We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (26 page)

Brown, Jr., the only unwounded men in the hole, hunched down beside Paolone. Bob Edwards, shot through the left shoulder and armpit, slumped, unable to move, in a contorted sitting position with his radio handset held to his right ear. "I continued to command as best I could," Edwards says. "An automatic weapon had the CP foxhole zeroed in and we lay there watching bullets kick dirt off the small parapet around the edge of the hole."

Edwards didn't know how badly he had been hurt, only that he couldn't stand up. The two platoons he had radio contact with continued to report that they were under fire but had not been penetrated. No one answered the captain's calls in the two worst-hit platoons, and the enemy had penetrated to within hand-grenade range of Edwards's foxhole. All this had taken place in only ten to fifteen minutes.

Lieutenant Neil Kroger's platoon had taken the brunt of the enemy attack. Although artillery and air strikes were taking a toll on the follow-up forces, a large group of North Vietnamese soldiers had reached Kroger's lines and the killing was hand-to-hand.

Specialist Arthur Viera was crouched in a small foxhole firing his M-79.

"The gunfire was very loud. We were getting overrun on the right side.

The lieutenant [Kroger] came up out into the open in all this. I thought that was pretty good. He yelled at me. I got up to hear him. He hollered at me to help cover the left sector. I ran over to him and by the time I got there he was dead. He had lasted a half-hour. I knelt beside him, took off his dog tags, and put them in my shirt pocket. I went back to firing my M-79 and got shot in my right elbow. The M-79 went flying and I was knocked over and fell back over the lieutenant."

Viera now grabbed his .45 pistol and began firing it left handed. "Then I got hit in the neck and the bullet went right through. I couldn't talk or make a sound. I got up and tried to take charge, and was shot with a third round. That one blew up my right leg and put me down. It went in my leg above the ankle, traveled up, came back out, then went into my groin and ended up in my back close to my spine. Just then two stick grenades blew up right over me and tore up both of my legs. I reached down with my left hand and touched grenade fragments on my left leg and it felt like I had touched a red-hot poker. My hand just sizzled."

Sergeant Jemison was over in Lieutenant Geoghegan's 2nd Platoon lines.

"My machine guns just kept cutting them down. The enemy drifted to our right front. At least a battalion was out there."

Some thirty-five yards to Jemison's right rear, Lieutenant John Arlington had safely negotiated the open clearing and made it to the Charlie Company foxhole to take over from the badly wounded Captain Edwards. "Arlington made it to my command post and, after a few moments of talking to me while lying down at the edge of the foxhole, was wounded. He was worried that he had been hurt pretty bad and told me to be sure and tell his wife that he loved her.

"I thought: ''t he know that I am wounded, too?' Ar rington was hit in the arm, and the bullet passed into his chest and grazed a lung. He was in pain, suffering silently. He also caught some shrapnel from an M-79 that the enemy had apparently captured and were firing into the trees above us."

The enemy were now closing in on Lieutenant Geoghegan's platoon. They were already intermingled with Kroger's surviving men and were pushing on toward Edwards's foxhole.

At 7:45 a.m. the enemy struck at the left flank of Tony Nadal's Alpha Company, at that critical elbow where Alpha and Charlie Companies were tied in. We were now under attack from three directions. Grazing fire from rifles and heavy machine guns shredded the elephant grass and swept over the battalion command post and aid station. Leaves, bark, and small branches fluttered down on us. Several troopers were wounded in the command post and at least one was killed. My radio operator, Specialist 4 Robert P. Ouellette, twenty-three years old, a bespectacled six-footer from Madawaska, Maine, was hit and slumped over in a sprawl, unmoving and seemingly dead. I kept the handset to my ear. The situation was now so critical that there was no time to deal with Ouellette.

At about this time fifteen or more mortar and rocket rounds exploded all around the termite-hill command post.

We were locked into a fight to the death, taking heavy casualties in the Charlie Company area, and there was no question that we were going to need help. I radioed Colonel Tim Brown to ask him to prepare another company of reinforcements for movement as soon as it could be accomplished without undue risk. Brown, with typical foresight, had already alerted Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion and had it assembled with the helicopters to fly in on call.

Joe Galloway remembers: "The incoming fire was only a couple of feet off the ground and I was down as flat as I could get when I felt the toe of a combat boot in my ribs. I turned my head sideways and looked up.

