by Robin Moore
“Goddamned good bunch,” Bergholtz said. “They were ready.”
Toward the rear of the camp two of the Vietnamese strike-force barracks blazed. Agonized screams came from them.
Falk winced. “God! Some of those poor kids must have got burned up in their sacks.”
The field telephone buzzed and Bergholtz picked it up. “Number four,” he said. He listened and then another whirring in the air made us huddle down. “Yes,” Bergholtz was saying. “Six hundred meters, 270 degrees.” He put the receiver back on the hook just as another series of searing blasts tore across the camp. “Flash the light on the 270-degree aiming, stake for me, Babe,” he said. Falk complied. Bergholtz stared through the mortar sight and cranked the correct azimuth and elevation into the weapon. “OK, charge four, give ’em four rounds of WP.”
In rapid succession Falk exploded four shells out of the mortar tube. We waited for half a minute as the camp was rocked by VC mortars. Then the phone rang. Bergholtz picked it up, called his position number, and listened.
“The tower says our WP’s on target. Fire HE now.” Falk reached for the high-explosive rounds and plopped four down the tube. The hollow reports of the camp’s other mortars sounded around us. Two positions were continuously firing, illuminating rounds which lit up the fields outside with a sickly pale-yellow light. I sensed men running toward the bunker and pointed my carbine at them.
“They’re ours,” Bergholtz called.
Immediately after our second group of rounds exploded, the field phone rang and Bergholtz grabbed it. “Tower says we were right in them,” he reported. “Keep throwing it to ’em.”
As Bergholtz and Falk with their two newly arrived Vietnamese mortarmen started lobbing high-explosive shells, I cautiously poked my head up and looked around the camp. Several of the buildings were burning. WP and HE rounds were exploding all around the camp. The smell of powder and explosives was everywhere. On the walls the strikers were peering out, holding their fire until they could see something to shoot at. It was a mortar- duel for the time being, the spotters in the tower trying to call down our barrages on the enemy weapons. Every unwounded man in camp was against the walls in the square sandbagged positions, which protected them from shell fragments bursting inside the camp as well as outside.
The heat and smoke from the fires became intense and, as the WP shelling continued, the unmistakable and sickening smell of burning flesh wafted over the camp.
The field telephone rang. Bergholtz took it, listened, and shouted, “Charge three. They’re moving in from the west and north.” The Vietnamese and American mortar crews were working smoothly and the rounds were pouring out of the camp just as fast, or faster than the incoming rounds were pounding us.
Again the field phone rang. I became aware of the firing on the walls now. “Charge two!” Bergholtz shouted. “They’re getting up to our outer wire.”
We could hear our own rounds exploding just beyond the outer perimeter. The heavy machine guns along the wall were pumping bullets into the enemy. The whoosh of the camp’s 57-mm. recoilless rifles and rocket launchers came from the west and north walls.
The phone to his ear, Bergholtz yelled, “Charge one!” He made for the mortar tube, changed the elevation and went back to the phone. “They’re on the concertina!” he yelled.
The eerie, ear-splitting noise of incoming rockets followed by shattering explosions told us that the Communists had both 57- and 75-mm. recoilless rifles. Phan Chau was in trouble. All the bravado I had felt when insisting that Lieutenant Colonel Train let me stay seeped out of me.
In the heavily sandbagged iron-ringed observation stand above the command bunker, Kornie and Train watched the progress of the attack. The Vietnamese camp commander was below in the nearly impregnable bunker, taking field telephone reports. A Vietnamese and an American heavy-weapons sergeant were in the tower directing the mortar fire. Borst, in the communications section of the main bunker, was keeping the B team appraised of the situation. Already flare ships were on the way to light up the battle. Meanwhile, our mortars, firing illuminating rounds, clearly lighted the outer perimeter of the camp, and into the circle of light a wave of black-uniformed men moved steadily forward.
Many hours later Kornie told me how the battle had looked from his position. Enemy rocket shells crashed into the barbed wire, opening rents toward which the Viet Cong headed. The attack was now concentrated on the west and north walls. Machine-gun and rifle fire from our walls raked the first wave of VC, dropping them in the tangled maze of barbed wire. Another Communist section charged the outer perimeter. The mortars were firing at minimum range now but the Communists came forward, many carrying ladders which they threw over the wire.
