We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (23 page)

Dillon knew better: "These lights were being used by the North Vietnamese, hundreds of them, as they moved down the mountain toward the LZ to get in position for attacks in the morning. Artillery was called in on these lights as well as the signal lights on the two mountain tops. Sometime after midnight there was a large secondary explosion on an area on the mountain right over X-Ray."

The Pathfinders momentarily switched on their small, shielded landing lights in the little clearing while Tifft talked Crandall and Freeman down through the thick . of dust and smoke hanging over X-Ray.

Old Snake and Big Ed powered down into the darkness, clipping the tops of some trees, and within seconds Dillon, Galloway, and party bailed out and heaved the ammo boxes and five-gallon plastic water jugs into the tall grass; then the two choppers were out bound. Galloway recalls, "We crouched there in the darkness, tried to get our bearings, and waited for someone to come get us. Out of the darkness came a voice: ' me and watch where you step. There's lots of dead people on the ground and they're all ours.' The voice, which belonged to Sergeant Major Plumley, led us to the command post."

I welcomed Galloway with a quick handshake and then briefed Dillon, Whiteside, and Charlie Hastings, the Air Force forward air controller (FAC) while Joe listened. The first order of business was to bring artillery and air down on the locations where the lights had been seen.

The second was to make sure that Sergeant Savage and the cut-off platoon were getting all the artillery they needed. Dillon and I discussed how to get to Savage's platoon. Galloway found a tree, leaned back against his pack, and waited.

It was a restless night. All the units were on hundred percent alert.

Herren and his Bravo Company troops were into their second straight night without sleep. The enemy commander had at least a rough idea of our strength if he had counted the helicopters coming in during the day, and he knew for a fact that he had whittled us down. A full moon rose at around eleven p. m., giving the enemy commander on Chu Pong a better look at the perimeter. Dillon and I, although grateful that the enemy had not brought any of their anti-aircraft machine guns into play, still feared that they would do so, and soon. We had to keep artillery and air pounding the slopes to suppress those weapons before they could be brought to bear.

Thirty-seven miles to the northeast, Bruce Crandall and Big Ed Freeman finally shut down their Hueys at a huge helicopter pad, nicknamed the Turkey Farm, outside the wire at Camp Holloway, near Pleiku. They had been flying nonstop since six a. m.; it was after ten p.m. when Crandall shut down and tried to get out of the aircraft. "That is when the day's activities caught up with me. My legs gave out as I stepped on the skid, and I fell to the ground. For the next few minutes I vomited. I was very embarrassed and it took some time to regain my composure. Someone slipped a bottle of cognac into my hand and I took a big slug. It was a waste of good booze. It came up as fast as it went down.

"I finally quit shaking and made it to the operations tent to recap the day and plan the next. The aviation unit had quite a day. We had not suffered a single fatality and we had not left a mission undone. When our infantry brothers called, we hauled. The standard for combat assaults with helicopters had been set on this day. I wondered about tomorrow. Would it be worse? I wasn't sure I could handle another day like today. Then I thought again about the troops in X-Ray. The choice was not mine to make."

Bruce Crandall was still steaming over the refusal of the medevac pilots to return to X-Ray to haul out the wounded. "The officer commanding the medevacs looked me up to chew me out for having led his people into a hot LZ, and warned me never to do it again. I couldn't understand how he had the balls to face me when he was so reluctant to face the enemy. If several of my pilots had not restrained me, that officer would have earned a righteous Purple Heart that night. From that day forward, I planned every mission in such a manner that the infantry would never have to rely on anyone but my unit for evacuation of their wounded."

All of our wounded flown out of X-Ray by Crandall's Hueys ended up at Charlie Company, 15th Medical Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division, which was temporarily set up in tents at Camp Holloway. The executive officer of "Charlie Med" was Captain George H. Kelling, twenty-eight, from St. Louis, Missouri. Charlie Med's five surgeons tried to stabilize the soldiers coming off the helicopters. "The treatment we provided," says Kelling, "was designed to keep blood flowing through the patient's system until he could be gotten to a hospital which had the personnel and equipment to perform definitive surgery." Charlie Med's doctors tied off perforated blood vessels to stop the hemorrhaging, and then pumped in whole blood.

