CHAPTER 7
“A Lousy Place to Fight a War”
The grunts called it “the Land with No Sun.” This was Kontum province and it was the most challenging terrain in South Vietnam. Also known as the Central Highlands, the area around the valley village of Dak To and a nearby Special Forces camp of the same name teemed with thick jungles, foliage-covered mountains, and muddy valleys. “The mountainous regions are rugged and rise to heights of 2,400 feet,” a 4th Infantry Division report, prepared in early 1968, stated. “They are normally covered with . . . thick jungle. The plateau area is intermittently covered with forests of 100-150 foot trees, grass and thick bamboo rising some 50-60 feet in the air. Except for the valley areas, 90% of the higher elevations are covered with dense close-canopy rain forests.” Another soldier wrote of it as a “merciless land of steep limestone ridges . . . covered with double- and sometimes triple-canopy jungle. This nightmare vegetation reaches up to blot out the sun with teak and mahogany that tower 100 feet or more above the rot of the jungle floor. The draws between the ridges are dreary, tangled places of perpetual twilight, where a thousand growing things struggle to the death for light and air. The jungle is laced with vines and thorns, and in it live diverse snakes, a million leeches and about half the mosquitoes in the world.” To the infantry soldiers, Dak To meant steamy, bone-weary humps, confining jungles, bamboo fields, wild streams, insects, exhaustion, and an eerie sense that they were treading on the enemy’s turf.
In fact, just several miles away, in Laos and Cambodia, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) maintained an extensive network of infiltration routes and base camps generally known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Shielded by the dense jungles, the North’s courageous soldiers sallied forth from these routes into South Vietnam, often to fight as guerrilla warriors. In the fall of 1967, several regiments of these NVA regulars massed around Dak To, heavily fortifying many of the key hill masses. Their goal was to draw the Americans into a costly struggle for those hills. They hoped that the heavy jungle canopy, the dearth of roads, and the dizzying array of peaks would negate the firepower and mobility of American aircraft, artillery, and vehicles. The communists were planning a major offensive for early 1968 and they wanted to draw the Americans into such remote areas, away from population centers. If the Americans did not take the bait, then the NVA formations would push east, make common cause with Viet Cong (VC) insurgents, whose hidden supply caches would support the NVA, and fight a hit-and-run war near the country’s population centers.
The Central Highlands, and specifically Dak To, presented General William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, with a vexing problem. He could not sit back and let the NVA move unmolested from their base camps into the rice-producing regions and cities of South Vietnam. Nor could he go after them in the exact manner he wished. He yearned to attack and destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail sanctuaries. But President Lyndon Johnson feared the international political ramifications of invading such ostensibly “neutral” countries as Laos and Cambodia. That the North Vietnamese and their allies in the VC had already done so hardly mattered in the forum of international opinion, which viewed any American cross-border operations as aggression. For fear of this sort of backlash, and the possibility that hitting the communists in Cambodia and Laos would provoke a larger world war with China and the Soviet Union, the Americans, as of 1967, had straitjacketed themselves into fighting the ground war primarily on South Vietnamese soil. For Westmoreland, this meant he had to react to enemy incursions of South Vietnam, rather than take the fight to the communist bases or even North Vietnam itself. His avowed strategy for victory was, of course, attrition—fight the enemy’s big units and savage them with overwhelming firepower until the communists could no longer continue the war.
Like most American commanders from World War II onward, Westy believed that aggressive attacks, the use of maximum firepower, and the relentless quest to annihilate the enemy’s forces in battle all led to strategic victory. By and large, this had worked in the Second World War and it had produced some results in Korea, too. So, in Vietnam, Westy liked the idea of fighting such decisive engagements in the out-of-the-way Central Highlands, where he could employ the full range of his firepower without fear of inflicting casualties on noncombatants. This, he believed, was the place to pile up the large body counts he so badly needed for his strategy to work. If he could not go after the communist bases themselves, he could essentially head the enemy off at the pass—taking on NVA units when they crossed the border, around the hills of Dak To, before they could push east, get into the towns and cities of South Vietnam, and cause even more serious problems. Better, he thought, to fight them in the remote areas first.
He understood that the suffocating jungles and peaks of the border areas negated some of the mobility he so badly needed to carry out his search-and-destroy concept. But he felt that helicopters more than made up for whatever he might lose in ground mobility for his foot soldiers and vehicles. “I believe when the enemy comes forth from Cambodia or Laos with his principal formations looking for a fight we must go out and fight him,” Westy once told one of his superiors. “We must strike him as soon as he is within reach, and before he can gain a victory or tyrannize the local population.”
All of these ideas made some sense, but they also led to serious problems that Westy either downplayed or did not appreciate. If the United States was unwilling to invade Cambodia, Laos, or, for that matter, North Vietnam, then there was almost no way that the Americans could control the borderlands. The NVA knew the ground quite well, far better than the Americans. The communists could always retreat to their sanctuaries, where they could devise new plans, reinforce their combat units, and come back to South Vietnam whenever they chose. Ominously for Westy’s attrition strategy, this also meant they could control the rate of their losses.
Westmoreland believed that by fighting the enemy in the border areas, he could “preempt his [the enemy’s] plans and force him to fight before he is fully organized and before he can do his damage.” This was highly questionable. One could actually argue that the NVA sought battle in exactly these spots and prepared accordingly. The thick terrain offered the perfect cover to conceal their movement. The “Land with No Sun” comprised the ideal place to construct well-camouflaged tunnels, bunkers, and spider holes that were often impervious to American bombs and shells. From here they would provoke American commanders, who they knew were so eager to find NVA units and pile up large body counts that they would do battle even when it was not necessarily to their advantage. As of November 1967, the NVA had fortified many of the hills around Dak To in just this fashion. Fighting there was more likely to play right into the enemy’s plans rather than disrupt or preempt them. Not surprisingly, Westmoreland’s in-house antagonist, Marine Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, opposed the commander’s notion of fighting big battles in the Central Highlands. “Those battles were fought too often on the enemy’s terms,” he later wrote, “where close-quarters combat in the fog-shrouded hills, forests, and vine-thick jungles, with which he was familiar, stretched our logistic system and diminished the effectiveness of U.S. supporting arms, particularly air.” Those indeed were the problems and, in the fall of 1967, they were about to coalesce in monumental fighting amid the unhappy hills around Dak To.1
The NVA blueprint at Dak To was similar to the Japanese inland defense at Peleliu. Both the NVA and the Japanese found ways to negate American firepower, mainly by digging deeply into favorable terrain and relying upon the willingness of their soldiers to fight to the death. They also both made use of the American tendency to overestimate the effectiveness of their firepower and engage in tactical assaults against heavily defended objectives of dubious strategic worth. They knew that, at times, the Americans squandered the incredible valor of their own combat troops for no ultimate strategic purpose (the Umurbrogol at Peleliu being a prime example).
In fact, even before the fall of 1967, the Americans had already fought the NVA in several sizable battles around Dak To. The most notorious clash took place on June 22-23, 1967, when the NVA succeeded in cutting off and destroying Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, on a jungle hill in what the paratroopers called the Battle of the Slopes. Of the original 137 men in Alpha Company, 76 were killed and 23 were wounded. One post-battle examination revealed that 43 of the dead paratroopers had suffered fatal, close-in head wounds, indicating that the NVA had killed them execution style, probably as they lay wounded. Most of the Dak To fights were not this grim, but a clear pattern was set. The NVA sought to draw the Americans into close-quarters battles, in the roughest terrain, where air and fire support were negated. Often this meant luring the Americans into costly assaults on heavily defended bunker networks. The enemy also tried to cut off and annihilate platoon- and company-sized units. With the exception of the the Battle of the Slopes, they usually failed. The Americans generally inflicted heavy losses on the NVA, but they were never able to win the decisive victory of annihilation they so badly wanted. Instead, combat would taper off into skirmishes as the surviving communists escaped across the border to their sanctuaries.
In October, after several months of uneasy calm around Dak To, American intelligence detected the new NVA buildup. Photo reconnaissance flights revealed enemy movement and fresh bunkers. Special airborne sensors that the Americans called “people sniffers” were flown over the jungles. They detected, by the sound of foot and vehicle movement as well as the odor of human urine and feces, the presence of new enemy regiments. The best information came from small, specially trained teams of soldiers who conducted long-range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs) deep in enemy country. Amid constant danger, they spent their silent days skulking around the jungle, observing everything the enemy did. Patrols that made use of local Montagnard tribesmen were especially effective since the Montagnards knew the terrain and the enemy patterns so well. “Putting all that together, we could develop a pretty good pattern of where the enemy was and what he was doing,” Major General William Peers, commander of the 4th Division, recalled.
In late October, based on this information, Peers moved his 1st Brigade to Dak To. Immediately the soldiers of this brigade detected even more NVA movement along the valleys around Dak To. On November 2, Sergeant Vu Hong, a member of an NVA artillery reconnaissance unit, turned himself in to an ARVN outpost. While operating as part of a scouting team that was plotting ranges and target information for mortar and rocket fire, he had apparently decided to defect. His knowledge of NVA plans was extensive (some thought suspiciously so for an NCO). Hong claimed that, in addition to his own 40th Artillery Regiment, four NVA infantry regiments—the 24th, the 32nd, the 66th, and the 174th—were positioning themselves for a major attack on Dak To, though many 4th Division senior officers were a bit leery of Hong, and suspected that he might be a plant, his information squared with what the Americans already believed. “All of our intelligence indicated that what he said was correct,” General Peers stated. The general immediately arranged for the 173rd Airborne Brigade to reinforce his own 1st Brigade. Together, the two units were to push west, depriving the NVA of the key hills and ridges that overlooked Dak To before the four enemy regiments could take them. Within a few days, the 1st Brigade soldiers and paratroopers were involved in bloody fights with the NVA for Hills 1338 and 823, thus beginning the Battle of Dak To.
Did the NVA deliberately plant Vu Hong? Many years later, there is still no definite answer to this question. Hong himself has disappeared into the mists of time. Communist sources are mum on the subject (and on most other aspects of Dak To). Peers and his staff seemed to think that Hong was legitimate, as did their ARVN counterparts. The information he dispensed was certainly accurate, but perhaps that was the point. He had nothing necessarily new to say. Everything he told the Americans simply confirmed what they already thought, and reinforced their desire—inculcated in them by Westy’s attrition strategy—to find the NVA regiments and fight them at Dak To. NVA commanders had so heavily fortified the hills around Dak To that it is hard to escape the conclusion that their goal was to lure the Americans into a major fight there. “The enemy continued . . . to choose the time and place in which decisive engagements would be fought,” Brigadier General Leo “Hank” Schweiter, commander of the 173rd, admitted. “Only when and where the tactical situation, terrain, battlefield preparation and relative strengths of opposing forces favored enemy action were significant contacts initiated.” In other words, at Dak To, the NVA commanders only fought where and when they wished to do so, leading to the conclusion that Hong might well have been a plant. As one grunt said, the area was “a lousy place to fight a war.” Like it or not, though, they were in for an intimate showdown with their mortal enemies in this “lousy place.”2
Ivy Leaves and Blood: Hill 724
The 4th Infantry Division had a proud history. Nicknamed the “Ivy Division” because of the way the number four looked in Roman numerals (IV), the unit had compiled a distinguished record in the Argonne Forest during World War I. Soldiers from the division had once stormed ashore at Utah Beach, liberated Paris, and struggled through the hell that was the Hurtgen Forest. By the fall of 1967, the division had been fighting in various locales throughout South Vietnam for over a year. Most of the 4th Division grunts were draftees serving a two-year hitch in the Army. This was certainly true for one of the division’s key infantry units, the 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry, whose soldiers liked to call themselves the “Ivy Dragoons.” The vast majority of the riflemen were between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. Following their basic training, most had received subsequent light infantry training at the Army’s Advanced Infantry Training Center, commonly known as Tigerland, at Fort Polk, Louisiana. These grunts came from all regions of the country. Whereas ground combat units in World War II had been all white, reflecting the racist segregation policies so prevalent in America at that time, in Vietnam infantry units were desegregated, with all races represented. This had been the case since the Korean War era, when President Harry Truman had signed an executive order mandating an end to racial segregation in the armed forces.
On the evening of November 8, two such companies of grunts, a couple hundred men, wearily settled into a knoll-side perimeter, not far away from Hill 724, their eventual objective. These troops from A and D Companies had been humping around this area for several days, engaging in periodic battles with the NVA. Most were carrying fifty to seventy pounds of equipment distributed among their metal rucksacks, their packs, and their web gear. They had already spent the better part of this day fighting hard to ward off enemy attacks before the shooting finally died down and they were able to cobble together defensive positions by hunkering down inside old NVA bunkers. These fighting positions were just over five feet deep and were reinforced with logs and sandbags. Both of the rifle companies were depleted enough by the fighting that they had trouble covering the whole perimeter. Forward air controllers arranged to cover the sparsely manned southern portion of the perimeter with their ordnance in case the enemy attacked there.
At 2000, to no one’s surprise, the NVA attacked in force. “Supported by B40 rocket fire and mortar fire from the small hills to the west and northwest . . . the ground attack came suddenly from the south and east,” a unit after action report stated. All at once, the night came to life with deafening fire and the screams of soldiers. Tracer rounds stabbed through the darkness. Mortar shells whooshed in and exploded. NVA soldiers were seemingly all over the place, running around and toward the perimeter. A couple of them were carrying flamethrowers. Before they could get close enough to roast the American bunkers, they were cut down by machine guns.
In one of A Company’s bunkers, Specialist Fourth Class (Spec-4) Bill Vigil, a twenty-year-old draftee from Fresno, California, was standing alongside three other men, picking out targets and firing his M16 on full rock ’n’ roll. He shot so much that he melted the barrels of several rifles. Still the enemy kept coming. “They were jumping around from tree to tree and you start popping ’em and getting in the hole,” he said. “We were about eye level to their feet.” Some of the enemy soldiers were only a few feet away. Somewhere to the right, he saw their fire shear off the head of an M60 machine gunner. NVA soldiers were throwing grenades into nearby bunkers. When the grenades exploded—usually with a seemingly innocuous pop—the NVA troopers tried to jump into the bunkers to kill the Americans at close range.
Vigil had been in country for about three months and he had seen his share of firefights. This one, he knew, would be a fight to the finish. The NVA meant to kill every last one of the Americans in that perimeter. To save ammunition, he and the others began firing single semiautomatic shots at the swarming enemy soldiers. They could only see what was in their immediate field of vision. They vaguely sensed that the fighting was raging all around the perimeter, but, as is so often the case with grunt-level fighting, they were only concerned with the struggle for their bunker and those around them.
Although he had not volunteered for the Army or Vietnam, Vigil was the product of much military tradition. His father had served in World War II, surviving serious wounds. His uncle had fought in Korea. One of his ancestors had been a Spanish conquistador. Standing in that miserable bunker, he was full of fear. He was angry, too. “You cry and laugh and all the senses humans have are just . . . running up and down your body.” Adrenaline surged through his bloodstream. His stomach was tight and queasy with fear. But, like most of the men around him, he resolved to fight to the end. “We’re not gonna say I give up. That’s not in our deal. I never thought about me just laying down there and dropping my weapon and hanging my head and saying go ahead and kill me. If they’re gonna take me, they’re gonna lose a lot of people.”
Not everyone was so determined, though. Inevitably, even in the best units, some soldiers will find close combat so traumatic that they will seize up with fear and quit, even if it costs them their lives. On the dirt floor of Vigil’s bunker, a soldier whom he only knew by the nickname “Speedy” was lying down, curled up in a ball, crying uncontrollably. “They’re gonna kill us, Vidge!” he screamed. “We’re gonna die! What are we gonna do?”
Vigil glanced away from the bunker aperture for a second and hollered: “If you don’t wipe your face and continue to load magazines, we’re definitely gonna die! So load them goddamn magazines and let’s keep going. I’m not asking you to put your head up here. I’m asking you to load the magazines.”
This was a classic case of the merciless nature of infantry combat. Vigil’s bunker, even with four resolute men fighting desperately, was still only as strong as its weakest man. In the end, through no fault of their own, their lives could have depended on whether Speedy would quit or fight.
