh air ripples my hair and my mind is lost in days gone by. Lonely country music wafts up on the breeze from a nearby bunker . . . Right now is the slack period before the birds come. Preparation is complete and the nervous talk and fiddling with weapons begins. Cigarette smoke rises heaven ward along with our prayers. This operation more than any other has me worried. I am carrying additional hand grenades, a claymore and a few other devices CO’s usually don’t carry. There is some big stuff out there. . . .”
Major Koenigsbauer had helped plan the assualt, but was no longer part of the battalion when it was launched, having been reassigned to division staff the day before, his six months with a line unit complete. Bill Williams took over as S3. In preparation for the switch, Koenigsbauer went over the firebase security and defensive-fire plans in great detail with Williams. It nevertheless struck Koenigsbauer as ludicrous that an experienced operations officer who enjoyed an excellent working relationship with his battalion commander was to be abruptly replaced in the midst of a major battle. “It didn’t make any sense, but those were the rules of the game,” noted Koenigsbauer. “I volunteered to see the battle through, but Lucas insisted I report to division as ordered. When the Loach picked me up, we shook hands, and I wished him luck. I said something to the effect that I wished I were staying, but Lucas made a major effort to keep my morale up, telling me that I was not abandoning ship, that I had put my time in, and that he had a good replacement as operations officer. He was adamant that I leave, and, of course, I did, however reluctantly.”
The lift ships bearing Captain Hawkins and Company A set down in their turn on the rocky hill east of Ripcord. Red smoke marked the landing zone as there were enemy soldiers on the south slope of the ridge firing on the Hueys as they departed with Charlie Company. Hawkins brought arty in on the snipers as his lead platoon slipped down the spine of the ridge to secure a good NDP. Captain Straub, meanwhile, was planning that same day for D/2-501st’s CA into the area from its present position near FSB O’Reilly. Straub was joined by 1st Lt. James M. Potter, his forward observer, who had been absent the previous week due to a badly infected cut on his leg that would not heal in the jungle. The resupply ship that brought Potter in took aboard a rifleman whose tour was over. “Straub and I conducted an aerial reconnaissance of our objective and the selected landing zone,” wrote Potter. The LZ was on a knoll a kilometer northwest of the objective, at the base of a ridge knifing up to the top of 805. “As we flew over the area we received ground fire,” added Potter. “I still remember the unmistakable sound of bullets ‘cracking’ as they passed between the rotor blades of the helicopter.”
Upon returning to the company position, Straub and Potter were informed that the log bird “had made a supply stop at Ripcord on the way to Camp Evans, taking .51-cal fire as it landed,” noted Potter. “The soldier on board from our company was hit in the shoulder and lost his arm. He had made it through his entire tour only to be shot during the last hour of his last day in the field.”
By noon of the next day, Company A, having continued down the ridge, reached the hillock at the end and, after Noll disarmed a booby trap on the landing zone, set up another NDP. While more tac air went in on the objective, D/2-501st humped to an LZ of its own to take a resupply of extra ammunition. “We were told at that time that we were going to the Ripcord AO,” noted Sgt. Raymond H. “Blackie” Blackman of Delta Three. In addition to the ammo, the slicks brought out soda, watermelons, and a hot meal in mermite cans. “I remember thinking that it was a kind of last meal for us,” wrote Blackman. “After eating, we split up into platoons and NDP’d in separate locations down different trails from the LZ. At first light, we met at the LZ and waited for the birds. We didn’t talk much. We knew this wasn’t going to be a typical mission.”
Captain Straub and D/2-501st began lifting out as of 7:55 A.M. on July 12, 1970. Three firebases were shelling the objective at that time, and a barrage of smoke was delivered immediately before the first slick landed to screen the LZ. In short order, Company D was moving in column up the ridge pointing to the top of Hill 805. The pace was brisk despite the sweltering heat, the tension palpable. There was no noise except the rattle of equipment. “You could feel the gooks,” wrote Blackman. “I walked rear security and never felt so alone in my life. We could hear them prepping 805 in the distance and the explosions were getting louder as we got closer.”
