Fire in the Streets

by Eric Hammel

  The initial phase of 2/5's assault would go off from right to left. In all its details, the plan was a classic scheme for attacking into a fortified area. The only problem was that no one present had ever undertaken such an attack in as intimidating a built-up area as that faced by the battalion that afternoon.

  For several good reasons, Captain Ron Christmas's Hotel/ 2/5 was slated to launch the first attack. The company had been inside the university overnight, and, presumably, the troops and their leaders had had an opportunity to study the buildings immediately to the southwest, chiefly the Provincial Public Health Complex, which was centered on a stoutly built two-story main building standing behind a row of lower buildings. The complex was across Ly Thuong Kiet Street, the northwest-south­east thoroughfare to 2/5's immediate front. Covering fire could be effectively placed on the objectives by Hotel/2/5 weapons and riflemen occupying upper-story rooms overlooking the objective.

  In Lieutenant Colonel Cheatham's studies of the night be­fore, he had learned that the way to move through urban terrain was to seize one building at a time through a rigorous application of cover-and-search tactics—a combination of target suppression from a base of fire and swift assault of the objective by a maneu­ver element. Thus, in the classic manner of infantry attacks, one platoon of Hotel/2/5, operating within the university, was to suppress the enemy fire while another platoon attacked at street level, clearing one building at a time until all the day's objectives had been seized. The third platoon would be held in reserve, for use as needed in target suppression or exploitation of the assault.

  Captain Mike Downs's Fox/2/5, which needed some time to infiltrate and blast its way through the buildings between Highway 1 and Ly Thuong Kiet Street, was initially to support Hotel/2/5's attack. The plan called for Fox/2/5 to place flank­ing fire on Hotel/2/5's objectives and suppress enemy fire from the formidable building that it would be facing directly across Ly Thuong Kiet: the National Treasury. When Hotel/2/5 had taken its initial objectives—the low buildings fronting Ly Thuong Kiet—Fox/2/5 was to attack straight across the street and seize the treasury.

  If there was a flaw in the scheme, it was that no provision had been made to secure the buildings to Fox/2/5's left. The failure of repeated attacks down Tran Cao Van Street by Golf/ 2/5 and Fox/2/5 on February 1 had left the NVA in possession of the city block bounded by Highway 1, Ly Thuong Kiet Street, Tran Cao Van Street, and Nguyen Tri Phuong Street. The two main building complexes occupying that block were the Jeanne d' Arc Private Girls' High School and Le Loi Primary School. The latter, which bordered Ly Thuong Kiet Street, was filled with NVA and commanded a clear field of fire to the northwest, right across 2/5's front. This block was to be 1/1's initial objective, but Mark Gravel's two-company battalion was not scheduled to sally out of MACV until the next morning.

  *

  It took two hours for Fox/2/5 to get into position opposite the treasury and the post office, which was next door to the treasury. In that time, the 3.5-inch rocket launchers were distrib­uted to Marines who knew how to fire them, and everyone received a gas mask. Ammunition of all types was distributed, and all hands received a fair share of the limited supply of hand grenades, including CS tear-gas grenades.

  At 1545 the lead fire team of Hotel/2/5's 2nd Platoon jumped off against the low structures fronting the Public Health complex. Captain Ron Christmas, who was a very sharp thinker, had reasoned that the best way to get troops across a street that was under enemy observation was to fill the street with smoke, thus obscuring the enemy's vista. So, the first thing the attacking platoons and Hotel/2/5's 60mm mortars did was "pop smoke"—heave smoke grenades and fire smoke rounds into Ly Thuong Kiet Street. Since there was a steady breeze off the river, to the right, the smoke tended to blow toward the left, across the front of the treasury and post office and more or less into the faces of the NVA in Le Loi Primary School. That should have done the job, but the NVA were not slackers. They saw the smoke billow up from the street, and they fired into it—blindly, to be sure, but quite effectively. Everyone in Hotel/2/5's lead fire team piled back into the university building.

