CHAPTER 25

Kill or Be Killed

Captain Thomas M. Austin was selected to replace Bob Kalsu as the acting commander of A/2-11th Artillery. Austin was not a seasoned combat officer; his normal assignments included serving as battalion intelligence officer, battalion club officer, and commander of the battalion’s headquarters section. “I was a certified, card-carrying REMF,” the short, chubby, redheaded Georgia boy would joke. “I was just sitting there fat, dumb, and happy at Camp Eagle.”

More than willing to go where sent, Austin was nevertheless extremely apprehensive about taking over a firing battery in a place such as Ripcord and would recall “saying the prayer, Lord, please don’t let me make a mistake that gets someone else killed.”

After collecting a helmet, flak jacket, and duffel bag, Austin ran to the LOH that had been dispatched for him. “Where you goin’?” the pilot asked. “Ripcord,” Austin shouted. With that, the pilot said, “Don’t get in front—get in back—and if you want that duffel bag, it had better leave first.”

It was dark by the time the LOH made it to Ripcord. Playing it safe, the pilot barely landed, balancing one skid at the extreme edge of one of the hillside pads, the rest of the aircraft suspended over space. “I threw the bag out, then dove out myself,” recalled Austin. “When I looked back over my shoulder, all I could see was the light on the bottom of that Loach. The pilot had literally turned that aircraft on its side and was rushing down the side of the mountain to build up airspeed to get the heck out of there.”

The next day, July 22, was another bad day on Ripcord. “Everyone was in really sad shape about Kalsu,” noted Austin, “but then things started happening again and nobody really had time to mourn.”

When a resupply Huey landed on the POL pad, it was knocked out of commission by a mortar salvo that exploded directly in front of the aircraft, wounding the entire four-man crew. “We had those people in the aid station before they knew what was going on,” noted Sergeant Rubsam of B/2-506th. “The whole platoon just materialized on the scene. They didn’t think about themselves, they just saw what happened and took care of it. After all we’d been through, I was heartened that people would still respond like that.”

Sergeant Diehl of D/2-506th was killed during the same incident, apparently while returning fire from the 81mm section. Diehl had been reassigned as a mortar crewman soon after his heroic performance on Hill 1000. “We were all happy for him because that was considered a REMF job,” recalled Diehl’s buddy Bruce McCorkle. Stan Diehl was zipped up in a body bag and laid on a stretcher, an unhappy reminder that there were no more safe jobs on Ripcord.

With the 105s eliminated, the enemy mortar crews concentrated their fire on Captain Austin’s 155s. It got so bad that the cannoneers would fire a couple of rounds, then dart back into their bunkers before the enemy could reply with their 82s and 120s. One of the section chiefs, Sgt. Randal D. Burdette, ordered his men to stay under cover as he single-handedly manned their 155. Specialist Fourth Class Lanny W. Savoie, the senior battery medic, helped man the 155s when not treating the wounded, a task he performed without hesitation no matter how intense the incoming. “Doc Savoie was a very bright, engaging Frenchman from New Orleans,” said Austin, “and the bravest man I have ever known.”

Not all the casualties were from enemy fire. Late that day, the rotor wash from a Chinook blew several powder charges into a trash fire; the charges flew out of the fire as they exploded, igniting, in turn, the M79 rounds in the rucksacks on which they landed and wounding five GIs. The powder charges also started a fire in the 155 ammunition storage area. Sergeant Robert L. Seeman, a section chief, rushed to the scene; while two cannoneers—Sp4 Ronald D. Carpenter and Pfc. James H. Stroud, the latter burned and wounded—put out the blaze with fire extinguishers, Seeman picked up an activated 155 round, carried it to the edge of the firebase, and threw it down into the wire, where it exploded. Burdette, Savoie, Seeman, Carpenter, and Stroud were awarded Silver Stars.

“For all that was going on, I thought morale was pretty good,” said Dennis Murphy, one of the cannoneers sent to Ripcord from Gladiator. “I was only there three days, but the guys who were there during the whole battle were one hell of a bunch of guys, very close-knit from what I could see. They did their jobs. Everybody seemed to be pulling for the same cause, and that was to get the hell off that mountain alive.”

Lieutenant Colonel Lucas had informed Captain Hawkins by secure net that Company A was finally to be extracted from the valley southeast of Ripcord. In preparation for the move to the extraction point, security patrols moved out around the little hill that the company had moved onto ranger style after dark the evening before. “Nothing positive was seen, but we could actually smell the enemy,” wrote Lieutenant Widjeskog. Others would also recall the same fish-saucy smell, but “since we had accumulated quite a bit of enemy equipment over the last three days,” noted Widjeskog, “we thought the odor was from that, and not more North Vietnamese.”