Company A started into the saddle between its NDP and Hill 805. Hawkins led with Alpha Three. “We are going to get hit,” Lieutenant Noll told his men before they moved out. “You’ve got to have your finger on the trigger and be ready to respond immediately,” he intoned, concerned about the large number of replacements in the platoon, “because as soon as we take fire we’re going to get on line and assault into the enemy. If we don’t, they’ll trap us in that little draw and we’ll be sitting ducks.”
Noll was so convinced they were going to run into trouble that as the column started down the trail, he fell in line directly behind the point team. At 10:15 A.M., the point man, upon cresting a small knoll in the saddle below 805, encountered an enemy trail watcher.
There was a quick AK burst, then silence. Christ, he’s dead, Noll thought as he scrambled up to the point man. Finding him in one piece, Noll urgently asked, “What the hell’s goin’ on?”
“Some little gook up there shot at me.”
“Why the hell didn’t you shoot him?” Noll snapped, upset because the point man was one of his veterans.
“I didn’t think. I was so scared, I just ducked.”
Noll rushed back to his platoon, angry that the guys had taken cover instead of deploying for an assault as instructed, especially because a gun team was keeping the enemy engaged from the flank. “Get up,” Noll barked. “Get up, and get the fuck up that hill.”
Enemy fire began zipping past as Lieutenant Noll charged forward, radioman in tow. Identifying where the fire was coming from, Noll opened up with his M16. His magazine was loaded with nothing but tracers. The troops were supposed to fire en masse wherever the platoon leader put the tracers, but none did because none had followed Noll in the face of the AKs and RPGs.
Noll was on top of the hill before he realized that the only man with him was his radioman. An enemy soldier popped up from behind a log at that moment, a startled look on his face, and Noll spun, raised his M16, and squeezed the trigger before the man could bring up his AK-47. The NVA flinched, evidently thinking he was hit, but Noll had already emptied the magazine in his weapon. As quickly as he ripped a fresh one from his bandolier and reloaded, the lucky North Vietnamese had already disappeared among the trees.
Lieutenant Noll went back down the trail, then, crazed with adrenaline, grabbed his new guys by their web gear, hauled them to their feet, and forced them up the hill. Noll was turning to say something to his radioman when a single shot rang out and he was knocked backward into a bomb crater. Unable to feel his left leg below the knee, Noll reached for his calf, which was throbbing, and accidentally slipped a finger into a small hole. He jerked his hand away; there was blood and a gob of meat on his finger. Thinking his lower leg had been blown off, he screamed for a medic.
The platoon medic, Sp4 Mark G. Draper, crawled up and, concealed behind some brush, called to Noll, asking him what was wrong. “I’m hit,” Noll yelled. “Get your ass out here and get me.”
“You’re okay,” Draper shouted, knowing that wounds usually seemed worse than they were. “You crawl your ass over here.”
Noll realized as he did so that he had landed with his left leg folded under him; it was just numb, not missing. After the medic bandaged his gunshot wound, he hopped into an old foxhole with his radioman and got Hawkins on the horn to request ARA.
The three or four enemy soldiers atop the knoll began lobbing grenades, and Noll’s radioman was painfully wounded in the hand. When two Cobras arrived, Noll pitched a smoke grenade, then hunkered down as the gunships came in at his direction, pumping rockets. The North Vietnamese slipped away under the onslaught.
While the casualties were escorted back to the overnight position for medevac, Hawkins—who hated to be losing Noll— had Lieutenant Olson, the new FO, hit the enemy’s likely escape routes with the 81s on Ripcord. Lucas, overhead in his command ship, was on the radio, urging Hawkins to keep the assault going without further delay. “Straub and I had been in communication and our move to the hill was well coordinated,” Hawkins would write. “Straub reported that his movement was being shadowed by one or more enemy and we suspected [more] contact at any time.”
It didn’t happen. There was no fire as Company A secured the hillside landing zone or as D/2-501st, simultaneously emerging from the jungle, scrambled up the steep upper slope of Hill 805. There were merely some smashed timber bunkers to show that the enemy had been there, plus two dead North Vietnamese, nailed the day before in their spiderholes by a scout ship. “We were told to get rid of them so they wouldn’t start stinking,” recalled Blackman.
