They Marched Into Sunlight (56 page)

Clark Welch was taken to the Ninety-third unconscious and did not come to until that morning after surgery, when he noticed a nurse looking down at him. The last thing the Delta commander had remembered was Lieutenant Stroup putting him on the helicopter and saluting. Did that even happen? He had some vague memory of it, as vague as anything that took place after he had collapsed near a tree and started drifting in and out of consciousness.

Bud Barrow was nearby. “Well, there’s a typical first sergeant!” Barrow heard a doctor proclaim as he emerged from an anesthetic fog.

What was that supposed to mean?

“The first thing that came out of your mouth was, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’”

They had removed forty-two pieces of shrapnel from Barrow’s legs, but at least he was alive. Clark Welch had been under the impression that Barrow was dead. And the last Welch had seen of his trusty first sergeant, Barrow was shooting directly at him.

No, lieutenant,
Barrow would say.
Not at you, at the Viet Cong right behind you.

Greg Landon was there, his back wound treated but the skin not yet sewn in place. And Dwayne Byrd, Santiago Griego, and Reynolds Lonefight. Frank McMeel had been groggy since they operated on both of his wrists. When they first wheeled him out of surgery the night before, he started to sit up, and a nurse put a hand on his chest and pushed him back down and said, “You’re safe. You’re in Long Binh.” And he fell asleep. But now, the day after, he was afraid to sleep, because when he did “it started all over again” in his mind: he was pinned down by enemy fire, metal flying, bushes turning into wood chips, men crying out in pain. He woke up, startled, and said, “I can’t go back to that again.”

John Fowler, from Delta’s third platoon, another draftee who came over on the USNS
Pope,
was taken to the psychiatric wing. It would mark the beginning of a long period of mental distress for him. His last cogent memory before the hospital had been seeing his commander, Clark Welch, being lifted onto the dust-off helicopter and giving the thumbs-up sign. He had collapsed then, from utter exhaustion, and started crying, and had been crying ever since. “Couldn’t take no more,” he said later. “That was the end of me.”

The Ninety-third evac was a world unto itself, with its own rhythms and rituals, attempts at normal life twisted by the realities of the war. One minute they would be watching a movie in the open-air theater, the next they would be scrambling to prepare for the arrival of broken young men. On the morning of October 17, according to the duty officer’s log, the hospital flag football team “played its ninth game of the season beating the 185th Maintenance Battalion 14–6.” Next item on the log: “Received an influx of 35 casualties from the 1st Infantry Division.”

The dust-off choppers from Lai Khe had come in from midafternoon until after dark, each one landing at the heliport with the large
READY NOW
sign painted on the ground. Most of the wounded men were carried to the emergency room on litters. Some walked. Those who were conscious looked around anxiously to see who else was there. For the first time since the battle, they could start to piece together who was dead and who was alive. The entire medical staff had been called in for the mass casualty situation. Internists, nurses, and medics manned the emergency room, recording vital signs on the “skinny sheet,” performing tracheotomies, controlling bleeding, binding up sucking chest wounds, getting X-rays, preparing patients for surgery. The chief of surgery performed the most critical function, triage. The worst were not treated first. He triaged for survival. The very worst were categorized as “expectant,” expected to die, and operated on last. The critical ones who could be saved and operated on fastest were taken first.

Thirty-four of the thirty-five Black Lions who arrived at the Ninety-third required surgery. There was one unfortunate but understandable hitch at the beginning. One of the first patients to be anesthetized started vomiting internally because he had been given too much water before he reached the hospital. This “alerted the anesthesiologist to the possibility of recent fluid ingestion by the other 34 patients,” according to a hospital report. Time was precious. They had to pump thirty-four stomachs before the operations began. Nine men underwent laporatomies, meaning their abdomens were opened for exploratory surgery; one underwent a right hepatic lobectomy: surgeons removed part of a bleeding liver. Most of the wounds were caused by shrapnel, the doctors noted, relatively few by gunshots. Within eight and a half hours, all the wounded were treated and taken to the postoperative recovery room.

