PART SEVEN
We were just dust in the wind out there.
—Pfc. Walter M. Jurinen Company D, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry 101st Airborne Division
CHAPTER 22
Captain Hawkins was sitting against his ruck like the other men in the column along the ridge—a rest halt had just been called—when he heard someone crunching through the leaves that covered the jungle floor. Coming to instant, nerve-tingling alert, he spotted the approaching North Vietnamese. There were two that he could see, one leading, the other a few paces behind, passing between the trees twenty feet away as they hiked up the side of the ridge at an angle. They were traveling light, no helmets, no packs—they wore fatigues and web gear and had fresh, close-cropped haircuts—and, unaware of the silent column above them, their AK-50s were slung over their shoulders. They were the first enemy soldiers Hawkins had seen face-to-face in five months of combat, and he froze at the sight of them. He realized that no one else had noticed the enemy, that no one was going to shoot them before they crested the ridge and were among them, but his body would not respond. A tremendous weight bore down on his shoulders and he could not breathe. He could not call out. His arms would not lift his M16.
Hawkins’s heart was pounding. C’mon, boy, he thought, cursing himself, don’t freeze on me now. You can do it. React.
He did. The lead weight evaporated and adrenaline flooded his system as he leveled his M16 on the lead enemy soldier from the hip, buttstock clamped under his arm. Hawkins cut the man down with a quick three-round burst to the chest— tang-tang-tang—then, shifting slightly, did the same to the second NVA. Tang-tang-tang.
Hawkins rolled to his knees, pumping more rounds into the bodies. Fearing he had killed merely the point team of a larger enemy force, he dug a grenade out of an ammo pouch, pulled the pin, cocked his arm, and tried to lob the grenade through the tree branches above him. The frag hit one and bounced back, landing between him and one of his radiomen. Hawkins shouted a warning and they frantically low-crawled away from the grenade, the radioman springing to action after it exploded, thinking it had been an enemy satchel charge as he sprayed the brush with his M16. Others joined in, but Hawkins, regaining his composure, realized that there were no other enemy in the area and bellowed, “Cease fire. Cease fire.”
Lieutenant Widjeskog made a sweep of the area, then joined Hawkins, who remarked that he had basically been preparing for such a moment since entering West Point. “All that training really paid off,” he exulted. “I did exactly as I was supposed to.”
Everything had been going Hawkins’s way since he had magically called in the air strike on the ammo cache six days earlier as Company A moved off Hill 805. The company spent that night below 805, moved onto the southeastern end of the ridge running down from Ripcord the next day, then dropped off the ridge the day after that, July 15, its stated mission to find enemy graves—higher command apparently wanted something to show for all the munitions being expended in defense of the firebase—its unstated mission to screen the southern approach to Ripcord. By late afternoon, Hawkins was moving onto a subhill, a klick down from the firebase, which had appeared a good NDP site but atop which were discovered two fresh enemy bunkers. Ominously, there was a pile of fresh feces beside one of the bunkers. It was too late to move to another location, so Company A dug in where it was. “Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, around three or four A.M.,” Hawkins wrote, “I woke up with an uncanny feeling that we were going to be hit.” Hawkins and his radiomen “went around to quietly wake up the platoon leaders”; the company “rucked up as silently as possible and moved out into the dead of night. I didn’t know where we were going, just downhill, away from that NDP.” An hour later, at which time the company was half a klick from the knoll and the sky was turning a twilight gray, “we heard a mortar being fired, and moments later, heard and felt the crash of the rounds impacting on our former NDP. The enemy fired fifteen to twenty rounds, enough to cause a lot of havoc had we still been there. Eerie. There were a bunch of guys in Alpha Company who were starting to wonder what sort of crystal ball their Charlie Oscar was using.”
