The Magnificent Bastards (17 page)

Lieutenant Morgan and Golf Two had been ordered to halt when they were 150 meters from Dai Do. The platoon was hunkered down and blindly returning fire against the entrenched enemy when a black Marine was suddenly shot through the throat. The wound was mortal. Next, Lance Corporal Parkins, who was firing his M14 from behind a burial mound, saw his good buddy, Mitch, who was about eight feet to his right behind another mound, get shot in the head. Mitch’s head dropped against the M16’s sights, and blood pumped out onto the plastic stock.

Parkins and Mitch had been trading bursts of automatic fire with a pair of NVA who were somewhere in the hedgerow to their front. The fire that had dropped Mitch gave Parkins a feel for where those two were specifically. Parkins turned his M14 on its side so that the recoil wouldn’t send the barrel up, but would instead allow him to scan side to side with his burst, then began firing into that spot. One of the NVA, wearing a pith helmet, suddenly jumped up to run away. Parkins couldn’t tell if he’d hit the man. Maybe the NVA made it to safety. Probably not: The whole platoon seemed to be shooting at this one and only visible target.

The second NVA who had had Parkins and Mitch in his sights ceased firing, too—the Marines later found him dead in
his hole—and Parkins rolled over to his grievously wounded buddy. The side of Mitch’s face was a bloody mess. It looked as though he’d been shot in or along one eye socket, and there was an exit wound behind his ear. Mitch wasn’t screaming. He was in shock, and he asked Parkins if he remembered the words to the song that he’d been trying to teach him before they’d started across the paddies: “I’m on a little vacation in South Vietnam—an expense paid trip for one—I’ve got my own little rifle…”

“Don’t worry about it, Mitch, I got ’Em,” Parkins assured his delirious friend. “Everything looks good. It’s no problem.”

“Am I bleeding?”

“Just a little bit. I think you got grazed on the side of the head.”

Mitch’s voice was small and tentative, as though he was a little scared and not sure what was happening. He kept saying that he was cold and thirsty. The blood was pouring out. Parkins, a nonsmoker, removed the cellophane wrapper from Mitch’s cigarets and used it as a protective cover over one of the wounds before unsnapping Mitch’s first-aid kit and securing a bandage around his head. He did not believe that what he was doing would make a difference.

Golf Company was bogged down for two hours before Captain Vargas was able to position his reserve platoon between his two battered assault platoons and suppress enough of the enemy fire to allow a renewed assault. This time the Marines were able to leapfrog right into Dai Do. Captain Vargas, who carried an M16 plus a .45 pistol in a shoulder holster, caught shell fragments in his right arm while maneuvering toward an NVA machine gun firing from inside a bunker that resembled a burial mound. The bunker was located about a hundred feet in front of the hamlet’s hedgerow edge, and had been bypassed by the first Marines to get into Dai Do. The NVA gunner inside had opened fire on the Marines following them in. Vargas and one of his radiomen got behind the bunker, and the captain flipped the brush-camouflaged top off of it. There were three enemy soldiers inside. Before they could react, Vargas
swung his M16 on them, shooting them all at point-blank range. The radioman tossed a grenade in for good measure.

Lieutenant Ferland of Golf Three crawled past a freshly killed NVA on the way in and, because he hated the guaranteed-to-jam M16, took his dead foe’s AK-47. Ferland also pulled the extra ammo magazines off the body and stuffed them in his cargo pocket. Moving to the berm at the hamlet’s edge, he spotted a bare-chested NVA with black shorts and an SKS carbine turning to crawl away from the trenchlike depression that ran down the enemy’s side of the berm. The NVA was about twenty meters away and had his back to both Ferland and a black sergeant who had moved up on the lieutenant’s right. Ferland quickly shouldered his AK-47, sighted in, and squeezed off a single shot at the same time that the black noncom let fly with a burst from his M16. The back of the NVA’s head popped open from what appeared to be a single hit, and Ferland and the NCO jumped over the berm, continuing the assault with the hard-chargers who were up with them, shouting and firing and throwing grenades.

