The Magnificent Bastards (56 page)

Seventy NVA were reported killed in the turkey shoot.

During the night, four more enemy tanks were reported in the area. At about 1300 on Wednesday, 8 May, following another prep by air and arty, Alpha Annihilator, reinforced by a platoon from Charlie Tiger, finally advanced on Xom Phuong to recover the casualties left behind two days before. The three Marine tanks accompanied the assault line to neutralize the tree line on the right flank, while a Barracuda platoon advanced on the other side of Jones Creek screening the left. The arty was lifted at the last possible moment, then the lead platoon,
on line between the tanks, reconned by fire when they were halfway to the burial mounds.

“Still got AK-47 fire with all the firepower we dished out,” an incredulous grunt wrote in his diary.

Lieutenant Gibbs, seeing that some of the company’s uptight survivors were ready to bolt, screamed at them to hold their ground. While the rest of Alpha Annihilator provided covering fire, Alpha Two carried out the sorry task of loading the dead aboard the two USMC Otters that had come forward with them. The grunts in the platoon were nervous because they could not hear over the engine noise, and everyone worked fast so the NVA would have little time to get their range and shell them. They found their dead where they had left them, although the bodies were barely recognizable after two days in the baking sun—with the exception of one body, which was still white, indicating that the man had only recently died of his wounds. All the rest of the corpses were bloated, black, and maggot-filled. The bodies with the worst wounds were literally falling apart. The fluid under their skin made them look watery. The stench was gagging. It was unbearable work. When GIs pulled at the bodies, the skin came away in their hands like blistering paint. Sergeant Bulte found his buddy, Sydney Klemmer, lying facedown. He recognized Klemmer’s strawberry blond hair. Bulte felt that he had to be the one who brought his friend back, but he was afraid to turn him over. When he did he saw Klemmer’s distorted face—half of it was swollen and purple—and the multiple wounds. “Those casualties were so unnecessary,” Bulte said. “It was such a waste.” For Bulte, the good soldier, the war that he had always kept at an emotional distance suddenly became very personal. He lost his enthusiasm. He was just going to get through this and go home. “It was pointless—stupid—what we did. It was such a dumb move. There was a bad undercurrent in the whole company.”

When they returned to Force Tiger, Sergeant Bulte, traumatized and distraught, walked past Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, who seemed to him to be blank-faced with shock. Not because Bulte held Snyder solely to blame—he didn’t—but
because he was so angry and he felt he owed it to Klemmer, Bulte looked the colonel in the eye and shouted, “We were fucking guinea pigs out there! What was the point of sending us out there? A lot of good people died for nothing!”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder offered no response. The Otters parked outside Alpha’s side of the Force Tiger perimeter and dropped their ramps. The hot stench inside the vehicles was thick for those men who climbed in to pull out the bodies so that they could be identified and medevac tags tied to them. Two gas masks were made available. Men had to be ordered to handle the bodies. “We just flopped ’Em out,” said Specialist Hannan. He grabbed a hold of one corpse by the hair and the seat of the pants, but the maggot-eaten scalp pulled off as he lifted up. “I almost cracked,” said Hannan. Captain Leach, furious at whoever had ordered the dead to be unloaded where all the shaken survivors could see them, instructed the detail to load the bodies back aboard and told the Otter drivers to get back to battalion with their cargo. “I looked in the Otters and blood was dripping out of them, and here are these dead American kids just stacked up inside,” sighed Leach. “It was just terrible. You talk about morale going down.…”

