CHAPTER 23
The men disembarking from the first slick into the landing zone included 2d Lt. Randall Thompson, 1st Platoon leader in D/1-506th. Thompson’s group dashed to the south side of the man-made clearing, grabbing positions to provide suppressive fire for the next helicopter in the five-ship lift bearing Delta One. “When we reached cover,” recalled Sp4 Richard E. Drury, the platoon leader’s radioman, “we realized that there was a communications wire running from one side of the landing zone to the other, as well as bunkers all around the edge of the LZ. I looked at Thompson, and he looked at me—we knew that this was not going to be good.”
It wasn’t. Thompson popped red smoke on the landing zone—it sat in a saddle between two knolls at the south end of a ridge, the terrain falling away to the east and west—as AK-47 fire greeted the second Huey. Approaching from the east, it deposited its troops, then banked away to the south at full throttle. The others followed in turn, door gunners blasting back as green tracers zipped past. As each Huey flared over the clearing, nose up, tail down, the grunts on board leaped from the skids and scrambled for the brushy cover from which Thompson’s group, reinforced with each new load, sent wave upon wave of M16 and M60 fire into the jungle below the LZ.
Captain Workman—the highly respected company commander was known to all by his call sign, Ranger—went in with Delta One. The slicks circled back to Triple Hill to pick up 1st Lt. John H. Smith’s platoon, Delta Two, which was to secure the north side of the LZ. The platoon sergeant’s slick took multiple hits as it came in. Forced to break off, it sputtered its way to Camp Evans, the shaken grunts on board eventually going back in aboard another Huey.
Leaving Thompson, Captain Workman had joined Smith on the north side of the clearing by the time SSgt. John W. Fraser, the shake ’n bake platoon leader of Delta Three, hit the LZ. Workman stepped from the trees to wave Fraser over. The enemy fire evaporated as the last slick departed, and Workman, exultant that the entire company had made it in unscathed, greeted Fraser with, “We’re still eighty-four fighting bastards—no one’s hurt yet.”
Workman radioed his first sergeant at Camp Evans: “Put in for Air Medals for all my cherries—we just hit a hot one.”
Ranger’s cherries included Lieutenants Smith and Thompson, Sergeant Fraser being the only combat-experienced platoon leader in Company D. Getting organized, Workman instructed Thompson to secure the knoll to the south—it was a hundred meters to the top by way of an enemy trail that ran along the spine of the ridge, bisecting the landing zone—while Smith secured the larger knoll to the north, also a hundred meters from the saddle. The ridge came to an end at the south knoll. From the north knoll, it cut eight hundred meters northwest to the top of a small mountain. The dominant terrain feature in the area— Hill 805, which was the reason the company had been inserted—lay to the west. The western base of the landing-zone ridge met the eastern base of 805 in a shallow valley. It was sixteen hundred meters from the LZ to the top of Hill 805.
Lieutenant Smith was preparing to move out when three enemy soldiers suddenly sauntered into the perimeter, having come down the trail from the north knoll. They were still at sling arms, and before they could react, one of Smith’s veterans, Sgt. Bobby M. Rosas, shouted a warning—“Dinks”—as he leveled his machine gun on the startled NVA. Rosas, standing, firing from the hip, cut them down where they stood, blazing away without pause until he had expended the entire 150-round belt in the M60.
With the enemy soldiers reduced to a clump of bloody rags on the trail, Rosas shouted triumphantly to Workman, “Ranger, I got three.”
“Good,” Workman yelled back. “Cut their dicks off.”
Ranger was not serious, but his exhortation, met with shouts and cheers, summed up the grim satisfaction of the moment. “It boggles my mind that those guys simply walked into our perimeter,” Smith later wrote. “I guess they thought that since this was their backyard, they could walk around oblivious to their surroundings. . . .”
There was contact moments later on Lieutenant Thompson’s side of the clearing when one of his new guys, Pfc. James G. McCoy, ammo bearer for the gun team covering the trail, spotted an NVA trotting downhill toward the LZ. Only the man’s bush hat was visible over the brush. “Do we have any friendlies up there?” McCoy called out in a panic. “There’s someone running down the trail.”
Private First Class Brian Redfern, a veteran, immediately jumped on the M60 and opened fire, shouting at McCoy to “Feed me.” Most of the platoon joined in, blindly shredding jungle. McCoy noticed that a fellow cherry, Tommy Smith, had ceased firing. Thinking he’d run out of ammo, McCoy tossed him some M16 magazines. Smith did not pick them up but simply stared up the trail in shock, eyes popped wide open. When the firing petered out, McCoy asked Smith why he had stopped shooting. “My gun jammed,” Smith gasped. “That gook was so close I could have shook hands with him.”
Lieutenant Smith took the north knoll with Sgt. Terry W. Handley’s squad. They advanced cautiously, pausing while Ranger worked their front with ARA, then swept the crest on line, spraying the brush with M16 fire. Thompson, meanwhile, secured the south knoll—both knolls had freshly dug enemy positions on them—without incident. The plan was to spend the rest of the day running RIFs, then for Workman, Fraser, and Smith to NDP on the north knoll and Thompson the south knoll. Most of the grunts, thinking the battle over, “just sat around talking with each other,” wrote McCoy. “I occasionally glanced down the trail I was supposed to be watching. It seemed like no one else was paying any attention, and I remember being amazed that they could relax so soon. . . .”
The battle had actually only just begun. McCoy turned to take another look down the trail and realized that there was an enemy soldier lying there. “Too scared to yell, I reached down and picked up my M16,” he wrote; the man raised up as McCoy sighted in, so that the cherry found himself “looking at a gook that was now looking at me.” McCoy fired a burst, and the NVA dropped flat, seemingly killed instantly. The shot was the signal for everyone to begin blasting the jungle again. Redfern sent several bursts down the trail, then stood up and while McCoy watched, amazed at his cool, pulled the pin and released the spoon on a fragmentation grenade, then let it cook off for a second or two in his hand before throwing it, getting an airburst. The firing quickly died down. McCoy recalled that the guys from his platoon “came over to me and patted my now-shaking self on the back in a moment of congratulations for what appeared to be my first kill. For the first time I actually felt like I was one of the guys, but little did they know the turmoil I felt inside for killing another person.” McCoy’s platoon was shortly to be shot to pieces, however, and “the dead and wounded Americans I would see erased any remorse I may have felt at that moment. . . .”
One platoon took heavy casualties that day, the rest of the company even more casualties the next. It could have been worse. Captain Workman, three weeks to go on his tour, was due to be rotated to the rear. His successor had already been selected. The new captain was a good man but mild mannered and inexperienced. “I must admit,” wrote Lieutenant Smith, “that I’m glad Ranger was still in command when we stepped in it at Ripcord. . . .”
Don Workman—strong, outgoing, a natural leader—was seven and his sister three when their parents divorced and they went to live on their maternal grandparents’ farm near Springfield, Missouri. He was thirteen when they rejoined their mother, who was back on her feet financially by then, settling finally in Kirkwood, a quiet suburb of St. Louis. Working days, going to college at night, Workman joined the army at nineteen to get the GI Bill. Two years later, he was at West Point with the Class of ’68.
Lieutenant Workman, airborne and ranger qualified, arrived in Vietnam in August 1969. He led a rifle platoon and the battalion recon platoon for eight months before getting D/1-506th on April 14, 1970, his twenty-seventh birthday. He was still a lieutenant at the time; he was that good. “Ranger was very professional, very competent,” noted a squad leader. Workman was crisp, autocratic, and supremely confident, fond of Hav-a-Tampa Jewels, a small cigar with a wooden tip. He was also approachable, the kind of officer who could enjoy having a beer with his men in boisterous circumstances, the familiarity breeding anything but contempt. “Everybody loved him,” said the squad leader. “He was a big brother to everybody in Delta Company.”
