They Marched Into Sunlight (48 page)

“What do you have down there, soldier?” Coleman asked.

“A bunch of wounded guys. And we’re worried they’re going to overrun us,” Costello answered.

“Well, can you see my chopper?”

Costello could hear it but not see it, until he realized that he had not been looking high enough. It was “way the hell up there.”

Coleman told Costello to throw green smoke to mark his position so artillery could be directed to the flanks, which might prevent the group from being overrun. Newman got on the frequency and fixed Costello’s precise location so rescue troops would know where to look, then he and Holleder headed toward the NDP. Coleman asked Costello about the condition of the soldiers. One guy had a sucking chest wound, Costello said. This was Grider, the buddy who knew the battalion frequency. Coleman told Costello to tear off Grider’s shirt, take out a cigarette wrapper, and place it on the wet wound. It would stick like Saran Wrap, he said. There was a commotion about the green smoke. Some of the guys yelled at Costello for throwing it. They were afraid the smoke would just show the Viet Cong where they were. They had a point, Costello thought. It was “kind of like putting up a flag.” But Coleman reassured him. He would drop medical supplies. Just hang in there, the general said. Help is on the way.

The artillery, as it turned out, came in closer than the supply drop. Rounds started landing within meters of the stranded group. Bill McGath, who like Costello had decided to turn around during the retreat, noticed that friendly artillery was “coming in on the wounded.” When the medical supplies were dropped, McGath headed out to retrieve them until he realized they were too far to the rear.

F
OR THE
B
LACK
L
IONS
who had remained inside the defensive perimeter that morning, the deadly hours brought a kind of horror once removed. They could hear the battle unfolding, and stage by stage it gradually became apparent to them that it was turning into a disaster, yet they felt helpless to prevent it. Ray Albin, a member of Delta Company’s mortar platoon, spent the morning in the fire direction center reading coordinates and making calculations on a plotting board. He was just learning the job, which carried a grave burden; if you made a mistake, you could end up killing your own guys. As the morning began, Albin could hear various Delta radiotelephone operators checking and cross-checking with other platoons to make sure they could communicate as they marched into the jungle. This was the daily background noise of infantry units in the field, and it was easy to tune out. Then came a clattering, and a violent counterburst, and suddenly a crescendo of sound. Albin and the soldiers around him could hear it all on the radio, followed by the distant echoes of rifles, machine guns, and claymore mines from the battle site. It was like listening to a recording and a live symphony performance at the same time, playing the same discordant notes a few seconds off, an eerie modernist syncopation of war. The radios would go silent and there was only the sound of live fire. Then the radiomen would squeeze their handsets and the static rataplan of weapons fire could be heard over the air, juxtaposed against the sounds reverberating from the jungle. All the while the calls became more desperate.

The key point for Albin’s platoon came when Welch, with a sense of urgency, called for his mortars, but Major Sloan, citing division policy, countermanded the request. The Delta mortar men, in the gun holes, eager to support their company, were ordered to hold fire. At the time, in the heat of the moment, Sloan did not elaborate. He explained later that he was acting on previous standing orders from above, coming all the way down from Major General Hay, the division commander. There had been “some bad luck” with mortars—“several misfortunes of mortars firing on our own troops,” Sloan said, and this made the ever-cautious Hay “reluctant to use mortar support” when soldiers were maneuvering in the jungle. Several months earlier, when Lieutenant Welch was teaching his new soldiers how to maneuver in a firefight with mortar and claymore explosions going off to their front and sides, he had been chewed out by an officious staff officer for ignoring division safety regulations. Welch had responded that he was trying to prepare his men for the realities of battle. He had won the argument that time, but now, when it counted, he could not get the mortars. As it turned out, Sloan in fact sympathized with Welch and disagreed with division policy, believing that mortars were “much more responsive than close artillery support,” but he upheld the order as it came down to him.

The mortar dispute at the time seemed minor to Sloan. Of greater concern, early in the battle, were the conversations he was overhearing on the radio of Lieutenant Colonel Allen on the ground talking to Colonel Newman in the air.

