CHAPTER 19
Captain Goates was provided a flight of Skyraiders from the Vietnamese Air Force. The stubby, prop-driven aircraft, ideal for close air support, dropped cluster bombs to cover Alpha Company’s withdrawal to Triple Hill. “It was the only time I saw cluster bombs used,” wrote Kwiecien, who had been informed by Goates that an enemy force had been spotted moving in pursuit of Alpha Company. “I remember thinking that the cluster bombs were sure taking care of anything behind us. Despite being wounded in the shoulder, I was still humping my ruck, and it hurt like hell. . . .”
Lieutenant Colonel Livingston choppered over with his field CP to spend the night in the NDP which was being established by Bravo and Charlie Companies and the recon platoon several hundred meters back up the ridge from the bunker complex at the base of Coc Muen.
The enemy mortared the overnight position near dusk from the top of Coc Muen, and a medevac took automatic fire, one round hitting a rotor, as it lifted out with Bravo Company’s WIAs. Alpha Company’s casualties, meanwhile, were medevacked from Triple Hill. Kwiecien recalled that when the Huey landed at the 85th Evac, “some earnest young medic came running up to me to help. He stopped dead in his tracks about three feet away and asked if I wanted to take a shower first—that’s how bad I smelled.”
Lieutenant Kwiecien had been wounded three times during his three months in the field. The third wound was far more serious than it looked or felt. “Apparently, the shrapnel had barely missed an artery and some nerves,” noted Kwiecien, who ended up with a medical profile and reassignment to brigade staff. Kwiecien was still being treated at the evac hospital when a Vietnamese baby was rushed in, having been medevacked from one of the lowland villages after crawling into a mechanical ambush. “Half his face was gone,” wrote Kwiecien. “I could see the baby’s X-rays from my gurney, and the paths the claymore pellets had taken through his body looked like a street map. I decided at that point that there couldn’t be a God. It would have been okay for something like that to happen to me, after all, I was trying to kill people, but not to a kid like that. I stuck with my atheism for a number of years, but God finally reached out and brought me home.”
Lieutenant Colonel Lucas received an alert from division G2 at 6:20 P.M. on July 14. As recorded in the battalion log, it read: “Recent intelligence [presumably, intercepted enemy radio transmissions] and very recent agent reports indicate strong possibility of sapper attack on FB Ripcord tonight. Highly reliable agent [presumably, a team from the division LRRPs] reported obs’[erv]ing en[emy] sapper force vic[inity] Ripcord and making final attack preparations.”
The alert was received shortly before the evening briefing, in which Lucas spoke from a small podium in his TOC. “The briefings were very organized and surprisingly formal, given our situation,” noted Fred Edwards, the battalion engineering officer. “We were always kept well informed.” Speaking to the predicted attack, Lucas said that he welcomed it. “I want the bastards to come up this hill because if they do we’re going to kick their ass,” declared Black Spade. Edwards would later muse that “if anyone else had said such a thing, I would have thought the bastard was crazy. Lucas, however, instilled a lot of confidence just by his bearing, and he made it sound completely logical that we were going to clean their clocks if they attacked.
“We felt helpless amid the incoming,” Edwards continued. “The only way we could strike back at the enemy was if they actually tried to get through the wire, and as gut wrenching a prospect as that was, it had to be better than facing the random hell that rained down on us every day. There was no fear in anyone’s eyes, just grim determination. Everybody had complete confidence that we would destroy the enemy in their tracks.”
General Berry typed a letter to his wife that night:
2230 Tuesday, 14 July 1970 [Camp Eagle]
Why am I writing at this hour? Because I’m so angry with two commanders—actually three—that I can’t sleep. And because I expect an attack on Firebase Ripcord tonight or in the early morning and have been planning the defensive and offensive fires that will catch the enemy in their preparation and advance to attack.
I may relieve a battalion commander [Livingston], perhaps another [Lucas], and possibly a brigade commander [Harrison]. Or to be precise, I may recommend their relief to General Hennessey. The brigade commander and his two battalion commanders have neglected to use sufficient supporting fires—air and artillery—in support of their soldiers on the ground. . . . This is particularly unacceptable when I personally have been instructing them each day to use heavier amounts of fire and telling them how to do it. . . .
