They Marched Into Sunlight (55 page)

There was no reason to stay another day, that much was obvious. The Vietnamese troops left shortly after dawn, both the First Regiment and the local logistical forces, following narrow oxcart paths through dense woods and skirting the edge of an old Michelin rubber plantation. Lam and his service group would return in a few days, when they felt safe from American bombs. Triet and his men would keep moving east and north, fording three waterways, including the Saigon River, using branches and cloth tarps to float across. There was rice, at last, at a base camp of Rear Service Group 82, but the regiment would stop only long enough to eat. They were late for their next mission. They were supposed to be the lead force in the attack on Loc Ninh, but because of the weeklong search for rice and the unexpected battle with the American battalion near the Ong Thanh stream, plans had changed. The VC Ninth Division’s Third Regiment, or Q763, would lead the attack, with Triet’s force held in ready reserve.

W
HEN MEN FROM
Bravo and Charlie companies returned to the battle scene later that morning, the bodies of dead Black Lions were exactly where the recovery team had left them the night before, stacked like cordwood in six tight piles at the side of the Hole. The surrounding terrain had been leveled by artillery fire—an overnight shelling, in a box pattern around the body pile, that was designed to deter the Viet Cong. It seemed to have served that purpose. Nothing was touched. Major Sloan, the battalion operations officer, who accompanied his two remaining companies on the morning trip back into the jungle, reported that “the US bodies were lying in the same place.” Bravo’s Kasik noticed that “large quantities of weapons, gear, and radios” were also still there, neatly stacked, though such things were coveted by the Viet Cong. The Americans approached the body pile cautiously, fearful of enemy booby traps. None had been set, but the recovery was chilling nonetheless. “That is a sight I can close my eyes and see to this day,” Sergeant Koch of Bravo Company said later. “My fellow Black Lions laying there with dirt all over them from the mortar rounds and artillery that was fired all night to keep the VC away from their bodies.” Dirt all over them, and an infestation of maggots.

Movements of Triet’s VC First Regiment

And that was not the worst of it. When they swept the battlefield in the morning light to see what else was out there, they came across an unaccounted-for body, then another, and more, until they found seventeen dead comrades who had not been protected in the pile. Two of these, unlike the rigid bodies in the stack, had not yet stiffened with rigor mortis, leading Kasik and his recovery team to an awful conclusion: “there may have been people alive down there overnight.” The task of removing the dead men was easier this time, since there was no enemy fire and the Hole was enlarged. But it was still a ghastly endeavor. They ran out of body bags, officially known as “human remains pouches.” A few body bags in the inadequate supply had been ruined by heat and humidity. As a result, some uncovered bodies and body parts were loaded onto the helicopter nets. The sight of them lumped together at the bottom of a net—an indignity, though perhaps a practical necessity—stuck sourly in the memory of some of the surviving soldiers.

Major Sloan, studying the scene, reported that they found three weapons that had not been fired and three M-16s that had jammed. From looking at the radios and helmets, it appeared that “generally speaking the equipment showed more evidence of being hit by shrapnel than anything else.” Other troops reported finding four helmets “with holes in them, obviously fired from close range,” and a flamethrower that had large, .50-caliber holes through both tanks.

T
HE REMOVAL OF
the bodies was well under way by ten that morning, when Lieutenant Grady held muster for Alpha Company back at the defensive perimeter. Alpha and Delta were of no use now, most of their men either dead or hospitalized, so those who remained were being shipped back to Lai Khe to await reorganization. Doc Hinger was in the same helicopter as Grady. It was, he reported, a “very somber” trip. “Very quiet. Normally, when you get extracted out of an NDP, you’re going home, you’re upbeat. It was a very quiet ride.” No one talked. The men were lost to themselves.

The standard operating procedure for Alpha was for the company commander to ride the first lift into the field and the last lift out. Grady, in temporary command, was on the last chopper out. He carried his own radio. When the last ship landed, he hopped out and started walking with Hinger and Top Valdez toward the wood line on the way across to the road that led to Alpha headquarters. They were greeted by Charles Bivins, an old supply sergeant, who would make sure everything was ready in the rear when the company returned to camp. Bivins knew by routine that if he saw the commander, that was the end of it, no men behind him. It took twenty helicopters to move a complete rifle company with supplies, but Grady had come in on the fifth chopper. There stood Bivins, here came Grady, bringing up the rear of this weary band of Alpha soldiers. Their eyes met. In disbelief the old sergeant asked, “That’s all there is?” He was weeping.

The only job to be done at Lai Khe was a distasteful one. Soldiers with any connection to the 2/28 Black Lions were asked to identify corpses at a makeshift morgue that had been set up by Graves Registration near B Med, the base medical facilities. It was brutally hot by late morning, near one hundred degrees. The bodies were arrayed in two long rows inside a tent. They were on their backs, in black bags, most of the faces uncovered, head first toward a center viewing aisle. The tent, even with open sides, reeked with an overpowering stench of death and decomposition. ID-ing dead buddies was something no soldier wanted to do. Some flatly refused. Some got drunk first. None of those who went ever forgot what they saw or how they felt.

Gerald Thompson, the Delta squad leader who missed the battle because of his ingrown toenail, was the first soldier brought in to look at the dead. He went reluctantly, under pressure from a brigadier general who had said to him, “I can’t order you, sergeant, but I’d rather you do it.” It was an experience that Thompson had not recovered from more than three and a half decades later. He had dealt with corpses before, but nothing like this. “God, it was nauseating,” he said, not only the smell but the realization that he was looking at his own men. There was Gary Lincoln, good kid—Thompson called him Abe, of course—dead without a scratch on him. And Luther Smith, platoon sergeant, a big black guy who loved to gamble. You never knew whether Sergeant Smith was winning or losing. Once he won a big pot with a pair of deuces. Thompson ID’d him by his ring, “a big old diamond on a gold setting.” And here was Richard Jones, a little guy who had come over on the ship, and next was Ronnie Reece.

