CHAPTER 4
Sergeant Herndon nudged Jerry Moyer awake for his turn on guard shortly before the attack began. “What in the hell, how come you’re waking me up now?” Moyer whispered harshly after checking the luminescent face of his watch. “It’s fifteen minutes early.”
“I don’t know,” Herndon whispered back. “All I know is Steele woke me up, and I did my hour and twenty minutes.”
“Okay, we’ll straighten this out come daylight. We’ll find out what went wrong,” Moyer said angrily. Either the platoon leader or the radioman had not pulled an entire guard shift.
Moyer scooted down to a fallen tree about ten feet in front of their poncho hootch. No sooner had the acting platoon sergeant gotten into position behind the tree—with weapon, ammunition, grenades, and the detonators to their claymores within easy reach—than he heard something moving on the side of the hill. You don’t cry wolf with the first brush snap, he thought. It was most likely a monkey or a wild pig, but the noise definitely put his ears on alert.
The rustling continued, and Moyer finally contacted Sergeant Dreher, who was on radio watch up at the company CP. “We’ve got serious movement out here. Wake the captain up, and see what he wants to do. I think we need to go to fifty percent alert till daylight.”
“Roger, wait one,” Dreher replied. He returned to the radio a moment later: “Yeah, start waking people up. . . .”
Moyer had not been the only one reporting movement. Private First Class Michael K. Mueller, an assistant machine gunner, was on guard two holes down to Moyer’s left—the gunner himself and the team’s ammo bearer were sleeping against a log just behind Mueller—when he heard something about twenty-five meters down from his foxhole where the scrubby brush below the denuded top of the mountain merged back into thick jungle. Next—and at this Mueller’s chest squeezed tight—he saw an enemy soldier, a black silhouette against a dark gray background, crouch down for a moment, then slip off into the shadows. Mueller got Dreher on the horn and was told, “The next time you see that guy—fire ’im up.”
Mueller dropped the handset and began spraying the bushes with his M16. It was too late; the enemy was already in position. As soon as Mueller cut loose, a rocket-propelled grenade shrieked out of the dark and slammed into the company CP. Satchel charges began exploding. Hearing someone blow a claymore, Mueller snatched up the detonator to his own, but when he squeezed down on it, nothing happened. The sappers had apparently cut the wire snaking downhill from the detonator to the mine itself.
It was 3:46 A.M. on July 2, 1970. Captain Hewitt, found sprawled in the tangle of his shredded hammock after the battle, missing one arm and both legs, was killed by that first RPG. The newly attached FO lieutenant was temporarily shell-shocked by the same blast.
In the command group foxhole, only about six feet down from the captain’s hammock, Dreher was wounded by the rocket that took out Hewitt, as was Doc Cafferty, who’d been sleeping on his air mattress just above the hole. Peppered all over with little fragments, his left arm sliced open from elbow to wrist, Cafferty slid down into the foxhole, grabbing his M16 and an ammo bandolier along the way. “I was so fucking scared I didn’t even know I was injured,” he recalled. “My medical bag was gone. My rucksack was gone. Everything was gone. We didn’t know what had happened to the Old Man, but he was obviously dead because he never got in the foxhole. Total confusion. There were explosions going off everywhere. It was like waking up on the Fourth of July.”
Dreher whispered frantically into his radio handset, calling for illumination and gunships. “I was just hiding in the corner,” recounted Cafferty, “and all of a sudden something fell against my back—and it was a fuckin’ satchel charge.” The sappers were using one-pound blocks of C4 plastic explosives, which produced terrific, head-ringing blasts and, if packed with enough scrap metal, could tear an arm or a leg into bloody ribbons. The satchel charge thrown into the command group foxhole wedged between Cafferty’s rear end and the wall of the foxhole as he knelt there. Said Cafferty, “I said to myself, this is it, I’m gone. I’m going to blow all over Dreher—he won’t get hurt because it’s behind my back—but the thing never went off. The blasting cap didn’t work, which was very common, thank God.”
