The Magnificent Bastards (29 page)

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

T
HE COLUMN WAS FOUR DAYS OUT FROM
FSB B
ELCHER
and eye-deep in elephant grass when a poisonous green viper nailed the point man of 2d Lt. Terry D. Smith’s platoon in A Company, 3-21st Infantry.

Overhead, the sky was overcast with the low, leaden clouds of the approaching monsoon, and the patrol was soaked from the cold, nearly constant drizzle. “It was an absolutely miserable area,” recalled Lieutenant Smith. The place had previously been defoliated. The trees were dead and without leaves, whereas the underbrush, exposed to direct sunlight through the withered canopy, had grown wildly. The dense, razor-edged elephant grass was ten feet high, so the Alpha Company GIs, moving in single-file columns, had to hack and chop the whole way. Their machetes were loud and progress was slow. It was dank and muggy in the elephant grass, and impossible to see what was ahead. The insects in the underbrush, to include red ants, were huge and vicious, and the mosquitoes were thick. There were leeches, too.

Alpha Company had found nothing of value, not even a hootch. “The hacking through the elephant grass just wore people out,” said Lieutenant Smith. “It was just a useless waste of time. There was absolutely nothing there.”

The only casualty was the point man, who was bitten twice on his left hand by the green viper, between thumb and index finger. “He was really calm, but I thought he was going to die on me,” said Lieutenant Smith. The platoon medic had to keep moving the tourniquet up the point man’s arm as it quickly swelled to three times its normal size. The snake had been killed. Its head was chopped off, placed in a plastic bag used to carry radio batteries, and tied to the point man’s fatigue shirt so the medical personnel in the rear could identify the species.

Lieutenant Smith immediately requested a helicopter med-evac, and in the twenty-five minutes it took a Huey to make the flight from Camp Evans, every grunt in the platoon who had a machete was swinging it to clear a landing zone. They hacked at the thick vegetation, stomped on it, and took running jumps to mash it down with their weight. It was tight quarters nonetheless for the helicopter, and the pilot complained about a tree that the platoon had not had the ordnance to knock down. The Huey came to a hover over the semiflattened vegetation, and grunts lifted the point man up to the skid, where the door gunner hauled him aboard. Thanks to rapid medical assistance, the point man was back with the platoon within a week—by which time the platoon was in heavy combat on the DMZ.

Lieutenant Colonel William P. Snyder was the commander of the 3-21st Infantry, 196th LIB. The chain of events that moved his battalion to FSB Belcher, and then on to the DMZ, began when the 1st Cavalry Division, headquartered at Camp Evans, launched an unrelated attack against the NVA logistical complexes in the A Shau Valley. In the absence of the Cav, the entire 196th LIB was tasked to disengage from its operations in Quang Tin Province and redeploy to Camp Evans, which was to the north in Thua Thien Province.

The realignment required Snyder’s 3-21st Infantry (better known as the Gimlets) to airlift lock, stock, and barrel from their mountaintop fire support base, FSB Center, to the brigade headquarters at FSB Baldy for further transportation by C-123
cargo planes to Camp Evans. The move began on 20 April with E/3-21 and the lead elements of D/3-21 arriving at FSB Baldy. When the remainder of Delta caught up the next day, the company moved on to Camp Evans and immediately started up Route 1 on foot to secure the slight rise on which its new firebase would be built. The company ran out of daylight before reaching the hillock, but the next morning, 22 April, Delta continued on to its objective. The GIs spent the rest of the day unloading the ammunition and supplies that followed them up in trucks. The developing perimeter was half a kilometer west of Route 1, where the coastal lowlands began undulating into the foothills that became one side of the Annamite Mountains, which shielded the A Shau Valley.
¹

Also on 22 April, elements of the Americal Division’s 198th LIB relieved the Gimlets on FSB Center, and HHC, A, B, and C/3-21 were shuttled by Chinook helicopter to FSB Baldy. The 3-21st Infantry was accompanied by its supporting artillery battery, D/3-82d Field Artillery (105mm), whose field guns were slingloaded underneath the twinbladed Chinooks. At FSB Baldy, each soldier was issued clean fatigues, extra ammunition, and another case of rations, as well as mail and a cold beer or soda. After the fixed-wing airlift to Camp Evans, B/3-21 was moved on by Chinook to reinforce Delta Company in the as yet unbuilt FSB Belcher. The rest of the battalion road-marched up Route 1 the next morning, 23 April, despite sniper fire and a booby-trapped grenade that wounded two Charlie Company GIs. The casualties were medevacked on the spot. After the linkup, Bravo was detailed to build bunkers, fill sandbags, and lay concertina wire at FSB Belcher while waiting for the bulldozers that would be brought in to push up an earthen berm and clear fields of fire.

The rest of the battalion moved out to secure the area. On 28 April, Capt. James F. Humphries, the Delta Company commander, was swinging back out of the foothills toward Route 1
when the point element triggered what was probably a booby-trapped 82mm mortar shell. The first three grunts in the column, all of whom were wounded badly in the legs, were blown down the side of the ridge along whose crest the company was moving.

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder was already airborne in the area, and he medevacked the casualties aboard his Huey. Captain Humphries then instructed 2d Lt. Richard J. Skrzysowski, whose platoon had hit the booby trap, to continue to march and to clear a path down to a narrow stream that Delta would cross in the morning. The stream was the last natural obstacle between the foothills and the safer ground along Route 1. On the way down, several more booby traps were found rusting away in the defoliated underbrush. The platoon sergeant blew them in place with plastic explosives.

