The Magnificent Bastards (36 page)

The grunts in the ditch crawled back the way they had come to reach the cover of a closer tree line. There they decided to pair up to make it back any way they could. It was nerve-racking for Karp and his partner as they walked along the edge of the trees. It was raining, and the flares, swinging as they came down, made everything appear to move. They had reached the previous night’s laager site when an M60 machine gun suddenly opened up from fifty meters away. They realized then that the company had pulled back to the same location. Karp wanted to wait until dawn before they crossed those last fifty meters, but his partner wanted to keep going and said he would go first. When they got moving again, Karp was glad that his partner was a head-bobbing, lanky-limbed country boy. No GI on watch, no matter how uptight, could mistake that distinctive lope.

The 196th Chargers lost 66 men but claimed 429 NVA kills in the Hiep Due Valley. Three weeks after the battle, Steel Gimlet’s reign ended at the stroke of six months, and Lieutenant Colonel Snyder rotated in for his shot of career-building command duty with the 3-21st Infantry.

Being a history professor, Bill Snyder selected the call sign Cedar Mountain 6. Cedar Mountain was the site of a Civil War battle that was the first in the regiment’s lineage. Some
of Snyder’s officers, comparing him to his predecessor, nicknamed him the Gentle Gimlet.

Snyder lost his first four men when the battalion deployed to FSB Colt during the Tet Offensive. The next major action began on 4 March 1968 when Alpha Company, by then commanded by Captain Osborn (Yurchak having been promoted and assigned to serve as Snyder’s S3), was attached to the division cavalry squadron and participated in the destruction of the 3d Regiment, 3d NVA Division, in the foothills near Tarn Ky. It was a three-day action. Wounds from enemy mortars and rocket-propelled grenades were numerous, and the cav unit had men killed, but Alpha Annihilator survived the battle without a fatality. The enemy, subjected to maximum arty, gunships, and tac air, as well as the cannons and machine guns of the cav’s tanks and armored personnel carriers, left behind more than four hundred bodies, according to the official after-action reports.

Two days later, Alpha Company lost a man in a minor skirmish. Two days after that, on 11 March, Lieutenant Colonel Snyder was involved in his first major contact when Bravo Company bumped into an NVA battalion in the Que Son Valley. Maximum use was again made of supporting arms, but, caught in the open, muddy paddies as they were, six Barracuda GIs were killed. It was Captain Corrigan’s baptism of fire as a company commander. When Corrigan reported that he was running out of ammunition, Snyder had his command-and-control (C&C) ship divert to FSB Center to take aboard an emergency resupply. Barracuda was under fire from the east, so Snyder’s plan was to have the chopper fly in from the west, kick out the ammo from a hover, and then spin around and zip out the way it had come.

The plan ran afoul of an NVA in a tree. The C&C Huey was just coming into its hover and was about twenty feet above the LZ when the undetected NVA emptied his AK-47 down the length of the helicopter from nose to tail boom. He put twenty holes in the chopper. The door gunner was shot in the foot, and Snyder was cut across the forehead by a piece of flying metal from one of the holes punched in the floor. The
wound was minor but a terrific bleeder. A crate of ammunition had also been hit, and Snyder shoved the smoking time bomb out the side door along with the rest of the packaged ammo. The shot-up Huey made it back to Center, where it died just as the pilot was setting it down.
²
Meanwhile, Corrigan’s company recovered all its casualties and withdrew to the hill where the mortar platoon had been left to provide support. The mortars were still there, but the crews were not. All but three of the crewmen eventually returned, explaining that an intense enemy mortar barrage had driven them from the position, and that they had become separated from one another while rushing down the jungle-covered slope. The three missing men were not recovered: They had been ambushed and captured.

The Gimlets’ next big contact—their last major one before the DMZ mission—began on 9 April when Captain Osborn’s Alpha Company killed four VC they caught running across a rice paddy in a little, horseshoe-shaped valley. The VC had been following them, sniping at the company ever since it had begun patrolling there. On the morning of 11 April, an Alpha GI tripped a booby trap, which blew off his hand and foot. During the day, the company killed three more VC who had been trailing it. To fully screen this active valley, the company spread out and established platoon patrol bases. Alpha One was joined in its position by Echo Recon, and they set up around a number of deserted hootches concealed in thick bamboo. Shortly before midnight on 13 April, the NVA assaulted this joint perimeter. Less than two hours earlier a ridgetop observation post from Delta Company had spotted NVA signaling each other with flashlights from one side of the valley to the other. The observation post had alerted the Alpha and Echo elements in the valley, but the joint perimeter was caught off guard nonetheless. In fact, neither the Echo Recon commander, who was seriously wounded, nor the Alpha One lieutenant,
who was killed along with his platoon sergeant, had had their men dig in. Nor had they put out claymore mines or trip flares. Most of the grunts had gotten out of the elements by setting up inside the hootches. Away from the supervision of their company commanders, the platoons had basically taken a siesta from the war.

The NVA ran right through them. Their mortar crews and machine gunners opened up first to keep the grunts’ heads down, then the NVA assault element let loose a shower of grenades before charging through one side of the perimeter and out the other. The attack was over in moments. Thirteen Gimlets were killed, and almost everyone else was wounded. Six of the dead were from Alpha One, seven from Echo Recon. The NVA left four bodies. The rest of Alpha conducted a night march to reinforce the position while illumination rounds flooded the valley with light, and gunships worked out with miniguns and rockets until dawn. The medevacs began at first light. One stunned grunt wrote home that “it sure was a sorry sight. Dead and wounded GIs lying all over the place. I had to help wrap ’Em in ponchos for extraction/The whole inside of the perimeter was blown to shreds. Rifles, rucksacks, web gear, and everything else was blown to bits. Everything was full of blood. Most of the guys didn’t even have time to fire a shot. Some men were sleeping inside huts when the NVA hit. We pulled what was left of them out of the ashes.”

