CHAPTER 7
Major Sidney Davis, the new battalion executive officer, choppered out as soon as Ripcord was secured to set up a jump CP. Gruff and thickset, he reminded Hawkins, meeting him for the first time, of Ernest Borgnine. Hawkins would write that Davis, on his second tour, “knew what combat was all about,” and that “if he liked you, then he loved you. If you got on his shit list, watch out.”
Not yet appreciating Davis’s temperament, Hawkins got on the major’s list that first afternoon on Ripcord. Hawkins was busy getting his company positioned and dug in when Davis called him over and told him in an amiable way that he wanted a roll of concertina wire around the firebase by last light. Wire and engineer stakes had been brought in but no gloves or sledgehammers. “When we get the proper tools, we’ll get it in,” the cocky Hawkins replied, starting to leave before Davis could reply. “Lieutenant,” the XO barked. Hawkins turned back around. Davis was livid. “You get that wire in now,” he thundered. “Have your men wrap their hands in sandbags, and use rocks and the flat side of ax heads, but you get that damned wire up before nightfall or I’ll have your bars.”
Davis’s anger was more than justified. “There are enemy all around this hill who would love the chance to come in and hit us when our defenses are down,” the major growled at Hawkins. “You get that wire in pronto. Do you understand me?”
Hawkins did. Wrapping his hands in sandbags, he joined his men and laid wire “until my hands and arms bled and dusk approached,” he later wrote. “That night, Ripcord had a single belt of staked-in concertina all the way around it, and a second belt had been started. That was the last time Davis ever chewed me out.”
The weather turned sour again, preventing the insertion of the battalion’s attached 105 battery for five days. Meanwhile, the mortar platoon shelled itself while registering close-in targets—two men were wounded—and one of Hawkins’s grunts was killed while digging a foxhole when his shovel hit a rusty grenade buried along with other unused ordnance by the last unit to occupy Ripcord.
It was a dreary, if busy, time. Lucas asked Captain Fox, battalion chaplain, about the morale of the troops during one of the colonel’s quick trips to Camp Evans. “The Chaplain let him have it,” chaplain’s assistant Rick Blythe wrote in a letter home. “Fox told Lucas exactly what the morale of the troops was,” Blythe would later recall. “Basically, it was lousy.” Hoping to bolster spirits, Lucas dispatched his popular chaplain to Ripcord. Expecting the worst, Fox came up with a shoulderholstered pistol and an M16. He also strapped a Randall fighting knife to his leg. “He’s ready for bear,” wrote Blythe. “A real combat Chaplain.” The wind-buffeted flight to Ripcord was unnerving, the base itself frightful, all alone high up in rugged mountains. “The fog has rolled in,” wrote Blythe. “Virtually no air traffic before noon of each day.” Blythe’s next letter read: “Still digging and filling sandbags at Ripcord. Some incoming and lots of outgoing. Thank goodness someone had cigarettes so I could put the filters in my ears. Guard duty on the perimeter in the rain. We made sure there was some outgoing.”
Captain Vazquez, back from leave, took charge of the construction of the firebase perimeter. Vazquez did not model Ripcord after the division’s other firebases but after the border outposts he had helped build during his tours with the Special Forces. The average firebase had big sandbag-and-timber bunkers that stood out like road signs. In some cases, conex shipping containers were used, firing slits having been cut out with an acetylene torch. “There be no sandbagged bunkers on this firebase,” Vazquez informed his platoon leaders in his harsh Puerto Rican accent. “That is the way the Army does it, but when you see a sandbagged bunker, you’re looking at a death trap. On my firebase, we have fighting positions—we don’t have no sandbags stacked up so the gooks know where to shoot.”
Instead of bunkers, Vazquez had his men dig L-shaped fighting positions amid the tree stumps around the perimeter. Each was home to a three-man fire team. The fighting leg, a grenade sump at one end, allowed the whole team to stand shoulder to shoulder and fire down into the wire. At night, two men could stretch out on air mattresses in the sleeping leg while the third member of the team took his turn outside on guard. The fighting leg was open. The sleeping leg was covered by sandbags and runway matting—PSP, officially, for pierced steel planking—to absorb mortar fire. The sandbags and runway matting were, in turn, covered with earth so as to blend into the bald hillside. “When we ran security patrols around Ripcord,” noted Lieutenant Campbell of Charlie Two, “you couldn’t see a single fighting position when you looked back up the hill. Nothing was above ground level.”
