The Magnificent Bastards (37 page)

This place has about as much cover as a fucking parking lot, thought Private Harp of Charlie One, which was moving with twenty meters between each man. The flat terrain between Lam Xuan East and Nhi Ha was nothing like the jungle-busting, ridge-running Charlie Tiger troopers had ever operated in. The fields of fire seemed to go on forever, broken only by dunes and low-lying hedgerows and tree lines. Spent LAWs lay on the ground, along with expended M16 brass and the shell casings and links from M60 machine guns. There were also Marine steel pots lying around, along with Russian-issue helmets and NVA footgear. Harp didn’t notice one boot until he’d stepped on it; flies exploded from it. Harp looked down as he passed by and saw a black, rotten, maggoty foot encased in the mangled canvas and leather.

Heat waves radiated off the ground as if off asphalt.

Charlie One, having gone into Lam Xuan East on point, was in the drag position on the way to Nhi Ha. Lieutenant Hieb, the platoon leader, had gotten the call from Lieutenant Kohl, the acting company commander, to hold up as they had begun to move out of Lam Xuan East so that Charlie Two, under 1st Lt. Edward F. Guthrie, could take their place up front. The platoons were always rotated on a share-the-risk principle. What was unusual was that when Charlie Two humped past, Lieutenant Guthrie was the lead man, helmet and pack on, his CAR 15 Colt Commando slung around his neck and held ready at the waist. “Hey, Ed, what the hell are you doing walking point?” Hieb called to him. “You’re not supposed to be walking point!”

“These guys are draggin’ ass, and I’m going to show ’Em how to do it,” answered Lieutenant Guthrie with an Oklahoma twang.

The problem was not only the foreign, forbidding terrain, but the fact that Captain Leach, who was nearly a living legend in Charlie Tiger, had departed two days earlier on R and R. Lieutenant Kohl, the company exec, had taken command in his absence. Although Kohl had been awarded both the Silver Star and the Bronze Star Medal for Valor (BSMv) while a
platoon leader in Black Death, the grunts still didn’t think he had the savvy to replace Leach.

Jones Creek, on the company’s left flank, was generally oriented from the southeast to the northwest, but it curved due west above Lam Xuan East so that Nhi Ha actually sat on the northern bank. Lam Xuan West was due south across the bend. Charlie Tiger, having approached from the southeast, had to swing around to assault the brushy island of Nhi Ha from the east. Again there was no enemy fire, and the two platoons up front did not waste ammunition reconning by fire.

The company stepped up about three feet from the paddies onto the slight high ground of Nhi Ha proper with Lieutenant Guthrie’s Charlie Two on the right and Charlie Three, under the acting command of a sergeant first class, moving abreast on the left. Lieutenant Kohl followed with his command group. The assault line, with a point team forward of each platoon, closed up to about five meters between men as they pushed through the first thicket of bamboo and brush at the hamlet’s edge. The terrain opened up on the other side, and by the time Lieutenant Hieb and Charlie One, bringing up the rear, were inside, the rest of Charlie Tiger had already swept nearly halfway through Nhi Ha. The hamlet, defined by an outer wall of vegetation, was narrow in width but long on its east-west axis. The sweep was from east to west. There were two-walled and three-walled hootches, which were checked as they were passed, and hootches so badly shot up that only the cement foundations remained. There were also old entrenchments, both friendly and enemy, but the village appeared to be deserted.

As the two platoons drew to within fifty meters of the brush line that cut the hamlet in half at its narrow waist, Sgt. Paul L. Yost and Sp4 William J. Morse, now on point, stopped to alert Lieutenant Guthrie that there was movement ahead. They could see at least one man wearing a helmet. Guthrie, concerned about an intramural firelight, shouted a warning down the assault line that there were still Marines in position. But the men they’d seen were not Marines. They were NVA regulars with helmets, fatigues, and web gear, and they opened
fire at that moment from their entrenchments in the heavy brush, killing the entire point team before the GIs knew what hit them. Guthrie caught a round in the back of the head that blew open his forehead on the way out. Yost took at least three rounds through his chest, and Morse was shot above the bridge of the nose. The bullet mushroomed and splattered out the back of his skull.

