We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (40 page)

Specialist 4 Jack P. Smith, who was in Charlie Company, had been a radio operator until a week or so before tiiis operation, when he was shifted lo a supply clerk's job. The evenls of November 17 are elched on his mind. Smilh's company commander, Caplain Fesmire, had, like The olhers, been called lo The fronl by Lieutenant Colonel Mcdade. "Subsequently, many people pointed to this as a major error, and in light of what happened, it was. The firing began to roll all around us. The executive officer of my company, a man called Don Cornell, a very fine officer, jumped up and in The besl style of the Infantry School yelled: ' me!"

"Elements of our 1st and 2nd platoons ran right toward a series of anthills. Within ten feet of them we saw there were machine gunners behind them firing point-blank at us. Men all around me began to fall like mown grass. I had never seen people killed before. They began to drop like flies and die right in front of me. These were the only friends I had, and they were dying all around me."

Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry would suffer the heaviest casualties of any unit that fought at LZ Albany. Before its violent collision with the North Vietnamese, the company had some 112 men in its ranks. By sunrise the next day, November 18, forty-five of those men would be dead and more than fifty wounded; only a dozen would answer "present" at the next roll call.

Captain Henry Thorpe, the Delta Company commander, was a hundred yards forward of his company when the fighting began. He and his first sergeant and radio operator sprinted ahead into the island of trees in the Albany clearing to join the battalion command group and helped organize and control a defensive perimeter. The radio operator, Specialist 4 John C. Bratland, was shot in the leg. They were lucky to be where they were. Delta Company, back down the column, was being torn apart. This day it would lose twenty six men killed and many others severely wounded.

PFC James H. Shadden was in Thorpe's Delta Company mortar platoon.

Shadden says the heavily laden mortarmen, exhausted from the march, had dropped in the trail for a short rest and a smoke. He recalls, "I had carried the base plate a long ways. Sergeant Amodias, true to his word, took the base plate, gave me the sights, and went in front of me. When the enemy sprung the ambush, Amodias was killed instantly. The ones who were not killed in the first volley hit the dirt, with the exception of our radio operator, Duncan

Krueger. I saw him still standing a few seconds later, until he was shot down. I have no idea why he didn't get down." PFC Duncan Krueger, eighteen, of West Allis, Wisconsin, was killed where he stood.

The intensity of the fire rapidly increased to the point where Shadden couldn't hear anything but weapons firing. "Tone Johnson came crawling by me, hit in the cheek and back of the hand. The trees were full of North Vietnamese, but spotting one was almost impossible. They blended in so well. I kept raising up to try to detect a good target. Matthews Shelton, who was lying next to me, kept jerking me down. As I raised up again a bullet pierced my helmet straight through, front to back. I went down again and as I came back up a bullet struck the tree beside my head from behind.

"I don't know if we were surrounded or it was our own men. They were firing wild--anything that moved, somebody shot at it. One trooper crawled up next to me, shooting through the grass a few inches off the ground toward where our own people lay, never thinking what he was doing. I told him to be sure he knew what he was shooting."

The firing eventually began to slack off. Shadden has no idea how much time elapsed. There was no way to keep track of time in a fight like this. "Men were wounded and dead all in the area. Six were alive that I know of: Sergeant [Earthell] Tyler, [PFC A. C.] Carter, [PFC Tone] Johnson, [PFC Matthews] Shelton, [PFC Lawrence] Cohens, and myself.

Tyler gave the only order I heard during the entire fight: ' to pull back before they finish us off.' Shelton froze to the ground and would not move. [PFC Matthews Shelton, age twenty, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was killed later that afternoon.] The five of us proceeded to try to pull back, but the snipers were still in the trees. Soon I was hit in, the right shoulder, which for a time rendered it useless. Tyler was hit in the neck about the same time; he died an arm's length of me, begging for the medic, Specialist 4 William Pleasant, who was already dead.

[Pleasant was twenty-three years old and a native of Jersey City, New Jersey.] The last words

Tyler ever spoke were ''m dying.' " Sergeant Earthell Tyler, thirty-five, was from Columbia, South Carolina.

