Grunts (31 page)

In the early afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, commander of 2-7 Cavalry, tried to reinforce his hard-pressed companies by helicopter under cover of a protective artillery barrage. The choppers took intense, accurate fire. Over one hamlet, Warrant Officer Robert Mason, one of the helicopter pilots, spotted an enemy machine gunner who had just shot and killed a pilot in another aircraft. The gunner was standing in the middle of a cluster of villagers, with his machine gun pointed upward on a mount. Not wanting to kill the noncombatants, Mason ordered his M60 door gunner to fire warning rounds, in hopes that the people would scatter. “The bullets sent up muddy geysers from the paddy water as they raged toward the group,” Mason wrote. No one moved, even when the rounds hit within fifty feet of them. In that sickening instant, Mason realized that the people were not going to move. They were more afraid of the enemy gunner than the American helicopters. Mason watched as the door gunner reluctantly fired into the group. “They threw up their arms as they were hit, and whirled to the ground. After what seemed a very long time, the gunner, still firing, was exposed. [His] gun barrel flopped down on its mount and he slid to the ground. A dozen people lay like tenpins around him.”

Over Phung Du, all six Hueys carrying soldiers from Bravo Company took hits. Two of them had to retreat. Only about a platoon of soldiers, plus Captain Myron Diduryk, their company commander, got into the uneasy perimeter that the Americans had cobbled together, mainly in the graveyard, over the course of several intense hours. Lieutenant Colonel McDade also managed to land, but he quickly got pinned down in a trench. “Every time you raised your head, it was zap, zap, zap,” he said. “The dirt really flew.” A stalemate had set in, ushering in a rainy, frightening night of desultory gun and grenade battles. At McDade’s urging, Captain Fesmire gathered what men he could, including eight of his dead soldiers, and made it into the perimeter.
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Needless to say, Colonel Moore was frustrated with the situation at Phung Du. He was not pleased, in particular, with McDade. Moore was not quite sure that McDade was qualified to lead the battalion. “He had been a division personnel officer for a year or two. He was rewarded for his good service by the division commander who gave him the battalion.” The debacle at LZ Albany back in November had partially resulted, Moore felt, from the fact that McDade did not, at that point, really know his troops. Now, in this operation, McDade just did not seem very aggressive or dynamic in resolving the stalemate at LZ-4. “I told him in no uncertain terms to get that landing zone cleared up, get that battalion organized, and get moving,” Moore said. “I let him know I was very displeased with what was going on.”

Throughout the night, Colonel Moore organized a relief force. Elements of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry—his old unit—would maneuver north of the village and block the enemy’s escape route from that side. Two companies from the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry, would come from the south and reinforce the perimeter. The colonel decided to lead that part of the assault himself. After sunrise on January 29, artillery pounded the enemy positions. Then Navy A-1E Skyraiders and Air Force B-57 Canberras attacked the enemy-held positions north and east of the village three times with napalm and high-explosive bombs. This touched off secondary explosions in some of the NVA trenches. Sergeant Kinney, the wounded medic, was still pinned down outside the perimeter. He and several other soldiers, most of whom he had treated for wounds, were in hastily improvised foxholes, perilously close to the air strikes. Kinney was amazed at the courage of one NVA machine gunner, who waited for each plane to release its bombs and “then while it was in the process of upsweeping, he would fire a burst at the belly of the plane. Right before the bomb hit and exploded, he would duck into his fortified spider hole.” After seeing him do this repeatedly, Kinney fired a 40-millimeter grenade from an M79 grenade launcher and killed the brave man.

At 1045, Moore and the 12th Cavalry soldiers landed south of Phung Du. “We came across a stream just to the south of LZ-4,” Moore recalled. “We waded across the stream. It was up to our waists. We were under fire. I joined in the assault across the stream and we relieved the troops on LZ-4.” Moore met with McDade, heard the battalion commander’s situation report, and then strode around with his indomitable sergeant major, Basil Plumley, at his side. One trench was filled with wounded soldiers and a few Vietnamese women and children. Up ahead, scattered throughout the graveyard, he could see the bodies of several dead Americans. In Moore’s opinion, far too many able-bodied soldiers were hunkered down, simply taking cover, rather than fighting back. “You can’t do your damned job in a trench,” he told many of them. Sergeant Major Plumley had known his commanding officer long enough to recognize his extreme displeasure with the situation. “The Old Man was not pleased. We talked to the men. They weren’t in too deep spirits although they had lost quite a few men. The biggest thing they needed was leadership and guidance to move them out of there.”

