We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (15 page)

Son of a bitch!' I could hear him hollering that down there. Then they threw grenades in on him." Hurdle, thirty-six, was from Washington, D.C.

Birenbaum, twenty-four, was a native of New York City. PFC Donald Roddy, twenty-two, hailed from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The three of them died in a hail of rifle fire and enemy grenades.

As Sergeant Wayne M. Anderson and his assistant gunner made it up the finger, carrying the other M-60, the enemy down below turned Sergeant Hurdle's M-60 around and began using it on the Americans on the knoll. The only ammo for the platoon's last machine gun was what was left in the belt hanging out of the gun. Sergeant Anderson was screaming and yelling that his face was on fire. It was.

Fragments from a white phosphorus grenade were smoking and smoldering in his flesh. Sergeant Zallen tripped Anderson and, with Savage's help, they used bayonets to scrape and dig the burning "Willy Peter" fragments out of Anderson's face.

The enemy, more than 150 strong, now attacked the knoll from three sides--north, south, and east--and soldiers on both sides were falling.

Lieutenant Herrick ran from trooper to trooper trying to get a defense organized. An enemy volley cut across Herrick, his radio operator, Specialist 4 John R. Stewart, and the artillery recon sergeant, Sergeant John T. Browne, wounding all three, Herrick and Browne seriously.

Stewart took a single bullet through his leg.

Herrick radioed Bravo Company commander John Herren and told him he had been hit bad and was turning command of the platoon over to Sergeant Carl Palmer. Herrick then gave explicit instructions to his men to destroy the signals codes, redistribute the ammo, call in artillery, and, if possible, make a break for it. Herren says, "I give Herrick all the credit in the world for pulling that platoon together so that they could make their stand."

So should we all. Savage and Zallen paint a clear picture of a green young lieutenant who did a superb job in a hailstorm of enemy fire. His platoon stopped a very large North Vietnamese unit clearly headed down to join the attack on the landing zone. I long ago concluded that the very presence of his platoon so far to the northwest confused the enemy commander as to exactly where we were and how far out we had penetrated in all directions, and thus helped us as the battle built.

Sergeant Savage recounts the final moments of Henry Herrick's life: "He was lying beside me on the hill and he said: ' I have to die, I'm glad to give my life for my country.' I remember him saying that. He was going into shock, hit in the hip and in a lot of pain. He didn't live long. He died early in the fight, next to a little brush pile." Specialist 5 Charles R. Lose, twenty-two, of Mobile, Alabama, was the platoon medic. "Lieutenant Herrick was kneeling when hit. He had a bullet wound to the hip. He told me to go help the other wounded.

"Carl Palmer got hit about the same time as Lieutenant Herrick, just as we came back in. It was alongside his head. Not a fatal wound, but it knocked him out. He fell right behind me. I thought he was dead but he wasn't. Palmer came to and said: ''s get these guys out of here.' I told him there was no way we could get out with all our wounded. Palmer was still talking about getting everybody out, fading in and out of consciousness."

It was now 2:30 p.m. and the cut-off platoon's ordeal had been going on for more than an hour. Pahner was lying wounded on the ground, beside a log. The man closest to him was Galen Bungum. Bungum says: "Palmer was lying there with his bandage held on the wrong side of his head, so I helped him get it on the side he was wounded on. As we were getting it changed, a North Vietnamese threw one of our own hand grenades toward us. It landed just behind Sergeant Palmer and exploded, killing him. A piece of that grenade hit me in the knee and I pulled the splinter out.

The North Vietnamese that threw the grenade just stood there and laughed at us. Specialist 4 Michael L. Patterson must have put a full magazine in his stomach. I swear I saw daylight through him before he went down."

Sergeant Carl A. Palmer died in action two days before his fortieth birthday. As he predicted, he did not live to see it.

Specialist Bungum had quickly run through his limited supply of M-79 grenades and had begun hunting for something else to fight with. "I was crawling around looking for an M-16.1 got my hands on one, and Specialist 5 Marlin T. Dorman said: ' doesn't work; I'll get you another one.' Then he hollered: ' doesn't work either.' I headed for third rifle and PFC Donald Jeffrey hollered: ' don't work!' Finally I did find an M-16 and some full magazines from our dead. About then PFC Johnnie Boswell [thirty-two, from Eatonton, Georgia] got hit in the buttocks and was bleeding bad. He said to me: ' am going to get up and get out of here.' I told him, ''ll never make it.' He started to get up. I grabbed his foot and held him with us, but he died a little later.

Sergeant [Robert] Stokes was hit in the leg. Doc Lose bandaged him up and went on to somebody else."

Sergeant Savage had earlier sent PFC Boswell, Sergeant Joaquin Vasquez, and Private Russell Hicks scurrying on all fours to the three sides of the perimeter under attack. He was also working with Sergeant Stokes on bringing in mortar and artillery fire. He had moved two wounded men, PFC Calix Ramos and Specialist Stewart, over to the north side of the knoll.

Specialist Clarence Jackson took a round clean through his left hand, shifted his rifle to his right, and continued firing until he was hit a second time. Sergeant Vasquez and several of the other wounded men likewise fought on, thanks to their own courage and Doc Lose's medical help. Specialist James Blythe had his thumb shot off. Patterson, Hicks, and Jeffrey were all wounded. Sergeant Ruben Thompson was struck by a bullet above his heart that exited under his left arm; bleeding heavily, he grabbed a rifle and fought on. The encircled infantrymen of the Lost Platoon refused to give up.

Specialist Dorman: "We were all on the ground now and if you moved you got hit. Our training really showed then. We shifted into defense positions. We had five men killed in twenty-five minutes. Then all of a sudden they tried a mass assault from three directions, rushing from bush to bush and laying fire on us. We put our M-16s on full automatic and killed most of them." Galen Bungum: "We gathered up all the full magazines we could find and stacked them up in front of us. There was no way we could dig a foxhole. The handle was blown off my entrenching tool and one of my canteens had a hole blown through it. The fire was so heavy that if you tried to raise up to dig you were dead. There was death and destruction all around."

By now eight men of the platoon's twenty-nine had been killed in action; another thirteen were wounded. The twenty five-yard-wide perimeter was a circle of pain, death, fear, and raw courage. Medic Charlie Lose crawled from man to man throughout the raging firefight, doing his best to patch the wounded with the limited supplies in his medical pack. Although he was wounded twice himself, Lose never slowed his pace. He would keep all thirteen of the wounded alive for twenty-six long, harrowing hours. Lose says, "On several occasions I had to stand or sit up to treat the wounded. Each time the VC fired heavily at me." Lose used his .45 and an M-16 rifle to help defend his patients.

Captain John Herren got a desperate radio call from the weapons-platoon forward observer with Herrick's platoon: "Sergeant Stokes was saying they were finished and he wanted to infiltrate out. I told him if it was hopeless to try and break out. He was hit shortly afterward." In the combined mortar-fire position on the landing zone, Specialist 4 Vincent Cantu, twenty-three, of Refugio, Texas, a Bravo Company mortarman who had only ten days left on his two year tour as a draftee, says: "We set up and got our elevations and deflections from Sergeant Robert Stokes, the mortar forward observer who was trapped with the platoon up the mountain. His pleas for help over the radio were desperate. We could all hear him. They were surrounded. He called for everything we had. Within minutes all our mortar rounds were gone." Cantu said the mortar crews were tortured by their inability to provide any further fire support for the trapped platoon and by their friend's pitiful pleas for help. He says, "Sergeant Montgomery told us we were going after Sergeant Stokes. We got our personal weapons and started up but we couldn't advance. The firepower was overwhelming. We moved back.

"By 2:30 in the afternoon it seemed like half the battalion was either dead or wounded. I remember rolling this soldier in a poncho.

He was face down when I turned him over. I saw the lieutenant's bars on him. I snapped; I thought to myself, these rounds don't have any regard.

Gary Cooper, Au die Murphy, they all came out of it, but that's in the movies."

Sergeant Ernie Savage, who was lying next to Sergeant Stokes, remembers: "There was a lot of fire coming in on us and they had people coming up at us, but they had a hell of a lot of fire coming down on them. The mortarman was calling artillery around us and we were all firing from the perimeter. The only cover we had was the rise of the hill. If you moved, you crawled, and if you crawled you drew fire. After Sergeant Palmer got killed, Sergeant Stokes says: ''ve got to get out of here." He got up.

"There were a lot of enemy out there, right on the ground, and if they saw your helmet they shot. Well, Stokes got hit right in the head, two shots in the helmet and one below the rim, and fell backward over a log with the radio on his back, laying on the radio. It was underneath him, on the other side of the log from me, but I reached under the log, got the handset, and called in more artillery and mortars." Sergeant Robert L. Stokes, twenty-four, was from Salt Lake City, Utah.

Command had passed from Lieutenant Henry Herrick to Sergeant Carl Palmer to Sergeant Robert Stokes as each, in turn, died fighting. Now it was the turn of buck sergeant Ernie Savage. "Sergeant Savage came up on the radio," Captain Herren recalls. "He said Herrick, Palmer, and Stokes were dead; to give him more artillery and he would direct it in as close as possible. We could never establish the platoon's exact position but Lieutenant Riddle could adjust fire on Savage's sensing, and he began to do that."

The extraordinary, unyielding resistance that the dozen or so effective fighters were putting up, plus the artillery barrages that Ernie Savage was bringing down, finally beat off the heavy enemy attack. During a brief lull, the Americans collected ammunition, grenades, and weapons from the dead 120 x-ray and those too badly wounded to shoot, and redistributed them. A few riflemen were shifted to better firing positions. Sergeant Zallen collected maps, notebooks, and signal operating instructions booklets from the dead commanders and burned them all. Lieutenant Herrick's PRC-25 radio was secured. Captain Herren was now talking to Savage, telling him of the desperate attempts to break through to him.

Ernie Savage and his small band hunkered down, determined to hold their ground to the end.

8

THE STORM OF BATTLE The most precious commodity with which the Army deals is the individual soldier who is the heart and soul of our combat forces.

--General J. Lawton Collins Our intention with this bold helicopter assault into the clearing at the base of the Chu Pong massif had been to find the enemy, and we had obviously succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. People's Army Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An, deep in a command bunker no more than a mile and a half away this Sunday afternoon, November 14, was issuing orders by land-line telephone--remember the commo wire spotted by the H-13 helicopter scouts?--as well as by old, unreliable walkie-talkie radios and by foot messenger. His orders to every battalion in the vicinity were simple: Attack!

Shortly after two p. m., with the battle well under way, Colonel An's boss, Brigadier General Chu Huy Man, was safely in his headquarters hard by the Cambodian border almost ten miles away from the action. My boss, on the other hand, was right over my head. With the battle raging on two sides of the perimeter, Colonel Tim Brown suddenly came up on my radio from his command helicopter, asking if he could land and get a firsthand look at the situation. I waved him off without explanation. There was too much going on to deal with the distraction of a visit by the brigade commander; besides, his command helicopter, bristling with a large array of radio antennas, would be too tempting a target. Brown did not press the question. He instantly understood.

The reports of continued heavy fighting in both Herren's and Nadal's sectors to the west reminded me again that the entire north and east sides of the landing zone were still wide open. I was praying that the next helicopter lift, bringing the last of the Charlie Company troops and the lead elements of Delta Company, would arrive soon. It was on the way.

Delta Company commander Captain Ray Lefebvre was in the lead chopper, flown by Bruce Crandall. With Lefebvre were members of his command group. In the helicopters behind were his machine-gun platoon, part of his mortar platoon, and the last of Captain Bob Edwards's Charlie Company elements. "By the time I came in around two-thirty p.m. there was plenty going on. We were about eleven minutes out, approaching X-Ray, and I was listening on my radio handset," says Lefebvre. "In the lead chopper were my radio operator, PFC Gilbert Nicklas; the mortar platoon leader, Lieutenant Raul E. Taboada, and his radio operator and others. I could hear the battalion commander on the radio.

"You could see the artillery and air strikes going in. You're flying in a helicopter and you watch this battle and listen to all this shit going on on the radio. The pilot, Bruce Crandall, turned around, shook his head, and made this face like: ', what are we getting into?' I recall that pilot's expression. We could see a lot of firing. I was trying to figure out exactly where I was going to go. I was sitting on the left side, facing out toward the mountain, in the middle between the two radio operators." Crandall radioed that he was on short final approach, dropping toward the LZ, and I told him to come on in but be quick getting out.

As this fifth lift of the day roared in at treetop level, the landing zone suddenly turned red-hot. The enemy at the creekbed turned their guns on the helicopters and filled the air with rifle and automatic-weapons fire. Says Crandall: "As I was flaring out to touch down we started receiving heavy ground fire. I touched down at the forward part of the LZ, looked out to my left and saw a North Vietnamese firing at my ship from a point just outside the length of my rotor blades. Another enemy soldier was firing from the other side.