CHAPTER 2
The shelling was not heavy. The response of gunships, tac air, and counterbattery fire had been standard, as was Lucas’s present decision to assault B/2-506th by helicopter onto Hill 805 to silence the mortar firing from behind its peak. “I flew over the area, checking in with Lucas and asking if he needed anything,” Colonel Harrison, the brigade commander, later wrote. “I was both surprised and very interested in the increase in enemy activity, but did not conclude that something big was about to happen. Lucas and I did not discuss the situation in those kind of terms.”
For more than a week, Company B, commanded by Capt. William J. Williams, had been working through a massive bunker complex built by an advance party to shelter the NVA battalion thought to be moving into the area to the north. There had been numerous fleeting contacts with an enemy not yet ready to fight. When given the mission to take Hill 805, Williams was bivouacked atop Hill 797 four klicks northwest of Ripcord with his 1st and 2d Platoons. The 3d Platoon— Bravo Three—was on an adjacent ridgeline. A small landing zone had previously been cleared amid the trees on Hill 797 with chain saws and plastic explosives, and as Bravo One and Two formed themselves into helo teams, Williams instructed Bravo Three to move as quickly as possible to the LZ to join the tail end of the attack. Everything was happening fast. In fact, air assaults, known officially as combat assaults, or CAs, though requiring close coordination between the lift, gunship, and fire-support elements, were everyday affairs in the airmobile 101st Airborne Division.
Most assaults encountered no enemy. That morning, however, gunships could be seen wheeling and diving in the distance, and smoke belched from some of the far hills. “You could tell by the look on Captain Williams’s face that we were going to get into it,” recalled SSgt. Thomas E. “Rube” Rubsam, the draftee platoon leader of Bravo Two. “Our hill was high enough that we could watch them prep 805 with artillery as we waited for the helicopters.”
The troops were not anxious to go into battle under Captain Williams. That he operated aggressively at a time when the grunts had reason to be anything but, and that he was balding, bespectacled, and uncharismatic, was enough for him to be sized up as a ticket-punching staff officer looking for a promotion. First Lieutenant Stephen C. Wallace of Bravo Three chalked up the ill feelings to the fact that “Captain Williams was all business, and like most career officers tended to place the mission before the men.”
Looks could be deceiving. Horn-rimmed glasses aside, Bill Williams was a pugnacious, highly experienced combat officer. He had been commissioned through the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program at Colorado State University in 1963 and had pulled a 1966–67 tour with the 5th Special Forces. Whatever the troops thought, one of Williams’s squad leaders found him to be “very professional, very smart.” Another noted with approval that Williams “enforced noise and light discipline, and was very strict about digging in.” Platoon leader Rubsam was of the opinion that “Captain Williams saved a lot of lives in Company B because he simply would not allow us to relax and get slack no matter how quiet the situation. He made sure that things were done right, but he still gave us platoon leaders a lot of authority to make our own decisions. He was an excellent company commander.”
Lieutenant Wallace was their best platoon leader, but as he was still en route to the landing zone, Williams told Sergeant Rubsam, two months in-country, to lead the assault on Hill 805 with Bravo Two. To keep an eye on his most ineffective platoon leader, Williams would go in on the second wave with well-meaning but in-over-his-head 1st Lt. Joe Delgado—a pseudonym—of Bravo One.
Landing one at a time, Hueys from the 158th Aviation Battalion, the division’s lift element, began picking up 2d Platoon, B/2-506th, at 10:26 A.M. The lift ships, known as slicks, could carry six to eight combat-loaded troops each. It was a quick flight to the objective, too quick for the infantrymen sitting at the open doors in a state of gut-tightening anticipation, and a rough one too, given the turbulent mountain winds. The assault was to be made into an LZ two hundred meters west and ten meters below the little bouldered peak of Hill 805, with the line of Hueys swinging first into a high and wide orbit to make room for a last bomb run by the Phantoms.
Following the air strike, the slicks started their descent. A pair of Cobras streaked in ahead of them, punching off rockets until the last possible moment to keep the enemy down. Undeterred, the NVA opened fire as soon as the gunships peeled off. Unable to risk a landing, the lead Huey merely slowed to a hover some three to four feet above the LZ. Sergeant Rubsam, his heart pounding, jumped from the skid, landing hard under his rucksack. The helicopter roared away as Rubsam’s troops scrambled into the old foxholes around the landing zone and immediately began laying down suppressive fire to cover the approach of the next Huey.
