Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Early on 30 April, in accordance with orders from Col. Hull the four companies of Weise’s battalion were widely dispersed, up to seven miles apart, north and east of the communists’ as yet undetermined positions. On the roof of an abandoned house near the river, Capt. Jim Williams watched through glasses as US Navy craft exchanged fire with enemy in the hamlets on his own shore. There was an explosion against the hull of an American landing-craft: at a range of five hundred yards, a 57mm recoilless rifle round struck, killing one sailor and wounding two more. While patrol boats sprayed the shore, the convoy turned back west to Dong Ha; the navy declared the Bo Dieu closed until the NVA had been dislodged.

  At 0818 L/Cpl. James O’Neill, a sniper accompanying a patrol from Williams’s H Company, glimpsed movement five hundred yards out, and said, ‘Sir, I think we got a whole bunch of gooks in front.’ His lieutenant said, ‘Shoot one of them.’ In the heat haze, O’Neill could not see clearly through the telescopic sight of his Remington 700, but after firing twice he observed a figure sitting on the edge of a hole, lacking half its head. Then Williams received orders from Weise, radio call-sign Dixie Diner 6: his own H Company was to assault the hamlet of Dong Hoang from the north, while neighbouring F attacked Daido, two thousand yards to their right. Regiment at this stage permitted Weise to use only these two companies, less one platoon. Here was a first blunder: by committing American strength piecemeal, the enemy in its path was granted superiority of numbers.

  F and H mustered fewer than a hundred men apiece thanks to depletions from casualties, sickness, R&Rs. On the shoreline Weise and his command group boarded a shallow-draft armoured monitor craft, from which they could observe progress, pulsing slowly upriver in sync with the infantry ashore. As usual, intelligence was non-existent: they might meet two communists with a recoilless rifle, or two hundred, or two thousand. American 105mm and 155m artillery began to plaster the objectives with high-explosive and smoke rounds. Around 1330 the lead platoons of H were approaching Dong Hoang when they met ferocious fire from a screen of trees. Weise’s report to Regiment – that the enemy was obviously positioned in strength – secured him additional support from two M-48 tanks, and from the navy offshore. A recon man fired a single M-16 bullet at an enemy soldier, and exclaimed ‘Jee-sus Christ!’ when he saw his target disintegrate: the Marine failed to realise that a tank had simultaneously landed a 90mm round. The infantrymen crawled forward until they were close to Dong Hoang then clambered to their feet, formed a line five yards apart, advanced firing from the hip.

  Some communist soldiers leapt out of their spider-holes and scuttled away, but others kept shooting. Marines started running forward, but Williams, a famously courageous thirty-year-old Minnesotan, dashed among them slowing the pace, lest they overtake their own barrage. Amid the cacophony, out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed an enemy emerging from a nearby hole and tossing a grenade. It bounced before exploding, blowing the company commander off his feet and piercing his legs and buttocks with agonising fragments. Unable to stand, with small-arms fire and explosions still deafening all comers, he told his radio-operator to fetch the senior NCO. The man loped away, ducking, then returned to report that the sergeant would not come: ‘He’s in a hole, and won’t leave it!’ Williams ordered his w/op to go tell the skulker he had better come fast, or the captain would shoot him. Another officer said in mitigation, ‘The guy had seen a lot of action, and he was gun-shy even before this.’ Lt. Alex ‘Scotty’ Prescott assumed command of H Company.

  The firefight continued: a staff-sergeant blown over by blast staggered to his feet and ran forward again only to meet another grenade that blew the shotgun out of his hands, the diver’s watch off his wrist. When he clambered up and found his head spinning, he told a corpsman to slap his face – which worked. It then took the remains of the company fifteen minutes to work through Dong Hoang, taking casualties at almost every step as enemy soldiers leapt from bypassed spider-holes. ‘Goddamn, there was dead gooks all over the place,’ said Sgt. Joe Jones, huge and black, who took over a platoon when his lieutenant was hit. ‘Wounded Marines … Everybody was all mixed up then; different squads from different platoons was all over the damn ville.’ Lt. Carl Gibson, three feet behind Prescott as they emerged on the south side of the village, dropped dead with a bullet in the head. Married a month, he had been in Vietnam ten days.