Berry was the author of a widely distributed pamphlet, Observations of a Brigade Commander, which enjoined commanders to “expend ammunition like a millionaire and lives like a miser.”
Putting words into action, the new assistant division commander had, among other things, ordered enough 81mm ammunition be shipped to Ripcord as of July 13 to increase the number of mortar rounds being fired around the base each night from five hundred to a thousand.
To return to Berry’s terse letter:
. . . believing that the two battalion commanders inadequately plan and use supporting fires . . . [and] further believing that the brigade commander should take personal control of the situation, I sent him to spend the night on Firebase Ripcord . . . I told him that I’ll check every two hours to see that he has employed a heavier volume of fire around his troops each subsequent two-hour period.
Forgive this “I” business, but that’s the way it is. General Hennessey expects his ADC, Operations, to run the division’s operations; and that’s what I’m doing. With a vengeance. By Big Red One standards, the 101st Airborne Division has a long way to go. By Bill DePuy’s standards, half the battalion commanders and two of three brigade commanders would have been relieved during the 12 days I’ve been here. . . . It’s criminal to tolerate a weak commander. Soldiers deserve the best leadership, and they can’t influence the quality of the leadership assigned to them. But I can, and I will. . . .
Harrison recalls that he had already planned to spend the night on Ripcord when instructed to do so by Berry. In any event, Harrison flew to Ripcord with Maj. James E. King, the new brigade operations officer, plus the air force major who served as the brigade’s air liaison officer and Lieutenant Case, the acting arty LNO. “I spent most of that night drinking coffee in the crowded battalion TOC,” noted Case. “I didn’t think the NVA would launch a ground attack against a fully alerted firebase.”
To make sure they did not, Harrison assured Berry, as indicated in the brigade log, that “[we] are employing 360° arty fire & 81mm around Ripcord & fri[endly] positions; are also having basketball [USAF flareship] on sta[tion] & 3 CH-47 [flareships] in reserve [at Camp Evans]. We will have FAC’s ready to bring in air [in the event of attack] . . .”
The enemy attack, when it came, was launched not against the firebase but Captain Straub’s embattled position on Hill 805. When hit, Straub immediately fired a red star-cluster flare to signal Capt. Ray Williams, Lucas’s arty LNO on Ripcord, “and within 2 or 3 minutes they were receiving [preplotted] defensive fires from 105’s, 155’s, 81mm’s, and quad 50’s,” read an after-action report prepared by Williams. “Due to the highly accurate and heavy concentration of defensive fires, D/2-501st sustained only [two casualties] . . .”
Berry commented on the battle in a subsequent letter home:
No attack on Ripcord last night. But we put out sufficient artillery, mortar, and grenade fire[,] plus air strikes[,] to discourage any planned attack. Also, some commanders learned something about planning and using supporting arms. . . . Thank God for my training in the Big Red One under Bill DePuy. More than ever now I realize what a superb outfit we were. And I realize how much I learned from DePuy and the BRO. My aim is to transfer those lessons, practices, and standards into the Screaming Eagles. . . .
Considerable friction developed between Berry and Harrison. Berry was dubious that Harrison’s command of an aviation battalion had adequately prepared him to lead an infantry brigade in combat. (Harrison would have argued that his combined infantry-aviation background well qualified him for command in an airmobile division.) Berry’s displeasure extended to Harrison’s staff, which he found extremely weak in terms of experience and military schooling. As the stalemate at Ripcord continued, he became increasingly impatient and short tempered during meetings in the TOC at Camp Evans. During one meeting, Major King began to make a tactical suggestion, only to be cut off by Berry, who, already knowing the answer, archly asked the operations officer, “And when did you graduate from Command and General Staff College?”
“I haven’t been there yet, sir,” King replied, his anger barely concealed. Berry moved on with a dismissive, “Uh-huh.”
Fred Spaulding was flabbergasted by the exchange, considering that King had served as S3 of a line battalion for six months before moving up to brigade, a qualification more important, he thought, than Command & General Staff College. “They didn’t even teach Vietnam there,” Spaulding noted, “and I remember thinking, well, what the hell, just because some of us don’t have CGSC diplomas, all of a sudden we’re not worthy enough to speak our minds?”
Berry recommended to Harrison that King be relieved. Harrison demurred, thinking King a solid combat officer. But whatever protection Harrison tried to offer his staff, Berry’s continuous ripostes nevertheless had a demoralizing effect. “General Berry was a martinet, the kind of arrogant ass who would relieve you for not kissing his ring,” said Spaulding. “It was also my impression that he was prejudiced against officers who weren’t West Pointers.”
Captain Echols, recently assigned to brigade, dejectedly told Lieutenant Case, his former FO, “We’re all going to be fired.”
“Ripcord was pretty much shaping up as a debacle,” Case wrote, “and my impression was that everyone’s head, except mine, was on the chopping block. The captains and majors had careers to worry about. I did not. In sum, there were a lot of officers working in the 3d Brigade TOC who were very concerned not only about Ripcord itself but also about how the battle was going to affect their careers.”
The wisest analysis of the situation was probably offered by Chuck Shay, whom Berry considered the best battalion commander in the division. “Sid Berry and Ben Harrison were both first-class guys,” said Shay. “Berry was an up-front guy. He told people exactly what he thought, and, of course, he was confronted by people who told him back what they thought. So until everybody got to know everybody better, there was probably a little intolerance on both sides. The best of intentions have to be worked out man to man.”
Captain Straub, like his men, was haggard and hollow-eyed by the time of the third attack on Hill 805. “I basically stopped eating and sleeping after the first night,” said Straub. “I couldn’t stop checking on things and thinking about what else we could do to prepare for the next attack. I forced myself to eat. There was zero hunger. I was just going on water and cigarettes and a very intense desire to get the company through this.” Straub was consoled only by “the very good fire support we were getting, and the guts of the troops. They fought like tigers and showed how much they cared for each other.”
According to Lieutenant Shipley, Straub had tried, during Lucas’s visit on the morning of July 14, to secure permission to move D/2-501st off the bald hilltop. He was unsuccessful. “There wasn’t any hope,” stated Shipley. “The NVA were watching and could see our casualties being medevacked out each day. They knew and we knew that it was only a matter of time before we were overrun.”
The observation posts were pulled in at dusk. The waiting began, the company at 50 percent alert. As noted by Captain Williams, Straub fired a red star-cluster flare when the RPGs started shrieking in—the third attack began at 10:53 P.M. on July 14—bringing down a wall of mortar and artillery fire while the troops, many already injured in the previous attacks, heaved grenades and laid down a sheet of M16 and M60 fire from their foxholes and makeshift bunkers. The third attack came mainly from the south and southeast, where Shipley’s platoon, Delta Two, was positioned. Straub had been provided during the day with two 90mm recoilless rifles. One faced the LZ across which the previous attack had come, and one was set up near Shipley’s CP. Shipley presently warned his men away from the rear of the weapon, given its ferocious backblast. While the platoon leader loaded, the trooper assigned as gunner began punching off flechette rounds known as Beehives. “Each Beehive shell sends out thousands of tiny steel darts in an expanding cone of fire,” noted Shipley, “ripping through anything and anybody in their path. They’ll go right through a small tree.”
The effect on the enemy was devastating. Straub and his forward observer, Lieutenant Potter, were also in for a shock as close as they were in the crowded perimeter to the recoilless rifle. “The backblast of each round would blow my chin-strapped helmet to the side of my head,” noted Potter, who was crouched beside a boulder, radio pressed to one ear, hand to the other, as he helped coordinate the supporting arms. “Rocks and dirt were blown all over our command post. It was sort of like sticking your head in the back end of a jet engine after feeding the front end with gravel.”
The sappers continued to work their way forward in the face of all the fire being thrown at them, covering one another with AK-47 fire as they darted from boulder to boulder until they were within throwing range of Delta Two. Satchel charges began exploding inside the lines with head-ringing blasts. Shipley’s medic, in position just below the platoon leader, told him the next morning about a satchel charge that had almost landed in the platoon CP. “He just happened to raise his arm one moment,” recounted Shipley, “and an incoming plastic explosive hit his arm and fell back outside and blew up. Except for his raised arm, the explosive would have landed in my position and blown us all up.”
Specialist Fourth Class Gary L. Schneider of Delta Two was firing an M60, which was a key target for enemy fire, when his bunker took a direct hit from an RPG. There were four men in the bunker. The blast blew them all out of the position. Two were injured, Schneider seriously. The others were unscathed, thanks to their helmets and flak jackets, but one of them—terrified, and strung out from lack of sleep—went temporarily insane at the sight of his wounded buddies. “He clutched my leg, screaming hysterically,” recalled Shipley, who could barely control his platoon’s fire and keep the recoilless rifle loaded with the trooper hanging on him. “I thought he was going crazy. It took about half an hour before we got him quieted down.”
The enemy hit the perimeter with tear gas. The troops didn’t know where it came from—some of the satchel charges were probably embedded with crystallized CS—but suddenly people were choking, crying, unable to breathe, and able to resume firing only after donning gas masks. The air soon cleared on the windy hilltop, and the claustrophobia-inducing gas masks were ripped away.
Everything happened fast, without thought. When an explosion started a fire in the deadfall, which was as dry as kindling, and lit up the positions on that side of the hill, “we ran down with a couple canisters of water and put it out, right in the middle of the firefight,” recounted Shipley. “The whole night was crazy like that. I probably should have been dead a hundred times.”
At Captain Straub’s direction, the two Cobras that had been scrambled began making minigun and rocket runs at 11:14 P.M. The troops kept up their fire, cursing the NVA. “We were screamin’ and cussin’ and throwin’ grenades,” said Shipley. “The enemy must have thought we were a bunch of idiots, screaming down the hill at them like that, but it worked on them psychologically. They were so close, we thought we were going to have hand-to-hand combat. We’d already made up our minds that we’d fight to the last man. We weren’t going to be captured. In the midst of the firefight, fear was not a problem. We had complete control, most of us. It was before, and after, that we were scared.”
The attack subsided as flareships lit up the area. Straub requested a night medevac for Schneider, who was unconscious and going into shock, his breathing weak, his pulse fading. Shipley’s platoon medic methodically pumped Schneider’s heart while Doc Fowler, the senior company medic, performed mouth-to-mouth, keeping him alive, if barely, until the medevac arrived at 1:12 A.M. The pilot spent forty minutes trying to maintain a hover long enough to lower a basket. The howling winds made it impossible. Low on fuel, the pilot finally had to break station, reporting to Straub before departing that there was only one pilot in his company capable of holding an aircraft steady under such conditions. “Hang in there. We’re gonna call for him.”
While waiting for the second medevac, Delta Company began taking 75mm recoilless-rifle fire, plus some 82mm mortar fire, thirty-six rounds in all. Most of the recoilless-rifle shells hissed past the little bouldered hilltop to explode harmlessly on the lower slopes. The mortar fire was more accurate. “The enemy would bracket our position,” noted Lieutenant Potter, “one short, one long, then one in the middle. It was nerve-wracking because our overhead cover could not stop the direct hit of a mortar shell. . . .”
Gunships swooped in on the firing positions. The fire stopped. The two medics had continued their lifesaving work on Schneider the whole time, oblivious of the bombardment. “He was bleeding internally,” Fowler later wrote, “and each time I breathed into him, I got a mouthful of blood. I cannot describe in words what that was like. I spit the blood out and continued the artificial resuscitation. When the second medevac arrived, we still had a pulse.”
That second medevac came on station at 2:41 A.M. The enemy greeted it with automatic-weapons fire despite the flares and the suppressive fire being laid down by mortars and gunships and, most furiously, the grunts of Delta Company. “The pilot reported to me that the winds were up to sixty knots,” recounted Captain Straub. “He nevertheless held his aircraft as steady as a rock over the blinking strobe that marked our position, taking enemy fire all the while as we strapped our wounded man into the basket that had been lowered. I never saw anything braver in the whole war.”
The enemy’s fire on an unarmed medevac killed Gary Schneider. “The medics had kept him alive for hours,” said Shipley, “but he was killed while being hoisted up in the basket. They found several bullet holes in him when the medevac landed at Camp Evans.”
The area fell silent. Straub scanned the night with a starlight scope as flares continued to pop overhead. The troops waited in their positions, exhausted, unable to sleep, chewing Tootsie Rolls. It was still two hours before dawn when several trip flares went off only fifty meters in front of Delta One. Everything cranked up again—M16s, M60s, M79s, and the recoilless rifles, plus more arty, more ARA. The enemy backed off without returning fire. “We were nearly out of ammo by then,” noted Potter. “If the NVA had pressed the attack, they would have had us. . . .”
