Fire in the Streets

by Eric Hammel

  The confused state of affairs brought on by the mass migra­tion of 1st Marine Division units into northern I Corps resulted on January 30 in the transfer of Golf/2/5 to the temporary operational control of the newly arrived headquarters of the 1st Marine Regiment (1st Marines). Thus, as the only fully manned infantry company in Phu Bai, Golf/2/5 became the 1st Marines palace guard.

  At 1645, January 30, Captain Meadows was ordered by the 1st Marines CP to conduct a night march out of Phu Bai to a hill about a kilometer to the west. Regiment did not tell Meadows what he was supposed to do out on the hill, but Meadows as­sumed that higher headquarters had reason to expect an enemy effort—probably a rocket or mortar raid—from that direction. Golf/2/5 left Phu Bai at midnight and marched to the hill without incident. The troops, who were veterans of scores of similar precautions, expertly set in and manned routine 50 per­cent watches—that is, half the men were on duty at all times.

  Sure enough, at about 0330, January 31, several rockets streaked directly over Golf/2/5's hill and detonated inside the Phu Bai wire. Captain Meadows shot an azimuth toward the apparent source of the rockets and radioed the numbers to the 1st Marines CP. No one asked Golf/2/5 to do anything to follow up, and, at daybreak, the company returned to its tent camp inside the Phu Bai base. The troops grounded their gear and went to eat breakfast.

  The rumor making the rounds of Golf/2/5 at breakfast was that the company's former operating area in Quang Nam Prov­ince was the scene of a big battle and that the company was flying out to fight there. No one was glad to hear the news, for that area of Quang Nam was a booby trap-infested region in which scores of Marines had been maimed for no apparent gain.

  While Golf/2/5 was eating breakfast, Chuck Meadows was called to the 1st Marines CP and told that the company was being attached to Lieutenant Colonel Mark Gravel's 1/1. Mea­dows walked away from the regimental CP with the vague under­standing that there was some sort of trouble in Hue and that Golf/2/5 and the 1/1 CP group were to head north to the 1st ARVN Division CP compound to escort the ARVN commanding general back to Phu Bai. No one at Regiment or the 1/1 CP had told Captain Meadows of the mayhem sweeping most of South Vietnam that morning. The mission sounded so routine that Meadows allowed his Marines to leave their packs in Phu Bai in the care of a small fire watch. Meadows naturally expected to be back inside the Phu Bai wire well before dusk. The only special gear the Marines took with them were their rain suits, for it was a misty, drizzly morning.

  The scuttlebutt that reached Meadows's troops in advance of the official word accurately predicted that the company was on its way north, to Hue; this was deemed vastly preferable to the rumored rush south to Quang Nam Province. Talking among themselves, the Golf/2/5 Marines built up a sort of ecstasy over the trip to Hue. Everyone who had been in-country for more than a few weeks had heard that Hue was a garden spot of clean prostitutes, decent food, and friendly people. The consistent rumor making the rounds of Golf/2/5 as it waited in the mist was that a few VC were making nuisances of themselves, and the company, which was on quick-reaction duty, was heading north to quell the disruption.

  There appeared to be no hurry getting the mission under­way. Seven or eight trucks had to be conjured up from the busy motor-transport units at neighboring Gia Le, and that took time. While they were waiting, most of the 160 Marines and Navy corpsmen in Golf/2/5 simply crapped out in the open, catching up on sleep or huddling together to ward off the cold winter mist.

  The transport assignment fell to 2nd Lieutenant Jerry Nadolski, a platoon commander with Charlie Company, 1st Motor Transport Battalion. As soon as Lieutenant Nadolski's mixed bag of 6x6 trucks had been assembled, the lightly equipped Marines and corpsmen hopped aboard. Captain Meadows introduced himself to Lieutenant Colonel Gravel and several of Gravel's staff officers, and at 1030 everyone headed north. Lieutenant Colonel Gravel's jeep was at the head of the column, Lieutenant Nadolski was riding in the cab of the lead truck, and Captain Meadows was in the cab of the second truck.

  The troops treated the trip as a holiday outing. Phu Bai was as far north as Golf/2/5 had ever been, so the sights were new. Despite the cold mist that whipped over them, there was laughing and joking aplenty as the Marines leaned back and took in the sights. Unknown to any of them, one of the two men in the lead jeep had a pretty good idea that there was going to be action ahead. Lieutenant Colonel Mark Gravel had been in intermittent contact with Captain Gordon Batcheller before and during the early part of the drive; he knew that Alpha/1/1 had got­ten into a fight, and he sensed that something terrible had happened. However, most of the trip from Phu Bai was made in silence; there was no radio contact with Alpha/1/1 for many long minutes.

