Lieutenant Larry Gwin, who was up front: “We picked up again. This time the battalion headquarters group was right with us and McDade was guiding us to a clearing. We broke into an area that looked like it might be Albany. A fairly open area, about the size of a football field, sloping up to a wooded, anthill-studded area. The grass was waist-deep. We’d made it. It was still very quiet. Just about then I was flabbergasted to see McDade and his entourage striding past me heading toward the clearing, moving very quickly.
“I moved forward and Joel Sugdinis was on his knee at the edge of the clearing. He said: ‘I sent the 1st Platoon around to the right, 2nd Platoon around to the left, and recon platoon forward to recon the far end of the LZ.’ McDade’s entourage had walked past us, across the grass, and into a clump of trees. It was swampy to the left, and on the right grassy. I didn’t know there was another clearing on the other side of those trees.”
The battalion after-action report states that Lieutenant Pat Payne’s recon platoon by 1:07 P.M. “had cleared through the western edge of the objective area LZ sites,” and that the other two Alpha Company platoons were to the north and south of the Albany clearing. It adds: “The remainder of the battalion was in dispersed column to the east of the objective area.”
One hour and ten minutes had passed since the two prisoners had been captured and the other NVA soldiers had fled. The company commanders had reached the clearing.
Sergeant Major James Scott: “Sergeant Bass said: ‘Let’s question these prisoners some more; I don’t believe a word they’re saying.’ At that point it was Bass and me and the prisoners and the Vietnamese translator. Then Bass said: ‘I hear Vietnamese talking.’ That interpreter really began to look afraid. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They are the North Vietnamese Army.’ So what did we have? The company commanders were all up front, and we had NVA all around us. Right about then small-arms fire started up. Bass said: ‘They’re up in the trees.’ Charles Bass was killed in action right there. I joined Alpha Company, no more than thirty yards away. First Sergeant Frank Miller and I went back to back and started firing our rifles.”
Lieutenant Gwin: “We had been there a short time, five minutes, when I heard some rounds fired near our 1st Platoon. I thought: ‘They must have caught up with those NVA stragglers.’ Then everything opened up. The firing just crescendoed. They hadn’t found the stragglers. They had run right into the North Vietnamese! I was out in the grass away from the trees when it started. The rounds were so fast and furious overhead they were knocking bark off the trees. I ran to them. One round struck the tree I was crouched next to, about an inch over my head. I said: ‘Holy shit!’ and ran to join Joel. We all got down. Then I heard the sickening whump of mortar fire landing where I had seen our 2nd Platoon disappear.”
Back at the 3rd Brigade command post at Catecka, Captain John Cash, twenty-nine, the assistant operations officer on duty, was writing a letter to his wife. “Suddenly Sergeant Russell leaned close to the radio and said, ‘Sir, something is going on.’ He could hear radio guys calling for fire support all over, hear them saying, ‘We are surrounded!’ He had friends in the 2nd Battalion’s operations shop. We couldn’t hear them on the radio—couldn’t hear Sergeant Charlie Bass. Casualty figures kept rising, kept going up,” Cash recalls, adding: “I went and woke up Major Pete Mallet, the S-3. This was afternoon. We couldn’t get a clear picture. Major Mallet came in and he was concerned. Major Harry Crouch, the S-4 [supply officer], came in, somber look on his face. He said, ‘They got Captain McCarn [the 2nd Battalion S-4].’All these things just kept building up.”
The most savage one-day battle of the Vietnam War had just begun. The 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had walked into a hornet’s nest: The North Vietnamese reserve force, the 550-man 8th Battalion, 66th Regiment, had been bivouacked in the woods off to the northeast of McDade’s column. The understrength 1st Battalion, 33rd Regiment, coordinating its movement and actions with the 8th Battalion, was aiming its men toward the head of the American column. And the point men of Lieutenant Payne’s re-con platoon had marched to within two hundred yards of the headquarters of the 3rd Battalion, 33rd Regiment. A senior lieutenant grabbed up the 3rd Battalion cooks and clerks and joined the attack. Lieutenant Colonel Phuong says other North Vietnamese soldiers in the vicinity on rice-carrying or outpost duty “came running to join the battle.”
