The Magnificent Bastards (53 page)

Captain Leach shouted at everyone to cease firing on the sole survivor behind the burial mound, and he had his Kit Carson scout attempt to talk the man into surrendering. Meanwhile, Sergeant Coulthard of Charlie Three was joined in his position by Specialist Green, a machine gunner. Green borrowed his M16 and sighted in on the last-stand position. Green was a tough, stocky GI from Alabama described by Coulthard as “a good old boy who enjoyed gettin’ it on with the NVA.” When the enemy soldier answered the calls to surrender by rearing up with his arm back to fling another Chicom, Green squeezed off a single round. The NVA had a rag of a bandage around his head. The bandage went flying as Green’s shot blew off the top of his head. “Who the hell shot him?” Leach exploded. Green theatrically blew smoke away from the rifle barrel, and answered, “I did. I’m not going to fuck around and get somebody killed up here.”

On Monday, 6 May, Lieutenant Colonel Snyder instructed Captain Osborn to conduct a reconnaissance in force along the enemy’s route of withdrawal. The immediate target of the sweep was Xom Phuong, twelve hundred meters northwest of Nhi Ha on the eastern bank of Jones Creek. A raised footpath connected Nhi Ha with the southern tip of Xom Phuong. The terrain in between was wide open, and Captain Leach, who
was to remain in position at Force Tiger, was convinced that the order to cross such vulnerable terrain was “very poorly conceived.” Noting that he “didn’t want to bad-mouth Snyder,” whom he respected, Leach added that “we never had the combat support wired before Osborn went out. We had no tac air on call, and we didn’t even have a good target list for our artillery fire support plan. I talked with Snyder about this, saying, ‘Our mission is to defend, so let’s do our reconnaissance, let’s start patrolling at night and setting up ambushes along the hedgerows and along the creek bed because we know that’s the way they’re coming down.’ Instead, Osborn was going right across the open, and my question was, ‘Why in the hell are we doing this?’”

The mood in Alpha Annihilator was extremely uptight as the men saddled up. The squad leaders in Alpha Two had a heated debate about whose turn it was to be on point. Specialist Four Sydney W. Klemmer, who was in the squad that lost the argument, told his good friend Sergeant Bulte, who was in a different squad, “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. We
know
they’re out there.”

Bulte was angry. He was also very concerned for Klemmer. “Just keep your head down,” he replied.

The sweep commenced at 1330 with Lieutenant Smith’s Alpha Two on the left flank and Lieutenant Kimball’s Alpha Three on the right. Captain Osborn moved in their trace, keeping his newest platoon leader, Lieutenant Simpson, in reserve with Alpha One. The well-spoken Osborn was a handsome Texan who had been awarded a Silver Star for the body count his company had run up when attached to the division cavalry squadron in the Que Son Valley. Despite such accolades from above, there were grave doubts about the captain in the rank and file. “Osborn blundered into stuff,” was how the battalion operations officer put it. Osborn was, in fact, a quartermaster officer involuntarily detailed to the infantry. He had not asked to command a grunt company in combat, and young, inexperienced, and unsure of himself, his command style was harried and overbearing. He never listened, and he never seemed to learn from his mistakes. His troops hated him. His lieutenants
resisted him. Lieutenant Smith had frequent shouting matches with Osborn over the radio and would “wind up doing the normal tricks,” such as pretending that transmissions were garbled or giving short answers that failed to provide a clear picture of what was happening. In a letter to his wife, Smith wrote that Osborn “is not too swift. He gives me a case of the ass just about every day. It’s bad enough fighting the elements without putting up with an Old Man that doesn’t really know what he’s doing.”

“Alpha Company had a reputation in the battalion for always being on its ass, which was a goddamn shame because Osborn’s soldiers were good kids,” said Captain Leach. “They were just under bad leadership.”

