The Magnificent Bastards (43 page)

Lance Corporal Ron Dean, the acting commander of Foxtrot One at the right edge of the hamlet, had expended all his M14 ammunition on the NVA behind the burial mounds out in the fields. Now other NVA were charging out of the bushes and trees. Dean already had out his .45. He was at the prone, and the enemy soldier he saw most clearly was rushing right at him with his AK-47 held out in front of him. By the time Dean could aim his .45, the man was five feet away.

Dean shot him in the face.

Twice-wounded Lieutenant McAdams, late of Foxtrot One, had escaped the sudden crescendo of fire behind him by crawling down into the creek bed with another wounded Marine. They could see two Golf Marines trying to get back by swimming from the opposite shore. They were about twenty meters from McAdams when a burst of automatic fire splashed around the two heads. Only one head remained visible. That Marine made it to shore and disappeared into the brush. The NVA had not seen McAdams and his partner. They were in the shallows near the bank, where they could remain prone and keep their heads up as they crawled along the muddy bottom. The water gave them bouyancy, making crawling easier. McAdams was too numb to realize how narrow his escape had been.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise shouldered his M16 and Sergeant Major Malnar swung his twelve-gauge pump into action. Every man in the command trench was firing at the NVA who darted at them or rushed past in frenzied pursuit of Golf One and Two. They dropped several enemy soldiers within a few
steps of their position. It was impossible to tell who was hitting whom. Everything was happening so fast as to be a blur of sound and motion. An NVA soldier on the right flank turned an automatic weapon down the length of the trench. The burst missed Vargas, who was firing his M16 to the front, but it killed his senior radioman and the 81mm mortar section spotter, who were on either side of Vargas. The mortar spotter lay in the trench, his mouth shot open.

Lance Corporal Pendelton, who was the captain’s backup radioman, was hit by the same burst. While Sergeant Bollinger secured a battle dressing around Pendelton’s wounded arm, Vargas used his K-Bar to cut the radio shoulder straps, then pushed Pendelton over the back of the trench and told him to crawl to the rear. Vargas then grabbed one of the radio handsets and began coordinating artillery support. Vargas shouted at everyone to get down in their four-foot trench just before the salvo slammed in some forty meters to their front. The concussion was stunning, and shell fragments ripped down tree limbs above their heads.

There was a definite pause in the enemy fire.

Moments later, several NVA who had gotten to a nearby hedgerow began flinging Chicoms. Some landed at the edge of the trench, and some rolled in. Some were duds and some were not. There were RPG explosions, and then a dozen NVA broke into the open on the left flank and rushed the trench. Captain Vargas stopped them with a full magazine of full automatic M16 fire. Most of the NVA went down dead or wounded; the rest disappeared into a hedgerow. There was another pause, and Weise shouted to Vargas that it was time to get out with their wounded. The dead they would leave. Malnar, who was to Weise’s right on Vargas’s other side, took up the call. “Start pullin’ back the wounded—”