The grunts had originally learned to put their faith in Lieutenant Workman after Company D CA’d into the Maureen AO on May 5. The mission involved numerous contacts and heavy losses. There was a devastating sapper attack on Delta Two—the action in which Kenneth Kays won the Medal of Honor—and the ambush death of Delta One’s point man, followed by the platoon leader’s enraged and fatal one-man charge on the next enemy bunker they encountered. To add to the company’s troubles, an errant U. S. 155 shell killed one GI and wounded five. Smith and Thompson joined Company D when it came in for stand-down at the end of the month; they were replacements for the two lieutenants killed during the mission. “The battalion exec told us that he was assigning us to the best company commander in the 101st,” recalled Smith. “He further stated that Workman would one day be Chief of Staff of the Army.”
Following the stand-down, during which Workman was promoted to captain, Company D spent an uneventful week in the bush, then a month on Firebase Kathryn, getting reorganized and absorbing replacements. “I was immediately taken with Ranger,” wrote Smith, a sharp, personable country boy from the Tennessee Tech ROTC program who intended to stay in the army. “Ranger was the consummate professional, calm and detached, firm but fair, accepting of no nonsense. He expected my best, but was also readily available with guidance. I felt like I was learning from the master.
“Ranger was aggressive,” Smith continued, “believing the best defense is a good offense. At the same time, he did not believe in taking unnecessary chances. He told me that he had two rules for his platoon leaders: never lie to him, and never send troops forward without first paving the way with prep fires. You can buy more ammunition, he said, but you can’t buy a soldier’s life back.”1
Captain Workman did not mesh as well with Lieutenant Thompson as he did with Lieutenant Smith. Randy Thompson, a draftee graduate of officer candidate school, jump school, ranger school, and jungle school, knew how to run a platoon. Cocky, profane, and irreverent, he knew how to win the loyalty of his grunts. “Randy was one of the guys,” said Sgt. Robert J. “Jerry” Wise, a veteran squad leader in Delta One. “His people would have died for him because he always took care of them.” Thompson was also headstrong, independent, and disdainful of authority, the consequence perhaps of a bitter relationship with his hard-nosed father, a colonel in the air force. “Randy was a little more laid back than Ranger wanted,” noted Lieutenant Smith. If Thompson thought an order unwise—and he was especially unimpressed when Workman’s successor began running night RIFs—“he’d wink at me,” explained Wise, “and we’d RTO the whole thing, reporting the patrol’s progress by radio without actually moving an inch out of our NDP. Randy was like that even before Ripcord.”
Lieutenant Thompson lost two men when a case of grenades in their foxhole exploded during a Mad Minute on Kathryn. The cause of the blast was never determined. Several possibilities were discussed—someone on top of the hill accidentally lobbed a frag into the hole, a sapper had wiggled in close with an RPG—but when a 105 round in the artillery section was subsequently found to have been booby-trapped, fingers were pointed at a certain untrusted Kit Carson scout. “They had to escort him on a helicopter and fly him off the firebase,” noted Wise, “or he would have died right there.”
Workman did not approve of Thompson’s emotional response to his first KIAs; the platoon leader bitterly recalled that Ranger took him aside and “told me I cared too much about my people.”
Thompson did not think his superiors cared enough; it was one of the reasons he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War chapter at the University of Arkansas. He would later contend that Workman withheld information about the odds that Company D would be facing when inserted into the Ripcord AO. According to Thompson, Workman led him to believe that the company was conducting a routine CA. “My recollection of our operations order was that most of the Vietnamese had left,” said Thompson, “and that we were to look for graves. It was well known [by higher command] how many Vietnamese were there. It’s always offended me [that we were not properly briefed at the platoon level].”
Why would Workman mislead Thompson? “Maybe,” offered one of Thompson’s troops, “they figured a bunch of us wouldn’t go if we knew what was waiting for us.” That explanation is charitable. Thompson’s account has convinced many that higher command, with Workman’s collusion, deliberately dropped Company D into an enemy base camp—“right in the gook’s chow line”—to cover the evacuation of Ripcord. “Nobody was expected to come out of there alive,” contends one furious survivor. “We were a diversion.”
“Ranger failed us,” says Jerry Wise. “He didn’t tell us what we needed to know because if we’d understood the threat, we might not have gone out on RIFs, you know what I’m saying? If we did go, we would have moved slower, we wouldn’t have gone as far. We also suspect Ranger volunteered us to make his resume for major look better—that’s the perception we have now.”
Workman cannot be held to blame for the disaster that befell his command. Division simply did not begin to appreciate the magnitude of the enemy buildup until Hawkins’s wiretap, by which time Workman had already CA’d into the hot LZ. Likewise, the bunker complexes in the area had been unknown to division intelligence. Workman could not have been acting as a decoy in any event, the decision to evacuate Ripcord being made only after and in part because of D/1-506th’s heavy contact east of Hill 805.
It is also unlikely that Captain Workman deceived his troops about the mission. According to Smith, Workman called his platoon leaders into his hootch after the company moved to Camp Evans on July 17 to prepare for the move into the Ripcord AO. Breaking out a map, Ranger identified Coc A Bo, a mountain southeast of Ripcord, as a known “NVA haven” and stated flatly that the company would make contact during the mission, enjoining Fraser, Smith, and Thompson to “get your cherries ready for combat.” There might have been some discussion of searching for enemy graves that distracted Thompson, but “the mission statement I remember,” Smith later wrote, “was to conduct RIFs to establish contact with whatever enemy forces were in the area. Everyone in the brigade knew that Ripcord was crawling with dinks. The battle had been going on for nearly three weeks and was part of our daily briefings all during that time.” 2
The company spent the night at Camp Evans. “We had one hellacious party,” recalled Sp4 Steve W. DeRoque. “Lot of beer, lot of steaks. After the fact, it almost seemed like the Last Supper.”
Company D CA’d onto Triple Hill on July 18. Lieutenant Thompson’s medic, Pfc. Ronald J. Kuntz—the name, a pseudonym, will reappear—“came down with ‘heat stroke’ almost immediately,” noted Lieutenant Smith. “Ranger didn’t buy that for a minute; he could stay on the LZ or come with the rest of us, but there would be no medevac. Kuntz quickly recovered.”
It was indeed hotter than Hades as the grunts spent that day and the next sweating up and down the ridges between Triple Hill and Hill 1000. They walked, spooked, through the residue of the reserve battalion’s actions—bloody bandages, empty drip bags, web gear, a torn jungle boot—but they encountered no NVA. That might have led Lieutenant Thompson to his erroneous conclusion that the mission was routine, the enemy having withdrawn; why else would D/1-506th alone have been sent to replace the entire 2-501st?
On the other hand, it should have been obvious as the enemy relentlessly shelled Ripcord that Company D would eventually run into at least a few NVA. When it happened, Ranger’s grunts fared badly. The problem was not that they had been misled but that the company was so heavy with replacements. “Everything changed after Maureen,” remembered Sp4 K. C. James, one of the veterans. “Really, I had, too. I wasn’t going to make no friends with nobody in case they got killed.” James’s observations about morale were trenchant. “Webster defines morale as the mental and emotional condition—enthusiasm, confidence, or loyalty—of an individual or group with regard to the function at hand,” he wrote. “Under that definition, morale was good; we all worked together and trusted each other. We all wanted to get back to The World, but not many days went by that we didn’t find something to laugh about. Webster also defines morale as the level of individual psychological well-being based on such factors as a sense of purpose and confidence in the future. A sense of purpose? We would take a hill, then go off and leave it. Confidence in the future? The future for us was the next hour. Psychological well-being? Give me a break. . . .”
