CHAPTER 3
Earlier, as night had approached, Captain Hewitt reportedly requested permission to move Company C off Hill 902, the unit having compromised its position by firing at the enemy mortar sites with machine guns and LAWs. “I was monitoring the radio, and Hewitt was emphatic about getting off that mountain,” stated Sp4 Gary A. Steele, an RTO in Charlie Two. “We knew we were going to get our ass kicked, but the colonel told us to stay put.” As Hewitt had supposedly feared, Company C, minus its detached platoon, was hit hard during the night. Casualties were heavy; Hewitt was among those killed. Steele blamed Lucas. Major Koenigsbauer, however, would have no memory in later years of Hewitt wanting to move to a new NDP. If he had, Lucas would have indeed refused the request, said Koenigsbauer: “Pulling off that hill wouldn’t have made any sense. It was key terrain. The countermortar radar on the firebase was good, but we needed eyes out there, too, and from Hill 902, Hewitt and his FO could observe enemy firing positions and report back to us the effectiveness of our counterbattery fire.”
Whatever the advantages, leaving the company on the hill involved a calculated risk. Units rarely spent two nights in the same location, on the assumption that the enemy needed at least one night to reconnoiter a position before attacking it. For Lucas to leave Hewitt in place implies that the battalion commander thought an attack on Company C much less likely than the resumption—come daylight—of the shelling of Ripcord. Though Hewitt might have argued that he could regain the high ground from his new position at first light, Lucas apparently did not want to gamble that the NVA wouldn’t occupy the strategic peak during the night. In any event, if Hewitt did argue with Lucas, if accounts to that effect did not generate after the fact to explain away the heavy casualties, what remains baffling is how indifferently Company C set up for its second night atop Hill 902. Enemy sappers, supported by regular infantry, were able to creep close enough to the perimeter to identify not only the company commander’s location—Hewitt had picked the wrong night to string up a hammock for the whole world to see—but also the uncamouflaged platoon CP and M60 positions on the side of the perimeter through which they planned to strike. Those positions were all eliminated in the first few seconds of the attack, allowing the enemy to dart inside the NDP.
Such is a best-case scenario. Many survivors became convinced as they tried to figure out what happened the next morning that at least some of the sappers—stripped to dark shorts, blackened from head to toe with charcoal, their folding-stock AK-50s slung tightly against their backs so their arms were free to feel ahead of them in the dark—had slipped with catlike stealth between men dozing in two foxholes and were already inside the lines when the shooting started. However the sappers got in, the men scrambling to return fire were stunned to realize that not only did they have NVA to their front but that more shadowy figures were behind them, throwing satchel charges down at their foxholes from the vicinity of the company CP.
Had the enemy mortared Hill 902, Colonel Harrison noted that moving would have proved the wiser course of action after all. “But against a sapper-infantry attack,” he wrote, the troops “were on terrain that should have favored them.” The brigade commander blamed Hewitt for “not preparing good defensive positions with an adequate number of claymore mines and trip flares, etc.”
Because Company C had been as loose as a unit in a quiet area, the melee in the flare-lit night was a madhouse of terror and confusion. “We did not know until reports came in the next morning from the relief force that the company had failed to dig in and otherwise prepare appropriate positions,” said Koenigsbauer. “I have a hard time with that. Should I have gotten on the radio and gone through the steps of establishing a night defensive position with Hewitt? Maybe, but he had been in command long enough that he should have known. If the company had been dug in and alert, that night would have ended much differently than it did, and Hewitt wouldn’t have paid for his complacency with his life.”
