CHAPTER 18
The strength of the enemy positions on Hill 1000 and the ferocity of the attacks on Hill 805 came as a revelation to Colonel Harrison. Contact had previously been too sporadic, the shelling of the firebase too intermittent, to suggest to the brigade commander that a major engagement was in the making. The actions at Hills 805 and 1000 began to bring the situation into better focus. “However, we still did not have a good fix on the size of the force opposing us or a clear picture of the enemy’s intentions,” wrote Harrison. Was the action around the firebase mere harassment, a diversion to draw attention away from something big about to happen somewhere else, or were the NVA, in fact, preparing a set-piece battle to destroy Ripcord?
“It’s easy now to reconstruct the enemy plan, but it was a most frustrating mystery then,” admitted Harrison, who was new to the area, having only replaced Bill Bradley on June 23. “As intense as the attacks on Hill 805 were, there was no evidence of mass numbers of enemy troops being involved. There were, in fact, no sightings of large enemy troop movements anywhere in the area. Not even a company-sized unit had been spotted at that stage. We were still desperately looking for targets. Clearly, we had a paucity of good intelligence.”
The terrain allowed the enemy to mass without notice and inflict heavy casualties without warning on isolated units. “You need troops on the ground to see what’s going on in the jungle,” wrote Harrison. “On the other hand, you simply cannot spread troops out too far in that kind of environment in an effort to locate the enemy.” When Harrison assumed command of the brigade, he found that the line battalions sowed the jungle with platoon patrols. “There was no way in hell that those understrength and widely separated platoons could have supported one another if hit by a large enemy force,” Harrison contended. “I ordered that until further notice units were to operate in company-size elements. One might argue that had I allowed the platoon patrols to continue we may have gained more intelligence more quickly about what was happening in the hills around Ripcord. I considered that and rejected it as too high a risk. Others may have different views.
“What could have been done?” Harrison wrote, dissecting the battle. “Perhaps the best chance of improving our intelligence in that situation would have been more intense reconnaissance by air cavalry of the many routes into and out of the A Shau. I said then, and I’ll say now, I would gladly trade two battalions of infantry for one squadron of air cavalry. As it was, our one squadron of air cavalry was stretched very thin in a large division AO.”
Lieutenant Colonel Robert F. Molinelli’s 2-17th Cavalry had deployed to Quang Tri City, in fact, during the first week of Ripcord in response to intelligence indicating that the replacement-filled 9th Regiment, 304th NVA Division, was going to cross the Laotian border into South Vietnam near Khe Sanh. On July 8, one of several Pink Teams braving a heavy overcast that the enemy had hoped would ground its foe’s helicopters caught a two-hundred-man NVA column as it marched down a thin trail in tall, concealing elephant grass. The result was a turkey shoot as swarms of scouts and gunships converged on the scene, hosing down the fleeing enemy with rockets and miniguns. Three shaken prisoners were scooped up by the squadron’s ground troop. The body count was 139. The area was subjected the next day to B-52 Arc Lights.
To further exploit the situation, Colonel Harrison was given operational control of Chuck Shay’s 2-502d Infantry, which reopened FSB Shepherd for a battery of ARVN 105s. Harrison himself moved a jump CP to Camp Carroll, another of the old U. S. Marine bases facing the DMZ. Molinelli’s pilots continued to rack up numerous kills. Two battalions from the 1st ARVN Infantry Division inserted into the area captured piles of abandoned enemy weapons and rucksacks and counted a hundred more NVA bodies strewn amid the cratered rubble left by the B-52s. The enemy regiment having been destroyed before it even had a chance to fight, the ARVN and Screaming Eagles returned to Thua Thien Province on July 15.
Harrison wanted to wreak the same type of havoc on the enemy in the Ripcord AO. As Harrison’s awareness of NVA strength around the firebase grew, so too did his determination to defeat the foe where they stood. It was a battle that made sense to the new brigade commander. “My understanding of the division mission,” he later wrote, “was that we were to deny the enemy a chance to prepare an area from which they could launch another Tet-type offensive on the populated coastal area. It was also desired that we inflict as much hurt on the enemy as we could before we withdrew from Vietnam entirely and left the ARVN holding the bag.”
