PART SIX

Siege

I was returning to Ripcord when I realized that the firebase was no longer an earthy brown, but almost black. Mortar rounds had exploded on virtually every square foot of the hill, charring it into a gray-black heap. It looked evil, malevolent. When the helicopter landed, it was like being dropped into an absolute hellhole.

—1st Lt. Fred H. Edwards Company B, 326th Engineer Battalion 101st Airborne Division

CHAPTER 21

One Long, Mad Minute

Lieutenant Edwards, who commanded the combat engineer platoon attached to Lucas’s battalion, kept a journal on Ripcord. Entries from the beginning of the battle reflected the general feeling that the situation was serious but not critical and sure to end soon. The mood began to change as the shelling continued unabated. Edwards was writing in his journal late on July 8 when the base went on alert, flares popping, 81s thumping, the Quad-50s pouring out streams of red tracers. Resuming the entry, he noted that “one of the sectors on the other side of the hill had some Dinks in the wire—had to put out the candle + go play army for a while. The Dinks got away, but worse, it appears that they were making a probe in preparation for a ground attack. . . . We’ll get hit soon, I’m sure . . .”

Edwards, a bright, eager, young West Pointer, was surprised that the NVA were able to maintain their harassing fire for all the firepower being employed around Ripcord. “They’ve been averaging about 20–30 rounds a day in 5 or 6 volleys,” Edwards wrote on July 9, adding that he “talked to some NBC correspondents out here (they didn’t take any shots of me) and they said Ripcord was being played up pretty big back home + even called it a ‘siege’—it’s not that, but it is very unpleasant (+ unhealthy).”

There had been numerous injuries, but no one had been killed. Edwards wrote on the morning of July 10 that “I’ve had the dozer cutting helipads + POL slots for the past few days + it’s coming along pretty well.” Lucas had congratulated him, in fact, during the evening briefing. “[T]he Col said the Engrs were doing outstanding work under combat [conditions]—an exaggeration, but helped the ego considerably. Can’t get any birds in for the 2nd day now,” he continued, “because of high winds. . . . It’ll almost knock you down if you aren’t careful. Hope it lets up soon, because it’s really going to put us in a bind w/o resupply of food and ammo . . .”

The winds were so bad on day ten that the scout ship in which Captain Williams and Tom Rubsam were riding was repeatedly spun around on its way to Ripcord from Camp Evans. Williams had made an administrative run to the rear, collecting Rubsam, his arm wound nearly healed, on the way back. Rubsam was glad to get back to the company but disappointed when informed that he was being reassigned to Bravo One, a new lieutenant having joined Bravo Two. Actually, Rubsam, whom Williams considered the epitome of the citizen-soldier—smart, calm under fire, and possessed of a real sense of responsibility—would soon be taking over Bravo One from Lieutenant Delgado. “Delgado wasn’t a bad person, but he just couldn’t make it as an infantry officer,” according to Williams. “I always put some of my best NCOs in Delgado’s platoon just to make sure he didn’t get somebody killed, and finally ended up replacing him on the firebase with Sergeant Rubsam.”

Upon reporting to the platoon, Rubsam climbed on top of the base’s mess bunker to familiarize himself with the layout of Bravo One’s positions on the eastern side of Ripcord. Rubsam, crouched down so as not to present too obvious a target, was about to climb off the roof when a 75mm recoilless-rifle round suddenly sailed right through the door of the mess bunker. “That was an accident,” Rubsam said. “I’m quite sure they were aiming at me.”

The enemy’s imperfect aim might have spared Rubsam, but it killed Pfc. Victor L. De Foor of Bravo Three, who had just ducked into the mess bunker. “That haunted me for a while,” said Rubsam, “but it was just something that happens in war, I guess. . . .”

Rubsam rushed into the smoke-filled bunker. De Foor was unrecognizable, decapitated by a direct hit. The skin had been burned off his shoulders and chest. There were also several wounded men in the bunker whom Rubsam did not know. He raced to the company CP for help, and a number of grunts from De Foor’s squad went to police up the body. “When the guys came back with tears in their eyes, telling how they had tried to pick Vic’s scalp up,” wrote Chip Collins, “we got with other units and agreed to take care of their bad KIAs if they would take care of ours.”

The other men in the bunker were from Company D, this being the day that Rollison’s battered command had humped to the firebase from Hill 1000 to get resupplied on its way to Triple Hill. The shelling had begun as Company D filed through the perimeter wire. “Four of us sought refuge in the mess bunker,” wrote Sp4 Patrick E. McCloskey. “We were standing near the door, waiting out the incoming, when a guy came in to get coffee.” It was De Foor, who got two cups, excused himself to get back by, “and was bending down slightly to get through the door,” noted McCloskey, “when an explosion rocked the bunker. The four of us flew across the bunker and landed on top of one another at the back wall. The guy with the coffee landed on the countertop [where hot chow was served when flown out in mermite cans]. He absorbed most of the blast because he was filling the doorway when the round hit. He certainly saved my life because I was closest to the door. We all ran like idiots out the back door and up to the aid station where the medics looked us over. The war was over for me. I had taken a hit in the right lung.”

Day ten was the first in which men were killed by the incoming fire. The shelling that had greeted Company D lasted from 9:45 to 10:15 A.M, during which time several enemy mortar crews around Hill 902, firing a few rounds at a time at odd intervals, placed twenty-five 82mm shells on Ripcord. Fourteen GIs were wounded badly enough to be medevacked. One of them, Pfc. Larry J. Plett of B/2-319th FA, hit while manning his howitzer, later died of his injuries in the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Phu Bai.

Two men were killed outright in addition to Vic De Foor. Private First Class Patrick J. Bohan, a pathfinder responsible for bringing in the medevacs that had been requested, lost his life when his radio malfunctioned and he left his covered position to secure another. Specialist Fourth Class Fredrick C. Raymond of A/2-11th FA was killed when it appeared that the shelling had finally petered out. “The battery commander called the hootch we were in, and asked for Raymond to bring a box of C-rations to the FDC [fire direction center],” recalled one GI. “Raymond didn’t have his flak jacket or steel pot on. He was just going to run over there with the chow, but he got caught in the open between bunkers by a mortar round.”

Lieutenant Colonel Walker, commander of the 2-319th Field Artillery, helicoptered in with his sergeant major during the shelling to check, as they often did, on Battery B. Walker was greatly impressed as Captain Rich, wounded yet again— his fifth injury since the battle had begun—kept his six howitzers in action amid the incoming, then leveled one tube for direct fire on a recoilless rifle that had begun firing on the medevacs from atop Hill 805. “Rich was a tough little knocker,” said Walker. Rich was, in fact, something of a legend, a former E6 who had won a direct commission during his second tour and, at the time of Ripcord, was a veteran of four years in Vietnam. Rich, short in stature, thin of frame, was a cocky, abrasive bantam rooster—“Don Knotts with attitude,” joked a contemporary—who referred to himself as the best artilleryman in the army and who intended, he often said, to stay in Vietnam until the war was over. Rich wasn’t the type to prosper in the peacetime military. “He wasn’t a paperwork guy,” noted Walker, “but he was the perfect kind of high-energy combat officer to have out in a situation like Ripcord. He set the example not only for his own people, but for everybody on the base.”

In a document to support a valor award, Lieutenant Colonel Walker described how Rich ran to the craters of each new salvo to determine back-azimuths, which, carrying a radio with him, he quickly called in to his FDC. “There the azimuths were used in selecting likely enemy mortar positions from locations obtained through previous visual reconnaissance and radar sightings,” wrote Walker. “Precomputed firing data for the selected positions was sent immediately to the howitzers.” By then, Rich, having rushed back to his little forty-five-man battery, would be shouting at his guys to get out of the bunkers, made of ammo crates and sandbag-covered culvert halves, to which they sensibly retreated between fire missions. “Responding to his example,” Walker continued, the “howitzer crews fell to their pieces and began delivering heavy countermortar fires within scant minutes of each mortar attack.”

The cannoneers, wearing helmets and flak jackets but otherwise completely exposed within the sandbagged parapets around their crowded battery area—about the size of a basketball court—manned their howitzers in a state of nervous anticipation. They could hear little of incoming mortar rounds over the fierce winds, not to mention their radios and shouted fire commands and the sharp cracks of their own howitzers, which were cranked nearly straight up, given the close proximity of the North Vietnamese. Walker described how Rich moved from gun crew to gun crew “with encouragement, advice, and instructions. His courageous actions, totally disregarding the hazard of subsequent mortar attacks, inspired the men of his battery to suppress their fears.” Because the howitzers were able to return fire so quickly and so accurately, “the mortar attacks were brief; in the majority of cases all rounds impacted within the span of a minute. By his gallant action Captain Rich was directly responsible for saving lives which would have been lost had the enemy felt secure in firing their mortars at will.”

