They Marched Into Sunlight (45 page)

Moving into the Ambush

Lieutenant Edwards, who had been separated from his platoon near the front, with two of his men and a useless armory of malfunctioning weapons, could sense that the American artillery was coming in closer and closer to their position and that they would have to move north. They crawled fifty meters, then got up and ran in a crouch. He could hear the artillery but not much enemy fire. The shots he heard seemed spaced and deliberate, as though they were “taking careful shots at the wounded.” They finally reached Valdez and the assembly area, joining the band of Alpha soldiers there who had formed a circle and were taking cover where they could, behind shrubs, anthills, logs. It was a few minutes before eleven.

A
T THAT MOMENT
in the American Midwest, the clock read thirteen hours earlier, half past nine on the evening of October 16. The San Francisco Mime Troupe was just reaching the climax of its final performance of
L’Amant Militaire
at the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis. Sandra Archer, wearing a miter, appeared suspended in air above the stage and brought the house down with the announcement “I’m a da Pope!” Before the play ended and the troupe packed up for the next stop on its college tour, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, all issues of war and peace were swiftly and neatly resolved from on high. “The war is over. Peace is declared,” the pope said. “Pacem in terris. Now, my children, we want to hear no more lies and we want to see no more destruction.”

But the war in Vietnam was not over, not even close. It would not be over until another forty-five thousand American soldiers were dead. Young infantrymen were dying in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone right then, as the curtain fell at the Firehouse.

T
HE
B
LACK
L
IONS
certainly had found what they were searching for. Now what? Was this an offensive operation or defensive? Would they destroy or be destroyed? How many Viet Cong were out there? Would the enemy stand and fight? That George’s lead company had walked into an ambush became apparent to Clark Welch as soon as he heard reports over the radio that machine-gun fire at the point was coming from enemy bunkers. This signified more than a sniper attack; it meant the Viet Cong had been ready and waiting. But Welch did not yet feel that his own Delta Company at the rear was hopelessly outmanned. Though the enemy fire began simultaneously up and down the line, with Triet’s knocks on the wood block, the opening minutes of the battle had been somewhat less intense in Delta’s area. Only a few men had been wounded in the initial volley, including the battalion’s S-2 intelligence officer, Captain Blackwell. Welch figured that he was dealing primarily with some well-placed machine guns and a squad of snipers high in the trees to his right. He shot the first one himself. “I got that sonofabitch!” Big Rock yelled to a platoon sergeant who had pointed toward the tree. Private Garcia, a rifleman on the right flank, took out another sniper, who fell ten feet and dangled in midair, his legs tied in ropes and vines. In Delta’s lead platoon Peter Miller watched a squadmate fire high above him and was splattered by debris, including a magazine of ammo and what Miller thought was a sack of rice balls. One by one, Delta was quieting the trees, but for every sniper killed it seemed three others appeared.

Welch’s role commanding the rear company was to serve as a backing force for Alpha, and that is how he now concentrated his efforts. He passed the word to his men to hold fire unless they had a definite target. He called his lead platoon and directed Lieutenant Stroup to link up with the rear element of Alpha. Prepare to take Alpha’s wounded back through your ranks, Stroup was told. And be ready for an about-face on a 360-degree azimuth. The azimuth was the angle of deviation from a fixed direction, which in this case was due north, the location of the NDP. As the first trickle of dazed and wounded Alpha men staggered back, Peter Miller and several other Delta soldiers ran forward to help, crossing the same trail that Gribble had first discovered. There was machine-gun fire ripping straight down the trail. The Delta soldiers tore branches from trees and took off their shirts to form makeshift stretchers. Welch closed his second platoon around Terry Allen to provide security for the lieutenant colonel, who remained behind the anthill as his battlefield command post.

Stroup and his first Delta platoon waited for the main force of Alpha to withdraw through them. After the first battered group, only a few others came back in a haphazard retreat. Top Valdez had set up his makeshift perimeter to the left of Stroup’s point troops. In the dense forest, it was like being in another world, and they never connected. Valdez and his men thought they heard the Delta troops but could not see them. Stroup wondered what was taking so long, why they were just sitting there. The battlefield slowly quieted. It was by no means silent; the Viet Cong were still firing away, but the volume had diminished considerably. What was happening? The First Division artillery had been stopped, check-fired in army terminology, so that air support could come in. Most of the soldiers lost track of time. The lull seemed like a few minutes to some, forever to others. It was at least a half hour.

