The Magnificent Bastards (26 page)

There were NVA in bypassed and camouflaged spiderholes to Hotel Company’s rear; Echo Company, moving rapidly into Dinh To, rolled right over the top of them. Sergeant Rogers, the new Echo Three commander, suddenly saw an NVA soldier come out of nowhere to run past him on his left. The NVA was going in the same direction as the Marines. Rogers, who could have almost reached out and grabbed the terrified man, hadn’t even had a chance to swing his M16 around before an M60 gunner chopped the soldier down. Rogers saw
five or six more NVA, panicked by the machine-gun fire, pop from their spiderholes and start running away. The machine gunner turned them into rag dolls before his eyes with one long burst.

It was about 1040. Lieutenant Taylor, who had moved to a bomb crater, turned to see Captain Livingston coming forward at the head of a group of what looked like twenty to thirty Marines. Taylor noticed that Livingston did not flinch despite shots that literally kicked up dirt around his feet. As Livingston directed his Marines into positions to flesh out the gaps in Hotel’s lines, Taylor rose up a bit from his cover to greet him. Livingston clambered into the crater with an enthusiastic, “How ya doin’, Tiger? C’mon—let’s go!”

Echo and Hotel Companies started forward again with their men jumbled together and bayonets fixed. They advanced in leaps and bounds between spots of cover. One of Lieutenant Taylor’s radiomen had his loudspeaker tuned to the battalion tac net, and at one point this background noise included their crusty regimental commander, Colonel Hull, coming up on the net to ask Weise, “What’s your situation up there?”

“We have two companies in the attack,” replied Weise.

“Now, exploit your advantage, exploit your advantage. Don’t hold back—exploit your success!”

Weise had a gravelly Philadelphia voice, and he barked back with some anger, “Well, you don’t have to tell me that, Six, because what we’re going to do is get up there and kill as many of these little yellow bastards as we can.”

Sounds like the “Send More Japs” message from Wake Island, thought Taylor. It was pure Weise and it breathed fire into them. The Marines needed that; it was about all they had. Most of their M16s were fouled from constant firing, and they were low on ammo of every type. Some men picked up NVA weapons. Others, out of ammunition, attacked with empty weapons. Taylor saw one Marine go by with no weapon at all. When Taylor called to him, the man explained that his M16 was jammed and that he had used an M79 until he’d run out of shells. He said he was looking for another weapon. Taylor, who had two .45-caliber pistols because past experience had
taught him that there wasn’t always time to reload, gave the unarmed man one of them, along with a couple of magazines, and off the Marine went.

Lance Corporal Cornwell was in a ditch with maybe twenty other Marines, and when the shout went up to charge the NVA who had them pinned, he reflexively went over the top. Within a few steps he’d fired the last of his ammo, and he dropped to the prone even as he realized that the Marines running with him were being hit. He looked around. One of them was dead; two others were seriously wounded. There was no one else there. Shocked, Cornwell looked back. In the confusion, the other Marines had never left the ditch. They were holding their M16s above their heads and firing blindly. Cornwell screamed at them to stop firing so he could crawl back. He had no idea if the three men with him had been shot by the NVA or by the Marines behind them. Cornwell left his empty M60 behind as he took hold of one of the seriously wounded men and started back in an exhausted, ground-hugging crawl. He made it.

On the right flank, LCpl. James L. Barela of Hotel Two was behind cover and working on his jammed M60 when a Chicom grenade exploded in his position. He and the three grunts with him were all wounded, but then a crazy little Marine from Echo Company got up to throw grenade after grenade; Barela, not wanting to let the man down, moved up with his cleared machine gun. He started firing where they thought the NVA were, then he moved on in the confusion to a trench full of Marines whose weapons were mostly jammed. There was a hootch about twenty-five meters to their front with a trail to the right of it. Two or three enemy soldiers in the hootch provided covering fire for other NVA who were moving into position by crossing the trail. One Marine fired several LAWs into the cement hootch, and another ran to the right to move in on its flank. The NVA cut him down. Barela left his rejammed M60 in the trench and worked his way toward the man with several Marines from Hotel Three. One of them was hit in the arm, so they dragged him back along with the man they’d gone out to rescue. The NVA, meanwhile, were still
crossing the trail despite the M79 rounds being lobbed in by a grenadier. Soon they had worked in close enough to fling Chicoms at the trench. Barela still couldn’t get his M60 to work.

