Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  Robert Maras Collection

  Bob Maras in sick bay aboard USS Princeton with wound sustained along the DMZ a week after the Hill Fights ended.

  Courtesy of Tony Leyba

  Bob Maras (left) and Sergeant Ed Crawford at a reunion thirty-five years after the Hill Fights at Khe Sanh. Courtesy of Kathy Crawford

  Larger-than-life bronze of three warriors of the Vietnam War who seem to be guarding and overlooking “The Wall” that lists the names of more than 58,000 servicemen who died in combat.

  Charles Sasser Collection

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A Night of Imposters

  The NVA apparently planned to end the Hill Fights in one fell swoop by striking against one of our two battalion positions at 881N. By attacking Echo, they may have expected Golf to strip out its own men to send across the valley to Echo’s aid. NVA elements held in reserve would then ambush our people in the lowlands while others assaulted Golf’s diminished defenses on the knob.

  Pappy Delong wasn’t going for it. “Hold tight,” he instructed Captain Sheehan. “Help for Echo is on the way.”

  That meant Golf did little but wait and watch the nonstop light-and-sound show of exploding shells and flares and crisscrossing red and green tracers. We used red: they used green. The NVA threw everything at Echo except Ho Chi Minh’s outhouse. The battle resounded throughout the hills, reflecting vividly against fog and a low bank of clouds left over from the rain. It was a spectacle none of us was likely to forget.

  Impotent rage engulfed the Marines of Golf Company. Our sister company might be getting overrun and we could do nothing about it.

  The gooks’ favorite tactic during an attack was to get in close and hug the line in that narrow buffer zone between the Marine perimeter and the wall of support provided by air and artillery that dared move no closer for fear of wiping out our own people. That meant the fight was mostly at close quarters, face to face. So near and personal that opposing sides yelled and screamed insults at each other.

  “Marines! Tonight you die!”

  “Fuck Ho Chi Minh!”

  Just like in the war movies—except actors in movies rose up from the “dead” after a scene, slapped each other on the back, and went out for coffee together with John Wayne.

  While snipers positioned on ridges to the north and west of Echo popped away—“They’re in the fuckin’ trees!”—NVA infantry scampered about outside the perimeter tossing grenades, killing Marines, attempting to penetrate Marine defenses. Battalion standing orders dictated that in this kind of situation everyone should hold fast; anybody up and about was fair game since it was often impossible to distinguish friend from foe in the dark.

  Company corpsmen took extreme risks to reach the wounded who, along with felled enemy soldiers, thrashed about in the grass screaming and sobbing for help. Ignoring the danger, corpsmen crawled or ran to them, calling out desperately to verify their identity so our own guys would not shoot them: “Marine coming through! Coming through!”

  NVA wearing Marine uniforms they had stripped from dead 1/9 leathernecks at the start of all this added to the confusion. Glimpsing a Marine uniform illuminated by exploding grenades darting through the chaos caused some defenders to hesitate on the trigger and in that hesitation pay the price with their lives.

  Enemy soldiers wearing Marine gear to cause confusion broke through Lieutenant Cannon’s 2nd Platoon sector and rampaged inside the perimeter, shooting and hurling grenades, executing those already wounded.

  “Gooks inside!”

  “Motherfucker! There’s thousands of the little bastards!”

  “Shoot ’em! Kill ’em!”

  Sergeant Bob Powell led his squad racing across the top of the hill to fill in the gap in Cannon’s line. An enemy 50-cal machine gun opened fire from a crew that had approached to within fifty meters to provide cover for the marauders. It cut down Powell and most of his squad.

  Radio traffic from Echo’s CP grew desperate: “We need help if we’re going to hold. They’re all over us. We need anything you got. It’s ‘enemy close.’ Do you read? It’s ‘enemy close.’”

  Something had to be done. And quick! Even if the solution posed a hazard for Echo’s Marines. Colonel Delong authorized Mike Company over below 881S to enter the fray and fire its Howtars 4.2 wheeled mortars across the valley in an attempt to relieve the pressure on Echo. Desperation increased to recklessness. As one Marine put it, “Better to die by friendly fire than gook fire.”