Hawkins planned to extract from an LZ on a ridge eight hundred meters northwest of his position, and he dispatched Lieutenant Pahissa and Alpha One southwest—the trail connecting the overnight position to the landing zone ran southwest before cutting northwest up the ridge—to secure a stream crossing below the NDP.

During the maneuver, Pahissa’s second squad opened fire on the lead squad; the problem, according to Frank Marshall, was that the Kit Carson leading the second squad “took us off course, so that instead of linking up with the point squad from behind, we ended up to one side of them. We didn’t expect anyone to be on our flank, so when we heard movement—the brush was so heavy we couldn’t see anything—we opened fire. I think the Kit Carson was the first one to fire. The lead squad immediately started shooting back.”

The intramural firefight died down as quickly as it had flared as men from both squads heard people shouting orders in English from the other side of the brush. “The Kit Carson ran away when we figured out that we’d been shooting at each other,” recalled Marshall. “He just disappeared into the jungle.” It remains unclear whether the scout—the same one who had tapped the enemy commo line with the earplug—had staged the whole event in order to escape or perhaps rejoin the NVA that he expected to overrun Company A, or whether he had honestly gotten lost but was afraid that his American buddies would not believe him and might prove it by accidentally shooting him. As Marshall said, “We never trusted those Kit Carsons.”

Lucas presently contacted Hawkins again on the secure net and instructed him to move to the rocky hill immediately east of Ripcord for extraction. No reason was given, but Hawkins imagined that Black Spade wanted Company A to use the LZ on the rocky hill because, as he later wrote, “it was almost always safe to get in and out of, being masked from direct observation from many of the key features around Ripcord.” Lucas probably also wanted Hawkins in a position to support Company B in case of ground attack on the firebase. To reach Lucas’s LZ, however, required that Hawkins backtrack up the ridge he had originally taken into the valley, an unwise maneuver, he thought, considering the trouble that Company A’s original passage had caused the enemy. “It also meant having to cover two-plus kilometers in a day,” he noted. “It was certainly doable, but not without sacrificing security for speed.”

Hawkins meant to object to the order, but his secure set went dead just as he said, “Wait, sir, I’ve got a better LZ in mind—”

Infuriated, Hawkins wrote out a brief message for Lucas, something along the lines of: Want to move to LZ grid 346182. Most secure for me. Your LZ tactically unsound. Please advise.

It took Hawkins and his radiomen ten minutes to encrypt the message letter for letter so that it could be sent over an unsecure net, by which time Lucas—unaware that Hawkins had a problem with his order—had departed the TOC, bound for a conference being organized at Camp Evans to plan the evacuation of Ripcord. “The radiomen in the operations center authenticated and acknowledged my message, but were unable to contact any battalion staff officers to resolve the dilemma,” noted Hawkins. “I knew in my heart that, had Lucas been available, he’d have understood the logic of my position, but since neither he nor any staff officers were in the operations center, I had to choose between my instincts and the order of my commanding officer. With time slipping away, I made the decision to follow orders and march to the LZ east of Ripcord.”

Hawkins pulled Pahissa’s platoon back from the stream and put Widjeskog, who was to have brought up the rear, in the lead, the direction of march having been reversed from southwest to northeast. “They know we’re here, and they’ve been following us,” incredulous grunts muttered bitterly among themselves, “and now we’re gonna turn around and walk right back into ’em?”

It was at least an hour after noon by the time the company was reorganized and ready to move. Lieutenant Widjeskog was fifth in his platoon’s well-spaced, seventeen-man column, following a narrow trail through the jungle, when his point man scampered back less than 150 meters into the move to report that there were NVA setting up a mortar on the trail. “Why didn’t you shoot?” Widjeskog blurted, but there was no time to argue. There was only time to inform his men, “Okay, if we got something up there, then we have to go up and get it.”

The platoon pressed on, the tense silence broken when a rocket-propelled grenade suddenly shrieked into the tree beside the point man, blowing down the tree. It was 1:30 P.M. on July 22, 1970, and the single most costly engagement of the battle had just begun. Widjeskog’s platoon dropped to its collective gut on the trail when the rocket exploded, but the platoon radioman was immediately shot in the leg as AK-47 and RPD fire began raking the column from the front and right flank. Within moments, Widjeskog could hear rounds hitting the bottom of a nearby mortar tube, the shells arcing down not on his platoon but back uphill in the overnight position where Hawkins and his command group were standing ready to join Alpha Three when it moved down the trail behind Alpha Two, to be followed in turn by Lieutenant Pahissa and Alpha One.

