The Magnificent Bastards (35 page)

Steel Gimlet rewarded GIs who got a confirmed kill with a three-day pass to the division rear in Chu Lai, where the beach was beautiful. When positive reinforcement did not work, however, he applied the stick. First Lieutenant Roger D. Hieb, whom Leach rated as his best platoon leader, described how Steel Gimlet refused to promote him to first lieutenant with the battalion’s other second lieutenants who shared the same date of rank “because my platoon didn’t have a high enough body count. I will never forget because then lo and behold—and it was not something we went out looking for—but we had contact and we killed some VC, and he flew out and promoted me and it was disgusting. It was really disgusting.”

Such pressures had their consequences. “We didn’t cut no slack on any of ’Em. There were no civilians,” explained one Charlie Tiger NCO. “If there was any doubt—shoot, fire it up. If they didn’t run, we didn’t fire ’Em up. If they ran, they was going to get fired up. I’m sure more than one innocent
person died.” While moving down a well-vegetated hill, Charlie Company’s point element spotted movement in the brush and fired. One Vietnamese male of military age was killed outright, and three men in their twenties were captured. They had neither weapons nor military equipment. They could have been farmers. The officer in charge decided they were probably local guerrillas, and an M60 machine gunner and a squad of grunts formed up in front of the three prisoners, who were in a squatting position. The grunts opened fire on order. The body count was thus four instead of one.

“We had one of our guys step on a mine, wounding him and two others,” remembered Sp4 William W. Karp, a platoon medic in Alpha Annihilator. The Steel Gimlet’s helicopter diverted toward the platoon to conduct the medevac. The only clearing in the area was a waist-deep rice paddy. As the Huey hovered inches above the water, Karp tried to carry the soldier who had tripped the mine to the chopper. The man was the most seriously wounded of the three. “I carried him as far as I could. I thought I was going to pass out, but just then a sergeant took the man from me and struggled the rest of the way to the chopper. The wounded kid was white and the sergeant was black, but that didn’t matter.” The Huey banked off with the casualty. The man did not survive. As the patrol continued, they caught a Vietnamese male in a free-fire zone—a place where he should not have been. “The black sergeant—who was later killed himself—went into a rage and started beating the shit out of him, hollering that he was probably the dink that planted the mine the kid stepped on. We all got caught up in the rage and almost killed the bastard. We finally let him go, beat up but still alive.”

“We all had borderline incidents,” stated Capt. Hal Bell, who commanded A/3-21 after the Gimlets returned to FSB Center from the DMZ. “You never knew if the ‘civilians’ were friends, foes, or neutrals. It would depend on what kind of day or week we’d had as to how we would treat civilians. It really was awful, but that was the case.”

The Gimlets’ nomadic patrolling around FSB Center neither
secured nor protected the villages of the Hiep Due and Song Chang valleys, for that was not the stated mission. The Gimlets’ only goal was to kill dinks. That was what the grunts called the enemy. It was also what they called most Vietnamese. The Gimlets killed a lot of dinks. The production of bodies was a demeaning mission and, given the virtually inexhaustible manpower available to the Communists, an unintelligent one. Success, as noted earlier, lay within the hearts and minds of the villagers, and their allegiance was won only through the protection offered by a permanent presence with an emphasis on civic action. As it was, one squad leader could observe only that it was “heart wrenching” to see the civilians killed and wounded by their arty preps of suspected enemy hamlets. “Terrible, terrible…”

The villagers had no reason to shift their allegiance away from the VC, who were that permanent presence (and who offered more than Saigon and the ARVN did). The Gimlets, with no connection to the people or the land, came to hate those they thought they had come to save. Charlie Tiger was approaching a lone hootch when a VC suddenly emerged from it. The VC cut loose with his AK-47 before turning to run away through the monsoon rain that was crashing down. Private First Class Gregory B. Harp recounted:

Harp lined up the Vietnamese and demanded to see their government identification cards. As they produced them, Harp heard something move inside the family bunker under the hard-packed earthen floor. He readied a fragmentation grenade
while the GI with him trained his M16 on the entrance. Harp continued:

Another day, Charlie Tiger was moving down a trail when Private Harp saw movement to the right of their column. A Vietnamese was sliding down an embankment, and he saw Harp at the same time Harp saw him. The Vietnamese took off like a jackrabbit down another trail, and Harp, concerned that the man was a VC scout, tapped his team leader on the shoulder and pointed. The two moved out in hot pursuit. Harp, well in the lead, caught up with the Vietnamese as he crawled away through a tapioca field, and stopped him with his M16. Harp ran up and rolled the body over. The dead man had no weapon and no military gear. Harp rejoined his team leader “and when we made it back, the company called in one VC body count. Of course, he could also have been an enemy deserter, or a civilian, or your great Aunt Sally.”

