CHAPTER 26
Although looking gaunt and fatigued, Lieutenant Colonel Lucas continued to project an attitude of energy and confidence that last night on Ripcord. His staff had been startled when he’d returned from Camp Evans to announce that division had decided to evacuate the firebase. Whatever Lucas’s own views, he put the best face possible on the situation, enthusiastically explaining that once the firebase was evacuated, the NVA who had massed in the area to destroy Ripcord would themselves be destroyed by waves of B-52s. “We got ’em right where we want ’em,” Lucas exclaimed. “He was almost snickering,” recalled Gary Watrous. “He wasn’t the least bit depressed about pulling out. He felt like we’d done our job. We’d pulled several thousand NVA in around us, and now he couldn’t wait to start blowing them to pieces with Arc Lights.”
The withdrawal was to begin at dawn. Fortified by much coffee, Lucas and what remained of his staff stayed up most of the night getting organized. “There was no time to debate or ruminate on the decision to evacuate,” said Watrous. “We were all too busy.”
Major Kenneth P. Tanner also participated in the planning session, having been assigned from the division G3 shop only the day before to take over as Lucas’s S3. “Tanner was a tall, cheerful, red-headed infantryman just bursting with enthusiasm for his assignment to a line battalion,” said Herb Koenigsbauer, who spent several hours with Tanner in the division mess facility at Camp Eagle, bringing him up to speed on how the battalion operated. Tanner then flew to Camp Evans, “and from what I understand,” noted Koenigsbauer, “he dropped his bags in the hootch the exec and operations officer shared in the battalion rear area, and without even unpacking, immediately caught a chopper out to Ripcord.”
Captain Vazquez, the battalion supply officer, came forward that evening, as did Lieutenant Caballero from the pathfinders and a liaison officer from the 159th Aviation Battalion. The three assisted Lucas in surveying the base and determining how many CH-47 sorties would be required to lift out all the equipment on site. As riggers from DISCOM prepared the loads, Austin’s 155 crews hastily expended the approximately thirteen hundred rounds in the battery’s ammunition supply point so the howitzers themselves could be readied for extraction. The evacuation of personnel actually began that night with Michaud’s cannoneers and Edwards’s engineers. The rest of the troops on base were to be evacuated after the equipment move in the morning. Manifests were drawn up and each man was assigned a number indicating the order in which he was to board the Hueys.
Vazquez returned to Camp Evans, meanwhile, to represent Lucas as the air-movement and suppressive-fire plans were finalized at brigade. The division’s air cavalry squadron and aerial-rocket artillery battalion stood ready to support the evacuation, and a massive amount of artillery and tac air had also been lined up. “The mood in the brigade TOC was nevertheless one of gloom and dread,” noted Blair Case. “I think most of us expected the evacuation to be a complete disaster.”
The mood was the same on the firebase. Captain Harris had been superficially wounded in the buttocks that evening while helping load a litter patient aboard a Huey that was itself damaged by the mortar salvo that hit the landing pad. Presently, the battalion surgeon filled two canteens, secured as many magazines as he could carry in addition to his medical gear, then carefully cleaned and polished ammunition and loaded it into the magazines so his M16 wouldn’t jam should he need to use it. “I wanted to make sure that I’d be ready if the evacuation choppers couldn’t get in,” recalled Harris, “and we were forced to walk off the hill and fight our way out of the area. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get a little help out there instead of being ordered to evacuate. You kind of hate to feel that you’re being pushed around.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “it might not have been worth it to take a lot more casualties to hang onto Ripcord. That’s what all my medics were saying—it just wasn’t worth it. The position was completely untenable. The way the enemy mortar and antiaircraft positions were multiplying around us, in another day or two we wouldn’t have been able to get our casualties out of there anymore.”
Having grabbed maybe two hours of sleep, Lieutenant Colonel Lucas was up again at 4:30 A.M. The battalion commander spent an hour checking to make sure that all loads were rigged and that his subordinates understood the evacuation plan, then he departed Ripcord in the C&C dispatched for him from Evans, accompanied by Ray Williams, his arty LNO. Lucas and Williams coordinated prep fires in the predawn gloom on and around a knoll one klick southeast of Ripcord and one klick northwest of Hawkins’s position, into which Rollison and Company D were to be inserted so as to move to the aid of Company A. Lucas had tried to assault Rollison onto the knoll the night before, but brushfires started by the air strikes supporting Hawkins had spread to the landing zone atop the knoll and the lift ships had been forced to return Company D to Camp Evans.
The idea of a night CA and a night march through jungle teeming with enemy had struck Rollison’s troops as ill conceived at best, foolhardy at worst, and they’d been relieved when the mission was aborted. “There was a somber attitude that night,” said Bruce McCorkle. “We were all very grateful we didn’t go, but we all realized that there were men dying out there. They needed help.”
General Berry and Colonel Harrison arrived on station some thirty minutes after Lucas went airborne. Settling into orbits successively higher than the battalion commander’s, Berry maintained an overwatch position while Harrison, this being an operation planned by brigade and under brigade control, assisted Lucas in coordinating the suppressive fires that began smashing at that point into all the hills around Ripcord. The battlefield had been divided so that artillery fire—and every tube that could range on the area was firing—could be directed onto certain targets, even as Cobras rocketed others. Harrison’s chemical officer, flying low in a Huey, smothered still more known and suspected enemy firing positions under choking blankets of tactical CS.
As the prep fires went in, the seventeen slicks that were to insert D/2-506th approached in a long, staggered trail from the east, the sun on the horizon behind them. The Hueys were followed by the fourteen CH-47s that were to pull the equipment off Ripcord. “The pilots had been briefed to maintain radio silence so the enemy wouldn’t be able to figure out the game plan,” said Lieutenant Fox, pilot of Berry’s C&C. “There was no conversation, and no enemy fire, but you could feel the tension as the aircraft neared Ripcord.”
The lead ship was flown by Capt. Randolph W. House of C/158th Aviation Battalion. The infantrymen on board included Rollison himself. Although dawn was breaking, it was still dark, especially under the canopy, when the CA began at 6:25 A.M. to coincide with the first air strike of the morning. The landing zone, a particularly small one, was hemmed in on all sides by tall trees, requiring House to hover straight down, his blades barely clearing the jungle. The enemy opened fire on the aircraft as it made its slow descent, and in the confusion the crew chief accidentally cleared House into a denuded, limbless tree on the right side of the Huey. There was a ferocious jolt as one of the main rotors whacked into the tree, followed by an onimous vibration that left House wondering if the blade was going to come loose as he pressed on to unload Rollison’s group on the LZ. Talking with Rollison after the operation, House “got the feeling that if I had tried to pull out after hitting that tree, he would have pointed his M16 at me and demanded that I land. That’s how intense everyone felt about rescuing Alpha Company.”