  The 81mm and 60mm mortars set in around the university courtyard were put into action, albeit against targets beyond the enemy front line, which was only just across the street. Even so, the 81mm mortar gunners had to employ extraordinary skill to fire at ranges far less than those their weapons were designed to reach.

  *

  Not all the NVA positions could be covered from the univer­sity windows, so Captain Christmas ordered Corporal Bob Meadows's squad of the 1st Platoon to get up on the roof and fire down into the NVA-held buildings that dominated Ly Thuong Kiet Street. As Meadows rousted his squad out of the upper-story rooms it was occupying, Captain Christmas sent three two-man 3.5-inch rocket teams and two two-man M-60 machine-gun teams to join him.

  Many rungs of the fire-escape ladder to the roof had been torn out, so the heavily burdened Marines had to shinny up part of the 25-foot ladder. When they got to the roof, they found a huge open area, covered with ceramic tiles and devoid of any cover except for a calf-high cement perimeter wall.

  Immediately, Corporal Meadows started the rocket teams and M-60s to work against known targets directly across the street, around the company's objective. For all the height the reinforced squad had gained, however, there were NVA weapons aplenty that were able to reach them. This forced Meadows to keep the weapons teams and all his riflemen and grenadiers on the move, evading fire as well as taking on more targets than there were Marines to cover.

  After only a few minutes on the university roof, Bob Mead­ows saw three enemy RPG teams climb onto a roof across the way. Before he could get any of his men to bear on the new danger, the NVA rocketmen had hidden themselves.

  About five minutes into the exchange, Corporal Meadows leaned out over the concrete railing in time to see a man dart across the street and take cover behind a wrecked Volkswagen truck. Meadows fired several M-16 rounds into the truck, coax­ing the man back into the open. As the Kentucky-raised game hunter was drawing a bead on the man, he saw that his target sported a long white beard. Just in time, Meadows eased the pressure on the trigger and allowed the civilian elder to enter the university compound.

  After about ten lucky minutes of running his reinforced squad back and forth across the roof without sustaining any casualties, Corporal Meadows lay down behind the low concrete fence. On either side, riflemen were firing into one of the tall buildings across the way. Meadows, who had just armed himself with an M-79 grenade launcher, was about to fire at the same building when he saw out of the corner of his eye that a civilian news cameraman had appeared in the open behind him. As the squad leader turned to go toward the newsman—he had warned the man off the fire-swept roof twice already—a B-40 rocket detonated right against the concrete railing. Equally as dangerous as the shrapnel from the RPG were the shards of cement and ceramic roofing tile the explosives had blasted into the air.

  Corporal Meadows was facing the cameraman, so he was not touched, but he saw that one of the riflemen who had been lying beside him had a faceful of bloody shrapnel wounds. A glance at the other Marine revealed that he, too, had been badly wounded. In fact, his throat had been cut by shrapnel. Instantly, Meadows leaned down to close the gaping throat wound and called "Corps-man, up!" Then he started dragging the Marine with the throat wound out of the line of fire. Plenty of helping hands arrived, the two Marines were quickly treated on the roof, and both were gingerly lowered by rope down the wrecked ladder. No sooner done, however, than another Marine was struck in the face by shrapnel from a B-40 rocket or 60mm mortar round. Once again, Corporal Meadows pulled the wounded man to the rear.

  As soon as the third wounded Marine had been lowered down the fire escape, Meadows yelled down that he needed more 3.5-inch rockets, right away. Then he ran forward to find his radioman. He saw him, and was about to give him a message to relay, when the lights went out. Bob Meadows was engulfed in an RPG blast and k
nocked unconscious.

  When Corporal Bob Meadows regained consciousness, it was late in the evening and he was aboard a medevac chopper bound for Phu Bai. Though he had sustained numerous shrapnel wounds in the head and back, he would be back with Hotel/2/5 within a week.

