We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

by Harold G. Moore

  “Then he dropped facedown on the ground. Lieutenant Taft was hit. I didn’t realize how bad till I rolled him over. He was shot in the throat and the round had ricocheted down and came out his left side. He was dead and it was difficult to roll him over, even though he was a slightly built man.”

  Captain Nadal says, “The enemy on the mountain started moving down rapidly in somewhat uncoordinated attacks. They streamed down the hill and down the creekbed. The enemy knew the area. They came down the best-covered route. The 3rd Platoon was heavily engaged and the volume of firing reached a crescendo on my left. At this time I lost radio contact with Taft’s platoon.”

  In the center of that fury, Bob Hazen struggled and rolled his dead platoon leader over. “He was gone and there was nothing we could do. The first thing I thought of was what they taught me: Never let the enemy get his hands on a map or the signals codebook. I got those from Lieutenant Taft and was kneeling over to try to pull his body back. That’s when my radio was hit and the shrapnel from the radio hit me in the back of the head. It didn’t really hurt; all of a sudden I was just laying facedown on the ground next to Lieutenant Taft. I felt something running down my neck, reached back, and came out with a handful of blood.” Carmen Miceli was on Hazen’s right: “We knew what had happened. The word passed fast: ‘They got Lieutenant Taft!’”

  Lieutenant Wayne O. Johnson’s 1st Platoon of Alpha Company was just to the right of Taft’s men. Johnson’s platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Troy Miller, recalls: “We could see the enemy go after the 3rd Platoon like crazy. It was a more exposed area than we were in and the North Vietnamese had a better-covered and [better-] concealed route into them. The enemy was well camouflaged and you could barely see them because their khaki uniform and hats of the same color blended in well with the brownish-yellow grass. They all seemed very well disciplined and did not seem to have any fear of dying at all.”

  This was a very critical time. Whichever side owned that dry creekbed, with its cover and concealment, owned the open area where the Hueys were landing. We had to hold that creekbed, and it had come down to Nadal and his men to do it, face-to-face with a very aggressive enemy.

  Like every other unit in the battalion, the 3rd Platoon’s weapons squad was understrength. It had two M-60 machine-gun teams, each authorized a gunner, an assistant gunner, and two ammunition bearers. In reality, one team was down to three men, the other to only two. One team consisted of the gunner, Specialist 4 Russell E. Adams, twenty-three, of Shoemakersville, Pennsylvania; assistant gunner Specialist 4 Bill Beck, twenty-two, of Steelton, Pennsylvania; and ammunition carrier PFC John Wunderly. Russell Adams was exactly fourteen days short of completing his Army obligation when he landed in X-Ray. At five feet eight inches tall and 145 pounds, Adams was small but wiry; he handled the heavy M-60 machine gun with ease. Beck was six foot two, lean and hard. The other M-60 crew was made up of Specialist 4 Theron Ladner, twenty-two, a tall, thin native of Biloxi, Mississippi, and his assistant gunner, PFC Rodriguez E. Rivera.

  Bill Beck says Russell Adams was his best buddy, a calm, soft-spoken man with big hands. “He didn’t talk much, never bitched—just oiled his M-60,” Beck says, adding: “We moved toward the creekbed after chow. Suddenly fire was everywhere and Jerry Kirsch, three yards directly in front of me, got hit with machine-gun fire and dropped screaming, rolling on his back, yelling for his mother. That scared the shit out of me and I jumped to the left for cover, beside a soldier on the ground. He was in a firing position and looking at me. It was Sergeant Alexander Williams. He had a small hole in his forehead and he was dead.” Williams, twenty-four, was from Jacksonville, Florida.

  Beck says: “I jumped up as fast as I jumped down and ran forward toward Adams, who had gone past Kirsch. We were in the open about thirty yards left of the creekbed, moving parallel to it toward Chu Pong. Nobody had told us how far to go, so we kept moving. I heard Bob Hazen yelling about Lieutenant Taft getting hit. I saw him leaning over Taft when an NVA blasted him and his radio exploded into pieces. His back was to the creekbed. That all happened at once, you know, thirty seconds. We kept moving. Adams, firing from the hip, blew away an NVA aiming his AK at us through the fork of a tree.”

