PART TWO
We told division from the beginning that if we went into that damn firebase without sufficient forces, they were going to attack.
—Maj. Robert A. “Tex” Turner S3 Operations Officer 3d Brigade, 101st Airborne Division
CHAPTER 6
Lieutenant Colonel Lucas had been in command only eight days when the 2d of the 506th launched its first assault on Ripcord. At that time, the battalion was operating from Camp Evans, as it had been since the northern monsoon had forced the entire division out of the mountains five months earlier. The winter had been dispiriting for the Currahees. Three of their line companies, washed by cold rains under low, leaden skies, had worked the foothills, seeing little of the enemy, their casualties the result of booby traps and hit-and-run ambushes. Working on a rotating basis, the fourth line company secured a muddy brown circle in a sea of elephant grass called Firebase Jack.
After such routines, a major offensive deep into the mountains was a matter of high drama. “We felt that we had a very important mission,” said Major Koenigsbauer, the battalion operations officer. “The 1st ARVN Infantry Division was one of the best units the South Vietnamese had, and not only Lucas and I, but also the ARVN officers with whom we coordinated, were eager to go.”
Two months before the end of the monsoon, the weather was still marginal. The assault was postponed several times until there was a break in the rains on March 12, 1970. Lucas and Koenigsbauer rode in the command-and-control (C&C) ship of the 158th Aviation Battalion, which was committed in full for the CA, while at higher altitudes the brigade and division commanders observed the assault from their own C&C Hueys. The plan was to open a firebase atop Hill 902. To secure the area, Capt. Carmelito Arkangel and B/2-506th landed at the southeastern end of the ridge running down from the peak. Shortly thereafter, two ARVN companies were inserted on a ridge running north from Coc Muen Mountain. One of the LZs was mortared, but after a brief firefight the ARVN reported the capture of an AK-47 and a body count of two NVA.
The supporting forces in place, Capt. Albert P. Burkhart’s A/2-506th approached Hill 902 in a line of Hueys. The objective was hazy with smoke. There had been a ten-minute artillery prep, then Cobras from the 4-77th ARA had unleashed several “rocket ripples,” starting with 2.75-inch high-explosive (HE) warheads and finishing with “nails”—rockets packed with dartlike flechettes, which were meant to detonate any booby traps on the LZ. The flechette rockets exploded with a distinctive burst of red smoke, which signaled that the last pass was being made. The Hueys started in, but at that point the plan went awry. “For security reasons, brigade had not permitted us to conduct a good aerial reconnaissance of 902,” said Koenigsbauer, the concern being that a LOH buzzing around the mountaintop would tip their hand. The vegetation was denser than had been estimated, and the lift ships could find no place to land. “The only way the troops could get in was to jump off the skids,” noted Koenigsbauer; the Hueys could hover only so low, “and there would have been numerous injuries as the troops crashed down into shattered trees and broken-off stalks of bamboo.”
Lucas conferred on a secure net with Col. William J. Bradley, then the brigade commander, and the decision was made to divert A/2-506th to Hill 927, the site of an old firebase originally opened by the 1st Cav in 1968 and renamed Ripcord when used by the Screaming Eagles in 1969. Hill 927, the flattened upper half of which was still bald and covered in spots with runway matting, was an easy place to land a helicopter, but it had not been selected as the primary LZ because it was dominated by nearby Hill 1000. The alternate landing zone was prepped only with ARA, “in part because there were no obstacles,” explained Koenigsbauer, “but mostly because we needed to get the troops on the ground and get the operation rolling.”
Captain Burkhart, in his first big action after two months in command, had gotten on the ground with one platoon when the next slick in line came under heavy automatic-weapons and mortar fire from Hill 1000. “There were Cobra gunships flying all over the hill and the tension was rising,” read the journal of Sp4 Frank W. Marshall, an M79 grenadier on that first Huey to take fire. “We were all very quiet, just looking at each other in fear, knowing that something was about to happen. As our helicopter was landing, a red smoke grenade was thrown and right then we knew it was a hot LZ. The door gunners were yelling to get off fast and stay low. . . .”
