The Magnificent Bastards (58 page)

The first Skyhawk, taking hits, pulled out of its pass in a skyward roar as the high-drag bombs seemed to float toward the NVA behind the burial mounds. The strike was bunker-shaking perfection. “They put ’Em right on the bastards,” Leach said. “It was beautiful. It was just death. The shit was flying right over us!” There was a definite lull in the NVA fire as the two Skyhawks continued to place their ordnance on
target. Then, at 0740, some of the enemy began to pull back to the north. The medic in Leach’s bunker suddenly shouted, “Jesus Christ, look at ’Em run!” Private Harp was able to sight his M16 on three NVA who had their backs to where he stood in the slit trench. “The first one was running about a hundred meters from me. I fired once. He fell and never got up.” The other two realized they’d been spotted and started zigzagging as they ran on. “I dropped the second one with two shots. I fired five times at the third guy. He fell, holding his arm, but got up again and threw or dropped his weapon as he got behind a grave. He got away.”

Captain Leach was so excited that he put down his radio for the first time since the attack started and raised his captured AK-47. He got off only a few bursts before some shook-up troops, who thought at first that an NVA had gotten inside the lines, shouted at him to knock it off.

On Alpha’s side, Sergeant Stone joined a grenadier who was lobbing shells at the retreating NVA from the slit trench. Stone opened up with his M16, but he was so tired that he kept nodding off between bursts. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Gibbs, the de facto company commander, instructed Specialist Hannan to bring his stranded LP in from the crater where they had been cut off during the battle. Hannan caught a bullet in the radio on his back while running in.

The LP from Charlie Tiger with which contact had been lost and that Leach feared had been overrun also made it back at about the same time. “I was awestruck,” remembered Leach. “I don’t know how those kids survived, but I was never so goddamned happy in my life as I was when I saw those three come marching back in.” The LP leader still had a grip around the hand grenade he had intended to throw when he’d first heard the NVA coming eight hours before. He had pulled the pin at the sound of movement, but when he saw how many NVA were out there he’d realized it would be suicide to give away his position by lobbing the frag. Unfortunately, he had dropped the pin and could not find it. “He had to hold the spoon down on the frag all fucking night,” one trooper explained. “That morning, when they finally came back in, his
hand had locked around the frag so he could not let go. It took two men to pry his fingers loose and throw the damn thing.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder considered the NVA attack to be “poorly planned,” an appraisal confirmed at 0742 when, in the middle of the retreat from Nhi Ha, the NVA launched a two-platoon effort against Captain Corrigan’s Bravo Company in Lam Xuan West. Barracuda destroyed the attack at a range of thirty meters with automatic rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, rockets, claymores, a recoilless rifle, mortars, artillery, and a helicopter gunship. Attacking an entrenched and fully alerted position after sunrise was madness. Snyder believed that the NVA units had been committed behind schedule because of the delay in getting past Alpha 1. The enemy depended on well-rehearsed battle plans. Because they lacked a sophisticated communications system, Snyder said, “Once anything went wrong, there was no way they could control what was happening, other than shouting at one another. So people would come in and charge, and once you disrupted the attack they didn’t know what to do. They would just lay there right around the perimeter and we’d flush them out in the morning.”

The NVA completed their retreat under the cover of mortar fire. At 1055, the medevacs began landing for The Gimlets’ one KIA and thirty WIA. Captain Leach saw a black grunt heading for the dust-off with a big bandage on the side of his face. Before Leach could give the man a few words of encouragement, the GI approached him and asked, “Are you okay, sir?” Leach, feeling humble and almost overwhelmed with emotion, grabbed the man’s arm and said, “We’re going to get you out of here right away.”
¹

Amid shell fire, Captain Humphries and Delta Company humped into Force Tiger before noon, policing up two NVA from spiderholes along the way. Apparently relieved to be alive, the two enemy soldiers were laughing as they were led
into the perimeter. Leach made sure that they were helicoptered out quickly because he knew there were troops who would have summarily executed them. That was the angry mood of the moment. Leach had ice water in his veins when it came to the bushwhacking guerrillas they chased down south, but he put his foot down when it came to mistreating NVA regulars who had fought the way these had. “These guys are soldiers, and they’re going to be treated like soldiers,” he told his men. “They’re goddamn good soldiers.”