  Over on the east side of the creek Bob Hazen lay, briefly unconscious, beside his dead lieutenant. When he came to, he helped drag Taft’s body back to the creekbed. “We were under fire. I looked over to our right and behind us was an NVA leaning up against a tree facing it [the tree]. We had bypassed him. The medic and I saw him up tight against that tree, pith helmet on, tan uniform, pistol belt, and a weapon. I didn’t have a weapon. He looked over at us. Then somebody on my left shot him. He slammed into that tree real hard and then just crumpled.”

  That NVA soldier could well have been the man who had done a lot of damage to Nadal’s 3rd Platoon. Dead were Lieutenant Taft, Sergeant Travis Poss, Specialist 4 Albert Witcher, and Sergeant Alexander Williams. Several men were wounded, including the platoon radio operator Bob Hazen, whose PRC-25 radio had been shot to pieces. Survivors, dragging their wounded comrades, pulled back to the creekbed.

  Although they had been hit hard and had suffered several casualties, Taft’s platoon, now led by Korean War veteran Sergeant Lorenzo Nathan, stood firm and stopped the momentum of the attack. The enemy recoiled and slowly drifted off to their left still trying to find a way to flank Bravo Company. This brought them directly in front of Joe Marm’s troopers, who had been moving up to join Bravo. About eighty North Vietnamese soldiers were caught by surprise as Marm’s troopers opened up with volley after volley of grazing, point-blank machine-gun and rifle fire and heaved hand grenades into their packed ranks on their exposed right flank. Marm’s men mowed them down. Two enemy were taken prisoner.

  Several of the men still remember the curious behavior of the North Vietnamese who came under this murderous fire. Captain Tony Nadal says, “It wasn’t much of a fight; the 2nd Platoon just mowed them down.” Staff Sergeant Les Staley recalls, “Fifty NVA came right across my front and were cut down almost immediately and they did not turn and try to return our fire.” The enemy survivors fell back to their right rear, toward the creekbed. That brought them back in front of Tony Nadal’s 1st and 3rd platoons, which were now in the four-foot-deep cover of the creekbed. Again the enemy were cut down by close-range flanking fire from their right. They just kept walking into the field of fire.

  Sergeant Troy Miller of the 1st Platoon was in the thick of it: “I saw one NVA in the creekbed hit in the upper part of his body, killed by a sergeant from 3rd Platoon and a team leader from my platoon. He was no more than ten feet away. We searched his body later and found he had taken Lieutenant Taft’s dog tags.”

  Captain Nadal, out of radio contact with Taft’s platoon, moved toward the furious firing on his left flank to find out what was happening. Nadal says, “My radio operator, Sergeant Jack E. Gell, the company communications chief who had volunteered to carry one of my two radios, ran with me out of the creekbed into the open area toward Taft’s position. We ran into Sergeant Nathan and I asked him what was happening. He said the platoon had been attacked on the left flank; the left squad had taken a number of casualties and had pulled back out of the creekbed, refusing their left flank to the enemy. Nathan said Taft had been hit and was left in the creekbed.

  “That made me angry. We had been taught never to leave any wounded or dead on the battlefield. Sergeant Gell and I crawled forward of our lines to that creekbed, where the enemy were, to find Taft. We came under grenade attack from the west side of the creekbed but had some cover from a few trees. We located Taft, dead. While bringing him back we saw another soldier who had been left behind. After leaving Taft’s body with his platoon, Gell and I went back again and we picked up the other man.”

  Bill Beck and Russell Adams had by now moved about a hundred yards toward the mountain and were heavily engaged with masses of enemy thirty yards to their south and west around the creekbed. Beck says their charge into battle ha
d been eventful: “As I was chasing after Adams, above the noise of automatic fire someone yelled ‘Grenade!’ and right in front of me, less than two yards away, one of those wooden-handled potato-masher hand grenades rolled to a stop. I started to go to ground, my knees bent; then came an explosion and flash of bright-white light. I never did hit the ground and continued to move, carrying my boxes of M-60 ammo.

  “On the right, twenty yards away, was an anthill with a clump of trees on it, just outside the creekbed. American GIs were on one side and two NVA soldiers were on the other side, not five yards away from each other. I don’t think our men could see the enemy. I yelled at the top of my lungs but nobody could hear me because of the overall noise of battle. It was deafening. The only weapon I had was my .45-caliber pistol.”