When Mike Troyer got to the morgue, they unzipped a body bag and he detected an airborne tattoo and said, “If that arm belongs to that body, that’s Jack Schroder.”

Tom Colburn was overwhelmed by the smell as soon as he entered the tent. At the sight of the first body part in an unzipped bag, he vomited. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

Larry McDevitt from headquarters company went in “half drunk…it was such a terrible thing to do.” He noticed that some corpses seemed peaceful, untouched, others were torn and broken or burnt by napalm.

Lieutenant Grady walked down the aisle of death with Doc Hinger. They could recognize most of the Alpha faces. Peewee Gallagher was identifiable by a tattoo on his forearm. Allen Jagielo was a medic who came in with the resupply helicopter on the sixteenth, the night before the battle, and no one in the battalion knew him, but Hinger could pick him out now by his brilliant white hair. Then Grady came upon the face of the kid he had grown so close to on the voyage across the Pacific. It was handsome Michael Farrell of New Orleans, with his olive skin and perpetual smile. One week short of his twentieth birthday, Farrell was dead. His lifeless face would haunt Grady in nightmares for years.

Major Shelton also visited the morgue. Big Jim recognized Captain Blackwell and Pasquale Tizzio, who had been his radiotelephone operator before Shelton left the Black Lions for the division operations shop. A New York City kid, Tizzio had Shelton’s style—not an ass-kisser. And there was Donald Holleder. Shelton “absolutely recognized” Holleder as soon as he saw him. “He was gray. He looked like he had been totally drained of blood. And he was like stone. It was like marble. He looked like a statue laying there.”

“God damn it, Don! How the hell!” Shelton said, looking down at the impassive face of the once-great Holly. He could not believe that “a guy so powerful was laying there dead as a doornail and there was not a mark on him.”

Nearby was another dead soldier, a sergeant.
Who is this?
they kept asking.
Who is this?
Shelton could not place him. He thought he knew everybody. Knowing everybody was his trademark, but he was drawing a blank.

Who is this?
McDevitt would have the answer, after Shelton had left. It was Eugene Plier, sergeant first class, from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, an older guy with thinning hair. Plier, the battalion’s assistant operations sergeant, had been new to the company, arriving only six days before Shelton left for division. Later, when he heard that it was Plier, Shelton felt terrible. In the few days they were together, he had been too busy to find out anything about the sergeant: whether he was married, what his first name was, where he had served before coming to the Black Lions. Shelton had “never said a god damn thing to him except to tell him to do something,” so he had no memory hook. From then on, wherever he went, Shelton would engage people until he had a way to remember them, haunted by the day he drew a blank on Sergeant Plier.

T
HIS IS NOT
V
IETNAM,
Joe Costello said to himself when he awoke. He was at the Twenty-fourth Evacuation Hospital at Long Binh, recovering from surgery. Doctors had taken a long piece of shrapnel out of his back. The bed was comfortable, and had a knob he could turn to adjust the angle of recline. The room was well lit. Cool, maybe air-conditioned. There were women around from the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, wearing fresh outfits. The environment seemed neat and clean. What time was it? Day or night? He didn’t know and couldn’t tell. He got out of bed and walked to the nurses station and looked around “at all these soldiers in various conditions.” Who was that across from him? “Grider, is that you?” Yes, it was Grider, cursing about how lousy he felt and how he had to get in touch with his grandmother.

Morrisette was in the next bed, and then Jenkins, and down the line eight more enlisted men from Alpha.

Officers were recovering in the next room. Lieutenant Tom Mullen awoke to find an X-ray technician digging into his chest with needle-nosed pliers. “He said he collected bullets and shrapnel, and if I didn’t mind, he’d collect a bit more,” Mullen reported. “The bullets pinged into a gallon size mayo jar that was three-quarters full.”

Jim George was nearby, unable to sleep. The Alpha commander, with a patch over his eye, was sweating, running a fever, haunted by visions of men dying. The nursing captain told him to get up and make his bed and shave, and he did.

The Twenty-fourth, which specialized in neurosurgery, was considered the “downtown” hospital in the region, meaning not that it served downtown Saigon, since it was in the far northern suburbs near the sprawling U.S. bases, but that it tended to be favored by dignitaries and high-ranking officers. Most of the wounded Black Lions had been taken to the Ninety-third Evacuation Hospital two miles away, the primary support hospital for the First Infantry Division. The Ninety-third had more of the atmosphere of a big-city general hospital, with four hundred beds in wings for surgery, regular medical care (mostly malaria patients), and psychiatry. One wing treated Vietnamese, including Viet Cong prisoners of war. The physical plant consisted of a series of thirteen buildings, each created by connecting four quonset huts in an X configuration. The fourteenth building, the operating room, was made of three quonset huts shaped in an H. Covered walkways connected most of the buildings. The place was an amalgam of the old, the new, and the improvised. Much of the X-ray equipment was left over from the French, but when it broke down, the staff could not replace the parts and instead brought in portable field units. Outdoor showers were constructed from fifty-five-gallon drums. Only the operating room and mess hall had reliable running water. Eight operating tables were so rusty they could not be moved. Dust blowing into the emergency room created a constant sanitation problem. But the doctors, most of them young draftees just out of medical school, were first-rate, as were the army nurses. The skilled medical teams, the speed with which dust-off helicopters ferried wounded soldiers from the field to the hospital, and the youthful vigor of the wounded young men—all of these elements combined for a remarkably low death rate at the Ninety-third. In all of 1967, 12,723 soldiers were brought in, three-fifths of whom required surgery, and there were only 67 deaths.