The next sixteen slicks hovered down the mine shaft in their turn, door gunners blazing in the face of AK fire from nearby enemy soldiers and .51 fire from Hill 805. Lucas, controlling the insertion from his command ship, which was itself the target of some of the .51 fire, helped direct the Cobras escorting House’s flight onto the gun position, then brought in the F-4s. Rollison, meanwhile, had his troops fire a Mad Minute into the jungle around the LZ, then took a compass reading and, to avoid the ambushes likely to be waiting on the trails, struck out cross-country in a straight line toward Company A. The pace was brisk. Relying on speed for security, Rollison’s column brushed through the enemy, ignoring those who could be heard moving in the jungle on either flank and barely pausing to return fire when the tail-end platoon was engaged. “We ain’t got time to fuck with these people,” Rollison had informed his platoon leaders. “Just leave ’em alone and keep moving.” Hawkins could hear the muffled reports of gunfire as Company D neared Company A’s little last-stand position. “We’d made it through the night only because the enemy hadn’t come back to finish the job,” recalled Hawkins, who knew that he and his troops would not survive the day by themselves but “didn’t believe that Rollie would actually make it to us. Lucas had informed me that radio intercepts indicated that we’d been hit by a full battalion the day before. I figured Rollie would run into part of that force or maybe another battalion entirely and get bogged down in another terrible fight.”
The equipment move began before the combat assault ended. The mission made little sense from an aviation perspective. Lieutenant Fox thought it would have been wiser to simply destroy the equipment and howitzers on the base rather than risk another disastrous CH-47 crash. “My thought at the time was to hell with the howitzers,” said Fox. “We’ll buy you a new howitzer. Let’s get the troops out. I couldn’t believe we were going to attempt to pull howitzers out of a position surrounded by mortars and antiaircraft guns. Chinooks are big targets. You could hardly miss one while it sat in a hover, waiting for the riggers to get the load hooked up underneath. It was really dumb to send in the Chinooks.”
The decision to extract the 155s—and, if possible, even the ruined 105s—was Berry’s. It was a matter of unit pride. Berry was also concerned, as he wrote home, that abandoning artillery would cast the evacuation as a “bugout” to the troops and the media. He hoped by recovering the howitzers “to preclude the ‘spiking the guns’ reporting that seems to appeal to young newsmen.”
Directed into position by Lieutenant Caballero’s pathfinders, the first CH-47 pulled out the first 155mm howitzer at 6:32 A.M. There was no enemy fire. The next five Chinooks, however, made their approaches through .51 fire and extracted the five remaining 155s amid incoming mortar salvos. Two crewmen were wounded, and three of the Chinooks were grounded due to battle damage after reaching Camp Evans with the 155s. Dennis Murphy watched in amazement as one of the riggers “hung onto the airlift straps after getting them hooked up instead of jumping off the 155, and went straight up in the air and got out of there under the Chinook.”
It took half an hour to extract the howitzers. Lucas broke station then to refuel, radioing the TOC before he departed to ask if any particular assistance was required; the casual reply from one of the radiomen, Sgt. Jon E. Penfold, heartened all those senior officers who were listening: “No sweat, sir, we’ll get out of this shit.”
The equipment move continued, the Chinooks forming a daisy chain—pick up a load, take it to the rear, get back in line—between Ripcord and Evans. Eight more CH-47s received battle damage in the process, and at 7:35 A.M. one from B/159th was shot down while attempting to extract one of the engineer bulldozers. The Chinook took hits from the .51 firing from Hill 805 and rotated completely around—a wisp of smoke coming from a bullet hole in one of the port engines— before the pilot regained control and crash-landed in the 105 area. The crew quickly scrambled out and headed for cover. Ten minutes later, the last of twenty-four loads—radar, bulldozers, ammunition, conexes filled with supplies and communications equipment—was picked up by the last Chinook.
Captain Alton J. Caldwell, the 2-319th FA’s supply officer, had been inserted onto the base that morning with three enlisted men, rigging equipment for six howitzers, and a rucksack full of thermite grenades. Caldwell’s mission—and he was visibly unenthused about being sent into a firestorm over what was essentially scrap metal—was to extract Battery B’s 105s or, should that prove impossible, disable them with the thermites. The Chinook that crashed into the battery area, sending Caldwell’s people rushing into a covered firing position, would have obstructed any attempts to lift out the 105s, so Caldwell passed out the thermites at that point.
The procedure to disable a howitzer involved closing the breech and sliding a thermite—they looked like smoke grenades and produced a tremendous amount of heat—down the tube so as to fuse the breech shut. One of the 105s was so badly damaged, however, that Caldwell could not get the breech closed all the way, and when one of his men popped a thermite down the tube, it fell to the ground through the partially opened breech. Caldwell kicked the thermite under the howitzer. Seeing the burning thermite, Major Tanner started hollering at Caldwell to stop, concerned that the thermites would ignite fumes from the crashed Chinook. Fuel from the disabled aircraft had, in fact, begun running downhill into the TOC, and Tanner was in the process of setting up a new command post in the adjacent 155 FDC. According to various after-action reports, the 105s were put out of commission with thermites. Caldwell would recall, however, that the pin had been pulled on only that single thermite that hit the ground before Tanner ordered him to cease and desist. “I guess I kind of failed in my mission,” Caldwell later said. Not that it really mattered, he added, because “the frames and sights had been twisted and melted down in the original ammo fire, and the tubes had probably been affected by the heat, too. I doubt it would have been safe to fire them even if we had recovered them.”
Lucas dashed into his battalion headquarters while his command ship was being refueled at Camp Evans to ask Major Davis, the battalion exec, if Major Koenigsbauer’s efficiency report had been typed up yet. It had, and Lucas quickly signed it before heading back to Ripcord, thus ensuring that no matter what might happen to him during the evacuation, Koenigsbauer’s service to the battalion would be officially recognized. Koenigsbauer, informed of the incident by Davis, would marvel at the professional loyalty of “a commander so concerned for the men who worked for him as to do something like that in the middle of an event as hectic and stressful as the withdrawal from Ripcord.”
Back on station as of 7:40 A.M., Lucas continued calling in fire as Berry and Harrison also departed to refuel their command ships at Camp Evans. The staff officers with Berry had brought thermoses of coffee with them, along with a breakfast of C-rations. “I knew better than to drink coffee on a helicopter. There’s no place to get rid of it afterwards,” recalled Fox, who watched amused as “all those ashen-faced majors and lieutenant colonels piled out both sides of the helicopter as soon as we landed to refuel and hosed down the area.”
Lucas, Harrison, and Berry were stacked up over Ripcord again when slicks from the 101st and 158th Aviation Battalions began pulling the troops off as of about 8:30 A.M. “The beginning of the evacuation was a nightmare,” recalled WO1 Kenneth L. Mayberry of C/158th. “Flights of ten were orbiting everywhere you looked over the flats in the Firebase Jack area just below the mountains. Mass confusion reigned. The air mission commander’s radios were breaking up and he had trouble communicating with us.”