Having secured the south knoll, Lieutenant Thompson presently instructed Sergeant Wise to run a patrol down the slope to the south. Specialist Fourth Class Eloy R. Valle, the point man, had gone about a hundred meters and was crossing a small clearing under the canopy when his diminutive slack man, Pfc. Patrick T. “Little Bit” DeWulf, suddenly yelled, “I see one.” Wise, third in line, hit the dirt and, along with Valle, opened fire into the thick brush ahead even as he shouted at the wide-eyed DeWulf to “shoot, shoot.” Snapping out of it, DeWulf cut loose with his M16. Wise began lobbing grenades. Surprised that the enemy did not fade away but kept up their fire, Wise reckoned that they were ensconced in bunkers. It was time to break contact and call in the Cobras. “We got caught in the open,” recalled Wise. “We got out on our hands and knees, got back to where we had some cover behind some trees, and moved back up to the platoon position. They let us go.”
Captain Workman, informed of the situation by radio, chastised Thompson, telling him that Wise should have held his ground while the platoon leader brought the rest of Delta One forward to reinforce the action. “Ranger wants another RIF,” Thompson told Wise. Moving out again, Valle took a different route to the contact area, circling in from the right. Coming across another clearing—it was about seventy-five feet across, carpeted with scrub brush—he cautiously started across, followed by DeWulf. Instead of maintaining a fifteen-foot interval behind his point team, Wise instinctively let Valle and DeWulf get almost all the way across the clearing before he started into the open, followed by Sgt. Paul Mueller, the assistant squad leader acting as Wise’s RTO.
The rest of the patrol had yet to enter the clearing as Valle reached the far side. Unable to see the camouflaged bunker in the heavy underbrush, he was only a few feet from it when the NVA inside squeezed a burst of AK-47 fire into the quiet Mexican American from Rio Grande City, Texas. “Valle was dead before he knew what was happening,” recounted Wise. “I actually saw the muzzle flash. Valle just kind of leaned over and collapsed.”
DeWulf, horrified—Valle and tough, cocky Little Bit had joined the company together almost three months earlier and were best friends—turned, screaming to Wise, “They got Valle.”
In the next instant, DeWulf was stitched by the AK-47. “It had to be the same shooter,” noted Wise. “He shot Valle, then just turned on DeWulf and gave him the other half of the clip.”
It was 5:30 P.M. on July 20. Wise scuttled into some deep brush, trying to disappear, losing track of Mueller as the assistant squad leader scrambled behind a tree and blindly fired back. Wise unlimbered several grenades from the prone position, then something suddenly exploded beside him. His glasses went flying as he was peppered with shrapnel in the face and shoulder. Unable to see beyond the tip of his nose and with his sense of direction gone, he frantically crawled out of the kill zone, hoping he wasn’t rushing right toward the enemy bunker in his confusion. He instead came across his grenadier, Pfc. John C. Knott, an eighteen-year-old kid who had been fifth in line behind Mueller and was now hunkered by himself behind a tree, having become separated from the rest of the squad. Wise, who hurried past, continuing his half-blind retreat, was, it was later determined, the last person to see Knott alive—except the North Vietnamese.
Lieutenant Thompson had already started down with another squad as the enemy began mortaring the south knoll, but Wise missed them as he clambered uphill to the NDP. Jim McCoy was stunned by the look of terror and anguish on Wise’s face as he screamed, “Little Bit and Valle are dead.”
As Wise’s squad pulled back, the enemy darted to where Valle and DeWulf lay, probably already dead, and to Knott, who had been left behind in the confusion, apparently wounded. When his body was recovered, it reportedly sported the bandage from his first-aid pouch. McCoy later wrote that those up in the NDP “heard screaming, followed by bursts of AK-47 fire, then a faint, muffled scream and another short burst. The NVA were finishing off Valle, DeWulf, and Knott. I carry in my head those final screams to this day, and I’m sure for the rest of my days on this earth. . . .”
Lieutenant Thompson had left Sgt. Elger Sneed, his young but combat-hardened country-boy platoon sergeant, to hold the south knoll in his absence. Meeting Wise as he entered the perimeter, Sneed exclaimed that he was bleeding. Wise, aware only then that he’d been hit, removed his shirt. “Any big wounds?”
“Naw, I don’t see anything,” said Sneed. “Just blood.”
More firing erupted as Thompson’s force collided with the NVA. Sneed, meaning to bring additional troops to help the lieutenant, looked Wise in the eyes: “Can you lead me down there?”
Glasses gone, the world a fog around him, Wise needed everything he had in him to lead Sneed back down the hill. They found Lieutenant Thompson sitting beside a trail, a medic bandaging his forearm, the platoon leader having been knocked out of the action with a grenade. The relief force suffered other casualties, including Pfc. Dale V. Tauer, who, badly wounded and blasted down the slope by an explosion, was rescued at great risk by his buddy Pfc. Randy L. Benck. Private First Class Bill G. Browning, one of the cherries, was killed, apparently by the same RPG that wounded Tauer. “Browning was my RTO,” recalled Sergeant Sneed. “When we were starting downhill, Browning threw off the radio and moved ahead, saying I could carry my own radio, he was going to get Valle and DeWulf. That was the last I ever saw of him.”
Sneed got several men on line and pushed forward, blasting the jungle, covering the movement of the wounded back to the NDP. Mueller was firing from behind a log when Sneed dropped beside him, blood running down his forehead from a shrapnel wound; his steel pot had been blown off. Sneed was lugging the radio with which he was in contact with the Cobras that had just arrived. “We popped smoke, and they started firing rockets and miniguns, just tearin’ the jungle up,” recalled Mueller. “Sneed kept working the ARA in closer and closer until we had shrapnel flying overhead.”
Workman sent a squad under Sergeant Fraser to assist in recovering the casualties, but as Sneed attempted to move forward while moving the Cobra fire back out, his people and Fraser’s came under heavy fire from the North Vietnamese. The decision was made to break contact. Having moved down the hill, Brian Redfern, assisted by Jim McCoy, put his M60 into action to cover the withdrawal to the NDP. When purple smoke blossomed behind them, Redfern, thinking they were inadvertently being marked for the Cobras, shouted to McCoy, “Let’s get the hell outta here.”
After catching up with the rest back atop the knoll, Redfern—one of the few, thought McCoy, to keep his cool during the short, intense action—spat, “Hey, thanks for leaving us the fuck behind.”
Captain Workman had previously dispatched Lieutenant Smith and a squad from Delta Two to secure the LZ. It was getting dark by the time the first medevac arrived. When a trooper stepped into the clearing to guide in the medevac with a strobe, Smith “looked up and saw Lieutenant Thompson walking very unsteadily out of the woods towards the chopper. The bright white bandage around his arm really got my attention. I was struck, too, by his dazed demeanor. He just seemed very unsteady at the moment.” Smith asked his friend if he was okay. Thompson said that he was, incorrectly brushing off his injuries as minor. “He was obviously troubled by something else,” noted Smith. “I didn’t know until someone else told me that four of Randy’s troops were missing. . . .”
Thompson, Sneed, and Wise were medevacked together, depriving Delta One of its platoon leader and its two most experienced NCOs. Two wounded grunts went out on the next medevac. Machine-gun teams, meanwhile, laid down into the jungle an uninterrupted sheet of fire, under which several volunteers crawled, hoping to recover the bodies of Valle, DeWulf, Knott, and Browning. It was too dark, and the effort was unsuccessful.
Workman told Smith to return to the north knoll with his security squad and Delta One. “The remaining members of the platoon were quite shaken and jittery, very demoralized,” wrote Smith. The group followed the trail running uphill from the saddle, the way lit by flares. It was too late for the Delta One grunts to dig in, and the rest of the company had already found the soil too rocky and choked with too many big roots from the trees covering the knoll to do more than scrape out shallow depressions. The perimeter was basically a ring of troops tucked behind trees, concealed by thick brush, claymores facing out. Illumination was fired all night over the knoll from Granite. “We had listening posts out to our front and rear a short ways,” wrote Smith, “and about midnight, the post to the north started reporting movement. Oh shit. This report was repeated several times, and I assumed we were being located for an attack. The LPs wanted to come in, but Ranger refused their repeated requests. I was brand new to combat and had to rely on his instincts, but gut feeling was that we were about to be hit, and I sympathized with the LPs.” There was no attack, however, “and as strange as it might seem,” noted Smith, “sleep came easy for those not on guard duty because we were all so exhausted.”