Lieutenant Widjeskog helped drag his radioman back into the circle that his platoon had formed, the trail running down the center, as they returned fire, but he lost the RTO’s rucksack and radio in the process. Widjeskog thus lost contact with Hawkins. It didn’t matter. Captain Hawkins could not have helped Widjeskog at the moment, such was the pressure on his own position. “Mortar rounds were exploding everywhere,” wrote Hawkins, who almost immediately caught a spray of speck-sized fragments in his upper back, neck, and shoulder. “Some exploded above us in the trees. Some dropped through the canopy and exploded among us, sending up geysers of earth.” Men were shouting, screaming in pain. Casualties were heavy. Tear-gas shells were mixed in with the high explosive, and many grunts began scrambling down the north and west sides of the hill, away from the enemy, grabbing weapons but leaving rucksacks and ammo in their haste to get out from under the shelling. “Everybody just went in their own direction,” said Frank Marshall, who was hit in the lower left leg as he tried to make good his own escape. “We became totally clusterfucked.”

Hawkins took shelter behind a large hardwood tree. There was no one between his command group and the enemy assault force, which, having slipped in close during the mortar barrage, started up the east side of the hill the moment the last shell exploded. “Enemy soldiers started boiling out of the brush from as close as fifty meters,” wrote Hawkins. “Whistles were shrilling. I could see some blue pith helmets among all the green ones, worn by leaders, I assume, for identification. They came at us in a massed attack, crouching low, running through the undergrowth, shouting and shooting. . . .”

Some of the onrushing enemy soldiers were killed or wounded as those troops still in position on the hilltop opened fire. The return fire lasted only moments, however. There were too many NVA. “CP. Rally point. North. Fifty meters,” Hawkins shouted, indicating a small knoll where he hoped he could regroup as RPGs began exploding inside his embattled NDP. “Follow me.”

Hawkins took off running, gear bouncing, and did not stop until he had reached the knoll, followed closely by his company and battalion RTOs. “I caught more shrapnel, in the leg this time, along the way,” Hawkins would recount. “I also lost track of the rest of my CP.”

Hawkins would learn only later that Lieutenant Olson, his forward observer, had been killed by an RPG, his left arm blown off. Hawkins’s secure-set radio operator had been blinded by a satchel charge. Sergeant Long, his interpreter, had been shot and killed. Lieutenant Pahissa had also been cut down, shot in the head by an RPD machine gun at the onset of the assault. Sergeant Singleton had been killed as he rushed to Pahissa. Doc Draper was shot through the forehead while defending a wounded man as the enemy overran the hill and would later be found sprawled on his back, both arms flung straight out, an IV bag clutched in one hand, his .45 in the other.

“My stomach was churning with bile and the sounds of battle were raging all around,” continued Hawkins. “Once we got our bearings, I forced myself to calm down and get on the radio to request gunships and tac air, thinking that wherever Olson was, he would be cranking up the arty and mortars. I think the enemy saw our antennas because we began taking more RPGs. We slid down the backside of the knoll as far as we could while still maintaining radio commo.” A team of Cobras already airborne for another mission diverted to the scene within minutes, by which time Hawkins and a half-dozen stragglers had established a small perimeter on the knoll. Hawkins edged up to the top to direct the Cobras and, after shouting to his scattered men to get some idea of their location, brought the rockets in so close that “after one run, I noticed a pain in the area of my left shoulder, then smelled something burning. It was me. A rocket fragment had struck me, but without much force and was just lying on my back as it burned through my tee-shirt to my flesh. I flicked it away. . . .”

Frank Marshall was one of the stragglers with Hawkins. The grenadier had initially linked up with two guys from Alpha Three, but the enemy had opened fire on them from the top of the hill, killing or wounding the Alpha Three GIs and sending Marshall scrambling.

“First Platoon, where are you?” Marshall screamed.

In response, his buddy Ron Janezic shouted, “Over here.”

Marshall started toward Janezic, only to come under direct fire from the direction of his buddy. “Don’t fire. It’s me, it’s me.”

“It wasn’t us. There’s a gook in between us.”