  Echo’s FO on the knob passed instructions to Mike and radio-walked exploding shells “enemy close” up the slope to within fifty meters of Echo’s perimeter. I felt like cheering every time a bright burst revealed tiny stick figures in the distance getting blown to Hell.

  Puff the Magic Dragon appeared in the sky overhead, circling, circling, raking its red neon wash of cannon fire through the attackers below in a visual display as dazzling as an alien flying saucer working a giant death ray. Although only one out of every fifth round was a tracer, the red groove they cut through the night appeared as a solid moving bar from sky to earth.

  Gunny Janzen went around to Golf’s machine gunners and assigned areas into which we were allowed to shoot to provide Echo further assistance. He pointed across the lowlands to where Echo Company’s hill boiled with fire and smoke.

  “That’s where Echo’s dug in.” He lowered his finger to point into the darkness below. “There is where you can shoot if you see movement.”

  “Do you see movement?” I asked Tony after Gunny left. It was too dark over there to see anything outside the little hill’s flaring core.

  “Yeah, yeah! I see ’em.”

  That was all I needed. Tony kept the M-60 fed while I goosed the Pig into action, stabbing tracers in red supersonic bee flights across the lowlands and into the lower part of Echo’s hill. I couldn’t tell if we were doing any good, but it felt good doing it. Judging from the rattle of other Golf machine guns, we were all feeling good about doing it.

  Echo fought on and prayed for sunrise. The battle began to subside when the first signs of morning broke the eastern sky. Generally, North Vietnamese liked to fight at night when they were not such ready targets for air and artillery. Stunned Marines, those blood-splattered, hollow-eyed, exhausted survivors of the night’s battle, still held the knob when firing ceased and the sun rose.

  About eighty of the enemy dead littered the ground around Echo’s perimeter. An equal number may have been dragged away. Unexploded mortar shells, cartridge casings, and other debris trashed the area, while blood from the enemy dead and wounded soaked into the red earth. Echo had also suffered in the night’s fighting: twenty-six young Marines paid the ultimate price and would be making their final journey home in government-issued wooden coffins draped in American flags. Another eighty-four were wounded. It was BLT 2/3’s worst night since the Hill Fights had started.

  The NVA dropped back out of sight and out of range to lick their wounds. In the quiet that followed, CH-46 helicopters soared in above the sun-tinted bloodied hills to recover our dead and wounded. They received minimal hostile fire. It was so soon after a major battle that all either side wanted was to find somewhere safe to recuperate.

  Colonel Delong ordered Foxtrot Company to relocate from the bottom of 881S, where it had been part of the defenses, to Echo’s battered knob to fill in Echo’s personnel gaps pending replacements. Echo Marines, greatly diminished in numbers with a casualty rate of well over 50 percent, were too spent to leave their holes. Foxtrot assumed the nasty business of burying NVA corpses in a common trench before they began to stink.

  Golf had avoided being hit during a miserable night on alert anticipating marauding NVA to practice their tactics on us. As the sun brightened and burned off night fog, renewed breezes dissipated smoke and haze over Echo’s hill. The quiet that followed was almost as shattering as last night�
�s bedlam and violence.

  Tony heaved a sigh of relief as we scrounged in our packs for breakfast and heat tabs with which to boil water from the mosquito crater-pond for coffee. Tony thought maybe we should have saved my leech for seasoning. He sighed again, weary from lack of sleep, and lifted his eyes up to the sky from the depths of our rodent den in the ground.

  “Good morning, Vietnam!” he managed, almost worshipfully, like a prayer of Thanksgiving.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Premonition

  Echo Company, along with its support, threw everything we had at the gooks and set them back on their heels. The company suffered in the attack, but it dealt out more misery than it absorbed. The enemy’s brutal thrust revealed not only the NVA’s determination and overwhelming troop numbers available for combat, but it also exposed the tenuous hold BLT-2/3 had clawed into the base of Hill 881N. Perhaps just as significantly, it revealed the tenuous hold each of us claimed on life.