Lieutenant Case, the brigade commander’s acting artillery liaison officer, witnessed a vivid demonstration of Harrison’s commitment to hold Ripcord. It came during a meeting with General Berry during one of Harrison’s daily trips to Ripcord. “There was an upper and a lower landing pad at Ripcord,” wrote Case, setting the scene. “The lower pad wasn’t as zeroed in as the upper pad, but landing at the lower pad meant you had a longer walk to the safety of the battalion TOC.” The brigade command ship “always landed at the lower pad,” noted Case, and those on board would “stride single file to the TOC amid the incoming that usually began when a helicopter arrived. Colonel Harrison set a leisurely pace. Whatever staff officers made the trip that day walked behind Harrison, with me, the junior officer, last in line. Helicopters, incidentally, didn’t wait on the pad at Ripcord, as they would at most firebases, but lifted off and circled the firebase to escape the incoming.”
Harrison was already headed for the operations center on the day in question when Berry’s command ship followed the brigade commander’s onto the lower landing pad. Harrison and Case met Berry as he came uphill, and the three proceeded toward the TOC. “As I followed Berry and Harrison, mortar rounds started coming in as usual,” recounted Case, “but they mostly impacted in the wire on the slopes of the firebase. Berry and Harrison obviously wanted to discuss the situation in private, rather than in the presence of Lucas,” Case continued. “About halfway to the TOC, they saw a soldier emerge from a sandbagged conex. Harrison and Berry stepped inside the conex and shut the door behind them. For a moment, I felt as though I’d been left out in the rain, only it was raining mortar rounds instead of raindrops. Realizing what they had done, Harrison opened the door and motioned me inside. There was barely room for the three of us in the conex and we had to scrunch up against the metal walls. Pressed up against a brigadier general and a full colonel, I felt very rank conscious.” As Case listened, Berry informed Harrison that he had spoken to higher headquarters—none of the three can now remember whether Berry was referring to XXIV Corps, USARV, or MACV—and the upper echelons were determined to hold Ripcord. “Yes,” Harrison exclaimed, slamming his fist into his palm.
“It was the only time I saw the colonel really animated,” noted Case. “My impression was that Harrison had expected a decision to abandon the firebase. These quotes are far from exact, but Harrison then said something to the effect that, We’ve got to hold the firebase. We can hold. We can’t let them win here.” Harrison further maintained, recalled Case, “that if the NVA knocked us off Ripcord, they would start picking off our forward firebases one by one. I silently agreed. At any rate, I came away with the impression that Berry and Harrison felt Ripcord had as much symbolic as strategic significance. I think they viewed the battle as a test of wills with the North Vietnamese.”
Case’s narrative presents Colonel Harrison as a stolid and courageous officer. The image is accurate. Harrison’s battalion commanders found him a “calm, levelheaded, and highly competent brigade commander,” to quote one. The brigade staff loved him. “Colonel Harrison was an old-fashioned soldier’s soldier,” stated Fred Spaulding, the air operations officer. “He was firm and demanding and completely in charge, but also low-key, the kind of commander who worked with his people as a team. He never drew attention to himself or sought accolades from above like so many of the ticket-punchers.” One junior officer found the colonel “gruff but compassionate.” Spaulding was particularly impressed that Harrison “still believed that a leader was supposed to pick up a rucksack and rifle and get out with the troops. He spent a lot of time out on the firebases, and even a few nights out in the boonies with the line companies. Harrison cared a hell of a lot about his troops, but he also knew that his job was to find the enemy and go after them, and that’s exactly what he did at Ripcord.”
Ben Harrison was the son of an elderly country doctor in Truman, Arkansas, who died when the boy was ten. Ben entered college at sixteen but ran out of money and left after two semesters “to join the Army and see the world,” he recalled, “but primarily to get the GI Bill so I could come back and finish school.”
An instructor at the adjutant general’s school, Harrison made sergeant first class during his 1946–49 enlistment, whereupon he returned to the University of Mississippi to major in psychology. He served as an infantry platoon sergeant in the reserves while a student, attended jump school, and, as a member of Ole Miss’s ROTC program, was commissioned upon graduation in 1951.
