The Magnificent Bastards (6 page)
Read The Magnificent Bastards Online
Authors: Keith Nolan
Weise made major during a 1962-65 tour as the Inspector-Instructor, 3d Force Reconnaissance Company, USMC Reserve, in Mobile, Alabama. In 1965-66, he attended the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was then assigned as an adviser to the Republic of Korea Marine Corps via the U.S. Naval Advisory Group, Korea.
As earlier described, newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Weise’s Vietnam tour began in October 1967 with his surprise assignment as commander of 2/4 following Operation Kingfisher. The battalion was down to about three hundred effectives, one-third the battalion’s normal wartime strength. The NVA had gutted it. Weise knew the wounded lieutenant colonel he replaced to be an intelligent, brave, and conscientious Marine officer. The problem, as Weise saw it, was that the battalion, having fought the VC down south for so long, had been afforded no time to adapt to facing the NVA when it came north. Operation Kingfisher had been the battalion’s first campaign on the DMZ, and its tempo had been intense.
Captain James Williams, then the battalion’s assistant operations officer, was Weise’s touchstone to what had gone before. Williams participated only in the tail end of Operation Kingfisher, but from what he had seen, it had been “an absolute abomination. There was no security. There was poor light discipline. The battalion wasn’t doing the simplest things that you learn in school, like flank security, or observation
posts, or putting out listening posts at night far enough where they can do something. It was a real mess.”
The 2d Battalion, 4th Marines, had joined Operation Kingfisher from Camp Evans on 11 September 1967, and initially served as the 9th Marines’ roving battalion outside Con Thien. The battalion was shelled every day from the DMZ. On 21 September 1967, it was ambushed by entrenched NVA and, despite a lot of courage and firepower (the battalion claimed thirty-nine confirmed kills), the Marines were forced to withdraw at dusk with 16 KIA and 118 WIA. Fifteen of those dead Marines had not been recovered. The battalion then defended a bridge on Route 561 in Leatherneck Square. The NVA attacked after midnight on 14 October 1967, probing first against H Company. Repelled there, the NVA used tear gas and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) to breach G Company’s sector. The fighting was hand to hand, and individual Marine heroism was again stunning, but the NVA killed the company commander, forward observer, and three platoon commanders. Two of those dead lieutenants had joined the unit only that morning. The assistant operations officer, sent to take command of G Company, was killed before he could reach it. The NVA fought to within hand-grenade range of the battalion CP. The battalion medical chief was killed, and the fire support coordinator, headquarters commandant, forward air controller, and battalion sergeant major were wounded before the NVA were pushed out by E and F Companies. The NVA left twenty-four bodies, but the battalion suffered twenty-one KIA and twenty-three WIA in what became known as the Battle of Bastards’ Bridge.
The battalion was withdrawn to regimental reserve at the DHCB to recover from the debacle. It was at that point that Captain Williams left 3d Recon at Khe Sanh and joined 2/4 as the new assistant operations officer. Soon thereafter, 2/4 participated in the final phase of Operation Kingfisher, a sweep on the west side of Route 561 with 3/3 in blocking positions at Bastards’ Bridge. The battalion commander gave his assembled officers a pep talk the day before the sweep commenced. After telling them that “the S-three shop will brief you on the
details,” the colonel left the tent, leaving Williams and his boss gaping in astonishment. Neither man had any knowledge whatsoever of the operation, but having been pointed in the general direction, they made up the order of march, et cetera, as they went along. They were not going to embarrass the colonel.
Afterward, though, Williams confronted the S3: “What the hell? We’re going on a big operation and we don’t know anything more than that? The colonel told the troops that
we
would brief them on the details!”
“Well, that’s the way it goes,” the S3 replied with a shrug. “We usually just kind of wing it around here.…”
There was no contact on the first day of the sweep, 25 October 1967, but, given the nature of the area, the battalion commander asked for an emergency ammunition drop at dusk. He knew that the helicopters would reveal their position, but he took the calculated risk that once resupplied they could move on to their first night’s objective before the NVA could respond. Unfortunately, more ammunition was delivered than requested, and the battalion, unable to carry it all, was forced to squat in place. The situation was made worse after dark by battle-rattled Marines who imagined themselves being overrun by every shadow, and who popped flares accordingly. The illumination pinpointed them, and ten artillery rounds crashed in shortly before midnight, wounding the battalion commander and killing his executive officer.
