We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (14 page)

"That made me angry. We had been taught never to leave any wounded or dead on the battlefield. Sergeant Gell and I crawled forward of our lines to that creekbed, where the enemy were, to find Tail. We came under grenade attack from the west side of the creekbed but had some cover from a few trees. We located Tail, dead. While bringing him back we saw another soldier who had been left behind. After leaving Taft's body with his platoon, Gell and I went back again and we picked up the other man."

Bill Beck and Russell Adams had by now moved about a hundred yards toward the mountain and were heavily engaged with masses of enemy thirty yards to their south and west around the creekbed. Beck says their charge into battle had been eventful: "As I was chasing after Adams, above the noise of automatic fire someone yelled '!' and right in front of me, less than two yards away, one of those wooden-handled potato-masher hand grenades rolled to a stop. I started to go to ground, my knees bent; then came an explosion and flash of bright-white light. I never did hit the ground and continued to move, carrying my boxes of M-60 ammo.

"On the right, twenty yards away, was an anthill with a clump of trees on it, just outside the creekbed. American GIs were on one side and two NVA soldiers were on the other side, not five yards away from each other. I don't think our men could see the enemy. I yelled at the top of my lungs but nobody could hear me because of the overall noise of battle. It was deafening. The only weapon I had was my .45caliber pistol." Beck says, "All this time I had been jumping, dodging, hitting the dirt, and moving forward with Adams. Now I pulled my .45 and fired the entire clip of seven rounds at the left side of that anthill and both of the enemy dropped. Adams called for ammo, and I moved up with him beside a little tree. We were now the forwardmost position. I was feeding belt after belt of 7.62mm ammunition into the gun. We were prone and he was firing at the enemy in front and to the right. On the right about ten yards out were our buddies Theron Ladner and Rodriguez Rivera on their gun. We could hardly see them in the grass."

Beck adds, "I would spot movement to the front, point where, and Adams did the firing. This went on for several attacks. The enemy were zeroed in on Russ and me, their bullets hitting the tree trunk, the dirt around us, and crackling over our heads. Russ stopped those assaults and we started looking for our ammo bearer, John Wunderly. He was gone. I can remember the extreme heat and exhaustion taking hold now, like I hadn't taken a breath the entire time. We were soaked with sweat and the sun was very hot as we lay in the brown grass, in the open with really no cover but the grass."

On one of his trips up to collect Tail and the wounded soldier, Captain Nadal spotted Beck and Adams on his left about twenty yards out and running toward the mountain.

Beck and his gunner, Russell Adams, and the other M-60 crew ended up at least seventy-five yards out front of Alpha Company's 3rd Platoon. Adams puts it simply: "Nobody told me to stop so I kept going."

In piecing together the mosaic of a confused and fast paced fight, it is clear to me that those courageous machine gunners inflicted heavy casualties on a large North Vietnamese force that was hurrying down to reinforce the attack on Alpha Company's left flank. Bill Beck and his buddies paid a terrible price, but virtually single-handedly they kept the enemy from turning Nadal's left flank and driving a wedge between Alpha and Charlie companies.

Overhead, some of the best air-support work was being done by the A-IE Skyraider, an antiquated single-engine propeller plane of Korean War vintage that proved of great worth providing tactical air support to ground troops. It was slow, but heavily armored and simply built; it delivered very accurate fire and, best of all, could hang around for up to eight hours.

Captain Bruce M. Wallace, an enlisted man in the Korean War and a 1956 West Point graduate, was on his second Vietnam tour with the Air Force in 1965, this time flying the old

"Spads," as the A-les were nicknamed.

Says Wallace: "The Skyraider was uniquely suited for putting ordnance on the ground at the exact time and in the precise place that the ground commander needed it. It was slow, cumbersome, ungainly, greasy and hot to fly. But you could hang everything under its wings but the kitchen sink. As fighting intensified around the Ia Drang, all available aircraft and crews of the 1st and 602nd Air Commando squadrons were committed to the mission."

At around two p.m. one of those A-les was coming in from the south just above the slope of the mountain, very low, just over the trees, on a bombing run directly over the location where the enemy was attacking from. Suddenly there was an explosion, and the Spad burst into flames.

