They Marched Into Sunlight (47 page)

Terry Allen Jr. died at twenty minutes after twelve. “The battle is the payoff,” his father, the great general, had once declared in his booklet on combat leadership.

The Black Lions were pulling out. Peter Miller reached the battalion command area a few minutes later and saw Jack Schroder there, in the middle of the mess, on his knees, praying. Miller yelled at Schroder to get going, then lifted a canteen from one of the dead officers and crawled away. Frank McMeel, his leafy protection behind a bush now completely stripped away by the unceasing fire, was nearby, crawling through the sprawl of dead bodies. He noticed Griego on the ground, motionless but breathing. “Come on, we’re getting out of here,” McMeel said to him. Griego shook his head no. A bullet sliced a chain off his neck. Griego was persuaded that it was time to leave. Viet Cong rocket grenades were falling two and three at a time. Stroup had his helmet blown off twice as he crawled through the death zone. He got separated from platoon sergeant Smith, who was up ahead. Smith reached Clark Welch first. Welch told him to take everyone he could and get out of there. Smith grabbed Welch and tried to take him along, but the Delta commander resisted. “I’ll make it. I’m in good shape,” Welch said. Smith crawled twenty yards further, then got up and ran.

Attack on Delta and Black Lions Command

Stroup was the next to reach Welch, who was being cared for by his radioman, Paul D. Scott. He seemed so weak now that Stroup thought he was dying.

“Lieutenant Stroup, please get my company out of here,” Welch said.

“Yes, sir. And I’m also going to get you out of here,” Stroup responded.

Welch’s tourniquet was soaked in blood. He told Stroup and his men to leave without him. He would keep fighting from there and try to cover their retreat. Not a chance. Private first class Scott attempted to lift Welch and carry him on his back, but Big Rock’s wounded arm made that impossible. He would have to crawl and crouch as best he could with one good arm and a chest wound stifling his breathing. Fire came in from both flanks. The Viet Cong seemed to be toying with the weary American troops. They would wait for an infantryman to move and then pour bullets directly in front of his path.

Jack Schroder, with his severe wounds, had been picked up by the Delta group on their way through the battalion command zone and was now following behind radioman Laub, who carried the compass. After inching north fifty meters, they reached a small clearing in the dense jungle. Never crawl through a clearing, they had been taught in jungle training school. Get up and run. Schroder, last in line, didn’t make it. He had been lucky the day before, when an enemy bullet lodged in his M-16, but not this time. That final night at Fort Lewis before the Fourth of July, he had told his young wife, Eleanor, that he would not return a cripple. He was coming home dead.

The soldiers of Delta’s rear platoon were the last ones into the jungle but faced the heaviest fire near the end. Lieutenant Luberda had started to retreat, then turned around and said that he had to find more of his soldiers before he left. He was running in a low crouch from man to man, telling them the way out, when he was killed. Jackie Bolen, leader of the third squad, was nearby, already wounded by a sniper but shouting in the smoke, trying to gather his men. Private Jensen approached. “Let’s go,” Jensen said. Bolen wanted nothing more than to leave this jungle and all of Vietnam—“to get out of this godforsaken place,” as he had described it in a letter to his grandmother in West Virginia. But in his last letter he worried that he would never get out of “this hell on earth” alive. And now he was sprawled on the jungle floor, wounded but still firing his M-16, Jensen looking down at him, and just when Bolen looked up, “a sniper with an AK-47 stitched him across the back,” and Bolen was dead. “No! No!” yelled another soldier nearby who saw Bolen die. The sniper turned on him next.

On the left file virtually an entire squad had been decimated. With his platoon leaders falling one after another, Danny Sikorski, the young squad leader from Milwaukee, took charge, organizing a small perimeter where casualties could be treated. He had heard Luberda’s final call to withdraw on a 360. For several hours Ski had been fighting to save the lives of his buddies. Now they were leaving, and he was killed as he started to bring them out. In Wisconsin, on the other side of the world, asleep in her bedroom, Diane Sikorski struggled with a nightmare. She could hear her brother Danny calling her name.
Diane! Diane!
And then his image came to her and he had a huge hole in his stomach. The vision jolted Diane awake. Only a dream. She reminded herself to write her brother in the morning. Jim Gilliam, who had been in Sikorski’s team until the day before, when he was recruited to carry Pinky Durham’s radio, came across Ski’s body as he was withdrawing. It looked as though he had been killed by a claymore mine explosion. There was a hole in his stomach.