Harrison served six years in infantry units before going to flight school in 1958. As a lieutenant colonel, he commanded the 10th Aviation Battalion, 1st Aviation Brigade, for a full year, 1966–67, during his first tour in Vietnam. The battalion supported the then-separate 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, which had preceded the rest of the division to the war zone, in the rugged mountains of II Corps. It was a year of intense combat, during which Harrison earned numerous awards, including the Silver Star and two Distinguished Flying Crosses. Because the aviators not only flew for the infantry but shared their remote and often-mortared forward base camps, Harrison was pinned with a CIB by the Screaming Eagles.
As a brigade commander, Harrison flew his own C&C Huey. He did so with casual expertise. Lieutenant Colonel Bobby B. Porter, who assumed command of the 1-506th Infantry during the Ripcord battle, recalled an incident involving Harrison’s flying skills from the monsoon season of late 1970. One of Porter’s platoons had discovered a weapons cache while operating off FSB Rakkasan. The platoon was instructed to remain with the cache until helicopters could evacuate it. Low clouds socked the platoon in for two days, however, preventing the numerous pilots who tried from reaching the position. By the third day, the platoon was in serious need of resupply, and Porter went to the brigade TOC to discuss the matter with Harrison. “Let’s give it another shot,” Harrison said.
“This time, Colonel Harrison flew the mission himself,” noted Porter, who went along and “observed Harrison literally ‘walk’ his helicopter across the tops of the jungle trees until he was over the platoon. We roped water, rations, and radio batteries into them, plus enough TNT to clear an LZ. Harrison spoke to the platoon leader by radio, instructing him to blow and clear a one-ship LZ, and that we would be back to pick up the platoon and their weapons cache. We then ‘walked’ the helicopter back to Camp Evans.” By the time the platoon had cleared a landing zone, “the ceiling had lifted just a bit,” wrote Porter. “Harrison was able to guide several helicopters to the platoon’s location, and after a few round trips in and out of the location, he had recovered the platoon and a sizable weapons cache. This is just one minor example of the type of combat commander and helicopter pilot we had in Ben Harrison.”
Though General Berry was, like Harrison, new to the division, his reputation was well known. “Sid Berry was outstanding his entire career,” wrote Harrison. Berry had been well rewarded for his excellence. “Fairly early in one’s career, usually by the rank of captain, the cream rises to the top and the fast-burners are recognized by the hierarchy,” noted Harrison. Those so recognized, and Berry was one of them, “get the early, below-the-zone promotions. They also get special attention from the assignment personnel in the Pentagon, who try to provide them the right professional development opportunities—in other words, that combination of staff, school, and command assignments required to enter the upper echelons of the United States Army.”
Berry’s renown was such that he was profiled by Lewis H. Lapham in Life magazine. Lapham described Berry as “a lean and athletic man, not particularly tall and with graying hair cut severely short. His strong face has the impassive cast of a man accustomed to command, an impression enhanced by the thin line of the mouth and the aggressive forward slant of the jaw. It is a face that would lend itself to [being carved] in stone or mint[ed] on coins. . . . I was struck not only by his military bearing but also by an air of exuberant self-confidence that I found inexplicably disturbing and only later came to recognize as a necessary characteristic of the warrior hero. I use the word without irony. Having read the full record of the general’s life, I can image him at Thermopylae. . . .”
Raised by his stern, widowed father—a country lawyer and judge who expected great things of his only son—Sid Berry of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had originally been commissioned with the West Point Class of ’48. He was posted to occupation duty in Japan in 1949 and commanded a rifle company in the 25th Infantry Division during the first terrible year of the Korean War, winning two battlefield promotions and coming home in 1951 a twenty-five-year-old major with a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and two Silver Stars.
Berry’s performance under fire opened doors for him. He was sent to graduate school at Columbia University, taught history at West Point, and, still a major, commanded a mechanized infantry battalion in Germany that had been rated subpar before he turned it around. He attended jump school, ranger school, and Command & General Staff College on his way to making lieutenant colonel. He was selected by Robert S. McNamara to serve as a military assistant in the office of the secretary of defense, one of those prestige positions that mark a rising star, and accompanied McNamara during four trips to Vietnam between 1961 and 1964.
