They Marched Into Sunlight (51 page)

Lieutenant Grady ignored Newman’s order for a brief period, pretending that he did not hear it, but eventually even he and his Alpha group gave up. The recovery team stacked all the bodies they could find, one atop the next, in six neat piles.

Then the weary soldiers retraced their steps. Moonlight filtered down through the trees, illuminating the way. The last man made it inside the perimeter a few minutes before eight. It had been twelve hours—a lifetime ago—since Jim George’s point squad had marched out on that sunlit morning.

A
T
L
AI
K
HE
late that night General Hay gathered his staff. The division commander had been at a meeting in Saigon all morning, away from the action, and by the time he was called out of the meeting and informed of the battle, it was already a disaster, unrecoverable. He had little to do with it, for better and worse, except as his policies shaped the decisions of those under him. He wanted to believe, or at least would say later, that if he had been there it would not have happened. There were other officers who told themselves the same thing. Details were still coming in, not all accurate, and what Hay knew was secondhand information from official logs and the best-face descriptions of his aides. He seemed shocked but was making an extra effort to calm those around him. “We’ve had a very tough day in this division,” Hay said. There was one point he wanted to emphasize above all else. This was not an ambush. This was a meeting engagement.

Big Jim Shelton was in the room, a deputy operations officer, numbed by the day’s events. Terry Allen was his closest friend in Vietnam. Through the long summer they had spent night after night together in the tent they shared, talking about everything. Shelton knew the intimate details of Allen’s life, including the trouble Terry had at home with his wife, Jean. Big Jim had been gone from the battalion for nearly two weeks, but he still considered himself a Black Lion. Only ten days earlier, on the night of October 7, before the battalion headed out to the field, Allen and the other officers had thrown a farewell party for him at the club in Lai Khe. It was a merry night of steaks and beer and bullshitting. Captain Blackwell announced that he was giving Shelton, who already had six kids, a condom—and pulled out a huge plastic bag. They gave him a Zippo lighter with a Black Lion on it. Shelton tried to speak, but he was half-drunk and a born romantic and for once the first-class talker could not get through a sentence. And now Allen and Blackwell were dead and General Hay was saying it wasn’t an ambush.

And Holleder. His death was beyond Shelton’s imagination. He knew Holleder as a tough sonofabitch. They fought often during their brief time together in Vietnam, two strong-willed staff officers swearing and fuming at each other. Holleder, as the operations officer for the First Brigade, would bring in a plan, and Shelton, as the division deputy, would say, “That’s just dumb, Don,” and the fulminating would begin. Shelton figured that the only way to deal with someone as overpowering as Holleder was to stand up to him. Holleder’s whole approach was that he was going to whip your ass, whether you were an enemy soldier, or a staff officer in his way, or a defender trying to tackle him. Shelton had tried that once too. It was the fall of 1955, Big Jim’s junior year at Delaware, Holleder’s final year at Army. The Fightin’ Blue Hens went up to West Point for a scrimmage against Blaik’s nationally renowned squad. Shelton, a linebacker on defense, had worked up a series of red dog blitzes, but it was preseason and “no one could remember what the hell to do,” and anyway Army was bigger and better. They ran through Delaware, Shelton remembered, “like shit through a goose, like piss through a tin horn.” Holleder was the new quarterback. It was obvious to Shelton that “he couldn’t pass worth a shit,” but he could run, and when he ran, no one wanted to tackle him, not with his arms flailing and his knees bucking high. He was nasty, Shelton thought. And when you tackled him, he was even nastier; he’d kick you on the way up. But he was damn near indomitable, and even when you fought with him, he was a good guy to have on your side, as tough as the Big Red One itself. Holleder was dead, and General Hay was up there saying it was not an ambush.

This was a hard one for the brass to accept and explain: Terry Allen, the son of the famous general, and Don Holleder, the great All-American, both dead. Shelton had typed out the telegram notifying General Westmoreland’s office at MACV himself, but even he couldn’t believe it. One thing he was sure of was that this was not a meeting engagement, a case of two opposing units just happening to bump into each other. But it was hard for Hay to acknowledge anything else. The division’s special intelligence reports for October had revealed in fairly accurate detail where the enemy forces were, how heavily armed they were, and predicted that there was a heightened probability that American units would encounter them in sizeable numbers. It was all on paper, hard intelligence, ahead of time.