The defensive wire wasn’t by the book, either. “Lieutenant Campbell, there be no gook get through my wire,” Vazquez said, putting the platoon leader in charge of the wire-laying detail. “Every other unit pulled out two spools of concertina side by side like a pair of slinkies,” said Campbell, “threw a third spool on top, and said they had wire out there. Bullshit.” Vazquez required multiple rings of the triple-stacked concertina, all of it tightly secured so a sapper couldn’t wiggle between the loops, with additional concertina mashed into the folds of the earth underneath and held down with crisscrossing strands of barbed wire. It was an old Special Forces trick. The beauty of it, noted a squad leader, was “if sappers blew holes in the wire on top with bangalore torpedoes, the concertina underneath, being really resilient, would pop back up, so they would’ve just created another barrier for themselves.”
In addition to the massive amounts of concertina, Vazquez also requisitioned hog-wire fencing. Each section consisted of metal rods in a metal frame the size of a door. “You never saw it on conventional firebases,” noted Campbell. “To stand up, it had to be anchored in a trench, but digging in that rocky, uneven ground was murder. We were laying wire and clearing fields of fire from morning till night for a month,” Campbell continued. “Vazquez was merciless. There were no breaks to get out of the sun because the base had to be made defensible before the enemy could mass for an attack. The troops were just brutalized. I had men come up to me, saying, ‘L. T., I’m begging you, let me go out on the RIF today.’”
When finished, the briar patch of wire ringing the firebase was fifty meters wide. Two trails leading downhill through it were closed at night with wire barriers. “It would’ve taken the NVA thirty minutes to get through all that stuff with bolt cutters in broad daylight,” Campbell asserted. With wry bravado, the troops began to refer to the seemingly invulnerable firebase as Cheeseburger Hill.
Vazquez and his lieutenants took turns scanning the slopes at night with a starlight scope. The wire was studded with hundreds upon hundreds of trip flares and claymores, the detonating wires of the mines carefully covered with dirt. Each fighting position had in front of it a fifty-five-gallon drum of thickened fuel known as phougas. The phougas barrels could be ignited by firing the claymore behind each, which splashed burning fuel into the wire. Vazquez came up with another use for the thickened fuel. “Vazquez had us take the metal canisters that mortar and artillery rounds were delivered in, and bury them in the ground a little ways, upside down,” noted Campbell. “The bottom of each would hold an inch or two of thickened fuel. After burying it, you tied a trip flare to a stick so that it pointed down at the canister, then ran the trip wire back to your fighting position. If you got hit at night, you pulled the wire and the trip flare would ignite the fuel, providing illumination which lasted a lot longer than flares or illumination rounds. You know, we wanted off that damn firebase before we all dropped dead from exhaustion,” concluded Campbell, “but, man, I’d of given my left nut if the gooks would have hit the place while we were there. I believe we would have handed them their ass.”
Lucas had his operations center built on the eastern slope, near the top of the hill. The engineers bulldozed a trench a hundred feet long and four feet deep into which four steel conexes were placed. Two sat side by side at one end to be used as the TOC. Two more were at the other end—one for the battalion aid station, the other an ARVN CP. Steps led up from the TOC to the helipad that was leveled off in front of it, which, being used by Lucas and visitors from brigade and division, was called the VIP pad. The roof was layered with sandbags and runway matting. Ammo boxes, filled with earth and held in place with engineer stakes, protected the exposed front and sides of the conexes. The ammo boxes were in turn reinforced with an outer wall of sandbags, which neatly joined the sandbagged roof. “We worked around the clock on the bunker, myself as a major filling sandbags alongside our RTOs,” said Koenigsbauer. “When we were finally finished, we had a TOC that we thought would stand up to anything—and which, in fact, did when the time came.”
