We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (32 page)

Within half an hour the attack on Diduryk's right was violently repulsed. Lieutenant Rackstraw's 1st Battalion recon platoon now made a second ammo-resupply run out to Diduryk's lines. At 5:50 a. m., forty minutes before daybreak, Smoky, the flare ship, ran dry. No more light from the sky. I ordered immediate resumption of artillery illumination and lifted the restriction on use of mortar illumination rounds.

At 6:27 a.m. the North Vietnamese commander launched another heavy attack, this time directly at Myron Diduryk's command post. Again the men of Sisson's and Rescorla's platoons bore the brunt. PFC Martin: "About 6:30 a. m., they hit us again with an ' or Nothing' attitude.

It was like a shooting gallery; waves of NVA were coming in a straight line down off Chu Pong Mountain." Specialist 4 Pat Selleck of the recon platoon was hauling more ammo to the line: "I heard bugles blowing. I saw in the light of the flares waves of the enemy coming down at us off the mountain in a straight line. One had a white hat or helmet on and it was like he was directing the line of march. His weapon was slung over his shoulder. They just kept coming down like they didn't care. The line company was shooting them like ducks in a pond."

From Lieutenant Bill Lund's point of view, the enemy commander could not have picked a better place for this attack. In the light of the flares, clusters of enemy soldiers were clearly visible only fifty to a hundred yards out across a hundred-yard front. Lund literally shredded those units with 105mm airburst shells and a nonstop bombardment of 81mm mortar shells. With their rifles and machine guns, the troopers in the forward foxholes ripped up those who escaped the heavy stuff. After only fourteen minutes of this, the few North Vietnamese survivors broke off the attack and started back the way they had come, to the southeast, dragging some of their wounded comrades.

Forward of Rescorla's troops, the number of moving enemy dwindled.

"Suddenly only one NVA was still moving, thrusting his squat body forward in one last effort. Every rifle and machine gun was firing at him. He finally fell three paces from a foxhole on our right flank. For the next five minutes men kept firing at him, refusing to believe he was mortal. A brave and determined soldier. ', he's carrying a pistol," Sergeant Musselwhite shouted. I started to crawl out through the dust to grab the souvenir, but Staff Sergeant John Leake beat me to it.

Specialist 4 Robert Marks spoke up: ', I think I've been hit.' That strong soldier from Baltimore had been hit in the neck long before, but chose not to report it until the battle was over."

Rescorla adds, "A quietness settled over the field. We put more rounds into the clumps of bodies nearest our holes, making sure. Ammunition was again resupplied by the recon platoon. Two full loads had been expended.

We stretched in the gray dawn. Suddenly an NVA body bucked high. His own stick grenade had exploded under him. Suicide or accident? We watched our front. Old bodies from the day before mingled with newly killed. The smell was hard to take. Forty yards away a young North Vietnamese soldier popped up from behind a tree. He started his limping run back the way he had come. I fired two rounds. He crumpled. I chewed the line out for failure to fire quickly."

The night attack had failed; it broke against the firepower and professionalism of Myron Diduryk and his officers and men. Hundreds more North Vietnamese soldiers died bravely doing their best to break through Myron's iron defenses. Captain Diduryk's Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, had borne the brunt of the attack and suffered precisely six men lightly wounded. Not one was killed.

During the two and a half hours of the attack against Diduryk's sector, the rest of the X-Ray perimeter had been quiet--too quiet. Dillon and I discussed the possibility of conducting a reconnaissance by fire to check for presence of the enemy elsewhere on the line. We had plenty of ammunition and, what the hell, the enemy knew where our lines were as well as I did by now. We passed the word on the battalion net: At precisely 6:55 a.m. every man on the perimeter would fire his individual weapon, and all machine guns, for two full minutes on full automatic. The word was to shoot up trees, anthills, bushes, and high grass forward of and above the American positions.

Gunners would shoot anything that worried them. By now we had learned to our sorrow that the enemy used the night to put snipers into the trees, ready to do damage at first light. Now was the time to clean up out in front.

At the stated time our perimeter erupted in an earsplitting uproar. And immediately a force of thirty to fifty North Vietnamese rose from cover 150 yards forward of Joel Sugdinis's Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion lines and began shooting back. The

"Mad Minute" of firing triggered their attack prematurely. Artillery fire was instantly brought in on them and the attack was beaten off. When the shooting stopped one dead sniper dangled by his rope from a tree forward of Diduryk's leftmost platoon.

