Grunts (45 page)

The intensity of the battle ran in cycles. The North Vietnamese kept up a steady volume of rocket and mortar fire. They would attack one part of the perimeter, get repulsed, regroup, and then hit somewhere else. “Sometimes it was really, really intense,” Private Lambertson explained. “Sometimes it wasn’t that bad. When it wasn’t that bad, you were moving around, collecting ammunition . . . getting guys to the middle of the perimeter where the aid station was. There was always something to do.” Some soldiers tried to dig in, using their helmets, bayonets, or even their fingernails. Officers and sergeants were constantly reorganizing and shoring up the firing line. Men were packed close together, facing outward toward the mostly unseen enemy, waiting for bona fide targets before opening fire so as not to waste their dwindling stocks of ammunition.

As Lambertson indicated, medics had collected the wounded in the center of the perimeter only a few meters behind the main lines. Many on the firing line were wounded but could still fight. Those who were lying in the middle of the perimeter were only the most badly wounded. Some of the medics, like Spec-4 Ennis Elliott, who was lugging around a shattered forearm from an AK bullet, along with several other debilitating wounds, were themselves casualties. “When you see somebody else hit, it doesn’t bother you,” he said. “But when you look at your own arm and see the bone and blood, it’s a shock.”

The company’s senior medic, Spec-4 Jim Stanzak, was a highly experienced soldier on his second tour with the 173rd in Vietnam. In that time, he had saved many lives. He had also seen quite a few soldiers die in his arms, their faces full of grief, shock, and sadness. Now he was dealing with more patients than he could handle. For him, the day was a whirlwind of responding to cries of “Doc!” or “Medic!” dragging wounded men to the middle of the perimeter and trying to save their lives. “I was getting guys hit one after another . . . and there was no way in hell that I could stay with [them] personally.” He moved from patient to patient, fighting his own personal battle with death. He was also in extreme danger himself. In one instance, a man next to him took two machine-gun rounds to the head, exploding his skull and brains over Stanzak’s shirt. “Of course, his head was pretty much gone.”

Nearby, when a machine-gun team got killed, Private First Class John Barnes braved withering enemy fire to leap over to the gun and man it himself. The Dedham, Massachusetts, native was on his second tour. He was anything but a recruiting poster soldier, though. He was eager and affable, but he had a permanent slovenliness to him and he always seemed to be the last man ready to move out each morning. He was the type of person who would look dirty three minutes after he took a shower. His buddies liked to call him Pig-pen. “[He] was a sad sack,” one soldier recalled. “I mean, he was never shaven. He had no noise discipline. Lieutenant Brown had to put a man in charge of his rucksack just to keep it quiet.”

What he lacked in field craft he made up for in courage. Several meters in front of Barnes’s gun, NVA attackers were surging ahead, trying to overrun this part of the line. “He was inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy as they made one human wave assault after another,” one nearby soldier recalled. In the recollection of Sergeant Robert Lampkin, his fire “turned back several enemy assaults, preventing that portion of the perimeter from being overrun.” His accurate M60 fire killed between six and nine enemy soldiers (estimates vary). This fire was the only thing that kept the enemy from breaching the line and killing Doc Stanzak and the helpless wounded who were all just a few meters behind Barnes.

Suddenly, a well-camouflaged enemy soldier snuck to within a few yards and hurled a grenade through the dense bamboo. In one surreal moment the grenade somehow sailed through several stands of bamboo, over the machine gunner’s head, and landed a few yards behind, right among the wounded. Spec-4 James Townsend, lying only a few feet away, saw the menacing grenade and noticed a flurry of motion from Barnes’s direction. “[He] leaped from his position and threw himself on the grenade.” Doc Stanzak had actually talked one time with Barnes about just such a situation as this. Barnes had assured the medic that he had too much to live for and would never hurl himself on a grenade. But, now, amid this anonymous stand of Vietnamese jungle and bamboo, when there was little time to mull over choices, Barnes made the ultimate sacrifice. Stanzak was only a few feet away. In the instant before the grenade detonated, the young New Englander happened to turn and look right at the medic. Stanzak saw “fright and fear” all over Barnes’s face, but his expression also seemed to convey a question: “Doc, didn’t I say I wasn’t gonna do this?”

