The Magnificent Bastards (25 page)

Hotel Company’s grunts moved through the southeastern side of Dai Do, past the few Marines they could see among the many from Echo and Golf who were safely tucked behind cover. Reaching the muddy, sluggish stream that defined the western edge of the battlefield, Hotel turned northwest along it. The battalion command group had moved into Dai Do, and Lieutenant Prescott, Hotel’s new skipper, gave Weise a cigar. “We’ll be back shortly,” he said.

Lieutenant Prescott assaulted Dinh To with Lieutenant Taylor’s Hotel Three hugging the blueline on the left flank, and Lieutenant Boyle’s Hotel One moving abreast on the right. Hotel Two was in reserve under the command of Sgt. Bruce Woodruff, who until that morning had been a squad leader in Hotel One. The assault platoons were moving forward aggressively and methodically in team and individual rushes, using trenches, hedgerows, and tumble-down hootches for cover, when they began taking fire from the front. It sounded as if it was coming from two enemy soldiers with AK-47s in separate, camouflaged positions. More NVA, none of whom the Marines could see, opened up as Hotel Company pushed on. Taylor suspected that the enemy had deployed observation posts ahead of their main line of resistance, and that it was these small teams of NVA who were doing the shooting. Their fire was accurate. Several Marines had already been hit when Taylor
and his radioman knelt behind some bushes. Prescott was on the radio. When the radioman extended the handset to Taylor, the young Marine was hit in the elbow by one of the to-whom-it-may-concern bullets snapping blindly through the vegetation.

Hotel Company leapfrogged deeper into Dinh To, returning the increasingly heavy fire but not suppressing it. As Taylor passed seriously wounded men he would thump the nearest Marine and tell him to help get the casualty to the rear. Their corpsmen already had their hands full, so Taylor had no choice but to use able-bodied riflemen. Nevertheless, he did so reluctantly. Their firepower was needed up front. Taylor knew that some of his Marines would rush forward again as soon as they carried a wounded man back, but he had others he knew would drag their feet, hoping, for example, that the gunny might scoop them up to move water cans or ammo in the company rear. As more Marines were hit and others fell out to help them, it became impossible for Hotel to maintain its momentum.

A lot of prep fire had hit Dinh To, but there was still plenty of greenery. There were trees and leafy bamboo thickets, as well as the hedgerows that had once demarcated property lines. There were also thatch-roofed homes with stucco-covered brick walls. Some were demolished, some were not. Some of the fences and empty animal pens were also still standing. Taylor thought it was like going from yard to yard in suburbia. He finally bogged down with the squad on his platoon’s right flank. They were hung up against a hedgerow that ran across their front. The entrenched NVA on the other side had every opening through the thick bushes zeroed in, and the enemy on the flanks covered the trenches that ran the length of the hedgerow, one in front and one behind the shrubs.

Meanwhile, Taylor’s platoon sergeant, Sgt. Joe Jones, was pinned down with the squad on the left flank. They were under heavy fire along the creek, and had several wounded men. Jones had two machine-gun teams with his squad, but one of the gunners had fallen out with heat exhaustion. The man was
in agony, and his comrades bellowed for a corpsman. The squad’s M79 man took over the machine gun, but it jammed on him just as the corpsman made it up to help the gunner. The other M60 was still firing, and the grenadier’s M79 also still worked. Every M16 in the squad was jammed, however. All the riflemen could do was throw grenades. Infuriated, Jones grabbed the inoperable machine gun. As he was trying to clear the weapon, he spotted one of the NVA who had pinned them down. He told the grenadier to fire on that position. Then, with the M60 back in working order, Jones rushed to their corpsman to provide the covering fire needed to start getting their casualties back. Jones, who was subsequently awarded the Silver Star, later told the division historical team:

North Vietnamese soldiers were firing from the hootches and bushes on the far side of the creek. Sergeant Jones said that once he’d forced some litter teams into action, NVA snipers were able to slip down the near side of the streambed to pour point-blank fire into Hotel Three’s flank because his scared grunts had begun “to pull in from the flanks and cluster up in the middle.”

