The Magnificent Bastards (38 page)

The initial eruption of fire that killed Lieutenant Guthrie of Charlie Two also dropped his platoon sergeant, Sfc. Eugene Franklin, with a round in the thigh. Pinned down, the thirty-year-old Franklin—a black career soldier—bled to death. Nearby, Pfc. Thomas M. Walker, age eighteen, also lay dead in the brush. Another man in Charlie Two hit right off the bat was Sp4 Larry C. Schwebke. He was shot in the stomach just as he reached a little stucco-type hootch that the rest of his fire team had already passed, all of them moving upright in those last seconds before the ambush was sprung.

Schwebke cried out, “Oh, my guts!” as he fell.

Under fire, Pfc. John C. Fulcher spun around and dragged
Schwebke up to the cover of the hootch, then pulled him as far down as he could into a small crater in the floor. Fulcher’s best friend and fellow team member, Pfc. Douglas D. Fletcher, joined them inside. The roof of the little, twelve-by-twelve structure had long since been blown off, and the wall to the left was also missing. Fulcher and Fletcher, pressed against the inside of the hootch’s front wall, slid to its left edge to return M16 fire—then ducked back as AK-47 rounds thudded into the stucco on the other side of the wall. Their buddy Schwebke held his bloody stomach, but apparently because of damage to his spine he moaned that it was his legs that hurt. Lying in an awkward position in the crater, he asked the other two to drag him back out and lay him in such a way that his legs would not hurt so much.

“Larry, they’re Marines’ at us,” Fulcher answered. “They’re goin’ to shoot you again if I move ya.”

Schwebke mumbled, “Okay, okay …”

Their squad leader, Sgt. Donald G. Pozil, made it to the rear wall of the hootch. A draftee, he had taken command of the platoon in the absence of Guthrie and Franklin—for which he would receive the Silver Star. His concern was to get his casualties to the rear. There was no door or window to pass Schwebke through, and moving him around the exposed edge of the wall seemed suicidal. Pozil had the GIs with him use their E-tools to chop a hole through the stucco. When the hole was big enough, Schwebke stretched out his arms so that the men on the other side could reach him and pull him through. He cried out in pain as he extended his arms. It seemed an eternity since he’d been shot.

Larry Schwebke, a farmer’s son with a young wife in Iowa, died sometime between being dragged back by Sergeant Pozil’s group and finally being lifted onto a medevac Huey. He was twenty-two years old and a draftee. Meanwhile, Fulcher and Fletcher, feeling very much alone, resumed their fire—until Fletcher’s M16 jammed. Fletcher did not get shook. He simply sat back against the hootch wall and methodically disassembled the weapon, cleaned it, and slapped it back together.
He thumped in another magazine, recharged the weapon, and rolled back into his firing position in the rubble.

Charlie Tiger received neither tac air nor gunship support—nor any direction from the company command group. Lieutenant Kohl, who was near the village well when the ambush began, stayed there for the duration of the fight. Crawling forward under heavy fire, Lieutenant Jaquez, the artillery spotter, found Kohl sitting up against the cement well on the side opposite the enemy. He had his helmet and flak jacket on, and both of his radios were on the ground beside him. No one else was there, and Jaquez realized that Lieutenant Kohl was physically shaking. Kohl was not giving orders on the radio. He was simply listening to the company net with a handset held to one ear, numbly relaying to battalion on his other radio that they were pinned down and needed help.

Lieutenant Kohl had seen a lot of action as a platoon leader, and had breathed a sigh of relief when his six months were up and he got a rear-echelon assignment. Now he was back in action and it was proving to be one firefight too many for him.

Jaquez screamed at Kohl to “get up and lead!”

Kohl yelled back incoherently, and Jaquez, with his radioman in tow, finally crawled forward and away from the immobilized company commander. Operating on his belly, Lieutenant Jaquez—a Mexican-American from Los Angeles—got Charlie Tiger some artillery support from three Marine artillery batteries. He worked their fires in as close as he dared in coordination with grunts up front who answered his radio calls, then he and his RTO crawled forward themselves to the point where they could hear enemy soldiers yelling back and forth in Vietnamese. Jaquez could see some of them hustling past several hootches on the left flank. After adjusting fire onto that area, he shouldered his own M16 in the excitement. Between radio transmissions, he used the ammo magazine already in the weapon and the six others in the bandolier hanging down from his shoulder.

