The Magnificent Bastards (16 page)

When Golf Company started off, Lashley, to the rear with the reserve platoon, stood atop a burial mound to orient himself on the area.

“I was just standing on the mound, checking out the scene like a goddamn tourist.…” A single round from the first heavy burst of gunfire directed at Golf caught Lashley high up on the left arm, shattering the humerus. He was left-handed, and his arm, which had been raised, dropped straight down like a piece of dead meat. Still on his feet but in terrible pain, Lashley stared in shock at the blood pumping out. I’ve been shot! he thought. He couldn’t believe it.

Lashley stumbled off the mound and collapsed, but Mike Zywicke quickly pulled him to cover and bellowed for a corps-man. Zywicke and the other members of the machine-gun team had to move out then with the rest of the platoon while the corpsman wrestled Lashley’s flak jacket off, administered a morphine Syrette, and hooked up a serum albumin IV. The corpsman also secured a battle dressing around the wound, which was still bleeding badly. When the pain wouldn’t go away, the sympathetic corpsman cheated and administered a second shot of morphine. It didn’t help. Lashley could only lie there, twisting in the grass as the battle was joined up ahead.

“Wow, man, these guys are crazy,” LCpl. James Parkins of Golf Two muttered to himself on the way in, cursing the lifers. “They’re so gungy, they’re gonna get us all killed.” Parkins, embittered by their earlier hamlet-to-hamlet battles above the Cua Viet, wondered if his own chain of command was as much the enemy as the NVA waiting for them in Dai Do. Both seemed pretty good at killing Marines. “Once again, we were real thankful to our leaders for taking us right into the open without too much fire support,” Parkins said later. “There was a lot of animosity, but you couldn’t say, ‘This is stupid, I’m not going to do it,’ ’cause if you weren’t there and your buddy got shot, you’d think, Oh man.…You kept those
thoughts to yourself, just kind of mumbling as you went forward.”

The M16 rifle was prone to misfire. Its reputation was such that many a Marine advanced toward Dai Do with his three-piece cleaning rod already screwed together and taped ready-to-go along the rifle’s stock. The cleaning rod was used to pound jammed rounds out of the chamber. Golf Two and Three crossed about two hundred of the seven hundred meters between An Lac and Dai Do before the NVA began sniping at them, especially from one-man spiderholes that dotted the open field. Fire also came from the entrenchments hidden among the trees and hedgerows at the edge of Dai Do itself. The dry brown grass was about thigh high, and the grunts, returning fire, moved through it in a low crouch. No one in the lead platoons was hit.

About fifteen minutes into the assault—at which point Golf Two and Three, still unscathed, had advanced to within three hundred meters of Dai Do—there was a sudden, decibel-doubling increase in the enemy fire.

Lieutenant Ferland and Golf Three took the brunt of it. The NVA were firing not only from the front, but from both sides of the tributary that ran past the western edge of the paddies from the direction of Dai Do. The NVA on the near bank were entrenched in hedgerows, and Ferland’s squad on that flank was immediately pinned down. Ferland detached another squad to suppress the NVA fire, while pushing on with his one remaining squad, anxious to keep up with Golf Two. In short order, though, Ferland and his men became bogged down in the face of heavier and heavier automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade fire from the front.

Several Marines were wounded. The NVA had opened up with several 12.7mm machine guns—a heavy, much-feared weapon—and Captain Vargas instructed Golf Two to halt until he could get Golf Three moving again. Vargas ran back to his reserve platoon and found the grunts lying prone to avoid the rounds snapping overhead. Vargas ordered them into the attack, but by the time they were advancing in fire-team rushes,
enemy mortars were pumping out rounds. Enemy artillery also opened fire, and the fields the Marines were advancing across had never looked so naked as they geysered with incoming rounds. Golf One’s grunts had no choice but to keep leapfrogging forward, unable to even return fire for fear of hitting other Marines hidden in the tall grass ahead of them.

