General Berry conducted an awards ceremony two days after the evacuation, presenting Silver Stars to Colonel Harrison and a dozen officers and men from the 2-506th Infantry. Pinning the medal to Harrison’s pocket, Berry called the evacuation “the most brilliantly planned and executed airmobile operation of the war.”
Concerned about morale, Berry spent considerable time talking with men from the 2-501st and 2-506th Infantry. Berry did his best to present the battle as a victory. The 155mm battery on the firebase had been able to inflict such damage on the enemy’s supply lines, said Berry, that the NVA had been forced to move an entire division into the area to neutralize Ripcord. By concentrating around a fixed point, the enemy had exposed himself to massed firepower and had suffered heavy casualties. Though division had been restrained by political considerations from bringing in the ground forces that would have been required to push the enemy back, the 2-506th had bravely held out as long as possible in order to maximize the enemy’s losses before being evacuated from Ripcord. In conclusion, Berry assured the troops that operations were even then being planned to strike into the supply areas of the enemy units that had besieged Ripcord.
Many officers were impressed with the concern that Berry showed during his visits. The grunts were not of the same mind. “We had a formation where Berry tried to give the troops a pep talk,” recalled Chaplain Fox of the 2-506th Infantry. “The troops didn’t receive him very well. There was a lot of anger from the troops at that time.”
As the grunts saw it, they had been used as bait, then left hanging when the enemy closed around Ripcord. “Nobody had a clear perception of the big picture,” said Fox, “but the one thing many people were angry about was that they didn’t feel that we had gotten the support from higher-higher that we should have.” In response, numerous troops threatened to refuse to return to the field as the battalion got organized for its next operation. Fox had “a lot of conversations with guys, trying to keep them out of court. It took some work, but most did go back out with their units. All most of them had needed was a little time to get it back together.”
During one of Berry’s visits, he discussed with Harrison the subject of a posthumous award for Lucas. Harrison suggested the Distinguished Service Cross. “Berry asked if I didn’t think Lucas was more deserving of the Medal of Honor,” wrote Harrison. “I said yes, but wasn’t sure we could make that kind of case.” Lucas had not been involved in any action that in itself merited the nation’s highest award for valor. “Berry nevertheless said he wanted to make the effort,” noted Harrison, “and would base the recommendation on Lucas’s sustained gallantry over an extended period.” Berry wrote home at that time, “Over the entire 23 day spasm of Ripcord that I observed, Lucas was magnificent. He was utterly and courageously devoted to his mission and his men. I don’t know why he wasn’t killed much earlier. Medal of Honor recommendations take a long time to go all the way, but I believe this one will make it.”
It did. Lucas became the only infantry officer above the rank of captain and one of only two battalion commanders—the other was an artillery officer—to be awarded the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War.
The award was a matter of considerable controversy, best summed up by a squad leader who remarked that “Lucas’s handling of the battle was a fiasco. He got his people in bad situations and didn’t know what to do. It was the kind of situation where if he had lived, he probably would have been brought up on charges, but since he got killed, he ended up with the Medal of Honor.”
Hawkins and Rollison thought that Lucas richly deserved the Medal of Honor. Herb Koenigsbauer agreed, writing that the criticism of Lucas was “rooted in frustration with an unpopular war and an assessment of tactics by junior persons who did not have the information required to arrive at such stinging conclusions about Lucas.” Harrison believed that Berry, in seeking the Medal of Honor for Lucas, meant to do more than recognize his courage; Berry also meant the award to be a “tribute to all the soldiers involved in Ripcord,” wrote Harrison, “a way to let the world know that something big and important had happened there.”
Something big indeed had happened at Ripcord. The Screaming Eagles had lost 74 KIA and more than 400 WIA during the fighting of July 1–23, 1970. Military spokesmen released to the press the figure of 61 U. S. KIA, making the losses appear smaller than they actually were while also avoiding a scandal by failing to note the 13 MIAs who remained on and around Firebase Ripcord.
Enemy losses are unknown. The 101st did not inflate body counts. The approximately 125 NVA kills that appear in the journals of the units involved in the siege reflect only those physically counted by the Screaming Eagles. The communists undoubtedly lost many more men, given the sheer weight of the firepower employed during the battle and in the week after the evacuation as likely routes of withdrawal from the area were subjected to a relentless round-robin of artillery fire, air strikes, and Arc Lights. Berry told the troops during his visits that “a conservative estimate of the number of NVA killed is over 500.”