Private Harp of Charlie One was a small, wiry GI. Jolted by the sudden firing, he fell into a low spot of sand, ending up like a turtle on its back because of his rucksack. The ruck weighed almost as much as he did. The fire seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, and when he moved, bullets chewed up the sand beside him. Harp finally slipped free of the rucksack and rolled it over to get the machine-gun ammo off, along with a couple of hand grenades and his spare bandolier of M16 ammunition. He noticed then that the two-quart water bladder that he kept secured on the ruck had taken a round through it and was deflated.

The ambush, which was initiated at 1250, included rocket-propelled grenades. As Sgt. Jimmie Lee “Red” Coulthard, a machine-gun team leader in Charlie Three, dropped toward the mound to his front, he was eye to eye with an RPG that seemed hell-bent on taking his head off. The projectile was slow enough to see, and it whooshed over him just as he slid prone behind the mound. It exploded somewhere behind him. The air above him seemed electrified with death.

Over the cacophony of explosions and automatic fire, the pinned-down grunts tried to make sense of what was happening.

“Get some return fire going!”

“Who’s been hit?”

It turned out that while Charlie Two’s point team was being shot to pieces on the right flank, the point man for Charlie Three on the left—a private named Adams, who was to pick up three superficial wounds during the battle—had been able to clamber to cover in a gully. Specialist Derryl D. Odom, the
backup man, was cut down, but the third man in line, Sp4 Eugene J. McDonald, was also able to find safety behind a brushy mound. Odom lay facedown and unmoving nearby. McDonald thought he was dead, but Odom, out in the open with a bullet-shattered arm, was playing ’possum where he had fallen. He knew that the enemy still had him in their sights, even if he couldn’t see them through the brush.

The fourth man in the point team was Sp4 Johnny Miller, who made a dash around McDonald’s mound to reach Odom. Miller made it two or three steps before he was hit in the head. McDonald heard him moan, and could see him sprawled out just beyond the mound. McDonald saw a second bullet thump into his back.

Johnny Miller was dead. Private First Class George L. Cruse, who had gone for the same mound as Sergeant Coulthard, let out an anguished cry—“They got Johnny!”—then shrugged off his rucksack and, acting on impulse and without coordinating covering fire, leapt up to make a run for Miller. It was the bravest, most stupid thing Coulthard ever saw. Cruse was blown away as soon as he exposed himself. The twenty-year-old Cruse had been a shy, quiet, kind of clumsy country boy from Liberal, Kansas. He was white. The man he sought to save was black. Both of them had been drafted. Miller, older than most grunts at age twenty-five, had been appalled by the poverty in the villages they usually operated in, and had written to his mother in North Carolina, asking that her church group send clothes over for the children. “They were just good, simple guys,” said Coulthard.

Charlie Tiger was spread across the open ground in scattered bunches wherever the men could find cover. Staff Sergeant James M. Goad, the acting platoon sergeant—and the most respected career NCO in Charlie Three—earned the Silver Star for taking control of the fight in the absence of their platoon sergeant and acting platoon leader, who they assumed had been killed. “When the going got really tough, Goad was a good man,” recalled the company’s artillery lieutenant. “He had innate leadership abilities. When he said something, he
said it with such a positive attitude that the men were willing to do it.”

Staff Sergeant Goad wormed his way up to Coulthard’s mound, and they returned M16 fire over it on full automatic.

“Get the machine gun up here!” Goad shouted.

Sergeant Roger W. Starr, the platoon’s machine-gun squad leader, was behind a berm about forty meters to the rear of Goad and Coulthard. He got a BSMv for his response to their shouts. Starr, an amiable, twenty-one-year-old draftee from a dairy farm outside Sand Lake, Michigan, gave his M16 to one of his gunners, and, taking the man’s M60 machine gun in return, rushed forward and clattered in unscathed beside Goad and Coulthard. The mound was too narrow for all of them, so Coulthard slid back into the shallow depression behind it to make way for Starr and his M60. They had to come up to their knees to fire over the shallow slope of the mound, so they took turns, Goad with his M16 and Starr with the machine gun. Starr directed most of his quick, jack-in-the-box bursts at an NVA machine-gun position that he could hear but not see in the hedgerow. Trying to keep low, he ended up shooting the top of their own mound with each burst before getting the weapon all the way up in the enemy’s direction. Return fire also kicked up dirt across the mound, and at one point Stan-felt something strike hot and sharp across the upper part of his left arm. He immediately dropped back down and saw that his sleeve had been torn and was bloody. He didn’t know if the graze had been caused by a bullet or a shard from a bullet-shattered rock.