Captain Straub, senior to Hawkins by date of rank and experience, was nominally in charge of the dusty, windswept hill and responsible for coordinating all supporting arms except the 81s on Ripcord—Hawkins would use those—in case of the ground attack that Lucas told them both to expect that night. Straub established his command post among the big boulders at the peak so that it was protected on three sides. “Shortly after,” noted Lieutenant Potter, the FO, “we were supplied with additional ammunition and grenades, plus shovels, axes, picks, and sandbags from a helicopter hovering at about fifteen feet, there being no place to land on the hilltop. Each soldier was supplied with about sixty magazines of ammunition, and each two- and three-man foxhole with a case of grenades.”
There was barely enough room for the company on the crown of the hill. It was less than forty meters across from one platoon to another. “We were almost elbow to elbow in there,” noted Straub. Digging was difficult in the rocky soil, and the troops, thoroughly winded from the uphill assault with full packs, settled for scooping shallow depressions from the old backfilled foxholes to be found among the stumps and scraggly trees. “My biggest mistake of the battle was that I didn’t require more digging in that first night,” wrote Straub. The men had been primed for a tough fight. The ease with which the objective had been secured had taken the edge off. No one believed that an attack was really coming, and no more than the normal number of claymores and trip flares were deployed. Still, the company had never before set up on a prominent terrain feature wiped clean of all natural cover, and there was a vague sense of uneasiness in the air as the sun set. “Blown up trees and branches covered the sides of the hill,” wrote Blackman, “providing a million places for the gooks to hide. At the bottom of the hill there was a wall of green jungle. We were, to say the least, extremely vulnerable.”
Captain Hawkins was approached two hours before midnight by Lieutenant Pahissa and Sergeant Singleton, whose platoon, Alpha One, was on that part of the perimeter facing Ripcord. Earlier, as the company had been digging in, Singleton had suggested implanting sensors back along the trail they had followed that afternoon to the hillside LZ. The plastic sensors, a new item of issue, resembled railroad spikes and came four to a camouflaged kit the size of a claymore bag, which also contained a receiving station with a headset. The spikes had transmitters in them and gave off a series of beeps when activated by the ground vibration caused by footsteps.
Pahissa and Singleton, along with a couple of troops, had placed the spikes at twenty- to thirty-meter intervals along the trail, starting two hundred meters down from the LZ. “I was sorta skeptical,” recalled Hawkins, “but Singleton loved the things and just knew he was going to catch somebody that night by using them. . . .”
The new platoon sergeant was listening on the headsets when the sensors did indeed begin chirping like crickets. Accompanied by Pahissa, he presently rushed to Hawkins. “Sir, we’ve got beaucoup movement comin’ up the trail,” Singleton whispered.
Singleton excitedly offered the headset to Hawkins. “I believe you,” Hawkins said. “Let’s get the FO on it.” Hawkins had Lieutenant Olson contact the 81s on Ripcord. To catch the enemy in the open, Hawkins told Olson to fire for effect without the usual adjusting rounds. “I let Straub know that we’d detected something,” Hawkins later wrote, “and he told me that they’d just had a mechanical go off. The tension was building. About the time the mortar rounds began bursting to Pahissa’s front, and we threw a bunch of rounds into the target area, maybe twenty or thirty, the enemy hit Straub from three sides with RPGs. The enemy column coming up the trail to attack the backside of our perimeter was busted up by the mortar barrage and never got into the fight. . . .”
When the attack began, Lieutenant Potter was standing on the north side of Company D’s perimeter with map and radio, preparing to make some adjustments in the artillery defensive targets he had already registered around the hill. Potter was calling in the first of his new targets when a green star-cluster flare burst overhead without warning, the signal from the enemy commander to begin the assault. Within seconds, Potter had rocket-propelled grenades hitting the boulders and tree stumps all around him. He dropped flat and crawled some twenty meters back uphill amid the continuing explosions to Captain Straub’s CP. Straub had given the command to return fire and was calling for a flareship and an ARA. “Four RPGs had hit the large boulder next to our foxhole,” recounted Potter, “and fragments had peppered the back of Straub’s radio operator. My air mattress, which I had been sitting on just twenty minutes earlier, was filled with holes.”
