Battle Field Angels (28 page)

About two hours after landing, Mike Company reached a small plateau approximately twenty-five feet high. The top was bare, save for a few knee-high shrubs, bomb craters of varying sizes, and a handful of large black rocks. The lead platoon was exposed on all four sides as it crossed the plateau. Marines surveyed left and right as they descended toward a rice paddy that was almost two hundred meters wide. Delta was still an hour’s hike away.

“Sergeant, a tree just moved,” said a Marine named Bill Vandegrift.

“If it moves again, shoot the son of the bitch,” Sullivan replied.
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Moments later the camouflaged enemy flinched and was shot by Vandegrift. Before the shot’s echo had subsided, hundreds of NVA soldiers opened fire and mortar crews zeroed in on the exposed Marines.

The enemy had caught both the first and second platoons of Mike Company in the open. The NVA had the advantages of position, crossing fields of fire, clear lines of sight, and camouflage. The Americans were stranded, with no immediate prospect of reinforcement. A dire situation faced by two companies of Marines in the morning became potentially catastrophic for three by early afternoon.

Mortar rounds pounded the ground around Larry Nunez. The onetime high school crosscountry star had turned down college scholarships to join the Marines and fight in Vietnam. It had taken two years, but he had finally received orders for Southeast Asia and arrived in February. As the enemy fire intensified, Corporal Nunez heard Bill Young scream with pain. Nunez ran to him, and dropped to the ground.

“Doc!”

Leal sprinted toward the two Marines, crouching low and lugging his aid kit. He slid to a stop as enemy bullets kicked up dirt into his eyes and mouth.

Leal looked Young over but couldn’t find any blood. The air buzzed with shrapnel from exploding mortars only yards away as the corpsman gently rolled Young over. He found two small bullet holes in Young’s pelvis and quickly applied a battle dressing.

“That’s all I can do for him,”
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Leal told Nunez. He straightened to scan the battlefield. A few yards away, a prone Marine’s blood pooled on the dirt. Leal jumped to his feet and crab-walked toward him.

Meanwhile, squad leader Larry Peters assembled his men, who had not yet climbed onto the plateau. He needed firsthand intelligence before he could deploy them to face the enemy on the other side. Peters told them to stay put. He ran to the top of the plateau and into the field of fire. The sight of Marines writhing on the ground and huddling in shallow depressions as enemy rifles and machine guns flashed across the distant tree line shocked him. He watched Leal belly flop next to one man whose leg had been shredded to a bloody pulp. His squad crested the knoll and saw Marines lying everywhere.

Ray Harton had hit the ground among the screams and explosions. Bullets zinged inches away from their heads as the Marines returned fire. Peters ran past Harton, directly toward the enemy. He fell when a bullet tore through his leg. Harton and two other Marines started to crawl toward Peters when an NVA gunner opened fire, killing the two and hitting Harton in the arm, severing an artery. Harton screamed as he attempted to stem the flow of blood. He tried to remain still, knowing NVA machine-gun fire riddled any injured Marine who moved.

Meanwhile, Peters was hit again with mortar shrapnel, this time in the face. Twice wounded, he struggled to his feet to draw enemy fire and expose their position to the few Marines still able to return fire. Peters was shot twice in the chest.

Lying motionless on the ground, Harton slowly turned his head to look across the plateau. He spotted Armando Leal, bloodied by shrapnel and waving off an approaching corpsman. Leal kept moving across the battlefield. Every few minutes his head popped up from behind a shrub or rock to identify who needed help. Each time, Leal made direct eye contact with Harton, who lay only about twenty yards away. He knew Harton needed help, but so did many others. Leal had to make instant diagnoses from afar, deciding which Marine most critically needed his triage. Sometimes a bleeding Marine managed to crawl into a shallow crater. The depression gave no protection to Leal, who often placed himself between the wounded soldier and the enemy to give his patient a marginally better chance at survival.