The platoon sergeant was Sfc. Buford Mathis, a powerfully built career soldier. “Mathis didn’t want anybody else fooling with the booby traps,” Lieutenant Skrzysowski said later. “He knew what he was doing, so we let him do it.”

The explosions marked the platoon’s progress. As directed by Captain Humphries, who was still in the foothills with the other two platoons, Skrzysowski and Mathis halted their platoon and dug in just short of the stream. The next morning, 29 April, Captain Humphries told 2d Lt. John T. Dunlap III, another platoon leader, to retrace Skrzysowski’s semicleared route down to his overnight position and to continue from there to clear a path to the stream. The rest of Delta Company would follow, and they would then all cross the blueline. Dunlap wanted to cover the ground personally before walking his whole platoon through the booby-trapped terrain. He selected five men to accompany him. Skrzysowski was sitting with Mathis and cleaning his M16 when Dunlap showed up behind the first two grunts of his patrol. A trail ran down to the stream through a bamboo thicket. Skrzysowski suggested to Dunlap that although both trail and bamboo were unchecked, Dunlap should take the trail, “where you can at least
see
this stuff.”

Lieutenant Dunlap disagreed. The bamboo might be booby trapped, but the trail almost certainly was. Just before starting
into the bamboo, Dunlap looked at Skrzysowski and said, “No sweat, Ski.”

Moments later, there was a huge explosion. Lieutenant Dun-lap was blown away, and the five grunts with him were grievously wounded. “I just found out that my platoon leader was killed in that last blast I heard,” Sgt. Laurance H. See, a squad leader, wrote in a letter to his fiancée as he sat in the company laager, listening to the hysterical screaming below the hill. “It was a 155 Howitzer round. Pieces of it landed all around, so I put my steel pot on. Damn it. Baby I’m pretty shook right now. He was a good lieutenant. We got along pretty well. Now he’s dead. It makes me feel weak and empty.”

Exercising great caution so no one else would get hurt by other booby traps, a handful of grunts pulled their wounded buddies out of the smoking, splintered bamboo. It was a demoralizing moment. “Without warning, somebody’s gone—and there was no enemy to fight,” Lieutenant Skrzysowski said later. “That really hurt. That had an impact that people had problems dealing with.”

Captain Humphries ordered every medic in the company to the scene, and a Huey landed in Delta Company’s position within fifteen minutes of the explosion to medevac the first three men removed from the shredded bamboo. Another Huey came in within a half hour to medevac the rest. Afterward, Lieutenant Skrzysowski gripped his radio handset with white-knuckled anger as he spoke with Humphries, who he greatly respected, blowing off steam: “We got to get the hell out of here! Losing people in a firefight is one thing, but walking around in an area loaded with booby traps just doesn’t make any sense!”

At 1413 on 1 May 1968, Col. Louis Gelling, the 196th LIB commander, ordered Lieutenant Colonel Snyder to execute the 3-21st Infantry’s contingency plan to deploy to the DMZ. Other brigade elements would assume control of FSB Belcher. “It was a confusing move,” recalled Lieutenant Skrzysowski, whose company was to lead the way into Mai Xa Chanh East. Delta Company was conducting platoon-sized ambushes and
road security operations along Route 1. Skrzysowski, whose platoon was dug in near an old French fort, was instructed to secure a pickup zone along the west side of the highway and to assemble his men for helicopter extraction. That was all the information he received. “I wasn’t told where we were going, what lift units were going to pick us up, what the mission was, what the threat in the landing zone was—none of the normal things.”

Since airlifting to Camp Evans, the 196th LIB had been on standby to respond to an expected NVA offensive. Higher command knew something was coming, but not where, and the 3-21st Infantry was ready to move to the DMZ or Khe Sanh or Da Nang or Quang Tri or Hue, which was the largest city near the A Shau.

Lieutenant Skrzysowski was most concerned about organizing his platoon into helo teams, but no information was forthcoming as to the number or type of helicopters involved. The result was that each helo team was hastily formed with as many combat-loaded soldiers as each pilot determined he could carry as the choppers came in one or two at a time. In short order, Skrzysowski was alone in the pickup zone with his radioman and three grunts. “Everybody was gone, and I had no idea where they were going!” Army Hueys had lifted the platoon out, but then a Marine Sea Knight settled into the pickup zone and a gunnery sergeant waved the tail-end group up the back ramp. “I’m looking out the window, trying to find out where the hell we’re going to land. I ask the gunny. Christ, he doesn’t know.…” Skrzysowski had been issued three maps at the time of their original deployment north, one apiece for Hue, Khe Sanh, and the eastern DMZ, and he broke them out aboard the Sea Knight. He had thought that Hue, the scene of house-to-house fighting during the Tet Offensive, would be the hot spot of this new NVA offensive. Instead of Hue, the Sea Knight unloaded Skrzysowski and his group among the burial mounds in a flat, sandy-soiled cemetery near the bend in a river that would not be identified to him as the Cua Viet until an hour later. He could hear firing off in the distance. “I wondered what the hell was going on,” he said. “I was trying
to assemble my people, and find my company commander—I had no idea where he was.”

Lt. Col. William Weise, commander of BLT 2/4 during the Battle of Dai Do.
Courtesy W. Weise
.