The End of the Line

T
HE ARTILLERY PREP ON LAM
X
UAN
E
AST AND
L
AM
X
UAN
West commenced at 0755 on 2 May 1968 as the 3-21st Infantry’s rifle companies moved toward their lines of departure. Colonel Gelling, the 196th LIB commander, helicoptered to Lieutenant Colonel Snyder’s Mai Xa Chanh East CP at the junction of Jones Creek and the Cua Viet River. Gelling, a hard, old-school commander, did not actually retain operational control of the Gimlets, but he was on the scene because he was concerned that the Marines might not adequately support their attached Army battalion. Gelling assured Snyder that the brigade would provide him with a command-and-control helicopter and a forward air controller “unless the brigade has contingency missions elsewhere that necessitate me pulling one or both back from you.”

Colonel Gelling, a short, feisty, hawk-nosed man, was chewing a cigar as he told Snyder, “Anything you need—if you’re not satisfied with the way things are going up here—call me.”

Gelling climbed back into his Huey. His next stop was Camp Kistler for a meeting with Colonel Hull, who was responsible for providing most of the 3-21st Infantry’s supplies and supporting fires. Gelling was, as Snyder put it, “openly
lobbying to make sure that I got a fair shake in Marine resources. He was more concerned about it than I was, and I was concerned.”

The prep fires lasted twenty minutes. Because The Gimlets’ own artillery battery had yet to be slingloaded up by Chinook, the rounds were delivered by the Marines’ 4.2-inch mortars at Mai Xa Chanh West, and four artillery batteries firing out of Camp Kistler and the DHCB. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder’s plan called for an attack on two axes, with Jones Creek serving as both a guide and dividing line. Captain Corrigan’s B/3-21 was to advance north from Mai Xa Chanh West to a graveyard west of Jones Creek and immediately opposite Lam Xuan East. From the graveyard, Bravo could support by fire the attack on Lam Xuan East by Lieutenant Kohl and C/3-21, which was to move up the opposite side of Jones Creek from Mai Xa Chanh East. Following another artillery prep, Charlie would move on to seize Nhi Ha, with Captain Osborn’s A/3-21 following behind. Keeping abreast, Bravo was to simultaneously secure Lam Xuan West, which was connected to Nhi Ha by a footbridge that spanned Jones Creek. Captain Humphries was to remain in reserve with D/3-21.

The first shot of what promised to be a long day was fired by Barracuda before moving out of its night laager for the line of departure. The first shot was an accidental discharge. Captain Corrigan heard the distinct thump of an M79 going off, then saw a grenadier who was kneeling with the butt of his weapon against the ground and the barrel pointed up. The grenadier, who’d been cleaning a loaded weapon, was staring straight up. “So the whole hundred of us just kind of looked straight up, too,” Corrigan remembered. “And we looked at each other, because you really didn’t know whether you were better off just standing where you were, or running around in circles, depending on where the shell was going to come down. About twenty seconds later, the thing came down in the company area. It exploded, but luckily it didn’t hit anybody.”

The attack kicked off at 0808 with Bravo and Charlie Companies simultaneously crossing their lines of departure. Snyder’s
C&C Huey dipped low to their front, reconning the flattened hamlets that were their objectives. The guerrilla-chasing Gimlets had never participated in an operation of this size before, and Lieutenant Smith of Alpha Company told his men that “this must be a battalion commander’s dream to have his whole battalion down on the ground while he’s up in a chopper maneuvering ’Em.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder encountered no fire and saw no enemy during his aerial reconnaissance. Thus advised, Captain Corrigan was able to move his company quickly into position. With Barracuda anchoring the left flank, Kohl’s men assaulted Lam Xuan East, a collection of blasted hootches and hedgerows halfway between Mai Xa Chanh East and Nhi Ha. The assault was a walk-through for Charlie Tiger. The grunts re-conned by fire and, drawing none in return, moved in and methodically grenaded the bunkers and spiderholes they found in the rubble.

At 1055, Lieutenant Kohl reported that Lam Xuan East had been swept and seized without contact, and the two companies resumed the attack. The prep fires were shifted onto Nhi Ha and Lam Xuan West as the assault companies covered the last two klicks in a two-up-and-one-back formation. Corrigan reached his objective at 1155 and reported it secured fifteen minutes later—again without contact. Barracuda’s march had taken it over the same ground that G BLT 2/4 had crossed in the opposite direction two nights before during its under-fire withdrawal. Along the way, some GIs had picked up Marine-issue flak jackets. The Army troops did not normally wear flak jackets, but the threat of enemy artillery fire caused them to be more cautious. Barracuda also recovered a 3.5-inch rocket launcher that the Marines had abandoned. Corrigan kept the weapon, using it to mark targets with white phosphorus shells. There were so many abandoned Marine and NVA weapons along the way that Corrigan later observed, “Back where we’d been, hell, if you found two or three rifles, you’d had a real successful day—and here you were damn near tripping over stuff. It impressed my people. It gave them the idea that this was serious.”