We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (39 page)

The battalion operations officer, Captain Spires, believes that the fact that the commanders were absent from their companies when the fight started contributed to the confusion. "It had the most effect, I think, on Charlie Company. Their commander, Captain Skip Fesmire, was up with us and Don Cornett, the Charlie Company executive officer, was killed early on, so they had no commander and they just disintegrated."

Spires also remembers that the shooting began "at the head of the column; then it moved back down the column. I think the enemy battalion ran head on into the recon and Alpha Company troops, withdrew, hooked around, and ran straight into Charlie Company. They also hit part of Delta Company. The battalion command group was just ahead of Delta Company. I had four men back there, including my operations sergeant, and three of them were killed."

Specialist 4 Jim Epperson, Mcdade's radio operator, says: "We set our radios down behind an anthill. The artillery guys were on their own radio calling in. We honestly did not know much about the situation in the rest of the column. Some of the radio operators were already killed.

We were cut off from everyone. Colonel Mcdade wasn't getting anything from his people down the line. Charlie, Delta, and Headquarters Company weren't reporting because they were either dead or, in the case of Headquarters, didn't have any radios."

By now it was 1:26 p.m. The recon platoon; the Alpha Company commander, Sugdinis, and his executive officer, Gwin; and Colonel Mcdade's command group were in the small wooded area between the two clearings. Sugdinis and Gwin were near one of the termite hills, Payne's recon platoon was near another, and Mcdade and his group were behind the third hill.

Lieutenant Larry Gwin looked back south at the point where he and Captain Sugdinis had emerged from the jungle just minutes before; the entire area was now alive with North Vietnamese soldiers who had obviously cut through the battalion's line of march, severing the head of the battalion from the body. Gwin saw three GIs coming through the high grass, running from the area swarming with the enemy. "I jumped up and screamed to them, waving my arm. They saw me and headed directly to our position. The first man was Captain Kenneth L. Weitzel, our 229th helicopter liaison officer, who was completely spent. I pointed out the battalion command group, which was huddled to our rear at another anthill, and he crawled toward them. He was followed by the battalion sergeant major, Jim Scott, who dropped down next to me. And Scott was followed by a young, very small PFC who was delirious and holding his guts in with his hands. He kept asking, "Are the helicopters coming?' I said, ', hang on."

"The battalion commander initially thought that the incoming rounds were all friendly fire. He had been hollering for all of us to cease fire and the word went out over the command net but to no avail, as the troops on the perimeter could see North Vietnamese. The sergeant major and I were looking to the rear when I heard a loud blast. The sergeant major yelled: ''m hit, sir!' He had taken a round in the back under his armpit and there was a large hole underneath his right arm. I told him he would be OK, to bandage it himself. This he did, ripping off his shirt. Then he picked up his M-16 and headed back to one of the anthills. I saw the sergeant major a few times after that and he was fighting like a demon." Sergeant Major Scott says, "I took a bullet through my chest, not more than fifteen or twenty minutes into the battle. I could see enemy soldiers to our left, right and front in platoon and company-size elements. They were up in the trees, up on top of the anthills, and in the high grass. We weren't exactly organized. We didn't have time.

Everything happened at once. I did not see a hole being dug prior to eight p.m. that night. We did use the trees and anthills for cover.

Within half an hour there was an attempt to organize groups into a defensive position in a company area. Individuals did this, no one in particular. I think that is what saved us."

Lieutenant Gwin rejoined the Alpha Company command group on the western edge of the copse of trees. "Joel Sugdinis told me that our 1st Platoon, on our right, was gone, and that the 2nd Platoon, to our rear, was cut off and all wounded or dead. I stood up to get a better view of the woods on the other side of the clearing to the north and saw about twenty North Vietnamese bent over, charging toward our position and only about sixty yards away. I screamed, ' they come!' and jumped forward firing. I heard the battalion commander yell, '!' and I thought that was odd because there didn't seem like anywhere to go.

