The Magnificent Bastards (49 page)

In position near the LZ, Sergeant See, who ran the machine-gun squad in Delta Three, was to the rear of an earthen berm.
He had unshouldered his ruck—which had fragments in it from the shell that killed his ammo bearer, Barker—and he was on his knees, alert, with his M16 in his hands. He expected the NVA to try to flank them. There was a lull in the fire up front, and See was able to hear a mortar round leaving its tube. He started shouting, “Incoming!” but he was still on his knees when the first round exploded before his eyes on the other side of the berm and knocked him down. It felt as though someone had hit him in the right shoulder with a baseball bat. He was afraid to look at his arm for fear that it had been ripped off. It felt that way. When he finally did look, he saw a chunk of metal the size of a silver dollar sticking from the shoulder. He pulled it out and flipped it away.

The grenadier attached to See’s machine-gun team, Pfc. Ronald L. Edwards, had been hit in the same explosion. He’d been leaning against his ruck on the forward side of the berm. Sprawled out now, he emitted the low moan of the seriously wounded as he called for help: “Uh-uhhh-uh-uh … Seeee … Seeee…”

Mortars were still exploding around the LZ, and no one was moving.

Edwards kept calling for help. Oh God, I can’t leave him out there, thought See, a rich kid from Beverly Hills, California, who’d gotten his draft notice immediately after earning a degree in business administration. He had instant sergeant stripes from the NCO Academy at Fort Benning. See crawled over the berm to reach Edwards, who had thick blood coming out of one ear, in addition to multiple fragment wounds in his head and legs. Man, this guy’s in bad shape, See thought, but what he said was, “Edwards, you’re okay, you’re okay. What hurts worst?”

“My legs … my legs,” Edwards mumbled.

See wrapped battle dressings around the wounds. The mortaring had ceased. See helped Edwards to his feet with one arm over his shoulder so he could get him back over the berm, where a medic took over. The medic also tied a battle dressing around See’s shoulder. As See put the bloody, ripped shirt
back on, the medic asked him if he wanted to be medevacked. See declined. It was no time to leave.

The action in Nhi Ha lasted six hours. A and D/3-21 lost two KIA and had twenty-two WIA. Officially, sixty-seven NVA were killed, but Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, unable to crack the enemy line with firepower, finally ordered his assault elements to disengage and retire to their night laager east of the hamlet. All of their seriously wounded had already been medevacked on the spot by the C&C Huey on loan from the 174th AHC Dolphins. The aircraft commander was WOl Kenneth W. Johnson, a tough former Airborne sergeant. Johnson and his copilot, WOl Martin H. Wifholm, were plugged into the fire control nets so they could get the trajectories of the arty, tac air, and naval guns firing counterbattery missions against the NVA artillery in the DMZ, and thus work up the safest flight path into the LZ in eastern Nhi Ha. It was real hairy stuff. Since the tac air got most of the enemy’s attention, they went in repeatedly right under the high-drag bombs that the Phantoms had just released.

During one low, fast approach, the door gunner spotted NVA in a bunker about seventy-five meters out on the flank. He could see one NVA’s face through the aperture, and he exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, there they are! I’m going to take ’Em under fire!”

“Don’t shoot!” Johnson shouted back on the intercom. “For some reason they ain’t Marines’ at us, so we don’t shoot at them. Let’s just do our job, get the wounded, and get out of here!”

Five more air strikes hit the western side of Nhi Ha to cover the withdrawal of the two companies. The strikes were conducted in the face of heavy ground fire. Although the NVA had not brought antiaircraft weapons to the village, they did use their AK-47s in mass, producing a screen of fire that the jets had to fly through. It was an effective tactic. During the final strike, a Marine Crusader making its third pass took hits and never pulled up. It went in about twenty-five hundred meters northwest of Nhi Ha on the other side of Jones Creek.
The Crusader bounced when it hit, then turned into a ball of fire as it pitched nose first into the ground. The explosion was clearly visible to a lot of grunts, who were stunned and horrified—and incredulous at the bravery of those NVA foot soldiers who had blasted a jet out of the sky.

“Did you see a chute, did you see a chute?” battalion asked urgently on the radio.

“Shit, no, I didn’t see a chute,” answered one dumbstruck officer. “We lost that guy.”

Maybe not. Almost an hour later, the U.S. personnel at Alpha 1, who had binoculars and a commanding view of the battlefield, spotted a lone figure east of the crash site on their side of Jones Creek. They reported on the radio that “he appears to be dazed, he’s kind of wandering around.” There was hope that the pilot had managed a low-altitude ejection. When the FAC diverted to the scene and confirmed the sighting, the C&C Huey immediately contacted the FAC. “We’re comin’ in low and hot, so direct us up.” Using the orbiting Birddog as a beacon, the Huey headed north ten to fifteen feet off the deck. The chopper rose up only to hop over tree lines. Johnson, the pilot, spotted the olive-drab figure in a rice paddy, and he could see that the man was bareheaded and wore no web gear. He did not appear to have a weapon. The figure stopped and looked at the approaching helicopter, and Johnson said on the radio, “We’ve got the pilot in sight. We’re going in to pick him up.”

Approaching, Warrant Officer Johnson had his Huey in a hard deceleration with the nose high before he was close enough to see the man’s black hair and the baggy cut of his fatigues. “That’s a dink, that’s a goddamned dink!” Johnson exclaimed as he pulled up and around. “It’s not the pilot, it’s an NVA. It’s a hard-core NVA and we’re going to engage him.”

The 3d Marines’ headquarters, monitoring the 3-21st Infantry’s command net, broke in, “Don’t shoot him. We’re going to want to take him prisoner.”

“Just what in the hell do you guys expect us to do out here? We’ve got our butts hanging out. We’re going to kill him.”

The Marines responded with a direct order not to shoot the NVA on the grounds that he could have intelligence value. They planned to mount a patrol from Alpha 1 to capture the man. Johnson brought his Huey into a low, tight, clockwise orbit that put the enemy soldier on the door gunner’s side of the ship. The door gunner, Sp4 Wallace H. Nunn, sat behind a mounted M60D equipped with twin, D-handled grips and a butterfly trigger. Nunn, who thought that the NVA was probably a lure to an ambush, spoke to Johnson on the intercom, “They’ve got to be fucking crazy. I can have an accident here, you know.”

“Hold your fire,” replied Johnson.

The ARVN patrol was visible as dots about a klick away as it moved out from Alpha 1. Johnson, also concerned that the NVA was bait, did not want to wait the twenty to thirty minutes it would take the ARVN to reach the scene. That was all the time an NVA unit would need to set up in the hedgerows around the paddy. “Look him over real goddamn close for weapons,” Johnson finally said on the intercom. “We’re gonna go in and get him.”

“This is comin’ nuts!” shouted Nunn.

“No shit.”

Specialist Nunn kept his M60 on the NVA until they landed behind the man, at which point he popped the radio cord on his flight helmet and jumped out with the M16 he usually kept behind his seat. The soldier turned to face them with his hands up, and Nunn screamed, “Get the fuck on!” He intended to kill the guy at the first sign of resistance, but the NVA, who looked terrified, obediently trotted toward him and clambered aboard the Huey.

Meanwhile, the search for the pilot of the Crusader had been aborted. Captain Stephen W. Clark of Marine All-Weather Fighter Squadron 235 had been killed in the crash, and was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. The man whom Johnson and his crew picked up was an NVA medic, a deserter who had simply walked south from his unit in the DMZ to find somebody to surrender to. He was in his early thirties and, when questioned in the rear, said that he had
been a schoolteacher before being conscripted. He could identify his unit only as the “fourth battalion,” and he was officially passed off as having “no information of tactical value.” Nunn held a .38 against the prisoner’s head during the flight back, but it was an unnecessary precaution. The enemy soldier, squatting on the helicopter floor, was so scared to be airborne that all he could do was stare at the terrain sweeping under them. When the Huey shut down at the 3-21st Infantry CP, the NVA, who was still holding on for dear life, was jerked out roughly and led to Captain Householder, the intelligence officer, who waited beside a dwelling. The NVA pulled North Vietnamese currency from his wallet and tried to press it on Householder. To further prove his sincerity, he reached into a baggy thigh pocket and produced a stick-handled grenade. “I just held that thing up, looked at the helicopter pilot, and smiled,” Householder said later. “He had his dark visor down, so I couldn’t see his eyes, but his mouth dropped open when he realized that the prisoner had been in his chopper with a grenade.”

