by Doug Stanton
• • •
Stan drops his rucksack and sets about exploring his new home. He fills sandbags and at about 9:00 p.m., dead-tired, he falls asleep in a puddle of water, hoping the small depression in the ground might provide some small degree of protection from ground fire, should it ever come.
January 31, 1968
LZ Jane
At 4:00 a.m., Stan is awakened by the shrill cry of whistles. At first he thinks he is in Indiana, on the wrestling mat in high school, and that the referee has just given a signal to start the match.
When the whistles don’t cease but grow louder, Stan sits up, wiping muddy water from his eyes. Something loud and big is shaking the ground.
When he looks up and sees the waves of attackers heading up the hill, he freezes.
Illumination rounds drift overhead, swinging like lanterns, their light casting shadows across the trees, across Stan’s face.
The artillery fire seems to be coming from North Vietnamese guns hidden along the western perimeter of the LZ. And then Stan sees them—hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers in khaki uniforms, accompanied by Viet Cong fighters in black “pajamas” and sandals, are storming up the hill.
The soldiers are blowing whistles, and some of them are carrying long bamboo poles whose ends bounce ahead of them as they run.
Stan had fallen asleep near Jerry Austin, a machine gunner named Olen Queen, Tony Beke, and Michael Bradshaw, and all of them now fear they are being attacked by an entire battalion of NVA, about five hundred men. They—Stan and the rest of Recon Platoon, Alpha Company, and a 105mm artillery battery—number only about two hundred.
The NVA are hitting the two steepest positions, focusing their massed wave at these parts of the perimeter. The concertina wire at the edge of the LZ stands only about thirty-five feet away from the sandbagged positions. Al Dove sees that the enemy are hitting these positions because the steep grade shields them from a direct angle of fire. Al, manning his M-60 gun, is leaning over the sandbag berm and shooting so much that the barrel of his machine gun begins to glow red in the dark, like the inside of a furnace.
Jerry, Stan, Tony, Michael, and Alpha Company troopers are firing their M-16s and are amazed that the NVA run right past them as if they are invisible. The enemy soldiers, it turns out, are more concerned with capturing the center of the camp, the command-and-control bunker, and the howitzer batteries. These guns are firing from behind and directly over their heads, at the positions from which the NVA are charging the hill. Overhead, green tracer rounds race in from the assaulting enemy while red tracers swim in the outgoing fire of the LZ’s U.S. troops.
An NVA soldier suddenly emerges from the dark, raises his rifle, and smashes Stan on the head with his rifle butt. The attacking soldier falls, shot by someone Stan can’t see. Next, he’s rushed by another NVA fighter. Stan can see his face, his mouth twisted in a scream, but what he sees most is the sharp point of the man’s bayonet at the end of his AK-47, aimed at his chest. Stan can almost feel the metal tip, the first hint of pressure against the sweat-damp fabric of his jungle fatigues, like the deliberate touch of a finger atop something baking, Is it done yet? and then the entrance, the piercing, the enormously painful entrance of the steel into his chest, through the ribs, so painful that he does not feel it at first, and then the silver point entering his heart.
Stan knows he’s supposed to raise his weapon, his M-16, and fire. He knows he’s supposed to raise the rifle, with the bayonet fixed to its end, and stab the soldier. But he can’t move. He sits there, feeling helpless, still foggy after getting clobbered by the NVA soldier and his rifle.
Off to his right, a burst of gunfire goes off. He can’t hear it because the night is already too loud, but he can see the muzzle flashes, and Stan sees a paratrooper with his M-16 firing on the bayonet-wielding NVA soldier. The trooper stabs the soldier in the back and the body falls across Stan, who pushes it away, just as the paratrooper grabs Stan’s hand and pulls him to his feet. The paratrooper keeps moving forward, leaving Stan behind.
Just then, another soldier runs up, and he yells above the din, “What are you doing?”
Stan shrugs—he feels stupid and he doesn’t know what to say.
“Follow me!” yells the guy.