Lieutenant Boyle and Hotel One were also in sorry shape. They had bogged down in the face of heavy AK-47 and RPG fire. As understrength as it already was before taking more casualties, the platoon could not properly cover the right flank, where the vegetation gave way to open paddies. There were NVA in that vegetation, as well as behind the burial mounds
in the paddies themselves. Hotel Two, brought up from reserve, was also subjected to this fire from three sides and was unable to restore the momentum of the assault.

There was a lot of confusion. Many Marines simply kept their heads down, but there were a number of others who did more, such as LCpl. Ralph T. Anderson, an eighteen year old from St. Petersburg, Florida. According to his Silver Star citation:

Almost every M16 in Hotel Company was inoperable due to overuse and a lack of cleaning gear. When Sgt. Donald F. Devoe’s carboned-up rifle jammed, he opened a C-ration can of beans and franks and used the grease it contained to lubricate the weapon. Devoe resumed firing.

Lance Corporal Donaghy of Hotel Two, crouched behind an earthen mound, was just rising up to fire his M16 when the Marine doing the same thing beside him was shot in the head. The round went through the man’s helmet, which stayed on his head, and he wordlessly turned to look at Donaghy as a fountain of blood spurted from the wound. Slumped over but still conscious, the Marine did not make a sound as the corps-man worked on him. He didn’t look as though he was going to survive.

“We were in a nasty, narrow spot and we had a lot of people jammed in that narrow front,” Lieutenant Prescott said later. He had moved his command group into a partially demolished hootch maybe fifteen meters up from the stream and was trying to get a handle on the situation.

“Scotty Prescott was a real good leader, and the troops liked him,” said Captain Williams, the man Prescott had replaced. “He had a lot of spirit and he had the wiseguy in him.” Prescott, a twenty-four-year-old Texan, could also be serious when necessary. From September 1967 to March 1968, when he’d had Hotel Three, he’d been considered by some to be the best platoon commander in the battalion. His follow-me brand of leadership had gotten him shot in the leg during the assault on Vinh Quan Thuong, where he’d also been an on-the-spot grenadier, machine gunner, and LAW rocketman. He’d been bumped up to the exec slot after recuperating. Prescott had no career intentions. He was a citizen-soldier. “Most of the officers were USMC. I was USMCR,” he noted. “I never wanted the R dropped off. I was always United States Marine Corps Reserve and proud of it, knowing that at the end of three years I was gone.”

Lieutenant Prescott, watching from behind cement cover, saw Cpl. Tyrone W. Austin, a black machine gunner, get shot in the head after setting up right outside the lieutenant’s hootch. The round took away half of his head. The corpsman inside the hootch with Prescott went into shock at the sight. He had to be shaken back to reality.

The NVA had moved in too closely for Prescott to call in air or arty—or even his own 60mm mortars, which the gunny had set up at the edge of Dai Do. At about 1200, Prescott radioed Lieutenant Colonel Weise to report that Hotel Company would probably be overrun if not reinforced. Shortly thereafter, Prescott’s radioman got off the horn and said excitedly, “Captain Livingston is coming!”

Lieutenant Prescott, who knew then that they would be okay, hollered to Taylor, who was about seventy feet from the hootch, “Echo is coming up!”

“Echo is coming!”

“Echo is coming!”

The word was repeated down the line, and it electrified Hotel Company. Marines who’d had all they could take of eating dirt got up to scream and wave, “C’mon, let’s go on. Let’s go!”

Lieutenant Prescott came out of his hootch, bellowing for everyone to stay where they were. He had taken only a few steps from cover when he was suddenly spun three-quarters of the way around and dropped on the spot. He had been hit in the small of the back. Prescott was vaguely aware of the sound of an AK-47 squeezing off a shot from across the creek at the same moment he stepped out of the hootch, and he was terribly aware that he could not feel his legs. He figured that his spine had been damaged, and as he lay on the ground he imagined that he would have to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. A corpsman and several Marines dragged Prescott back into the beat-up hootch. A thousand thoughts rushed through his mind. He had been shot before, and this did not feel like a gunshot wound. His back was sore. He could feel something wet, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding badly. But why don’t my legs work? he wondered frantically.

