The Magnificent Bastards (47 page)

Pittman was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and he lay down on a stretcher near the amtrac. He realized just before he fell asleep that he was enraged. That bastard, he thought. That gung-ho, hard-charging bastard. He’s after his bird at any cost.

Although Pittman at first blamed Weise, he later realized that the battalion commander, a remote figure, had been a convenient scapegoat for his anger and frustration. But even when he cooled down, Pittman would never understand the logic of frontal assaults or why, having paid the price, they then moved on as soon as the bodies had been counted. “It was absolutely—
absolutely
—ridiculous, and I always felt that somebody ought to have been hung. I lost so many friends. I was starting to grasp the picture of Vietnam by then, and I realized at that time that it was going to come down to just surviving. There was no purpose in that war, and there was no purpose in dying for those villages.”

The bullet in Lieutenant Colonel Weise’s back was removed aboard the
Iwo Jima
. The damage to his spine was not permanent, but he was still in a wheelchair when most of his officers came to the ship one or two at a time to say good-bye to the finest battalion commander any of them had ever served under. Weise also had a last farewell to make, and he asked Lieutenant Muter to push his wheelchair down to the ship’s morgue. The morgue had been vacated for the colonel’s visit. The body of Big John Malnar was lying on a cold steel table, around which was a curtain. Muter wheeled Weise into the partitioned area and left him there until called.

On 4 May 1968, the Marines at the BLT CP could see black smoke rising from the air strikes the Army battalion was calling
in on Nhi Ha. The battle was three klicks away. It did not concern them. Because of the heavy casualties, the BLT 2/4 TAOR had been reduced to the two square kilometers around Mai Xa Chanh West to give the battalion the breathing room needed to reorganize. For the survivors, there was steak and potatoes and grape juice. Beer soon followed. “Division sent us 10 cans per man for our show at Dai Do,” wrote Captain Murphy to a battalion veteran who had rotated out before the battle. “Judd Hilton B.S.’Ed and we ended up with about 15 cases. The bunker is completely full of beer—there are ‘priorities’ you know.”

Shedding helmets, flak jackets, and worn, torn utilities, Marines went swimming in the Cua Viet River along the southern edge of the perimeter. A lieutenant cracked a grin for a reporter and said, “Looks like a damn nudist colony.”

“Despite losses, the battalion still had a strong nucleus of officers and senior sergeants,” the reporter wrote. “And it still had confidence.” The reporter had been a Marine in Korea. The spirit in the battered command had not been stamped out, and it made him proud. “According to both officers and men, the battalion’s heavy losses at least did not result from tactical errors or plain carelessness.” Trophies brought back from Dai Do were on display near the river. They included a Chinese-made mortar, a recoil less rifle, an antiaircraft gun, and a pair of 12.7mm machine guns, each on its own tripod. There were also two Chinese field telephones, plus piles of mortar rounds and other types of ammo, and some seventy AK-47s, SKSs, RPDs, and RPG launchers. A lot more enemy weapons had been captured, but the troops still had them.

One of the heroes of the battle was the tall, slender ex-VC who was Golf Company’s Kit Carson scout. Corporal Schlesiona wrote afterward of “the admiration this man had gained for himself. Everyone I spoke to was quite aware that he could easily have deserted. It would not have been difficult for him to get into an NVA uniform and slip away.” Schlesiona was in the river that morning when there was “an uproar about fifteen feet away. The Kit Carson was being attacked by a number of Marines misdirecting their desire for revenge. Before
I could get to his aid, any number of other Marines had already pulled those guys off and were giving them quite an earful about how stupid they were. I have always believed that those Marines could not have known what a brave man they were attacking.”

There was an uproar in Hotel Company, too, but only because Lieutenant Prescott—who everyone thought had been shot in the spine the day before—suddenly appeared with nothing worse than a bruised back. Prescott was grinning from ear to ear as he walked into the company area. His men went nuts, and amid the laughter and welcome-back shouts, Prescott and Taylor joked about who was in command of the company. Major Knapp gathered everyone at the Buddhist temple that served as the CP to read them a note from Weise praising the men. There was also a minute of silent prayer for the dead. Then, wrote the reporter who had also worn the uniform, “the Marines looked up and one by one, in matter-of-fact tones, discussed the mechanics of getting ready for combat again—replacements, supply, equipment…”

Nhi Ha

S
ERGEANT
J
IMMIE
L
EE
C
OULTHARD
, C/3-21
ST
I
NFANTRY
, 196th LIB, Americal Division: “There sure wasn’t any glory in being in Charlie Company other than it was a regular line company which would do what the hell they were told. We didn’t do as good a job as we could have if we’d had better training and more experience, but they were a good bunch of guys and I was real proud to be in the company.”