When the first rocket crashed in, Moyer was crawling back to wake up Sergeant Herndon and Gary Steele. They rolled out from under their poncho hootch at the sound of the blast, and Herndon stood up on one side and Steele got to his knees on the other, reaching for his M16. Steele immediately spotted someone with a floppy bush hat standing at the top of the hill, aiming down at them with a rocket launcher over his shoulder. Steele was stunned that a sapper could appear behind them so suddenly. The apparition convinced him that the sappers must have already been inside the perimeter when the shooting started. Steele threw his rifle to his shoulder. He thought he had the man atop the hill dead to rights, but as groggy as he was he had forgotten to flip off the safety, and when he pulled the trigger nothing happened. An instant later, he saw the quick jet of flame that was the backblast of the RPG.
The rocket exploded just behind the poncho hootch. Steele, sent flying by the blast, lay where he landed, stunned, hoping the enemy would think him dead. He could feel warm blood leaking from his ears and mouth and rectum, such was the concussive force of the explosion, and he was having trouble breathing. He would later learn that a big chunk of shrapnel had punched through his back, cracking several ribs, one of which punctured his left lung.
Sergeant Herndon was in even worse shape. The sappers atop the hill heaved a satchel charge down at where they could hear him screaming. It wounded not only Herndon but splattered Steele in his legs and rear end with more shrapnel, painfully flipping him over.
The first illumination round, fired by the mortar platoon on the firebase, popped overhead, trailing thick white smoke as it descended under its parachute. The enemy took cover, but when the flare burned out and the hilltop was again swallowed in darkness, another satchel charge came sailing toward Herndon. It landed on the left side of Steele—boom!— rupturing his eardrum. Another flare, another pause in the enemy fire. The flare blinked out. More satchel charges exploded. Boom! Boom! Boom!
Herndon’s sobs were drawing most of the satchel charges, and Moyer hissed loudly to his buddy, “Shut up, Tom. Shut up.”
Sergeant Moyer was back at his log, helmet hastily slapped on. Holding his fire so as not to give away his own position with a muzzle flash, he instead chucked frag grenades down the slope, not comprehending that the enemy soldiers throwing the satchel charges were actually inside the perimeter.
Each time Herndon screamed, Pfc. Richard J. Conrardy, the new platoon medic who had dived behind Moyer’s log, muttered that he should try to go get the sergeant. “No, no, hold up,” Moyer barked at him, “just hold up a minute—wait till this dies down.”
Finally, Conrardy, a tall, skinny, nineteen-year-old conscientious objector from Wright, Kansas, blurted, “I’ve got to go get him.”
Rising to his knees, Doc Conrardy was shot before he could make his move. He pitched backward against Moyer, who knew that the medic was dead as soon as he hit him; the kid was just a lifeless weight. Moyer, however, couldn’t make sense of the fact that the shot that killed Conrardy had come from the top of the hill. Another satchel charge exploded moments later, abruptly snuffing out Herndon’s screams. The acting platoon leader was dead. For having tried to get to Herndon, Conrardy was posthumously awarded the Silver Star.
Sergeant Lee N. Lenz was dug in with a machine-gun team between Herndon and Mueller to cover the trail that entered the perimeter from the southwest. The position was taken out with a satchel charge in the first moments of the attack. Though it is likely that some sappers had already infiltrated the perimeter, most probably darted in behind the satchel charge that eliminated that key M60. Lenz scrambled uphill for cover. His machine gunner, Sp4 Roger D. Sumrall of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, had been killed by the satchel charge and would be affectionately remembered by Campbell as a “tough, stocky bastard and a good soldier.”
All that was later found of Sumrall’s assistant gunner, Pfc. Stephen J. Harber—he was another good soldier, a quiet, blond-headed draftee with a wife back home in Minnesota— was a jungle boot with a foot inside and one of his dog tags secured to the laces. Harber apparently survived the explosion that killed Sumrall, only to be blown to bits moments later by an RPG. After the illumination rounds started, Steve Manthei saw someone who looked like Harber try to dash up the hill. “There was a hell of an explosion at that moment,” recounted Manthei, “and he was gone. He was blown away. There were pieces of human everywhere. It was terrible. Harber had a lucky dollar bill that he carried with him all the time, and right after the explosion a ripped half of that dollar bill floated down next to my foxhole. I still have it. . . .”
