We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

by Harold G. Moore

  Sergeant Major Scott says, “I took a bullet through my chest, not more than fifteen or twenty minutes into the battle. I could see enemy soldiers to our left, right and front in platoon- and company-size elements. They were up in the trees, up on top of the anthills, and in the high grass. We weren’t exactly organized. We didn’t have time. Everything happened at once. I did not see a hole being dug prior to eight P.M. that night. We did use the trees and anthills for cover. Within half an hour there was an attempt to organize groups into a defensive position in a company area. Individuals did this, no one in particular. I think that is what saved us.”

  Lieutenant Gwin rejoined the Alpha Company command group on the western edge of the copse of trees. “Joel Sugdinis told me that our 1st Platoon, on our right, was gone, and that the 2nd Platoon, to our rear, was cut off and all wounded or dead. I stood up to get a better view of the woods on the other side of the clearing to the north and saw about twenty North Vietnamese bent over, charging toward our position and only about sixty yards away. I screamed ‘Here they come!’ and jumped forward firing. I heard the battalion commander yell ‘Withdraw!’ and I thought that was odd because there didn’t seem like anywhere to go.

  “Almost everyone jumped up and ran back to the third anthill. First Sergeant Frank Miller; Joel Sugdinis; the artillery FO, Hank Dunn; and PFC Dennis Wilson, the radio operator; and I stayed and killed all the North Vietnamese. I shot about three with my first burst, and then remember sighting in on the lead enemy, who was carrying an AK-47. I got him with my first round, saw him drop to the ground and start to crawl forward. I was afraid he would throw a grenade. I sighted very carefully and squeezed again, and saw him jolted by my second round, but he continued to move and I stepped out from cover and emptied my remaining rounds into him. He was about twenty yards from our anthill. The rush had been stopped, but we could still see many, many Vietnamese milling around on the other side of the clearing.”

  The Alpha Company command group now returned to their original position, facing the area where they had first emerged from the forest, to the southwest. Lieutenant Gwin says, “Joel Sugdinis and I had pretty much decided we would make our stand right here. No point in moving. The North Vietnamese were between us and the rest of the battalion column, and that jungle was crawling with bad guys. They were fighting, moving on down the column.”

  Sugdinis and Gwin agree that it was not long after this that the commander of Alpha Company’s missing 2nd Platoon, Lieutenant Gordon Grove, staggered into the American position from the east. Larry Gwin: “I saw Gordy Grove coming across the field along with two wounded men. They were the only ones left of his platoon who could move. Grove was distraught. We got him and his two men in with us, and got our medics working on the wounded. Then Gordy asked for men to go back with him and get his people. Joel Sugdinis said: ‘Gordy, I can’t send anybody back out there.’ It was clear that to leave this perimeter was death. Everywhere you looked you could see North Vietnamese. Gordy asked permission to go talk to the battalion commander. Sugdinis said go ahead. He jogged over, asked McDade for help to go get his men, got a negative response, so he came back to our anthill.”

  Gwin adds, “There was a tremendous battle going on in the vicinity of where we had come into the clearing and beyond there in the jungle. It was Charlie Company, caught in the killing zone of the ambush, fighting for its life. The mortar fire had ceased—the enemy tubes apparently had been overrun by Charlie Company, because we found them all the next day—but there still were hundreds of North Vietnamese calmly walking around the area we were observing. Now began the sniping phase of our battle. I call it that because for a long period of time all we did was pick off enemy wandering around our perimeter, and this lasted until we started getting air support. Everything that had happened to this point had probably taken less than thirty minutes.”

  Gwin saw Major Frank Henry, the battalion executive officer, lying on his back using the radio, trying desperately to get some tactical air support and succeeding. “The air was on the way, but there was no artillery or aerial rocket artillery yet. Jim Spires, the S-3, ran over to us and queried Gordy Grove as to the situation outside the perimeter where he had just come from. Grove told him there were still men out there, tightened into a small perimeter, but they were all wounded and dying and the radios had all been knocked out. Captain Spires asked a second time if he thought anyone was still alive and none of us said anything.”

