CHAPTER 20
There was a terrible accident at dawn in Captain Goates’s overnight position west of Triple Hill. Goates was awakened moments before it happened by the sound of a tree, badly damaged by aerial rocket artillery, squeaking in the strong winds that had blown all night. Suddenly, there was an especially strong gust of wind. “This time the tree cracked,” wrote Goates. “I was wide awake now, but the tree was already falling as I dove out of the way.” The tree came crashing down atop Pfc. Richard R. Timmons, who was sacked out about ten feet from Goates. “Timmons never knew what hit him,” noted Goates. “The tree cut diagonally across his body. His head, face, and one hand, which were above the tree, were a deep purple color, while the hand below the tree was as white as a sheet. It took four or five of us to lift the tree and pull him out, but as quick as the medic got there, it was too late to attempt to revive him. Timmons was the only man I lost while I was a company commander.”
Livingston’s battalion spent July 16 working its way around the enemy bunker complex between Coc Muen and Hill 1000. The battalion CP and Company C were digging in north of the complex at dusk, and Company B to the south, when Livingston was informed by brigade that there would be no more assaults on Hill 1000. The entire 2-501st Infantry, in fact, including its detached Company D on Hill 805, was to be extracted from the Ripcord AO.
“I was very surprised when we were directed to withdraw,” said Lieutenant Colonel Livingston. “I was ready to keep on going, man—there was still a fight out there—but somebody up above had made the decision to not launch any more assaults up Hill 1000.”
The decision had been made by Berry after he and Lieutenant Colonel Young, the division G3, flew to Camp Evans late that afternoon to discuss the situation with Colonel Harrison in the 3d Brigade TOC. Fred Spaulding recalled that it was a particularly contentious meeting, with Harrison arguing forcefully that control of Hills 805 and 1000 was key to the security of Ripcord. If the enemy held the high ground, their mortar and antiaircraft fire would eventually make prohibitive the cost of even resupplying the firebase. It was time, said Harrison, not to withdraw the reserve battalion but to commit additional forces to the Ripcord AO.
In response, according to Spaulding, Berry did not so much address Harrison’s tactical concerns as speak to the displeasure that higher command had begun to express about the resources being consumed to maintain Ripcord. There had already been more casualties than the political situation could bear, said Berry, more helicopters shot down and more mortar and artillery ammunition expended than could be justified, given the fiscal crunch under which the army was forced to operate as it withdrew from Vietnam.
The idea of increasing the number of ground sensors in the area so that supporting arms could be used more selectively and to better effect was discussed, as was seeding the high ground with persistent CS. “We don’t need to have people fighting and dying on those hills,” said Berry, ending the debate with Harrison. “We can, and we will, decide the issue with the firepower available to us.”
During a subsequent meeting, Spaulding recalled that an officer from div arty made a comment—seconded by Berry—to the effect that they had to be careful how many 105 shells were fired during a maneuver related to Ripcord, given a cap on ammunition expenditure recently imposed by USARV. “I thought Harrison was going to come unglued,” said Spaulding. “I knew right then and there that it was all over. The writing was on the wall—you’re not going to win a battle when higher command is more concerned with the price of artillery ammunition than destroying the enemy.”
Berry would vigorously deny that any restrictions had been imposed. Lieutenant Colonel William A. Walker, commander of the 2-319th FA, the artillery battalion supporting Harrison’s brigade, would nevertheless recall “being rather surprised by the questions I began getting from my superiors during the battle about why we were shooting as much ammunition as we were, and was it really effective, and could we not conserve? Evidently, a decision had been made somewhere up the chain to reduce the amount of artillery ammunition being fired,” noted Walker, “and we were eventually restricted as to the amount of ammunition we could draw on a daily or weekly basis from the supply depot. The amount was substantially less than what we had been firing, and I remember being disturbed and arguing about the cutback. I also vaguely remember getting my hand slapped because my battalion managed to take more ammunition than we had been allocated so we could meet the requests of the infantry units fighting at Ripcord.”1
Berry had returned to a very different war than the one he had fought as a brigade commander. Berry’s plan, for example, to fire a thousand mortar shells per night around Ripcord had lasted only three nights, as recorded in Harrison’s brigade log. Major Koenigsbauer could speak to the problem; his first task upon being reassigned to the division operations shop had been to recalculate the ammunition supply rate, given a cutback in the amount of 81mm ammo being provided the 101st by USARV. Koenigsbauer gave priority to Lucas and Livingston, the only battalion commanders then in heavy combat, but no matter how he did the math he ended up cutting by half the amount of 81mm ammo going to Ripcord as compared to what had been delivered during May, June, and the first half of July. “It was a travesty,” he would bitterly recall. Koenigsbauer went to his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Young, who “empathized with me, but said that he had no choice, that higher command had decided that we had been firing too much 81mm ammunition. He had no flexibility in the matter, except not to provide ammunition to anyone else, which would have been a dereliction of duty since any firebase was subject to attack at any time.