Gary Steele crawled back to their blasted poncho hootch for his M16, only to find that the weapon had been damaged beyond use. Luckily, the grenades he had laid out were still there, but he was so rattled that after pulling the pins he threw the first two up where he had seen the RPG gunner without thinking to remove the safety clips on the spoons. Oh, you dumb son of a bitch, he thought; now they’re gonna take them clips off and throw ’em back.
There were intense moments of automatic fire and explosions in the intervals between illumination rounds, lulls when new flares popped. “You just can’t imagine how many satchel charges went off. I want to say hundreds,” noted Moyer. “There was a little AK fire, but not much. Not as much as we were firing our M16s.”
The enemy infantry supporting the sapper attack could be heard down on the slope, and Moyer, like many others, thought they were the ones throwing the satchel charges. C’mon, give me a target, give me something to do here, he thought during one lull as the flares cast weird, shifting shadows through the naked trees. At that moment he heard a satchel charge land behind him. It rolled down against his boot. He crawled over his log like a shot and braced for the explosion. “It never did go off,” he recalled. “I scooted back to my position, but it still hadn’t registered that we had been overrun. I couldn’t comprehend that they were behind me. You know, they don’t get behind you. That just didn’t happen.”
When Mike Mueller opened fire, his team leader, Sergeant Mendez, snapped awake and jumped into the foxhole with him, as did their ammo bearer, a kid nicknamed Shaky. Mendez got behind the M60, ready to open fire and expose the position of this key weapon only when the enemy rushed in behind their satchel charges. Mueller fired single shots down the slope, not realizing until he happened to glance back and saw figures flitting against the night sky at the crest of the hill that sappers had already breached the perimeter. Before Mueller could swing his M16 around, he saw a satchel charge rolling down the hill at them. He pulled his head down. The first explosion was quickly followed by more—boom, boom, boom!—then the fourth or fifth satchel charge bounced into the hole, and Mendez, Mueller, and Shaky scrambled out in a heartbeat, going face first into the dirt below their position. Boom!
They piled back in. Mueller, having lost his web gear and ammo bandoliers, had only the single magazine in his M16. There was no time to fire, because another satchel charge fell in with them. They dove out of the foxhole again—boom!— then jumped back in. The first flare burst overhead at that moment, exposing two sappers in black pajamas who were crouched behind a log above them, methodically flipping satchel charges at their foxhole. Another one rolled in. Mueller dove uphill, lost his footing, and slid back down the steep slope so that his left leg was across the top of the foxhole when the satchel charge at the bottom detonated. Mueller skidded into the hole, his knee a bloody mess, then popped up and frantically cut loose on the sappers with what was left of the magazine in his M16.
Many things were happening at the same time. Dreher and Doc Cafferty were still in their foxhole when a close friend of the medic’s, Sp4 Robert P. Radcliffe, and a man Cafferty didn’t recognize in the dark—it was Sergeant Lenz—clambered in with them, desperate for cover. The foxhole was no refuge. “There’s too many people in here,” Cafferty said. “They know this is the goddamn CP. We’re all going to get killed with one grenade. I’m outta here.”
With that, Cafferty started crawling away, unaware that almost as soon as he exited the foxhole an RPG exploded at its edge. Dreher survived the blast. Lenz and Radcliffe were decapitated.
Doc Cafferty shimmied over a fallen tree to his right, numbly noticing that his left forearm was sliced open. “I didn’t care,” he recalled. “I could still function, and that’s all that mattered.”
Seeing the artillery recon sergeant in a foxhole, Doc Cafferty “just fell in on top of him because I didn’t know where else to go. I was scared shitless.” It was tight quarters in the little hole, and Cafferty was in an awkward crouch, half in and half out, when “I got hit in the helmet with a goddamn grenade. It bounced off and was laying there in front of my face. It was a U. S. baseball grenade. I might have been able to reach it, but I just froze. I said to myself, that’s it, I’m gone. I thought of my mother and my fiancée. . . .”