  The survivors formed a perimeter in the midst of the continuing bedlam. A corpsman cried hysterically over a wounded friend; a sergeant lay turning grey from loss of blood – another corpsman shouted, ‘We gotta get him out – he’s dying, he’s dying!’ No helicopter could land; instead, at 1530, small boats – ‘skimmers’ – touched the riverbank a few hundred yards south of the battlefield, bringing ammunition and evacuating thirty wounded. Col. Hull suddenly appeared and began quizzing ‘Scotty’ Prescott. The bombastic, iron-tough regimental commander believed that Weise and his men were displaying insufficient aggression. He urged the CO to ‘belly up’ to the enemy, which caused his operations officer to protest that ‘We were so close already that the NVA could slit Weise’s belly with a knife.’ Williams found himself being evacuated in a boat wherein a discarded canteen floated on blood, some of it his own. Voicing a preoccupation common to many wounded men, he said to a navy corpsman, ‘I’m so numb I can’t feel anything. Can you check my balls are still there?’ – the battalion’s own ‘Big John’ Malnar had lost a testicle in Korea. The man examined the sensitive area and responded, ‘They look fine to me, sir.’ Such an exchange would be comic, were it not terrible.

  The wounded were flown offshore to Iwo Jima, where successive waves of choppers were preceded by Tannoy broadcasts: ‘Medevacs inbound … medevacs inbound.’ A Marine entered the ship’s crowded sickbay and announced that the 2/4th were in trouble, and that anybody fit to fight should return ashore. Several bandaged figures walked stiffly to the hangar deck, strewn with bloody flak jackets and gear, equipped themselves with essentials and flew back, albeit not into the battle. While corpsmen in the field had a fine reputation, this did not extend up the medical chain: every infantryman heard of possessions plundered. When Jim Williams aboard Iwo Jima was invited to surrender his pistol, despite acute pain he clutched it and snarled, ‘No goddamn sailor is going to take my weapon!’ He eventually released the .45 to a Marine. It was months before he could sit comfortably, a year before he was fit for duty.

  Even as Hotel – H – was taking punishment to secure Dong Hoang, two thousand yards further west, and very late, at 1350 Foxtrot approached Daido from the north riding atop amphibious tractors, wholly ignorant of what to expect. An incoming rocket exploded against a vehicle carrying five radio-operators, one of whom fell off, wounded and screaming. More RPGs exploded as they dismounted and moved hesitantly forward. Most of the company went to ground a hundred yards out from the objective, the right-flank platoon hugging a little cemetery.

  Company commander Capt. James Butler, a quiet-spoken twenty-five-year-old Texan, son of a general, directed a napalm strike – tin cans tumbling out of the sky until they burst red, billowing clouds of fire that turned suddenly black – within forty yards of one of F’s lieutenants. He radioed: ‘Goddamn, it’s hot here – don’t get it any closer!’ Four hours into the fight, Butler reported to Weise that he had only twenty-six effectives left, and sought permission to pull back. Weise agreed, though it took two hours for the dispirited group to break contact, covered by Phantoms and the amphtracs’ .50-calibre machine-guns. If the NVA had chosen to pursue, said Butler, ‘they had a good opportunity to really clean our clocks’; but they did not.

  At 1700, Bravo Company of the 1st Marines was ferried across the river to reinforce the 2/4th. This was not a happy body of men: Bravo had been suffering disciplinary difficulties, with NCOs brawling among themselves, together with a stoned radio-operator who had threatened them with a grenade. The amphtracs hit the shoreline beside the hamlet of An Lac, their passengers supposing they were merely headed to support Weise’
s battalion attacking Daido. Instead, within seconds of crawling onto the sand they faced a hail of close-quarter enemy fire which killed their commander, along with a lieutenant, a sergeant and seven men, leaving another fourteen badly wounded. ‘It was total chaos,’ said L/Cpl. Doug Urban. ‘Everybody just freaked. We weren’t a company any more. We were just a bunch of people lying on the ground.’

  Norman Doucette, a lifer and Korean vet, said to a sergeant, ‘We got to get in the treeline – we gotta secure that fuckin’ treeline!’ The man declined to move. Then, as Doucette leaned sideways to check a dead man, he himself dropped, hit in the face, losing most of his tongue and teeth. For some time he lay alone, believing that he was bleeding to death and reflecting bitterly: ‘Somebody went and left us lying right here to just get slaughtered.’ Then a gutsy Filipino corpsman ran over and bandaged him. The survivors of Bravo secured the western half of An Lac, where Robert Robinson, a deep-throated black platoon sergeant, won a Silver Star for continuing to shoot despite a shoulder wound sealed with mud. They were not in a good way, however: their only remaining officer, a bewildered lieutenant, froze where he crouched.