The relationship between the brigade and battalion commanders had been somewhat uncomfortable from the time the Black Lions headed out to the Long Nguyen Secret Zone for the start of Operation Shenandoah II. As Sloan saw it, Allen preferred deploying smaller and lighter units, usually single companies, on search-and-destroy missions, with the battalion commander in the air coordinating artillery support, while Newman believed in sending out two companies at a time with the battalion commander on the ground. Now Sloan could sense a tension between Newman and Allen over the use of air strikes. He heard Newman tell Allen that he was check-firing the artillery and wanted to put in six air strikes. Allen did not like the idea and tried to disagree. He wanted the artillery support to continue. As Sloan interpreted the discussion, he sensed that Allen “was forced into…I shouldn’t say forced, but his better judgment told him not to accept the decision. However, he was told by a superior officer and without agreeing, he accepted it.”

First Lieutenant Lester T. Scott Jr., an aerial observer for First Division artillery, was also witness to the check-fire dispute. His version corroborated Sloan’s, with additional detail. Scott, who maintained contact during the battle with Pinky Durham, Delta Company’s artillery observer on the ground, said that he was ordered by the brigade commander, Colonel Newman, to check-fire artillery for an air strike. He heard Terry Allen try to cancel the check-fire, but “the answer was negative.” Pinky Durham was “begging for artillery because the VC rate of fire was increasing,” Scott reported, but “the check-fire was in effect for more than thirty minutes before the air got there. Then the air went in about six hundred meters to Durham’s west.” The battalion made another request to bring in artillery, but again they were denied. Finally, according to Scott, Durham and the Black Lions were “being hit so hard there was no alternative but to fire the artillery.” But by then, he said, the check-fire had “lasted long enough for the VC to regroup for an overwhelming attack.” It was indeed during that crucial period that Vo Minh Triet brought up his reserve battalion to seal the three-sided attack.

It was also during that period that many of the Delta and Alpha soldiers on the ground wondered why they were not pulling back to the NDP. Perhaps only Allen could answer that question definitively, and he took his reasoning to the grave with him. There would be conflicting arguments about whether that was a tactical error on his part, but it reflected something larger in any case. His determination to stay on the battlefield was a manifestation of the pressure coming down, all the way down, from President Johnson, who wanted good news and enemy body counts, to General Westmoreland, who wanted more troops and believed the war could be won through search-and-destroy missions in which the First Division pursued the enemy overland relentlessly, to Major General Hay, who was feeling the heat for being too cautious, to Colonel Newman, who wanted the Black Lions and their commander out there on the ground, not just searching but destroying, to Lieutenant Colonel Allen, who wanted to prove that he could do it.

As the battlefield situation grew bleaker in the hour after the artillery pause, the soldiers stationed at the NDP could not believe what they were hearing. Craig Watson, a rifleman in Bravo Company, had been assigned to a listening post just outside the perimeter. By the middle of the battle, when it “almost sounded as one loud roar,” his group was called back in and deployed in bunkers circling the perimeter. There was great fear that the camp would be overrun. Don Koch, a Bravo sergeant, “never felt so helpless” in his life. There were snipers shooting at them. They could not leave the bunkers they were guarding. Their battalion buddies, the soldiers he had watched so carefully as they marched away that sunlit morning, “were getting hit, and they were not that far away, but they might as well have been on the moon. There was nothing we could do for them.” Albin and a few others left the mortar gun hole and walked south of the perimeter about fifty meters, and “here comes this GI running towards us with nothing on, no web gear, no helmet, no weapon, no ammo clips, just him.” Before that, they knew the horror of the battle only secondhand, from the radio and the roar echoing back through the woods. Here was the real thing, the first survivor, a soldier “who got the shit scared out of him and took off.”