The second wave of the enemy attack, when it finally came, started near the front and moved back through the battalion columns with awful fury. Delta was hit from both sides and even some from the rear, but this time the worst was coming from the left, or east. Triet had taken advantage of the pause to bring more elements of his third backing battalion across the draw from the east. He also had moved more men on line from the south and west. The
U
ambush was complete. With fire pouring in from three sides, it became difficult to distinguish enemy fire from friendly fire. A machine gun pounding at the battalion command area from the east sounded like an American gun and further confused the situation. First Sergeant Barrow heard Terry Allen and other officers shout, “Cease fire! Cease fire! You’re shooting your own men.” Welch thought differently and began yelling “Fire! Fire!” Confused soldiers decided for themselves. Most returned fire. More Alpha soldiers made their way through the crossfire and reached what became a makeshift aid station for wounded men near the battalion command perimeter. Welch, with his familiar forward lean, lurched up toward Stroup’s platoon and back toward the rear, trying to hold his company together, firing his .45 as he went. He calculated on the run that he was now dealing with four machine guns on the east, six to ten from the southeast, and four from the west. The machine-gun fire came at them in fifty- to one-hundred-round bursts, six inches off the ground.

There was no longer any question as to who held fire superiority. The Black Lions’ lone advantage was artillery support, but that was minimized by close fighting—the enemy’s trademark tactic of hugging the Americans by the belt and holding tight—and by confusion over when and where to stop the artillery to bring in air power, which never came close to the actual battle site in any case. The Viet Cong stayed within fifty meters at all times and often came within ten meters. They were blowing claymore mines, sending in rocket-propelled grenades, and firing down from the trees with AK-47s.

Welch tried to call in mortar support.
Fire the last targets,
he radioed back to Sergeant Terry Warner at the mortar station inside the night defensive position. He could not remember the “last targets” (the coordinates he had arranged with his mortar team during the march south), but he intended to adjust the mortars once he knew where they were landing.
Wilco! Wilco! Wilco!
Warner replied affirmatively. But nothing happened. The orders were countermanded by a battalion officer at the NDP who said it was against First Division policy to fire mortars into thick canopy jungle.

In the din of war Welch could hear enemy soldiers “yelling, screaming, and laughing back and forth,” especially from the east. Trying to eliminate the enemy machine guns became a task of great courage but Sisyphean frustration. Welch would fix the location of a machine gun and point it out to his men. Two or three would rise up and go after the gun, often taking out the Viet Cong but getting shot in the effort. All those letters home to Lacy about building the best damn company in the First Division, the best damn unit in all of Vietnam, had come down to this—one after another, his kids sacrificing themselves to silence machine guns, if only for a minute. Not long after each enemy gunner was hit, replacements from Triet’s regiment filled the void and the firing started again.

Though the machine-gun charges proved futile in the face of such a large enemy force, they at least involved clear action with a defined goal. For most Delta men most of the time, the battle was undefined and the enemy unseen. They were pinned down, confused, woozy with fright, fighting to save themselves and their buddies. Dwayne Byrd, the young Texan leading the second platoon, had a sharpshooter’s eyes, but could never find the face of the enemy. He saw only flashes that seemed to be coming out of the ground.

Jack Schroder was one of the first men wounded when the second round of shooting started. “Airborne Schroder’s hit in the leg,” platoon sergeant Luther Smith shouted, and members of his squad crawled over to help, dragging him toward the battalion command area, which they assumed was secure. “I’ll be all right, I can make it,” Schroder said. A few meters away a rocket grenade hit Sergeant Smith, blowing off much of his left leg. He was still conscious when Faustin Sena reached him. Sena took out his first aid kit and lit a cigarette and gave it to Smith, then moved back when a bullet pinged off his helmet and he heard his squad leader tell him to take over the radio. Machine-gun fire struck Sena in the wrist, making it difficult for him to work the radio and painful for him to crawl.

Radioman Frank McMeel, another of the former C Packet troops, got stuck behind a clump of bushes that offered less protection by the minute, the once-leafy branches pruned by withering enemy fire. Every time he moved, the wood-chipped ground in front of him was sprayed by fire from brush to his right. His uniform became covered with sawdust. The first thump McMeel felt was a joke; a bullet had gone through his C-rations and sent spiced beef flying. “Someone shot my fuckin’ lunch,” he said to his buddy, Donnie Hodges. Then McMeel looked down at his T-shirt and saw blood and realized that he had been hit too, though he was too numb to feel it. He was shot again. And a third time. All became a blur around him. He fell back against his heavy radio and thought to himself,
Three strikes so far and I’m lucky I’m still here. Better not get hit a fourth time.