Marshall darted to Pfc. Danny J. Fries, medic for Alpha One, who lay nearby, screaming for help. As Marshall later wrote in his journal, the medic’s “ass was half blown off.” Marshall was just bending down to help Fries when “a satchel charge was thrown down on us,” he wrote, “hitting him in the back as he laid there[,] blowing up and knocking me down the hill. I was blinded for a few seconds and my ears were ringing.” Fries was killed. Regaining his senses, Marshall finally found refuge with Hawkins. “In a few minutes,” he noted, “I was fine except for some facial burns. . . .”

Lieutenant Olson’s radioman, Sp4 Floyd Alexander, was trying to assist the blinded secure-set operator when the enemy overran the position. Alexander covered the man with his body and, playing dead, watched through half-closed eyes as the NVA walked up to the dead and wounded GIs on the hilltop and shot each in the head. When an enemy soldier stopped before him, Alexander knew that his time had come. The radioman’s head was down, so he could see only the man’s sandals. But after giving Alexander a vicious kick to the forehead, which elicited no response, the NVA moved on without using his AK-47. Alexander and the secure-set operator continued to play dead among the enemy for the remainder of the battle. They survived. Ten others on the hill did not: Olson and Long from the CP; Pahissa, Singleton, Fries, Sp4 Donald J. Severson, and Pfc. Robert J. Brown from Alpha One; plus Doc Draper, Pfc. John M. Babich, and Pfc. Virgil M. Bixby from Alpha Three.

Specialist Fourth Class Rick T. Isom of Alpha Three recalled that when the enemy took the top of the hill, “they immediately started firing and throwing satchel charges in the direction we had gone. They also used the grenades attached to our abandoned rucksacks.” Isom had taken cover by himself in a tangle of thick brush not far from the top of the hill, close enough to “hear some of the NVA yelling orders as they directed their men into positions around the hilltop. I could see that the enemy soldiers had pith helmets, pressed fatigues, and AK-47s. I did not dare move.” One of the enemy soldiers, a young boy, took up a security position only ten meters uphill from Isom. “He acted as though he was scared to death,” Isom later wrote. “He kept peeking around the side of a big tree he was hiding behind. I knew I would be in trouble if he spotted me, so I sighted in and blew the top of his head off the next time he showed his face.” Having exposed his position, Isom jumped up and dashed down the hill, shouting “Currahee, Currahee,” so he wouldn’t be shot by his own guys, even as “a satchel charge went past, its fuse sizzling. It exploded away from me. Several grenades also came down the hill at me, and some nearby enemy soldiers were firing, but the vegetation was too thick for them to really draw a bead. I was finally able to hook up with ten or twelve other GIs.”

Spared a mortar barrage, Lieutenant Widjeskog and Alpha Two fared better than the other platoons, though they too faced a considerable number of NVA. When the main assault went past Widjeskog’s right flank as he faced down the trail—the knoll on which Hawkins regrouped was to the left—a secondary force maneuvered behind Widjeskog, so that the point platoon, already out of radio commo with the rest of the company, now found itself physically cut off as well. Widjeskog kept his head throughout the crisis, proving himself in the heat of battle to grunts who had previously been skeptical of their soft-spoken, highly educated L. T.

The troops themselves fought like natural-born killers. The platoon sergeant, Sgt. John W. Brown, who had been bringing up the rear, was shot in the face before he could join the perimeter that Widjeskog had formed up ahead, the bullet tearing through his right cheek and out his left, shattering teeth and part of his jawbone. Brown could not raise his head without choking on his own blood. The enemy thought to overrun the rear of the platoon, but the three men with Brown—his radioman, the pugnacious Al Miller, and a brand-new E6 named Whitecotton—cut them down as fast as they charged down the trail, shooting at least ten before the rest darted for cover and began sniping at the little group from behind trees. The radioman was wounded, but he kept shooting. The left shoulder of Whitecotton’s shirt was blown off and his arm was burned by a satchel charge, which did not prevent him from lobbing grenades while Miller provided cover fire. Whitecotton threw every frag that the four of them had, killing and wounding so many enemy soldiers that there was a lull in their fire. Miller and Whitecotton, accompanied by the radioman, took advantage of the lull to drag Brown down the trail to rejoin Widjeskog. By that time, Miller, his own weapon having been shot out of his hands, was carrying an AK-50 that he had secured from a dead North Vietnamese.

Widjeskog had hoped to use Brown’s radio to regain contact with Hawkins, but the platoon sergeant’s wounded radioman had lost his ruck. “We had a third radio, but it was not working and we had planned to send it back for repairs on the next resupply chopper,” noted Widjeskog, who set his own wounded radioman to getting that radio up and operational. “The radioman broke it down and went through the parts, trying to figure out what the problem was, even as the rest of us continued to return fire.”