Another dropped dead out of a tree immediately forward of John Herren's Bravo Company, 1st Battalion command post. A third North Vietnamese sniper was killed an hour later, when he tried to climb down his tree and run for it.

Sergeant Setelin's arm, speckled with the white phosphorus burns, began hurting him now. "I was sent back to the aid station, where my arm was bandaged, and I was waiting to be medevac'd out. The more I sat there the more I realized that I couldn't in good faith get on a chopper and fly out of there and leave those guys behind. So I took the sling off my arm and went on back out. Somebody asked: ' are you going?' I said: "Back to my foxhole.' Nobody said anything else."

POLICING THE BATTLEFIELD Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

--The Duke of Wellington, in a dispatch from Waterloo, 1815

In our Mad Minute we had swept the area outside our perimeter. Now I ordered a sweep inside our lines. At 7:46 a.m. the reserve elements, the recon platoon, and the survivors of Charlie Company began a cautious and very deliberate patrol of the territory enclosed by our troops. I ordered them to conduct the sweep on hands and knees, searching for friendly casualties and North Vietnamese infiltrators in the tall elephant grass. They also checked the trees inside the line of foxholes closely. By 8:05 a.m. they were reporting negative results.

At 8:10 all units on line were ordered to coordinate with those on their flanks and prepare to move five hundred yards forward on a search-and-clear sweep, policing up any friendly casualties and all enemy weapons. There was a long delay before this dangerous but necessary maneuver could begin. Radio checks, ammo resupply, coordination with flanking units--all these took time for men who were slowing down mentally and physically after forty-eight hours of constant tension and no sleep. My last rest had been those five hours of sleep the night of November 13. I could still think clearly but I had to tell myself what I intended to say before I opened my mouth. It was like speaking a foreign language before you are completely fluent in it. I was translating English into English. I had to keep my head, concentrate on the events in progress, and think about what came next.

The sweep began at 9:55 a. m., and Myron Diduryk's men had moved out only about seventy-five yards when they met enemy resistance, including hand grenades. Lieutenant James Lane, Diduryk's 2nd Platoon leader, was seriously wounded. I stopped all movement immediately and ordered Diduryk's company to return to their foxholes. Sergeant John Setelin, his burned arm still throbbing, was unhappy. "That morning we were ordered to sweep out in front of our positions. I didn't like that. At night I felt fairly safe because Charlie couldn't see me and I was in that hole and didn't have to get out. But when daylight came I wanted to cuss Colonel Moore for making us go outside our holes. We were told to make one last sweep, a final check around. During that sweep, Lamothe and I brought in one of the last of our dead. Big man, red hair, handlebar mustache. We found him next to a tree, sitting up, his rifle propped up on another tree. One round through his chest, another through the base of his throat. We got him back, running and dragging him."

Lieutenant Rick Rescorla, as usual, was in the middle of it all. "I led my platoon forward into the silent battlefield. We followed a twisting path through the clumps of enemy dead. Fifty yards out we crossed a clearing and were approaching a group of dead NVA machine gunners. Less than seven yards away the enemy head snapped up. I threw myself sideways. Everything was happening in slow motion. The grimacing face of an enemy gunner, eyes wide, smoke coming from his gun barrel. I fired twice and went down, looking foolishly at an empty magazine. '!' I called back to my radio operator, [PFC Salvatore P.] Fantino. He lobbed a frag to me. I caught it, pulled pin, and dropped it right on those NVA heads. Firing broke out up and down the line and there was a scramble back to the foxholes.

Seven more men wounded along the line, including Lieutenant Lane.

Sergeant [Larry L.] Melton and I crawled back out with backpacks of grenades while the others covered us. That handful of enemy died hard, one by one, behind the anthills."