While many of Colonel McDade’s troopers lay in the grass resting, North Vietnamese soldiers swarmed toward them by the hundreds. A deadly ordeal by fire was beginning in the tall elephant grass around Albany and along the column of American troops strung out through the jungle, waiting for orders to move. It was 1:15 P.M., Wednesday, November 17. By the time the battle ended, in the predawn darkness the next morning, 155 American soldiers would be dead and another 124 wounded. Those who survived would never forget the savagery, the brutality, the butchery of those sixteen hours.
19
Hell in a Very Small Place
War is a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The North Vietnamese battlefield commander, then-Senior Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An, had watched the Americans leaving the clearing they called X-Ray. He and his principal subordinate, 66th Regimental commander Lieutenant Colonel La Ngoc Chau, had one thought uppermost in their minds: General Vo Nguyen Giap’s dictum “You must win the first battle.” As far as Colonel An was concerned, the fight with the Americans that had begun on November 14, in Landing Zone X-Ray, wasn’t over. It was simply moving to a new location a short distance away.
An says: “I think this fight of November seventeenth was the most important of the entire campaign. I gave the order to my battalions: When you meet the Americans divide yourself into many groups and attack the column from all directions and divide the column into many pieces. Move inside the column, grab them by the belt, and thus avoid casualties from the artillery and air. We had some advantages: We attacked your column from the sides and, at the moment of the attack, we were waiting for you. This was our reserve battalion and they were just waiting for their turn. The 8th Battalion had not been used in the fighting in this campaign. They were fresh.”
Viewed from the American side, the firefight began at the head of the 2nd Battalion column and swiftly spread down the right, or east, side of the American line of march in a full-fledged roar.
Specialist 4 Dick Ackerman was the right-flank point man in the recon platoon, which was itself the point of the battalion. Says Ackerman: “We were going to the left to a clearing. We had gone about 100 feet when we heard some shots, then more shots and finally all hell broke loose. The main brunt of the attack was right where we had been standing just a few minutes before. We hit the dirt. I was laying in the middle of a clearing and bullets were kicking dirt in my eyes and breaking off the grass.”
Some of the platoon gathered at a row of trees in front of Ackerman. “I wasn’t going to run over there with the bulky pack, so I unhooked it and took off for the trees. We saw NVA sneaking up. We started picking them off and I don’t think any of them ever realized we were there. After a while we could hear someone calling us from a circle of trees. We started running back across the field. I fell behind a small tree. I was on my side with my shoulder against the tree when I heard a big thump and felt the tree shake. It had taken a bullet just opposite my shoulder. I decided to lay down flat.”
Ackerman’s first sergeant was standing, shouting and giving directions. “His shirt was off and he was in his tee-shirt. He lifted his left arm to point and I could see where a bullet had ripped open the inside of his arm and part of the side of his chest. He was still giving orders. We were then ordered to another part of the circle that was weak. It was facing the main area of attack. There were people running everywhere. We couldn’t just open fire in that direction because our guys were there. We were on semi-automatic and picking off whoever we could be sure of as a target.”
Ackerman’s recon-platoon leader, Lieutenant Payne,
had moved most of his men across the second and larger clearing and into the trees on the western or far side of Albany. Alpha Company had split and sent one platoon around the northeast edge and another around the southwest edge of the clearing. Pat Payne was headed across the clearing to join his platoon when, he says, “all hell broke loose up along the north side of the LZ. I turned to my right and observed some American soldiers moving to the northwest to set up positions and they went down in a hail of bullets. Within minutes we were all under heavy attack and my radio operator and I were pinned down in the middle of the LZ with most of the fire coming from the north and northwest.”
Lieutenant Payne’s radio came alive as the Alpha Company platoon leaders reported heavy fighting. Payne says, “Mortar rounds began falling, which was a new experience for everyone, since we had never had any kind of mortar fire against us. The noise level was unbelievable. I remember pressing my body flatter against the ground than I had ever been in my life and thinking that certainly the highest things sticking up were my heels. Mortars continued to fall and small-arms and machine-gun fire continued at a hectic pace. Finally my mind seemed to adjust and I once again began to think about the situation we were in and what we were going to do.”