  Marines never gave up clawing, however. And we learned from our environment. For example, the caper the gooks pulled by donning Marine uniforms to penetrate Echo’s perimeter. Echo turned the tables on them by saving a few Vietnamese stiffs from the mass burial, putting Marine helmets on them, and propping the bodies at strategic locations inside the perimeter or outside as fake OP/LP watches. The objective was to draw fire and provide advance warning of further attacks or probes.

  In the dark, about the only way to identify friend from foe was the distinctive silhouette of the Marine helmet compared to the pancake-like NVA pith helmet. The ruse of those several corpses rigid from rigor propped about after nightfall like scarecrows in a corn field was a bit macabre, but it worked.

  The NVA wasn’t ready for another heads-on fight after the blooding they took. Best they could do the following night was launch a few probes to test Marine resolve and keep up the pressure. The first foray occurred about an hour after sunset when a squad-sized NVA element crept up on what it took to be two “foolish Marines” out almost in plain sight on perimeter watch. They were decoys, of course, which the gooks discovered to their detriment when they opened fire.

  Marines overwatching the decoys with machine guns and M-16s on auto mowed down the attackers, having seized this advantage over the enemy once he exposed himself.

  An hour later, another enemy squad “ambushed” an “OP/LP” at the edge of the woods outside the Marine perimeter. Again, a Marine overwatch was waiting. The situation reminded me of a little ditty composed by 9th Marines operating out of the Da Nang area.

  Eighteen gooks in a free-fire zone,

  Last one hit goes home alone.

  These fucking gooks will never learn. . . .

  The gooks did learn, of course. At least they learned caution, even if it took them most of the night and a bunch of casualties before they figured it out.

  “Hey, hey, you Hos want to try that again!” Marines taunted. “We need some fresh gook bodies. You keep shooting these up.”

  Echo and Foxtrot on their little hill and Golf on ours dug in to hold on while pin pushers in the rear reorganized and reoriented rifle companies for a final push on the Wicked Twins. Fresh troops from the 26th Marines arrived at Khe Sanh, choppered in from Phu Bai to provide security assistance to 2/9 at the airfield—or, we supposed, to be available as reinforcements in the event BLT-2/3 got chewed up on 881N. LBJ must have thought the bloodshed worth it—and Marines weren’t going to give up on him.

  B-52s stalked the sky seeking concentrations of the enemy infiltrating from Laos or crossing the DMZ. The distant thunder of exploding bombs reverberated through the draws and valleys like an ill wind that rattled leaves on trees. Artillery at Khe Sanh, the 105s and 155s, kept up H&I into areas where enemy might congregate. Even bigger guns, the 175s from Leatherneck Square, along with fast movers in the air, took their turns at bombarding the Twin Witches. Ploughed-up red earth at the tops of the two larger cones reflected back sunlight and appeared as though the hills themselves were bleeding.

  Surely, to endure all this and keep coming at us, the gooks must have nine lives like cats. Either that or we were fighting ghosts.

  Snipers contributed to the war of nerves by taking pot shots at us from the surrounding jungle. We learned to keep our heads down so that they did little damage except to our psyches. We went around constantly pissed off, vowing to rain death and destruction on the sneaky little bastards at the first opportunity.

  You gotta get yourself a weapon,

  An automatic weapon. . . .

  ’Cause every night when you’re a’sleepin’,

  Charlie Cong comes a’creepin’

  . . . All around.

  Gook mortars were worse, but we had more success against them than against snipers. The Whump! Whump! of rockets leaving tubes down in the woods pinpointed their location for our 60mm mortar teams to respond in kind. The rest of us utilized the three-second interval between the Whump! Whump! of the firing and the Boom! Boom! of the explosions to dive deeper into our holes before hell fire rained down from heaven and stomped blossoms of flame back and forth across our little knoll. We jeered back at the gooks whenever our 60mm guys scored.