While the perimeter sweep was being organized, Leach stormed over to Captain Osborn’s command post. “I was taking Benzedrine,” Leach remembered. “That shit works on you. I was a little crazy by then.” Leach confronted Osborn in a low, angry whisper. “Why weren’t you on the comin’ radio?” Then he exploded in a booming rage. “What the fuck, you sonofabitch—you weren’t on the radio all night! What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

Osborn just gave Leach a blank stare.

The perimeter sweep commenced at 1300. Killing NVA stragglers along the way, the grunts had pushed out two hundred meters in two hours when the NVA rear guard opened fire from the tree lines to the northwest along Jones Creek. Air strikes were called in. Enemy shelling began at dusk, resulting in three injuries and the last medevacs of the day.

During the night, Lieutenant Stull, the Alpha Company FO, overheard some angry conversations about the trooper killed the night before on LP. “That was the ball-buster,” said Stull. “That was the one that made everybody crazy.” The grunts could not fathom why the LP had not been immediately pulled back when it had NVA crawling all over it. Stull, who enjoyed a pretty good rapport with the men, interrupted one group to ask, “What’s the problem?” The answer: “Well, we got somebody that needs to be taken out.”

“Whaddya mean ‘taken out’?” Stull asked.

“Well, you know…”

Lieutenant Stull immediately approached Sergeant Dickerson of Alpha Two. “What the hell’s going on? They’re talking about fragging somebody! Is it me?”

“Nan, nan, nan, you’re okay. You’re cool,” said Dickerson.

“Hell, if it’s me, I’ll start walking home right now. You guys don’t have to frag my ass!”

Sergeant Dickerson repeated that Stull was not the target. It was Captain Osborn. Dickerson, a career man with seven years in uniform, was as angry and burned out as his grunts, and he told Stull that the company headquarters and each platoon were going to provide a GI armed with a grenade. One of the four grenades was going to be defused and the pile jumbled so that the men would not know which one was inactive when they picked the frags back up. All four were to roll their grenades into the company commander’s bunker. If one of them had pangs of guilt afterward, he could rationalize that he had tossed the defused grenade.

“Hey, that’s not where it’s at,” Stull protested. “Being stupid like the captain is one thing. Being vindictive is another. Maybe we should try to cool the guys down.”

Sergeant Dickerson disagreed. “Well, how many motherfuckers is he going to kill before his number comes up?”

The idea of using a captured AK-47 on Captain Osborn was also discussed. Some of the grunts went directly to Lieutenant Gibbs, who was the most respected officer in the company. Gibbs, who had no doubt that they meant what they said, told them to cool it, that he would handle it. Gibbs called Lieutenant Colonel Snyder and reported that Osborn was “not going to live very long,” and added that “if his men don’t kill him, I think I will.” Snyder cut him off. “Lieutenant, stop talking that way,” he snapped.

The battle with the NVA was not over yet. Artillery had been fired all night long as enemy platoons, throwing grenades, had moved around the perimeter to recover casualties from the night before. On the morning of Sunday, 11 May 1968, the sweep around Force Tiger commenced again. Staff Sergeant Goad of Charlie Two bent over to pull an AK-47 from a hole in which he had found several apparently dead enemy soldiers. The weapon discharged when he pulled on it. Goad had been holding the barrel with his right hand. His arm jerked violently away as the shot tore through it, but he was still on his feet.
Before he could think, he swung up the M79 in his left hand and unloaded a canister round into the hole. If one of the NVA was still alive, that finished him. It also destroyed the evidence of what had happened. Goad would never know if he had been shot by a diehard NVA at the other end of the AK-47 barrel he’d been tugging on, or by a dead man whose fingers were stiff around the trigger.

“It would be a hell of a deal,” he said later, “to make it through all that bullshit—and then have a dead man shoot me.”

Staff Sergeant Goad’s arm hung uselessly. The bullet had entered his forearm and exited six inches farther up through the elbow, shattering it. He was in shock. When a medic tried to administer morphine, he declined, saying, “Hell, it ain’t hurtin’.” Captain Leach ran over to find Goad cradling his elbow with his good hand. Goad, stud that he was, was embarrassed. “Sir, I’m really sorry. I’m really sorry for screwing up.”

