We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (18 page)

By the time of the battle at LZ X-Ray, which was without question a very vulgar brawl, Bob Barker was the commander of Battery C, 1st Battalion, 21st Artillery, whose six 105mm howitzers were firing in support of us from LZ Falcon, just over five miles away. Lieutenants Bill Riddle, the forward observer with John Herren's Bravo Company, and Tim Blake, who was killed with Tony Nadal's Alpha Company, were on loan to us from Barker's Battery C. Also located in Falcon were the six big guns of Battery A, 1st of the

21st Artillery, commanded by Captain Donald Davis, twenty-eight, a native Ohioan.

The brave cannon-cockers in LZ Falcon went without sleep for three days and nights to help keep us surrounded by a wall of steel. Those two batteries, twelve guns, fired more than four thousand rounds of high-explosive shells on the first day alone. Says Barker, "On the first afternoon both batteries fired for effect [directly on target] for five straight hours." One of Bruce Crandall's Huey slick pilots, Captain Paul Winkel, touched down at Falcon briefly that first afternoon and was astounded by what he saw: "There were stacks of shell casings, one at least 10 feet high, and exhausted gun crews. They had fired for effect for three straight hours by then, without even pausing to level the bubbles. One tube was burned out, two had busted hydraulics. That's some shooting!"

No matter how bad things got for the Americans fighting for their lives on the X-Ray perimeter, we could look out into the scrub brush in every direction, into that seething inferno of exploding artillery shells, 2.75-inch rockets, napalm canisters, 250- and 500-pound bombs, and 20mm cannon fire and thank God and our lucky stars that we didn't have to walk through that to get to work.

BRAVE AVIATORS I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come--if alive.

--William Tecumseh Sherman, in a letter to Ulysses S. Grant Over the twenty months of airmobile training, a bond had been welded between the infantry and their rides, the Huey helicopter pilots and crewmen. Now the strength of that bond would be tested in the hottest of fires. If the air bridge failed, the embattled men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry would certainly die in much the same way George Armstrong Custer's cavalrymen died at the Little Bighorn--cut off, surrounded by numerically superior forces, overrun, and butchered to the last man.

I asked Bruce Crandall's brave aircrews of the 229th Aviation Battalion for the last measure of devotion, for service far beyond the limits of duty and mission, and they came through as I knew they would. This was the first, and in the view of many of us, the toughest of many missions we would accomplish together in a long, deadly combat tour. We desperately needed ammunition and water and medical supplies--and Crandall's Hueys brought them to us. Our wounded, screaming in pain or moaning quietly in shock, had to be evacuated, or they would die where they lay, on their ponchos behind the termite hill.

Hauling out the wounded was not the slick crews' job. Crandall's people were assault helicopter crews, trained to carry infantrymen into battle.

Hauling the wounded off the battlefield was a medical-evacuation helicopter mission. But this was early in the war, and the medevac commanders had decreed that their birds would not land in hot landing zones--or, in other words, that they would not go where they were needed, when they were needed most. Even before I asked, Bruce Crandall had already decided to begin doing everything that had to be done.

As his shot-up Huey, full of wounded, headed back east, Old Snake was thinking about the perilous situation on the ground at Landing Zone X-Ray. Crandall recalls, "Getting back to Plei Me seemed to take forever, although we were flying as fast as it would go. I made up my mind during this flight that if the 1st Battalion lost this fight it would not be because of the failure of the helicopter support. We knew the officers and men on the ground were the best in their business; now it was our time to prove that we were their equals in the air.

"Before I landed at Plei Me I had decided that Colonel Moore needed ammunition more than he needed additional manpower at this point. My plan was to change helicopters, then two of us loaded with ammo would go back to X-Ray. Get the ammo in and bring out the wounded. I felt we could reach the LZ if we came in hard at treetop level. If we couldn't get back out, at least the ammo would be there and the Infantry would protect us if we could just reach the landing zone."

Crandall radioed Orange 1 Lead, Captain Paul Winkel, who was sitting on the strip at Plei Me, and told him to send two of his Hueys to Camp Holloway to load with all the ammunition they could carry. Winkel dispatched his Orange 3 and Orange 4 Hueys, piloted by CWO (Chief Warrant Officer) Dallas Harper and CWO Ken Faba. Round trip plus loading: about one hour.