Not far away from Vigil, Spec-4 Cecil Millspaugh was leaning on the trigger of his M60 machine gun. The twenty-pound gun—affectionately nicknamed “the Pig” by soldiers because it could eat up so much ammunition—spat out 7.62-millimeter rounds at a rate of over five hundred per minute. Millspaugh spotted a group of enemy nearing an adjacent bunker. He turned his gun on them and fired several bursts. All at once, he rose from his hole and rushed the NVA, firing all the way. Needless to say, the M60 was not designed to be employed in this fashion as an assault weapon. Like any machine gun, it was heavy and unwieldy, plus it went through ammo so fast that it generally needed to be fed belts by an assistant gunner in a fixed position. This hardly mattered to the adrenaline-crazed Millspaugh. He slaughtered the NVA soldiers at nearly backslapping range. The heavy bullets shredded them, spurting their blood in every direction. Several of them scattered or went down. Millspaugh jumped into the bunker they had assaulted and continued firing at other attackers, preserving that part of the perimeter.
At one point, the NVA took over the bunker next to Spec-4 Vigil’s, about eight feet away, initiating his own personal duel to the death with a North Vietnamese soldier. Back and forth they went, firing their rifles, throwing grenades. For these Vietnamese and American men, who might well have been friends in another time or circumstance, the entire war boiled down to this personal struggle for survival, a struggle that meant literally everything to them but little in the big-picture context of the Vietnam War. Such is the ruthless calculus of modern combat. “We were playing peekaboo until I got him or he stopped or a frag [grenade] got him,” Vigil recalled. “Something happened, but he stopped. He was laying there dead. There was two of ’em laying there on top of the GIs.”
In another dugout, Private First Class Clinton Bacon saw a B40 rocket score a direct hit on an adjacent bunker. The logs and sandbags collapsed onto the men inside, wounding and partially burying them. Bacon surged outside and, while machine-gun and rifle bullets snapped around him, he crawled to the wrecked bunker and dug out the stricken men. “He began removing them, insuring that they received medical treatment,” a citation later related. After that, he stacked some of the unscathed sandbags and resumed shooting back at the enemy.
According to one account, soldiers from Delta Company were “in close hand-to-hand combat” with the NVA. It is well to consider once again what this really meant. They were struggling at intimate, body-groping distance with other men, using any weapon at their disposal to kill them—bayonets, can openers, rifles, ammo boxes, helmets, anything. Death came in ugly fashion, with crushed skulls, severed larynxes, punctured abdomens or throats, gouged eyes, or from point-blank gunshot wounds. Warm, sticky blood bathed the victor and vanquished alike. The trauma was beyond description.
Because the fighting was going on at such close quarters, it was difficult for the Americans to employ artillery. This was no accident. The enemy liked to fight at this close range precisely because it could negate American firepower. Alpha and Delta Companies were forced to call down 105-millimeter artillery fire within their own perimeter. As long as the Americans remained in the bunkers, and the NVA continued to move about in the open, the shell bursts were likely to do more damage to the enemy than the GIs. Explosions mushroomed and flashed in seemingly random patterns, sending hot deadly fragments in every direction. In some cases, the fragments sliced into attacking enemy soldiers, killing a few of them, but wounding many more.
Air support only added to the carnage. “As the enemy crawled up the slope from the south, napalm was dropped in continuous strikes to within 25 meters of the perimeter,” an after action report said. Guided by forward air controllers, Air Force F-4 Phantoms and other close air support planes screamed in and dropped large quantities of the jellied gasoline along every NVA avenue of approach. The ensuing flames consumed the jungle and men alike. “It takes . . . oxygen to make that napalm really work,” one soldier said. “So if you’re real close to it, you’re gasping for air.” Like the artillery shells, the napalm was especially deadly to troops on the move, rather than the Americans in their bunkers. In some cases, NVA soldiers simply expired in flames. Most of the time, the flames roasted them or even melted limbs or other body parts. The Americans could hear their bloodcurdling screams.
One napalm canister burst so close to Spec-4 Vigil’s bunker that he could smell the acrid, almost sweet odor of the weapon’s chemical ingredients (probably its benzene components). When the flames died down, he peered out of his bunker and saw, in the distance, an enemy soldier melted to the wheels of his .51-caliber machine gun. Other enemy soldiers were turned by the napalm into “frosty critters. They looked like charcoal. Some of ’em were even halfway running and then they’re charcoaled. They were melted to the trees or wherever they were at.”
The pilots were so skilled that they were dropping bombs, by the light of flares, on the edges of the perimeter. Sometimes, the grunts could see the bombs descend, and they generally looked to each man as if they would hit him personally. “I mean, the noise, it’s unbelievable,” Vigil recalled. “The ground would just jump up maybe two feet, right in front of you. The ground actually lifts so all that sand and dirt and everything is all over you. It just slaps you, like you’re standing in a sand blasting machine.” Undoubtedly the bombs, exploding as they were so close to the U.S. positions, wounded or even killed some Americans, but they did tremendous damage to the NVA.
At around 0200, the enemy attack tapered off. The NVA used long hooks to drag away their wounded and dead. After a lull, they hit the perimeter several more times, but never with as much ferocity as that first push. The next morning the Americans combed the area and counted 232 NVA bodies. Some had been killed by concussion and looked as if they were only sleeping. Others were torn apart by shrapnel or punctured with holes from rifle or machine-gun bullets. Some were little more than globs of dismembered flesh or, as Vigil mentioned, charcoaled remains of human beings. All of them emitted disgusting odors in the tropical heat.
Alpha Company had been decimated. Out of an original complement of more than 130 men, the outfit was down to 47; 21 had been killed. The rest were wounded badly enough to require evacuation. Even the supposedly “unwounded” had scratches, cuts, and bruises that in peacetime circumstances would require medical attention. A day later, Lieutenant Colonel Glen Belknap, the battalion commander, decided to relieve Alpha Company. Although the perimeter was still under intense mortar and rocket fire, he airlifted his Bravo and Charlie Companies in and arranged for helicopters to remove the remnants of Alpha, including the dead and wounded. “We proceeded to pull the casualties out of the holes and get their bodies to the LZ, along with the surviving wounded,” a Charlie Company soldier recalled. “Each chopper would be loaded with, first, the wounded, then the dead, as reinforcements arrived.” One sergeant, coming upon the intermingled bodies of several soldiers—black, white, and brown—gazed at them thoughtfully and asked no one in particular: “How is it that men can die together, but find it so difficult to live together?”
The helicopters took the Alpha Company survivors and their fallen buddies to the American base at Dak To. Equipped with an airstrip and many buildings, the base was growing into the main American logistical and staging point for this intensifying struggle. Spec-4 Vigil and the other exhausted survivors from his company gazed at long rows of charcoal-colored body bags lying along the tarmac. Some of the misshapen bags held the remains of his buddies. Others contained dead soldiers from the intense fighting around Hills 1338 and 823. He paced around, staring at them, shaking with grief and anger, trying to comprehend that they were all gone. “I can still see . . . all those body bags. I think it was more to see than the battle itself. I was in a crouched position, walking around, just shaking.” His nerves were shot. It took him several days to even resume eating again.3
In the meantime, Lieutenant Colonel Belknap resumed the push for Hill 724, a mass of high ground that was covered with a solid sheet of bamboo and tropical foliage. At sunrise on November 11, Bravo remained in the original perimeter to maintain a secure landing zone (LZ). Charlie and Delta set out for the hill, which was only about five hundred meters away. They made it, cut out a makeshift LZ, and sent word for Bravo to join them. This was the way the Americans generally operated in the Central Highlands. Commanders wisely sought to control the high ground. When they succeeded in doing so, they set up perimeters, like little American enclaves splayed into the heart of enemy country.
Later that day, just as Bravo Company was approaching the perimeter on Hill 724, the NVA attacked. “B40s were fired en masse, striking trees and showering positions with fragments,” an officer later wrote. “Enemy mortar positions had been carefully prepared to fire from at least three directions. They continued to fire even under repeated air attack and counter battery.” Some of the NVA soldiers had tied themselves into the trees, from which they could rain down withering accurate rifle fire upon the Ivy Dragoons. Others were pushing up the hill, assaulting, as usual, at close quarters. The grunts dropped their heavy rucksacks, fanned out into bomb craters, behind logs, in fighting holes or any other cover they could find and returned fire. From the vantage point of their perches in the trees, NVA snipers could clearly see some of the Americans, even if they were crouching behind trees or logs. This sniper fire was frighteningly accurate, ripping through the heads of several unsuspecting grunts. The Americans learned to spray the trees with automatic fire even if they did not see anything to shoot at.
Charlie and Delta Companies had already carved some semblance of a perimeter with holes and fields of fire from which to fight the NVA attackers. But the Bravo soldiers quickly realized that the NVA had gotten between them and their comrades in the makeshift perimeter. This put them in the desperate circumstance of taking fire, at close range, from all sides. With a flurry of AK-47 fire, the NVA overran several Bravo soldiers who were manning observation posts (OPs) to protect the company’s flanks. The OP soldiers were in a hopeless position but they fought back with everything they had, especially Privates First Class Nathaniel Thompson and William Muir, who both were mortally wounded but remained in place, pouring out fire until the end. The NVA wiped out the OPs.
Several dozen meters from the OPs, Spec-4 Bob Walkowiak, one of the company commander’s radio telephone operators (RTO), heard the shooting but did not know what was going on. He was helping the company medic attend to a badly wounded soldier. As the deafening sounds of shooting, explosions, and hollering raged around them, they came to the sad realization that the man was beyond hope. The medic moved on and Walkowiak tried to talk to the dying soldier and comfort him. “As I apologized for our inability to save him, the fight for his life ended. Hopefully, someday I’ll know if he forgave us for failing.” As the soldier expired, Walkowiak rolled over and looked at the clear blue sky above. The air was so thick with bullets and shrapnel that it was “like having stars or streaks in your eyes.”
Medics were braving the worst of the fire, scurrying all over, treating and retrieving wounded men. They dealt with the horrible consequences of combat—the torn flesh, the jagged holes, the broken bones, the gushing blood, the internal bleeding, the crying and screaming of grievously wounded soldiers. With bullets zinging around and explosions cooking off, the medics could only hope to administer some first aid—keep the airways open, apply pressure bandages, stop the bleeding, give morphine shots to those who needed them—and hope for the best. One medic, Spec-4 John Kind, came under enemy attack as he was crouching over a badly wounded man, trying to save him. Kind grabbed the man’s rifle and, according to one account, “began placing accurate fire at the advancing enemy.” When the enemy attack failed, Kind resumed treating the wounded soldier. Another medic from Charlie Company, Private First Class John Trahan, was so busy that he personally treated eighteen wounded men in the first several minutes of the firefight. When he realized Bravo Company’s predicament, he crossed a patch of open ground under intense fire to get to them, even though he himself was wounded, too. At that point, according to one witness, he took the lead in “caring for the wounded and evacuating them to safer positions.”
Spec-4 Walkowiak, the RTO, found a bit of cover with two other men behind a small log. He cautiously peered down the incline of the hill at the foliage beyond and saw that the NVA was overrunning one of the platoons. “On the right, one man raised up to fire as he withdrew and was promptly shot dead. On the left a fellow with a pump shotgun retreated up the hill. He stood tall as he walked backwards, firing every few steps. No panic, just grudgingly giving up ground in that hail of bullets. As he raised his weapon to fire, a bullet went through his jaw.” Enemy grenades soon followed, showering shrapnel in every direction. Employing M72 Light Antitank Weapon (LAW) rocket fire, machine guns, grenades of their own, and accurate rifle fire, Walkowiak’s group managed to slow the NVA into a tense standoff.4
At about this time, an enemy B40 rocket exploded among Bravo’s command group, killing twenty-eight-year-old Captain John Falcone, the commanding officer, who had been rushing all over the place, positioning his men, hollering orders, and trying to keep his soldiers as calm as possible. The well-liked former Marine and Army Ranger left behind a wife and three children. Lieutenant William Gauff, one of the platoon leaders, somehow made his way through deadly fire to reorganize the survivors around Falcone and assume command of the company, even though he was wounded himself. Another key leader, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ortiz, assumed command of his platoon when his platoon sergeant got killed. Ortiz manned a machine gun and poured belt after belt of 7.62-millimeter ammunition into attacking NVA soldiers. As was so often the case in this kind of desperate combat, the example of a tenacious NCO motivated other surviving members of the platoon to stay and fight. They laced the NVA with heavy fire until they ran out of small-arms ammunition and began hurling grenades at the enemy, finally forcing them away from that spot for good.
The Ivy Dragoon grunts were fighting tenaciously, but without some serious fire support the entire perimeter was in real danger of being overrun by the NVA. Mortarmen set up makeshift gun pits, pointed their tubes straight up, and fired their shells (NVA crews responded in kind). Aided by forward air controllers, jets screamed in to drop 500- and 750-pound bombs as close to the hill as they dared. In some cases, they dropped their ordnance within five hundred meters of the grunts. “They really lit the area up,” Walkowiak later wrote. “The pilots put napalm and CBUs [cluster bomb units] directly on both sides of the perimeter of the hill behind my location.” In one instance, he and several other grunts popped smoke grenades to mark their position for strafing planes. The fighter pilots swooped in and unleashed a stream of 20-millimeter cannon shells on a woodpile that was sheltering several NVA, leaving behind little besides boiling plumes of smoke, dust, and traumatized flesh. Walkowiak estimated that enemy fire diminished by one-third. Another soldier watched the planes drop cluster bombs full of 3-millimeter-long fléchettes or darts. “They’d come down through the trees and, holy cow, were they effective.” Hundreds of tiny darts tore holes into any NVA soldiers who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the kill zone of the cluster bombs. They died, literally, a death by a thousand cuts. In the recollection of one American, he and several others later found, in just one sector, “over a hundred bodies . . . with just little pinpricks over ’em . . . looking like a very fine shot from shotguns.”
The aircraft were hardly impervious to enemy fire. Helicopter crews found it nearly impossible to even approach the hill, much less get close enough to unload supplies and remove the wounded. Enemy rifle, machine-gun, and rocket fire was just too intense. In the recollection of one man, the air was full of so many B40 rockets that “you could almost reach up and catch ’em.” In one instance, Sergeant Steve Edmunds, a squad leader in Charlie Company, saw “a chopper, in an attempt to provide us with food, water, and ammunition was blown out of the sky by an enemy rocket, as it attempted to drop our supplies. The chopper exploded into flames and all the ammunition which was on board continued to explode.” The enemy even shot down a CIA Air America T28 Trojan propeller plane that was operating as a forward air controller. The grunts were able to rescue the two pilots.
Artillery observers were constantly on their radios calling in fire missions. Several miles away, at various firebases the Americans had constructed, artillerymen hunched over their guns, in the synchronized choreography so necessary for well-trained crewmen to do their jobs properly, loading and firing their pieces. Everything from large-caliber eight-inch and 155-millimeter shells to the more common 105-millimeter howitzer rounds crashed into NVA-held portions of Hill 724 (and on some of the American positions, too). One of the observers, First Lieutenant Larry Skogler, was roaming around with his RTO and reconnaissance sergeant in tow, looking for good places to call down fire. From the lip of one bomb crater, he called in so many fire missions he lost track of how many. The low-key Minnesotan had once attended the state university in Minneapolis, but had gotten drafted in 1965 when he lost his student deferment. Well trained and experienced, he possessed the keen forward observer’s feel for terrain, distance, angles, and the capability of the guns. At Hill 724, he had one battery of four guns at his disposal. “The trees were so tall, we couldn’t get good artillery coverage on the ground,” he said. “The one-oh-five rounds would burst in the trees and scatter all over creation. Ninety percent of it would be stuck in the trees.” Even so, it was effective enough to wound and kill many NVA soldiers, if only because of the sheer volume of the American fire.
The more time that passed, the less chance the NVA had to overrun the battalion. Steadily, the Bravo survivors formed a continuous perimeter with hard-pressed Charlie and Delta Companies. With the NVA positions well known, the Americans could unleash a constant barrage of artillery, napalm, and bombs upon the enemy, at a minimum negating their movement. After dark, planes dropped flares to illuminate the area. C47 gunships (nicknamed “Puff the Magic Dragon”) circled overhead, spewing forth laser-beam-like streams of Gatling gun rounds on the NVA. Farther away, B-52 heavy bombers unloaded many tons of explosives on suspected NVA strongholds.
During lulls, amid the dancing half shadows, the Americans heard NVA sergeants blowing whistles, organizing their men for new assaults on the perimeter. Over the course of the evening, they attacked several times. Those who could get close enough to the Americans fought it out in confusing, intimate firefights, with muzzle flashes winking like camera flashbulbs. The fighting was ghastly and brutal, sometimes even hand to hand. Because of the massive amount of American firepower that was raking every approach to the hill, the communists could not reinforce any of their attacks well enough to succeed in their goal of annihilating the hard-pressed American battalion. Gradually, the Americans fended them off and, by daylight, the battle evolved into a stalemate, with the NVA besieging the hill and the Americans keeping them at bay with firepower plus the sheer tenacity of their grunts.
