The Magnificent Bastards (23 page)

Corporal Cardona, a squad leader in Echo Two, finally made it up to the first hedgerow with his radioman. A dilapidated barbed-wire fence, less than two feet high, ran through the overgrown vegetation on the opposite side. A Marine flung himself prone on Cardona’s right, and another made it up to his left.

From the right, a wounded corporal from another squad hollered at Cardona, “There’s somebody in that bush!” Cardona bobbed up to his knees and flipped grenades over the bushes as he tried to see where the enemy was. He could hear the NVA firing but saw nothing. The wounded corporal could see the concussion of the automatic weapon as it shook the leaves, though. “I’m going to fire some cover for you! Come over the fence!” he shouted.

Captain Livingston suddenly appeared beside Cardona to help them get organized. The skipper fired his grease gun into the brush as Cardona shouted at a machine gunner to move up on the left and provide more fire. The Marine started forward with his M60 and, to Cardona’s horror, was immediately wounded. It was now or never. The wounded corporal on the right was still firing to help them over the hump. Cardona shouted at one of his men, Lance Corporal Mitchell, to get over the fence. Mitchell stared at Cardona as though he was crazy. “Mitchell, we gotta go!” Cardona screamed. When Mitchell started to get up, Cardona shoved him over the fence, then hurdled the shrubs himself and went prone. Mitchell was already firing. Cardona squeezed off a few more rounds, then threw a grenade. Other grunts were doing the same, and the enemy Soldier in the bushes was finally silenced.

There were dead NVA in camouflaged spiderholes at the edge of Dai Do, and live ones dug in amid the gutted hootches,
hedgerows, and bamboo thickets. Echo Company pressed forward behind a shock wave of M16 and M60 fire. The Marines also used LAWs and M79s against identified enemy positions, then pitched in fragmentation and white phosphorus grenades.

The NVA did not retreat.

One Marine took a direct hit from an RPG—and his blown-off leg went cartwheeling through the air.

Lance Corporal Cornwell was behind another Marine when he saw spiderhole trapdoors abruptly open to either side of the advancing grunt. The Marine hesitated. Before he could decide whom to swing his M16 at first, the NVA shot him in the head. When the situation allowed Cornwell to move forward again, he noticed that the dead Marine had fallen at such an angle that the blood had all rushed to his head. The dead man was purple from the neck up.

Gunnery Sergeant Eggleston, the artillery spotter, crouched over a young Marine who had been hit in the side of the head. The man’s brain was exposed, but he was still coherent. He told Eggleston that he knew he was going to die. As Eggleston wrapped a battle dressing around the wound, he told the man he’d be all right—that he was going to get him back. The gunny hefted the wounded Marine over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and humped back toward an Otter that had driven up to within a hundred meters of the hamlet.

Gunnery Sergeant Eggleston was a big man, but when he saw several Marines huddled behind one of the burial mounds with an M60 he called to them for help. The Marines did not move. “We’re takin’ fire here!” they shouted back. Eggleston moved on to the Otter without assistance, and got the wounded man propped up on the deck inside the open back door. At that instant, he glimpsed the flash of an RPG being fired from behind the first hedgerow. He turned to see the slow-moving projectile arcing toward the vehicle. Eggleston pushed the wounded man inside with an instinctive shove that was so hard and fast he was afraid he had killed him. Then he dove for cover, losing his helmet in the process. The RPG exploded about twenty meters away, just as Eggleston was hitting the deck. He was grazed across the top of his head, and blood ran
down his face. The Otter took off at top speed as soon as the RPG impacted, and he could see the wounded man’s legs bouncing as they hung out the back. Eggleston secured a battle dressing over his own head, tied it under his chin, and put his helmet back on over the thick bandage before starting back into Dai Do in a crouching walk.

Assigned as a machine gunner, Pfc. Marshall J. Serna of Echo Company had also played corpsman and grenadier on the way to Dai Do. He put a lot of rounds through his M60, but he couldn’t see a single NVA; he finally ceased fire and moved to assist the casualties nearest him. Serna grabbed an M79 from one of the wounded men and slung a bag of 40mm shells around his neck. After lobbing several into the first hedgerow, he leapfrogged his way to the next wounded Marine, carrying his M60 in one hand and the M79 in another. By then he was close enough to make some sense of where the NVA had dug in. He fired the M79 at those positions, pausing repeatedly to bandage the wounded man lying beside him. He finally called for a corpsman and charged on through the hedgerow into the hamlet itself.