Kelling recalls that many of the casualties were rapidly bleeding to death, so it was a race against time to get blood into the soldier faster than he was losing it, even while the surgeons were trying to tie off the bleeders. "We threw caution to the winds and often gave a patient four cut-downs [intravenous tubes tied into blood vessels] with four corpsmen squeezing the blood bags as hard as they could. It was not unusual for the patient to shiver and quake and lose body temperature from the rapid transfusion of so much cold blood--but the alternative was to let him die."

Army Caribou transport planes from the 17th Aviation Company were standing by ready to evacuate the stabilized patients from Pleiku to Army hospitals at Qui Nhon and Nha Trang. After additional surgical repairs there, the most serious cases were flown to Clark Field in the Philippines, and then on to the United States. Those who were expected to recover within two or three months were evacuated to Army hospitals in Japan--and found themselves back in South Vietnam and back in the field in due course.

In Landing Zone X-Ray this first night, the enemy harassed and probed forward of all the companies, except for Delta on the east and southeast quadrant of the perimeter. In each case they were answered by artillery fire or M-79 grenades. Our M-60 machine gunners were under strict orders not to fire unless ordered to do so; we didn't want to give their locations away.

Captain Bob Edwards and his Charlie Company troopers, reinforced by one of Myron Diduryk's platoons, occupied the longest section of the perimeter, which now stretched across 140 yards on the south and southeast sides, tied in with Alpha Company on their right and Delta Company on their left.

Says Edwards: "The enemy probes occurred mainly in the vicinity of Lieutenant Lane's position on my right. Small probes of about five to ten enemy. I think they were just trying to feel us out for automatic-weapons locations. The troops fired back with M-16 and M-79 fire. I really did not know what the enemy's capabilities were that night, but I expected anything and told my platoon leaders to keep everyone on hundred-percent alert and to expect an attack."

The fact that Charlie Company began righting right after its arrival had kept the troops on the southern perimeter from digging good foxholes or clearing good fields of fire through the tall grass. The men had hastily dug shallow holes that protected them only if they were prone. Now they had time to dig better holes, but were prevented from doing so by the strict noise discipline ordered at nightfall by Captain Edwards, who didn't want the sounds of digging to give away the American positions or to muffle the noise of enemy movements.

Bob Edwards's reinforcements, Lieutenant Lane's 2nd Platoon detached from Myron Diduryk's company, held down Charlie Company's right flank and tied in on their right with Captain Tony Nadal's Alpha Company at the creekbed. They had done what they could to dig in but it was hard going because of the tangle of tree roots and rocks just beneath the surface of the hard, dry ground. Sergeant John Setelin, having seen to it that his gravely wounded buddy Willard was being taken care of at the aid station, returned to his squad's position before nightfall.

Setelin got back, regained his composure, and told Lamothe to watch the trees. "I didn't move my men anymore. I kept everybody down until I could find out where this one sniper was, and sure enough in about five minutes he made the fatal mistake of swinging out from his tree. He was in a harness and roped very high in a tree. He swung around that tree like an aerial artist in a circus and sprayed fire indiscriminately when he came around. We waited him out and he came by one more time. When he did, we were ready. We eventually shot the cord holding him and he fell to the ground, dead. We were pretty well satisfied he was the one who had shot Willard.

"They probed us all night long. We had a few men wounded. I had never been in a situation like that. When they would come at us, they would come screaming and we could hear bugles."

Delta Company, now commanded by Lieutenant Larry Litton, held down a shorter section of the line, immediately to the left of Bob Edwards's Charlie Company. Delta was covering the east-southeast sector. The first sergeant of Delta, SFC Warren E. Adams, was in an L-shaped foxhole with Litton and two radio operators. Adams was a veteran of World War II and Korea and had run his company throughout a long succession of company and platoon commanders.

Sergeant Adams had placed the six M-60 machine guns of the company next to and tied in with Charlie Company's leftmost unit, Lieutenant Geoghegan's 2nd Platoon. Those machine guns had flat fields of fire to the south across Geoghegan's left-flank positions to the southeast and directly east. These six guns constituted a most formidable position, capable of laying down a wall of grazing, interlocking fire. The guns and the gunners behind them would play a key role in defending X-Ray over the next forty-eight hours.

