The Magnificent Bastards (13 page)

The casualties piled up quickly. Lieutenant Norris was hit a few steps onto the beach, then hit again as several Marines tried to move him back in a poncho. King George was dead.

Second Lieutenant John M. Odell, a platoon commander, was KIA.

Sergeant Harold J. Vierheller, a platoon sergeant, was KIA.

Altogether, seven Bravo Company Marines were killed and fourteen were seriously wounded in perhaps the first five minutes of chaos on the fire-swept beach. Two of the amtracs were hit by RPGs and began exploding. “It was total chaos,” recalled Lance Corporal Urban. Bravo Company, caught off guard and decapitated before anyone had gotten anything organized, bogged down in the enemy’s killing zone. “Everybody just freaked,” said Urban. “We weren’t a company anymore. We were just a bunch of people lying on the ground trying to get a handle on this thing. Anything above two feet was dead.”

Because Gunny Doucette did not know that King George was dead, he did not understand the breakdown on the beach. We’re getting the living shit kicked out of us, he thought, and
my goddamn Marines are hiding behind all these goddamn graves. What the hell’s going on here?

Gunny Doucette, who was never without a short stubby cigar, had fought in Korea and had been with B/1/3 in Vietnam for nearly a year. He may have been an idiosyncratic, hard-assed lifer, but he was also a tough, dedicated Marine who led by example. He ranged the beachhead at An Lac with utter abandon, waving his favorite walking stick—a golf putter—above his head as he tried to get the company organized. He reached the position of a redheaded sergeant who had made it with a squad or two around the northern fringe of An Lac and was firing south into the thicketed hamlet. Doucette wanted them to rush the NVA from that flank. “We got to get in the tree line—we gotta secure that comin’ tree line!” he shouted.

The redheaded sergeant had plenty of reason to balk, and he did. He said that by assaulting from the north, they would charge right into the Marine fire coming from the burial mounds to the west.

“I don’t give a shit!” screamed Doucette. “We’ll maybe lose a couple of men—but we got to take the comin’ tree line ’cause that’s where the fire’s comin’ from!”

Not one Marine moved. Gunny Doucette cursed the redheaded sergeant in the heat of the moment as a goddamned yellow bastard. A Marine ran to him then to report that Lieutenant Norris had been killed. Doucette could not believe it, and he started back down the line to find the skipper, convinced that he might still be alive. King George was bulletproof.

Gunny Doucette never made it to Norris. He stooped over a prostrate, seemingly wounded man who was lying in the open. The gunny’s left shoulder was to the enemy tree line. He stopped for only a moment to check the casualty, who turned out to be a dead young Marine, but in that instant he became a stationary target. Before Doucette could push on, an NVA marksman dropped him with a head shot. There was a sudden white flash in his face and the simultaneous sensation of what felt like a baseball bat connecting with his left cheekbone. The round exited through his right cheek, taking most
of his tongue with it and shattering most of his teeth as it knocked him down. It was an excruciating, blood-pumping wound. Doucette rolled onto his left shoulder so his back was to the enemy soldier who had nailed him, and he froze in instant recognition of his foe’s marksmanship. If I move again, I’ve had it, he thought.

Gunny Doucette lay there helplessly, looking at his grunts behind the burial mounds. They looked back at him, but not one of his fellow Marines came to his aid. Finally, one gutsy kid, a Filipino-American Navy corpsman, crawled out and secured a battle dressing to each of his shot-open cheeks. That son of a whore, Doucette thought with great affection as the corpsman bounded off to aid their other wounded. Doucette’s wound kept bleeding, though. His utilities clung wetly to him. The sand around him was red. Doucette, convinced he was bleeding to death, prayed like he had never prayed before. It was all he could do. No one else was going to get him out of there. Amid the shouting and gunfire, nothing really seemed to be happening. Not a goddamn thing, Doucette thought, and he cursed the bastards who had gotten them into this, and the other bastards who didn’t pick up the ball and attack and take the initiative. Somebody went and left us lying right here to just get slaughtered, he thought.

No Free Rides

W
HEN SOME CLOSE AIR SUPPORT BECAME AVAILABLE
,
CAPTAIN
Butler of Foxtrot Company, pinned down outside Dai Do, used it to support Lieutenant McAdams, who had a toehold in the hamlet itself. McAdams brought the napalm to within forty meters of his slit trench, then said, “Goddamn, it’s hot here—don’t get it any closer!”

Captain Butler was working with both USMC and USAF Phantoms, and this—his first experience with the Air Force—proved that the pilots were all brave in the face of the NVA fire but that doctrine made the Marine aviators more effective. The Marines ran their strikes down the length of the NVA entrenchments and thus parallel to the opposite Marine lines, which placed them at maximum exposure to ground fire but gave them the broadest opportunity to hit their targets. The Air Force pilots came in from behind to flash for a moment over friendly lines and then for a moment over the enemy. This minimized their exposure to ground fire but allowed them to hit only a small segment of the enemy line—and increased the risk of friendly casualties. Butler complained about this to Weise, and later commented that “the Air Force put twenty-millimeter casings right down our shirts. It was new to us and
a little bit disconcerting—we didn’t know who they were shooting at.”

Captain Butler’s command group was under enough fire as it was. Lieutenant Basel, the FO, two weeks in-country and in his first action, was shot in the back of the arm. Basel refused medevac until the next morning. Once the bullet was removed by the battalion surgeon, he rushed to rejoin the still-embattled company.

