CHAPTER 5
The silence just before twilight was so total that Sergeant Moyer wondered whether he was the only man left alive on the hill, although he knew that was impossible. When it got light enough, he made eye contact with Layne Hammons. Moyer held up two fingers and pointed to his front. Hammons’s assistant gunner, Chuck Damron, pulled the pins on two frags and, moving down to Moyer, scanned the jungle with hard eyes as he asked in a hard whisper, “Whatcha got?”
“The last dink I seen was right there,” Moyer answered, gesturing to the spot where he had blasted the now-missing NVA.
Damron threw his grenades, then stayed with Moyer until the relief force began landing. Moyer checked how many rounds he had left—he had to know—and discovered that in addition to the one in the chamber he had only one more in the magazine. He turned loose of his M16 as Damron helped him up the hill. They passed the bodies of numerous half-naked, charcoal-streaked sappers along the way, and a dumbfounded Moyer realized for the first time that the enemy had been inside the perimeter with them.
The top of the mountain had been secured shortly before the arrival of the relief force by Doc Cafferty, who, hearing shouts and screams from wounded men on Charlie Two’s side of the hill, did what had to be done to get to them. The senior medic rounded up two guys from a nearby foxhole—they looked scared to death, and he had the impression they’d played turtle during the whole fight—and, barking at one to get on his right, the other his left to cover him, he nervously started up the hill, not trusting that his wide-eyed companions wouldn’t freeze if they ran into trouble. One of the wounded men screeching in pain was the sapper with the bags of satchel charges who had been cut down earlier by Mike Mueller. There was a single shot in the morning stillness that abruptly silenced the enemy soldier, then Mueller heard Cafferty shout, “Currahee.”
The old regimental motto served as a catchall password in situations where friend could not be distinguished from foe. Mueller gave the obscene counterresponse with his distinctive stutter: “C-c-currahee, m-m-mother-f-f-fucker.”
“Alaska, is that you?” Cafferty shouted, hearing the stutter.
Mueller called back that it was, and Cafferty shouted, “Get up here and help me clear this hill.”
“I’m w-w-wounded.”
“We all are, man. Get up here.”
Cafferty and Mueller walked the entire hilltop at that point, methodically shooting each sprawled-out NVA in the back of his head. “To this day I regret having to do that,” Cafferty would recall sadly, “but what was I going to do? I didn’t want to walk by one who wasn’t really dead and have him shoot me in the back.”
Bob Smoker threw unexploded satchel charges off the hill. There were dozens of the one-pound blocks, and it didn’t register with Smoker in the heat of the moment that any one of them could have exploded in his hands. Meanwhile, in the absence of anyone else able or willing to take over, Doc Cafferty realized that he was the de facto commander of Charlie Company. Frantic to get to the wounded, he first had to reestablish the perimeter. He spread out the survivors to fill the empty foxholes, then, grabbing what few battle dressings he saw lying around in the debris, he started doing what he could for the wounded, bandaging those he had bandages for and organizing litter teams to get them up to the LZ.
Gary Steele dimly realized that six troopers were carrying him up the hill in a poncho. Cafferty hit him with morphine— the pain miraculously ebbed away—and slapped the biggest dressing he had over Steele’s split-open anus, then told a new guy to stay with Steele and keep him talking, to make sure he didn’t go into shock.
“Where you from?” the cherry babbled encouragingly. “Hang in there. . . . You’re doing great. . . . You’re going home, man.”
Steele knew what the cherry was doing. He had done it himself for other wounded men in other firefights. He wasn’t listening. Instead, he asked about the guys who had been at his position.
“Sergeant Moyer’s doin’ good,” the cherry said.
“Where’s Tom?” Steele knew that Tom Herndon was dead but wanted to see him one last time before he was medevacked.
“Tom’s fine,” the new guy lied. “He’s over there, he’s okay—”
“Bullshit. How many pieces is he in?”
Nearby, other troops were stacking up the dead sappers. “How many did we get?” Steele asked angrily. “A lot,” the cherry said. The body count was fifteen, not including the numerous blood trails leading down the hill. Against that, Company C had one man, Steve Harber, who was missing in action (MIA), seven killed in action (KIA), and six officially wounded in action (WIA).
Cafferty found Dreher, the senior radioman, sitting deaf, wounded, and dazed after having coordinated illum and supporting fires while dodging satchel charges. Captain Hewitt was nearby in a mangled clump, both legs and one arm blown off, his remaining limb hanging on by a few strands of muscle. Seething at the stupidity of the captain’s death, sickened and saddened by the waste, the senior medic wrapped Hewitt’s remains in a poncho.
Moving on, Cafferty also policed up Lenz and his good buddy Bob Radcliffe, whom he was stunned to find in the foxhole he had vacated during the fight. They had no heads—a piece of skull the size of a cupped hand was flopped down on one’s back—and their upper bodies were red and black mush, cauterized by the heat of the RPG that killed them. Sergeant Lenz was identified by the cutoffs he had worn during the recent battalion stand-down when the company was trucked down for an afternoon at Eagle Beach, the division’s R&R center on the South China Sea. He was still wearing the cutoffs under his fatigue trousers.
“It was the worst thing we’d ever seen,” said Manthei of the scene on the hilltop. “I remember this one black kid, he lost it. He grabbed a machine gun and poured about three hundred rounds into some dead gooks that were piled up on the south side of the hill. We all consoled him, and told him it don’t mean nothin’, you gotta move on, that we were gonna get all our boys and get the hell outta there.”
Captain Lieb and Sergeant Burkey’s platoon, Charlie Three, had departed Ripcord under mortar fire and were inserted into the LZ on 902 under ground fire. Burkey’s people urgently fanned out across the hilltop, securing it, shocked at the devastation that had been wrought upon their buddies from the other platoons. “Some of the survivors had that thousand-yard stare,” said Sgt. Frank Bort, a squad leader in Charlie Three. “They were devastated.”
For all that, when Burkey tried to medevac his buddy Cafferty, whose left arm hung limp and bloody, the medic shot back, “No way, I’m not leavin’ this hill till all my men are out of here.”
Cafferty placed Hewitt’s remains inside one of the Hueys. When Steve Harber’s foot-filled jungle boot was found, part of Charlie Three pushed down the mountain, trying to find the rest of his body. There was no sign of the missing man. During the search, Sgt. Rodney G. Moore saw someone’s brains splattered against a tree. “I didn’t know if it was from an American or a Vietnamese,” he recalled, adding that “everyone was uptight because we knew the North Vietnamese had the hill zeroed in, and the longer we stayed there the more likely it was we were going to get mortared.”
Captain Lieb called in tac air when the mortaring began. Red smoke was popped, a warning to the pilots, as the Hueys landed for the KIAs and WIAs. The wounded included several guys who claimed to be deaf, so desperate were they to get to the rear. After the casualties were evacuated, what was left of Charlie One and Two was shuttled to Ripcord. Lieb and Charlie Three were lifted out shortly before noon. Rodney Moore was the last man on the last Huey. The enemy mortar was thumping again. The slick came to a hover several feet off the ground, and the four guys with Moore immediately hauled themselves aboard, knowing that the pilot had no time to linger. Moore, terrified that he might be left behind, jumped toward the skid with a surge of adrenaline and hit the metal with one foot just as the pilot started to lift off. Having turned as he pushed himself up, he landed on his rear in the center of the cabin so that he was looking out the door as a mortar round exploded an instant later off to one side of the landing zone. Several more rounds landed on top of the smoky hill as the helicopter banked away.