Suddenly, incomprehensibly, the key northwest bunker machine guns began to rake our own west and north walls. Cambodes and Vietnamese preparing to charge out and meet the incoming Communists were falling from the walls in crumpled heaps, either back into the camp or out onto the pungi stakes in front, which impaled their bodies.
“Kornie!” Train shouted. “What are those insane bastards doing?”
“We got VC in the strike force! They’re on that bunker,” Kornie yelled back. He snatched his field telephone and cranked the handle shouting, “Schmelzer, get reinforcements ready to take the northwest bunker. The VC got it!”
Schmelzer’s position in a mortar bunker next to the operations room enabled him to watch at close range the fighting on the west wall. With Schmelzer was Lieutenant Cau talking on his field phone to Captain Lan safely in the main bunker. Schmelzer pounded his counterpart to indicate he should get all the strikers he could to take back the northwest bunker. Cau and Schmelzer could both see the devastating fire from the bunker spewing death along the west wall in front of them.
Lieutenant Colonel Train was appalled at the speed with which Phan Chau was seemingly falling apart. Then suddenly, shockingly, the northeast bunker started firing down the north wall, catching the hundred or more defenders in a murderous crossfire. Train turned to Kornie. “We’ll have to evacuate to the southeast. Borst can call for gun ships to pick us up.”
“Colonel,” Kornie cried over the explosive din of the battle, “you are going to see how crazy and unconventional I really am.”
He reached down to the floor of the observation post, kicked aside a sandbag and pulled out a box streaming insulated wires. In the light of the illuminating flares he studied the switches a moment. He threw one, then another.
Instantly, first the northwest and then the northeast bunker exploded, their treacherous machine gunners silenced. Over the field phone Kornie yelled, “Schmelzer, take the two bunkers.”
The first wave of Viet Cong were well through the outer barbed-wire entanglements, not more than thirty yards from the walls. Kornie threw another knife switch on his detonating box. No less than a dozen simultaneous explosions rang out from the north wall, and the pressing mass of black-clad enemy crumpled beneath a lethal hail of jagged metal.
“Claymores!” Kornie yelled above the renewed firing. “Very good!”
Schmelzer and Lieutenant Cau had commandeered reinforcements from the south wall and were making for the two smoking bunkers. Jumping into the northwest bunker Schmelzer riddled the wounded VC with his AR-15, and the strikers behind him, Cambodes and Vietnamese, righted the overturned machine gun, dug ammunition belts out of the debris, pitched bodies over the wall and were set up and firing just as the next wave of Viet Cong broke through the outer defenses to threaten the walls once more.
During all this time the VC mortar fire never ceased, killing and wounding strikers everywhere within the camp. A round dropped onto the main bunker, its concussion flinging Kornie and Train to the bottom of the observation post. The sandbagging saved them from being shredded by the blast of steel fragments.
Kornie pulled himself up and looked out over the battle. By now an Air Force plane was circling overhead, dropping high intensity flares, and turning the battlefield into hig
h noon. The mortars, relieved of the necessity of firing illuminating rounds, kept a steady rain of high-explosive rounds dropping on the attacking Viet Cong ranks.
When Kornie and Train recovered from the blast they saw that the enemy seemed slightly slowed down. With both bunkers in action again and the north wall spitting a solid sheet of death, the first Communist bid for a fast victory was gone. The Viet Cong rocket launchers kept up a steady fire, though many of the missiles were flying high over the camp in an effort to knock out the tower. It presented a small target, but if hit it would destroy the effectiveness of Phan Chau’s mortar fire, since it acted as observation post.
The bunkers were under incessant recoilless-rifle fire, which was furiously returned. Abruptly from the west came the sound of bugles. Out of the blackness of the foothills and scrub brush a few hundred yards away and into the bright light of the flares appeared over two hundred Viet Cong advancing on foot.