Payne raised his head and saw that the North Vietnamese weren’t actually ambushing Alpha Company so much as they were attacking it. “I told my radio operator to stay put and I jumped up and ran the twenty-five yards back to the command post in the trees between the two clearings, where I found the battalion S-3, Jim Spires. I explained the situation and recommended that I pull the recon platoon back across the LZ and set up positions so that we could have an adequate field of fire. In LZ X-Ray I had seen the advantages of the fields of fire that the 1st Battalion had set up and how they had successfully repelled heavy attacks. The S-3 agreed and I returned to the middle of the LZ to link up with my radio operator.”
Payne was able to get all his squad leaders on the radio, “explained to them what we were going to do, and then we coordinated our movement. I counted down to jump-off; then all of us raced back across the open LZ. Miraculously, we had only one man killed: a new recruit who froze. Just as we reached the tree line, we set up a perimeter and turned to face the first of two or three North Vietnamese attacks across the clearing from the west, where we had just come from. I clearly remember that first attack; we stopped them. They were surprised by the amount of firepower we put across the landing zone.”
The recon-platoon leader adds: “As they regrouped I saw what must have been a company commander, North Vietnamese, running back and forth along his line of men encouraging them and rallying them. He then led a second attack. I admired his courage, because there were at least twenty of us all trying to stop him. After a third attempt, the NVA didn’t try to come across the landing zone again. Rather, they started coming around to the north side.”
Alpha Company’s commander, Captain Sugdinis, was in the trees, headed to where he had seen the battalion command group disappear. “Just as I noticed a small clearing up ahead I heard one or two shots to my rear, back where my 1st and 2nd Platoons were. I looked back. There was a pause of several seconds and then slowly all hell began to break loose. Since I was somewhat forward of the remainder of my Company and did not draw fire in the initial exchange, I continued to move forward toward Albany. I knew I had to establish a perimeter that would accommodate helicopters, provide fields of fire, and be a distinctive piece of terrain for people to maneuver toward.”
Albany was not a typical landing zone—the usual single clearing surrounded by trees. In fact, the small clearing that Captain Sugdinis believed to be Albany was actually only the first of two clearings. A lightly wooded island separated it from a larger clearing up ahead. Within that grove of trees there were at least three giant termite hills: one at the edge of the trees, on the north side; another on the western end; and a third in the middle. The copse was not completely surrounded by open area; the east and west ends were connected to the forest by a few trees about twenty feet or so apart.
Captain Sugdinis says, “Larry Gwin and I hit the edge of Albany on the northeast side of the clearing as the column began to receive intense fire. We began to receive sporadic sniper fire. Part of the Recon Platoon had already reached the island. I yelled across the opening for someone to cover us. We ran to the island. At this point I called my 1st and 2nd Platoons on the radio. Almost immediately I lost communication with the 1st Platoon. The platoon sergeant for the 2nd Platoon came on the radio. That was SFC William A. Ferrell, 38, from Stanton, Tennessee. He was a veteran of World War II and Korea, had been a prisoner of war in Korea, and could have chosen to remain in the States. He did not have to deploy to Vietnam with us. Everyone called him Pappy.”
Ferrell kept asking Captain Sugdinis where he was, telling him they were mixed up with the North Vietnamese and had several wounded and killed. “I couldn’t pinpoint his location. I knew where he should have been—directly east of our island. Pappy then radioed that he was hit; that there were three or four men with him, all hit. I could hear the firing at his location over the radio. I never heard from Pappy again. He did not survive.
“The survivors of my 1st Platoon, with the Recon Platoon, were the initial defenses at Albany. The battalion command group made it safely into the perimeter. Bob McDade and Frank Henry probably owe their lives to those North Vietnamese prisoners. If they hadn’t come forward when they did, and stayed forward, they would have been further back in the column and probably would not have survived. At some point at Albany I asked what had become of the North Vietnamese prisoners and was told that they had attempted to escape when the shooting started and had been shot.”