Widjeskog’s medic, Pfc. Martin J. Glennon, a skinny, bespectacled, decidedly naive, and extremely religious kid, had frozen up at the start of the fight. He pulled himself together when he saw Brown. Glennon saved the platoon sergeant’s life, expertly administering blood filler and a transfusion of dextrose, then keeping Brown out of shock, consoling and encouraging him whenever he started to fade. Widjeskog, meanwhile, made a head count. Brown and the platoon RTO were seriously wounded, and one man, Sp4 Thomas R. Schultz, was missing. One of the grunts told Widjeskog that Schultz had lost his glasses in the opening volley. They had sought cover together, but several satchel charges had exploded around them. When the smoke cleared, Schultz was gone, apparently having decided to make a run for what he mistook to be the safety of the hilltop NDP. Widjeskog didn’t think he’d make it. Schultz’s body was, in fact, subsequently discovered sprawled in the jungle between his platoon and the rest of the company. “Schultz was from the squad that had refused to walk point the week before,” noted Widjeskog. “Everybody was nervous, but Schultz more so than anybody else. He had even approached his squad leader about getting out of the field. Maybe he was getting premonitions that he was going to be killed. Sometimes those kinds of things are self-fulfilling, I think.”

There were peaks and lulls in the action as Widjeskog’s grunts, at the prone position and facing outward, visibility no better than five meters, fired short, controlled bursts whenever they took fire or saw or heard something in the thick brush ahead of them. Widjeskog kept control of the action from the center of the platoon—he was the only man on the trail, the only one up on his knees—darting over to whoever had last fired to ask what they had. More than one grunt reported that he’d been able to square an enemy soldier in his sights and had actually seen the man go down.

The enemy suddenly released a shower of grenades and satchel charges, most of which fell short or flew from one side of the trail to the other, missing Widjeskog’s men altogether. Rushing the perimeter from all sides behind a crescendo of AK-47 fire, the enemy ran into a matching crescendo of M16 and M60 fire. It took five intense minutes, the air under the canopy growing hazy with smoke, to beat back the attack, during which time a grenade went off to Widjeskog’s left, peppering his arm and shoulder and thigh. A big fragment from the same grenade smashed into the right cheek of the machine gunner beside him, Sp4 Anthony J. Galindo, a tough, stolid Mexican American from Texas. With his right eye swelled shut, Galindo switched to his left hand as he continued to fire his M60.

Robert Journell was screaming bloody murder as he sprayed the brush flat in front of him, his M16 on automatic. Journell was cut down as he fired, and Doc Glennon, superficially wounded himself in the temple, could do little more than ease the man’s pain with morphine, for he was bleeding internally. It took Journell forty-five minutes to die. “His life left him right in front of us all,” recalled a horrified Glennon. “He was kicking until the end.”

Widjeskog saw a muzzle flash about thirty feet away on the left flank, where the terrain fell away. Sergeant Whitecotton saw it, too. “There’s a guy shooting from behind that tree,” he shouted to Widjeskog. “Give me some cover fire while I throw a grenade.”

Widjeskog came to his knees and, shouldering his M16, squeezed off single shots in rapid succession, keeping the enemy soldier pinned while Whitecotton let his frag cook off before throwing it so the NVA wouldn’t have time to grab it and throw it back. The grenade exploded as it landed, eliminating the enemy soldier but also wounding Widjeskog; his lips were parted in a grimace as he fired his last shot before ducking when a piece of shrapnel shattered his upper left incisor and skidded up into his gum. He felt the impact, but the pain was masked by adrenaline, however bad the blood running from his mouth looked to the grunt who pointed it out to him. Whitecotton shouted for more frags. Doc Glennon dug a baseball grenade out of his pocket and, without thinking, pulled the pin before handing it to Whitecotton. Realizing what he’d done, he blurted to Whitecotton that the grenade was armed. “He immediately threw it,” recalled Glennon. “It rolled down the hill and exploded. None of our guys were hurt, thank God.”

Amid the continuing fire, it dawned on Widjeskog that they were eventually going to be overrun. “We weren’t going to get out of there alive,” he recalled. “That realization actually seemed to calm me. I figured we might not make it, but we would fight to the end.” The situation improved somewhat when the platoon radioman managed to bring their third radio back to life about ninety minutes into the battle, and Widjeskog was finally able to regain contact with Hawkins. “We learned that the enemy had taken the hill, and that the company had been split into three or four groups, but that they were holding their own at that time,” wrote Widjeskog. “Hawkins had thought us dead, but when I informed him that the enemy appeared to be coming from an area east of the hill not more than a hundred meters from my position, he was better able to direct the gunships and artillery he was already bringing in on the North Vietnamese.”