Everyone was awake when the shooting started at 10:22 P.M. “We were on a self-imposed full alert,” noted Sergeant Blackman of Delta Three, on the northern side of 805. Blackman was sitting, talking with a buddy at the base of one of the big boulders. “After such a long day and not much sleep the night before it was nice to kick back a little,” he wrote. “It was real quiet and peaceful. When the RPGs started pouring in, we were taken completely by surprise.”
First Lieutenant John D. Shipley of Delta Two, which was on the southeastern side of the perimeter, was slightly wounded in the sudden barrage of RPGs. “We were sitting around, drinking hot chocolate, when they hit. I gotta admit they kind of caught us off guard,” recalled Shipley, in his first sustained action after almost two months with Company D. Unbeknownst to Shipley, a few of his guys had been quietly smoking pot at their positions. “We thought we were in for a gravy train on that hill, a rest,” noted the platoon leader. “Sure, we got word to expect an attack, but we’d gotten those before and they often didn’t develop.”
The ferocity of the enemy attack was shocking. “There was a lot of confusion and not enough holes dug,” according to Blackman, who rushed back down toward his foxhole with his buddy. “The battle was in full force before we ever reached our position, with loud explosions and small-arms fire hitting all over the hill.”
Blackman’s buddy took shrapnel in the back as they ran down the hill side by side. But he, along with Blackman, who tripped in the dark and ended up crawling into the foxhole, was soon returning fire. Everyone was, and the red tracers of a hundred M16s and M60s fanned out from the hilltop like the spokes of a wheel. “It was an impressive display of the firepower that a line company is capable of producing,” wrote Blackman. “The noise was deafening.”
It got louder as Lieutenant Potter requested mortar concentrations close around the perimeter from Ripcord. The 81mm crews also fired illumination rounds, one after the other as the parachute-born flares were quickly carried off by the high winds, “causing eerie shadows to dance around the tree stubble,” noted Blackman. Captain Hawkins, in position two hundred meters west and ten meters below D/2-501st, could see enemy soldiers scurrying up the northern and southern slopes of Hill 805 in the flare light. It was an organized assault, with some of the NVA firing into Straub’s position, green AK-47 tracers ricocheting off the boulders, while others made short dashes forward through the deadfall. Hawkins was surprised that the North Vietnamese would leave their flanks open to fire from his element on the LZ. “It was one of the few times I’d ever seen them attack without conducting adequate reconnaissance,” he wrote. “We were in a position to devastate them. We had, in fact, prearranged sectors of fire with Straub to interlock with his defensive position. My machine gunners and grenadiers knew where to fire and where not to fire if we had to provide support.”
The problem was that no one was firing. The troops seemed stunned, never having seen so many enemy at one time, and Hawkins rushed to an M60 gunner in Alpha Three, which faced the southern slope of Hill 805. “See them?” Hawkins barked. “That’s the enemy attacking your buddies up there. You’ve got targets. You know where the friendlies are. Shoot to the right of the hill.”
Hawkins dashed to a man with an M79. “Can you put a grenade up there every fifteen seconds?” he asked. The soldier said that he most definitely could, and Hawkins ordered, “Then do it now.”
Alpha Two had a good view of the northern slope, and Hawkins scrambled over to Lieutenant Widjeskog. “Keep your fire on the slope to the left of the hill,” Hawkins said. “Don’t let up. We’ve got to provide some support. Get a thump gunner working, too.”
As the troops began pouring fire into the enemy, Captain Hawkins, venturing onto the open landing zone for a better look, saw that RPGs trailing rooster tails of sparks were being lobbed into Straub’s perimeter from a forested depression about two hundred meters north of Hill 805. Hawkins grabbed a LAW from a nearby position, then “went back to the top of the LZ,” he wrote, “leaned back, took aim, and pressed the firing mechanism. Nothing. The LAW was a dud. I put the safety back in, put the LAW on the ground, then went back for another one and repeated the process. This one worked. I fired into the sky, waited, and a moment later the LAW round blew up in the depression with a satisfying crummmmp. There was an eerie silence, and I remember thinking to myself, well, that’ll show ’em they can’t fire with impunity.”