Crandall now dropped his Huey, loaded with casualties, onto the red dirt strip at Plei Me. "When we hit the ground at Plei Me we were met by medics and the Infantry troops still waiting to be lifted into X-Ray.

They removed the dead and wounded from my bird--and this act is engraved in my mind deeper than any other experience in my two tours in Vietnam.

A huge black enlisted man, clad only in G.I. shorts and boots, hands bigger than dinner plates, reached into my helicopter to pick up one of the dead white soldiers. He had tears streaming down his face and he tenderly cradled that dead soldier to his chest as he walked slowly from the aircraft to the medical station. I never knew if the man he picked up was his buddy or not. I suspect not. His grief was for a fallen comrade and for the agony that violent death brings to those who witness it."

Crandall called his pilots together and briefly discussed the terrifying situation on the ground in X-Ray. He outlined his plan to take back into the LZ two ships loaded with ammunition and asked for volunteers. He says, "Captain Ed Freeman, my friend for a dozen years who had been leading my second flight all morning, said he was taking that flight.

Big Ed misunderstood. I only wanted a volunteer crew for the second bird. I intended to lead the flight myself. I planned to leave Ed behind in charge of resuming the troop lift as soon as Colonel Moore opened the door to the LZ."

Captain Ed Freeman, thirty-six, fought on Pork Chop Hill in Korea as an enlisted man and won a battlefield commission there. At six feet six inches, Freeman was four inches taller than the maximum height limit for Army pilots at the time he went to flight school, hence his nickname: "Too Tall to Fly." Crandall and Freeman had been a close team for years, sharing flying duties over some of the world's toughest terrain.

Together they had flown the Arctic, the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa, and the jungles of Central and South America on mapping missions for the Army. The only thing the two of them were ever known to argue about was which of them was the second-best helicopter pilot in the world. Pop Jekel describes the Too Tall Ed of that era as "a good old shit-kicker whose poker winnings could pay off half the national debt."

Crandall understood how determined Freeman could be. "Big Ed and I discussed the mission for a few seconds, and knowing that arguing with him was a waste of time, I decided we both would fly the mission."

Until the LZ went hot, Matt Dillon and Mickey Parrish had controlled all flights into X-Ray from the command chopper overhead. No more. I took control because only I knew where my men were, where the enemy ground fire was coming from, and where the safest spot to land was at any given moment. From this point forward, every helicopter coming into X-Ray would radio me for landing instructions.

The Huey crews performed magnificently, running a gauntlet of enemy fire time and time again. They never refused to come when called. In turn, we did our best to call them in only when fire was lightest, and we tried to have teams standing by to unload supplies and load the wounded in record time, to reduce the aircraft's exposure on the ground.

Back on the dirt strip at Plei Me, Crandall and his copilot, Jon Mills, shifted their gear from their crippled bird to Lombardo's helicopter; the new ship and Freeman's were soon filled with ammunition from the remaining 7th Cavalry stocks at the strip. Crandall then assigned one of his section leaders to take command of the eight-ship flight that had been waved off at X-Ray. He told them to stand by to bring in the rest of Delta Company when I gave the word.

Crandall says, "Big Ed and I took off and headed for the LZ. We picked up the radio traffic and knew things hadn't improved. About five minutes out I contacted Colonel Moore, explained what I had on board, and he acknowledged they needed the ammo. That made it mandatory for us to go in, no matter the consequences. Moore knew the problem and gave us instructions on the approach and where to land. We started receiving heavy fire on our approach. I notified Big Ed and he calmly came back with: '. What do you want me to do about it, Snake? I kind of thought this might happen."

"Moore's people laid down covering fire for us, and as we broke over the trees into the clearing I could see Hal Moore standing up at the far end of the LZ, exposing himself to enemy fire in order to get us into the safest position possible in the LZ. I landed where he directed and our crews and his people began pitching the ammo boxes off the aircraft as fast as they could. At the same time, the wounded were moved up and loaded aboard."

Some of the wounded being loaded aboard, including Captain Lefebvre and Lieutenant Taboada, were men of Ray Lefebvre's Delta Company, which Crandall had brought into X-Ray on his last trip. One of the walking wounded, standing by to board, was the battalion intelligence officer, Captain Tom Metsker, who had been shot in the shoulder earlier in the creekbed fight with Alpha Company. Lefebvre recalls, "We were standing by the helicopter. I remember Metsker helping me. Metsker helped shove me in. And about that time he said: ''m hit.' He was pulled aboard the chopper by the crew chief."