Captain House, at the controls of a replacement aircraft, finally broke off from his flight and took over as air mission commander. “In short order, House turned mass confusion into an orderly evacuation,” noted Mayberry. House used a well-known landmark—a spectacular waterfall three kilometers northeast of Ripcord—as the final checkpoint from Evans to Ripcord. He directed the slicks in from the falls three at a time, a tactic that minimized the number of lift ships exposed to enemy fire at any one time and maximized the number of gunships available to cover them. Arriving three at a time, the slicks landed on the various helipads where pathfinders were stationed, wearing glow vests and using hand and arm signals to guide the Hueys. Many pilots were forced to abort their approaches at the last moment because of incoming mortar fire. Realizing that the base was being shut down when they saw the howitzers lifted off, the enemy mortar crews had begun using at a furious rate the ammunition they had stockpiled for the siege. The incoming was so intense that “the troops finally stopped getting on the aircraft that did make it in,” recounted House. “They didn’t want to leave their cover. Our aircraft were going in empty and coming out empty. They could only sit on those pads for a matter of seconds, then they had to take off whether anyone got on board or not because of the heavy fire.”
After making a futile touchdown of his own to confirm what his pilots were reporting, House called Lucas: “Nobody’s getting on. I can’t keep sending birds in through this fire if nobody gets on ’em.”
The radio in Lucas’s command ship malfunctioned at that critical moment—it was now 8:45 A.M.—cutting off communications with Major Tanner on Ripcord. Lucas had originally planned to land at the end of the operation so as to ensure that everyone had been extracted before going out with the last load of troops. Presently, though, he contacted Harrison: “The air mission commander says the troops aren’t getting on the aircraft. I’ve lost commo with the firebase, so I’m going to go in and take charge on the ground.”
Mortar fire forced Lucas’s pilot to turn away when he attempted to land on the VIP pad. After several other harrowing approaches, the pilot was finally able to set down for an instant on the POL pad at the other end of Ripcord. The enemy dropped a salvo on the pad even as the command ship banked away, sending Captain Williams—the arty LNO had disembarked with Lucas—diving into the closest foxhole. Striding on through the fire, Lucas shortly encountered Cpl. Michael L. Renner of A/2-11th FA, who was huddled in a vacated mortar position with several other GIs. In a scene that blew Renner’s mind, Lucas stood at the edge of the position, suited up in helmet and flak jacket, his fatigues clean and pressed, his boots glistening, casually ignoring the incoming fire as he asked the young cannoneer where the infantry command group was located. “Up the hill, sir,” Renner shouted, indicating the 155 FDC. “You’re doing a good job, son,” Lucas said, throwing Renner an encouraging salute as he continued on. “Airborne all the way.”
Hoping to set an example, Lucas, having moved around the base to take stock of the situation and do what he could to encourage the troops, stood in the open on the path cutting between the mess bunker and the front of the 155 FDC on its way to the VIP pad. Major Tanner joined him, as did, briefly, Lieutenant Bialosuknia—responsible for the airlift, he was gratified to report that the troops had begun boarding the lift ships again—and Lieutenant “Teenager” Watrous, who, a radio strapped to his back, had been calling in air strikes through the FAC orbiting Ripcord. Much of the enemy fire was coming from a 120mm mortar on Hill 805. The position was marked by the tall plume of smoke that burst through the vegetation around it each time the crew dropped a round down the tube. Though pinpointed, the position was so deep and narrow that neither the F-4s nor Cobras had been able to score the direct hit required to knock it out. Captain Caldwell watched one Cobra roll in on the mortar, minigun blazing. “The top of the hill seemed to come alive with thousands of tiny, dusty explosions,” he wrote. “It was somewhat like large drops of water striking the calm surface of a pond. The fire completely covered the top of the hill, and might have been effective had the pilot not come in from the north, as it appeared the mortar was sheltered in a gully that ran east to west. Less than ten minutes after the Cobra banked away, a Phantom came on station. The pilot had the correct angle, approaching from the southwest, but the two high-drag bombs he released completely missed the little hilltop, going right over the enemy and into the valley beyond. The explosions were incredibly loud. The concussion actually shook the firebase. . . .”
Lucas, who could see the smoke himself as the mortarmen put an almost continuous stream of rounds in the air, instructed Watrous to, “Go get the sons of bitches.”
Watrous intended to, but before he moved out, he urged Lucas and Tanner to take cover inside the FDC. “Sir,” he said to Lucas, “there’s nothing for you to do out here except get killed.”
Lucas shrugged as if to indicate that such were the risks of command, but he was seriously wounded only minutes later— at about 9:15 A.M. on July 23, 1970—when a 120mm round exploded three feet from him, apparently fired by the invulnerable mortar on Hill 805. The round exploded with such force that Captain Williams and the battalion radiomen, positioned behind the blast wall protecting the entrance to the FDC, were hurled, stunned, across the floor of the bunker. Captain Harris, the battalion surgeon, immediately rushed out of the FDC to see if there were any casualties. Two men, obviously dead, lay twisted on the ground, killed instantly judging by their massive injuries. One of them was Major Tanner. The other was Pfc. Gus Allen, a black trooper who had ended up on the firebase some days earlier on his way to rejoin A/2-506th from the rear. Allen happened to have been moving past Lucas and Tanner on the path the moment the shell landed. Lucas lay on his back, unconscious, mouth agape, legs mangled but barely bleeding— the mortar shrapnel, white hot, had cauterized the wounds—his face so aged by fatigue and shock that Harris did not even recognize the battalion commander as he grabbed him by the shoulders of his flak jacket to drag him inside the FDC. “I got him inside, and, boy, it wasn’t five seconds later that four more rounds went off right outside,” said Harris, who was awarded his second Silver Star for the rescue. “There were several other people in that artillery bunker, and we just looked at each other. It had been a close call.”
Harris didn’t realize whom he had saved until he unzipped Lucas’s flak jacket and spotted the crossed rifles and black oak leaf on the battalion commander’s collar. Harris got an IV going and began administering albumen. There was not much else he could do for Lucas. The colonel had been protected from the waist up by his flak jacket, but his legs were so shattered that bandages would have been useless. Half of one kneecap was blown away, the tibia popped out of the socket. “Lucas’s injuries were horrible,” said Harris. “There were bones sticking out, and he had shrapnel wounds all the way up into his buttocks on one side. It was obvious that both his legs would have to be amputated once he was medevacked. . . .”
Lucas came awake in about ten minutes and asked what had happened. “You got the shit knocked out of you, sir,” said Harris.
Lucas squeezed his testicles and, relieved to find them intact, joked, “My wife wouldn’t want anything to happen to them.”
Captain Benjamin F. Peters, four days in command of B/2-506th on the perimeter, had been called to the 155 FDC, and Lucas handed him his blood-splattered map. “Well, Ben, looks like you got it.”
“Yes, sir, I think I can handle it.”
“I know you can,” Lucas said.
Captain House, who much admired Lucas, went in to evacuate him—a single Huey escorted by four blazing Cobras. Lucas was loaded aboard the slick on a stretcher, but as quickly as House got the battalion commander to the aid station at Camp Evans, it was too late. Lucas had apparently gone into shock during the flight. Harris was later informed that “Lucas took one last breath as the medics unloaded him from the chopper, then died there on the pad.”
Lieutenant Colonel Walker, commander of the 2-319th FA, was over Ripcord in his own C&C; when Black Spade’s death was reported on the command net, “I felt a great personal loss,” recalled Walker. “I was deeply moved. I thought Andre Lucas was a super guy and was pleased to call him a friend. That he was a superb commander was exemplified by the way he died. . . .”
