Chapter 3
Troops from the 1-506th and 2-506th were called Currahees. A Cherokee word meaning “stand alone,” Currahee had been the official nickname of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, during World War II.
Captain Charles R. Lieb, the battalion air operations officer (S3 Air), led the relief force that helicoptered from Ripcord to Hill 902 at first light on July 2, 1970. The mission was personal for Lieb, a former platoon leader in C/2-506th; when one of the SSI team members subsequently “told us that they had known the attack was coming, several of us got quite upset,” recalled the husky West Point football player. “We had some discussions with them about the need for immediate information at the local level. After that, they began bending the rules and telling us quite a bit more about what they were reporting back through their channels.”
Chapter 4
The lieutenant eventually recovered enough to get on the radio with Lucas and Koenigsbauer in the TOC on Ripcord. “The information he could pass to us was limited, but just by whispering over the radio, the FO was endangering his life by giving his position away,” recalled Koenigsbauer. Credited with taking command of the company and directing a counterattack, the FO was subsequently awarded the Silver Star. The citation was fraudulent. “Talking on the radio was a brave act,” wrote Koenigsbauer, “but both Lucas and I failed when we tried to motivate the lieutenant to action. We wanted him to adjust the supporting fires and to show some leadership and coordinate a defense. In response, he would repeat that he was injured—I believe he had lost a finger and had minor shrapnel wounds— and that he was unable to move without being killed.”
Chapter 6
Major Law, Captain Williams, and Lieutenant Darling were all awarded Silver Stars for the April Fools’ Day Assault. Darling was subsequently killed when the log bird taking him from Ripcord to Camp Evans was shot down on May 18, 1970.
If that was not the plan, then the 101st was simply and reflexively going after the enemy where it would hurt him most when it targeted Ripcord and Co Pung Mountain, however overreaching the plan seems in light of Vietnamization. Interestingly, when the NVA besieged the ARVN at FSB O’Reilly in August 1970, an impolitic division staff officer wrote in an after-action report that “since the massing of enemy forces presented numerous targets which were vulnerable to allied fire support systems, the decision was made to maintain the fire base and exploit the massed enemy.”
Chapter 7
Colonel Bradley had seemed a natural for general officer. To the dismay of his staff, the best brigade commander in the division instead retired shortly after his Vietnam tour, such was the damning effect of the fitness report he received from General Hennessey in the aftermath of the attack on FSB Henderson.
Unable to cope with what he had gone through, Kays turned to drugs, was committed to his state mental institution, and committed suicide in 1991.
Chapter 8
Following the battle for Dong Ap Bia, Zais was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of XXIV Corps in Da Nang. Zais repeatedly postponed Operation Chicago Peak as too risky; the operation had still not been launched when Zais turned over his command to Lt. Gen. James W. Sutherland in June 1970.
Chapter 9
The award was presented nonetheless, given the bureaucratic efficiency of the battalion personnel officer who saw Lucas’s name in the battalion surgeon’s log. Lucas was visibly embarrassed when Colonel Harrison, the brigade commander, pinned the Purple Heart on him at FSB Ripcord.
For the record, Livingston had no problem with Goates. It should also be noted that Goates was wounded in action four times, once during his tour as an ARVN advisor, again during a mortar attack at FSB Granite on May 1, 1970, while serving as Livingston’s S2, and twice more as CO of A/2-501st. In addition to the injury he suffered on July 7, Goates was seriously wounded on August 27, 1970, when, armed with only a pistol, he pursued an enemy soldier he had spotted, only to be shot with an AK-47 from a concealed position under a berm. Goates was awarded the Silver Star for his one-man charge, but the gunshot wound was so serious that it resulted in a medical retirement, prematurely ending his career in the U. S. Army.
Chapter 12
Gary Radford, unable to forgive himself for not bringing back all of his men, alive or dead, never felt that he deserved the Bronze Star he was awarded for Hill 1000. “There were a lot of brave guys up there,” he reflected. “I didn’t do anything more than what a platoon sergeant was supposed to do, and not even that.”
What happened to Beals and Howard tormented Radford for years. “In 1988, I finally got up enough courage to look the families up,” he said. He was especially anxious to talk with the family of his friend Lewis Howard. “Because of the racial thing, I wanted them to know that he was with people that cared, that he wasn’t just left out there because he was black and most of us were white.”
Chapter 16
The dead man was the younger brother of future film star Chuck Norris.
Chapter 19
The enemy’s effective antiaircraft fire had an intimidating effect, as noted by Lieutenant Case, who spent a week as an aerial observer with a scout detachment before being tapped to serve as the acting brigade arty LNO. “On my first day as an aerial observer,” wrote Case, “I was picked up from a landing pad at Camp Evans, and we circled Ripcord for most of the morning. About midday, we returned to Evans, where I switched helicopters and circled Ripcord most of the afternoon. I could not coax the pilot of either LOH down to altitudes where I might have actually spotted the mortar and antiaircraft emplacements we were supposedly looking for. They both flew at such high altitudes to avoid the antiaircraft fire and stay out of the way of fast-movers on bombing runs that we practically needed oxygen masks. On the second day, I wore a field jacket to keep from freezing to death. I had previously thought of the scout pilots as suicidal maniacs with huge death wishes, and was surprised, and secretly relieved, that they refused to fly at treetop level. I know this doesn’t square with the heroism displayed by pilots during medevac and extraction missions during the Ripcord battle, but perhaps that is because there was a greater sense of urgency during such missions. As it was, there was so much ordnance hitting the ridges around Ripcord, and the sky was so full of fighter-bombers, that we felt as inconsequential as a gnat in our LOH.”