The mortar section and the infantry company CP were dug in below the VIP pad. Captain Rich’s B/2-319th FA was positioned on top of the base, along with a small countermortar radar and a pair of 106mm recoilless rifles from E/2-506th. The base had two distinct levels. The 105s occupied the upper or southeastern tier, which was about the size of a football field. The 105’s ammunition supply point (ASP) was at the far end of the plateau, adjacent to the base supply conexes and the main logistical pad, where sling loads of beans, bullets, and bandages were daily delivered by Chinook.
The saddle between the southeastern tier and the lower and smaller northwestern tier was originally occupied by an ARVN 105 battery, which supported the South Vietnamese regiment operating near Coc Muen Mountain. When the South Vietnamese redeployed to FSB O’Reilly in late May, the ARVN CP was converted to a communications center, and the ARVN 105s were replaced by the 155 howitzers of Captain Baxendale’s A/2-11th Field Artillery.
The saddle rose to a gentle hump. The elephant-sized boulder atop it, a dominant landmark on the firebase, was nicknamed Impact Rock because of the splatter of white shrapnel scars it bore from one of the previous occupations of Ripcord. A secondary log pad was established on the lower tier, as was a POL (petroleum-oil-lubricant) pad with sandbagged blivets of JP4 aviation fuel for emergency helicopter refueling. Attached from corps, a four-barreled M55 .50-caliber machine-gun antiaircraft system known as a Quad-50 was positioned inside a sandbagged parapet adjacent to Impact Rock.
General Hennessey inspected Ripcord, walking down beyond the wire with Lucas and Vazquez to get a look at the hill from the enemy point of view. Hennessey, thinking he had found a blind spot, pointed out a gully to Campbell, who was laying wire with his troops. “You can’t see it,” Campbell said, “but there’s a claymore covering that gully. It’s right behind and tied to that empty sandbag lying there.” When Hennessey asked Hawkins to see his best fighting position, Hawkins led the general’s entourage to a fire-team leader known as Buffalo in charge of what had been dubbed The Electric Bunker. “The name was apt,” Hawkins wrote. “Not only was it wired to about twenty claymore mines, the detonators to which Buffalo could finger without looking, but it also had three phougas barrels. Additionally, and the brass weren’t exposed to this, the bunker drew electrical power from the firebase generators to light the interior. I didn’t have it that good in my own shelter.”
Those units operating around the firebase continued to make heavy contact as the monsoon petered out. First Lieutenant James W. Kwiecien was assigned to A/2-501st at that time. He boarded a resupply slick at Evans with several grunts returning to the field and was flown out to join his new company on the ridge running southeast from Hill 902. He didn’t make it. The Huey was flying low level down a valley toward the company headquarters and the platoon it was with when a rocket-propelled grenade suddenly exploded beneath the helicopter— Kwiecien could feel shrapnel thud into the metal floorboard under his feet—and the pilot poured on the power to get out of the area. Losing fuel, the Huey made an emergency landing on Granite, the reserve battalion’s new mountaintop firebase nine klicks east of Ripcord, and passengers and crew realized how lucky they’d been when they gathered to inspect the sieve of holes ripped in the underside of the Huey.
Unable to sleep that night, Kwiecien listened to the outgoing artillery and ruefully recalled that his biggest concern upon arriving in-country a week earlier had been that, with the war winding down, he might not earn a CIB, the coveted Combat Infantryman Badge.
Jim Kwiecien, age twenty-three, product of working-class Chicago and a Catholic education from grade school through college, had been considering a military career since signing up for ROTC at Loyola University. Whether he stayed in or not— eventually he would decide not to—he took duty and patriotism seriously. He was, in sum, a true believer who had volunteered for Vietnam, though he considered the war a lost cause, because “I felt that I had to put my body where my mouth was.”
Kwiecien need not have worried about the withdrawals. There was still plenty of war left where he was going. The new lieutenant had no sooner joined the company headquarters the day after his first aborted attempt and met Capt. James E. Mitchell, the steady, confidence-inspiring CO of Company A, than the outfit’s separated platoons CA’d into a little hole-in-the-jungle LZ from which they could support B/2-501st. Company B had of late been ambushing and killing NVA at a trail intersection on a hill situated along the ridge three klicks down from the top of 902. “We moved off the LZ and I spent my first night in the field,” wrote Kwiecien. “The next morning, the sounds of a not-so-distant firefight awoke us. Bravo Company was getting hit on their hill. We saddled up and moved to join them.” The enemy, repelled, left two bodies; Company B lost one dead, twelve wounded. “When we arrived,” Kwiecien continued, “their commanding officer was standing there, wearing a ranger patrol hat, bringing in air strikes on a knoll a few hundred meters from the hill. The jets would roll in, drop their ordnance, and, in return, there would be the sound of a single AK-47. The enemy soldier shooting at the jets popped a green smoke grenade, an effort to confuse the pilots about who was where in the jungle.”