There, standing tall, was Sergeant Major Basil Plumley. Plumley leaned down and shouted over the noise of the guns: ' can't take no pictures laying down there on the ground, sonny.' He was calm, fearless, and grinning. I thought: ''s right. We're all going to die anyway, so I might as well take mine standing up.' I got up and began taking a few photographs." Plumley moved over to the aid station, pulled out his .45 pistol, chambered a round, and informed Dr. Carrara and his medics: "Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!"

The enemy commander's assault into the Delta Company line was not going well. In fact, he would have done a good deal better attacking any other sector of the perimeter. Delta Company now had its own six M-60 machine guns, plus three more M-60s from the recon platoon, stretched across a seventy-five-yard front. Each gun had a full four-man crew and triple the usual load of boxed ammunition--six thousand rounds of 7.62mm. To the left rear of the machine guns were the battalion's 81mm mortars, whose crews were firing in support of Charlie Company and, meanwhile, fending off the enemy at closer range with their rifles and M-79s.

Specialist Willard F. Parish, twenty-four years old and a native of Bristow, Oklahoma, was assistant squad leader of one of Charlie Company's 81mm-mortar squads. Parish was one of the mortarmen who had been outfitted with the spare machine guns and rifles collected from our casualties and put on the Delta Company perimeter.

Parish recalls: "When we were hit I remember all the tracer rounds and I wondered how even an ant could get through that. Back to our right we started hearing the guys hollering: ''re coming around. They're coming around!' I was in a foxhole with a guy from Chicago, PFC James E.

Coleman, and he had an M-16. I had my .45 and his .45 and I had an M-60 machine gun. We were set up facing out into the tall grass.

"I was looking out front and I could see some of the grass going down, like somebody was crawling in it. I hollered: ''s out there?' Nobody answered so I hollered again. No answer. I turned to Coleman: ' his ass.' Coleman said: ' rifle's jammed!' I looked at him and him at me.

Then I looked back to the front and they were growing out of the weeds.

I just remember getting on that machine gun and from there on I guess the training takes over and you put your mind somewhere else, because I really don't remember what specifically I did. I was totally unaware of the time, the conditions."

On that M-60 machine gun, according to extracts from his Silver Star citation, Specialist Parish delivered lethal fire on wave after wave of the enemy until he ran out of ammunition. Then, standing up under fire with a .45 pistol in each hand, Parish fired clip after clip into the enemy, who were twenty yards out; he stopped their attack. Says Parish: "I feel like I didn't do any more than anybody else did up there. I remember a lot of noise, a lot of yelling, and then all at once it was quiet." The silence out in front of Willard Parish was that of the cemetery: More than a hundred dead North Vietnamese were later found where they had fallen in a semicircle around his foxhole.

Specialist 4 Vincent Cantu had been drafted into the Army the day before President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. He had one week left in service and he had been praying that he would live to make it home to Refugio, Texas, where he had been the lead guitarist and singer for a local band called The Rockin' Dominoes. Says Cantu, "The fighting never let up for long. The artillery fired all around us continually. The jets bombarded the hell out of that mountain. I got word that a friend of mine from Houston, Hilario De Ia Paz, had gotten killed. He had only four days left in the Army. He had two young daughters back in Houston." Hilario De Ia Paz, Jr., was killed that morning in the attack on Delta Company.

He was just eighteen days past his twenty-sixth birthday.

During that fierce attack on the Delta and Charlie Company lines, Cantu recalls, "I was hugging the ground better than a snake when I saw what appeared to be a soldier in camouflage with 2 or 3 cameras dangling around his neck. He came from behind a tree and took 2 or 3 snapshots, then ducked back behind a big old anthill. I thought to myself: ', he wants pictures for his scrapbook real bad.' I lay there for a moment and I started to think: ' guy reminds me of someone.' I crawled to the tree because next time this guy appears I wanted a better look--but I also wanted protection. I didn't have to wait long; there was no mistake. It was hot, his face was red; it was my old friend, Joe Galloway. I felt joy at seeing someone from Refugio, but at the same time sadness because I didn't want anyone from home being killed, and he was going about it the right way."

