A Shau Valor

by Thomas R. Yarborough

  Just as the battle for Hill 937 reached a climax, another battle, this one of words, erupted on the home front. Dialog about the war had remained relatively quiet since the beginning of the year, with what attention there was focused on the Paris peace talks. In the media, casualty lists and war stories were routinely buried somewhere on an inside page; for the American public, the Vietnam War seemed to have lost its immediacy. That was about to change.

  On May 18, a 23-year-old Associated Press war correspondent named Jay F. Sharbutt had choppered into the mountain of the crouching beast for a first-hand look. By no means was this young man like the flaky, reckless war-junkie journalists that the Rakkasans had encountered since May 14. He interviewed the generals and the colonels, but mostly he listened to the grunts and wrote about them. Rather than regurgitate a series of bland facts, dates, and statistics, Sharbutt put a human face on the life and death struggle in the A Shau. Unlike many of the reporters who penned innocuous descriptions of the fight in routine terms, Jay Sharbutt seemed to have an insightful Ernie Pyle quality about him, a trait that encouraged the young troopers to open up. In telling the story, Sharbutt’s dispatch struck a nerve back in the world, and the opening lines of his article captured the undivided attention of countless readers:

  The paratroops came down from the mountain, their green shirts darkened with sweat, their weapons gone, their bandages stained brown and red—with mud and blood. Many cursed Lt.Col. Weldon Honeycutt, who sent three companies Sunday to take this 3000-foot mountain just a mile east of Laos and overlooking the shell-pocked A Shau Valley. They failed and they suffered. “That damn Blackjack won’t stop until he kills every one of us,” said one of the 40 to 50 101st Airborne troopers who was wounded.35

  Many readers were shocked yet mesmerized by Sharbutt’s frank characterization of the battle, but others, mostly staunch hawks, were outraged. They accused Sharbutt of being a tool of the anti-war liberal press, that he had sensationalized his dispatch by employing an inflammatory term like “meat-grinder” and for derogatorily referring to the location as “Hamburger Hill.” Those accusations were patently false; the reporter never used either term in his article. In all probability the name Hamburger Hill originated with the grunts of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry, the very men who fought and died taking the hill. For them it had indeed been a meat-grinder, informally memorialized on May 20 when a weary trooper scrawled “Hamburger Hill” on the bottom of an empty C-ration carton and nailed it to a shattered tree trunk on top of Hill 937—members of the press undoubtedly picked up on the term and included that unflattering sobriquet in their dispatches. Another grunt cut to the very heart of the matter when he added a P.S. to the sign: “Was it worth it?”

  At least one influential person did not think so. A day later Edward M. Kennedy delivered on the Senate floor a stinging condemnation of the battle on Dong Ap Bia, calling it “both senseless and irresponsible to continue to send our young men to their deaths to capture hills and positions that have no relation to ending this conflict…. The assault on “Hamburger Hill” is only symptomatic of a mentality and a policy that requires immediate attention. American boys are too valuable to be sacrificed for a false sense of military pride.”36

  While the controversial uproar continued to play out in Washington, on May 20 four allied battalions—three American and one ARVN—finally stormed Dong Ap Bia and secured Hamburger Hill—on the 11th try. The weary troopers inspected some of the log and earth bunkers abandoned by the retreating enemy. Remarkably strong and well built, the dugouts all had that intolerable stink the NVA always seemed to impregnate everything with: a smell of cordite, rotting fish, and untended urinals. A number of dead soldiers lay around the crest, a sign that the enemy had left in a hurry without taking their fallen men with them, as was standard practice for them.

