The Magnificent Bastards (12 page)

Weise was sure of at least one direct hit by the Monitor. When the NVA artillery cranked up, he brought his binoculars up for another look at two Vietnamese sampans about two hundred meters upriver. The people on board wore fisherman’s garb, and the southern shore of the Bo Dieu was, in fact, populated. But Weise did not think they were villagers. Presumably, civilians would have headed for shore when the first round hit the water. Weise suspected that they were NVA artillery spotters with a radio aboard one of the sampans. Taking no chances, he instructed the gunboat commander to swing his 20mm cannons around. The rapidly firing guns blew the sampans apart.

It was at about that time (1530) that Colonel Hull boarded the Monitor. Weise wrote that although “the enemy had been firing at everything that moved on the water,” the regimental commander “seemed unimpressed by his own daring dash up the river or by the artillery and mortar rounds exploding around us. He had already been ashore to visit Hotel Company.”
¹

Colonel Hull and Lieutenant Colonel Weise discussed the situation. Hotel Company had just pushed a large number of NVA out of Dong Huan, and Foxtrot was pinned down by another large force in Dai Do. There were also an undetermined number of NVA in An Lac. Though Hull had given Weise permission to reinforce with Golf Company, helicopters had not yet been made available to move it from Lam Xuan
West. Echo Company was opcon to division at the Dong Ha bridge, a situation Weise hoped Hull could remedy. “I don’t have any more troops,” he told the regimental commander. “I want to get Echo Company.”

“I’m working on Echo Company,” replied Hull. “Division said they would probably release them, but they weren’t sure about it.”

Weise then made his first personal request for what Major Warren had been raising cain about via radio: “You know, we could
really
use some tanks and Ontos. We could also use a hell of a lot more close air support.”

Hull said he would work on it. In the meantime, the pressure was on to reopen the river. He told Weise that he was giving him opcon of B/1/3, commanded by 1st Lt. George C. Norris, which was currently in the battalion base camp at Giao Liem on the populated southern side of the Cua Viet River. Giao Liem was three klicks due south of Mai Xa Chanh West, along a Cua Viet tributary. Like BLT 2/4, 1/3 was resupplied by Mike boats from Camp Kistler. A platoon of amtracs was to be made available to carry B/1/3 up the Bo Dieu to the western edge of An Lac, which was on the north shore about seven hundred meters southeast of Dai Do. That would put B/1/3 in a position to assault Dai Do from the south after clearing An Lac, thus taking the pressure off Foxtrot’s pinned-down attack on the northern side.

Lieutenant Norris, marching to a point outside Giao Liem to meet the amtracs, came up on the BLT 2/4 net at about 1550. Weise had worked with Norris during Operation Task Force Kilo (29 March-2 April 1968), a multibattalion push to the DMZ, and had been “very much impressed with die way he handled himself. He was a good combat leader and he ran a damn good company.” Weise briefed Norris via radio, and by 1625 the Monitor had pulled several hundred meters downriver from An Lac so it could support the landing by fire. Weise described the scene as follows:

Bravo 1/3 was pinned down in An Lac and reporting heavy casualties when Hull got back in his skimmer to return to his Camp Kistler CP. Weise thought the appearance of yet another NVA unit had made a believer out of Hull, and he stressed once more to him, “We’re in a world of hurt here. There’s a whole lot of bad guys and not many of us good guys.”

The regimental commander, however, did not release the Foxtrot platoon at My Loc, nor did he commit additional elements from 1/3 at Giao Liem. The latter option would have been judicious considering the shot-up condition of 1/3’s orphan company, Bravo, and the fact that things were quiet in
the Giao Liem TAOR. That Hull did not commit these elements indicated his wait-and-see frame of mind. Hull could not be sure that Weise was not simply up against three NVA platoons or companies in the three fortified hamlets. With only two infantry battalions, 1/3 and BLT 2/4, currently opcon to his regiment, Hull had reason to be prudent with his resources. BLT 2/4’s action in the horseshoe was already drawing resources away from the Jones Creek approach to the Cua Viet River, and Hull was not willing to invest the bulk of 1/3 in a battle he was not yet convinced would be the major one.

Weise had a real three-ring circus on his hands in Dong Huan, An Lac, and Dai Do, and every combat instinct he had told him to pile on with everything available. He was correct, but so was Colonel Hull. The NVA would shortly exploit the growing holes along Jones Creek, just as he feared. Hull would be forced to divide his resources between two simultaneous, large-scale enemy actions.

It was galling to the Marines to be on the defensive and literally outnumbered. Major Warren, interviewed three weeks after the event by the division historical section, put it this way:

There were other problems. The BLT’s attached tank platoon fielded only two tanks, and requests for additional tanks went unanswered by division. The BLT’s attached antitank platoon—which had five tracked Ontos vehicles, each equipped with six 106mm recoilless rifles—had previously been chopped to another command, and division failed to act
on requests to return it. “Too bad,” Weise wrote, “because the Cua Viet area was ideal country for tracked vehicles and we sorely missed the firepower of the thirty 106mm recoilless rifles of those light, highly mobile vehicles.” The BLTs attached 105mm artillery battery at the DHCB had likewise been chopped to the division’s artillery regiment. The battery was thus firing missions for other units within range of the DHCB, and the result, Warren would angrily report, was an “inefficiency of general support artillery in situations where continuous dedicated fire support is crucial to success on the battlefield.”

BLT 2/4 was not totally stripped of support, however. Weise could count on naval gunfire from the five-inch guns on the destroyers offshore, and from the eight-inchers of a cruiser. Weise wrote that “the ships loved to shoot,” and that their fire was “accurate, reliable, and, best of all, available when needed.”

