Employing the new RTO, McElwain remained in constant contact with Captain Ed Sills, the battalion operations officer, and Lieutenant Colonel Schumacher. By late morning, after passing along many conflicting reports on the size of the enemy force, McElwain was practically begging for help. Flying distantly in a helicopter thousands of feet overhead, and thus with no appreciation of the battle’s ferocity, Schumacher thought that McElwain was overreacting. “First you report a squad, then a platoon, then a company,” he said. “Now it’s a battalion. Get up and go after those people.”
McElwain was not a fan of Schumacher. In McElwain’s opinion, the colonel was the type of spit-shined commander who was content to buzz around in his command chopper, rarely ever getting on the ground with his troops. The captain thought of him as a careerist who cared much more about his next promotion than the welfare of his soldiers. In McElwain’s estimation, few things were so detestable as that. “He really didn’t have any interest in anybody other than himself,” McElwain said. This resentment, and the stress of the fight, boiled over into an argument. “Goddamn it, Six [radio lingo for the battalion commander],” he howled, “if you don’t get us some fucking help down here, you won’t have a Charlie Company! Listen to me, get us some help!”
Schumacher told McElwain to calm down and watch his language. The colonel still refused to send any substantial help. Fortunately, General Schweiter, the brigade commander, was listening to their radio communications. “You’d better listen to your man on the ground, Colonel,” he told Schumacher. “If he says he’s facing a battalion, he’s facing a battalion.” Only with that prodding from a superior did the battalion commander take action. He found that his options were limited. The logical force to relieve Task Force Black was Task Force Blue, since they came from the same battalion and were only a couple miles away. But they had run into an apparent enemy bunker complex and, according to Captain Jesmer, the outfit was pinned down by sniper fire. Schumacher told him to press through the complex and relieve Task Force Black. But Jesmer and his people remained pinned down by the snipers (actually this was just an enemy rear guard designed to hold off Task Force Blue while the main group finished off Task Force Black). Such was the intensity of the fighting going on all over the Dak To area that the only other unit available for an immediate rescue was Charlie Company of the brigade’s 4th Battalion, several kilometers away at Ben Het. Just after noon, General Schweiter ordered Lieutenant Colonel James Johnson, the battalion commander, to get the company ready for a helicopter assault. Captain Sills found a small LZ for them about eight hundred meters north of Task Force Black’s position.13
At 1300, even as McElwain and his people desperately hung on, Captain William Connolly and 120 of his Charlie Company troopers boarded their helicopters. After a short flight, the choppers dropped them off, one shipload at a time, in the LZ. “The company moved south, using trails and double-timing where possible to reach the embattled troopers of the First Battalion,” a unit report later said. “The men carried a full basic load of ammunition for themselves and another basic load for [Task Force Black].” They moved as fast as they could but they had to be constantly wary of an enemy ambush. Most of Connolly’s men knew that fellow paratroopers were in real trouble, so maintaining such a deliberate pace was frustrating for them. Sergeant Mike Tanner, a mortar forward observer with a radio strapped to his back, was especially impatient because he knew that his best friend from stateside training, Ben Warnic, was with McElwain’s surrounded group. “So I was pushing the point team really hard,” Tanner recalled. “I kept complaining that we were not going fast enough.”
The point team’s squad leader finally turned to Tanner and offered him point if he thought he could move so much faster. Tanner handed someone his radio and took the lead. He moved quickly and “recklessly not looking for booby traps or enemy ambushes.” Several minutes after assuming the lead, he was delicately stepping across basketball-sized rocks to traverse a dry streambed. He happened to look down and saw “that the streambed was crawling with . . . hundreds or thousands of bamboo viper snakes. They were little hatchlings with . . . twenty or thirty adult snakes.” The adults were a foot long and the babies about six inches. Hundreds of them slithered around the bottom of the rocks, a few inches from his boots. He kept going and the company followed him, but he soon yielded point back to the original group.