  Gwin climbed atop the termite hill and began sniping at the North Vietnamese clearly visible across the clearing in the trees to the south with his M-16 rifle. “There were plenty of targets and I remember picking off ten or fifteen NVA from my position. My memories revolve around the way in which each enemy soldier that I hit fell. Some would slump limply to the ground; some reacted as if they had been hit by a truck. Some that I missed on the first and second shots kept on milling around until I finally hit them. What we did not know at the time was that they were wandering around the elephant grass looking for Americans who were still alive, and killing them off one by one.”

  After an incoming round snapped past his head, Gwin surrendered his vantage point to Lieutenant Grove, who was eager to settle some scores for his lost platoon. Gwin and his boss, Captain Sugdinis, eased behind the hill, leaned back, and smoked their first cigarettes. Gwin says, “That cigarette brought us back to our senses, and we talked the situation over while those around us poured out fire. We knew we had lost our two Alpha Company rifle platoons, about fifty men, during the first half-hour. Joel was despondent.”

  The survivors in that thinly held grove of trees at the head of the battalion column could hear the noise of a terrible battle continuing in the forest where the rest of the column was caught. Having hit the head of the 2nd Battalion column hard and stopped it, killing most of Sugdinis’s two rifle platoons, the North Vietnamese soldiers immediately raced down the side of the American column, with small groups peeling off and attacking.

  As the attack began, all of McDade’s company commanders were forward, separated from their men. They had brought their radio operators and, in some cases, their first sergeants and artillery forward observers with them. All of them but one would remain in McDade’s perimeter for the rest of the battle.

  In answer to the radioed summons from Colonel McDade, Captain George Forrest, a high school and college athlete who was in excellent physical condition, had hiked more than five hundred yards from his Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry position, at the tail of the American column, to the head. His two radio operators accompanied him.

  Just about the time McDade started to talk to them, a couple of mortar rounds came in. Forrest immediately turned and dashed back toward his company. “I didn’t wait for him to dismiss us. I just took off. Both of my radio operators were hit and killed during that run. I didn’t get a scratch. When I got back to the company I found my executive officer was down, hit in the back with mortar shrapnel. I wasn’t sure about the situation, so I pushed my guys off the trail to the east and put them in a perimeter. It appeared for a time that fire was coming from every direction. So we circled the wagons. I think that firing lasted thirty-five or forty minutes. All my platoon leaders were functioning except Second Lieutenant Larry L. Hess. [Hess, age twenty, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was killed in the first minutes.] My weapons sergeant was wounded.”

  George Forrest’s run down that six-hundred-yard-long gauntlet of fire, miraculously unscathed, and the forming of his men into a defensive perimeter, helped keep Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry from sharing the fate of Charlie, Delta, and Headquarters companies of the 2nd Battalion in the middle of the column.

  North Vietnamese soldiers climbed into the trees and on top of those brush-covered termite hills, and poured fire down on the cavalry troopers trapped in the tall grass below them in the main body of the column. There was furious firing, including mortar fire, from both sides. The strike at the head of the column was followed so quickly by
the enemy encircling assaults that the whole business seemed to erupt almost simultaneously.

  Without doubt some platoons of McDade’s battalion were alert and in as secure a formation as they could achieve in the elephant grass, brush, and thick scrub trees. But the visibility problem made it difficult to maintain formation, and one result was that the American troops were closer to one another than was tactically sound, providing juicy targets for a grenade, a mortar round, or a burst from an AK-47 rifle. All down the column, platoon leaders, sergeants, radio operators, and riflemen by the dozens were killed or wounded in the first ten minutes, rapidly degrading communication, cohesion, and control.

  Captain Skip Fesmire was near the Albany clearing when the shooting started. He believed his Charlie Company rifle platoons were close enough to the landing zone to maneuver against the enemy and reach the clearing if he moved them quickly and if he was lucky. Fesmire radioed Jim Spires, the battalion operations officer, reported his location, and told Spires he was returning to his men. He never made it.

