The Magnificent Bastards (15 page)

Inside Dong Huan, cutoff NVA who had lain low until dark tried to slip through Hotel Three’s side of the line. The Marines opened fire on the shadows, and at dawn they found two extra enemy bodies in front of their positions among the hedgerows.

Meanwhile, in An Lac, Lieutenant Keppen, the new, green commander of B/1/3, was getting shook up again. One of the problems was that the NVA had begun jamming his radio net with a high-pitched electronic tone that effectively shut down his communications with Lieutenant Colonel Weise on the Monitor. The jamming wasn’t perfect, but Weise couldn’t make Keppen understand through the constant buzz that he should switch to the BLT’s alternate frequency. Weise finally felt compelled to put ashore aboard a skimmer with his sergeant major and radiomen.

Weise spoke with Lieutenant Keppen, who was very relieved to see the colonel, and made sure they were straightened out on a new frequency; then Weise and his little group worked down Bravo Company’s line in the predawn darkness. Weise wanted to ensure that the troops had enough ammunition and that there was a leader assigned to each group, and to let the Marines in the shot-up company know that someone up the chain knew they were there and was concerned about them.

The grunts were keyed up. “We had to be very careful that the Marines didn’t shoot us,” Weise remembered. But by and large, “they were in pretty good shape considering that they had taken heavy casualties. They had gotten all of their wounded out. They had even gotten their dead out. We adjusted the lines somewhat, but they were in reasonably good positions. Had they been hit real hard, I think that new lieutenant would have been able to handle himself.”

Lieutenant Colonel Weise and Big John Malnar were still working their way through Bravo’s position when there was an explosion about ten meters in front of their command group. It was probably an enemy mortar round. Weise was wounded superficially in his right thigh. He had the wound bandaged but did not report it. He had been wounded before—taking shell fragments in his left thigh and shoulder during Operation Task Force Kilo—and that injury had likewise not been reported outside battalion channels. Weise knew that battalion commanders with two Purple Hearts had to give up their commands, so he reckoned that what division didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

Weise spent the rest of the night with Bravo Company. An hour before sunrise, he instructed Keppen to send a patrol into the eastern side of half-secured An Lac. The patrol reported that the NVA had withdrawn. Bravo Company reoccupied the remainder of the hamlet at first light, amid enemy artillery and recoilless rifle fire that killed one Marine and wounded four. Bravo Company got its payback two and a half hours later when thirty to forty NVA, including many wearing Soviet-style helmets, were caught in the open fields between An Lac and Dong Huan. Hotel Company in Dong Huan, the first to spot them and take them under fire, thought the NVA had slipped out of Dai Do in order to hit An Lac. Weise suspected that the NVA were what remained of the force that had held An Lac and had retired into the fields on order. It was unclear whether they planned to continue their retreat or await reinforcements and then double back and assault.

Whatever the case, the Marines excitedly tried to line up the small, bobbing figures in their rifle sights. “Look at all
them comin’ gooks,” shouted one Bravo Company Marine. “Let’s kill ’Em!” The NVA pulled back toward Dai Do, hounded by mortar and artillery fire. It was a real turkey shoot. “We caught them in the open before they could get their act together,” said Weise later. “Some of them were moving and some of them were just standing or sitting there like they were waiting to do something before we opened up. We put a lot of fire on them. Some of them began running, some of them hit the ground—and, of course, you could see some of them drop.”

High Diddle Diddle, Right Up the Middle

L
IEUTENANT
C
OLONEL
W
EISE BRIEFED
C
APTAIN
V
ARGAS
, the CO of G BLT 2/4, on the situation in Dai Do at about 0945 on Wednesday, 1 May 1968. They spoke aboard Vargas’s Mike boat, the leader of the two that had pushed up onto the beach at Mai Xa Chanh West some thirty minutes earlier to take aboard Golf Company and its two attached tanks. Vargas, who thought his company was going to be in reserve during the attack on Dai Do, was in for a surprise.

“The minute you hit, you’re going for broke,” Weise told him. “You’re going to have to go right into the attack. The other companies in there have been torn apart.”

Naval gunfire and artillery were already pounding the objective. Weise estimated that the NVA held Dai Do with a reinforced company. His plan to seize the square, hedgerow-encased hamlet called for Golf Company to put ashore east of An Lac and then to pass around the right flank of B/1/3. Golf would then attack northwest across the seven hundred meters of rice paddies between eastern An Lac and the southeastern underbelly of Dai Do. Hotel Company, to the east in Dong Huan, was to provide a base of fire that would shift north as Golf progressed in the assault. Foxtrot Company, also located in Dong Huan, was to move out to where it faced the north-eastern
edge of Dai Do and provide a second base of fire, while B/1/3 remained in reserve in An Lac.

Dai Do, with roughly three hundred meters to each of its four sides, was surrounded by paddies except along its southwestern edge, which was snug against the bank of the unnamed tributary that ran northwest from the Bo Dieu. Separated from Dai Do by a hundred open meters, the long, narrow hamlet of Dinh To was situated to the northwest along this blueline, where it merged with the equally thin village of Thuong Do. Viewed together, the three hamlets looked like a tilted “L,” with Dinh To and Thuong Do forming the lean vertical leg along the blueline, and Dai Do the fat horizontal leg jutting into the paddies. Given the enemy’s capacity to reinforce from the DMZ, it was a good guess that additional NVA units stood ready in Dinh To and Thuong Do. At the very least, these hamlets offered the NVA in Dai Do a covered escape route.

