CHAPTER 17
Numerous air strikes were conducted throughout the morning and afternoon as Captain Straub’s troops busily prepared for another night on Hill 805. Fields of fire were cleared. Bunkers big enough for five or six men were dug chest deep and covered with tree limbs and sandbags. As resupply ships came in, crates of ammunition and grenades were hauled up from the hillside LZ. Claymores and trip flares, also delivered in abundance, were set up in the deadfall on the slopes; sensors and mechanical ambushes were positioned astride likely avenues of approach. Concertina wire was staked all the way around the hilltop in a single belt about thirty feet below the perimeter.
First Lieutenant Joseph L. Guerra, recently recovered from wounds received with another company, was flown out to take over Delta Three. Guerra’s platoon was positioned from ten to two, Shipley’s from two to six, and Palm’s from six to ten facing the saddle between 805 and the subhill atop which sat the resupply LZ.
As the troops dug in, a .51 below the hill fired on the CH-47s that approached Ripcord. Lieutenant Potter called in 8-inch fire, “but I could never get the gun crew to stop firing altogether. They would just move a little and fire again at the next Chinook.”
Potter had plotted a routine number of defensive targets around the hill the first day, “adjusting selected targets with live fire,” he wrote. “This allowed the batteries supporting us to record firing data—deflection, elevation, powder charge, and fuse setting—and assign target numbers for quick reaction if we had contact.” Given priority for supporting fires that second day, Potter “spent four hours adjusting 81mm rounds over the surface of the hill in twenty-five-meter increments. Each time we adjusted on a piece of terrain from which we had received fire during the night, I recorded a target number on my map[,] and the mortar section on Ripcord recorded the firing data. I also refined my artillery adjustments, calling for close-in fire from Ripcord, O’Reilly, and Rakkasan.”
Lieutenant Palm opted for foxholes and prone fighting positions instead of the bunkers with overhead cover favored by Delta Two and Three. It is unknown whether Palm thought it unwise to advertise his positions with moundlike bunkers or simply discounted the possibility of an attack across the open LZ. “Aside from laying wire, there was very little done to shore up our positions,” noted Sp4 Richard R. “Rod” Soubers, who’d rejoined Delta One that morning after a week in the rear with a swollen knee. “My squad had dug sleeping positions that sloped back into the hill, but few foxholes. I didn’t detect any sense of urgency or expectation, despite the fact that the other platoons had been hit the previous night. No one seemed to know how long we were going to be on the hill, nor for that matter why we were on the hill.”
The mission, as it had been explained to Captain Straub, was to deny the enemy a dominant terrain feature from which they could observe and adjust mortar fire onto Ripcord. The unstated implication was that because the enemy would fight to regain the hill, holding it would provide an opportunity to fix the NVA and subject them to massed firepower. “I was basically told to go sit on a bald hilltop and wait to be attacked,” said Straub. “I didn’t accept that order with good cheer. It wasn’t the way we operated. We weren’t a company that did obvious things and set up in obvious places. The enemy didn’t hunt us. We hunted them. I was very concerned then when we dug in atop 805 because we were giving up the initiative right at the start to the North Vietnamese.”
The result would be the worst action of Straub’s two and a half years in the war zone. A native of New York City, Straub was highly articulate, youthful and clean-cut in appearance, and had once considered entering the priesthood. He held a B.A. in English from Columbia University but, bored with graduate school and curious about the war, enlisted for OCS in late 1965. He arrived in Vietnam in February 1967 and led a rifle platoon and a recon platoon in the crack 2d of the 27th Wolfhounds. Extending his tour, he served as aide-de-camp to the commanding general of the 25th Infantry Division until September 1968.
Assigned next as a speechwriter for the commandant and assistant commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Straub instead volunteered for jump school, ranger school, and another combat tour, making it back to Vietnam in August 1969. After six months of staff duty, he assumed command of Company D, 2-501st Infantry, in February 1970. “Every captain in the battalion who wanted a company got a company,” noted Straub. The fierce competition among junior officers for combat commands had evaporated. “Enthusiasm for winning the war was pretty much out of the officer corps by ’69–’70,” reflected Straub. For those few who asked to return to combat, “it was a question of doing your duty, and seeing the Army through, seeing the troops through.”