Operation Chicago Peak finally commenced on July 25 when Chuck Shay’s 2d of the 502d opened FSB Maureen east of Co Pung Mountain while under the operational control of the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne. After artillery had been air-lifted to Maureen, elements of the 1st ARVN Infantry Division combat-assaulted onto Co Pung on July 30. After some initial resistance, the enemy faded away, choosing not to defend Co Pung by direct action but by launching a diversionary offensive against FSB O’Reilly. The offensive was initiated on August 6 by the 6th NVA Regiment. The other regiment that had participated in the Ripcord siege, the 803d, was not involved in the O’Reilly action, having withdrawn into the mountains to refit due to the casualties it had suffered at Ripcord.
General Hennessey, back from his leave, terminated Chicago Peak on August 12 to allow the ARVN to concentrate on defending O’Reilly. Thus between Ripcord and O’Reilly did the communists blunt the big summer offensive. One division-level report referred to Chicago Peak as a “moderate success,” noting that the “operation netted 97 enemy killed and 32 enemy weapons captured; however, no major cache sites or logistical facilities were discovered.”
Harrison, meanwhile, was anxious to return to the Ripcord area to recover his MIAs. There seemed no point in risking troops to search for the C/2-506th GI lost on Hill 902, or the two bodies from D/2-506th left on Hill 1000. All three men had apparently been blown to bits during the battle. Harrison instead combat-assaulted his brigade recon platoon into the area of D/1-506th’s fight on August 3, the surrounding high ground having been secured by Livingston’s 2-501st Infantry. The body of the medic who had tried to escape on a helicopter skid was never found. The other eight MIAs from D/1-506th were zipped into body bags and evacuated aboard Harrison’s C&C Huey. “The odor was overwhelming,” wrote Harrison. “We had difficulty flying and not throwing up.”
Because of bad weather, three weeks passed before Harrison was able to launch a “body-snatch” mission to recover the remains of the D/2-506th mortarman left behind during the evacuation of Ripcord. The firebase was by then unrecognizable, having been turned upside down by air strikes. After Livingston’s battalion again secured various strategic points in the area, a LOH from the brigade aviation platoon, covered by a team of gunships, touched down on Ripcord on the morning of August 27. The mortarman’s body bag was loaded aboard, but the LOH took fire on takeoff and burst into flames upon crash-landing back on Ripcord. An element from B/2-501st marched to Ripcord and secured the crash site long enough for another helicopter to dart in to recover the body and the crew of the LOH. The aerorifle platoon from B/2-17th Cav landed on Ripcord the next day to prepare the LOH for extraction. That accomplished, the 2-501st Infantry was withdrawn on August 29.
Colonel Harrison, meanwhile, had launched a major operation that was connected emotionally if not physically with Ripcord. The operation began when Chuck Shay’s 2d of the 502d was placed under 3d Brigade control and inserted on August 13 into landing zones around FSB Barnett, a U. S.– ARVN position overlooking the Khe Ta Laou river valley from a mountaintop fourteen kilometers northwest of FSB O’Reilly in Quang Tri Province. Division intelligence had determined that the narrow valley and the hills rising along it were honeycombed with bunker complexes that served as way stations for enemy troops and supplies moving across the border from Laos. The jungle-covered hills also sheltered a high-level NVA command group suspected to have orchestrated the siege of Ripcord before turning its attention to FSB O’Reilly.
Shay’s battalion was in contact from the moment it hit the ground in the Barnett AO. On the second day of the operation, A/2-502d found a hilltop dotted with 150 bunkers and fighting positions; a typewriter and mimeograph machine uncovered in one of the bunkers identified the complex as a North Vietnamese CP.
On the third day, August 15, B/2-502d had a contact west of Barnett in which an enemy soldier was killed and a bamboo bridge spanning a mountain stream was destroyed by ARA. Shay reinforced Company B with a platoon from D/2-502d. The enemy mortared the combined force after sundown, then launched repeated ground attacks against it from midnight to dawn on August 16. The combined force lost one dead and seventeen wounded. The enemy left thirty-four bodies around the NDP.
Shay combat-assaulted C/2-502d that morning into a hot LZ half a klick west of Company B. One enemy soldier was killed, another captured. Pushing out from its embattled position, Company B found a nearby bunker complex guarded by an enemy soldier who lay dead beside his RPD thanks to the prep fires. Commo wire ran into the jungle from the complex. Surgical equipment and bloody bandages were found in a bunker that had been used as an aid station; a pair of binoculars and a map were discovered amid the rice, rucksacks, and ammunition in the other bunkers. The map was whisked to brigade, then forwarded to division intelligence.