Most of the bunkers on Ripcord were solid enough to protect those inside from even direct hits. People usually went outside only when required, whether on working parties or when checking the wire for signs of enemy infiltration, as the infantrymen on the perimeter did each morning, sometimes drawing sniper fire from the lower slopes of Ripcord. At the first indication of enemy fire, everyone headed for the nearest shelter. Ripcord when being shelled resembled a ghost town. There were numerous close calls, however, given the unpredictability of the incoming fire. Captain Williams, the S3, was coming up the stairs leading out of the TOC, for example, when a shell exploded just on the other side of the blast wall at the top. “The concussion hurled me back down the steps and through the open conex door into the TOC,” said Williams. “I slid across the floor and landed right at Colonel Lucas’s feet, and I remember him looking down at me and making some sort of smart-ass comment about my having made quite a dramatic entrance. I didn’t think it was real funny at the time.”

In another incident, Captain Rich was directing the fire of one of his howitzers on an enemy position east of the firebase when a .51-caliber machine gun opened fire on the 105; a slug passed directly between Rich and Lucas, who was standing beside him observing the mission, embedding itself in the bunker behind them.

Lieutenant Colonel Lucas put his life on the line every day during the battle for Ripcord. In distinct contrast to his helicopter-seat style of command during operations, Lucas was in his role as base commander—King of the Hill, in the argot of the division—highly visible to the troops, recognizing perhaps that men being pounded day after day by an unseen enemy needed an extra boost. “When the shells were falling, you’d see Lucas out checking positions, basically letting the troops know he was around,” said Lieutenant Wallace, acting commander of Company B. “It made you feel good that the battalion commander was willing to take the same risks as the troops. He was the type of officer who wouldn’t ask his men to do anything that he wouldn’t do himself.”

One of the more vivid examples of the lengths to which the battalion commander went to make his presence known involved Sgt. Christopher Hinman of Company B. Hinman, a tough and reckless squad leader on his second tour, had been tasked to set up two M60s to help cover several resupply Hueys. The enemy began mortaring the base when the helicopters came into view. Hinman started blasting away, as did Sp4 Thomas E. Searson on the other M60, drawing in return heavy fire from a .51 caliber. Hinman took a ricochet in his helmet and was knocked aside, dazed. Lucas appeared from nowhere at that moment and, taking over Hinman’s M60, joined Searson in laying down suppressive fire for the five full minutes it took the slicks to touch down in their turn, unload their supplies, and bank away at top speed from Firebase Ripcord.

The firebase medics also risked their lives freely and often. “They were just phenomenal,” said Lieutenant Edwards. “Everyone on the whole damn hill would be hunkered down under the incoming, but if somebody hollered ‘medic,’ they were right there.”

“I was really proud of my medics,” said Captain Harris, the battalion surgeon on Ripcord. “A lot of them hated that war, but they all did their job. They weren’t going to let their buddies down.”

Captain Harris was something of a hawk himself, such was the impression made on him from treating numerous civilian victims of communist terrorism when he was assigned to a MASH unit in the Saigon area before being transferred up north to the Screaming Eagles. “That was a real eye opener,” noted Harris, who, taking his job more seriously than the average draftee doctor, became a genuine hero to the men on Ripcord. To begin with, Harris was the only doctor any had seen on a forward firebase such as Ripcord. In addition, the short, stocky surgeon habitually joined his medics when they left the safety of the aid station to treat casualties; and when a medevac landed on the helipad in front of the aid station, he was usually at one end of one of the stretchers being hastily loaded onto the Huey. “I just didn’t think it was fair to use my position as an officer and a doctor to send my medics out there if I wasn’t willing to do it myself,” said Harris, subsequently awarded the Silver Star.

Harris tended to downplay his own bravery, explaining that because the enemy didn’t know which helipad to hit until an approaching chopper actually landed, and because it took twenty to thirty seconds for a shell to arc down for impact after leaving its tube, “you had a window of opportunity there to get your wounded safely loaded aboard. If everyone had their shit together, the medevac would be airborne again and we would all be back inside the aid station before the first shell hit the LZ.”

The process was not always so smooth. Specialist Fourth Class Daniel C. Thompson, a wireman with the battalion communications section in the conex beside the aid station, often lent a hand during medevacs. In one instance, Thompson helped hump a stretcher out to a chopper, only to have mortar shells begin landing just as the group was making its dash off the helipad. “I was running like a football player trying to make a touchdown,” said Thompson, “but I got nailed just before I reached the door of the aid station.” Someone reached out, grabbed Thompson by his shirt, and jerked him inside the conex, where he made a crash landing on the floor. “I thought I was hit real bad, and the guys thought I was blind because I had instinctively brought my hands up to my face, but it turned out it was just little cuts on my face and forehead, that’s all. The medic who checked me out asked if I wanted a Purple Heart. I said no. It wasn’t the first time I’d picked up little dings from all the shit we were taking. I didn’t give a damn about medals. I just wanted to do my time and go home.”

It was on day nine that Sp5 Chris W. Jensen, in charge of a three-man team of combat photographers, arrived on Ripcord. “We had just come back from Cambodia,” recalled Jensen, a photojournalism major who had dropped out of college to enlist, “when the word somehow got to our unit in Long Binh that there was bad stuff going on up in the 101st at a firebase called Ripcord. One of our officers must have heard something at the evening press briefing, so we decided to head up there and see what was going on.”

After flying to Camp Eagle, Jensen and his team reported to the 101st’s public information office (PIO). “They told us in no uncertain terms that they would not permit us to go out to Ripcord,” said Jensen. “There was to be no media, military or civilian, out there.”

As described in Fred Edwards’s journal, a few media types had visited Ripcord early in the battle. As the situation worsened, however, a news blackout had been imposed by the PIO officers, apparently on order from a division headquarters concerned that Ripcord might turn into a public-relations disaster like Hamburger Hill. The blackout served only to further intrigue Jensen’s people about what was going on out in those mountains, and they hitched a ride to Ripcord on a medevac. Lucas was clearly surprised by the appearance of three enlisted men wearing bush hats and loaded down with cameras. Jensen said he wanted to get out with one of the line companies. “Lucas’s response was absolutely not, things are really bad out there,” recalled Jensen. “He offered to let us stay on the firebase, however. He was very gracious. He said they’d find us a bunker to stay in, and get us some steel pots and flak jackets.”

Jensen and crew had several close calls of their own as they went about the next several days filming and photographing the 105s in action on top of Ripcord. There was the time a mortar round suddenly exploded where Jensen had just noticed one of his guys, Sp4 James Saller, standing to line up a shot. “The blast sprayed all this hot, wet stuff on my shoulders and the back of my neck,” said Jensen. “I thought, oh shit, that’s Saller, and I reached back to wipe the crap off my neck—and it was Spanish rice. The round had hit a mermite can full of hot food. Saller had moved from the area right before the explosion, and was perfectly okay, but lunch was ruined.”

Saller’s luck ran out a day or two later when he was splattered in the side with recoilless-rifle shrapnel. The third member of the team went out on the medevac with Saller. Jensen decided to stay on a few more days. “There was no feeling of impending doom on Ripcord,” he explained. “There was a reasonable amount of incoming, and nobody was happy about that, but everyone was well dug in. People were in good spirits. Morale was solid.”

Jensen’s impressions were correct. There were a few men who either freaked out or decided to cut and run, including Sergeant Johnson, who, having been switched from Bravo One to Bravo Three after getting Bob Utecht killed on Hill 805, “simply skyed out on a resupply chopper shortly after joining us on Ripcord,” noted Chip Collins, “never to return.”

Most, however, were hacking it. “It was hairy, but we were young,” said Danny Thompson, the wireman. “We had a little black dog called Rip. He was our mascot, and we went out during a mortar attack and ran around chasing him so we could put him on a helicopter and get him back to Evans. That just goes to show you some of the crazy stuff we did as kids.”

Sergeant Rubsam recalled one of his squad leaders, Tolson, not only as a great soldier but as a great morale builder. “It was hard to get people out of their holes once they’d taken cover,” said Rubsam. “Everybody would be hunkered down, but then all of a sudden you’d see skinny, pimple-faced Phil Tolson prancing back and forth, wielding an old trash-can lid like it was Captain America’s shield, cursing and taunting the NVA. It was hilarious, especially to guys who were scared shitless, and it was a great motivator. It let people know that the shellings weren’t the end of the world.”

The only thing better than cursing the enemy was hitting them back. The opportunity presented itself to Sergeant Rubsam when a Huey landed on the refueling pad in his platoon sector and came under AK-47 fire from a bunker dug beneath a gigantic boulder on the rocky hill immediately east of Ripcord. A man sitting at the open cabin door was wounded before the helicopter could make its hasty departure. Using binoculars, Rubsam could see the silhouette of the sniper when he moved past the narrow firing aperture of the bunker, but the return fire being directed at the position seemed to have no effect, sheltered as it was by the overhanging rock.