At the same moment the VC were pressing in from the direction of the Cambodian border, the attack from the north was launched anew. In a vicious salvo of rocket fire, mortar-shelling, and heavy machine-gunning the VC swept through the scattered outer-defense barbed wire and charged the north wall.
Schmelzer in the damaged northwest bunker was now under fire from two sides. Thanks to the foresight of Rodriguez, who had laid his charges in all the bunkers the day before against just such a possibility, Schmelzer had both of the heavy machine guns in operation. Rodriguez had carefully placed the charges to do as little damage to equipment as possible, while killing or wounding every man in the position.
Kornie had one eye on the north and west walls, the other on the southeast and southwest bunkers to make sure they didn’t fall victim to similar treachery. Train was firing his automatic rifle now at the Viet Cong advancing toward the inner perimeter. The Communists were within twenty yards of the north wall when Lieutenant Cau screamed orders from the bunker he had taken, jumped down outside the walls and headed straight for the Viet Cong. Over the walls clambered a platoon of screaming Cambodian and Vietnamese strikers with bayonets fixed and charged the Viet Cong. Bayonets ripped bodies, tore out throats, and after five minutes of vicious, bloody, hand-to-hand combat the VC advance was halted. Schmelzer now was able to turn both of his heavy machine guns on the Communists who were now breaching the western outer-defense perimeter.
Kornie, watching intently from the observation post, reached for his black box. Again he threw a knife switch and a dozen claymore mines, trained on the western outer perimeter, went off. Black-clad enemy fell screaming, but others still came on. Their rockets and mortars had mangled the concertina and tanglefoot barbed wire. In spite of the heavy fire streaking from the west wall the Communists advanced. Mortar shells fell with uncanny accuracy on our walls, knocking out sections of the inner defenses and killing or wounding the defenders.
Through the western outer perimeter the Viet Cong streamed. Strikers rushed from the south and east walls to meet the new attack. Rockets tore out sections of the wall and reached for the machine-gun bunkers. The northwest and southwest bunkers were subjected to heavy recoilless-rifle fire. Only the north wall, thanks to Lieutenant Cau’s bloody countercharge, had successfully beaten back the Communist attackers.
Kornie turned to Train. “It’s up to the men now,” he shouted above the firing. “We got no more claymores. I had no time to lay on my full dose of secret weapons. But I can still knock out the other two bunkers if VC get into them.”
As Kornie watched the VC steadily advancing from the west through the barbed wire and withering fire, a rocket made a direct hit on the northeast bunker, blowing off the top machine-gun position. Kornie clutched the edge of his post and stared. The machine gun in the lower, heavily protected base kept up its deadly grazing fire about a foot above the ground. But the gunners and crew on top were blown into scattered pieces. Kornie knew Schmelzer had been helping direct the fighting from the vantage point of the top of that bunker.
The VC, perhaps 50 of them, had reached the west wall and were trying to climb it. Hand-to-hand fighting raged. Train had set his AR-15 on semi-automatic and was picking away at the enemy from the observation post. The entire attack was now centered on the west wall. The camp’s mortar positions were still battering the VC at close range, helping to hold them back at the outer perimeter.
From our mortar position we could see the VC clambering over the walls. Twice, figures in black pajamas fought their way into the camp and sprayed the defenders from the inside with automatic weapons until they were themselves shot down.
Bergholtz and Falk saw more and more VC begin to breach the walls. The Vietnamese strikers seemed to be losing heart. “Hey, Babe!” Bergholtz cried to Falk, “let’s give them a hand on the wall. The Viets can handle the mortar.”
“You’d better stay in here,”’ Bergholtz shouted to me needlessly, and firing his AR-15 as he went he headed for the wall. The two big bare-headed Vikings reached the walls and with savage yells plunged into the fighting. The unexpected appearance in the thick of the battle of the American giants, towering a foot above the combatants on both sides seemed to stiffen the resolve of the flagging defenders. The strikers flocked about the two Americans, and screaming curses their resistance became more ferocious than ever. Falk, firing his automatic rifle with his left hand, grabbed a bayonet-tipped carbine from a lunging VC, gave it a twirl and plunged it through a Communist’s back with such force that it pinned him, squirming, to the mud wall.