  Fesmire remembers: “The firing became quite intense. My artillery forward observer [Lieutenant Sidney C. M. Smith, twenty-three, of Manhasset, New York] was hit in the head and killed. I was in radio contact with Lieutenant Cornett [Fesmire’s executive officer]. He told me that the fire was very intense, particularly incoming mortar fire that was impacting directly on the company. I instructed him to get the company moving forward along the right flank of Delta Company. This was the direction from which the attack was coming. I felt it was necessary to try to consolidate the battalion; to help protect the flank of Delta Company, and to get Charlie Company out of the mortar killing zone.”

  Captain Fesmire adds, “As I moved back southeast toward my company, I could see the North Vietnamese in the tree line on the other side of a clearing. They were moving generally in the same direction that I was moving, toward Charlie Company. By this time Lieutenant Cornett had Charlie Company moving; they met the elements of the 66th Regiment’s battalion head on and were outnumbered. The result was very intense, individual hand-to-hand combat. In the confusion, I had no idea exactly where the company was located. When Lieutenant Cornett died, it was virtually impossible for me to talk to anyone in my company. The battle had clearly become an individual struggle for life. First Sergeant [Franklin] Hance, my two radio operators, and I found our return to the company blocked. We were on the edge of an open area and all we could see were enemy.”

  Specialist 4 Jack P. Smith, who was in Charlie Company, had been a radio operator until a week or so before this operation, when he was shifted to a supply clerk’s job. The events of November 17 are etched on his mind. Smith’s company commander, Captain Fesmire, had, like the others, been called to the front by Lieutenant Colonel McDade. “Subsequently, many people pointed to this as a major error, and in light of what happened, it was. The firing began to roll all around us. The executive officer of my company, a man called Don Cornett, a very fine officer, jumped up and in the best style of the Infantry School yelled: ‘Follow me!’

  “Elements of our 1st and 2nd platoons ran right toward a series of anthills. Within ten feet of them we saw there were machine gunners behind them firing point-blank at us. Men all around me began to fall like mown grass. I had never seen people killed before. They began to drop like flies and die right in front of me. These were the only friends I had, and they were dying all around me.”

  Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry would suffer the heaviest casualties of any unit that fought at LZ Albany. Before its violent collision with the North Vietnamese, the company had some 112 men in its ranks. By sunrise the next day, November 18, forty-five of those men would be dead and more than fifty wounded; only a dozen would answer “present” at the next roll call.

  Captain Henry Thorpe, the Delta Company commander, was a hundred yards forward of his company when the fighting began. He and his first sergeant and radio operator sprinted ahead into the island of trees in the Albany clearing to join the battalion command group and helped organize and control a defensive perimeter. The radio operator, Specialist 4 John C. Bratland, was shot in the leg. They were lucky to be where they were. Delta Company, back down the column, was being torn apart. This day it would lose twenty-six men killed and many others severely wounded.

  PFC James H. Shadden was in Thorpe’s Delta Company mortar platoon. Shadden says the heavily laden mortarmen, exhausted from the march, had dropped in the trail for a short rest and a smoke. He recalls, “I had carried the base plate a long ways. Sergeant Amodias, true to his word, took the base plate, gave me the sights, and went in front of me. When the enemy sprung the ambush, Amodias was killed instantly. The ones who were not killed in the first volley hit the dirt, with the exception of our radio operator, Duncan Krueger. I saw him still standing a few seconds later, until he was shot down. I have no idea why he didn’t get down.” PFC Duncan Krueger, eighteen, of West Allis, Wisconsin, was killed where he stood.

  The intensity of the fire rapidly increased to the point where Shadden couldn’t hear anything but weapons firing. “Tone Johnson came crawling by me, hit in the cheek and back of the hand. The trees were full of North Vietnamese, but spotting one was almost impossible. They blended in so well. I kept raising up to try to detect a good target. Matthews Shelton, who was lying next to me, kept jerking me down. As I raised up again a bullet pierced my helmet straight through, front to back. I went down again and as I came back up a bullet struck the tree beside my head from behind.