There developed a special bond between Captain Straub and the grunts of Delta Company. “We all idolized him,” said one. Straub was at once personable with his men, obviously committed to getting them home in one piece, yet serious about taking the war to the enemy and experienced enough to do it with skill. The troops responded. “In the context of 1970, Delta Company was an excellent unit,” wrote Straub. It lacked that leavening of Regular Army NCOs that made for the kind of units Straub had seen in 1967. The company did, however, have an exec, 1st Lt. Ralph L. Selvaggi, and a top sergeant, 1st Sgt. John T. Schuelke, who provided excellent support from the rear, and in the field highly motivated platoon leaders and shake ’n bake sergeants. Straub also had Lieutenant Potter, USMA ’69, son of a retired lieutenant colonel who had been a platoon leader with the same 501st Infantry at Bastogne. “Potter had been to jump school and ranger school and was not only an exceptionally skilled forward observer, but also my assistant in running the company,” wrote Straub. “We didn’t look like a recruiting poster, but the troops were serious and professional, and because of that we had very low casualties.”
As a platoon leader, Straub had not lost a single man killed. He did not intend to lose any as a company commander. “We prided ourselves in being unpredictable and surprising the enemy,” Straub wrote. “Our point man always had the upper hand. We were never ambushed.” During Company D’s deployment to the Ripcord AO in April 1970, its point teams, moving with stealth and staying off trails, had killed many startled NVA during numerous meeting engagements in the jungle. Delta Company even captured a number of North Vietnamese; as a result, Palm wrote home, the troops “no longer have an unwarranted fear of them. Respect, yes; but not fear. Know your enemy . . .”
Captain Straub was emphatic about noise and light discipline. “We were not your normal, noisy, squeak-all-night-on-your-air-mattress company,” he said. One night, Delta Company, hunkered in tall grass, was targeted for attack. “We were probed throughout the night,” recounted Straub, but the attack never really got started because “as they probed, we’d kill one with a little burst of fire, and then another enemy soldier would appear and we’d kill him.” Frustrated, the enemy finally faded away. “They never knew exactly where we were,” wrote a gratified Straub. “When over a hundred heavily laden infantrymen can move into a position so quietly that the enemy can’t locate their NDP, you know they’re good.”
Straub’s original concerns about setting up in plain sight on Hill 805 had been largely academic. Enemy attacks, often predicted, rarely occurred. The night assault, however, confirmed the intelligence that Straub had been provided. “I became very angry at that point that this great company was being used in such a way,” Straub wrote, meaning being used as bait to bring the enemy into a prepared kill zone. “I also became very determined that we would hold the hill.”
By dusk, solid holes had been dug, and the troops sat waiting for the next attack, their weapons freshly cleaned and oiled and wrapped in towels to protect them from the eye-stinging dust on the windy hilltop. Straub pulled in his observation posts, passed the word for everyone to get under cover, then had the FO walk mortar and artillery fire to within fifty meters. “Straub wanted to show the NVA that we were ready,” noted Blackman. “He also wanted us to know what we had available for support, assuring us that we weren’t on our own out there. The shrapnel whizzed right over our heads. It made me feel better. . . .”
The night was cold and tense. It was hard to hear over the endless winds, and the flares that periodically popped overhead revealed nothing to the waiting grunts, for the sappers coming up the hill made expert use of the boulders and deadfall on the hillside. Most were within twenty meters, some even closer, when either a sapper or more probably one of the enemy infantrymen following them in triggered a trip flare. “By the time we were attacked, we were pretty tired,” wrote Sergeant Blackman. “We’d been digging all day, then standing in our bunkers for a long time, trying to stay awake and alert. When the attack came, it seemed to happen all at once around the hill. The hill just exploded with incoming fire. . . .”
It started on the west side when Sp4 Dennis W. Belt, whose squad was on the right flank of Delta One’s line, realized that there was a sapper at the wire thirty feet below his foxhole. “They’re movin’ down there,” Belt hollered, squeezing off a burst from his M16.