Rubsam contacted Lieutenant Wallace, the acting company commander, and after much delay the artillery ceased firing so a Cobra could overfly the base to rocket the bunker. The gunship made numerous passes. None were on target. “I just could not get through to the pilot about where the bunker was,” recalled Rubsam. When the pilot reported that he was going to have to break station to refuel and rearm, Rubsam desperately collected several LAWs, hoping to drop one close enough to the bunker to draw the pilot to the target. “I knelt on the hill and used this big old dead tree above the bunker as an aiming stake,” noted Rubsam. Surprised by the accuracy of the first two LAWs he fired, he readied the third “with the idea that, hell, forget the gunship, I might actually be able to knock out the bunker myself—and that third LAW did indeed go right through the aperture. It tickled everybody in the platoon. The guys were just bored, watching the show, and when the rocket exploded inside the bunker it was standing-ovation time. I don’t know if the enemy soldier was still in there, or if he had an escape tunnel, but we never took fire from that position again.”

Because the enemy was so close, Captain Rich’s battery fired numerous Charge One missions, meaning that the howitzer crews used only one of the seven powder bags, or charges, that came packed in a canister with each shell. The excess charges were an accident waiting to happen, and a working party began destroying them in a burn pit on July 16. It didn’t take long for the high winds to whip sparks from the fire into the gun parapets and onto a big pile of charges. The resulting explosion blew Rich’s exec, Lieutenant Brennan, across the battery area, badly burned, and he ended up in a heap against the tire of a 105. One of Brennan’s academy classmates, Lieutenant Wintermute, USMA ’69 and formerly of the 1-506th Infantry, was tapped to replace him and was flown out to Ripcord that night on a resupply Huey. Night flights to the firebase, infrequent because of the inherent risks, were almost always unopposed, the enemy only rarely exposing its mortar positions by continuing to shell Ripcord after the sun went down.

Lieutenant Wintermute was only nominally fit for duty, having been wounded, along with every other member of the platoon to which he was attached as FO, ten days earlier in the Rakkasan AO. Though it did not prevent Wintermute from calling in arty until the enemy broke contact, a big piece of grenade shrapnel had sliced open the head of his penis before burying itself in his thigh.

Wintermute was evacuated by jungle penetrater and treated at Camp Evans. Climbing in and out of helicopters since his release from the aid station had torn open the stitches in his thigh, however; the wound was packed with gauze before he was sent to Ripcord.

Lieutenant Wintermute’s first morning on the base included the usual early-morning barrage, in this case a dozen 82mm shells, which fell short in the perimeter wire. Shortly thereafter, at 7:37 A.M. on July 17, there were two extralarge explosions, one inside the wire, one outside; the subsequent discovery of a mangled, extralarge mortar tail fin confirmed that the shells were from a 120mm mortar. “That got everybody’s attention big time,” recalled Chris Jensen. “That ratcheted everything up a little.”

Manufactured in China and Russia, the 120mm was the largest mortar in Hanoi’s inventory—“a pee-ringin’ weapon,” in the words of one officer. It was a heavy weapon with heavy ammunition, not easy to transport, not easy to replace if lost, and as such rarely employed by the enemy far south of the DMZ. Its sudden appearance on the battlefield—the first time that one had been employed in the division area in a year and a half—indicated that the NVA intended to destroy Firebase Ripcord.

Amid air strikes and counterbattery fire, the enemy dropped in two more 120mm rounds, then two more again. After an hour’s lull, there were another two, wounding several men, including Captain Rich, who suffered powder burns in addition to catching a little piece of shrapnel in the corner of his right eye. Chris Jensen decided to pack up his cameras and get out while the getting was good. Before he hopped aboard a departing slick, he was given a large chunk of 120mm mortar shrapnel, which Lucas wanted him to hand-deliver to an officer from division intelligence who would be waiting for him on the pad at Camp Eagle. Jensen, incidentally, was summoned to the PIO office upon returning to the rear and reprimanded for having defied orders by taking his team to Ripcord.

Captain Rich was supervising another fire mission when, at 12:34 P.M., sixteen 60mm rounds were launched in rapid succession from one direction, twelve 120mm rounds from another, all of them impacting directly on top of Ripcord. Some of the 120s actually exploded inside Battery B’s parapets, wounding eight cannoneers and putting Rich out of action with multiple shrapnel wounds to his legs, one of which was slightly fractured. The fire mission continued amid the incoming. “The men never left their guns,” noted Lieutenant Wintermute. “I saw one round impact very close to one of the howitzers, literally blowing a crewman out of the position. He did a backflip—you would have thought it was a circus act— but immediately popped right back into the position, loaded the howitzer, and continued firing. They were all like that. They did an absolutely fantastic job. For all the stuff you read about bad morale in Vietnam, quite frankly, I never saw it.”¹

In addition to the counterbattery fire, gunships and tac air were scrambled to hit the suspected 120mm firing position almost four kilometers from the firebase on the reverse slope of Coc Muen Mountain. Captain Harris, meanwhile, recommended that Rich, wounded seven separate times, finally be evacuated, not only because of his fractured leg but, more importantly, so he could have exploratory surgery to ensure that no arteries had been damaged by a bad fragment wound in his groin area.

Lieutenant Colonel Walker selected Phil Michaud, CO, A/2-319th FA, on Rakkasan, to replace Rich for the duration of the battle and flew out in a LOH to pick him up and take him to Ripcord. “Whereas Rich was somewhat flamboyant, Michaud was very steady, very calm and cool under pressure,” noted Wintermute. Michaud held the Silver Star from the first sapper attack on Granite. Another officer described him, admiringly, as “short and stocky, built like a damn rain barrel. He was forceful and outspoken, a football-player type.”

Rich provided Michaud a hasty briefing in his culvert–half bunker about the enemy situation, the procedures that had been worked out for delivering ammunition and evacuating casualties under fire, and the status of the personnel in Battery B. “In the middle of the briefing, we got mortared,” recalled Michaud. Rich and Michaud had no sooner exited the bunker to conduct crater analysis and get the 105s firing back than “that little hootch took a direct hit,” noted Michaud. “It was completely demolished.”

Having survived his last close call, Rich climbed aboard the colonel’s LOH after the shelling and departed Ripcord. He was subsequently decorated with the Silver Star and Distinguished Service Cross. Rich’s valor had taken such an emotional and physical toll, however, that Walker disapproved his request to extend once again and had him reassigned to battalion headquarters for the five months left on his tour. “Rich was one step away from being a basket case by the time I took over,” said Michaud. “I don’t know how long it had been since he’d had any sleep, but he was completely spent. He was just running on adrenaline. He was basically shell-shocked, and from what I saw, he stayed that way until he rotated out of Vietnam.”

The other battery commander on the hill, Captain Baxendale of A/2-11th Field Artillery, was also evacuated on July 17 so that a piece of shrapnel lodged in a bone in his neck could be surgically removed. Baxendale turned over the 155 battery to his exec, 1st Lt. J. Robert Kalsu of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. “Kalsu was just a great guy,” recalled Michaud. “He feared absolutely nothing. . . .”

Bob Kalsu, a tall, beefy hulk of a man who had gone to college on a football scholarship and played a season with the Buffalo Bills—he was their Rookie of the Year in 1969—was, thanks to his ROTC commission, one of only a half-dozen athletes who had to interrupt their pro careers to serve in Vietnam. Married to his college sweetheart, the father of a baby girl, everything going his way, Kalsu had wept the day he received his orders to Vietnam. He made the best of it, however, believing as a patriot and devout Catholic that one had to take the bad with the good. Extremely popular, Kalsu was a fine artilleryman and a gentle giant who rarely used profanity—“highly unusual considering the crowd,” noted a fellow lieutenant—and enjoyed a remarkable rapport with his troops. “He was one of the very few officers completely at ease with the enlisted men, and they with him,” wrote one GI, adding that Kalsu was “cheerful, fair, strong, seemingly indestructible, and one of the nicest people I have ever met.” Another recalled that “Kalsu used to help us haul ammunition. For an officer, that was unheard of. A lot of the section chiefs didn’t even hump ammo.”

Captain Michaud was wounded only a few hours after relieving Rich by a ricocheting sniper round that took him in the back of the thigh. The bullet went in sideways, plowing all the way to the bone. “It felt like a red-hot poker had been jammed into my leg,” said Michaud, who, informed by the medics in the aid station that the bullet would have to be removed in a surgical hospital, opted against being medevacked. “The walking wounded like myself,” he noted, “got patched up and continued to drive. It didn’t take long before the wound got infected and my leg turned black.”

Toward dusk that same day, Michaud won a second Silver Star when he spotted smoke from a mortar tube that had begun shelling Ripcord. The firing position was on the crown of a little rocky knoll in the low ground southwest of the firebase, so close that the thump of each round could be heard as it left the tube. Michaud even caught a quick glimpse of one of the bareheaded NVA manning the mortar as he sighted the howitzer that was facing the knoll; Michaud was peering down the bore itself because the direct-fire sight had previously been damaged by shrapnel. “It was a major attack,” recalled Michaud. “They were popping rounds on us like there was no tomorrow, but after three or four rounds of our own we were right on ’em, and then we pounded the position with another fifteen, twenty rounds. We got a direct hit. We could see pieces of metal go flying from the destroyed tube. It was no big deal. We immediately started firing other missions because it was coming in all the time and they just started peppering us from some other direction.”

