Grunts (41 page)

At 2000, to no one’s surprise, the NVA attacked in force. “Supported by B40 rocket fire and mortar fire from the small hills to the west and northwest . . . the ground attack came suddenly from the south and east,” a unit after action report stated. All at once, the night came to life with deafening fire and the screams of soldiers. Tracer rounds stabbed through the darkness. Mortar shells whooshed in and exploded. NVA soldiers were seemingly all over the place, running around and toward the perimeter. A couple of them were carrying flamethrowers. Before they could get close enough to roast the American bunkers, they were cut down by machine guns.

In one of A Company’s bunkers, Specialist Fourth Class (Spec-4) Bill Vigil, a twenty-year-old draftee from Fresno, California, was standing alongside three other men, picking out targets and firing his M16 on full rock ’n’ roll. He shot so much that he melted the barrels of several rifles. Still the enemy kept coming. “They were jumping around from tree to tree and you start popping ’em and getting in the hole,” he said. “We were about eye level to their feet.” Some of the enemy soldiers were only a few feet away. Somewhere to the right, he saw their fire shear off the head of an M60 machine gunner. NVA soldiers were throwing grenades into nearby bunkers. When the grenades exploded—usually with a seemingly innocuous pop—the NVA troopers tried to jump into the bunkers to kill the Americans at close range.

Vigil had been in country for about three months and he had seen his share of firefights. This one, he knew, would be a fight to the finish. The NVA meant to kill every last one of the Americans in that perimeter. To save ammunition, he and the others began firing single semiautomatic shots at the swarming enemy soldiers. They could only see what was in their immediate field of vision. They vaguely sensed that the fighting was raging all around the perimeter, but, as is so often the case with grunt-level fighting, they were only concerned with the struggle for their bunker and those around them.

Although he had not volunteered for the Army or Vietnam, Vigil was the product of much military tradition. His father had served in World War II, surviving serious wounds. His uncle had fought in Korea. One of his ancestors had been a Spanish conquistador. Standing in that miserable bunker, he was full of fear. He was angry, too. “You cry and laugh and all the senses humans have are just . . . running up and down your body.” Adrenaline surged through his bloodstream. His stomach was tight and queasy with fear. But, like most of the men around him, he resolved to fight to the end. “We’re not gonna say I give up. That’s not in our deal. I never thought about me just laying down there and dropping my weapon and hanging my head and saying go ahead and kill me. If they’re gonna take me, they’re gonna lose a lot of people.”

Not everyone was so determined, though. Inevitably, even in the best units, some soldiers will find close combat so traumatic that they will seize up with fear and quit, even if it costs them their lives. On the dirt floor of Vigil’s bunker, a soldier whom he only knew by the nickname “Speedy” was lying down, curled up in a ball, crying uncontrollably. “They’re gonna kill us, Vidge!” he screamed. “We’re gonna die! What are we gonna do?”

Vigil glanced away from the bunker aperture for a second and hollered: “If you don’t wipe your face and continue to load magazines, we’re definitely gonna die! So load them goddamn magazines and let’s keep going. I’m not asking you to put your head up here. I’m asking you to load the magazines.”

This was a classic case of the merciless nature of infantry combat. Vigil’s bunker, even with four resolute men fighting desperately, was still only as strong as its weakest man. In the end, through no fault of their own, their lives could have depended on whether Speedy would quit or fight.

Not far away from Vigil, Spec-4 Cecil Millspaugh was leaning on the trigger of his M60 machine gun. The twenty-pound gun—affectionately nicknamed “the Pig” by soldiers because it could eat up so much ammunition—spat out 7.62-millimeter rounds at a rate of over five hundred per minute. Millspaugh spotted a group of enemy nearing an adjacent bunker. He turned his gun on them and fired several bursts. All at once, he rose from his hole and rushed the NVA, firing all the way. Needless to say, the M60 was not designed to be employed in this fashion as an assault weapon. Like any machine gun, it was heavy and unwieldy, plus it went through ammo so fast that it generally needed to be fed belts by an assistant gunner in a fixed position. This hardly mattered to the adrenaline-crazed Millspaugh. He slaughtered the NVA soldiers at nearly backslapping range. The heavy bullets shredded them, spurting their blood in every direction. Several of them scattered or went down. Millspaugh jumped into the bunker they had assaulted and continued firing at other attackers, preserving that part of the perimeter.