  *

  While the drama on the roof was unfolding, Private First Class Peter Murray, of Hotel/2/5's 2nd Platoon, was firing at the treasury from a window in the south corner of the university. As Murray and his comrades fired, Murray heard the racket of a Marine M-48 tank trundling up Truong Dinh Street. When the tank nosed out into Ly Thuong Kiet Street, its turret was hit by a hail of green .51-caliber tracer rounds. The tank stopped, and its turret turned toward the source of the fire. Then the tank commander's cupola-mounted .50-caliber machine gun spat a concise response in orange tracer. The NVA machine gun ceased firing, but a B-40 rocket streaked out of a building to the tank's right front, and it struck the tank obliquely on the thickly ar­mored glacis plate, right in front of the driver. Momentarily cheered by the arrival of the tank and its deadly cool response to the NV heavy machine gun, Private First Class Murray was disappointed to see the behemoth grind back up Truong Dinh in reverse.

  As Private First Class Murray watched the tank recede, the lead fire team of his squad—part of Staff Sergeant Johnny Miller's 2nd Platoon—was already running across Ly Thuong Kiet. Murray wasn't sure what was going on, but he instinctively followed.

  The nearest safe haven Murray spotted was a low masonry building he had watched throughout the previous night. Then, Murray had seen a number of people moving around inside the structure. Now, as he charged through the front door, he saw a dead civilian sprawled on the floor. The Marines ahead of Murray were already through the building, so he barreled down a hallway and charged out the back door. There was a shed in the yard, and Murray ducked into its doorway. From there, he fired three or four magazines at a building across a narrow side street, the Public Health Building itself. Murray's squad leader was firing his Ml6 from a few meters away, and his fire team's M-79 grenadier was blooping out 40mm fragmentation grenades as fast as he could load and fire.

  Murray had no idea if the other Marines had actually seen any targets; he was just following their lead. It was dawning on him that there was no return fire, when he felt like someone had punched him in the neck. Instantly, Murray realized that he had already heard a bullet strike the door frame in which he was standing, and another bullet had struck somewhere behind him. One of those bullets had ricocheted into Murray's neck. By then, Murray was sprawled on the lawn in front of the shed. Before he had sorted through the past second's events, his fire-team leader was helping him to his feet.

  The next thing Murray knew, he was up and running around the corner of the shed. There he found a corpsman, who looked at the bruise on his neck. "There are probably some bullet fragments in there," the doc said, and he ordered Murray to return to the company aid station for treatment. Murray ran back through the house and dashed across the street to the university. When he reached the aid station, he found the docs treating about a dozen Marines, including the unconscious Corporal Bob Meadows and four members of Meadows's squad. When the company's senior doc finally got around to Murray, about twenty minutes later, he told the rifleman that he would have to return to Phu Bai for treatment. However, the doc said, the medevac choppers were reserved for men with serious wounds, so Murray would have to wait until a truck convoy returned to Phu Bai, probably in the morning. The neck wounds were cleaned and dressed, and Peter Murray was left to his own devices for the night.

  *

  Staff Sergeant Miller's 2nd Platoon pressed its dogged advance on the Public Health Building for nearly an hour against stiff NVA small-arms fire. The platoon actually entered the NVA stronghold at 1758 and had it cleared out by 1855. However, at 1924, the victory was negated by orders from Captain Christmas to return to the university. Fox/2/5 had failed to secure its objective, and, as a result, Miller's platoon could not risk spend­ing the night in its advanced and insupportable position. Miller's troops reluctantly pulled back across Ly Thuong Kiet Street in the dark and helped man Hotel/2/5's night defensive position around the perimeter of the university.

  Fox/2/5 had indeed failed to seize its objective, the mas­sively built treasury building, but it certainly had given its all trying.

  ***

  Chapter 17

  When Hotel/2/5 jumped off against the Public Health Complex at 1545, Captain Mike Downs's Fox/2/5 was still getting set in among the buildings and courtyards on the northeast side of Ly Thuong Kiet Street, facing the treasury and post office com­pounds. The plan was for Hotel/2/5 to get established on the southwest side of Ly Thuong Kiet before Fox/2/5 jumped off in its attack. However, when Hotel/2/5 was initially rebuffed and no solution seemed to be readily at hand, Fox/2/5 was ordered to cross the street whatever way it could.