Lieutenant Taylor ran over to the hootch. Prescott passed command to him with three words—“You got it!”—then the corpsman got two Marines to start back with Prescott on the trail to Dai Do. Prescott had an arm over the shoulder of each and, with his feet dragging, he grimaced in pain and mumbled groggily about his useless legs.
²

After being taken by skimmer to the BLT CP, Lieutenant Prescott was lying facedown on the beach among some other Hotel Company casualties when, perhaps thirty minutes after being medevacked, his feet suddenly began to tingle. He removed his jungle boots and massaged his feet. Feeling returned to his legs. Prescott was unsteady when he stood up, but he felt 100 percent better. There was a half-dollar-sized bruise at the base of his spine, but no blood, and his torn-up gear explained why. The bullet had hit the full canteen on his left hip, mushroomed, and ricocheted against a stud on his cartridge belt. The stud was driven into the small of his back, and the blow had temporarily knocked out the feeling in his legs. The
bullet had then zipped through the canteen on his right hip. The first canteen had a small entrance hole and a big exit hole, and the second canteen was completely ripped apart. The luckiest hit of the war, Prescott thought as he showed the canteens to the bloody, bandaged Marines around him.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise had not planned to send Echo Company into Hotel Company’s meatgrinder. He thought that Echo Company, which numbered about seventy-five men after its dawn assault into Dai Do, was thoroughly winded. Golf Company, also on hand in Dai Do, was even more beat up. Weise’s original idea was to form a composite platoon from the support personnel in An Lac and hustle them into Dinh To aboard amtracs. His next step would then have been to bring Foxtrot Company over from Dong Huan to follow the composite platoon in. Weise contemplated taking command of Foxtrot himself because he did not trust Butler’s drive. Captain Livingston, however, made these plans moot. He had been monitoring the situation by radio. He neither waited for nor asked for orders but simply got on the battalion tac net. “Dixie Diner Six, this is Echo Six. I’m going to help Hotel. They are really fixin’ to get into trouble. I’ll go get ’Em.”

Captain Livingston called up his platoon commanders before leaving Dai Do, but just as Lieutenant Jones of Echo Three started to move he heard the thump of an outgoing mortar round. The sound seemed to have come from just ahead of his covered position. Jones was sure that Echo’s mortars hadn’t been brought forward yet, but he couldn’t imagine an enemy mortar being that close to their lines. After waiting for what seemed a long time and hearing nothing, Jones reckoned that it had been an outgoing friendly shell. He came out of his ditch then, just as what was in fact an enemy shell landed right behind him. The round had been fired from such close range that its arc was almost straight up and down, and its time of flight relatively long. The explosion lifted Jones off his feet and sent him crashing into another ditch. He figured out that he was still alive, but beyond that he really didn’t know what
had happened to him. He could feel a lot of burning sensations cutting through his overall numbness.

Well, this must be what it’s like to get hit, he thought. This hurts bad enough that I might be outta here.

Lieutenant Jones’s radioman ran up to him from the ditch and said, “Your legs are messed up—you need to get out of here.” The back of Jones’s flak jacket was shredded, but it had done its job and protected his upper body. Except for small bits of metal in the backs of his arms, the fragments had mostly gouged him in his buttocks and the backs of his legs. He had seventeen serious wounds. Jones radioed Captain Livingston, who told him to hang in there and make sure that someone took care of him—and to find somebody to pass command to. Jones told his radioman to find Sergeant Rogers, the squad leader who was next in the chain of command in the absence of a wounded platoon commander, platoon sergeant, and right guide. That done, the as-yet-unbandaged Jones started rearward with six or seven other walking wounded.

“I wondered how in the hell we were going to assist anyone without ammo,” recalled Lance Corporal Cornwell of Echo Two. He was angry and scared as he retrieved his M60 and started forward with the rest of the platoon. The assault pouch on his machine gun, which normally held a hundred-round belt, was only partially filled. That was all he had. “We were almost completely out of ammo, and we were out of water. In that heat, water was as important as ammo. We were hardened. You know what you can do, and you know what you can’t do. In our condition, what we were doing was crazy.”