The company was getting ready to move out the next morning to recover its missing men when Lieutenant Smith heard a muffled popping—three thumps in rapid succession—from the low ground to the southwest. Captain Workman also heard the mortar tube and was already calling in an azimuth and estimated position for counterbattery fire as Smith shouted to the troops to get in their foxholes, such as they were. He was amazed that many of the men, having heard nothing themselves, simply stared at him in disbelief as they sat eating a C-ration breakfast. The first three rounds exploded on the LZ. Smith heard two more thumps, his shouts growing more urgent as those rounds exploded halfway up the north knoll. With that, everyone began scrambling for whatever cover was to be found before the enemy adjusted the next salvo right on top of them.
Smith and his platoon sergeant darted along the perimeter to make sure their guys had their heads down. Seeing that they all did, the two literally dove toward the large roots of a tall tree as the third salvo whistled in. Fragments from the first shell to explode on the hilltop caught Smith in the lower back—he felt a sudden, clublike impact, then burning—and he burrowed his head and shoulders into the roots. He was convinced as explosions erupted all around that he was going to lose his legs and his testicles, that there was no way he was going to survive such a firestorm. “It seemed the rounds would never stop,” recalled Smith, shocked by the intensity of the fire; he had been under the impression that the enemy, being poorly supplied, “would drop a few mortar rounds on you, then cease fire to conserve ammo. These guys obviously didn’t know they needed to save their rounds, they just kept firing and firing after finding the range to our position.” Each salvo took half a minute to land. “There is no scarier feeling in the world than waiting for indirect fire to impact,” wrote Smith. “My stomach still tightens when I think of it. As I came to my senses, I began to hear cries of pain from all around the perimeter. We were taking casualties.”
Captain Workman and his RTOs squeezed into a narrow, enemy-sized zigzag trench atop the knoll and shouted at nearby troops to cover the vital radios with logs as they directed 8-inch fire on the enemy mortars from Rakkasan. The salvos kept coming. Lucas’s battalion journal records that the shelling began at 7:12 A.M. on July 21 and that within a few minutes an incredible eighty 82mm rounds had been sent crashing into D/1-506th’s NDP from positions nine hundred meters away at the southeast base of Hill 805.
Those few minutes were excruciating. “Everyone was hysterical,” wrote Jim McCoy, who, having no cover—others had scurried into the enemy spiderholes on the hilltop—lay curled up in a ball, his rucksack protecting his back. The grunt at the prone position beside McCoy suddenly screamed that he was hit. McCoy saw a hole in the man’s arm, but he had no sooner bandaged it than “he started yelling that his foot was also hit. I looked down and saw a bloody hole in the side of his boot, but I didn’t have another bandage. . . .”
Walt Jurinen, one of the replacements in Delta Two, had rushed to Ranger’s trench when the thumps started—it seemed the safest place on the hill—but Workman had barked at him to get back to his position on the perimeter. Jurinen was thus at the prone position beside the platoon medic, Pfc. Robert B. Hays, another cherry, when the first on-target volley splattered both of them with fragments. Jurinen took it in both legs, Hays in the groin area. Sergeant Handley, a veteran squad leader in Delta Two, happened upon Jurinen and Hays as he checked positions between volleys. Hays, a sensitive, devoutly religious conscientious objector, did not appear badly hurt, but he was terrified, almost delirious with fear. “I’m gonna die,” he mumbled. “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die. . . .”
Handley tried to calm him down. “Doc, you are wounded, that’s correct, but it doesn’t look too bad. You’re gonna be okay.”
It did no good. Hays kept repeating that he was gonna die, and when the next salvo slammed in—Handley was hit in the calf and buttocks—Hays shut his eyes and slipped into shock. Responding to Handley’s shouts, two other medics, Pfc. Richard Finley and Pfc. Barry K. Marchese, rushed over; they spent several minutes giving Hays mouth-to-mouth, but he never regained consciousness, leaving his comrades to wonder whether he died of shock or internal bleeding. Marchese must have been beside himself; only moments before, he had lost another man, Pfc. Peter P. Huk, also a replacement, who gasped his last breath even as Marchese taped a piece of plastic over his sucking chest wound.
Private First Class Frank L. Asher, yet another replacement, was also killed by the incoming fire, his body blasted down the side of the hill. Asher and Huk were so new—less than a week with the company, in fact—that Richard Drury did not know which of the two it was whose death he witnessed; Drury had already been wounded himself when “I saw a fellow soldier jump up, yelling, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ and the next mortar round killed him. . . .”
Acting before the entire company was flogged to death on the little hilltop, Captain Workman stood up, shouting to his troops to move down to the LZ. “By that time,” recalled Smith, “the damned dinks had dropped a few CS rounds in. We abandoned the hill in gas masks, taking our wounded with us and dragging the body of Doc Hays along in a litter made by folding a poncho around two poles.”
Private First Class George T. Pourchot, a radioman from the company command group, remained behind—although he had been wounded in the head—to cover the move, spraying the jungle with his M16. The mortar fire petered out as the company moved downhill, but the troops were on the verge of panic. Everything seemed to be spinning out of control. “I don’t think we’re gonna fuckin’ get outta here,” Jurinen found himself blurting to the grunt who’d dived behind a log with him when one of the last mortar shells crashed in. Mueller caught a glimpse of one trooper dragging his rucksack and M16 along in one hand, his other arm hanging limp and bloody at his side. Jim McCoy saw his buddy Pfc. John E. Millard limping toward him, wounded in both legs, calling, “I’m hit, I’m hit.” McCoy forced himself to wait for Millard and, throwing an arm around his waist, began helping him down the hill. Millard had a radio strapped to his rucksack frame. It had been badly damaged by shrapnel. “Get that thing off,” McCoy shouted.
“No way, it saved my life,” Millard shouted back. McCoy got Millard to the bottom of the knoll, then went back to help a young black soldier who was holding a large bandage against the side of his face, the ties having come undone. The kid let go of the bandage when McCoy reached him. “I could see that part of his cheek was missing, exposing shattered teeth and gum,” McCoy wrote. “I tried not to let him see the sickened look on my face when I tried to put the dangling bandage back. I was unable to reattach the bandage, and simply placed it back against his face, then put his hand to it, and told him he would have to hold it in place. I know it must have hurt him badly to hold it in place. I felt terrible that I was unable to help him. . . .”
Workman organized a hasty defensive perimeter at the base of the knoll on the north side of the landing zone, realizing as he helped place people in position that he had only forty able-bodied soldiers left, three having been killed during the shelling, another thirty wounded. Workman put Sergeant Handley in charge of the medevacs, ordering the wounded squad leader, one of their best, to evacuate himself on the last Huey. The seriously wounded included Sergeant Fraser of Delta Three, who had been hit in both legs at the beginning of the barrage. Workman sought out Lieutenant Smith, the only platoon leader still on his feet, to ask him how badly he had been hurt. “I’m okay,” Smith said. He was in some discomfort, but a medic had already assured him—Smith had been afraid to look at the wound himself—that there was only a small hole in his lower back. Workman wanted to be sure. “Can you stand the pain?” he asked. “If you can’t, I’ll send you in, but if you can, I really need you—you’re the only officer I have left.”