The predawn move allowed Hawkins to slip under the enemy’s radar screen, so to speak, and numerous NVA positions were discovered on the side of the ridge during the next few days. There were mortar and machine-gun pits, sleeping bunkers, hospital bunkers, even an underground kitchen. The grunts paused long enough at each position to blast it with a plastic jug of crystallized CS wrapped with det cord, thus impregnating the earthen walls with tear-gas powder and rendering the position unfit for human habitation. Company A had never operated with such stealth. “We were really scared and we stayed real quiet,” explained Lieutenant Widjeskog. The grunts felt themselves on enemy ground, vulnerable at any moment to ambush. Gunfire seemed to echo continuously through the jungle as other units made contact, and the CH-47 that was shot down on Ripcord seemed to throw in doubt which side was winning. Widjeskog’s platoon, Alpha Two, was close enough to hear the muffled report of the .51 that nailed the Chinook and to watch it crash and burn, setting off a chain reaction of explosions. “Pieces of shrapnel could be heard hitting the trees between us and the firebase,” wrote Widjeskog. “The explosions seemed to go on forever, a haze of black smoke filling the sky. We were certain that many had been killed up on Ripcord.”
The tension built to the point that the sergeant in charge of the squad whose turn it was to lead Alpha Two at that particular time had to inform Widjeskog that he couldn’t get anyone to walk point. Widjeskog didn’t think he could persuade anyone to walk point by force of personality, having little standing with his grunts—in their eyes, he was just another green lieutenant—and he didn’t want to give anyone a direct order to do so. Those men who disobeyed a direct order would be packed to the rear on the next resupply slick to await court-martial, an option that Widjeskog knew would appeal to the more uptight grunts in the squad. He also rejected as unfair the idea of putting a different squad in the lead. “Okay,” he finally said, “if you guys won’t do it, I’ll do it. I don’t care. I’ll walk point.”
Lieutenant Widjeskog had proceeded about two hundred meters down a trail when the squad leader came up to tell him that he had found somebody to take the point. “Afterwards,” noted Widjeskog, “I heard that no one wanted me getting killed on point because none of the sergeants wanted the responsibility of taking command of the platoon. That kind of problem did not occur again.”
Lucas instructed Hawkins to begin pushing southeast as of July 19 toward the narrow valley pinched between the southwestern base of Hill 805 and the major ridgeline knifing east from Coc Muen Mountain. That same morning, the 155s on Ripcord fired a six-gun salvo uncomfortably close to Alpha Two. Hawkins received an agitated call from Widjeskog to get the firing stopped, which he did by immediately contacting the TOC. Hawkins then demanded to talk with the S3. Captain Williams got on the horn—this was his last day on the firebase before being wounded—but made a throwaway comment to minimize the incident upon learning there had been no casualties. “Listen, friend,” Hawkins barked, “this is my AO and anyone fires into it, I’m going to know beforehand. You got that?”
Williams got a bit huffy, so Hawkins, wanting to be seen by his men as a commander who took care of his troops, proceeded to lay down the law: “I have just had six one-five-five rounds nearly hit one of my platoons. I didn’t call for fire. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t give a shit. If it happens again, I am going to personally RIF up to the TOC and de-nut you. Do you roger?”
That was the end of it. Williams told Hawkins not to worry, he would make sure things stayed under control. Widjeskog’s men had been shaken by the friendly fire. To bolster their morale, Hawkins decided to move his CP, then with Alpha Three, the half klick to Alpha Two. Meanwhile, Hawkins instructed Lieutenant Pahissa of Alpha One to take control of Alpha Three, which was commanded by a less-than-aggressive E5. Pahissa was then to lead the descent into the valley—the eager academy graduate sounded pleased when so informed— and find a good company-sized NDP.
Charlie Oscar’s presence did not have the desired effect on Alpha Two. There were eight men in the command group: Hawkins; his three RTOs; the FO and his RTO; the senior medic; and Sfc. Pham Van Long, the ARVN interpreter attached to Company A. “There was so much activity because of the radiomen and all the things the CP had to do,” noted Widjeskog, “that I was immediately getting complaints from my men that these guys were too noisy and were sure to get us into trouble. We could hardly wait till the CP joined another platoon and left us quietly alone in the jungle.”