It is true that Hewitt basically killed himself. It is also true that he might have proved at least an adequate commander had he had more time to get his feet on the ground. As it was, Hewitt didn’t last long enough to do anything but compare unfavorably to his predecessor, Capt. Isabelino Vazquez-Rodriguez. “Captain Vazquez was the ultimate soldier,” said one sergeant, speaking for the entire company. A native of Puerto Rico, the bantam-sized Vazquez was a veteran of the Korean War and had pulled several tours in Vietnam as a senior Special Forces NCO—he limped a bit from an old leg wound—before receiving a temporary commission and orders to the Screaming Eagles. His combat experience was awe inspiring. “The colonel and the battalion staff didn’t know shit compared to that man,” said 1st Lt. James H. Campbell of Charlie Two. Vazquez, unsmiling, black eyed, was a hard man to work for. Campbell, himself the subject of several “ass-chewings” as he got his act together as a platoon leader, noted that the captain was “incredibly severe and had the fiercest temper of any human being I have ever met in my life. He had zero tolerance for error. Vazquez lived and breathed war. He had been on the ground fighting the enemy for years. He didn’t think about going home. He thought about terrain, tactics, routes of travel, avenues of approach, fire support, and the readiness of his troops twenty-four hours a day. He didn’t seem human. He seemed immortal.”
The six-month rule also applied to company commanders. To make room for Captain Hewitt, Vazquez was wastefully reassigned to a staff position—battalion supply officer—when his time was up. The original intent of the rule had been to spread around as much combat experience as possible in the officer corps in what was expected to be a quick war. The practice had since been institutionalized to serve the needs of career officers who required a combat command to remain professionally competitive. The constant rotation of officers from platoon leaders to brigade commanders might have benefited individual careers, but it cast an amateurish quality over the war effort as a whole and resulted in needless casualties.
Compared to the flinty Vazquez, Hewitt, a twenty-five-year-old family man from Topeka, Kansas, with ROTC bars, came across as an eager kid, especially when he showed up with a shotgun and a hot little .38 in a shoulder holster, which the troops dismissed as affectations. That he had served as an ARVN advisor before extending his tour to get a company did not impress the troops either.
Captain Hewitt looked like a high-school basketball player with his crew cut and thick glasses. “Hewitt was a good guy,” said Pfc. Gerald A. Cafferty, the senior company medic, “but he just didn’t have it as far as experience, and he didn’t get the chance to learn what he needed to know before we got hit by the sappers.”
Lucas had passed the company guidon to Hewitt during a week-long battalion stand-down at Camp Evans. When it ended on June 15, the battalion, having been brought up with replacements to what was considered full strength during the withdrawals—ninety men per company instead of the usual seventy-five—launched a combat assault to relieve the 1-506th Infantry, which had temporarily been given responsibility of the Ripcord AO.1
Captain Hewitt and Company C landed on the ridgeline running southeast from Hill 902 to replace a 1-506th company that lifted out aboard the same Hueys. Lieutenant Campbell went in on the first chopper with his point man, radioman, and best machine-gun team. Knowing that the rest of the company would not be far behind, they immediately started down the trail that ran along the spine of the ridge. Campbell took the slack position behind his point man. Moving quickly, the two had gone only 150 meters when they crested a small rise and were surprised to find themselves face-to-face with two equally startled North Vietnamese.
The enemy soldiers had been trailing the 1-506th company and had been in the process of rigging a claymore when they heard the Hueys. Unable to see that the lift ships were not only taking out their quarry but bringing in a fresh company, they began dismantling their ambush. “They were standing in the middle of the trail, and, suddenly, we were right there on top of ’em,” recounted Lieutenant Campbell, a tough, bluff doctor’s son who’d put aside his plans for law school and joined up to see what he was made of after four beer-blasted years at Louisiana State University. “The closest gook was rolling the claymore in his hands, wrapping the detonating wires back around it. When he saw us, he just looked at the AK-47 he had leaning up against a tree. He knew he was screwed. He didn’t have anyplace to go. We killed him and his buddy just like that. We just shot the shit out of ’em. . . .”
True to form, Sp4 Layne Hammons charged forward and laid down a sheet of M60 fire as Campbell and the point man hit the dirt and from their bandoliers tore fresh magazines for their M16s. Campbell was still reloading when he noticed a third NVA off to one side of the trail. “I came up shooting, but he disappeared into the brush,” said Campbell. “The three of us kept firing because we didn’t know what we had, but nothing else developed so we grabbed our stuff and dragged the two bodies back to the LZ.”