Out there in the dark, Stan can see the bayonets moving above the ground. Floating, moving forward. Toward him. Something awakens in him. He feels alive. Stan knows he’s going to attack them.
He turns around and is shocked to see a platoon-mate, Ron Kuvik, “The Kuv,” from Missouri, either dead or fast asleep. “Hey, Kuvik, wake up!” Stan yells. Nothing. In truth, Kuvik is exhausted by the day’s trip to LZ Jane from the south, and he will even sit up at one point, see all the red dots swarming around him, the tracer rounds, and fall back asleep. Stan jumps up and follows the soldier. They run to the center of the fighting, the point at which the NVA are most intensely attacking.
Stan watches as the men carrying the poles plant them like vaulters and launch themselves over the concertina wire. It is then that Stan sees that some of these men are carrying satchel charges—bombs. Their plan is to run through the camp and into its command bunkers and machine-gun nests and blow them up.
He and Jerry Austin are shooting and loading new magazines as fast as they can. He can’t shoot fast enough. When Al and Olen Queen join them at the wire with their M-60 machine guns, the firing is so loud it seems to be held by no sound at all.
Stan tries shooting the pole vaulters out of the air. He will later learn that these approaching sappers, armed with satchel charges, are from the 10th Sapper Battalion, 812th NVA Regiment, 324B NVA Division, and that they were sometimes drugged with opium to induce euphoria.
Some of the pole vaulters don’t have enough momentum, and they teeter at the apex of their arc and begin falling back—at which point their comrades rush in, grasp the pole, and begin to push it forward, delivering them to the other side. Stan in his addled state marvels at this and thinks it reminds him of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.
Other NVA soldiers take a more direct route to glory. They run at the wire and leap up, arms spread wide, and do a swan dive right onto its impaling blades. Stan watches as several of the enemy do this, making a soft human carpet on the wire, over which dozens of NVA are scrambling. Stan thinks, How in the hell are we going to win against men like this? He’s firing so fast and so much that he doesn’t know what he is hitting. He spots some of the sappers who have made it inside the camp. Stan aims at them, trying to hit the satchel charge so it will blow up.
Looking over to his left, he watches a rocket-propelled grenade race in and blow up one of the M-60 machine-gun positions. Just then he also sees a lone, tall figure, an American, charge the position, fire, and retake the gun. Even in the dark, amid the explosions, he can recognize the silhouette of the gunner as Michael Bradshaw. Stan is filled with joy that Bradshaw has rushed to the position to counter the enemy’s attack; his decision to do this may help save them. Stan knows Bradshaw must be scared, but in the din he can’t hear if he’s screaming or yelling or swearing; silence. He’s a flickering image amid hundreds of explosions.
Looking back to his front, Stan sees one sapper detonate nearly in front of him, just about twenty-five feet away. Stan closes his eyes and hears a sickening rain fall around him. When he opens his eyes, he sees two of the dead soldier’s fingers stuck to his shoulder.
And then the combat turns hand to hand. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong jump into the shallow bunkers, and Stan is fighting them off with the bayonet fixed on the end of his M-16. He remembers what his instructor told him at Fort Leonard Wood—that he would teach what it means to feel the “warrior’s spirit.” Only now is Stan comprehending what his instructor had meant. Stan shoots two soldiers as they run past, then stabs a third. He is surprised at how hard it is to get a man unstuck from the blade. He has to lift his foot, place it against the dead man’s chest, and pull back hard. He has just gotten one of the dead NVA to slide off his
bayonet when he’s again rifle-butted by some unseen enemy. It knocks him backward, and he clenches, waiting for a next blow. But it doesn’t come. He jumps back up and keeps shooting and stabbing.
When the attack is over, the silence of the night is deafening.