It was 2:03 A.M. on July 14, 1970. The sapper rolled behind a log and cut loose in return with his AK-50. Sergeant William E. Jones, squad leader on the right flank, was sitting cross-legged near Belt’s position. Only a few days with the platoon, Jones—a young regular, black, proud of his German wife, back for a second tour—had ignored Palm’s orders to dig in that afternoon. “I don’t know if he was lazy or if he thought he knew the ropes,” recalled Belt, unimpressed. Jones presently commenced firing, then, leaning over the edge of the hill to get a better bead on the sapper behind the log, abruptly slumped forward, killed instantly by a shot that left one hole in the front of his helmet, a corresponding exit hole in the back. Unable to see what had happened to Jones in the dark, a grunt jumped beside him. “Sarge, are you all right?” No answer. The grunt shook Jones, pleading with him: “C’mon, Sarge, you’re okay, aren’t ya?”
Lieutenant Palm and his shake ’n bake platoon sergeant, rugged, stolid SSgt. Michael L. Cooksley, scrambled along the line, shouting directions as the platoon blew its claymores and opened fire on the sappers hidden in the deadfall. “The wind was howling so much and there was so much fire from our side,” wrote Rod Soubers of the right-flank squad, “that a person couldn’t be sure exactly where the incoming fire was coming from. All we could do was look for flashes or simply put a blanket of fire out all along our front.”
Captain Straub and Lieutenant Potter began calling for fire support, the frightful whoosh, flash, and crash of mortar and artillery shells adding thunder to the ceaseless roar of small-arms fire. Straub himself was stunned by the “large amount of fire by both sides in [such] a small space . . . It was the most intense combat experience of my Vietnam service . . .”
Potter would later write:
I adjusted 105mm artillery close-in to the south and west, and 81mm mortars even closer on the west side, where the main attack was taking place. Both of these came from Ripcord. On the north side I adjusted 155mm support from the ARVN battery on O’Reilly to about two hundred and fifty meters. Being on the gun-target-line, I was hesitant to adjust the fire much closer. Down in the valley on the south side, I used 8-inch artillery from Rakkasan. I had kept the 8-inch at a thousand meters the first night, but brought it in closer during the second attack.
Straub called for Quad-50 fire from Ripcord, and the red tracers formed a spectacular arc from one hill to the other as they rained into the deadfall in front of Delta One. Delta Company’s grenadiers, meanwhile, fired flares, and the 81s on the firebase pumped out illum. Given the steady winds, however, the parachute-born flares and illumination rounds were quickly swept away from Hill 805.
To add to the sound and fury, gunships arrived at the thirty-minute mark from Camp Evans. Wrote Potter:
Captain Straub had one of his RTOs mark the center of our position with a small strobe light, a reference point from which we gave the pilots instructions. The troops also marked some targets with tracers from an M60. The Cobras positioned their ordnance—miniguns, rockets, and 40mm grenades—with surprising accuracy, and having worked them in very close, fifty to a hundred meters, the first night, we brought them in even closer during the second attack.
The effort required Captain Straub and I to work as a team, communicating with the platoon leaders on his radio net and the sources of all the fire support on my artillery net. The process worked well. We had as many as eight fire missions going at once. I had never been under such stress, but this allowed us to engage eight different targets simultaneously, and everyone involved—mortars, gunships, 105s, 155s, 8-inch artillery—were usually able to respond to our adjustments in less than a minute, sometimes as quickly as fifteen seconds. The gunships exposed themselves to great risk coming in as low as they did. We owe our lives to the pilots in the back seats of those Cobras and the gunners in the front seats.
Straub and Potter were in position among the boulders five to ten meters up from Delta One. The enemy was so close on that side—too close to be affected by the protective ring of mortar and artillery fire—that satchel charges flew over the heads of the troops on the perimeter and landed right in the CP. “At one point, four satchel charges exploded against the inside edge of the boulder about six feet to my left,” wrote Potter, who, like Straub, won the Silver Star for coordinating the defense of Hill 805. “I didn’t expect to see the sun rise in the morning. We were that close to being overrun. . . .”
Many battles were going on at the same time. Specialist Fourth Class Jack L. Godwin, with the center squad of Delta One, was firing away—this was probably before the gunships arrived, but the order of events could not be recalled precisely even the next day—when a satchel charge landed in his foxhole, blowing off his foot and lower leg. The two GIs in the hole to the left, eardrums ruptured by the blast, fled up the hill to take shelter among the boulders at the top.