As the sweep kicked off across the paddies between Nhi Ha and Xom Phuong, Lieutenant Smith shared a grimace with Lieutenant Kimball. “This is going to be fun,” Smith said disgustedly. “This is going to be
crazy.’”
The day was hot and bright, and their assault line was well spaced because of the openness of the terrain. Smith’s left flank was bounded by Jones Creek and was relatively secure (Barracuda had moved a platoon up on the other side), but Kimball was extremely concerned about the tree line that paralleled their line of advance on the right. Both lieutenants were concerned about the tree line that ran across the far end of the paddy, shielding Xom Phuong, which lay some two hundred meters on the other side. The village cemetery was on the near side of the tree line. The paddies were dry and hard, full of golden, thigh-high rice that was ready for harvest.

Alpha Annihilator was still more than a hundred meters from the cemetery when someone spotted an NVA sprinting rearward from an individual burial mound ahead of the rest. The GIs blazed away at the man as Smith and Kimball, convinced that an ambush force was waiting in the tree line, quickened their pace toward the cover of the mounds. The running soldier had been a lure, however. As the assault line approached the mounds, an enemy machine gun opened fire on Alpha Three from an inconspicuous hole dug in the forward slope of one of them. The enemy gun crew was inside the
earthen hump. Sergeant Stone’s squad, deployed across Alpha Three’s front, dropped along a paddy dike while the other two squads in column behind it found cover of their own. The platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Dale, was lying behind the dike to Stone’s right. Dale shouted instructions to Specialist Henry, their machine gunner, who engaged the NVA bunker with his M60 while his assistant gunner, Private Melindez, fired two LAWs at the mound. Each time Melindez rose up to fire, Stone and his squad increased the volume of their covering fire.

Melindez put both LAWs right into the hole. The enemy fire ceased, then an NVA appeared, staggering toward the tree line behind the burial mounds. Everyone blasted away at him as Staff Sergeant Dale, just off the radio, shouted at Stone to assault the bunker with his squad. “Jesus Christ, this is looking right into the gun,” Stone yelled back. He was very concerned that the bunker might still be occupied. “Call Cherokee back and tell him to send a squad from Second Platoon up to the bunker on the left flank! They’re already over to that side!”

Surprisingly, Captain Osborn agreed. He instructed Lieutenant Smith to conduct the flanking maneuver in support of Alpha Three. Smith, who had halted Alpha Two when Alpha Three was engaged, was behind a dike with his RTO and the left flank squad. He moved up to Sgt. Thomas F. Crews’s squad, which was deployed across their front, to lead the rush into the cluster of mounds ahead. At twenty-five, Terry Smith was known for such up-front leadership. He was a big, strong country boy from Galena, Illinois, who had grown up toting hay bales. He enlisted for OCS after graduating from college because he figured that the draft was bound to get him. He had been in Vietnam for three months. “As Smith would say, he’d rather be back home with his wife, seeing his baby son for the first time,” a fellow lieutenant observed. “But he also said that he was paying his debt back to the country, and when the shit hit the wall he was right up there, front and center.”

It was about a hundred feet to the next burial mound, and Lieutenant Smith sprinted toward it by himself. He wanted to
see what kind of position and view the mounds would offer to their flanking maneuver.

Smith was shot before he could reach the mound. The round, which came from the right, caught Smith in the right thigh about two inches above the knee, and exited with a hot, painless flash that spun him around and knocked him down. The bullet hole was small, but the exit wound on his inner thigh was massive.

Lieutenant Smith lost his helmet but kept a grip on his CAR 15 as he crawled past the mound to his left and sought cover behind the mound directly ahead of him. Smith was still trying to figure out what had happened to him when an NVA gun crew in the mound to his left, undetected until that moment, opened fire across his platoon’s front. The firing hole was concealed by a big, battered rice pan that lay halfway up the slope of the mound. The NVA were firing right through the thatch pan.

Lieutenant Smith, stunned that the NVA would so desecrate a grave, was twenty feet from the bunker’s blind side. Before Smith could do anything, Sp5 Terrance W. Allen, the gung-ho machine-gun team leader in Alpha Three, suddenly ran toward him from the right flank, shouting, “I’ll get it, Lieutenant—I’ll get it!”