Captain Hawkins would recall that “when the Cobras first appeared overhead and I heard the pilots on the radio, I stopped being frightened.” The Cobras halted the enemy assault, allowing an increasingly confident Hawkins to get his act together. When tac air was made available, “that’s when I got angry, and started to fight the battle the way I wanted, not the way the enemy commander wanted. At that point, it was him and me, his will against mine. He had thrown his best punch and we were still standing. Now I set out to destroy him.”

Hawkins orchestrated the fire support to simultaneously hit the enemy with 81s, arty, and ARA, even as a forward air controller, Maj. “Skip” Little, USAF, whom Hawkins knew from the battalion stand-down, fired white-phosphorus rockets along the enemy’s likely routes of reinforcement to guide the F-4s in the placement of their napalm and 250-pound high-drag bombs. “We worked Phantoms up and down the enemy lines all afternoon,” wrote Hawkins. “Trouble was that Skip wasn’t authorized to drop ordnance any closer than five hundred meters from friendly troops. We were in deep trouble, though, so he fudged the danger-close margin down to three hundred meters. Still not good enough. Most of the NVA were fifty to a hundred and fifty meters away, and sometimes closer, and a mortar was still throwing rounds at us from just on the far side of our old NDP.”

Several times, a trooper near Hawkins caught his attention and shouted over the din, “Charlie Oscar, we got to do something.”

The man was right. The only way to regain the high ground was by frontal assault. Hawkins and his group started up the north side of the knoll at that point. Sergeant John W. Kreckel of Alpha One provided suppressive fire from the draw west of the knoll where he had pulled a half-dozen able-bodied stragglers together and to which he had already dragged several wounded men under heavy fire. The assault group ran into some of that same fire. The near miss of an RPG left Hawkins with a piece of shrapnel lodged in his cheekbone. Sergeant Ross was grazed in the mouth by an RPD round. “I heard Ross swear when the bullet kissed his lips,” recalled Hawkins. “We both low-crawled backward to get out of the line of fire. . . .”

Frank Marshall caught a piece of shrapnel in the right arm between the shoulder and elbow. Feeling nothing—he was literally numb with fear—he was shocked when he put his hand over the injury and his middle finger went into a hole that was nearly bone deep. Having no time to worry about it, Marshall threw down his M79, ineffective as it was in the thick brush, and picked up an abandoned M16. With the attack stopped, Captain Hawkins was sitting, talking on the radio, when an enemy soldier popped into view on the hilltop. “Wait one,” he said into the handset and, putting it down, reached for his M16. “The NVA was standing full up with an RPG launcher on his shoulder,” Hawkins wrote later. “He was either aiming at us, or was trying to acquire us in his sights. I got a good sight picture while still sitting, and squeezed the trigger. I was aiming for him dead center in his chest, but the round went six inches high and blew through his neck. His head snapped back, the launcher dropped like a weight, and he went down flat on his back. . . .”

Hawkins resumed the assault. Sergeant Kreckel’s group moved up the west side of the hill, Pfc. Buster G. Harrison of Alpha Three laying down heavy cover fire with his M60. Specialist Fourth Class Lowell T. Webster, the de facto leader of Alpha One, led another dozen grunts uphill from the north, followed closely by Hawkins and his RTOs. The troops leapfrogged forward, tree to tree, in the face of AKs and RPDs and RPGs. Hawkins demanded that Little put a strike on the enemy mortar, regulations be damned. “We’re dying down here,” he shouted. Although the FAC did not answer, the very next Phantom came in lower and closer than the others, one high-drag bomb hitting the top of the hill in the jet’s earsplitting wake, the other landing directly in the vicinity of the mortar position to the east. The first bomb failed to explode, but the one that went in on the mortar “filled the sky with black smoke that blocked the sun for a short while,” noted a stunned Widjeskog, whose hunkered-down platoon was a scant hundred meters from ground zero. “Dirt and tree limbs fell all around us. After the smoke cleared, we could suddenly see deep into the jungle, many of the trees having been cut down to eight inches in height. That single bomb effectively ended the enemy threat to my position.”

