by Albracht, William; Wolf, Marvin; Galloway, Joseph L. (FRW)
I moved up and took the point.
I understood that I was about to die. But it had to be done, and there was no one else. My carbine was slung beneath my right arm and held waist-high on full automatic, my finger resting on the trigger. I gripped the radio handset in my left hand.
“Follow me,” I said, and stepped into the night.
At a rapid walk, I led the column into and then through the gap, well aware that it was a textbook example of a perfect ambush choke point.
As the troops moved past me and into the open, Tex and I remained at the mouth of the gap until Pierelli, who I had stationed near the middle of the column, relieved me. His job was to ensure that the troops stayed together and kept moving. Because I was all but certain that the enemy would come up behind us, I instructed Dan to form a small rear guard to cover our withdrawal. He was the one man that I was comfortable entrusting with this vital task.
In earlier clear radio traffic with Spooky and Shadow about our planned escape, I tried to make sure that they knew our precise route. This was critical, because we expected one or the other to fire its miniguns ahead of us. My plan was to bring our column across the open space toward Ambush Hill, and then descend to the west, or left, of the hilltop, thereby avoiding what I believed was the heaviest enemy concentration, then link up with the waiting Mike Force.
Now, unexpectedly, I found myself near the gap and out of position to direct the point man. I had briefed him on the importance of turning leftward out of the gap, and then to pass to the left of Ambush Hill’s wooded summit. In the darkness, however, I couldn’t tell if the man who had minutes earlier frozen was still on point, or if someone had taken his place. Guided by the hand of God, he led the column to the east, or right, of Ambush Hill. I was annoyed and worried, until I realized that without Spooky overhead to clear the way, the exact route was less important than avoiding contact.
And by this time, the main body of the column was committed and moving rightward. In a few minutes, we passed close to the top of Ambush Hill; had an enemy force been concealed in the trees and brush near the summit, it was so dark that we could not have seen them.
But there was neither sign nor sound of the enemy as we started down the slope toward the wood line near where, three days earlier, my patrol had been ambushed and the point man mortally wounded. The head of the column entered thick, pitch-black jungle, dimpled here and there with deep bomb craters, many fringed by the battered remnants of trees—King Kong’s obstacle course, with giant toothpicks haphazardly studded across it. In minutes, the troops were dangerously disorganized and scattered everywhere. Pierelli and I began grabbing men, pushing or pulling them back into the column, trying to restore order and discipline. By remaining at the jungle’s edge, we got the men headed away from Kate in a northerly, downhill direction, making sure that each followed the boots in front of him.
I got on the radio and called the Mike Force element waiting below us to advise them that I was about to enter their perimeter.
No answer.
A moment later, SAS Major Brydon, the commander of both Mike Force battalions in the vicinity, replied from Bu Prang.
No Mike Force troops awaited us below Ambush Hill, he said.
They were miles away, to the northwest, and we would have to find them.
I was pissed, but before I could react to this shocker, great green balls of fire came hurtling down the slope, just over our heads, and the stuttering roar of a heavy machine gun broke the silence. I thought that Spooky was firing on us.
I yelled, “Cease fire!” into the radio. The Skyraider pilot came back that Spooky was not firing and wasn’t yet on station. Then, through the foliage, I saw that the fire was coming from the top of Ambush Hill.
Warren Geromin: “We were trying to avoid a North Vietnamese .51-caliber [12.7 mm] machine gun, and when that opened up, oh man, it was like a flaming thing with green tracer rounds like strobe lights that just lit up! We were close enough to see the muzzle flashes—I could almost see the crew members on the gun—something dark, moving around. We stopped and somebody poked me and said, ‘Geromin, open fire,’ and I thought, Wait a minute; something’s not right. Then the gun opened up again and I could see through that green light that our guys were between me and the gun—we were going downhill. If I had fired, I’d have gotten them first. Then the Yards who were near the gun started throwing hand grenades at it. Someone yelled that the enemy was shelling us, and we tried to run but couldn’t get far because there were so many bomb craters there at the bottom of the hill and it was pitch-dark.
“So I did something that we’d been told never to do—if we got lost, we weren’t supposed to light anything, but because everything was so messed up, I lit a cigarette lighter real quick, because nobody was expecting to see a North Vietnamese soldier who was speaking English. Someone recognized me. He said, ‘Okay, put out the lights; we’ll have to figure this one out.’”
“There were a couple of areas where the ground was mush,” recalls Pierelli. “When a bomb hits, it really breaks up the ground, so there were times when we would walk into and out of a crater. About a half hour into this, once we scattered in there, I heard somebody yell, ‘Sarge, Sarge!’ When we were on the hill, we knew where our people were, who was with whom, so they knew where I was. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ [An unidentified American soldier] said, ‘We’re lost! I can’t find the people up front—I lost them!’