The grenade exploded, lifting Barnes’s body about a foot off the ground, shredding his abdomen, almost cutting him in half. In a matter of seconds, he bled to death. Stanzak caught some shrapnel from the grenade, as did Sergeant Watson and a couple other men, but none of these wounds were life-threatening. Barnes had saved the lives of an untold number of his friends (one soldier estimated the number at ten). Why did he sacrifice himself to save the others? Perhaps out of love, perhaps out of obligation, perhaps just in the heat of the moment. His friends could never know for sure, but they were forever grateful to him. Glancing over at the brave man’s body, Lieutenant Kelley was struck by how frail he looked. “The grenade had blown a huge hole in his torso and penetrated different parts of his equipment. His face was completely intact.” For his heroism, Barnes earned a well-deserved Medal of Honor.
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Captain McElwain knew that, even though his men were fighting well, holding off powerful enemy attacks, time was not necessarily on their side. After all, they were surrounded, cut off from resupply, with many casualties, separated even from their rucksacks. Minute by minute, their stocks of water, medical supplies, and ammunition dwindled. Eventually, if Task Force Black did not get some serious help, the NVA would overrun the perimeter and probably kill everyone. Some of the men were down to only a few magazines of ammo, and were even saving their last bullet for themselves. “I just knew that nobody was gonna get out of there alive,” one of them later said. Lieutenant Kelley, like many, believed he would certainly die and found a strange sort of peace in accepting that sad reality. “A calmness . . . came over me. I guess it goes along with pure acceptance of the fact that this is gonna happen.”

McElwain was moving around frenetically, constantly on the radio, imploring higher command for help. On several occasions he had to personally fight for his life. “Each time the enemy carried the attack to the perimeter, CPT McElwain moved to the critical area killing the enemy when they started to break through and urging his men to hold the position,” a post-battle report chronicled. “He personally killed six or seven North Vietnamese that day.” In one such instance, several NVA soldiers came within fifteen feet of him but probably could not see him because of the dense bamboo. He raised his CAR-15 rifle and opened fire. “[The bamboo] was so thick in there that you could almost walk on top of somebody and not even see ’em,” he said. “I hit four of them.”

As McElwain’s RTO, Sergeant Chuck Clutter’s job was to stick close to him, no matter the danger. “I just never understood how anyone could pass through all that flying lead and . . . come out . . . unscathed,” he said. “He was just living right that day, I guess. There’s no answer to that.” Clutter himself took an AK round to the leg, breaking a bone, and it felt like “a thousand volts of electricity . . . attached to a baseball bat.” As medics tended to Clutter, Sergeant Jacques “Jack” deRemer, another member of the command group, took the radio from Clutter and gave it to another man. The wounded Clutter remembered that the fire around them was so thick that, as he lay bleeding, water from bamboo stalks kept splashing on him as bullets struck the stalks a couple feet overhead.

Employing the new RTO, McElwain remained in constant contact with Captain Ed Sills, the battalion operations officer, and Lieutenant Colonel Schumacher. By late morning, after passing along many conflicting reports on the size of the enemy force, McElwain was practically begging for help. Flying distantly in a helicopter thousands of feet overhead, and thus with no appreciation of the battle’s ferocity, Schumacher thought that McElwain was overreacting. “First you report a squad, then a platoon, then a company,” he said. “Now it’s a battalion. Get up and go after those people.”

McElwain was not a fan of Schumacher. In McElwain’s opinion, the colonel was the type of spit-shined commander who was content to buzz around in his command chopper, rarely ever getting on the ground with his troops. The captain thought of him as a careerist who cared much more about his next promotion than the welfare of his soldiers. In McElwain’s estimation, few things were so detestable as that. “He really didn’t have any interest in anybody other than himself,” McElwain said. This resentment, and the stress of the fight, boiled over into an argument. “Goddamn it, Six [radio lingo for the battalion commander],” he howled, “if you don’t get us some fucking help down here, you won’t have a Charlie Company! Listen to me, get us some help!”