Bravo Company moved down the ridge to the east, leaving Captain Mitchell’s outfit, known infamously as Hard Luck Alpha, in possession of the hill. Events soon confirmed the nickname. During the company’s second day in position, April 18, it was mortared, then toward dusk one of its platoons, Alpha Two, was ambushed crossing a gorge on the southern slope of the ridge. Two men were killed, two wounded. Mitchell sent Kwiecien to take over Alpha Two from its acting platoon leader—a shake ’n bake E6 who normally served as platoon sergeant—as it set up on a subhill below the main company NDP. “One of the KIAs was well-liked, a family man, and his death really did a job on the platoon. The men were seriously rattled,” wrote Kwiecien, who had hoped to rely on his platoon sergeant until he got his bearings. The young E6, however, had greeted him with, “I’m glad you’re here, sir. I’m an 11C, mortars—I don’t know anything about this infantry stuff.”
Kwiecien was not sure how much he knew himself. “I’m flat-out jealous of the platoon leaders who fought in our other wars,” he would reflect. “They had a chance to get to know their men and train with them before they went into combat. We lieutenants in Vietnam, on the other hand, just got plunked down in the jungle, green as the vegetation around us, and were told to lead. . . .”
Captain Mitchell took the company down the side of the ridge the next day, April 19; the point platoon, Alpha One, came under fire from a bunker complex east of the ambush site, losing one KIA and five WIA. For Kwiecien, whose platoon was second in line, the day had already been ordeal enough. “I was in good shape,” he noted, “but nothing could prepare you for humping a ruck that weighed almost as much as you did up and down mountains as rugged as the Rockies in 110-degree heat with 90 percent humidity. . . .”
At Mitchell’s direction, Lieutenant Kwiecien moved his platoon forward along a trail as automatic-weapons fire reverberated under the canopy. Kwiecien was coming down the trail himself when an unseen NVA took three quick shots at him from the trees to his left. “Within a second or two, I located the source of fire, asked myself why someone was trying to kill me since I had never done anything to him,” Kwiecien wrote of his baptism by fire as an infantryman, “answered myself that I was out there trying to kill him so he had a right to try to kill me, dropped to one knee, and returned fire. The shooting from that direction stopped.”
Shortly thereafter, the platoon radioman took a round through his cheek, splattering Kwiecien across the face and chest with blood and gobs of flesh. The contact began late in the day. By the time Alpha Three moved up to help Alpha One and Two pull back—the ARA called in had not silenced the enemy—it was getting dark. “We couldn’t fully break contact,” wrote Kwiecien, “but the fighting did taper off as our elements moved back from the bunkers. When night fell, we were in a horrible position to defend and would have been in serious trouble had they decided to come after us. The medevacs came in by the light of the strobes we used to mark our position. It was surreal, like an imagined scene from hell. . . .”
The action continued two more days. There were more casualties, more close calls, including an incident in which a short 105mm WP shell landed within fifteen feet of where Kwiecien was conferring with his squad leaders. “The shell was defective,” he noted with relief. “It just split and burned without actually bursting the way it should have. If it had, we would have been fried. . . .”
The bunker complex was not secured until the air force hit it with Daisy Cutters, devastating 15,000-pound bombs normally used to blast landing zones out of the rain forest, on April 21. What had been lush jungle now resembled the surface of the moon. Blood was splattered against some of the shattered tree trunks. “It was a real emotional event to finally take the bunker complex,” wrote Lieutenant Kwiecien. There was a flip side to the elation of victory. “At some point during the battle, I realized that there was no way I was going to survive my tour. You simply could not go through this day after day without getting seriously hurt or killed. . . .”