Lucas and Koenigsbauer brought in arty and guns, orchestrating the fire support so that a corridor remained open for the lift ships bearing in with the rest of A/2-506th. One of the slicks took hits and crash-landed atop the firebase when the enemy began firing from the upper slopes of the mountain itself. Several infantrymen were shot and badly wounded as they bounded for cover. The Cobras spotted one of the hillside positions but hesitated to fire, given its proximity to the top of Ripcord. Burkhart sent a platoon to do the job. “We dropped our rucksacks and just grabbed our weapons and ammunition and started down the hill, taking cover as we could,” wrote Frank Marshall. The brand-new platoon leader, 2d Lt. Dudley Davis, was killed by an RPG. Davis’s radioman was medevacked over his protests that the scratch behind his ear wasn’t serious, only to die en route to the evac hospital, a small piece of shrapnel in his brain. Marshall realized he had shrugged off his ammo vest along with his rucksack. “I had to run back up the hill while my squad covered for me, then back down,” he wrote. “I was never so scared as bullets were flying all around me. When we found the enemy position, I kept firing grenades at the position. . . . Between my grenades and the . . . gunships, we knocked out the position. . . .”
With tac air coming in, a Chinook was able to extract the downed Huey. The lull ended at dusk with another barrage. Everyone expected a ground attack, and the company’s field first sergeant, a two-war Regular Army E7, “cracked on us,” noted 2d Lt. James P. Noll, one of the platoon leaders in Company A. “Just went to hell. Started crying. We had to send him out. We never saw him again.” The night passed without incident, the company surrounded by a wall of artillery fire. In the morning, Burkhart moved down the ridge to the rocky knoll east of Hill 927. There he stayed for most of three days until the decision was made to lift Company A to the vicinity of Company B so the mortar positions around Ripcord could be saturated with fire without endangering friendly troops. Noll was running a local security patrol when “we were told to turn around and run back up to the LZ. Turned out they were going to B-52 the place. They didn’t tell us. We were the last to find out. I was on the last chopper out of there, and, literally, as we were departing, here came the bombs. . . .”
Major General John M. Wright, the division commander, ordered another attack on Ripcord. “Obviously, the initial set-back did not mean the end of the summer offensive,” explained Koenigsbauer. Hill 927 was redesignated the primary LZ. Like the first assault, the second one was repeatedly postponed by the rains. In the interim, all available artillery was brought to bear, including 8-inch and 175mm fire from corps; when the weather permitted, tac air hit known or suspected mortar positions within range of Ripcord. “That told the enemy we were coming back,” noted Koenigsbauer, “but we didn’t have any choice. It was critical that we take the hill, and to take the hill we had to suppress the firing positions around it.”
When Captain Arkangel’s six months were up on March 26, Bill Williams took over Company B, flying out to its NDP on the ridge below Hill 902. As Williams disembarked from the slick, a poncho-wrapped body was loaded aboard; the dead soldier, a point man, had been shot in the back of the head on patrol as he turned to alert his slack man that he thought he’d seen something up ahead.
Chip Collins, a rugged kid who’d joined up to escape the poverty of his Virginia coal-mining roots, was also assigned to Company B at that time, one of several replacements packed aboard a log bird at Camp Evans. The veterans ignored the new guys. Morale had shriveled in the cold rain. To Collins the grunts looked “like men gone two steps back toward ape. They stank. They were bearded. Their fatigues were dirty and ragged. They ate with their hands, hunched over, wolfing down the food. They were quiet, speaking little, signing with their hands to communicate. They had fear written on their faces.”
Originally assigned to Bravo One, Collins spent that first night in position with two battle-rattled GIs, one of whom, taking advantage of the army’s cynical policy of getting draftee grunts to sign over three more years in exchange for immediate reassignment off the line, “was plotting a way to get to the rear so he could re-up to get out of the field.”
Collins was detailed to an observation post (OP) the next day. The other two guys were digging in when “an NVA in pith helmet and khakis almost walked on top of us.” Collins was on guard with an M16, but “I was so cherry that I hadn’t even locked and loaded. The delay in my response permitted that NVA to fight another day.”
The observation post became a listening post at sunset. The night was frightful. “The rain beat down unmercifully,” Collins would later write. Wraiths heard but not seen probed the perimeter, “and we were repeatedly told [by radio] not to fire unless engaged first. Should we have been ‘engaged’ and attempted to come in with the enemy close at our heels we would likely have been killed from fire along our own perimeter. In close bush, being on LP really meant you were an expendable first alert for the main force.”
On Easter Sunday, March 31, Bravo One followed a scout-dog team along the spine of the ridge right into two or three enemy soldiers who, concealed in spiderholes in the dense underbrush, held their fire until the dog team was about twenty feet from the muzzles of their AK-47s. Three men were killed in the sudden fusillade, including the dog handler—along with his scout dog—and the platoon leader, alert, hard-charging but green 1st Lt. Harry E. Hayes, United States Military Academy (USMA) Class of 1968.