  From the volume of enemy fire, Weise estimated at least a regiment fighting them. In truth, at this stage only one NVA battalion was committed, the 6/52nd, whose officers made a mirror misjudgement of American strength, reporting that they faced two Marine battalions supported by twelve tanks. The communists cursed the American artillery which repeatedly severed their field-telephone links, though doing little harm to the occupants of deep bunkers. Out on the river aboard their monitor, Weise was himself firing an 81mm mortar while ‘Big John’ Malnar his sergeant-major, a fabulous forty-one-year-old veteran of World War II Pacific and then Korean battles, manned a .50-calibre machine-gun. Malnar had never married: the Marine Corps was his life. They saw two sampans drifting offshore which might have contained fishermen, but seemed more likely to be spotting for the communists: the Americans blew them out of the water.

  As the light faded, Weise told Col. Hull that he believed higher command still did not understand the opposition’s strength: ‘We’re in a world of hurt here. There’s a whole lot of bad guys and not many of us good guys.’ He was told that he was not the only one with problems: four miles westwards another battalion was in heavy action, and had already suffered 144 casualties. Operations officer Major ‘Fritz’ Warren later wrote: ‘Bill Weise was in a shit sandwich.’ The battalion CO secured reluctant approval to bring forward his own Golf Company, then three thousand yards north-westwards. Two platoons of G duly boarded Sea Knights, but once in the air they saw NV shells and tracer hitting their intended LZ, causing Jay Vargas to abort the move. Landing back at the patrol base he told his men, ‘No free ride today – we have to walk.’ They took only their fighting gear for the two-mile hike. In gathering darkness, NCOs had to shout at some exhausted men to keep them moving. The communists spotted the long files, and soon shells and mortar bombs were falling nearby. Lt. Jim Ferland said, ‘The troops were on the verge of panic, but Capt. Vargas kept good control.’

  Though gunfire ebbed during the night, there was no tranquillity. Back in Dong Hoang, Corporal Richard Tyrell yanked at a sandalled foot beneath some hay, which he assumed was attached to a corpse. Instead, a thoroughly alive NVA soldier burst forth. Tyrell fired his M-16 once before it jammed, then grabbed a pistol from another soldier and emptied it towards the fleeing figure. A newly-arrived replacement urinated into the open mouth of a dead communist, before being shoved away by a disgusted companion. Weise exploded at James Butler when he discovered that F Company still had fifty-five effective Marines, not the twenty-six that officer had claimed to support his request to withdraw. Weise said later, ‘It was then that I realised Butler had lost control.’ Another officer dismissed the Texan as ‘just a nice, decent, mild-mannered Clark Kent, who never turned into Superman’.

  There were night alarms as trapped NVA soldiers sought to slip out of the American perimeter. In the neighbouring shoreside hamlet of An Lac, Bravo found the enemy jamming its radios. Weise came ashore to impose a change of frequency – and took a mortar splinter in his thigh. American illuminants were bursting over Daido, but these did more to show Marines to the communists than the other way about. An incoming blast knocked Jay Vargas into a creek, and thereafter he marched and fought with splinters in his knee and calf. At the battalion command post, the captain was told that landing craft would take Golf’s men the last few hundred yards upriver, yet the boats failed to appear: their commander declined to risk a passage in darkness, exposed to fire. Vargas snatched thirty minutes’ sleep, then at 0100 on May Day briefed his platoon commanders to renew the attack on Daido.

  At dawn, a patrol found that the NVA had abandoned their foothold in An Lac, which Bravo secured at the cost of a further five casualties. Two hours later, the Americans were bemused to behold a large body of enemy moving across their front, in obvious disarray. They plastered the communists with fire, Weise saying with satisfaction, ‘It was a real turkey shoot.’ Morale was further boosted by napalm strikes from two F-4s. The observer in a ‘bird dog’ spotter aircraft warned the Phantoms over the radio, ‘You’re takin’ fire! You’re takin’ fire!’ which caused an F-4 pilot to retort sardonically, ‘Uhhhh, uhhhh … I think that’s only fair.’ On the riverbank, Bravo Company reported itself still unable to advance, and indeed it accomplished little that day or the next: the traumatised survivors were in no mood for heroics.