At one point, the NVA took over the bunker next to Spec-4 Vigil’s, about eight feet away, initiating his own personal duel to the death with a North Vietnamese soldier. Back and forth they went, firing their rifles, throwing grenades. For these Vietnamese and American men, who might well have been friends in another time or circumstance, the entire war boiled down to this personal struggle for survival, a struggle that meant literally everything to them but little in the big-picture context of the Vietnam War. Such is the ruthless calculus of modern combat. “We were playing peekaboo until I got him or he stopped or a frag [grenade] got him,” Vigil recalled. “Something happened, but he stopped. He was laying there dead. There was two of ’em laying there on top of the GIs.”

In another dugout, Private First Class Clinton Bacon saw a B40 rocket score a direct hit on an adjacent bunker. The logs and sandbags collapsed onto the men inside, wounding and partially burying them. Bacon surged outside and, while machine-gun and rifle bullets snapped around him, he crawled to the wrecked bunker and dug out the stricken men. “He began removing them, insuring that they received medical treatment,” a citation later related. After that, he stacked some of the unscathed sandbags and resumed shooting back at the enemy.

According to one account, soldiers from Delta Company were “in close hand-to-hand combat” with the NVA. It is well to consider once again what this really meant. They were struggling at intimate, body-groping distance with other men, using any weapon at their disposal to kill them—bayonets, can openers, rifles, ammo boxes, helmets, anything. Death came in ugly fashion, with crushed skulls, severed larynxes, punctured abdomens or throats, gouged eyes, or from point-blank gunshot wounds. Warm, sticky blood bathed the victor and vanquished alike. The trauma was beyond description.

Because the fighting was going on at such close quarters, it was difficult for the Americans to employ artillery. This was no accident. The enemy liked to fight at this close range precisely because it could negate American firepower. Alpha and Delta Companies were forced to call down 105-millimeter artillery fire within their own perimeter. As long as the Americans remained in the bunkers, and the NVA continued to move about in the open, the shell bursts were likely to do more damage to the enemy than the GIs. Explosions mushroomed and flashed in seemingly random patterns, sending hot deadly fragments in every direction. In some cases, the fragments sliced into attacking enemy soldiers, killing a few of them, but wounding many more.

Air support only added to the carnage. “As the enemy crawled up the slope from the south, napalm was dropped in continuous strikes to within 25 meters of the perimeter,” an after action report said. Guided by forward air controllers, Air Force F-4 Phantoms and other close air support planes screamed in and dropped large quantities of the jellied gasoline along every NVA avenue of approach. The ensuing flames consumed the jungle and men alike. “It takes . . . oxygen to make that napalm really work,” one soldier said. “So if you’re real close to it, you’re gasping for air.” Like the artillery shells, the napalm was especially deadly to troops on the move, rather than the Americans in their bunkers. In some cases, NVA soldiers simply expired in flames. Most of the time, the flames roasted them or even melted limbs or other body parts. The Americans could hear their bloodcurdling screams.

One napalm canister burst so close to Spec-4 Vigil’s bunker that he could smell the acrid, almost sweet odor of the weapon’s chemical ingredients (probably its benzene components). When the flames died down, he peered out of his bunker and saw, in the distance, an enemy soldier melted to the wheels of his .51-caliber machine gun. Other enemy soldiers were turned by the napalm into “frosty critters. They looked like charcoal. Some of ’em were even halfway running and then they’re charcoaled. They were melted to the trees or wherever they were at.”

The pilots were so skilled that they were dropping bombs, by the light of flares, on the edges of the perimeter. Sometimes, the grunts could see the bombs descend, and they generally looked to each man as if they would hit him personally. “I mean, the noise, it’s unbelievable,” Vigil recalled. “The ground would just jump up maybe two feet, right in front of you. The ground actually lifts so all that sand and dirt and everything is all over you. It just slaps you, like you’re standing in a sand blasting machine.” Undoubtedly the bombs, exploding as they were so close to the U.S. positions, wounded or even killed some Americans, but they did tremendous damage to the NVA.