Hawkins’s group was still with Alpha Two late that afternoon when Widjeskog called a rest halt, having just realized to his dismay that he was going to have to turn the whole show around, because he had taken the wrong ridge to reach the overnight position being secured by Pahissa. It was at that moment that Hawkins, waiting for the column to proceed, shot the two unwary North Vietnamese. Hawkins recalled that upon moving on to the overnight position, which was atop a knoll on a ridge that descended southeast into the valley, Bill Pahissa and his platoon sergeant, Gerald Singleton, “offered a mock round of applause for the kills. I waved it off.”
Hawkins had taken a small brass cigarette lighter as a souvenir from the first man he shot, from the other a belt with the prized red-star buckle. “It’s your kill, captain,” a grunt had said. “You get first pick.” The lead enemy soldier had a wallet in which were tucked a piece of notebook paper, a letter, postage stamps, photographs of what were presumed to be his wife and child, plus a few folded-up pages from an American skin magazine. The company interpreter examined the material, which identified the NVA with the wallet as a sergeant named Van Thai, his companion a Private Thuan, both reconnaissance personnel from “K3 Company, D9 Battalion.” The sergeant had partially healed wounds in his back and legs, and the notebook paper—a supply request he’d been dispatched to carry from his company commander to some higher headquarters—indicated that he was on light duty after having been hit by ARA shrapnel during the night attacks on Hill 805. As recorded in the battalion journal, the letter had been written by the sergeant to an older brother in Bac Thai, North Vietnam, and in it he “complained about lack of uniforms, medicine, and food.”
Hawkins had his own worries. There was obviously a large enemy force encircling Ripcord, but “if there were so many NVA in the area,” he later wrote, “why was Lucas sending a lone company into a valley, vulnerable from all around, to suffer what so many enemy might throw at it?” Lucas had told Hawkins when talking to him on the secure net that, given the extent of the entrenchments on Hill 1000 and the fact that the firebase was taking 120mm fire—the enemy did not usually employ their heaviest mortar until they had invested an area in at least regimental strength—“he thought we might be up against a regiment, maybe two regiments. But it came across as only speculation. The truth is that we simply didn’t know what we were really up against at that particular time.” Hawkins had no choice but to take the mission at face value, which meant that he was to “look for the enemy and kill him; find his bunkers and supply caches and destroy them. What I was being asked to do wasn’t a heck of a lot different from the search and clear patrols we’d been doing since I joined the battalion. The big difference was that I would keep the platoons within mutually supporting distance of each other. Our platoons usually operated rather independently in order to cover all the territory we had.”
Lieutenant Colonel Lucas had been running out of options when he sent Hawkins into the valley. Not one to reveal doubts to subordinates, Lucas, outwardly positive, could not have but felt abandoned when he took stock of the situation that morning; his firebase was half demolished, the incoming was relentless, and the division reserve had been withdrawn, nullifying any hopes of securing Hill 1000. Lucas had basically been left to fight alone with his battered battalion—actually, those two companies not tied down on firebase security—plus an attached company, D/1-506th, commanded by Capt. Donald R. Workman, which had been inserted onto Triple Hill upon the departure of the Geronimo Battalion.
Division was counting on firepower to disperse the enemy on Hill 1000. Lucas hoped to deny the enemy their other major stronghold, Hill 805, with the ground forces available to him; thus did Lucas send Hawkins into the valley southwest of 805 and make plans to assault D/1-506th the following day onto a ridge fifteen hundred meters northeast of Hill 805. Chuck Hawkins and Don Workman had been classmates at West Point. “Don’s company and mine were going to link up, and then work our way up the backside of 805, rooting out the enemy,” wrote Hawkins, who was somewhat dubious about the enterprise, given what the NVA in the area had been able to muster against D/2-501st when it had held Hill 805.