  “Lord, Lord?” Tony beseeched from the bottom of our hole during a particularly heavy bombardment. “Lord, let me make it through all this and I promise I’ll stop cussing forever.”

  The shelling stopped. We looked at each other. “The Lord must have heard you, Tony.”

  Minutes later: “Incoming!”

  A shell exploded so near our position that it splattered mud and rock down on top of us.

  “Son of a bitch!” Tony erupted. “That one was too fucking close!”

  We looked at each other. Tony shrugged.

  Since the enemy couldn’t be allowed free run in the hills to plan more mischief and move up more troops and guns, Marine combat patrols went out constantly to gather intel and keep the NVA nervous and unsure. Most of the time the gooks avoided direct contact in order to nurse their resources and wait for another opportunity to attack. On our hill redoubts we reinforced bunkers and trenches, cleared fields of fire, and cleaned weapons. We still had problems with the M-16s.

  One of the guys decorated his hole with a bouquet of orange fire poppies and golden eardrops, which grew only after intense fires. Gunny Janzen shook his head in amusement, but warned, “Don’t get too comfortable. We still have to go up there.”

  He pointed at 881N, which overlooked our small first step on the way to the summit.

  I looked up at the hill, the bitch, and thought, This is going to be bad. Really bad. Our guys were dying, more buddies were going to die. Hill and Doc Heath and Schmitz and the others—all gone. Thinking about them only made us feel sorry for ourselves. Thinking about not thinking about them while thinking about surviving made us schizophrenic. So, a man compensated with bravura and bullshit and macho bluster. You had to make yourself believe you really were the meanest sonofabitch in the valley.

  Dying? Dying was the easy part. Not to let your buddies down while dying was the hard part.

  Gene Kilgore struggled with that part. He experienced premonitions of his own death. “I know how it’s going to happen. I shut my eyes and I see it in detail.”

  His thin face appeared pinched and drawn beneath his helmet, accentuated into the haunted look of a concentration camp survivor by the beard he hadn’t shaved since 2/3 joined the Hill Fights. We all looked that way by now.

  “See,” he said, “in this dream we’re on patrol and we’re going through a draw, just like it was when Hotel and Sergeant Crawford got hit. I actually hear it happen—the shooting and awful screaming. I realize I’m the one doing the screaming. I’m dying! I’m dying, guys! I look down and what I see is me lying there dead.”

  “Oh, man. Come on. . . .” Tony said.

  “I’m dead. Just dead. Like Doc Heath and the others.”
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br />   No matter how we, his buddies, tried to cajole him out of it, he remained convinced he hadn’t much longer to live. He even knew what he wanted inscribed on his tombstone: PFC Gene Kilgore. A US Marine Who Died For His Country.

  “Did you thermite the Starlite first?” Bill Rainey cracked, attempting to lighten the mood. That produced nervous laughter. Even Kilgore smiled.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Dog Biscuits

  Due to infrequent resupply, we still drew water from the scummy shell crater. After a mid-afternoon mortar shelling, I left Tony on watch while I grabbed our canteens—“No leeches this time, Maras”—and scuttled across the top of the explosion-riddled knob to the pond. Magilla, Jacubowski, and Gunny Janzen were at the watering hole on the same errand. Instead of kneeling at the water as usual to fill up, the three stood eyeing the crater with open revulsion. I approached cautiously.

  “Holy—!” That was as far as I got.

  We had been drinking from the pond—only to discover now that it served as a grave for dead gooks. Not just one, but three of them. What we figured was that an aerial bomb or one of the big 175s from Leatherneck Square must have landed right on top of an NVA fighting position, burying its occupants at the bottom of the crater. Rain came down and filled the depression. After a few days, the corpses produced gases and had now floated to the surface. They were all face down, with their backs humped out of the water and covered in a green-scum crust. Pieces of rotted flesh slewing off the corpses left greasy rings in the algae. Jacubowski retched from the overpowering stench and fled back to his hole with his canteens empty.

  “It’s all protein,” Gunny remarked with tired sarcasm.