  Weise reboarded the monitor and made the short passage downriver to meet G Company. Its new attack on Daido, supported by two tanks, began after a Skyhawk ‘prepping’ strike at 1253. What followed was an epic of courage and sacrifice, in a frontal attack that should never have happened, across seven hundred yards of open ground. The communists were firing from bunkers built on heavy bamboo A-frames reinforced with layers of earth and rice matting. During the night the 6/52nd NVA had been reinforced by a company from their 48th Regiment, which now reported itself under attack by three Marine battalions supported by fourteen tanks.

  Many Americans thought the assault crazy, among them L/Cpl. Jim Lashley, due to go home in seventeen days: ‘We’re getting too short for this shit, man.’ L/Cpl. James Parkins of Golf shrugged, ‘There was a lot of animosity, but you couldn’t say “This is stupid and I’m not going to do it,” ’cause if you weren’t there and your buddy got shot, you’d think, Oh man … You kept the thoughts to yourself, just kind of mumbling as you went forward.’ Several Marines had three-piece cleaning rods assembled and taped to the plastic stocks of their M-16s to clear rounds which so often jammed – and would jam that day. The Americans had advanced two hundred yards through thigh-high brown grass when NVA small arms began to hit them from spider-holes dotting the fields. Lashley was shot in the left arm, shattering his elbow. For a few seconds he remained upright, in agony, then stumbled and collapsed: pain persisted through two shots of morphia.

  Lt. Ferland’s platoon stopped and dropped. Jay Vargas ran back and urged men onto their feet and forward, though one of Ferland’s squads soon had two dead, six wounded. Bravo Company, lingering in An Lac, reported by radio that they could see a hundred NVA on Golf’s left flank. One of the supporting tanks started shooting that way, directed by a Marine standing on the hull, until blast blew him to the ground. The tank commander, dismayed by incoming fire, started pulling back. Jay Vargas ran forward, grabbed the hull phone and shouted that he would have the commander court-martialled unless he stayed. ‘Go to hell,’ said the tanker, who grudgingly lingered long enough for some wounded men to be laid on the hull, then back-pedalled the M-48 off the battlefield.

  The other tank exhausted its sixty-seven 90mm rounds, then likewise began to withdraw. When Vargas argued by radio, the tanker responded that he could do nothing more. But you can, urged the Marine: the moral effect is tremendous, for both friend and foe, of a steel monster moving across the paddy. Weise, monitoring the net, cut in: the tank must stay. NVA artillery suddenly shi
fted fire from Golf onto Foxtrot, wounding eight men. Lt. Ferland picked up a discarded AK-47, because he hated his own M-16. Some Marines lay motionless in the grass, hoping neither side would notice them.

  Golf lingered in Daido under mortar fire for two hours, steadily losing men. In a macabre moment, a Marine headed towards the rear shoulder-carrying the headless corpse of a buddy. Then the North Vietnamese counter-attacked. Air strikes came in, shooting at whatever pilots could see, while Vargas popped green smoke to mark his own position. At 1625 his survivors began pulling back, three wounded men limping together, while he and his FAC covered the withdrawal, shooting hard. G had started the day with 150 men; now, forty-five survivors took refuge in a drainage ditch. The NVA triumphantly claimed to have counted three hundred American corpses.

  At 1700 Weise decided to commit Bravo. But that company’s spirits, already low, were further eroded when they were herded away from a ration truck to board amphtracs which rolled forward before they could eat. Three hundred yards short of Daido, the Marines began to receive fire, leapt down, went to ground. The company’s new commander and his radioman led an attempt to renew the advance – then found nobody following. An RPG exploded, seriously wounding the captain in the shoulder. A greenhorn platoon commander thus became Bravo’s only officer. He screamed hysterically into the radio, ‘You gotta help me! We’re surrounded out here! They’re all over the place! They’re going to kill us all!’ Jay Vargas came calmly up on the net. ‘Now listen to me, Bravo, take it easy, I’m right over here. You’re okay; just pull your line in and talk to your people and stop yelling.’