Smith assured Workman that he could count on him. Others felt the same way. Ron Kuntz did not; while Handley and medics Finley and Marchese, the latter one of the walking wounded himself, busily treated the numerous casualties, Kuntz—the medic who had earlier come down with “heat stroke”—sat on the trail, mouth agape, hands shaking. “What’s the matter with you, Doc?” Workman asked. Kuntz’s reply: “I’ve got shell shock, sir.”
The perimeter had no sooner been established than Workman dispatched a five-man patrol to recover a machine gun left behind during the hectic withdrawal. Reaching the abandoned position, the patrol presently came face-to-face with several enemy soldiers who had just crested the knoll from the opposite direction. The NVA disappeared into the brush when fired upon, and the patrol quickly scooped up the lost M60 and hustled back down to the LZ.
The enemy soon followed. There were numerous short, intense firefights throughout the morning as the enemy attacked in small groups from various directions, always fading back in the face of heavy return fire, always returning after a lull. Company D took no serious casualties, but it was, in effect, surrounded, and neither the M16 and M60 fire of the troops, which became almost constant after the first few attacks, nor the numerous Cobras that Workman brought in gave more than momentary pause to the North Vietnamese. Lieutenant Smith was confident that the company could hold its own, but, shocked as he had been by the intensity of the mortar barrage, he was dismayed that the enemy seemed to hold the initiative throughout the ongoing battle. “We were in the middle of an NVA stronghold,” he wrote, “under attack from all sides by an enemy that was better trained and organized than I’d ever been led to believe from my own training and the war stories I had heard. They had their shit together. They’d had our number, in fact, from the moment we touched down on that same LZ the day before.”
Many of the walking wounded joined the defense of the perimeter. Steve DeRoque of Delta Two had been badly wounded in his legs and stomach; the second-tour veteran nevertheless took over for a machine gunner whose hands were a bloody mass of shrapnel wounds. “We fired that M60 until the barrel went red,” he recalled, “then switched barrels, and continued to rock and roll.”
Medevacs had been requested. The first to arrive, at approximately 8:20 A.M., was flown by 1st Lt. Laurence Rosen from Eagle Dust-Off, the all-volunteer Air Ambulance Platoon, 326th Medical Battalion. Sergeant Handley, aided by a group that included Finley, Marchese, and Bobby Rosas—another of the walking wounded—rushed out of the trees to meet the medevac as it flared to land, carrying the company’s six most serious casualties in ponchos. Rosen’s own medic, Sp4 Brent R. Law, jumped out to help load the wounded, and the Huey quickly departed, having taken no direct fire thanks to the infantrymen blazing away on the perimeter and the Cobras slicing low around the LZ.
First Lieutenant Allen Schwartz arrived at the controls of a second medevac as the first pulled out, and he circled out of range of ground fire while Rosen provided a sitrep by radio and a recommended approach and egress route while speeding for Camp Evans. Handley’s team emerged again from its cover as Schwartz landed and loaded two litter cases—Steve DeRoque and Sgt. Michael Thomas, a squad leader in Delta Two—as soon as the skids of the medevac touched earth. Six walking wounded clambered aboard next. Schwartz’s crew chief gave him clearance to take off as Handley’s team withdrew, but Schwartz had lifted up only a few feet when the Plexiglas windshield suddenly shattered in a hail of automatic-weapons fire. The aircraft immediately lost lift and crashed straight back down; it began to shake violently a moment later, a rocket having blown off the tail boom. “The dink who fired the RPG was up in a tree,” noted Smith. “Someone saw him as he fired, so while he was successful in his mission to bring down a helicopter, he also paid the ultimate price.”3
Unsure what had happened, Lieutenant Schwartz tried to hold the helicopter steady and get it shut down even as those casualties not strapped in went bouncing out the open doors. The Huey vibrated backward all the while toward the slope on the east side of the LZ. “Get out,” Schwartz screamed to his copilot, who was physically launched out of his seat upon unhooking his seat belt and opening his door. The same thing happened to Schwartz; unfortunately, he had not yet managed to shut off the engine when he went flying. He landed hard, tumbled, and ran a short distance to get away from the out-of-control aircraft, then he hit the dirt, trying to keep low until he figured out what was going on and what he should do. He totally lost track of the other crewmen. Luckily, there were two grunts dug in at the edge of the landing zone, one of whom called Schwartz over while the other crawled to a new position to make room for the stranded and terrified pilot. “I didn’t know I’d been injured until the grunt in the foxhole asked me what had happened to me and pointed to my face,” Schwartz later wrote. “I wiped my gloved hand across my mouth and it was immediately saturated with blood; at some point, I must have gotten slammed into some component of the aircraft, and my lower teeth had penetrated right through the skin between my chin and lower lip.”
Most of the wounded were able to rush back to Handley’s position, Jurinen and DeRoque running painlessly on bloody legs, numb with adrenaline. Mike Thomas, however, was able to exit the aircraft only after it came to a stop at the edge of the LZ. Thomas, unarmed and unable to walk, joined another wounded grunt who’d also gotten separated from the rest and who had no magazine in the M16 he’d come up with, only the single round in the chamber. Together they crawled into a little furrow on the east slope about twenty feet below the Huey. “The main blade was still pumping,” said Thomas. “There were gooks in the debris farther down the slope, trying to shoot the bird and blow up the fuel tanks. White tracers were going right over our heads.”
Captain Workman shouted encouragement to his men as they kept up their fire, shouted at them to get their heads down whenever he brought in another Cobra. “Ranger’s language was quite colorful, and I’m sure the pilots loved performing for him,” wrote Smith. “The rocket explosions would literally lift us off the ground, and we often had shrapnel landing around us. . . .”
It was then and there that Lieutenant Smith learned his final lesson about fighting the NVA: “It takes somebody that’s either crazy or extremely dedicated to stand up and shoot at a Cobra gunship that’s bearing down right at you, but those suckers would do it with an AK-47. They were incredibly brave. . . .”
Lieutenant Rosen was dismayed upon returning to see that the main rotors on the wrecked medevac were still pumping away, the engine revving up to an explosive level. Upon touching down, Rosen’s medic, Brent Law, hauled Lieutenant Schwartz aboard by his survival vest—the downed pilot had made a break from his foxhole when Rosen flared to land— then raced across the landing zone, climbed aboard the vibrating Huey, and shut it down by hitting the fuel cutoff switch. Law dashed back in time to help Handley’s team load the last of nine wounded aboard his own medevac. One of them was Mike Thomas, who ended up wedged between pilot and copilot on the overloaded Huey. “It seemed to take forever,” Rosen wrote, “but, in reality, we were airborne again in less than two minutes, kissing the treetops with our skids on our way out.”
There had been no enemy fire. It took Lieutenant Rosen thirty minutes to reach base camp, unload the wounded, and return at top speed to the embattled, smoke-shrouded LZ. Warrant Officer Douglas J. Rupert, the copilot, made the landing; he was flying left seat, in training as an aircraft commander. The suppressive fire from the grunts and gunships again kept the enemy at bay as Handley’s team loaded five wounded men on the Huey. The rest of Schwartz’s crew also clambered aboard, one of the airmen having exclaimed when he saw the helicopter approaching, “That’s it, I’m aviation, I’m not a grunt. I’m getting my ass outta here.”
Ron Kuntz was of the same mind. The medic who had previously tried to get out with heat stroke, then shell shock, was now at Sergeant Handley’s elbow, literally begging to be medevacked: “I need to get out on the next bird—I’m really sick.”
“No way,” Handley said. “You’re one of the only medics we have left. I don’t care how sick you are, you just can’t leave.”
Kuntz, in an absolute panic, wouldn’t let up, and Handley finally agreed to call Captain Workman: “I’ve got a man here who says he’s physically ill and needs to be medevacked.”
“What’s the story?” Workman asked.
“It’s Doc Kuntz,” said Handley. “We can’t afford to let him go. He’s not wounded, he’s not that sick, and we need him out here.”
“I agree,” Workman said. “If he’s not wounded, he stays.”