At around 0200, the enemy attack tapered off. The NVA used long hooks to drag away their wounded and dead. After a lull, they hit the perimeter several more times, but never with as much ferocity as that first push. The next morning the Americans combed the area and counted 232 NVA bodies. Some had been killed by concussion and looked as if they were only sleeping. Others were torn apart by shrapnel or punctured with holes from rifle or machine-gun bullets. Some were little more than globs of dismembered flesh or, as Vigil mentioned, charcoaled remains of human beings. All of them emitted disgusting odors in the tropical heat.

Alpha Company had been decimated. Out of an original complement of more than 130 men, the outfit was down to 47; 21 had been killed. The rest were wounded badly enough to require evacuation. Even the supposedly “unwounded” had scratches, cuts, and bruises that in peacetime circumstances would require medical attention. A day later, Lieutenant Colonel Glen Belknap, the battalion commander, decided to relieve Alpha Company. Although the perimeter was still under intense mortar and rocket fire, he airlifted his Bravo and Charlie Companies in and arranged for helicopters to remove the remnants of Alpha, including the dead and wounded. “We proceeded to pull the casualties out of the holes and get their bodies to the LZ, along with the surviving wounded,” a Charlie Company soldier recalled. “Each chopper would be loaded with, first, the wounded, then the dead, as reinforcements arrived.” One sergeant, coming upon the intermingled bodies of several soldiers—black, white, and brown—gazed at them thoughtfully and asked no one in particular: “How is it that men can die together, but find it so difficult to live together?”

The helicopters took the Alpha Company survivors and their fallen buddies to the American base at Dak To. Equipped with an airstrip and many buildings, the base was growing into the main American logistical and staging point for this intensifying struggle. Spec-4 Vigil and the other exhausted survivors from his company gazed at long rows of charcoal-colored body bags lying along the tarmac. Some of the misshapen bags held the remains of his buddies. Others contained dead soldiers from the intense fighting around Hills 1338 and 823. He paced around, staring at them, shaking with grief and anger, trying to comprehend that they were all gone. “I can still see . . . all those body bags. I think it was more to see than the battle itself. I was in a crouched position, walking around, just shaking.” His nerves were shot. It took him several days to even resume eating again.
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In the meantime, Lieutenant Colonel Belknap resumed the push for Hill 724, a mass of high ground that was covered with a solid sheet of bamboo and tropical foliage. At sunrise on November 11, Bravo remained in the original perimeter to maintain a secure landing zone (LZ). Charlie and Delta set out for the hill, which was only about five hundred meters away. They made it, cut out a makeshift LZ, and sent word for Bravo to join them. This was the way the Americans generally operated in the Central Highlands. Commanders wisely sought to control the high ground. When they succeeded in doing so, they set up perimeters, like little American enclaves splayed into the heart of enemy country.

Later that day, just as Bravo Company was approaching the perimeter on Hill 724, the NVA attacked. “B40s were fired en masse, striking trees and showering positions with fragments,” an officer later wrote. “Enemy mortar positions had been carefully prepared to fire from at least three directions. They continued to fire even under repeated air attack and counter battery.” Some of the NVA soldiers had tied themselves into the trees, from which they could rain down withering accurate rifle fire upon the Ivy Dragoons. Others were pushing up the hill, assaulting, as usual, at close quarters. The grunts dropped their heavy rucksacks, fanned out into bomb craters, behind logs, in fighting holes or any other cover they could find and returned fire. From the vantage point of their perches in the trees, NVA snipers could clearly see some of the Americans, even if they were crouching behind trees or logs. This sniper fire was frighteningly accurate, ripping through the heads of several unsuspecting grunts. The Americans learned to spray the trees with automatic fire even if they did not see anything to shoot at.

Charlie and Delta Companies had already carved some semblance of a perimeter with holes and fields of fire from which to fight the NVA attackers. But the Bravo soldiers quickly realized that the NVA had gotten between them and their comrades in the makeshift perimeter. This put them in the desperate circumstance of taking fire, at close range, from all sides. With a flurry of AK-47 fire, the NVA overran several Bravo soldiers who were manning observation posts (OPs) to protect the company’s flanks. The OP soldiers were in a hopeless position but they fought back with everything they had, especially Privates First Class Nathaniel Thompson and William Muir, who both were mortally wounded but remained in place, pouring out fire until the end. The NVA wiped out the OPs.