Bravo Three linked up with Bravo One and, passing through, firing as it advanced, discovered two blood trails leading off the ridge. The wounded and dead were carried to a landing zone, but the medevac had to break off its approach in the face of more enemy fire. “Air strikes went on all around us,” wrote Collins, who half-expected the bomb fragments slashing past “to take off our heads.” After the enemy was silenced and the casualties were evacuated, Collins wondered what he had gotten himself into. “The trails we were walking on were practically four-lane highways and we kept going back over the same ones every day. Was someone stupid? You be the judge.”
The big guns from corps were good, but howitzers were better. They were more accurate and could be adjusted faster. Accordingly, on March 29, after Colonel Bradley had personally inspected the site with a ten-man security team, C/2-506th combat-assaulted onto Hill 316, seven klicks northeast and well within 105 range of Ripcord. Lucas’s mortar platoon and a howitzer battery, Captain Rich’s B/2-319th Field Artillery, went in next. The position was dubbed Firebase Gladiator. The weather had broken. The assault was on. With Companies A and B positioned southeast of Ripcord, Lucas deployed his last company, D/2-506th, to the northeast on March 30.
Lucas selected Company B for the second assault onto Ripcord, which commenced late on the morning of April 1, 1970. Captain Williams had gotten on the ground with two platoons and a three-man pathfinder team headed by 1st Lt. Michael D. Anderson—the elite, all-volunteer pathfinders were essentially combat air-traffic controllers—when, fifteen minutes into the operation, there was a single explosion on the mountaintop. In the pause that followed, Williams reckoned that a rocket from the gunship prep had cooked off late, but then more mortar shells began raining in behind that first registration round. “They had been waiting for us,” recalled Williams. “The fire was coming from every direction. The enemy knew every spot on that hill, and they walked rounds all over the place. It was like being in the middle of a huge bull’s eye.”
One platoon leader was seriously wounded. Captain Williams and another platoon leader, SSgt. Terry W. Ratcliff, were running together, checking positions, making sure that everyone was either digging in or returning fire on the NVA. “I turned right for some reason,” recounted Williams. “Ratcliff didn’t, and he was hit just that quick.” Making it to a shallow depression, Chip Collins was shocked to see soft-spoken, bush-savvy Ratcliff, one of the few veterans who had been encouraging rather than disdainful when dealing with the new guys, lay sprawled in the open like a rag doll. “A widening pool of blood flowed out from under him,” Collins wrote. “Raw-boned Doc Kellogg scrambled over, felt for a pulse, shook his head at us, then gently laid Terry’s helmet across his face. . . .”
Major Laurence J. Law, the battalion executive officer, had landed with a jump CP. Along with the pathfinders, Law’s group, which included advance parties from the engineer platoon and artillery battery that were to have been lifted onto the hill, set up against one of the man-high boulders on the upper half of Ripcord. While Anderson kept the lift ships coming in, door gunners blazing, Law coordinated the medevacs. The lift ships were also used to evacuate casualties. “As the troops were bouncing off, we’d madly try to throw the wounded on the same slicks,” noted Anderson, who was peppered with shrapnel in his legs and arms in the process. Three badly wounded men were rushed aboard one medevac, which was splattered with mortar shrapnel and came crashing back down as soon as it started to lift off. Through it all, battalion, brigade, and division commander—stacked up overhead in their command ships—were bringing in gunships, arty, and tac air, everything they had and plenty of it. It wasn’t enough. “The NVA had pre-plotted firing positions all around the hill, and as quick as we hit one they moved to another,” noted a frustrated Koenigsbauer. “For all the firepower available to us, we could not suppress the mortar fire.”
Captain Williams dashed over to Law to give him a quick situation report and had just taken off again when he was knocked to the ground by the concussion of a mortar round that slammed into the boulder sheltering the CP. Getting up, Williams saw that 2d Lt. William P. Wall, his FO, had been killed instantly by the blast. One of Anderson’s pathfinders was also sprawled dead against the boulder, and the other was badly wounded in the leg. Anderson used Wall’s belt for a tourniquet. “Major Law came stumbling out of the smoke and dust with blood coming out of his mouth,” said Williams. Law had big holes in his back, and “he had that thousand-yard stare you get when you’re in shock,” noted Williams. “I got ahold of him and sat him down, and he mumbled something about getting the mortars, and I of course agreed with him, and then we got the medics and got him out of there.”
The battalion communications officer, 1st Lt. John E. Darling, USMA ’68, took command of the CP and, with Williams, moved the radios and surviving RTOs into a shell crater. People from brigade and division, meanwhile, kept breaking in on Williams’s company frequency, asking questions, demanding updates, and giving orders such as: “I want you to get out and get those mortars.”
“Which one do you want me to get?” Williams barked, utterly exasperated. “I got ’em at three hundred and sixty degrees.”