Turning the Tables

W
HEN THE
NVA
WORKED OVER
N
HI
H
A WITH
152
MM FIRE
, as they did several times a day in nine-gun salvos, Alpha 1 provided early warning by radio to the 3-21st Infantry. From Alpha 1, the muzzle flashes could be seen along the the ridgelines on the North Vietnamese side of the DMZ. In addition, radar able to lock onto the enemy firing positions ensured that counter battery bombardments, usually from the cruisers offshore, were almost immediate. The NVA, although too well entrenched to be put out of action by anything less than a direct hit, refused to pinpoint themselves further with a second salvo, so the counterbattery fires bought time for the men on the ground. Friendly casualties were few. One of the wounded, however, was no less than Captain Leach, commander of the two-company task force in the village. Leach was up doing something when one of his RTOs began yelling that Alpha 1 had reported incoming. As Leach ran for cover, one of the rounds exploded behind him. The concussion picked Leach up and sent him headfirst into the rubble of a demolished house. Because the shell had sunk perhaps a foot into the soft soil before detonating, Leach’s only injuries were cuts on the top of his head.

The shellings, which jangled nerves and kept everybody
with one ear cocked to the north, also produced some memorable near misses. Lieutenant Hieb of Charlie One had to chew out his RTO because the man didn’t want to wear his flak jacket. When he did wear it, he left it hanging open because it was so hot. “I want it on and I want it zipped,” Hieb finally told him. After some moaning and groaning, the radioman did as he was told. Shortly thereafter, during another barrage, Hieb and his RTO jumped into the same foxhole. As they talked, Hieb noticed a big shell fragment lodged in the zipper of the GI’s zipped-up flak jacket. When Hieb pointed it out, the RTO managed a weak grin. Hieb later remarked that “after that I never had to tell him to put his flak vest on. It was the only thing that saved him.”

With Force Tiger situated astride the NVA infiltration routes along Jones Creek, Captain Leach said, “I knew goddamn well we were going to be hit. It was just a matter of time.” Because Lieutenant Colonel Snyder felt that the situation “was perfectly within Leach’s capabilities as a very able and tough-minded infantryman,” he did not move his battalion command post forward to Nhi Ha. The decision to remain back at Mai Xa Chanh East was, Snyder said, “a matter of personal debate for me,” but such a rearward location gave him the freest access to the 3d Marines, upon whom they depended for support. In this instance, Snyder needed bunker material, extra ammunition, and firepower. He got what he needed, thanks to Colonel Hull. As Snyder put it, Hull “raised holy hell” whenever his attached Army battalion did not get what it requested through the Marines’ support system. “Colonel Hull was a rough cob in some ways, but he was a gentleman of the old school. Since I was now his guy, he was determined that I was going to get my fair share of what resources they had,” said Snyder.

The 3d Marines provided the three tanks, as well as four 3.5-inch rocket-launcher teams from BLT 2/4, which would be lethal in the event of an enemy armor attack. The rocket launchers were also effective against ground troops. One team went to Alpha Company and two to Charlie; the fourth was attached to Bravo in Lam Xuan West. The Marines were
stunned by how well equipped their Army counterparts were. Each soldier had at least thirty loaded magazines in his defensive position. One Marine joked with the GIs that “a good Marine doesn’t need more than seven magazines, at least that’s what they say.” After the Army grunts shared what they had, the Marine offered to buy some of their claymore mines. Specialist Hannan answered, “I’m not going to sell a Marine a claymore. I’ll give it to you. How many do you want?” The Marine grinned and said, “You guys do things
right
. If I ever get out of here, I’m going to talk to my congressman!”

The Marines and GIs went into action together after dark on Thursday, 9 May 1968, when elements of the 76th Regiment, 304th NVA Division, crossed the DMZ with the mission of overrunning Force Tiger. The NVA, moving south along Jones Creek, first had to run the gauntlet of firepower brought to bear by Alpha 1. This was the tenth night in a row that the NVA had attempted to slip past Alpha 1, and one of the ARVN advisers at the outpost, 1st Lt. Travis Kirkland, wrote in his diary, “No sleep is the order of the day.” By then, the personnel at Alpha 1 had developed a routine with which they orchestrated the massive amount of firepower available to them. They used a new type of artillery ammunition that the GIs called Popcorn to start the show, usually with a six-gun salvo. Each round contained approximately 150 golfball-sized bomblets that showered down when a charge split the shell casing in midair. The bomblets, equipped with stabilizer fins to ensure that each landed on its detonator, would bounce up several feet before exploding. The night observation devices at Alpha 1 provided a clear enough view for spotters to see which NVA had packs on. When the first Popcorn shell popped overhead and released its bomblets, the spotters could see the NVA pause in midstep at what must have sounded to them like an illumination round. Instead of a burst of light, however, the enemy was in for a lethal surprise. The nine hundred bomblets in a six-gun salvo, exploding a few at a time at first, quickly reached a shattering crescendo. The screams of the wounded and dying NVA could be heard on Alpha 1.