Captain Leach arrived at Lieutenant Colonel Snyder’s CP in Mai Xa Chanh East during the Nhi Ha engagement. Leach, who had been with Charlie Tiger for more than five months, had managed to miss his company’s first nose-to-nose encounter with the NVA because of the timing of his R and R. In his absence, Charlie Tiger had been shot to pieces. Furious and anxious to rejoin his command, Leach, who was a fiery individual, spoke urgently with Snyder. “Those are
my
guys. We’re gettin’ in trouble here. This is what it’s all about, and I want to be with ’Em. I trained ’Em. They know me, they work well for me, and I’m responsible for ’Em!”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, who had greeted Leach with, “My God, am I glad to see you!” briefed him then from his map. Snyder wanted Leach, who was his most experienced company commander, not only to resume command of Charlie Tiger, but also to act as a task force commander with authority over A and D/3-21 until Nhi Ha had been taken. Snyder, meanwhile, would remain at Mai Xa Chanh East to organize its
defenses and ensure that no kinks developed in their lifeline with the 3d Marines. “Okay, Leach, you run that show up there. I’ve got enough problems back here,” he concluded.

Major Yurchak, the operations officer, joked with Leach as he got ready to move out. “I’m going to get out of your way ’cause you love this stuff. This is going to be fun for you!”

Captain Leach, age twenty-nine, had dark hair and intense green eyes and was muscular and animal-like. He was, in fact, the closest thing the battalion had to a war lover. Tattooed on his right shoulder was a Ranger tab over Airborne wings. He walked point on patrols, and carried death cards that congratulated enemy soldiers for having been dispatched by Charlie Tiger.

When the C&C Huey took Leach from Mai Xa Chanh East up to the laager east of Nhi Ha, it landed amid 152mm artillery fire that had begun crashing in from the DMZ. The Huey barely touched its skids to the dirt when Leach clambered out fast and flung himself prone. Everyone was relieved to see him, especially Lieutenant Jaquez, the company FO. Leach joined Jaquez after the shelling ceased and asked to be brought up to date. Jaquez, depressed by the raw brutality of the previous day’s action, was especially disenchanted with Kohl, the acting company commander, although he tried to be circumspect when he told Leach that indecision during the fight may have contributed to the disaster.

Leach got the idea. He found Lieutenant Kohl hunkered down in a bomb crater, and asked him what had happened. “We really got the shit kicked out of us,” Kohl answered.

“Hey, Gerry, listen—we’ve got to get you out of here. You’ve had enough. C’mon, we’re going to get you on a helicopter.”

“Yeah, sir, I think you’re right.”

Leach had not been sure of Kohl’s condition until he gave his defeated answer. “If Kohl had said, ‘Hey, sir, you can’t do that, I gotta stay here,’ I would have said, ‘Fine.’” Leach did not normally reward burnout cases with a chopper ride to the rear, but he knew of Kohl’s decorated service as a platoon leader. “That kid had been shot at and shot at and shot at, and
demonstrated his bravery over and over—and when somebody like that looks at you like a whipped dog and doesn’t know what to say, then you get him the hell outta there.”

They didn’t do it smart, Captain Leach thought as he went over the lessons of the ambush with his remaining lieutenants. They should have reconned by fire. They should have had tac air available. The men of Charlie Tiger, who believed themselves to be in the best company in the best battalion in the best brigade (in what was generally acknowledged, however, to be the worst division in Vietnam), were convinced that Nhi Ha would not have been such a black eye had Leach been there. They had absolute faith in him. Leach was from little Fairmont, Minnesota, the son of a laborer. With no immediate interest in college, he went from high school to the U.S. Navy, where he was a boxer and earned appointments to both Annapolis and West Point. He chose the latter and graduated with the USMA Class of 1963. Following jump school and Ranger training, he served as a platoon leader at Fort Lewis before volunteering for Vietnamese language school and a combat assignment. His 1965-66 tour was split between duty as an assistant adviser to the 37th ARVN Ranger Battalion in Quang Ngai Province, and the staff of the ARVN corps headquarters in Da Nang. Assigned next as a company commander at Fort Benning, he immediately volunteered for a second Vietnam tour so he could command a rifle company in combat, which he considered the ultimate experience of any infantry officer.

Captain Leach returned to Vietnam in October 1967 as the assistant S3 of the 3-21st Infantry and took command of Charlie Tiger the following month, after the battalion moved from Chu Lai to FSB Center. He earned his reputation with the troops on one of his first patrols when Sergeant Skinner, the point squad leader, was shot in the head while crossing a footbridge in pursuit of a fleeing VC. The lone VC had been a lure. The trap was a VC squad dug in across the footbridge. Their fire pinned down the lead squad, and Skinner, who was either unconscious or dead, lay out of reach in a pool of blood. Leach’s solution, after deploying the company to provide a base of fire, was to personally run to Skinner across an open
paddy, heft the man into a fireman’s carry, and sprint back with bullets kicking up all around him. Skinner was not dead. The round had hit near one ear, followed the curve of the back of his skull, and exited near his other ear. He recovered with nothing worse than hearing damage in one ear.