The C&C Huey immediately medevacked Staff Sergeant Goad to the 18th Surgical Hospital in Quang Tri City. While he was sitting on a gurney in the triage area, the pain suddenly came down on him—as did the emotions of the moment. Colonel Gelling, the brigade commander, helicoptered up to see him as he was being prepared for surgery. Gelling later wrote that despite the pain, Goad’s only concern was for “what was happening to the men in his squad. He was not overly emotional, but actually cried when talking about the men in his squad and wondering who was going to take care of them. He specifically asked me to carefully select a squad leader to replace him because the men in his squad were so outstanding that they deserved special consideration.” Gelling added that Goad’s action reflected “the deepest concern I’ve ever seen by one man for those who fought with him.”
²

The NVA rear guard was still in position. Several GIs were
wounded by enemy fire from the northwest. Four air strikes later, the sweep began anew. The single Marine tank that had survived the night attack—it had been positioned with Alpha Company—fired its 90mm gun into likely enemy hiding places, as did the M79 grenadiers advancing across the parched brown lunarscape. Troops used their M16s liberally, and grenaded all the craters and spiderholes as they systematically progressed with the tank.

Sergeant See of Delta Company checked out a brush-camouflaged dugout that the tank had just blasted. The two NVA inside the dugout had been reduced to hamburger. One of the GIs picked up a pith helmet with a red star on it and discovered that it was full of brains. See spotted another NVA with ants crawling out of his mouth and maggots squirming in his eye sockets. When is it going to end? thought See, trying not to gag at the sight and the smell. Some troopers wrapped olive-drab sweat towels around their mouths and noses to filter out the stench. The bodies were everywhere, as were the big green flies and the human debris caused by heavy ordnance. “You’d see something weird-looking on the ground,” remembered Sergeant Coulthard of Charlie Three, “and all of a sudden you’d realize, Jesus Christ, it was part of a hand or part of a head.” Private Harp encountered a dead NVA who lay atop his AK-47 in a small gully. The man had been hit by napalm. “He looked like some kind of obscene burned rubber doll,” said Harp. “He was kind of melted. He had no features at all, just the general outline of a man burned into black rubber. His uniform had been completely burned off. All that was left were his boots. They were completely intact. Strange shit, napalm.”

There were so many dead NVA that the tank could not avoid running over bodies. Leaving broken weapons where they lay, the troops slung working AK-47s over their shoulders as the sweep progressed. They also checked the bodies for intel material. Private Harp removed the helmet, web gear, grenades, and an intact AK-47 from one NVA with a blown-open head. As he did so, the man’s shredded body began to pull apart. The soldier’s papers included a couple of hundred piasters, a
military document, a letter written in Vietnamese, and a photograph of the dead man with a young woman and two children. “For a minute I thought I was going to cry for that guy,” Harp recalled. “But then I remembered Yost and Morse and Sullivan, and all those guys from Alpha Company, and those guys from Second Platoon that we scraped into a poncho, and my attack of humanity passed as I went on to the next corpse to police up his gear. An awful lot of very brave people on both sides died extremely violent, miserable deaths at Nhi Ha. I’d had a bellyful.”

The Gimlets’ DMZ adventure, which was essentially over at that point, cost the 3-21st Infantry a total of 29 KIA, 1 MIA, and 130 WIA—71 of whom required medical evacuation. The battalion was credited with 358 NVA kills and 4 prisoners. An additional 91 kills were claimed by air, and 130 by artillery. The Gimlets’ reward was to be included in the Navy Unit Commendation awarded to the 3d Marines. It was a proud moment for the battalion. “Even the Marines admit that we’re really kicking ass,” Specialist Hannan wrote home from the DMZ. Specialist Farrand of D Company commented that no one was scared anymore “because everyone was too into what they had to do. You didn’t sense fear. You sensed fatigue, seriousness, anger at the enemy, and a lot of backslaps and forced levity. Everybody was a brother to everybody. The NVA were up against a force that wasn’t going to move.”

The exception was Alpha Annihilator. Captain Osborn was, in the words of his replacement, “a broken man who couldn’t wait to get out of the bush” and the company was “listless and hurting.”

Nine days after the battalion pulled off the DMZ, Alpha was attacked in its night defensive position in the Que Son Valley. In their haste and confusion, the GIs in Alpha Two’s LP left behind their starlight scope when they pulled back to the perimeter. Captain Osborn ordered the three-man team to retrieve it. The NVA were waiting, however, and fired an RPG. Sergeant Patterson and Specialist McFaddin—the grenadier who had saved the day in the creek at Xom Phuong—
were killed instantly. McFaddin’s arm was torn from his body and sent flying. The third man, seriously wounded, was able to crawl back under covering fire from the perimeter. Snyder relieved Osborn the next morning.