  *

  Something was wrong. The convoy was well along the road to Hue when Chuck Meadows suddenly realized that no people were out and about. In fact, there weren't even any chickens scratching alongside the roadway. There was nothing going on.

  Private First Class Bill Tant was oblivious to the first signs of danger. Tant had been in Vietnam since Christmas, but he had yet to experience any real action. He still retained the new guy's rosy, heroic view of the war. In fact, Tant was eagerly asking his squad leader, Corporal Glenn Lucas, if Lucas thought Golf/2/5 was going to see any enemy soldiers this trip when the convoy nosed past the southernmost wrecked ARVN M-41 tank. Cor­poral Lucas, who had only ten days left to serve in Vietnam, pointed at the destroyed tank, with the charred crewmen hanging out of a turret hatch. He answered, "You'll probably see more action than you want to."

  The Golf/2/5 convoy proceeded into the market-area shantytown that stretched about 500 meters alongside Highway 1. From his vantage point in the lead truck, Lieutenant Nadolski noticed that a number of the tin-roofed shanties in the market area had been shot up, but he didn't dwell on the matter. Shot-up buildings were a common enough sight on the roads Nadolski traveled for a living.

  The Golf/2/5 convoy crossed the An Cuu Bridge, went around the traffic circle, passed through the northern section of the market area, and nosed onto the causeway across the kilome­ter-wide cane field. There were no signs yet of Alpha/1/l's fight. That unit had surged across the causeway only an hour earlier but was by then completely out of sight within the southern edge of the city proper.

  Suddenly, light small-arms fire reached out at the convoy from dead ahead. The lead trucks—Lieutenant Nadolski's and Captain Meadows's—swerved to a halt, and all the rest of the trucks along the column followed suit. Lieutenant Colonel Grav­el's jeep, which was well into the open area when the shooting started, also swerved to a halt, blocking both lanes of the cause­way. The battalion commander and his driver, the only men riding in the jeep, bailed out with alacrity and took cover on the right side of the berm. From his vantage point Gravel could see khaki-uniformed figures to the northwest, jogging and marching in the open alongside the southern edge of the city.

  *

  Even before Captain Meadows had hurtled out of his truck, he had seen the muzzle flash of a machine gun set in just in front of a large walled compound at the southwestern corner of the cane field. The NVA machine gun was about 200 meters to the left of the roadway and well ahead of Golf/2/5's position, about 700 meters away altogether.

  Meadows and his rain-suited Marines clambered to the mist-damp ground, brought their weapons to the ready, and moved to the right, away from the fire, down behind the causeway berm. Meadows ordered the nearest M-60 machine-gun team to set up at the head of the column and return fire at the enemy machine gun. Then he started trying to find out what the hell was going on. Since Lieutenant Colonel Gravel was out of his jeep and without a radio, Chuck Meadows was on his own, a turn of events he liked just fine despite the confusion and danger of the mo­ment.

  While Golf/2/5 was getting itself organized to advance on foot, Captain Meadows ducked into a Texaco gas station he thought would be a good initial observation post. During his brief stay inside, he scavenged a city map of Hue he chanced to find taped to a wall. It wasn't
a particularly good map, Meadows noted—most of the major structures were keyed to a list on the back of the sheet. But it was drawn at half the scale of his military map. It even had half-assed military grid markings, which might be a big asset if artillery fire or air support could be arranged.

  By the time Meadows had inspected the Texaco map, the company was set to move out on foot. Lieutenant Nadolski and his trucks were left behind the protection of the abandoned buildings. They could not advance because of the gunfire and because Lieutenant Colonel Gravel's jeep and trailer were block­ing the causeway. They would be called ahead when the road was clear and safe.