Lucas began insulating Williams from all the advice from above at that point, letting Williams, Anderson, and Darling organize the suppressive fire and medevacs without further interference. To disrupt the enemy mortars, Lucas inserted Captain Rollison and D/2-506th northeast of Ripcord. To put help within Company B’s reach, Lucas inserted Captain Burkhart and A/2-506th back onto the rocky hill east of Ripcord. The company was shelled, but a Cobra swinging over to assist spotted the mortars in the open on Hill 805 and expended its entire load, getting multiple secondaries.
To further reinforce Bravo Company, Lucas dispatched the battalion reconnaissance platoon under 1st Lt. John W. Wilson from Camp Evans. Wilson, a veteran of five months in-country, had taken command of the recon platoon only the day before. He did not know his troops and they did not know him. The enemy mortared the mountaintop with a renewed fury at the approach of recon’s lift ships, preventing any from landing or even hovering despite repeated attempts. At best, a few pilots were able to glide over the landing zone low enough for some of the troopers to leap to the ground. In that way, Wilson and ten of his men made it into position with the grunts. Low on fuel, the slicks finally had to turn back with the other half of the platoon still on board.
The mortar fire petered out at dusk. Captain Williams, having suffered too many casualties to hold the hill—seven dead, twenty-one wounded—was instructed to link up with Company A. At that time, all the casualties had been evacuated except two KIAs. The bodies had no sooner been thrown aboard a Huey that reluctantly landed than the mortar fire started again, and the door gunners shoved the bodies right back out to lighten the slick for a quick takeoff. A trooper from the artillery advance party who had helped load the bodies fell back into his foxhole only to have a mortar round land directly on his chest. The explosion blew his flak jacket open and left the man gasping, lungs exposed, the nose cone of the shell stuck in his chest, for the horrible minute it took him to die.
Williams ordered the bodies wrapped in ponchos and concealed under old sandbags in an ammo-crate bunker near the command group’s boulder. They would have to be recovered later. Abandoned weapons were piled by the downed medevac and blown up with plastic explosives. “We were low on water,” wrote Chip Collins. “I felt like hell rifling through a dead man’s ruck for food and water.” Before moving out, Williams had a Cobra zip over to investigate a fire burning on one of the hills to the west. Williams watched as tracers came up from the hill and the gunship took evasive action, then swung around and fired the area up, killing and wounding numerous ARVN. It is unclear if a trigger-happy South Vietnamese had brought the wrath down on his unit, or if it had been an enemy position that had fired on the Cobra and the ARVN had simply been too close to the NVA. Williams, meanwhile, got on the horn with the CO of Company A “and asked him to send up a team to meet us as we came down the ridge and guide us into his perimeter so we wouldn’t get shot up by friendlies. He refused.”
Lieutenant Wilson’s troops led Company B’s seven-hundred-meter march east to the hill occupied by Company A. “Everybody was scared shitless, but it was a disciplined move,” said Sp4 John A. Schnarr, a recon RTO. The troops, each hanging onto the rucksack of the man in front, moved in rhythm with the illum being fired for the column from Gladiator, stopping when the eerie light sifted through the trees, moving another few meters in the dark interval before the next illumination round popped overhead.1
The ordeal was not over. Thunderstorms rolled in the next morning, preventing the planned extraction of Company B. When the rain let up, Wilson’s recon troops, cloaked by a misty fog, slipped up onto Ripcord, unearthed the poncho-wrapped dead, and carried them down to a platoon from Company A waiting in the saddle below Ripcord. Lucas—taking a risk that was either bold or divorced from reality—immediately ordered Wilson back onto Ripcord. Wilson was to secure the LZ with five of his men, then dispatch the other five to Hill 1000 to pinpoint the mortar positions there for counterbattery fire. The five-man patrol never made it, halted by several AK-47s and an RPD light machine gun while moving up the hillock between Ripcord and Hill 1000. The recon troops took cover, but firing back into the fog served only to reveal their positions to an NVA with an RPG. In the ensuing explosions, Schnarr was peppered with shrapnel in his back and buttocks, and their slack man caught a red-hot fragment the size of a butcher knife in his thigh, with an end sticking out either side.
The hillside went quiet. No one moved. When someone did, the enemy sent a quick RPD burst his way. Wilson presently arrived with his five men, having just weathered a mortar attack on Ripcord. “As the lieutenant came up from behind, he radioed us to break contact,” said Schnarr. “We just kind of scooted out of there, and, fortunately, the gooks didn’t fire at us or follow us.”