Other young Marines hung back in the tall grass.

Staff Sergeant Wade, the commander of Golf One, reached a ditch beside a trail in the ville. He stopped there with several of his Marines to get reorganized. From a culvert under the ditch an NVA, who must have been hiding inside, suddenly jumped up and began running away from the Marines. Wade cut him down with his M16.

There was little return fire as the Marines worked in teams to clear each entrenchment they encountered in the vegetation. The NVA were in retreat, and could be seen bobbing between hedgerows as they ran. The grunts blasted away at them as Golf Company began sweeping through the right flank of the village. The vegetation was thin enough in spots to see all the way to the paddies on the other side. There were still enough hootches, trees, and hedgerows left that Lieutenant Morgan and Golf Two, anchoring the right flank, had worked forward only about fifty meters when they lost touch with the platoon on their left. The NVA chose that moment to begin lobbing in 82mm mortar rounds on Morgan and his men. One Marine
was killed. The other eleven bunched-up Marines in the dead man’s squad were seriously wounded by the first round of what became a five-minute barrage. The attack stalled out. The senior corpsman moved up to help treat the casualties, who were then carried back and loaded aboard the lone tank that was still with them. One man required a tracheotomy. When he was hoisted onto the tank in a poncho, the Marine had a plastic tube sticking from the hollow of his throat and his eyes were crossed. The casualty-stacked tank, never resupplied with ammo, headed back for An Lac.

Captain Vargas, juggling radios, became aware that the 1st and 2d Squads of Golf Three, on the far left flank, had been pinned down again fifty meters short of Dai Do by NVA holding their ground in the hamlet’s southern corner. Vargas got Golf Company moving again. The Marines completed their sweep across the hamlet, then swung around in as even a line as the vegetation allowed to push through to the two pinned-down squads. The forward elements had gone only thirty meters when they came under heavy fire.

The NVA were counterattacking. They could be seen by an aerial observer as they crossed the open space between Dai Do and Dinh To. The aerial observer also reported that he had NVA in the open and likewise moving south from the vicinity of True Kinh, which was about two klicks to the northwest. Artillery and naval gunfire worked them over, as did helicopter gunships with rockets and machine guns. Jets also flashed in to drop bombs and napalm. Enemy in the open in broad daylight was a rare sight, and the pilots were excited as they coordinated with each other on the air net. “Hey, there’s a whole bunch of ’Em down there, over there by that tree on the north end of the village. I’m going in!”

“Let me get in there, let me get in there!”

“No, wait your turn!”

“There’s thirty of them over here in this graveyard. I see some and they got weapons on their shoulders …!”

The situation was not nearly so clear to thinned-down and ammo-light Golf Company. Captain Vargas had his men pop green smoke to mark their positions for the pilots. The Marines
thought the air support had allowed their two pinned-down squads to break through, because figures soon became visible running toward them through the brush. A grunt shouted, “Hey, Gunny, more Marines coming on our left!” Del Rio also thought they were Marines—until they got closer. They were NVA, lots of them.

It was 1625. On Captain Vargas’s order, Golf Company began pulling back, but Staff Sergeant Del Rio, only a few steps into the retreat, was sent reeling by an explosion. He came to lying on his back in a shallow trench. He felt as though he’d been knocked out for only a few seconds. It was hard to tell. He realized that his helmet was gone and that he had blood running down his face from a wound on his forehead. He was also bleeding from his left knee. His M16 was gone. Del Rio unholstered his .45 pistol, chambered a round, and was lying there trying to get his brain unscrambled when two NVA suddenly jumped over him. They kept on running. They had looked right at him, but with one bloody leg stretched out in front of him and the other bent underneath, and with blood smeared on his face, the NVA had probably assumed he was dead, despite his open eyes. Del Rio got to his knees and shot one of them in the back. The other NVA darted around a hedgerow and disappeared.

Shit, I’m going to die here! thought Del Rio. In pain and confused about where to go, he joined two wounded and equally disoriented Marines. They helped each other stay on their feet as they moved out. They hoped they were going in the right direction. Another NVA sprang into view to one side of them, running in the same direction but paying them no attention. Del Rio knocked him down with a few shots from his pistol.