Capodanno had seen Peters’s chest explode in crimson. As Capodanno ran toward him, a mortar shell detonated only fifty feet away. Shrapnel hit the priest’s shoulder and obliterated part of his right hand. He stumbled to Peters, lay down next to him, and ministered the last rites as bullets flew overhead.

Capodanno next ran to Howard Manfra, who had been wounded and was stranded by enemy crossfire. Although other Marines had tried to rescue Manfra, only Capodanno reached him and dragged him into a small depression. As he did, Capodanno and Leal locked eyes a few yards away from each other before Leal turned toward another screaming Marine.

The battle had stretched to more than ten hours. As the afternoon light faded, the enemy grew bolder. Alert Marines spotted “walking bushes” as the camouflaged enemy crept closer, sometimes to within yards of the Americans before opening fire. The entire battle raged in an area smaller than the size of two football fields. Only a few miles away, the medical staff at a sophisticated military hospital waited for the battle to stabilize enough for the Army’s medevac helicopters to begin delivering the wounded.

Vietnam posed new challenges and opportunities to the military hospital corps. Unlike Korea, MASH units did not follow advances and then pull back alongside retreats. The Vietnam War was a guerilla war fought largely in place. The static nature of guerilla warfare in the jungle enabled the military to establish fully equipped hospitals on the fringe of combat. Some patient wards were inflatable and air conditioned. Most had complete surgical teams, a variety of specialists, and comprehensive recovery facilities. Field hospitals in Vietnam functioned at the level of a four-hundred-bed general hospital in the United States.

Still stranded on the plateau, Harton prepared for death at the point of an enemy bayonet. Someone touched his shoulder. Inches away, the grimy, haggard face of Father Vincent Capodanno melted into a smile. The priest’s condition shocked Harton. He was covered in dried blood. Rivulets of sweat flowed from the corners of his eyes, down his cheeks, and along a prominent jaw. A bloodied hand had been quickly bandaged but still oozed.

“Stay calm, Marine,” Capodanno said. “God’s with all of us today. Someone will be here in a minute to take care of you.”
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Perhaps the chaplain was thinking of Leal. He had seen the young corpsman darting from Marine to Marine for hours. A gasping, high-pitched scream only twenty feet away cut Capodanno short.

“My leg! My leg!”
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It was Armando Leal. The corpsman sat upright, his uniform now soaked in blood and dirt, both hands clutching his thigh just above the knee as if he had pulled a hamstring. He gently rocked back and forth in pain, chin down, his eyes glassy with shock. Capodanno quickly blessed Harton with his good hand before running to Leal. He put an arm around Leal and leaned closer to whisper into the young corpsman’s ear. After treating wounds for hours under fire, Leal was white with shock.

“Watch out! There’s a Viet Cong with a machine gun!” Frederick Tancke yelled at Capodanno.
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Tancke had spotted the enemy setting up his machine gun only about fifteen yards away. The enemy heard Tancke and laughed as he squatted to take aim at the priest and the corpsman. As Capodanno spoke to Leal, two bursts of machine-gun fire ripped into them. They fell as one, side by side.

The battle continued as dusk deepened. Dozens of Marines still stranded in the open huddled together in shallow craters across the plateau. Darkness would bring an enemy advance. The Viet Cong would infiltrate the perimeter and then storm the exhausted Marines. Soon the enemy would be shooting point-blank at Marines who were nearly out of ammunition.

Second platoon leader Ed Blecksmith surveyed his troops. Blecksmith had grown up in Los Angeles. A gifted athlete, he had played receiver and safety at the University of Southern California before following his father and two uncles into the Marine Corps.

Blecksmith pulled wounded Marines into bomb craters, some of which were only a few feet across and shallow, not nearly large enough for a soldier to get out of the line of fire. Others were fifteen feet across and nearly five feet deep. These were the only possible refuges if the Marines of Mike Company hoped to survive the night.