The wounded were not evacuated. The area was totally socked in. Recon had run out of daylight anyway and, forming a tight circle, spent an unnerving night on the hillock. Before rejoining the grunt companies the next morning, Lieutenant Wilson first had to recover the signal operating instructions (SOI) booklet that had fallen out of his pocket on Ripcord sometime the day before. Wilson’s men argued against going back for the sake of a codebook, “but Wilson didn’t want to start off his command by reporting that he had lost his SOI and forcing the whole division to change codes,” noted Schnarr. “He insisted that a small group of us were going back up with him. We didn’t want to, but we followed orders.”
Moving quietly through the fog, the point man approached an old perimeter bunker. It was occupied by two sleeping enemy soldiers. Lieutenant Wilson rushed up, shot them both with his silencer-equipped M16, then shouted to the rest of the patrol, “I got ’em, I got ’em.” Other NVA on the hill opened up with AKs. Wilson and the point man started back down, but an RPG landed directly in front of them. Wilson was blown off his feet. The point man dragged him to where the rest of the recon troops were waiting, and a medic went to work—the platoon leader had a sucking chest wound and a serious head injury—while Schnarr called for a medevac and a fire mission on Ripcord. The hilltop was obscured by fog, but the artillery rounds rumbling through the sky sounded as though they were on target. Shortly thereafter, a medevac pilot who’d volunteered to brave the low clouds in an attempt to save a life arrived on station. “He got through, but we couldn’t spot him through the fog, and he couldn’t spot us,” said Schnarr. “We could hear him and were trying to direct him by sound, but there was just no visibility. He loitered as long as he could, but finally said he was running low on fuel and had to turn back. Wilson was lying there, semi-conscious, semi-coherent, trying to hang on, but when I got off the radio and told the guys that the medevac was heading back, he kind of let out a final breath and moan and died right there. He just couldn’t hold on anymore.”
The recon troops pushed through the jungle at the base of the hill, desperate to link up with the line companies on the other side of Ripcord. Their slack man, his badly injured leg swelled and stiff, limped along with an arm thrown over a buddy’s shoulder. They also brought out Lieutenant Wilson. A litter hastily fashioned for him from ponchos and two sturdy branches kept coming undone, so they finally hefted Wilson’s body onto the back of a trooper named Neal Whittler, lashed the dead man’s hands together to help keep him in position, and kept moving.
Recon didn’t reach Company A’s perimeter until nightfall on April 3. The grunts had been buried in a cloud bank on the rocky hill for two days, the body bags in their perimeter putting out a bad smell and worse vibes. “It was a spooky, ghostly time,” recalled Lieutenant Anderson. “We couldn’t see thirty feet in the daytime, and less at night. The enemy knew where we were, and we knew that they knew. Tensions were very high. We were almost out of food and water, so there was a lot of sharing, cutting bamboo, and drinking the water out of the stalks, making one LRRP ration last for two days, that sort of stuff.”
The weather cooled enough the next morning, April 4, that the clouds sank below the top of the hills, and a medevac finally got in for the wounded recon troops. The log bird that landed next came under mortar fire as Wilson’s body was loaded aboard, along with the three remaining KIAs from the April Fools’ Day Assault.
The weather turned foul again before Captain Williams and Company B, which had moved off the rocky hill the day before and linked up that afternoon with Company D at the northern base of the ridge, could also be resupplied. The air force tried to parachute in cases of C-rations, but the bundles were lost in the fog. Captain Rollison had his troops share what rations they had with Company B.
Williams told one of his sergeants to coordinate with the NCOs in Company D about setting up the NDP. “No, bullshit,” said Rollison, a steady, second-tour pro. “You guys are dead on your feet. Just get some rest. We’ll handle the security tonight.”
“Rollison was the exact opposite of the captain in Company A,” reflected Williams. “Delta Company was a good bunch. They took us in and gave us a chance to regroup. We owed them. There was always a special bond after that between Bravo and Delta Company.”
It was clear enough again on April 5 for an element from the 2-17th Cav to CA onto Ripcord to recover the medevac shot down during the April Fools’ Day Assault. The Huey was checked for booby traps and rigged for extraction amid incoming mortar fire, which wounded two men. The element departed under automatic-weapons fire. The Chinook under which the Huey was sling-loaded ran low of fuel on the way back to base and was forced to punch its load. The Huey was destroyed on impact.
The situation had again been stalemated by the monsoon. During the interlude, Brig. Gen. John J. Hennessey, the assistant division commander for operations, flew in for a conference with Bradley and his staff at Camp Evans. It was understood, recalled Bradley, that there would be a third assault—as many as would be necessary, in fact—so that when the dry season began, Ripcord would be ready to support the offensive into the Warehouse Area. “It wasn’t just our brigade, the entire division and the ARVN were committed to interdicting the NVA supply routes deep in the mountains,” Bradley noted. To begin that process, “Ripcord, literally, was where you had to go. That being said, it was a matter of how to best take and defend the objective. We needed the tools to do the job, and I emphasized during the meeting that the farther out you went, the more risky it became, and the more troop strength you had to have.”
