The Magnificent Bastards (11 page)

Lieutenant Wainwright finally had to use some assertive leadership in the form of the butt end of his M16 and some good, solid thumps to convince the malingerer to get saddled up.

The new Foxtrot 6, Capt. James Butler, a soft-spoken, twenty-five-year-old career officer from Texas, had left Wainwright to get the company mounted up while he took a skimmer over to the BLT CP to get the word on Hotel’s developing fight and Foxtrot’s planned role. Weise was already moving out aboard the Monitor, so Major Warren briefed Butler. The skipper had relied heavily on Wainwright during his previous three weeks of no-contact command, but he elected to leave him behind this time. Unable to secure permission from regiment for Foxtrot Two to rejoin the company from My Loc, and with the rest of Foxtrot moving out, Butler wanted his seasoned exec with that lone platoon. Butler also sent the scout observer and radioman from his artillery team, his 81mm FO team, and his 60mm mortar section to My Loc. The platoon at My Loc was commanded by a staff sergeant. “Butler felt the staff sergeant was the more experienced and capable platoon commander, and wanted to keep a close eye on us second lieutenants,” McAdams recalled.

Captain Butler was a member of the Naval Academy Class of 1965. His father, also an academy graduate, was a retired Marine major general. Butler rejoined his company as it moved past Mai Xa Chanh West atop the BLT’s attached amtrac platoon from B/1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion. He had McAdams’s Foxtrot One and 2d Lt. Robert Lanham’s Foxtrot Three riding atop rather than inside the platoon’s four armored, sandbag-topped LVTP5 amtracs because the vehicles’ highly volatile gasoline fuel tanks were located directly beneath the troop compartments. Two of the amtracs had a 106mm recoilless rifle mounted on top.

At the BLT CP, Major Warren had described for Butler the plan to have Foxtrot ford the tributary between Bac Vong and Dong Huan, then move on Hotel’s west flank and assault
southward into Dai Do when the latter hit Dong Huan. Warren noted that they still had no indication of enemy forces in Dai Do.

Foxtrot’s amtracs rolled past the two tanks firing into Dong Huan, then easily earned the two platoons across the blueline north of Hotel’s fording site. Hotel had been given priority on artillery fires dedicated to BLT 2/4, and Foxtrot was unable to get a smoke screen. This had been a concern of Butler’s from the beginning. The map showed nothing but open ground between the stream and the objective. Butler didn’t care if any NVA had been spotted in Dai Do or not; he wanted as much smoke as he could get when they crossed the line of departure. His FO, 2d Lt. J. M. Basel, made an initial request for a smoke mission as they pulled out of Mai Xa Chanh West. Before crossing the creek, Basel tried again, but for “reasons I never fully understood, the artillery was not ready to fire the mission or had more pressing missions. Captain Butler eventually gave the order to commence the attack without smoke cover.”

Feeling naked, Foxtrot Company closed on Dai Do from the northeast with its four amtracs spread out in the dry, thigh-high grass. The hedgerows at the edge of the hamlet were in view when, at approximately 1350, the first RPG came out of nowhere toward them. It hit the right rear of the amtrac on which Captain Butler rode with Foxtrot Three. The RPG exploded where the side of the advancing amtrac crowned onto the flat deck. In the sudden flash, Butler saw the radioman from the naval gunfire team spill off the deck, wounded and screaming. There had been five radio operators on the captain’s vehicle, and their flock of antennas must have looked like a red flag to the enemy.

Lance Corporal Donald J. Gregg, a nineteen-year-old squad leader, was wounded in his right wrist and leg by fragments from the same RPG. He jumped down into the grass. Other Marines fell off in confusion, and Gregg got them behind the cover of the halted amtrac. Most of the men in his squad had been wounded or otherwise shook up, including one who’d taken some bad hits in his shoulder and upper chest, and their
M79 man, whose face was peppered with metal shards and whose glasses had been blown off.

More RPGs exploded around Foxtrot Three’s other amtrac. As the Marines dismounted, Pfc. Norman I. Phipps, twenty, of Haysi, Virginia, was killed instantly by shell fragments—the first Foxtrot Marine to die that day.

The NVA also opened fire from Dai Do with automatic weapons. Captain Butler grabbed his radio handset to respond to Hotel 6, who was calling for him to assault Dai Do. Butler was not ready. Although there was a lull in the NVA fire, that first volley of ten to fifteen rocket-propelled grenades had damaged two amtracs and produced multiple casualties. It was a bad start.

Butler was finally able to get some arty going on Dai Do, and the two 106mm recoilless rifles on their amtracs also began pumping HE downrange. Under this cover, the two Foxtrot platoons started forward behind a rolling shock wave of from-the-hip, on-the-move firing. The field was dry and hard—and terribly long and open. The NVA let the Marines get within a hundred meters of the first hedgerow, then opened up again. The roar of their AK-47s was sudden and shattering. The wall of fire dropped the Marines on the left and right of the already wounded Lance Corporal Gregg. He could hear the crack of bullets all around him as he crawled to the casualty on his right. The Marine had been shot in the leg. It was a traumatic, bone-breaking wound, and Gregg and another Marine held the man to calm him down, then dragged him far enough back toward the amtracs for others to move forward to assist him.

Gregg then crawled back to help the Marine who had fallen on his left It was LCpl. Kenneth C. Baxter, nineteen, of Council Bluffs, Iowa. He was dead. Baxter, tall and blond, had been a replacement in Gregg’s squad and was quiet and hardworking, like most new guys. He had been shot in the head. Gregg managed to pull Baxter off the paddy dike he’d fallen across as another dirt-kicking burst of AK-47 fire hit all around him. Gregg tried to move back with the body but couldn’t. He was too exhausted to crawl, and there was too much enemy fire to allow him to get up and drag the man. Gregg finally
rolled away and began shooting into the hedgerow. He couldn’t see the enemy.

Private First Class John J. Kachmar of Foxtrot Three glimpsed two or three NVA in the hedgerow in the brief instant before they opened fire. It looked as though they were rushing from one position to another. Kachmar, already firing from the waist, swung his M16 to his shoulder, and had just squeezed off a couple of semiaimed rounds when the NVA opened fire in unison. In the sudden roar, Kachmar saw the new guy in his fire team, Frenchy LaRiviera, bounce backward and scream as he was hit. Kachmar crawled to him in the tall, concealing grass. LaRiviera’s right arm was smashed below the shoulder, but his system wasn’t registering the pain yet. Kachmar applied a battle dressing. It was soaked with blood in moments, so he used an extra belt-suspender strap that he kept in his medical pouch for use as a tourniquet. When he pulled it tight, LaRiviera passed out from the sudden jolt of pain.

Kachmar raised up to drag his buddy back—and was instantly a target. He returned the fire as best he could from the prone. His guess was that the NVA who had shot at him was in a tree at the hamlet’s edge. Kachmar couldn’t get higher than the two-foot rice stalks hiding them, so after discarding LaRiviera’s weapon, ammo, and web gear, he got a grip on the man’s flak jacket, got his legs around his body, and shoved off on his back. He pushed along with an upside-down frog kick. LaRiviera shoved weakly with his feet, too. They were making it inch by laborious inch when an AK-47 round ripped into one of the ammo magazines in a bandolier across Kachmar’s chest, sending a metal fragment into his nose. It was a minor wound, but it hurt like hell, and Kachmar, exasperated, unslung the M16 he’d been dragging in the dirt around his neck and fired another ineffectual burst into the treetop.

Behind them, Corporal V.…heard movement and called for identification. Kachmar shouted back, “It’s me, Kachmar! I’m over here with Frenchy! He’s hit! I need help!”

Corporal V.…hollered back that he would get help. Kachmar
lay in the grass under sporadic fire for five minutes before he realized that no one was coming. Feeling exposed and alone, Kachmar pulled LaRiviera toward an M60 firing to their rear. Exhausted and sweat-soaked, he drained most of his last canteen, then poured the rest over LaRiviera’s face. The young Marine was going into shock and carrying on nonsense conversations.

They finally made it back to the dike and mound from which the M60 was firing. Several other Marines were there, including their platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Chateau, whom Kachmar was wildly relieved to see. Chateau had a corpsman tend to LaRiviera, then told Kachmar, “You’re dead.”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“V—said you and Frenchy were dead,” replied the non-com. He sounded disgusted.

Maybe Corporal V—really thought Kachmar had been killed. Maybe not. Maybe the idea of leading a team back for Kachmar and LaRiviera had completely unnerved him. It didn’t matter to Kachmar, who was boiling. “I’m going to kill the motherfucker,” he shouted.

“Nan, nan, nan,” Chateau replied. “V—’s been hit, he’s in one of the amtracs.”