Lieutenant Colonel McDade himself recalls, “When things began happening I got in with Alpha Company. I know I was trying to figure out what was going on. I moved very fast—let’s get over here in these trees and let’s all get together. The enemy seemed to be all over the woods. We had good tight control in the immediate area and were trying to figure out where everybody else was. One of the things I was very concerned with was people being trigger-happy and just shooting up the grass. I was telling them: ‘Make sure you know what you are shooting at because we are scattered!’”
Sergeant Jim Gooden, the battalion’s assistant operations sergeant, was with the headquarters detachment, toward the rear of the column. “We were getting fire from three sides. We were getting it from up in the trees, and from both sides. A guy got hit next to me and I grabbed his machine gun. I braced myself against an anthill. Then we got hit by mortars. It was zeroed in right on us. I looked around and everybody was dead. The commo sergeant, SFC Melvin Gunter, fell over hit in the face, dead. The same mortar round that killed Gunter put shrapnel in my back and shoulder. They were closing in for the final assault. I was shooting, trying to break a hole through them, but didn’t know which way to go. I went the wrong way, right into the killing zone. I found stacks of GIs.” Gunter, thirty-eight, was from Vincent, Alabama.
The battalion operations officer, Captain Spires, believes that the fact that the commanders were absent from their companies when the fight started contributed to the confusion. “It had the most effect, I think, on Charlie Company. Their commander, Captain Skip Fesmire, was up with us and Don Cornett, the Charlie Company executive officer, was killed early on, so they had no commander and they just disintegrated.”
Spires also remembers that the shooting began “at the head of the column; then it moved back down the column. I think the enemy battalion ran head on into the recon and Alpha Company troops, withdrew, hooked around, and ran straight into Charlie Company. They also hit part of Delta Company. The battalion command group was just ahead of Delta Company. I had four men back there, including my operations sergeant, and three of them were killed.”
Specialist 4 Jim Epperson, McDade’s radio operator, says: “We set our radios down behind an anthill. The artillery guys were on their own radio calling in. We honestly did not know much a
bout the situation in the rest of the column. Some of the radio operators were already killed. We were cut off from everyone. Colonel McDade wasn’t getting anything from his people down the line. Charlie, Delta, and Headquarters Company weren’t reporting because they were either dead or, in the case of Headquarters, didn’t have any radios.”
By now it was 1:26 P.M. The recon platoon; the Alpha Company commander, Sugdinis, and his executive officer, Gwin; and Colonel McDade’s command group were in the small wooded area between the two clearings. Sugdinis and Gwin were near one of the termite hills, Payne’s recon platoon was near another, and McDade and his group were behind the third hill.
Lieutenant Larry Gwin looked back south at the point where he and Captain Sugdinis had emerged from the jungle just minutes before; the entire area was now alive with North Vietnamese soldiers who had obviously cut through the battalion’s line of march, severing the head of the battalion from the body. Gwin saw three GIs coming through the high grass, running from the area swarming with the enemy. “I jumped up and screamed to them, waving my arm. They saw me and headed directly to our position. The first man was a captain, our Air Force forward air controller, who was completely spent. I pointed out the battalion command group, which was huddled to our rear at another anthill, and he crawled toward them. He was followed by the battalion sergeant major, Jim Scott, who dropped down next to me. And Scott was followed by a young, very small PFC who was delirious and holding his guts in with his hands. He kept asking, ‘Are the helicopters coming?’ I said, ‘Yes, hang on.’
“The battalion commander initially thought that the incoming rounds were all friendly fire. He had been hollering for all of us to cease fire and the word went out over the command net but to no avail, as the troops on the perimeter could see North Vietnamese. The sergeant major and I were looking to the rear when I heard a loud blast. The sergeant major yelled: ‘I’m hit, sir!’ He had taken a round in the back under his armpit and there was a large hole underneath his right arm. I told him he would be OK, to bandage it himself. This he did, ripping off his shirt. Then he picked up his M-16 and headed back to one of the anthills. I saw the sergeant major a few times after that and he was fighting like a demon.”
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young Page 31