Security patrols moved out in the morning, finding blood trails and chewed-up equipment among logs and trees that were saturated with flechettes. Hueys touched down on the landing zone below the top of the hill with everything needed for another day in position—ammo, frags, claymores, flares, rations, radio batteries, medical supplies, canisters of water foul with purification tablets. As the company got reorganized, “the captain called me to one side and asked me to wash my face,” recalled Fowler, who produced a small mirror from his personal gear and saw that “the horror of war was all over me. I had dried blood all around my lips and nose, my teeth were red, my hands were stained, my uniform had blood all over it. I washed myself, got some other clothes, and tried to put it behind me. We were staying on the hill, and we knew we were going to get attacked again when the sun went down. . . .”
Berry tried late that morning to join Lieutenant Colonel Livingston at his command post on the narrow ridge knifing down from Coc Muen Mountain. The landing zone inside Livingston’s perimeter was too cluttered to allow a helicopter to land on terra firma, but Lieutenant Fox, the command-ship pilot, thought he could hover low enough over the deadfall and between the tree stumps so that Berry could safely disembark. Fox, careful not to let the wind push him into any trees on the way in, was about twenty meters from touchdown when he realized that there was a black soldier lying on his back at the edge of the landing zone. He was the only man Fox could see, the rest being concealed in the thick brush. The man was firing a CAR15 with one hand and frantically waving the helicopter off with the other. Fox could neither hear nor see what was happening on the ground, but the door gunner on the opposite side of the aircraft, Sp4 Thomas J. Chase, saw muzzle flashes winking at him from the underbrush and he shouted a warning over the intercom. “Lieutenant Fox was one hell of a pilot,” recalled Chase, noting how Fox banked to their right and dropped down into the valley below the ridge so quickly and so sharply to avoid the fire that “one of the general’s aides, who didn’t have his seat belt on, almost flew out of the aircraft.”
Berry instructed Fox to make another attempt to land, but Fox again had to break away in the face of heavy fire. Fox thought the incident an inspiring example of the risks Berry was willing to take to get on the ground with his soldiers. “When we flew back to refuel, I noticed that I had taken a round right in my ammo box,” said Chase, who had quite another take on the incident. “It was foolish. It was an unnecessary risk for a general. There had been something like four or five generals killed in Nam already at that time. We didn’t need a sixth. Berry scared me. He thought he was John Wayne.”
In a letter home, Berry noted that as his helicopter departed the area, “I jestingly accused Livingston by radio of giving me an unfriendly reception just so I couldn’t land and harass him.”
Berry had, in fact, wanted to get on the ground to take Livingston aside and tell him in private that old ties notwithstanding—the two had been on good terms since Lieutenant Livingston had been a tac officer for Major Berry’s class at the ranger school—he was prepared to relieve him of command should he not use the firepower available to him to better effect on Hill 1000. Chase described Berry as having been “incensed” as he monitored the previous day’s failed attack over the radios in the C&C Huey. Livingston’s own officers thought the problem was not the improper use of supporting arms but the tenacity of the enemy and the restrictions on taking anything but light U. S. casualties. “If Livingston had been relieved, it would have been a massive injustice,” said Jim Kwiecien. “The guy was a fantastic battalion commander.”
Livingston called in artillery, then the resupply ships bearing the ammunition needed before the 2-501st Infantry again maneuvered toward Hill 1000. One of the first slicks to attempt to land had its tail shot off by a .51 and crashed down the ridge from the LZ. The pilot lost his leg in the crash. The resupply effort was disrupted not only by enemy fire but also by the high winds. Captain Goates watched from atop Triple Hill as one resupply ship started toward his position from Ripcord. “Halfway there, the wind blew the Huey in a 360-degree circle,” Goates wrote, “shaking it like a dog with a toy, and forcing the pilot to return to the firebase. I don’t think I have ever seen wind move an aircraft like that before or since.”