Lieutenant Ferland, meanwhile, received a call from his 1st Squad leader, whom he had put in charge of the two-squad action on the left flank. The corporal reported that he had two dead and six wounded. At the same time, Golf’s backup company, B/1/3, which had a wide-open view of events from An Lac, reported that a hundred NVA were visible on either side of the blueline on Golf Three’s flank. In response, Golf’s 60mm mortar section in An Lac commenced firing. While Ferland adjusted the mortars onto the noisy but, to him, basically unseen targets on the far side of the creek (expending most of the mortar section’s ammunition in the process), Vargas directed one of the supporting tanks to swing left and blast the NVA in the hedgerows. Immediately before the tank arrived, a pair of ammo-laden Marines made it up to Ferland’s position in response to his call for more machine-gun ammunition. One of the men was Cpl. Richard R. Britton, an S2 scout with BLT 2/4 who had been attached to Golf that morning after eight months out in the bush with other companies. Britton described his dash up to Ferland:

Then the tank arrived. Lieutenant Ferland wanted a fire team to guide it into position on the left. Britton said he’d go. Ferland asked for two more Marines to accompany him, and, as Britton wrote:

Corporal Britton climbed onto the tank and shouted instructions to the tank commander. Marines from Golf Three’s 1st and 2d Squads also pointed out targets as the tank fired its 90mm cannon into the enemy entrenchments. Some NVA literally disintegrated in the roar, but others popped up with RPGs over their shoulders. Britton noted that twice as he directed fire he was “knocked off the tank by exploding enemy rockets, but I climbed back on. I was sure the tank would be knocked out of action if it stayed any longer.”

The tank commander felt the same way. The tank had been damaged so that it could move only backward, and backward it went in a noisy, dusty beeline for An Lac. Captain Vargas ran to the retreating vehicle and grabbed the external phone mounted on the rear of the tank. Vargas threatened to court-martial the tank commander if he did not stop, but the excited tanker told him to go to hell and kept on trucking. The tank
did, however, make one stop before disappearing into the trees. It stopped to take aboard wounded. One of them was Lance Corporal Lashley with his shattered arm. After he was helped onto the tank’s back deck, he was shocked to see his good buddy, Mike Zywicke, lying there beside the turret. He had no idea that Mike had been hit. Mike was hurt too badly to talk, so Lashley held his hands as the tank started rolling back, bullets ricocheting off its armor.

The tank still on line between Golf Two and Three exhausted its basic load of sixty-seven 90mm HE rounds. This tank also started to retreat, and Captain Vargas, again feeling insanely exposed as he used the external phone at the rear of the tank, chewed out the tank commander. “You can’t leave me out here! Just keep driving for the village!”

“I’m outta ammo! I don’t have any need—”

“There
is
a need,” Vargas interrupted, “because the psychological effect of a piece of armor coming across the rice paddy, whether it has any ammo or not, is a tremendous weapon!”

The tanker was unconvinced. “I’m getting the hell out of here!” he shouted. Suicide was not part of his game plan.

“No way,” Vargas barked. “You’re going in there with us, or I am personally going to shoot a three-five in your tail!”

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, who was monitoring the radio in An Lac and intended to get more ammo up to the tank, finally got the tanker turned around with a no-nonsense affirmation of his company commander’s threat. “I don’t know what the enemy’s going to do to you, but if you come back here I’m going to blow you away. I’m back here where I can see you, so turn that goddamn tank around!”

In the thick of the fight was, of all people, 1st Lt. Judson D. Hilton, the battalion’s forward air controller. Hilton should have been back in An Lac with Weise, but had mistakenly thought the colonel intended to accompany the assault and had thus tagged along. Hilton shouldered his M14 and sprayed those treetops where he thought snipers were located. Nearby, Staff Sergeant Del Rio caught a glimpse of several NVA who
had stood up in the brush to fire on the Marines. They were about sixty meters away, with their backs to Del Rio, and he assumed a sitting-kneeling firing position as he squared his M16 sights on the first of the fully exposed enemy soldiers. Del Rio, previously a competitive shooter, squeezed off a single shot. The NVA pitched face first into the brush. He never knew what hit him, and his overly excited comrades, firing on their own targets, never realized that a Marine marksman was shooting at them from the rear. Del Rio did not fire on automatic. Fire superiority was great, he thought, but he doubted that all the wild, ammo-burning fire of his young Marines really ever hit anything. Del Rio instead fired single shots down the line, dropping the enemy soldiers one at a time as though they were bull’s-eyes on the shooting range.