When that firing broke out Diduryk reported by radio. I grabbed Charlie Hastings, the forward air controller, and my own radio operator, Specialist Bob Ouellette, and along with Plumley we ran the seventy-five yards to Diduryk's command-post foxhole. Rescorla was thirty to forty yards off to the left front, regrouping his men. I told Hastings to pull out all the stops and bring down all the air firepower he could lay hands on, bring it in now. Orbiting overhead was a flight of A-IE Skyraiders from the 1st Air Commando Squadron. Captain Bruce Wallace, the flight leader, says: "I remember talking to Charlie Hastings on the radio. '-Ray, this is Hobo Three-One, four A-les, bombs, napalm, and guns. Please key your mike for a steer.' The reply: ', Hobo Three-One, X-Ray. Your target is a concentration of enemy troops just to our southeast. Want you to come in first with your bombs, then your napalm, then your guns on whatever we see that's still moving around out there.' ' X-Ray. We are ready for your smoke.' "

The aerial attack began. Hastings had also called in a flight of jet fighter-bombers. Within minutes the brush out beyond Diduryk's lines was heaving and jumping to the explosion of rockets, 250- and 500-pound bombs, napalm, 20mm cannon shells, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus.

Peter Arnett, then a reporter for the Associated Press, had hitched a lift into X-Ray this last morning. Arnett was near Myron Diduryk's foxhole busily snapping pictures.

After several minutes of this I told Charlie Hastings: "One more five-hundred-pounder very, very close to kill any PAVN left out there, then call them off." I told Diduryk to order his men to fix bayonets and move out. Within ten seconds we jumped off into the black smoke of that last five-hundred-pound bomb. Overhead, Air Force Captain Bruce Wallace's flight of Spads was reassembling and getting a battle-damage assessment from Charlie Hastings: "On many missions that report would contain estimates that the flight had destroyed suspected enemy truck parks or bamboo hooches or inflicted casualties on suspected enemy pack animals. LZ X-Ray was different. Charlie Hastings would tell it like it was. Tactfully if we didn't do it right: ', Hobo, no score today, but thanks for your help anyway.' Enthusiastically if we did it right: ', Hobo, exactly what we needed. The ground commander sends his compliments.' "

Rescorla and his men had been watching the air show appreciatively. "We gathered for the last sweep. Suddenly a fighter-bomber plowed down from above. We buried our noses at the bottom of our holes. An express train screamed down and the explosion shook the earth. The bomb landed thirty yards from our holes. We came up cursing in the dust and debris. The call came to move out. Every available trooper, including Colonel Moore, pushed the perimeter out."

This time it was no contest at all. We killed twenty-seven more enemy and crushed all resistance. I looked over a field littered with enemy dead, sprawled by ones and twos and heaps across a torn and gouged land.

Blood, body fragments, torn uniforms, shattered weapons littered the landscape. It was a sobering sight. Those men, our enemies, had mothers, too. But we had done what we had to do.

Aside from wanting to make certain that Diduryk and his men did a clean, safe job, I had one other reason for joining the final assault personally. Rick Rescorla watched. "Colonel Moore, in our sector, was rushing up to clumps of bodies, pulling them apart. ' the hell is the colonel doing up here?' Sergeant Thompson asked. I shook my head.

Later we saw him coming back at the head of men carrying ponchos. By 10:30 a.m. Colonel Moore had found what he was looking for. Three dead American troops were no longer missing in action; now they were on their way home to their loved ones."

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Mcdade and the rest of his men of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had begun marching toward LZ X-Ray from LZ Columbus, three miles east, at around 9:30 a.m. Mcdade brought with him his headquarters company, plus Charlie and Delta companies of the 2nd Battalion. He had also been given Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry. They closed in on our position at about noon. In the forefront of the column was Specialist 4 Jack P. Smith, son of radio and television broadcast journalist Howard K. Smith. Jack Smith wrote of what he saw in a 1967 article for the Saturday Evening Post: "The 1st Battalion had been fighting continuously for three or four days, and I had never seen such filthy troops. They all had that look of shock. They said little, just looked around with darting, nervous eyes. Whenever I heard a shell coming close, I'd duck but they kept standing. There must have been about 1,000 rotting bodies out there, starting at about 20 feet, surrounding the giant circle of foxholes."

Others echoed Jack Smith's astonishment. Specialist 4 Pat Selleck, hardened by three days in X-Ray, listened to the newcomers: "I heard one soldier say, ' Christ, what did you guys do out here? It looks like a blood bath. All you see is bodies all over the place walking in here." " Specialist 4 Dick Ackerman, a native of Merced, California, was in Me Dade's recon platoon as it marched into X-Ray. "Upon entering the LZ the first thing I saw was enemy bodies stacked like cordwood alongside the trail, in piles at least six feet high. I have never forgotten that sight."