Greg Landon had seen too many friends die already. He had crawled away from the killing zone near Lieutenant Colonel Allen just in time, as rocket grenades were exploding. He had “watched helplessly as one of our shells tore up the side of one of our men.” He had seen “uncountable acts of heroism” all around, most by soldiers who would not live to tell their stories. One image haunted him—a bullet slicing through the head of the company medic, Joe Lovato. At Fort Lewis back in April, as C Packet was being formed, Landon thought he was smart enough to tell which soldiers would live and which would die. No more. During his first weeks at Lai Khe, he had written home sarcastically saying that he was hoping to get a “slow healing, painless wound” that would take him out of action until the next spring. Now the Professor thought there was no way he would get out alive. He joined the ragged stream of soldiers moving north.

Mike Troyer was just ahead. This is taking forever, Troyer thought as he crawled away from the field of death near Allen’s anthill. His last vision had been of a rocket whistling in and black smoke rising from the battalion command post and pieces of bodies landing in different places. He withdrew with radioman Jimmy Scott and Doc Taylor, the third platoon medic and Preacher. Taylor was praying aloud. His booming voice penetrated the chaos.
Stand up with me. God is with us. We’ll make it.

Through the darkness of the jungle floor they crouched and limped and ran. Troyer and Jimmy Scott and the preacher Taylor. Griego and Miller and Lonefight and McMeel and his buddy Donnie Hodges. One couldn’t crawl, the other couldn’t walk. Stroup and Laub and Paul D. Scott and Lieutenant Welch, struggling to breathe, feeling stronger.
I’m not going to die. I know I’m not going to die.
Jim Gilliam and Greg Landon and Jensen and Giannico and sergeants Smith and Byrd. Faustin Sena, collapsed, on a stretcher. John Fowler, overcome by fear, breaking down.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.
Lieutenants Edwards and Kay and Sergeant Pipkin and Private Jones. Top Valdez and Michael Arias and Goodtimes Buentiempo. Woodard and Morrisette and Doc Hinger and Captain George, half blind and deaf, his face swollen, his left eye shut.
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.

One by one and in loose bunches the Black Lions stumbled out from the trees into the sunlight of a marshy clearing near the draw cutting along the eastern edge of the jungle. Fresh troops in clean uniforms were moving toward them, on the way to help.

Chapter 17

Holleder’s Run

O
F THE
A
MERICAN SOLDIERS
remaining on the battlefield, most were dead. Lieutenant Colonel Terry Allen Jr. was dead. Captain Blackwell was dead. Sergeant Major Dowling was dead. Forward Observer Pinky Durham was dead. Lieutenant Luberda was dead. Sergeant Luther Smith, Sergeant Plier, and Sergeant Larson were dead. Radiomen Tizzio and Farrell were dead. Medics Lovato and Jagielo were dead. Gilbertson, the division photographer, was dead. Danny Sikorski and Jack Schroder, the Milwaukee connection, both dead. Squad and team leaders Bolen, Barker, Chaney, Lancaster, Sarsfield, and Ostroff were dead. Specialists Cook, East, Miller, and Wilson were dead. Ralph Carrasco, the two-hundredth Arizonan killed in Vietnam, was dead. Ammo bearers Crutcher, Lincoln, and Thomas were dead. Riflemen Adkins, Anderson, Camero, Dodson, Miller, Gilbert, Randall, and Dye were dead. Anthony Familiare, one day after his twenty-first birthday, was dead. The Garcias, Arturo and Melesso, both dead. Jones, MeGiveron, Moultrie, Platosz, Shubert, Ellis, Fuqua, Crites, Gilbert, and Breeden were dead. Ohioan Bob Nagy, who wanted his parents to meet him in Hawaii when he got a break from the war, was dead. Reilly and Gallagher, in new uniforms brought in by supply chopper the day before, were dead. Ray Gribble, who left a safe job at division headquarters to come back to lead his squad, was dead. Ronnie Reece, denied R and R while his pal Kirkpatrick was granted a second vacation in Japan, was dead. Fitzgerald and Hargrove were missing and presumed dead. Half regular army, half draftees, white, black, and brown—all dead.