The Gimlets’ first major encounter with enemy regulars occurred when Alpha and Delta Companies were placed opcon to the 4-31st Infantry in response to an offensive by the 2d
NVA Division. The battle took place in the misty, monsoon-soaked Hiep Due Valley, and it was a real shock to the system. The action began during the night of 5-6 January 1968 when another attached company was partially overrun in its night defensive position. In the morning, Captain Belcher’s Delta Company was airlifted into the valley, where it worked in tandem with B/4-31 during a battalionwide sweep of the battle area. The NVA had melted away and it was not until 8 January, when Delta was north of the stream that cut the valley, that B/4-31 regained contact on the south side. Captain Belcher, a reckless, superaggressive black company commander, immediately joined Delta’s lead platoon with his forward observer, first sergeant, and two radiomen, and they started across the shallow stream. They were mortared when they reached the opposite bank. Then, as the platoon hastily advanced across an open paddy toward the cover of a wood line, it was ambushed. Captain Belcher was one of the first to be killed. He was shot in the back as he ran toward the stream to rejoin the main body of his company. The two platoons on the other side were unable to push forward and join the pinned-down platoon. Meanwhile, the NVA, who were camouflaged to resemble walking bushes, began maneuvering across the paddy toward that platoon. It was the company’s first real firefight, and one grunt who had been with the outfit less than a week described the panic of the moment:

Black Death suffered fourteen KIA in the debacle in the pouring rain, and had four men taken prisoner. Among the captured GIs was the company first sergeant, who had killed one NVA with his M79 before having his hand shattered by enemy fire. The first sergeant, who did not survive captivity, was trying to keep the grenade launcher in operation one-handed when the enemy overran his position.

The next afternoon, 9 January, Captain Yurchak and Alpha Company started across the same terraced, water-filled rice paddies. American bodies lay where they had fallen. The day was hot and muggy, and a misty rain was falling. The NVA were still in position, and they ambushed Alpha Annihilator. “A GI near me stood up and fired his M16 to cover men retreating from exposed positions,” recounted a grunt who did not fire his own weapon. “I could see bullets kicking puffs of dust from his clothes as he was hit. He crumpled slowly to the ground, firing till he died. A general panic took over. We seemed to be without leadership. I didn’t know whether to run or stay hidden behind the paddy dike.”

This confused grunt was captured, as were two other Alpha Company GIs. Thirteen were killed. One of those who barely escaped was Private Karp, who sought cover behind a dike when the ambush began. One of his good friends, a machine gunner, was shot in the legs on the other side. Karp fired his M16, then crawled out to his buddy. He was lying beside him, trying to figure out what to do next, when the machine gunner tried to push himself up. He was instantly shot in the chest, and red bubbles came out of his mouth. Karp asked God to bless and keep his friend, then heaved the dead man’s M60 to the ammo bearer behind the dike and shouted for covering fire.

The ammo bearer froze. He said the weapon was jammed. He would not raise up to fire. Feeling naked, Karp rolled back over the dike and flattened himself behind the ammo bearer.
Karp heaved two grenades to cover their retreat, but as they crawled back, bullets smacked into the mud around them. When hit, the mud looked as if an invisible finger had been drawn through it. An M79 man silenced an NVA machine gun, and Karp and the ammo bearer made it to the cover of a muddy pool. The platoon leader was there, but instead of giving orders, the panic-stricken lieutenant simply blurted that they had to get out, grabbed his radioman’s harness, and disappeared with him over the edge of the pool. Karp spotted an enemy soldier crawling toward them and flung his last grenade in that direction. It fell short because the medic’s water-soaked flak jacket had sapped his energy. It was a lucky thing, because the man crawling toward them was actually a light-skinned black trooper. Unscathed by the friendly fire, he made it into the muddy pool.

They were also joined by their black platoon sergeant, Sfc. Alan Dickerson, who had become separated from his weapon, helmet, pack, and web gear. All he had left was a bayonet. In fact, most of the grunts abandoned weapons and equipment while crawling to cover, and Karp had already given his .45 to another unarmed man. Dickerson decided that their best chance was to crawl rearward in small groups down a snaky little drainage ditch that ran from their pool. Dickerson had just shoved off with a wounded man and several others when an NVA jumped into the ditch with his AK-47. He put a killing burst into one GI just as the M79 man beside Karp fired at him. The round missed, but Karp had shouldered his Ml6 in that instant and he dropped the NVA with a head shot. Convinced that they were about to be overrun, the dozen men still in the pool crawled through the chest-deep water in the ditch to the point where it emptied into the rice paddy they would have to cross to reach the tree line the company had retreated to.

One of their guys lay dead in the paddy. Sergeant First Class Dickerson hollered for covering fire as his group ran toward the trees. Another man went down, hit in the head. Karp aimed his M16 at two NVA moving on their right and squeezed the
trigger. The weapon blew up in his hands. The barrel was clogged with mud. The dozen grunts in the ditch decided to wait until dusk before crossing that open, fireswept paddy. It had just gotten dark when Karp heard voices. He looked up from the ditch and was astonished to see several NVA in position a stone’s throw away. The battle was over and the NVA were talking amongst themselves. Karp silently watched one of them pull on a sweater to ward off the evening’s misty chill. The NVA disappeared when U.S. artillery began landing, but after the barrage more Vietnamese appeared in the flare-illuminated night. Two with ponchos and conical hats walked along the edge of the ditch and right past the terrified, un-moving soldiers lying in it before disappearing back into the darkness.