Though Bradley had three maneuver battalions on paper, only Lucas’s was actually available for offensive operations. The 1-506th was tied down defending Evans and the firebase cordon in the foothills, and the 3d of the 187th Rakkasans were totally committed to the pacification campaign in the coastal villages, as they had been since the battalion was destroyed on Hamburger Hill in 1969.
Hennessey promised that Lt. Col. Bobby F. Brashears’s 2d of the 501st Geronimo Battalion would be committed to the taking of Ripcord. “That was the division’s swing battalion, meaning it was always ready to respond to wherever it was needed most,” noted Colonel Bradley. “It was a very alert, very tough outfit.”
Major Turner, the brigade operations officer, recalled that Bradley’s basic message to Hennessey was that division should go to Ripcord in strength or not go at all. Bradley knew of what he spoke. “Colonel Bradley was a cool, calm, thoughtful commander, and a real firebreather when it came to going after the enemy,” said Turner. Bradley had been twice wounded as a mechanized infantry sergeant during the push across France in World War II. Selected to attend West Point after the war—he was USMA ’51—Bradley had led a platoon and a company in the Korean War, commanded a battalion from the 82d Airborne in the Dominican Republic expedition of ’65, and was presently regarded as the best brigade commander in the 101st. “Bradley’s was the most nimble brigade we had,” stated Lt. Col. Charles W. Dyke, the division G3, “the one that would react the quickest and with the surest hand.”
Returning to the Ripcord question, Turner noted that “we’d gotten our ass kicked out of there twice, and if we went back in with what we had, we were going to get our ass kicked again.” The terrain so overwhelmingly favored the enemy as to make irrelevant the attachment of the division reserve to Bradley. “It was going to take more than just a couple of battalions,” said Turner, a young West Pointer on his second combat tour in Vietnam. “If we went back in, the enemy was going to respond in force, and then it would take a couple of brigades to hold the damn place.”
It was unlikely that such a force would be piled on when it was needed—not in the era of Vietnamization. “We didn’t mind getting in a fight in the One-O-First, but we had to be very careful about casualties,” noted Lieutenant Colonel Dyke, a veteran of thirty-three months with the 101st in Vietnam, 1965–66 and 1968–70. “The big anti-casualty push started after the so-called Hamburger Hill action,” explained Dyke. “I was the division personnel officer at that time, and was present when General Abrams flew up to Camp Eagle and told General Melvin Zais, then the division commander, ‘Goddamnit, Mel, find a better way to do it.’” From that point on, Dyke continued, “both of the division ADCs and myself, first as G1 and subsequently as G3, were always on the phone with our parent command, XXIV Corps, and sometimes even with USARV [United States Army Vietnam] down in Long Binh, explaining in detail why a particular company in a particular battalion had lost two or three people the night before. We were under great pressure to hold the casualties down. That was well understood in the division.”
Precisely because the restriction on casualties was well understood, recalled Turner, a certain reluctance to return to Ripcord was expressed, albeit obliquely, during the briefing for General Hennessey. First, the brigade intelligence officer, Maj. William G. Keoho, a mono-tonal, fireplug-shaped Hawaiian— “one hell of a stud, and a good S2,” noted Turner—provided a lengthy analysis of the enemy situation in the brigade area and the mountains to the west. The unmistakable message, as Turner later paraphrased it, was that “the NVA were moving into the A Shau in droves from Laos, and that if we didn’t go out there in force, Ripcord was eventually going to become an untenable position.”
Next, Turner went to the map to outline options. “If you want a general to pick a particular course of action, you make it your first recommendation,” he mused. The first three recommendations presented by Turner were variations on the theme that the brigade hold onto its existing firebases and, taking advantage of the division’s airmobile assets, hit the North Vietnamese as they tried to infiltrate through the foothills to the lowlands. At the end of his supply lines, the enemy was at his most vulnerable in the foothills. The last recommendation was to reoccupy Ripcord. Division was determined to strike into the enemy’s vitals. “When we finished briefing Hennessey,” recalled Turner, “all he said was, ‘Well, you’re going back to Ripcord.’ ”
Brigade’s preferred course of action was modeled on the standing operations order written by Dyke and approved by General Wright in December 1969 when the 101st was regrouping after the withdrawal of the 3d Marine Division from Quang Tri Province. At that time, Dyke had divided the newly expanded Screaming Eagles AO into three sectors. The heavily populated lowlands of Thua Thien Province became the protected zone. Within it, units assigned to pacification ran civic action programs for the villagers and joint combat operations with the local militia forces. The NVA had been pushed completely out of the area. There were still Viet Cong remnants, but, given the division’s close coordination with the militia, said Dyke, “we were able to respond very quickly if there was an attack on a village, or if a school was being burned down, or if a government official had been kidnapped or assassinated. We also provided medical support after such terrorist incidents.”