Many grunts were convinced that Hawkins had volunteered them for the mission into the valley. It seemed a suicidal venture, and Hawkins had to call in a medevac on the morning of July 20 for a GI who had shot himself in the foot with his M16. “He says it was an accident, but it’s sure a good way to get out of the field,” a skeptical medic remarked to Hawkins after treating the GI.
Captain Workman and D/1-506th, meanwhile, CA’d into a hot LZ two and a half kilometers away on the other side of Hill 805. Hawkins’s luck still held as Alpha One—continuing southeast down the ridge from the overnight position after the medevac, followed in column by Alpha Two, then Alpha Three—reached the heart of the valley without incident, whereupon it made the most important intelligence coup of the entire battle for Firebase Ripcord.
It was 2:25 P.M. when Hawkins received the urgent radio call from Lieutenant Pahissa: “I think you better come down here.”
Hawkins asked Pahissa what he had. “High-speed trail and commo wire—and it isn’t ours,” Pahissa answered. “We’re rigging a wiretap and we’d like the company interpreter to listen.”
Alpha One, nine hundred meters from the overnight position, had just discovered a major enemy trail, three to four feet wide, at the southwestern base of Hill 805, a klick down from the top. Several feet to one side of the trail, running parallel to it in the thick underbrush, was a black phone line that had been “laid on the ground or over trees and bushes as it was spooled out,” noted Hawkins, who quietly moved to the scene with his interpreter and two RTOs. “Pahissa and Singleton were excited and delighted at their success at finding and tapping the wire. . . .”
“How’d you tap the wire,” Hawkins asked Pahissa.
“Earplug from a Sony transistor radio—one of the men had it.”
For reasons of noise discipline, troops in Company A weren’t supposed to have transistor radios in the field, “but at that point it was a serendipitous violation of my policy,” mused Hawkins. “Pahissa already had his Kit Carson listening in and making notes; he then cut the cord of a PRC25 handset and spliced that into the commo wire so Sergeant Long, my interpreter, could listen, too.”
The line was extremely active. Long wrote in a notepad as fast as he could, with the radio handset squeezed between his ear and shoulder. It appeared, said the enthused, grinning ARVN NCO, that the phone line ran between a mortar unit firing on Ripcord from the reverse slope of Hill 805 and an enemy division headquarters somewhere to the southwest in the direction of Hill 902.
Hawkins passed intell directly to Lucas and General Berry, who was overhead, monitoring A/2-506th’s activities and D/1-506th’s ongoing engagement from his C&C. Company A also encountered the enemy several times as the day wore on. The first contact involved an ambush that Alpha Two had established between Alpha One, which was deployed in defensive positions around the wiretap, and Alpha Three, which had backtracked up the ridge to secure the high ground. The ambush was on a bluff a hundred feet above a fast-moving, boulder-strewn stream running between the lower edge of the ridge and the base of Hill 805, overlooking a spot that seemed readily accessible to enemy soldiers who might need to refill their canteens. Hawkins moved to the scene when Pfc. Alan R. Miller, one of the ambushers, opened fire on a water detail that did indeed appear at the stream. Miller had time for only a quick burst before the enemy disappeared back into the jungle. “I think I winged one in the foot,” Miller said with a chagrined look.
Hawkins was talking with Widjeskog when several more M16 shots rang out from the bluff, followed by a blast from an M79. Miller, who packed both weapons, had just ambushed another water detail. Hawkins was stunned that the enemy would return to a spot where they had taken fire but surmised—and this spoke to a great number of enemy in the area—that the second water detail had been dispatched by an entirely different NVA unit on Hill 805.
Hawkins hustled up to Miller’s position to find a dead NVA spread-eagled on a flat rock down below at the edge of the stream. “Good shooting,” Hawkins exclaimed; in response, Miller, short, chunky, and tough, one of the few who wanted to fight in a unit full of draftees—he had dropped out of college to enlist and had wangled his way into an infantry unit after being assigned as a clerk because of his education—“just looked up at me,” wrote Hawkins, “and smiled the biggest shit-eating grin I can remember. . . .”