The move continued, each platoon branching off along a separate route before establishing separate night defensive positions. The routine continued for the next four days as the company worked its way downhill from the landing zone to the southeastern tip of the ridge, a distance of about two kilometers. Captain Vazquez had always preached that however slow and exhausting, in such circumstances it is wiser to cut a cross-country route than risk ambush by walking trails. “Vazquez possessed a particular blend of caution and aggressiveness,” noted Chuck Hawkins, who served as a platoon leader under Vazquez before making captain himself. “He knew when and how to fight, and when and how not to.”
Though it meant courting contact on the enemy’s terms, Captain Hewitt ran the mountain trails in headlong pursuit of the NVA. The unsettling change in tactics wasn’t the only thing that had the troops spooked. The heavily jungled ridge was dotted with “freshly dug, heavily fortified, well camouflaged bunkers,” wrote Pfc. Michael Womack, a new guy in Charlie One. Additionally, Womack’s squad found an inch-thick cable “snaking its way through the jungle attached to trees about four and a half feet off the ground with light blue-green glass insulators. I wanted to cut the line but the other guys wouldn’t let me. They told me the enemy would send people to find out why it wasn’t working and they might run into us. I thought that was what we were there for.”
Upon reaching the end of the ridge, Company C was picked up late on the fifth day of the mission and assaulted back into its original LZ, the idea being to push uphill this time to the top of Hill 902. The sweep was to begin after a squad from Charlie One returned to the bivouac it had occupied the first night in the area and retrieved two claymore mines concealed in the brush along the trail running through the NDP. It had been hoped that the claymores, utilizing fishing line as trip wires, would blow away any enemy soldiers who came to forage the site for the rations and ammunition that undisciplined troops were known to discard to lighten their loads. When deployed by U. S. forces, such booby traps were euphemistically referred to as mechanical ambushes (MAs).
The squad from Charlie One set up for the night with Lieutenant Campbell and Charlie Two. As the squad got organized the next morning, June 21, Campbell requested some 81mm fire along the intended route “to shake the gooks up.” The mortar section leader on Ripcord, apparently unconcerned because it wasn’t a contact mission, said it would be a while before he could get any rounds out. “It was real early, and he gave me some bullshit about having to reset the base plates on his mortars, which would then require additional adjustments,” recalled Campbell. “What he was probably doing was screwin’ around, eating breakfast or something.”
The patrol moved out. Following the trail, it took the four-man point team an hour to reach the first MA. The enemy had moved it, however, and the North Vietnamese crouching in the spiderhole to which a detonating wire had been run, and from which he could observe the trail, presently squeezed the firing handle, setting off the claymore. The man quickly slipped away into the jungle, having successfully wounded the three troopers behind the point. None were killed, because they were not in the actual kill zone of the claymore, having halted to the side of the forward-pointing mine to let the rest of the patrol catch up with them. That’s when the stunning explosion suddenly blew them off their feet. The point man, unaware that the explosion had been command detonated, rushed back to his wounded buddies, frantically apologizing because he thought he had blundered into a trip wire.
Lucas landed before the medevac did. “Lieutenant, as long as you’ve been out here, you should have known better than this,” the colonel snapped at Campbell. “Why didn’t you prep the area?”
Campbell tried to explain that he had called for fire but had been told that he couldn’t get a mission anytime soon. Lucas squinted suspiciously. “Well, you call up there and see if you can get a fire mission,” Campbell said hotly. “If you use your own call sign, hell, yeah, they’re gonna fire, but use mine and see what they do.”
Lucas made the call. Getting the same static as Campbell, he threw the radio handset to the ground in an uncharacteristic display of anger, snatched it back up—“I want the mortar platoon sergeant up at the helipad by the TOC when I get back,” he said—then stalked to his Huey. Lucas was a cultured, normally reserved West Pointer on his second combat tour, forceful in a quiet sort of way and considered by his superiors and peers to be one of the most professional and effective battalion commanders in the division. He gave the impression to some of his more junior subordinates, however, that the war was a professional contest for him, his troops pieces on a game board. Campbell was fuming as Lucas departed. “It wasn’t a major event,” he said later, “but Lucas chewed me out in front of my men, then just left without another word when he found out what really happened. I know colonels don’t apologize, but for my sake he should have said something like, ‘I’m going to jack that crew up, lieutenant. This won’t happen again.’”
