The Magnificent Bastards (57 page)

“Permission denied. Stay out and observe.”

“We need to pull back!”

“You stay out there,” Captain Osborn said in his best unthinking, I’m-the-boss voice. “If you come in, I’ll shoot you myself.”

Lieutenant Gibbs, who was the most experienced officer in the company—he had taken charge of Alpha Two—came up on the net and shouted, “What the fuck? You think the LPs
should all get killed? This is
it
, they’re comin’! Let ’Em come back! What the fuck’s the difference—the NVA are here!”

Shouting himself, Captain Osborn said they could not be sure that it was not merely a probe. Gibbs moved from his bunker to confront Osborn. After a heated, face-to-face exchange, Osborn finally relented. Lieutenant Stull, the company’s forward observer, who had been working arty on the NVA at the direction of the terrified LPs, came up with a plan to help them slip back. Stull passed the word that on the signal of a star-cluster flare, an eight-inch WP artillery round fused to detonate at two hundred meters above the ground would be fired. Everyone on the perimeter was to close their eyes, duck their heads, and count to fifteen when the flare went up. The idea was that the blazing white phosphorus airburst that was to follow the flare would momentarily rob the NVA of their night vision and allow the LPs to run back in. The plan mostly worked. Except for the men from two LPs, who were shot at when they made their move, the rest were able to sprint to safety. One of the LPs that drew fire, under Specialist Hannan of Alpha Two, scrambled into a crater and, undetected, sweated out the night there as fire from both sides crisscrossed in the darkness right above their heads.

The other unlucky LP was from Alpha One. Its leader, Sp4 Carl F. Green, twenty, of Shady, New York, was killed by an RPG while up and moving. Two of his men, wounded by fragments, were able to crawl in.

Meanwhile, two GIs with the LP from Charlie Two were wounded as they came in, while the leader of another LP reported to Captain Leach that they could not move because there were NVA between themselves and their lines. Leach responded, “Well, okay, then get yourself in a fucking hole.” When radio communications with the LP were lost shortly thereafter, Leach suspected that either the NVA had stumbled across their hiding place or friendly fire had taken them out. At 0103, Spooky 1-2 came on station to add the ripping roar of its miniguns to the cacophony of mortar and artillery fire. The amount of illumination over the battlefield was massive. The NVA, who were mostly behind burial mounds, got bogged
down, although they continued to fire RPGs and throw Chicoms. The enemy did not expose themselves by firing their AK-47s. Leach had his troops hold off with M16s and M60s and return fire with only mortars, LAWs, and M79s. The lull in visible enemy movement lasted four hours. Presumably, the NVA were using the time to bring additional units into preat-tack positions as each cleared the Alpha 1 gauntlet. Leach, dug in behind his central platoon, Charlie One, was on the horn without pause, placing arty on enemy avenues of approach while maintaining fire on the troops already hunkered down in front of them. “We don’t know where the main attack’s going to come, so don’t give your positions away,” Leach told his platoon leaders. “Don’t fire from your bunkers. Move out in the trenches. Fire your M79s and LAWs and then move to a new position.”

The noisy lull ended at 0535 when the NVA initiated an intense mortar and artillery bombardment of Force Tiger. Lam Xuan West and Mai Xa Chanh East were also shelled. Captain Leach was still awake. Except for two hours of sleep each day before sundown, he had been on his feet for almost four days. Leach was kept going not only by adrenaline, but by a bottle of military-issue amphetamines delivered by Snyder and the battalion surgeon, Captain Hildebrand, when they helicoptered forward for a visit soon after Nhi Ha had been secured. The amphetamines were for Leach and his platoon leaders. They gave Leach’s voice a quick, irritable edge as, in response to the enemy barrage, he keyed his handset to speak with Cedar Mountain 6. “As soon as this shit lifts, you know what’s going to happen,” Leach said. “You better get Delta Company moving right now. You better get ’Em up here because we’ve got a battalion of dinks out there who are getting ready to hit us.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder told Delta, his reserve company in Lam Xuan East, to be prepared to move north to Force Tiger on order. Meanwhile, Leach’s artillery spotter, Lieutenant Jaquez, realized that their 81mm mortar section was not returning fire. During the afternoon, Jaquez had preregistered their fires on a brushy little island in the paddies that seemed a
natural rallying point for the enemy should they try to organize a ground attack. Dodging shell fire, Jaquez ran to the mortar pit and, yelling and screaming, physically dragged the crewmen from their bunker. He had them start firing on that registration point—where, after the battle, an NVA flamethrower was found, its operator killed before he could put the weapon to use.