There was no time to mourn. “I was in front of the operations center, calling in air strikes again when I got the word about Lucas,” said Lieutenant Watrous. “I can remember feeling horrible—and then snapping out of it in a matter of moments because the task at hand was so serious. I just went back to calling in air strikes to shut those mortars down so other people wouldn’t get hurt. . . .”
Lieutenant Fox recalled that when Berry relayed the news of Lucas’s death, the general was “simple, direct, very military, but also very compassionate. General Berry actually sounded sickened, but the mission went on. That’s the way it was. The mission continues.”
Harris was also sickened, not only by Lucas’s death but also by the loss of Major Tanner, who would be posthumously decorated with a Silver Star. “I only met him the evening before we evacuated,” noted Harris. “It was already dark out. Fifteen hours later, he was dead. It hurt because he was one of my friends. Every man on that hill was my friend. There’s a certain bond you establish under stress, and it existed between me and Major Tanner even though we really didn’t know each other at all. He’s still one of my friends. It’s the kind of thing you can’t understand unless you’ve gone through an experience like Ripcord. . . .”
There were those who did not mourn. Captain Wilcox, banished from the battalion, was one of the duty officers in the brigade TOC at Camp Evans during the evacuation of Ripcord. “When it came in over the radio that Lucas had been killed,” recalled Wilcox, “there was this hush that fell over the room and a lot of standing around being somber. I wondered why we didn’t get hushed when some private got blown away. I was still a little pissed at that point, too, about Lucas and Hill 1000, and I remember I spoke up rather loudly, and said, ‘Well, listen, I’ve discussed losing people with Colonel Lucas, and he thinks casualties are all just in the game.’ No one said anything, and we all just slowly got back to work.”
The slicks came in low and fast along a ridge that led from the falls to the firebase, running a gauntlet of ground fire. Gunships flanked the slicks, and jets flashed over them, homing in on their targets. The battlefield was obscured with clouds of smoke from friendly and enemy fire, which the slicks flew through before finally flaring to land amid green tracers and dusty explosions on Ripcord. Watching from his orbit, Captain House was moved to remark to his copilot, “Damn, this looks like Twelve O’Clock High.”
The evacuation was chaotic yet organized. Flight corridors had been established so that lift ships approaching the firebase would collide neither with those flying back along the ridge with troops aboard, nor the scouts and gunships ranging the battlefield looking for targets of opportunity, nor the slicks running tear-gas missions, nor the jets dropping bombs and napalm on enemy firing positions. The aircraft involved also had to avoid the trajectories of the artillery fire pounding the high ground from other firebases.
House was in radio contact with Lieutenant Bialosuknia, who, positioned at the entranceway to the ops center, controlled the evacuation of the support troops packed in the TOC. The troops went out five at a time, mostly from the VIP pad. Three would rush to the landing slick from the command bunker, two others from foxholes on the other side of the pad into which they had moved at Bialosuknia’s direction to await the Huey. Bialosuknia also directed troops to the log pad in the vacated 105 area just above the TOC.
Captain Austin, meanwhile, was in a dugout adjacent to the log pad in the 155 area, in radio contact with his fire direction officer, a lieutenant, who was in a bunker with most of the battery personnel; each time Austin got five troops out on a slick, he would have the fire direction officer send five more running to his dugout to await the next Huey. House was playing the old shell game by then, such was the fire, sending the lift ships in one at a time so the pathfinders could wave each approaching pilot to the pad that was taking the least amount of fire at that moment. Once the troops had clambered aboard, the pilot would pick up to a hover, back past the edge of the base, make a pedal turn, then dive down the northeast side of the hill to avoid the enemy fire—which was mostly coming in from the west and southeast—and the next inbound Huey. “You got out of there right on the deck,” noted House. “People literally had tree limbs stuck in their skids when they landed at Camp Evans.”
No lift ships were shot down on the firebase. At least four were badly damaged by mortar shrapnel, however, including one piloted by Ken Mayberry of C/158th, who described the incident at length:
I had begun my flare when another mortar round landed between my aircraft and the five troops I could see to my front, waiting to board. There was a puff of smoke and dust, and they were knocked flat like bowling pins. At the same instant, my aircraft was splattered with shrapnel, and it felt like someone had stuck a burning hot poker into my left leg. Someone yelled over the intercom to “go around”—to abort the mission and get back in line—but when I saw those guys go down, I felt responsible, and knew I couldn’t leave them there. I said we had to get the wounded first, and set down.
When the skids hit the ground, my crew chief, Sp5 John T. Ackerman, and my door gunner, Sp4 Wayne E. Wasilk, jumped from the aircraft and ran forward to get to the wounded, an act of tremendous courage given the machine-gun and mortar fire impacting all around. . . .
I don’t know how long it took them to carry and drag the wounded on board, but it seemed like forever. More than one aircraft making its final approach to the pad I was sitting on had to make a go-around, and Captain House was calling to ask what my situation was. I couldn’t answer. I just stared straight ahead at the scene before me. Everything was happening in slow motion. I was afraid if I moved I’d break the spell and the next mortar round would kill us all. . . .
Finally, all the wounded were loaded and Ackerman yelled, “All clear.” The spell was snapped and I pulled pitch.
As I made my call, “Chalk 1 is coming out,” my throat was so dry from fear that I didn’t even recognize my own voice.
I began to relax on the way back and watched my instruments to detect anything amiss. I knew we’d taken some hits, but didn’t know the extent of the damage. Another aircraft from our company, piloted by WO1 David J. Wolfe, flew all around us so his crew chief could check us over visually. He didn’t see any major damage, but thought he detected some smoke, so Wolfe escorted me all the way back to Charlie Med at Camp Evans in case the engine quit.
I called ahead, and there were medics waiting on the pad with stretchers for the wounded when we landed. One of the doctors stuck his head through my window to ask if we were okay. I told him we were fine. It was rather comical as he looked at the holes in the aircraft and down at my chin bubble, which also had a shrapnel hole in it, and asked me, “Are you sure you’re okay?” My leg stung, but it wasn’t a big deal. I would have been embarrassed to go into Charlie Med where the really seriously wounded guys were, so I pulled pitch and flew over to Phoenix Nest, our company area at Camp Evans. I parked outside the hangar so maintenance
could check me out. Maintenance took one look and Red-X’d my aircraft. We had over forty shrapnel holes and had sustained structural damage. Maintenance was preparing for a long day of battle damage, and didn’t want to give me one of their replacement aircraft, but I eventually got one and got back in the air near the end of the evacuation. . . .
The airmanship displayed during the evacuation was phenomenal. More than one gunship pilot flew directly between a descending lift ship and the .51 firing on it, for example, drawing the fire away from the slick even while attempting to silence the gun crew with miniguns and rockets. Every pilot involved in the evacuation save one was later awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross, every crew chief and door gunner an Air Medal for Valor.