• • •
In the morning, January 31, the Recon Platoon stares out at dead enemy soldiers piled up along the concertina wire. Severed legs, heads, and arms scattered across the spindly ground. Stan and many of his comrades, covered in blood, pieces of flesh, and bone fragments, break open their C-rations and eat breakfast. For a moment, Stan expects the worst to happen: he expects his fellow soldiers to know that the night before he’d momentarily froze in the midst of combat. He wonders who the soldier was who noticed him and got him to his feet. He’d like to thank him for saving his life.
He watches Jerry Austin pick up something from the ground, look at it, and pass it around. Stan thinks it looks like a square piece of a sponge. . . . The object is squishy to the touch. Troy Fulton, the medic, says, “What the hell are you doing? That’s a hand.” In fact, it’s a hand with no fingers.
Al Dove rouses from his position and counts twelve feet, detached from the shin down, scattered about. He looks more closely and sees that they were right feet. He figures the blast that had ripped them apart had come from their right side, for how else to explain the inexplicable? He doesn’t dwell on this; there are too many macabre sights to take in. Stan looks around the LZ and sees that some of the heads look as if they have been emptied, the faces folded nearly in half. The night’s attack had lasted just twenty minutes.
If this is what it’s like, Stan thinks, we are really in for a war.
• • •
The official after-action reports would record that fourteen enemy soldiers had been killed in the night, but when Bradshaw and Austin and Parker and the others start counting, they tally up nearly one hundred dead enemy soldiers. Bradshaw has the unfortunate job of driving a flatbed vehicle called a Mule and picking up their remains. He and a crew throw them onboard, drive them to the pit the engineers had bulldozed that morning, toss the pieces in the hole, and cover them with lime. Bradshaw loads the Mule four or five times with eight to twelve enemy bodies each time. He works for several hours at this job, and as much as he dreads it and is repulsed by the gore, he hates even more the words he hears next: he and Recon will be heading out beyond the wire to take up ambush positions in case the NVA plan another attack.
• • •
In those first predawn hours of the Tet Offensive, about 100,000 North Vietnamese regular army soldiers attacked thirty-six cities throughout South Vietnam. Planning for the attack, led by Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, had begun about seven months earlier in Hanoi. Tons of matériel and thousands of fighters had been quietly inserted into South Vietnam by way of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The swift execution of the countrywide offensive stunned the American military.
Enemy soldiers and guerrillas attacked the radio station and U.S. embassy in Saigon and even attacked Westmoreland’s headquarters at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, outside Saigon, setting it on fire. Westmoreland called the attack “deceitful.” He complained that the NVA and VC broke a holiday truce they themselves had agreed to.
The surprise onslaught was meant to shock the American public. At the same time, the attacks were supposed to inspire Vietnamese citizens to rise up and take arms against the American “occupiers” and South Vietnamese “puppet regime” living among them. The hope was that the Vietnamese in Hai Lang, in Hue, in Quang Tri City, in Saigon—throughout the entire country—would foment their own insurrection. But the understaffed, ill-equipped, and poorly trained citizen soldiers who might have led a countrywide rebellion did not coalesce as a fighting force.
News and images of these surprise attacks rippled back to the United States in a matter of hours via teletype and the beaming of TV combat footage. Nearly overnight, American perceptions of the war changed. The North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong would win a victory in the realm of psychological operations, but suffer enormous losses on the ground. By March 4, the end of the Tet Offensive, estimates of enemy dead would number 40,000, and some 14,000 South Vietnamese, including women and children, would die. The combat deaths of Americans would number 4,000. General Westmoreland would put a diplomatic point on the moment: “Although the enemy has achieved some temporary psychological advantage,” he remarked, “he suffered a military defeat.”
The Tet Offensive would last another thirty-four days.
• • •
At about 7:30 on the foggy and cold morning of February 1, with a light rain falling, the men of Recon Platoon load into a three-truck convoy and leave LZ Jane.