Feeling rather pleased with himself, Hawkins was ambling over to check on Alpha One’s situation when there came from the depression the sound of many, many rockets being fired all at once—pop-pop-poppity-pop-pop-pop. He began sprinting for the nearest foxhole, no doubt in his mind that those RPGs were headed directly for whoever had scored the direct hit with the LAW.
The nearest hole was occupied by Lieutenant Pahissa and Sergeant Singleton, who were still directing 81 fire along the trail leading up to the LZ. “I’m comin’ in,” Hawkins roared.
Hawkins tumbled into the hole as fifteen RPGs—Singleton had the presence of mind to count them—exploded in a great, rumbling mass twenty meters to the front of Alpha One, producing a chorus of startled exclamations: “Goddamn.” “What the fuck? . . .”
Sergeant Singleton looked evenly at Hawkins. “I wouldn’t do that anymore if I were you, sir,” he said.
“And I didn’t,” noted Hawkins. “But those fifteen RPGs that missed us were fifteen RPGs that did not explode against the exposed positions of Company D.”
The enemy, sheltered by boulders about fifty meters downhill on the southeastern slope, pressed the attack on Lieutenant Shipley’s side of the hill with a barrage of RPGs. To keep the enemy from creeping forward under cover of the rockets, Delta Two swept the deadfall with a sheet of fire. Shipley’s machine gunners, firing without pause, burned out their barrels and blistered their hands replacing them. The platoon radioman had “his arm torn up pretty badly by shrapnel,” noted Shipley, but “the doc patched him up, shot him full of morphine, and five minutes later he was back in action, screaming, cussing, and lobbing grenades down the slope.”
Captain Straub got his gunships fifteen minutes into the attack. The enemy began backing off. The troops continued to pour on the fire for another hour as three artillery batteries put up a wall of steel around the hilltop. “When the shooting finally stopped, there was a moment of complete silence,” wrote Blackman. “My ears swelled up, trying to hear something. Someone called for a medic, not too loud, almost a whisper-yell, then there was another call, and another, and we realized that we had casualties.” The wounded, a dozen of whom would be evacuated in the morning as an equal number with superficial injuries stayed on the hill, were mostly from Delta Two. “A few guys began moving around the hill to help,” continued Blackman. “The sergeant who was our acting platoon leader ran up to check if we were all right. We stayed awake and down in our crowded foxhole the rest of the night.”
Security patrols moved out at first light. There were bloody bandages to be found, plus a few rocket-propelled grenades and ammo magazines missed by the enemy as they had policed up their casualties and equipment in the dark. Lucas landed to speak with Hawkins and Straub. Company A, Lucas said, was to begin backtracking that afternoon into the draw between 805 and the firebase in preparation for reconnoitering the low area south of Ripcord. “We were rucked up and ready to leave when Lucas, who was back in the air by that time, called me directly and said I had a set of Phantoms to use any way I wanted,” recalled Hawkins. “I told him I didn’t have a target. He told me to pick a target and use them.”
Hawkins, consulting his map, chose a spot six hundred meters to the west on a nondescript finger ridge branching to the south from the main ridge leading southeast of Ripcord. “It was on my planned route into the valley,” noted Hawkins, “and because the spot was not in line of sight with Ripcord, but was down low on the finger, I figured it was as good a place as any for the enemy to have a cache.” The FAC fired marking rockets, then “the first F4 went in,” wrote Hawkins, “and KA-BOOM, we had smoke and flame and debris shooting into the air two to three hundred feet above the treetops. The FAC told us it wasn’t the bombs doing that, but secondary explosions. We’d lucked out and hit an enemy ammo bunker. The Phantoms hit the target area for fifteen minutes before breaking station, and the FAC went nuts watching all the secondaries. He said that you could tell what you’d hit by the color of the explosion. Reddish yellow meant munitions. My troops and I enjoyed a ringside seat, looking right down on the area from the LZ. Guys were cheering. It was a pretty awesome sight.”