Shay requested that the map be returned, unsatisfied with what division had been able to glean from it. “We initially didn’t read the map too well ourselves,” said Shay; unlike U. S. maps, which were divided into one-kilometer grids, the enemy’s French-made map had two-kilometer grids. “Harrison got the map back for me,” said Shay, “and in my flying around, I finally picked up a physical point—the intersection of two streams—that I was able to identify on both my map and the enemy map.” As various way stations were marked on the enemy map, “we just went from there,” noted Shay, “and were very successful in rooting out the NVA.”
On the sixth day of the operation, Company B seized another bunker complex, then followed the commo wire snaking from it to a four-lane trail. Company B spotted an NVA unit moving up a partially denuded hill the next morning, August 19, and called in tac air and ARA before launching a ground assault. One enemy soldier was captured and twenty-five were killed in the battle; a plethora of weapons and equipment was policed up, including a field radio and an 82mm mortar. The action had been nose to nose. The lead platoon had been nearing the top of the hill when the NVA had begun firing AK-47s and throwing grenades from a cluster of bunkers that had survived the air strikes. Private First Class Frank R. Fratellenico crawled close enough to the nearest bunker to toss fragmentation grenades through the firing port, killing the five enemy soldiers inside. Fratellenico was advancing on the next bunker when he caught an RPD burst in his chest; knocked to the ground, he dropped the grenade whose pin he had just pulled, but reached out, grabbed it, and pulled it in under his chest before it could explode and injure his fellow GIs. Killed by the blast, Fratellenico was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Eight enemy soldiers were killed when Companies A and D established numerous ambushes around Hill 848, a major terrain feature two klicks south of FSB Barnett. The 2-502d Infantry suffered five KIA and sixty-four WIA during the Barnett operation, but it took two prisoners and, in combination with its supporting arms, killed eighty-four NVA before being extracted on August 30.
Although the Barnett operation did considerable damage to the enemy, the pressure nevertheless continued to mount against O’Reilly as the communists reinforced the 6th NVA Regiment with the 9th and 29th. While the base itself was subjected to 82mm and 120mm mortar fire, the ARVN units operating in the area came under repeated ground attack. Approximately forty ARVN were killed, as was an Australian advisor. The enemy’s casualties were far worse thanks to the 2-17th Cavalry, the 4-77th Aerial Rocket Artillery, and the U. S. Air Force, which provided such overwhelming fire support to the ARVN as to turn the hills around O’Reilly into a North Vietnamese killing ground. The ARVN claimed to have found nearly five hundred enemy bodies before the approaching monsoon necessitated the evacuation of FSB O’Reilly on October 7.
Though the success of the Barnett operation had not been total, it had been satisfying. “The Barnett operation was basically a continuation of the Ripcord battle under terms that were more favorable to us,” noted Shay. “The decision to withdraw from Ripcord had been the right move. Harrison had gotten a tiger by the tail during the siege, though, and he didn’t let go. He was a bloodhound. He kept his eye on the intelligence picture until he thought he had found the headquarters element responsible for the siege. We had a good intelligence briefing before we went into the Barnett area, and Harrison was relentless in ensuring that we received timely intelligence during the operation itself.” The results spoke for themselves. Shay would remark that “Ben Harrison can rest in peace knowing that we made the enemy headquarters that had controlled the siege pay dearly for Ripcord.”
The relationship between Berry and Harrison, already tense, became increasingly strained in the weeks following the evacuation of Ripcord. Berry was actually dissatisfied with the performance of all three brigade commanders, writing home that “they are all failing the real test of effectively using their supporting fires in combat.”
If Berry found all the brigade commanders wanting, he focused his ire most severely on Harrison, given that the 3d Brigade’s area of operations was the most active and thus the most critical sector in the entire 101st AO. “Berry critically questioned everything that I and my staff did,” noted Harrison. “He picked on my briefers, apparently trying to trip them up. He told me that my standards were too low and that I tolerated incompetence on my staff.”
Berry took Harrison aside after one briefing. “You’re not mean enough to be a brigade commander,” he said.
“I’m tough,” Harrison replied in his defense, “but I never expect to be mean.”