The regimental operations officer took temporary command of the battalion. The next day, following several sharp contacts, 2/4 got into a firefight with 3/3 as it moved into the area to reinforce the embattled Bastards. The battalion battened down for the night, intermixed and uncoordinated with 3/3, while taking casualties from NVA shellings and probes. After the NVA pulled back, Williams suggested to the interim battalion commander that, since their lines were so screwed up, word be passed for everyone to hunker down and anything that moved be considered enemy and shot on sight. No sooner had the directive been issued than one of 2/4’s company commanders began acting irrationally. He was scared, really
scared, and Williams was directed to relieve the man. Unclear as to the company’s exact position, and expecting to be shot by his own side, Williams crawled around, whispering the password like a mantra until he found the fighting hole occupied by the company command group.
In the morning, having lost eight men killed and forty-five wounded in the previous two days (they reported nineteen NVA kills), 2/4 was ordered to move to Charlie 2, and then on to Cam Lo. Williams was still an acting company commander during the withdrawal when they found a dead Marine from 3/3. They brought the man’s body out with them in a poncho. It took six Marines to carry the corpse; it was so hot that another team of six had to spell them every few minutes. Along the way, they encountered a company from 3/3 and an indignant captain who snapped, “Hey, that’s my Marine! We take care of our own guys—give him to us!” Angered by the officer’s brusque, unthanking tone, Williams shot back, “You left him out there. We brought him this far, so we’ll carry him the rest of the way. Fuck you!” When the captain responded by taking a swing at him, Williams countered the blow and their first sergeants jumped in to pull the two skippers apart. It was a fitting, self-defeating end to the operation.
We are really fucked up, Williams thought.
The next day, 28 October, the 2d Battalion, 4th Marines, moved back to the DHCB, where Lieutenant Colonel Weise joined them later in the day. He arrived with the new battalion exec, Maj. Charles W. “Chuck” Knapp, who was new to Weise as well but who would soon prove to be a cornerstone in his rebuilding efforts. Knapp had been an enlisted man in World War II and a junior officer in Korea. According to Weise, Knapp was “very intelligent” and had a “quiet, unassuming manner, but was tough and could raise the roof when necessary. He seemed to have the answers to questions before they were asked, and solved problems before others knew they existed.”
After giving the battalion priority on replacements, division headquarters also greatly facilitated Weise’s reconstruction
plan by moving 2/4 into defensive positions around the Ai Tu airfield north of Quang Tri City. The war there was with the Viet Cong. Officially, 2/4 was participating in Operation Osceola, with the mission of constant patrolling to the depth of enemy rocket range on the airfield complex. Unofficially, the operation was a time-out for Weise to absorb replacements, establish his leadership, and train his battalion in a hostile but low-intensity environment.
At Ai Tu, Weise put Captain Williams in charge of their company-at-a-time training program, in which marksmanship, camouflage, and basic patrolling and security techniques were stressed. They practiced crossing streams with ropes at unlikely, seemingly unfordable spots. They learned to move into villages through the hedgerows in order to avoid the booby traps and ambushes that covered the trails where the going was easier. They conducted live-fire, fire-and-maneuver exercises against mock enemy positions. There was the usual Weise emphasis on night work, and on properly briefing and debriefing each patrol. Weise dictated that machine gunners were no longer to be used as automatic riflemen with the assault squads. A good M60 gunner, he said, could put well-aimed fire on visible targets up to two thousand meters away; furthermore, by squeezing off three-round bursts instead of letting the weapon run away on full automatic, a gunner could keep the barrel from burning out while keeping his fire on target. “When I first took over the battalion, the guys weren’t carrying their tripods,” Weise commented. “They were shooting John Wayne-style with a bipod or from the hip. We had to kick ass on that one. I threatened to relieve one company commander if he didn’t get the tripods back on his machine guns. It was a matter of getting back to the basics in a lot of things, just requiring them to do what most of them already knew how to do.”