“I gathered everybody around and said, ‘Look, be quiet, here’s what we’re going to do: I’m going to go first; the man behind me is going to grab my web gear. Everybody hold on to the person in front of you, and we’re going to do that until everybody’s hooked up. Under no conditions do you let go.’ I also told them that we had to be completely quiet so that we could hear the enemy; you learn that in basic, that sound travels farther at night. I listened, and off in the distance I heard somebody walking, breaking brush. So I started going, and about every thirty or forty steps I’d stop, I’d listen; we were getting a little closer. I did that about five or six times and found the guys up front, but I wanted to make sure that I was following the right people,” Pierelli continues.
“I could hear English being spoken, so I went up to whoever it was, an artillery guy, but by that time we were walking away from that machine gun, we were moving about ninety degrees away from him, we were distancing ourselves from the enemy. We started this E&E about 2000 hours, full darkness, but fortunately it wasn’t pitch-black; otherwise it could’ve been a real disaster.”
About then, Mike Smith, very near to Pierelli in the darkness, was having second thoughts about being in the dark jungle. “The night belongs to Charlie,” he says. “We’d learned that. And I’m an artillery guy. I’ve never walked around in a jungle in a combat situation. We were all afraid, but we’re not stupid; we knew that we had to do something, that we had to keep going.”
Koon: “Before we left, Captain Albracht told us, ‘If we take fire, don’t shoot back. They might be trying to recon by fire. They may not know where we are, but if we shoot back, then they’ll know.’ Some of the guys had left their M16 and everything else. They walked off with nothing. Once the flare went out, we started down the hill and we’re out [where Ambush Hill descends into the jungle] and a machine gun opens up on us.
“Some of the Montagnards were afraid to go into the jungle. They didn’t know what was in there, but they knew we were surrounded. But once that machine gun opened up, those Montagnards beat feet for the tree line.
“Albracht had to try to stop them and all of us. We ran into the tree line and guys were yelling, ‘US!’ to let them know that we were Americans and which ones were Montagnards. Then we’re down in the jungle and the tracers are going over our heads because they couldn’t get their barrel down low enough to hit us. We hit the dirt, and then this guy, a staff sergeant, laid his M16 across my arm and opens up, trying to hit that damned
machine gun. Somebody said cease fire to him, and he stopped.”
I believe that Koon is correct: After I realized that it wasn’t Spooky, I recognized the gun firing at us as a PAVN 12.7 mm, a crew-served machine gun. But why was this tripod-mounted weapon firing over our heads? It had to be because, like the GI version that it was modeled on, that big, heavy gun was attached to a traversing and elevating mechanism. That supported the heavier end, and allowed the gunner to sight and zero in on distant targets, and return to them later. This T&E device has a limited amount of vertical travel, both up and down, and the steep angle at which our hillside declined exceeded the limits of the mechanism. In simple terms, the PAVN gunner couldn’t lower the weapon’s muzzle far enough to hit us. Had the crew known in advance that it was going to be firing that low, of course, they could have dug out the hillside and sited their gun properly. That makes me think that they had hastily moved the gun from where they had set up, on the other flank of Ambush Hill.
I still shudder to think what would have happened if the point man had followed my original plan. Had we gone to the west side of Ambush Hill, our column would have presented itself head-on to that gun. The gunners could have fired down the length or our line, which then would have been stretched almost back to the gap. A single bullet from a 12.7 mm can tear a man’s arm from his body. It can punch through the torsos of four or five adults standing one behind the next. With the PAVN assault force coming down behind us from the south, we would have been caught in a crossfire. I doubt that any of us would have survived.
But that was not to be our fate.
Despite the ineffectiveness of their fire, those frightening green tracers caused the men in our column to panic. Men began crashing pell-mell through the brush. I raced ahead to take the lead of the main body, yelling for them to continue northward along the tree line. As I had a little earlier, I grabbed every trooper I could find and pushed him in the direction of the column. Behind me, Pierelli was doing the same.
I had supposed that his security squad was covering our back side, but at that point in our hegira, it was all that he could do to round up our guys and get them moving in the right direction. For those few minutes of half-panicked confusion as we came off Ambush Hill, we had no rear guard.
“We withdrew from the edge of the grassy slope about 20 meters or so into the jungle and got ourselves organized,” recalls Bob Johnson. “The captain said that we wouldn’t be able to see each other in the darkness, but it was very important that we stay together, be soundless, no whispering or talking. We had to walk as quietly as we could possibly walk. He told us to check our gear to make sure that nothing was rattling. Then he said that we should keep one hand on the shoulder of the man in front of us. But first, he told us to get down on your knees and brush aside the litter on the jungle floor. ‘Dig deep down into the rotted leaves. They’re phosphorescent. Put some of them on the back of the person in front of you so that if your hand slips off, you’ll be able to see them.’
“And that worked like a charm,” Johnson added.
Koon was having his own problems in the dark, repeatedly stumbling over unexploded mortar rounds and rockets, well aware that stepping on one in the wrong place might cause it to explode. “Once we hit the tree line, I think the B-52s must have been along in here because we were falling into bomb craters. You couldn’t see very well because it was pitch-dark and then we looked at the ground and a lot of the tree leaves were glowing, and I thought, my God, what if it was some kind of chemical from the bombs? We put it on the back of our helmets and then the guy behind us could see where we were. It was pretty good for that.”
