They Marched Into Sunlight (49 page)

With some men the gap between performance on a football field and how they live the rest of their lives is so vast that not much can be learned about one from the other. Holleder played the way he lived, and his football career at Army went a long way toward explaining him. He had been a schoolboy star at Aquinas Institute in Rochester, New York, and was recruited to West Point by Doc Blanchard, the great former Army star, and an assistant coach named Vince Lombardi. By his junior year he was regarded as one of the elite ends in the country, a six-two, hundred-and-eighty-seven-pound All-American who made devastating tackles on defense and was a cunning receiver who could outjump defensive backs for the ball. He and his quarterback that season, Pete Vann, working on pass routes seven days a week, became so attuned to one another that when Holleder flicked an eye, Vann knew precisely where he was going. They hooked up on nine touchdowns and nearly eight hundred yards of completions, even though Holleder had to sit out two games because of the minor infraction of leaving his post to call his girlfriend.

Though he had a body that seemed sculpted in iron, it was not athleticism that set Holleder apart but his presence. In a culture of toughness, he was toughest. Vann remembered “a look in his eye, this look of ‘Don’t screw with me, baby, and you better do it right.’” People either loved or hated Holly. If he was not on their side, they might consider him a bully, another one of Blaik’s thugs. But he made the men around him believe that they were going to win. Even as an underclassman, from his position on the flank, he was the undisputed leader of the team. Vann, who began West Point a year ahead of Holleder, flunked a semester and ended up graduating in the same class, but he had exhausted his eligibility by the 1955 season, forcing Red Blaik to find another quarterback. Not satisfied with the apparent choices, the coach decided to try to turn a leader into a quarterback rather than a quarterback into a leader. Just before spring practice he asked Holleder if he would make the switch. “Colonel, I have never played in the backfield in my life,” Holleder responded, but he did what his coach wanted, turning in his old jersey for a new one—number sixteen. “I knew he could learn to handle the ball well and to call the plays properly,” Blaik later wrote in his autobiography,
You Have to Pay the Price.
“Most important, I knew he would provide the bright, aggressive, inspirational leadership at the key position of the game.”

If this was a daring move, its wisdom was not universally accepted. Old Army mules groused that Blaik had stripped the team of its best player by moving him out of position. Why make him start all over again at something unfamiliar? The pessimists were fortified by a weakness that became obvious from the first day of practice: Holleder passed like a misfired howitzer. Vann tutored him as best he could in the mechanics of throwing a football, but the spiral was not in his repertoire. “He had trouble throwing anything but a kickoff, if you know what that looks like,” Vann would joke later. Distance, no problem. Holleder could wind up and heave the thing seventy yards. Velocity, he had it. Even without a spiral, his ball had juice. But timing the pattern, judging the proper arc, using the right touch—those quarterback skills were slow in coming. Before the season started, even Blaik’s closest pals in the New York press corps thought he had made a grave mistake. The second-guessing intensified during the season when Army lost to Michigan, Syracuse, and Yale. The quarterback switch became known as “Blaik’s folly.”

After the Michigan game, in which Holleder had completed only one of eight passes, the coach and his quarterback met privately. Holleder approached Blaik’s office prepared to end the experiment even though he secretly hoped to get another chance. “It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks or says around this place,” Blaik told him. “I am coaching this Army team, and you are my quarterback.” As the coach later recounted the scene, Holleder’s hard eyes glistened with tears.

Blaik’s reasoning all along was to have his quarterback ready for the most important game of the year, against archrival Navy, played at the end of the season in Philadelphia. The best Army season could be ruined by a loss to Navy, and the worst season salvaged by a win. Army had lost in 1954, and Blaik did not intend to lose again. He was a coach who believed in traditions. One of his annual rituals came the night before the big game, when he would take his squad out for a walk and tell them a motivational story. He concluded this time by saying that he had “grown weary of walking across the field” after games to offer congratulations to winning coaches on the other side. “Now, I’m not as young as I used to be, and that walk tomorrow, before one hundred thousand people…would be the longest walk I’ve ever taken in my coaching life.”

There was a long silence, finally broken by Holleder.