Specialist Four Mike Troyer had been lighting a cigarette when the firefight intensified. He was near the battalion command post, where he had just undertaken an unfinished effort to evacuate the wounded Captain Blackwell. He and Joe Lovato, the company medic, had placed Blackwell on a stretcher and had started to move out when an officer said they should bring Blackwell back to the command area. The fighting might be over; the captain could be evacuated later, they were told. After leaving the prone Blackwell north of Allen and the anthill, Troyer took his position on the flank, lit his cigarette, and came under fire. He found cover behind another anthill, sharing it with a humble private with the august military name of Colonel Fett. Troyer crouched on the left side of the anthill, in the shade. Private Colonel Fett was on the right side, in the sunlight. Troyer avoided enemy fire. Fett took a bullet in the shoulder. Most of the men getting hit were in the sunlight, Troyer noticed. He rose to his knees and ripped open Fett’s shirt. He had a hard time finding the hole. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be, Troyer thought, because the bullet had entered but never come out. He finally found the wound, started to patch it, and yelled for a medic. Here came Doc Gomez, the second platoon’s aidman. Gomez jumped on Troyer and pushed him facedown into the mulched earth. “You damn fool! What are you trying to do, get killed?” Gomez said, worried that Troyer had made himself an easy target. Then he pulled Fett into the shade and began working on him.

To his left Troyer saw Melesso Garcia behind a log, gesturing. It seemed that Garcia wanted to say something. He turned on his side and pushed his body up with one hand—and at that moment was shot. A look came over his face that Troyer had not seen before. For two days Garcia had been haunted by premonitions that he should not be out there, and now the realization of his foreboding registered on his face. Troyer had never been hit. He wondered what it would feel like. He could only imagine from Melesso Garcia’s silent expression of horror.

Tom Colburn was also on the right flank, taking cover behind an anthill, where he had been hiding since the shooting began. He had been “scared shitless” the entire time. His buddies joked that Baby-san was so thin he could disappear behind a bamboo reed, and the anthill seemed to be doing the job now, but his fortunate position brought its own measure of psychological torment. Only a few meters away on the jungle floor another Delta soldier was caught in the sunlight, exposed to a tree sniper. “Colburn! Colburn!” the man yelled when he was hit. Then he was hit again and their eyes met and Colburn could see the look of desperation. The soldier, crying for help, tried to crawl from the line of fire. Each time he moved, he was shot. Five shots. Six. What should Colburn do? The noble response, he thought, would be to leave the anthill and try to pull his comrade to safety. But he could not force himself do it. It would only lead to his own death, he thought. “Charlie wanted you to go out there so he could kill you too.” So Colburn stayed behind the anthill, haunted, as the wounded buddy called his name. He felt helpless, guilty, protecting his own ass, guys dying all around him. He was only eighteen, but he “got old real quick.”

To the rear on the right flank Greg Landon, the Professor, had taken off his PRC-25 radio and was trying to unjam his squad leader’s faulty M-16 when he got shot in the back. Like Troyer and most Delta infantrymen who had come to Vietnam on the USNS
Pope
three months earlier, Landon had never been shot before and did not know how it would feel. It was just a thud, and he remained conscious and kept moving. A machine-gun bullet from the south had grazed his back, cutting through his skin in a long, ugly, but superficial slice. Reynolds Lonefight crawled over and tried to patch him with bandages, but it was “like trying to put a hamburger bun over a plate of spaghetti.” Lonefight had discarded two faulty weapons already, first his M-79 and then an M-16 that jammed on his fourth magazine, and now he took Landon’s rifle and started covering the right flank. A claymore mine went off and sent shrapnel flying into his wrist, hip, and leg. Nearby, another grenadier, Robert Jensen, saw a soldier from Alpha running toward them with no weapon, no shirt, and no helmet, screaming, “Get me out of here!” It appeared as though medics had worked on this soldier’s wound-ravaged body once already. He had been hit in the groin, chest, arms, testicles, and right leg and was bleeding badly. Jensen jumped up, stopped the man, placed him against a tree, gave him water, and started to bandage him. Landon crawled over to help.