Dai Do was being napalmed and bombed by a pair of A-4 Skyhawks when the ramps of Golf Company’s Mike boats went down on the shoreline immediately east of An Lac. Nearby, a Navy Monitor sent a stream of 20mm automatic-cannon fire into the swirl of dust and smoke partially obscuring the objective. Lieutenant Colonel Weise disembarked with Vargas, who immediately placed his exec, Lieutenant Deichman, in the first wood line off the beach along with the company mortars. Vargas wanted Deichman to remain at the splash point to coordinate their supporting arms. The 60mm mortar section began shelling Dai Do as Vargas moved on to the forward edge of An Lac, where he deployed his Marines in a defensive perimeter with their backs to the river. The two attached tanks moved up with them, their main guns booming downrange.

Captain Vargas, a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican American from Winslow, Arizona, held a platoon commanders’ meeting to finalize the assault plan. They would launch with Lieutenant Ferland’s Golf Three on the left flank, and Lieutenant Morgan’s Golf Two on the right. Vargas counted Jay Ferland, a sandy-haired working man’s son from Manchester, New
Hampshire, as his best platoon commander. Rick Morgan, the son of a bank president in Charleston, West Virginia, was a similarly confident, forceful, and aggressive officer, but Vargas saw him as a greenhorn who questioned too many orders. Both lieutenants had gotten married less than a month before shipping out for Vietnam.

The two tanks would move between and slightly to the rear of the assault platoons. Captain Vargas and his gunny, Staff Sergeant Del Rio, would follow the tanks with the company headquarters. Stocky, dark Ray Del Rio was a thirty-year-old Mexican American from Texas. He had been with Golf Company for only two weeks. He was, however, a strong, up-front professional, and veteran of a tour with D/1/9—the company made infamous by Morley Safer and CBS News when its marines put their Zippo lighters to Cam Ne in 1965.

Staff Sergeant Wade, another pro, had the reserve platoon, Golf One, which since the Night Owl disaster had only two squads. Vargas also spoke with Lieutenant Acly, his forward observer, a twenty-two-year-old Yale graduate from upper-crust Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Vargas wanted Acly to plaster Dai Do with a barrage of white phosphorus and delay-fused high-explosive shells. He wanted to roll his company across those murderously open paddies while the barrage kept the NVA pinned to the bottom of their spiderholes. And he wanted an artillery-delivered smoke screen to cover them during the final few strides of their assault into the enemy entrenchments. Vargas basically wanted the same fire support that Hotel Company had enjoyed the day before during its successful assault, but he did not get what he needed. Acly explained why in a tape-recorded interview with the division historical team:

The Skyhawk pilots flew low and slow to place their high-drag bombs and tumbling, fire-blossoming napalm canisters right into the teeth of the enemy entrenchments along the southeastern edge of Dai Do. They did a superb job and were not the source of the problem. The red tape that muzzled the artillery came from division-level fire support coordinators at the DHCB who were overly concerned about the one-in-a-million chance of an artillery round meeting an aircraft in midair. Air and arty were supposed to be able to work in unison. The proper application of doctrine would have had the arty check-fired only when the Skyhawks were actually conducting their firing runs. The total cessation of artillery fires in this case was completely unjustified, according to the infantry officers waiting to attack. From the time Golf Company landed at An Lac (1040) until it launched its assault on Dai Do at 1253, the Skyhawks came on station only infrequently. Weise later wrote that although BLT 2/4 had finally been given priority for close air support (CAS), the battalion still “didn’t get all the CAS we requested, nor as quickly as we needed it.… We learned to operate without relying on CAS, the king of Marine Corps supporting arms.”

Dixie Diner 6 added a bitter addendum: “… lives were lost because of inadequate or unresponsive support in critical situations.”

The NVA were, at intervals, shelling Dong Huan and An Lac. Since Lieutenant Acly did not know how long the company would remain in the open area off the beach before moving out, he and his out-of-work FO team started to dig in. They were not successful. The day was getting hotter and the ground was brick hard. After a few rebuffed swings of their entrenching
tools, they said the hell with it and settled for the relative cover of a paddy dike. Acly was crouched behind the dike when a Skyhawk dropped another bomb on Dai Do. He heard a quick, hissing sound—
zzzppppt
—justas a metal shard ripped his left sleeve from shoulder to elbow and smacked into the dirt beside him. He hadn’t even been scratched. Burning his fingers on the red-hot, two-inch fragment, he stowed it in his pack to take home as a souvenir. Acly was impressed. So were the NVA in Dai Do. The napalm especially got them stirred up. Lieutenant Prescott, the new Hotel skipper, said in his own interview with the division historical section that after the napalm hit, there were “gooks running through the ville, hopping out of various trench lines, and [we] were taking them under fire from our position. Foxtrot Company was working the back end of the village with a one-oh-six recoilless rifle mounted on an amtrac.…”

Lance Corporal Lashley, the machine-gun team leader with Golf One, was seriously wounded only a few steps into the assault on Dai Do. Lashley, with eight months in the bush, was down to seventeen days before he was to leave the field and begin outprocessing at the end of his two-year enlistment. He had written home the night before with the good news (“I don’t have to go out on anymore squad sized patrols or ambushes since I have so little time to do”), but he had, without objection, boarded the Mike boats with everyone else. Lashley did not think his dedication made him a standout. “All the grunts I served with were incredibly brave,” he later wrote. “To saddle up and move out when you were inadequately supplied, undermanned, and outgunned is an inherently brave act.”

Lance Corporal Lashley, who’d previously suffered two flesh wounds, was, nonetheless, totally unimpressed with their across-the-paddies scheme to assault Dai Do. It’s crazy, he thought. He had some real doubts about his ability to survive, so while the Skyhawks worked out he turned to his gunner and good friend, Mike Zywicke, who was also a Kingfisher
vet, and said, “We’re gettin’ too short for this shit. Man, I just don’t
know
about this one.”