Hawkins returned to the wiretap, and Long reported that, in addition to the location of the enemy division headquarters, they had also determined the center of mass of four major subordinate units—regiments, according to Long—on the high ground north, south, east, and west of Ripcord. There had been discussion of a mass assault on the firebase that night, but apparently no final decision had been reached, because reinforcements expected that day had failed to arrive. The Kit Carson eavesdropping with the earplug was visibly shaken, but Long, delighted at the trick they were playing on the enemy, beamed as he told Hawkins, “Beaucoup NVA. . . . Full division. . . . F-5 Division. . . . many men.”
The dual taps had lowered the transmission signal, and Long presently informed Hawkins that a repair team was being sent out to inspect the line. The jig’s up, thought Hawkins. It was, but it wasn’t. The enemy soldiers on the radio, even if they suspected that the line had been tapped—and it appeared that they were responding matter-of-factly to what they thought was a technical problem—knew neither the location nor the size of the force that had entered their valley. The situation was ripe for another ambush. To confuse the enemy, Pahissa suggested they fire up the linemen with the AKs recovered from the two sappers Hawkins had shot. Hawkins agreed. Pahissa took one of the captured weapons and joined those grunts covering the trail as it ran into their perimeter from the direction of the enemy headquarters, while a Sergeant Ross did likewise with the other AK-50 on the side of the perimeter facing Hill 805.
The linemen came down the trail in Ross’s direction. Ross shot the lead NVA in the chest at close range, but the man bounced back up and darted into the brush even as a machine gunner cut loose in his direction and other grunts frantically opened fire with M16s.
Pahissa, rushing over, asked Frank Marshall where the NVA had gone. “He went down right there,” Marshall said, pointing to the trail, “then went through those little bushes over there.”
“Go ahead,” Pahissa said, his blood up. “We’ll follow you.”
“No, you won’t,” Marshall blurted to the brand-new platoon leader. “You’re crazy. I ain’t goin’ in there first—I got the ’79.”
Pahissa darted on to one of the riflemen, and a small group took off in hot pursuit of the wounded NVA. They followed a heavy blood trail down to the stream, but the man had disappeared.
It was time to get out. Hawkins moved northwest with Alpha Two to rejoin Alpha Three, leaving Pahissa and Alpha One, as Hawkins later wrote, to “hang around the wire-tap a bit longer to see what developed, and to give me time to get up the slope so the whole company wouldn’t be clustered together. . . .”
It took the enemy about an hour to organize a response to the ambush of their linemen. Pahissa briefly engaged the NVA as they approached, then ripped out fifty feet of telephone line and moved out to follow the rest of the company up the ridge. Pahissa, wearing one rucksack and dragging another, was really huffing and puffing by the time he reached Hawkins. Seeing the extra ruck, Hawkins thought Pahissa had lost a man, but it turned out that the platoon leader had relieved one of his troopers of his rucksack so the man would be unencumbered as he covered the withdrawal.
Hawkins had Lieutenant Olson, his forward observer, call fire down on the wiretap area as Company A moved several hundred meters west of the trail leading back to its previous overnight position to establish a new NDP. “I didn’t want to be found too easily,” noted Hawkins. Berry and Lucas had been full of praise as Hawkins relayed information to them from the wiretap, and as things settled down that night, Hawkins recalled that he was “pleased, excited, and feeling very proud of Alpha Company.”
Hawkins thought it was time to get out of the valley. Lucas, however, wanted him to come up with a prisoner the next day to confirm the intelligence from the wiretap. Hawkins’s impression was that the new mission had come down from division. “The concern, apparently, was that the enemy may have suspected the wiretap and sent false information to mislead us,” noted Hawkins. “I doubted that, but could not say in so many words why. If the order to get a prisoner had originated with division, that means there was [a] strong feeling in higher headquarters not to believe how many enemy we were up against, even at that late date. . . .”