Big John Malnar was interrupted by the sudden, shattering detonation of an RPG against the forward edge of the trench. At that instant, Sergeant Major Malnar and Sergeant Bollinger, the colonel’s radioman, were side by side and on their knees behind the earthen berm at the rear of the trench. Bollinger was firing his M14 and Malnar had lowered his shotgun as he
turned his head to shout. The blast of the RPG flung them both backward, and Bollinger, suddenly on his back, saw blood burst from Malnar’s mouth. A chunk of metal had hit the sergeant major in the chest and blown out the back of his flak jacket, killing him instantly.
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Sergeant Bollinger got back to his knees and reached for the M14 rifle that had been blown from his hands. He was in bad shape. His right humerus had been shattered and the artery cut. Feeling no pain, he glanced in numb shock at the bone sticking from the massive wound and at the blood pumping out of his upper arm.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, who was still in the trench, resumed firing with his M16 after he saw Malnar go down. An instant later, an AK-47 round bounced Weise against the back wall of the trench. He felt the thud in his lower left side. It stung, but it didn’t really hurt. The shock dulled the pain, and Weise fell forward across the front edge of the trench and squeezed off a few more shots. He tried to climb out of the trench but couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t work; there was no feeling in them. He had to grab onto the edge of the trench to keep from falling to the bottom of it. He was bleeding badly.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise’s legs had gone out from under him because the bullet that punched through his flak jacket had lodged between his third and fourth vertebrae. Captain Vargas dropped his M16 and reached down to pull Weise out of the trench by his arms; then, with one hand locked around the collar of the colonel’s flak jacket and his .45 in his other hand, Vargas started dragging Weise toward the rear. Weise, sitting upright with his legs dragging behind him, kept a grip on his M16. When Vargas would stop to catch his breath, the colonel blasted the bushes, where it sounded as though there were enemy soldiers. Vargas was pulling Weise along again when he suddenly saw an NVA coming over the bank of the
creek on the left flank. The NVA saw them, too, but before he could swing his AK-47 up to fire, Vargas snapped off a shot with his pistol. The slug hit the dirt in front of the enemy soldier, then ricocheted up to catch the man in his cartridge belt and knock him back into the water. The NVA, dead, wounded, or just stunned, did not reappear, and Vargas was able to get Weise back about fifty meters to the cover of a tree stump. Before Vargas headed back toward the command trench, he shouted at the Marines behind the stump to haul the colonel back to Dai Do.
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Meanwhile, Sergeant Bollinger, who was on his second combat tour with the Magnificent Bastards, had resumed firing his M14 despite his shattered right arm—only to be hit again as he blasted away on his knees. The first round caught him in the left bicep—missing the bone but cutting the nerve to his hand. As he dropped his rifle and spun around from the impact, another round hit him in the face. The bullet tore across his mouth from one side to the other, split his lips, blew out his front teeth, and tore away his mustache. He hit the deck with no rifle and a mouthful of blood and tattered flesh, and he knew he was in trouble. This time it hurt. It hurt beyond words.

The only Marine that Bollinger could see—the only man still in the trench—was Lance Corporal Kraus, the colonel’s bodyguard, who was blasting away with his M16. Bollinger, in a panic because of the pain, screamed at him. “Kraus, I’m comin’ bleedin’ to death! Get this radio off of me!” Kraus smacked Bollinger in the face, which brought him to his senses, and then used his hunting knife to cut the shoulder straps on the sergeant’s radio. Working fast, he secured a battle dressing around each of Bollinger’s blood-streaming arms—the bandages didn’t do much good—then got him up on his feet with an arm around his shoulder. The pair stumbled back
to a position of relative safety, then Bollinger sank to the ground and passed out. He woke up when a black Marine tried to heft him onto his back. Bollinger mumbled that the man wasn’t doing it right, and the exhausted grunt told him to shut up or he’d leave him. He got Bollinger back a little farther, then said he was going to find a stretcher and some help.

The Marine disappeared. Kraus was already gone. Bollinger was all alone. He passed out again. He opened his eyes as he was being lifted onto a stretcher, and he drifted in and out of consciousness as they hustled him back to where Major Warren, the operations officer, was organizing a line of resistance in Dai Do. Bollinger didn’t know where he was or what was going on. When a lance corporal he knew from the communications platoon went through his pockets to get the crypto sheets used to decode radio messages, he suddenly became alert and kicked out as violently as he could at what he thought was a gook. He got a whoa-hey-I’m-a-Marine response from the man, and then calmed down when a corpsman thumped a morphine Syrette into one of his wounded arms. Major Warren appeared for a moment above his stretcher. Bollinger told Warren that the colonel was hit and the sergeant major was dead, but the morphine and shock fuzzied his thoughts. What he was really thinking about was how the major used to lead their morning exercises. When they lifted Bollinger’s stretcher and carried him past Warren toward an amtrac that was taking aboard wounded, he shouted, “Hey, Major, no more PT!”

Lieutenant Colonel Weise was a big, strong man, and although the initial shock of the blow to his spine had rendered his legs numb, he was able to shake off the trauma and start walking back. The first Marine he ran into was Lieutenant Hilton, whose FAC team was about a hundred meters to the rear of the vacated command trench. Weise sat down. Hilton, who’d been so busy on the air net that he’d lost track of the details of the ground action, was surprised that the colonel was not in the company of his sergeant major and radiomen. Hilton was even more surprised when he realized that Weise was
wounded. Weise was holding his side and there was a lot of blood. Hilton blurted, “Do you need any help?”

“No,” Weise said. “Big John’s been hit. I think he’s dead. We’ve got to pull back. We’ve
got
to pull back.”