Meanwhile, Captain Vargas was standing up to direct his Marines past his command group and rearward some fifty meters more to a drainage ditch that would make a good defensive position. When no more Marines could be seen coming, the rear guard began pulling back. The NVA were right on top of them. Lieutenant Hilton, the misplaced air officer, threw his heavy, reliable M14 rifle to his shoulder and started banging
away at those enemy troops he could see as they darted from one spot of cover to the next. The young sergeant walking backward beside Hilton had an M16 in each hand and was firing the weapons simultaneously on full automatic. Vargas was squeezing off his own M16 bursts. Although the NVA exposed themselves for only a few seconds at a time, some of them were going down in the cross fire. Vargas noticed that some of the enemy soldiers didn’t even have weapons in their hands. They were apparently hapless survivors of the original defenders of Dai Do who had been swept up in the counterattack.

Staff Sergeant Del Rio had made it to the edge of the brushy-banked drainage ditch when several NVA, in full, reckless pursuit, came through the bushes where he and a number of Marines were starting to set up. The Marines and NVA collided. Del Rio saw a Marine swing an empty or jammed M16 like a baseball bat. He saw another Marine jump atop an enemy soldier, smashing the man’s head again and again with an entrenching tool. The other NVA ran right through them, as a shocked Del Rio turned to fire his pistol at them.

Surrounded

T
HE NORTH-SOUTH DRAINAGE DITCH THAT BECAME
G
OLF
Company’s rallying point, and from behind which the Marines rose to fire, had bushes growing thickly along both banks. They had to shoot blindly through the vegetation, and lob their hand grenades and M79 fire at the unseen foe. The volume of their barrage compensated for what it lacked in accuracy, and the NVA were forced to seek cover. The enemy counterattack lost its momentum.

Captain Vargas had forty-five men with him along the ditch. He had a dozen or so other men, the survivors of the two squads on the left flank, pinned down in their own little last-stand position. Golf Company had started toward Dai Do with more than 150 Marines.

The NVA, having regrouped, tried to outflank the Marines at a point where Lieutenant Morgan and Golf Two had formed a line facing north above the drainage ditch. When fifteen to twenty NVA moved down a trench flinging Chicom grenades ahead of them, what was left of Golf Two began pulling back. They had no choice. They had expended almost all their ammunition repelling the first counterattack, and many a grunt’s M16 had failed so often that he had broken the weapon down, thrown away the bolt, and picked up an AK-47 instead.

Fortunately, the check-fire on artillery support had finally been lifted, so Lieutenant Acly quickly worked up a fire mission to put HE on the NVA trying to outflank them—an act for which he later got a Bronze Star. It took five minutes to go through the fire support bureaucracy, then two 105mm howitzers began firing from Camp Kistler. Golf was on the gun-target line, so each round roared in over their heads. Acly, who was behind a burial mound with his radioman and could not actually see the enemy, started the barrage long and then worked it back to within fifty meters of their position. The two tubes fired one round every thirty seconds, maintaining that pace—one shell crashing right after the other, for fifteen minutes until the enemy fire petered out.

“I was really worried about Golf Company,” Lieutenant Colonel Weise later wrote. At the same time the NVA launched their ground assault on G BLT 2/4, they also shelled Weise’s CP and B/1/3 in An Lac, and F and H BLT 2/4 in Dong Huan. When the NVA initiated their flanking maneuver some thirty-five minutes later, at about 1700 on 1 May, Weise had Golf’s perimeter boxed in with naval gunfire, artillery, and 81mm and 4.2-inch mortar fire. “But something more was needed to take the pressure off Vargas and give the enemy something else to worry about,” wrote Weise. That something was B/1/3, and Weise’s account noted that, “from its location in An Lac, Bravo Company, mounted on amtracs, would move quickly north (about 500 meters) into the southern edge of Dai Do, dismount, and fight its way to link up with Golf.”