It was 1340 and the NVA were counterattacking. Lieutenant Taylor had just moved to the cover provided by the banana trees in the courtyard of a shot-up cement hootch with a partially collapsed thatch roof. There was a sudden and definite increase in the amount of NVA fire, and it riddled the banana trees and the masonry wall of the hootch. As banana leaves folded down around them, Taylor looked up to see that the bushes fifty meters to his front were alive with heavily camouflaged enemy soldiers. The closest NVA were already within twenty-five meters. Their pith helmets, fatigues, and web gear were covered with fresh leaves. They looked like moving bushes with little faces, and Taylor flashed back to a ghostly, black-and-white documentary he had seen of identical-looking Viet Minh in an attack on Dien Bien Phu.

Fuck it, he thought. Come on, you assholes! Lieutenant Taylor, firing his .45 when not talking on the radio, was at a fever pitch, as was the Marine nearest him. The grunt was armed only with a pistol and a sandbag full of grenades, and he pitched the frags as fast as he could pull the pins.

Nearby, Pfc. Vincent A. Scafidi of Hotel Three, a lean, tough kid from New York City, earned the Silver Star as he stood with his M60 braced against his hip, killing the enemy soldiers as they came through the brush.

Corporal Britton of the battalion scouts was preparing to grenade an enemy bunker when the counterattack began. Four NVA rushed him, and he pointed his pistol at the closest one. “I fired at least three shots into him and watched him fall at my feet,” Britton later wrote. “I suddenly found myself out of ammo in my .45, with no time to put in another magazine.” Britton unslung his M16, which he carried with fixed bayonet, and killed the next NVA with a slash to the throat. He shot the third one in the stomach. “As he died, he lunged into me, and his bayonet sliced my left leg just inside the thigh. At this
exact moment, the fourth NVA crashed into my right side, knocking my M16 to the ground. I immediately grabbed his rifle with my left hand, pulled my K-Bar knife from its sheath on my belt, and slammed it into his stomach. He slumped against me.”

A Chicom grenade landed beside them, and the explosion blew apart Corporal Britton and the last NVA, with the enemy soldier taking most of the blast. Britton’s face was bursting with pain, and he put his hands to it. Blood was everywhere. He passed out.

Britton was startled back to reality by a long burst from an M60 as the machine gunner ran up to him. After rolling Britton over, the grunt shouted back that Britton was still alive and needed a doc. The corpsman bandaged Britton’s face, and two exhausted Marines half-carried, half-dragged him to where other casualties were waiting to be loaded onto skimmers. Britton passed out again, and did not regain consciousness until he’d been medevacked to the ship and the doctors were working on him. They removed a piece of metal from his right foot, another from his right forearm, and three from his face. The explosion had also broken his nose, both cheekbones, and partially dislocated his jaw. A corpsman visited Britton after surgery, and Britton wrote that the doc “gave me a bullet that he’d removed from the upper chest area of my flak jacket after taking it and the rest of my gear when I arrived on board ship. Sometime during the two days of fighting it was shot at me and lodged in my flak jacket. I really do not know when.”

“Captain Livingston and I were in visual contact most of the fight, and I never once saw him take cover or a backward step,” Lieutenant Taylor later testified. “Instead, he moved among his troops encouraging, threatening, comforting, urging, pushing, and pulling them to virtually superhuman feats.”