Hard Luck Alpha returned to the top of its hill. As if in pay-back for the destruction of the bunker complex, the enemy hit the NDP that night. The attack began three and a half hours after midnight on April 23. There was a ferocious exchange of fire, then a lull as the sky began to lighten. “With all the smoke in the air, everything looked very red,” noted Kwiecien. The lull ended when an RPG suddenly whooshed in, and a trooper shrieked as he lay dying, “I’m hit, I’m hit—my God, they blew my legs off.”
It was close, but the NVA were again pushed back, leaving seven bodies in exchange for the one friendly KIA and eleven WIA. Kwiecien had been told in training that there is a tendency to fire your weapon high at night. “Our people were good, though,” he wrote. “They kept their fire low, and when it was over we found several dead dinks with their feet shot off at the ankles. Another very young enemy soldier had been hit by the blast from a claymore mine. It had blown his uniform off and he was hanging, dead and naked, with his arms outstretched, from a tree. He looked like Christ on the Cross.”
Hard Luck Alpha finally humped off the hill after being relieved by Charlie Company. The embattled position became known as Re-Up Hill, after the numerous survivors who subsequently reenlisted to get out of the field. “Officers didn’t have any choice, of course, but I don’t think any of us who stayed were critical of those who decided to take that way out,” wrote Kwiecien. “You just did what you felt you had to to survive, and if that meant re-upping, so be it.”
There had been a similar wave of reenlistments, incidentally, in the 2-506th Infantry after the original battle to take FSB Ripcord.
Following a drunken respite at Eagle Beach, Captain Mitchell and A/2-501st took over the perimeter at FSB Granite. The firebase had been penetrated by sappers a month earlier. Intelligence presently predicted another attack, and Hard Luck Alpha waited for it in a state of benumbed calm. “We just accepted the fact that they were coming and there was nothing we could do about it until they got there,” explained Kwiecien. “Looking back on it, our attitude seems strange since our company strength at that point was in the low thirties at most. There were so few of us that troops from the battalion mortar platoon were attached as reinforcements.”
After four nights of waiting, the attack began two hours before midnight on April 29, 1970. “There was some confusion when the shooting started on the other side of the perimeter,” wrote Kwiecien, “but the word spread quickly: ‘Dinks in the wire.’ ”
The new battalion commander, Lt. Col. Otis W. “O. T.” Livingston, a rawboned, old soldier from Columbia, South Carolina, who had fought as a platoon leader in Korea, jumped into a foxhole himself and opened fire with his M16. Most of the sappers leading the attack died in the wire as Alpha Company raked it with fire and detonated its claymores and phougas. According to a prisoner taken the next morning, the supporting U. S. artillery fire killed the enemy assault commander and broke up the two infantry battalions standing ready to follow the sappers in.
It was a long night, nonetheless; a handful of sappers, smeared with charcoal and naked except for loincloths, had managed to penetrate the perimeter. They intended to do as much damage as possible before being killed, and there were intense little melees as each sapper was eliminated with grenades and M16s. Eighteen enemy bodies were counted at dawn, but the defenders of Granite lost seven WIA and seven KIA, as well as an infantryman who was blown to bits and listed as MIA.
Livingston’s exec and sergeant major, along with numerous others who were getting the perimeter reorganized, were wounded when the enemy mortared the log pad at the approach of a Huey. Kwiecien and his shake ’n bake platoon sergeant were among those hit. “A medevac came in and some of us got on,” recalled Kwiecien, who had a piece of shrapnel in his back that would keep him in the rear for three weeks. “The chopper drew more mortar fire, so it went around, touched down again, immediately took off so the mortar rounds could land, then darted in and picked up the rest of the wounded before the enemy could put another salvo in the air. The pilot really did a nice job of faking the dinks out.”
As reinforcements arrived, “the firebase was completely socked in,” recalled 1st Lt. Blair Case, FO, A/1-506th, which walked onto Granite that morning. Chinooks with sling loads of ammunition followed the Rao Trang River to get in under the low clouds, then swung north toward Granite. “Once they reached the base of the mountain with Granite on top,” Case wrote, painting a surrealistic scene, “a soldier with a radio stood on the edge of the firebase and ‘talked’ them up through the clouds. We could hear but not see them far below us, then, eventually, the rotor blades, engine housings, and fuselages would appear through the fog. The enemy dead were hooked under one of the Chinooks in a cargo net and dropped along the path of the retreating North Vietnamese.”