The foothills—or piedmont, as the region was identified on military maps—constituted the primary zone of engagement. “That was where we preferred to do battle,” noted Dyke. In the foothills, the insertion and extraction of troops, like the use of gunships and tac air, was unhampered by the vagaries of the monsoon, the weather being almost always flyable below the mountains.
The reconnaissance zone stretched west from the firebase cordon to Laos and northwest all the way to the DMZ. It encompassed the mountains of Thua Thien Province and all of Quang Tri except for a system of strongpoints in the lowlands held by the 1st Brigade, 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized). The reconnaissance zone was monitored by brigade recon teams, the division LRRPs, and the 2-17th Cavalry. In the event of an enemy buildup, a U. S.–ARVN operation, multi-battalion in size though limited in duration, might be mounted. More frequently, a 105 battery, an infantry company attached to provide security, would launch what was known as an artillery raid. “You get a good, sunny day, you hook up the howitzers, and you head out to an old firebase,” explained Dyke. “You shoot up the place, then come back in either that same day or within a couple days depending on enemy capabilities in the area. We made sure that we didn’t give the North Vietnamese enough time to gather enough forces to overwhelm those positions. We also had to play bet-your-ass with the weather so that we didn’t get people hung out there beyond our reach. I was a pretty cautious guy on that, and watched those positions very carefully.”
Division seemed to be throwing caution to the wind with Operation Chicago Peak. There is always a case to be made about taking the fight to the enemy, and Wright eventually gave Bradley a battalion from another brigade, freeing up the 1-506th for the push into the mountains. Nevertheless, the idea of another assault on zeroed-in Ripcord seemed a bit mad. “It was as if there was a personal vendetta between the 803d NVA Regiment and our division staff,” said Capt. Philip L. Michaud, a career officer with the 2-319th FA. “They couldn’t face up to the fact that the Screaming Eagles had been denied access to the area, so we were attacking again just so we could say we took a place on the map called Ripcord.”
Sergeant Burkey of C/2-506th thought the division was possessed of “what I call the Hamburger Hill Syndrome—the going back after something over and over, the senseless loss of people for no fucking good reason. Hamburger Hill was probably the most shameful thing the 101st ever did. Ripcord was more of the same.”
Specialist Fourth Class Richard R. Blythe, a former combat infantryman in the Big Red One assigned as assistant to the 2-506th chaplain, wrote home on the eve of the third attack that “for an unimportant far away hill [Ripcord] seems to me to be a hell of a place to die. To save face and for the morale of this battalion I’m not so sure that we don’t have to go back to the place where we were knocked off of. I only hope they do it right this time.”
It has been speculated that division was determined to open a firebase in such a contested area to draw the enemy to it like ants to sugar, the idea being that it would be less costly to destroy the NVA with firepower as they gathered around Ripcord than to dig them out of their elaborate bunker complexes on Co Pung Mountain. It was a valid tactic in theory. Given what actually transpired, though, Dyke perhaps had no other choice but to state that such a firebase-as-bait scheme “was never the plan at Ripcord.” 2
Lieutenant Hawkins, acting commander of C/2-506th— Vazquez was on R&R—choppered into Company A’s NDP from Gladiator on April 5, having been relieved there by a unit from the Geronimo Battalion. Lucas had previously moved a jump TOC to Gladiator. Captain Leroy “Lee” Fox, the battalion chaplain, was thus on hand to visit the troops the night before. “I don’t think there was a man in Charlie Company who didn’t go and get the blessing from the chaplain,” recalled a squad leader, “and at the same time drop what he hoped wasn’t his last letter in the mail bag sitting there.”
The stranded troops from the engineer and artillery advance parties went out on Company C’s slicks. In preparation for the third assault, Lucas fanned out his companies to find and destroy the enemy mortar positions. Company A, badly shaken from the top down, balked and did not get moving until volunteers had been organized to lead the way. Two platoons from Company C, meanwhile, walked into a bunker complex on the knoll between Ripcord and Hill 1000 on April 6. Pinned down with two dead, eight wounded, and a flipped-out platoon leader—the other platoon leader, 1st Lt. Robert “Gypsy” Wallace, took charge of the fight—the grunts finally had to dig in where they were as night fell. Hawkins, having moved up with the rest of the company by then, carefully walked artillery in on the North Vietnamese. When Hawkins medevacked his casualties the next morning, the landing zone came under fire from more enemy soldiers atop Ripcord.
