Grunts (32 page)

Major Charlie Beckwith, the legendary Special Forces commander, was badly wounded by enemy machine-gun fire when his command helicopter approached the ambush site. Somehow, though, other choppers extracted the survivors. Of seventeen Special Forces soldiers who went into the An Lao, seven were killed and three others wounded. Three of the bodies were never recovered.

So General Kinnard expected a major fight when he sent Moore’s 3rd Brigade and the 2nd Brigade, under Colonel William Lynch, into the valley on February 7. “Numerous valleys and draws were heavily forested, providing many areas in which concealment from aerial observation is afforded,” a 2nd Brigade report stated. Helicopters landed most of the rifle companies on the ridges, from whence they worked their way down the steep slopes into the valley. The soldiers humped through this exhausting terrain, dealing with leeches, ants, heat, rain, mud, and abject weariness. “In a few days they were reduced to sodden, weary, leech-encrusted men,” one soldier wrote. They found many abandoned enemy base camps, along with quite a bit of rice, salt, weapons, and tunnels. They also found plenty of evidence that the enemy dominated the area politically. “Moving through the villages, I was struck by how much anti-American propaganda I saw posted in them,” a grunt recalled. “Some posters [showed] NVA or VC soldiers shooting down American aircraft.”

But contact with the actual VC and NVA was sporadic to the point of nonexistent. “The hills were honeycombed with recently abandoned bunkers and caches which had to be destroyed before [we] moved on,” the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry’s, after report recorded. The An Lao was typical of what field duty was often like for grunts in Vietnam. They spent most of the day cautiously walking, while carrying heavy loads of equipment, ammunition, and food, sweating in the beastly heat, all the while wondering when danger might beckon. The whole experience was grueling and exhausting, even if they never encountered the enemy, which they usually did not. The old cliché about combat being mostly an exercise in boredom, punctuated by fleeting moments of extreme terror, sprang readily to mind.

The Americans killed about a dozen rearguard VC. For the rifle company grunts, then, the An Lao was more a place of tedium than danger. Even so, a division report claimed that the operations in the valley “succeeded in throwing the enemy off balance,” and added to “the general turmoil experienced by the VC during current operations.” The author of the report even optimistically asserted that “the adverse effect on enemy forces will have a long-lasting effect in that area.” This was staff officer spin doctoring. The Americans had not come to the valley to find nothing but abandoned camps and replaceable war matériel. Nor did the sweep have a substantial long-lasting effect.

In actuality, the elusive NVA and VC had somehow melted away, a common problem during the Vietnam War. Search and destroy meant nothing if the actual destroying never took place. General Kinnard and his brigade commanders decided to look for the enemy ten miles to the south in the Kim Son Valley, another obvious spot for base camps.
⁹

The Crow’s Foot

On the maps, and even from the air, the Kim Son Valley looked like a crow’s foot (some thought of it as an eagle’s claw). The Kim Son River and its tributaries snaked through a muddy sludge of inundated rice paddies. Brooding over the brownish mess were five jungle-packed ridges that comprised the various toes of the foot. “The ridges and valleys were covered with thick interwoven vines, rocks, crevices, along with leeches and snakes,” Captain Robert McMahon, one of the rifle company commanders, wrote.

Colonel Moore devised a new way to ferret out the hard-core survivors of the Sao Vang Division. He air-assaulted all three of his battalions into the area. Some established company-sized ambushes “astride probable enemy escape routes in the valley fingers [ridges].” The rest of his brigade landed at LZ Bird, right at the hub of the valley, and established a firebase there from which the infantry then proceeded to “act as the ‘beater’ force, attacking out of the valley forcing the enemy towards the ambush sites.” He called this new approach Hunter Killer. By now, the Americans were beginning to understand how predictable their loud, ostentatious helicopter insertions were to the enemy (that was probably one reason for the heavy enemy presence at LZ-4). So, during the Crow’s Foot insertions, helicopter crews carried out many mock landings to confuse the enemy on the whereabouts of the rifle companies.

Moore’s concept worked well. Almost immediately, the troopers clashed with the communists. Nearly every company was involved in firefights, often against platoon-sized groups of VC. In just a couple days, they had killed two hundred VC, captured several weapons caches, and overran a base camp, a hospital, and a grenade factory. Documents captured in the base camp revealed the location of a VC main force battalion staging area near the village of Hon Mot. Lieutenant Colonel McDade airlifted his B and C Companies near Hon Mot, just two and a half miles southeast of LZ Bird.