The exception was a young, relatively new warrant in House’s company who, forced to break off his attempted landing on Ripcord, did not rejoin those lift ships circling the flats but instead headed for Camp Evans. House thought the warrant had been injured or needed to refuel, but “later learned that he had cracked. As I understand it, he climbed out of his aircraft in shock after he landed and just walked into his quarters. He was a good kid, and was absolutely ashamed when I talked to him after the mission. He got it together, as I recall, and started flying again after Ripcord.”
Frank Parko of the 2-320th FA described his escape:
There were beaucoup people in the TOC. We were all crunched together, standing room only. An officer with a PRC25 radio [Lieutenant Bialosuknia] was at the doorway, calling out names from a list as the choppers came in. Somebody had a transistor radio off to one side, and the Rascals came on in the middle of all this with, “It’s a Beautiful Morning.” Everybody in the bunker started laughing and snickering, “You should be here.”
When my group was called up to the door, the officer with the PRC25 said, “You know where the 155 pits are? Go down this road, get in the 155 pits, and the slick will be right there.”
He tapped us on our backs—“Go!”—and we hauled ass down the road to the 155 area. I was wearing my flak jacket, and had my helmet in one hand and my M16 in the other. Mortar rounds were coming in, and there were some zings going by, so I figured we were getting sniped at, too.
We got down to the empty 155 pits—and there was nothing there—no chopper—and we kind of just looked at each other and headed for cover—and all of a sudden the chopper dropped straight in from out of nowhere. The pilot must have come right up the side of the firebase. He hovered about two feet off the ground, and we all ran to climb aboard. One of the guys was having trouble getting in, so me and another guy who had our feet on the skid just grabbed him by the seat of his pants, threw him in, and piled in right behind him.
We were on the floor of the chopper, holding on to each other and the webbing of the seats as the pilot lifted off and put the pedal to the metal. We were flying over the valley below the firebase when we started taking fire, and the pilot banked hard to the right to avoid it—and everybody said, “Holy shit, look at that,” because [of] the way we were tipped, we were looking straight down at fifteen or twenty NVA. They were hauling a 120 mortar. Three of them had the tube over their shoulders like a log. The rest of them were ammo bearers with mortar shells strapped to their backs. They were going down the side of a hill, like they were changing positions or something. Most of them were shooting up at us with their AK-47s. We swept right over them. . . .
Under fire from the debris below the wire, the grunts of Company B—who were to hold the perimeter until the support troops had been evacuated, then follow them out—lobbed grenades and LAWs in return, and burned out the barrels of their M60s. Captain Peters himself secured an abandoned machine gun at one point and returned fire on an enemy position marked by dust and a muzzle flash. “I picked up some little shrapnel wounds in my left hand and arm,” recalled Peters, who would be awarded the Silver Star. “It was just a little sting. I didn’t pay attention to it in the heat of the moment, and only later realized that I was bleeding. . . .”
The mortar fire continued throughout. Lieutenant Wallace was checking the line with his radioman, Don Colbert, when he came across one of his troops, Sp4 Andre L. Rice, sprawled out, one leg blown off, the stump cauterized. “Don’t move, we’ll get somebody here in a minute,” said Wallace. Rice nodded. Wallace saw Chris Hinman, the company’s two-tour, hard-to-control veteran, at the top of the hill, working out with an M60. “Hinman was a cocky kid,” recalled Wallace. “I think he actually enjoyed running around with the bullets whizzing. I hollered that Rice was down, and Hinman got a stretcher team together ASAP.”
There were so many casualties that Lieutenant Caballero’s pathfinders exposed themselves not only to guide in aircraft but to load wounded aboard the evacuation Hueys. Caballero had three men on the base with him, to include his section sergeant, SSgt. Samuel Williams, a black Regular Army NCO, and two enlisted pathfinders, Cpl. Jimmy D. Howton and Pfc. William H. Kohr. At one point, Caballero and Williams came across several wounded GIs clumped together below Impact Rock. It looked as though they had been abandoned in the chaos—the nearest positions were empty, as if the troops in them had bolted for better cover—and Williams immediately began piggybacking the casualties up the hill one at a time, impervious to the incoming. “Williams was a section sergeant extraordinaire,” noted Caballero. Williams, in civilian life a boxer from down south, went by the call sign Prizefighter. “He was incredibly ripped, incredibly strong,” recalled pathfinder Mike Anderson. “His lips had been split, his nose crushed, and his eyebrows cut up so many times prizefighting that he was permanently scarred. A kinder soul you’d never find, though.”
Williams was coming up the hill after rescuing the wounded when a mortar shell exploded directly behind him, shattering one arm and blowing a huge chunk of muscle out of the back of one of his thighs. Lieutenant Caballero jammed a towel in the thigh wound to stop the bleeding, secured a tourniquet, and packed Williams out on the next Huey. Caballero was wounded himself—superficially, in his arms and legs and hands—shortly thereafter as he continued directing aircraft in. It did not slow him down. Sergeant Rubsam of Company B helped Caballero “drive some people out of the mortar pits and onto the slicks. They were incoherent, just at the end of their rope, I suspect.” In contrast, noted Rubsam, “Caballero was doing one hell of a job, man, and loving it, too. He was totally in charge, totally up to the task at hand. That’s what he’d been trained for, and now he was doing it. He was completely in his element. He was just reveling in it.”1
Captain Austin was spun around and knocked down by a mortar round while evacuating his cannoneers, catching a spray of fragments in his hip and his right armpit through the armhole of his flak jacket. It hurt so much that Austin thought he was dying, but after Doc Savoie pulled him into a bunker to attend to his injuries, he discovered that he had suffered little more than bad skin abrasions. Able to continue, Austin got all his people evacuated, then—having checked the battery area to ensure that no one had been left behind—went to report to the command group at the 155 FDC.
There were two sergeants standing at the entrance. Austin was exchanging greetings with them as he approached when he was suddenly sent flying by an explosion just behind and below him on the side of the hill leading to the FDC. He had no sooner landed than someone grabbed him by the back of his shirt, shouting, “C’mon, get up, get up, we gotta get outta here.” Austin gasped that he couldn’t move his legs—his right calf was shredded and the Achilles tendon in his left leg was completely blown away—then passed out. When he regained consciousness, he was on a stretcher being hustled toward a slick that was flaring to land. The litter team was moving so fast that they slammed the hefty Austin into the side of the Huey when they went to load him aboard. Trying again, they bounced him onto the cargo floor. Another litter case came sliding in next to Austin. With that, the pilot pulled pitch and banked away, thus ending Austin’s forty-hour career as a combat officer after having lived the good life at Camp Eagle. For his valor, the self-confessed REMF would be awarded a Silver Star.
Lieutenant Watrous had been dusted by the debris of several near misses before he was finally put out of action by a shell that went over his head and landed behind him as he ran toward a perimeter position to call in yet another air strike on yet another target. Actually, Watrous had been putting tac air on the same set of positions on a revolving basis. “I would call in strikes on a mortar or machine gun that was firing on the choppers,” he recalled. “The fire would cease, and I’d run to the other side of the base to start calling in strikes on the targets over there—and all of a sudden the enemy would be active again in the position I’d just silenced. It seemed like the fire was coming from everywhere. . . .”