  Golf/2/5 encountered no difficulty in crossing the cane field behind the protection of the causeway berm. However, as the Marines advanced farther north, several of them spotted knots of khaki-clad NVA soldiers way off to the left, at the southwestern edge of the cane field, in the vicinity of the now-silent NVA machine gun. Slowly, the picture resolved itself. A large NVA unit—the 4th NVA Regiment's fresh 810th NVA Battalion—was moving north into the city, paralleling Golf/ 2/5's route. Every once in a while, a burst of gunfire whistled over the heads of the Marines. Presumably, the shots were idle gestures on the part of individual NVA soldiers who wanted the Marines to know their side was full of fight. When Captain Meadows got wind of the NVA migration, he decided to ignore it. The NVA column was a tempting target, and Meadows figured Golf/2/5 could lick the enemy soldiers in a stand-up fight, but his mission was to get to MACV and on up to the 1st ARVN Division CP compound. Lieutenant Colonel Mark Gravel had reached exactly the same conclusion. Gravel had never seen so many NVA troops in the open, but this was not the occasion to take them on.

  As Golf/2/5 proceeded north, the first hard evidence of Alpha/1/ l's fight became apparent. Here and there, wounded Marines were being treated by corpsmen and fellow Marines. Chuck Meadows learned that the wounded Americans were mem­bers of Alpha/1/1 and got a quick rundown on their unit's situation.

  By happenstance, Lieutenant Colonel Gravel spotted a wounded Marine entangled in a roll of concertina wire bordering the left side of the road. It was Captain Gordon Batcheller. Gravel was awed by the size of the wound in Batcheller's right thigh. He knelt down to see if the blood-covered company commander was still alive. He was, but he was really tangled up in the wire. For his part, Batcheller was extremely surprised to see that his battal­ion commander had arrived on the scene so soon after their last radio conversation. (Batcheller was lucid, but he had apparently lost his sense of time.) There was still sporadic fire coming from the NVA infantry column to the southwest, so Gravel ordered his driver to retrieve their jeep and maneuver it to the left edge of the roadway to form a protective barrier. When it was in place, a

  Golf/2/5 corpsman gave Captain Batcheller cursory medical treatment, and several Marines extricated him from the wire. As soon as the captain was free, a Marine tried to splint his shattered right leg with the handle of a shovel scavenged from Gravel's jeep. Before the splint could be secured, however, the Good Samaritan was shot through the foot.

  At the time Captain Batcheller was being extricated from the barbed wire, Lieutenant Jerry Nadolski started easing his empty 6x6 trucks forward from the southeast. As Nadolski got out onto the raised roadway, he could see the many khaki-clad NVA soldiers moving northwestward along the far edge of the cane field. Individual NVA soldiers were firing at the trucks, which Nadolski took to be a warning. When the trucks reached Lieuten­ant Colonel Gravel's position, Gravel commandeered one of them and ordered the driver to turn it around. Then several wounded men, including Captain Batcheller, were hoisted aboard. While the rest of the convoy headed northwest, the casualty truck raced southeast at top speed. Gordon Batcheller was operated on in Phu Bai that afternoon. He was out of danger and would emerge whole, but he faced ten months in a Stateside hospital.

  As the Golf/2/5 Marines entered the outskirts of the built-up area, they were at the height of wariness, but the battle in the area was over. There was still the odd round zinging between buildings, but the danger was minimal. When Captain Meadows noted that the Alpha/1/1 Marines in the area were still collecting their casualties, he ordered his platoons to advance quickly but cautiously to MACV, which was about 350 meters northeast of the edge of the built-up area.

  Signs of a moving fight abounded. As Golf/2/5 advanced up Highway 1, it ran into more Alpha/1/1 casualties. However, the street remained reasonably quiet, and the Alpha/1/1 Ma­rines and corpsmen appeared to have the situation well in hand. As Meadows glanced down one major side street, to the left, he saw the backside of a tank, which was on station guarding the Alpha/1/1 casualty evacuation.

  *

  Major Frank Breth and another Marine, Major Wayne Swenson, were checking in with the Marine security guards in the bunker at the MACV Compound's southeast corner when a nearby group of Army advisors erupted in cheers and shouts of "Hey, Marines, here comes the Army!" Breth looked down the street and, to his everlasting amazement and joy, saw his lunch date, cigar-chewing Lieutenant Colonel Ed LaMontagne, leading a pair of Marine M-48 tanks right up the middle of Highway 1. "Take another look," Breth shouted back at his Army colleagues, "Those are U.S. Marine tanks!"