Promoted to colonel after graduating from the Army War College, Berry was assigned in July 1965 as senior advisor to the 7th ARVN Division in the Mekong Delta. He was wounded by a loose grenade while inspecting two captured sampans filled with ammo meant for the VC. As his tour wound down, Berry resisted reassignment to the United States, arranging instead, through his acquaintance with Maj. Gen. William E. DePuy, commanding general (CG), 1st Infantry Division, to take command of a brigade in the Big Red One. DePuy was a hard man to work for. He was, in fact, infamous for his ruthless elimination of subordinates who did not meet his exacting standards. “DePuy was a brilliant, demanding division commander with a solid combat record from WWII,” wrote Harrison. “He stated that he would not allow officers to learn how to fight at the expense of his soldiers. They had to be professionally competent when they joined his division. The record reflects that he relieved thirty-nine lieutenant colonels during his one year in command of the Big Red One.”
Berry commanded a brigade under DePuy from June 1966 until completing his extended tour in January 1967. The young colonel habitually joined his troops on the ground when they made contact, and earned two more Silver Stars during heavy action in the tropical rain forests of War Zone C northwest of Saigon. Berry exposed himself to enemy fire so routinely and fearlessly that DePuy would tell Lapham that he’d had “no right to survive.”
Berry’s more than successful command of a brigade in combat won him an early promotion to brigadier general and assignment as assistant commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning from 1968 to 1970. “This is a highly sought after position and is considered a great honor by all infantry officers,” noted Harrison. Berry was, in fact, being groomed as a future Army Chief of Staff. Senior officers at the Pentagon said as much to Lapham as the writer from Life did background research for an article about the process by which a man becomes a general. At the suggestion of those senior officers, Lapham used Berry as his case study, quoting DePuy to the effect that “Sid Berry expresses the ideal of the American soldier. He is what the profession would like to believe itself to be.”
Lapham’s article, based on conversations with Berry at Fort Benning in the spring of 1970, was a bittersweet portrait of the general as ascetic, ramrod straight in bearing and manner, a reserved, deeply patriotic, and religious man somewhat aloof from his contemporaries, though not lacking in humor and a streak of soldierly sentimentality, who had given himself totally to his profession and his own ambitions. “I know I short the family, but they get conditioned,” Berry said coolly. His wife was a devout Quaker. Their home struck Lapham as “unusually silent. The general’s two young daughters remained obediently out of sight; his 17-year-old son, who wears his hair long and subscribes to peace movements, played the guitar very softly in an upstairs room. . . .”
Brigadier General Berry returned to Vietnam on July 2, 1970, as assistant division commander for operations, 101st Airborne Division. “Berry visited me and my brigade every day and was frequently critical, but that was no surprise,” noted Harrison. “There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that General Berry was going to be a very tough taskmaster.” That was the role of a division commander’s right-hand man. Whereas Berry struck some subordinates as overzealous in his fault-finding, Harrison tended to ascribe such harshness to the lessons he had absorbed with the Big Red One: “It is not unreasonable to assume that Berry thought that DePuy had it right; no one deserves a second chance, fire the SOB, and get some competent professional to replace him.”
Harrison further noted that the imminent publication of the Lapham article, which appeared in the September 25, 1970, issue of Life, put “considerable pressure on Berry to perform in an exceptionally professional manner and succeed, as portrayed, as the brilliant star of a new generation of Army generals.”
The heat was on from the moment Berry reached Camp Eagle. “I liked Sid Berry,” said Col. David E. Grange, CO, Division Support Command (DISCOM), 101st, during Ripcord. “We got along well and he took good care of me professionally—but he was a tough guy to work for. He was very professional, very demanding. I mean there were no gray areas with him. It was black and white.”
Lieutenant Fox, who came to admire Berry greatly while serving as his command-ship pilot, offered this portrait of the general:
General Berry loved the soldier. He had great compassion for the soldier. When we landed at a firebase, usually unannounced, he would ignore the battalion commander when he came running up to greet him because he didn’t want to talk to him at that time. General Berry wanted to get down to the bunker line and talk to the soldiers. He put them first. He wanted to see what they saw, understand what they understood, know what they knew. If it was near lunch time, he wanted to know what was for chow, and whatever that young man in the foxhole was eating, that’s what he would eat. If it was C-rations, the general’s favorite was beans and franks. The rest of us stayed away until General Berry had finished touring the base and talking to the soldiers, then he would rejoin us at the battalion TOC and receive a briefing. The briefing meant more than it would have otherwise because by talking with the troops, General Berry understood the morale of the unit and what the soldiers were expecting in terms of enemy activity. His conversations told him just how well a battalion was communicating intelligence about the enemy down to the privates.