Staff Sergeant Pedro P. Balignasay, the acting gunny, was another tough nut. Butler told him to move back to the amtracs and bring one forward to evacuate their wounded. When Butler later turned at the sound of an approaching amtrac, he spotted Balignasay walking in front to guide it in. The amtrac was a big target, but the gunny acted as if he were invincible.

Four hours into the assault, Lieutenant Colonel Weise called Butler to get a sitrep on how many people he had left. Butler reported that he was down to twenty-six effectives. Without a reserve platoon to renew the attack, Butler recommended that Foxtrot disengage because “with our casualties, even if we get in there, they’ll counterattack and they’ll kick our butts out of there. If I get in there, I can’t hold it.”

Weise agreed. He ordered Foxtrot to withdraw east to Dong Huan and establish a joint perimeter with Hotel Company. “If you encounter a lot of resistance,” Butler later explained, “there’s no sense in throwing good lives away just to take that position. That’s what supporting arms are for.”

It took two hours to break contact. Captain Butler used the 30-caliber machine guns on his four amtracs to cover Mc-Adams’s pickup squad in Dai Do, then he had the Phantoms go in hot while that little group pulled back. “It was so close we could feel the air drawn from us by the napalm, but it was effective and got us out of there,” recalled Tyrell, the platoon radioman. To keep the NVA down, the Phantoms also conducted dummy passes that were even closer to the Marines. Butler brought in the artillery as his platoon commanders, Lieutenants McAdams and Lanham, got their troops backpedaling across the open paddies. The men were exhausted and a little demoralized, and events began to unravel as darkness
approached. “It was disorganized. There had been a melee out there,” Butler conceded. “The NVA had a good opportunity to really clean our clocks, but they didn’t seize upon it.”

Foxtrot straggled into Dong Huan, where Hotel Company had been too busy skimmer-boating its own casualties out to thoroughly clear the whole hamlet. Foxtrot was securing the section that would become its night position, when Corporal Tyrell noticed a sandaled foot under some hay in the deserted animal pen beside a hootch. He could see a human form under the hay, and imagined that a wounded NVA had crawled under there to die. Before bending down to search the body for anything of intel value, Tyrell gave the foot a good kick to ensure that the man was really dead. Before his eyes the NVA sat up amidst the hay, his right hand on the stock of his AK-47 and his left grasping the pistol grip and trigger. Tyrell shot first—one instinctive, unthinking squeeze of the trigger—and then his M16 jammed. He grabbed a .45 from a corpsman behind him, and wheeled back to empty the pistol at point-blank range.

Private First Class Kachmar saw one of the new guys urinating into the open mouth of a dead NVA. Kachmar shoved the man away from the corpse and shouted, “You fucking asshole, what’re ya doin’ that for?” The new guy just looked at him blankly.

Continuing on, Kachmar and the two Marines left in his fire team were passing an NVA entrenchment when Kachmar suddenly saw something white move inside it. The white was the bandage on a wounded enemy soldier who was going for his weapon, and in that millisecond of recognition Kachmar, with his M16 still at his waist, fired two or three rounds into the man from ten feet away. Kachmar and his two stunned buddies pulled away the overhead cover of sandbags and-grass and discovered both an AK-47 and a Czech first-aid kit beside the body. “I don’t think he could have actually even fired the weapon,” Kachmar reflected, “but I didn’t know that at the time. I just shot. I just fired. It was pure combat instinct. I probably wouldn’t have done it if I had thought about it, but to think about it would have been foolish.”

Bravo Company finally secured the embattled beachhead at An Lac, despite the loss of their company commander, thanks to a handful of Marines such as SSgt. Robert G. Robinson, a deep-voiced black platoon sergeant who was subsequently awarded the Silver Star for his actions there. When his radioman took an AK-47 round in his PRC-25, Robinson cut the shoulder straps and took the radio himself as he told the Marine to find cover. Robinson pulled down the telltale antenna and was calling for fire support when an AK-47 round hit his left shoulder and lodged in his flak jacket. He scooped up a handful of mud to cover the bloody rip. With sand-encrusted M16s jamming up, he collected what clean weapons and ammo he could find among their casualties, then distributed what he had gathered. By that time he could see puffs of smoke from where RPGs were being launched about two hundred meters away, and he could discern that most of the AK-47 fire on his platoon was coming from entrenchments beneath a small archway and gate in the hamlet. The fire support he was able to bring to bear silenced those positions.

Bravo Company also managed to seize part of An Lac about an hour before dark. At this point, Weise later wrote that he “ordered the company (now confused, disorganized, and with only one officer left) to halt, reorganize, form a defensive perimeter in the western half of the hamlet, evacuate casualties, and carry out resupply.”

The only remaining officer was 2d Lt. Thomas R. Keppen, who was brand-new and floundering. Weise, trying to get the young lieutenant calmed down over the radio, sent Muter’s eighteen-man reconnaissance platoon down to reinforce Bravo Company.

Lieutenant Muter organized the evacuation of the wounded, and face-shot, tooth-shattered Gunny Doucette, weak from loss of blood but thanking the Lord, was finally loaded in an amtrac leaving the beachhead. When the ramp went down at Mai Xa Chanh West, Doucette, who didn’t know where he was, was helped onto a Sea Horse. Medevacked to the DHCB, he ended up lying on a stretcher in a hallway at the base aid station. His
turn for medical attention did not come; there were too many emergencies ahead of him. So his litter was carried to the airfield for a helo ride farther down the medevac chain to Da Nang. He was by then an unmoving form on his stretcher, with a haphazardly bandaged, ripped-open face. He overheard one of the crewmen remark that he must be dead. Doucette looked up bitterly at the man and gave him the finger.