Livingston’s famous grease gun had jammed up on him, and he had thrown the ammo magazine in one direction and the defective weapon in another. He unholstered his .45 then, but one of his young Marines suggested he become a rifleman and threw an M14 to him, along with a bag full of magazines.
Livingston maintained one M14 per squad for use as a sniper weapon, and he put the heavy, reliable weapon to accurate use. “It was survival of the fittest at that point,” Livingston recalled. “There were multiple targets—it was a matter of who you wanted to get involved with. I was banging away at a few of ’Em. I don’t know how many I dinged. I was shooting and people were dropping. There were plenty of them to go around.”

Sergeant Rogers of Echo Three was suddenly knocked to the ground, and when he moved his hand to his hip he felt blood. Don’t look at the wound, he thought. You’ll go into shock! Staying close to the ground, he hollered for a corpsman. One made it up to him and asked, “Where you been hit?”

“I’ve been shot in the hip!”

The corpsman gave him a quick inspection, then exclaimed, “You dumb ass—you’ve been shot in the canteen!”

Rogers, thinking he’d been hit, had expected pain, so there was pain. It disappeared when the corpsman shouted at him. Regretting only that he’d just lost his last precious canteen of water, Rogers moved on to assume a prone firing position behind some cover. Everything was happening fast. He could see the enemy coming at them. Everyone was firing. Rogers settled his sights on one NVA, and then another, and another as more popped up in the place of each who went down.

Bring the Wounded, Leave the Dead

D
URING THE BUILDUP TO THE
NVA
COUNTERATTACK
, C
OR
PORAL Cardona of Echo Two had been blasting away at movement in the brush farther up the trail along which his platoon was bogged down. Cardona was on the left side. His squad members lay prone on either side of the footpath, along with other Marines from Echo and Hotel Companies. The Marines were almost stacked on top of each other. They couldn’t see anything for all the vegetation. There were wounded everywhere, and corpsmen were making an effort to drag them back.

Cardona’s M16 suddenly jammed as he fired down the trail.

At the same time, the machine gunner beside him experienced a jam, too. The gunner looked up then and exclaimed, “Hey, look!”

The NVA were coming down the trail at them.

Corporal Cardona, an experienced, squared-away Marine, shouted at another grunt beside him to grab a grenade, as he himself jerked the pin from one. The two of them let fly and the NVA, firing as they moved, swerved off the relatively open trail and into the thick brush to the right of it.

Cardona sprinted across the trail and ran into Lieutenant Sims, his platoon commander. Cardona explained that their machine gun was jammed and angrily held up his own useless
rifle. Sims, armed only with a .45-caliber pistol, handed it to him. “Here, take it!”

Lieutenant Sims was a short, stocky man from Atlanta, Georgia. According to his troops, he didn’t have loads of common sense, but he was an educated and concerned young officer who was willing to listen to his seasoned grunts—and took the platoon’s casualties hard. Cardona grabbed the pistol that Sims offered, then ran back to where the M60 gunner was trying to clear his weapon. Within minutes, the shout went up that the lieutenant had been hit. Cardona hustled back to where he had last seen Sims, then to a small hootch to the rear of the firing line where dead and wounded Marines were being moved. Sims was inside. He’d been shot in the stomach. Blood was coming out of his mouth. He told Cardona that he couldn’t move. Cardona, satisfied that the lieutenant was being taken care of, told Sims to hold on, that they would get him out as soon as possible, then he moved out to rejoin his squad.

Someone hollered that the hootch was on fire. Cardona ran back to find the thatch roof ablaze and caving in. He went inside with several other Marines. “Get me out of here!” Sims screamed. Cardona and another grunt got the lieutenant to his feet. They rushed him outside, then dropped down to avoid the fire snapping through the area. Cardona saw two Marines half-crawling and half-running under the heavy fire as they dragged a mortally wounded black Marine by his arms. The back of the man’s head kept banging against the ground, and Cardona screamed, “Pick him up, pick him up! Don’t drag him like that—get his head above the ground!”