We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (17 page)

"The choppers approached the LZ from the east and the lead ships were setting down only a few feet from the NVA marksmen in the tree line. Our Alpha left flank was exposed until later in the day when Charlie Company lengthened its lines and took up positions there. Initially the gap between Alpha and Charlie companies was covered by fire only. It was a critical point, and an open avenue of approach. When Charlie Company came under attack, Alpha Company was attacked down the creekbed. They came down from the massif."

All this time, Bill Beck and Russell Adams andntheir buddies on the other M-60 were out front, anchoring the far left flank of Alpha Company, and their sheets of machinegun fire wreaked havoc on the attacking enemy. Beck now briefly became a medic as well. Beck recalls, "I spotted an arm, off to my left about twenty yards, reaching up above the grass with a GI canteen in hand. Right arm. Like he was trying to drain one last drop out of it. Adams covered me and I ran over. It was a radio man, helmet off, radio on the ground. He was tall and thin with brown hair. He asked me for water and said he'd been hit. I opened his shirt and there was a small black hole in his chest. I tried to comfort him, telling him he'd be all right, that it's not bad. I gently rolled him on his side expecting to find half his back blown out, but the same small black hole was there also.

"I wrapped his first-aid pack and a plastic wrapper over both holes, screamed for a medic, got his M-16, and tried to fire it at the NVA shooting at us. It was all shot to hell. I screamed again for a medic and dragged him back ten or fifteen yards till Doc [Donal J.] Nail got him. Then I spotted an officer--I remember the silver bar on his shirt--he was in shock, moaning, his hand blown apart and his thigh equally bad. He was sitting facing the creekbed. I knew he had got hit from that area and I was scared shitless that I was going to get it in the back while tending to him."

Beck, down on his knees, bandaged the wounded officer and screamed for a medic. He adds, "I wasn't with him for more than a minute. I got his M-16 and tried to fire it and it was inoperable. I took his .45 pistol and fired into the jungle toward the enemy. Somewhere along the line I picked up an M-79 grenade launcher from a dead guy and tried to fire it, and it was no good. I fired more .45 rounds into the jungle. The enemy firing picked up.

"Just then I heard Ladner screaming, ', Beck, help! Adams is hit.' I ran back. Russ was on his back staring at me, the M-60 lying on its side. The side of his head was a mess. He was trying to talk to me but nothing was coming out. The enemy knew they had shot him and were closing in on us from the front and right front thirty yards out. I righted the M-60 fast and started firing at them. Every time I fired Adams winced. He was lying right beside the gun, so I tried not firing so often. Besides, we were low on ammo and this was no small firefight.

"Suddenly the M-60 jammed. We were being assaulted and I could see the enemy twenty-five yards out. It's surprising how fast you think and act in a situation like that. Lying prone I opened the feed cover, flipped the gun over and hit it on the ground. It jarred the shells loose.

Debris from the ground had caught in the ammo belt when Adams was hit. I flipped it right side up, slapped the ammo belt back in, slammed the feed cover closed and began firing again. It seemed like a lifetime, but wasn't more than five or ten seconds.

"The enemy firing slacked off. Adams's helmet lay in front of me. I could see a bullet hole in it and I reached out and turned it over. It seemed like his entire brain fell out in front of me on the ground. I was horrified! I screamed over an dover for the medic and tried to tell Adams that it wasn't nothing, that he'd be all right. I told him the choppers would get him out soon. I took his .45 pistol; now I had three of them. I remember Adams laying there for at least a half hour. Ladner and Rivera were firing and I saw more movement to the front and right. I started firing again. At one time I stood up and, using a poncho, kicked out a brush fire moving toward us."

Bill Beck, thirsty, exhausted, and shocked by his friend's terrible wound, now heard screams from the other machinegun position. He says, "Ladner cried out to me, horror in his voice, ' is hit! Help!

His guts are on the ground!' Doc Nail came, patched Adams's head, and carried him to the rear while I covered for them. Doc then came back for Rodriguez but Ladner had already taken him back."

Beck was soon rejoined by Specialist Theron Ladner and Ladner's ammo bearer, PFC Edward F. Dougherty, the only men left out of the two M-60 crews. They were fifteen yards apart, each one steadily firing at the close-in enemy. Someone brought up a load of ammo for the machine guns.