Before my eyes the tide turned again. Shrieking and yelling, the strikers jumped from the walls, now cleared of live VC, and pursued the enemy into the area between the perimeters. Another American sergeant wearing his green beret jumped over the wall, rallying the strikers behind him. The impact of the fighting was irresistible; shouting like a combatant, I leaped out of the safety of the bunker and ran for the wall. Looking down at the savage fight below, I could scarcely control the near-unconquerable impulse to jump. On the walls wounded strikers still able to fire weapons kept up a blast at the new squads unendingly breaching the outer perimeter.
It seemed impossible that we could hold out against another determined wave of these ferocious, suicidal Communists. Slowly our forces cleared the area outside the west wall, and the VC, hauling as many of their dead and wounded as they could with them, retreated beyond the outer perimeter. The strikers and the three American sergeants likewise retired behind their own walls again as renewed Communist mortar fire started falling.
I heard the incoming rounds and plastered myself to the wet red earth. A series of rounds plowed up the ground around us. When I pulled myself up I saw that Kornie had left his post and was standing behind the wall, assessing the damage. Bergholtz, his left arm gushing blood, and Falk, miraculously unwounded, rallied around him. The other sergeant who had gone out also came back wounded. I recognized the slight figure of the demolitions sergeant, Rodriguez. His fatigues were blood-soaked around his chest and he staggered, both hands held above his right breast.
“Where’s Schmelzer?” Kornie asked. There was no answer. Kornie yelled the name of his executive officer into the strange lull in the fighting. There was no answer.
“Our orders,” Kornie said hoarsely, “are for all Americans to exfiltrate the camp if we see it’s going to be overrun. We’re missing Schmelzer and maybe others. Falk, right now, find every American. Tell them to report to the control bunker. If anyone is dead try to drag the bodies in. I’ll make the decision what we do then. Move!”
Falk took off to search the positions assigned to members of the American team. Screams and begging cries of the wounded arose from all sections of the camp. Kornie looked at me and shook his head. “We cannot hold against more than another company, two maybe. If they got another battalion they overrun us.”
“How’s Train?” I asked.
“He’s in the commo bunker with Borst trying to get help over the radio. He’s been talking to the flare ships about getting fighter support. Th
e God damn Vietnamese Air Force don’t fly at night and our nearest American fighters are at Soc Trang. That’s more than a hundred and fifty miles.”
From out in the foothills, beyond the area which the faithful Air Force C-47’s were lighting up with flares, came the sharp, stinging notes of a bugle. It was joined by others. The bugles blasted fear into the hearts of the strike force who had regrouped on the walls. Sergeant Ebberson, the medic, appeared.
“Sir,” he said to Kornie, “I’ve got three Vietnamese medics, two nurses and Sergeant Heimer working on the wounded. The dispensary’s been hit twice but we put out the fires. If we pull out of Phan Chau, sir, a lot of wounded are going to die. Bergholtz and Rodriguez are both pretty bad. They couldn’t walk far.”
Kornie nodded in comprehension. “You heard those bugles, Ebberson? Maybe they are bluffing or maybe they really got another battalions. We’ll soon find out. But we got to be ready to evacuate through the southeast gate if we’re going to be overrun. Those are orders.”
“Yes sir,” Ebberson answered. “I’ll get the medical section ready.”
“Have you seen Schmelzer?” Kornie asked wearily.
“No, sir.” Ebberson headed back for his dispensary.
The bugles sounded louder now, as though they were closer. “Stay with me,” Kornie said to me, and headed away from the walls.
In the open parade ground he checked the fire arrow that indicated the direction of enemy strength. It was locked pointing due west at the attacking VC. Cans of sand, heavy oil and gasoline in them burning steadily, outlined the big wooden arrow. From the air, if help came, the pilots would know from the arrow where to strafe and drop their bombs. Kornie and I went up to his command post above the main bunker. The A team, except for Schmelzer, Train, Borst on the radio, Bergholtz, Rodriguez and the medics, gathered outside the main bunker.