The squad leader on the left flank of the platoon sent two of his men to fill the gap. One of them, Sp4 John L. “Red” Keister, ran to Pfc. Martin Cirrincione—the platoon sergeant’s radioman had grabbed a position near Godwin—and asked where he should go, where he was needed most. “Right here with me,” Cirrincione exclaimed. Almost as soon as the two began firing down the hill, Keister was shot just below the brim of his helmet and slumped dead against Cirrincione, who was splattered when the hole was blown in his buddy’s head. The shot had apparently come from the sapper ensconced behind the log in front of Denny Belt. “He had me cold,” recounted Belt, who, unable to raise his head, frantically lobbed frags at the sapper. Belt had a case of grenades, two-thirds full, and he “threw almost all of them that were in there. . . .”
Cirrincione screamed that he was out of ammo, and Sergeant Cooksley, appearing above him on the hillside, threw down a bandolier for his M16. Everyone was eating up ammo. “The machine gunner in the bunker to our left was sending out a steady stream of fire. The barrel was bright red and I could see the piston pumping,” noted Sergeant Blackman of Delta Three. Blackman, his own weapon jammed, was alternately rolling grenades down the slope and loading magazines for the others in his bunker. The night was like a Bosch painting. “The sound of the incoming artillery rounds was absolutely unbelievable,” wrote Blackman. “They sounded like train wrecks. The whole thing was unreal . . . the tracers from the Quad-50 on Ripcord and our small-arms fire, the Cobras circling like vultures, miniguns belching, explosions from grenades and satchel charges and RPGs, smoke, flares, dancing shadows. . . . This couldn’t be happening. Such firepower, yet they kept coming. What drives these men we call gooks?”
Blackman’s account continued:
I remember glancing at the men in our bunker as I loaded magazines, taking note of how hard they were working at trying to kill people and stay alive. It was only a quick glance, but the memory has stayed with me always. These were the men I ate with, slept with, and shared future plans with on a daily basis. To make those plans come true we had to survive the night. To do that we had to fight like hell. These guys, my friends, were shooting, throwing grenades, yelling for ammo, operating automatically, out of instinct. It was like living in a war movie except you could smell the smoke and feel the concussions from the satchel charges and RPGs. I remember their helmets rocking back and forth with each round they fired, and their concentration, their determination—there was no time for fear, though it was certainly there. The flashes from exploding satchel charges and RPGs, and our own grenades, caused no flinching or ducking down. There was a job to do and we couldn’t hide. . . .
Lieutenant Guerra, only one day with the platoon but a seasoned veteran of Hard Luck Alpha, jumped into Blackman’s bunker “and asked if we could tell where any of the NVA were. We pointed out a couple spots, and he got on top of the overhead cover and began shooting LAWs down at the suspected enemy positions. I remember looking up through the overhead cover from inside the bunker, and seeing him on one knee, a LAW on his shoulder, totally exposed amid the incoming fire. I thought that was a little crazy, but it was a crazy night. . . .”
Lieutenant Palm also exposed himself freely as he moved from position to position in his sector; he was finally hit while attempting to rescue Jack Godwin. Huddled at the bottom of his foxhole, the badly wounded Godwin had heard Palm calling as he approached, but Palm no sooner reached the position than he was shot in the chest at close range and fell in a heap on top of Godwin.
Straub got Lieutenant Shipley on the horn, telling him, because his platoon was not under direct attack, to dispatch four men to hard-pressed Delta One. Staff Sergeant James T. Hembree, the platoon sergeant, picked the four, including a machine gunner. Hembree immediately reconsidered, perhaps seeing the flash of fear in the kid’s eyes. “Never mind,” he said, taking the M60. “I’ll go myself.”
Sergeant Hembree, slung with extra ammo for Palm’s platoon, led his three reinforcements to the west side of the hill and was maneuvering into a position to clean out several NVA from behind a boulder with his M60 when he was killed by a shot through the neck. Hembree, a twenty-six-year-old Regular Army NCO from Georgia with a Korean wife, had been with Delta Two for eight months and was the backbone of the platoon, the pro whom lieutenants and troops alike leaned on and learned from.