The grenade never exploded. Cafferty made a point to examine it after the battle and saw that, though the pin was missing, the spoon was still held down by a safety clip. He assumed a sapper had scooped up the U. S. grenade and thrown it without knowing he needed to do more than just pull the pin. Actually, the grenade was probably one of the two that Gary Steele had heaved uphill in such haste that he forgot to remove the safeties. If Steele had removed them, he would have killed Cafferty and never known about it.
Cafferty suddenly realized that the artillery lieutenant was huddled at the bottom of the foxhole under the recon sergeant. “I swore I was going to kill that guy someday,” said Cafferty. The FO was the ranking man on that hill after Captain Hewitt, but instead of taking command, “all he did was hide in his foxhole all night,” noted Cafferty. “I guess I really can’t blame him for being scared because we all were, but, Jesus, he should have did something.”1
Furious with the lieutenant, Doc Cafferty jumped from the foxhole. He spotted a sapper and shouldered his M16. “I finally got my shit together and started shooting. I finally got some balls. . . .”
The sapper was standing about thirty feet away, ready to throw another satchel charge down at them. Bullshit, Cafferty thought as he squeezed off his entire magazine, putting most of eighteen rounds into the North Vietnamese. Fuck you.
The sapper went down like a spastic marionette. Jerry Cafferty—a wisecracking, extremely dedicated draftee-medic from an Irish neighborhood in West Haven, Connecticut—saw only then that another sapper was beside the first, and he frantically grabbed a fresh magazine from the bandolier across his chest. The magazine jammed in his weapon. Cafferty had no way of knowing until he inspected the magazine in the morning that it had already stopped a bullet for him. He’d been pumping adrenaline so furiously as he shot the first sapper that he hadn’t realized that the second one had been blasting back at him with his AK. Cafferty hadn’t felt a thing when a round hit the magazine in question, which was over the center of his chest, mangling the magazine so that it was useless in his M16.
Feeling insanely exposed as he struggled to clear the jam, Cafferty finally popped the malfunctioning magazine back out, thumped another one in, and resumed fire. He cut down the second sapper, along with several more who materialized out of the light and shadows. “I can still picture those guys lined up,” Cafferty, awarded the Silver Star, would haltingly recall, still rattled, still haunted. “I just shot. I put it on semiautomatic, and just started firing ’em up as fast as I could. If they stopped shooting, I figured I got ’em. I was scared to death. I had no idea why I was there in that country, but somebody had to do something. Everybody else on that side of the hill was dead or fucked up. There weren’t a lot of other guys firing, and I figured I was already dead. I should have been killed by that satchel charge. I should have been killed by that grenade. I had already said my prayers and said good-bye to my girlfriend and my mother and father. I was gone. I didn’t have anything to lose. . . .”
Bob Smoker was in his foxhole when he heard something and, turning, saw the silhouette of someone standing about ten feet uphill from him. The man didn’t notice Smoker. By his size, he was obviously Vietnamese, and Smoker’s first thought was that he was one of the NVA defectors attached to the company as a Kit Carson scout; but then it hit him that Hewitt, not trusting the scouts, had left all of them on Ripcord. The sapper was so close that Smoker didn’t have to sight in but merely raise his M16 quietly and slowly in the silhouette’s direction. He squeezed the trigger once. The sapper dropped like a stone, shot in the forehead. Other unseen sappers began whispering urgently to one another. Smoker lobbed two grenades in their direction. He didn’t know if the frags killed the sappers or sent them scuttling for cover, but there was no more chatter.
Mike Mueller saw Shaky scramble down the hill after the third satchel charge landed in their hole. Mendez also disappeared in the chaos. Mueller might have been alone, but at that point he found his two missing ammunition bandoliers, which gave him a total of fourteen magazines. He also grabbed his web gear, to which several grenades were attached. Finally able to fight back, he began spraying the log shielding the two sappers who’d been throwing the satchel charges down at his foxhole. He crouched to change magazines, then popped back up to fire another burst—and realized that one of the sappers had popped up himself with his AK.