The scene of battle abruptly shifted. Colonel Bradley had previously been tasked to support one of the joint operations periodically launched to disrupt enemy infiltration past Khe Sanh in northwestern Quang Tri Province. The ARVN were to provide the ground troops, and the Screaming Eagles were to secure a firebase to provide artillery support. Bradley used a company attached from another brigade to reopen a debris-strewn Marine base named Henderson. Behind the attached company came an ARVN 105 battery, the 155s of B/2-11th FA, and a regimental TOC from the 1st ARVN Infantry Division, which took control of the South Vietnamese units combat-assaulting into the hills west of Firebase Henderson.
The attached company spent five days patrolling the unfamiliar and unsecured area around Henderson and preparing as time permitted defensive positions on the firebase itself until relieved by Captain Mitchell and A/2-501st on the morning of May 5. The battalion recon platoon under 1st Lt. Richard A. Hawley, Jr., arrived late that afternoon. Company A had been brought back to strength with about sixty replacements, and the idea was to let Mitchell integrate them with the battered veterans of Re-Up Hill and Firebase Granite in what was considered a relatively quiet AO.
Hard Luck Alpha never got that chance. It took the company all day to establish its positions and set up its claymores. There was no time to make use of the concertina wire that had been flown in, or to clear fields of fire in the brush growing right up to the edge of the wire barriers begun by the attached company. No security patrols were run, no listening posts deployed. Taking advantage of the situation, sappers, concealed by the heavy ground fog that shrouded the base that night, cut two paths through the flimsy perimeter wire. Behind the sappers came NVA assault troops. With a crash of AK-47 and RPG fire that shocked everyone awake, they darted into Henderson an hour before dawn on May 6, 1970.
The enemy moved swiftly and ruthlessly, one prong of the attack homing in on the A/2-501st CP and the ARVN TOC, the other the 155 parapets and the ammo-fuel storage area directly behind Hawley’s recon platoon. “Many of the big guns were destroyed by satchel charges, some with barrels peeled back like bananas,” it was later reported. One of the attackers cut loose in the dark with a Soviet-made flamethrower, torching a hapless infantryman who “ran off the hill screaming. He was never seen again. . . .”
Either the flamethrower or a satchel charge ignited a fuel fire, which, in turn, detonated the ammunition in the storage area in a titanic blast. At the heart of the explosion were a thousand 155mm shells belonging to B/2-11th FA. The brigade after-action report implies that the ammo had not been properly entrenched with overhead cover, a not uncommon problem on new firebases as shells were delivered faster than revetments could be built. Turner recalls, however, that the U. S. ammo had been revetted; the inferno started because of exposed ARVN ammunition. Bradley would concur, writing: “Turner and I had observed ammo supply pallets sitting in the open adjacent to the ARVN 105 positions as we flew over the firebase two days prior to the sapper attack. All exhortations to the senior ARVN commander and his U. S. advisors to revet the ammo or ‘shoot it up’ fell on deaf ears as Mitchell’s troops reported exposed ammo when they occupied their defensive positions.” Turner added: “Colonel Bradley was just livid because if they had revetted the ammo as instructed, one satchel charge wouldn’t have ended up destroying most of the firebase.”
Most of the recon troops were killed in the ammo explosion, as was their platoon leader, Lieutenant Hawley, the “goat” of the USMA Class of ’68. The devastation was so complete, the survivors were so shell-shocked, that when the enemy withdrew before first light, many ambled away at sling arms. Some of the overconfident NVA were picked off by infantrymen who were still functioning.
Livingston landed that morning with B/2-501st, even as ammo continued to cook off and the base was subjected to mortar and recoilless-rifle fire. There had been twenty-five U. S. and three ARVN KIAs and, between the two forces, fifty-five WIA. Given that the enemy had time to carry away their casualties, only twenty-nine NVA bodies were accounted for on and around FSB Henderson.
