Grunts (48 page)

As usual, another major factor in keeping the enemy at bay was prodigious supporting fire. Artillery shells, most commonly from 105-millimeter howitzers, burst all over the hill, wounding and killing NVA, disrupting their movements. Air strikes also did grisly, unrelenting work. In the recollection of one officer whose job was to coordinate air support, “pilots who had expended their ordnance would call back to their base and let them know [they] wanted [to be] rearmed as soon as [they] landed” because they were so badly needed at Hill 875. Many pilots flew three or four sorties over the course of the day.

As evening approached, the shooting quieted down a bit. The battered American survivors were deeply worried that the NVA was regrouping for a night attack. Air strikes continued to pound the NVA-controlled portions of the hill. At 1858, just as darkness crept over the unhappy hill, a lone American plane approached from the northeast, on course to pass over the shoulders of the Americans. Previous planes had swooped in from the other direction, over enemy lines. Noticing this, one of the first sergeants told his RTO to call the forward air controller and ask why. As he did so, the plane flew directly overhead. Many of the Americans thought the plane was a Marine jet. Others believed it was a prop-driven Air Force A-1E Skyraider. Such are the vagaries of eyewitness observations, especially in a combat setting.

Regardless of what it was, the pilot was clearly confused as to the location of the American lines. By the light of a flare, he dropped two 500-pound bombs over the American positions. One of them detonated, with a bright flash and a powerful wall of concussive sound, directly above Captain Kaufman’s command post. The effect was nearly apocalyptic. In less time than it took to blink an eye, Kaufman and his command group were killed, as were many of the nearby wounded. Many of them were literally blown to bits, liquidated, as though they never existed. Father Watters was killed outright. So was Lieutenant Richard “Buck” Thompson, yet another member of West Point’s class of ’66. Some of the dead were blown to pieces. Hands, legs, heads, and torsos were scattered everywhere. “I could see the body parts on the trees,” one survivor remembered. Those same trees were smeared with blood and flesh. In one position, a soldier looked up and saw a naked corpse hanging in the tree above him. Try as he might, he could not free up the corpse. Not wanting to attract enemy attention, he left the corpse alone, even though the bottom of the dead man’s feet nearly touched his shoulders.

For about ten or fifteen seconds after the detonation, a stunned silence hung over the hill while the survivors shook off concussion and tried to figure out what had just happened. The only noise was the diffuse crackling of small fires. Spec-4 Ronald Fleming’s eardrums were ruptured. Amid the drowsy world of silence around him, he kept screaming for someone to put out the fires. Blood was pouring from Spec-4 Steer’s nose, mouth, and ears. “I noticed my right arm was gone because I went to pick it up and it was just hanging by some tissue. My right leg was almost gone.” Thinking he was about to die, he cried out: “God, don’t let me go to hell!” and then passed out. Lieutenant O’Leary, the Dog Company commander, had a sucking chest wound, but his first sergeant was hurt even worse. As O’Leary struggled to save the sergeant’s life, he saw a man walk past holding the stump of his left arm with his right. “Will someone tie off my arm?” he mumbled to no one in particular and staggered away.

Sergeant Welch awoke to the sound of a man behind him screaming: “My legs are gone! Mom! Mom!” The man bled to death in his lieutenant’s arms. Private First Class Clarence Johnson had been easing into a shallow fighting hole when the bomb hit, flinging him several feet in the air. “It took out my elbow and most of my left arm. My humerus bone and all the bones . . . closest to my shoulder down to the middle of my arm . . . were pretty much shattered.” He lay quietly, fighting off concussion, with no morphine or medical care, all the while bleeding and in pain. Lieutenant Remington, wounded even before the bombing, was now hurt even worse, with shrapnel in his side and shattered eardrums. Even so, he had the presence of mind to crawl past horribly wounded, crying men and body parts to find a radio, get in touch with the firebase, and call off any further air strikes: “Stop those fucking airplanes,” he roared. “Don’t let ’em drop another bomb. They’re killing us up here.” The bomb killed forty-two Americans and wounded forty-five others. It was the worst friendly fire incident of the Vietnam War.