Someone was shouting, “Machine gun up!”

Serna put down the M79 and clambered into the cleared-out NVA trench from which the call had come. There were about ten Marines in it. The trench was only about forty meters from one that was full of NVA who kept exposing themselves as they rose to fire. There was a bunker in the clearing between the two, and several wounded Marines huddled behind the earthen mound for cover.

“Why hasn’t anybody got those guys?” Serna screamed, furious at the other Marines’ inaction.

He decided to go after the wounded himself.

The irony was that Serna, who had been raised fatherless and on welfare in Pittsburg, California, had previously been a discipline problem in Echo Company. He had a real problem taking orders. Furthermore, Serna was a pothead who got stoned almost every day he was in Vietnam. He got stoned because he was scared.

Serna had never touched marijuana prior to shipping out to Vietnam in November 1967. During his first day in the transient area in Da Nang, however, a fellow grunt had taken pity on the nervous new guy and fired up a nerve-mellowing joint as he rapped with him about the ’nam. From then on, Serna smoked grass whenever and wherever he could get away with it, even on patrol. Although no one in the platoon lit up as enthusiastically as he, there were usually takers when he passed a joint. “We just talked and cracked up,” Serna recalled. “Hey, a lot of things were ugly but after smoking weed, you didn’t give a damn.” The marijuana was never smoked openly, and Serna himself told no one that his nerves had become so jangled that he had graduated to morphine. The only person who knew was the corpsman who supplied Serna with morphine Syrettes from his medical bag. It started the first time Serna saw the doc thump a Syrette into a badly wounded grunt. Serna approached the corpsman afterward and asked, “What the hell did you hit him with? First he’s screamin’, now he’s
laughin’?
Doc, do you think, you know.…” After that, Serna would shoot up in his fighting hole when no one was looking.

Oh God, Serna thought as he went over the top with his machine gun and dashed to the bunker behind which the wounded Marines were pinned down. He received the Silver Star for what he did next. Serna dropped to his gut atop the bunker and fired his M60 into the enemy trench in front of them. Return fire cracked past his head as several NVA clambered out to charge his machine gun. Everything was happening fast but with a clarity that was almost like slow motion. Serna could see the pith helmets and the banana-shaped magazines in the AK-47s of the NVA charging him. He could see his bursts hitting them, but one NVA would not go down. Serna kept firing. He knew he had hit the man in the chest. It terrified him. He figured the man must be on opium. The guy was going to kill him. Serna flashed back to childhood arguments about Superman, whom he hated, and he remembered how stupid it had seemed when the villains shot the superhero in the chest. He had always said he would have shot Superman
in his big fat head. Thinking of that, Sema raised his sights and shot the NVA superman in the head. The enemy soldier finally fell.

Sema threw grenades into the NVA trench, then left his M60 atop the bunker as he grabbed one of the wounded. Hunched over, he dragged the man like a sack back to the Marines’ trench. Then he ran back to his machine gun. No one followed him. These guys are watching me like they’re watching goddamn TV! he thought. Why isn’t anybody helping me? Sema resumed firing, hammering out long bursts that burned out the barrel of his M60. Another machine gun lay nearby in the debris, and he kept firing with that weapon until he turned and grabbed another of the wounded. Sema made it back with the man, and then went back for another, screaming at the other grunts for not assisting him.

“What the hell is wrong with you guys?” Sema clambered back out of the trench, shouting, “The hell with you, man—I’m going to kill these sonsofbitches, man!”

Sema picked up the machine gun and started toward the enemy trench in a killing fury. He hadn’t gone two steps when an enemy soldier, apparently the last one still alive in the position, flung a grenade at him. He saw it tumbling end over end and spun around to jump back onto the mound. The grenade exploded. When he rose back up to try to kill the NVA, Sema saw that his right leg was pumping blood from a wound below the knee. Oh, goddamn, I’m hit! he thought. He couldn’t feel anything, but his leg buckled under him. He lay where he had fallen and bellowed that he was out of ammunition. He was so scared that it took him a moment to remember the ammo bracelet he wore around his wrist. He snapped the half-dozen rounds into the M60 and got behind the weapon to sight in on where the NVA had appeared. Sema waited for the soldier to come up again with another grenade. When the man did, Sema fired a burst into his head and chest. Then Sema passed out.