The wounded being brought down the trail at that time included new guy Mike Womack, with four steel pellets and a chunk of the claymore fuse in his legs. It was a torturous trip. The poncho litter into which Womack had been loaded quickly came apart, dumping him on the ground. The litter was put back together, but as they continued, one of the guys carrying it bumped a nest of red ants, which showered upon Womack in a biting and stinging frenzy. “They set the litter down and broke out the GI insect repellent and gave me a good dousing,” Womack later wrote. “The next thing I knew, I was on fire. I had wounds in the back of both thighs that no one was aware of and the repellent was burning like hell.” Mercifully, the platoon medic administered morphine. Moving on, the litter team encountered a tree that had fallen across the trail, with U. S. Air Force cluster bombs hanging from it. Unable to bypass the obstacle because of the thick jungle, the litter team had to lift Womack over it, which they did without disturbing any of the bombs, at which point the litter gave way for a second painful crash. Womack thanked God when they finally reached the LZ and he was loaded aboard a medevac Huey. The crew chief stuck a business card in his pocket: “Congratulations. You have been successfully dusted off by Captain John Doe, 326th Medical Battalion, 101st Airborne Division.”
The day after the ambush, Charlie One, with which Hewitt’s command group was then moving, humped to the top of Hill 902. Lieutenant Campbell was supposed to link up with Hewitt that evening, so as dusk approached Charlie Two jumped on a trail cutting up the mountain from the southwest. Campbell and his point man, Sp4 Thomas C. Manbeck, were extremely cautious as they approached the crest; they were concerned about getting fired on by Charlie One. “As we approached the perimeter, we kept asking for radio acknowledgment that the security covering the trail knew we were coming in,” wrote Campbell. Acknowledgment was received, but there was, in fact, no security to worry about. Hewitt had deployed Charlie One in a half circle on the eastern side of the bald mountaintop but had left the western side open, knowing that Charlie Two would shortly take up positions there. “There might have been a couple guys sitting and watching the western half,” recalled Campbell, “but it wasn’t the way it ought to have been.”
It got worse. Though it was already getting dark, a man in the center of the perimeter was boiling a cup of coffee field style: Cut holes in a C-ration tin, light a heat tab inside it, and place a larger fruit can full of water and instant coffee over the intense flame.
Lieutenant Campbell kicked the cans over in an incredulous rage. “You stupid shit,” he growled at the startled trooper. “You know better than to light a fire after dark in a goddamn perimeter.”
“L. T., I was just cooking a cup of coffee for the captain.”
Campbell realized that Captain Hewitt was sitting right next to the man he was berating. “Captain, come here a minute,” Campbell said, leading Hewitt away from the CP. Campbell’s six months of combat time were actually over, but Lucas had left him in the field an extra month to ease the transition from Vazquez to Hewitt. “Look, I don’t want to act like I’m trying to run the company,” the veteran platoon leader said to Hewitt when they were out of earshot of the command group, “but we’ve got to get some things straight out here. First thing is, nobody lights fires out here at night. Nobody lights a cigarette. You just don’t do that. We’re out in the mountains and the gooks can see that fire from anywhere.”
Hewitt nodded, and Campbell went on, questioning the new commander about why there was no security on the west side of the perimeter. Explained Hewitt, “I knew you were coming in.”
“I think we got to be a little tighter than that, Captain.”
Campbell next asked Hewitt if he’d deployed a three-man LP to cover the trail where it ran into the NDP from the southeast. Hewitt responded in the negative. “You gotta get LPs out to cover the trails unless you’re working in small groups,” Campbell replied. “Men don’t like to go on LP or ambush, but they understand the need for it, and they’ll do it if you make ’em.”