Enemy soldiers could be heard screaming in the wake of the explosion. As their fire lulled, Kreckel and Webster—shrapnel having slashed just overhead as they neared the top of hill, their men gagging on smoke and gas from the bomb blast— were able to reach the NDP. The grunts could see enemy soldiers dragging their wounded away, and Hawkins wrote that his men “shot some of the NVA in the back as they ran. Enemy dead and our own dead, our equipment and theirs, were scattered together all over the hilltop.”

The enemy retreat was covered by an RPD gunner firing from the northeast edge of the hilltop. Seeing a grunt walking unawares into the gunner’s field of fire, Sergeant Kreckel rushed over and pushed him down just as the RPD opened fire on the GI. Kreckel took the burst meant for the other man and, shot in the head, died some minutes later on the hilltop, several of his buddies gathered around him, doing what they could to comfort him. Kreckel was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

The attack stalled even as the enemy broke contact, few of the grunts willing to push on to secure the far side of the hill. Being a squad leader, Rick Isom decided he had no choice but to set the example. Isom had no sooner reached the forward edge of the hill, however, than an NVA spotted his silhouette against the dusk sky as he moved between the denuded trees and squeezed off two shots from his AK-47. One round grazed Isom under the arm, the other took him in the chest, knocking him down. Isom knew he was in trouble. Not only was the enemy soldier who shot him only twenty to thirty meters away, but one of their supporting gunships was, as previously directed, rolling in on a rocket run. Barely able to breathe for his injuries, Isom was unable to move to take cover, “and when the rockets came ripping through the trees above me, I received shrapnel wounds in the hip and back, one piece hitting me in the spine and paralyzing me from the waist down. . . .”

Isom saw a young black grunt hiding behind a downed tree. “I told him to go and find my friend Buster Harrison and bring him back to help me,” recounted Isom, who was drowning in his own blood, air and blood bubbling from his sucking chest wound. “The kid didn’t move. He was frozen with fear. I emphasized to him over and over that I was going to die if he didn’t go get Buster, and he finally crawled off across the hilltop to find Buster. . . .”

Buster Harrison cautiously moved forward with the black grunt. No one else would go with them. Seeing where Isom was sprawled, Harrison crawled toward him, covered by the other GI. “Rick, can you move?” Harrison whispered as he approached Isom.

Isom, his voice weak, said that he could not, so Harrison rolled him onto his side, grabbed him under his arms, and, dragging him back out of the line of fire, began hollering for a medic.

Captain Hawkins, meanwhile, had just joined Webster at the top of the hill when the enemy fired a last RPG at them, marked as they were by the company commander’s RTOs. Instead of being blown to bits, Hawkins and Webster and the battalion radioman were merely wounded, the rocket hitting a tree limb on its way in so that it exploded in front of them instead of at their feet. The effect was bad enough. Hawkins took a piece of shrapnel full in the throat, the impact knocking him down onto his rear end with such force as to leave him gasping for breath. Hawkins thought he was mortally injured but realized as he grabbed the radio to pass command to Widjeskog that he could still breathe and that he was actually barely bleeding. The shrapnel had zipped through his windpipe and out the left side of his neck, missing his spine and jugular vein. The injury did leave Hawkins rasping a bit, however, as he redirected their fire support onto the path of the retreating North Vietnamese.

Widjeskog had a clear view through the shattered jungle at one enemy soldier who tried to dash away, his arm straight down at his side, toting an RPD by its carrying handle, the weapon parallel to the ground. Up on his knees, Widjeskog was the only one in the platoon who could see the man—everyone else was at the prone position—and, realizing that, he opened fire with his M16. Widjeskog squeezed off single shots, his target frantically darting left-right-left-right as bullets smacked into the trees and leaves to either side of his head and shoulders. Widjeskog fired without aiming, so overly excited that he emptied the magazine without result, even as he thought to himself between shots I . . . got . . . to . . . draw . . . a . . . bead. The enemy soldier cut hard to his right, disappearing into some deep brush. Widjeskog called in a Cobra on the spot. “We all got down as the gunship fired its rockets,” he wrote. Whitecotton, however, raised his head to watch and “a rocket fragment bounced towards us and hit him on the nose,” continued Widjeskog. “He later said that he just couldn’t take his eyes off the fragment even as it was about to hit him. It bloodied his nose and slowed him down as we moved back up the trail to rejoin the rest of the company. . . .”

The battle had lasted five hours. The company slowly regrouped on the hilltop as night fell, some of the wounded staggering into the perimeter on their own power, others being dragged in by the light of the illum popping overhead. The rucksacks strewn across the hill were checked for ammo, grenades, and water, which everyone desperately needed, as Hawkins called a wall of artillery fire around what was left of his company. “We were all exhausted, but we dug in as well as we could and set up fields of fire,” noted Lieutenant Widjeskog. “We were certain we were going to be hit again.”