On the morning of February 15, Captain Myron Diduryk’s B Company found the VC. His 2nd Platoon was moving through a rice paddy just outside of Hon Mot when they came under heavy small-arms and mortar fire. They took cover behind paddy dikes and returned fire. The experience of doing this was terrifying and nauseating. As enemy bullets snapped around them and splashed into the rancid paddy water, the grunts kept low, while propping their rifles and machine guns atop the muddy dikes to fire back. Everyone was wet, filthy, and rife with the fecal, moldy stench of the paddy. At first Captain Diduryk thought he was up against a VC platoon. Actually, he was facing two companies dug in along a jungle-covered embankment and hillside.

Diduryk had fought in the Ia Drang battle so he had a firsthand understanding of how effective American firepower could be in this kind of pitched battle. As his mortar crews pounded the enemy-held embankment, Diduryk’s artillery forward observer called down 105-millimeter fire from tubes at nearby LZ Bird. “In the left sector of the 2d Platoon,” Diduryk wrote, “artillery fire was brought to within 25 meters of friendly troops due to proximity of the enemy.” The howitzer shells exploded up and down the length of the VC line. Air strikes from helicopter gunships firing rockets and A-1E Skyraiders dropping cluster bombs eventually followed. Under cover of this awesome array of weaponry, four Hueys swooped in to resupply B Company with mortar and small-arms ammunition.

Captain Diduryk planned an all-out assault, led by his 3rd Platoon, for the minute the bombardment lifted. Sure enough, at the appointed moment, his grunts rose up and went forward. They even had their bayonets fixed. “The platoon moved forward in determined, rapid and well-coordinated bounds employing the technique of fire and movement,” the captain recalled. Infused with adrenaline, they soon began advancing at a dead run, screaming “like madmen” in the recollection of one soldier. This combination of posturing and aggressiveness overwhelmed the entrenched Viet Cong. As the 3rd Platoon soldiers approached them, firing deadly volleys from their rifles, the enemy soldiers broke and ran. As they did so, they exposed themselves to fire from the 2nd Platoon, which was still hunkered down in the rice paddy. Then, Captain Diduryk sent in his 1st Platoon, adding to the rout. Hollering groups of grunts spotted the fleeing VC and mowed them down. “The enemy was on the run,” the captain commented. Those VC who stood and fought were slaughtered by the B Company soldiers. Many of those who took off, usually in groups of three or four, came under saturating fire from hovering helicopter gunships. The whole experience must have been awful beyond description for them—dodging the ubiquitous American fire, seeing comrades tattered by bullets or torn apart by shrapnel, fleeing from blood-crazed gun-toting Americans who were twice their size.

In two hours of one-sided fighting, two VC companies ceased to exist. Diduryk’s grunts counted 57 enemy bodies and estimated, on a fairly sound basis, that they had probably inflicted another 150 casualties on the VC (counting wounded who escaped and bodies that were not found). “VC bodies were piled near a bunker,” one soldier later wrote. “Some were missing limbs and heads. Others were burnt, facial skin drawn back into fierce, grotesque screams. [The grunts] were policing the dead for weapons and piling what they found in a growing heap. Most were smiling with victory. Wood smoke from the hootches mixed with the stench of burnt hair and flesh.”

The company also captured four VC, including Lieutenant Colonel Dowwng Doan, the battalion commander. The thirty-seven-year-old Doan was a professional to the core. He had joined the Viet Minh in 1949 and had spent several years fighting the French. When Colonel Moore later interrogated him, he looked the American commander right in the eye and said through an interpreter: “You will never win.” Doan firmly believed that his side would wear down the Americans as they had worn down the French. “He was a hardcore Viet Cong,” Colonel Moore commented. “He was tough. He was not frightened a bit. I admired this guy for his absolute strength of spirit.” He also respected him as a fellow military professional.