Opcon to the 3d Marines, the mission of Lieutenant Colonel Snyder’s 3-21st Infantry was to seize and hold Nhi Ha and Lam Xuan West in order to check NVA infiltration down Jones Creek and prevent NVA action against logistical traffic on the Cua Viet River. Lam Xuan West had been easy to secure. Nhi Ha had not. Forced back with heavy casualties on 2 May 1968, the attack resumed the next day, although Lieutenant Colonel Snyder anticipated that the NVA had retired during the night. They had not. Elements of the 4th Battalion, 270th Independent NVA Regiment, had entrenched themselves in Nhi Ha and intended to fight it out. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder obliged them, though with a prudent, cautious approach that would have seemed heresy to the Marines and with a smothering abundance of firepower that had not been available in the first overtaxed days of the enemy offensive.

Private First Class Gregory B. Harp, C/3-21st Infantry, 196th LIB, Americal Division: “All my observations of the battle were through the peepsight of a rifle, and that is an extremely narrow view. I never saw a map. I was confused the whole time, and half-crazed from thirst and fatigue. My world consisted of a fire team, squad, platoon, and, once in a while, the whole company.”

Black Death and Charlie Tiger

T
HE
NVA
ATTEMPTED TO REINFORCE THEIR POSITIONS IN
nhi ha. At 0028 on Friday, 3 May 1968, the personnel at Alpha 1 spotted the NVA through their night observation devices. Having marched south from the DMZ, the NVA were, when detected, in the vicinity of Nhi Trung—less than a kilometer south of Alpha 1 and two klicks above Nhi Ha. The firepower brought to bear on these NVA was locked, cocked, and ready to go in part because of an argument that 1st Lt. Travis P. Kirkland, an adviser with the ARVN battalion at Alpha 1, had had the night before with a major from the 40th Field Artillery at the DHCB. Kirkland had been calling in fire missions on smaller groups of NVA when the major, short of ammo from the afternoon battles, challenged the priority of these particular missions: “Lieutenant, you’re lying—you don’t have that many targets.”

“Well, bounce your butt up here if you think I’m a liar, and I’ll show you all the dinks you can handle,” replied Kirkland.

The major arrived the following afternoon by helicopter, and Kirkland suggested he sack out because he probably wouldn’t get any sleep that night. The NVA heading for Nhi Ha proved Kirkland right. A Marine with the naval gunfire liaison team at Alpha 1 was the first to alert Kirkland, who was in his own
bunker. “Hey, LT, we’ve got people out here in the open.” Kirkland asked how many there were. The answer was sixty-seven, but the doubting major grabbed the field phone and asked the Marine how he knew. “I counted the motherfuckers,” the young Marine shot back.

At that point the major zipped up to the bunker line and looked through a night scope of his own. Suitably impressed, he told the FO lieutenant who was present from his own 40th Field Artillery to “get these people everything that’s in range.”

Additional artillery was fired into Nhi Ha itself. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, located at Mai Xa Chanh East, planned to resume the attack with Captain Osborn’s A/3-21 and Captain Humphries’s D/3-21, which were in a night defensive position in the rice paddies six hundred meters east of Nhi Ha with Lieutenant Kohl’s C/3-21. South of Nhi Ha on the other side of Jones Creek, Captain Corrigan’s B/3-21 was dug in near Lam Xuan West, where it could support the attack by fire. The attack was to come in from the east and sweep west down the length of Nhi Ha, with Alpha Company on the north flank and Delta Company to the south. This was the same approach taken the day before by Charlie Company.

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder had available to him a forward air controller in an O-IE Birddog from the Air Force’s 20th Tactical Air Support Squadron (call sign Helix). At 0815 on 3 May, Helix 1-5 came on station and established contact with Black Death 6—Captain Humphries of D/3-21—who was the most experienced company commander the Gimlets had on the ground. Humphries briefed the FAC, who had Marine and Air Force fighter-bombers plaster Nhi Ha at 0910, 0945, and 1040. There was a mishap during the second air strike, however. The FAC warned the company commanders to make sure that all their people were down each time he brought in a strike. Captain Corrigan and the Bravo Company FO, who were the closest to Nhi Ha in Lam Xuan West, could get only so far down as they helped adjust the strikes. The two were kneeling behind several banana trees at the edge of the hill that served as the company command post while watching an Air Force Phantom
drop 250-pound high-drag bombs. “It was amazing,” Corrigan recalled. “The bombs went off, and then right where the cloud of smoke was there was something small that got bigger and bigger and bigger—and then, wham, my forward observer got hit right beside me. It looked like it was coming in slow motion at us, but the whole thing couldn’t have taken more than half a second. My brain couldn’t have told my body to duck in time.”

The white-hot chunk of metal was the size of a golf ball. It hit Pfc. Rod “Rocky” Bublitz, the Barracuda FO, in the shoulder with such force as to almost rip off his arm. While Captain Corrigan requested an emergency medevac for Bublitz and another injured GI, the FAC came up on the battalion net and shouted, “I
told
you guys to stay down!”