“The cutback made it clear to me,” Koenigsbauer continued, “that while the NVA were committed to taking Ripcord, we were not committed to defending it. Brigade was being held back by division, which was being held back by the next higher level of command, and so on. If higher command was not prepared to make available the ammunition necessary for the indirect-fire battle, they were certainly not prepared to commit additional ground units to fight the enemy around Ripcord. No one above brigade was prepared to take the enemy on in a major battle.” It seemed to Koenigsbauer that higher command was prepared to “allow the status quo at Ripcord to continue until either the enemy pulled out or the effort became too expensive for us, at which point we would pull out.”
The enemy began moving into attack positions around Captain Straub’s perimeter soon after sundown. As Straub and Potter called in the fire support and coordinated the releasing of flares from a series of orbiting flareships, the troops responded with hand grenades and M79s to the movement and voices that could be heard below them on the slopes of 805. There was a sensor activation to the north of the perimeter and the detonation of a mechanical ambush to the west. The pilot of a LOH spotted flashlights on the east and northeast sides of the hill, within three hundred meters of the top, and called in arty and 81s. Secondary explosions flashed in the wake of a rocket run by one of two Cobras kept on station all night over 805. Straub was contacted by Lucas’s operation center and warned that the enemy was massing for a major attack. The information came from the NVA themselves. “It just so happened that one of the radios in the TOC was set to the same frequency the gooks were using that night,” noted Captain Williams, the S3 on Ripcord; when a transmission in Vietnamese was monitored, “a Kit Carson Scout was called over, and he listened to it. These guys were talking in the clear, no radio security at all, and the Scout said they were coordinating for a big attack later on that night against Hill 805.”
The attack did not begin until 2:30 A.M. on July 17, six hours after the first movement around the hill had been detected, when a mechanical ambush and several trip flares went off in front of Delta One. The company, opening fire, immediately began taking AK fire and satchel charges in Delta One’s sector and Delta Two’s.
The fight had apparently been battered out of the enemy just getting into position, for their attack soon fizzled in the face of the overwhelming and unceasing fire of M16s, M60s, M79s, 90mms, 81s, 105s, 155s, ARA, and Quad-50s. It was just as well; at the end of the fifth attack in five nights, “you was totally burned out,” recalled Sergeant Gaster of Delta One. “There was nothin’ left in you. . . .”
Straub was resupplied during the morning and early afternoon, then directed to move to a landing zone on a knoll at the narrow northwestern base of Hill 805. Depending on how long it took to reach the landing zone, seven hundred meters away as the crow flies—a lot longer by way of the trail running down 805 and up to the top of the knoll—Company D would be extracted late on the seventeenth or early on the eighteenth. “We busted our asses filling in our bunkers,” wrote Sergeant Blackman of Delta Three. “We wanted to get off the hill before they changed their minds and made us stay another night.”
After the recoilless rifles were back-hauled aboard a slick, Delta One moved out, followed by Delta Three. Shipley’s platoon remained to rig with demo charges the ammo and equipment that could not be carried. “It made a tremendous boom,” noted Lieutenant Shipley. Delta Two rejoined the rest of the company where it was waiting in the jungle below the resupply LZ, having deployed in a small defensive circle bisected by the trail. What happened next “scared us and made us mad, too,” recalled Shipley. “We were trying to sneak away with the woods full of NVA. Along came a helicopter [the time was 4:45 P.M.], no warning, no radio message to us. It tried first to land on the LZ with the downed chopper, took [AK-47] fire, then came over to where we were trying not to be seen and lowered a ladder to us.” The first man to try to descend the flexible metal ladder, a lieutenant, fell to the ground from the helicopter’s fifty-foot hover, amazed everyone by standing up, then collapsed, his foot broken. Several more equipment-laden figures scrambled down the ladder. “It turned out they were a communications team that had been dispatched [by brigade] to set up sensors around the hill,” explained Shipley. “We told them they were crazy, to go ahead if they wanted to, but without us. They decided to stay with us.”