The shell that landed behind Watrous knocked him unconscious. He came awake on his back, his legs bent under him. His helmet, flak jacket, and the radio on his back had absorbed most of the fragments from the waist up—the radio was demolished—but he realized after pulling his legs out from under him that he was badly hurt from the waist down. He was in excruciating pain, both legs riddled, blood flowing from a gaping hole behind his right knee. He ripped a ragged strip from his shirt to tie off the wound, then, unable to move, lay there in the open, praying he wouldn’t be hit again. Watrous realized that a couple of terrified troops whom he recognized as new guys were looking at him from a nearby foxhole. “Get the hell out here and get me,” he bellowed over and over, and finally they did, hastily dragging him to the TOC. Bialosuknia himself grabbed one stretcher handle as a litter team rushed his friend to the next slick that came in. “I was only a couple weeks away from rotating home,” recalled Watrous, “and I was seriously worried that I wouldn’t get out of there because the landing pads were completely zeroed in. I don’t even know if we took any fire on the way out. I was so relieved to be on that helicopter and flying out of there that I don’t remember much about the flight. . . .”
Captain Rollison’s people had previously worked the area through which Company D now moved, but once-familiar terrain became unrecognizable—all craters, tattered brush, and splintered trees—as the relief column neared Company A. Rollison, on the horn with Hawkins, asked that Company A make some noise that he could guide in on. Hawkins fired three shots from his M16. Rollison asked him to fire three more shots some time later, which Hawkins did, then three more yet again. “Just follow the bodies,” Hawkins said, skittish that his signal shots might also draw the enemy to his position.
There was indeed a string of enemy bodies—sixty-one by official count—and abandoned enemy equipment strewn in the blown-down jungle that led directly to Company A. Rollison was about fifty meters from linking up with Hawkins when he heard a transmission over the battalion net to the effect that the battalion operations officer had been killed and the battalion commander wounded and medevacked. Rollison’s radiomen, Bruce McCorkle and Rick Rearick, looked at him, astonished. “Don’t open your mouth, don’t say a word,” Rollison snapped, concerned about the effect it would have on the troops if they thought that effective command and control had been lost. “You didn’t hear that. You didn’t hear nothin’ and you don’t know nothin’.”
Rollison didn’t even tell Hawkins about Black Spade when he reached Company A’s position at about 9:25 A.M. Rollison would be awarded his second Silver Star for making it to Hawkins. “I was never so glad to see anyone in my life,” Hawkins later wrote, “as I was when Rollison strode—yes, strode—into our perimeter. . . .”
The survivors of Company A felt the same way. “I had chills when I saw Delta Company coming through the bushes,” recalled thrice-wounded Frank Marshall. “They immediately started giving us food and water and chocolate bars and stuff. It was fantastic. I was absolutely scared shitless until they got there. . . .”
Chuck Hawkins, wounded five times, a dressing mottled with dried blood around his throat, stood up to greet Rollison: “When Black Spade told me it was you, I knew you’d get here.”
“How many effectives you got?” Rollison asked.
“Maybe twenty who can still fight.”
“Okay, then they’ll provide security for us while we blow an LZ,” Rollison said matter-of-factly. “This is lieutenant’s work, Hawk. You an’ me are going to have a cup of coffee.”
The coffee was brewed up field style. Rollison, trying to get Hawkins to relax, made note of his throat wound as they began sipping, and he joked, “Dang, Hawk, y’all bleedin’ in the coffee.”
Loosening up, Hawkins—also to be awarded the Silver Star—provided Rollison and his RTOs a glib account of the battle. Rollison, in turn, told Hawkins about having rescued Workman’s company two days earlier: “Your classmate’s dead, Hawk. . . .”
In contrast to Workman’s benumbed troops, the Company A grunts “were still pretty alert,” noted McCorkle. “They looked like they’d been in a dogfight, but they were still with it. It was obvious that they had fought hard, and fought bravely. I felt humbled. . . .”
The enemy lobbed a few mortar rounds toward the hilltop as the landing zone was being blown, but all fell short of the perimeter. In the event of a major attack on Hawkins and Rollison, General Berry had an entire battalion, Chuck Shay’s 2d of the 502d, standing ready to combat-assault into the area from the main pad at Camp Eagle.
Enough trees had been blown down by 10:00 A.M. to allow a medevac to make a dangerous descent and hover low enough over jagged stumps for Hawkins’s ten most serious casualties to be loaded aboard, including Rick Isom and Sp4 Harvey R. Neal of Alpha Three, who had suffered some eighteen hours with a stomach wound only to expire after making it to the evac hospital.
The work continued. By the time Lieutenant Flaherty, in charge of clearing the landing zone, had blown down almost all the trees required to allow a Huey to safely land, he reported to Rollison that he was almost out of C4. “Get out your LAWs and knock down those remaining trees,” replied Rollison. Flaherty did just that. “I fired probably twenty LAWs,” the platoon leader recalled. “They’d blow a nice little hole in the trunk. You’d pack it with plastic explosives and you could knock down a good-sized tree with less than a pound of C4. Normally,” he explained, “you’d daisy-chain the explosives around the trunk, and it’d take ten or twelve pounds to do the job. The only problem with firing so many LAWs was that I couldn’t hear a thing in my right ear for something like two weeks afterwards. I’ve still got a sixty percent hearing loss in that ear. That was the least of my concerns at the time, though. We were working fast. We had no idea what the hell was going on, but from the bits and pieces we were catching on the radio, it sounded like the world was coming to an end up on Ripcord. . . .”
With Lucas dead, Colonel Harrison instructed his operations officer, Major King, to take command of Ripcord. King was near the end of his tour and, doubting under the circumstances that he would survive his eleventh-hour return to combat, his knees were shaking as one of the desk sergeants helped him strap and buckle on his helmet, web gear, and flak jacket in the TOC. Calming down, King met the LOH that landed for him on the brigade pad. It was piloted by a brigade scout pilot, WO1 Steven M. Wandland, who had been pulled off an artillery-spotting mission over Ripcord. King climbed in the back. Captain Spaulding, the S3 Air, having been instructed by Harrison to take control of the extraction of Hawkins and Rollison, climbed into the seat beside Wandland. Ripcord was obscured by so much smoke and dust when Wandland arrived that Spaulding was forced to lean out of the aircraft and clear him to the ground with hand signals. “When we touched down, Jim King hopped off with a case of grenades we had thrown on board,” recalled Spaulding. “It was so heavy it just about yanked his arm off and knocked him flat. I think that saved him because two or three mortar rounds hit right there just as we were lifting off. . . .”
King got on the ground at about 10:45 A.M. The evacuation was half over at that point, Lieutenant Bialosuknia having departed, as planned, with the last load of support troops—he would be awarded the Silver Star for his part in the evacuation—turning over to Lieutenant Wallace responsibility for extracting Company B.