While still serving as the acting division commander, Berry dispatched Brig. Gen. Olin E. Smith, assistant division commander for support, to Camp Evans with instructions to closely inspect the base, for which Harrison had responsibility, as well as the rear areas of all the 3d Brigade units stationed there. Before reporting back to Berry, Smith told Harrison that he had uncovered nothing significant. “Watch yourself, though,” Smith said. “General Berry is after you.” Smith assured Harrison, “You have nothing to worry about from me. I’m just like Allstate,” he said, cupping his hands together in a parody of the insurance company’s advertisement. “Your career is in good hands.” Smith then opened his hands, exclaiming to an unamused Harrison, “Oops!”
Berry informed Harrison shortly after Hennessey’s return that he had requested that the general relieve him of command. Berry handed Harrison a copy of a letter he had prepared for Hennessey on the subject, along with a draft efficiency report. “Berry criticized me in the draft for tolerating a weak staff,” recalled Harrison. “He stated further that I had extensive aviation experience, but was lacking infantry experience and was poor at fire-support coordination. All the numerical ratings were at the bottom or next to the bottom.”
Shocked and depressed, Harrison lay awake in his quarters that night until three in the morning. Harrison was able to get to sleep only after destroying the letter and draft efficiency report, thinking that no purpose would be served by dwelling on them. Harrison respected Berry’s combat record but thought that the general had come to a wrongheaded conclusion about his own abilities. “I concluded that I was doing a very good job as a brigade commander,” he wrote, “and that I should simply go on doing my job and not spend any more time worrying about getting fired.”
General Hennessey visited Harrison the next morning. “Do you know that Sid Berry wants me to relieve you?” Hennessey asked.
“Yes, sir, he told me in person and in writing.”
“I’m not going to relieve you,” Hennessey said, “but you’ve got a problem. I have confidence in you. Berry doesn’t. I’m not going to change his mind. That’s your problem. You’ll have to do it.”
Harrison had plenty of opportunity to do so as Berry continued to visit the 3d Brigade every day for what Harrison referred to as “my daily ass-chewing.” Berry began to ease off a bit near the end of Harrison’s command tour, at which point Hennessey told Harrison, “Ben, I think Sid is comfortable with you now. He has never said he was wrong, and I don’t think he ever will, but you are doing okay.”
Harrison turned his brigade over to Dave Grange in December and was reassigned as senior advisor, 1st ARVN Infantry Division.
Harrison worked with Berry again at Khe Sanh during Operation Lam Son 719. Their relationship became much improved at that time, Berry expressing admiration for the job that Harrison was doing not only with his counterpart but also as de facto senior advisor for the ARVN Airborne Division and I Corps Forward. Berry’s own performance during the ill-fated incursion was one of the war’s great examples of generalofficer leadership; by exposing himself daily to heavy antiaircraft fire over Laos and working tirelessly to coordinate activities between various U. S. and ARVN commands, Berry was able to impose a semblance of control over an operation badly mismanaged otherwise by I Corps, XXIV Corps, and MACV.
That a rapprochement was possible between Berry and Harrison had not seemed likely when Harrison left the Screaming Eagles. Hennessey had given Harrison top marks in his efficiency report, recommending him for promotion to general officer. He also noted: “Colonel Harrison had the most demanding command tour of any brigade commander in this Division for the past six months. He did a great job. He spent more time on the ground with his platoons and companies than anyone else. He had less [sic] problems in the rear areas than anyone else. I would have kept him in command for a full year were it not for the fact that he had been previously selected to become the senior advisor to the 1st ARVN [Infantry] Division—a job I hold more important, at this time, to the 101st Airborne Division and the United States Army.”
Berry, on the other hand, described Harrison as a middle-of-the-road officer who, barely competent when he took command, had gradually grown into the job. Berry added insult to the injury of his efficiency report during the change-of-command ceremony in which the brigade guidon was passed from Harrison to Grange. Battalion and brigade commanders in Vietnam customarily received the Legion of Merit at the end of their command tours, in addition to an almost routine “package” of valor awards. Berry, however, presented only a single decoration to Harrison during the change-of-command ceremony. It was not a Legion of Merit. Nor was it a Bronze Star. To save face, even commanders who had been relieved for cause were usually presented with one or the other on their way out the door. For his six months of combat command, Harrison instead received the Army Commendation Medal (ARCOM), the lowest award then available and one normally reserved for junior enlisted men. “I was flabbergasted,” recalled Harrison. “No one from division had informed me before the ceremony that I would be receiving an ARCOM. There should have been some explanation or discussion. To me, the medal was a cheap shot.”