“Ranger said you can’t go,” Handley told Kuntz.
“I want to talk to Ranger,” Kuntz implored, but Handley had had enough. “The answer’s no,” he snapped. “You’re stayin’.”
Doc Kuntz was actually beyond helping the wounded, so consumed was he with fear, but he was not an entirely unsympathetic character. Kuntz had served six months with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade before being transferred to the 101st two months before Ripcord. Having already earned his combat medic’s badge, he was assigned to the relative safety of the 1-506th battalion aid station. Kuntz, however, was a necklace-draped pothead, his attitude—and the fact that he helped malingerers find medical reasons to stay in the rear—his ticket to a disciplinary transfer back to the bush. He joined Company D only the day before its assault into the Ripcord AO. Kuntz felt that he had been screwed. “But you’ve got to work with the cards that are dealt you,” as Handley put it. “Kuntz didn’t.”
Kuntz wasn’t the only one getting freaked out. During one of the lulls in the ground attacks, Captain Workman had dispatched a second small patrol to the north knoll to ensure that no one had been left behind. One member of the patrol happened upon the body of Frank Asher, already bloating in the heat, sprawled some thirty meters below the top of the hill. The man rolled Asher over, retrieved his wallet, and brought the dead man’s ID card to Workman. Sergeant Mueller of Delta One was instructed to organize a squad-sized element to recover the KIA. “The thought of going back up that hill sent shivers up my spine and they had to call my name two times when I was selected to join the squad,” wrote Jim McCoy. The advance up the trail could not have been more cautious. When the point man spotted movement, Mueller spread out his jittery troops on line and reconned the area to their front by fire. The enemy did not respond, but Mueller, sensing an ambush, nevertheless radioed Workman, trying to beg off the mission, arguing that “it’s just some equipment up there, and a guy who’s already dead.”
“You’re not in contact,” Workman answered unsympathetically. “Now, move up, secure the area, and drag back that KIA.”
“No fuckin’ way,” Mueller blurted. After a moment of stony silence on the radio, Workman told him to fall back to the LZ.
As the ground attack continued, many grunts thought it was only a matter of time before they would be overrun. They were especially demoralized when they overheard the normally unflappable Ranger, apparently in an argument with Lucas, bark on the radio: “What are you trying to do, get us all killed out here?”
During one of the attacks, Lieutenant Smith’s young platoon sergeant, Sgt. Gilbert C. Rossetter—a seasoned veteran who had just turned twenty the day before—was checking positions when he looked up and saw an NVA lean from behind a tree to throw a satchel charge at two men in a nearby foxhole. Rossetter immediately opened fire, so close to the enemy soldier that he could see the expression on the man’s face change as he was hit, then scooped up the satchel charge to throw it back. It exploded just as he got rid of it. Lieutenant Smith turned at the sound of the blast. Rossetter was just standing there, an odd look on his face. “Gib, are you okay?” Smith asked. Rossetter, not answering, continued to stare out toward the enemy. “The explosion had dazed and deafened him,” recounted Smith, “but had not physically damaged anything except the ammo vest he was wearing. I told Rossetter to sit down, that he was truly ineffective at that point and needed to stay out of harm’s way until we could get him to the rear.”
Moments later, several grunts shouted that a “dink” with an RPD machine gun had darted behind a large tree only fifteen feet outside the perimeter. Specialist Fourth Class James E. Fowler, a big, soft-spoken black GI who performed magnificently throughout the battle, engaged the enemy gunner with his M60, covering Smith and several others as they popped up to lob grenades at the RPD.
In the middle of this minibattle, dazed Sergeant Rossetter strode past Smith, heading straight for the RPD as he mumbled to himself about taking care of that “goddamned machine gun.”
Smith had no choice but to stand up to stop Rossetter. Leading him back to cover, Smith instructed one of his men to keep Gib there even if he had to sit on him. The enemy machine gunner was silenced, meanwhile—one of eight NVA known to be killed by Company D and its supporting ARA during the fight on the LZ.
At about 9:40 A.M., a slick from the 158th Aviation Battalion darted in and quickly unloaded ammo and picked up casualties, including wounded platoon leader John Fraser, amid an eruption of AK fire and RPGs. As the chopper was lifting off, one rocket hit the tail boom but failed to explode. “The tail shaft of the rocket was sticking out of the tail boom,” remembered Richard Drury, the wounded radioman. “I stared at it all the way back, thinking the rocket would go off at any moment, but it never did, thank God.”
Lieutenant Rosen was less than ten minutes behind the slick, the interior of his medevac splattered with blood from the first three trips, the mood of his crew somber. “We all knew that the repeated use of the same approach and departure routes to the same landing site was practically suicidal,” noted Rosen. “We all knew that we had already pressed our luck beyond our wildest hopes.” Given the resupply slick’s narrow escape, Rosen felt obligated to ask his crew if they were willing to go in again, but everyone on board—Rupert, Law, Sp5 Donito C. Deocales, the crew chief, and the new medic whom Law was training, Sp4 James L. Wieler—agreed that “we would keep going in until there were either no more wounded or we were shot down,” as Rosen later wrote. “We were all of one mind. . . .”
Rosen dropped into a two-foot hover over the LZ. All the other wounded having previously been evacuated, Handley, Rosas, and Marchese sprinted for the medevac to finally get out themselves. Only Rosas, however, had gotten aboard—in the lead, he literally dove into the cabin on Rosen’s side— when an enemy soldier stood up from the debris at the west edge of the landing zone and opened fire with his AK-47 directly into the left front of the Huey. Bullets exploded through the windshield. With Rupert screaming that he was hit, Rosen pulled back on the stick, lifted up, then banked hard to the right to escape the fire, wheeling all the way around to exit the clearing the way they had come in. Law, also hit, started to fall out, but Wieler caught him and pulled him back inside the Huey.
Rosen sped for the aid station, Doug Rupert in agony beside him, his smoldering left arm blown almost completely off above the elbow. Deocales and Wieler, meanwhile, were urgently attending to Brent Law; the bullet that had blasted through Rupert’s arm had shattered against the copilot’s armored seat, a fragment of it catching Law just below the edge of his “chicken plate,” the body armor worn by aircrews. There was little that Deocales and Wieler could do, for the bullet fragment had ruptured Law’s liver, and he bled to death almost instantly on the floor of the Huey.
In the chaos, no one on the medevac was aware of a drama involving their helicopter that left those watching from the ground absolutely dumbfounded. Handley and Marchese had been a few steps from the medevac when the shooting started and the helicopter pulled up. As they threw themselves to the ground to avoid being clipped by the tail rotor, Ron Kuntz darted past—unknown to Handley, the panicked medic had dashed out with them—and, reaching up with both hands, managed to grab the right skid just before the medevac wheeled around. Handley thought Kuntz was deserting. It is entirely possible, however, that with the wounded evacuated, Workman had given Kuntz permission to get on the last medevac.
“At first, Kuntz had both his arms and legs wrapped around the skid,” recounted Handley, who watched with almost surrealistic detachment, everything seeming to stop around him, as “the helicopter went into a dive down the side of the ridge. The wind was blasting Kuntz so strongly that his legs came loose, and he was just hanging on with his hands. The helicopter started pulling up at that point, going full throttle, and that’s when Kuntz was blown off the skid. The helicopter must have been several hundred feet up and going in excess of a hundred miles an hour when he lost his grip. I watched him fall. He just went straight down into the jungle, almost as if in slow motion. There was no way he could have survived. . . .”
During Workman’s battle, Hawkins and A/2-506th, tasked with securing a prisoner to confirm the wiretap intelligence, continued to pass unnoticed among the enemy on the other side of Hill 805. Alpha Three led the move back into the valley, its point team, moving down a trail, shortly encountering two NVA coming up the trail. The point team fired them up, dropping one and sending the other scurrying into the brush, a blood trail in his wake that was followed without result. The enemy soldier who was sprawled on the trail was still breathing despite a cracked skull that was leaking brains. “He ain’t gonna make it,” Doc Draper, the platoon medic, reported to Hawkins on the radio. “He’s as good as dead.”