The soft-spoken Shadden says, "The helplessness I felt is beyond description. Within a few minutes I was hit again, in the left knee. The pain was unbearable. Cohens was hit in the feet and ankle. We were wounded and trapped. I could see we were getting wiped out. A buddy helped me bandage my leg. He got the bandage off a dead Vietnamese. I got behind a log and there was a Vietnamese there, busted up and dead.

This was behind us, so I knew we were surrounded."

Specialist 4 Bob Towles, who was with Delta Company's antitank platoon, heard the firing and mortar blasts forward and could see where the trail disappeared into the brush ahead of him. But he saw no one at all up there. As the front came alive with intense firing, and no information came back to him, Towles's concern redoubled:

"The sound of firing on our right flank got our attention in a hurry. We all faced in that direction. A couple of senior NCOs moved forward and joined the line of enlisted men. We formed a solid battle line about twenty yards long; twelve of us. Bullets whizzed overhead. Still we could see nothing. We waited, expecting to see our men out on flank security break cover and enter the safety of our perimeter. They never did. The sound came closer. Within seconds the wood line changed.

"North Vietnamese troops shattered the foliage and headed straight for us, AK-47 rifles blazing, on the dead run. I selected the closest one and fired twice. I hit him but he refused to go down; he kept coming and shooting. I turned my M-16 on full automatic, fired, and he crumpled. I shifted to another target and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

The fear I felt turned to terror. I saw a cartridge jammed in the chamber. I removed it, reloaded, and began firing again. They kept pouring out of the wood line; we kept firing; then finally they stopped coming. On the ground in front of me lay the three magazines I taped together to carry in my rifle plus one other magazine. I had fired eighty rounds."

The lull did not last long. Towles peered beyond the anthill toward the mortar platoon. "It appeared as if the ground was opening up and swallowing the mortarmen, they fell so fast," Shadden recalls. "A brown wave of death rolled over them and on into Charlie Company. Vietnamese intermixed with them. Then reality set in: The enemy held the ground beyond the anthill. The column was cut in half!

"Incoming gunfire drew our attention back to the tree line. The firing rapidly increased. We returned fire at muzzle flashes. I heard an explosion behind me. Turning, I saw Chicom grenades landing. All flash and smoke, no casualties. The volume of fire became almost unendurable.

Bullets peeled bark from trees. Vegetation disintegrated. I looked to Lieutenant James Lawrence for help. Saw his head violently recoil. He hit the ground.

"A second later I was spun around, then slammed into the dirt. I rose to my hands and knees and started down the line. Blood ran everywhere. The mortar-platoon sergeant's .45 pistol had been shot from his hand. His right hand hung limp from his wrist, and blood poured to the ground.

Someone tried to dress his wound. Someone raised Lieutenant Lawrence and attempted to steady him. The firing continued."

Towles's tight twelve-man line was shrinking fast. "I turned back toward the wood line and detected movement. I shifted in that direction and spotted North Vietnamese in the underbrush. Enemy turning our flank! Our position was no longer tenable. I turned back with the warning. Sergeant Jerry Baker took charge now; he realized we needed to pull out. He appointed the unwounded and some slightly wounded to help the severely wounded. An instant later he ordered the move.

"I led this retreat because of my position on the battle line. I rose to my feet and headed in the only direction void of enemy fire--toward our left rear--at a run. Thirty or forty yards and I broke out of the trees into a large clearing of waist-deep grass. The sunlight hurt my eyes.

Twenty yards into the field I noticed the man running a half-step to my rear go down. I dove to the ground and turned to see PFC Marlin Klarenbeek struggling with a leg wound."

Captain George Forrest was now back with his Alpha Company, 1 st Battalion, 5th Cavalry soldiers at the rear of the column. "I had lost my radio operators, and when I got back and got another radio I found out Mcdade's lead elements were in heavy firefights to their front and to their west. I got maybe two transmissions from Mcdade, then lost contact. We circled up. My parent battalion had come up on my net and I was able to contact Captain Buse Tully, commander of Bravo Company, 1 st Battalion, 5th Cav. I have never felt such relief at hearing and recognizing a voice. I knew someone who cared about us was close at hand."

Here's what the Vietnam War looked like in midafternoon of November 17, through the eyes of two of Captain Forrest's Alpha Company riflemen, PFC David A. (Purp) Lavender of Murphysboro, Illinois, and Specialist 4 James Young of Steelville, Missouri.