Private Joseph Otis Booker, a medic from Richmond, Virginia, died there, in the middle of the night, of septic shock. He was twenty-two.

Willie C. Johnson was nearby, alive but in critical condition. Knock on wood, trying to hang on.

Faustin Sena opened his eyes the day after and thought he saw a priest hovering over him. Last rites?
No way I’m gonna die,
Sena said to himself.
No way.

I
T HAD BEEN A
typical morning for General Westmoreland. Up at six for a soft-boiled egg, two slices of toast, and ginseng tea on the veranda of his villa. To the MACV office at Tan Son Nhut by 7:30. A telephone conversation with Ambassador Bunker, then a stream of aides and visitors. He heard news of the latest discontent in Washington. And he talked about his trip the previous afternoon to the prison on Con Son Island in the South China Sea, where he had asked John Paul Vann, an official at CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), whether they could “take advantage of the abundance of rock” on the island by using prison labor and “then transporting the crushed rock by barge to the Delta where it is sorely needed” for roads and other paving projects. One of Westmoreland’s favorite phrases for describing how to defeat the insurgent Viet Cong was “to pulverize the boulder.” Here, literally, was another way to do it. At 12:15 the general left for his regular Wednesday tennis match at the Cercle Sportif Country Club, the elegant French colonial retreat in the shadows of the Presidential Palace. It was de rigueur for the American and Vietnamese elite to practice lobs and backhands in the noonday sun.

Then back into his green fatigues, four stars on the left collar, four stars on the baseball cap, and over to Tan Son Nhut airfield, where at 2:10 his white-and-blue command helicopter flew him to First Division headquarters at Lai Khe. The purpose, he wrote in his diary, was “to get a firsthand report on the severe engagement by the 1st [he meant 2nd] Battalion, 28th Infantry, in which the Battalion Commander, LTC Terry Allen, and the Brigade S-3, Major Donald Holleder, were killed.” He first had been told of the battle while contemplating the pulverization of boulders on Con Son Island. He immediately realized the implications of a battle with so many casualties and two well-known officers dead. It was exactly the kind of story that he did not want to be dealing with then, not while he was pushing LBJ and McNamara for more troops and arguing that the search-and-destroy strategy of attrition was prevailing. And not while he was preparing for the impending visit of the most respected military skeptic of his search-and-destroy policy, the retired General James M. Gavin. This was the kind of story that would be hard to contain. A pack of correspondents and cameramen from the Saigon press corps were even now tailing him to Lai Khe.

Lieutenant Grady was just leaving battalion headquarters, where he had responded to an “officers’ call” to meet the new battalion commander, the replacement for Terry Allen. It was Louis Menetrey, new to the First Division, having arrived only two days earlier from the First Cavalry. Menetrey, who would go on to be a four-star general, was still a major then but on the list for promotion to lieutenant colonel, and he had jumped at the chance to run his own battalion. He was there, waiting in the wings, when Allen was killed. Vietnam, he thought, would now become his war. “Brigades and divisions had a place, but it was really a battalion commander’s war. You had a great deal of latitude in what you did or did not do as long as you didn’t screw it up too bad.”

As he took command of the 2/28 Black Lions, Menetrey set to work reconstituting the two lost companies and bolstering the spirits of those who had been through the worst of war. He was that rare commander who washed his men in a feeling of security and good sense, exuding what one of his officers called “a wonderful air about him,” including a sense of calm that many young officers lacked. In that first meeting Menetrey seemed to know exactly what to say. He searched out Grady and told him that he had heard that the lieutenant “had done a lot of good things” in the hours after the battle. When Gerry Grosso introduced himself as the “acting commander” of Delta Company, Menetrey quickly responded, “No, not acting anymore; you’re permanent.” He took it as his mission to study the October 17 battle and make sure the battalion would never be put in that position again.