"Almost everyone jumped up and ran back to the third anthill. First Sergeant Frank Miller; Joel Sugdinis; the artillery FO, Hank Dunn; and PFC Dennis Wilson, the radio operator; and I stayed and killed all the North Vietnamese. I shot about three with my first burst, and then remember sighting in on the lead enemy, who was carrying an AK-47.1 got him with my first round, saw him drop to the ground and start to crawl forward. I was afraid he would throw a grenade. I sighted very carefully and squeezed again, and saw him jolted by my second round, but he continued to move and I stepped out from cover and emptied my remaining rounds into him. He was about twenty yards from our anthill. The rush had been stopped, but we could still see many, many Vietnamese milling around on the other side of the clearing."

The Alpha Company command group now returned to their original position, facing the area where they had first emerged from the forest, to the southwest. Lieutenant Gwin says, "Joel Sugdinis and I had pretty much decided we would make our stand right here. No point in moving. The North Vietnamese were between us and the rest of the battalion column, and that jungle was crawling with bad guys. They were fighting, moving on down the column."

Sugdinis and Gwin agree that it was not long after this that the commander of Alpha Company's missing 2nd Platoon, Lieutenant Gordon Grove, staggered into the American position from the east. Larry Gwin: "I saw Gordy Grove coming across the field along with two wounded men.

They were the only ones left of his platoon who could move. Grove was distraught. We got him and his two men in with us, and got our medics working on the wounded. Then Gordy asked for men to go back with him and get his people. Joel Sugdinis said: ', I can't send anybody back out there.' It was clear that to leave this perimeter was, death.

Everywhere you looked you could see North Vietnamese. Gordy asked permission to go talk to the battalion commander. Sugdinis said go ahead. He jogged over, asked Me Dade for help to go get his men, got a negative response, so he came back to our anthill."

Gwin adds, "There was a tremendous battle going on in the vicinity of where we had come into the clearing and beyond there in the jungle. It was Charlie Company, caught in the killing zone of the ambush, fighting for its life. The mortar fire had ceased--the enemy tubes apparently had been overrun by Charlie Company, because we found them all the next day--but there still were hundreds of North Vietnamese calmly walking around the area we were observing. Now began the sniping phase of our battle. I call it that because for a long period of time all we did was pick off enemy wandering around our perimeter, and this lasted until we started getting air support. Everything that had happened to this point had probably taken less than thirty minutes."

Gwin saw Major Frank Henry, the battalion executive officer, lying on his back using the radio, trying desperately to get some tactical air support and succeeding. "The air was on the way, but there was no artillery or aerial rocket artillery yet. Jim Spires, the S-3, ran over to us and queried Gordy Grove as to the situation outside the perimeter where he had just come from. Grove told him there were still men out there, tightened into a small perimeter, but they were all wounded and dying and the radios had all been knocked out. Captain Spires asked a second time if he thought anyone was still alive and none of us said anything."

Gwin climbed atop the termite hill and began sniping at the North Vietnamese clearly visible across the clearing in the trees to the south with his M-16 rifle. "There were plenty of targets and I remember picking off ten or fifteen NVA from my position. My memories revolve around the way in which each enemy soldier that I hit fell. Some would slump limply to the ground; some reacted as if they had been hit by a truck. Some that I missed on the first and second shots kept on milling around until I finally hit them. What we did not know at the time was that they were wandering around the elephant grass looking for Americans who were still alive, and killing them off one by one."

After an incoming round snapped past his head, Gwin surrendered his vantage point to Lieutenant Grove, who was eager to settle some scores for his lost platoon. Gwin and his boss, Captain Sugdinis, eased behind the hill, leaned back, and smoked their first cigarettes. Gwin says, "That cigarette brought us back to our senses, and we talked the situation over while those around us poured out fire.

We knew we had lost our two Alpha Company rifle platoons, about fifty men, during the first half-hour. Joel was despondent."

The survivors in that thinly held grove of trees at the head of the battalion column could hear the noise of a terrible battle continuing in the forest where the rest of the column was caught. Having hit the head of the 2nd Battalion column hard and stopped it, killing most of Sugdinis's two rifle platoons, the North Vietnamese soldiers immediately raced down the side of the American column, with small groups peeling off and attacking.