  Beck says, “All this time I had been jumping, dodging, hitting the dirt, and moving forward with Adams. Now I pulled my .45 and fired the entire clip of seven rounds at the left side of that anthill and both of the enemy dropped. Adams called for ammo, and I moved up with him beside a little tree. We were now the forwardmost position. I was feeding belt after belt of 7.62mm ammunition into the gun. We were prone and he was firing at the enemy in front and to the right. On the right about ten yards out were our buddies Theron Ladner and Rodriguez Rivera on their gun. We could hardly see them in the grass.”

  Beck adds, “I would spot movement to the front, point where, and Adams did the firing. This went on for several attacks. The enemy were zeroed in on Russ and me, their bullets hitting the tree trunk, the dirt around us, and crackling over our heads. Russ stopped those assaults and we started looking for our ammo bearer, John Wunderly. He was gone. I can remember the extreme heat and exhaustion taking hold now, like I hadn’t taken a breath the entire time. We were soaked with sweat and the sun was very hot as we lay in the brown grass, in the open with really no cover but the grass.”

  On one of his trips up to collect Taft and the wounded soldier, Captain Nadal spotted Beck and Adams on his left about twenty yards out and running toward the mountain. Beck and his gunner, Russell Adams, and the other M-60 crew ended up at least seventy-five yards out front of Alpha Company’s 3rd Platoon. Adams puts it simply: “Nobody told me to stop so I kept going.”

  In piecing together the mosaic of a confused and fast-paced fight, it is clear to me that those courageous machine gunners inflicted heavy casualties on a large North Vietnamese force that was hurrying down to reinforce the attack on Alpha Company’s left flank. Bill Beck and his buddies paid a terrible price, but virtually single-handedly they kept the enemy from turning Nadal’s left flank and driving a wedge between Alpha and Charlie companies.

  Overhead, some of the best air-support work was being done by the A-1E Skyraider, an antiquated single-engine propeller plane of Korean War vintage that proved of great worth providing tactical air support to ground troops. It was slow, but heavily armored and simply built; it delivered very accurate fire and, best of all, could hang around for up to eight hours.

  Captain Bruce M. Wallace, an enlisted man in the Korean War and a 1956 West Point graduate, was on his second Vietnam tour with the Air Force in 1965, this time flying the old “Spads,” as the A-lEs were nicknamed. Says Wallace: “The Skyraider was uniquely suited for putting ordnance on the ground at the exact time and in the precise place that the ground commander needed it. It was slow, cumbersome, ungainly, greasy and hot to fly. But you could hang everything under its wings but the kitchen sink. As fighting intensified around the Ia Drang, all available aircraft and crews of the 1st and 602nd Air Commando squadrons were committed to the mission.”

  At around two P.M. one of those A-lEs was coming in from the south just above the slope of the mountain, very low, just over the trees, on a bombing run directly over the location where the enemy was attacking from. Suddenly there was an explosion, and the Spad burst into flames. It continued on down the creekbed, trailing fire and smoke, passed directly over us and the fighting, turned back east, and staggered on for perhaps two miles before crashing in a black ball of smoke. We saw no parachute. Overhead, Captain Matt Dillon in the command ship had a clear view: “The plane caught fire, veered off and crashed to the east of X-Ray. There was an explosion and fire. We flew over to see if we could see any sign of life. Very soon after the crash a lot of enemy, twenty or thirty of them, came running to the plane. I called the Aerial Rocket ships in on them.”

  Air Force records indicate that the pilot who died in that crash was Captain Paul T. McClellan, Jr., thirty-four, of West Stayton, Oregon, who flew for the 1st Air Commando Squadron. Captain Bruce Wallace says, “Paul was probably downed by fragments of his own ordnance. We were carrying both bombs and napalm on a single aircraft, and safe separation altitude [s] for the two types of ordnance were different. It was easy to select the wrong switch in the cockpit during the heat of a low altitude mission under fire. The precise cause of that crash, however, was never officially determined.”