Mueller could hear shots cracking past his head, then what felt like a baseball bat caught him in his left shoulder, and he dropped back in his hole, stunned and numb. The two sappers, thinking him badly wounded, started down the hill to finish him off. Suddenly enraged as he realized that this was for real, that these bastards meant to kill him, Mueller was about to pull the trigger of his M16 when Mendez sprang up directly in front of him from a hole in which he’d been hiding, screaming at Mueller as he tried to get away from the sappers, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”
Mendez dove to the left, leaving the enemy in full view again, but after almost shooting his team leader in the back, Mueller was too rattled to do anything but duck back down. Luckily, the sappers had also been unnerved by the commotion, and they scrambled back behind their log. They heaved a satchel charge toward Mendez, then charged down the hill again, one of them slung with bags of satchel charges, the other armed with a folding-stock AK-50.
Mike Mueller, a naive, dependable, Billy Budd type with a stammer that would put a smile on your face, had grown up on his stepfather’s homestead in Alaska. To win the Silver Star, Mueller had leveled his M16 at the onrushing sappers and, remembering his training, raised his left index finger at the end of the barrel to give him something to guide on, because it was too dark to use the front sights. Mueller dropped the sapper with the AK-50, then nailed the one with the satchel charges in turn. The second sapper fell out of sight, screaming horribly, and Mueller burned off a couple more magazines, trying to shut him up. Able to take the keening no more, Mueller finally exited his foxhole to finish the man off. He was shot almost immediately in his left leg—again, it felt like a hard-swung baseball bat—by an enemy soldier who spotted him in the flare light. Mueller retreated back to his hole, and Mendez crawled in with him. The bullet hole in Mueller’s upper thigh was the size of a quarter; when the shock wore off, his entire leg throbbed so badly he could barely move. The round had shattered the compass in his pocket, scoring his leg with little bits of metal, then ricocheted like a hot poker through the muscle from the ball joint of his hip to a point about six inches above his knee. He was bleeding badly.
The private battles continued. When Steve Manthei of Charlie One, in position with Tarbuck and Holthausen, heard something moving in the undergrowth below them, he blew their claymore. The movement stopped. Most of the NVA were on Charlie Two’s side of the hill, but they did hit the position occupied by Sgt. Daniel Smith, Charlie One’s platoon sergeant, on the left flank of Charlie Two. Specialist Fourth Class Robert W. Zoller was killed, and Smith and the third man in the position were wounded.
Smith, terrified, kept screaming to Manthei for help. No way, Manthei thought, hoping that Smith didn’t think him a chickenshit for not rushing headlong to his aid. There was no way to get over there without getting killed, though. If the sappers didn’t blow you away, your own guys would in the confusion.
Instead, Manthei, Tarbuck, and Holthausen lobbed grenades out in front of Smith’s position to keep the enemy at bay. Meanwhile, things were starting to quiet down, most of the sappers having been killed during the first thirty intense minutes of battle, when the Cobras finally made it to Hill 902. To mark the NVA infantrymen supporting the attack, Manthei threw one hand flare directly down the hill to the south and another as far as he could to the southwest, then got on the radio to the gunships: “Dump everything you got in a straight line from one flare to the other.”
As the gunships made their passes, the fight on the hill dribbled away to an occasional explosion, an occasional shout. Sergeant Moyer, who hadn’t actually seen a single enemy soldier, was still prone behind his log. He didn’t hear the satchel charge that landed next to him. As he discovered in the morning, his rucksack had absorbed most of the blast, but he still caught a lot of shrapnel in his buttocks, and the explosion sent him tumbling down the hill. He instinctively kept a grip on his M16. After he could think straight again through the roaring in his ears, he realized that he was lying on his stomach among some tree limbs about fifteen feet from the cover of his log. His legs didn’t feel right, and as he reached back to slap them awake he saw that the seat of his trousers was on fire. He frantically swatted out the little flickering flames, thinking not of being burned but being spotted by the sappers.
Moyer’s heart was pounding. He had lost his helmet, he didn’t have his ammo bandoliers, he didn’t have any grenades. He remembered, though, that he had thumped a fresh magazine in his rifle just before the explosion. He tried to decide if he should crawl back to his log. The problem was that Layne Hammons’s gun team occupied the next position to the right of the log. Moyer became convinced that if he moved, Hammons would shoot him full of holes in a case of mistaken identification. The hell with it, Moyer thought, feeling secure enough where he was. I’m just gonna wait here till daylight and see what happens.