The still-burning wreckage of the downed chopper blocked the small LZ that the soldiers had hacked out. Resupply helicopters could only swoop in and hover precariously several feet off the ground, all the while under enemy fire. The crewmen hastily threw out crates of ammunition, food, and water cans. If possible, grunts loaded the most seriously wounded aboard. Then the choppers took off. The whole process usually took less than a minute or two. The helicopters made operations in this remote area possible, but in such a heavy battle, they were a tenuous supply link at best. Control of all the ground around Dak To and the establishment of a secure land-based supply line was an impossibility under the circumstances (and a major reason why officers like Krulak thought it was folly to fight in the Central Highlands).
So the helicopter supply runs were only a temporary solution to this problem. In the words of one after action account, “Further support was impossible until the enemy could be driven far enough from the landing zone to deny observed fire.” Captain John Mirus, the commander of Charlie Company, and Captain Terry Bell, Delta’s commander, were the two highest-ranking officers left on the hill. Both of them understood that they must expand their perimeter to provide necessary breathing space for the choppers. If they did not, wounded men would die, and supplies of vital ammo and water would dwindle to dangerously low levels. They ordered their men to push the NVA back, away from the hill. “It took another two days of fighting out from the base to secure the area sufficiently to resume operations,” a unit citation later stated.
In that time, the NVA gradually disengaged and faded away. The Americans later learned that they had destroyed the better part of two NVA battalions. They counted 300 North Vietnamese bodies. A prisoner told interrogators that his regimental commander had been killed. American losses were grim, too. When Bravo Company first went up Hill 724, it had 165 soldiers. When the fighting finally ended there, 19 of the men were dead and another 68 were wounded badly enough to require evacuation. Losses in the other two companies added several dozen more soldiers to the casualty rolls. As the survivors boarded helicopters and left the torn, pockmarked hill behind, their young filthy faces were tinged with the glazed, dazed, exhausted mask of heavy combat. Their bravery, combined with lethal fire support, had won a tactical victory at Hill 724, albeit one that did nothing to enhance American strategic aims in Vietnam. The Americans left the hard-won hill and resumed their pursuit of the NVA. The Dak To pattern was set.5
“I just knew that nobody was gonna get out of there alive”: Task Force Black on Veterans Day
Most of them were volunteers. The 173rd Airborne Brigade was comprised of young men who had chosen to become airborne infantrymen. To achieve this status, they had endured rugged training. A few of them were draftees, but the vast majority had elected to join the Army, usually out of patriotism, machismo, or a thirst for adventure. Their nickname was “the Sky Soldiers,” but in Vietnam they only made one combat jump. Instead, they functioned as the ultimate light infantrymen, grunts to the core. Their unit was arguably the hardest working in Vietnam. Since arriving in 1965, the 173rd had spent almost all of its time in the field, operating as a veritable fire brigade for Westy. Wherever the action was thickest, wherever the terrain was the most challenging, the Sky Soldiers were there. “We lived like animals,” Private Ken Lambertson said. “We didn’t go back to the rear. We didn’t go back and party and drink and get high and all that.” Sky Soldiers like Lambertson lived “in the elements, [with] the snakes, the critters . . . the leeches.” In this unit, luxuries were unheard of. Troopers subsisted on C rations, coffee, and Kool-Aid. In a one-year tour of duty, a typical Sky Soldier spent all but a few weeks in the field, humping a sixty-pound rucksack, dealing with the heat, digging fighting holes, going without adequate sleep, facing danger day and night. “Such a rifleman was faced with so many hazards and hardships that the cards were completely stacked against him to ever make it out of that jungle without becoming a casualty to some degree or other,” one of the unit’s senior NCOs later wrote.
The paratroopers had fought around Dak To during the summer of 1967, so they knew the place was the NVA’s backyard and that going back there would mean heavy fighting. Many of them had premonitions that they were getting into something terrible. “When we were told we were going back to Dak To, it got really serious,” Sergeant David Watson later said. “We knew it was gonna be serious again.” Now, in November, they were back to this foreboding, unhappy place, on the trail of their old NVA adversaries.
Like their comrades in the Ivy Dragoons, they had little trouble finding their quarry. On the windy evening of November 10, a company and a half of paratroopers laagered atop a hill mass close to Cambodia, over twenty miles west of Hill 724. Like the area that surrounded it, the hill was thick with bamboo trees, vines, and the moldy detritus of the jungle. This Sky Soldier group consisted of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry, along with two platoons of the battalion’s Dog Company. Collectively this force of just under two hundred paratroopers was known as Task Force Black. They were under the command of Captain Thomas McElwain, Charlie’s CO, a self-made former enlisted man from West Virginia who had been in the Army for ten years but was still two weeks shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. Honest, fair, and professional, McElwain had been in command only a couple months but had already built up a strong loyalty among his men, who affectionately called him “Captain Mac.”
He and his grunts knew the NVA were close. They had skirmished with them several times in the last few days. Moreover, as the troopers of Task Force Black had silently patrolled this jungle, they had found blood trails, empty bunkers, fresh feces, discarded equipment, artificial stairs cut into hill-sides, and, most alarming of all, live enemy communication wire. Beyond all of these visual indicators, the paratroopers could just feel the presence of the enemy, particularly the spooky sensation of having eyes upon them. A few of the Americans could even smell the NVA. The mood among the grunts was tinged with the ambivalence of an impending fight. On the one hand, as aggressive combat soldiers, the men were excited at the prospect of a chance to destroy their elusive enemies. On the other hand, everyone understood that, no matter the outcome of the looming battle, death and wounds awaited many of them. “No one knew exactly what to expect, but we expected it would be something big,” McElwain said.
November 10 was a tense but quiet night. In the morning, Captain McElwain received orders from Lieutenant Colonel David Schumacher, the battalion commander, to follow the enemy communication wire and hook up with Task Force Blue, a similar-sized element consisting of the battalion’s Alpha Company and the other platoon from Dog Company. Unspoken was the expectation that the two task forces would draw the enemy into a sizable battle that would produce a big body count to fulfill the strategic expectations of General Westmoreland and his White House superiors.
Captain McElwain’s plan was to send part of his Third Platoon, under Lieutenant Charles Brown, down the hill several meters to recon the laager site, as well as Task Force Black’s anticipated route of advance, to make sure the enemy was not waiting in ambush. McElwain understood, and appreciated, that moving along trails was dangerous and to be avoided under most circumstances. But the vegetation in this part of Vietnam was so thick that his unit simply had to move along trails or any other small openings the jungle might occasionally offer. When Brown’s patrol was finished, the captain planned to move his company along a narrow ridgeline while the two Dog Company platoons, under the control of their commander, Captain Abe Hardy, moved along a parallel ridgeline.6
At 0800, Brown and his men hoisted their weapons, spread out into a suitable patrol formation, and negotiated their way down the hill. They had not even gone fifty meters when the point man spotted an NVA soldier just down the trail. Intrepid North Vietnamese trail watchers such as this soldier often hid along obvious movement routes, watching, gathering information on the Americans, even shadowing them as they moved. The point man opened fire and wounded the enemy soldier, who then took off. Lieutenant Brown wanted to pursue the man’s blood trail and radioed that request to Captain McElwain, but the captain told him to stay put. For all McElwain knew, the enemy soldier was luring Brown’s platoon away from the company, into an ambush. At Dak To, American commanders constantly had to beware of these tactics, which, after all, were the product of the enemy’s superior initiative and strategic position in the Central Highlands. Since they controlled most of the ground, they could usually do battle at the time and place of their choosing, for maximum advantage. The Americans knew the enemy’s goal was to separate and annihilate a platoon- or company-sized unit. To foil this menacing possibility, good commanders like McElwain were intent on keeping their units together, albeit at the expense of mobility and flexibility. What’s more, on this morning he was mindful of his orders to link up with Task Force Blue, something he could not do if his unit was absorbed in a rescue operation for a cutoff platoon.
McElwain’s most experienced platoon leader was First Lieutenant Jerry Cecil, a member of the West Point class of 1966, a group made famous by a Newsweek article (and subsequent book) on them. Twenty-four years old, Cecil hailed from a rural Kentucky family with a long tradition of military service. For him, West Point offered a free college education, a chance to serve the country, and an exciting career as a soldier. He had thrived there and, like many of his infantry officer classmates, he was a graduate of Ranger School, one of the most formidable combat training courses in existence. He had been in command of the 2nd Platoon since June. Knowing Cecil’s background, his experience, his knowledge of this terrain, and his quality as a small-unit leader, McElwain decided to put his platoon on point after Brown’s encounter with the trail watcher. This decision reflected Cecil’s excellence more than any deficiency on Brown’s part. Brown was a fine officer, just not as experienced as Cecil.
Lieutenant Cecil and the nineteen other men who comprised his platoon slowly walked down the trail, passed Brown’s group, and moved on. Like most of the other men in Task Force Black, the 2nd Platoon had trained and fought together for several weeks. They were as close as brothers, and they had developed a strong sense of teamwork in combat. The jungle they traversed grew progressively thicker as they descended the hill, the trees taller, the shadows longer. Cecil had several men deployed on either side of the trail in a cloverleaf formation to guard against ambush from the flanks. For several more meters, the soldiers followed the communication wire. Then the point man, Private First Class John Rolfe, spotted another trail watcher. Rolfe raised his arm to signal for a halt and turned his head slightly back with a finger against his lips to call for quiet. He turned back again to the front, took aim on the NVA soldier, and fired one shot. The soldier went down.
The Americans moved a few more meters down the trail to look at the dead man. Cecil radioed back a report to Captain McElwain and he came up to have a look, too. Immediately the two officers and everyone else noticed how well equipped and fresh the dead NVA appeared to be. Lieutenant Cecil noticed that his AK-47 rifle had Cosmoline on it, indicating a brand-new weapon, and speculated that he had probably just come south. Captain McElwain knew that this probably meant that a new, reinforced enemy regiment was somewhere nearby. A chill ran down his spine. “They’re out there, Jerry,” he told Lieutenant Cecil. “This really is looking bad. I can feel ’em. We’re gonna have to be really careful going down this ridge.” Cecil readily agreed.
His platoon resumed its steady advance, in the same manner as before. The ridge narrowed. The sides of the trail grew steeper, making the footing tricky for Cecil’s flankers. They covered several dozen more meters, to a saddle of low ground that formed at the bottom of the ridge, before the ground sloped upward into the next ridge. All around them were tree trunks, bamboo groves, and tangled green foliage. The sun could hardly penetrate this canopy. The air was moist and sodden. An eerie, unnatural silence hung over the jungle. “All the sights and sounds of the jungle just ceased,” Cecil recalled, “you’d normally hear monkeys . . . walking through the jungle . . . you’d hear birds flying.” Instead, now, there was nothing, as if the animals were hushed into an awed or frightened silence by something, or someone. The quiet was so alien it was almost earsplitting.
Every member of the 2nd Platoon knew that the silence meant big trouble, none more so than Cecil. He had learned much about ambushes at Ranger School, and had even taught ambush techniques at Fort Hood. He knew, with a powerful certainty, that danger was imminent. He thrust his clenched fist in the air, signaling his men to stop, and then twirled his index finger, ordering them to fall back into a mutually supporting semicircle. The lieutenant whispered: “Guys, I think we’re in it. The gooks are here. When I give the signal, start . . . spraying at your feet like a garden hose.” He figured this would kill any potential ambushers with grazing fire.
Lieutenant Cecil raised his CAR-15 rifle and opened fire, as did several others. At that exact moment, a host of hidden NVA soldiers began shooting, too. “You’ve never seen a Fourth of July display like this one—the noise was like ten million firecrackers,” Spec-4 Ken Cox, a mortar forward observer who was standing a few paces away from Cecil, later commented. “They literally stood up in front of us,” Cecil said. “It was like walking into a dark room, turning on a light, and seeing someone there. They literally stood up within arm’s reach.” The adrenaline rush was profound, almost like a narcotic, as the body’s natural self-preservation mechanisms kicked in. Enemy soldiers popped out of holes and materialized out of the bushes. Everyone on both sides poured out as much fire as he could. Many of the platoon members were already on the ground when the shooting began. Those who were still standing flung themselves onto the trail and blazed away with their M16s. Quite a few of the NVA went down. Others tried to press forward, crawling or hurling themselves at the Americans. Intense enemy machine-gun, rifle, and rocket fire swept up and down the column. The AK-47 fire was so thick that the distinctive cracking sound of the enemy rifles sounded, to some men, like bullwhips snapping. Some of the fire hit home, wounding or killing grunts. One trooper caught a round in the face, instantly blowing out the back of his head in a red spray.
Spec-4 Jerry Kelley, one of Cecil’s machine gunners, was with the point element, right in the worst of the kill zone. Most platoon leaders preferred to place their machine gunners in the middle of their formation for the sake of protection and flexibility, but on this day Cecil had fortuitously put Kelley’s team up front where they were in a position to do major damage to the attacking NVA. The machine gunner was leaning on his trigger, pouring deadly fire into the shapes of enemy soldiers. “Oh my God, they’re everywhere!” he roared. “Here they come!” He alternately stood and squatted along the trail, firing long bursts.7
In the meantime, Lieutenant Cecil was keeping his platoon together as best he could. With his RTO in tow, he lunged around, telling his men where to position themselves and what to do. In his recollection, he was attempting “to get some kind of perimeter that straddles the trail and hugs over to the right and left as it drops off. It’s obviously pandemonium, chaos, shooting.” Spec-4 Cox saw him repeatedly expose himself to enemy fire as he directed the battle. “This is when Lieutenant Cecil becomes the hero that he is, as far as I’m concerned,” Cox later commented. “That guy stood up and placed everybody. He walked. He didn’t run, but he walked fast and he placed everybody. He . . . made sure somebody was covering the wounded. He put that small perimeter in place, the whole time talking on the radio with the company commander.” When it came to combat, infantry officers like Cecil were taught to guard against inertia, to do something—maybe even anything—no matter the circumstances. In this perilous situation, that philosophy proved appropriate. With his flurry of activity, the young West Pointer penetrated through the inherent confusion of this horrendous firefight and held the platoon together as a cohesive fighting entity. He also personally shot several enemy soldiers who were charging his position.
Lieutenant Cecil and his men did not yet know it, but they were at the open end of an NVA horseshoe-shaped ambush. The enemy had deployed the better part of a battalion along either side and in front of the trail where the saddle morphed into the higher ground. “Had we gone another thirty or forty yards, we would have been completely surrounded,” Cox said. This would have put them right into the NVA kill zone. Few, if any, would have survived. Instead they had stopped short before the enemy could bait them into this trap. This was not the result of luck. These troopers were experienced, well led, and wise to the ways of the NVA. Because of deduction, prior experiences, and pure intuition, they stopped short of the kill zone, forcing the enemy to spring their ambush in the thicker foliage around the trail, where the Americans had a chance to fight back on something approaching even terms.
Even as the fighting raged, Lieutenant Cecil was on the radio, hollering over the din, reporting what was happening to Captain McElwain, who was about one hundred yards away, back up on the hill. At first, Cecil thought he was up against a squad, then a platoon, and then some sort of undetermined larger unit. When the enemy fire showed no signs of abating, McElwain grew concerned. He called Lieutenant Brown and ordered him to reinforce Cecil, but enemy opposition was so formidable that Brown and his people could only get within shouting distance of Cecil’s platoon. Moreover, enemy rifle, machine-gun, rocket, and mortar fire was now coming from the front and both sides. This meant that the NVA was enveloping Task Force Black, attempting to surround and destroy the unit. “It was difficult to see the enemy,” an after action report explained. “The jungle was closing in on the troopers as the enemy, completely covered with natural foliage, moved forward.” Copying a tactic from their brethren at Hill 724, some of the NVA even tied themselves into the trees and poured intense fire down on Task Force Black. One of them dropped a grenade between Cecil and his RTO, Preston Prince, wounding both of them. Cecil got hit in the left hip, Prince in the right. They looked up and shot the NVA. His dead body tumbled out of the tree and hung several feet above the trail.
About half an hour after the battle erupted, Captain McElwain and his command group moved from the hill to link up with Brown’s platoon. The captain could now see firsthand how desperate the fighting had become. He sensed that, somewhere out there in the trees, the enemy was moving along adjacent ridges, trying to get between the various American platoons to destroy each one of them in detail. This was exactly what they had done at the disastrous Battle of the Slopes in June. He understood that Task Force Black was now in serious danger of experiencing the same fate. To forestall such a bloodbath, McElwain knew that he had to get the entire task force together, into one continuous, defensible perimeter.