Hewitt thanked Campbell for his advice. “It wasn’t an adversarial conversation, which I was worried about,” Campbell recalled. “Hewitt was a real nice fella.” Perhaps to justify himself, Hewitt described how his ARVN unit had operated in the lowlands of III Corps, and Campbell got the impression that Hewitt had been fighting VC, not NVA, and that he’d picked up some bad habits from the South Vietnamese: “The ARVN went out in battalion size, toting chickens and ducks with them, and they had cooking fires at night. They thought security was a matter of numbers.”
Campbell, scheduled to leave in a day or two for R&R, after which he was to be reassigned to the rear, sat down that night with his platoon sergeant, Sgt. Thomas H. Herndon—good soldier, good friend—who would be taking over Charlie Two until a new lieutenant arrived. “Sarge, this is something different,” Campbell said of the increasing enemy activity. “This thing is changing. You’ve got to keep everyone’s shit together out here. . . .”
As the sappers were to prove, the company did not keep itself together. “In a firefight, they were hellacious soldiers,” Campbell said of the draftee infantrymen in Charlie Company. “They’d do whatever you told ’em to do, every damn one of ’em. But there’s no sorrier bastard in the world, soldiering-wise, than a U. S. soldier who’s not scared, and that’s the never-ending problem of being a commander—trying to keep the men combat ready when they decide there’s nothing to worry about and get complacent.”
What Captain Hewitt needed were some old pro Regular Army NCOs. He had none. There simply weren’t enough left at that stage in the war. Absent Campbell, two of Hewitt’s platoon leaders and almost all his platoon sergeants and squad leaders were products of the Noncommissioned Officer Candidate School (NCOCS) at Fort Benning, which made sergeants of those who showed leadership potential in basic and advanced individual training (AIT). Honor grads were promoted to staff sergeant. The whole process, from recruit to NCO, took eight months. Though bright and motivated, these instant sergeants, known as shake ’n bakes, lacked the experience that normally went with so many stripes. Given that they were the same age as their troops and were often draftees themselves, they tended to be more buddies than taskmasters.
The contacts continued. On June 24, Company C was at the southeastern end of the ridge again when Hewitt reported that he had fifty NVA in the open, moving up the slope of a partially denuded mountain thirteen hundred meters to the south. The result was a feeding frenzy—mortars, arty, gunships, tac air—but when the company swept the mountainside, there was not a single body, weapon, or piece of equipment to be found amid the craters.
On June 27, Charlie One opened fire on two enemy soldiers whose line of retreat inadvertently led them directly toward Charlie Two. Herndon popped a claymore on them at twentyfive meters, and the platoon opened fire, killing both NVA. As part of a new program to help morale, Charlie One was lifted up to Ripcord the next day for an overnight vacation, complete with a barbecue over sawed-off oil drums. Hewitt and Charlie Two went in the day after that. “It was pay day, and we had a poker game going inside a bunker,” recalled Sgt. Jerry D. Moyer, a squad leader bumped up to serve as platoon sergeant of Charlie Two. “Captain Hewitt was in the game. I wasn’t. They were playing for forty and fifty dollar pots, high stakes for me. Hewitt was doing real good, talking about ‘this is my car payment . . . this is my house payment. . . .’ It’s kind of ironic that he got killed right after raking in all that cash.”
Before Hewitt helicoptered back out with Charlie Two, Lucas attached to his command group Company D’s FO, an artillery lieutenant with little to do while his company secured Ripcord. Prior to that, Hewitt’s forward observer had been an artillery sergeant. Linking up with Charlie One, Hewitt and Charlie Two returned late that afternoon to the top of Hill 902. Charlie Three, meanwhile, was lifted up for its turn on Ripcord. When the shelling began the next morning, Hewitt and the FO helped direct the counterbattery fire while a handful of troops opened up with M60s and LAWs. In response, the NVA planned a sapper attack on Hill 902. Radio conversations to that effect were monitored by a special signal-intercept (SSI) team in an underground, sandbag-covered conex only a hundred feet from the TOC on FSB Ripcord. It should have been simple enough to pass that information to Lucas. However, for security reasons, SSI teams were under strict orders to bypass their host units and forward their raw data directly to division headquarters, which would decide what to send back down the chain of command to the line battalions. In this case, division prepared an intelligence warning, but for reasons never explained the alert hit a snag and did not reach Lucas until after the attack on Hill 902. At that point, it only added insult to injury.2
With an overconfidence born of inexperience, Hewitt deployed no listening posts that second night on Hill 902. Nor did he insist that everyone dig in and camouflage their positions. The company commander himself slung a hammock between two naked trees to one side of an LZ that had been cleared near the top of the mountain before air strikes removed most of the rest of the vegetation around the upper slopes. “Everybody was too casual, too relaxed,” recalled Cafferty, the senior medic, who, along with Sgt. Jack H. Dreher, senior radioman, had dug in near Hewitt. Another member of the command group, Sp4 Robert C. Smoker, an ex-rifleman now in charge of resupply, was supposed to share their hole, but “we were kind of clumped together, which didn’t make sense to me, so I wound up digging a hole off by myself.”