It continued on down the creekbed, trailing fire and smoke, passed directly over us and the fighting, turned back east, and staggered on for perhaps two miles before crashing in a black ball of smoke. We saw no parachute. Overhead, Captain Matt Dillon in the command ship had a clear view: "The plane caught fire, veered off and crashed to the east of X-Ray. There was an explosion and fire. We flew over to see if we could see any sign of life. Very soon after the crash a lot of enemy, twenty or thirty of them, came running to the plane. I called the Aerial Rocket ships in on them."

Air Force records indicate that the pilot who died in that crash was Captain Paul T. Mcclellan, Jr., thirty-four, of West Stayton, Oregon, who flew for the 1st Air Commando Squadron. Captain Bruce Wallace says, "Paul was probably downed by fragments of his own ordnance. We were carrying both bombs and napalm on a single aircraft, and safe separation altitude[s] for the two types of ordnance were different. It was easy to select the wrong switch, in the cockpit during the heat of a low-altitude mission under fire. The precise cause of that crash, however, was never officially determined."

Meanwhile, back at 3rd Brigade headquarters, Brigadier General Dick Knowles had been filled in on details of our rapidly developing fight.

The prisoner we captured had been debriefed; he identified his unit as a battalion of the 33rd Regiment of the People's Army. Intelligence said the 66th Regiment and the 320th Regiment were also in the vicinity. At Knowles's urging, the division commander, Major General Harry Kinnard, flew in from headquarters at An Khe for a briefing. Says Knowles: "When General Kinnard arrived I showed him a situation map. He took one look and said, ' the hell are you doing in that area?' I replied: ', General, the object of the exercise is to find the enemy and we sure as hell have.' After an awkward pause and a few questions he said, ', it looks great. Let me know what you need.' "

While all of this was taking place, John Herren was still desperately trying to reach Lieutenant Herrick's cut-off platoon. His other platoons were battling a large number of enemy who had moved between them and Herrick. During the confusion, Lieutenant Bill Riddle, Herren's artillery forward observer, made his way forward and linked up with Lieutenant Al Devney. Herren was still in the creekbed area, to the right of Nadaps Alpha Company location, trying to get Lieutenant Joe Marm's platoon of reinforcements linked up with Deal and Devney.

The devastating flanking fire Nadal's Alpha Company soldiers poured on the enemy, and the shock of the continuing artillery and air bombardment, caused the North Vietnamese ahead of Devney and Deal to reel back and slack off. This gave Lieutenant Marm and his troops the opportunity to move forward and link up with the two Bravo Company platoons. Now they were able to launch a full three-platoon attack in the direction of Herrick's cut-off men. It was three platoons abreast, left to right: Deal, Devney, and Marm.

Dennis Deal remembers: "We moved on line for about a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards before the volume of firing forced us to stop.

We were taking too many casualties. I radioed Herrick's platoon and said: ' think we are close to you. Shoot one round off; wait to the count of three and shoot two more.' The radioman, or whoever was on the radio, did that, so we had a pretty firm fix on where he was. We got up and started the assault again. We went about ten yards and the whole thing just blew up in our faces. The enemy had infiltrated between Herrick's platoon and us and now were starting to come in behind us.

"I saw Platoon Sergeant [Leroy] Williams shoot into a tree; a weapon fell but the body didn't. It was roped into the treetop. There were at least fifteen of our men, wounded and dead, out front. At this point our medic, Specialist 5 Calvin Bouknight, rose from cover, ran over, and began administering aid to the wounded. He succeeded in treating four or five of them, always by placing his body between the continuous sheets of heavy fire and the man he was treating. Bouknight was mortally wounded less than five minutes after he began performing his stunningly heroic acts." Bouknight, twenty four, was from Washington, D.C.

Deal says, "Suddenly a lull occurred on the battlefield. During that lull one of the men in my platoon got up on his knees while the rest of us were all flat on our stomachs. He was promptly shot in the upper body, ten feet from me, and I heard the bullet strike human flesh. It sounded exactly like when you take a canoe paddle and slap it into mud.

One bullet, one hit, another man down. During the same lull, my radio operator's hip suddenly exploded, if you will, and before the bleeding started I saw white, jagged bone sticking out. We gave him first aid and tried to keep him out of shock. He said: I'll be all right. Just show me where to go.' He made his own way back to the aid station."