He actually found this to be a bit frustrating. McElwain, like many other combat arms officers of his generation, was taught to fight aggressively—close with the enemy and destroy them through fire and maneuver. “I was eager to . . . fight in battles instead of going into defensive positions. That’s the way I had learned in all my experiences, was to fix the enemy, maneuver against him, and destroy him.” In Vietnam’s Central Highlands, though, that was not the name of the game. Here such aggressive tactics invited massacre because they made it easier for the NVA to surround units, fight them at close enough range to neutralize American firepower, and then inflict horrendous casualties on the GIs. Instead, the Americans, especially after the Slopes, learned, upon making contact, to peel back into a perimeter, hold it, and unleash their firepower at the communists, in hopes of keeping them at bay and inflicting a large body count. These tactics, effective though they undeniably were, reflected the unhappy reality that, in the Highlands, the enemy held the strategic initiative. By and large, the communists chose where they wanted to fight and they controlled most of the terrain. The Americans controlled only enclaves. Only in this sort of environment could such defensive tactics make sense.8
Be that as it may, Captain McElwain knew, on the morning of November 11, that Task Force Black’s survival depended on forging and holding a strong perimeter. Knowing that time was short, he radioed Captain Hardy and had him move his two platoons back to Charlie Company’s position. McElwain’s Weapons Platoon, under Lieutenant Ray Flynn, and his 1st Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Ed Kelley, were both still on the hill. He radioed Flynn and Kelley and told them to come off the hill and join up with everyone else at the base of the hill, where the perimeter was forming roughly around Brown’s platoon. Ordinarily, Flynn’s mortar crews would have had their tubes set up and firing. So far, though, they had remained inactive because the trees on the hill were so dense that the crews had no fields of fire. The situation was now so serious that Flynn’s people buried their mortars, picked up their rifles, and dashed down the hill. They had to fight their way to the rest of the company. Most of the soldiers even left behind their rucksacks, taking only weapons and ammo with them.
The same was true for Kelley’s riflemen and machine gunners. Knowing the company’s predicament, they moved with great haste, in rushes, down the hill through the bamboo-riddled foliage. “We were in a . . . line going down,” Private Lambertson remembered. “We’d stop and then move on a little bit. We could hear all the firing down below.” Lieutenant Kelley constantly prodded his men to keep moving. The group was hunched over, pushing through the brambles, adrenaline coursing through their veins. “We literally fought our way down to where the rest of the company was,” Kelley later said. “It was like a hundred damned Harley motorcycles all revving up. That’s the only way I can explain the noise. It was absolute bedlam.”
The volume of enemy fire was considerable. One of Kelley’s most experienced men, Staff Sergeant Jerry Curry, caught some mortar shrapnel on the way down the hill. “Twenty-two months I never got a scratch until I got to that damned hill,” he said. Curry was a prime example of a born infantryman. He’d been with the unit in combat almost continuously for that two-year period. A natural outdoorsman who had dropped out of high school and joined the Army in 1964, Curry had few equals when it came to combat savvy. He was so at ease in the jungle that he often led small groups of handpicked soldiers on recon patrols hundreds of meters away from Charlie Company, almost like a modified LRRP team. He liked combat so much that his greatest fear was being plucked from the unit and forced to go home. His admiring men referred to him as “Sergeant Rock” after the cartoon character. On this morning the shrapnel tore into one of his legs. “I just felt my leg kick up and it was numb the rest of the fight.” Blood steadily trickled down into his sock but, true to form, the cigar-chomping NCO hardly paid any attention to his wound.
As the platoon moved and shot, some of the grunts even caught glimpses out of their peripheral vision of the enemy. At one point, Private Lambertson actually came face-to-face with two NVA soldiers. “We just looked at each other and kept going,” he said. The odd moment passed quickly, as Lambertson hastened to keep up with his buddies. Why did the enemies refrain from shooting at each other? Perhaps they could not bring themselves to kill face-to-face. Or maybe the opportunity was so fleeting, and so instantaneous, that they scarcely had the chance to open fire.
Kelley was in such a hurry to reinforce the company that he bypassed an NVA machine gun. It was so close that the lieutenant could see “the grass in front of [it] parting” as the enemy gunner fired. “In retrospect, I should have gone ahead and taken care of that then because it was a thorn in our side the rest of the fight.” The gun poured continuous and distressingly accurate fire on Task Force Black. In spite of this fire, Kelley and his people made it to the company, having fought there every step of the way. In the view of Sergeant David Watson, a fire team leader, it was like forcing the NVA to “open a door and then shut it.”9
By about 1045, with the addition of Kelley’s platoon, the mortarmen, and Hardy’s Dog Company troopers, the Americans had established a makeshift perimeter about one hundred meters long and forty meters wide. Bamboo, tree trunks, and bushes offered the only cover. Lieutenant Richard Elrod, the company’s artillery forward observer, and Captain McElwain both called down accurate artillery fire that played a major role in keeping the enemy at bay. Elrod, in particular, was all over the place, crawling and sprinting from one position to another. His RTO was killed and Elrod was wounded several times but, knowing the vital importance of the fire support to Task Force Black’s survival, he kept at it. Many of his shells detonated within twenty-five meters of the American lines, even wounding some of the Sky Soldiers. Air strikes, coming in at greater range, only added to the devastation.
By now, Captain McElwain had ordered Lieutenant Cecil to fight his way back up the trail to the task force position. To cover the withdrawal, Cecil ordered his men to place claymore mines in front of themselves, crawl back as far as the detonation cord would go, and prepare to hit the clackers that detonated the mines. Each mine weighed about a pound and contained dozens of BB-sized steel balls. Many rifle platoons did not carry them on patrol, but Cecil’s did. Against the objections of many in his platoon, he had forced his men to carry the mines. He himself carried two.
Here, in the middle of this fight to the death, the unpopular order paid off. When the soldiers detonated their mines, steel balls filled the air, shredding many NVA attackers. One enemy soldier was even in the process of trying to sneak up and turn a mine in the direction of its American owner when it exploded. The young North Vietnamese soldier literally disintegrated into nothingness, as if he had never existed. This and the other explosions staggered the NVA, giving many of the soldiers in Cecil’s platoon some time to fall back. “I’m convinced, to this day, that me insisting on every man packing a claymore . . . saved us,” Cecil later commented. “The claymores gave us some breathing room. When you hear that thing go off in the jungle and then smell the cordite, that’s a deal breaker if you’re the attacker.”
This hardly guaranteed the 2nd Platoon’s escape, though. The most difficult aspect of the withdrawal was moving the wounded and the dead, an awkward, dangerous, and physically exhausting task. Spec-4 Kelley, the machine gunner, bought his comrades precious time to drag away several wounded men who could not walk on their own. In the process, according to one eyewitness, “Kelley was suddenly wounded himself. He was out in front of the perimeter and moved back [twenty] meters, firing his machine gun as he moved. The enemy shifted their attention to Kelley, who was raising havoc with his weapon. He fired away with long, sweeping bursts.” Other grunts laid down cover fire with their rifles for Kelley. The M60 gunner seemed oblivious to everything. With a look of intense concentration, he focused on shooting at a seemingly endless stream of NVA soldiers who were moving through the trees, trying to get him. “Kelley stayed with his weapon, cutting down one North Vietnamese after another as they charged him.” They finally succeeded in cutting him off and killing him.
Lieutenant Cecil saw two of his men lying badly wounded several meters away, in what was now NVA territory, almost in the spot where the battle had originally begun. Two separate times, he made himself a prime target by crawling out to grab them by the armpits and drag them to safety. As he did so, he felt groggy from the concussion of several nearby rocket explosions and he flinched under the weight of more near-miss bullets than he could ever truly appreciate. “It’s the typical adrenaline story,” he said. “In normal times I couldn’t have carried those guys from here to the door.” After retrieving the first man, he was nearly overwhelmed with fear and wondered if he could bring himself to go back into the kill zone for the second man. “Of course there was . . . only one answer to that. You’ve gotta go ’cos you’re the lieutenant.” He did exactly that. Most of the 2nd Platoon soldiers made it back to McElwain’s defensive position. Cecil had lost four killed. Everyone else, except for one man, was wounded.10
Within the perimeter, the remnants of Cecil’s platoon were in the middle (most of his wounded men simply kept fighting). Brown was on the right and Kelley on the left. Task Force Black was surrounded but intact. Nearly everyone was hugging the ground, getting as low as possible. Much of the time, if they rose up even a foot or two, they risked getting blown away. The NVA attacked from nearly every direction. In the recollection of one soldier, these attacks “were characterized by an intense, concentrated barrage of rockets, mortar and rifle grenade fire immediately followed by a relentless infantry attack. The attackers surged through the bamboo toward [the] perimeter.” The Americans unloaded on them with rifles, machine guns, and grenades in the direction of the movement. The troopers had to be very careful to make sure the grenades did not bounce off trees and roll back in their own direction. “An AK fired at me and four rounds . . . [went] in the ground along my leg,” Sergeant Watson recalled. “We were fighting pretty heavily. Everybody [was], like, laying in a certain position, moving back and forth, trying to get lower. The leaves were covering us, which was probably a good thing.”
Not far away, Watson’s platoon leader, Ed Kelley, was imploring his machine gunners to fire short bursts and then displace before the enemy could pinpoint their location. Kelley’s mouth was dry from fright or adrenaline, he was not sure which. Behind him, wounded and dying men were screaming in terror (the memory of their desperate shrieks haunted him for many decades). Now, he was humbled by the responsibility of command. “What do we do now, L-T?” many of his young soldiers kept asking. This was the essence of combat leadership. In life-or-death situations, soldiers follow an officer or NCO, not always out of military discipline but because they have confidence in their judgment. Lieutenant Kelley was frightened out of his wits but, like any good leader, he knew he could not show that face of fear to his soldiers. “I was just as concerned about how we were gonna get out of there as they were. But they were looking to me. I was moving about pretty much all the time, shifting people here, shifting people there.”
His machine gunners were not following his orders quickly enough, and this allowed the NVA to zero in on them with B40 rockets. One of the rockets scored a direct hit on a team, vaporizing two men. “B40 rockets, you wouldn’t believe the power in them,” Staff Sergeant Curry said. “You get a direct hit, you’re gone, ain’t nothing left. They got hit and they just disintegrated.” A mortar round came in and exploded close to Private Lambertson’s head, bursting his eardrums, temporarily deafening him. Blood streamed from his damaged ears. The same round, plus an RPG, wounded Sergeant Watson, who had fragments in his jaw and an eye swollen shut. Sergeant Curry stayed close to the deafened Lambertson, pointing out where and when to shoot.
Most of the time, the NVA remained unseen, in the trees, like menacing apparitions. “The North Vietnamese presented an eerie picture as they moved ever so slowly,” an after action report stated. “The enemy would spread apart branches, fire one round, and then freeze.” Some of them even got into the American lines. One of them was running right past a shotgun-toting soldier. The American pointed and fired, cutting the NVA in half. Spec-4 Cox was lying on his back, against a log, looking for targets, when he saw two of them materialize right in front of his spot. In that instant, he was sure he would die. He only hoped the pain would not be too great when they shot him. “One of ’em looked right at me and I looked right back at him. We just sort of made eye contact. He was no more than . . . ten feet away.” Before Cox could aim and shoot his rifle, the man and his partner took off into the trees.
Not long after this, Cox saw Captain Hardy walking toward him. The Dog Company CO was everywhere that day, braving the intense enemy fire, inspiring—and worrying—his soldiers with his courage. Tall and lanky, Hardy was the sort of person whose strides were so long that, when he walked fast, he almost appeared to be running. Several times that morning, his men and his fellow officers begged him to get down. As he loped up to Cox, the young mortarman could hardly believe that the angry enemy bullets and fragments missed the upright captain. The officer peered down at Cox and a nearby soldier: “How are you jaybirds doing down here?”
“We’re doing fine, sir,” Cox replied.
“That’s good to know,” he said breezily and resumed his odyssey, moving from one spot to another to make sure the line was intact. Captain McElwain later saw him running, shooting his rifle, and hollering obscenities at the enemy. When Hardy rested for a moment next to a spot where McElwain was lying, the West Virginian said to him: “Slow down, Abe. You can’t beat them yourself.” Hardy just smiled and took off in the direction of Lieutenant Kelley’s platoon. One of the men was standing up, yelling at the NVA. Another was badly wounded, wandering around in shock, babbling. Kelley tackled both of them and tried to calm them.
Nearby, a gravely wounded man was sobbing and screaming: “I don’t wanna die!” Lieutenant Kelley watched as Hardy stood up, trotted over to where Sergeant Watson was lying wounded and half dazed, and knelt beside the NCO. Watson greatly admired the young captain for his courage and his military bearing. He gazed up at Hardy. The captain yelled some instructions to a group of men, glanced down at Sergeant Watson, and stood up. As he did so, an NVA tree sniper, probably no more than a couple dozen meters away, noticed the movement, aimed at Captain Hardy, and squeezed off several shots. “He took three rounds,” Watson remembered, “one in the head, the throat and the chest and he died on top of me and I couldn’t move him with my arms.” Somebody had to manhandle the captain’s lifeless body off Watson. His dead eyes stared vacantly at Watson, whose trauma over the horrible incident never went away.11
The intensity of the battle ran in cycles. The North Vietnamese kept up a steady volume of rocket and mortar fire. They would attack one part of the perimeter, get repulsed, regroup, and then hit somewhere else. “Sometimes it was really, really intense,” Private Lambertson explained. “Sometimes it wasn’t that bad. When it wasn’t that bad, you were moving around, collecting ammunition . . . getting guys to the middle of the perimeter where the aid station was. There was always something to do.” Some soldiers tried to dig in, using their helmets, bayonets, or even their fingernails. Officers and sergeants were constantly reorganizing and shoring up the firing line. Men were packed close together, facing outward toward the mostly unseen enemy, waiting for bona fide targets before opening fire so as not to waste their dwindling stocks of ammunition.
As Lambertson indicated, medics had collected the wounded in the center of the perimeter only a few meters behind the main lines. Many on the firing line were wounded but could still fight. Those who were lying in the middle of the perimeter were only the most badly wounded. Some of the medics, like Spec-4 Ennis Elliott, who was lugging around a shattered forearm from an AK bullet, along with several other debilitating wounds, were themselves casualties. “When you see somebody else hit, it doesn’t bother you,” he said. “But when you look at your own arm and see the bone and blood, it’s a shock.”
The company’s senior medic, Spec-4 Jim Stanzak, was a highly experienced soldier on his second tour with the 173rd in Vietnam. In that time, he had saved many lives. He had also seen quite a few soldiers die in his arms, their faces full of grief, shock, and sadness. Now he was dealing with more patients than he could handle. For him, the day was a whirlwind of responding to cries of “Doc!” or “Medic!” dragging wounded men to the middle of the perimeter and trying to save their lives. “I was getting guys hit one after another . . . and there was no way in hell that I could stay with [them] personally.” He moved from patient to patient, fighting his own personal battle with death. He was also in extreme danger himself. In one instance, a man next to him took two machine-gun rounds to the head, exploding his skull and brains over Stanzak’s shirt. “Of course, his head was pretty much gone.”
Nearby, when a machine-gun team got killed, Private First Class John Barnes braved withering enemy fire to leap over to the gun and man it himself. The Dedham, Massachusetts, native was on his second tour. He was anything but a recruiting poster soldier, though. He was eager and affable, but he had a permanent slovenliness to him and he always seemed to be the last man ready to move out each morning. He was the type of person who would look dirty three minutes after he took a shower. His buddies liked to call him Pig-pen. “[He] was a sad sack,” one soldier recalled. “I mean, he was never shaven. He had no noise discipline. Lieutenant Brown had to put a man in charge of his rucksack just to keep it quiet.”
What he lacked in field craft he made up for in courage. Several meters in front of Barnes’s gun, NVA attackers were surging ahead, trying to overrun this part of the line. “He was inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy as they made one human wave assault after another,” one nearby soldier recalled. In the recollection of Sergeant Robert Lampkin, his fire “turned back several enemy assaults, preventing that portion of the perimeter from being overrun.” His accurate M60 fire killed between six and nine enemy soldiers (estimates vary). This fire was the only thing that kept the enemy from breaching the line and killing Doc Stanzak and the helpless wounded who were all just a few meters behind Barnes.