Beck says, "That made me very happy. There was no one on my left for a long time. It was lonely as hell up there until a captain came over to me from my left rear and ordered me to 'stay put. You are with such-and-such a company now!' I'll never forget that. I can't remember what company he said; hell, one company's as good as another. I don't know what the hell's happening. I'm out there by myself. I'm only a twenty-year-old kid. I don't know what's going on. I followed Russell Adams; I'm his assistant gunner so I go where he goes.

That's how I got up there."

The captain was John Herren of Bravo Company. Bob Edwards and his Charlie Company men were off on Beck's left but not in direct contact.

Beck, Ladner, and Dougherty-- and, before they were hit, Russell Adams and Rodriguez Rivera--all of them draftees, none of them with combat experience, were undergoing a profound and shattering experience.

Russell Adams somehow survived the traumatic head wound, which left him partly crippled. He recalls the wood and bark chips flying as a stream of enemy fire chewed up the tree next to his machine gun. "The next burst hit me."

It was during all this horror that Beck remembers the fear coming over him: "While Doc Nail was there with me, working on Russell, fear, real fear, hit me. Fear like I had never known before. Fear comes, and once you recognize it and accept it, it passes just as fast as it comes, and you don't really think about it anymore. You just do what you have to do, but you learn the real meaning of fear and life and death. For the next two hours I was alone on that gun, shooting at the enemy. Enemy were shooting at me and bullets were hitting the ground beside me and cracking above my head. They were attacking me and I fired as fast as I could in long bursts. My M-60 was cooking. I had to take a crap and a leak bad, so I pulled my pants down while laying on my side and did it on my side, taking fire at the time."

Over to Beck's left, Charlie Company was getting its baptism of fire.

Sergeant First Class Robert Jemison, Jr., was the top sergeant in Lieutenant John Geoghegan's 2nd Platoon. Jemison, a native of Aliceville, Alabama, married and the father of four, was an old veteran who had already helped make history in Korea. Drafted in 1947 at age seventeen, Jemison stayed in the Army. In February of 1951, he was a rifleman in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment. At Chipyong-ni, twelve miles behind enemy lines, the 23rd Infantry was surrounded by two Chinese army corps and miraculously defeated them.

Fate and the United States Army hadn't done all that well by SFC Jemison. He was now surrounded again, and making history again. Says Jemison: "We received fire on the landing zone. We had one man killed, a Specialist 4 from Phenix City, Alabama, and one private who was a replacement. We moved into position and started digging in. We sent an ammo and casualty report to the platoon leader, Lieutenant Geoghegan. We reported one killed. He said: ' God have mercy on his soul.' We were attacked throughout the day, off and on, where we had set up."

Specialist 4 George J. Mcdonald, Jr., twenty-four years old and a native of Pass Christian, Mississippi, was a mortar man in Charlie Company.

When he bailed out of a helicopter onto Landing Zone X-Ray he had precisely fourteen days left to serve in the Army. "LZ X-Ray has never left my mind. Sunday morning my squad saw the LZ. There were troopers laying and firing their M-16s into the trees and waving and signalling to us that they were under fire. As soon as we hit the ground we started getting automatic rifle fire from the left up on Chu Pong. We had to hug the ground for a while; the rounds were hitting all around and very close. I could see muzzle flashes coming from up in the trees. Since they were out of range of my M-79 grenade launcher, I borrowed an M-16 from the trooper next to me who couldn't see them. I fired directly at the muzzle flashes until they stopped.

"Then we grabbed the mortar and moved ahead into the trees and set up and quickly used up our mortar ammo. There were some dead Cavalry troops laying on the ground, and word was being shouted that there was heavy fighting up ahead and they needed help. I went in the direction of the heavy rifle fire and used up what ammunition I had, then returned to the mortar."

From my command post at the termite hill, the enemy were clearly visible a hundred yards to the south. They were damned good soldiers, used cover and concealment to perfection, and were deadly shots: Most of my dead and wounded soldiers had been shot in the head or upper body. The North Vietnamese paid particular attention to radio operators and leaders.

They did not appear to have radios themselves; they controlled their men by shouts, waves, pointing, whistles, and sometimes bugle calls.