Lieutenant Deal adds that he and the other two platoon leaders now began planning yet another attempt to break through and rescue Herrick's men.

"Leaders were running back and forth coordinating this when all of a sudden firing began. The lull dissipated quickly. It was at this time that my weapons-squad leader, Sergeant Curry, ' Chief,' was killed.

His last words were ' bastards are trying to get me!' He was caught rolling around on the ground. Later on, as my men were carrying him back, I had them put him down and I turned his face toward me and looked at him. I could not conceive of the Chief being dead." Staff Sergeant Wilbur Curry, Jr., of Buffalo, New York, was thirty-five years old.

Deal says his platoon and the others got up to launch the attack and again were driven back by extremely heavy fire. "We slugged it out for all we were worth but finally had so many wounded we had to stop and say, ''s get out of here.' " Sergeant Larry Gilreath says, "We tried fire and movement and on-line attack but the NVA were waiting for us each time."

Less than a hundred yards away Herrick's men were in a running gunfight for their lives, and had been from the first minute of contact. Shortly after Sergeant Ernie Savage cleaned up that enemy machine-gun crew, he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye, back toward the little creek. Turning in that direction he saw a large group of fast moving enemy. Savage says: "There were fifty, maybe seventy of them. They weren't firing on us; they were going around to our right trying to get in behind us. We fired on them and kept firing to our front also. Then they outflanked us. There was no way we could control it with what we had. We were short on people."

By now Sergeant Paul Hurdle's two machine guns were firing on enemy to the front and to the right. Savage's squad was also fighting on two sides, thirty yards out front of the machine guns, and began withdrawing by fire and movement, one fire team shooting while the other fell back toward the rest of the 2nd Platoon on the lower end of the finger. Says Savage: "The machine gunners were already set up on the lower part of the finger and firing. There was so much noise, I didn't know that at the time. When we started pulling back I saw both gunners sitting there.

They were firing just over the rise and downhill. We pulled back past the guns. PFC Bernard Birenbaum was one of the gunners and he damned sure did some damage before he went down. His firing allowed us to get back. We pulled straight back toward him. It was a wonder he didn't shoot us; the enemy were behind us and he was firing past us. Things were going real fast."

Herrick and the other two squads were holding precariously to the small knoll near the bottom of the finger. Savage teamed up with Mchenry's squad, which was pinned to the ground. Herrick was with that squad.

Sergeant Zallen's squad was to their left rear. Savage checked on his men when he tied up with Mchenry. He knew that Specialist 4 Robert M.

Hill, the M-79 grenadier, was no longer with them. "Hill got killed in there somewhere. He had his M-79 and a .45 pistol and he was firing both at the same time." The twenty-three-year-old Hill came from Starkville, Mississippi.

Now the men of Herrick's three rifle squads were all grouped together on the small knoll, under heavy fire from enemy troops close in on their north and east. Unfortunately, the two M-60 machine-gun crews were separated from them by a distance of about thirty yards, downhill. As Savage began to deploy his men into firing positions, the North Vietnamese mounted a reinforced attack from three directions: up the finger from the north; down the finger from the southwest; and, worst of all, fifty to seventy attackers coming from the ditch toward the rear of the two M-60 machine guns. Lieutenant Herrick and Platoon Sergeant Carl Palmer were in the middle of the action. By now Savage had personally killed fifteen to twenty enemy. "The machine guns were still firing and we were all fighting as hard as we could to hold the enemy off. There were a lot of them, all over," Savage recalls.

Lieutenant Herrick shouted to the machine-gun crews to come up the hill.

One was out on the north end of the finger, with Sergeant Hurdle. The other, closer in, disengaged and scrambled up the knoll and into the tiny American perimeter. Sergeant Hurdle's gun kept firing to cover the withdrawal. It came under attack by a large number of enemy who swarmed all around the crew. It was during this desperate melee that Herrick's platoon suffered its worst casualties and lost one of its precious machine guns.

Sergeant Savage again: "The enemy were past the machine gun before it ever quit firing. I could hear Sergeant Hurdle down there cursing. Even over the firefight I heard him. He was famous for that: ' fucker!