“You sure we can’t take him prisoner?”
“No, sir,” answered Draper. “He’s dyin’.”
“Okay, put him out of his misery,” said Hawkins, who heard, a few seconds later, the report of a single M16 shot in the jungle.
Company A continued to the bluff where the water party had been ambushed the day before. The body on the rock was gone. Still empty-handed, the company started west to grab some high ground and set up a new NDP. To make sure they weren’t being followed, Hawkins had Lieutenant Widjeskog, who was bringing up the rear, drop off a two-man OP a hundred meters short of the NDP.
In short order, one of the men at the observation post, Sp4 Robert M. Journell, opened fire on two NVA, wounding one— who left a blood trail—and killing the other. “The guy’s head just exploded like a watermelon,” Journell told Hawkins. The dead NVA—the grunts booby-trapped his body with a frag— had broken cigarettes, sugar packets, and tins of peanut butter on him, having apparently scrounged through the company’s previous NDP. More importantly, there was a note on the body; translated by Long, the company interpreter, it identified the dead man as a sergeant named Son and explained that he was part of a recon team tasked with finding the best approach through Ripcord’s defenses in preparation for a two-battalion assault. There was also a French-made topographical map on which the sergeant had made notes in Vietnamese and drawn arrows outlining the planned attack on Ripcord. Bingo, Hawkins thought, we don’t need a prisoner anymore. If Hawkins was gratified with his company’s latest intelligence coup, he was also becoming increasingly nervous. “We had killed numerous enemy soldiers,” he noted, “but too many had also escaped during those encounters for me to feel safe. We were pushing our luck.”
The pressure on Workman would undoubtedly have gotten worse if not for Captain Rollison and D/2-506th, which Lucas inserted atop Hill 605, the small mountain eight hundred meters northwest by way of the connecting ridge from D/1-506th’s LZ. Rollison’s orders were to move down the ridge as quickly as possible and link up with Workman. Rollison led the assault with Lieutenant Flaherty’s Delta Three, the only one of his platoons still commanded by an officer—Jim McCall had recently left to take over the battalion headquarters company—and went in himself on the first Huey. The time was 10 A.M.
Despite the gunship prep, the lead slick took fire from the left side of the LZ. “We deassed that helicopter right quick,” said Rollison, who, along with radioman Rick Rearick, “went running for this big blob of green on the right side of the landing zone that I thought was a bush. We dived into it, but it wasn’t a bush, it was a camouflage net, and we slid through it into an enemy gun position.” The .51 was mounted atop an earthen pole in the center of the ring-shaped position. Its crew was unable to fire, it was later discovered, because the weapon’s firing pin was broken. The men were escaping into a tunnel even as Rollison and Rearick crashed through the camouflage netting. “I saw the ass end of the last guy as he went into the tunnel,” recounted Rollison. “I pitched a frag in there after him, let it go off, then rolled back, stuffed my shotgun in the opening, and pumped off three or four shells. With all the dust, I couldn’t tell if I hit anyone or not. It appeared that the tunnel led into a fairly large bunker where I assume the gunners kept their ammo and took shelter whenever we hit ’em with artillery and air strikes.”
Lieutenant Flaherty’s platoon secured the landing zone after a quick firefight, losing two men wounded. Rollison excitedly called Flaherty over and pointed out something incredible about the captured .51-caliber machine gun. Not only was it in an ideal position to fire on CH-47s approaching Ripcord from the lowlands, but the enemy had gone so far as to cut a V-SHAPED notch in the trees at the top of a ridge situated between the gun position and Ripcord, three klicks to the southwest. “The notch appeared to be about ten feet across and five or six feet down,” recalled Flaherty. “All they had to do was just aim at the notch, and they’d be putting .51 fire right on Ripcord, which was visible in the distance through the notch. Amazing.”
Rollison put Flaherty’s platoon on point as Company D started down the ridge, passing numerous enemy bunkers along the way and losing two more people to a booby trap. One was the amiable company coward, Pat Dooley, who sat along the trail, half his foot blown off, feeling no pain—the medics treating him had given him morphine—as he smoked a cigarette, smiling, happy to have been maimed if it meant getting out of Vietnam alive.
Glad to see Dooley go, radioman Bruce McCorkle crouched beside him for a moment on his way down the ridge. “Hey, sorry you’re hurt, guy—can I have your pound cake and peaches?”
Rollison’s column found the bodies of Asher and Huk and brought them along, suspended from bamboo poles by their hands and feet like slain deer. Company D also passed a dead NVA. “He was just lying on the side of the trail, kind of smiling like corpses do when their face muscles tighten up,” noted McCorkle. “He had a gold-capped tooth, and looked well-fed, almost plump, and well-equipped, too, right down to a belt buckle with a big red star on it.”
Shouts echoed through the jungle to ensure that there would be no friendly fire as one company of uptight grunts neared the other before Rollison linked up with Workman at 12:20 P.M. “So you’re a ranger, too,” Workman said, noting the tab on Rollison’s shoulder.
“You just ain’t a bullshittin’,” Rollison replied.
To further reinforce the situation, Lucas inserted Captain Lamb and C/2-506th onto Hill 605 from Firebase O’Reilly— the captured machine gun was evacuated shortly thereafter— then landed himself to talk with Rollison and Workman. Lucas evidently thought he had enough forces on the ground at that point to push the enemy off the ridge, prelude to recovering D/1-506th’s missing KIAs. “Ranger told us to dig in deep,” recalled Lieutenant Smith. “We would be spending the night, which I couldn’t believe.”
Captain Workman couldn’t believe it either. Jim McCoy has a vivid memory of Workman telling Lucas, “If we get hit again, it’s going to be every man for himself.” Workman was apparently trying to impress upon Lucas that his company was no longer combat effective and needed to be extracted, “but the effect that Ranger’s comment had on the few of us who remained was devastating,” wrote McCoy. “Any hope of getting out of there was now lost. That’s the one thing that I could never forgive Ranger for. . . .”
Rollison’s first move after linking up with Workman was to secure the south side of the landing zone. The ground attacks had fizzled out, but Workman warned Rollison that there was a mortar to the southwest, the time in flight to his position about thirty-five seconds. Wanting to test that, Rollison, stepping into the open, “waved and made obscene gestures in the direction of the enemy, and, bonk-bonk, two rounds hit the bottom of the tube. I ran back inside the tree line, and the rounds lit right in the middle of the landing zone, and, sure enough, it was about thirty-five seconds or so.”
With that, Rollison sent his men across the landing zone two at a time. “Whenever we sent two guys running across, you’d hear the enemy fire another salvo,” recalled McCorkle, amazed that Workman’s “glassy-eyed troops were to the point where they wouldn’t take extreme measures to seek cover when we had incoming on the way. They seemed catatonic. They would just duck down a little, like, well, if it hits me it hits me. Running across an open LZ with eighty pounds on your back, knowing mortar rounds were coming in, was a real fun feat, but we all made it. We immediately began digging in. . . .”
Rollison, taking control of the operation at that point, brought in arty and 81mm fire on the suspected enemy mortar positions. But when a medevac tried to evacuate the last of Workman’s wounded and those who had arrived with Rollison—six altogether—it was driven away by AK-47 fire from the southwest. After Rollison brought in the ARA, a second medevac was able to touch down on the LZ.
Sergeant Handley was slated for the medevac, but out of loyalty to Workman, he said, “I’m okay, and I’m willing to stay out here.”
“We don’t want infection to set in,” Workman replied, insisting that Handley needed to go and praising his coordination of the earlier medevacs. “I really appreciate the job you did.”