When the NVA sought cover in the tree lines along Jones
Creek, the artillery fire ceased and a USAF AC-47 Spooky gunship lit up the area with multiple flares, then hosed down the woods with six-thousand-round-a-minute miniguns that drove the NVA back into the open paddies where the artillery could harvest them. Killing in such ways and at such distances turned the NVA into dehumanized targets. Once, after a particularly effective pass by Spooky, Lieutenant Kirkland shouted into his radio, “Do it again, do it again! I can hear ’Em yellin’!” and got in response, “Do it again—that’s what my wife told me when I went to Honolulu on R and R.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, incredulous that the NVA commanders would subject their units to this firepower night after night, remarked that the result was “absolute slaughter.” Once the NVA had been forced out of the tree lines, Spooky would orbit over the ocean to allow the artillery a free hand. The artillery shot as if without counting, although it sometimes had to cease fire because in the hot, humid night air the smoke from parachute flares and white phosphorus shells became so dense that it concealed the enemy. Lieutenant Kirkland commented that the awesome volume of firepower “would literally light up the sky. I’m told that during this period we controlled more artillery from Alpha 1 than was being fired in the rest of South Vietnam.”

The courage of the NVA running this gauntlet was stunning. Most of them made it somehow on 9 May, and at 2108 a Charlie Company LP reported seeing ten to fifteen NVA coming across the paddies toward Force Tiger. The uptight GIs on LP duty were little more than a stone’s throw beyond the perimeter. The NVA were two hundred meters away to the northeast. Other NVA appeared to the north. Artillery was fired and the enemy ran northwest. At 2156, another Charlie Tiger LP engaged a squad of NVA with M79 fire as it moved in from the northwest. Two NVA were seen to fall. The enemy had yet to open fire. Their movements appeared to cease as Charlie Company continued placing M79 fire on them, along with the arty. Flares popped overhead, one after the other, to reveal in
harsh, black-and-white relief an empty, cratered landscape of burial mounds and fallow rice paddies.

The sightings began again at 2337. This time there were a hundred NVA in view as they maneuvered in from the north, northeast, and northwest, darting from burial mound to burial mound with artillery blasting them.

The movement, whether a probe or the preparation for a major attack, ceased at this point. It began again at 0016 on Friday, 10 May, when another hundred NVA were spotted within 150 meters of Force Tiger. This is it, Captain Leach thought. She’s going down tonight. The NVA began lobbing RPGs toward the perimeter. Leach requested gunships and flareships, and instructed his LPs to return as the rate of artillery-delivered HE and ilium increased. By then, Captain Osborn’s Alpha Company GIs, deployed along the southern half of the perimeter, could see more NVA crossing the footbridge that spanned Jones Creek and connected Lam Xuan West and Nhi Ha. Leach had not expected an attack from that direction because of Bravo’s presence in Lam Xuan West. Because he had no faith in Osborn, Leach positioned him to the south where he would be out of the way. The NVA, however, were coming from both directions. Osborn’s LPs soon reported the movement of fire-team-sized groups of NVA, then requested to pull back to the perimeter. When Osborn denied them permission to withdraw, the whispered radio messages from the listening posts grew desperate. “There’s gooks all over out here in front of us They’re right in front of us They’re
beside
us—they’re going to get us! Request permission to return to the perimeter!”