  By actual body count the enemy lost 633 soldiers killed, although considerably more probably lost their lives during the battle. A prisoner indicated an 80 percent casualty rate for the NVA 29th Regiment, rendering it ineffective as a combat unit. The Screaming Eagles, however, also paid a steep price. Hamburger Hill cost the Americans 72 killed and 372 wounded. The Rakkasans, the battling bastards of Dong Ap Bia, incurred the lion’s share of the casualties with 36 KIA and 329 WIA.37

  On May 21 a fleet of 101st helicopters lifted the entire 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry off Hamburger Hill and transported them to Eagle Beach, an in-country R&R center located right on the warm waters of the South China Sea. But the Rakkasans were in pitiful shape: twelve days on Hill 937 in constant combat; boots coming apart, beards, fatigues hanging on them in rags, indescribably filthy and haggard. They had arrived at the battle with all their hope and élan, valor and firepower, and been cut down, and others had come to fill their depleted ranks and been cut down in turn. Arguably the toughest engagement of the Vietnam War, the physical battle for the mountain of the crouching beast—Hamburger Hill—was over. Justifying the victory was a different battle with a different beast, because the tactical success of the battle was lost amid shouts of “senseless slaughter”—some of those shouts from reporters, some from politicians, and some from the men of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry. Specifically in response to Senator Kennedy’s Hamburger Hill speech, General Zais commented:

  He’s performing to the best of his ability as a Senator in Washington … but I know for sure he wasn’t here [during the battle] … That hill was in my area of operations, that’s where the enemy was, that’s where I attacked him. If I find him [the enemy] on any other hill in the A Shau, I assure you I’ll attack him.38

  Operation Apache Snow officially terminated on June 7 but unfortunately ended on a sour note. The new commander of the 101st Airborne Division, Major General John M. Wright, created a public relations firestorm when on June 5 he quietly pulled all troops off Dong Ap Bia and abandoned it to the enemy. While Generals Zais, Stillwell, and Abrams proclaimed another unparalleled victory based on kill ratios of 10 to 1, the American public reacted in a totally negative way, just as they had following the Tet Offensive in 1968. And just as in 1968, the Army did not understand the public and political reaction to staggering casualty lists followed by unilateral withdrawal from the battlefield. Instead of holding or neutralizing territory paid for in American blood, MACV had reverted once again to a strategy of attrition, and the Army found it increasingly difficult to explain the strategy to outsiders—especially the media. Yet that approach, represented by the awful expenditure of lives at Hamburger Hill, clearly exceeded the value the American people attached to the war in Vietnam. As one Nixon administration official privately told a reporter, “I don’t understand why the military doesn’t get the picture. The military is defeating the very thing it most wants—more time to gain a stronger hand.” Adding to the critical chorus, a senior political advisor to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, astutely explained the situation this way: “This is the tragedy of Vietnam—we were fighting for time rather than space. And time ran out.”39

  Whether fighting for time or a questionable strategy, the Screaming Eagles resolutely continued their campaign in the A Shau. On June 8 they initiated Operation Montgomery Rendezvous, the final push in Kentucky Jumper, the phased pacification of the valley. They signaled their intention to stay when engineers from the 27th Engineer Battalion built a graded road all the way from the division headquarters at Camp Eagle to the valley floor. The 326th Engineer Battalion also rebuilt the old airstrip at Ta Bat; after only 54 hours the strip was operational and the first C-7 Caribou landed in a cloud of red dust. The campaign continued when, on June 20, a procession of 80 tracked vehicles, both tanks and armored personnel carriers, snaked along the road to Ta Bat, the first U.S. armor of the war to enter the Valley of Death. During this period contact with the enemy remained sporadic, but NVA units were still operating in the area, as evidenced by several vicious sapper attacks against Fire Bases Berchtesgaden and Currahee, resulting in 11 Americans killed and 54 wounded.40

  Unf
ortunately, the military undermined its own credibility by chronicling the A Shau campaign with less than honest appraisals. In assessing the battle for the A Shau, military documents touted a long-term, sweeping victory. Apparently the authors of those documents put on their rose-colored glasses and wrote the accounts their bosses wanted to read, not the reports that detailed the unvarnished truth. One Project CHECO report, for example, completely misrepresented Operations Massachusetts Striker and Apache Snow by claiming that the 101st Airborne Division had “occupied the valley so effectively that large NVA units in Laos could not break through the allied shield to reach Hue or the coastal lowlands. This allied conquest of the A Shau Valley thus ranked as one of the most successful campaigns of the Vietnam War.”41 Neither claim was accurate.