The division commanders, led by General Hay, were coming out to greet Westmoreland just as Grady and Grosso were going back to company quarters. There was chewing out to be done, all the way down the line, but first Westmoreland and Hay had to figure out how to explain this to the rest of the world. The generals retreated into a back room and did not come out until they were ready to brief the press. Bert Quint was there from CBS, and Joseph Fried from the
New York Daily News,
and reporters from the wire services and magazine newsweeklies and radio networks. The buzz had already started about this being an ambush. Hay insisted that it was not an ambush but rather a meeting engagement, and that mistakes had been made by the battalion command but, despite the mass casualties, the battle had been won. “After I received a briefing I made a brief statement to the press and then turned them over to General Hay for further details,” Westmoreland noted in his diary. In his statement he attempted to diminish the battle by saying it was “among many that are going on throughout the country on a day-to-day basis.” The American military, he stressed, was not stumbling around unprepared in the jungle darkness. “We know, we have a pretty good idea of the enemy troops in this area. We have quite a bit of intelligence on this particular regiment.”

“What happens now, sir?” Quint asked General Hay.

“What happens now? What happens now is we continue to work on him until we destroy him,” Hay said. He sounded aggressive and determined to pursue the enemy. Westmoreland could not accuse him of being too cautious now. “This is what I’ve hoped we could do for a long time, is to get him to stay in one place. For the past two months I’ve been chasing units all over my area—we just get a hold of ’em and they break contact and run. And he’s finally gotten into an area here where it appears he’s going to stay. And I hope he does stay because we’ll destroy him.”

When the briefing was over, Westmoreland got in touch with the III Corps commander, Major General Frederick C. Weyand, and asked him to attend the five o’clock follies in Saigon to “put the engagement in better perspective.” The battle, they would say, “was a severe engagement which was fought on the enemy’s terms, since the Second of the Twenty-eighth was moving into a well-established enemy base area.” But they did not want the press calling it an ambush, and they wanted it to be considered not on its own but as part of a larger operation that was overwhelmingly successful. Weyand told the Saigon press corps that the battle “did not have the flavor” of an ambush. Fortified with a new body count from the division staff, he said that by “conservative estimate” 103 Viet Cong were killed. The enemy regiment, he asserted, was “as close to destruction as it has ever been.” By the time Operation Shenandoah II was done, he concluded, “we will have removed the closest main base area to the north of Saigon from which they had attempted to launch major attacks.”

Hay and Westmoreland were airborne by then, flying in Westmoreland’s helicopter north to Chon Thanh and west into the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, where they hovered briefly, at high altitude, over the deserted battlefield.

The correspondents and camera crews were ordered to stay back in Lai Khe. They were led around by “a very scared colonel who didn’t like to have us there,” as CBS cameraman Kurt Volkert described him. Alpha soldiers who had survived the battle and wanted to talk were set up on folding chairs outside the orderly room at the company area, and the “fruit flies,” as soldiers called the press, descended. Top Valdez and James Schultze talked about the opening moments of the battle at the Alpha front and of unseen enemy snipers shooting down from trees. Doc Hinger was asked about the death of Major Holleder. It was from the correspondents that he learned who Holleder was. All he had known when he cradled the dying officer in his hands was that he was holding a brigade major. He had never met Holleder before and knew nothing of his glory years of Army football. Hinger felt “extremely wary” of saying the wrong thing. He knew that every soldier’s version of the truth would differ somewhat, because “a battle wasn’t a single battle but a hundred individual battles.” He was also nervous about saying anything that would disturb the families of dead soldiers.

But in describing what they had walked into, Hinger and other survivors were more interested in the truth than in cautious military semantics. They said it was an ambush. As Top Valdez told a correspondent from the Associated Press: “They were set up and waiting just like a cat getting ready to jump, and that’s what they did.”