The fire was so intense when King took over—it was officially estimated that six hundred to a thousand mortar rounds pounded the firebase during the evacuation—that he closed Ripcord to all air traffic as of 11:05 A.M. Gunships and tac air were able to operate more freely with the sky clear of lift ships. Amid the onslaught, there were numerous aerial sightings—fleeting because of the smoke blowing across the battlefield—of NVA moving up the side of Ripcord. They were coming uphill from the north and south in squads and platoons. Most were still five hundred meters or more from the perimeter, but tactical CS was dropped on a mortar that had begun lobbing rounds into the base from only two hundred meters away. The enemy was attempting to “hug” the perimeter, a classic NVA tactic to get out from under U. S. firepower, and position themselves to breach the wire when the opportunity presented itself. “There was hardly any vegetation left on the upper slopes,” noted Captain House, the air mission commander. “There was just red clay and stumps and logs and debris. The enemy was in amongst that stuff. We’d roll F4s in on ’em with snake ’n nape, or Cobras, depending how close they were to the perimeter. . . .”
Major King had House resume the extraction, then shut it down again at 11:45 A.M. when Lieutenant Caballero—having just sent out his two remaining pathfinders with all the secure communications equipment on the base—advised that it was too dangerous to continue landing aircraft on the log pad in the 105 area. The Chinook that had crashed nearby was ablaze, the fuel cells ruptured by the direct hit of a mortar round. The fire had spread to the TOC, too, preventing the recovery of the radios and 81mm mortars left there by the mortar platoon when it was extracted. The twenty-five men still on the ground moved at that point to the lower tier of the firebase and set up around Impact Rock.
Major King was there, along with Captain Peters and Captain Williams, Lieutenant Caballero, Lieutenant Wallace and his radioman, Don Colbert, plus Chip Collins, Phil Tolson, who had multiple shrapnel wounds, and Chris Hinman, who had powder burns on the side of his face and a peppering of fragments in his arm and leg. A .51 round had blown up the ammo box that Hinman was feeding from as he fired cover for the slicks with his M60. The enemy was using tear gas, and clouds of the stuff drifted across the base, even as black smoke boiled from the burning Chinook. More smoke curled up from the TOC and the refueling point, which had also been set afire by the incoming, and from brushfires started in the perimeter wire by the claymores and phougas barrels that the grunts had detonated before pulling back from their fighting positions. Caballero began bringing slicks in on the POL pad, long intervals between each as the way was prepared with still more tac air and ARA. The slicks came through the smoke and banked away at top speed, door gunners firing into the smoking, burning mess below the whole time. “After I left there were 8 men left,” Colbert wrote home. “Man I was scared. There were Gooks coming up the hill when I left. They were trying to shoot our chopper down. We had to leave our rucks up there plus a lot of weapons, etc. . . .”
Chip Collins went out next on the second-to-last Huey. “As we left that place, the whole goddamn bird lit up,” he recalled. To prevent accidents, grunts weren’t supposed to fire from helicopters, “but it was a spontaneous reaction. Everybody was firing indiscriminately at anything and everything.”
The last slick departed at 12:14 P.M. It is unclear who was on board. The citations to Major King’s Silver Star and Phil Tolson’s Bronze Star credit them with being on the last helicopter off Ripcord. Personnel listening to the evacuation in the brigade TOC would confirm that King was the last man to get aboard that last Huey. Tolson recalls, however, that the only other passenger was a grunt, not an officer. Captain Williams, the arty LNO, remembers that there were actually six passengers and King was not one of them.
Williams described the final moments of the evacuation this way:
By the time we were down to the last few loads, there were enemy soldiers coming up into the 105 battery area on the other side of Ripcord. I could see them with my binoculars. They were rummaging around, looking for whatever they could find. They didn’t seem to be in any big hurry to get over to our side of the base, and they basically laid low after some of the infantrymen took them under fire with M60s.
I was the last person to leave that firebase. They tried to get me to go on an earlier chopper, but I refused. Somebody had to stay and coordinate the fires. I found a place where I could see everything, and called in fire until the last Huey arrived. There was a lieutenant from the infantry company [Wallace], myself, and four enlisted men on that last chopper out. He touched down, we jumped on—and we were gone in a flash, Cobras laying down fire all around us. . . .
General Berry was informed after the evacuation that Caballero was, in fact, the last man on the last slick. Caballero would concur: “Steve Wallace and I were the last two guys off that hill.”
It is the vague memory of Lieutenant Wallace, however, that he went out on the last Huey not with Caballero, but with Peters:
I was pretty scared as the last of us waited to get out, but the situation wasn’t overly tense. We knew they’d get us. We had good pilots. They weren’t going to leave us behind. I was on what I thought was the last ship out. I thought Captain Peters was on that ship, too, but I’m not positive after so many years. What I do remember is that when I climbed aboard, I had about as much equipment as I could carry, including ammo bandoliers and rucksacks, plus my weapon and an M14 and an M60 I saw laying there. I grabbed ’em up and took ’em with me. I wasn’t going to leave ’em for the NVA.
Peters tends to concur with Wallace’s description of the end of the evacuation. To quote Captain Peters:
After the second-to-last helicopter got out, myself and another individual were the only people left on Ripcord. I cannot definitively remember who that other individual was. I remember that he was wearing a radio. It might have been my RTO, but I think it was probably Lieutenant Wallace. He was wearing a radio by that point, and he was the kind of officer who would have insisted on being the last to leave.
Whoever it was, we went around to all the fighting positions on the base to make sure we weren’t leaving anyone. We were hollering, “Is anyone still here, is anyone still here?” but no one answered. There was absolutely nothing going on when we called the last helicopter in—no incoming, no nothing. When the two of us disembarked at the Currahee Pad back at Camp Evans, there had been enough of a lull between our helicopter and the second-to-last helicopter that the guys thought we had been left behind. I remember there was a group of people going from helicopter to helicopter, trying to get one of the pilots to take them back to get us. . . .
Though not mentioned in any official accounts, two people—one dead, one alive—had inadvertently been left behind in the confusion of the evacuation. The dead man was Sergeant Diehl, the mortarman killed the day before; his body-bagged remains had been overlooked as they lay on a stretcher at the entrance to the TOC.
The live one was the young Kit Carson attached to the 1st Platoon of B/2-506th. The scout’s GI handler, who spoke Vietnamese, had been medevacked some days earlier with a head wound. Friendless, unable to communicate with the troops being evacuated, the scout had taken refuge in a bunker, emerging only when everything went ominously quiet, the enemy shelling having petered out about the time the last Huey departed Ripcord. Luckily, a Pink Team went in to look the base over at that point; popping yellow smoke to get the Loach pilot’s attention, the scout frantically waved and pointed at the Screaming Eagle patch on his shoulder so as not to be mistaken for an NVA. Harrison went down to confirm the sighting— “Roger, that’s one of our boys,” the brigade commander announced, thinking the man was a GI—and a request went out over the radio for a volunteer to pick up the individual. In response, CW2 Leslie R. Rush, an artillery spotter with A/377th FA, landed his LOH, and the scout scrambled aboard. Not sure who he had, Rush told his door gunner to keep an eye on the man as they headed for Camp Evans. One of the desk sergeants in the brigade TOC described the scout’s escape in a letter home: “A LOH Pilot with Genitalia the size of basketballs went down to pick him up. When he gets down there he finds it[’]s a Kit Carson Scout [instead of a GI] . . . He goes and picks him up[,] not knowing whether he is a VC in US fatigues or really a good guy. The Major [King] sez there would be one less Kit Carson Scout before I’d take a risk like that. . . .”