Colonel Bradley choppered in shortly after Livingston with Major Turner and Captain Hopkins, his fire-support coordinator, and Sgt. Maj. Raymond L. Long, the brigade sergeant major, only to have a mortar round explode behind his command group as it dashed from the LZ to the ARVN TOC. “As we got to the bunker, Sergeant Major Long stepped aside at the entrance to let me go in first,” recounted Turner. “As I moved past Long, I grabbed his left arm to pull him into the bunker. Hopkins was close behind me. At that instant, the mortar round hit slightly to the rear. Long went down like a polled bull. Hopkins and I were blown into the bunker, Hopkins on top of me. He had been hit in the legs and buttocks while I got only a few slivers in the neck and face.” Turner crawled back out of the bunker, pulled Long inside, “and tried to revive him without success. He had been hit in the base of the skull by a small sliver from that damn mortar round. He died in my arms. . . .” 1
The enemy kept up the pressure. The next major action involved 1st Lt. Donald R. Workman’s company, D/1-506th, after it combat-assaulted onto the site of an old firebase, Maureen, seven klicks south of Granite. The three platoons moved off the hill in three different directions, the 2d Platoon under 1st Lt. Lawrence E. Fletcher returning to Maureen to set up an NDP in the middle of the abandoned firebase after heavy contact with the NVA below the hilltop on May 5. Fletcher spent the next day, May 6, on patrol. Running out of daylight before a new night defensive position could be found, Fletcher opted to return to Maureen. The sappers who crept up the hill that night infiltrated the perimeter without detection, and when the satchel charges began exploding—the attack started shortly before dawn on May 7—Fletcher and his radioman were the first to be killed. The platoon sergeant was also killed. The platoon’s brand-new medic, Pfc. Kenneth M. Kays, a reluctant soldier—denied conscientious-objector status, he’d fled to Canada when drafted, returning only when the army guaranteed him service as a medic—was running across the perimeter to reach the wounded men screaming for help when a satchel charge blew his left leg off below the knee. Not realizing what had happened to him, Kays jumped back up, only to fall head over heels when he tried to keep running and his left foot wasn’t there to support him. He secured a tourniquet to the stump, then dragged himself from casualty to casualty, shielding these men he barely knew with his own body as he treated them. The platoon lost six dead and twelve wounded. The half-dozen able-bodied survivors frantically threw grenades at the enemy to their front and fired behind them at those inside the perimeter.
Leaving four bodies, the sappers pulled back at first light as Workman and the platoon that his command group was accompanying arrived, having been delayed by an ambush en route. Kays was found on the side of the hill, weak from loss of blood as he huddled beside the soldier he had left the perimeter to reach after the man had been blasted down the hill. For such dedication, Kays would be awarded the Medal of Honor.2
Next, during the night of May 28–29, the NVA tried to penetrate FSB O’Reilly but, caught in the wire after one of the approaching enemy triggered a trip flare, were chopped to pieces by the Cobras that methodically rolled in under the light of an orbiting flareship. Three ARVN were killed and fifteen wounded, light losses compared to the official body count of seventy-seven enemy—two NVA were also taken prisoner— and the capture of two Chinese radios, three Soviet flamethrowers, eight RPG launchers, and twenty-nine AK-47s.
The attack on Granite had been visible in the night sky to the troops on Ripcord, who expected to be hit themselves. It hadn’t happened by the time Captain Williams and Company B relieved Company C on rainy, muddy, miserable Ripcord on May 14. Williams had no sooner gotten his company into position than Lieutenant Delgado reported that one of his men had been injured. The circumstances were a sign of the times. The problem was a trooper from Company C who had missed the combat assault back to the bush. “It was a black guy,” said Williams. “He holed up in a fighting position with some of my black soldiers, got stoned, and decided to throw a grenade. He didn’t throw it very far, and shrapnel hit one of my men, a very good man, in the leg.”