The attack was held up as more arty, as well as ARA and tac air, was directed against various confirmed and suspected enemy positions. It was not until approximately 2 P.M. that Livingston’s recon platoon began moving toward the bunker complex between Coc Muen and Hill 1000. Meanwhile, the site of the shot-down resupply ship had been secured by a line platoon, and a CH-47 arrived to extract the disabled Huey. The mission was aborted under heavy fire, the pilot of the Chinook banking away with six bullet holes in his aircraft as the two escorting Cobras rolled in on the NVA.1
The recon platoon made contact in the bunker complex, still occupied despite the pounding it had taken, at 4 P.M. Instead of reinforcing the action, Livingston pulled his people back and resumed firing artillery on the area. Loath to spend a second night in the same location, Livingston then moved his field CP, the recon platoon, and Companies B and C four hundred meters up the ridge toward the top of Coc Muen Mountain. Similarly, Company A, which had tentatively advanced toward Hill 1000 during the day, humped a klick west of Triple Hill to set up a new NDP.
Livingston’s cautious approach was in keeping with the guidance he was getting from Harrison, who was, in turn, responding to Berry and Hennessey. “We had identified Hill 1000 as being very strongly defended, but we were not directed at that time to make another assault,” recalled Livingston. “I think the enemy force on and around the hill was a lot larger than brigade and division had expected. We were up against a formidable, dug-in enemy, and the concern was that Hill 1000 could become another Hamburger Hill. Nobody wanted to be responsible for that. The division was still in a state of shock over Hamburger Hill, so there was some indecision in the operation at that point, a lull of sorts as the upper echelons sorted the problem out and decided how best to proceed.” Livingston’s impression was that division hoped firepower alone would drive the enemy off the hill, but, given the position’s tactical importance, “it was not inconceivable that the word would come down to go take that hill. I was ready to go, and so were the troops.”
Harrison, apparently disappointed that Livingston had not taken the objective on the first try and thus resolved the dilemma, informed Livingston after the battle that, like Berry, he had contemplated relieving him of command. “I was completely floored,” recalled Livingston, unsure what he could have done differently and unimpressed with Harrison’s contention that by taking his CP to the field he had disrupted the brigade commander’s ability to confer with him face-to-face and better coordinate the action. Harrison’s ire made more sense to Livingston when he learned of Harrison’s concern that he might himself be relieved by Berry. “Everybody tends to relieve everybody when things go bad,” Livingston noted philosophically.
Harrison’s rebuke nevertheless left a bad taste in Livingston’s mouth and confirmed the negative impression he had formed of Harrison when he first met the latest brigade commander to which his swing battalion had been attached. The meeting took place in the TOC on Ripcord. “Harrison’s major concern at that moment in life was to prepare Andre Lucas and me for an imminent visit from General Berry,” recalled Livingston. “He was quite agitated as he laid out how we should react when Berry arrived. Harrison wanted to butter up General Berry. I could understand that, but he was going so overboard that I came away thinking that the only concern this latest colonel I was working for had was how he looked to his superiors. I didn’t like Harrison from that first meeting, and I think he sensed it. Harrison and I did not have a particularly good relationship during Ripcord.”
The decision on whether or not to continue the attacks would have to be made without General Hennessey. The division commander departed Camp Eagle at 6:30 P.M. on July 15 for a twenty-day leave that had been scheduled well in advance of the action at Ripcord. Berry had been informed upon joining the division that he would shortly be its acting commander, and he had spent much time when not out with the line units bringing himself up to speed on Operation Chicago Peak. The ambitious summer offensive, drawn up by Wright and Hennessey, was to be launched by Berry. “So now I’m in command of a division,” Berry wrote home. “Another man’s division . . . Which has some built-in inhibitions. . . .”
Berry went on to note that two marriages had been planned around Hennessey’s leave: that of his son, 2d Lt. John Jr., Infantry, USMA ’70, to the daughter of Maj. Gen. George S. Blanchard, CG, 82d Airborne Division, and that of his daughter to his son’s former roommate at West Point. After marrying off his oldest children, Hennessey would “help pack out . . . his wife and two [younger] children to Clark AFB in the Philippines,” wrote Berry. “Wow! General Hennessey will have to return to the combat zone to rest.”
