The Magnificent Bastards (44 page)

The Marine took off in a frantic run, and O’neill said to his partner, “What’s he talkin’ about? That’s desertion if we run, isn’t it?” O’neill started to rise to look over the hedgerow so he could see what was going on, and there was Lieutenant Colonel Weise, bulling his way through the brush, pushing and limping. He fell when he got through, but there were other Marines with him, and they quickly got him moving again.

“Do you know who that was?” O’neill gasped.

“No,” said his partner.

“That was the battalion commander!”

“Damn, he looks hurt!”

“Well, I’m a firm believer in doing like they always say—follow your leaders. Let’s get the hell outta here!”

The sniper team fell in with the colonel’s group. O’neill, hanging to the rear to provide some security, could see other Marines running back through the brush. He suddenly realized that there was an NVA about twenty feet to his right. The man was going in the same direction in the same cautious trot. They
saw each other at about the same time. O’neill veered to the left as the NVA veered to the right and disappeared. Neither combatant had fired a shot.

“It’s amazing what the human body does when it’s trapped,” reflected Captain Vargas. “I actually believed I was not going to get killed. I was shooting as fast as I could because I knew it was my ass or theirs.” After having dragged the colonel back, Vargas ran forward several more times with other Marines in the rear guard to personally haul back at least five more wounded men. He had picked up an AK-47 and secured several hand grenades from Marines in the rear, and he used them each time he rushed forward. “I had to go back. I couldn’t leave them, not after what they had gone through.” He was wounded when an RPG knocked him down and opened up his knee while he was hustling rearward with a one-armed Marine on his back. Later, Vargas was running forward again when he and an enemy soldier collided in the brush. “It was that crowded. There was so much confusion in there between the Marines and the NVA.” The man fell down, then tried to swing his AK-47 around as he got up. Vargas had already drawn the knife that he kept strapped to the front of his flak jacket. “I got on him right away and just stuck the knife right in his throat. Other Marines had other NVA down on the ground, and they were fighting, too. Marines who were out of ammo were swinging their rifles or entrenching tools. It’s amazing that any of us got out of there.”
⁴

Nearby, Private Kachmar and his buddy James Moffett, having lost track of the rest of Foxtrot Three during the retreat, had gotten mixed in with Golf Company. They ended up all the way down by the creek on the left flank. There were other survivors from Golf, most of whom had lost their weapons and gear, trying to climb up from the creek bed, and Kachmar reached down to help a sergeant. Kachmar had no more grabbed hold of the man’s hand than the NVA opened fire
again. Kachmar saw a bullet punch through the sergeant’s chest as he struggled to get out of the water. The round thudded into the ground between Kachmar’s feet on the bank. He quickly pulled up the sergeant and dragged him to cover. The man had a sucking chest wound, but Kachmar and Moffett sealed the hole with plastic and then started carrying him back toward the casualty collection point.

They were quickly pinned down. They could see NVA, whose uniforms were dark green from having just crossed the chest-deep stream, as they fired and rushed forward. Kachmar and Moffett fired like madmen, dropping some of the enemy soldiers. Kachmar, who’d taken cover behind a tree, fired until he was out of ammunition. He had never run out of ammo before. He was terrified. Spotting three NVA setting up a drum-fed RPD light machine gun in a dugout, Kachmar dropped his M16 and heaved a grenade at the position. The grenade exploded at the lip of the dugout, and without thinking Kachmar charged in right after the blast. The three NVA were all wounded and stunned. “One tried to get at his SKS rifle, which was maybe two feet from his hands, and I plunged my K-Bar into his chest,” recalled Kachmar. He pulled out the knife and turned like a robot toward the next enemy soldier. “I stabbed him, too, but I twisted my knife. I couldn’t get it out.” The third NVA was sprawled against the back wall of the entrenchment, moaning in pain. “All these years later I want to say he was trying to get me, but I don’t think he was. He was just moaning and I just choked him to death. I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I just did it. It was like watching a movie. There wasn’t any rage. I don’t think I felt any conscious emotion whatsoever. I only thought consciously about what I did two or three days later, and I didn’t feel like I actually did it. It all happened so fast.”

Kachmar and Moffett ran back to their group, where Kachmar got ammo for his M16 from some of the walking wounded as they kept moving rearward. The sergeant with the sucking chest wound was a big man, and it took four Marines to carry him. Every time he started gasping for air they would put him down and Kachmar and another Marine took turns giving him
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It seemed to help. The sergeant wanted water, but they adhered to their training and refused to give him any. Finally, the man started mumbling that he knew he was going to die. He did not sound scared, nor was he screaming in pain—the fire was simply going out in his eyes. “I really wanted that guy to live,” said Kachmar. “I intensely wanted to see that man live.” He screamed at the sergeant not to give up. He gave him mouth-to-mouth again. He kept talking to him. They got the sergeant all the way back to Dai Do, but when they set him on the ground where the corpsmen were working, he died. Kachmar, exhausted and overwrought, angrily pushed the sergeant’s body with his foot and shouted, “You comin’ gave up—I don’t believe you comin’ gave up!”

Cut off on the wrong side of the creek, Corporal Yealock’s group from Golf One was buzzed by one of the Phantoms that had arrived to provide close air support. Luckily, the grunts, convinced they were about to be strafed, were able to wave off the low-flying jet. Moments later, a Navy Monitor appeared in the stream—the group had worked almost all the way back to the Bo Dieu River—and when the gunboat swung its machine guns toward the unidentified figures on the bank the Marines again began waving frantically. The Monitor pulled up close enough to let a ramp down on the bank for them to come aboard.

