The Magnificent Bastards (21 page)

Fixed Bayonets

C
APTAIN
L
IVINGSTON
, CO, E BLT 2/4: “A
T FIVE O’CLOCK
in the morning, I said on the radio, ‘We’re fixin’ to go. Fix bayonets.’ That was really something to hear—all those young fellas, a hundred-fifty-something of ’Em, clicking bayonets. All down the line you could hear these clicks. They were for real.”

During the night of 1-2 May 1968, Battalion Landing Team 2/4 was deployed as follows: G Company (Vargas) was cut off in the eastern tip of Dai Do; F Company (Butler) and H Company (Prescott) were in Dong Huan; and E Company (Livingston) was in An Lac with B/1/3 (Keppen). At 0023 on 2 May, Lieutenant Colonel Weise, who was also in An Lac with his Alpha Command Group, issued his frag order for the next attack on Dai Do. The concept called for E Company to launch a predawn assault into the hamlet with H Company following behind. Once linkup had been achieved with isolated G Company, the three-company attack was to continue through Dai Do and into Dinh To. F Company was to be the BLT reserve. B/1/3 was not to participate. As noted in an after-action report, B/1/3 was “no longer an effective fighting force due to casualties,” so the company was to remain in An Lac to “aid in resupply, medevacs, and provide security for the 81mm mortar section.”

Captain Livingston, CO, E BLT 2/4: “Bravo Company had a lot of bodies still left on the battlefield, which we passed as we began the attack on Dai Do. It’s a sad situation where you’re firing and maneuvering past the bodies of your fellow dead Marines.”

The Palace Guard

T
HERE WERE VOICES IN THE DARK ABOUT FIFTY METERS
ahead of the burial mounds where Sergeant Rogers’s squad from Echo Three had established its ambush/listening post. There were also the muffled sounds of equipment and weapons. Someone was walking toward them, and Rogers, who did not have a starlight scope, was very concerned that Marines had entered his kill zone. Rogers whispered into his radio handset as he described the situation to the company headquarters, which was two hundred meters to the rear in An Lac. Captain Livingston personally came up on the net to verify that there were no friendly patrols in the area. At the same time, one of Rogers’s men whispered to him, “They’re speakin’ Vietnamese out there.”

It was shortly before dawn on Thursday, 2 May. Captain Livingston thought the NVA might be approaching An Lac to surrender, and he put his Vietnamese interpreter on the radió to tell Rogers what to say to find out. Rogers gave away his position when he called out,
“Chieu hoi chieu hoi—”

The reply was an AK-47 burst. The Marines responded with everything they had, including an attached machine-gun team,
until there was no more enemy fire. Livingston instructed them to withdraw, and they walked back to the company perimeter as quietly, cautiously, and quickly as they could. Shortly thereafter, when the sun came up and Echo Company was moving in the assault across those same paddies, Rogers’s squad passed the scene of its two-minute contact. The Marines found three dead NVA behind a burial mound, along with the 12.7mm machine gun that they had never had the chance to set up.

“We fought the palace guard at Dai Do,” said Captain Livingston. “They were big guys with new uniforms, brand-new weapons, and closecropped haircuts. They were quality troops.” The NVA were not guerrillas. The NVA stood and fought, nose to nose, and that was the kind of enemy that Echo 6 wanted. “I was impressed at his anxiousness for combat,” wrote Lieutenant Deichman of Golf Company. Deichman had been at An Lac when Livingston had arrived the previous afternoon from the Dong Ha bridge, and he noted that at the time Livingston “sort of had a smile on his face like the combat he had been waiting for had at long last arrived, and he wasn’t going to miss it for the world. He was itching for a fight, and he got one.”

“Captain Livingston was hardcore as hell, well-respected, and sometimes feared,” commented a rifleman about his spartan, cigar-chewing skipper. “Even his voice was gung-ho sounding.”