Before assuming command from Harrison, Colonel Grange went on leave to Hong Kong. While there, he and his wife visited a department store operated by the Chinese communist government that sold antiques from the mainland. Grange had expected the red banners and communist slogans with which the store was decorated. He had not expected to be confronted with a lavish window display devoted to the Battle for Firebase Ripcord. The display featured a series of photographs taken by enemy cameramen of the destroyed howitzers atop the base, as well as shots of abandoned, bombed-out Ripcord itself. The accompanying text described how the imperialist aggressors had been put to flight at Ripcord by the People’s Army of Vietnam. “It was interesting,” said Grange, “but it also rankled the hell out of me to see that.”
Most participants in the battle would come to view Berry’s decision as both militarily and politically sound. To credit Berry with making the right decision, however, is by implication to cast doubt on the original plan to open Ripcord. “The decision to evacuate,” wrote Chris Straub, “confirms my view that from the start the 101st’s push into the Ripcord AO was not in consonance with what the U. S. was trying to accomplish in Vietnam in 1970.”
Chuck Hawkins would write that he didn’t understand “why we didn’t use the advantage of our airmobility to keep the enemy off balance. We could have choppered into Ripcord, built a base, waited for signs of enemy activity, then choppered over to the next mountain to continue harassing their lines of communication with artillery fire. Can you imagine the effort the bad guys put into preparing for the Ripcord siege? What if they had to do that all over again in order to ring the next mountaintop we occupied?”
Ripcord’s establishment as a hardened, semipermanent bastion in enemy territory implies, as was speculated at the time, that division wanted to draw the NVA into a showdown. That division would want to do so perplexed Straub. “The people down in Saigon were biting their nails every night, wondering who was going to get involved in the next Hamburger Hill,” he reflected. “So why the mix-up? Why did the 101st commit itself to a grandiose operation out on the edge of the A Shau Valley, an area that was obviously home to a lot of NVA, if the division leadership was aware that once they’d taken a certain number of casualties, they’d have to pull out because of pressure from MACV and USARV?”
Herb Koenigsbauer would be unable to talk about Ripcord without becoming emotional. Lucas and Koenigsbauer had both been under the impression that division was committed to a major battle when it tasked the Currahees with opening Ripcord. “It never occurred to me that the will did not exist to engage the enemy and destroy him once the battle was joined,” said Koenigsbauer. “Lucas and I made repeated requests that division commit additional forces to the action. We had fixed a sizable enemy force around Ripcord. We were at the peak of good weather for using our helicopters and air support. There were no other significant actions in the division to divert resources away from Ripcord. If division was going to react, we said, now was the time. The opportunity was there to hurt the enemy, but higher command was not prepared to follow through and do what was required to win the battle, and I must admit to a certain sense of disillusionment that after all the sacrifices that had been made to take and hold Ripcord, we just turned around and gave it back to the North Vietnamese.”
Koenigsbauer’s analysis of the battle continued in writing: “I cannot reconcile in my mind that the chain of command could not foresee the impact the opening of Ripcord would have on the NVA. The potential for a major enemy response must have been realized at the highest levels. If the political climate was so clear to the people above battalion and brigade that evacuation was the only viable option when the enemy massed around the firebase, it makes no sense that the battalion was ever committed to taking Ripcord. There had been no change in the political situation from the time we were ordered to take Ripcord and the time we were ordered to evacuate. To write Ripcord off made clear to those of us fighting the war that there was no national commitment to fight and win. I respect General Berry as a professional soldier, and hindsight tells us that his assessment of the situation was absolutely correct. The evacuation saved U. S. lives, but it was also one more step towards our tactical, operational, and strategic defeat in Vietnam.”
In the months that followed the evacuation, General Berry would have his command-ship pilot, John Fox, circle the demolished base whenever their flights from one firebase to another took them through the area. Berry would stare down at the battlefield with sulfurous eyes, studying the cratered brown lump that had been Ripcord and the scarred hilltops around it. “He might have been evaluating the battle in professional terms,” recalled Fox, “but what I really think he was doing was grieving. You could tell that he was in pain over what had happened. It weighed on his mind for a long time that we’d had to pull out of Ripcord. He wouldn’t say anything as he looked out the helicopter window, and, finally, he would just give me a quick hand signal to continue on.”