Informed that the landing zone was hot, Captain Williams gave the troops on his slick an enthusiastic thumbs-up, as if to say, let’s go, the game is on. Williams was marked as a unit leader by the radio telephone operators (RTOs) disembarking with him. Rubsam, looking back over his shoulder between M16 bursts, was shocked to see spurts of dust kicking up all around the captain and his command group as they dashed off the open LZ.
As his slick made its approach, Sgt. Robert L. Judd of Bravo One saw a muzzle flash and caught a quick glimpse of somebody among the boulders on top of Hill 805. “He was firing at us as we went by and the door gunner was firing back at him,” recalled Judd; when the Huey slid into its hover, “we unassed it as fast as we could. . . .”
As best as could be determined amid the noise and confusion, there was one enemy soldier with an AK-47 atop the hill and two or three others firing from the jungle below the western side of the landing zone. Rubsam was facing uphill. One of his machine gunners, Specialist Fourth Class Dempsey—“a gung-ho Alabama guy”—was in position on the other side of the perimeter when shot in the back and gravely injured by the enemy soldier atop the hill. “That LZ was horrible in that the enemy could fire right down on it from 805. We were like fish in a barrel,” noted Williams. “I was so frustrated that just to piss off that little son of a bitch on top of the hill, I jumped up on a log and screamed at the top of my lungs a phrase we had all memorized during my first tour about Ho Chi Minh having relations with his mother. After I yelled it, I looked down and there was one of the troops looking up at me with an expression that said you have got to be the craziest, dumbest bastard I’ve ever seen. He was probably right. It wasn’t a very smart thing to do.”
When all of Bravo One got on the ground, Sergeant Rubsam’s platoon, having dropped rucks and spread out on line, started its attack up the side of the hill. The whole thing was unfolding like a live-fire exercise, which amazed Rubsam, in his first big action, because he’d always assumed that their training was so much “horseshit.” The only discordant note was a man named Foster who, stunned into inaction or at least trying to appear so, was sitting on the slope below the landing zone, looking away from the action, his rifle between his knees. He was mumbling to himself, something like, “What am I doing here? What the hell am I doing here?”
Rubsam jerked Foster up by his collar, spun him roughly toward the hill, and snapped, “Son, they’re up there!”
Rubsam was leery that Foster might someday settle the argument with an accidental discharge in his back. “I always kept an eye on Foster because I’d had a few other run-ins with him when he wouldn’t do his job,” recalled Rubsam. The problem wasn’t just that Foster was a nonhacker but that the Jamaican-born GI with the thick accent was into Black Power. He struck a hostile pose. In fact, using one of the movement’s derisive nicknames for whites, he had written KILL RABBITS on his helmet cover over his Magic Marker drawing of a black hand plunging a knife into a white rabbit. It was a pretty bold proclamation, thought Rubsam, given that in combat you wanted all the friends you could get.
Racial conflict, rampant in the support bases, was mostly absent in the line units. “Everybody suffered equally,” noted Lieutenant Wallace. From that simple truth there developed a camaraderie in which every man could depend on every other man. Given the times, though, Rubsam’s platoon was divided into two white squads and a third—under Sgt. Clarence “C. C.” Clark, a black Regular Army noncommissioned officer (NCO)— whose members were all black and Latino GIs. “Clark had six or seven years in and was very capable,” said Rubsam. “He did an excellent job with his guys. They were as good as anybody.”
All except the sullen Private Foster, who, as it turned out, never fired his weapon in anger, either at Rubsam or the NVA. “He’d just hide when we were under fire, and I realized he wasn’t a threat to anybody,” noted Rubsam. “He was just baggage. I finally told the company commander and he was reassigned to the rear a month or so after Ripcord. He just went away. He was one of those guys that don’t work out in the infantry. We had white ones, too.”
The attack pressed on. Rubsam was more excited than scared as he squeezed off bursts. He was so pumped up, in fact, that it barely registered when the AK-47 cracked again from up above, and he was hit once in the arm—the bullet punched through his left biceps, missing the bone, a clean wound—and again in the face by a fragment from a shattered bullet or piece of rock as more rounds splattered the boulder to which he had instinctively headed for cover. Feeling no pain, Rubsam didn’t realize he’d been shot until the platoon medic, a good friend, told him that he was bleeding.