Kachmar was still at a fever pitch. He saw an M79 grenade launcher lying unattended nearby and asked who it belonged to. Chateau asked why, and Kachmar answered, “Because I’m going to fire up that gook who was trying to kill me and Frenchy! That cocksucker wanted to kill me!” They were still taking fire from Dai Do. Kachmar didn’t care. He went up on the mound to get a clear view, and fired his first M79 round at the tree at the edge of the hamlet. It was a long shot, and the round fell short. Kachmar lobbed his next round at nearly maximum elevation from a kneeling position. Bingo. He fired two more rounds before Chateau got ahold of the back of his web belt and hauled him off the mound. “Stop it,” the platoon sergeant yelled, “you’re going to get killed! Enough!”

While Foxtrot Three’s assault on the left flank stalled, Lieutenant McAdams and Foxtrot One on the right flank were clear
of the cross fire and able to conduct a fire-and-maneuver assault all the way to the edge of Dai Do.

It was Lieutenant Mc Adams’s baptism of fire. The assault was a matter of jumping up and running, then falling down and doing it again. Sweat-slick and worn out, McAdams, a large, pithy, slow-talking farm boy from Gaston, Oregon, was basically going it alone: Both his platoon sergeant and right guide were on light duty because of jungle rot, and had been left at Mai Xa Chanh East. As a result, McAdams had difficulty maintaining contact with and controlling his platoon during the long maneuver. Nevertheless, he later wrote that the attack “was a classic frontal assault out of The Basic School. We maneuvered by fire team rushes until the artillery got hot. We then crawled in to get closer. Then, when the artillery was lifted, we went in shooting. Fortunately, we were not receiving heavy fire.”

At about 1505, Lieutenant McAdams went through the first hedgerow and over the first slit trench, where several NVA with weapons were huddled, apparently dead. The Marines ensured that they were by firing into the bodies as they rushed past, not stopping until they reached the next trench line some twenty meters into the hamlet. McAdams jumped into it at the urging of his veteran radioman, Cpl. Richard J. “Mongoose” Tyrell, who was very impressed by his gutsy new lieutenant. Tyrell wanted McAdams to understand, though, that his role was to be to the rear of his platoon, controlling all the elements, rather than leading the charge. McAdams and Tyrell could count only a dozen Marines still with them, including four who’d gotten mixed in from the other platoon. McAdams discovered then that two of his men had been hit in the legs. Their trench was bordered by vegetation and seemed to be one side of a complete square with a burial mound in the middle of it. They were in the hamlet’s cemetery.

Lieutenant McAdams and Tyrell could see two NVA standing in the chest-deep trench across from them. They were about thirty meters away, and seemed to be looking around for the Marines who had made it into their lines. When McAdams called up his M79 man, the NVA took notice and
disappeared. The grenadier’s subsequent shot landed reasonably close to where McAdams pointed, but they figured the NVA had gotten away. Butler and Basel had meanwhile organized some arty to protect McAdams’s little position. The salvos were so close that McAdams, afraid he was going to get hit by friendly fire, made adjustments from the bottom of his trench.

The barrage did its job; no NVA closed with the Marines.

Captain Butler, who was terribly frustrated at not having a reserve platoon to exploit McAdams’s toehold in northeastern Dai Do, and the rest of Foxtrot Company were being plastered with 130mm NVA artillery fire in the open fields where they lay pinned down. Muffled kettledrumming signaled each five-gun cannonade from the foothills on the North Vietnamese side of the DMZ. The salvos were terrifying in their accuracy. They weren’t doing much physical damage, however, because the NVA did not use variable time fuses capable of causing airbursts. Lieutenant Basel later wrote that “we were picking fragments from our flak jackets,” but what “saved us was they appeared to adjust with time fuses and fire for effect with quick fuses. If they had hit us with time or VT fuses, I doubt that many of us would have seen another day. As it was, the quick fuses buried in the sand and much of the lethal effect was lost.”

“Foxtrot was hanging by the skin of its teeth,” Lieutenant Colonel Weise later wrote, “and we were pounding enemy positions with artillery, naval gunfire, and organic weapons.… Foxtrot Company needed assistance. I ordered it to hold on, hoping to reinforce with Golf Company.” Weise’s view of the flat, smoky battlefield was from the Navy Monitor steaming back and forth on the Bo Dieu River in an effort to avoid enemy fire. Lieutenant Kelley and his half-dozen crewmen, all wearing helmets and flak jackets, returned the fire with .30- and .50-caliber machine guns and a pair of 20mm cannons. Weise and Big John Malnar manned the deck-mounted 81mm mortar in support of the ground attacks. They also lobbed rounds at targets of opportunity, namely NVA soldiers
who appeared as olive-drab dots in the distance as they moved across an open area. It was impossible to tell if the NVA were retreating or reinforcing, but Weise could see that his rounds were landing where intended. It was impossible to tell what damage they inflicted.