From the positions their platoons had assumed in the thigh-high grass east and northeast of Dai Do, Lieutenant McAdams of Foxtrot One and Lieutenant Lanham of Foxtrot Three delivered fire into the hamlet to support Golf’s assault. Neither friend nor foe was visible, but Golf marked its progress at intervals with smoke grenades, and Captain Butler made sure that his men fired to the right of the smoke. At one point, though, Butler saw .30-caliber fire from one of the amtracs impacting on Golf’s side of the smoke. Unable to get the amtrac commander on the radio, Butler realized that the young, hard-charging lieutenant was blazing away with a machine gun. Butler shouted at him, “I need you to be a
commander
, not a gunner! You have somebody else who can do that! I need you on the radio so you can control your troops!”

Enemy soldiers became visible in the distance as they moved back and forth between Dai Do and Dinh To in small groups, and the 106mm recoilless rifles on the amtracs fired at them. In the smoke and dust of the explosions, the effect was not clear, but the recoilless rifles barked until they were almost out of ammunition.

By that time, the missing body of the Foxtrot Marine killed the day before had been recovered, and Lieutenant Colonel Weise instructed Butler to return to the cover of Dong Huan.
Shortly thereafter, at 1445, as Foxtrot was just starting to move, the NVA artillery batteries in the DMZ that had been placing intermittent fire on Golf shifted the fire of two of their tubes onto Foxtrot. The enemy did not need to make a single adjustment in their accurate, twenty-round barrage, which—delivered two rounds at a time—whipped shell fragments over the heads of the helpless grunts while showering them with dirt clods and debris.

Eight men were wounded, including Lieutenant Lanham and Staff Sergeant Balignasay, the acting gunny. Balignasay, at forty, was a crewcut, pineapple-shaped Filipino who had fought the Japanese in World War II as a teenage member of the Hukbalahap guerrillas. He was also a Korean War veteran, and was on his second tour in Vietnam. Balignasay was hit when he and seven other Marines sought shelter behind a big boulder, only to have an NVA artillery round land ten feet from them. Balignasay caught a large shell fragment in his upper left thigh. It was a bad, blood-gushing wound. It also happened in a moment of mass confusion, and Balignasay and the men wounded with him were left Where they lay. Most of the Marines were already lying prone. Others jumped up between salvos to put some distance between themselves and the amtracs, which the NVA seemed to be using as registration points, or to lead the retreat into Dong Huan. It was nearly an hour before anyone returned to where Balignasay had been left to bandage himself. Balignasay, on the verge of bleeding to death, was finally loaded into an amtrac.
¹

The artillery fire also killed three Foxtrot Marines. Private First Class Kachmar ended up evacuating one of the dead grunts, whose head had been blown off, leaving behind just a flap of bloody, hairy scalp. Kachmar first tried to carry the body out, but could not. He was too hot and tired. He finally
began dragging the dead Marine behind him, holding the feet under his armpits. When he stopped to catch his breath, he looked at the dog tag laced into the dead man’s jungle boot. It was common practice to wear one dog tag around your neck and one on your boot, the premise being that whatever killed you probably wouldn’t remove both your head and your legs. Kachmar realized that he knew the headless Marine. He saw the man’s face in his mind. He had been a funny little guy, blue eyed and sandy haired, who always seemed to be in trouble with the powers that be. Kachmar couldn’t drag him anymore. Tired as he was, he hoisted the body over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Ignoring the blood and body fluids that gushed nauseatingly onto his face and down the front of his flak jacket, he started marching.