Before long, they could hear the distant sounds of Task Force Black’s battle. Captain Connolly was in constant radio contact with Captain McElwain, informing him of his company’s progress. Connolly’s point elements made it to Task Force Black’s original hilltop laager site and began to trade shots with groups of NVA. They also surprised and captured a couple enemy soldiers who were rifling through the rucksacks McElwain’s men had left behind. The NVA had pilfered many packs for food and medical supplies and had even tried to employ the Americans’ 81-millimeter mortars against them.
As Connolly’s outfit began pushing down the hill, directly toward the Task Force Black perimeter, they ran into strong enemy opposition. After all, they were fighting through enemy lines to get to McElwain’s position. Periodic firefights broke out as Connolly’s men bumped into the NVA and fought it out. The captain was a West Pointer and a Ranger School alum who was totally dedicated to his soldiers. He was also highly experienced, having been in Vietnam for a year and a half. At just twenty-four years old, he was young for company command. He had trained his men to hit the dirt upon making contact, flip off their rucksacks, and use them as cover. Some would return fire. Some would dig in. During the rescue of Task Force Black, these tactics proved highly effective, partially because Charlie Company was dealing with quite a few tree snipers. The rucks provided a modicum of cover. The captain himself noticed a bullet in his ruck, looked up, and saw an NVA in a tree. “Sergeant [Janus] Shalovan, one of my platoon sergeants, was pretty close behind. I turned around and pointed to him and, next thing I know, that guy was falling out of the tree.” In another instance, an NVA suddenly materialized a few feet away from the command group. Spec-5 Lynn Morse, the senior medic, blasted him with a shotgun. In Connolly’s recollection, the fléchettes from the shotgun shell “actually stuck him to a tree. The NVA guy’s toes were dangling.”
NVA opposition was formidable, though, and several times Connolly’s company had to retreat and regroup as they tried to make a last push to the perimeter. Part of the problem was that they were also taking fire from Task Force Black. “They’d tell their guys don’t shoot . . . somebody’s coming in,” Connolly said, “then the enemy would shoot and somebody would return fire.” Finally, he arranged with McElwain to have his guys completely cease fire for about a minute while Connolly’s company charged through the NVA, into the perimeter. At Connolly’s signal, they got up and sprinted down the ridge straight at Task Force Black’s lines. “Bullets were flying everywhere and the men began yelling and shouting the running password to identify themselves in the confusion,” one post-battle report stated. “They leaped and tripped over the dead and wounded as they broke into the perimeter.” As they came in, they yelled “173rd! Don’t shoot!” or “Geronimo!” or “Airborne!” Staff Sergeant Donald Ibenthal, one of Connolly’s men, later said: “We wanted to make sure they knew we were coming and also so they wouldn’t fire at us when we came in.” He saw dead and wounded men everywhere. “The machine gunners we replaced were both shot in the head several times.” The enemy fire slackened as Connolly’s company made it through, either because the NVA were regrouping or perhaps because they were demoralized at the arrival of these newcomers.
The Task Force Black soldiers, many of whom had resigned themselves to imminent death, could hardly believe their eyes or contain their joy. “The emotion of knowing you only have a few more minutes or hours to live and you are helpless to do anything about it, being turned around to knowing that the bad guys are gone, Dr. Death is nowhere to be seen, and you have survived is impossible for me to describe,” one of them later wrote. Ser
geant deRemer, a white soldier, was so excited that he got up and kissed the first relieving trooper, “this big black guy. I refer to him as the first black guy I ever kissed on the lips,” he said and laughed.