The company maintained its position as Captain Straub brought in a medevac, which lowered a basket through the canopy for the injured lieutenant. One of the Cobras making suppression runs took AK fire as it circled past the southern slope of Hill 805. Straub called his platoon leaders together to map out their next move after the medevac; it was now almost 6 P.M. Delta Three had only just begun to move through Delta One to take the point down the trail when there was a big explosion back at the company CP. Everyone hit the ground and began returning fire as Straub, a piece of shrapnel in his left elbow—Potter, at his side, had taken shrapnel in his leg— grabbed the radio and reported to Lucas that he was under attack. It sounded as though they had been hit by an RPG.
There were multiple casualties. “The concussion effect of the explosion knocked me off my feet,” Rod Soubers of Delta One later wrote, unaware at that time of the sliver of shrapnel stuck in the front of his helmet. It was the second time his steel pot had saved him during the battle. “Within seconds, I was out of my ruck, back on my feet, and instinctively firing into the bush on automatic while yelling at the stunned [and wounded] new guy on my left to do likewise.”
Soubers glanced to his right where his best friend, Dave Beyl, was positioned and saw that he was sitting down against his ruck. “Rod, I’m hit,” Beyl said calmly. “Get a medic.” Soubers, rushing over, saw that Beyl had a hole where his upper chest was exposed because he had not zipped his flak jacket all the way in the terrible heat. “When I got to him, he was just staring straight ahead with a blank expression, apparently in shock and slipping into unconsciousness.” Soubers was so upset that he was literally shaking as he pulled off Beyl’s ruck and flak jacket, tore open his shirt, and ripped a section from his own shirt to cover the wound, “all the while screaming for a medic. Bubbly blood was coming out of his mouth and the hole in his chest. I got the hole in his chest covered and tilted his head back, continuing to yell for a medic.” Soubers didn’t know that their platoon medic, Doc Grubidt, had been severely wounded in both legs and the other medics were busy with the casualties around the CP. “As I looked up the trail,” Soubers continued, “wondering where the hell the medics were, I saw two or three different colored smoke grenades filling the air with smoke. I continued to hold my torn shirt over Dave’s wound and continued to yell for a medic until I was nearly hoarse. . . .”
Lieutenant Selvaggi ran back down the trail to the CP. Straub screamed at him to find out what was going on. The situation was wildly confusing; except for the first explosion, there didn’t seem to be any more enemy fire. Selvaggi darted from person to person, asking what each had seen or heard, finally shouting for everyone to cease firing when he realized that they were not actually under attack. Instead, it turned out that Kim, the Kit Carson scout attached to Delta Three, had dropped a grenade at his feet and it had spontaneously detonated the three other grenades hanging from his web gear. Kim had been killed instantly, and his assigned buddy, Sp4 Wilfred W. Warner—the two had been flown out to reinforce the company during the third or fourth day on the hill—was grievously wounded in the chest.
Why the scout did what he did will never be known. There were those who thought that Kim, sick with guilt after so many of his former comrades had been killed during the night attacks, had meant to take Straub out when he blew himself up, an act of atonement and retribution. Most of the grunts were of the opinion, however, that Kim had meant to kill only himself, apparently convinced that the company was going to be overrun on its way to the extraction point, and was so deranged with fear at what would happen to a defector such as himself should he be captured that he pulled the pin on the grenade without even thinking of those around him. Kim, in fact, had tried to get medevacked before the company left the hill, complaining of sore feet. Soubers recalled the scout walking with “a noticeable limp” and later heard from others on the scene that “Warner had warned [Kim] that if he couldn’t keep up with everyone else, he was going to leave him behind for the NVA. Whether this scared the scout into a state of suicide is difficult for anyone to say, but it does provide a motive.”
Word of the self-inflicted disaster passed among the men in shocked whispers. Several troops from Delta Three were sent back up the trail to secure a small clearing for the medevac. “We walked past what was left of the scout,” recalled Blackman. “People were cussing, and I saw Straub talking on the radio while a medic worked on him. It scared me to see Straub hurt. We needed him. . . .”