  The National Treasury was the place they kept the money. It was every bit as physically and psychologically imposing as anyone would imagine. From the northeast side of Ly Thuong Kiet Street, it looked as impregnable as a kid's fantasy of Fort Knox.

  The objective was a flat-roofed structure of two-and-a-half stories. The building was set in behind a courtyard fronted by a knee-high masonry wall topped by a fence of upright wrought-iron stakes. The gate in the center of the front wall was also composed of wrought-iron stakes. NVA machine guns were set into several of the sandbagged windows in the top story and, apparently, in ventilation ports along the uppermost half story. No one could even guess how many NVA were inside the huge structure, nor what they had done to fortify the interior.

  The tactical problems facing Fox/2/5 were many and com­plex. Except for the university, to the right, there were no high buildings northeast of Ly Thuong Kiet from which the Marines could fire down into the treasury courtyard. No one knew for certain what lay right behind the courtyard wall, but it was known that, whenever possible, NVA soldiers dug their neat little fighting holes right along the base of a wall. If Fox/2/5 Marines breached the courtyard and got as far as the front door, no one knew what they would face inside. No one had a diagram of the interior, but it was safe to assume that there would be built-in interior defenses designed specifically to thwart robbers.

  On top of everything else, Fox/2/5's intentionally delayed attack across Ly Thuong Kiet Street revealed that at least one NV .51-caliber machine gun in the Le Loi Primary School, to the company's left rear, had the street covered. Thus, any attack across the street would be made under observed fire from the well-hidden machine gun on the left flank. The farther out into the street the attackers got, the better targets they would become.

  Lieutenant Donald Hausrath's 3rd Platoon was slated to lead the Fox/2/5 attack into the treasury. After leading the way out of MACV, the platoon had blown and blasted its way through a hotel and several small buildings until it came out into a court­yard directly facing the treasury gate. Fortunately for the men in the 3rd Platoon, a head-high masonry wall stopped the hail of small-arms fire that greeted the point fire team as it entered the courtyard.

  The job looked impossible. There were NVA out there, but no one could see them. Before anyone was going to be willing to cross the street, the entire treasury complex would have to be softened up with whatever high-explosive ordnance Fox/2/5 could wangle. Over time, that amounted to a mere twenty 81mm mortar rounds fired from the university courtyard and another twenty 60mm mortar rounds fired directly from the 3rd Pla­toon's rear. The results of the mortar fire could not be observed, but there was no lessening in the NVA fire. In fact, in response to the Marine mortar fire, the NVA started working out with their own 60mm mortars.

  Fox/2/5 Marines in second-story windows of the buildings facing the Treasury, which housed the Jeanne d'Arc chemistry lab and a music room, fired a preparation amounting to over thirty 3.5-inch rockets, fifteen LAAWs, fifty M-79 grenades, and thou­sands of 5.56mm and 7.62mm bullets from M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns. The 3.5-inch rocket
s were the only weapons that seemed to do any real damage to the thick treasury walls. The LAAWs could punch through the walls, but they didn't have much effect beyond making holes. The M-79 grenades were about as effective as golf balls would have been; they had zero penetrating power. All the small-arms ammunition that was expended probably just made the Marines feel better.

  *

  As the 3rd Platoon's preparations mounted, Lieutenant Hausrath emerged from the chemistry building and told his troop leaders in the courtyard that Captain Downs wanted one man to cross the street to find out if there was any way into the treasury compound other than through the heavily defended front gate. Among the squad leaders listening to Hausrath was Lance Corporal Bernie Burnham.

  Burnham was not your average lance corporal. He was thirty-one years old, three years older than Captain Downs, and a decade or more older than all the other men in his squad. He had been a Marine in the mid-1950s and had risen to sergeant. Then he had gotten out and found a high-paying job in the New York City area. He had never given any serious thought to return­ing to the Marine Corps until, less than a year earlier, he had become enraged over an antiwar protest in Central Park. On the spur of the moment, Burnham had reenlisted as a private and started on his way to Vietnam and Fox/2/5.