Suddenly, a well-camouflaged enemy soldier snuck to within a few yards and hurled a grenade through the dense bamboo. In one surreal moment the grenade somehow sailed through several stands of bamboo, over the machine gunner’s head, and landed a few yards behind, right among the wounded. Spec-4 James Townsend, lying only a few feet away, saw the menacing grenade and noticed a flurry of motion from Barnes’s direction. “[He] leaped from his position and threw himself on the grenade.” Doc Stanzak had actually talked one time with Barnes about just such a situation as this. Barnes had assured the medic that he had too much to live for and would never hurl himself on a grenade. But, now, amid this anonymous stand of Vietnamese jungle and bamboo, when there was little time to mull over choices, Barnes made the ultimate sacrifice. Stanzak was only a few feet away. In the instant before the grenade detonated, the young New Englander happened to turn and look right at the medic. Stanzak saw “fright and fear” all over Barnes’s face, but his expression also seemed to convey a question: “Doc, didn’t I say I wasn’t gonna do this?”
The grenade exploded, lifting Barnes’s body about a foot off the ground, shredding his abdomen, almost cutting him in half. In a matter of seconds, he bled to death. Stanzak caught some shrapnel from the grenade, as did Sergeant Watson and a couple other men, but none of these wounds were life-threatening. Barnes had saved the lives of an untold number of his friends (one soldier estimated the number at ten). Why did he sacrifice himself to save the others? Perhaps out of love, perhaps out of obligation, perhaps just in the heat of the moment. His friends could never know for sure, but they were forever grateful to him. Glancing over at the brave man’s body, Lieutenant Kelley was struck by how frail he looked. “The grenade had blown a huge hole in his torso and penetrated different parts of his equipment. His face was completely intact.” For his heroism, Barnes earned a well-deserved Medal of Honor.12
Captain McElwain knew that, even though his men were fighting well, holding off powerful enemy attacks, time was not necessarily on their side. After all, they were surrounded, cut off from resupply, with many casualties, separated even from their rucksacks. Minute by minute, their stocks of water, medical supplies, and ammunition dwindled. Eventually, if Task Force Black did not get some serious help, the NVA would overrun the perimeter and probably kill everyone. Some of the men were down to only a few magazines of ammo, and were even saving their last bullet for themselves. “I just knew that nobody was gonna get out of there alive,” one of them later said. Lieutenant Kelley, like many, believed he would certainly die and found a strange sort of peace in accepting that sad reality. “A calmness . . . came over me. I guess it goes along with pure acceptance of the fact that this is gonna happen.”
McElwain was moving around frenetically, constantly on the radio, imploring higher command for help. On several occasions he had to personally fight for his life. “Each time the enemy carried the attack to the perimeter, CPT McElwain moved to the critical area killing the enemy when they started to break through and urging his men to hold the position,” a post-battle report chronicled. “He personally killed six or seven North Vietnamese that day.” In one such instance, several NVA soldiers came within fifteen feet of him but probably could not see him because of the dense bamboo. He raised his CAR-15 rifle and opened fire. “[The bamboo] was so thick in there that you could almost walk on top of somebody and not even see ’em,” he said. “I hit four of them.”
As McElwain’s RTO, Sergeant Chuck Clutter’s job was to stick close to him, no matter the danger. “I just never understood how anyone could pass through all that flying lead and . . . come out . . . unscathed,” he said. “He was just living right that day, I guess. There’s no answer to that.” Clutter himself took an AK round to the leg, breaking a bone, and it felt like “a thousand volts of electricity . . . attached to a baseball bat.” As medics tended to Clutter, Sergeant Jacques “Jack” deRemer, another member of the command group, took the radio from Clutter and gave it to another man. The wounded Clutter remembered that the fire around them was so thick that, as he lay bleeding, water from bamboo stalks kept splashing on him as bullets struck the stalks a couple feet overhead.
Employing the new RTO, McElwain remained in constant contact with Captain Ed Sills, the battalion operations officer, and Lieutenant Colonel Schumacher. By late morning, after passing along many conflicting reports on the size of the enemy force, McElwain was practically begging for help. Flying distantly in a helicopter thousands of feet overhead, and thus with no appreciation of the battle’s ferocity, Schumacher thought that McElwain was overreacting. “First you report a squad, then a platoon, then a company,” he said. “Now it’s a battalion. Get up and go after those people.”
McElwain was not a fan of Schumacher. In McElwain’s opinion, the colonel was the type of spit-shined commander who was content to buzz around in his command chopper, rarely ever getting on the ground with his troops. The captain thought of him as a careerist who cared much more about his next promotion than the welfare of his soldiers. In McElwain’s estimation, few things were so detestable as that. “He really didn’t have any interest in anybody other than himself,” McElwain said. This resentment, and the stress of the fight, boiled over into an argument. “Goddamn it, Six [radio lingo for the battalion commander],” he howled, “if you don’t get us some fucking help down here, you won’t have a Charlie Company! Listen to me, get us some help!”
Schumacher told McElwain to calm down and watch his language. The colonel still refused to send any substantial help. Fortunately, General Schweiter, the brigade commander, was listening to their radio communications. “You’d better listen to your man on the ground, Colonel,” he told Schumacher. “If he says he’s facing a battalion, he’s facing a battalion.” Only with that prodding from a superior did the battalion commander take action. He found that his options were limited. The logical force to relieve Task Force Black was Task Force Blue, since they came from the same battalion and were only a couple miles away. But they had run into an apparent enemy bunker complex and, according to Captain Jesmer, the outfit was pinned down by sniper fire. Schumacher told him to press through the complex and relieve Task Force Black. But Jesmer and his people remained pinned down by the snipers (actually this was just an enemy rear guard designed to hold off Task Force Blue while the main group finished off Task Force Black). Such was the intensity of the fighting going on all over the Dak To area that the only other unit available for an immediate rescue was Charlie Company of the brigade’s 4th Battalion, several kilometers away at Ben Het. Just after noon, General Schweiter ordered Lieutenant Colonel James Johnson, the battalion commander, to get the company ready for a helicopter assault. Captain Sills found a small LZ for them about eight hundred meters north of Task Force Black’s position.13
At 1300, even as McElwain and his people desperately hung on, Captain William Connolly and 120 of his Charlie Company troopers boarded their helicopters. After a short flight, the choppers dropped them off, one shipload at a time, in the LZ. “The company moved south, using trails and double-timing where possible to reach the embattled troopers of the First Battalion,” a unit report later said. “The men carried a full basic load of ammunition for themselves and another basic load for [Task Force Black].” They moved as fast as they could but they had to be constantly wary of an enemy ambush. Most of Connolly’s men knew that fellow paratroopers were in real trouble, so maintaining such a deliberate pace was frustrating for them. Sergeant Mike Tanner, a mortar forward observer with a radio strapped to his back, was especially impatient because he knew that his best friend from stateside training, Ben Warnic, was with McElwain’s surrounded group. “So I was pushing the point team really hard,” Tanner recalled. “I kept complaining that we were not going fast enough.”
The point team’s squad leader finally turned to Tanner and offered him point if he thought he could move so much faster. Tanner handed someone his radio and took the lead. He moved quickly and “recklessly not looking for booby traps or enemy ambushes.” Several minutes after assuming the lead, he was delicately stepping across basketball-sized rocks to traverse a dry streambed. He happened to look down and saw “that the streambed was crawling with . . . hundreds or thousands of bamboo viper snakes. They were little hatchlings with . . . twenty or thirty adult snakes.” The adults were a foot long and the babies about six inches. Hundreds of them slithered around the bottom of the rocks, a few inches from his boots. He kept going and the company followed him, but he soon yielded point back to the original group.
Before long, they could hear the distant sounds of Task Force Black’s battle. Captain Connolly was in constant radio contact with Captain McElwain, informing him of his company’s progress. Connolly’s point elements made it to Task Force Black’s original hilltop laager site and began to trade shots with groups of NVA. They also surprised and captured a couple enemy soldiers who were rifling through the rucksacks McElwain’s men had left behind. The NVA had pilfered many packs for food and medical supplies and had even tried to employ the Americans’ 81-millimeter mortars against them.
As Connolly’s outfit began pushing down the hill, directly toward the Task Force Black perimeter, they ran into strong enemy opposition. After all, they were fighting through enemy lines to get to McElwain’s position. Periodic firefights broke out as Connolly’s men bumped into the NVA and fought it out. The captain was a West Pointer and a Ranger School alum who was totally dedicated to his soldiers. He was also highly experienced, having been in Vietnam for a year and a half. At just twenty-four years old, he was young for company command. He had trained his men to hit the dirt upon making contact, flip off their rucksacks, and use them as cover. Some would return fire. Some would dig in. During the rescue of Task Force Black, these tactics proved highly effective, partially because Charlie Company was dealing with quite a few tree snipers. The rucks provided a modicum of cover. The captain himself noticed a bullet in his ruck, looked up, and saw an NVA in a tree. “Sergeant [Janus] Shalovan, one of my platoon sergeants, was pretty close behind. I turned around and pointed to him and, next thing I know, that guy was falling out of the tree.” In another instance, an NVA suddenly materialized a few feet away from the command group. Spec-5 Lynn Morse, the senior medic, blasted him with a shotgun. In Connolly’s recollection, the fléchettes from the shotgun shell “actually stuck him to a tree. The NVA guy’s toes were dangling.”
NVA opposition was formidable, though, and several times Connolly’s company had to retreat and regroup as they tried to make a last push to the perimeter. Part of the problem was that they were also taking fire from Task Force Black. “They’d tell their guys don’t shoot . . . somebody’s coming in,” Connolly said, “then the enemy would shoot and somebody would return fire.” Finally, he arranged with McElwain to have his guys completely cease fire for about a minute while Connolly’s company charged through the NVA, into the perimeter. At Connolly’s signal, they got up and sprinted down the ridge straight at Task Force Black’s lines. “Bullets were flying everywhere and the men began yelling and shouting the running password to identify themselves in the confusion,” one post-battle report stated. “They leaped and tripped over the dead and wounded as they broke into the perimeter.” As they came in, they yelled “173rd! Don’t shoot!” or “Geronimo!” or “Airborne!” Staff Sergeant Donald Ibenthal, one of Connolly’s men, later said: “We wanted to make sure they knew we were coming and also so they wouldn’t fire at us when we came in.” He saw dead and wounded men everywhere. “The machine gunners we replaced were both shot in the head several times.” The enemy fire slackened as Connolly’s company made it through, either because the NVA were regrouping or perhaps because they were demoralized at the arrival of these newcomers.
The Task Force Black soldiers, many of whom had resigned themselves to imminent death, could hardly believe their eyes or contain their joy. “The emotion of knowing you only have a few more minutes or hours to live and you are helpless to do anything about it, being turned around to knowing that the bad guys are gone, Dr. Death is nowhere to be seen, and you have survived is impossible for me to describe,” one of them later wrote. Sergeant deRemer, a white soldier, was so excited that he got up and kissed the first relieving trooper, “this big black guy. I refer to him as the first black guy I ever kissed on the lips,” he said and laughed.
When Mike Tanner got through, he only saw four soldiers and feared these were the only survivors. To his relief, though, he saw that many other Task Force Black soldiers were still alive, including his buddy Ben Warnic, who was wounded but stable. Throughout the perimeter, officers and NCOs of both units coordinated a mutual relief and defense. For Lieutenant Charles Brown, the moment was perhaps the happiest of his life, even though his platoon had only six effectives left. A skinny, large-nosed sergeant first class brought his own platoon up to relieve Brown’s. The young lieutenant thought that this grizzled sergeant was “the handsomest and bravest human on earth at that moment.” The NCO lit a cigarette, stuck it in Brown’s mouth, handed him a canteen, and said: “Tell your men to pull back and relax, we have everything under control now.” The time was 1437.
The relief of Task Force Black did not end the battle, but it did mean that the NVA now had no real hope of annihilating the Americans and that was, after all, the purpose of their ambush. The Americans now had the initiative. They spent the rest of the afternoon gradually fighting their way back to the laager hill. McElwain did, though, have to leave many of his dead behind, including Captain Hardy’s body. By nightfall, enemy attacks had ceased and the NVA contented themselves with lobbing mortar shells and rockets at the hill. This was not exactly a safe environment, but it was a veritable paradise compared with what Task Force Black had endured much of the day. The Americans were firmly ensconced on the hill. They had some helicopters coming in and plenty of supporting fire. Compared with the events of the day, the night was quiet.
The survivors were left to contemplate, sometimes through thousand-yard stares, the ordeal they had just endured. Almost everyone in Task Force Black had some sort of wound. McElwain’s force had lost 20 dead, 154 wounded, and 2 missing. Connolly’s company had 65 wounded, with no one killed. Sergeant deRemer, like most of the “lightly” wounded, refused evacuation (as did all of the company officers). His chore was to supervise the evacuation of the wounded and the dead. “One of my jobs was . . . to inventory each body bag and make sure that if it was a white body that all the other parts were white, and making sure we didn’t have a bag with . . . two left feet in it.” Sometimes he even had to move parts from bag to bag, a surreal and disturbing task.14
Task Force Black had survived, and won, not just because of the salvation given to them by their Charlie Company, 4th Battalion brothers, but also because of superb leadership and extraordinary valor. From the outset, Captain McElwain had recognized the extreme danger his unit was in, and took steps to avoid a repeat of the Battle of the Slopes. Most of his survivors believed that he and the other officers saved their lives because of their good leadership. McElwain saw it differently. He believed that he survived because of the bravery of his men. “I’ve always been thankful that I had that unit because they saved my life. If I’d have had maybe a different unit where I couldn’t have controlled them as much or if they didn’t have that esprit like paratroopers did . . . it may have turned out different, because we were very close to being overrun.”
The sad postscript was that, in the context of the Dak To struggle, none of this meant enough strategically. The hill and the saddle were worthless. The surviving Americans were in no position to hunt down and destroy the battered NVA, whose 66th Regiment had sprung the ambush (they lost about a battalion in the fight). In the context of Westmoreland’s attrition strategy, all that really mattered strategically was a high body count and a favorable ratio of casualties—kill way more of theirs than they do of yours.
Lieutenant Colonel Schumacher was a confirmed citizen of the body count culture. Like practically every other officer, he knew that his reputation and career advancement depended upon producing the right numbers. On the morning of November 12, he flew into the battle area and ordered McElwain to send patrols out to count the enemy dead. There was nothing inherently wrong with this order, as it made good sense to honestly assess the enemy’s losses. The problem was the overwhelming emphasis he placed on producing numbers that sounded good.
McElwain’s exhausted and sad survivors policed up their own dead and then fanned out, counting the decomposing remnants of their enemies—men who, like the Americans, also had families, homes, and much to live for. The stench was nauseating, like draping oneself in rotten meat. The troopers constantly had to be wary of booby traps and ambushes. The job was enervating and disgusting. “It was a very, very trying time for the soldiers there,” McElwain later said. “It was an emotional event for them because they had so many of their buddies who’d been killed. I could just see it in their eyes how scared and tired and mad” they were. After an all-day search, they passed along a body count of sixty or seventy enemy. When McElwain reported that to Schumacher, he snapped: “Goddamnit, Captain, you lose twenty people and you expect me to accept a body count of seventy. Go back down there tomorrow and find me some bodies.”
McElwain grumbled but he complied. After another nightmarish day of counting, identifying, and digging up enemy bodies in the tropical heat, the captain reported a find of ninety-five bodies. Still, this was not good enough for Schumacher, who clearly wanted something well into triple figures. “I can’t believe you’ve had that many men killed and wounded and there’s not any more enemy bodies down there so I want you to go back down.”
McElwain had finally had enough. He was already angry at the colonel for his reluctance to send help during the battle. He was tired and sad and coursing with grief over his dead men. He bristled at the idea of his soldiers’ valor being reduced to a mere casualty ratio for some bean counter at MACV. He knew that Schumacher was only motivated by his desire to produce a favorable body count so he would look good to his superiors, and the very idea of this angered him all the more. “Look here, Colonel,” McElwain barked, “you tell me the fuckin’ number you want! If you want a hundred and fifty, that’s what the number is, but I ain’t taking my men back down there again.”
The two men bickered some more. McElwain told the colonel that if he insisted on pressing the matter, the captain would go down and count the bodies by himself, without risking his men. The colonel backed off when they settled on the captain’s farcical suggestion of 150. The official records downgraded the total to 116, plus assorted strays. Either way, the ledger looked good to higher command. Schumacher had gotten his favorable body count.15
See the Hill, Take the Hill: The Horror of 875
The tension was palpable, jolting, like an electrical current. Here and there, morning fog hung in the valleys. For three companies of troopers, Alpha, Charlie, and Dog of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, the order of the day from Major James Steverson, the battalion commander, was to take Hill 875. The hill was an unsightly, jungle- and tree-covered pile of woebegone earth a few miles east of Cambodia. It had no intrinsic value except that the NVA was there. The previous day, a Special Forces team had detected their presence and engaged in a brief firefight with them. The Americans had then spent much of the nighttime and early morning hours hurling the usual blend of firepower at the hill.