Doan was a prime example of the spirit and toughness that characterized many VC fighters. He and his comrades sought to win through superior human will. By and large, this was a successful formula for them. At Hon Mot, though, they ran into a lethal combination of American firepower and willpower that eclipsed the VC’s strength in morale. Diduryk’s B Company destroyed a force twice its size, at the cost of two men killed and six wounded. In the captain’s own estimation, he was glad to employ “the overwhelming combat power provided by the artillery, mortar and TAC Air fire support systems.” In his view, the supporting fire set the conditions for this major tactical victory, but they were not the most critical factor. “The most essential ingredient which contributed to the success of the battle consisted not of the tools of war but of the men of Company B. It was the leadership of its officers and noncommissioned officers; the gallantry and professionalism of its men; and, finally, its ‘will to win’ ” that proved decisive. The lesson was that this kind of fighting spirit, supported by suffocating firepower, could be a formidable combination.
¹⁰

Hon Mot began a series of running battles between the 1st Cavalry Division troopers and the communists in the Crow’s Foot area. There were two types of engagements: clashes with retreating VC or NVA formations, and battles when the Americans found their base camps. In an example of the former, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry, on February 17 fought a VC heavy-weapons battalion not far from the site of Diduryk’s battle. They battled along the valley floor among water-soaked craters created by Air Force B-52 bombers several days earlier on pre-operation bombing missions. “Two craters that were half filled with water were . . . full of semi-naked wounded with the medics administering morphine and changing bandages,” Captain Robert McMahon, the company commander, wrote.

As was so often typical in combat, some men were paralyzed by fear, and others invigorated by it. McMahon saw his unwounded mortar platoon sergeant cowering among the wounded soldiers. The captain and his first sergeant gave the man “a severe chewing out” to force him back to the edge of the crater to call down fire on the enemy. By contrast, one of the other NCOs, Sergeant Gary Gorton, a mortar squad leader, was almost reckless in risking his life. When his crews ran out of ammo, he bounded around, hurling grenades at the VC, firing clip after clip of M16 ammo at them. He personally killed and overran one enemy machine gun. Before he could get back undercover, a VC sniper shot him through the head.

Captain McMahon was worried that his company was about to run out of ammunition. He ordered his people to fix bayonets. Upon hearing the order, Private First Class John Martin immediately thought of Custer at Little Bighorn. The enemy soldiers were so close, and so aggressive, that they were rolling grenades into the American-held craters. Fortunately for Martin and the other soldiers, McMahon was able to call down lavish fire support to keep the enemy at bay. Air strikes were especially effective. “[A-1E] Skyraiders dropped napalm so close that one white phosphorous bomb hit the edge of [a] holed-up platoon and one officer threw himself back first in the mud to douse his burning shirt,” Martin said. White phosphorous burns straight through skin, muscles, and bones. Water only feeds it with more oxygen, making it burn more intensely. Mud, though, can douse it. Elsewhere, another soldier watched the planes swoop in for the kill. “The F-4 jets . . . were coming in and they would make a steep dive and shoot these Gatling guns on the front of ’em. It sounded like a cow belching. They were dropping some bombs off their wings and they were dropping some white phosphorous.”

In the end, the combination of air power, and a supporting counterattack by Alpha Company against the rear of the VC unit, ended the battle. The Americans counted 127 VC bodies. The grunts captured several recoilless rifles and mortars.
¹¹

Meanwhile, the Americans began to unravel a network of enemy base camps throughout the heavier jungles of the Crow’s Foot that they came to call the Iron Triangle. Ironically, they were aided in these finds by the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Doan. Defiant and proud though he undoubtedly was, he also was garrulous in captivity, revealing much about how VC units operated and, in this instance, the general vicinity where their bases were located.

The fighting that eventuated from these base camp discoveries was ferocious. In most cases, point elements found the enemy the hard way—when they opened fire from prepared, expertly camouflaged fighting positions. For instance, Private Swanson Hudson’s squad from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, was walking point one day for his entire battalion, following a small trail in the jungle. “One second, everything was eerily quiet. The next second, enemy troops opened fire. They were hidden in machine-gun bunkers that had been dug flush to the ground. They cut my squad to ribbons . . . under deadly fire from 12.7mm machine guns, light machine guns, AK-47 assault rifles and some kind of anti-tank weapon—possibly a 57mm recoilless rifle.” As it turned out, they were right at the edge of a major NVA base camp. The two men next to Hudson were killed instantly, as were the squad leader and three other men. The platoon leader was shot through the neck and arm. Hudson fired back as best he could until “my rifle was shot out of my hands. At the same time I was shot in my left thigh-bone.”