Of the 290 men who had ascended the hill in the morning, 100 were now dead and at least 50 more wounded. Even so, junior people took over leadership positions and began to reorganize the shattered remains of the unit. Within thirty minutes, they had reestablished the perimeter. With little water, no food, and a looming ammunition shortage, they held on, warding off several probing North Vietnamese attacks (by most accounts, the bombing had also hurt the NVA badly). Men slept or fought next to the corpses of their dead friends. Crazed with thirst, wounded troopers lapsed in and out of consciousness. The enemy well understood the importance of psychological warfare. They blew bugles and taunted the Americans with calls to surrender. A few of them got within ten meters of the American positions, but none broke through. “The night was absolutely hell on earth,” Remington later said. “It was just desolate up there, scary, the smell . . . there was just death in the air.”
¹⁹

Knowing that the 2nd Battalion was in deep trouble, General Schweiter arranged for a relief force. He hopped on his helicopter and flew to see Lieutenant James Johnson, commander of the 4th Battalion. “Jim,” he said, “you’ll have to get your people to that hill. Get them there as fast as you can.” Thus, for the second time in a week, troopers from this battalion were called upon to rescue a stricken group from another battalion. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson’s companies had seen plenty of fighting themselves. They were spread all over the area. He got in touch with his company commanders and they spent the rest of the night hastily organizing a relief mission.

Johnson had less than three hundred men available within his Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Companies. The situation was so critical that Johnson did not concentrate his companies and send them out as one large force. Instead, they set out as they were ready. Bravo was the first. Shortly after sunrise, about one hundred troopers from this company left Fire Base 16, a few kilometers to the northeast of Hill 875. They had spent a long, impatient night preparing for the rescue of their airborne brethren. “There was fear,” one of them later wrote, “but on top of that fear was the driving force that we must get to and save our brothers.” Knowing much about the 2nd Battalion’s plight, they were laden down with extra food, water, and ammunition. Since a favorite NVA tactic was to pin down one unit and ambush a relieving force, Bravo Company proceeded very carefully along narrow trails, through thick jungle and bamboo, even employing a rolling artillery barrage ahead of their line of advance. The going was exhausting and tense. It took Bravo Company the entire day to make it to Hill 875. “We encountered sniper positions, commo wire, well-used trails and various other signs of a large enemy presence,” Private First Class Rocky Stone, a machine gunner, recalled. They found several enemy base camps with bloody bandages, dead bodies, and even parts of bodies. They also discovered, and destroyed, several enemy mortar rounds.

By late afternoon they were finally within sight of the hill. All this time, of course, 2nd Battalion had continued to take accurate mortar and rocket fire, even as they fended off more enemy attacks. They were perilously low on water and ammo. Few of them had any food left. The Bravo Company troopers could hear the shooting. They also were engulfed in the powerful stench of death that permeated Hill 875. Fortunately, the NVA did not hold a continuous line around the hill. The Bravo Company men carefully ascended the ingenious steps that enemy soldiers had cut into the side of 875. Soon the relief force saw the grisly results of the previous day’s fighting. “American bodies along with enemy bodies [were] all entwined on the jungle floor, covered in blood, some blown apart,” Private First Class Stone recalled. “We saw bodies strewn all along our route. The smell of gunpowder, napalm, and death engulfed the hill and filled our noses.” They found Private First Class Lozada’s body, still at his gun, with NVA corpses all around him. Everyone was spooked by the sight of the bodies, so much so that some men wondered aloud if they would ever make it off this hill. The horrible cries of the wounded only added to the trepidation. The cries conveyed hopelessness, agony, vulnerability, and even anger. “This sound was one that none of us will ever forget,” Stone said.

Somewhere between 1700 and 1730, Sergeant Leo Hill and his point element made contact with the 2nd Battalion. “There were tears in their eyes as they greeted their buddies from the 4/503d Inf.,” one report claimed. The 4th Battalion soldiers passed out whatever food and water they had left. “It was like stepping into the third circle of hell,” one soldier later commented. The cratered hill looked like a garbage dump, strewn as it was with discarded equipment, boxes, helmets, weapons, uniforms, and, of course, human remains. Felled trees lay crisscrossed in jagged patterns, making movement difficult. An odor of death, vomit, urine, and human feces blanketed the perimeter. Many of the filthy, dehydrated 2nd Battalion men were in a state of mental shock, gazing with listless, wide-eyed thousand-yard stares at their friends. In the recollection of one Bravo Company man, their faces communicated “relief at seeing us, yet a look of total terror, pain and disbelief.” Bravo’s medics began working on the many wounded. One of them treated badly hurt Private First Class Clarence Johnson and gave him some water, immediately lifting his spirits. “You knew you were gonna . . . live.”
²⁰