To say that a prized battalion of the First Division had been wiped out in an ambush would be “a mark on the escutcheon of the division,” Shelton concluded. “A First Division unit ambushed? Never. We cloverleaf patrol, we do this, we do that, how the hell could we get ambushed? It’s all part of the aura of the Big Red One.” Hay talked for a long time. No one asked any questions. More reports came in about body counts. The latest estimate was that the Black Lions had killed at least sixty-seven Viet Cong. They could say they won a difficult fight. No one bothered to figure out where the numbers came from, at least not yet.

Colonel Newman was still in charge at the Black Lions’ NDP. He spent much of the night talking to Hay and other division officers back at Lai Khe. A company from the 1/16 Battalion had come in to help, and he placed them around the perimeter. His artillery liaison officer said that all of the division’s artillery was available to fire overnight to help seal the area around the stacked bodies that would remain in the jungle until morning. He asked his units to muster and account for personnel. It was a pathetic sight when Alpha and Delta fell into line. Grady was now in charge of Alpha. He thought he could account for everyone but Hargrove and Fitzgerald, but there was great confusion about where everybody was, who was injured, and who had been taken where, and he could not be sure. Clark Welch was gone. Lieutenant Stroup had put him on a helicopter and they had snapped salutes at one another and it was over—Welch was on his way to the Ninety-third Evacuation Hospital near Bien Hoa, the same place that Sergeant Barrow and Private Landon and many of the old C Packet survivors were being taken. What was left of Welch’s proud new company, the unit he had hoped to make the best damn company in Vietnam, was now in the hands of Captain Grosso, who had been the battalion’s air officer.

The camp was full of dazed men, drained of feeling, shaken by what they had been through and frightened by what yet might come. Rumors swept through camp that the Viet Cong stopped the battle so that they could overrun the entire battalion in the middle of the night. Michael Arias, the radiotelephone operator who used his compass to find the way out for Jim George and his Alpha group, felt more afraid in his bunker than he had during the battle. He shivered involuntarily and tears rolled down his face as he thought to himself,
Those motherfuckers are coming back tonight to finish the job.
The place was all jitters. Lieutenant Grady tried to light a cigarette. He had managed to keep calm on the recovery mission, but now his hands trembled. He could not hold a match. He just took a deep breath, said,
Oh, man,
and leaned up against a bunker all night.

No silent night this time. The artillery pounded away, and the men inside the perimeter were sending out a constant barrage of nervous fire. A soldier on the perimeter mishandled a claymore mine and it went off in the wrong direction, injuring him. One final evacuation. Stories flew from one bunker to the next. Word spread that Terry Allen’s body had been evacuated before the wounded were taken out. Much of the anger among the privates went toward their fallen commander. He had messed up, and then they took his body out first. Was it the right thing to do? Yes, probably, some of them said, but that did not lessen the us-versus-them anger. There were more stories about who lived and who died. In Alpha they talked about Randy Brown, who had come back into camp saying that his foot was killing him. His buddies had noticed that there was still a bullet in Brown’s foot; they took the boot off and Michael Arias kept it as a souvenir. The C Packet guys talked about Ronnie Reece. He and three other soldiers on the USNS
Pope
had cut a dollar bill in fourths and were going to match all the pieces at the end of the war. It would not be a full dollar.

Noise all around, yet the camp was enveloped by quiet despair. Some of the medics were hurting most. George Burrows of Charlie Company watched silently as the medic next to him washed and rewashed his hands. No matter how hard he scrubbed, he could not get the blood from his fingernails.

Doc Hinger was disoriented from the moment he returned to the NDP. The normal routine would be to get something to eat, then do a radio watch or an ambush patrol or a listening post. But now he and the other Alpha survivors had nothing to do. They were unimportant and almost invisible. Hinger’s uniform was an unspeakable mess. Blood and body parts stained his pants and shirt. Hot chow came in plastic foam cups. Macaroni and beef. He looked at it and couldn’t touch it.