The medic relieved Rubsam of his M16 before getting a bandage around his arm. Rubsam had no intention of being jerked to the sideline. He took his rifle back, but moments later Captain Williams got him on the horn and told him to hold in place. Bravo Three was finally on its way, and the company commander wanted Wallace to lead the attack instead of the wounded Rubsam.
Though disappointed, Rubsam didn’t miss much, because the two shark-bodied Cobras working the hill—each had rocket pods under stubby wings, and a nose turret with an automatic cannon and a six-barreled minigun capable of firing up to four thousand rounds a minute—nailed the NVA who was holding them up shortly before the arrival of Bravo Three. Unable to hit the enemy soldier when he was down behind the boulders, the pilots finally decided to trick him out of his cover. The first gunship made a dry run past the hill. Realizing he wasn’t taking fire, the NVA, a brave man, rose up, trying against all odds to shoot down a Cobra with an AK-47. The second gunship was already diving in, however, with rockets flying and the minigun and grenade launcher blazing. There was a ferocious ripple of explosions and much smoke and dust; afterward nothing moved and not another shot was fired from Hill 805.
Moving as a platoon in the jungle was bad. Moving as a company was even worse. The enemy usually heard you coming and had the option of slipping away or setting up an ambush for the point team. Lieutenant Wallace instead broke down his platoon into six-man tiger teams, fighting the war like the enemy fought it. When moving as a unit, Wallace’s well-trained troops operated with an alertness not seen in the average platoon, threading slowly, cautiously, almost noiselessly through the jungle. The platoon leader was so adamant about using hand signals and speaking in whispers when it was necessary to speak at all, even on the radio, that Lucas had jokingly tagged him as Whispering Wallace. “As far as we were concerned, that nickname was a badge of honor,” said Pfc. Rodger D. “Chip” Collins, a rifleman in Bravo Three.
“I may have taken it to the extreme, but I believed in being quiet in the woods,” said Wallace, a country boy from South Carolina. “You always took risks, but being smart minimized those risks.”
Like most infantry lieutenants, Wallace, a college dropout who signed up for Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Fort Benning, Georgia—he also volunteered for jump school, pathfinder school, and special warfare school—spent his first six months in Vietnam leading a rifle platoon, after which he was automatically rotated to staff desk in the rear. Unlike most lieutenants, he soon asked for another platoon. He had no career intentions, but he had come to do a job and thought it was “absolutely insane to pull lieutenants out of the field as soon as they figured out what was going on.”
That’s how Wallace got Bravo Three. Shortly to be revered by his troops as one of the few lieutenants who could keep them alive, he had at first been resented as a hard-ass. “It was my platoon and they were going to do what I said,” recalled Wallace. “I demanded discipline. You’d be surprised how guys who consider themselves combat veterans will make noise and get sloppy, but they were a pretty good group, typical American boys, and if you held their feet to the fire, they’d do what they were supposed to do.”
That first morning of the battle, however, the platoon broke all its rules as it moved in noisy haste to the pickup zone atop Hill 797. In case of trouble, Lieutenant Wallace took a position in the column just behind his point team. Hill 797 was “terribly steep, one of the worst hills I remember climbing,” said Wallace; given the speed of the march and the suffocating summer heat, “we were really huffing and puffing with the loads we were carrying.”
It was rough, but because the rest of the company was in trouble and needed help, “there was a lot of cooperation during the trek up the mountain,” wrote Chip Collins. He passed along the way a number of guys near physical and emotional exhaustion, including a sweat-soaked machine gunner fading under the load of his twenty-five-pound M60. “I went up to the top,” noted Collins, “dumped my ruck, and went back for him and the gun.”
Bravo Three was shuttled one ship at a time from the mountaintop to the LZ below Hill 805 between 12:14 and 12:20 P.M. Rubsam and Dempsey were evacuated aboard the platoon’s slicks. There was no fire from the 805 at that point thanks to the Cobras. Collins thought the fight was over, and Captain Williams, seeing the unhurried trooper, barked at him: “Get your ass down.”