Galloway and Cantu were classmates; in 1959 they graduated from Refugio High School together with fifty-five others. Cantu braved the hail of fire, sprinted across the corner of the open landing zone, and dived under a bush, where Galloway was kneeling. "Joe. Joe Galloway. Don't you know me, man? It's Vince Cantu from Refugio." The two men embraced, agreed that this was "some kind of bad shit," and for a few brief minutes stolen from the battle raging around them, talked of home, family, and friends. Canto told the reporter: "If I live, I will be home for Christmas." Vince Cantu survived and made it back to Refugio, Texas, population 4,944, just in time for the holidays.

FRIENDLY FIRE Duke bellum inexpertis. ("War is delightful to those who have no experience of it.")

--Erasmus The ordeal of rifleman Arthur Viera, crumpled on the ground, terribly wounded, beside the body of Lieutenant Neil Kroger, was just beginning.

"The enemy was all over, at least a couple of hundred of them walking around for three or four minutes--it seemed like three or four hours-- shooting and machine-gunning our wounded and laughing and giggling," Viera recalls. "I knew they'd kill me if they saw I was alive. When they got near, I played dead. I kept my eyes open and stared at a small tree.

I knew that dead men had their eyes open. Then one of the North Vietnamese came up, looked at me, then kicked me, and I flopped over. I guess he thought I was dead. There was blood running out of my mouth, my arm, my legs. He took my watch and my .45 pistol and walked on. I saw them strip off all our weapons; then they left, back where they came from. I remember the artillery, the bombs, and the napalm everywhere, real close around me. It shook the ground underneath me. But it was coming in on the North Vietnamese soldiers, too."

Over in the 2nd Platoon sector, Sergeant Jemison was struck in the stomach by a single bullet. He ignored the pain, continued firing, and exhorted those still alive to fire faster and hang on. Clinton Poley, the Iowa farm boy, was still alive in the fire storm: "When I got up something hit me real hard on the back of my neck, knocked my head forward and my helmet fell off in the foxhole. I thought a guy had snuck up behind me and hit me with the butt of a weapon, it was such a blow.

Wasn't anybody there; it was a bullet from the side or rear. I put my bandage on it and the helmet helped hold it on. I got up to look again and there were four of them with carbines, off to our right front. I told Corner to aim more to the right. A little after that I heard a scream and I thought it was Lieutenant Geoghegan." Poley and Specialist Corner , the man on the trigger of the M-60, blazed away at large numbers of plainly visible enemy troops.

There was no wind, and the smoke and dust hanging over the battlefield were getting worse by the minute, making it ever more difficult for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine fighter-bomber pilots, and Army Huey gunship pilots overhead to pick out our lines. On my order, at 7:55 a.m. all platoons threw colored smoke grenades to define our perimeter for the pilots. Then we brought all fire support in extremely close.

Moments after throwing his colored smoke, Sergeant Robert Jemison was struck a second time, by a round that tore into his left shoulder. It had been about twenty minutes since he was first hit in the stomach. He got back up again and resumed firing his rifle. Thirty minutes later Jemison was shot a third time: "It was an automatic weapon. It hit me in my right arm and tore my weapon all to pieces. All that was left was the plastic stock. Another bullet cut off the metal clamp on my chin strap and knocked off my helmet. It hit so hard I thought my neck was broken.

I was thrown to the ground. I got up and there was nothing left. No weapon, no grenades, no nothing."

Corner and Poley, thirty feet to Jemison's left, were like wise coming on hard times. Poley says, "A stick-handled potato-masher grenade landed in front of the hole. Corner hollered, ' down!' and kicked it away a little bit with his foot. It went off. By then we were close to out of ammo, and the gun had jammed. In that cloud of smoke and dust we started to our left, trying to find other 2nd Platoon positions. That's when I got hit in the chest and I hit the ground pretty hard. I got up and got shot in my hip, and went down again. Corner and I lost contact with each other in the long grass. We had already lost our ammo bearer [PFC Charles H. Collier from Mount Pleasant, Texas] who had been killed the day before. He was only eighteen and had been in Vietnam just a few days. I managed to run about twenty yards at a time, for three times, and finally came to part of the mortar platoon. A sergeant had two guys help me across a clearing to the battalion command post by the large anthill. The battalion surgeon, a captain, gave me first aid."