  “I don’t know if we were surrounded or it was our own men. They were firing wild—anything that moved, somebody shot at it. One trooper crawled up next to me, shooting through the grass a few inches off the ground toward where our own people lay, never thinking what he was doing. I told him to be sure he knew what he was shooting.”

  The firing eventually began to slack off. Shadden has no idea how much time elapsed. There was no way to keep track of time in a fight like this. “Men were wounded and dead all in the area. Six were alive that I know of: Sergeant [Earthell] Tyler, [PFC A. C] Carter, [PFC Tone] Johnson, [PFC Matthews] Shelton, [PFC Lawrence] Cohens, and myself. Tyler gave the only order I heard during the entire fight: ‘Try to pull back before they finish us off.’ Shelton froze to the ground and would not move. [PFC Matthews Shelton, age twenty, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was killed later that afternoon.] The five of us proceeded to try to pull back, but the snipers were still in the trees. Soon I was hit in the right shoulder, which for a time rendered it useless. Tyler was hit in the neck about the same time; he died an arm’s length of me, begging for the medic, Specialist 4 William Pleasant, who was already dead. [Pleasant was twenty-three years old and a native of Jersey City, New Jersey.] The last words Tyler ever spoke were ‘I’m dying.’” Sergeant Earthell Tyler, thirty-five, was from Columbia, South Carolina.

  The soft-spoken Shadden says, “The helplessness I felt is beyond description. Within a few minutes I was hit again, in the left knee. The pain was unbearable. Cohens was hit in the feet and ankle. We were wounded and trapped. I could see we were getting wiped out. A buddy helped me bandage my leg. He got the bandage off a dead Vietnamese. I got behind a log and there was a Vietnamese there, busted up and dead. This was behind us, so I knew we were surrounded.”

  Specialist 4 Bob Towles, who was with Delta Company’s antitank platoon, heard the firing and mortar blasts forward and could see where the trail disappeared into the brush ahead of him. But he saw no one at all up there. As the front came alive with intense firing, and no information came back to him, Towles’s concern redoubled:

  “The sound of firing on our right flank got our attention in a hurry. We all faced in that direction. A couple of senior NCOs moved forward and joined the line of enlisted men. We formed a solid battle line about twenty yards long; twelve of us. Bullets whizzed overhead. Still we could see nothing. We waited, expecting to see our men out on flank security break cover and enter the safety of our perimeter. They never did. The sound came
closer. Within seconds the wood line changed.

  “North Vietnamese troops shattered the foliage and headed straight for us, AK-47 rifles blazing, on the dead run. I selected the closest one and fired twice. I hit him but he refused to go down; he kept coming and shooting. I turned my M-16 on full automatic, fired, and he crumpled. I shifted to another target and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The fear I felt turned to terror. I saw a cartridge jammed in the chamber. I removed it, reloaded, and began firing again. They kept pouring out of the wood line; we kept firing; then finally they stopped coming. On the ground in front of me lay the three magazines I taped together to carry in my rifle plus one other magazine. I had fired eighty rounds.”

  The lull did not last long. Towles peered beyond the anthill toward the mortar platoon. “It appeared as if the ground was opening up and swallowing the mortarmen, they fell so fast,” Shadden recalls. “A brown wave of death rolled over them and on into Charlie Company. Vietnamese intermixed with them. Then reality set in: The enemy held the ground beyond the anthill. The column was cut in half!

  “Incoming gunfire drew our attention back to the tree line. The firing rapidly increased. We returned fire at muzzle flashes. I heard an explosion behind me. Turning, I saw ChiCom grenades landing. All flash and smoke, no casualties. The volume of fire became almost unendurable. Bullets peeled bark from trees. Vegetation disintegrated. I looked to Lieutenant James Lawrence for help. Saw his head violently recoil. He hit the ground.