There had been relatively few fatalities on the firebase, none at all, as noted, until the tenth consecutive day of shelling, none again for the next seven days. “One life is too many,” said Lieutenant Wintermute, “but for the amount of mortar fire we were taking, the casualties were unbelievably low. It was amazing.”

The law of averages caught up with the defenders of Ripcord on July 18, the day that the battle, already something of a siege in spirit, became one in fact. Colonel Harrison flew in during a lull in the shelling late that morning and was standing at a bunker opening near the TOC, “talking with a sergeant as we both leaned on the stack of sand-filled ammo crates shielding the bunker entrance,” he later wrote, when a “120mm round landed at the front base of the stacked crates. It blew both of us back about eight feet into the bunker. The sergeant was evacuated with blood coming out of both ears. A soldier leaning on crates in the same fashion at the next opening to my right [Sp4 William D. Rollason, a sniper attached to the 2-501st TOC] was killed instantly. My S-3 was approaching from the helipad to our left, and was wounded in the right leg.” Like Major King, Harrison was also superficially wounded, though he did not report it: “I was bruised and had a terrible ringing and pain in my ears, and later discovered a nick in my leg. . . .”

Following the departure of the brigade commander, several CH-47s deposited supplies on the log pad on the southeast side of the firebase where the crown of the hill protected them from a .51 caliber that had begun firing on aircraft in the area from below the southwest side of Ripcord. The fourth or fifth Chinook to arrive, at 1:30 P.M., was piloted by WO1 Robert A. Barrowcliff of A/159th Aviation out of Phu Bai. Barrowcliff had already flown several missions to other firebases that morning when, upon refueling, he was dispatched to Ripcord with a sling load of 105 ammo he picked up at Evans. Barrowcliff was not in radio contact with Ripcord and, as such, was unaware of the threat posed by the machine gun. It would not have mattered—the pathfinders on the log pad had safely brought in the other resupply ships with hand signals—had Lucas not ordered the Chinook diverted with a smoke grenade to the 105 battery’s ammunition supply point, about fifty feet from the log pad at the southeastern end of the base. The pathfinders had emphatically opposed the diversion, because an aircraft hovering over the ASP would be exposed to the machine gun below, but Lucas had overruled them, his prerogative as King of the Hill. By doing so, Lucas meant to protect the troops who would have to hump the ammo up to the battery area from the log pad, an extremely hazardous task, given the incoming mortar fire. Because the pilots could quickly position and unhook their loads, Lucas gambled that the enemy, at the receiving end of much suppressive fire, would be unable to hit the Chinook as it placed the howitzer shells directly in the wide trench in front of the main bunker in the ASP.

Lieutenant Colonel Lucas took a calculated risk, and he lost. He lost big time. Barrowcliff was settling into a thirty-foot hover when his door gunner, Sp4 Terry A. Stanger, behind the pilot on the left side of the aircraft, spotted three figures—in strange uniforms and wearing odd helmets—down in the vegetation at the base of the hill, directing, it appeared, some type of weapon toward the Chinook. Stanger immediately swung his M60 in the group’s direction, flipped off the safety, and, as required, keyed his mike to ask Barrowcliff for permission to open fire. “We had been informed that there were friendlies outside the wire,” noted Stanger, only two weeks in-country at that time. “I could tell those three weren’t Americans, but I thought they might be ARVN.”

The enemy gun crew opened fire at that instant. Lieutenant Edwards, the engineer platoon leader, was underneath the hovering CH-47, one of several men who, reaching up to grab the cargo net in which the artillery ammunition was secured, were physically guiding the sling load into the trench in front of the ammo bunker.

Edwards saw the .51 stitch the Chinook:

If you have ever been near a hovering helicopter, you know that the noise is deafening. It’s so deafening, in fact, that there was absolutely no sound as several bullet holes spontaneously appeared in the side of the Chinook. It was almost surreal—one second, it was a perfectly routine resupply mission, the next, there were these big bullet holes two to three inches wide. I was dumbfounded for a second before it registered that the Chinook had taken direct hits from a .51-cal. . . .

When the machine gun opened fire, the flight engineer, Sp4 Michael A. Walker, was lying on his stomach, peering through the hook hole in the center of the helicopter’s floorboard, ready to press the button that would release the sling load once it was in position on the ground. Private First Class Charles L. Holmen, the crew chief, was manning an M60 at the right door, which was opened from the waist up, directly across the aisle from Stanger.

The burst of fire from Stanger’s side passed through the aircraft and sparked a fire in the rear engine on Holmen’s side; as Holmen noted, the crew was initially unaware that they were in trouble:

The helicopter was about level with the top of the firebase on my side. I was watching to make sure we didn’t clip any antennas with the rotors when I saw a pathfinder running towards us, frantically waving his arms. Something was obviously wrong, and I leaned forward to look down the side of the helicopter—your peripheral vision is limited when you’ve got a flight helmet on with the visor down—and saw that the engine was on fire. Looking back inside, I realized that the cabin was full of smoke. It was so thick I could barely see the light coming in through the hook-hole where Walker was positioned. I hollered to the pilots that we were on fire. Of course, everybody was hollering on the radio by then. . . .

There was an intense flash of heat in the cabin as the entire aft section of the helicopter burst into flames, an auxiliary fuel tank having been ignited by the engine fire. Walker immediately released the sling load, as trained, so that the pilot could pull away from the ammo they were carrying before he crash-landed the burning helicopter. Singed by the flames, Walker frantically pushed past Holmen to climb through the crew chief’s half-open door and jump to the ground from the still-hovering Chinook.

The enveloping wave of heat melted the outside of Stanger’s visor. Barely able to see through the blurry plastic, the door gunner rushed into the cockpit, screaming that the helicopter was on fire. Barrowcliff and his copilot, Capt. Edwin W. Grove, had only just realized that something was amiss when Stanger burst in; at that same moment, the cockpit filled with smoke and the aircraft lurched forward, knocking Stanger headfirst into the center windshield. Stanger’s arms got wrapped up in the controls, and Barrowcliff, unable to push the cyclic forward, decided that he had no choice but to set down where they were and hope they could get away from the burning aircraft before the main fuel tanks exploded. Stanger fell onto Grove as the helicopter tilted to the right. The copilot pulled the emergency release on his door, which jettisoned the entire door, along with Stanger, who’d been pushing off the door with his hand, desperately trying to get off Grove. Stanger described his sudden free fall:

It was just, boom, out goes the door with me in tow. I fell about fifty to a hundred feet down the mountain and landed on some empty ammo crates that had been thrown down the side of the mountain as trash. I hit pretty hard. The visor on my helmet slammed into the bridge of my nose, and I was half-blind for all the blood in my eyes. I was actually lucky, though, because if not for the visor I would have gotten a face full of nails from the ammo crates. As it was, when I stood up, my flak vest had ammo-crate lids hanging all over it. The nails had embedded themselves in the metal plate in the vest. I didn’t realize it at the time—I didn’t feel a thing—but the fingers on my right hand were all wrenched out of their sockets and bent in different directions from the fall.

All I could think of was my instructors at helicopter school who told us to get the hell away from a chopper’s blades when you crashed. I took off downhill, the ammo-crate lids bouncing on my chest, until I thought I was clear of the blades. When I looked back up, I saw that the aircraft had come to rest on its side. The rotors had flayed themselves off against the ground. I tore my helmet off, unfastened the flak vest, and started climbing back up the mountain as fast as I could. . . .

The cannoneers from the 105 battery had barely survived the thrashing rotor blades. Captain Michaud described the scene:

We were in the rotor wash of that big bird. We saw the back end of it catch on fire, and watched the helicopter drop straight down on top of the ammo bunker it had been hovering over. The rear wheels landed on top of the bunker, but the front end nosed down into the trench in front of the bunker, and then the bird rolled to its right, and, of course, the rotor blades hit the ground and just tore themselves to pieces. The Chinook came down so fast that all we could do was jump for cover. I tried to squeeze into one of the little powder pits where we threw excess charges—they were about two feet by two feet by two feet—as the blades hit the ground, kicking dirt in our faces, slinging equipment and trash through the air. Pieces from the disintegrating rotors sliced right overhead, plowing into the howitzers, crashing down all around us. . . .

Barrowcliff and Grove exited the aircraft through the copilot’s empty door frame after the blades finished destroying themselves; Holmen went up through the door gunner’s window. Stanger rejoined them as they rushed to Walker, who had been knocked down by the helicopter when it rolled. Walker was flat on his stomach at the edge of the trench, right below the crew chief’s half-open door, pinned down from the back of his thighs by the pontoonlike main fuel tank running along that side of the Chinook. The situation was desperate. The aft section of the helicopter, propped up on the ammo bunker, was burning out of control. “The fire was spreading rapidly along the fuselage towards that trapped crewman,” recalled Michaud, who had dashed to the scene. “Because of the magnesium mixed in the aluminum, the skin of the helicopter was burning so hot the flames were almost white.” Magnesium, noted Stanger, “burns like the sun. There’s nothing that can put it out.”