Captain Livingston, age twenty-eight, was a Georgia farmer’s son. He was a tall man with features that were handsome in a rawboned way. He shaved his head and carried himself with a certain hands-on-hips confidence. He referred to his troops as his youngsters. Livingston’s tour had begun with his assumption of command of E/2/4 on 31 October 1967. The company had just come off Operation Kingfisher, where it had taken serious casualties. Morale was not all it could have been. The company was filled with replacements, including four new lieutenants. Livingston came on hard
from the word go. He was, of course, seriously resented by the old salts in the company, especially after he ordered every Marine in the outfit, regardless of time in service, to get a skinhead, boot camp-style haircut. Mustaches were outlawed, and daily shaving was enforced. There was little time to bitch about this new spit V polish skipper, nor was there time to be idle or bored. When Echo Company was not out on combat operations, Livingston was PTing the hell out of them, and when he wasn’t PTing the hell out of them he was holding class or another weapons inspection. Livingston was especially tough on his young, inexperienced lieutenants. At Ai Tu, he’d locked their heels and told them that if they did not get squared away soon they would be relieved of command. He did not have to relieve them, however, because “after I had my platoon commanders clean a platoon’s worth of weapons, they understood what I meant about keeping weapons clean—and about making sure that the troops were shaving, and had clean socks, and those kinds of issues that cause Marines not to be combat ready.” Captain Livingston hated what Vietnam was doing to the Marine Corps. “I was uncompromising. A lot of people were beginning to make accommodations. They had lowered their expectations for their Marines. I kept my Marines looking like Marines. I was death on keeping weapons cleaned, and we were famous for conducting office hours in foxholes.” “Office hours” involved a monetary fine and a black mark in a Marine’s record book, which Livingston and his grand old first sergeant would administer whenever and wherever needed. No-slack Echo Company was also famous for conducting PT on the front lines, even after the battalion had moved from Ai Tu to the sticks around Mai Xa Chanh West. When the tactical situation allowed, Livingston jogged his men around the perimeter in flak jackets, and he had them dig fighting holes large enough in which to do sit-ups, push-ups, and bends-and-thrusts. “We were getting up at oh-five-thirty, before all the other companies, and running around the area doing our morning exercises,” remarked Lieutenant Jones. “That was kind of
a local joke within the battalion. We hated it, but we always felt that we were the most ready.”
¹

On most of Echo Company’s hot and sweaty days in the sand dunes and rice paddies, most of its hot and sweaty young Marines hated Captain Livingston. Ultimately, though, they would agree that his hard, unyielding standards kept them alive. Private First Class Michael Helms, who was grievously wounded at Lam Xuan East, wrote that “we blamed the skipper for our woes because it seemed he was always volunteering us. A lot of us figured he would win the Medal of Honor, or die trying. We used to gripe and bitch among ourselves that he would probably kill us all getting it, but he definitely had our respect and, secretly, our admiration. I can think of no other officer I would rather have around when the shit hit the fan.”

It was not quite light and Echo Company was just saddling up to attack Dai Do when a lone NVA was spotted inside the perimeter. The running soldier appeared as only a half-glimpsed shadow to LCpl. Philip L. Cornwell, a machine-gun team leader in Echo Two. Cornwell fired his M60 at the same time that several other Marines opened up with M16s, and the NVA went down immediately. Cornwell tossed a grenade, then ran to the area with his Colt .45 in hand. The NVA was lying facedown, and when he started to get up Cornwell shot him in the back of the head. It was his first confirmed kill. A machine gunner nicknamed El Toro rushed up to congratulate Cornwell—and to hand him a bayonet. “Here, here, he’s yours!” said El Toro, grinning broadly.

“El Toro was always happy-go-lucky, but that boy was sick,” Cornwell recalled. “He would really smile when he got the chance to cut bodies up.”

This time Cornwell used the bayonet. He cut the ears off his kill.

Cornwell had seen El Toro in action two months earlier in an embattled hamlet that was thick with smoke from burning hootches as the Marines grenaded the enemy bunkers beneath each. The men in Echo Two were in a black mood because one of their most popular comrades had been killed by a defective grenade. When Cornwell tossed a grenade of his own into a bunker, an ancient-looking Vietnamese woman emerged. She stood small and gray and wrinkled on the trail, hands clasped against her chest. No civilians were supposed to be in the area. “The sergeant called to ask what to do with her. Word came back to waste her. I wanted to kill her. She was mine. I threw the grenade in that bunker.” Cornwell put down his machine gun. He wanted to kill her execution-style with his .45-caliber pistol. He started to unholster the weapon. “El Toro beat me to it. He whipped his machine gun up and just put a burst right through her. I always wondered if it would have bothered me if I’d gotten the chance to kill her. When you’re eighteen and in that position day after day, you know you’re going to die. There’s no doubt whatsoever that you’re going to die. The fear, the total fear, cannot be understood. You do things you’re not really proud of.”

As Echo Company’s attack on Dai Do got rolling, two more NVA, previously undetected, were discovered squatting in holes in the tall grass. They immediately raised their hands in surrender. They had apparently deserted their positions in Dai Do and had waited all night to give up. They were quiet and scared, and Lieutenant Jones quickly organized a detail to escort them back to the battalion CP. There they joined two other khaki-clad prisoners, deserters who had approached Hotel Company in Dong Huan during the night with their brand-new, folding-stock AK-47s held over their heads.

Sergeant Ernest L. Pace from the division G2’s Interrogator-Translator Team spoke with the prisoners, then reported directly to Weise. Pace said that one prisoner told him twelve NVA companies were in Dai Do alone, and that they had
identified themselves as belonging to the 52d Regiment, 320th NVA Division. The prisoners claimed that the only thing they feared were the air strikes. Weise looked at them before they were loaded into a skimmer for the trip downriver. They were sitting under guard with their hands tied behind their backs. They occasionally looked around with great curiosity, but mostly they had downcast eyes. Weise said later, “I’m sure they were wondering whether they were going to be killed. I was very concerned for their safety. We made it a point to impress the intelligence value of prisoners on our troops all the time, but the men were really upset and you had to be careful.”