We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (27 page)

Captain Bob Edwards was still holding on in his foxhole: "I think that the fire support prevented the enemy from reinforcing when he really could have hurt us. The penetration reached the first line of holes of the two platoons that had the most contact." Captain John Herren of Bravo Company says, "The enemy broke through to Edwards's command post before he was stopped, mainly by the battalion's use of artillery, air, and helicopter rockets and gunships. It was, in my view, the closest we came to being overrun."

Bob Edwards's personal war was far from over. Some thirty yards from his foxhole was a large termite hill covered with brush and grass. Atop that mound was a North Vietnamese with an automatic weapon who was a damned good shot. He had killed Sergeant Hostuttler; he had wounded Bob Edwards and Lieutenant Arlington; and he was still firing. "We were pretty much pinned down by an automatic weapon sited behind an anthill in front of the 3rd Platoon's left side. Lieutenant Bill Franklin tried to reach us but he, too, was hit. I am not sure if this was before or after Arring ton was wounded. We had at least four of us hit by that one person within an hour. Then Sergeant Kennedy came up after Arlington was wounded and single-handedly eliminated the threat with grenades and his rifle. This took the bind off of us."

Corner and Poley's machine gun was not the only one which had fallen silent. George Foxe, twenty-five, and Nathaniel Byrd, twenty-two, were slumped across their silent M-60 machine gun, surrounded by heaps of empty shell casings and empty ammunition cans. They had died together, shoulder to shoulder. Sergeant Jemison pays them the ultimate compliment of a professional soldier: "Byrd and Foxe did a great job. They kept firing that gun and didn't leave it. They stayed on it to the end."

It was time to clean out the enemy overwhelming the left side of Charlie Company. Dillon and I talked it over and agreed we now had to commit our reserve. I told Lieutenant James T. Rackstraw to take his recon platoon and counterattack on the left side of the Charlie Company sector. I pointed at the precise area of the perimeter he was to attack and told him to coordinate his movements with Lieutenant Litton of Delta Company.

After his platoon secured the left side of Charlie, I told him he was to join Litton and kill the enemy behind the mortars. Then, to reconstitute a reserve, I ordered Captain Myron Diduryk to bring his Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion command group and one of his platoons off the line and into a dispersed position near the battalion command post. He was to stand by to block, reinforce, or counterattack into Bob Edwards's sector of the line, or anywhere else that came under heavy attack.

Diduryk took off at a dead run and was back with Lieutenant Rescorla's platoon by 8:15 a.m. A heavy volume of grazing fire was covering the entire LZ. Rescorla's platoon had one killed, one wounded.

By now most of the men in Bob Edwards's two hardest hit platoons were either dead or wounded. The job of holding off the enemy fell to the few still up and shooting. Somehow PFC Larry D. Stevenson of Delta Company found himself in Lieutenant Geoghegan's platoon sector, the only soldier left holding a fifty-yard section of the line. He calmly dropped to one knee and methodically shot fifteen enemy before help finally arrived. That help was the battalion recon platoon. They cleaned out the Charlie Company left, then shifted toward the center of Charlie Company's lines and linked up with them for the rest of the fight. That portion of the perimeter was now under control. The maneuver took some of the pressure off the landing zone, and we noticed an immediate slackening in the volume of fire sweeping the clearing. I radioed word to brigade headquarters to send the lift helicopters in with Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav.

Somewhere in this time frame I noticed that my radio operator, Bob Ouellette, was sitting back up, looking shaky but functioning again. I took a closer look and discovered he had been knocked cold by a bullet which had penetrated his helmet but not his head. I told him: "Ouellette, never give up that helmet. It saved your life." The crusty old medical-platoon sergeant, Thomas Keeton, says, "I remember Colonel Moore's radio operator. He just suddenly dropped. I thought he had laid down and gone to sleep. I was kind of mad at him; went over and kicked the hell out of him; told him to get off his ass and help us with the wounded. No response. I picked up his helmet and a bullet fell out. A round had gone through the steel pot and helmet liner. Knocked him cold as a cube. He had a big lump on his head."

All of us in the vicinity of the battalion command post were now shocked by an event that unfolded, slow motion, in front of our disbelieving eyes. I was on one knee facing south toward the mountain. Ouellette, still dazed, was kneeling beside me. Movement off to the west, my right, caught my eye. I jerked my head around and looked straight into the noses of two F-100 Super Sabre jet fighters aiming directly at us. At that moment, the lead aircraft released two shiny, six-foot-long napalm canisters, which slowly began loblolly ing end over end toward us.