Moore had something in common with John Corley, the soldier who had commanded the 3rd Battalion, 26th Infantry, at Aachen. Both of them had a great knack for minding the big picture while staying close to the action, and without stepping on the toes of their subordinate commanders. In Vietnam, there was a great temptation for commanders at the battalion and brigade level to remain in their helicopters, where they could see much of the battlefield, and manage the fighting from on high. To some extent this made sense. From a helicopter, the commander could see the terrain well, often to the point of spotting the enemy, even as he remained in direct communication with subordinates and superiors alike. However, from thousands of feet overhead, he had little appreciation for the reality of what was happening on the ground. Terrain often looked quite different from the air versus the ground, especially in jungle-encrusted Vietnam. A man in a helicopter could not feel the heat, smell the smells, hear the screams of the wounded, gauge the mood of the troops. In short, he could become way too detached from his soldiers. In a helicopter, the commander was less of an infantryman and more of an aviator. If he spent enough time thousands of feet overhead, he often came to see the world of ground combat from a pilot’s detached vantage point, rather than a grunt’s intimate perspective.

For these reasons, and not out of any need for medals or personal glory, Colonel Moore liked to get on the ground during a fight: “You’ve got to be on the ground to sense what’s going on, and the troops like to see you on the ground, sharing the risks too. It’s not to be a hero. It just makes a hell of a lot of sense. You can’t sail around in a helicopter on a radio and really know what’s going on on the ground.” At Phung Du, his personal presence was important to the outcome of the battle. He organized a counterattack that eventually overwhelmed the remaining enemy positions in hard fighting that lasted for the better part of another day as soldiers methodically assaulted the NVA bunkers, tunnels, and trenches. Much of the village was on fire and angry plumes of smoke wafted skyward. “As far as the eye could see the land was under assault,” one witness related, “the full expression of the Army’s war-fighting fury . . . as if waging war against the land itself.”

The Americans captured a few prisoners, including one frightened man who relieved his tension in a unique way. “The first thing this guy did was squat down and take a crap,” Colonel Moore recalled. “He thought we were gonna kill him. We gave him some water.” They also reassured him that he would not be killed. Moore was a big believer that the better treatment prisoners got, the more information they yielded. This man divulged everything he knew.

As medevac helicopters swooped in to the now secure LZ to evacuate Sergeant Kinney and several other wounded men, he gazed at the dead, bloated body of one of his friends. “I was suddenly struck by the thought that for the rest of my life, I would be living on borrowed time . . . that had been given to me by all these men who had died on LZ 4 . . . while I had lived.” This was not survivor’s guilt so much as survivor’s determination, and it had positive consequences. As Sergeant Kinney hopped aboard the medevac helicopter, he resolved to heal from his wounds, return to the company, save as many lives as possible, and then live his own life the best he possibly could. “It was the only way I knew to repay the debt I felt I owed.”

That night, Colonel Moore and Sergeant Major Plumley stayed with the surviving troopers in Phung Du. “It helps the troops to see the colonel down there with ’em sharing the risks. They felt . . . more safe,” Moore said. This command presence also gave the men a sense that someone was in charge, making decisions, looking out for their welfare. Moore’s major concern was to keep the retreating NVA from escaping. On the morning of January 30, he ordered McDade’s depleted companies and 2-12 Cavalry to move north, in hopes of pushing the NVA into the waiting muzzles of 1-7 Cavalry. In some instances, artillery fire, helicopter gunships, and fighters shot up dozens of retreating enemy, the exact sort of scenario Westy would have envisioned.

Moore’s northward push also sparked a pair of sharp fights against company-sized NVA units in the villages of Tan Thanh and Luong Tho. In the latter engagement, three companies from 1-7 Cavalry were fighting so close to the enemy—ferreting them out of bunkers and spider holes—that, according to one after action report, “heavy fire support could not be used because of the close proximity of the engagement.” Only by withdrawing from the village could the Americans make use of tactical air support and artillery. The communists had learned to negate American firepower by fighting at close quarters. The Americans came to call this enemy tactic “hugging the belt.”