Lieutenant Colonel Lucas and Captain Williams raced over from the TOC; after ordering many of the troops converging on the crash back to cover so as to hold down casualties when the main fuel tanks exploded, they began building a sandbag wall between Walker and the oncoming fire. Barrowcliff removed Walker’s flight helmet as soldiers pulled at his arms and chipped away at the rocky soil around him with shovels. “Walker was begging us to help him,” recalled Stanger. “We were beside ourselves.”

Holmen climbed back into the burning helicopter to secure the escape ax, then, back outside, swung it into the skin of the chopper, splitting it, but the ax bounced off the door frame above Walker. The enemy, meanwhile, began dropping mortar rounds around the stricken Chinook.

Michaud was one of those doing what he could:

I remember jumping into the trench and crawling under the helicopter—there was just enough clearance under the nose—to see if there was any way I could get that crewman’s legs loose from underneath. I thought if I clawed enough dirt away, he could pull himself free, but I got soaked with boiling hydraulic fluid that was pouring out of the helicopter, and quickly gave up that attempt. . . .

Staff Sergeant Van F. Rosenkilde, a pathfinder, ran up with two fire extinguishers and handed one to Sergeant Hinman of Company B. Hinman sprayed the flames licking along the fuselage while Rosenkilde sprayed another pathfinder, Pfc. Nicholas A. Fotias, who was frantically trying to pull Walker out. “As long as he held the fire extinguisher directly on us,” said Fotias, “it would keep the flames back, but as soon as he’d take it away, the flames would spring back to life.”

Within perhaps five minutes of the crash, the main fuel tanks, which, topped off before the mission, held seven thousand pounds of JP4 jet fuel, exploded, engulfing the entire helicopter in flames. The machine-gun ammunition on board cooked off like strings of firecrackers. The wall of fire sent everybody running for their lives. Walker was left behind, still pinned under the Chinook. “I remember that kid’s eyes, man, when the flames finally forced us back,” said Fotias, still haunted. “They drug me away from him, and I was just looking at him, our eyes met, and he was just screaming. . . .”

Reaching cover, Michaud looked back at Walker. “All we could do was watch as he cooked inside his flame-retardant nomex flight suit,” said Michaud. “You could see the steam coming out of his flight suit. It was the most terrible thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life. I even considered pulling my .45 and just ending it for him, but I couldn’t do it. He was finally consumed by the flames. . . .”

Stanger scrambled into a bunker already occupied by three GIs, but it offered no refuge. Chunks of burning metal flew past the door as 105 rounds in the sling load began exploding and a stream of burning jet fuel ran toward the bunker from the blazing Chinook. Stanger asked one of the GIs where they should go, but the man was so terrified that, seeing Stanger’s spec four insignia, he blurted that he was only a private and Stanger should tell them what to do and where to go. “Okay, where is the main bunker and who knows how to get there?” Stanger asked. One of the other men said he would lead the way to the TOC, the safest position on Ripcord.

The four of them dashed out of the bunker. Stanger immediately hit a concertina-wire barrier, which, as he tried to bull his way through it, tore off his gloves and snared his shirt and trousers. The other three men, not noticing, kept going. There was a tremendous explosion as the fire spread to the ammo bunker atop which the helicopter had crashed, and Stanger tore through the wire, shredding his legs, feeling nothing, fire and smoke all around, the concussion of an exploding shell knocking him down just as he reached the TOC. He blacked out for a second, then, looking up, saw a man with a cross on his helmet. It was Chaplain Fox, standing at the entrance, shouting at him to get inside, which he did, crawling in on his belly amid the continuing explosions. Holmen became separated from his fellow crewmen in the chaos, but Barrowcliff and Grove also made it to the TOC. There they weathered out the storm. “We had at least two direct hits from artillery shells that were blasted out of the ammo dump and exploded after hitting the roof,” recalled Stanger. “They really shook the world. The concussion from one picked up one of the pilots as he stood there in the main hallway of the bunker and just laid him flat on his back.”

Captain Harris described the destruction of his aid station:

The artillery shells were blowing up one by one, and group by group. There were tons of explosions. They kept getting bigger and bigger, louder and louder, and, meanwhile, burning jet fuel had run down into the communications center and caught it on fire. The conex containers we were set up in were essentially fireproof, but we’d used dirtfilled ammo crates to build additional compartments around the conexes. We also used the crates for walls and desks and chairs. It was all that wooden stuff that was on fire.

The aid station was right next to the communications center, and it began to fill with smoke as the fire worked its way down towards us. There was an ammo-crate wall between the aid station and the 2-501st TOC, and one of the guys—I think it was Danny Thompson—chopped through it with an ax so we could get down the hall to the main TOC without stepping outside. Nobody was going to go outside. That would have been like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. The fire finally stopped at the main TOC. If the fire hadn’t driven us out of the aid station, my medics and I would have all been killed. We didn’t know it at the time, but the artillery guys had dug ammunition revetments at the top of the hill directly above and behind the aid station. When the shells in there detonated, the explosion just replaced the aid station with a big hole in the ground. . . .

The exploding artillery ammo included WP shells, which sent burning chunks of white phosphorus splattering down here, there, and everywhere, starting more fires. Tear gas from exploding CS shells permeated the southeast end of the base, and some of it drifted down into the TOC. “It was pretty bad,” said Stanger, who, like most of those who’d sought shelter in the ops center, was without a gas mask. “The medics soaked four-by-four cotton pads in water and passed them out to hold over our mouths so we could breathe.”

Holmen had already taken cover inside a bunker when “the tear gas came rolling in like fog, and I darted over to one of two conexes outfitted with communications equipment that were sitting back to back. The gas came in there, too, and I ended up going over the top of the radios and through this little opening into the next conex. Somebody in there gave me a gas mask, and that’s where I stayed until everything settled down.”

It took three hours for the ordnance in the ammunition supply point to expend its fury, with the more than two thousand 105mm rounds and accompanying powder charges stockpiled there. “Being in the middle of such carnage is almost beyond description,” wrote Lieutenant Edwards, who was hunkered inside an underground bunker with several GIs. “The explosions were of such magnitude that you could literally see the bunker rise off the ground with each blast. I truly don’t want to think about it. . . .”

Sergeant Rubsam was initially pinned down in a small bunker with his platoon sergeant and radioman as Beehive rounds cooked off outside, weakly but with enough power to pepper the sandbags with scores of darts. The tear gas that began wafting in convinced them that they had to get as far from the area as possible. Waiting for a lull, then hoping for the best, they made a mad dash for Impact Rock. Taking cover against the giant boulder, Rubsam’s group was joined by several more grunts. Everyone was uptight, expecting the NVA to take advantage of the situation by slipping sappers through the wire. With adrenaline pumping as they waited for the ground attack, the grunts felt a ferocious need for sugar. “Somebody recovered a case of C-rations,” said Rubsam, “and we dug through it, looking for peaches and fruit cocktail, anything with a high sugar content.”

There appeared then a naked figure moving rapidly uphill in their direction, shielded by the boulders between which he was passing. It was impossible to get a clear shot at the man, so Rubsam, thinking that this was it, that the ground attack was starting, gave the okay to one of his grunts to pitch grenades down among the boulders. Undeterred, the figure continued forward. “He scared the hell out of us,” recalled Rubsam, “but as he got closer, we realized he was an American. I couldn’t believe it. I also couldn’t believe we hadn’t succeeded in killing him before we saw who he was.”

The naked, barefoot GI high-stepped his way through the wire and, reaching safety, sat down. Medics rushed over as Rubsam questioned him and relayed his name and unit to the TOC. The GI, it turned out, had been asleep in his hootch when the top of the base began exploding; he had dashed down the southeast end to escape the inferno, tearing through the concertina, hurtling the hog-wire fence, and otherwise not slowing down until he reached the jungle below the cleared upper slopes of Ripcord. Moving in defilade, the man had made his way all the way around to the northwest end of the hill, which was not exploding, then started back uphill toward the perimeter. “If I recall correctly, he was an artilleryman,” said Rubsam. “He was sort of in shock and had a bunch of cuts and scrapes, some of which were probably from our grenades, but he was in remarkable shape for what he’d been through and was obviously relieved to be back inside the wire.”

Colonel Harrison, airborne over the firebase, which was hazy with smoke and tear gas and from which a column of thick black smoke rose high into the sky, was in radio contact with Lucas as they coordinated protective artillery barrages from Barbara, Rakkasan, and O’Reilly. When the tear gas dissipated enough to allow helicopters to approach the base, Harrison sent in slicks to deliver fire-fighting equipment and take out the wounded while gunships rolled in around Ripcord.

Amazingly, no one had been killed or even seriously injured by all the exploding ordnance, not even the trooper who had to be dug out of his bunker after it collapsed on him. According to initial reports, however, the 105 battery had been destroyed. Even if the fire did not spread to the 155 battery, its rate of fire and adjustment capabilities were too slow to provide support to units in contact. Using a secure net, Harrison called General Berry, who had also rushed to the scene in his command ship, and “requested the immediate reopening of Fire Base Gladiator, for the positioning of a 105 battery to support the troops on the ground in the Ripcord area. I asked that an engineer mine and booby trap element be dispatched to Camp Evans to join my recon platoon to check out Gladiator. I also requested [that] an infantry battalion and a 105 battery meet me in the air for insertion into and around Gladiator that afternoon.”