• • •
ONCE I found the head of the column, I moved forward as quickly as the darkness and terrain would allow. After several minutes, I stopped to regroup and reassess the situation. Smith and Zollner took a head count of their artillerymen; two were missing. My striker leaders said that when the automatic fire began, several of their troops had separated from the main body. There was no way to look for them in the thick jungle blackness without endangering everyone else. I could only hope that the missing GIs had joined company with the missing strikers and that they would all find their way back to Bu Prang safely. Frankly, that was an awful lot to hope for.
I still expected to link up with Mike Force, but I was no longer sure where we were or even where they were. Spooky was finally on station, however, so I told Alabama where the PAVN heavy machine gun was sited, a location he knew well from previous missions, and that there were no more friendlies on Kate. Almost immediately, Spooky’s miniguns began ripping up the terrain on Ambush Hill and then on Kate itself. I received word by radio that more aircraft were en route to pound Kate.
We took advantage of the noise from Spooky’s engines and miniguns to mask the sounds of our passage through thick jungle as we put space between us and Ambush Hill. When I thought that we were far enough north—more a feeling than any sense of the actual distance—I turned, and we began moving westward. I had a vague sense of where the rescue force was dug in—little more than a hunch, my guess of about where I saw the helicopters touch down, and a look at my map—but based on what I was told before leaving Kate, I still expected to find a Mike Force element in the immediate vicinity of our abandoned hilltop.
I know that the enemy was all around us; when I could no longer hear Spooky, I halted the column to listen. After several seconds, an almost infinitesimal change in air pressure, the suggestion of a phantom breeze, brushed my face. The tiniest of vibrations nudged the soles of my feet. Then came the faint, softly rhythmic scrape of feet treading hard earth.
I signaled DOWN! and we all fell forward, a row of dominos collapsing front to back. The sound grew louder. As I pressed my body into the earth, the vibration was more intense, but still barely discernible.
To our left, through the foliage, was a darker darkness, movement where there should be none.
Men rushed by in the jungle only about ten meters away, moving eastward in a closely bunched column stretching several hundred yards and parallel to our column, following some hidden path cut, tunnellike, through the foliage.
The Mike Force?
Whispering, I radioed and said that if they are on the move, we were now on their immediate left.
The Mike Force replied: “We are dug in.” Definitely not moving.
Then the men marching past us, close enough that we could smell the sour odor of their unwashed bodies, must be PAVN.
All we could do was lie prone on the jungle floor, listening to the sound of our own breathing and feeling the drum beating in our chest as we waited for all those troops—hundreds, I believe—to pass—a long and very scary time.
When they had disappeared into the night, I waited a few minutes more, against the surprise of a rear guard trailing the main body.
Finally, I signaled everyone to get to their feet. That simple act generated enough noise to make me wait another few minutes, to wait until it was completely quiet except for the normal sounds of a jungle at night: insects engaging in six-legged social networking, the high-pitched twitters and haunting calls of night birds, the faint croak of tree frogs. In the distance, some creature—perhaps a wild pig, or maybe even a tiger or a leopard— made an odd sound, something between a grunt and a cough.
Humans, of course, both grunt and cough.
I waited another few minutes, then called Mike Force again. This time they sent coded grid coordinates of their position.
I could only hope that they were as good at map reading as I thought I was.
At my signal, the column resumed its slow, stealthy trek through the jungle. I navigated by compass, stopping from time to time to check the azimuth, and keeping a rough count of my paces to give me some idea of how much ground we had covered. Except for an occasional glimpse of the starry sky, we were in almost total darkness. Each step I took was slow and deliberate. My boot-shod
toes felt for the ground, trying to avoid a root that I might trip over, or making noise by crushing a twig.
I also hoped that I wouldn’t step on a cobra, a tree viper, a krait—any of the thirty poisonous snake species living in this jungle. Or that some twenty-foot-long Burmese python wouldn’t drop from a tree to wrap itself around my chest and crush the life out of me.
“There was no sign or sound of any humans as we continued up and over hills, and through streams,” recalls Bob Johnson. “We climbed a hilltop and there was an open field with an old, French colonial–style house. Even though we were in triple-canopied jungle, we could look past the trees and see the plantation buildings.”
Moving even a small group with stealth in such terrain is agonizingly slow and difficult—and, as I now learned with a large group, virtually impossible. Nevertheless, we continued our slow progress, each step made with purpose, at all times knowing that we risked not only our own fate but the lives of our buddies.
Forty miles away, at Camp Coryell, the northern of BMT’s airfields, Les Davison was in the 155th AHC operations center. “I’d just returned from flying some mission,” he recalls. “Somebody told me that Kate had been evacuated and the guys were walking out, through the jungle. My first thought was that we’d be lucky if we saw any of those guys alive.”
There’s a Legion that never was ’listed,
That carries no colours or crest,
But, split in a thousand detachments,
Is breaking the road for the rest.
Our fathers they left us their blessing—
They taught us, and groomed us, and crammed;
But we’ve shaken the Clubs and the Messes
To go and find out and be damned