The truck Stan is riding in hits a hole in the road, jostling his helmet. Stan doesn’t want to wear the “steel pot” (as the soldiers called their metal helmets), so he throws it off and it bounces in the road as the truck continues on. He’s glad to be rid of it. It’s always knocking around on his head, heavy and hot, and it really doesn’t seem it would do a damn bit of good. It hardly seems worth the discomfort. So he’s glad he’s rid it. But then he’s amazed to watch one of the Loach helicopter crew members, flying in a tiny bubble-headed chopper escorting the convoy, lean out of the canopy, reach down, and grab Stan’s helmet off the road. The Loach rises and moves up and over the truck where Stan is riding at the tailgate. He then drops down a notch or two in the shimmering air (the rotor wash is tremendous during this entire incident), and the crew member hands Stan his helmet. He looks up, takes it hesitantly, and finally puts it on—to have refused would have seemed an insult. The Loach lifts away and is gone.
Well, I’ll be damned, thinks Stan. Now I’ve seen it all.
When they reach the western edge of Hai Lang, they get out of the trucks and walk into town. Along the road, they see piles of bandages and blood-smeared helmets and rifles, but they don’t find any wounded or dead.
The houses they pass are empty.
The people of Hai Lang have fled.
• • •
On the same day that a helicopter crewman plucked Stan’s helmet off the road, South Vietnam’s national police chief made history on the streets of Saigon. Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised a .38 pistol and fired point-blank at the head of a Viet Cong fighter turned prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem. Loan made history for two reasons: for the brazen, swift act of killing the prisoner in broad daylight on a busy Saigon street and because it was in full view of AP photographer Eddie Adams, who took a picture at the instant the bullet entered the VC fighter’s head and at the same time a cameraman for NBC News was filming the execution.
Loan approached the short, slender man, whose arms were bound behind him, quickly raised his pistol, and fired. The fighter toppled over, dead before he landed on the pavement, with bright blood shooting from the exit wound on the left side of his head onto the pavement. Adams won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for the photograph and would later say that two people died in the picture; the VC fighter and Loan. What Adams later explained was that earlier in the day, Nguyen Van Lem had been leading a Viet Cong “revenge squad” and had executed families of Saigon police officers. Lem had been brought to Loan for questioning and Loan, on hearing about the revenge kills, had killed Lem. After the execution, Loan is reported to have said, “These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think Buddha will forgive me.”
The movement of his arm was that of a quick rising motion, of a man suddenly raising his arm to light a candle at head height. At the touch of the pistol to his head, the man instantly crumbled. Back in the United States, millions of Americans, gathered around television sets, were horrified by the execution of an unarmed man.
The fallout of the cold-blooded killing followed Loan the rest of his life. After the war, in 1975, he moved to the United States and opened a pizza parlor in a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C., but even there he was haunted by his act of revenge. Once when he visited the pizza parlor, Adams, who remained in touch with the out
cast general, found graffiti in the pizza shop men’s room that read, “We know who you are, fucker.” Loan died in 1998, only sixty-seven years old. Cancer.
• • •
The U.S. artillery starts dropping on Hai Lang, and the men of Recon begin walking house to house with the intent of clearing the remaining enemy.
As they patrol, an artillery shell lands in a nearby neighborhood.
That’s when the wailing starts.
A moaning, a tide of grief—rising.
Stan can only imagine the damage the shelling has done, crumpling tin, smashing mud, burning thatch.
Can imagine the dead persons lying amid the rubble.
Kids.
Women.
And probably the VC, too, which is why the neighborhood has been targeted. The intention had not been to kill civilians, but Stan can hear them wailing. He’s beginning to feel that his mind’s not right, that he’s having trouble thinking.
Things are becoming disconnected, he realizes. There’s some relationship between the landing of the artillery shell and the wailing that ensues, but it’s harder and harder for him to make this connection.
That night, hunkered in a shallow hole in the yard of an abandoned school, Stan sits and listens to the wailing, wishing with all his might that it would stop. Sitting in the dark, he and Beke, Lane, and Dove also hear a mysterious thunk and swishing noise at least a dozen times. The morning light reveals a dozen NVA hand grenades scattered about them, within two to five feet of where they were resting—all of them duds, miraculously.