When Mike Tanner got through, he only saw four soldiers and feared these were the only survivors. To his relief, though, he saw that many other Task Force Black soldiers were still alive, including his buddy Ben Warnic, who was wounded but stable. Throughout the perimeter, officers and NCOs of both units coordinated a mutual relief and defense. For Lieutenant Charles Brown, the moment was perhaps the happiest of his life, even though his platoon had only six effectives left. A skinny, large-nosed sergeant first class brought his own platoon up to relieve Brown’s. The young lieutenant thought that this grizzled sergeant was “the handsomest and bravest human on earth at that moment.” The NCO lit a cigarette, stuck it in Brown’s mouth, handed him a canteen, and said: “Tell your men to pull back and relax, we have everything under control now.” The time was 1437.
The relief of Task Force Black did not end the battle, but it did mean that the NVA now had no real hope of annihilating the Americans and that was, after all, the purpose of their ambush. The Americans now had the initiative. They spent the rest of the afternoon gradually fighting their way back to the laager hill. McElwain did, though, have to leave many of his dead behind, including Captain Hardy’s body. By nightfall, enemy attacks had ceased and the NVA contented themselves with lobbing mortar shells and rockets at the hill. This was not exactly a safe environment, but it was a veritable paradise compared with what Task Force Black had endured much of the day. The Americans were firmly ensconced on the hill. They had some helicopters coming in and plenty of supporting fire. Compared with the events of the day, the night was quiet.
The survivors were left to contemplate, sometimes through thousand-yard stares, the ordeal they had just endured. Almost everyone in Task Force Black had some sort of wound. McElwain’s force had lost 20 dead, 154 wounded, and 2 missing. Connolly’s company had 65 wounded, with no one killed. Sergeant deRemer, like most of the “lightly” wounded, refused evacuation (as did all of the company officers). His chore was to supervise the evacuation of the wounded and the dead. “One of my jobs was . . . to inventory each body bag and make sure that if it was a white body that all the other parts were white, and making sure we didn’t have a bag with . . . two left feet in it.” Sometimes he even had to move parts from bag to bag, a surreal and disturbing task.14
Task Force Black had survived, and won, not just because of the salvation given to them by their Charlie Company, 4th Battalion brothers, but also because of superb leadership and extraordinary valor. From the outset, Captain McElwain had recognized the extreme danger his unit was in, and took steps to avoid a repeat of the Battle of the Slopes. Most of his survivors believed that he and the other officers saved their lives because of their good leadership. McElwain saw it differently. He believed that he survived because of the bravery of his men. “I’ve always been thankful that I had that unit because they saved my life. If I’d have had maybe a different unit where I couldn’t have controlled them as much or if they didn’t have that esprit like paratroopers did . . . it may have turned out different, because we were very close to being overrun.”
The sad postscript was that, in the context of the Dak To struggle, none of this meant enough strategically. The hill and the saddle were worthless. The surviving Americans were in no position to hunt down and destroy the battered NVA, whose 66th Regiment had sprung the ambush (they lost about a battalion in the fight). In the context of Westmoreland’s attrition strategy, all that really mattered strategically was a high body count and a favorable ratio of casualties—kill way more of theirs than they do of yours.
Lieutenant Colonel Schumacher was a confirmed citizen of the body count culture. Like practically every other officer, he knew that his reputation and career advancement depended upon producing the right numbers. On the morning of November 12, he flew into the battle area and ordered McElwain to send patrols out to count the enemy dead. There was nothing inherently wrong with this order, as it made good sense to honestly assess the enemy’s losses. The problem was the overwhelming emphasis he placed on producing numbers that sounded good.
McElwain’s exhausted and sad survivors policed up their own dead and then fanned out, counting the decomposing remnants of their enemies—men who, like the Americans, also had families, homes, and much to live for. The stench was nauseating, like draping oneself in rotten meat. The troopers constantly had to be wary of booby traps and ambushes. The job was enervating and disgusting. “It was a very, very trying time for the soldiers there,” McElwain later said. “It was an emotional event for them because they had so many of their buddies who’d been killed. I could just see it in their eyes how scared and tired and mad” they were. After an all-day search, they passed along a body count of sixty or seventy enemy. When McElwain reported that to Schumacher, he snapped: “Goddamnit, Captain, you lose twenty people and you expect me to accept a body count of seventy. Go back down there tomorrow and find me some bodies.”