  Official reports notwithstanding, the furor over Hamburger Hill had just begun to cool when yet another media event rocketed the battle back into the headlines. The June 27 issue of Life magazine featured an article with photographs of 241 men killed in Vietnam during the preceding weeks. The article also included a short letter written by a soldier on Hamburger Hill: “I am writing in a hurry,” he wrote to his parents. “I see death coming up the hill.” In reality only five of the pictures were of men who had died during the battle, but many Americans misinterpreted the quote and assumed that all of the 241 pictures were of troopers killed storming Dong Ap Bia. The story was even harder to digest by the unexplained evacuation of Hill 937. The American public’s outrage was most definitely exacerbated by the publication of those photographs, so much so that military historian Shelby Stanton came to the conclusion that the Life article, like the 1968 Tet Offensive, constituted a major turning point in the flagging support for the Vietnam War. General Westmoreland added more fuel to the controversy over Hamburger Hill when he noted, “Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.”42

  Until press coverage about Hamburger Hill made it infamous, most Americans had never heard of the A Shau Valley. Now the Valley of Death became firmly rooted in the public lexicon, forever linked to Senator Kennedy’s charges of a senseless and irresponsible battle. The White House obviously felt the pressure because shortly after the appearance of the Life article, General Creighton Abrams was ordered to avoid such large-scale battles, ostensibly to hold down casualties. At the same time, President Nixon instituted what came to be known as “Vietnamization,” a strategy whereby the fighting would gradually be turned over to the South Vietnamese. As a first step, on July 8 Nixon ordered an immediate drawdown of 25,000 U.S. troops, to be followed in December by 35,000 more. By November the entire 3rd Marine Division had been withdrawn to Okinawa, a move that dramatically reduced MACV’s ability to conduct operations in the A Shau.43

  While bureaucrats tinkered with the intricacies of Vietnamization in Washington, the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade pressed on with Operation Montgomery Rendezvous. The toughest fight of the campaign occurred on July 11 at Hill 996, roughly four kilometers southwest of Hamburger Hill. That morning Lt Colonel Arnold C. Hayward led the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry up the mountain against a well-entrenched NVA bunker complex. Veterans of the battle for Hill 937, the Currahees inched forward as RPG explosions and green tracers filled the air. Seemingly nothing ever changed in the battle for the A Shau. It was always monotonously, cruelly the same. The forward observer, Lieutenant Leonard E. Griffin, had just linked up with Hayward and his radio operator, Private First Class Curtiss Fernhoff, when all three were hit by a volley of AK-47 fire. The three wounded men managed to crawl behind a log where a medic dressed their wounds before moving off to aid others. Lapsing in and out of consciousness, the three men occasionally talked to each other in whispers, but mostly they wondered why they were alone in the dense jungle and where the rest of the Currahees were. All conversation for Lt Griffin ended abruptly when an RPG round exploded a few feet away, with a piece of shrapnel cutting his left ear and rendering him partially deaf for several hours. At some point NVA soldiers brazenly walked through the underbrush shooting any wounded Americans they found. While Lt Griffin played dead, an enemy soldier murdered Lt Colonel Hayward and PFC Fernhoff and kept on walking. In the hours that followed, Griffin remembered a strange, pungent smell, the odor of a large quantity of blood, the smell of death. It had an odd stench to it, an acute copperish, metallic smell, and in the heavy jungle air it reeked of putrefaction, damp-rot, and cordite. When Len Griffin came to after passing out a second time, it was dark. He managed to crawl about 20 yards when he heard American voices; he had survived in the Valley of Death.44