Weise could also count on his attached 4.2-inch mortar battery, W/3/12, commanded by Capt. F. X. Conlon, which was located with the BLT CP at Mai Xa Chanh West. The four-deuce mortar was a highly lethal and accurate weapon, and Whiskey Battery did a superb job. The battery exec, 1st Lt. W. A. Sadler, was aboard ship when the battle began because his tour was actually over, but as he later wrote, he “scrounged some gear and hopped on an inbound helicopter. We flew just above the surface of the river. When I reached the CP, I ran straight to the battery position.” The four-deuces had been in action from the beginning, “firing three or four missions at the same time,” Sadler wrote. “It sounded like one continuous roar. We fired everything we had and were resupplied by helo in the middle of our position. Our Marines fired their mortars until the base plates had sunk out of sight. The guns were out of action for a very few minutes, just long enough to pull the base plates out and reset them.”

What was needed most was close air support, which was not provided in anywhere near the quantity necessary. “Somebody screwed up,” Weise said later. “They should have assigned
us priority. I was very, very unhappy then, and I’m still very unhappy about it.”

The big picture offered a partial explanation. Major General Tompkins, whose division had few reserves to spare, was being forced to feel two pulses at once: Simultaneous with BLT 2/4’s engagement was the ongoing Battle of Thon Cam Vu (29 April-1 May 1968) in the 9th Marines’ TAOR. Thon Cam Vu was only six kilometers west of Dai Do. The battle there involved the tanks of Task Force Robbie, the division reserve, and the infantrymen of 3/9. The latter lost 29 KIA and 115 WIA while reducing an NVA battalion. A body count of 66 was claimed by 3/9, but every jet and artillery round committed to Thon Cam Vu was one less for BLT 2/4. The 3d Marine Division was stretched to the point where its commanding general had to rob Peter to pay Paul. In effect, no echelon from battalion to regiment to division was fighting the way it wanted to. The situation produced a lot of hard feelings among the commanders involved.

The Marines of B/1/3, pinned down on the beach at An Lac, had most recently been engaged in a spectacular melee at Charlie 4, located where the DMZ met the South China Sea. It had been an intramural event. Charlie 4 was a seemingly impregnable strongpoint, and since Bravo Company was not required to stand watch during its first night there after weeks in the field, attitudes became relaxed. Lieutenant Norris ended up in a boozy game of blackjack in his bunker. When their big first sergeant turned into a nasty drunk and would not listen to the gunnery sergeant’s gentle suggestions to retire, the wiry little gunny jumped up and sucker-punched the topkick, knocking him cold. Norris was tight with the gunny but thought it only fair to jump him in response, and the fist-swinging brawl piled outside. It was then that a radioman with the company headquarters jumped atop the bunker with a grenade. He looked crazy—as though he was going to kill someone. It wasn’t funny anymore.

Lieutenant Norris succeeded in talking the man down before he pulled the pin. Norris and his quick-fisted gunny, GySgt.
Norman J. Doucette, realized then that the radioman was stoned. They were shocked. The use of marijuana by Marines was, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon; although generally smoked only in base camps, strongpoints, or village defensive positions, its presence explained to Doucette why he’d been finding glassy-eyed grunts on night watch during the past few months. If he had understood then what he later learned, he would have administered more than a mere kick in the rear and a harsh word or two.

Norris and Doucette gathered Bravo Company’s hung-over Marines the next morning to read them the riot act. Norris barked at the formation, “If any of you guys want to take me out with a grenade—
do it now.”

Lieutenant Norris, a twenty-six year old from Des Moines, Iowa, was a big man and, sporting a black mustache and a red bandanna around his neck, he was nothing if not colorful. His call sign was King George. Norris had been on line with Bravo Company for eleven months as a platoon commander, executive officer, and company commander. He was not a career man, but he had a lot of pride in the Marine Corps, and he had resisted reassignment to battalion. He had signed on to see the war, not sit it out in the rear.

“We had a great company commander, and we were elite compared to other units,” recalled LCpl. Doug Urban, who spent eighteen months in Bravo Company. “We were strictly business—very, very professional—and the guys were incredibly tight.”

Nevertheless, Lieutenant Norris’s landing with B/1/3 in An Lac was a complete disaster. A particularly confusing fog of war dominated the event. When the amtracs churned across the Bo Dieu River toward An Lac, the Bravo Company Marines sitting on top were completely shocked by the wall of NVA fire that greeted them. It was the first indication that the NVA occupied An Lac in strength. Although Weise later wrote that the “primary concern at the time was to clear An Lac and open the river,” and that Bravo was to continue its attack to relieve Foxtrot “only after An Lac was cleared,” the Bravo Marines had not understood their mission that way. They had
been under the impression that An Lac was relatively secure, that it was only a jumping-off point for the urgent business of reinforcing Foxtrot.

Bravo Company’s landing was an unanticipated, stumbled-into meat grinder, not the “classic amphibious assault” of Weise’s description. Bravo Company would also take exception to the statement that it had been covered “by a heavy bombardment of artillery and naval gunfire.” According to Gunny Doucette, “There was nothing—
nothing.”
No smoke rounds were fired to obscure Bravo’s approach, so the NVA in An Lac had a shooting-gallery view of the landing. Their fire geysered the water around the low-riding amtracs as they trundled in with .30-caliber machine guns blazing. As soon as the amtracs hit sand again, the Marines dismounted and sought cover behind burial mounds on the western fringe of An Lac. There they returned the fire of the invisible, entrenched enemy to the east.