Lieutenant Colonel Weise was a crew-cut, tough-as-nails cigar chewer who had his initials tattooed on his left forearm. That had been done with a needle and coal dust when he was twelve. He was a big man who came on strong and could get pretty boisterous when angry. Captain Williams, who was
given command of H Company a month after Weise’s arrival, was skeptical of the new battalion commander:
We were really gunshy of Weise because our impression was that he was a hip-shooter. He would see something wrong and he wouldn’t investigate—he’d just take immediate, instantaneous action, and sometimes it was wrong. He made hasty judgments of his commanders. That was because he was under so much pressure to shape us up, and he was pushing real hard to overcome all this inertia that the battalion had built up. What he was doing was gaining a strong, firm control to compensate for the previous total lack of leadership from battalion level. We didn’t fight him, but we company commanders looked askance sometimes and we grumbled to each other.
Although their troops needed physical conditioning, Williams was initially unimpressed when Weise ordered the companies to conduct physical training (PT) at Ai Tu:
We company commanders thought the idea of doing PT in a battle zone and running in cadence with company formations was a little much. Admittedly we were in a kind of rear area, but we were certainly within range of artillery and rockets. We thought it was hokey and not very tactical, not very safe, but we came around. We never did take any incoming, and it did get us back to thinking like Marines again. Gradually, Weise got our confidence and we found out he was maybe a little flamboyant and hot-doggy, but he had the substance to go with it.
During the two months the battalion spent at Ai Tu, 2/4 lost six KIA and seventy-eight WIA against seventeen confirmed kills, forty probable kills, and two prisoners. The battalion’s command chronology spoke of the decrease in contacts and booby-trap incidents that corresponded with 2/4’s familiarization with the terrain and the enemy, and noted that “newly arrived unit leaders and troopers alike received invaluable
training and experience from the numerous small-unit operations. A steady improvement in the tactical employment of units was evident.”
After the Magnificent Bastards were relieved at Ai Tu, stage two of their rebirth began on 6 January 1968 when the battalion disembarked at Subic Bay in the Philippines for seven days of training, liberty, and refurbishment. The battalion, newly redesignated as BLT 2/4, was brought up to full strength, and old weapons and equipment were rehabilitated or replaced.
It was a shiny battalion that sailed back to I Corps and the 1968 Tet Offensive, and it was on that brutal proving ground that even the most skeptical became Weise converts. “He did the right things,” said Williams. It was that simple. The commander of the battalion’s Headquarters & Service (H&S) Company, 1st Lt. Edward S. “Ted” Dawson, a Korean War veteran and ex-master sergeant, considered Weise exceptional in his ability to develop initiative in his subordinates by issuing mission-type orders and keeping abreast of progress without over-supervising. According to Dawson:
Bill Weise didn’t feel that he had to have the last word on everything. That’s true leadership. Never once did Weise approach me and say, “This is the way we’re going to do it, and that’s the bottom line.” He said, “We need to do such-and-such. I want you to come up with a concept and get back to me.” After being there awhile, it was, “Take care of it.” When you have the reins let loose that far, you do the very best job you can. Weise, as well as Knapp and Warren, were prepared to explain in detail, without criticism, when they disagreed with an idea. In a combat situation, it’s easy to say, “No, we’re not going to do it that way, we’re going to do it this way,” and just carry on. But a couple minutes dedicated to recognizing an individual’s idea shows that the commander is not a demigod, but one who is interested in what you have to offer. A positive outlook is contagious, and I would have moved heaven and earth to accomplish any task that Bill Weise gave me.
“I thought commanders who flew in helicopters while their troops were in a fírefíght were assholes,” said Weise. “You have to go where the action is to find out what’s going on.”
Lieutenant Colonel Weise, at thirty-nine, did just that. Wearing helmet and flak jacket, he carried an M16 rifle and six magazines, a compass, and a map case, and had his binocular case taped to the left side of his flak jacket. He also shouldered a small rucksack in which he toted his toothbrush, shaving gear, an extra pair of socks, and his poncho. He did not wear his rank insignia in forward areas, and he ordered all other shiny objects removed. Rings were worn around the neck, and watches carried in pockets or kept covered. As to a commander’s fire-drawing circle of radiomen, Weise commented, “It’s hard to disguise a PRC-25 radio, but we usually used the short antenna and kept spread out.”