“Colonel,” he said, “you are not going to take that walk tomorrow.”

The next day the big lefty completed no passes, but it did not matter. Running sweeps and sneaks, handing off, blocking, pushing his team-mates, he was the point man in a ferocious infantry attack that leveled Navy fourteen to six. He was the leader Blaik needed.

Now, twelve years later, another autumn afternoon, and here came Holly rushing down the draw, through the tall grass, water splashing left and right, losing his balance and regaining it, lunging on with his long stride and big thighs, his knees pumping high, breaking away from his men, filling the breach.

Doc Hinger was far behind, watching this officer, a man he had never met before, lead the way toward the jungle and the fallen Black Lions. He saw Holleder reach a point near a large tree where the draw narrowed, and he heard the AK-47 shots ring out and he saw the major go down. The other soldiers edged to the sides of the draw, looking for cover, keeping low as they moved forward to reach him. Hinger, protected by a sergeant who sprayed overhead with a machine gun, tried to drag Holleder to the safer side of the big tree, but he was too heavy. It took two men to pull him. He had been hit twice, once in the chest, once in the thigh. He was ashen gray, unconscious, his eyes closed, but still breathing when Hinger went to work on him. As the first bandage was being applied, he died.

Jim Kasik of Bravo Company reached the clearing at the front of the draw a few minutes later. A small helicopter was idling there, and as Kasik approached, he saw three soldiers loading a mud-splattered body into the passenger side. “Who the hell is that?” he asked. “Some major,” one of the men replied. “Some major who just landed here and told us to go running into the jungle with him. And when we told him that there were VC out there, he just said, ‘Come on!’ He got some yards on the rest of us and they nailed him.”

Soon after the helicopter lifted off, Colonel Newman came by and asked if Major Holleder was in the area. He was told the story about the big officer running down the middle of the draw ahead of his men and getting shot by a sniper. Newman twice had tried to hold Holleder back, keep him in the helicopter, station him at the NDP, but there was no way, and now the bull-rushing quarterback was stone dead at age thirty-two. “You gotta watch out for these young ones,” Newman said, taking in the news.

I
N THE ANTI
-U.S. war of resistance for national salvation, the actions of Vo Minh Triet’s regiment that October morning were by the book, right out of the combat manuals of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Plan the operation in detail. Conduct reconnaissance. Rehearse in detail. Use the three-pronged attack. Maintain complete security during movement. Conduct a sudden assault with maximum firepower. Retain a reserve element. When the enemy believes you are attacking from the west, attack from the east. When he believes you have stopped, attack again. When he believes you are advancing, stop. Plug the ears and blind the eyes of the enemy, the generals in Hanoi would say. Create surprises. Walking in the middle of the night, a man is deadly frightened if he is struck from behind. It is the same in the military field. The side which is caught by surprise will be embarrassed and be unable to capture the initiative. The side which is caught by surprise will be at a loss and be quickly annihilated.

Truth and falsehood. Falsehood and truth. To the individual Viet Cong soldier, this battle, like any battle, was a blur of chaotic moments. Nguyen Van Lam, the company commander attached to Rear Service Group 83, who grew up near the battlefield, could remember only moving from one entrenched bunker to another with his comrades that morning, shooting at Americans, listening to the helicopters and high-performance jets, trying to predict where artillery and air strikes would come in, so they could stay away from those places. He felt little threat from the Big Red Brothers on the ground.

Some American soldiers withdrew from the battle wondering how, with the trap so deadly, with the firepower so massive, the Viet Cong commanders could let even one of them get out alive. But Triet had concerns other than killing every enemy soldier. His men were tired and starving—they still had no rice—and, more important, this fight had not been planned by his superiors and was of little interest to them. For all the ingenuity and agility that Viet Cong soldiers showed on the battlefield, there was an equal and opposite rigidity in their military bureaucracy. A quick ambush was one thing, but a full-blown battle with an entire regiment engaged was quite another. Triet’s superiors were expecting him to get across the east-west corridor and meet them to prepare for the attack on Loc Ninh, a battle that had been in the planning stages for some time, part of a larger high-stakes strategy that eventually would lead to a massive attack on the cities of the South.