The North Vietnamese regulars were good, but Charlie Company was cutting them down with fire that scythed through the tall elephant grass. Bob Edwards and his thin green line were stopping the most serious threat of the afternoon. Edwards had run his company for nineteen months. His company first sergeant, John James, was in the hospital with malaria and the acting first sergeant for this operation was SFC Glenn F. Kennedy, a soft-spoken Mississippian, thirty years old.

Edwards had gotten three brand-new second lieutenants as platoon leaders just before we shipped out of Fort Benning. The 1st Platoon leader was Neil A. Kroger, twenty four, a recent Officer Candidate School graduate from Oak Park, Illinois. Kroger's platoon sergeant was SFC Luther V.

Gilreath, thirty-three years old, a tall, slender paratrooper who hailed from Surgoinsville, Tennessee. The 2nd Platoon leader was John Geoghegan, a handsome, red-haired young officer, commissioned out of the Pennsylvania Military College, who was four days past his twenty-fourth birthday. Geoghegan was married and the father of a baby daughter born three months before we shipped out to Vietnam. His platoon sergeant was Robert Jemison. The 3rd Platoon leader was William Franklin, another OCS graduate, who was older than Kroger and Geoghegan; he was married and the father of two children. The 3rd Platoon top kick was SFC Charles N.

Freeman, another old pro.

The attacking North Vietnamese 7th Battalion ran straight into a company of American infantrymen in a sector that had been completely undefended only minutes before. They were violently thrown back. Now Major Hoa tried to regroup under blistering ground fire and murderous air and artillery barrages. Bob Edwards reported that Charlie Company was in good shape, was locked in a heavy fight but had things well in hand.

It was 2:45 p.m. All three of my rifle companies were heavily engaged.

We had lost the use of the larger clearing for helicopter landings.

Wounded were streaming into the command-post aid station. We were in a desperate fix and I was worried that it could become even more desperate. By now I believed we were fighting at least two People's Army battalions; turns out it was three. They were very tough and very determined to wipe us out, but a major difference between Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An of the People's Army of Vietnam and Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore of the 1 st Cavalry Division was that I had major fire support and he didn't.

Air Force Captain Bruce Wallace and his fellow A-IE Skyraider pilots, as well as jet fighter-bombers from all three services, helped provide that edge, flying fifty sorties in close air support that Sunday afternoon.

Says Wallace, "The importance of airplanes in a vulgar brawl is to be down among the palm trees with the troops, putting ordnance on the ground at the exact time and in the precise place that the ground command needs it."

While he was in the airspace over Landing Zone X-Ray, Captain Wallace observed the attacks of the 1 st Cavalry Division's aerial rocket artillery (ARA) helicopters with more than passing interest. He says, "It is always an experience for an Air Force pilot to watch a gaggle of Hueys attack a target. We pride ourselves on flexibility of thought, quick response time, ability to react to ever-changing situations, but we are committed to a somewhat linear thought process. In the attack the target is always directly in front of us. Not so with a Huey. To watch four or eight of them at a time maneuvering up and down and laterally and even backward boggles a fighter pilot's mind. Those guys swarm a target like bees over honey. I had to hand it to those Huey guys. They really got down there in the trees with the troops."

The ARA helicopters chewing up the slopes of Chu Pong on our behalf were from Charlie Battery, 2nd Battalion, 20th Artillery (ARA), commanded by Major Roger J. Bartholomew, the legendary "Black Bart" Bartholomew, who would later be killed in combat in Vietnam. One of Black Bart's pilots, Captain Richard B. Washburn, then thirty-one, recalls, "The Battery fired all day in support of X-Ray. We refueled every third trip, never shutting down the engine. Each helicopter carried 48 rockets, and with six helicopters plus the battery commander we were going through ammo in a hurry. An artillery battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, and his driver were among the volunteers opening boxes of rockets to help keep us armed. CH-47 Chinook helicopters flew in load after load of ammo to keep us going. We stayed with it all day."

The field artillery, what we called "tube artillery" to distinguish the howitzer folks from the helicopter-rocket folks, proudly calls itself the King of Battle. During training at Fort Benning my battalion's fire-support coordinator, Captain Robert L. Barker, presented me with a print of an impeccably uniformed artillery officer, circa 1860s, lighting a match to a small cannon aimed at a pile of grubby men engaged in swordfights, fistfights, and gunfights. The legend engraved across the bottom said: "Artillery Lends Dignity to What Would Otherwise be a Vulgar Brawl."