The fearsome sight of those cans of napalm is indelibly imprinted in my memory. It was only three or four seconds from release to impact and explosion, but it seemed like a lifetime. They were released by the lead F-100 and were on a direct line for the right side of the command post where Sergeant George Nye and his demolition team were dug in in the tall grass. The jets were on a very low pass. I couldn't do anything about those first two napalm cans, but I had to do something to stop the pilot of the second plane, who was aimed directly at the left side of the command post, from releasing his two canisters. If he hit the pickle switch [bomb release button] he would definitely take out Hal Moore, Captain Carrara, Sergeant Keeton, Captain Dillon, Sergeant Major Plumley, Joe Galloway, Captain Whiteside, Lieutenant Hastings, our radio operators, radios, medical supplies, and ammunition, and the wounded huddled in the aid station. The nerve center--the life center--of this battalion would be instantly killed in the middle of a cliff-hanger battle for survival.

I yelled at the top of my lungs to Charlie Hastings, the Air Force FAC: "Call that son of a bitch off! Call him off!" Joe Galloway heard Hastings screaming into his radio: "Pull up! Pull up!" Matt Dillon says, "I can still see the canisters tumbling toward us. I remember thinking, "Turn your eyes away so you won't be blinded.' I put my face into a reporter's shoulder to hide my eyes. Was Joe Galloway's. I could hear Good Time Charlie Hastings shouting into his radio: ' up!' The second jet did. The napalm from the first hit some people and some ammo caught on fire. Sergeant Major Plumley jumped up to put out the fire around the ammo. I ran out into the LZ to put an air panel out." Sergeant Nye says: "Two of my people, PFCNJimmy D. Nakayama and Specialist 5 James Clark, were on the other side of me, several yards away. Somebody was hollering and Colonel Moore was standing there hollering something about a wing man, and I looked up. There were two planes coming and one of them had already dropped his napalm and everything seemed to go into slow motion. Everything was on fire.

Nakayama was all black and Clark was all burned and bleeding."

Galloway: "Before, I had walked over and talked to the engineer guys in their little foxholes. Now those same men were dancing in the fire.

Their hair burned off in an instant. Their clothes were incinerated. One was a mass of blisters; the other not quite so bad, but he had breathed the fire into his lungs. When the flames died down we all ran out into the burning grass. Somebody yelled at me to grab the feet of one of the charred soldiers. When I got them, the boots crumbled and the flesh came off and I could feel the bare bones of his ankles in the palms of my hands. We carried him into the aid station. I can still hear their screams."

Specialist 4 Thomas E. Burlile, a medical-aid man from Myron Diduryk's Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, rushed out into the clearing with his kit bag to help the napalm victims. Burlile was shot in the head and died within minutes, in Lieutenant Rescorla's arms. An Oklahoman, Burlile had turned twenty-three years old just four days before he was killed.

Sergeant Keeton, in the battalion aid station, quickly shot Nakayama and Clark up with morphine but it gave little relief. They were horribly burned. Their screams pierced the hearts of every man within hearing.

Both soldiers were evacuated, but PFC Nakayama, a native of Rigby, Idaho, died two days later, on November 17, just two days short of his twenty-third birthday.

Says Sergeant Nye: "Nakayama was a real friend of mine. A good kid. Used to call me China Joe. He caught me one time with a Chinese girl and that nickname stuck with me through the whole war. I called him Mizo. In Japanese that meant ' God.' The day he died his wife had their baby.

A week after he died his reserve commission as a lieutenant came through. Every damned guy on Landing Zone X-Ray was a hero, but the real heroes were guys like Nakayama. I lost good people in there; they gave their all. Every time I hear a helicopter I get all watery-eyed. It's hard to explain."

Back in the command post, our Air Force FAC, Charlie Hastings, was stunned by the tragic consequences of the misplaced air strike. Hastings recalls, "After the napalm strike Colonel Moore looked at me and said something that I never forgot: ''t worry about that one, Charlie.

