The Magnificent Bastards (10 page)

Sergeant Joe N. Jones, a huge black man and second-tour professional, was the platoon sergeant of Hotel Three. Jones took command when Taylor was wounded; he described the action as follows when interviewed three weeks later by the division historical section:

“It was so fucking confusing” was how Staff Sergeant Ward put it. So much so that just before Lieutenant Prescott gave the word to U-turn and mop up, he and Lieutenant Gibson, the FO, actually got ahead of their assault line. At that point, an NVA wearing a bush hat and light green fatigues
popped up about twenty feet away. He disappeared back into the ville’s overgrown vegetation when Prescott started firing his .45 at him. He was the only live NVA that Prescott saw.

The village gave way to open paddies leading south to An Lac and west to Dai Do, where Foxtrot was engaged in a furious firefight of its own. When Prescott reached the edge of the ville, not knowing what was waiting for them out there, he told his group to back up.

Lieutenant Gibson, who was only three feet behind Prescott, suddenly dropped as they turned back. He had been shot in the forehead, presumably by an NVA sniper who saw his radioman beside him and figured he was an officer. Gibson had been in Vietnam just ten days.

Lieutenant Prescott radioed Williams that they had secured the recoilless rifle, then requested permission to pull back and consolidate. Hotel Company set up a tight 180 against the tributary running past Dong Huan where die footbridge connected them with Bac Vong. “Lieutenant Prescott really had a head on his shoulders in putting the unit back together, and calming everybody down,” recalled radioman Barnes of his new company commander. At the creekside medevac point, Prescott was surrounded by bedlam. On one side of him was a crying, nearly hysterical corpsman who couldn’t believe that his best friend, Bucky McPherson, was dead. On the other side another corpsman screamed that Sergeant Enedy was gray faced from loss of blood and that he was holding in his intestines as they slipped through his gut wound.

“We gotta get him outta here, Lieutenant!” the corpsman shouted. “We gotta get him out—he’s dying, he’s dying!”

“Put him on the ground,” Prescott answered. “Hold him. We’re doing what we can, we’re trying to get medevacs in.”

No helicopters could land. The NVA had begun lobbing sporadic artillery fire into the area, and there was a near-constant rain of USMC artillery in support of Foxtrot Company in Dai Do. Prescott had to rely instead on the battalion’s fourteen-foot fire-team assault boats, better known as skimmers, which were made of fiberglass and had thirty-five-horsepower outboard motors. At about 1530, several of them
came upriver from the BLT CP to shuttle back Hotel’s thirty or so wounded, and to bring forward wooden, rope-handled boxes of ammunition and grenades.

Meanwhile, amid this hurry-hurry-hurry, life-and-death scene at the medevac point, Lieutenant Prescott was stunned to see Colonel Hull, the 3d Marines CO, approaching with his operations officer, sergeant major, and radioman. Fire Raider 6, as Hull was known on the radio, was a real Old Corps warrior. He had taken a skimmer of his own straight from Camp Kistler to Dong Huan. The colonel walked up to Prescott and began questioning him about the fight. Prescott was too busy to answer. “Excuse me, but I don’t have time for this, sir,” he told the colonel. “I got other things to do.”

Lieutenant Prescott, always an irreverent sort, operated under the philosophy of What are they going to do? Shave my head and send me to Vietnam? Major Murphy, the regimental S3, didn’t appreciate Prescott’s offhand dismissal, and glared at him. “Lieutenant, do you know who you’re talking to?” Murphy asked.

“Major, I don’t care
who
I’m talking to right now. I got a company to run here—you’ll have to excuse me.”

Colonel Hull, who was squat, gray haired, and bulldog faced, stepped between them. “That’s all right, son,” he said, “you just go ahead and do your job. Where can we help?”

“You can help me get these wounded out,” Prescott replied. With that, Hull and Murphy picked up a wounded Marine by his arms and legs and hustled him down to a skimmer.

Captain Williams was loaded into a skimmer, too. Williams, crammed in with five or six other wounded Marines for the top-speed, fifteen-minute ride to Mai Xa Chanh West, later wrote, “the bottom of the boat was completely covered with blood to the depth of several inches in some places. I remember it sloshing around in the boat as we sped across the water. I remember a discarded canteen actually floating in blood.”

The flat-bottomed skimmers brought the casualties to the beach at Mai Xa Chanh West. There, the BLT’s two Navy surgeons and several corpsmen determined their priority for
evacuation—routine, priority, or emergency—by the Sea Horses of HMM-362, which were making round-robin flights between the beach and the USS
Iwo Jima
. The helicopters were lowered one at a time by elevator to the below-deck hangar, where they were met by corpsmen who conducted a second triage, then carried the casualties’ litters to the ship’s below-deck surgery. Each chopper was announced over the ship’s public address system with a chilling monotone: “Medevacs inbound.…Medevacs inbound.…”

Second Lieutenant Bayard V. “Vic” Taylor, the exec of H BLT 2/4, was filled with helpless rage as he began recognizing the faces of men from his company among the casualties. Taylor had recently given up Hotel One to replace Prescott, who was supposed to move to the S3 shop in a couple of days. Taylor had made an admin run to the
Iwo Jima
that morning to pick up the company payroll. He was a real field Marine and he thought he should have been out there, but all he could do at the moment was walk over to where the KIAs had been unloaded. They were laid out of the way to one side of the hangar, and Taylor and their tough little company first sergeant, 1st Sgt. Clifford Martin, knelt beside each poncho-wrapped body to formally identify them. There were three from Dong Huan.