Doc Fowler had dashed down to where Soubers was shouting by then, and after getting Beyl bandaged up moved on quickly to the next casualty while Soubers and several others carried Beyl to the LZ. The clearing was too small for the medevac to land, and the pilot was hesitant to lower a basket, not wanting to hover in enemy territory. “Straub had to beg him to stay, assuring him that we were not under attack,” recalled Selvaggi. Beyl, unconscious, his breathing labored, was loaded into the basket with a black GI who had “visible wounds on his head and much of his body,” noted Soubers. “As the basket was going up . . . I said a silent prayer, pleading with God to help Dave pull through. . . .”
A second medevac arrived, as did a LOH, which was able to slip between the trees to land in the clearing. Between them they took out seven of the nine men who had been wounded, leaving Straub and Potter, who intended to stay with the company until the end. Dave Beyl and Wilfred Warner died from their injuries in the evac hospital, boosting D/2-501st’s losses on Hill 805 to nine KIA.
After the wounded had been lifted out, Straub told Selvaggi to get the body of the scout evacuated. The scout was a mess, one arm blown off, his guts blown out. “Someone showed up with a poncho and helped me put the body and body parts in it,” recounted Selvaggi. “We carried this sloshing poncho to the clearing.” Another LOH came in but was still three feet off the deck when the pilot, unwilling to power down all the way to land in case he took fire, gestured to the grunts to throw the body aboard. “We tried to tell him the body wasn’t all in one piece,” wrote Selvaggi, “but he couldn’t understand us and angrily gestured to throw it in. As we swung the load up into the chopper, the pilot started to move forward. He wasn’t hanging around. The poncho started to unravel as we let go and was fully opened as it landed on the floor of the chopper. Body parts flopped all over the place. I think some of them slid right out the other side. The pilot never looked back.”
It was too late by then to reach the extraction point, so Straub moved Company D several hundred meters down the trail. Hoping the darkness would conceal them, just as night fell they established an NDP around a small knoll on the side of Hill 805. Straub set up in the last place he thought the enemy would look for them, right in the middle of an old NVA bunker complex seeded during a previous operation with persistent CS. The tear-gas crystals, no longer overpowering, still made the area uncomfortable. “We couldn’t dig in for the noise,” said Lieutenant Shipley of Delta Two. “We had to keep quiet. We put out a few claymores. We were scared to death. We felt awfully alone in that jungle.”
Sergeant Blackman described the company position as being “smaller than a normal platoon-sized NDP. I think that’s when it hit me just how many men we’d lost over the past few days. We just kind of laid on the ground, no real positions or anything.” Everyone was expecting to be hit during the night. “[O]ur morale was so low,” wrote Rod Soubers, “I’m not sure we would have been able to adequately defend ourselves. . . . [T]he NVA missed a golden opportunity, but they may have been satisfied enough just to get Hill 805 back. . . .”
Moving out at first light, Company D continued down the trail and reached the extraction LZ by late morning. “We didn’t have long to wait before the line of choppers arrived to take us back to Camp Evans,” the account by Soubers continued. “We were never so happy to see a Huey as we were that morning. . . .”
Delta One went out first, one chopper load at a time, followed by Delta Two, by which time enemy soldiers could be seen moving downhill from the top of Hill 805, apparently in an attempt to find positions from which to fire on the extraction LZ. The NVA had gotten within range by the time the last elements of Delta Three were being lifted out. “I think the group I was with went out on the second or third to last chopper,” recounted Sergeant Blackman. “When it came in, we started running toward it from behind. As I passed the door gunner, the bird took three rounds, maybe more, in its tail, very close to where I was. The pilot started to take off as I was climbing in the chopper. Jerry Bull and another guy pulled me in. Just as I turned to sit down, the bird, having reached treetop level, banked and dove to pick up speed. I started to slide out the door. I remember trying to grab ahold of something—anything. What a helpless feeling. As I slid out, Bull grabbed my rucksack frame and pulled me back in. He saved my life.”
Shortly after the chopper carrying Blackman reached Camp Evans, the last one or two slicks arrived with the rest of the platoon. “The pilots and crews got out and started counting bullet holes in their birds,” noted Blackman. “We heard that the last bird had to circle several times before it could get in to land because of the heavy volume of enemy fire. The last guys out said they could see NVA running up the side of the hill towards them when that last pilot came in through the fire to pick them up.”