Unremarked upon in Berry’s letter was the disaffection felt by many in the division that Hennessey had not canceled his leave, given the increasingly volatile situation at Ripcord and the potential for heavy casualties at the start of Chicago Peak. It cast a certain shadow across a bright career. Hennessey, an academy man, USMA ’44, had served in the European theater of operations in 1944–45. He became a master parachutist and aviator after the war and, a recognized fast burner, was picked in 1963 to command the first battalion activated in the 11th Air Assault Division. Trained as the army’s first airmobile division, the 11th was redesignated the 1st Cavalry Division before deploying to Vietnam in 1965. Hennessey commanded a brigade in the division, as well as the division support command, before returning to the United States in 1966.
During General Hennessey’s eighteen months as ADC-O and CG, 101st Airborne Division, 1969–71, he was regarded as a calm, composed, methodical professional of superior tactical acumen. “He was the epitome of the quiet man who just ‘woke up every morning and went to work,’ ” noted Colonel Root. Bobby Porter of the 1-506th concurred: “I had nothing but the highest order of respect for and confidence in General Hennessey. He was a great role model as well as a great combat division commander.”
Given Hennessey’s sterling reputation, it is puzzling that he would turn over the single biggest battle of his command tenure to a brigade commander and an assistant division commander who had between them only five weeks of experience in the Screaming Eagles’ AO. “I’ll tell you, it was the weirdest thing, Hennessey going on leave like that,” recalled Colonel Grange, an infantry veteran of World War II, Korea, and three tours in Vietnam. “General Hennessey was a good division commander,” continued Grange, groping for an explanation, “but I don’t think he was as troop-oriented as some generals are. It seemed to me that he didn’t feel comfortable around troops and for that reason tended to stay in his headquarters. He nevertheless made good tactical decisions, and I’ve always been indebted to him personally for giving me a brigade after I commanded DISCOM. Those were two great jobs.”
Others were less muted in their criticism. One officer would state off the record: “It was obvious that Hennessey was protecting himself. Should the situation at Ripcord completely deteriorate, he would be able to say, well, you can’t blame me, I wasn’t even there.”
Captain Hawkins of A/2-506th was also bitter: “For a long time I thought it was outrageous that General Hennessey had gone home for his daughter’s wedding during Ripcord. In retrospect, I think we were far better off having a man of General Berry’s caliber step in in the place of a man who obviously didn’t care that much about us.”
Colonel Harrison thought such criticism completely unjustified, noting that Hennessey had not taken the leave due him during his first tour and arguing—the point would strike some as fantastic—that “there was no compelling reason for him not to take a normal leave during his second tour; the gravity of the situation at Ripcord was not at all clear by the time Hennessey left on July 15. . . .”
Harrison felt that Hennessey supported him completely, on the battlefield and in his skirmishes with Berry. “Jack Hennessey was a model airborne officer, tall, erect, and except for his prize-fighter nose, handsome,” Harrison later wrote. “Where he did not fit the airborne persona was that he was quiet and reserved. He demanded calm order and discipline. The general officer’s mess at Camp Eagle was as stiff as a gentleman’s club in London.” Hennessey was the only commander Harrison ever knew or heard of who enforced a closed-door policy with his subordinate commanders. Hennessey called them on the radio; they did not call him. Nor did they see him in his office at division headquarters without first making an appointment with the division chief of staff. Small matter, thought Harrison, given that “Hennessey’s leadership was flawless. He visited all parts of the division area routinely and frequently, skillfully flying his own helicopter. Although private and reserved by nature, he exhibited warmth in conversations with the troops, always with a ready smile. He had splendid relationships with the ARVN and the Vietnamese officials in Thua Thien Province. All said, he inspired confidence and was everything one would wish [for] in a division commander.” The army agreed. Hennessey would go on to retire with four stars.
Captain Straub’s company had spent July 15 laying wire, rigging claymores, and otherwise preparing for the next attack on Hill 805. Lieutenant Potter arranged with Captain Rich, the 105 battery commander on Ripcord, to have one of his howitzers dedicated exclusively to neutralizing an outcropping of boulders about fifty meters from Company D’s perimeter on the south slope of 805, from which numerous RPGs had been received during the first three night attacks. “Rich took a radio to the howitzer position and talked directly to me,” recalled Potter. “For safety’s sake, as we would be just fifty meters east of the final gun-target line, we got everyone under cover, then Rich and I walked shells up the hill until the howitzer was sighted in exactly on the spot that had been giving us trouble. Rich then directed that ammunition be prepared and the sighting not be touched in anticipation of that night’s attack.”