Berry was a fanatic for details. He had a bulldog temper, noted Fox, when he discovered laxness in a unit:
As the old saying goes, the troops only do best what the boss checks most, but believe me, General Berry checked everything most. He was tireless. When he wasn’t out on one firebase, he was monitoring the battalion nets in the command ship on our way to the next firebase. Whenever contact was made anywhere in the division area, he would go there as fast as possible to see what was going on and provide whatever support was needed. General Berry made a lot of people mad. They felt they were being watched over their shoulders, but it kept them on their toes. General Berry told his officers that this is the standard and you will adhere to this standard and I will hold you to this standard.
I remember one incident in which we landed on a hilltop the same afternoon that a company had combat-assaulted onto the site to open a new firebase. We came back three days later and General Berry was shocked to see soldiers sitting around on the perimeter, smoking and really not doing anything in particular. General Berry went down to one of the soldiers and asked him where his fighting position was. The soldier pointed to a shallow foxhole. There were no sandbags, there were no cleared fields of fire, there was no concertina wire, there were no claymores. This was three days after the company had opened the firebase, and it should have been done in three hours. General Berry hauled the company commander down into the TOC and ran everybody else out. I thought I was going to see that young captain come flying out of the bunker in pieces and parts because General Berry was just furious that he had exhibited such poor leadership and such lack of concern for his soldiers to not even have them prepare adequate defensive positions for their own safety. General Berry had the battalion commander bring out a new company commander and escort the other officer off the firebase, and he stayed there until that new captain actively had people digging foxholes and setting up concertina wire.
Berry enjoyed being photographed—the function, as his detractors saw it, of an overblown ego. Captain Michaud, battery commander with the 2-319th FA, was left a little cold when the cameras began clicking during one of Berry’s visits to FSB Rakkasan. “It was during the monsoon, and we’d been living in the rain and mud for weeks on end,” recalled Michaud. “Berry got off his helicopter all spit and polish, and jumped into a fighting position knee-deep in mud while his aide stood at the edge of the position taking pictures of him. That wasn’t the kind of thing your typical general did.”
Berry assumed an aggressive stance when conferring with subordinates, feet well apart, arms crossed over his chest, head tilted back to one side, eyes narrowed to skeptical slits. “Berry was not one for small talk or chitchat,” noted Colonel Harrison. “He did not talk with anyone so much as question them, and his style was to be on the offensive, to take the initiative and set the terms.”
Lieutenant Colonel Porter of the 1-506th, a future general officer himself, recalled that “one got the feeling of being in a ‘gotcha’ situation when conversing with General Berry. I’m sure he didn’t intend to, but he projected somewhat of a pompous attitude. I had no reservations, however, about his tactical competence.”
Captain Hawkins of A/2-506th saw only strength in Berry’s persona and considered the assistant division commander “one of the few generals with any real guts.” Hawkins elaborated:
Once, after Ripcord, when we were working the FSB Kathryn AO, General Berry landed his C&C ship in the midst of a CA I was conducting. His aide kicked out a ruck and an M16 and took off with the ship. Berry told me he would be spending the night and not to worry about him, he would join my CP after the dust had settled. He spent the next four hours talking to and working with the troops. He helped them assign sectors of fire, construct foxholes, fire in defensive targets, debrief recon patrols, you name it. Then he and my RTO dug his foxhole at my CP and we settled in for an evening of discussion. Our big bitch was radio call signs for artillery forward observers, which remained the same and allowed the NVA to identify the units after listening to the FO for a few minutes. Three days later Berry had the Signal Security Instructions/Signal Operating Instructions (SSI/ SOI) completely revamped.
Colonel Walter H. Root’s memories of Berry are instructive. The commander of the 2d Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division wrote: “Sid Berry had well developed notions of what a combat commander should be—what he should look like, act like, talk like, think like. Sid lived up to those standards in every way himself, and had some trouble concealing his disdain for those who didn’t.”