Hawkins reported to Lucas shortly thereafter that he could hear hand-cranked generators used for Morse code in the jungle to his south as well as up on Ripcord. The enemy was definitely well equipped. Rollison’s company, sweeping toward Hill 805 that same morning, killed a lone NVA; the man had thrown a grenade, run, and was cut down. He had an AK-47, three magazines, three grenades, web gear and pack, an extra uniform, and a new rain poncho. He also had a pen, paper, a map, and documents that identified him as leader of a seven-man squad that packed two rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Enemy morale was high; as recorded in the battalion journal, one of the dead man’s notes, when translated, turned out to be a “letter to [his] wife stating NVA winning in the south[.]”
The division reserve was committed during a break in the bad weather that afternoon. Captain Christopher C. Straub and D/2-501st landed under fire on Hill 902. After securing the landing zone, Straub dispatched 1st Lt. Terry A. Palm’s platoon, Delta One, on a RIF, or reconnaissance in force, along the ridge leading up Coc Muen Mountain. The platoon followed a trail into an unoccupied base camp. Palm had no sooner deployed security than an M60 gunner cut down the point man of an NVA squad walking unawares back into camp. “[W]e stuck a 101 airborne patch in the hole in the back of his head and started chasing the rest,” Palm wrote in a letter home. “We followed them for 6 hours through a fresh company[-sized] NVA base camp. My people wanted to stop but I told them I wasn’t quitting until we had swept the entire ridgeline.”
Reaching a knoll, Palm, sensing trouble, signaled his men to get down, which saved some lives because the enemy detonated a claymore a moment later and “rained satchel charges all over us,” the lieutenant’s letter continued. Most of the NVA “opened up on me, personally. They had seen me talking on the radio and knew I was the leader.” An RPG exploded six feet away, and Palm took light shrapnel in his shoulder. All the while his platoon was literally shooting the jungle flat. “[A] gook dashed out of the bushes and we fired him up good,” Palm wrote. The enemy began to pull back. Palm organized an on-line assault, but Straub, on the radio, prudently ordered a withdrawal. “With M-16s and M-60 machine guns red hot and blazing fire 2–3 feet out of the barrels, we pulled back to an NDP position with all weapons, [and] packs . . . we took 13 minor wounded. One man may lose his sight, however. . . . When we went forward the next morning, we found another dead gook and many blood trails leading away, and 2nd Platoon killed one of the wounded ones down the hill. There still are many gooks here, so I expect more contact. Don’t worry, there’s not a gook alive I wouldn’t tangle with after I’ve seen what this platoon can do.”
For the Currahees, the area remained jinxed. On April 8, one of Rollison’s platoons discovered a bunker complex at the southeast base of Ripcord and, spotting movement, popped smoke to mark its location before the Cobra from a Pink Team supporting Company D rolled in hot. Unable to see anything but treetops, the pilot fired his rockets based on directions given him from the smoke. The smoke, however, had not actually emerged over the friendlies as it slowly sifted its way up through the jungle canopy, the result being that the platoon calling in the Cobra took one KIA and fourteen WIA.
Over the next two days, there were more quick contacts, more finds—Company D walked into a deserted enemy bivouac with uniforms hanging on a clothesline—and through it all, arty, tac air, and ARA continued to work over likely enemy mortar sites.
Resistance faded. With friendly units spread all over the high ground, watching for enemy mortars, it was time to take Ripcord. Lucas selected Hawkins and Company C, positioned halfway up the southern slope of the mountain, to make a ground attack, supported by Company D. Hawkins moved his people into position in the dark, and the assault began with a quick artillery prep at first light on April 11. There was no enemy fire as the troops advanced up the open slope, then into the interior of the firebase. After the position was checked for booby traps—there were none—Lieutenant Anderson of the pathfinders was inserted with a team to control the lifting in of supplies and equipment. The troops on the mountaintop held their collective breath when the first Chinook hovered over the landing zone with a sling-loaded engineer bulldozer. No mortar rounds dropped in, however. The enemy did not contest the third attack in any way. Anderson had actually been expecting trouble. For that reason, “I had wanted to go back,” he recalled. “I had started the fight. By God, I was going to finish it. I had my pick of other pathfinders who wanted to go as well. We all had unfinished business on that hill. We set up our base of operations next to the same boulder where we had previously taken casualties, partly out of bravado, but mostly because it was the best spot on the firebase with the best visibility. . . .”