Specialist Allen had a grenade in his hand. Smith, screaming, “Get down, get down, you idiot!” watched Allen, who was either overly excited or confused about where the firing hole was. He jumped right in front of the rice pan and was immediately blown backward by a burst across his stomach.

“No, no,
no!”
Smith roared.

Allen was moaning terribly as Lieutenant Smith, enraged, pulled a fragmentation grenade from his web gear, crawled to the side of the burial mound, reached around, and threw it in. He quickly rolled away. The grenade went off with a muffled boom. Smith always carried four grenades—two frags and two smokes—and he pulled the pin on his second frag, rolled over to the mound again, and tossed it inside. The bunker fell silent. Smith wanted Sergeant Crews’s squad to take advantage of the
situation and move up to his position so they could start their flanking maneuver. Smith urgently motioned to Crews.

“I wanted him to crawl, but damnit—damnit—they got up and did an assault, which totally blew my mind,” recalled Smith. “Crews came across that damn killing zone with his squad, and they were firing every time their left foot hit the ground—just like they were taught in basic training. I couldn’t believe they did that.” Short, stocky Sergeant Crews, age twenty-five, who spoke with a slow Alabama drawl, was one of the platoon’s old-timers and a good squad leader. “He misunderstood what I wanted him to do. I didn’t have my radioman at that moment, and Crews didn’t have a radio. It was mostly hand signals and shouting, and shouting was useless because of the noise.”

Sergeant Crews was mortally wounded in the sudden eruption of fire from the other camouflaged, previously silent positions among the burial mounds. The rest of the squad members rushing forward with him over the cover of their dike were also dropped by the sudden wall of fire. Most were wounded, but Bulte’s worried buddy Klemmer, along with Sp4s John A. Johnson and Richard F. Turpin, were either killed outright or mortally wounded. They went down right before Smith’s eyes, even as he frantically screamed at them to get down and crawl. “If they had crawled forward we could have gotten in among the burial mounds and beaten those goddamn dinks,” Smith recalled. “It was terrible. It was defeat. I felt like a failure. Before, I had really felt that I could go through the whole damn war and not get hurt. I was gung-ho and confident. I didn’t take unusual chances. I used my head, I thought. I can’t believe I let my men get in that position. I got them killed in a way that should never have happened.”

Although Lieutenant Smith was awarded a BSMv for his bravery, he would never forgive himself for his perceived failure. Smith was alone among the enemy positions, except for the gut-shot, mortally wounded Allen, who was screaming, “Put a bandage on me, put a bandage on me!”

“Shut up, we’ll get one on you,” Smith answered. “Just shut up.”

The NVA fire had grown in intensity from the right flank—Smith had no idea what was going on over there—and, in response, he could see one of his GIs behind a dike prepare to fire a LAW. The LAW malfunctioned. It would not fire. “Shit, this is useless,” Smith muttered. He grabbed hold of the dying Allen and, pushing with his good leg, started back across the clearing on his belly. “We were in that field of fire. If you stuck your head up, you were dead.” The NVA were lobbing in mortar rounds, 82mm stuff, and Smith took a fragment in his left leg. It was red-hot. He could feel it. His bladder was bursting, and he pissed in his pants. He didn’t care. Someone crawled up to him, grabbed Allen by the shoulder straps of his web gear, and said he would take over. Smith kept crawling rearward by himself. “I absolutely went into shock. I thought I was stronger than that. I muttered to myself what a bad soldier I was—ineffective—I got too many people killed. I muttered all kinds of things. I totally lost control.”

Staff Sergeant Dale of Alpha Three, a stunned witness to the massacre of Alpha Two on the left, kept Sergeant Stone and his men firing forward from the prone positions they had assumed along their paddy dike. Dale, a stocky, confident, twenty-six-year-old career NCO, was on his second tour, but he had been with Alpha Annihilator for only about two weeks. Dale’s RTO, Specialist Woodward, kept shouting at him about the tree line that ran down the length of their exposed right flank. “Don’t you think we need to put out some security? We need to put out some security.…You better put out some security!”