Schumacher told McElwain to calm down and watch his language. The colonel still refused to send any substantial help. Fortunately, General Schweiter, the brigade commander, was listening to their radio communications. “You’d better listen to your man on the ground, Colonel,” he told Schumacher. “If he says he’s facing a battalion, he’s facing a battalion.” Only with that prodding from a superior did the battalion commander take action. He found that his options were limited. The logical force to relieve Task Force Black was Task Force Blue, since they came from the same battalion and were only a couple miles away. But they had run into an apparent enemy bunker complex and, according to Captain Jesmer, the outfit was pinned down by sniper fire. Schumacher told him to press through the complex and relieve Task Force Black. But Jesmer and his people remained pinned down by the snipers (actually this was just an enemy rear guard designed to hold off Task Force Blue while the main group finished off Task Force Black). Such was the intensity of the fighting going on all over the Dak To area that the only other unit available for an immediate rescue was Charlie Company of the brigade’s 4th Battalion, several kilometers away at Ben Het. Just after noon, General Schweiter ordered Lieutenant Colonel James Johnson, the battalion commander, to get the company ready for a helicopter assault. Captain Sills found a small LZ for them about eight hundred meters north of Task Force Black’s position.
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At 1300, even as McElwain and his people desperately hung on, Captain William Connolly and 120 of his Charlie Company troopers boarded their helicopters. After a short flight, the choppers dropped them off, one shipload at a time, in the LZ. “The company moved south, using trails and double-timing where possible to reach the embattled troopers of the First Battalion,” a unit report later said. “The men carried a full basic load of ammunition for themselves and another basic load for [Task Force Black].” They moved as fast as they could but they had to be constantly wary of an enemy ambush. Most of Connolly’s men knew that fellow paratroopers were in real trouble, so maintaining such a deliberate pace was frustrating for them. Sergeant Mike Tanner, a mortar forward observer with a radio strapped to his back, was especially impatient because he knew that his best friend from stateside training, Ben Warnic, was with McElwain’s surrounded group. “So I was pushing the point team really hard,” Tanner recalled. “I kept complaining that we were not going fast enough.”

The point team’s squad leader finally turned to Tanner and offered him point if he thought he could move so much faster. Tanner handed someone his radio and took the lead. He moved quickly and “recklessly not looking for booby traps or enemy ambushes.” Several minutes after assuming the lead, he was delicately stepping across basketball-sized rocks to traverse a dry streambed. He happened to look down and saw “that the streambed was crawling with . . . hundreds or thousands of bamboo viper snakes. They were little hatchlings with . . . twenty or thirty adult snakes.” The adults were a foot long and the babies about six inches. Hundreds of them slithered around the bottom of the rocks, a few inches from his boots. He kept going and the company followed him, but he soon yielded point back to the original group.

Before long, they could hear the distant sounds of Task Force Black’s battle. Captain Connolly was in constant radio contact with Captain McElwain, informing him of his company’s progress. Connolly’s point elements made it to Task Force Black’s original hilltop laager site and began to trade shots with groups of NVA. They also surprised and captured a couple enemy soldiers who were rifling through the rucksacks McElwain’s men had left behind. The NVA had pilfered many packs for food and medical supplies and had even tried to employ the Americans’ 81-millimeter mortars against them.

As Connolly’s outfit began pushing down the hill, directly toward the Task Force Black perimeter, they ran into strong enemy opposition. After all, they were fighting through enemy lines to get to McElwain’s position. Periodic firefights broke out as Connolly’s men bumped into the NVA and fought it out. The captain was a West Pointer and a Ranger School alum who was totally dedicated to his soldiers. He was also highly experienced, having been in Vietnam for a year and a half. At just twenty-four years old, he was young for company command. He had trained his men to hit the dirt upon making contact, flip off their rucksacks, and use them as cover. Some would return fire. Some would dig in. During the rescue of Task Force Black, these tactics proved highly effective, partially because Charlie Company was dealing with quite a few tree snipers. The rucks provided a modicum of cover. The captain himself noticed a bullet in his ruck, looked up, and saw an NVA in a tree. “Sergeant [Janus] Shalovan, one of my platoon sergeants, was pretty close behind. I turned around and pointed to him and, next thing I know, that guy was falling out of the tree.” In another instance, an NVA suddenly materialized a few feet away from the command group. Spec-5 Lynn Morse, the senior medic, blasted him with a shotgun. In Connolly’s recollection, the fléchettes from the shotgun shell “actually stuck him to a tree. The NVA guy’s toes were dangling.”