Private First Class Keith E. Utter, also of Delta Two, caught a bullet in the head and, like Hembree, was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for rushing to the aid of Delta One. As it could best be pieced together after the fact, Hembree and Utter, like Jones, Keister, and probably Palm, too, had been shot by the sapper behind the log. The sapper, lying still, holding his fire until he had clear targets, picked off his victims with single shots or quick bursts, leaving most of the defenders unaware in the confusion that one of their attackers had gotten in so close to the perimeter.
Sergeant Warren R. Hanrahan, another of Hembree’s reinforcements, jumped into a foxhole upon cresting the hill. Just below, Sp4 Ronald W. Grubidt, Delta One’s medic, was in another foxhole with a wounded man, “calling for some covering fire to get his man out,” recalled Hanrahan. “I started down toward his hole when I got hit in the right side of my neck.” Hanrahan survived by a fraction of an inch, the bullet passing between his jugular vein and spinal cord, which was nonetheless bruised, temporarily paralyzing his right arm. “It’s kind of fuzzy in my memory,” continued Hanrahan, who was losing blood and unable to speak, “but the [wounded] man and I crawled back up the hill, helping each other. We stopped in a hole awhile. My [M16] had gotten smashed when I got hit, but the other man gave me [his M16]. I had to shoot with my left hand, [and] I remember he told me I might as well go [back] across to the other side with that kind of shooting.”
The center of Palm’s line was basically being held by Sp4 Roger Myles, machine gunner, and Pfc. Angel Arimont, assistant gunner, who, feeling all alone, such were the casualties, laid down a continuous sheet of M60 fire from the foxhole immediately to the right of Godwin’s. Their fire abruptly stopped. Myles shouted that he had a jam. “Roger always took good care of his weapon, so the jamming could not be attributed to carelessness on his part,” noted Rod Soubers. “He had complained, in fact, about having a bad barrel weeks before 805, but was never issued another one. . . .”
Hoping to help, the machine gunner on the right flank, Sp4 Paul G. “Rat” Guimond, a tough, sarcastic kid from Chicago who had recently married a Thai girl on R&R, left the foxhole from which he had been blazing away with his own M60 and raced down the line toward Myles. Sergeant Drew Gaster reached out to trip Guimond as he went past; failing that, he began “yellin’ for him to stay down,” Gaster recalled, “because he was runnin’ standin’ up. . . .”
It was probably the sapper behind the log who nailed Guimond as he passed behind Belt’s foxhole, and he tumbled twenty feet down the slope, ending up in a sprawl between friend and foe. Denny Belt and Rod Soubers waited until the latest flare blew out of range, then, hoping the darkness would cover them, rushed down to get Guimond. They were almost there when Belt suddenly froze and yelled that he was hit and couldn’t move. One round had taken him in the stomach, nicking his spine on its way out his back; another round had shattered his left hip. Soubers hefted Belt over his shoulder, barely noticing the bullet that creased the side of his steel pot, and hustled back up the steep slope, legs pumping in the loose earth. Soubers later wrote that Belt was “cussing a blue streak as I carried him up the hill, since the pain of his stomach wound was so intense. After I got him up to a level spot above our position, I wrapped a poncho liner around him while at the same time yelling for a medic. I then went back to our position on the line, hesitant to go back after Rat given the intense fire we were getting . . .”
The platoon medic, Doc Grubidt, scrambled from one casualty to the next with his aid bag. At some point, he and several grunts carried Jack Godwin from his foxhole to the collecting point that the other medics had established among the boulders at the top of the hill. Grubidt pulled Palm out of the same foxhole as Godwin, but it was too late to do anything for the platoon leader, and Grubidt cried out in anguish, “Oh, my God, the lieutenant’s just died in my arms.”
Lieutenant Palm won a posthumous Silver Star. Despite the heavy casualties, Delta One was still holding. Myles had gotten his machine gun back into action, and Drew Gaster, assisted by Pfc. Rodney B. “Nose” Collins, had taken over Guimond’s M60.