Lance Corporal Dean of Foxtrot One, wounded twice already, had just shot the charging NVA when an RPG explosion peppered his forehead with little fragments. Dazed, he realized that the Marine lying beside him was dead; the explosion had blown away half his shoulder. Dean couldn’t find his pistol, so he was unarmed as he started crawling toward the rear, screaming at the handful of grunts who were still there to follow him.

Dean staggered into a nearby hootch, and saw a squad leader struggling to hold down a convulsing grunt named Walter Cleveland. Better known as Coffee, Cleveland was a big,
happy-go-lucky black Marine who was popular even with the Johnny Rebs such as Dean and Digger. Coffee loved to wrestle and horse around with them. Dean helped the squad leader pin Coffee to the hootch floor, amazed that he was reacting so violently to what looked like a little ding in the arm.

“Goddamnit, we’re all hurt,” Dean yelled. “Just lie down!”

In moments, Coffee went limp under them. He was dead. Dean couldn’t believe it until he rolled the body over and saw the massive exit wound in the big man’s chest, near his heart.

Foxtrot Company Marines were moving back helter-skelter all over the place. Digger Light, along with Alvarado and Bob Young of Foxtrot Two, having worked their way into the tree line between the hamlet and their fire-swept field, got their wounded organized for the run to Dai Do. They had eleven casualties with them, all of whom were shook up but still listening and functioning, to include Tanabe, who was temporarily blind. They had all the wounded men hold hands or grab onto web belts—the stronger supported the weaker. With the most able-bodied casualties in the lead, their bleeding, stumbling daisy chain made its desperate run. It was a moment of wild confusion. They did not know the terrain. They ran through smoke, then made like a centipede over a dike, then ran on into more smoke and popping embers. They passed the bodies of Marines and NVA alike. Light and Alvarado brought up the rear, firing at anything that looked as though it might be following them. Huey gunships roared in directly over their heads, their machine guns blazing.

We Took a Lot of ’Em With Us

B
Y THE TIME
L
IEUTENANT
H
ILTON GOT SEPARATED FROM
his pickup squad, he had already expended all his M79 ammo—maybe a hundred rounds—and had handed the weapon to a Marine moving rearward. He had also dropped all his excess gear. He was traveling fast and light. All he had besides his .38 revolver, an aviator’s weapon, was a LAW he had picked up. Hilton ended up along the creek on the left side of Dinh To, where he saw an exhausted, soaking-wet Marine crawling over the bank. He joined the man, and they spotted three NVA cautiously coming out of the trees a hundred feet ahead of them. The wet Marine showed Hilton how to prepare his LAW for firing, but when Hilton put it over his shoulder to shoot it, he said, “I better aim it up a little bit to loft it.”

Bad move. Hilton watched aghast as the 66mm HE projectile shrieked over the heads of the three NVA he’d been aiming at. The enemy soldiers, who’d been looking around, dropped and then backed up into the tree line. Other NVA, however, were still running past in the brush.

Hey, we’re surrounded! thought Lieutenant Hilton as he and the young Marine slid into the creek bed and crawled along in about three feet of water until they reached Dai Do. Hilton
saw Sergeant Pace in the mob of Marines. Pace had just made it back with a wounded Marine he’d found staggering dazed and naked near an old barbed-wire fence. All the grunt had on were his jungle boots. When Pace grabbed the Marine’s arm to help him back, he weakly jerked away and moaned not to touch him because it hurt too much. Pace then noticed that the man had been hit in several places. The Marine mumbled, “I’ll make it, I’ll make it,” as Pace walked beside him. When they finally reached Dai Do, the Marine sank to his knees and said, “told you I’d make it.” Then he died.

Lieutenant Hilton and Pace stared at each other, and then hugged. “You got guts, Pace,” Hilton said. “No,” Pace answered. “You’re the one with them.” Given the casualties and the confusion, they wondered if they were the senior Marines on the spot, and Pace said half-jokingly, “Looks like you’re in charge.”

“Bullshit. I’m an air officer.
You’re
in charge.”

“Shit, I’m an interrogator. I don’t know anything about this shit.”

There were no coherent units left. “It was like a fire team here and a couple of stragglers there,” recalled Lieutenant Acly of G Company, “and just about everybody had been hit or cut up or something was wrong with them. Everybody felt beat up.” While running around along the forward edge of Dai Do getting Marines into defensive positions and organizing litter teams, Lieutenant Taylor of H Company saw Lieutenant Colonel Weise being helped back by Vargas on his shaky, semiparalyzed legs. Taylor, greatly concerned, asked him how he was doing. Weise, in much pain, answered through clenched teeth, “We took a lot of ’Em with us.”

Weise was led to Major Warren, and passed command to him with a simple, “It’s all yours.” A young corpsman helped remove Weise’s torn-up flak jacket, slapped a battle dressing over the gunshot wound in his lower left side, and hooked up an IV of serum albumin to his left arm. Holding up the bottle, Weise was led to a stretcher on the floor of an amtrac alongside several of his young, badly wounded Marines. When the ramp went down in An Lac he was hustled to one of the skimmers.
Moving down the river, Weise, who was on his back, could see Navy craft gliding by in both directions. The logistical lifeline had been reopened. They had accomplished their mission. A feeling of peace washed over him. He had given everything he had and done everything he possibly could. There wasn’t anything else he could do. When he allowed himself to relax, Weise passed out on the floor of the skimmer. The shock and blood loss had finally caught up with him.