  As soon as Lieutenant Colonel LaMontagne could break away from a covey of proud, back-slapping fellow Marines, he reported to Colonel George Adkisson, the MACV Advisory Team 3 commander. LaMontagne filled the Army colonel in on the progress of the moving fight involving Alpha/1/1. He urgently requested that Adkisson dispatch trucks to help evacuate the Marine infantry company's many casualties. Adkisson, who had been under enormous strain all night, briefly hesitated. Before he could recover, a handful of Marine officers—Major Breth, Major Swenson, Captain Jim Coolican, and two or three others— simply commandeered two trucks, including a Navy stake-bed truck that happened to be parked near the MACV gate.

  Accompanied by one of the Marine tanks, the Marines drove hell-bent down Highway 1 to the southeastern edge of the built-up area, where Marines from Alpha/1/1 and Golf/2/5 were still engaged in sporadic exchanges with unseen NVA soldiers. There were wounded and dead Marines all over the place, but mainly in a roadside ditch at the northeastern edge of the cane field. Someone called out that there were wounded Marines around a walled compound halfway out in the cane field. The stake-bed truck, with most of the Marine officers aboard, plunged into the open and roared down the exposed causeway.

  The rescuers found a knot of leaderless, bypassed Alpha/ 1/1 riflemen in the ditch beside the compound—the Thua Thien Provincial Police headquarters—about halfway back along the exposed causeway. As the officers jumped down to the roadway, Major Frank Breth, who had commanded a Marine infantry company at Con Thien during the height of the siege, noticed how jumpy the Marine riflemen were; he had never seen troops as jumpy. Before Breth could say anything, Lieutenant Colonel LaMontagne pointed at the men in the ditch and said to Breth, "You get those guys together." At that instant, NVA soldiers, hunkered down along the southwestern edge of the cane field, opened fire. "Shit," LaMontagne bellowed. Breth looked at LaMontagne's outstretched arm and saw where a bullet had grazed along the pointing finger. "Holy shit," the normally sanguine LaMontagne screeched, "they're shooting at us!"

  Under dwindling fire, the officers got the trucks turned around and helped the Marines in the ditch load their wounded comrades aboard. Then everyone headed northwest, to the built-up area. There the Marine infantrymen went their own way, to help their comrades establish a base of fire and collect, treat, and protect even more casualties. The two trucks with the wounded men aboard drove straight through to the MACV dispensary, where Advisory Team 3's only surgeon, Captain Steve Bernie, and his medics were already hard-pressed in the battle to save lives.

  *

  It is probable that the last Americans to leave the causeway were Lieutenant Colonel Mark Gravel and his jeep driver. After getting Captain Gordon Batcheller and several other casualties on their way toward Phu Bai, the two worked slowly northwest­ward on foot
, searching both sides of the road for more hidden men. They found no one else, and, eventually, Gravel realized that there was no one behind him. He thought of going back with his driver to fetch their abandoned jeep, but, on quick reflection, that seemed like a really lousy idea. Fearful that his powerful battalion radio might fall into the wrong hands, Gravel found a Marine who was carrying an M-72 LAAW antitank missile and ordered him to blow up the jeep. This was done.

  Gravel next set out to find Gunnery Sergeant J L Canley, the acting Alpha/1/1 commander. On the way up the street, Gravel encountered Sergeant Alfredo Gonzalez, who was grinning widely over the outcome of several wild encounters in which he had prevailed. Eventually, Gravel found Gunny Canley. The huge noncom was standing in the middle of the roadway, oblivious to the bullets that spattered all around him, directing the clearing of an NVA-occupied building. Gravel and Canley were among the last Marines to close on the MACV Compound.

  The failure of the 804th NVA Battalion to press its advan­tage in numbers on MACV in the predawn January 31 assault was understandable. The NVA unit had simply been outfought. What seems incomprehensible is that the commander of the 4th NVA Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Van, did not rein­force the 804th NVA Battalion or, at least, order the battalion commander to isolate the compound from the outside. Seemingly more incomprehensible is the NVA's failure to close Highway 1, an eminently easy task. After all, the 810th NVA Battalion was on hand to observe and harass Alpha/1/1 and Golf/2/5 as they entered the city. Why did the NVA take no measures to seal Highway 1? Because doing so had not been part of the 810th NVA Battalion's mission.

  As if the battlefield failures were not enough, the vaunted Communist intelligence-gathering assets had completely over­looked an isolated and unprotected U.S. Army cryptocommunications relay center south of MACV and west of Highway 1. As a result, MACV and the 1st ARVN Division CP never lost contact with outside agencies, an extremely important advantage in the long run.