Says Lavender: "My platoon was bringing up the rear. We started to maneuver and work our way up the column to help those up ahead. Every time we made a move we were hit by mortars. It was something you can't describe. People were dropping like flies. The first blast killed a young soldier named [PFC Vincent] Locatelli. Every time we moved they dropped mortars on us. I know we must have had twelve or fifteen wounded out of our platoon, including our platoon leader.

"These were my buddies I had been in the Army with for two years. [The] majority of our whole battalion had been drafted at age twenty-one [and] had been in service for over eighteen months. All of us were near twenty-three years old. They became my brothers over time. Hearing these fellows scream, hearing them killed, stuck in my heart and mind ever since. The most critical part of this fight was the beginning. It was the surprise. They had us in a U-shaped ambush and they had us cut off with mortars." Rifleman Jim Young says: "I sat down and took a nap. We had flankers out a hundred yards or so on left and right, so I thought it was safe to grab some sleep. That little bit of shooting up front got a lot worse. That woke me up. Then our 1st Platoon received mortar fire.

Five men wounded. I heard them calling for medics. Mortars kept coming in. Heard them order 1 st Platoon to pull back out of the area where those rounds were hitting."

Young's platoon was ordered to get on line and move in reaction to the enemy fire. "Everyone had hit the ground when those mortars began coming in. They told us to move ahead toward the enemy. We got on line and we walked right into an enemy ambush. They were behind trees, anthills, and down on the ground. There was waist-high grass and a lot of trees around us. There were enemy soldiers in that grass. They were hard to see and we had to shoot where we thought they were. The medic had his hands full, couldn't take care of all the wounded. One man to my right was hit in the heel. His name was Harold Smith.

"There was a grassy field to my left twenty-five or thirty yards, and a sniper off on my right. I couldn't see him, but I saw a tracer bullet go across my hand. I felt the wind of that bullet. The same bullet passed over the back of Smith's neck. He was lucky he had his head down. Our company commander, Captain Forrest, came running along our line. He was stopping and telling everybody where to go. He acted as though he was immune to the enemy fire. I don't know how he kept from getting hit."

Just ahead of Alpha Company, 1 st Battalion, in the hodgepodge of admin and supply staffers, medics, and communications people that constituted Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry marched Doc William Shu cart, the 2nd Battalion surgeon; Lieutenant John Howard of the medical platoon, and Lieutenant Bud Alley, the communications-platoon leader.

Says Shucart: "Before the fight I remember smelling cigarette smoke.

Vietnamese cigarettes. I said: ' smell the enemy smoking!' The next thing we knew mortars were dropping all around us, then a lot of small-arms fire was coming in, and then everything just dissolved into confusion. We thought that the head of the column had gotten turned and somehow we were getting shot by our own troops. Guys were dropping all around us. It seems like in a very short time I found myself all alone. We had gotten widely dispersed. I was running around with my M-16.1 had a .45 pistol, which was useless, and I picked up somebody's M-16.

"I was under direct enemy fire all this time. I got one little zinger up my back; nothing serious, just a grazing wound that left me a nice little scar. This was the most scared I've ever been in my life. I was wearing a St. Christopher's medal around my neck that somebody had sent me. I thought: This is the time to make a deal. Then I thought: I've never been very religious. He isn't likely to want to deal. So I got up and started looking for somebody, anybody. I found one of our radio operators, dead, and got on his radio trying to raise somebody. I remember trying to get them to throw some smoke so I could find them."

Lieutenant John Howard remembers: "Soon after the first shots, mortars and grenades started hitting all around us. The small-arms fire then picked up to an intense level and soldiers started going down very quickly with gunshot or shrapnel wounds. There was confusion, and some thought they were being fired at by other American soldiers in the area.

This confusion cleared up pretty quickly as the North Vietnamese assault wave moved in so close that we could see them and hear them talking.

"They suddenly appeared behind anthills and up in the trees, sniping at anyone who moved, and we found ourselves shooting at them in all directions. As we crawled around in the tall elephant grass it was very difficult to tell where anyone was, or whether they were friendly or enemy. One thing I caught on to very quickly was how the NVA were signaling to each other in the high grass by tapping on the wooden stocks of their AK-47 rifles."