Rod Soubers took up a position with his best friend, Sp4 David R. Beyl, who methodically lobbed M79 shells into the deadfall when not answering the muzzle flashes winking from the trees on the far side of the LZ. Sergeant Cooksley— wounded when a bullet smashed through the magazine in his M16, spraying bits of metal—moved along the perimeter, noted Soubers, “giving help when he could and giving orders, and in general taking charge of the platoon. . . .”
Denny Belt was holding his gut, writhing in agony as he waited for Grubidt to get to him, when he saw in the light of a flare that the man who’d been in his foxhole when the attack started was crouched behind a boulder a few feet farther up the hill. “Come down here and put my rifle in my hands,” Belt implored, terrified that the enemy was going to dart through the decimated line and kill him as he lay there, helpless, paralyzed from the waist down. The man behind the boulder said that he had something in his eye and couldn’t see, then disappeared. “The son of a bitch split on me,” Belt would recall bitterly. “He never took any part in the action at all, and wouldn’t even move a few feet to help me. What makes me madder, he was always the gung-ho type until then.”
At some point in the action, Captain Straub received support from six Marine A-6 Intruders, a jet fighter-bomber specifically designed to hit targets obscured by darkness or bad weather, guided in this instance by the navigational beacon on Ripcord. “I just had to give range and direction from 805 to have the bombs placed with accuracy, even in total darkness,” noted Straub. Each Intruder released twenty-eight 500-pound bombs at a time. “It was a spectacular sight,” said Straub, “and it broke up the attack on us.”
At the forty-five-minute mark, a CH-47 flareship out of Camp Evans arrived. “Captain Straub gave instructions to the pilot in order to adjust each flare drop so the wind would carry the flares to where they would silhouette the enemy,” wrote Potter. “Constant adjustments were needed because of the winds. . . .”
The enemy fire slowed, then dried up completely at 3:20 A.M. Staff Sergeant Raymond T. Dotson, platoon sergeant for Delta Three, appeared at the entrance of Blackman’s bunker. “First Platoon’s been hit hard,” he said. “There are men laying all over the side of the hill. I need one man to come with me. We have to reinforce that side.” The grunts in the bunker looked at one another, too stunned to answer. “C’mon,” Dotson barked. “I don’t care who goes, but we gotta go now. They need help over there.”
Blackman was closest to the entrance, so, having just cleared his jammed M16, he climbed out to follow Dotson. They went first to the top of the hill, then started down toward Delta One. Blackman, stumbling against something, realized that “there were three men lying in a row at my feet, covered with poncho liners. You could see their boots. I knew they were dead but didn’t want to believe it, and my first thought was, how can they sleep through all this?”
Dotson shouted at Blackman to come on, then pointed to a prone fighting position: “You stay here and keep your eyes open.”
Blackman saw that there was only one man in the hole to his left and the foxhole to his right was empty. I hope my damn M16 doesn’t jam again, he thought. I should have brought more frags.
Taking advantage of the lull in the enemy fire, Sergeant Cooksley and Rod Soubers hastily put together a plan to get Rat Guimond. “Mike [Cooksley] said that he would have the whole [platoon] put out covering fire if I and another guy would go after Rat,” Soubers would later write. Cooksley cautioned Soubers to make his move when the area was fully illuminated “since the gooks would be laying low in order to avoid detection. . . . During the course of the battle it [had] bec[o]me evident [to Cooksley] that the NVA were using the cover of darkness for movement. Whenever the flares were up[,] the NVA were apparently crouched low and motionless.”
Cooksley and Soubers moved along the line, getting everyone organized to lay down the cover fire. Blackman saw someone he didn’t know stop and talk to the guy to his left, then the man—it was Soubers—came over to his position. “Rat’s down there and he’s still alive,” he said. “I want you to help me carry him up.”
Blackman went cold. “Where?” he mumbled.
“He’s right down there,” Soubers snapped, pointing to an inert shape lying just on their side of the concertina wire. “Can’t you see him? He’s still alive, damn it, and when I come back, we’re gonna bring him up.”
The man disappeared, then more illum popped overhead and Blackman saw him to his left, rushing downhill at an angle toward Guimond. Blackman hesitated, terrified. Soubers turned, screaming at him, “Get some balls about you, man, and help me.”