Alpha and Charlie Companies stumbled into the perimeter a few hours later, after dark. Throughout the night, the three companies and the 2nd Battalion survivors manned the perimeter, expanded an LZ, dealt with the wounded, and called in fire missions on the NVA bunkers. The enemy responded with heavy mortar and rocket fire. The shelling was accurate enough to add to the list of American dead and wounded. In the darkness, some of the Americans, while keeping watch, inadvertently rested their weapons on dead bodies, thinking they were sandbags.

As the sun rose over the eastern horizon on November 21, the paratroopers were busy hacking out a new LZ, tending to the wounded, policing up weapons and bodies, setting up mortars, and planning their next move. Helicopters still had to run a veritable wall of fire to get in and out of Hill 875, but the gutsy crewmen did succeed in dropping off some supplies and evacuating the worst of the wounded.

Lieutenant Colonel Johnson was a no-nonsense, fair-minded leader who was well thought of by his men. Even so, he was not actually on the hill (yet another example of an absentee battalion commander). He was, though, in constant radio contact with Captain Ron Leonard, who was Bravo’s commander and the ranking 4th Battalion officer on 875. At 0900, Johnson told Leonard that, in two hours, he wanted him to launch an attack to capture the summit of the hill. The captain was not surprised in the least by this order. In fact, he fully expected it and agreed with it. Yet, in retrospect, much can be read into this seemingly straightforward command. From Lieutenant Colonel Johnson’s perspective, and that of nearly every trooper on 875, the hill had to be taken. Honor and pride demanded it. The idea of abandoning 875 was anathema to these proud airborne light infantrymen. To them, victory in war meant fighting tactical battles to destroy the enemy and take the ground he occupied. The hill represented a challenging task that must be accomplished, regardless of the cost. American culture frowned on the notion of leaving a job unfinished. In this context, Johnson’s order made perfect sense.

However, from a bigger-picture, more objective point of view, the order was questionable. The NVA had already destroyed the 2nd Battalion. The 4th Battalion was hardly in good shape, having already fought for weeks. The NVA on Hill 875 were hunkered down in well-sited, heavily reinforced bunkers that were connected by tunnels. Some of the bunkers were strengthened by six feet of logs and dirt, and were thus impervious to artillery and air strikes. Nothing short of a direct hit from a B-52 bomber could destroy the bunkers. At any moment of their choosing, the NVA could use their tunnels to escape back into Cambodia. The hill itself was bereft of any strategic value. Taking it would mean nothing to the outcome of the war. Senior American commanders knew that they would eventually abandon it even if the 4th Battalion succeeded in taking it. Not to mention that doing so promised to be a bloodbath. In fact, the Americans were not even likely to compile much of a body count on the hill because NVA defenses were so strong and the enemy soldiers could escape so easily, probably after inflicting heavy losses on the Americans.

Basically, the North Vietnamese had baited the Americans into fighting for Hill 875. They well understood the American mania for body counts. They knew that the Americans would fight them anywhere in South Vietnam, even in places (such as Hill 875) where the communists enjoyed most of the advantages. At Hill 875, they also knew that, once the fighting started, the Americans would sacrifice heavily to take the hill because they believed this equated to victory. The enemy was quite content to let the Americans claim their pyrrhic notions of victory. Their aim was to goad the Americans into fighting for this worthless hill and either annihilate them or bleed them dry. To the NVA this meant victory of their own.

Hill 875, then, amounted to a fascinating but tragic dichotomy. From the ordinary paratrooper’s point of view, the hill absolutely had to be taken—abandoning it would dishonor the memories of so many dead friends. Moreover, many of the troopers were angry at the enemy and wanted payback for the lives of their dead buddies (a common emotion in combat). But, from an outsider’s point of view, taking the hill made no sense, and was actually counterproductive to the American cause. In essence, taking the hill amounted to an American banzai attack.