The medevac was completed at 2:48 P.M. Lucas informed Rollison and Workman shortly thereafter that they were to be extracted. Lucas might have originally thought to stay and fight it out, but General Berry had recommended to Colonel Harrison—battalion, brigade, and acting division commander were all overhead in their command ships—that withdrawal might be a wiser course of action. “Priority is to get the 1-506th out of trouble,” Berry radioed Harrison, according to the brigade log. “Number two, get everyone out of the area before dark. We’re on their ground,” Berry added, referring to the enemy. “They have all the advantage.”
Harrison concurred. To subdue the enemy before the lift ships arrived, he had tear-gas missions run along the western side of the ridgeline—the CS canisters were jettisoned from low-flying slicks—while air strikes went in on the suspected mortar positions on 805. “When the F-4s screamed in,” said Pfc. Merle Delagrange of D/1-506th, “they’d tell us to hit the deck, and when the jets pulled out, there’d be jagged, white-hot pieces of shrapnel sticking in the trees.”
Flaherty and a team of grunts pushed the downed medevac completely off the landing zone to clear the way, then Rollison and Workman passed the word to lay down suppressive fire as slicks from the 158th arrived to extract D/1-506th. It was now approximately 4 P.M. Workman’s people had already been organized into four-man helo teams, everyone loaded down with weapons and equipment from the casualties. Seeing the first slick approach from the east, Lieutenant Smith and another of the men who had been selected to go out first moved into the landing zone so that they would be able to clamber aboard the left side of the Huey while the other two men in the group, running to meet the helicopter from the tree line, simultaneously climbed aboard from the right, thus minimizing the ground time on the LZ. “As the bird touched down and we ran to board,” recalled Smith, “I saw a black trooper hauling ass towards it from the trees wearing an enemy pith helmet and carrying an AK. I’ll bet some Vietnamese forward observer did a double take on that one. Since there were known enemy positions to the west, the bird hovered backwards after loading up. As we backed out and turned around, the second bird touched down, and as we headed rearward, we saw the next helicopter in line pass us on our left as it approached the LZ. . . .”
The first two slicks landed and departed without incident. The third drew fire. Jim McCoy was supposed to go out on the fourth but was so afraid that he didn’t leave the cover of the tree line and start toward the slick until Workman, shouting at him to get moving, ran over and gave him a solid shove from behind. “As the chopper landed, we dived in and tried to find anything to hold onto as it lifted off,” wrote McCoy. The fourth slick also came under fire. As the door gunners blazed back, “I just kept my head down and prayed as hard as I could. A few moments later I felt a hard slap on my back, and looked up to see our Kit Carson Scout smiling at me. We had made it out alive. We all sat up and began cheering.”
The door gunner beside McCoy grabbed his arm and, pointing back toward the landing zone, shouted over the roar of the engine and rotors, “The bird behind us didn’t make it out.”
The cheering stopped. As it transpired, Captain Workman, weapon in one hand, a radio in the other, had just reached the fifth slick with his two RTOs when it was hit by AK-47 fire and began swaying from side to side where it sat on the LZ. The door gunner motioned the grunts to get back. Unable to hear the fire over the rotors, they hesitated and were only just starting to move back when the Huey flipped onto its side. The main rotor caught Workman in his right shoulder, instantly slicing him in half at a downward angle across his chest. No one could believe what they had seen. One moment, Workman was turning to dash back to cover; the next, the rotor was striking earth in a blast of dust, flinging Workman’s head and shoulders under the helicopter as it came to rest on its side, his rucksack tumbling end over end through the air, his headless, armless body crashing into the dirt in a welter of blood.
Workman was posthumously awarded the Silver Star, which he deserved for all that had come before. His death, however, was controversial. Two loads of Workman’s battered troops were still on the ground when their commander, the last officer among them, attempted to make good his own escape. Under the circumstances, there were those who thought he should have waited to depart on the last lift ship. The fact that Workman was at the very end of his last mission after eleven months in combat probably explains why he did not. Blair Case, who knew and admired Workman, was upset when he talked with Rollison after the operation. “Rollison spoke very critically of Workman and D/1-506th. He said that Workman’s troops were ‘completely beaten.’ Rollison also said, ‘If Workman hadn’t been so eager to get on the helicopter, he would still be alive.’ ”
Lieutenant Flaherty dashed to the wrecked slick, crouched for a moment against the tail boom, then raised his head, only to find himself staring into the muzzle of a revolver aimed at his nose by the terrified pilot on the other side of the helicopter. The pilot had thought he was about to be overrun. “Put that fuckin’ thing away before you hurt somebody,” Flaherty snapped. The pilot indicated that his door gunner was pinned under the ship. Rollison was on the scene by then, and he used his knife to cut the cord to the door gunner’s radio helmet, which was strangling the man as he lay pressed into the dirt, the weight of the helicopter on his chest.
“Whatever happens, don’t let me burn, please don’t let me burn,” the door gunner implored, jet fuel running onto the ground around him.
Corporal Michael L. Mann and Sp4 Robert A. Gutzman of D/1-506th crawled to the slick with their entrenching tools; they tried to dig out the door gunner, but progress was slow. The longer it took, the more likely the door gunner would indeed be consumed in a fuel fire. Mann and Gutzman, along with Rollison and Flaherty, finally stood up in the middle of the firefight and rocked the tail boom up and down, allowing James Fowler to pull the gunner out from under the Huey. Flaherty hauled the radios from the helicopter and shot them up so the enemy could not use them. The door gunner, meanwhile, was dragged to cover. As the medics did what they could for him—it appeared he had some broken ribs, maybe internal injuries—the man moaned and screamed, his inconsolable keening so unnerving that one of the grunts finally barked, “Will somebody shut that guy up?”
The lift was canceled. Captain Rollison moved his people back to the north side of the LZ, then—there being only one way out at that point—got organized to march back up the ridge to Hill 605. Rollison expected a fight along the way and didn’t want to devote men to litter teams to carry the bodies of Workman, Asher, Hays, and Huk. “I’ll get all the live ones out of here,” Rollison told Lucas by radio. “That’s all I can do. I recommend leaving the KIAs.”
Berry gave Lucas permission to leave the bodies, and Rollison moved out as dusk approached, his column burdened with much ammo and equipment from the casualties—much more was left behind—the pace set by the men hauling the injured door gunner in a poncho litter. The enemy did not oppose the trek up the ridge, thanks to the Cobras that continued to roll in.
The lift resumed once Rollison linked up with Lamb. “We had a lot of slicks coming in, just one right after the other,” recalled Lieutenant Campbell. The last few members of D/1-506th went out first, followed by D/2-506th, and, finally, C/2-506th. “Those last few ships were coming into a pitch-black LZ,” noted Campbell. “I had my strobe light out. It was hairy as shit.”
After the extraction from Hill 605, A/2-506th was the only company still on the ground in the Ripcord AO. When setting up that night, Hawkins had “used a trick I had learned in ranger school to cover our tracks and throw off any recon scouts who might be watching us as we moved into our NDP. It’s a simple but effective technique,” he explained, “which involves setting up a fake NDP in the late afternoon, then making a night move past and a switchback into your real overnight position about five hundred meters past the decoy NDP. Prepositioned guides who have reconned the real position help put everyone in position.” Having thus slipped into position in the dark, Hawkins noted that “we didn’t dig in and were very quiet throughout the night.” The only noise was the blast of the booby-trapped grenade that had been left under the body of the dead enemy recon sergeant. The enemy, it seemed, were out in the dark, trying to track down the element that had slipped into their valley. “It was that kind of thing,” recalled Frank Marshall, “that had the whole company convinced that we had to get out of there. We weren’t glory fighters. There were a couple guys in the outfit who wanted to fight, but most of us just wanted to get the hell out of that valley before the enemy caught up with us.”