Weise told Hilton, who was a big, bold, crazy young officer, to organize a delaying action to give the remnants of Golf and Foxtrot the breathing room they needed to reach the position that Major Warren had organized in Dai Do with Echo and Hotel Companies. To put Weise back in contact with Warren, Hilton stood behind one of his radiomen and changed the frequency on the radio from the air net to the battalion net. He told the radioman to stick with the colonel and help him back, then took the handset from his other radioman to speak with the aerial observer in the Birddog above them. “I want you to bring in everything you can. Fly as low and fast as you can—make as much noise as you can—but don’t drop any bombs because they’re in amongst us. I don’t know where anybody is.”

Packing an M79, Lieutenant Hilton—who was near the end of his tour after six months in helicopters and six months playing grunt—moved forward to organize the delaying action. Weise, who had previously considered Hilton a typically immature, smart-ass aviator, made sure he got the Silver Star. Hilton ran into Pace, the battalion interpreter, in the hedgerow in front of his original position. Pace had become separated from his two ARVN scouts. There were six Marines near Pace, and Hilton knelt beside them to explain the situation: “The colonel said delay. We’ve got to hold until we can get our people back.”

Sergeant Pace was a career Marine from Lookout Mountain, Georgia. When Hilton told him what needed to be done, he answered, “Lieutenant, we’re with y a, we gotta hold.” Pace turned to the young Marines around them, shouting, “We’re going to hold! How many you guys going to stay with the lieutenant?”

Holy shit, thought Hilton when all the Marines answered in the affirmative. I guess I’m here with ’Em. They went forward to the next hedgerow and spread out behind it in a determined,
nine-man line with about ten meters between each covered position. Those Marines they saw they waved back through their hedgerow. When one group went through and on across the open ground toward the next hedgerow, another group followed hard on its heels. The second group was made up of NVA. There were eight of them, and they were so focused on their chase that when they hustled through the breaks in the shrubbery, they did not see any of the grunts in the pickup squad at the base of the hedgerow.

“Those weren’t our guys!” Hilton exclaimed to Pace.

Lieutenant Hilton quickly turned and aimed his M79 at the back of one of the running enemy soldiers. The NVA was literally blown apart by the 40mm shell. As Hilton reloaded, Pace rose up and blasted away with his M16. He was joined by several other Marines, and before the NVA realized what was happening, they were dead.

Lieutenant Hilton covered his men with the M79 as he directed them back to the hedgerow behind them. There were several wounded Marines there, and they stopped and made their next stand. Hilton saw Captain Vargas and several able-bodied grunts helping the wounded, so he slung his M79 across his back and joined them. Hilton tried to heft one of the wounded into a fireman’s carry, but he was too tired, too drained. Instead, he grabbed a camouflage poncho liner and, along with three other Marines, rolled the man onto it and started back with him. They were all exhausted. They couldn’t keep the poncho off the ground, and every time it bumped against the ground the Marine inside, grievously wounded in the buttocks, would let out a ferocious yell. He looked as though he was dying. A Marine ran up to take Hilton’s place at one of the corners of the poncho, and behind that grunt came another with a stretcher.

Lieutenant Hilton rejoined his pickup squad in the hedgerow then, and they covered the casualty evacuation. Hilton was reloading his M79 when three more NVA caught him by surprise, busting out of their brushy cover and charging right at him. They had seen the broken-open, one-shot grenade launcher and had thought to take advantage of the Marine
reaching into his demo bag for the next shell. Hilton quickly snapped the weapon closed and swung it up. His shot hit the nearest NVA squarely in the chest at such close range that the round had not traveled the fourteen meters required to arm its warhead. There was no explosion, but the impact of the shell was enough to kill the enemy soldier as it knocked him off his feet. The other two NVA dropped in the dirt in that same instant as Pace and his men opened fire. Hilton, quickly snapping his next round into the grenade launcher, thought he saw another NVA wheel around in midcharge and disappear into some bushes. That was where he fired next.

Lance Corporal O’neill, the sniper, was behind a four-foot hedge with his partner when a Marine coming out of nowhere jumped over it. The Marine still had his helmet and flak jacket on, but he’d lost his rifle and other gear. All he had was a bayonet and a wild look in his eyes. The bayonet was bloody, as was the man’s hand. “They’re everywhere,” he screamed. “God, get us out of here! They’re everywhere, they’re everywhere! Get outta here!”