Root thought Berry’s disdain sometimes misplaced. On the occasion of Berry’s first visit to Root’s brigade, he met Root out on one of the firebases in the 2d Brigade AO. Root, in turn, introduced the general to the battalion commander on the base. The battalion commander saluted smartly, and Berry asked, “How are things going?” The battalion commander replied, “About as well as could be expected, sir.” On the way back to his helicopter, Berry said to Root, “That officer should be relieved of his command. Anyone satisfied with the status quo has no business commanding troops in this division.” Root was taken aback, though he did not think Berry entirely serious. “Berry’s comment was intended, I guess, to impress me,” recalled Root. “It didn’t. I thought it a very extreme response to someone who was just trying to be modest. Not all of us are showmen. The battalion commander concerned was actually a favorite of mine and the division commander. Berry mellowed a lot in the ensuing months, and better than any other commander I have known, he could get in front of a group of men and make them feel that there wasn’t anything they couldn’t accomplish.”
General Hennessey, the division commander, had been forced to postpone Operation Chicago Peak, the offensive into the Co Pung Mountain area that Ripcord existed to support, because of the air cavalry squadron’s discovery of the enemy regiment near Khe Sanh. Chicago Peak, already postponed several times by corps, had finally been scheduled to begin on July 10. The pressure was considerable to get the operation rolling so that as much damage could be done to the enemy as possible before the seasonal approach of the monsoon once again forced the division out of the mountains.
“I spent the morning flying in the nose of a Cobra gunship out over the Ashau Valley[,] reconnoitering the area of operations in which we’ll launch our next major operation,” Berry wrote home in reference to Chicago Peak. “Got a good look at the excellent, well-traveled roads the NVA use to haul their men and equipment through Laos and the Ashau Valley right into the area where we are now fighting them [that is, the Ripcord AO]. . . . This is going to be a difficult operation. The enemy seems to be there in real strength and with many antiaircraft weapons. We are going into his vitals, his supply bases that he has established via Laos.”
The operation could not begin until the Ripcord fight had been finished. To accomplish that, Hennessey and Berry planned to maximize the pressure on the enemy around Ripcord. The taking of Hill 805 by A/2-506th and D/2-501st had been part of that plan, as had the increased use of supporting arms around Ripcord.
The plan next called for Lieutenant Colonel Livingston’s 2-501st Infantry, the division swing battalion, to assault and seize Hill 1000. The key terrain feature had been hit with numerous air strikes since Lucas’s two aborted assaults had revealed the depth of the NVA defenses, but “you cannot suppress a determined enemy indefinitely with firepower alone,” noted Harrison. “At some point the only real solution would be U. S. infantry on the high ground.”
The swing battalion was lifted out of the field on July 11 to get resupplied and reorganized at Camp Evans. Livingston flew in from the TOC he shared with Lucas on Ripcord to brief his company commanders. The attack that Livingston outlined called for a rolling artillery barrage, behind which Companies A, B, and C, and the battalion reconnaissance platoon, converging on the objective from different angles, were to push the NVA off Hill 1000. It was the only time in memory that the battalion was actually being called upon to operate as a battalion. “Captain Goates was ecstatic,” said Jim Kwiecien of A/2-501st, who would recall with distaste someone making the excited suggestion that “we round up some pins so we could stick 101st patches to the eyes of dead dinks.”
Lieutenant Arndt’s recon platoon combat-assaulted into a hot LZ atop Coc Muen Mountain during the afternoon of July 12, followed by Companies B and C. Several men refused to board the slicks when it was Company A’s turn to lift off the pad at Camp Evans. Two were from Lieutenant Kwiecien’s platoon, new men badly shaken by their baptism by fire the previous week on Hill 902. “They sheepishly admitted that they were afraid to go back out,” wrote Kwiecien, who, busy getting the rest of his platoon saddled up, only vaguely noticed the two being “walked off with someone escorting them. I was later informed that one of them, a sergeant who gave the appearance of being really sharp, but who was in reality a heavy-duty doper, was court-martialled and spent some time in LBJ. I would assume the same thing happened to the second man, which is too bad because I think he would have turned out differently if he’d had a less brutal introduction to the war.”