At Luong Tho, North Vietnamese opposition was so fierce that any helicopter that approached the area risked getting shot down. But, as the sun set on January 31, Captain Ramon “Tony” Nadal, the commander of A Company, had a dozen wounded men who needed immediate evacuation. Although the odds of getting in and out safely seemed minuscule, Major Bruce Crandall, who had performed numerous acts of bravery at Ia Drang, volunteered to fly his Huey through the darkness into a tiny LZ in hopes of extracting the wounded. The LZ was so small, and surrounded by so many trees, that Crandall had to descend vertically, all the while under steady enemy fire. Moreover, the night was so dark that Crandall could not see the trees or the ground as Captain Nadal talked him down. Nadal’s soldiers laid down a powerful base of fire. The North Vietnamese responded with heavy machine-gun fire. Crandall could see their green tracers whizzing uncomfortably close. Somehow, he made it to the ground, picked up six wounded soldiers, took them to a base at Bong Son, and then came back in for another load. “Coming out was tough because I had to pull up and take those people out without any forward movement.” Difficult or not, he pulled it off, saving many lives. Crandall willingly risked such danger not just out of a sense of duty, and not just because he and Nadal were friends, but out of deep mutual respect for the grunts. “You always had great confidence in the infantry. You supported those guys as well as they supported you.”

The 3rd Brigade patrolled the Bong Son plain for several more days in early February, but the fighting died down into sporadic skirmishes with snipers. With the enemy seemingly gone, General Kinnard hoped that the plain was now secure. He ordered an end to this phase of Operation Masher in favor of a new push into the An Lao Valley. The vital calculus of casualties, of course, meant everything in these big-unit operations. Already, the Americans had lost 123 men killed (counting the plane crash), and another 200 wounded. Division records claimed 603 enemy killed, by actual body count. The reports also claimed, with no real basis whatsoever, that 956 other enemy soldiers were probably dead. The records were, of course, mute on how many noncombatants were dead or if, perhaps, on-site commanders counted some of their bodies as “enemy.” Such were the vagaries and potential inaccuracies of the body-count war. Without question, though, the Americans had inflicted significant damage on the enemy’s 22nd Infantry Regiment.
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When word of Operation Masher reached President Johnson, his first reaction was quite telling. Instead of asking about casualties, or what results the 3rd Brigade had achieved, he recoiled at the aggressive name the Army had given the operation. From the beginning of his escalation process, he had sought to downplay the size, scale, and violence of the military effort in Vietnam. He did not want the American people to think that their country was truly on a war footing. To his ears, “Masher” sounded too warlike. “I don’t know who names your operations but ‘Masher’?” he said to General Earl Wheeler, the Army’s chief of staff. “I get kind of mashed myself,” Johnson added. McGeorge Bundy, one of the president’s security advisors, asked Wheeler to tell the commanders in Vietnam to come up with less provocative operational names so that “even the most biased person” could not use such names to criticize Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Wheeler passed the request along to Westmoreland, who, in turn, told General Kinnard. The 1st Cavalry Division commander was stunned, and chagrined, by this political foolishness. In his recollection, he changed the name, “partly out of spite,” to the most innocuous, peaceful moniker he could imagine—White Wing. So the campaign came to be known as Operation Masher/White Wing. This naming incident might appear minor, but it illustrated a fatal aspect of Johnson’s war leadership that affected the way Westy carried out his strategy—all too often, Johnson was more interested in appearances than real results.
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They Must Be in the An Lao Valley

Once the fighting petered out on the Bong Son plain, General Kinnard felt that the An Lao Valley, a few miles to the northwest, was the logical place to clear next. Intelligence officers believed that the valley comprised an important logistics and transit point for the North Vietnamese. They had pinpointed it as the home for the Sao Vang Division’s headquarters. An Lao was the likely place of retreat for those enemy soldiers who had escaped the fighting around Phung Du and the other contested villages of Bong Son. What’s more, even as that fighting was going on in late January, Special Forces teams had run into a veritable buzz saw while they were reconning the area. They had found that the place was teeming with NVA and VC. One six-man team was lucky to be extracted intact. Two others became enmeshed in desperate firefights against overwhelming numbers of enemy soldiers. “We kept getting fire in on us,” Sergeant Chuck Hiner, whose team was ambushed by the VC, recalled. All around him, his teammates got hit. Hiner got on the radio and called for fire support and a rescue attempt. “I could hear Dotson. He was hit through the chest and I could hear that death rattle. This other kid (Hancock) . . . they had stitched him from the ankle to the top of his head.” Sergeant First Class Marlin Cook was nearby, lying still, paralyzed from a crippling, mortal wound. Air strikes by helicopter gunships came right in on his position. “It was either do that or get overrun,” Hiner said. “We were fighting—I daresay the closest—within ten feet of each other. It was that tight.”