With the firebase cleared, all that remained was to evacuate Hawkins and Rollison. The effort was to be coordinated by Captain Spaulding, who, riding in the left seat of Wandland’s unarmed LOH, had been buzzing around the area at treetop level since dropping off King on Ripcord, searching for those enemy positions in range to fire on the approaching and departing slicks when the extraction began. Spaulding leaned out to pitch smoke grenades directly into the positions they found. Spaulding ran out of smokes before he ran out of targets, at which point Wandland began marking them for their supporting gunships and jet fighters by hovering directly over the NVA. The scout ship took several hits in the process and, while hovering between two hills looking for more targets, was almost blown out of the sky by an RPG. “I looked out my window,” recalled Spaulding, “and there were three little dudes scurrying on the side of the hill about fifty yards away. I could see ’em because most of the vegetation had been blown away. One jumped up with an RPG launcher and fired that sucker, and it looked like a damn football was coming right at us.”
Spaulding screamed a warning to Wandland, who immediately pulled back on his stick so that instead of hitting the aircraft directly, the RPG skimmed underneath, creasing the aluminum—the body of the warhead touched the aircraft, the detonator in the nose did not—before exploding against the opposite hillside, showering Wandland with dirt and debris through his window. “I was so scared,” Spaulding said, “it felt as though somebody had slammed me in the chest with a sledgehammer. I could barely catch my breath. That bird should not have flown—we saw the crease and realized the stabilizer bar was barely hanging on when we shut down on the brigade pad—but we managed to make it back to Camp Evans.”
Spaulding and Wandland immediately went airborne again in another LOH. More targets were marked, more hits received. The AK rounds did little damage, but the aircraft finally came under .51 fire from underneath, “and, hell, each hit would move the Loach up five or six inches,” recounted Spaulding. “All the warning lights started flashing, and we lost hydraulics. The aircraft wouldn’t go forward. Wandland had to fly sideways all the way back to the brigade pad. He shut it down and we frantically unstrapped our seat belts and unplugged our radio helmets, and ran like hell to get away from the thing in case it exploded.” Instead of exploding, Spaulding noted, “the whole damn aircraft started wobbling and shaking on the pad, and the tail boom came apart from the main body. . . .”
Spaulding and Wandland were back up in a third LOH when the extraction of Hawkins and Rollison began at 1 P.M. It took half an hour to get Company A out, House’s slicks having to once again hover straight down a 150-foot mine shaft that had been blown in the jungle. Until all the dead had been evacuated, the aircraft load for each slick was two body bags and four troops. Rollison’s people were to follow Hawkins out, but the extraction of Company D had no sooner begun than three Hueys took hits in rapid succession from a .51 caliber that began firing from a distance of a hundred meters and enemy soldiers who had moved in as close as thirty-five meters on the north side of the LZ. Spaulding and Wandland went back into action, taking more hits as they marked targets for the Cobras, which splintered the trees all around Company D. The enemy fire petered out as the extraction continued. Spaulding and Wandland would both be decorated with the Silver Star. “I expected their LOH to be shot down at any moment,” recalled Blair Case, who observed the action from Harrison’s C&C. “It seems like a miracle that they survived. In my mind, Spaulding and Wandland are the real heroes of the evacuation of Ripcord.”
Captain Rollison went out on the third-to-last ship, turning over the last two loads to Lieutenant Flaherty, who said to his platoon sergeant, George Strasburg, as the next Huey hovered into the LZ: “Go ahead, George, I’ll go on the last ship.”
“No, L. T., you go,” said Strasburg. “I’ll get the last load out.”
Flaherty climbed aboard the second-to-last slick, and Sergeant Strasburg and the last few grunts followed him on the last Huey. The evacuation was thus completed at 2:07 P.M., arty being called shortly on the friendly and enemy equipment piled up on the LZ.
Major Davis and other members of the battalion staff greeted Peters, Hawkins, and Rollison as they touched down in their turn on the Currahee pad. It was a mob scene on the pad, troops cheering as each new load came in, first sergeants hugging company commanders and slapping platoon leaders on the back. The men were delirious with relief.
It all came crashing down for Rollison, though, when informed that Lucas had died of his injuries. “Rollison loved Colonel Lucas,” said Flaherty. “He was absolutely devastated by the news of his death. He came up to me when I landed, and said, ‘The Spade is dead,’ and broke down right there on the pad. He cried and cried and cried. We all cried. . . .”
Once all the troops were out, it was open season on the enemy. Unable to keep track of the call signs of all the jet fighters stacked up over the area, Spaulding finally announced over the radio: “It’s like a barber shop, guys—everybody get a number and get in line. You know who you are. When I say ‘Next,’ you pop on the line and tell me what ordnance you got and I’ll tell you where to put it.”
The aircraft rolled in one after the other. “Okay, Sortie Six,” said Spaulding, “you’ll take care of that .51 we’ve got marked with purple smoke on the south slope of Hill 805.”
The pilot rogered that and rolled in. “Sortie Seven,” Spaulding continued, “once you see Sortie Six’s hit, move a couple hundred meters to the east—and just let ’em fly.”
“Any specific target?” the pilot asked.
“Hell, they’re all over down there. Don’t worry about it. Wherever you put your bombs, you’re gonna hit somebody.”
Most of the jets dropped two bombs at a time. One pilot reported that he did not have enough fuel to make repeated passes. “Well, just drop the whole damn load at once,” said Spaulding, who would recall “watching something like twenty-six bombs flying towards the target as the jet pulled out of its dive. The whole damn side of the mountain erupted, and I thought, take that, you little shits.”
By the time Berry and Harrison broke station after nine hours in the air, Ripcord itself was being bombed. “The last view I had of Ripcord,” noted Case, “was of jets streaking toward it and geysers of debris erupting from the top of the base as the bombs exploded. . . .”
Major Little directed the air strikes on the firebase from his little Bird Dog, assisted by Lieutenant McCall, who had gone airborne with the FAC because Little had specific orders to destroy the TOC and McCall knew the exact layout of Ripcord. There was some concern at division that certain sensitive items that should have been evacuated or destroyed might have been left behind in the operations center. “To make sure the enemy didn’t secure any such items, “we put marking rockets right into the TOC door,” noted McCall. After the operations center had been bombed, Little and McCall marked other key targets for destruction, including the howitzers on top of the firebase. Little would pull up to make way for the jets, “then we’d come back down after each strike to do a bomb damage assessment and make sure the bombs had landed where we wanted them,” explained McCall. “It was like a roller-coaster ride. One thing that confused us was that we could see footprints in the dust that had settled across the firebase from the air strikes. We were getting right down on the deck, and could see footprints going from one position to another inside the perimeter. We called back to confirm that there were no friendlies still on the ground, and were told that everyone had been accounted for and to continue the mission.” It was McCall’s impression that the enemy, having breached the perimeter wire, was hiding in the bunkers that had just been evacuated. “I think every time we rolled in hot, they would take cover, so we never actually saw anybody. But there was definitely evidence that somebody was running around up there, and more than one. . . .”