Chapter 20
When correspondent Arthur Hadley visited the 101st in the fall of 1970, a battalion commander produced an index card from his pocket and handed it to him with the comment, “These are what guide my life.” On the card was typed the exact number of M16, M60, and 40mm rounds, plus claymore mines and 81mm shells, that the colonel’s battalion was allowed to fire each month, in addition to the amount of artillery fire it was allowed to request. “The colonel carries on another card the number of hours each day he can fly the various helicopters assigned to him,” wrote Hadley. “This limitation, called the blade-hour limitation and used throughout Vietnam, is the most rigid cost-control tool of the war. This year, helicopters will fly roughly one-sixth the hours they did last year.... U. S. participation is not just winding down. It is flooding toward the close. . . .”
Chapter 21
Every crewman in B/2-319th Field Artillery was awarded a BSMv or an ARCOMv, that is, the Bronze Star or the Army Commendation Medal for Valor. At least one man, Sgt. Robert L. Dunner, won the Silver Star: “When a round impacted in the parapet of Sergeant Dunner’s position and wounded three members of his section, he carried the wounded men to a sheltered area to await medical assistance. Maneuvering back to his gun, he single-handedly delivered an intense volume of suppressive fire which was instrumental in destroying two enemy positions.”
First Lieutenant Gabino J. “Joe” Caballero was platoon leader of the pathfinder teams rotating on and off FSB Ripcord; he recalled that the colonel commanding the 101st Aviation Group “tried to pin the donkey’s tail on the team that was up there for the CH47 that was shot down on July 18th. I’m a mustanger, so I wasn’t about to roll over. I still had that NCO blood in me. I told my boss, the aviation group operations officer, that he’d better go to the group commander and tell him that I demanded an Article 32 investigation, the whole nine yards, before they tried to pin any tail on my people. My pathfinders had nothing to do with controlling that aircraft. Lucas was the one who diverted that CH47 to the artillery ASP. The next thing I knew, the heat was off. The crash was just written off as a ‘Combat Loss.’ ”
Chapter 23
Private First Class John Chamless offered not only a different perspective on Workman but also an insight into the doubts that many of the troops had about the cause they served. He wrote of his conversation with SSgt. Michael Saunders on the eve of the man’s DEROS out of Vietnam: “. . . I shared a foxhole with Mike as we stood bunker guard at the basecamp one night. He surprised me. ‘I don’t plan to stay in the United States,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to finish school, but then I intend to get a job in a country like Sweden. I can’t see raising children and then letting them be placed in a situation like this. The country has gone crazy.’ This wasn’t a radical speaking. Mike was . . . drafted and sent to Vietnam as a private. He was promoted until he attained the rank of staff sergeant[,] then was offered a field commission. He turned the commision down because becoming an officer would mean spending an additional year in the army. ‘Even Ranger scares me,’ he confided. ‘He is concerned with protecting his troops, but he also loves to kill. Haven’t you ever noticed him talking about how he loves to kill gooks? He doesn’t consider them human. I can’t stay in a country that fosters that....’ ”
Captain Workman might very well have volunteered for the mission, although his doing so would have been superfluous. When the 1-506th was instructed to detach a company to the 2-506th, it was only logical to send Company D: It was commanded by the most experienced company commander in the battalion and, after a month’s refitting on Kathryn, was in better shape than the other companies for heavy combat. Smith noted that “Ranger was getting a little antsy to get our company off the firebase and back into the jungle. He was afraid we were losing our sharpness.”
The NVA wanted to bring down a helicopter to block the LZ and trap D/1-506th. That the helicopter happened to be an unarmed medevac, noted Handley, “just meant that they had a big red cross to use as a bull’s-eye.”
Chapter 24
Although the A/2-506th interpreter did report that there was one mortar and three infantry regiments in the area, much of this force, if the intelligence from the wiretap was indeed accurate, must have been held in reserve during the battle, perhaps in anticipation of a massive ground attack on Ripcord. There had otherwise been no big-unit engagements around Ripcord; even the actions at Hill 805 and Hill 1000 had involved enemy platoons and companies, not massed battalions and regiments. At the time of the wiretap, other available intelligence indicated that U. S. units in the Ripcord AO had been actively engaged by two NVA infantry battalions supported by a mortar battalion and transportation battalion; these elements were controlled and reinforced by the two regimental headquarters, each the size of an extra infantry battalion, that had also moved into the area, the 6th in the vicinity of Hill 902, the 803d on Hill 975. The regimental headquarters were controlled in turn, according to the wiretap, by the headquarters of the F-5 Division, which was believed to be located somewhere around Hill 902 or Coc Muen Mountain.
When Harrison was awarded the Silver Star, he was cited for fighting his brigade against six enemy battalions at Ripcord. Enemy units being smaller than their U. S. counterparts, an estimated 2,300 NVA had participated in the battle, according to a recommendation that the 101st prepared for a Valorous Unit Award. Perhaps because such a figure does not adequately convey the advantages the enemy enjoyed—the cover and concealment provided by the terrain and bunker complexes virtually immune to artillery and air strikes—Berry and Harrison have tended to cite the wiretap intelligence without qualification when discussing enemy troop strength at Ripcord. That the enemy had brought a division to the battle became an accepted fact among Ripcord veterans when Berry stated at a reunion, “There were for sure three, and probably four regiments. . . . So let’s say there were nine to twelve thousand [enemy soldiers besieging Ripcord].”
Chapter 26
The four pathfinders who controlled the evacuation— Caballero, Williams, Howton, and Kohr—were all awarded Silver Stars. The article on General Berry in Life magazine included a photograph of the acting division commander decorating Williams in his hospital bed at the 85th Evac, Phu Bai.