The enemy shelling lasted twenty minutes. When it lifted, there was a sudden eruption of muzzle flashes and green tracers as the NVA fired their AK-47s for the first time. A 12.7mm machine gun, positioned to the northeast, also opened up. The NVA foot soldiers started darting forward. “The NVA were not reckless,” said Lieutenant Hieb of Charlie One, whose platoon manned the center of the line and was under the most fire. “Those guys were good, and they were cunning, and they stayed low. You had a very difficult time picking up their movement.” Hieb watched as an RPG scored a direct and disabling hit on the Marine tank assigned to his sector. The tank had not had a chance to fire a single round. Amid all the flashes and shadows, Hieb finally saw the head and shoulder movements of an NVA lying prone while attempting to slide a bangalore torpedo under the perimeter wire. Hieb and his RTO were in a small dugout behind the main line, and the enemy soldier was directly to their front. Hieb did not have any positions in front of him, so he opened up on the man with his CAR 15. Others blazed away at the sapper, and at some point in the confusion Hieb realized that the NVA was lying quite still. He was dead. There were plenty of others to go around, and Hieb’s M60 team, positioned to his left front, fired like madmen at the movements. “The barrel got so hot that I could see it glowing red in the night,” Hieb remembered. “Somebody burned his hands pretty severely trying to get that barrel off and replace it with a new one. The volume of fire was very, very intense. We just kept firing and firing and firing to keep them away from the wire.”

The bunkers at Force Tiger, most of which were large enough for a fire team, were half-submerged and moundlike in appearance. Each had a firing port to the front and an exit
to the rear leading into the slit trench that connected each position. Private Harp of Charlie One was asleep in his team’s bunker when the ground attack began. He had not meant to go to sleep. Exhausted, he had simply leaned up against the back wall to rest, but had drifted off as soon as the weight was off his feet. Harp never heard the RPG that hit the top of his bunker explode; he simply found himself sprawled on the bunker floor with an egg-sized knot on the back of his head. The pain was throbbing. Dirt fell on his face from the broken sandbags of the overhead cover. No one else was in the bunker. “I could not get my eyes to focus. I was coughing up sand and trying to get sand out of my eyes. I thought we were being overrun.” Totally disoriented, Harp climbed out into the slit trench and headed toward where he thought his squad leader, Burns, was firing from. “Shit was going off all around, ours and theirs.” Harp had yet to reach Burns when he saw two NVA coming in fast. They were about fifty feet away. One was carrying a satchel charge, the other an AK-47. “I think I saw light reflecting off a bayonet at the end of it.” It was too dark to aim through the peep sight, so Harp looked over the front sight the way one would with a shotgun. “I put the 16 on ‘crowd’—automatic—and fired a magazine at them in six-round bursts. Caught the guy with the satchel charge in the chest. He fell back in a hole, and about three seconds later one hell of a firecracker went off. The other guy fell just in front of the crater. I think I got him, but I’m not sure. At any rate, he was not coming my way anymore.”

Two Marine gunships arrived an hour into the attack and made strafing runs in front of Charlie One and Charlie Three, which was under fire on the right flank. At about the same time, the NVA launched a supporting attack on the left flank. Staff Sergeant Goad, the acting platoon leader in Charlie Two, juggled radios as he tried to shift their fires where needed when not personally handling an M79 grenade launcher. He also fired several LAWs, and mashed down the detonator hooked up to his claymore mines. Goad had prepared his defenses well. He had used an E-tool during the afternoon to dig the
claymores into the forward slopes of the burial mounds, then arranged vegetation over the holes as camouflage. When he ran out of claymores, he scooped out additional holes the size of large coffee cans, placed C-4 explosive at the bottom of each with a blasting cap wired to a claymore detonator embedded in the plastique, and then packed the holes with captured enemy munitions and handfuls of metal links and casings from their own expended machine-gun ammunition.

Enemy soldiers were shredded by the explosions.

The NVA set up a recoilless rifle to blast Charlie Two, but the amount of fire it drew prevented its crew from punching off a single shell.

Private Fulcher, in position with two new men, fired his M16 through his bunker aperture—and saw an RPG screaming toward him trailing a rooster tail of sparks that made him think of a giant bottle rocket. Luckily, the RPG hit the sandbags just three inches below the aperture. Meanwhile, the Marine tank with Charlie Two rolled into a firing position that put its 90mm main gun directly over Fulcher’s bunker. When the tank fired its first earsplitting, earthshaking round, Fulcher and the two replacements thought they’d been hit by the enemy artillery.

They dropped to their guts so fast that their helmets bounced off. Shaking off the shock, Fulcher realized what had happened and stuck his head out of the dugout. “Back up,” he screamed at the tank commander. “You’re going to blow us up before you blow up the gooks!” Fulcher grabbed the detonator for his own half-dozen camouflaged mines. He had memorized which cord ran to which claymore, but when he squeezed the detonator he got no response. Furious that he had a dud, he plugged in the next wire and mashed down the detonator again. Nothing. Fulcher frantically tried every wire, but not a single claymore detonated. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. After the battle, he discovered that the tank’s first shot, a canister round, had chewed up all his claymore wires.

On Charlie Three’s side, where there were the fewest enemy, Sergeant Coulthard spotted an NVA about twenty meters away. The man just barely broke the natural outline of things,
and he moved forward only when each flare died as it hit the ground. Lieutenant Musser couldn’t see what Coulthard was pointing at, so Coulthard finally took aim in the flarelight with his M16, and started squeezing off shots at the man. Musser told him he was giving away their position, and to throw hand grenades instead. Coulthard, throwing frags, didn’t know it yet, but he’d already killed the NVA with a round through the top of his collarbone. The body lay in the shadows, wearing an ammo vest, its grip loosened on its folding-stock AK-47.

Captain Leach had requested a backhoe with which to construct tank emplacements, but no engineer support had been made available. Without parapets, the tanks were sitting ducks. The tank parked beside Leach’s CP had already been disabled by a rocket-propelled grenade. Leach was talking with his other tank commander, the one supporting Charlie Two, when the Marine suddenly exclaimed, “I’m starting to take fire—”

The tank was hit by an RPG at that instant.

The bruised and concussed crews of both knocked-out tanks popped their hatches and jumped down in the slit trench between the bunkers. Leach was certain that a lone NVA was going to sprint through their lines to reach the abandoned tank beside his CP, so while he kept busy with a radio in each hand he told his RTOs, “Some sonofabitch is going to climb up on that tank and start hosin’ us down with the .50-cal. Don’t you let anybody get up there!”

Captain Leach was also concerned about the fireworks to his rear where Alpha was dug in, but he could not raise Captain Osborn on the radio. “Not once did Osborn get on the radio, so I had no idea what was going on over there,” recalled Leach. What was happening along Alpha’s side of the perimeter was the same as on Charlie Tiger’s, only with fewer NVA involved. One of the guys in Sergeant Stone’s bunker fired his M16 on automatic at the bobbing figures before them, only to have an RPG explode nearby. Stone shouted at the rifleman, “Jesus, don’t shoot on automatic—they think we’re a machine-gun position!” Everyone had ducked down in anticipation of the next RPG, except for Pfc. Jesse Alston, who kept
raising his head to look out the firing aperture. “Jesse, stay down, stay down!” Stone shouted. But the man put his head up again just as the next RPG exploded directly in front of the bunker. Alston cried out as he fell back. Stone hunted around in the darkened bunker for a battle dressing, and as he bandaged the wound on the side of Alston’s head he realized that it was not too serious. It was bad enough, though, that the shook-up Alston volunteered to stay down and reload ammo magazines for the rest of the fight.

Surprisingly, the NVA continued pressing their attack even after the sun rose. At 0700, a Helix FAC came on station, followed in about twenty minutes by two A-4 Skyhawks from Marine Attack Squadron 121. Captain Leach told the FAC to bring in the air strikes immediately. When the FAC asked, “Well, how close do you want ’Em?” Leach answered, “I want ’Em about thirty meters from the perimeter. Do you see this tank here? I want you to use this tank as a reference point.…”

One of the Skyhawks executed a nonfiring pass over the target area and took AK-47 fire and one hit.

“That was perfect,” Leach told the FAC.

The next low-level pass was to deliver the five-hundred-pound snake-eye bombs. “Get everyone down in their holes,” Leach said when he got his platoon leaders on the horn. “Get under the overhead cover. Don’t worry about what’s on the goddamned perimeter—we got it comin’ in!” Leach stunned his command group when he said with deadly seriousness, “Guys, I’m going to say a little prayer right now,” and then dropped to his knees on the bunker floor. “It’s time to ask for help from above.”