As before, Charlie One, down to about fifteen men, was on the eastern side of the hill and Charlie Two on the western side with twenty-five troops. The perimeter was a ring of three-man positions, thirteen in all. “Some guys did dig foxholes, but most didn’t,” said Sergeant Moyer. “We weren’t very far apart. We had about ten yards between positions, and the whole perimeter was about the size of a softball diamond with the captain at the pitcher’s mound.”
Actually, most of those troops who dug foxholes simply scooped out the shallow, half-eroded ones left over from whatever unit had established the first NDP atop Hill 902 years before. “There was no fresh dirt on that hill,” contended Sergeant Burkey, whose platoon, Charlie Three, flew in the next morning as the relief force. Burkey was appalled that the company had used the original foxholes “just like every other bunch of idiots that ever went up there. They should have moved off the hilltop a bit and dug a new perimeter. Vazquez made sure you understood that you never go near a foxhole that’s already been dug because the enemy knows right where it’s at. Vazquez would have come from the rear and kicked me in the ass if he had found us setting up in old foxholes.”
Instead of digging in, Sergeants Herndon and Moyer, and Gary Steele, the platoon radioman, had made a little poncho hootch. Two feet high, the shelter provided relief from the sun during the day and some warmth during the cool of the night. A grenade tossed atop it, however, would take out the entire platoon command group, and it was a bad example. Other easy-to-spot poncho hootches dotted the mountaintop. “I thought putting up a pup-tent was really stupid,” said Sp4 Stephen L. Manthei, a survivor of ten months in the bush with Charlie One. “I spoke to ’em about it, but they outranked me, and nothing was done. You looked up the hill and the CP was sticking out like a sore thumb, too. It was ridiculous to set up like that after we had ticked off the enemy by firing down at them that morning.”
According to Manthei, neither he nor Bob Tarbuck and Don Holthausen, who were in position with him on the south side of the hill, shared the general no-sweat attitude. “We dug our holes deep as we were expecting totally to get messed with,” said Manthei. One man was supposed to be awake at all times at each position, and when Manthei took his first watch after dark, “it was a beautiful night, starlit, with some mortar and artillery shows you could see off in the distance. We pulled our guard shifts with a little more intensity than usual that night— at least at our position.”
Having probed the firebase and another company that night, good diversions both, the enemy didn’t strike their primary target until almost four in the morning. It was the textbook hour for a night assault, a time when bleary-eyed guards, convincing themselves that nothing was going to happen in the two hours remaining before dawn, were most likely to nod off. “It was really quiet on the hill, almost an eerie quiet,” remembered Manthei, awakened for another turn on watch shortly before the attack started. The first indication of trouble was the whispered report of an alert guard who had seen movement in front of his position. Manthei put a hand on Tarbuck and Holthausen and silently indicated that they should get in their holes. The perimeter guard on the radio was instructed to open fire, and that’s when “all hell broke loose,” said Manthei. “I saw an RPG flash across the hill into the command post, and the radio went dead from that position. The explosion knocked me backwards against the inside of my foxhole, and then in the next instant numerous grenades and satchel charges started going off, gunfire erupted from everywhere, and there was a lot of hollering and screaming in the dark, both by us and the Vietnamese. . . .”