Awakened during his evacuation by amtrac, Sema was on a stretcher at Mai Xa Chanh West when he saw a newsman lining him up for a photograph. “I don’t need this kind of shit,
man, to be showin’ at home.” Serna screamed at the photographer, thinking of his nervous mother.

Bitter and shell-shocked, Serna was in the recovery ward aboard the
Iwo Jima
when he made a decision. “I knew I had reached my limit,” he recalled. “I’d seen men snap out there and they got people killed. Rather than going back out there and being a worthless piece of shit, I said no, I better end it now.” Serna had been wounded before, but it took three Purple Hearts for an enlisted man to be reassigned off the line, not two, as was the policy for officers. Serna knew one of the corpsmen working the ward, and he talked the man into altering his medical records so that an injury he’d received when burned by a hot machine-gun barrel would show up as enemy related and thus become his ticket out of ’nam. The trick worked, “but to this day it still bothers me because I’m supposed to be a big war hero.”

Lieutenant Ferland of Golf Three slid into an abandoned enemy trench at the forward edge of Dai Do. As the NVA retreated into Dinh To, the next hamlet along the creek, Ferland established radio contact with an aerial observer above the battlefield and called for an air strike.

Lieutenant Ferland’s radioman, Hester, was to his right in the trench. Hester was an easygoing, redheaded country boy whom Ferland thought the world of. Because Hester was strong as an ox and because Ferland wanted to be able to move quickly and freely, Hester humped not only the radio and his gear but most of Ferland’s stuff as well. Ferland appreciated those long handset cords because Hester could not always keep pace, loaded down as he was.

Private First Class Bill McDade, the platoon’s number one grenadier, was to Ferland’s left in the trench. McDade was a tough guy from New York City—the type you’d love to know in combat and hate to know in civilian life, according to Ferland. McDade was impressive with the single-shot M79; he could put three rounds in the air before the first one landed.

As Lieutenant Ferland talked to the aerial observer, an RPG exploded in front of their trench, wounding all three men before
they could get the air strike in. Ferland caught a metal fragment in his right eye. He thought that both eyes had been hit because his left one clouded in unison with his right. He grabbed his face and slid down to the trench’s bottom as he exclaimed, “Oh, shit!” Ferland wasn’t in pain, but he couldn’t see anything. His right eye felt very heavy, and he thought it was gone. The pressure was not as severe in his left eye. His first thought was that he’d be able to take up skeet shooting again with that eye. Then reality hit: How the hell are we going to get out of here? he wondered.

Although Ferland had been rejoined by his two squads that had fallen back to An Lacthe previous evening (they had come up with Echo Company), his shot-up platoon could not spare anybody to escort the wounded trio rearward. The only assistance they got was from a corpsman who wrapped a bandage around Ferland’s eyes, treated Hester’s wounded arm, and then tended to McDade, who was semidelirious with a head wound. The idea was to have McDade lead them back through the partially cleared hamlet, with Ferland hanging onto McDade’s web gear with one hand and keeping a grip on his AK-47 with the other. Hester, who was too badly injured to hold a rifle, would bring up the rear. If they ran into anything, Ferland was to blast them at Hester’s direction. After making it back to An Lac without incident, the three became separated along the medevac chain. Lieutenant Ferland was finally helped aboard a Sea Horse that flew him to the USS
Repose
. He had refused to let go of his folding-stock AK-47 the whole way back, and he still had it in the triage area when a gurney carrying a wounded NVA prisoner was wheeled up beside him. Ferland, who had become delirious and was mumbling to himself, began screaming, “Get this bastard away from me or he’s going to get it!” A Navy chaplain came over to calm Ferland as the prisoner was moved away. The chaplain told Ferland he could keep the AFC’s clip as a souvenir, and Ferland agreed to give up the weapon only if he could toss it overboard. He didn’t want it to wind up as some Navy brass hat’s undeserved trophy. The chaplain helped Ferland off the gurney, led him to
the side of the ship, and together they threw the rifle over the railing.
³

Lieutenant Morgan of Golf Two never heard the descent of the 82mm mortar rounds that the NVA fired from Dinh To twenty minutes after his platoon reached the far side of Dai Do. No one could hear the mortars being fired over the general din. The Marines were in and around the hedgerow-covered slit trenches that the NVA had vacated, and they were checking their ammunition supply and refilling magazines when explosions began erupting around them. The enemy fire was right on target, and before Morgan knew it he had fifteen more wounded Marines on his hands.