  At approximately 6 p.m. on July 11, the men of Bravo Company moved up Hill 996 with a vengeance after hearing that the enemy was killing their wounded buddies. Valor and retribution were the orders of the day. As Specialist 4 Gordon R. Roberts’ platoon approached the enemy positions, it was suddenly pinned down by heavy automatic weapons fire from camouflaged fortifications on the steep slope above them. The opening volley was so fierce that five members of the platoon were wounded. Seeing his unit immobilized and in danger of failing in its rescue mission, Specialist Roberts crawled rapidly in driving rain toward the closest enemy bunker where the RPD machine gun stopped, started again, and the firing rose to a sudden roar, so loud that no human shouts could be heard above the din. With complete disregard for his safety, he leaped to his feet and charged the bunker, firing as he ran. But there wasn’t just one bunker. He saw another behind it to the right and a third stepped back to the left—this was death in echelon. Despite the concentrated enemy fire directed at him, 19-year-old Roberts silenced the two-man bunker with a long burst from his M-16. Without hesitation he continued his one-man assault on a second bunker. As he neared the log and earthen position, a well-placed burst of enemy fire knocked his rifle from his hands. Roberts picked up an M-16 dropped by a comrade and charged forward, killing the defenders in the bunker at point blank range. He continued his assault against a third bunker and destroyed it with well-thrown hand grenades. Even though Specialist Roberts was now cut off from his platoon and totally alone, he continued his onslaught against a fourth enemy emplacement. He then fought through a hail of tracers to join elements of the adjoining company which had also been pinned down by the enemy fire. Although continually exposed to hostile fire, the Ohio native remained in the open and assisted in moving wounded personnel from exposed positions to an evacuation area before returning to his unit at approximately 10 p.m. For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, Specialist 4 Gordon R. Roberts was awarded the Medal of Honor.45 When the battle of Hill 996 ended the next morning, 20 of Gordon Roberts’ buddies lay dead and 26 more wounded. And it came as no surprise when both opponents followed to the letter the time-honored script for battles in the A Shau—shortly afterwards, the Currahees deployed to the east side of the valley, and the NVA re-occupied Hill 996.

  Before the 1st of the 506th left Hill 996, they were joined by a celebrated outfit within the 101st—the Tiger Force platoon of the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry. As a reconnaissance unit, Tiger Force became the eyes and ears of the battalion commander and was charged with a unique mission: “out guerilla the guerillas.” The heart and soul of Tiger Force was 24-year-old Staff Sergeant John G. Gertsch, a legend within the 101st Airborne Division. As platoon sergeant of Tiger Force, Gertsch, on his third tour in Vietnam, had already earned two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. Epitomizing valor, he was considered a soldier’s soldier, the best point/recon man in the division, so when Tiger Force combat assaulted into the A Shau on July 15, the Gertsch legend would continue to grow.

  Although the NVA may have lost Hill 996 in the fight with the Currahees, enemy strength along the border remained formidable, with combat-tested units moving at will throughout the area. On the 15th, Tiger Force clashed with one of those enemy companies. During the initial phase of an operation to seize
a strongly defended enemy position, SSgt Gertsch’s platoon leader was seriously wounded and lay exposed to intense enemy fire. Without hesitation John Gertsch rushed to aid his fallen leader and dragged him through a salvo of fire to a sheltered position. He then assumed command of the heavily engaged platoon and led his men in a fierce counterattack that forced the enemy to withdraw. Later, a small element of SSgt Gertsch’s unit was reconnoitering when attacked again by the enemy. SSgt Gertsch moved forward to his besieged element and immediately charged into the withering barrage, firing his M-16 as he advanced. His one-man assault forced the enemy troops to withdraw in confusion and made possible the recovery of two wounded men who had been downed by the heavy enemy fire. Sometime later his platoon came under attack by a large enemy force. Sgt Gertsch was severely wounded but refused medical evacuation and continued to command his platoon despite unbearable pain. While moving under fire and leading his men against multiple fortified bunker complexes, he observed a medic treating a wounded officer from an adjacent unit. With enemy soldiers only a few meters away and realizing that both men were in imminent danger of being killed, he rushed forward and took up a position in the open, shielding both men with his body and drawing all enemy fire to himself. While the wounded officer was being moved to safety, the gutsy Tiger Force leader was instantly killed by multiple volleys of enemy fire. For his conspicuous gallantry and extraordinary heroism, Staff Sergeant John G. Gertsch was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.46