His bunker had been taken over by one of the new companies, so he went to the mortar pits. He found a spot in a trench where they kept the ammunition, but there was no way he could sleep. The adrenaline was gone. The reality of the day was setting in. Hinger felt deeply alone. Now and then someone came by, patted him on the back, and said, “Well done,” but that was the last thing he was feeling. He had performed acts of bravery in an impossible situation, yet he felt like a failure. His job was to save men, but too many men had died. He had gone through twelve weeks of training at Fort Sam Houston and after that had performed medical tasks on a daily basis that interns in the states had never done. He was a humble person, but sometimes in the field, when he was working the volume blood expander or doing an emergency tracheotomy or tightening a tourniquet, he felt almost godlike. Now he was aching with guilt. He was saying to himself again and again,
If I am alive, I must have really done something wrong. Did I run? What did I do?
He knew better, but he almost convinced himself that he had turned and fled. He took out a pistol and thought of killing himself. The urge passed, but the guilt did not. As midnight came and the dreadful day slipped into history, Tom Hinger could not find a logical explanation for why in the world he was still alive.

Chapter 18

“The News Is All Bad”

T
HE DEEPEST DARKNESS
in Vietnam, forty minutes after one, and Doc Hinger was still awake in the mortar pit, suffering through the bleakest night of his life. In Washington at that moment, twelve time zones earlier, President Johnson had just left a meeting with Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister of Singapore, and walked into the weekly Tuesday lunch of his war advisers.

The meeting was in the second-floor dining room of the White House residence, the same intimate room where LBJ and Lady Bird and their daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci, took their meals. As historian Henry Graff once described the weekly scene, Johnson and his men were surrounded by “brilliant panels of wallpaper depicting American soldiers of the Revolutionary War in the glorious moments of victory at Yorktown and elsewhere—as if to mock the subject of their own war counsels.” They gathered around a formal Sheraton dining table, with LBJ at the head in a high-backed black swivel chair. Secretary of Defense McNamara sat to his left. Secretary of State Rusk sat to his right. Presidential assistant Walt Rostow was at the other end, with CIA director Helms, General Wheeler of the Joint Chiefs, and Press Secretary George Christian in between. Aide Tom Johnson, as usual, was the note taker.

As he entered the room, Johnson mentioned that he was impressed with Prime Minister Lee.

“We need to get him with Reston and Joe Kraft,” Rostow said, referring to two nationally syndicated correspondents, skeptics on Vietnam whose opinions carried great weight.

“He would be good,” said Helms.

Washingtonians who drove to work that morning listening to the 6:55 “Front Line” radio report of CBS correspondent Dan Rather on WTOP had been given a heads-up on the way things might go from there. Rather devoted his entire five-minute report to explaining the rituals of the Tuesday lunches and what to expect this time. “Lunch begins, so does the serious conversation. There is an occasional pause, punctuated by the whirl of Mr. Johnson’s battery-powered pepper grinder. He likes pepper and he likes the gadget.” Rather called the session “Target Tuesday” and noted that McNamara would come with a list of potential targets to bomb in North Vietnam. The site selection would be preceded by the usual debate about whether to reduce the bombing, intensify it, or invoke a bombing pause. McNamara, by Rather’s estimation, was the strongest proponent of a reduction, with Wheeler the hawk pushing a dramatic increase of bombing targets around Hanoi, and Rusk in between. “In thinking about Target Tuesday and the White House luncheon where so many decisions are on the menu,” Rather concluded, “you may want to consider the words of nineteenthth-century writer F. W. Borum: ‘We make our decisions, and then our decisions turn around and make us.’”

The debate at the Tuesday lunch was framed by two top-secret memoranda that reached Johnson’s desk that day, both at the president’s request.

The first, from Wheeler and his Joint Chiefs, represented a wish list of everything they wanted to do to win the war. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that NVN is paying heavily for its aggression and has lost the initiative in the South,” the memo began, making an argument that was the conventional wisdom of military brass that month, though of little comfort to the Black Lions ambushed in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone. The chiefs went on to argue that, although they believed progress was being made on all fronts, “pace of progress indicates that, if acceleration is to be achieved, an appropriate increase in military pressure is required.”