Joe Costello was alive, one of a small band of Black Lions who had not made it out. After turning around and walking back into the battle to help his stranded buddies, Costello ended up amid a group of twelve to fifteen soldiers who had been cut off from the withdrawing forces late in the firefight. They had formed their own desperate perimeter. Most were wounded, some barely aware of their surroundings, some unconscious, some dying. Anyone who could hold a rifle was given one. Costello was among the few who could move around and perform life-saving functions. It was a mix of Alpha and Delta soldiers with no distinction between companies and little regard for rank. Lieutenant Mullen was there from Alpha’s third platoon, along with Randy Brown, a young squad leader from the first platoon, and First Sergeant Barrow from Delta, all seriously wounded. Barrow had been hit in both legs and could barely walk. His M-16 was down to its last magazine, only a few bullets left, but he found a machine gun and a supply of ammo nearby and pulled it into the circle, then crawled from man to man offering encouragement. To treat one wounded man, he unbuckled his belt and used it as a tourniquet. Another soldier, near death, asked him whether multiple wounds merited two purple hearts. The waterfall of enemy fire had slowed to a persistent drip, with occasional sniper shots from the flanks, but other sounds of war now haunted the battlefield—the moans of mangled men. Private Costello noticed that the dying cried out for their mothers, not for their wives.

Even the heartiest among them felt trapped and doomed. Something was coming, they were certain, but nothing good. They would be overrun, they feared. The Viet Cong only had to come and get them. Though much of the dense brush had been trimmed by gunfire, smoke hung over them like a fog, cutting visibility to a few meters. The surviving Black Lions could barely see one another, which made them more jittery. Rustling noises…
Who’s that? Sergeant Barrow. How the fuck do I know it’s you? Could be an enemy who speaks English. Prove it.
Costello heard the nervous exchanges, back and forth, and he understood. The fear was overwhelming and constant.

Randy Brown, wounded in the leg, foot, and back, swore he heard enemy soldiers calling out mockingly, “Hey, GI, where are you? Where are you, GI?”

Barrow had decided not to let the Viet Cong take him alive. He was prepared to kill himself if it came to that.

Doug Cron, wounded in the left leg and shoulder, heard Barrow’s voice and crawled toward him, reaching an anthill, where he played dead, his face yellowed by a smoke grenade that discharged when he was hit.

These last, lost men kept going with adrenaline and cigarettes, whoever had them. When Costello ran out, he turned to the soldier next to him, shoulder to shoulder.
You got a smoke?
he asked. No answer. Costello shook John D. Krische until he realized “the poor guy was dead.” That spooked him even more. He had been talking to Krische earlier but never heard a cry for help and did not hear him die.

Three radios were strewn on the ground nearby. Costello gathered one to his side and tried to operate it, but he was a grenadier and had never used a PRC-25 before. “Does anyone know the battalion frequency?” he shouted, and from one of the wounded men, Private Edward J. Grider of Chicago, came the answer.
Grider?
Costello thought.
That’s great. Grider was always in and out of trouble, on the fringe. Yet this guy, of all guys, knows the frequency?

Costello got on the radio.

“This is Unknown Station. Please help. We need help. This is Unknown Station. We are out here by ourselves. We need help. This is Unknown Station. Please…”

He kept pushing: ten minutes, fifteen. Finally…

“Unknown Station, this is Seven-niner. Who is this?”

“This is Private Costello.”

Although he had no idea who Seven-niner was, Costello was fluent enough in military jargon to know it was brass. Seven-niner meant the deputy division commander. It was Brigadier General Coleman, flying overhead in a command-and-control helicopter with the division chemical officer, the division chaplain, and a general staff aide. Coleman had been in the air, with several long breaks for refueling, since a quarter after ten, a few minutes after the shooting started. He had spent most of that time on the radio with Buck Newman, the brigade commander, who was also circling overhead in another helicopter with his operations officer, Donald Holleder, and all of them had been talking to Terry Allen on the ground. But Allen was dead, and there had been no contact with soldiers on the ground since.