A third man in the platoon had also considered opting for Long Binh Jail over Hill 1000. “Hoffman was kind of a gentle guy with a Master’s in history,” recalled Kwiecien. Though Hoffman was certainly frightened, “his problem was more intellectual. He told me the day before the assault that he didn’t like the person he was becoming as a grunt. I asked the battalion surgeon to talk to him, and he came around.” Kwiecien and Hoffman ended up in the same unit in the States after their tours in Vietnam. “I was very happy he made it out alive,” noted Kwiecien, “because if I had to pick who wouldn’t have made it, it would have been him. He’s probably a professor somewhere now.”
Captain Goates and Company A combat-assaulted onto Triple Hill. The LZ was being secured for them by Captain Rollison and D/2-506th. Delta Company had humped to Ripcord two days earlier. By the time the troops had been resupplied, several men had been seriously wounded by incoming recoilless-rifle fire. What was left of the company moved off the base with mortar shells exploding in the perimeter wire to either side of the column.
Delta Company fought its way to the top of Triple Hill the following evening, pushing off a squad of NVA. There had been a Caucasian with the enemy, presumably the same one spotted in the area three weeks earlier by B/2-506th. “I personally saw him at the top of the hill while we were still at the bottom,” stated Rollison. “He was wearing a bush hat and aviator shades. I assumed he was a Russian advisor. Without taking my eyes off him for fear I would lose sight of him in the vegetation, I borrowed an M16 from one of my RTOs, sighted in, aiming uphill, and squeezed off a single shot. When we took the hill, we found a large blood stain where he had been.”
Lieutenant Colonel Livingston and a small field command group accompanied Alpha Company as it moved off the LZ and set up an NDP on another of the knolls composing Triple Hill. “A battalion commander had actually donned a rucksack and gotten on the ground with his troops,” wrote Kwiecien. “The men positively loved him for this. It just impressed the hell out of them. I mean, here’s this old guy, he had to be about forty, struggling with a ruck just like the grunts.”
After digging in at dusk, Livingston, a former tac officer at the ranger school, discussed with Goates the possibility of conducting a night recon of the objective. “Livingston wanted to make such a recon, but only with volunteers,” noted Goates. “I tried to put together a group of men who were willing to tackle such an assignment, but was only able to come up with about ten men, myself included. Livingston thought it unwise to go with so small a group. Livingston, incidentally, had planned to accompany us had we gone. He had a set of . . .”
The next day was spent prepping the objective. Lieutenant Arndt’s recon platoon began the cautious advance on Hill 1000 early the following morning, July 14, approaching from the southwest while Captain Goates and Alpha Company edged in from the north. The recon platoon, moving down the ridge that knifed off Coc Muen in the direction of Hill 1000, was still a full kilometer from the objective when its point man turned to Arndt and whispered that they had NVA to their right front. Quickly looking where the point man indicated, Arndt too saw an enemy soldier. The man was only forty meters away, casually walking from one position to another within what appeared to be a bunker complex.
“What do you want me to do?” the point man asked.
“Shoot the bastard,” Arndt answered, moving to bring the rest of the platoon up even before the point man cut loose with his M16.
The enemy immediately returned fire. Arndt was rushing back up to the front when rocket-propelled grenades began exploding in the treetops, and he was suddenly blown backward over a log with a little bit of shrapnel in his right shoulder and a lot in his left leg. The recon platoon had nine men wounded in total by the RPGs.
The worst casualty was lifted out by jungle penetrater. Lieutenant Arndt brought in the Cobras soon thereafter, but all attempts to maneuver were met with more enemy fire, as was a medevac that hovered over a clearing a hundred meters back from the bunker complex to which some of the wounded had been moved. The Huey, stitched across its fuel cell and tail boom by a burst of AK-47 fire, managed to make an emergency landing on Ripcord.
Four hours after contact had first been made, two medevacs landed in the insertion LZ atop Coc Muen. “Those of us who were wounded had to crawl away from the bunker complex,” Arndt wrote. “You couldn’t stand up and expect not to get shot.” The enemy took the mountaintop landing zone under fire at the approach of the medevacs, which “stopped just long enough for us to jump in, then took off again as fast as those Hueys could go.”