Now, after sunrise on this Sunday morning of November 19, it was time for the grunts to take it. This order came with little circumspection, no assessment of enemy numbers, no serious analysis of the strength of NVA defenses on the hill, nor any consideration of whether the hill was a worthwhile objective. In the war of attrition, Hill 875 was just one more place to find, fix, and kill the enemy. In the context of the episodic fighting that was raging around Dak To in November 1967, one hill was like any other. As at the Umurbrogol on Peleliu a generation before, American commanders had almost no idea what they were getting into.
But the grunts did. After several days of clashing with the enemy in his Dak To lair, the infantrymen sensed the danger that lurked on Hill 875. They had enough experience that they could sense the enemy’s presence in such recent finds as spools of abandoned communication wire, steps cut into hills, vacant base camps, bloody bandages, and propaganda leaflets. Some of the soldiers even swore that they could feel the enemy’s nearby presence. Many of the paratroopers believed this day would be their last day on earth. Before setting out for the hill, quite a few of them attended a Catholic Mass given by the battalion’s legendary, universally loved chaplain, Father Charles Watters, a forty-year-old priest who made a point of spending most of his time in the field with the grunts. The respected priest even said Mass with camouflaged vestments and a portable altar. Like several other troopers, Sergeant Steven Welch attended the Mass even though he was not Catholic. “I figured I needed all the help I could get because things weren’t looking good on that hill.”
At 0943, the grunts began trudging up the hill, negotiating their way around felled trees and through scrub brush. “There was a heavy undergrowth of bushes, vines and small trees,” a post-battle report stated. “Visibility was restricted generally to 5 to 15 meters and not more than 25 meters.” Farther up the hill, the Americans could detect some gaps in the jungle where bombs and shells had impacted. Everything was quiet, unusually so, as if all the creatures of the jungle understood that the hill was pregnant with menace.
In column formations, Dog and Charlie Companies led the way with Alpha following behind in reserve. A small trail slashed down the hill, separating Dog on the left from Charlie on the right. About twenty meters separated the point squads of the two companies. A squad of scouts with specially trained dogs forged ahead, hustling up and down the hill, looking around for signs of the enemy. One of these soldiers picked up the harsh, sweet scent of marijuana smoke: “I smell Charlies,” he said to another man. Neither he nor anyone else could see them, though. The scouts worked their way back down to the point men and warned them that NVA soldiers were very close. “Watch your ass, Zack,” one of them said to Spec-4 Raymond Zaccone, a machine gunner, “the gooks are up there and they’ll be after you.” Zaccone and his squad leader, Sergeant Welch, were at the point of Charlie’s advance. A shudder ran down their collective spines. To their left they could see Spec-4 Kenneth Jacobsen, Dog Company’s point man, along with his slack man and his squad leader a few meters behind him.
About three hundred meters from the top of the hill, they came to a clearing that had been created by a bomb. Mounds of dirt and tangled brambles were heaped in random clumps. “At the edge of the treeline, when I looked out, I could tell . . . there were what looked like bunkers to me,” Sergeant Welch said. “It looked like we were gonna walk into a kill area.” Welch had been in Vietnam for eleven months. He knew an ambush when he saw one. He was sure the NVA were in those bunkers, waiting for him and the others to stray into their kill zone. He halted the point men and radioed his company commander, Captain Harold Kaufman, and twice asked for permission to recon by fire. The captain would not hear of it: “Negative. Move your men out now.” In disgust, Welch flipped the radio handset back to his RTO.
Hearing the captain’s order, Zaccone said: “This is stupid. This is fucking crazy.” Welch nodded in agreement but gave the order to move out. A moment later, Spec-4 Jacobsen was stepping over a downed tree in the clearing when he smelled the enemy. He turned to his slack man and pointed at his nose. He lowered his hand and turned back again. Three shots rang out, ripping through Jacobsen, knocking him backward, probably dead before he hit the ground. One of the rounds tore through his head, spraying pieces of his skull and brain in a halo around him. In that instant, the world exploded as both sides opened up with everything they had. A medic named Farley ran to Jacobsen, hoping he could still be saved. Bullets laced through the medic, reeling him violently backward, killing him instantly. “We’d never seen anything like this,” Spec-4 Zaccone later said. “I dropped down to one knee . . . trying to see something. The next thing I saw to my left, the brush was just being mowed down. Being a machine gunner, once the firing started, I couldn’t make a move without being shot at.”
The Americans were taking rifle, machine-gun, grenade, rocket, and even recoilless rifle fire. Men were getting hit left and right. “There is no sound in this world like a bullet tearing through a human body,” Private Joe Aldridge said. “It sounded like slaps.” Sergeants kept imploring their men to get up the hill, but that was impossible. The Sky Soldiers were actually right in the middle of a mutually supporting, expertly built NVA bunker complex, exactly where the enemy wanted to fight them. Some of the soldiers were no more than five meters away from bunkers. The enemy fighting positions were so well camouflaged in this mazelike jungle that it was quite difficult for the Americans to see them at all—at least until it was too late. Many of the bunkers were connected by underground tunnels. Even when the troopers succeeded in pitching grenades into apertures or killing enemy soldiers, others soon came through the tunnels, into the same bunkers, replacing their dead comrades. For the most part, the grunts were shooting blind. Many of them simply pointed their weapons in the vague direction of danger and snapped off shots.
Sergeant Welch was hugging the ground, listening to AK-47 and machine-gun bullets impact around him. In nearly a year in Vietnam, he had never experienced fire this intense. A medic crawled up next to Welch. The sergeant ordered him to go help a wounded man. He crept a few feet forward but got killed before he could get to the soldier. As in any firefight this serious, people were shouting, crying, and raging. The average soldier saw only a few feet in any direction and had no clue what was happening. “Everybody that moved seemed to get hit,” Lieutenant Bart O’Leary, Dog Company’s commander, recalled. “Progress sort of stalled at that time.” Throughout the morning, at Major Steverson’s behest, the paratroopers tried multiple assaults up the hill. Every one of them failed.
Finally, Captain Kaufman, the senior company commander, decided to call off the attack and pull everyone into a perimeter. While the soldiers laboriously extricated themselves from the kill zones of various bunkers and crawled back down the hill, fighter planes dropped bombs and napalm near the crest. Under fire all the way, the grunts managed to set up mutually supporting positions about twenty meters down from the initial point of contact. “The men began to dig in with knives, steel pots or anything else they could work with,” an officer later wrote.16
A few dozen meters down the hill from them, Captain Michael Kiley, commander of Alpha Company, ordered his Weapons Platoon to cut an LZ and a collecting point for the wounded while his other platoons fanned out. His 1st Platoon protected the rear flank, closer to the bottom of the hill. The other two tried to tie in with Dog and Charlie Companies, a difficult task because the Alpha soldiers were spread very thin, mostly along the trail, in thick vegetation. They could hardly see the next squad, much less the other companies.
Nearer the bottom of the hill, about forty meters away from the company, four 1st Platoon soldiers were on OP duty, guarding the rear of the entire American force on the hill. Private First Class Carlos Lozada, a tough twenty-one-year-old kid from the Bronx, was lying just to the left of the trail, in a nice firing position, hunched over an M60 machine gun. Beside him was Spec-4 John Steer, his assistant gunner. His team leader, Spec-4 James Kelley, and Private First Class Anthony Romano were hiding behind some bushes to the right of the trail. Romano was incensed: “This is stupid . . . a fucking suicide mission,” he huffed. The others shushed him and then he stalked away, back to the company. Soon thereafter they heard mortar shells exploding behind them. The rounds were detonating near the company command group, but the outpost men did not know that. The three men peered down the trail and noticed movement. A column of NVA soldiers emerged, no more than about twenty or thirty meters away, and walked right toward them. “They had on regular uniforms with bushes tied on them and black painted on their faces to camouflage themselves,” Steer said. “Also, they had burlap sacks tied around their weapons.”
Lozada waited until they were within fifteen meters and then opened up. “Kelley, here they come!” he yelled. He unloosed a long burst that caught the NVA by complete surprise and scythed through several of them. The rest scattered in every direction. On the other side of the trail, Kelley hurled two grenades and emptied a full magazine of M16 bullets in their direction. In spite of the heavy American fire, the enemy soldiers fired back with rifles and RPGs and kept coming. “They were trotting toward us in rows,” Steer said, “they would run, drop down and get up and run some more. And they kept coming. They got real close.” Steer kept feeding ammo into Lozada’s gun. The two soldiers screamed at each other over the din of the weapons, intently looking for new targets. Steer saw an NVA only a few yards away. “I don’t know how this guy got so close. I emptied an entire magazine into him.”
By most estimates, Lozada alone killed as many as twenty enemy soldiers. Kelley and Steer killed six more. Still the NVA kept coming. These men represented the vanguard of two NVA companies that were leading a battalion-sized assault on the rear of the attacking American force. To get in position, they had moved along carefully prepared and concealed trails and hillside steps. The NVA was planning an elaborate bait and switch. While the American force was pinned down by the formidable nest of bunkers on Hill 875, these two NVA companies were to attack from behind, cut off and isolate the paratroopers, and kill them. The outpost men held them up for several valuable minutes while Alpha Company reacted to the surprise attack.
Several men from the 1st Platoon heard the sound of the shooting and ran to help the outpost men. At least three got wounded. Private First Class Romano carried one of them farther up the hill. He and several other soldiers yelled at the OP men to retreat. “They either didn’t hear or refused . . . as they continued to fire and to throw grenades at the advancing enemy, who by now had gotten on both sides of us and threatened to surround us,” Romano recalled.
At the outpost, the situation was getting critical. Spec-4 Kelley yelled for his machine-gun team to displace to his side of the trail. As Lozada kept firing, Steer dashed over to Kelley. Lozada stood up, held his M60 at the hip, and blazed away until he made it behind the log where Kelley and Steer had taken cover. The NVA were all over the place now and Kelley knew they had only moments to escape. “Lozada refused,” Kelley said. “He would not pull back even when [the NVA] were just meters away.” Kelley shot and killed one nearby camouflaged enemy soldier and then his weapon jammed. He got it fixed and hollered at his men to retreat. Lozada also had a jam but he cleared it, resumed firing, and told his buddies to fall back. In the confusion, as Steer was turning to go, he glanced to his right and saw enemy soldiers tromping past them. “Get down, Carlos!” he roared. In the next instant, two bullets slammed into Steer’s back and his left arm. He spun around and saw Lozada up on the trail, starting to fall back. A bullet tore through the New Yorker’s head and he went down in a heap. “He died in my arms,” Steer said. “My eyes were wild and crazy. I was crying and saying how they had got Lozada.” Kelley hurled a couple grenades, keeping the NVA at bay long enough to somehow collect the hysterical Steer and run up the trail, back to the platoon. Lieutenant Joseph Sheridan, leader of the 3rd Platoon, believed that the young machine gunner “gave the company the time to regroup and rejoin the task force.” Lozada earned the Medal of Honor for his bravery in holding off the enemy attackers. In Kelley’s estimation, the Bronx native “gave his life so that his comrades could be saved.”17
In the meantime, the two NVA companies, with plenty of supporting mortar and rocket fire, were assaulting all out against the rear of the American perimeter, hitting Alpha Company especially hard. “Nothing was stopping them,” Private Miguel Orona, a rifleman, recalled. “They kept coming. It was like we were shooting through ’em.” Some of the NVA soldiers were emboldened by narcotics. “Several had strange grins on their faces,” a paratrooper later wrote. “One trooper reported seeing an NVA charge into a tree, bounce off and continue his charge.”
The situation was so desperate that they overran and killed the company command group, including Captain Kiley. They also executed several of the nearby wounded men. Lieutenant Tom Remington, the 2nd Platoon leader, led an abortive attempt to rescue Kiley and his men but ran into heavy opposition. Remington himself got seriously wounded. “I had a bad shrapnel wound in my leg and then a few seconds later, I was shot in the shoulder. Of . . . ten men with me, I think maybe five were dead and [the] other five were wounded. So . . . we never got to Captain Kiley.” The company’s survivors carried out a harried, fighting retreat up the hill, into the perimeter established by Dog and Charlie Companies.
They placed their many wounded in a bomb crater in the middle of the perimeter. Eventually there were close to one hundred wounded men in and around this spot. Some could still fight. Others were too badly wounded to do anything but lie still and cling to life. Men were crying, pleading for their lives, raging at the enemy or their wounds, and calling out for their mothers.
The medics had suffered devastating casualties. Many were dead. Others were wounded.
Father Watters was on a one-man mission of mercy, risking his life all over the hill, retrieving and tending to wounded men, whether in or out of the perimeter. He moved around so much, amid such devastating fire, that it hardly seemed possible he could remain unscathed. Lieutenant Bryan McDonough saw him scurry through snapping bullets and plop down beside one of the dying medics. “He cradled him in his arms, saying a quick prayer over him. After giving him last rites and blessing him, he moved forward toward the enemy to the next wounded man.” He did this more times than anyone could count. In the lieutenant’s estimation, the brave priest’s actions inspired the soldiers “on to greater risks and very brave deeds.”
He carried or dragged an untold number of wounded men to the relative safety of the bomb crater. He distributed ammo and water. In spite of the extreme danger he was in, he hardly seemed to notice. “He showed no strain or stress especially when among the wounded,” one soldier later wrote. “The men talked to him freely and I’m sure he prevented several from going into shock.” Several of the soldiers pleaded with him to get down but he paid them no heed. When Captain Kaufman urged him to take cover, he replied: “It is all right, someone has to do it.” He moved among the wounded, dispensing water, praying with them, talking to them, keeping their spirits up. With water and medical supplies running perilously low, he used his holy water and wine to bring some relief to wounded soldiers. “He was my hero,” one soldier later said. “He cared so much for us. He was always there. There was no task that was too difficult.”
It is fair to say that no one was more inspirational that day than Watters. Although he was a man of peace who carried no weapon, no one instilled more fighting spirit in the troopers. He was the very embodiment of mercy, self-sacrifice, and duty. To frightened young men in a life-and-death situation, he was the face of God. He took crazy chances yet he did not get hit. To some, it seemed as if God was protecting him from the enemy bullets and fragments, as if a miracle was happening before their very eyes. At one point, Spec-4 Zaccone happened to glance over and see the priest with a dying soldier in his lap, administering last rites. “The sun happened to be shining down through the trees. He smiled at me. It was like this reassuring smile, his way of giving me some encouragement.” The two men waved at each other.
Watters’s smile was so peaceful, so reassuring, that it gave Zaccone some measure of peace himself, even amid such violent circumstances. “No one could quite believe the things that Father Watters did unless they had witnessed it,” another man later said.18
As had occurred with alarming frequency throughout the Dak To campaign, the NVA at Hill 875 had forced a potent American ground force into an isolated, surrounded, hard-pressed perimeter. From well-hidden—and expertly displacing—positions on adjacent hills, NVA mortar and rocket crews hurled their deadly projectiles at the Americans. All over the perimeter, their comrades probed and attacked, provoking ruthless firefights between small groups of frightened men. “I was between two riflemen,” Sergeant Welch recalled, “and I looked to one side and saw the right eye explode in the guy’s head as the bullet went through it. Then, when I looked to my right, the other guy caught one in the forehead and he flopped down and . . . died.” As always, the Americans fought back with stubborn determination and almost incomprehensible valor. They huddled in their shallow holes, picked their targets carefully, and held the line.
Try as they might, the NVA could not breach the perimeter. But they made it nearly impossible for helicopters to resupply the hard-pressed paratroopers. Any chopper approaching the hill flew through a gauntlet of small-arms, machine-gun, and rocket fire. The lower they flew, the worse the fire. Six helicopters were hit so badly that they were barely able to limp back to their base a few miles away at Ben Het. One crew did succeed in dropping, from an altitude of eighty feet, a couple pallets of ammunition into the perimeter. Sergeants distributed the ammo—mainly grenades and M16 magazines—as evenly as possible. Another pallet of ammo landed fifteen meters beyond the American lines on a downslope halfway between the opposing sides. Rushing beyond the perimeter, a recovery team attempted to recover the ammunition. The NVA reacted quickly, spraying machine-gun and rifle fire all around the pallet. Several soldiers tried to drag the crates back to friendly lines while Lieutenant Peter Lantz, another member of West Point’s class of 1966, unleashed covering fire in the direction of the enemy. An NVA sniper squeezed off a perfect shot, killing the lieutenant instantly. The men had to leave his body where it fell.