McElwain grumbled but he complied. After another nightmarish day of counting, identifying, and digging up enemy bodies in the tropical heat, the captain reported a find of ninety-five bodies. Still, this was not good enough for Schumacher, who clearly wanted something well into triple figures. “I can’t believe you’ve had that many men killed and wounded and there’s not any more enemy bodies down there so I want you to go back down.”
McElwain had finally had enough. He was already angry at the colonel for his reluctance to send help during the battle. He was tired and sad and coursing with grief over his dead men. He bristled at the idea of his soldiers’ valor being reduced to a mere casualty ratio for some bean counter at MACV. He knew that Schumacher was only motivated by his desire to produce a favorable body count so he would look good to his superiors, and the very idea of this angered him all the more. “Look here, Colonel,” McElwain barked, “you tell me the fuckin’ number you want! If you want a hundred and fifty, that’s what the number is, but I ain’t taking my men back down there again.”
The two men bickered some more. McElwain told the colonel that if he insisted on pressing the matter, the captain would go down and count the bodies by himself, without risking his men. The colonel backed off when they settled on the captain’s farcical suggestion of 150. The official records downgraded the total to 116, plus assorted strays. Either way, the ledger looked good to higher command. Schumacher had gotten his favorable body count.15
See the Hill, Take the Hill: The Horror of 875
The tension was palpable, jolting, like an electrical current. Here and there, morning fog hung in the valleys. For three companies of troopers, Alpha, Charlie, and Dog of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, the order of the day from Major James Steverson, the battalion commander, was to take Hill 875. The hill was an unsightly, jungle- and tree-covered pile of woebegone earth a few miles east of Cambodia. It had no intrinsic value except that the NVA was there. The previous day, a Special Forces team had detected their presence and engaged in a brief firefight with them. The Americans had then spent much of the nighttime and early morning hours hurling the usual blend of firepower at the hill.
Now, after sunrise on this Sunday morning of November 19, it was time for the grunts to take it. This order came with little circumspection, no assessment of enemy numbers, no serious analysis of the strength of NVA defenses on the hill, nor any consideration of whether the hill was a worthwhile objective. In the war of attrition, Hill 875 was just one more place to find, fix, and kill the enemy. In the context of the episodic fighting that was raging around Dak To in November 1967, one hill was like any other. As at the Umurbrogol on Peleliu a generation before, American commanders had almost no idea what they were getting into.
But the grunts did. After several days of clashing with the enemy in his Dak To lair, the infantrymen sensed the danger that lurked o
n Hill 875. They had enough experience that they could sense the enemy’s presence in such recent finds as spools of abandoned communication wire, steps cut into hills, vacant base camps, bloody bandages, and propaganda leaflets. Some of the soldiers even swore that they could feel the enemy’s nearby presence. Many of the paratroopers believed this day would be their last day on earth. Before setting out for the hill, quite a few of them attended a Catholic Mass given by the battalion’s legendary, universally loved chaplain, Father Charles Watters, a forty-year-old priest who made a point of spending most of his time in the field with the grunts. The respected priest even said Mass with camouflaged vestments and a portable altar. Like several other troopers, Sergeant Steven Welch attended the Mass even though he was not Catholic. “I figured I needed all the help I could get because things weren’t looking good on that hill.”
At 0943, the grunts began trudging up the hill, negotiating their way around felled trees and through scrub brush. “There was a heavy undergrowth of bushes, vines and small trees,” a post-battle report stated. “Visibility was restricted generally to 5 to 15 meters and not more than 25 meters.” Farther up the hill, the Americans could detect some gaps in the jungle where bombs and shells had impacted. Everything was quiet, unusually so, as if all the creatures of the jungle understood that the hill was pregnant with menace.
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