Blecksmith and others pulled several wounded men into one of the largest bomb craters. Some still writhed in agony, but most had gone into shock after lying in the afternoon sun, bleeding. Many were alive because, hours earlier, Leal had applied a battle dressing to slow the flow of blood. The crusted wounds of others who had gone unattended were scraped open as they were dragged into craters, sometimes on top of other wounded men who screamed in pain.

At the battle’s outset, the Marines had been yelling to one another, usually asking for orders or reporting enemy movement. That night, a man called out for Blecksmith. It sounded as though he were only a few yards from the crater where Blecksmith and others huddled.

“That’s not any of our guys calling you, sergeant,” said one Marine as Blecksmith prepared to climb out.
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It grew quiet in the crater as they listened to the repeated pleas. Just barely, they could hear an accent. It was the enemy. No one moved. The jungle quieted.

The Marines called for night air support. When the spotter aircraft arrived overhead, it fired a white star cluster that turned night into day. The pilots in the following attack aircraft looked down at the dimpled plateau, each depression filled with prone Marines. They lined up to bomb the surrounding tree lines and hedgerows. As the ground shuddered from the explosions, the Marines climbed out of the craters and dragged as many of the wounded as they could to the other side of the plateau, where Mike Company had established its command post.

Someone rolled Harton over. “Doc, this one’s alive!” he yelled.
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Unseen hands placed Harton onto a poncho and dragged him into a shell hole. A Marine lit a cigarette for him. Another stuck a needle in his arm. As the morphine took effect, Harton grew drowsy, but he kept peering out of the crater, as American aircraft blasted enemy positions. When the bombing stopped, quiet returned, and the enemy disappeared into the safety of the jungle.

The next morning, Harton awoke under a blinding sun. Waiting for a helicopter, he walked across the hill, now littered with ponchos covering dead Marines, including Leal and Capodanno. The corpsman had been hit in the neck and throat, while the chaplain had taken nearly two dozen rounds in his chest. Most men die with an expression of shock. The Marine covering Capodanno marveled at the serene look on his face. Leal was curled up nearby. Dead NVA soldiers lay within a few yards of the two. Once the surviving Marines regrouped, they were ordered to pursue the retreating enemy.

A proud Armando Leal, Sr. had pulled some strings to get transferred to a rapid area supply support team in Vietnam so he could be close to his son, the corpsman. He had waited a month for the transfer to a civilian supply team near Da Nang that distributed jet engines. As he was flying over the Pacific, an enemy machine gunner killed his son. He arrived in time to identify his son’s body. Later, at the funeral in Texas, the closed casket was opened only for the father to say goodbye.

“I lost my son and my world,” he often said.
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The patriarch of the Leal family never completely recovered from the loss of a son who died in battle just two weeks short of his twenty-first birthday.

September 4, 1967, marked the start of Operation Swift, the series of Marine missions to rid the Que Son Valley of North Vietnamese troops. That day sixteen Americans died and thirty-one were wounded. Eighty-five enemy soldiers lay dead. That day also became known as one of the most remarkable concentrations of bravery in the Vietnam War.

Armando Leal received the Navy Cross for his courage and compassion. Father Vincent Capodanno and Sergeant Larry Peters both became Medal of Honor recipients. The Navy Cross also was awarded to Mike Company’s commanding officer, Captain John Murray, as well as to Lance Corporal Thomas Fisher. Sergeant Howard Manfra received the Silver Star, while 2nd Lieutenant Ed Combs and Sergeant Craig Sullivan both received the Bronze Star. Their citations provided only vague clues for families anxious to understand the horror they had faced.

The day after the ambush, a letter arrived at regimental headquarters:

It had been written by Father Capodanno the day before Operation Swift.

A community movement in San Antonio organized a successful campaign to rename Southcross Junior High School as Leal Middle School. In 1973, it became the first school in San Antonio to be named after a Vietnam veteran. Every day, teachers, students, and parents pass the glass-encased tribute to a quiet young man who grew up only a few blocks away. His eulogy in the display case is Leal’s Navy Cross citation: