We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (16 page)

Everybody and his brother seemed to be shooting either at us or at them.

"It seemed like this went on forever, but in reality the infantry cleaned up these guys rather quickly. Even though the enemy was that close, my door gunners could not take action to defend themselves.

Troops on the ground, or those getting out of our birds had to handle the enemy in the landing zone. We couldn't shoot without killing our own people on the perimeter, so our policy was not to shoot.

"I stayed on the ground a little longer on this lift so that I could pick up wounded. As I pulled pitch my flight of four came out and the next four choppers hit the landing zone almost immediately. I reported the heavy fire to the incoming aircraft and directed them to continue with the approach. I knew several helicopters were hit but I couldn't stick around; my job was to get those wounded aboard my helicopter back to Plei Me to medical help and start getting support and reinforcements going for the people on the ground. I had three dead and three wounded on my bird. The wounded included my crew chief, who had been hit in the throat. When we landed we saw that every bullet had struck the wounded in the head or neck. Excellent marksmanship by the other side, and not a happy thought for a helicopter pilot, to say the least."

Captain Ray Lefebvre, commander of Delta Company, was about to earn his Combat Infantryman's Badge, a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart, all in the next seven minutes. He remembers, "When we came in, the mountain was off to our left and we were taking a lot of fire. We settled down near the wood line. There was lots of fire coming from the woods. Taboada was hit in the hand while we were hovering.

"I was starting to unhook my seat belt when I felt a round crease the back of my neck. I turned to my right and saw that my radio operator had been hit in the head; the same round that cut me killed him. He just slumped forward, still buckled in. Nicklas was a young guy, just twenty, came from Niagara Falls, New York. I jumped out. Firing was coming from the mountain, and three or four of us moved about fifty to seventy-five yards toward the trees, to the sound of the firing, and stopped in a small fold in the ground."

With Crandall, flying Serpent Yellow 3, was Chief Warrant Officer Riccardo J. Lombardo, thirty-four, of Hartford, Connecticut.

Lombardo was in the pilot's seat and recalls that lift: "As I approached I saw the battle smoke getting heavy. As my skids touched down, my troops leaped out. I saw men lying on the ground. I felt and heard bangs on the back of my seat. I looked ahead and saw a man about fifty yards ahead on the edge of the LZ. He was standing in plain view, pointing a weapon at us. I thought it was one of our people, but something didn't look right. His uniform was khaki color and he wasn't wearing a helmet.

"Before I even noticed the muzzle flashes, three holes appeared in my windshield. In my mind I was asking, ' is that bastard shooting at me?' As fast as that man appeared, he disappeared. Then I was off the ground and banking to the right in a climb, and all the while red streaks were following me. That was the last lift of troops I made into the LZ."

This was Lombardo's only flight into X-Ray, as his Huey was used by Crandall for the next flight into the LZ and was shot up. Crandall went back to his first bird, which had been pronounced flyable. Lombardo spent the rest of the afternoon listening to the battle on the tactical radio at Plei Me and sucking down beer.

First Lieutenant Roger K. Bean was flying a Huey in the second wave of birds behind Crandall's. "When we landed I was flying on Captain Ed Freeman's right wing. We were all taking fire and the number four ship didn't look like he was going to make it out of X-Ray. I was in the pilot's seat and Captain Gene Mesch was in the left seat. I was looking over my shoulder at the number four ship when we got hit by AK47 fire. A round came through the door in front of Gene, entered the back of my flight helmet, tore a hole in the side of my head and came out through the front of the helmet. I was bleeding like a stuck pig and my flight helmet was turned sideways on my head with the earphone covering my eyes. At first I thought I was blind. That concerned me because I was still flying. Gene took the controls and the door gunner patched me up.

I was X-rayed at the Special Forces camp and went back to the unit after they sewed me up."

For the rest of the afternoon Chief Warrant Officer Alex S. (Pop) Jekel, forty-three, of Seattle, Washington, flew in Bean's seat. Pop Jekel was the father of nine children. During World War II, at the age of twenty, he had flown B-24s out of England, and B-29s during the postwar years, until he left the service in 1950. Pop Jekel reenlisted in 1953 and had been flying helicopters since 1963. Pop flew into X-Ray seven times under fire. Says he: "The anxiety of going back into that hell on earth was devastating."

Several of the Hueys in the first wave of eight took hits, but none crashed, none caught fire, none had to be abandoned in the landing zone.

I radioed orders for the other eight Hueys in the fifth lift to get out of the area and wait until I got the landing zone cooled down and under control. They headed back east to Plei Me where they landed, off loaded the troops, refueled, and shut down to wait.

Captain Ray Lefebvre now swung into action. Purely by chance, he and several of his Delta Company men had run toward a critical section of the perimeter, an uncovered gap on the left flank of Tony Nadal's embattled Alpha Company troops. Lefebvre recalls, "My executive officer and first sergeant didn't come in on that lift, so the only sergeant I had was George Gonzales, a staff sergeant from the machinegun platoon, and he had gone in another direction.

"There was no one between us and the tree line; we had an unobstructed view forty yards to the front. Lieutenant Taboada was to my left. I hollered to him saying I needed his radio and to stay where he was. He yelled back that he had been hit but was OK. When his radio operator got over to me, I contacted Sergeant Gonzales and told him to bring his machine guns to my location. He was about 150 yards to my rear and said he was on the way. I called him three or four times but we never got together."