As the attack began, all of Mcdade's company commanders were forward, separated from their men. They had brought their radio operators and, in some cases, their first sergeants and artillery forward observers with them. All of them but one would remain in Mcdade's perimeter for the rest of the battle.

In answer to the radioed summons from Colonel Mcdade, Captain George Forrest, a high school and college athlete who was in excellent physical condition, had hiked more than five hundred yards from his Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry position, at the tail of the American column, to the head. His two radio operators accompanied him.

Just about the time Mcdade started to talk to them, a couple of mortar rounds came in. Forrest immediately turned and dashed back toward his company. "I didn't wait for him to dismiss us. I just took off. Both of my radio pperators were hit and killed during that run. I didn't get a scratch. When I got back to the company I found my executive officer was down, hit in the back with mortar shrapnel. I wasn't sure about the situation, so I pushed my guys off the trail to the east and put them in a perimeter. It appeared for a time that fire was coming from every direction. So we circled the wagons. I think that firing lasted thirty-five or forty minutes. All my platoon leaders were functioning except Second Lieutenant Larry L. Hess. [Hess, age twenty, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was killed in the first minutes.] My weapons sergeant was wounded."

George Forrest's run down that six-hundredyard-long gauntlet of fire, miraculously unscathed, and the forming of his men into a defensive perimeter, helped keep Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry from sharing the fate of Charlie, Delta, and Headquarters companies of the 2nd Battalion in the middle of the column.

North Vietnamese soldiers climbed into the trees and on top of those brush-covered termite hills, and poured fire down on the cavalry troopers trapped in the tall grass below them in the main body of the column. There was furious firing, including mortar fire, from both sides. The strike at the head of the column was followed so quickly by the enemy encircling assaults that the whole business seemed to erupt almost simultaneously.

Without doubt some platoons of Mcdade's battalion were alert and in as secure a formation as they could achif. ve in the elephant grass, brush, and thick scrub trees. But the visibility problem made it difficult to maintain formation, and one result was that the American troops were closer to one another than was tactically sound, providing juicy targets for a grenade, a mortar round, or a burst from an AK-47 rifle. All down the column, platoon leaders, sergeants, radio operators, and riflemen by the dozens were killed or wounded in the first ten minutes, rapidly degrading communication, cohesion, and control.

Captain Skip Fesmire was near the Albany clearing when the shooting started. He believed his Charlie Company rifle platoons were close enough to the landing zone to maneuver against the enemy and reach the clearing if he moved them quickly and if he was lucky. Fesmire radioed Jim Spires, the battalion operations officer, reported his location, and told Spires he was returning to his men. He never made it.

Fesmire remembers: "The firing became quite intense. My artillery forward observer [Lieutenant Sidney C.M. Smith, twenty-three, of Manhasset, New York] was hit in the head and killed. I was in radio contact with Lieutenant Cornell [Fesmire's execulive officer]. He lold me that the fire was very intense, particularly incoming mortar fire that was impacting directly on the company. I instructed him to get The company moving forward along The right flank of Delia Company. This was The direction from which The allack was coming. I fell il was necessary lo try to consolidate the bal talion; lo help prolecl The flank of Delta Company, and lo get Charlie Company out of the mortar killing zone."

Captain Fesmire adds, "As I moved back southeast toward my company, I could see The North Vielnamese in The Iree line on The olher side of a clearing. They were moving generally in The same direction lhal I was moving, toward Charlie Company. By This time Lieutenanl Cornett had Charlie Company moving; ihey mel The elements of the 66th Regiment's battalion head on and were oulnumbered. The resull was very intense, individual hand-to-hand combat. In the confusion, I had no idea exactly where the company was located. When Lieutenanl Cornell died, il was virtually impossible for me lo talk lo anyone in my company. The bailie had clearly become an individual struggle for life. Firsl Sergeanl [Franklin] Hance, my iwo radio operators and I found our relurn lo The company blocked. We were on the edge of an open area and all we could see were enemy."