Lieutenant Jaquez was awarded the BSMv. So was Charlie One’s Lieutenant Hieb, a slim, bespectacled draftee commissioned
from officer candidate school (OCS), and a twenty-four-year-old native of Twin Falls, Idaho. Hieb, holding open Nhi Ha’s back door with his platoon, also moved from position to position under fire to organize individual and fire-team efforts to drag the casualties back from up front. His RTO was right behind him. When Hieb got up to run, his RTO got up to run. The RTO was such an obvious target that Hieb finally took the radio from him, slipped his arms through the shoulder straps, and told the GI to grab some cover. One of Hieb’s better squad leaders, Sp4 John H. Burns, anchored their right flank with his troops behind an earthen berm that was some three feet high. Along with Burns, there was Brooks, Hobi, Harp, and a guy named Meister. When the NVA tried to move in on that side, their M16 fire was overwhelming. Their machine gunner, Pope, who had set up beside Burns, burned out his barrel with sustained fire. The NVA went to the ground. Burns’s people kept pouring out rounds, and Harp ended up making three trips back to get ammo from the other squads. He got lost each time on his way back. The situation was that confusing.

The GIs in Charlie One could not fire to their front for fear of hitting Charlie Two and Three. Most of the survivors in Charlie Two had made it to a large crater and were pinned at the bottom of it. One soldier near the crater began digging a shallow trench toward it. When he got close enough, he heaved another E-tool to the men inside so they could dig from their direction, link up, and get out under cover. The digging seemed to take forever.

During the wait, Specialist Burns asked for a volunteer to help him drag back Sergeant Yost’s body. Harp said he’d go. Their maneuver required them to crawl past a certain NVA position, and although high grass offered some concealment and the NVA appeared to be firing in a different direction, it was a risky prospect. The medic said to be careful, adding that he didn’t want to lose anyone “trying to recover guys who are already dead.”

“There’s gotta be a better way to do this,” Harp chimed in.

Burns exploded. “Harp, you chickenshit!”

Harp was always in trouble with Burns, mostly because he was so afraid he would screw up that he usually did. Burns tagged him as the squad dud, and in this instance he took Brooks with him to drag Yost’s body back. There was a hole in Yost’s chest and back that a fist could pass through, and he was blue around his lips and eyes and fingernails. It was a devastating, infuriating sight, and when an NVA on the right kicked up dirt around them with a sudden burst, Harp had to shoot back. He had seen the smoke rise from where the NVA had fired on full automatic, and he ran over to Pope, whose machine-gun position afforded a clear line of fire.

Harp jumped down beside Pope and shouldered his M16, exclaiming, “This little motherfucker is mine!”

Harp pumped two magazines into the spot—silencing the NVA, maybe temporarily, maybe for good—then rushed back to where Burns and the medic were getting Yost’s body on a stretcher. Burns cranked up again, “Goddamnit, Harp, if I need you to shoot, I’ll tell you to shoot. Right now I need you to lift, so get on the goddamn stretcher and leave the Marines’ to Pope!” A Marine Otter had moved up behind the village well to evacuate casualties. With Burns and Brooks up front and Harp and the medic in back, they moved out with Yost’s stretcher in a running crouch, only to get hung up on a tree stump. By then they were all moving sluggishly, but in the heat of the moment Burns snapped around to scream at Harp again, “Harp, pick your fucking end up …”

At the same time that Charlie Tiger was ambushed, Captain Corrigan and Barracuda, across the stream in Lam Xuan West, also began taking AK-47 and M79 fire from Nhi Ha. Corrigan remained in position to provide suppressive fires into the left flank of Kohl’s fight. It was Corrigan’s second big action. The son of a West Pointer, twenty-six-year-old Corrigan was an ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate. He was a low-key, highly intelligent man and he ran a good company, although Snyder did not think he had the battlefield instincts of Leach or Humphries. Nevertheless, the battalion commander noted
that Barracuda 6, however green, was a cool customer on the radio despite the bullets snapping over his head. Corrigan, lying prone, had called several of his lieutenants and platoon sergeants to his position beside the stream. There were no trees or bushes there, but the crown of the bank, which was three feet above the creek, provided some cover. The Barracuda GIs deployed along the southern bank could not see the NVA blasting away from the other side. The brush in Nhi Ha was too thick. Nor could they see Charlie Tiger. Until they determined who was where in the vegetation, Corrigan instructed them to return fire only with M16s, adding, “Don’t use your machine guns, and no LAWs or M79s. We don’t want to be killing our own people over there.”