  Meanwhile, back at 3rd Brigade headquarters, Brigadier General Dick Knowles had been filled in on details of our rapidly developing fight. The prisoner we captured had been debriefed; he identified his unit as a battalion of the 33rd Regiment of the People’s Army. Intelligence said the 66th Regiment and the 320th Regiment were also in the vicinity. At Knowles’s urging, the division commander, Major General Harry Kinnard, flew in from headquarters at An Khe for a briefing. Says Knowles: “When General Kinnard arrived I showed him a situation map. He took one look and said, ‘What the hell are you doing in that area?’ I replied: ‘Well, General, the object of the exercise is to find the enemy and we sure as hell have.’ After an awkward pause and a few questions he said, ‘OK, it looks great. Let me know what you need.’”

  While all of this was taking place, John Herren was still desperately trying to reach Lieutenant Herrick’s cut-off platoon. His other platoons were battling a large number of enemy who had moved between them and Herrick. During the confusion, Lieutenant Bill Riddle, Herren’s artillery forward observer, made his way forward and linked up with Lieutenant Al Devney. Herren was still in the creekbed area, to the right of Nadal’s Alpha Company location, trying to get Lieutenant Joe Marm’s platoon of reinforcements linked up with Deal and Devney.

  The devastating flanking fire Nadal’s Alpha Company soldiers poured on the enemy, and the shock of the continuing artillery and air bombardment, caused the North Vietnamese ahead of Devney and Deal to reel back and slack off. This gave Lieutenant Marm and his troops the opportunity to move forward and link up with the two Bravo Company platoons. Now they were able to launch a full three-platoon attack in the direction of Herrick’s cut-off men. It was three platoons abreast, left to right: Deal, Devney, and Marm.

  Dennis Deal remembers: “We moved on line for about a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards before the volume of firing forced us to stop. We were taking too many casualties. I radioed Herrick’s platoon and said: ‘I think we are close to you. Shoot one round off; wait to the count of three and shoot two more.’ The radioman, or whoever was on the radio, did that, so we had a pretty firm fix on where he was. We got up and started the assault again. We went about ten yards and the whole thing just blew up in our faces. The enemy had infiltrated between Herrick’s platoon and us and now were starting to come in behind us.

  “I saw Platoon Sergeant [Leroy] Williams shoot into a tree; a weapon fell but the body didn’t. It was roped into the treetop. There were at least fifteen of our men, wounded and dead, out front. At this point our medic, Specialist 5 Calvin Bouknight, rose from cover, ran over, and began administering aid to the wounded. He succeeded in treating four or five of them, always by placing his body between the continuous sheets of heavy fire and the man he was treating. Bouknight was mortally wounded less than five minutes after he began performing his stunningly heroic acts.” Bouknight, twenty-four, was from Washington, D.C.

  Deal says, “Suddenly a lull occurred on the battlefield. During that lull one of the men in my platoon got up on his knees w
hile the rest of us were all flat on our stomachs. He was promptly shot in the upper body, ten feet from me, and I heard the bullet strike human flesh. It sounded exactly like when you take a canoe paddle and slap it into mud. One bullet, one hit, another man down. During the same lull, my radio operator’s hip suddenly exploded, if you will, and before the bleeding started I saw white, jagged bone sticking out. We gave him first aid and tried to keep him out of shock. He said: ‘I’ll be all right. Just show me where to go.’ He made his own way back to the aid station.”

  Lieutenant Deal adds that he and the other two platoon leaders now began planning yet another attempt to break through and rescue Herrick’s men. “Leaders were running back and forth coordinating this when all of a sudden firing began. The lull dissipated quickly. It was at this time that my weapons-squad leader, Sergeant Curry, ‘the Chief,’ was killed. His last words were ‘Those bastards are trying to get me!’ He was caught rolling around on the ground. Later on, as my men were carrying him back, I had them put him down and I turned his face toward me and looked at him. I could not conceive of the Chief being dead.” Staff Sergeant Wilbur Curry, Jr., of Buffalo, New York, was thirty-five years old.

  Deal says his platoon and the others got up to launch the attack and again were driven back by extremely heavy fire. “We slugged it out for all we were worth but finally had so many wounded we had to stop and say ‘Let’s get out of here.’” Sergeant Larry Gilreath says, “We tried fire and movement and on line attack but the NVA were waiting for us each time.”