General Berry placed the 1-501st Infantry under Harrison’s operational control from the 2d Brigade for the reopening of Gladiator, which sat on a small, bald hilltop in the low ground seven klicks northeast of Ripcord. Past problems aside, Berry was impressed with the way Harrison and Lucas handled the crisis, writing home that he had monitored Lucas’s command net “during the whole burning, smoking, exploding mess and heard calm, cool, and collected professionals doing their job in a business-like manner.”

Chaplain Fox, who went from bunker to bunker after the fires had been brought under control, talking with the troops and taking their measure, recalled that “nothing ever fell apart. Things got crazy there for a while, and we had to reorganize a lot of things, but nobody lost their head. Everyone was still holding up well.”

Initial reports of the destruction of the howitzer battery were not exaggerated: All six 105mm guns had been put out of commission. They were just scrap metal. Nothing was left of two or three but tubes lying on the ground, the wheels and carriages having burned away. Until a decision was made about flying in replacement guns, Michaud and Wintermute ended up as artillery spotters on the perimeter, and their cannoneers were used to beef up the infantry positions or were integrated into the 155 crews of A/2-11th FA.

As troops reestablished their positions, some of the hot shells that had been tossed all over the area continued to cook off, randomly, unnervingly, and the enemy continued to drop in mortar salvos. There was a heavy, twenty-round barrage of 120mm fire at 6 P.M., which wounded several GIs and killed Pfc. Burke H. Miller of A/2-11th FA. The enemy also doused the hill with CS. “It was terrible because all of our equipment and personal gear had been destroyed in the fire, including our protective masks,” noted Captain Michaud. “As soon as the gas clears, you’re okay, but when you’re sucking that stuff down in your lungs, you get violently ill, you puke, and the tears run together at the point of your chin. . . .”

Elements from the 1-501st were at that time securing Gladiator. As the infantry began digging in, six CH-47s, with a howitzer and its basic load of ammunition sling-loaded beneath each, began moving a 105 battery, B/2-320th FA, commanded by Capt. Charles R. Brooks, from Tomahawk to Gladiator. It was dusk by the time the entire battery was on site, and the cannoneers laid their guns and prepared their ammunition in the light of an orbiting flareship. The crews worked fast. It took less than forty minutes from the arrival of the first gun before the battery fired a registration salvo of WP shells in the low ground below Gladiator. “There were no land lines hooked up yet,” recalled Frank Parko, “so one of the lieutenants stood on top of an ammo crate and shouted out ‘Battery adjust,’ followed by the deflection and elevation to Ripcord, then, ‘Round, HE. Fuse, quick.’ Next, he shouted out the number of rounds we were to fire, and that’s when everyone’s jaws hit the ground because it was two hundred rounds per gun. That was the whole basic load. The last thing he shouted was, ‘Target— known mortar positions and enemy troop concentrations.’ ”

The cannoneers peeled off their shirts in the muggy heat and, firing without respite, sent two hundred, then three hundred, then four hundred rounds per gun flashing into the night, additional ammo being brought in by Chinook. “Everybody knew everybody else’s job, and everybody pitched in,” recalled Parko. “We all did a little of everything—loading, firing, hauling ammo, cutting charges, putting in fuses.” The battery’s ammo section had a flatbed Mechanical Mule, which it used to haul shells from the helipad at the edge of the jungle to the howitzers at the top of the hill. The mule couldn’t keep up with the demand. “There were two or three guys on each gun. Everyone else was busting open ammo crates and humping ammo up from the helipad,” noted Parko. “We’d heft the rounds on our shoulders, hump ’em up, drop ’em off, then go back for more. There were so many empty canisters and expended brass piled up, we were tripping over the stuff. We were hauling ammo and bustin’ caps like bats out of hell all night long.”

Colonel Harrison spent the night on Ripcord, helping Lucas and his staff arrange for and coordinate the supporting fires, the flareships, and the resupply effort that continued in the dark as ammunition of all types was collected from other division firebases and sling-loaded up to Ripcord by Chinook. The pilots, all volunteers, delivered the ammo under fire, the constant counterbattery fire and the night-flying Marine Intruders suppressing most but not all of the enemy mortar crews in the black hills around Ripcord.

The expected ground attack did not develop. During a quiet interlude in the ops center, one of Lucas’s staff officers admonished him for rushing to the scene of the burning Chinook. “Look, sir,” he said, “there’s only so many chances you can take.”

“Nobody’s indispensable,” Lucas replied. “We can get new captains out to the companies in no time flat. If I get killed, there will be a new battalion commander out here within four hours.” “Sir,” the staff officer blurted, “let’s not talk about that.”

“Look, that’s just one of the facts of life around here.”

That Lucas was a man of great personal courage is indisputable; his competence as a commander is a matter of much controversy, however, one of the darker enigmas of Ripcord. “Lucas meant well, but common sense did not always prevail,” said Fred Spaulding, who thought Lucas too reckless with not only his life but the lives of his troops. “He would move units into areas and send helicopters into LZs without adequate prep fires,” according to Spaulding. “There were a lot of pilots who refused to fly for him. Those scout pilots had brass balls, but, shit, Lucas could be totally irrational. I was in the air almost every day during the battle, looking for targets and helping coordinate our fire support from a LOH. There were numerous instances in which I’d have to call a check-fire because Lucas’s chopper had suddenly gotten in the way. I’d tell him, ‘Clear the area, you’re holding up progress here.’ ”

Lieutenant Anderson of the division pathfinders recalled that when a new three-man pathfinder team was sent to Ripcord, the team that rotated off “described the battle as a total fuck-up being run by some hopeless lieutenant colonel.” The CH-47 crash was not the only issue. “Our guys also said that Lucas gave them a direct order to have helicopters fly along certain routes so that they would elicit ground fire and help him pinpoint enemy positions,” noted Anderson. “There were numerous anecdotes like that, and lots of passionate anger in the pathfinder platoon about Lucas. The animosity was so intense that we gave serious consideration to seeing what we could do to get Lucas court-martialled.”²

The last word about Lucas should come from those who worked closely with him in the TOC on Ripcord. The colonel’s operations section was a tight, sharp little group, including as it did Bill Williams as S3 and Charlie Lieb as S3 Air, with two low-key, highly respected ex-platoon leaders, 1st Lt. Gary L. Watrous and 1st Lt. Henry J. Bialosuknia, assigned as the assistant S3s. To these men Lucas was a cool professional who did a remarkable job in the face of an overwhelming enemy force and a puzzling lack of support from above. “Lieutenant Colonel Lucas was the finest damned battalion commander I’d ever served under, bar none,” Williams would write. “He was a fighting soldier. My only problem with Lieutenant Colonel Lucas was that he ran too slow; when we were moving around the firebase and there was incoming, he kind of jogged. At times like that, I wanted to pick it up a bit.”

Gary Watrous’s impressions are especially valuable. Having joined the army at eighteen and graduated from OCS with no college, he was leading a rifle platoon in Vietnam shortly before he turned twenty. Watrous was so good that Lucas’s predecessor had selected him to run the battalion reconnaissance platoon; out of respect and affection, the recon troops, many of them older than Watrous, called their platoon leader Teenager. Watrous thought Lucas a bit too spit ’n polish but noted that “Lucas treated the junior officers on his staff very well and respected our opinions. We had a lot of field experience which he didn’t have. Lucas was a leader and a fighter. He imparted the feeling that anything could be done. It was rare to see him in a down moment no matter how bad things were. He kept everybody in the right frame of mind. I thought he was a very caring, compassionate individual, too. It broke his heart, every casualty, every fatality. . . .”

Lieutenant Edwards would have agreed, recalling the day that Lucas visited the engineer area by himself after a helicopter had lowered a prefabricated wooden bunker into an entrenchment. The entrenchment was not deep enough, however, and most of the bunker remained aboveground. Lucas motioned Edwards over as he sat down on some sandbags. “Young man,” Lucas said softly, almost wearily, “I really don’t want to write your mother a letter saying that you died on this hill. That bunker may seem solid to you, but it’s not solid enough and it sticks out of the ground so much we might as well paint a big bull’s-eye on it.” Edwards had his engineers cover the exposed bunker with several layers of sandbags, reflecting later that Lucas’s tone and manner “made it apparent that he really cared about my welfare, that he wasn’t just a senior officer telling a junior lieutenant about field fortifications. It was in vogue at the time for high-ranking infantry officers to look mean and angry, but Lucas was not of that school. In fact, there seemed to be a gentleness about him that was really a little disarming. It occurs to me that I never saw him smile. There was a perpetual hint of weariness, maybe sadness, in his face.”