After checking the injured soldier, Captain Williams stormed down to the position where the frag-happy malingerer was ensconced, and shouted, “Come out of there, boy.” It was the wrong word to use in the time of Black Power. “He came out of there like a mad badger,” recalled Williams, “and went into a furious tirade. Delgado reminded him that he was talking to a captain, and he said he didn’t care who he was talking to, I was just a white honkey motherfucker.” When the malingerer threatened Williams’s life, the captain went to report the situation to Lucas and was instructed to use as much force as necessary to bring the out-of-control trooper to the TOC. Williams did, informing the malingerer that if he tried anything he would be shot dead on the spot by the sergeant whom Williams had picked to stand ready at his side with an M16. It was obvious that the sergeant would have relished shooting him. “With that, his whole attitude changed and he timidly marched up to the TOC,” noted Williams. “I guess he got what he wanted because Lucas had him helicoptered to Camp Evans and thrown in the stockade. He got sent to the rear. He got out of there.”
There soon followed another bizarre incident. Company B’s fighting positions on the perimeter were shelled several evenings in a row, right at sundown, by someone firing a grenade launcher from inside Ripcord. The source could not be identified because the fire always stopped after two or three rounds. The grunts surmised that it was coming from a pot-smoking support trooper, and they called the phantom the Mad 79er. Finally, one of Company B’s most popular soldiers, a little Italian guy who owned a barbershop back home—when he gave haircuts on an old ammo crate, taking the time to do it right, he made many guys feel as though they were human again for the first time since they’d been drafted—was wounded by the friendly fire. “I got a bunch of people together the next night,” said Williams. “Everyone took their rank off, and we just had flak jackets, no shirts, plus our steel pots and weapons, and we sat outside and waited for the guy with the grenade launcher to start shooting. There was going to be no quarter. That sort of low-life bastard didn’t deserve any. Evidently, the word got around because there was no M79 fire that night or any other night thereafter.”
There were many nights when noises were heard in the wire or the ground radar detected movement. Company B would lob frags and M79 fire down the hill while the 81mm crews dropped in some HE. At odd times during the night, even when all was quiet, there would be so-called Mad Minutes in which every available rifleman, machine gunner, and grenadier would cut loose for sixty seconds to deter infiltrators. “[T]here are beaucoup gooks all around,” Sergeant Tolson wrote home in a letter dated June 5. “Three days in a row now we found tracks just outside our wire . . . Last night the guy in the hole next to mine was looking through his starlight scope . . . and he saw a gook on his stomach right at the wire.” The mortars coincidentally put up some illum at that time. The flares released by illumination rounds make a popping sound before igniting. “As soon as the round popped,” Tolson continued, “the gook got up and ran behind a big rock. About the time he got up to run, the guy next to me opened up for all he was worth, guys were shooting and throwing hand grenades, but this morning when they went down and checked it out it was the same old story, just tracks. . . .”
Captured documents spoke of numerous sappers being killed while attempting to breach the wire at Ripcord. Sergeant Tolson’s letter made reference to two NVA, captured after a firefight with another company, who “said that they have been sending people up to the wire to find an easy way to get in and so far they haven’t found it. One of the prisoners said that they were at the bottom of the hill that the firebase is on and before they could do anything they had 20 dead out of his company due to close in mortar and artillery fire that is shot all night just to keep the gooks away.”
The hard days of laying wire continued. With all the vegetation having been cut down, the firebase was blisteringly hot when the monsoon finally blew over. “The only bright spot was if we’d gotten mail on the resupply bird,” noted Sergeant Rubsam of Bravo One. “We’d go inside our little bunkers at the end of the day, and burn the wax wrappings off mortar rounds to read them by at night. It really stank up the place, but it relaxed you to read about home.”
Entertainment was provided on a nightly basis by U. S. Air Force C-47 Spooky gunships—also known as Puff the Magic Dragon—which could be seen circling to the south, pouring streams of red minigun fire into enemy truck convoys and antiaircraft sites in the A Shau Valley. There was an air force directional beacon and a Marine tactical aircraft antenna on Ripcord, “and we ran both fighter-bombers and B-52s into the A Shau and the Warehouse Area,” noted Koenigsbauer. “There was no question in our minds that between the air power we were bringing in and our own ground operations, which were uncovering the caves and bunkers the enemy used to shield themselves from artillery and air attacks, we were seriously disrupting the enemy’s ability to resupply their units in the coastal plains. We were definitely an obstacle to their plans—a thorn, in hindsight, that they were going to remove at any cost.”