To the left of the six M-60 machine guns was the position where the battalion's eight 81mm mortars, now resupplied with hundreds of rounds of ammo, had consolidated. From this position, the mortars could support any section of the perimeter with their high-explosive rounds. The mortar crews were not only responsible for their big tubes but also had to function as riflemen, helping Delta Company defend that side of the perimeter. To their left, with three more M-60 machine guns, was Lieutenant Jim Rackstraw's recon platoon. They were securing the two crippled Huey helicopters sitting on the edge of the perimeter.

Specialist 4 Vincent Cantu, who had been appointed a mortar-squad leader that afternoon to replace a casualty, was alert and alive, and had every intention of staying that way. He recalls, "That night was just like day, thanks to the guys from the artillery that supported us. By that time we were all dug in. I had dug me a custom foxhole with space where could sit, and places for all my ammo and grenades and weapons. I had a .45-caliber pistol, an AR-15 rifle, [an] M-79 grenade launcher and a 15-inch bowie knife plus my 81mm mortar and ammo for that. Also fifty feet of nylon rope for river crossings."

Captain Myron Diduryk's Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, minus Lieutenant Lane's platoon, was on the left of Delta Company and the battalion's mortar pits, protecting the north-northeast sector and helping cover the mortar crews and the small landing zone. "Colonel Moore directed me to occupy the sector extending from the Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, right flank at the stream bed to Delta Company left flank. The 1st Platoon led by Lieutenant Cyril R. [Rick] Rescorla was on the left, and the 3rd Platoon led by Lieutenant Ed Vernon was on the right."

Diduryk's troops dug in, cleared fields of fire, and prepared for the night. Lieutenant William Lund, the artillery forward observer, had the artillery fire marking rounds and pre-plotted the coordinates for instant barrages. During the night Diduryk's men were harassed by sniper fire and a few minor probes of the perimeter.

To the left of Diduryk's Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion were the lines of Captain John Herren's Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, defending north and northwest. Herren recalls his men digging in the best they could: "I told the troops to at least dig prone shelters. A big ditch [the dry creek] provided natural cover. I put my command post in it. The fighting positions were forward of that, however. I put my machine guns in a position to cover my direct front. My perimeter had good grazing fire to the front. Diduryk had more of a problem because his terrain was not as open as mine. There were covered approaches leading into his defense4ine. The enemy could have come up our side, but I wasn't apprehensive because we had fired in some real good defensive concentrations which were so close when we registered them that they blew me around in the ditch."

On John Herren's left, defending along the dry creekbed on the western perimeter, was Captain Tony Nadal's Alpha Company. The bulk of Alpha's men were employed holding the crucial creekbed, but a small section of the line now bent sharply south to tie in with Bob Edwards's right flank twenty yards east of the creekbed. Captain Nadal says, "We repulsed short attacks, primarily on my left flank, where the 3rd Platoon was, and on the 1st Platoon in the center of my line. That attack came between one and two a.m. Artillery support increased, and I mistakenly believed that the crisis was past."

Nadal's new radio operator, Specialist Ray Tanner, said that with the arrival of reinforcements everyone began feeling a little better about the situation. "While things were quiet we had lots of time to think about what had taken place during the day. I think we all became men that day. After that afternoon, I don't remember feeling real fear again. We were going to live and we knew we would win. I remember seeing lights come down the mountain. I got no sleep. There was artillery and mortar rounds going off all night, and small arms fire would flare up every once in a while. It was a very long night."

On the Alpha Company perimeter that night, Specialist Bill Beck remembers "flares, bugles, fear, talk, thoughts of home, shadows, NVA silhouettes, green enemy tracers. We were still out in the open, flat on the ground, and the flares would whistle and burn bright and light us up as well. This worried the hell out of me; I lay very still and held my fire."

Two other troopers in Nadal's Alpha Company were not so conscientious about maintaining fire discipline. Every few minutes we would hear a "plunk" as an M-79 fired, then the explosion of the 40mm grenade out in front of Alpha Company. Every time this happened I told Dillon to call Nadal and find out what's happening. Finally, Dillon told Nadal: "If you don't stop that M-79 firing, Charlie [the enemy] is going to hit you over the head with a sack of shit." Nadal investigated and reported back: Two of his men were short-timers, men who had only a few days left in the Army.