What happened was that another flare popped overhead, catching an NVA in green fatigues as he moved up the slope in a half crouch—his AK-47 at the ready—directly in front of Moyer. The man was about twenty feet away. Moyer instantly cut loose on semiautomatic—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop — and the enemy soldier jerked backward four times as at least four rounds hit him. You’ve got to stop shootin’, you fool, Moyer suddenly thought, you ain’t got no more bullets. He ceased firing. Everything was quiet. The NVA was nowhere to be seen. Moyer desperately wondered how many rounds he had left. He touched the dust cover of his weapon. It was closed, meaning there was a round in the chamber. Good enough. He wasn’t about to remove the magazine and check how many more rounds it contained, afraid that the noise would reveal him to any other enemy soldiers slinking along the slope. He stayed low. It would be morning soon enough.
In the hushed stillness that had fallen over the hill, Gary Steele could hear Vietnamese voices about twenty feet up from where he lay next to his smashed poncho hootch. The sappers were talking loudly, as if they owned the hill. I guess they think they won the war and we’re all dead, Steele mused bitterly. Though in considerable pain from his wounds, he pulled the pin on a grenade, removed the safety clip, and crawled toward the sappers, afraid that if he didn’t take care of them, they would eventually take care of him. They were squatting together, apparently planning their next move. Steele quietly pulled the spoon off the frag, let the grenade cook off—one, two, three—then tossed it into the group and scrambled back down the hill as fast as he could manage.
Steele lay low again until twilight, when he spotted three fellow survivors in a position down the line to his right as the sky began to turn a neon gray. No fire had come from that foxhole during the night, and Steele had assumed the three men there to be casualties. They were not. They were simply cherries—replacements too scared and confused to start blasting away in the dark.
When Steele saw them in the first hazy light of the morning, he called to them, “I’m wounded. I’m comin’ over.”
Not sure which side held the hill but expecting the worst, Steele pulled the pin on his last grenade and kept his hand wrapped around the spoon as he started crawling toward the foxhole. He was determined that if any sappers jumped him along the way, they’d be in for a big surprise when they rolled his body over.
To get to the foxhole, Steele had to get past a fallen tree. There wasn’t enough room to crawl under it, so he backed up, got on his haunches, and dove over it. As he did so, a shot cracked out from behind. Instead of hitting the meat of Steele’s buttocks, which would have been a bad but not permanently disabling wound, the round went straight up his anus, destroying his whole rectum.
It felt to Steele as though someone with a pointy-toed boot had kicked him for all he was worth right in his anus. The pain was so intense for one terrible second that he was surprised he didn’t drop his grenade and blow himself up, but then everything went numb and he crawled on, furious that the cherries weren’t laying down some cover fire. Another round cracked out, grazing his right knee.
Steele finally reached the foxhole, but it wasn’t much of a hole, and for Steele to pull himself in, one of the cherries had to get behind some other piece of cover. The petrified kid did so only reluctantly. Steele held up his frag, meaning to get rid of it, but he was fading at that point and instead slipped and let the spoon fly off. One of the new guys snatched the grenade and heaved it down the hill. Steele asked for a cigarette, then lay back in the hole, feeling relieved, almost safe. The last thing he remembered before passing out was turning to the cherries and saying, “I quit.”
It is impossible to know if any sappers escaped the perimeter before dawn. Four of them were definitely still inside at daybreak. They tried to slip out the way they had come but, having waited too long, were silhouetted against the twilight skyline as they started down from the top of the hill. Mike Mueller, rising up from his foxhole, squared the sights of his M16 on the head of the first sapper, then emptied the rest of the magazine on the next one in line, leaving them both sprawled dead on the hillside. The other two darted behind some debris, and Mueller lobbed two frags in that direction. The enemy soldiers did not reappear. They were found later where the grenades had gotten them, one of them sprawled atop an RPG launcher that was pointed toward Mueller’s position.