The entire Geronimo Battalion was lifted out that day, July 18: the headquarters elements from Ripcord and Companies A, B, and C from LZs on and around Triple Hill. Alpha Company discovered along the way a cluster of hillside caves strewn with blood-encrusted bandages from enemy casualties who had been treated there. It was a chilling sight to grunts whose nerves were drawn tight from fatigue and heavy combat, and Captain Goates thought it best to take point himself as they continued. “There was a stillness so profound you could cut it with a knife when I stumbled on a downed Huey further along in the jungle,” wrote Goates. “It had been there for a long time, but as the remainder of the company passed by, the silence grew eerie. I was glad when we got past that point and were finally able to reach the extraction LZ.”
The battalion was trucked to Phu Bai late that afternoon, at which point Captain Straub checked into the 85th Evac to have the shrapnel dug out of his elbow. Straub ended up naked on a gurney next to one of his M60 gunners, also naked, who had taken little shrapnel wounds all over his hands several days earlier. Because of Straub’s policy of evacuating only the worst of the wounded, the gunner had stayed with the company until the end of the fight for Hill 805.
The man’s hands were now badly swollen. “This is terrible,” the attending doctor exclaimed. “Who left him in the field this long?”
“It was me, doc,” Straub barked from his gurney, too tired to explain what they had gone through out there. “Send me the bill.”
Straub was visiting his wounded in the enlisted ward at the 85th when General Berry arrived to present Purple Hearts. Straub had served as Berry’s speechwriter at Fort Benning, and Berry, impressed with Straub’s handling of his company on Hill 805, presently sought to engage him in a congratulatory conversation. “I really have nothing to say to you, sir,” Straub snapped, suddenly seething. Straub would have preferred to present his grievances to Hennessey, whose leave-taking he thought appalling, but Berry, whom he had always respected, was there in the flesh, so Berry would do. Straub had thought the concept of using a rifle company to draw the enemy into a prepared killing ground around Hill 805 unwise from the outset. Having held onto the hill for most of six days, however, he couldn’t fathom why they had suddenly given it back to the North Vietnamese. It made no sense to him that they had not been replaced on the high ground by a fresh company. It made no sense to him, in fact, that division had not massively reinforced the two battalions fighting in the Ripcord AO.
“You people forsake me and my soldiers,” Straub said to Berry, his voice low and furious, his emotions at the breaking point. “You put us out there and just left us. We were statistics to you people, nothing but numbers, but I lost a lot of good men on that hill.”
Straub said something about quitting an army as screwed up and poorly led as the one they had in Vietnam. “Now, Chris, I know you’ve been through hell out there,” Berry interjected calmly, “but before you do anything irrational, just think about it. Don’t make any rash decisions. You’ve got a good career ahead of you.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Straub spat, but Berry, who understood what combat did to people and had absorbed Straub’s venting without becoming angry himself, pressed on, reminding him that the army had already lost too many of its finest professionals because of the war. It needed people such as Straub to get back on its feet. “I know it hurts too badly now,” Berry said, “but think carefully about whether you really want to get out when you’re stationed back in the States.”
Berry made a point of visiting Straub again before he was medevacked on to Japan. “I was cooler then,” Straub wrote, “and we had a good discussion about NVA tactics and U. S. options in the Ripcord AO. I realized that he had done his absolute best in the Ripcord campaign to get the 2-501st and 2-506th all the support possible. Given the constraints from Saigon, no general in the 101st could have done better. It is an honor to have served under him.”
The grunts of Delta Company, at least those who did not immediately reenlist to get out of the field, began at Eagle Beach to recuperate from their ordeal. There was splashing and laughter in the surf, a litter of empty beer cans in some of the hootches, the passing of the pipe in others. “Most of the guys had a good time, apparently trying to put the past week out of their minds,” wrote Rod Soubers, who was in too much of a funk about Dave Beyl’s death to join in. “I had lost the best friend I ever had. I suddenly felt all alone. . . . Instead of joining the rest of the guys, I would spend much of my time sitting on the beach, just staring out at the South China Sea. I kept asking myself why, why did Dave have to die? Dave had so much to live for, if anyone deserved to live it was Dave. Why couldn’t I have been the one to take that piece of shrapnel? I felt there must have been something I could have done after he was hit to help him survive. We had depended on each other to get through the year, so for the longest time I felt that I had somehow let him down. It would take years before I would be able to put this feeling of guilt behind me, but the pain of his death will stay with me the rest of my life. . . .”