Triet’s reasoning, as he later explained, went like this: His regiment, in its search for rice, was already behind schedule as it moved across the corridor to its next assignment. The fact that the battle was being fought in mature jungle made it easy for him to spring the ambush but difficult to sustain a prolonged fight. The longer the battle went on, the greater the possibility that his unit would take significant casualties, especially from American artillery and air power. His regiment had been badly bruised all year, starting with Operation Junction City, and had only recently been replenished with new recruits. The last thing he needed was to bring a depleted force into the next campaign. When his scouts, observing the action from trees, told him the American forces were withdrawing, he considered the battle over and pulled back most of his troops.

It would take several hours to sweep the battlefield, dress the wounded, bury the dead, and hole up in bunkers and underground tunnels as protection against late-arriving American air strikes. Much of that work would have to be done at night, when the Americans would cede the jungle. Triet filed a report by Morse code to Ninth Division headquarters, located in what was known as the Fishhook region up near the Cambodian border. They had annihilated an American battalion. The regiment would resume its march the next morning. “We had to get where we were going,” he later explained.

L
IEUTENANT
G
RADY
was in Lai Khe during the battle. As Captain George’s executive officer, he monitored the radios in Alpha Company’s communications center, known as the commo bunker. Protected by sandbags and concrete, he listened to the distant sounds of war on the battalion frequency as the firefight grew more intense and the American position more desperate. Allen was dead. George was being evacuated. Grady’s company and battalion were in disarray in the jungle to the north. At approximately the time that Vo Minh Triet considered the fight over, Grady wheeled a quarter-ton jeep down to the 2/28 Black Lions headquarters at the sprawling base camp. On the way there he encountered the battalion’s executive officer, Robert Gillard. “Get your stuff, you’re going out,” Gillard said. Grady turned around and gathered his combat gear. He stopped at brigade headquarters on the way to the helicopter pad, and just then they were bringing in his boss, Jim George, who had been medevaced directly to Lai Khe.

The captain was a bloody mess, conscious, but deaf in one ear and barely able to see. Grady, with his light-hearted nature, could not grasp the horror, or perhaps could not yet accept it. He looked at George and blurted out, “You big dummy, what’d you do?”

During the voyage across the Pacific three months earlier, Grady had tried to ease the concerns of young recruits destined for the Vietnam battlefields. Just one year and you’re home, he would say. And the three weeks aboard the
General John Pope
counted toward that year. Only a week earlier he had persuaded one of the former C Packet soldiers, frightened and certain that he would die, to overcome his fright and return to the field. “You’re scared? We’re all scared. You just gotta go,” Grady had said then. Now, as he reached the resupply pad and loaded case after case of ammo in the chopper and then climbed in himself, the same fear that he had tried to ease in others washed over him.
What the hell…what am I…what the hell am I doing here?
he muttered. The helicopter hovered over the treetops and clattered north toward the trouble near the Ong Thanh stream. The rescue mission was under way when he arrived at the perimeter.

Back toward the jungle, with Sergeant Mark Smith in the lead, marched most of Erwin’s recon platoon, followed by Kasik’s Bravo Company, Reese’s Charlie, plus Lieutenant Grady and fresh soldiers from Alpha, Delta, and Headquarters, including Ray Albin, the mortar plotter, Steve Goodman, the armorer, and Rick Calef, a senior medic, along with survivors like Private Hinger and Sergeant Valdez who wanted to find their buddies. The force that marched south to extract the wounded and the dead was larger than the force that Terry Allen had taken into battle. Albin borrowed an M-16 from someone in the Alpha weapons platoon, then started worrying whether it would fire properly or if the soldier had forgotten to clean it. Hinger, shaken by Holleder’s death atop everything he had seen earlier, had “broken down pretty bad” at the battalion aid station, where his friend Dave Berry, a fellow medic, tried to tranquilize him by giving him a shot of muscle relaxant, but he could not relax and could not stay in the NDP; he had to get back to find more wounded men, so here he was in the long line heading out again, following almost the same path he had taken seven hours earlier.