As usual, another major factor in keeping the enemy at bay was prodigious supporting fire. Artillery shells, most commonly from 105-millimeter howitzers, burst all over the hill, wounding and killing NVA, disrupting their movements. Air strikes also did grisly, unrelenting work. In the recollection of one officer whose job was to coordinate air support, “pilots who had expended their ordnance would call back to their base and let them know [they] wanted [to be] rearmed as soon as [they] landed” because they were so badly needed at Hill 875. Many pilots flew three or four sorties over the course of the day.
As evening approached, the shooting quieted down a bit. The battered American survivors were deeply worried that the NVA was regrouping for a night attack. Air strikes continued to pound the NVA-controlled portions of the hill. At 1858, just as darkness crept over the unhappy hill, a lone American plane approached from the northeast, on course to pass over the shoulders of the Americans. Previous planes had swooped in from the other direction, over enemy lines. Noticing this, one of the first sergeants told his RTO to call the forward air controller and ask why. As he did so, the plane flew directly overhead. Many of the Americans thought the plane was a Marine jet. Others believed it was a prop-driven Air Force A-1E Skyraider. Such are the vagaries of eyewitness observations, especially in a combat setting.
Regardless of what it was, the pilot was clearly confused as to the location of the American lines. By the light of a flare, he dropped two 500-pound bombs over the American positions. One of them detonated, with a bright flash and a powerful wall of concussive sound, directly above Captain Kaufman’s command post. The effect was nearly apocalyptic. In less time than it took to blink an eye, Kaufman and his command group were killed, as were many of the nearby wounded. Many of them were literally blown to bits, liquidated, as though they never existed. Father Watters was killed outright. So was Lieutenant Richard “Buck” Thompson, yet another member of West Point’s class of ’66. Some of the dead were blown to pieces. Hands, legs, heads, and torsos were scattered everywhere. “I could see the body parts on the trees,” one survivor remembered. Those same trees were smeared with blood and flesh. In one position, a soldier looked up and saw a naked corpse hanging in the tree above him. Try as he might, he could not free up the corpse. Not wanting to attract enemy attention, he left the corpse alone, even though the bottom of the dead man’s feet nearly touched his shoulders.
For about ten or fifteen seconds after the detonation, a stunned silence hung over the hill while the survivors shook off concussion and tried to figure out what had just happened. The only noise was the diffuse crackling of small fires. Spec-4 Ronald Fleming’s eardrums were ruptured. Amid the drowsy world of silence around him, he kept screaming for someone to put out the fires. Blood was pouring from Spec-4 Steer’s nose, mouth, and ears. “I noticed my right arm was gone because I went to pick it up and it was just hanging by some tissue. My right leg was almost gone.” Thinking he was about to die, he cried out: “God, don’t let me go to hell!” and then passed out. Lieutenant O’Leary, the Dog Company commander, had a sucking chest wound, but his first sergeant was hurt even worse. As O’Leary struggled to save the sergeant’s life, he saw a man walk past holding the stump of his left arm with his right. “Will someone tie off my arm?” he mumbled to no one in particular and staggered away.
Sergeant Welch awoke to the sound of a man behind him screaming: “My legs are gone! Mom! Mom!” The man bled to death in his lieutenant’s arms. Private First Class Clarence Johnson had been easing into a shallow fighting hole when the bomb hit, flinging him several feet in the air. “It took out my elbow and most of my left arm. My humerus bone and all the bones . . . closest to my shoulder down to the middle of my arm . . . were pretty much shattered.” He lay quietly, fighting off concussion, with no morphine or medical care, all the while bleeding and in pain. Lieutenant Remington, wounded even before the bombing, was now hurt even worse, with shrapnel in his side and shattered eardrums. Even so, he had the presence of mind to crawl past horribly wounded, crying men and body parts to find a radio, get in touch with the firebase, and call off any further air strikes: “Stop those fucking airplanes,” he roared. “Don’t let ’em drop another bomb. They’re killing us up here.” The bomb killed forty-two Americans and wounded forty-five others. It was the worst friendly fire incident of the Vietnam War.
Of the 290 men who had ascended the hill in the morning, 100 were now dead and at least 50 more wounded. Even so, junior people took over leadership positions and began to reorganize the shattered remains of the unit. Within thirty minutes, they had reestablished the perimeter. With little water, no food, and a looming ammunition shortage, they held on, warding off several probing North Vietnamese attacks (by most accounts, the bombing had also hurt the NVA badly). Men slept or fought next to the corpses of their dead friends. Crazed with thirst, wounded troopers lapsed in and out of consciousness. The enemy well understood the importance of psychological warfare. They blew bugles and taunted the Americans with calls to surrender. A few of them got within ten meters of the American positions, but none broke through. “The night was absolutely hell on earth,” Remington later said. “It was just desolate up there, scary, the smell . . . there was just death in the air.”19
Knowing that the 2nd Battalion was in deep trouble, General Schweiter arranged for a relief force. He hopped on his helicopter and flew to see Lieutenant James Johnson, commander of the 4th Battalion. “Jim,” he said, “you’ll have to get your people to that hill. Get them there as fast as you can.” Thus, for the second time in a week, troopers from this battalion were called upon to rescue a stricken group from another battalion. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson’s companies had seen plenty of fighting themselves. They were spread all over the area. He got in touch with his company commanders and they spent the rest of the night hastily organizing a relief mission.
Johnson had less than three hundred men available within his Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Companies. The situation was so critical that Johnson did not concentrate his companies and send them out as one large force. Instead, they set out as they were ready. Bravo was the first. Shortly after sunrise, about one hundred troopers from this company left Fire Base 16, a few kilometers to the northeast of Hill 875. They had spent a long, impatient night preparing for the rescue of their airborne brethren. “There was fear,” one of them later wrote, “but on top of that fear was the driving force that we must get to and save our brothers.” Knowing much about the 2nd Battalion’s plight, they were laden down with extra food, water, and ammunition. Since a favorite NVA tactic was to pin down one unit and ambush a relieving force, Bravo Company proceeded very carefully along narrow trails, through thick jungle and bamboo, even employing a rolling artillery barrage ahead of their line of advance. The going was exhausting and tense. It took Bravo Company the entire day to make it to Hill 875. “We encountered sniper positions, commo wire, well-used trails and various other signs of a large enemy presence,” Private First Class Rocky Stone, a machine gunner, recalled. They found several enemy base camps with bloody bandages, dead bodies, and even parts of bodies. They also discovered, and destroyed, several enemy mortar rounds.
By late afternoon they were finally within sight of the hill. All this time, of course, 2nd Battalion had continued to take accurate mortar and rocket fire, even as they fended off more enemy attacks. They were perilously low on water and ammo. Few of them had any food left. The Bravo Company troopers could hear the shooting. They also were engulfed in the powerful stench of death that permeated Hill 875. Fortunately, the NVA did not hold a continuous line around the hill. The Bravo Company men carefully ascended the ingenious steps that enemy soldiers had cut into the side of 875. Soon the relief force saw the grisly results of the previous day’s fighting. “American bodies along with enemy bodies [were] all entwined on the jungle floor, covered in blood, some blown apart,” Private First Class Stone recalled. “We saw bodies strewn all along our route. The smell of gunpowder, napalm, and death engulfed the hill and filled our noses.” They found Private First Class Lozada’s body, still at his gun, with NVA corpses all around him. Everyone was spooked by the sight of the bodies, so much so that some men wondered aloud if they would ever make it off this hill. The horrible cries of the wounded only added to the trepidation. The cries conveyed hopelessness, agony, vulnerability, and even anger. “This sound was one that none of us will ever forget,” Stone said.
Somewhere between 1700 and 1730, Sergeant Leo Hill and his point element made contact with the 2nd Battalion. “There were tears in their eyes as they greeted their buddies from the 4/503d Inf.,” one report claimed. The 4th Battalion soldiers passed out whatever food and water they had left. “It was like stepping into the third circle of hell,” one soldier later commented. The cratered hill looked like a garbage dump, strewn as it was with discarded equipment, boxes, helmets, weapons, uniforms, and, of course, human remains. Felled trees lay crisscrossed in jagged patterns, making movement difficult. An odor of death, vomit, urine, and human feces blanketed the perimeter. Many of the filthy, dehydrated 2nd Battalion men were in a state of mental shock, gazing with listless, wide-eyed thousand-yard stares at their friends. In the recollection of one Bravo Company man, their faces communicated “relief at seeing us, yet a look of total terror, pain and disbelief.” Bravo’s medics began working on the many wounded. One of them treated badly hurt Private First Class Clarence Johnson and gave him some water, immediately lifting his spirits. “You knew you were gonna . . . live.”20
Alpha and Charlie Companies stumbled into the perimeter a few hours later, after dark. Throughout the night, the three companies and the 2nd Battalion survivors manned the perimeter, expanded an LZ, dealt with the wounded, and called in fire missions on the NVA bunkers. The enemy responded with heavy mortar and rocket fire. The shelling was accurate enough to add to the list of American dead and wounded. In the darkness, some of the Americans, while keeping watch, inadvertently rested their weapons on dead bodies, thinking they were sandbags.
As the sun rose over the eastern horizon on November 21, the paratroopers were busy hacking out a new LZ, tending to the wounded, policing up weapons and bodies, setting up mortars, and planning their next move. Helicopters still had to run a veritable wall of fire to get in and out of Hill 875, but the gutsy crewmen did succeed in dropping off some supplies and evacuating the worst of the wounded.
Lieutenant Colonel Johnson was a no-nonsense, fair-minded leader who was well thought of by his men. Even so, he was not actually on the hill (yet another example of an absentee battalion commander). He was, though, in constant radio contact with Captain Ron Leonard, who was Bravo’s commander and the ranking 4th Battalion officer on 875. At 0900, Johnson told Leonard that, in two hours, he wanted him to launch an attack to capture the summit of the hill. The captain was not surprised in the least by this order. In fact, he fully expected it and agreed with it. Yet, in retrospect, much can be read into this seemingly straightforward command. From Lieutenant Colonel Johnson’s perspective, and that of nearly every trooper on 875, the hill had to be taken. Honor and pride demanded it. The idea of abandoning 875 was anathema to these proud airborne light infantrymen. To them, victory in war meant fighting tactical battles to destroy the enemy and take the ground he occupied. The hill represented a challenging task that must be accomplished, regardless of the cost. American culture frowned on the notion of leaving a job unfinished. In this context, Johnson’s order made perfect sense.
However, from a bigger-picture, more objective point of view, the order was questionable. The NVA had already destroyed the 2nd Battalion. The 4th Battalion was hardly in good shape, having already fought for weeks. The NVA on Hill 875 were hunkered down in well-sited, heavily reinforced bunkers that were connected by tunnels. Some of the bunkers were strengthened by six feet of logs and dirt, and were thus impervious to artillery and air strikes. Nothing short of a direct hit from a B-52 bomber could destroy the bunkers. At any moment of their choosing, the NVA could use their tunnels to escape back into Cambodia. The hill itself was bereft of any strategic value. Taking it would mean nothing to the outcome of the war. Senior American commanders knew that they would eventually abandon it even if the 4th Battalion succeeded in taking it. Not to mention that doing so promised to be a bloodbath. In fact, the Americans were not even likely to compile much of a body count on the hill because NVA defenses were so strong and the enemy soldiers could escape so easily, probably after inflicting heavy losses on the Americans.
Basically, the North Vietnamese had baited the Americans into fighting for Hill 875. They well understood the American mania for body counts. They knew that the Americans would fight them anywhere in South Vietnam, even in places (such as Hill 875) where the communists enjoyed most of the advantages. At Hill 875, they also knew that, once the fighting started, the Americans would sacrifice heavily to take the hill because they believed this equated to victory. The enemy was quite content to let the Americans claim their pyrrhic notions of victory. Their aim was to goad the Americans into fighting for this worthless hill and either annihilate them or bleed them dry. To the NVA this meant victory of their own.
Hill 875, then, amounted to a fascinating but tragic dichotomy. From the ordinary paratrooper’s point of view, the hill absolutely had to be taken—abandoning it would dishonor the memories of so many dead friends. Moreover, many of the troopers were angry at the enemy and wanted payback for the lives of their dead buddies (a common emotion in combat). But, from an outsider’s point of view, taking the hill made no sense, and was actually counterproductive to the American cause. In essence, taking the hill amounted to an American banzai attack.
On November 21, the Americans postponed their attack several times while the choppers braved enemy fire to fly in more water, food, and ammo. All day long, NVA mortar crews, hidden on adjacent hills, hurled shells at the paratroopers. American artillery and air strikes continued to pound those positions and the NVA-held portions of Hill 875. Air Force F-100s and F-4s dumped nearly seven tons of napalm on the enemy bunkers. The stench of burning trees and benzene infused the air. As was so common, the Americans were convinced that their enormous firepower had killed most of the remaining enemy soldiers on the hill.
Just after 1500, the 4th Battalion companies started up the hill. Alpha was on the left, Charlie on the right, and Bravo in the middle. The footing was tricky. The soldiers had to step over and around fallen trees and foliage. In the process they made themselves ideal targets for the NVA, who were in their bunkers, just waiting for the Americans to enter their death zones. With devastating suddenness, they opened up with deadly machine-gun, rifle, mortar, and rocket fire. Several Americans were hit and went down in heaps. Others spread out, took cover, and returned fire, but they had great difficulty seeing the enemy. “The NVA were firing from six-inch slots in their bunkers,” one after action report said. “The men crouched behind whatever cover they could find, small trees, logs, or mounds of dirt. The hill was soft from the constant bombardment that enemy rockets slid down the hillside among the troopers and exploded.” Tree snipers added to the carnage.
In small groups, the Sky Soldiers poured out fire and advanced uphill in perilous rushes, all the while working against the formidable combination of gravity and savage enemy firepower. The bravest among them stood in the open and sprayed the trees, killing enemy snipers. The Americans tried to blow up the bunkers with M72 LAWs but the slits were so narrow that the M72 rockets bounced off logs, earth, or exploded among the mishmash of trees and other detritus. Mortar shells were also ineffective. The only way to destroy the maze of bunkers was up close, almost within hand-shaking distance, but this was difficult because they were mutually supporting, capable of sweeping every approach with deadly cones of fire. “They’d have three bunkers dug in the ground, maybe seven yards apart with a connecting tunnel,” Lynn Morse, Charlie Company’s senior medic, recalled. “They’d leave ammunition in each one of the bunkers. They’d shoot from this one and move to the last one or come to the middle one. You’re still looking at the first one and they’ve got you in a cross fire.” Some of the grunts got close enough to the bunkers to rake their narrow slits with rifle or machine-gun fire. A few even succeeded in dropping grenades inside them. They would no sooner kill the group inside the bunker than more NVA would move through a tunnel and replace them.
Private First Class Stone, the Bravo Company machine gunner, was wielding his M60 from the hip, “running up the hill and seeing men on my right, left and even behind me falling to enemy fire, their legs, arms and in some cases, heads blown off.” Some of the bodies lay with their veiny guts spilled onto the ground. The air literally buzzed with the sound of bullets and angry fragments whizzing past him. Some of the rounds tore through his clothes and his equipment, yet somehow he remained unhurt. Intense though it was, he felt as if everything was happening in slow motion (the adrenaline rush and the reaction of his nervous system to extreme danger produced that effect). All around him, he saw his buddies go down. As they got hit, he could “see [them] fall, ever so slowly to the ground in a heap of blood; hear the screams [they] made as [they] hit the ground or the silence of [their] death. The roar of gunfire, theirs and ours, was deafening, yet, you could hear the sounds of bullets hitting flesh and bone, the last moan of the dying.” Stone likened the awful experience to a movie, a common description among modern American combat soldiers whose cultural conceptions are, of course, so powerfully tied to Hollywood images.21
The NVA were rolling dozens of Chinese-made (Chicom) grenades down the hill. They bounced, rolled, and bucked malevolently downward. Often they exploded before the Americans could see them. One of the grenades burst under Private First Class Stone’s M60, destroying it. He found himself pinned down by heavy rifle fire from an individual NVA soldier. Stone now had only a .45-caliber pistol. He fired back ineffectually. The AK bullets clipped perilously close to the young machine gunner. He glanced ten meters to his left and saw his platoon leader, Lieutenant Larry Moore, hiding behind a tree. Stone yelled at the lieutenant, asking the officer to lay down cover fire while Stone moved to a less exposed spot. “My pleas for help went unanswered as Lt. Moore never fired or attempted to fire at the enemy I was pointing out to him,” Stone recalled. In such searing moments, a soldier’s impression of a leader can forever be etched. As the lieutenant lay still, another soldier ran in front of Stone and promptly got killed by the NVA rifleman. Stone retrieved the dead man’s M16, killed the NVA soldier with it, and then set off in search of another machine gun. Stone never trusted, or respected, Lieutenant Moore again.