Barracuda began taking casualties at that point. The first to be hit was SSgt. William F. Ochs, a twenty-year-old career soldier assigned as the platoon sergeant of Bravo One. Ochs, who had been with the platoon for almost nine months and was a highly respected NCO, should have crawled when he returned from Corrigan’s meeting and started passing the word. Instead, he ran along the bank in a crouch, shouting at his men not to fire their M60s and LAWs. Almost immediately he was blown off his feet by a round that caught him high up on his right leg. The bullet tore a four-inch-long gash where it went in, shattered the bone, and then exited just below his buttocks, taking a grapefruit-sized chunk of muscle and flesh with it. Ochs, in excruciating pain, screamed obscenities until a medic crawled over and thumped a morphine Syrette into his leg. The whole leg went numb. Ochs was still shook up because his leg, which seemed held together by only a few strands of muscle, was bent crazily so that his foot was up by his ear. One of Ochs’s squad leaders and good friends, Bob Waite, who had also crawled to him, placed a helmet under his head to make him comfortable and spoke encouragingly to him, doing for Ochs what Ochs had done previously for so many of their casualties. Hoping to distract Ochs, Waite got a can of beer out of Ochs’s rucksack and opened it for him. Ochs managed a few sips. Meanwhile, Ochs could hear someone trying to organize a medevac on the radio: “The
guy’s bleedin’ like a stuck pig. He’s not going to last long. We can’t stop the bleedin’!”

The helicopter pilot’s response came in broken over the radio: “Get him … wood line behind you … we’ll pick him up.” As gently as he could, Waite straightened Ochs’s leg so it would fit in the poncho they lifted him on, and then several other grunts carried Ochs toward the wood line. It was a hundred-meter trip. Under fire the whole way across, the litter team had to tug and drag Ochs along as they struggled on their hands and knees. They made it, though, and Ochs was medevacked within fifteen minutes of getting hit—quickly enough to save his leg.

At about the same time, approximately 1400, a rifleman in Bravo One, Pfc. Robert A. Romo, a twenty-year-old draftee from Rialto, California, caught another of the bullets snapping at them from across the creek. It hit him in the neck and killed him. Afterward, Romo’s body was escorted home by his uncle, an OCS graduate serving as a platoon leader in the Americal Division. They were the same age and had been raised as brothers. Romo’s death was a deciding factor in his uncle’s decision to join the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and to throw away his Bronze Stars during the organization’s 1971 protest on the Capitol steps. One of Romo’s Barracuda buddies wrote home that he couldn’t understand “why God would take his life. He never cussed, drinked, or smoked. The guy was twenty and never had sex with a girl… everyone else would seem like a devil compared to him.”

At 1410, Captain Corrigan requested another dust-off for another wounded man, and the
C&C
Huey was dispatched without the colonel. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, coordinating the action from Mai Xa Chanh East, intended not to carry the fight into the NVA entrenchments, but to have Charlie Tiger recover its casualties and break contact so that he could obliterate Nhi Ha with massed artillery and air strikes. As such, Snyder had immediately ordered Captain Osborn and Alpha Company to cover Charlie Tiger’s exposed right flank. Leaving one platoon in Lam Xuan East, Osborn had his other two platoons rolling within ten minutes of the first shot. Knowing
that any medevac attempt in Nhi Ha would result in a shot-down helicopter, Snyder also dispatched the USMC Otters attached from BLT 2/4 to resupply the engaged company with ammunition and evacuate its casualties. Each Otter had a .50-caliber machine gun manned by a Marine crewman, and Echo Recon GIs aboard to provide additional security. Captain Humphries and Delta Company, previously in reserve at the battalion command post, moved out some thirty minutes after the Otters departed Mai Xa Chanh East.

Overhead, a US AF forward air controller had arrived to help direct the Marine artillery pounding Nhi Ha. Meanwhile, at 1525, four artillery shells landed near Bravo Company in Lam Xuan West. The first one took Captain Corrigan by surprise. He was conducting a recon for a night defensive position with his FO team and one of his RTOs about a hundred meters from the main body of the company when the round exploded about thirty meters from them. They dropped down and stayed down as three more rounds slammed in. When they realized that no more were coming, they jumped up to rejoin the company. The Gimlets had never experienced NVA artillery fire. When Corrigan reported the incoming, a check was run to determine if it had been enemy or misplotted friendly fire. The NVA answered the question five minutes later by dropping several more salvos on Barracuda, thirty rounds total in a little less than thirty minutes. The incoming shells wounded four grunts, who were evacuated aboard the colonel’s helicopter. The enemy then shifted their artillery fires onto Nhi Ha.