Along with Bravo Company, Lieutenant Erwin’s scout platoon had been stationed as a protective force around the perimeter after being called back from their morning march to the west of the battle site. At 1:15 that afternoon Erwin was in the NDP’s tactical operations center and encountered Colonel Newman and Major Holleder, who had just landed. The full extent of the calamity on the ground was becoming clear to them. With Allen dead, Newman had decided to take personal command of the battalion and organize the rescue. He had wanted Holleder, his righthand man, to stay airborne in the helicopter and help run things from there, but Holleder talked him out of that plan. Since his days at West Point, Holly, as his classmates called him, had been a man of action. If soldiers were fighting and dying and in need of help, he wanted to be on the ground to help them.

During the brief discussion at the battalion operations center, the brigade officers said they intended to march toward the draw, a third of the way to the battlefield past the southeastern edge of the perimeter, where they could set up an evacuation area. Colonel Newman needed a radio operator, and Erwin, who knew the call signs, was pressed into service. As they moved beyond the perimeter, Major Holleder seemed to be pulsating with an adrenaline rush, as if he were leading a squad onto the field at Michie Stadium. “We’ve got to get in there and help them! They’re in trouble and need help!” he kept saying. Newman repeatedly told him to calm down until they had assessed the situation.

As they neared the marshy clearing, a weary band of soldiers approached from the wood line, some without shirts, helmets, or weapons. It was the Alpha contingent that included Captain George, Michael Arias, Top Valdez, and Doc Hinger.

Valdez looked up at Erwin and said, “It’s a massacre out there, sir.”

Newman was finishing his plans. He would send the recon platoon in first, bolstered by Bravo Company, which was marching down from the NDP, and Charlie Company, now being called in from the fire support station at Chon Thon, plus any fresh men available from Alpha, Delta, and the headquarters unit. Holleder was an untamed mustang, pawing the turf, urging Newman to let him run. He had to get in there. The colonel reluctantly relented, again, and Holleder swiftly recruited his little advance team. He rounded up a handful of medics and riflemen from Bravo who had made it to the draw. Erwin gave him a .45 and two magazines of ammunition. As Holleder headed out, he saw Doc Hinger, without either weapon or helmet, trudging toward them and told him to get a steel pot on his head and come along. Then Holly accelerated into the soggy marshland, breaking away from his soldiers, his legs churning high, just like he ran as the fearsome end and valiant quarterback at West Point, a hardheaded bruiser, all knees and elbows, bone and muscle, hurtling hell-bent down the field.

When Holleder arrived in Vietnam in late July, a few days before the shipload of C Packet soldiers, the glow from his years of athletic glory at the U.S. Military Academy a decade earlier had barely dimmed. He had washed out of flight school at San Marcos, Texas, after graduation, but then rose through the infantry, commanding a company in the Seventh Infantry Division in Korea, serving as aide-de-camp at the Continental Army Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and attending Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. During much of that time he also played football or coached, including a stint during the early sixties as an assistant at his alma mater. Still and always he was a winner and golden boy, and his celebrity not only made him the young officer every general wanted nearby, but it also could have kept him safely away from Vietnam had he wanted to skip the war. The same characteristics that sent him rushing down the draw in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone pushed him to get sent to Vietnam, even though by then he had a wife and four young daughters. He burned to go places. Some of his superior officers thought he was on the path to becoming a four-star general, much like another hard-charging member of the cadet class of 1956, H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

Holleder had the instincts of a leader, if not refined intellect. He fared only slightly better in his West Point studies than Terry Allen Jr., who had graduated second-to-last in the class of 1952. In the order of merit, Holleder ranked 444th out of a graduating class of 480, and did that well only because of the nightly tutoring of his scholarly roommate, Perry Smith, a future Air Force general. But in that regard Holleder would be only another in the long gray line of officers who proved that there was not necessarily a correlation between class rank and military achievement. This duality was apparent all through his cadet years. “His uphill battle for tenths left him with two turnout stars,” the 1956
Howitzer
yearbook noted, using academy jargon to convey that he nearly flunked out twice and had to take special exams to avert dismissal. Yet his leadership skills were so evident that he was appointed a cadet captain and commander of his company, M-2, the Mighty Deuce, comprising the tallest cadets in the corps.