Private Collins did so just as the NVA downhill to the west opened up again with AK-47s. “The company was in such a tight little area that we were all packed on top of each other,” recalled Collins. “It was so crowded I almost shot somebody who popped his head up in front of me when I was trying to return fire.”
Williams told Wallace to take the hill, and, dropping rucks, Bravo Three started into the thick vegetation between the landing zone and the bald, bomb-blasted top of 805. “We had to climb over and around and through stuff, and we were all bogged down,” said Collins, whose turn it was to walk point. The tension was terrific as the lead troops leapfrogged across the steep, open ground directly below the top of the hill. If anyone was still in position up there, the grunts knew that he’d get one of them with his first burst. He’d get one before the guy knew what hit him. There wasn’t anything to do but hope you weren’t the one; it was a matter, recounted Collins, of “hiding behind a tree stump or whatever, and then climbing and scuffling to the next little place of cover. There wasn’t any fire, but many of us, me included, just threw up when we reached the top from the heat and the anxiety and the physical exertion.”
Bravo Three cautiously checked the top of the hill. Spotting a small bunker under a boulder, Collins pitched a grenade through one of its two entrance holes, and after the muffled blast another trooper pulled out a dead enemy soldier. The first confirmed kill of the battle was credited to the gunships. “Not that I cared one way or the other,” recalled Collins. “Our platoon wasn’t into body counts.”
The top of Hill 805, from which the ocean could be seen in the far distance, looked like a castle for all the boulders. Williams placed his command post (CP) among the rocks with Bravo One and Two. There being little room remaining, Bravo Three established a separate night defensive position (NDP) back down on the LZ.
After digging in and setting up claymore mines and trip flares, each platoon sent out a three-man listening post (LP) to monitor the most likely avenues of enemy approach to the NDPs.
The taking of the hill might have been only a skirmish, but, given the generally low tempo of action in the area, it was a big deal to Bravo Company. Williams christened the hill Rube’s Roost, in honor of Rubsam, and affixed to the remains of a blasted tree the Irish flag that he flew over his CP whenever they were on Ripcord.
As tallied in the battalion log, the dead enemy soldier’s bunker contained clothes, medical supplies, some marijuana, a fifty-pound sack of rice, grenades, ammo, satchel charges— and an RPG launcher with ten rockets. “The only thing I can figure is that the launcher was jammed,” said Williams, “because we were coming into a one-ship LZ, and all that guy had to do to screw that whole operation up was blow up the second or third ship in the middle of the LZ. Nobody else could have landed, and those people already on the ground would have been stuck because that North Vietnamese was in a position where one or two people could hold back an army.”
The man’s AK was missing, however, perhaps blown to bits, perhaps carried off by a second unseen NVA. It didn’t matter. The one kill was satisfying enough. “After weeks and weeks of getting plinked at and never seeing the sons of bitches, it was good to finally get one and see what they really looked like,” recalled Williams. “We looked at this guy as kind of a trophy,” noted Sgt. Thomas P. “Phil” Tolson of Bravo One. “We propped him up next to his bunker. He had a towel in the bunker. We put the towel over his shoulder and a cigarette in his mouth, and posed for pictures with him like we were old buddies at the beach.”
At least one mortar salvo had previously been reported coming from a ridgeline with three small peaks, known informally as Triple Hill, a kilometer north of Hill 1000. As Company B dug in, an air strike went in on the ridge, and a FAC who went down for a look reported the mortar destroyed and an enemy soldier killed.
The lull in the incoming ended an hour and a half later, at 1:35 P.M., when a single mortar round hit Ripcord. Fifteen minutes later, a 75mm recoilless rifle opened up from Triple Hill. Several rounds missed the firebase, but at least five others didn’t. “You could see where the recoilless rifle was firing from, and you could see the smoke trails zipping toward Ripcord,” said Judd. Second Lieutenant Aaron Andrasson, the artillery forward observer (FO) attached to Company B, was known for his speed in adjusting fire. “He called in one marker round,” noted Judd, “then adjusted and fired for effect—and got secondary explosions. We let out a cheer.”