Livingston had previously instructed Capt. Robert G. Stanton, commander of B/2-501st, to bypass the recon platoon and hit the enemy from the flank. Six and a half hours into the action, at which time Stanton was three hundred meters north of the recon’s position, the lead platoon of Bravo Company encountered still more enemy bunkers on the northeastern slope of Coc Muen, down near the draw separating the mountain from Hill 1000. The point man was within fifty meters of the camouflaged bunkers when the shooting started. The platoon leader, 1st Lt. Robert L. Worrall, was hit several times. The platoon medic was also hit; a radioman pulled him to cover and, unshouldering his shot-up radio, grabbed the medic’s aid bag and took over treatment of the wounded until he too was hit. The medic from the next platoon in the column rushed forward to help and became a casualty himself. In a few chaotic moments, Bravo Company had one KIA and eleven WIA.
In coordination with his wounded lieutenant, Stanton had a pair of Cobras from C/4-77th ARA rocket the bunker complex so the lead platoon could break contact. Three NVA were reported killed in the action. The first set of Cobras was replaced by a second set when it broke station to refuel and rearm. After the ground elements again popped smoke to mark their positions, the rocket runs continued. The Cobras, diving from north to south through the draw between Coc Muen and Hill 1000, began taking fire from a .51-caliber machine gun positioned at the southwestern base of Hill 1000.
Captain Goates, standing by in reserve on the western side of the hill and overlooking Stanton’s action in the bunker complex, instructed Lieutenant Driver’s platoon, Alpha One, to destroy the .51 while Kwiecien and Alpha Two advanced on a mortar firing from somewhere near the gun position. Goates, still energized about meeting the enemy in conventional battle, “was up front,” recalled a chagrined Kwiecien, “telling the squads where to go and what to do himself, totally ignoring his platoon leaders.”
Alpha One, in the lead, engaged a pair of enemy soldiers in spiderholes upon cresting a small ridge and, moving forward, eliminated them with grenades. Next, and the action was then at the eight-hour mark, one of the Cobras took more fire from the .51 while making its break to the left as it came out of a rocket run. It responded with four quick 40mm rounds from its chin-mounted grenade launcher. The rounds missed their target, exploding instead between Alpha One and Alpha Two, which had advanced to within two hundred meters of the enemy machine gun. Five men were wounded in the mishap, including Driver and Kwiecien. It is unclear whether Goates had failed to inform Stanton, who was controlling the rocket runs, that he had an element advancing past the smoke grenades previously used to mark his position or, if so informed, Stanton had neglected to explain the maneuver to the section leader of the Cobras. In any event, the aircrews continued making their runs for B/2-501st, unaware until a subsequent investigation of the incident that they had fired up A/2-501st.
Lieutenant Kwiecien, paying no attention to the gunships as his platoon advanced on the enemy, did not himself realize they were taking friendly fire when the grenades suddenly exploded in front of him. Something hit his shoulder like a rock from a slingshot, and he assumed that it was, in fact, a rock sent flying by the explosions. Everyone crouched where they were to see what was happening. Kwiecien reached into his left breast pocket, flipped open his plastic cigarette case, and pulled out a cigarette. It was cut in half. He pulled out another cigarette. It too was cut in half. Alarmed, Kwiecien pulled out the case itself and saw that a piece of shrapnel had gone through it. “I looked at the spot on my shoulder where I had felt the impact,” he later wrote. “Nothing. I next looked inside my shirt. There was a black and blue mark about the size of a silver dollar where I had been hit by a single piece of shrapnel. There was very little blood, though.”
Kwiecien realized then that Chau Ngoc Tu, the platoon’s Kit Carson scout, was lying in the open, moaning in pain. Thinking they had taken enemy fire, Kwiecien scrambled forward to pull Tu to cover, but when he tried to pick up the scout—with one arm behind his back, the other under his legs—the injured man let out a shriek, and screaming in Vietnamese let it be known that he hurt too badly to be moved. Tu’s left leg had been chewed up by shrapnel, and a broken bone had split through the skin from a compound fracture.
Sergeant McCoy and the platoon’s other scout, Kai, moved up to help Kwiecien. Kai gave Tu holy hell in Vietnamese, and McCoy, who had picked up the language without benefit of formal training, told Kwiecien that Kai was scolding his fellow scout for acting like a baby. McCoy picked up Tu and carried him out of harm’s way as both platoons began pulling back on order. “The big attack,” noted Kwiecien, “had been called off.”