One of the company’s resupply ships took fire as it came in to land that afternoon. The engine failed as the pilot attempted to pull away, and the Huey made a hard landing on the side of the subhill LZ on the west slope of 805. Delta One secured the crash site, and a CH-47 escorted by Cobras attempted to extract the Huey. The Chinook was forced away by heavy fire from a .51-caliber machine gun.
The pilot and copilot of the Huey were evacuated, but two very scared and very pissed-off door gunners were left behind for the night; they, their immaculately cleaned M60s, and all the ammunition that had also been recovered from the slick were put in position with Delta One to cover the trail leading up from the LZ.
Lieutenant Selvaggi, the company exec, arrived shortly after the resupply ship went down, having been called forward by Straub to take command of Delta One. Straub had instructed Selvaggi, a former platoon leader in the company, to bring with him every able-bodied man he could find in the company rear. “I went in with five or six men, a couple of whom were cherries,” recalled Selvaggi. “I was scared. They were petrified. No one spoke during the flight.”
Selvaggi got a good look at Delta Company’s positions as the Huey approached the LZ. After disembarking, Selvaggi’s group hiked quickly to the top of 805, passing along the way the sapper who had inflicted so many casualties during the big attack and who lay where he had been killed, bloated and rotting. A severed arm lay on the ground nearby. The smell of decomposing flesh and expended ammunition and burned, smoldering trees was overwhelming.
“Once inside the perimeter, I had to sit down for a couple of minutes before I could talk,” noted Selvaggi, winded by the climb, shocked by the scene. Straub briefed Selvaggi on the situation, but the company commander’s eyes told the story. Everyone on the hill actually had red eyes from the wind and dust and lack of sleep. There was trash and debris everywhere. Selvaggi noticed one “thin, red-haired soldier who seemed to be in a trance. His eyes were red-rimmed and bulging, and his face was covered with soot and dirt. He was walking about aimlessly, staring blankly, and mumbling incoherently. I thought he must have been the soldier who went into shock during the previous night’s attack on Delta Two.”
The fourth attack on Hill 805 began at 2:46 A.M. on July 16, when the approaching sappers tripped a mechanical ambush in front of Delta One. The enemy was only fifty meters from the perimeter, and a ferocious exchange of fire quickly built up on the west side of the hill and the southeast side where a trip flare exposed the approaching enemy to Delta Two. As if by rote, Straub and Potter began coordinating close-in fire support all around the hill—mortars and artillery and dazzling streams of Quad-50 fire from Ripcord. In response to the RPGs flashing in from the rocky outcropping, “Straub ordered all the troops to get their heads down,” recounted Potter, “and I called Captain Rich to fire the howitzer we had previously sighted in. We got the first shell within a few seconds, and after a few more, we never took another RPG from that spot.”
The attack was over in twenty minutes. There had been no friendly casualties. The first flareship that had been requested came on station at 3:15 A.M., revealing almost immediately a fresh group of NVA moving up the north slope of Hill 805. The Cobras that had also just arrived rolled in hot on the reinforcements, breaking them up 250 meters from Delta Company.
There was another lull, then, at 4:13 A.M., the blast of another mechanical ambush, this time to the north. The enemy reinforcements were apparently still trying to work their way up the hill. The perimeter again exploded with M16 and M60 fire, and the 90mm recoilless rifles boomed out more flechette rounds. Moments later, the night flashed as Marine Intruders began dropping loads of 500-pound bombs south and southeast of Hill 805. “After the fireworks ended,” noted Selvaggi, “we continued lobbing grenades down the slope in front of us, every so often, just in case.”
Nothing further developed as gunships and flareships orbited the hilltop, keeping the enemy at bay until morning, when more resupply ships arrived with more ammunition and more jets flashed past, dropping more bombs. As most of the troops wearily began putting out more claymores, more wire, and more trip flares, a security patrol found two dead enemy soldiers on the south slope of the hill and recovered some weapons and satchel charges and grenades. Soubers recalled that another patrol that had been dispatched to check the downed slick on the landing zone discovered that “a plate containing the chopper’s logo was missing. The NVA had apparently managed to take it during the night for a souvenir.”