Although it seemed that the North Vietnamese were attacking purposefully, the enemy commander, Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An, was frustrated and angry. He says, "I ordered the 66th Regiment's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ia Ngoc Chau, to use his 7th Battalion to attack you constantly, to encircle you, and not to allow you to withdraw by helicopter. In the first attacks [on the Bravo and Alpha Company sectors] by the 9th Battalion and the 33rd Regiment, our reconnaissance soldiers learned your positions-- but the 7th Battalion commander did not know where you were. I ordered him to keep searching for you. I told him to move forward personally to the front so he could control the situation and directly encircle you."

The People's Army 7th Battalion commander, Major Le Tien Hoa, thought he had finally found the open door into Landing Zone X-Ray on the southern side of the perimeter, and he swung his battalion in a broad encircling maneuver around Tony Nadal's left flank toward the south side of the clearing. But, thanks to Charlie Company, that open door was closing fast. Charlie Company's commander, Captain Bob Edwards, raced down the line of newly arrived infantrymen, picking up those who belonged to him and hurrying them into position with the rest of the company on the south and southeast sides of the landing zone. Edwards sited his machine gunners and riflemen along a thinly stretched blocking position that now ran for 120 yards.

No more than five minutes had passed when a huge wave of North Vietnamese, the lead assault units of Major Hoa's 7th Battalion, charged headlong into the thin line of 112 American riflemen. Added to the din of battle in the Alpha and Bravo Company areas was the sudden heavy firing in the woods where Charlie Company was located. Captain Bob Edwards was on the radio to battalion instantly, shouting: "We are in heavy contact. Estimate a hundred and seventy-five to two hundred enemy.

Damn! These guys are good!" Captain Edwards says, "The enemy were moving fast toward the landing zone, headed northwest. More toward the center of the LZ where the helicopters were landing. They had to be surprised to hit us. Right after we got into position there was a lot of fire, then after the initial rush it tended to slack off. You could see them. It was shooting ducks out there."

Simultaneously, the 9th Battalion of the 66th Regiment launched a strong attack against Tony Nadal's Alpha Company, feeling for the forty-yard gap between Alpha Company's left flank and Charlie Company's right flank and desperately trying to seize control of that dry creekbed. Nadal's brave machine gunners--Beck and Adams, and Ladner and Rivera--were covering most of the gap between my companies with their deadly fire.

Now a handful of newly arrived Delta Company troopers led by Captain Lefebvre played their part as well in stemming the enemy tide.

Ray Lefebvre had dropped into a fold in the ground in the western edge of the clearing, just short of the tree line. "Captain John Herren came out of the trees to my right and said: "There's a hell of a lot of enemy up there coming into our area.' Then I saw sixteen or seventeen enemy real close, twenty yards, coming down the creekbed right at the edge of the LZ. They didn't seem to know what they were doing, coming out into the landing zone. We had a machine gun [and] our M-16s, and we were throwing grenades. I fired two magazines of M-16 ammo at them and then they just disappeared. The machine gunner on my right got hit. I think he was killed. About then I was hit also, as was my replacement radio operator. I called Sergeant Gonzales again and told him: ' get up here quick as you can.' I was on the ground and John Herren helped give me a tourniquet. I radioed Colonel Moore and told him I had been hit." John Herren says, "After finishing my latest report to Matt Dillon, who was overhead, I looked up to see a North Vietnamese soldier with an AK-47 just over the bank I was standing behind with my two radio operators. I fired a burst from my M-16 which promptly fell apart. The pin holding the trigger mechanism to the barrel had broken off or dropped off. The North Vietnamese, who was obviously the lead man for his unit, dropped down behind another embankment, so I grabbed my one grenade and threw it toward him. It hit a branch above him and bounced back just in front of us and exploded. Not knowing whether the enemy was dead or not, and fearing that there were more enemy in the creekbed behind him, which meant that they had gotten between my platoons, I moved out with my radio operators across the creekbed and back into the LZ, then to the southwest, where 1 thought Dennis Deal's platoon would be.

"I thought the people in the ditch were Deal's men. I saw a machine-gun crew off to the right. I ran over and told them there were NVA in the creekbed. We immediately came under withering fire from the south and dropped down next to some other troopers behind what little cover there was. It was part of Delta Company, and I was next v to Captain Lefebvre.

Shortly after, automatic-weapons fire swept over us. My tireless radio operator, PFC Dominic De Angelis, nineteen, from Queens, New York, suddenly turned toward me after a shot ripped into his arm, with the words '

Herren, I'm hit' frozen on his lips. As he turned a bullet hole appeared in the center of his helmet and he was dead.

"On my right, Lefebvre was also hit and the blood was gushing out of his right arm. He tried to stop the bleeding himself. I grabbed my first-aid kit compress and pressed it on the wound, using it and some other cloth to make a tourniquet. Lefebvre began to weaken, and after about twenty minutes--while I was firing and hugging the ground and talking on the radio to Lieutenant Herrick and checking on Ray Lefebvre's wound--I got the nearest man to help me get Lefebvre back to the rear. I returned to find Tony Nadal in the same general area where we were pinned down, dragging some of his dead men back. It was a wrenching, frustrating experience for me, out of physical contact with my platoons and pinned down while Henry Herrick's platoon was in trouble."

Lefebvre, seriously wounded, was fading fast: "I had lost a lot of blood. I could see people shooting but I couldn't hear any sounds anymore. I told John Herren somebody had to take over. I again called Colonel Meore and told him that I was going to turn the company over to Sergeant Gonzales. Then the medic arrived to bandage my wound. Shortly after, I remember someone putting me in a poncho and hauling me over to the area of the battalion command post. When I saw Lieutenant Taboada again later, we never did talk much about it. It was just too damned close a thing."