About fifty meters to the right of Stone, another young officer was experiencing the extreme challenges of infantry leadership in heavy combat. Captain Bill Connolly and Charlie Company had saved Task Force Black over a week earlier. Now they were fighting among some of the best-hidden, deadliest bunkers. The trees and jungle were so thick that Connolly’s troopers found it hard to move, much less fight. The captain was rushing around, RTOs in tow, constantly exposing himself to enemy fire, barking orders, talking to his lieutenants, trying to find a weak spot in the enemy defenses. “There was still a lot of mortar fire coming,” he later said, “the bunkers were very well emplaced. They were situated so that they had interlocking fire. It was very difficult to go after one without getting hit with another one.”
Hoping to build irresistible momentum in this attack, Captain Connolly kept pushing his platoons to clear out the bunkers. As he did so, squad after squad got decimated by enemy machine guns and mortars. Some of the men were literally shot to pieces. Others were shredded by mortar fragments. Quite a few collapsed under a flurry of machine-gun bullets. Their blood stained the trees and jungle floor. Medics crawled and sprinted everywhere, tending to screaming, crying men. Connolly believed that in order for the attack to have any chance of success, his 2nd Platoon, under Lieutenant Tracy Murrey, had to destroy one particular machine-gun bunker. “It had a commanding field of fire through the brush and debris,” one Charlie Company soldier wrote. “Anyone trying to move forward was hit.”
The gun had already cut down several men. The captain told Murrey to throw his last remaining squad at the gun. The bespectacled lieutenant had grown up with no father and had gotten through college on an ROTC scholarship. Most of his lieutenant’s pay went toward his sisters’ college education. As a platoon leader, he had struggled with land navigation and had sometimes clashed with the company NCOs. He hardly fit the recruiting-poster image of a gung ho airborne infantry officer. Connolly’s order was deeply upsetting to him, tantamount to suicide. He pleaded with the captain to change his mind. Connolly appreciated the gravity of the command (he himself was only about fifty feet behind Murrey), but in the desperation of the moment, he felt there was no other option. In response to Murrey’s pleas, Connolly barked: “That’s an order! Out!”
Murrey may not have been the prototypical platoon leader, but he embodied the first principle of infantry leadership—never ask your people to do something you will not do yourself. Unwilling to send his men after the machine gun, he did it himself. He charged at the bunker, got within a few feet of it, and pitched grenades into it. The explosions killed the enemy gunner. Before Lieutenant Murrey could do anything else, NVA machine guns opened up from adjacent bunkers, ripping into the platoon leader. RPGs streaked from unseen positions, pulverizing Murrey. “The only thing left of him was his helmet and glasses,” Morse, the medic, recalled. “I was one of the [men] that made out the reports of how his remains disappeared.”
In spite of Murrey’s valor, the 4th Battalion’s attack was at a standstill. One platoon from Alpha Company did succeed in breeching the bunkers and nearing the top of the hill, but they were in danger of being cut off. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, flying overhead in a helicopter, decided to call off the attack. Captain James Muldoon, Alpha’s commander, and Connolly both believed that the hill could still be taken before nightfall, but the order stood. The battalion’s survivors filtered back down the hill, yielding hard-won ground back to the enemy. The grunts were weary, frustrated, and anguished over the loss of so many friends. Another leaden night descended on Hill 875, practically dripping with the smell of death, tension, and desperation. In the darkness, Private First Class Stone, whose platoon had lost twenty-two men in the space of an hour, settled into a small hole. All around him, NVA mortar shells continued to explode. In the distance, he could hear the moans of wounded men. He felt a sharp pain in his back and thought he had been hit. He reached around to check this out and felt an object sticking in his back. He pulled the object out, only to discover that it was part of an American soldier’s spine. The spine “had stuck in my back when I laid down on it.” He had no time for emotion or reflection over the gruesome discovery. “I simply tossed the piece aside and lay back down.”
For the next thirty-six hours, the Americans contented themselves with giving the NVA bunkers another pasting while they prepared for yet another assault. Artillery and jets repeatedly worked over the NVA sections of the hill. The bombs and napalm jostled the grunts around and took their collective breath away. Captain Leonard later called it “an absolute firepower display.” Amid the endless sound track of explosions, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson finally made it into Hill 875 to meet with Leonard and the other two company commanders. He told them that there was still no doubt among the senior commanders (Schweiter, Peers, and the others) that the hill had to be taken. In fact, General Peers, commander of the 4th Division, was sending two companies from his 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, to help out. The only question was whether the airborne commanders wanted their men to once again take the lead role in capturing the hill. Johnson felt that they should. Muldoon, Connolly, and Leonard agreed. If Hill 875 had to be taken, then Sky Soldiers should do it. For them, the hill had turned into a kind of holy grail, offering closure, redemption, and honor.22
On Thanksgiving morning, November 23, the costly quest for Hill 875 resumed. The attack was scheduled for 1100. The remnants of the 4th Battalion would attack straight up the hill, in the same place as two days earlier, with Bravo on the left, Charlie on the right, and Alpha following. On the other side of 875, Delta and Alpha Companies, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, would launch a supporting assault from the southeast. These two companies had air-assaulted onto the other side of the hill the previous day. In order to determine which of the two companies would lead the way, Captain George Wilkins, the commander of Delta, had drawn straws with his good friend Captain Larry Cousins, Alpha’s CO. Wilkins had “won,” so his men were in the lead with Cousins’s people trailing behind.
Up until the last moment, the ubiquitous artillery and air strikes lambasted the hill. Some of the ordnance hit so close to the grunts that they had to dodge fragments. As the paratroopers of Charlie Company prepared to move out, Sergeant Mike Tanner, a mortar RTO, overheard Captain Connolly tell his command group that the hill had to be taken “at all costs.” At that moment, the realization hit Tanner that he was probably about to die. A sad pride engulfed him and he sat down to write his wife a last letter. Many others did the same. Having experienced such horrors on this hill, most felt that they could not hope to survive another attack. But, when the word came to get moving, they stood and started up the hill anyway. Mortar crews walked rounds about thirty meters in front of them.
The grunts carefully worked their way over and around the mess of felled trees, shell holes, and other obstacles that honeycombed the ugly hill. They braced themselves for the NVA bunkers to come alive with machine-gun fire, but this did not happen. The Americans did not know it, but North Vietnamese commanders had decided to disengage at Hill 875. They had bled the Americans badly. Fighting to the bitter end for the hill served no further purpose for them. So most of the enemy survivors (from the NVA 174th Regiment) had previously exited the hill through their tunnels, then trekked back to Cambodia, surviving to fight another day.
Plenty remained behind, though, to make the Americans’ final push for the top of the hill a very unpleasant quest. Enemy mortar crews on nearby hills hurled accurate mortar fire at the GIs. Well-concealed stay-behind snipers also opened up. Anticipating more close-quarters fighting among the bunkers, some of the Americans were carrying satchel charges of TNT. Several extraordinarily brave souls volunteered to lug flamethrowers, although no one really had much training in how to operate them. One mortar round scored a direct hit on Sergeant First Class William Cates, who was lugging a satchel charge. The shell disintegrated him and killed several men near him.
The flamethrower men were moving awkwardly under the weight of their smelly, heavy tanks of napalm, enhancing their vulnerability. As Captain Connolly moved up the hill, a flamethrower man named Flatley got slammed by a mortar. The round ignited the fuel in the tanks, detonating a fiery explosion. “He just basically evaporated,” Connolly recalled. “I was very lucky. It threw me forward, ten, fifteen, twenty feet. I got up and I was fine.” Not far away, Sergeant Tanner and another man slid into a bomb crater to avoid the heavy incoming mortar fire. “There was a flash and a blast of heat. We saw a [flamethrower] volunteer go down. He was struggling, all aflame. He crumpled in a blazing heap with the tanks on his back.” In Bravo Company’s line of advance, Private First Class Rocky Stone was walking uncomfortably close to Private Mike Gladden, a grunt who had volunteered for flamethrower duty. “A sniper shot the tank,” Stone said. “I remember seeing the flame [shoot] out the tip, circle around . . . ignite the tank and totally engulf Mike in flame. I remember watching him spin in a circle totally covered in flames and hearing him scream for someone to shoot him. He was shot by his own men to save him a very painful, slow death.”
Still the assault continued. Small, weary groups of paratroopers huffed and puffed upward, blasting snipers, shooting up bunkers, braving the deadly enemy mortar fire. At 1122, they finally made it to the summit of Hill 875. Stone and his buddy Private Al Undiemi led the charge. By now, Private First Class Stone was on his fourth machine gun since arriving at the hill. One had been destroyed by a grenade. Stone had warped the barrels on the other two from having to fire them so continuously. Brandishing his new M60, he jumped up, yelled “Let’s go!” and ran for the top of the hill. He and Undiemi made it there and, finding no more resistance, they hopped into a bomb crater. All around them paratroopers were yelling “Airborne!” “Geronimo!” and “All the way!” in cries of victory. At last, Hill 875 belonged to the Americans.
The price was staggering: 158 killed and 402 wounded. Among the dead were all the members of Stone and Undiemi’s squad, except for one man. When the terrible reality of these deaths sank in to Stone, he leaned, almost involuntarily, against a tree, his eyes cast downward, his mind trying to process what had happened on this troubled hill. “I had the feeling of total sadness as I looked around to see all the bodies and carnage around me and upon learning of the death of so many close brothers.” He was proud to have taken the hill, but forever saddened, and troubled, by the irreplaceable losses his unit had suffered. Nearly every other survivor felt the same way.23
As the paratroopers focused on spreading out and setting up a defensive perimeter, the point elements of Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, approached the crest from the south. They had received some sniper fire but little other resistance on the way up. In the confusing smoky haze that hung over the peak of Hill 875, Delta’s point men could see soldiers moving around. “Just as we were preparing to fire upon these soldiers, someone yelled ‘friendlies! ’” Private Dennis Lewallen recalled. “The situation could have evolved into a very serious firefight where many more lives could have been lost. I think of this every time I remember or hear of the battle of Hill 875.”
The other 4th Division company soon arrived. Together these Ivy Division troops extended the perimeter, circulated around, and attempted to comprehend what the paratroopers had been through. They were shocked at the sight of their hard-bitten airborne colleagues. “They were good guys but, boy, they were beat up,” Captain Wilkins said. “That’s a very proud tradition in that organization. They’re pretty elite guys. You could tell they’d been in the fight of their lives.” Even more troubling were the other sights that greeted them all over the hill. “Not one major tree seemed to be standing,” Private John Beckman, a Delta Company rifleman, remembered, “and the whole side of the hill looked like toothpicks burning and smoking. It was the scariest sight I’d ever seen.” Spec-4 Bill Ballard, an RTO, shuddered at the carnage and the putrid smell of death that engulfed the hill. “The upper . . . quarter of the hill was just totally nude. No trees, no stumps, no nothing, just dirt. It had been bombarded with artillery and air strikes so heavily that it was just clear.” He and the others saw bodies and parts of bodies strewn all over the place, rotting in the midday sun.
Captain Larry Cousins, Alpha’s commander, was in his second tour in Vietnam, but he had never witnessed anything like this. “There were helmets with heads in ’em . . . GIs, arms, legs, body parts everywhere,” he said. He and his first sergeant saw the grisly remnants of a Sky Soldier’s head hanging almost neatly from the twigs of a tree. “It was just like somebody scalped him right about where his ears were on both sides and just peeled all the skin off. You could see the eye holes. It was just sickening. It was kind of like a Halloween mask. It was . . . revolting to see Americans like that.”
The hill was still under periodic mortar fire, but helicopters could now get in and out with some semblance of safety. The chopper crews evacuated many of the wounded and dead. They also flew in a special Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and pie. Some of the men welcomed this meal as a morale booster. Others thought it was unthinkable, to the point of obscenity, to dine on such fare amid the dismembered, decomposing remains of their dead friends. Two days later, the helicopters came and took the paratroopers from the hill back to the main Dak To base, where they held a subdued ceremony to mourn their dead.
The 4th Division soldiers stayed on the hill for a few more days, taking casualties of their own from NVA mortar and rocket fire. Eventually, though, they abandoned the hill to resume the endless search for and pursuit of the NVA. The hard-won hill was now the enemy’s to reclaim, thus illustrating the essential absurdity of expending so many lives for a worthless geographic objective. “A week or so later,” Spec-4 Ballard recalled, “we were flying by that hill, going somewhere in our helicopters . . . and we could see ’em already up there, moving around, building bunkers, resettling.” When paratroopers like Private First Class Stone found this out, they were understandably bitter. “This told us that all we had done, all we had gone through on that Hill was basically for naught,” he wrote. “This . . . was an insult to us who survived and a bigger insult to those of us who gave their lives.” The anger and bitterness never went away for him or for the other survivors of Hill 875. Fighting raged at 875, and Dak To, for the rest of the war.
Of course, American commanders could hardly have chosen to remain on Hill 875. It was deep inside enemy country, at the edge of a perilous supply line, and it had no intrinsic value. They only fought there because the NVA was there. When the NVA left, they had to as well. The Americans were much like tethered goats being led to and fro by their enemies. Nothing could illustrate the inherent worthlessness of the attrition strategy more than these unhappy realities. This cold assessment does not, in the least, diminish the extraordinary valor of the soldiers who took Hill 875. If anything, it only adds to it, since superhuman gallantry in the service of strategic aimlessness is even more impressive than bravery demonstrated for a clear objective, such as the Normandy beaches or Paris. The 173rd Airborne Brigade earned a well-deserved Presidential Unit Citation for its exploits on the hill and elsewhere at Dak To. The 4th Division’s 1st Brigade also was a deserving recipient for its important part in the fighting.
The Americans found a grand total of 22 NVA bodies on Hill 875. Certainly they killed many more than that (probably about a battalion, according to captured documents), but the communists dragged most of them away. In the November 1967 battles at Dak To, the Americans expended over 151,000 artillery shells. Air Force, Navy, and Marine aviators flew nearly 2,100 close air support sorties for the grunts. B-52s even flew 257 sorties, blasting suspected enemy troop concentrations. By their own admission, the Americans lost nearly 300 men killed and about 1,000 wounded. The numbers were probably slightly higher than that since commanders notoriously tried to downplay their losses in hopes of showing favorable kill ratios. Every rifle company in the 173rd Airborne Brigade lost more than 50 percent of its troopers. The Army claimed that 1,644 NVA were killed in the battles at Dak To, but this figure is suspect. Westmoreland himself later put the number at 1,400. Many other officers, including one general, thought the number was closer to 1,000. Even if the high number is correct, the United States expended a monumentally inefficient 92 artillery rounds and one and a half air strikes for every enemy soldier killed.
As the battle raged, General Westmoreland was in the United States, briefing President Johnson, addressing Congress, and generally attempting to build public confidence in the administration’s policy in Vietnam. General Westmoreland insisted that the United States was winning the war and he even optimistically ventured the possibility that, if the war continued to go this well, the troops might start coming home by 1969. In a press conference, when reporters asked the general if Dak To was the beginning of the end for the NVA, he responded: “I think it’s the beginning of a great defeat for the enemy.”
Sadly, the general was wrong. Dak To was not necessarily a defeat for the United States, but nor was it anything approaching a victory. It was true that the Americans decimated three enemy regiments at Dak To and foiled any communist plans to cut South Vietnam in two by pushing east from the Central Highlands. But the enemy’s purpose was still served by fighting the Americans on even terms, bleeding them badly, and inconclusively. The longer the war dragged on, and the worse losses that piled up from such aimless tactical tests of bravery, the more the American public’s appetite for the war diminished. In short, stalemate favored the communists and Dak To was, in the end, an inconclusive stalemate. Westy could inflict substantial casualties on the enemy, but not mortal losses, thus guaranteeing the failure of attrition. Dak To was the prime example of this unhappy circumstance. It was also a bitter tale of the price grunts pay for the poor strategic choices of their generals and political leaders. At Dak To, even the combination of extreme valor and overwhelming firepower could not produce any semblance of strategic victory for the United States.24