Second Lieutenant Gibson, the twenty-two-year-old FO from Radford, Virginia, had been a short, stocky, muscular, and very bright young man with a dark mustache. He had been polite, quiet, and unassuming—like most second lieutenants joining a battle-seasoned outfit. He had gotten married about a month before shipping out for Vietnam.

Sergeant Enedy, also twenty-two, of San Diego, California, had been alive when they put him in the skimmer, but he died en route to the ship. He’d been a short, dumpy, humorous little guy, perpetually unshaven, with dark blond hair and a mustache. He’d also been a tough field Marine, and the squad he’d honchoed through countless patrols and firefights took his death hard.

Lance Corporal McPherson, a nineteen-year-old native of Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, had been a lean, handsome, talkative
kid from a single-parent home. He’d been the 3.5-inch rocket squad leader in Lieutenant Taylor’s old platoon, and the cord was pulling tight in Taylor’s gut as he folded back Bucky McPherson’s poncho shroud. Only four days earlier McPherson had told him that he kind of liked this Marine Corps and that after he got out, he wanted to go to college and come back as an officer. McPherson had been shot up badly and the sun had started to turn him black. The only way Taylor could positively identify him was by his USMC bulldog tattoo.

“Medevacs inbound.…Medevacs inbound.…”

Lieutenant Taylor saw Captain Williams in the next load. The skipper, lying on a stretcher and waiting his turn on the hangar deck, was arguing with the corpsman kneeling beside him. Per standard operating procedure (SOP), the sailor wanted to put Williams’s weapon, ammo, and gear on the growing pile off to one side of the hangar bay. The problem was that although the field corpsmen were trustworthy, their shipboard, noncombat counterparts had a reputation for looting gear and personal items from the anonymous piles of casualty discards.

So, his adrenaline still pumping, Williams shouted, “You’re not taking my forty-five!”

“Sir, I’ve
got
to take your forty-five.”

“Like hell! I’ll turn my forty-five over to a
Marine
—I’m not going to give it to any fucking Navy man in the rear!”

First Sergeant Martin waved the corpsman away and took the pistol from Williams. The captain, still energized, shouted to Taylor and Martin from his stretcher about how the company had attacked across four hundred meters of open ground and annihilated the enemy dug in before them. “Boy, you should have been there, you should have been there! They weren’t going to let anything stand in their way!”

Piecemealed

B
Y
L
ATE
A
FTERNOON ON
30 A
PRIL
1968,
THE ASSAULT BY
H BLT 2/4 on Dong Huan was over, but F BLT 2/4 was heavily engaged in Dai Do. At the same time, a company placed opcon to the battalion, B/l/3, came under heavy fire in An Lac. The battlefield resembled an open-topped, bluelined horseshoe some two kilometers in depth and a klick wide. Framed by one unnamed tributary to the east and another to the west, and with the Bo Dieu River as the southern edge, it contained five evacuated hamlets. Dong Huan was situated at the eastern edge and An Lac at the southern, with Dai Do snug against the western tributary. Dinh To and Thuong Do sat along the same creek north of Dai Do. This horseshoe had been an ARVN TAOR. With the ARVN redeployed to the Dong Ha area, BLT 2/4 had been given the mission of clearing the horseshoe. Lieutenant Colonel Weise requested via regiment that the 3d Marine Division approve a boundary change to annex the battle area to the BLT 2/4 TAOR. Weise was adamant (“We wanted to be able to fire and maneuver with a free hand”), and he commented about the several hours of delay before the shift was finally ordered: “It shouldn’t have taken that long, but that’s the way it was when you were dealing with the ARVN. On previous joint operations we had tried to get artillery fire missions and air strikes cleared through
ARVN fire support coordination centers, and you may as well be assuming a twelve-hour delay for something that should take half an hour. They were very slow with coordination, and I knew damn well that I wasn’t going to commit any of my troops in their area unless I had operation control of it.”

A Toehold in Dai Do

W
ELL, LOOKING BACK, EVERY TIME WE’VE HAD A NEW
second lieutenant we’ve really had a good initiation for him,” the seasoned lieutenant had told the new one with matter-of-fact humor when asked about the outfit and the area. The seasoned lieutenant had gone on to say that “some of those guys didn’t survive their baptism of fire.”

The new lieutenant, 2d Lt. David K. McAdams, thought of that observation as he got his platoon, Foxtrot One, onto the amtracs that had arrived late in the morning of 30 April 1968 to move F BLT 2/4 from Mai Xa Chanh East to Dai Do. McAdams had been in Vietnam for six days and in command of this platoon, his first, for two. His mouth was dry. His adrenaline was pumping. He was not alone. A young Marine from the other platoon boarding the amtracs claimed that his jungle rot was so bad he ought to be medevacked back to the ship. McAdams watched as the seasoned officer who had spoken with him, 1st Lt. James Wainwright, the company exec, told the balking Marine to get his ass in gear. Wainwright was the most experienced officer in the company. He had been a correctional officer in civilian life, and was older than the average lieutenant. His black hair was flecked with gray, and he
was a tough, gruff, chunky little man with heavy jowls, a black mustache, and perpetual five o’clock shadow.