Crandall remembers, "My bird carried out eight of the seriously wounded.

While we were in there a wounded captain helping another officer onto my Huey was shot and killed. We took him out, too. Ed was able to get five wounded out on his ship." Captain Tom Metsker, married and the father of a seventeen-month-old daughter, was dead on arrival at Plei Me.

Busy fighting the battle, I did not see the shooting of Captain Metsker in the clearing beside Crandall's Huey, but it was an ominous development. It meant-there were North Vietnamese on the eastern side of the clearing, knocking at our unprotected back door.

Crandall now powered his overloaded Huey out of X-Ray, hitting some treetops with his main rotor blades on the way. He recalls, "We almost didn't make it. In training sometimes we would deliberately hit the treetops with our skids, just to scare the shit out of the infantry, especially if they were new guys. But hitting trees with the rotor blades scared the shit out of me. Once we cleared the trees we again received fire. When we got back to Plei Me I switched back to my first ship, which had been checked out and refueled."

At Plei Me, Captain Paul P. Winkel, thirty-four, of Cicero, Indiana, West Point class of 1956, was waiting for his two Orange Flight choppers to return from Pleiku with more ammunition. "The infantry radio channel sounded like an old war movie. Colonel Moore, Trojan 6, came across calm and commanding. [His voice] rang with courage and sound judgment. It made men of boys in X-Ray that day. ', understand your situation ... keep steady ... we are going to drop artillery all around you. Get your men ... all of them ... and walk together slowly back as the shells impact. Just walk back with the artillery and you will be OK. Hang in there.' "

CWO (Chief Warrant Officer) Leland C. Komich radioed Winkel that his ship and that of CWO Dallas H. Harper were inbound from Pleiku and asked for disposition of their cargo of ammunition. Winkel replied, "Wait one," switched channels, contacted Bruce Crandall, who was enroute to Plei Me with his shipful of casualties, and relayed the question. Old Snake's reply was brief: "LZ X-Ray." Says Winkel: "I thought, good God, how am I going to get two ships heavily loaded with ammo into X-Ray, now surrounded by the enemy, with air support, ARA support and artillery direct fire all going in there, without getting hit and blowing up. I switched channels and called Komich: ' at Plei Me immediately.' When the two ships dusted down, I ran to the ship, saw Lee Komich in the left seat, told his copilot to unass [get out of] his ship, go to my aircraft, and fly with my copilot, CWO Walter Schramm. I told Komich we were going to X-Ray. Lee's eyes narrowed. I knew he was thinking what I was thinking.

[We were] loaded with ammo, one hot round could turn us into a brilliant burst of sunshine followed by a dark puff of smoke over the treetops of LZ X-Ray.

"I switched channels to Moore's frequency. ' 6, this is Orange 1, flight of two with ammo, enroute to X-Ray. Directions for landing, please, sir.' The battalion command ship broke in. Captain Vince Panzitta's voice came over: ' generally 275 degrees for the downed A-IE, then make a sharp left turn and when you pick up fire, say 10 seconds later, swing immediately right 90 degrees. You should be heading directly to the center of the LZ.' Moore added: ''s a roger. We will have a panel waving where you should land. Do not overshoot. I say again: Do Not Overshoot. If you miss, turn directly north and bug out for another try. Stay at treetop." "We came to the burning A-IE. I said: ' left! Hit 80 knots and clip the treetops.' Lee's turn was precise. Then came the pop, pop, pop and right beside us the bright flash of passing green tracers. ' right, Lee, right! Watch for the [marker] panel!' I saw it directly in front and below. There it is. Down now. Lee rolled us back just in time to flutter to the ground on top of the pane' man. I looked out and saw our troopers lying prone, hugging the ground. Lee and I sat in our seats about six feet above the ground. My crew was quickly dumping the ammo.

Boxes flew. I stared straight forward. Directly ahead, looming high, was the Chu Pong. I fully expected to receive a spray of bullets at any moment. All of the color seemingly drained from my vision and it seemed that it took literally hours to unload. Fear does strange things.