General Berry visited the firebase the morning after the Chinook crash. “Getting into Ripcord by then was like playing a shell game,” said John Fox, the general’s pilot. There were four helipads. The pathfinders, or Black Hats, did not communicate by radio with approaching aircraft on the assumption that the enemy was monitoring their frequency. “Instead, you’d make your approach,” explained Fox, “and at the last possible moment a Black Hat would pop out of a foxhole and wave you towards the pad that had been cleared for landing. As soon as you landed, everyone got off the aircraft immediately and you departed immediately because there was probably an incoming mortar round headed for that pad.”

Berry spent an hour on Ripcord. “It was good for me to talk with the soldiers there,” Berry wrote home. “Their calmness and matter-of-factness reassured me and built my confidence.” Berry described how he squatted beside a young GI who was sitting on the ground in the 155 area, cleaning the breechblock of one of the howitzers: “I stuck out my hand and said, ‘I’m General Berry. What’s your name?’ He looked up disbelievingly, stuck out his oily hand, shook hands, and exclaimed, ‘Jesus, what’s a general doing here? I thought you’d be back at a headquarters or some shit like that.’ ”

When it came time to pick Berry back up, Fox played the same shell game with the Black Hats. “When I landed,” Fox recalled, “General Berry and the division sergeant major came running out of a foxhole with the general’s aide right behind them, and nobody stepped into the aircraft—they all dove in belly first. . . .”

Captain Andrew Breland choppered in that same morning, July 19, with a three-man team from the 287th Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Detachment, USARV, out of Phu Bai. Two members of the detachment had actually been dispatched to Ripcord the day before, only a few hours after the Chinook had crashed into the ammunition supply point. “They were totally unprepared for what they found,” noted SSgt. Robert J. Lynch; between the incoming mortar fire and exploding artillery ammunition, “it was impossible to do any work. From what they described after they flew back to Phu Bai late that evening, this was going to be an EOD nightmare, the big one you hoped never happened. . . .”

Sergeant Lynch’s narrative continued:

The door gunner on our Huey pointed towards Ripcord. We could see smoke and small fires. The burned-out Chinook was still smoldering. We off-loaded the Huey as fast as we could and reported to the TOC. We were briefed, then escorted to the top of the firebase. The area was just strewn with ordnance . . . hand grenades . . . 40mm shells in the armed condition . . . High Explosive rounds . . . White Phosphorus rounds . . . Bomblets from a type of artillery shell called Improved Conventional Munitions, better known as Firecrackers, were also scattered in the rubble. If you accidentally stepped on one of the golfball-sized bomblets, it was designed to spring about six feet into the air before detonating. This was an extremely dangerous situation.

We started stacking the ordnance in shell craters and detonating the piles with C4. We used everything we had brought with us. More was flown in from Camp Evans. I don’t remember how many cases we used, but at one point, Camp Evans ran out and started sending TNT blocks until they could get more C4. The heat was terrible as we went about our work. By noontime, it was unbearable. Even the ground was hot from all the fires. I was new in-country, and my arms were almost purple to go with the terrible heat rash developing under my arms and between my legs. The lack of drinking water made it worse. I’ve never been so thirsty. All the water bladders on the base were nearly empty. To get any water at all, several guys would jump up and down on a bladder. If you were lucky, a few mouthfuls would come out.

The demolition work was carried out under fire. Lynch had a chunk of skin torn away under his right knee by mortar shrapnel his first day on Ripcord. When the EOD team returned the following day, having choppered to Phu Bai for the night, he took additional shrapnel in his left leg. “Later that second afternoon,” he wrote, “a mortar round went off not far from me, and the blast knocked me through a razor-wire barrier, resulting in multiple cuts.”

Lynch described the ongoing give-and-take of fire:

Shell craters were everywhere, which proved handy during the mortar attacks. There seemed to be another salvo every twenty minutes. There was almost constant sniper fire, too; occasionally, you would hear one zip by your head.

The grunts on the perimeter were spotting for the 81s, and they frequently pointed out enemy soldiers moving on the ridges around us. The Quad-50s would rake the hillsides whenever someone reported movement or smoke from a mortar tube. Pink Teams were buzzing the ridges, the LOHs flying at treetop level, trying to draw ground fire, the Cobras rolling in if the enemy shot at the scouts, just tearing up the area with rockets, miniguns, and automatic grenades. We also had a ringside seat to numerous air strikes. The Phantoms would come out of nowhere, dive, and release their payload of snake-eye bombs, retarding fins popping out so that the bombs seemed to float down into their targets. None of it suppressed the enemy for long. I gained a lot of respect for the NVA. They were just as determined as us, I was learning. . . .

The ordnance team was assisted by a small M450 bulldozer that had been lifted in after the Chinook crash from the 326th Engineer Battalion headquarters at Camp Eagle. Because the bulldozer was a regular magnet for enemy fire, three crewmen took turns using it to push the debris and unexploded ordnance and destroyed 105s over the side of the mountain, clearing the battery area for replacement guns. All three were later awarded Silver Stars, Lynch recalling in particular “a black GI who refused to leave the bulldozer no matter how heavy the sniper fire and incoming mortar fire.”

Lieutenant Edwards’s platoon sergeant, SSgt. Ronald L. Henn, a big, cheerful Regular Army NCO with red cheeks and a good ol’ boy smile, a fellow Kentuckian, removed by hand those shells that the bulldozer could not reach, earning a Bronze Star. There were dozens of them, blown into corners and tight spaces between bunkers. Some of the shells were cracked and leaking gunpowder, and all were so hot that you had to wear gloves to handle them. “Any one of them could have gone off at any moment,” noted Edwards, “but Henn went about picking them up and carrying them to the disposal area for hours. He had a helmet and flak jacket on, in addition to his asbestos gloves. Of course, had a 105 round cooked off while he was carrying it, nothing would have been found of him or his ‘protective’ gear, but it was the principle of the thing.”

Frank Parko volunteered to join one of the working parties sent by the 2-320th FA to help with the cleanup. “Ripcord to me was like a long, long Mad Minute,” Parko later wrote. He elaborated:

We were told to pair up and help where we could. I teamed up with my buddy Dennis Murphy. During the day, we helped clear debris, humped supplies off the helipads, ran ammo down to the infantry positions on the perimeter, things like that. There was movement all around the hill, and snipers among the boulders of a rock outcropping about five hundred meters off one of the helipads. When we saw muzzle flashes, Murphy and me’d pop right back with our M16s. Everybody would. We didn’t get much sleep at night. One night, we helped man the 155s. Another night, we were part of a human chain passing rounds from the mortar section’s ammo bunker down to the crews in the 81 pits, running into the bunker when incoming came crashing in. We finally joined the 81 crews. They were pumping off hundreds of rounds that night, HE and Illum. . . .

Parko encountered an angry grunt one of those nights who informed him that he’d caught a Vietnamese scout shining a flashlight and calling to the NVA. “If you see a Kit Carson shining a flashlight out there,” the grunt intoned, “shoot the sonofabitch.”

Lucas finally had all the Kit Carsons on the firebase confined to a bunker, basically putting them under house arrest. “They were yelling to the enemy on the other side of the wire,” recalled Sp4 William W. Heath of HHC/2-506th, “and there was some misunderstanding as to whether they were trying to give themselves up or trying to provide information to the NVA.”

Through it all, the casualties continued to pile up. Captain Williams and Captain Lieb were hit on July 19 when the NVA, as they always did when the officers on the base gathered for the evening briefing, dropped a mortar round on the VIP pad in front of the TOC. “You could almost set your watch by that round,” noted Captain Harris. The battalion surgeon recalled that there were a dozen or so officers lounging against the TOC’s blast wall, waiting for the briefing to begin, when Williams, concerned about the target they presented, ushered them inside: “Hey, maybe we better get our ass out of here because they’re gonna drop one in pretty soon.”

Captain Williams was the last man through the doorway and thus took the full brunt of the round that exploded on the VIP pad. His injuries were massive. In addition to a ruptured eardrum and several dozen flesh wounds in his back and buttocks, his left lung was punctured and collapsed, the back of his skull was crushed, and the right side of his jaw was shattered, the lower portion blown off. “Williams was laying on his back about halfway down the stairs, blood just pouring out of a wound in his throat. His jugular vein had been cut by the piece of shrapnel that broke his jaw,” recounted Harris, who scrambled to the unconscious Williams and stuck his fingers into the throat wound. “It was a torrential hemorrhage,” Harris continued, “but after a few minutes, it seemed to stop. I stuffed some gauze sponges in there, and that’s when he came to.” Williams was out of his head, screaming and yelling as several officers, including Lieb—who had been splattered with shrapnel through his flak jacket badly enough to be medevacked—held onto him to ensure that he didn’t reopen his neck wound as they talked him down. Alerted that a medevac was on the way, a litter team gingerly moved Williams up the steps. Someone told him that it would be a long time before he rejoined the battalion, and Williams, barely able to breathe, barely able to talk, grunted his response: “Fuck you.”