Doc Glennon and the only other surviving medic, Sp4 Ian Hailstones—the senior company medic had been hit twice— used up all their bandages, albumen, and morphine, such were the casualties. Thirteen men had been killed and fifty-one wounded, fifteen so badly that they would have qualified as urgent medevacs had there been time and manpower to clear a landing zone. Rick Isom was one of them. Buster Harrison, who was to spend the night helping with the wounded, put a poncho over Isom and one of the medics, allowing the medic to turn on a flashlight as he sealed Isom’s sucking chest wound. “He told me to lay with the wound down,” Isom later wrote. “That helped a lot, at least it didn’t feel like I was drowning anymore. The medic, of course, couldn’t do anything for my spinal injury, and not only did I grow progressively weak through the night from loss of blood, but I also became very sick because my bladder was paralyzed and urine was backing up in my system. I was awake all night and pretty much on my own, but the thought that I would be going home helped me hang on.”

Captain Hawkins had only twenty men who could still move and fight, and all but six of them were wounded to some degree. There simply were not enough troops left to form a perimeter large enough to encompass all the casualties. “I elected to leave the seriously wounded outside the perimeter on one side,” Hawkins wrote. “It was the toughest decision of my life, but the men understood. We placed the wounded in small groups of twos and threes between tree roots and anywhere else they’d have some cover and a chance of surviving another attack. Some were in agony, some in shock, but most could still hold a weapon and even if they couldn’t walk without assistance were ready to fight if need be. The guys on the perimeter who had wounded to their front knew where they were and fires were arranged accordingly.”

Those grunts who thought that Hawkins had volunteered to go into the valley would forever hold him to blame for the disaster. Those who thought that Hawkins had only been following orders saw it differently. “You did a good job, sir,” one grunt said to Hawkins as he checked positions that night. “Without you, we’d all be dead.”

Everyone was traumatized, joking and crying in the same breath but otherwise hanging tough. Hawkins was particularly impressed with an immobilized grunt who was propped up against a tree, rifle across his lap, ammo within reach. “Let ’em come back,” the kid muttered to Hawkins. “We’ll whip the shit out of ’em again.”

At some point during the night, the metal rings from the mortar illumination rounds being fired from Ripcord began crashing through the trees and smacking here and there on the hilltop. Hawkins shifted the fire, but not before he heard someone on the perimeter let out a cry as one of the rings crashed into his position. Hawkins went over to find Glennon treating Al Miller, who had blood streaming down the side of his face. “All day I’ve fought,” Miller shouted at Hawkins, “and I don’t get a scratch, and now our own guys are doing it to us.” Exhausted and exasperated, Miller trailed off in midsentence, “I’m gonna go up there and . . .”

“You just sit tight,” Hawkins said as Miller settled down. “I’ve got the fire shifted. It won’t happen again.”

Lucas got Hawkins on the horn around nine or ten that night. “Raffles Four-three, this is Black Spade,” Lucas said. “We’re going to evacuate tomorrow. Deal Four-three”— Rollison—“will be inserted to assist you.” Hawkins rogered the message, then Lucas asked, “What’s your status? How are your men?”

The casualty count that Hawkins gave was far greater than what he had earlier reported. Lucas’s composure cracked as the numbers sank in; he was troubled by the thought that, had Hawkins moved northwest as he had wanted instead of northeast as Lucas had ordered—the battalion commander had found Hawkins’s message waiting for him when he returned to the firebase—he might have avoided the enemy attack. “Chuck, I’m so sorry,” Lucas sobbed into the radio, his voice breaking. “I’m so goddamned sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Hawkins stammered. “We’ll be fine. Currahee, sir.”

“Roger,” Lucas said, his voice steady again. “Currahee. Out.”

Figuring that the enemy knew where they were anyway, Hawkins secured a strobe light to a pole and placed it in the center of his perimeter, a reference point for the Cobras that took turns orbiting the hill all night in case of attack. The gunships were eventually joined by a flareship. Hawkins spent the night outside the perimeter with his medics, going from casualty to casualty, until about four in the morning, when one of his radiomen realized that he was becoming incoherent and led him back into the perimeter, firmly telling him to lie down and get some rest. “I passed out and slept till first light,” Hawkins would recount. “When I opened my eyes, I was staring into the face of a dead North Vietnamese. . . .”

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