Staff Sergeant Goad and Roger Starr were about the only men in the platoon seriously engaging the enemy. While Coulthard crawled back to Charlie One to get more ammo for them, Starr and his impromptu assistant gunner, Sp4 Ray Elsworth—having no time to wait—yelled to Charlie Two on their right that they needed ammunition right away! In response, Sp4 Pierre L. Sullivan, a grunt from the other platoon, ran to their mound and began firing his M16 from a prone position several meters to their right. The position around the edge of the mound was so vulnerable that Coulthard had avoided it when
he’d been up there. Sullivan had always been willing to take chances—a trait that earned the nineteen year old the nickname Tunnel Rat because he frequently climbed head first into enemy tunnels with only a .45 and a flashlight. One of his buddies suggested that Sullivan was always going first because he was self-conscious about his small stature. Sullivan was not a draftee; he had enlisted. He wanted to prove himself. He was, however, a short-timer, and some weeks earlier, during a mountain-climbing patrol in the highlands, he had tried to sham his way out of the field by claiming that his eyes were bad. Captain Leach, who was death on malingering, ordered Sullivan to walk point. When he successfully navigated the dangerous crevices of the jungled mountain, the captain, who had been behind him the whole time, grabbed him and barked, “Don’t you ever pull that shit again!”

Specialist Sullivan had been acting like his old self when he made his dash to join Starr and Elsworth. When Sullivan’s M16 jammed, he sat up with his back to the enemy, began disassembling the weapon—and was shot in the head within seconds. He slumped forward and shook for several minutes before he died.

Starr, unable to reach Sullivan because of the fire, muttered, “I’m going to get sick.”

Elsworth swallowed hard and answered, “So am I.”

Sergeant Coulthard snaked his way forward again, having gone from man to man back to Charlie One, imploring each for grenades and ammunition. Tall, chunky Red Coulthard—a hard-drinking but level-headed and likeable farm boy from Mount Ayr, Iowa—left the ammo he had gathered with Goad and Starr, then moved to the left with another NCO toward an NVA machine-gun position. Coulthard had been in the Army since enlisting six years earlier at age seventeen. Coulthard and his buddy slid into a gully about fifty meters away from the enemy gun. After heaving grenades at it without effect, Coulthard decided to use a LAW on the bunker, which they could just see at an angle through the vegetation. The other NCO covered him with his M16. On cue, they both popped up, but the instant Coulthard fired the LAW an enemy grenade
exploded between them in a shower of debris. They knew that more grenades would be coming, and they almost climbed over each other as they hustled down the ditch. There were no more explosions. They realized then that the first explosion had actually been the LAW’s backblast hitting the back of the gully, which was higher than the edge they were shooting over. They started laughing like crazy.

Pinned down on the left flank, Specialist McDonald of Charlie Three squeezed off single shots into the hedgerow ahead. He couldn’t see anything, but the point man, Adams, was still down in his gully directing fire. Adams kept shouting for him to aim higher. Adams also hollered at McDonald to toss him some grenades since he was closer to the enemy. McDonald never had the chance. As he rose up to fire his M16 again, a round caught him in his left arm and flipped him over onto his back. His glasses and M16 were gone. Shocked and in pain, he did not look for either. A small bit of his thumb was missing, and blood bubbled up from where the round had lodged in his arm. McDonald yelled that he was hit, and a GI crawled up to pull the bandage from his medical pouch, wrap the wound, and then start back with him. They were eventually able to move in a running crouch, and McDonald joined a number of other walking wounded near the village well, where the company command group was in position.