Lucas requested a resupply of mortar and artillery ammunition, and toward late afternoon Chinooks from the 159th Aviation Battalion began arriving. Coming in groups of two and three, the big CH-47s, twenty-five in all, replaced the thousand-plus rounds that had been fired before sundown. Guided by a pathfinder, each Chinook hovered over the main logistical pad in its turn and placed its sling load of ammunition on the ground before banking away. The operation came under heavy fire. When the escorting gunships rolled in on one muzzle flash, others would wink from other hillsides. At 3:50 P.M. a Chinook from B/159th took enough hits as it unhooked its load that it was forced to shut down on Ripcord.
Concurrent with the resupply effort, an aerorifle platoon from the 2-17th Cav went into a hot LZ on Triple Hill. The mortar and recoilless rifle that had apparently been destroyed there were nowhere to be found, and the enemy who had fired on the helicopters bringing the platoon also vanished as the cavalry troops called in gunships and secured the top of the ridge. Before being lifted out the next day, the platoon discovered bunkers all over the hill, as well as trails heavily tracked with fresh sandal prints.
Other enemy, meanwhile, mortared the firebase to try to destroy the downed Chinook. At 7:21 P.M. another CH-47, this one from A/159th, was shot down on the log pad—ominously, the fire came from a heavy .51-caliber machine gun—but, hastily repaired by its crew, was able to depart for the nearest lowland firebase, where it could be worked on in safety. One grunt on the perimeter watched as Lucas “walked to the edge of the hill, trying to see where the fire was coming from even as his staff officers tried to pull him back into the TOC.”
The machine gun was firing from a knoll a klick down the slope on the southeastern side of Ripcord. Captain Rich of B/2-319th FA had one of his 105s rolled forward to fire down on the knoll. The .51 was in a cave. When helicopters approached, the crew would push it to the front of the cave, “and then when the artillery zeroed in on them, they’d just wheel it back inside,” explained Judd, watching from 805. “The fast-movers came in,” he said, referring to the jets, “and napalmed the whole area, and we thought, boy, nothing can be alive down there—but after the air strike, the little bastards wheeled that gun back up to the opening and popped off a few more rounds just to let us know they were still there.”
It was assumed that, having inflicted some damage, the enemy would pull back during the night. At best, he might hang on for a few days, then melt away as the allied response intensified. The major concern as the sun went down was that the enemy would follow up the shelling with a sapper attack on the firebase. “We did not anticipate the all-out enemy offensive that was about to take place, or actually was taking place,” stated Koenigsbauer.
The action sputtered on after dark. The 105s and 155s fired methodically around the firebase to deter the possible sapper attack. A U. S. Air Force flareship orbited overhead for a time, lighting up the hills.
A trip flare went off on the knoll between Ripcord and Hill 1000. The mortar platoon put a salvo on the spot. The 81s shifted their fire when Company D reported limbs breaking about seventy-five meters down from their perimeter positions on the southern slope of the firebase. “When the flares went up, you could see NVA moving around outside the wire,” noted a grunt from Company C, watching the action from 902. “They were really getting bold.”
The ground attack, when it came an hour and a half before midnight, was launched not against the firebase but Company B atop Hill 805. Forced to work their way in close because of the thick vegetation, several enemy soldiers opened fire with AK-47s while another fired RPGs at the boulders shielding Bravo’s CP. “It’s a very colorful thing seeing an RPG fly over your position,” recalled Williams. When fired, rocket-propelled grenades “make a coke-can-pull-top sound,” noted another officer, “then leave a streaking sparkler trail as they ‘whoosh’ toward their target. It isn’t hard to pinpoint where they’re coming from at night.”
Williams was gratified that though it went against their instinct, the troops, as trained, responded only with frags and M79s, because a muzzle flash would identify their position for the next RPG. When the shooting started, a new guy out on LP immediately darted back to the NDP. He thought he was supposed to. When his squad leader asked him what he was doing—listening posts pull back only on order—he resolutely dashed back out through the fire to rejoin the two men he had inadvertently left behind.
While the mortar platoon put up illumination rounds from the firebase, Lieutenant Wallace, down on the LZ with Bravo Three, moved into a position from which he could zap the enemy RPG gunner with a LAW. Wallace fired the rocket himself, concerned that an overly excited trooper might forget about the weapon’s backblast and hurt somebody. Wallace sent the rocket flaming toward the enemy, then quickly moved away before he drew fire—an unnecessary precaution, he noted, because “after I fired the LAW at the guy with the RPG launcher, he shut up right quick.”