Blackman slid down the hill after Soubers. Grabbing an arm each, they dragged Guimond back up the steep slope and laid him on his back near Denny Belt. Guimond had been shot in the temple and had blood all over the side of his face. Doc Grubidt placed a bandage against the wound and told Blackman, lying next to the unconscious Guimond, to hold it in place until the medevac arrived. “Damnit, Rat,” Blackman pleaded, “don’t die, man.”
The medevac that arrived at 3:40 A.M. was unable to land because of the boulders. The pilot instead lowered a basket while holding his aircraft steady in the buffeting winds over a strobe light that marked the perimeter. “There is a strange silence when a helicopter is hovering overhead—all you hear is the rotors,” wrote Sp4 Gary L. Fowler, senior company medic. Once the basket touched down, it was carried to the casualties—Fowler loaded Guimond first, Denny Belt on top—then carried back so that Fowler could reattach it to the cable dangling beneath the Huey. Fowler worked fast as the grunts on the perimeter laid down suppressive fire and gunships streaked in, miniguns blazing, rocket pods flashing, expecting the NVA to slam an RPG into the medevac at any moment and send it crashing down atop the company.
To save time, Fowler loaded only Jack Godwin into the basket lowered by a second hovering medevac. As the first medevac neared Camp Evans, meanwhile, Belt “could feel Guimond breathing hard under me—and just as the hospital hut came into sight, I felt him gasp his last breath, and he died. . . .”
Captain Straub spent what was left of the night controlling an air force C-130 that had come on station during the second medevac and flew lazy eights over the area for the hour and a half till dawn, discharging a succession of large flares to discourage another attack. No one slept. When the sun finally came up, all the claymores that hadn’t been used during the attack were detonated on Straub’s command so that new ones could be emplaced in safety, the thunderclap a finale of sorts to the battle. “The hill now had an eerie stillness to it,” wrote Rod Soubers. “We walked around almost in a daze as smoke from the many small fires that had been ignited by the firefight was whipped around by the wind.”
Soubers’s friend Dave Beyl walked down the line to see how the rest of the platoon had fared. Learning only then about Lieutenant Palm, Beyl returned with tears in his eyes to tell Soubers. Physically spent, emotionally overwrought, Beyl and Soubers sat on the side of the hill, heads down, crying. They fell silent after a time and looked out over the dense vegetation between the hill and Ripcord. “Well, Rod,” Beyl finally said, “at least we made it through.”
Many of the grenades thrown down the hill during the attack had failed to explode. Some of the duds now began to cook off in the smoldering deadfall. Nose Collins was injured by one of the unexpected explosions and was evacuated in a medevac basket.
Security patrols found a bag of satchel charges that had been lost in the dark, along with an RPG. Five shot-up bodies had also been left behind, a sure sign that the enemy had been badly hurt, for they always made every effort to recover their fallen comrades. One of the dead men was the sapper behind the log, his right hand blown off, apparently from a grenade he had tried to throw back.
With a squad securing the landing zone so that a chopper could touch down, Straub had Doc Fowler determine which of the remaining wounded required evacuation. Fowler sent six men out, to include troops with blown-out eardrums and Warren Hanrahan, a bandage wrapped around his throat. Those suffering from what were in comparison superficial fragment wounds, and there were many, stayed on the hill. “I wouldn’t let anyone be medevacked unless he had a really serious wound,” said Straub. “Anybody who could pull a trigger and throw frags was going to be of immense value when the next attack came. I didn’t get any resistance on this. Nobody complained, nobody pleaded to be sent out. They were willing to stay with the unit until this mess was over.”
Observation posts were reestablished. Log birds shuttled in with ammo and claymores and wire, plus twenty hapless replacements. The log birds left with the dead, who had been carried in body bags down to the LZ. Lucas and his artillery liaison officer also landed, bringing mail, medical supplies, and two starlight scopes for Straub. Lucas, apparently having detected the depression in Straub’s voice when he reported his casualties, made a point to reemphasize to the company commander the importance of holding the hill. “Lucas talked to me and bucked me up,” recalled Straub. “He gave me a good little pep talk, which I needed. He got me thinking positively and made me stop feeling sorry for Delta Company. And then he went around to every position and talked to everybody, sat in foxholes and talked with the troops. That was super.”