Just keep them coming.' "

Shortly after the napalm strike, an enemy soldier staggered and stumbled into the clearing from behind Bob Edwards's far left flank. He had no weapon, was severely wounded, and, judging by his black uniform, was evidently a member of the H-15 VC Battalion. Staff Sergeant Otis J.

Hull, a thirty-year-old native of Terra Alta, West Virginia, and one of his recon-platoon men ran to the enemy soldier and brought him into the command-post aid station for medical treatment. He died before we could evacuate him and was buried in a shallow grave nearby.

The battle in the Charlie Company sector raged on. Most of Kroger's men were down. A handful, like Arthur Viera, had escaped the enemy execution squads and were hunkered down in positions where the heavy close-in fire support shielded them. Over on the far right, Lieutenant Lane's platoon was having a hard time of it--perhaps because they were just to the left of that creekbed highway that led into our positions. Sergeant John Setelin: "The air strikes and the artillery were hitting almost in our holes for forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. That's when I was hit by white phosphorus. The attacks came at various parts of our line. They were determined to overrun us. I guess we were determined enough that we were not going to go down, and we didn't."

At about nine a.m. Lieutenant Dick Tifft, who was controlling the helicopter lifts, gave me the welcome news that Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry was a few minutes out on final approach. At 9:10 a.m. Captain Joel E. Sugdinis, twenty-eight, West Point class of 1960, landed with his 3rd Platoon led by Lieutenant William Sisson. That platoon immediately headed south, toward the sound of the guns in the Charlie Company sector, deploying in the scrub brush behind the few survivors of Lieutenant Geoghegan's platoon. I briefed Sugdinis and pointed him to Myron Diduryk's sector, telling Myron to see that Sugdinis was thoroughly oriented.

S. Lawrence (Larry) Gwin, Jr., twenty-four and a native Bostonian, was Sugdinis's executive officer. Commissioned out of Yale University ROTC, Gwin had spent two years in the 82nd Airborne, was Ranger qualified, and had studied the Vietnamese language at the Defense Language School in Monterey, California, for two months. "That LZ was hot. When I got off my ship there were rounds coming in. Out in the LZ, PFC Donald Allred popped up out of the grass and said: ', I've been hit.' We patched him up and now we knew we were in Zululand. Alpha Company closed up, with the exception of Sisson's platoon, which was almost immediately detached. That is significant because we would not see them again until four days later."

Sergeant John Maruhnich, a thirty-five-year-old career soldier from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a squad leader in Sugdinis's mortar platoon.

"We had no sooner landed than firing grew intense. At that time we of the mortar platoon fought as riflemen. Five of us were told to move to a section of the line which was lightly held. We spotted about twenty enemy and killed them all. One North Vietnamese I killed was running at me screaming and firing a rifle. After I killed him I saw he was an officer. I took his pistol out of the holster and put it in my pack."

After two and a half hours the battle for Charlie Company finally wound down. Sergeant Setelin recalls: "The firing stopped as quickly as it started. The enemy dead were stacked two or three deep in front of us.

In the lulls we would kick and shovel dirt up on them to keep the stink and flies down." Lieutenant Lane now made his way over to Bob Edwards's foxhole without incident. All the officers in Charlie Company were either dead or wounded. Captain Bob Edwards had done all that duty demanded, and much, much more. He had also lost a lot of blood. Turning over command to Lieutenant Lane, Edwards was pushed and pulled out of his foxhole by Lane, Sergeant Glenn Kennedy, and Sergeant James Castleberry.

At the termite-hill command post, I called Myron Diduryk over and ordered him to move with his one assembled platoon to Bob Edwards's sector, assume control of the survivors of Charlie Company and Lane's platoon, and clean out and defend that portion of the perimeter. At 9:41 a.m. he and his troopers moved out, followed in minutes by his other platoon after Joel Sugdinis took over that sector. I attached Sugdinis's 3rd Platoon under Lieutenant Sisson to Myron Diduryk's Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion.

By 10 a.m. the surviving North Vietnamese were withdrawing. Charlie Company had held its ground in a stunning display of personal courage and unit discipline. The brave men of Geoghegan's and Kroger's platoons had stood and died fighting for each other and held their ground. The senior-ranking survivor in those two platoons was Platoon Sergeant Jemison. Asked why the enemy failed to overrun his platoon, Jemison says, "First, it was Byrd and Foxe on the machine gun on the right. At the end, what saved us was Comer's machine gun."