Lieutenant Edwards was called to the rear the next morning, July 20. In his absence, two of his men—Sp4 Durl G. Calhoun and Sp4 Dennis F. Fisher—were killed by a barrage of 120s when they were caught in the open, helping to clean up the mess on top of the hill. Calhoun could have gone home to Leesville, Louisiana, almost two months earlier but had instead extended his tour. He was a veteran of the engineer advance party that had CA’d onto Ripcord during the April Fools’ Day Assault. “That alone established him as ‘hardcore,’ ” noted Edwards, “but he had also participated in several other missions that involved heavy combat, so he was a legend in his own time around the company, one of those guys who had ‘seen some real shit.’

“It was great to have Calhoun in the platoon,” Edwards continued. “He was quiet, dependable, and worked like a Trojan. Physically, he was young, tanned, and thin with lady-killer looks. I never got to know him well, but like everyone else, I admired him. He usually had a slightly amused look when I talked with him. I think he wanted to let me know that he was not overly impressed with this lieutenant’s budding combat experiences. When Calhoun got killed, there was more disbelief than anger. It reminded me of when they finally killed Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.”

Morale began to unravel. The troops, unable to comprehend why division did not either pile on or pull them out, became gripped with a certain numb despair, a feeling that they had been abandoned to their fate. “I don’t think the mortars are ever going to stop coming in,” Edwards wrote in his journal after returning to Ripcord. There were grunts who basically flipped out under the onslaught, taking bets on whether they could survive walking from one bunker to the next amid the incoming, whistling, hands in their pockets. Other grunts never left their bunkers. “It was terrible picking people for the working parties that had to go topside,” Sergeant Rubsam reported. “You could hardly look ’em in the face. We spaced it out as reasonably as we could so a guy didn’t have to go up top every day.”

People were physically and emotionally frazzled not only from the dangerous and exhausting working parties but from trying to stay awake half the night on watch, the perimeter positions having been reduced to two men each because of the heavy casualties. Sometimes guys just ran out of steam. Chip Collins and his best friend, Al Riddle, tough troopers both, jumped into a bunker during one particularly heavy barrage, abandoning whatever task they’d been assigned to that day. They were soon confronted by a furious captain whom they did not know. “What do you fuckers think you’re doing in here?” the captain barked. “We’ve got things to do up on top of the hill. You get your asses up there.” Neither man budged, not even when the captain said that he was giving them a direct order. “We just laughed at him,” recalled Collins, “which elicited a threat of court-martial. We laughed that off, too, and he just sort of disappeared.”

Replacement guns were not flown in as planned. The chances were too great that one of the Chinooks trying to place new 105s on site would be brought down, either by the .51s or the 82s and 120s. It was not uncommon for resupply CH-47s to pull away from Ripcord with shrapnel damage despite the fact that they barely slowed down to unhook their sling loads. “[W]e’re taking 75–80 rounds a day and they’re deadly accurate,” Lieutenant Edwards wrote on July 21. “[M]edevacs are constantly in + out with the wounded. . . . A ground attack is sure to follow, as the whole hill is all but wiped out + no supplies can get in. Really feel low . . .”

The casualties continued to pile up. Edwards himself received a number of cuts and scrapes when a direct hit caved in part of the roof of the bunker he was in. The engineer platoon sergeant, the indomitable, always-smiling Sergeant Henn, was wounded badly enough to be medevacked on July 21 when he and Edwards were running working parties on different parts of the hill. Edwards raced to a small bunker near him when the explosions started. “At least one other trooper was wedged in there with me,” he recounted; when the incoming let up, “Henn came barrel-assing in, telling everyone to clear out as he hit the door on all fours. His lower leg was a bloody mess, but he was lucid—and seriously pissed. For the first time ever, he wasn’t very keen on showing proper military courtesy. Luckily, Henn had caught frags from a CS round rather than an HE round. Had it been HE, it is doubtful that Henn would have survived as close as the round landed to him.”

Sniper fire was received that same morning from the south side of the base, and Al Riddle of Bravo Three began returning it with a ground-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. The enemy put the gun out of action within moments, dropping a single 82mm mortar shell just behind the position, almost a direct hit. “Unfortunately, there were five or six guys from the platoon clusterfucked around Al, watching him fire, seeing if they could help,” recalled Chip Collins, one of many who rushed to help when word went out that they had casualties. The scene was devastating. “All I saw was a mass of bodies, and we began pulling them out of the position,” Collins wrote. Private First Class Francis E. Maune had been killed instantly, and five others were wounded, including Pfc. Larry J. “Mac” McDowell, who would die of his injuries after being medevacked. Riddle was at the bottom of the pile, one of the wounded; though dazed and peppered with shrapnel, he had been spared death or serious injury by his flak jacket and the men around him who had absorbed most of the blast. As Collins helped him to cover, Riddle kept repeating, “Those fuckin’ gooks. . . . Those fuckin’ gooks. . . .”

Specialist Fourth Class Roberto C. Flores of Bravo Two was also killed on July 21, felled while on a working party. Flores, a draftee, had a wife and baby waiting for him in Brownsville, Texas. Rubsam, who counted Flores as one of his best friends, described him as smart, upbeat, a completely dependable soldier. That was what got him killed. “Most of us would go whenever we were called upon, but some guys eventually said ain’t no way,” recalled Collins. Between those who were medevacked to safety and those who simply faded into the woodwork, the most dangerous assignments were falling disproportionately on men like Flores. “Roberto came over to my position the very morning he was killed,” noted Rubsam, “and complained to me that the new lieutenant running Bravo Two was always picking him for details and working parties. He was depressed about being out there on top of the hill day after day. Roberto was very well liked in the whole company, and it really hurt when we found out that he was KIA.”

Flores was killed toward dusk when the enemy dropped a heavy salvo of 82s into the 155 area from the reverse slope of Hill 805, hoping to catch those troops moving howitzer ammunition that had just been sling-loaded onto the battery helipad by a fast-moving Chinook. The salvo did just that, wounding seven men and killing Flores and Sp4 David E. Johnson of A/2-11th FA.

The salvo also killed Lieutenant Kalsu, the big, popular pro-football player serving as acting commander of Battery A. Kalsu had been standing with pathfinder Nick Fotias at the top of the stairs leading down into his FDC. “It was foolish to be in the open like that,” admitted Fotias; the problem was that the enemy gunners were “clobbering us with a round of CS and then three HE in that pattern, just constantly. It got to the point after a while,” explained Fotias, “that you didn’t even wear your gas mask because it was so sweltering hot you couldn’t breathe with the darn thing on. You’d rather breathe the CS than suffocate in your mask. I guess you just had to decide which was the lesser of two evils. It was so hot down in the bunkers anyway, you sometimes gave up the safety of being inside one just to get a breath of anything close to fresh air.”

Lieutenant Kalsu had been telling Fotias that his wife, pregnant with their second child, was due to deliver that very day when an 82 suddenly slammed in about five feet from the entranceway to the FDC. Fotias was blown down to the bottom of the stairs and Kalsu crashed atop him, big and heavy. Fotias, stunned from the blast, rolled Kalsu off him when he came back to reality. The lieutenant had been killed instantly, a shrapnel hole above his left eye. “I put my hand up there and tried to stop the blood,” Fotias recalled, “and then I realized I was holding a piece of his brain in my hand. . . .”

The death of the gregarious Kalsu sent a shock wave across Ripcord. “Even Colonel Lucas gasped a little bit when he heard,” noted Harris. Bob Kalsu, the only professional athlete killed in the Vietnam War, was sorely missed by the men in his battery, as was the dead cannoneer, David Johnson. “One was a highly educated white professional athlete,” said Alfred Martin, a section chief, “the other a poor colored kid from Humnoke, Arkansas, who didn’t have shit goin’ for him. Kalsu and Johnson had nothing in common except their size and their hearts. They were both giants, and they were both two of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet.

“They were together all the time,” Martin continued. “Everything was a competition to ’em. Them 155 rounds we carried, they weighed ninety-seven pounds apiece. They carried three, one across each shoulder, which we all did, but then they’d have a third laid across the back of their necks, supported by the other two. That’s three hundred pounds. They’d hump three rounds at a time off the helipad as long as they could, just to see who’d say uncle first. . . .”

Lieutenant Edwards felt himself sliding into a hopeless funk. “Every time a chopper approached, the entire hill headed for cover because we knew that incoming was on the way,” he wrote. “Cobras would be circling and artillery fire smashing into the adjacent hills, but nothing could stop the incoming. We felt helpless, at the mercy of the enemy. Sustained incoming has to be one of the worst tortures ever inflicted on a soldier. There is an element of humiliation involved, too—you just have to sit and take it.”

As men were methodically wounded and killed by an enemy who seemed immune to the allies’ overwhelming fire superiority, Edwards felt “vulnerable, humiliated, sickened, angry. When the bastards gassed us, it just added to the humiliation of it all. It’s impossible to look macho in one of those anteater gas masks. We all looked like dorks, and felt that way, too.”

Edwards finally succumbed to the numb resignation of combat fatigue. “I can remember saying to myself, I’m gonna die on this damn hill. It was an awful, apathetic feeling. Finally, near the end, the passivity bordered on indifference to death. Maybe there was no other way to cope with what was happening day in, day out, more incoming every day, almost constant, more body bags stacking up to be evacuated. Who next? Who cares? Here it comes again. . . .”