by Phil Ball
This explosion seemed to me to come from the general area where I knew Don’s LP was. I felt that the power of the blast must have killed someone; it was just so close and so strong.
The records indicate that at 0245 three NVA with satchel charges overran a four-man LP, killing themselves and three of the four Marines. I question the validity of this statement. I know for a fact at least two of the Marines survived the initial blasts, and one report I received actually claims that all four Marines managed to leap away at the last second.
The only name I’m sure of is Don’s, and he most definitely survived the blast. His helmet was blown completely off, and although he hung onto his M-16 and carried it back to the perimeter, there wasn’t much of it left. The plastic stock pieces were splintered and broken off, yet it was still operational. I don’t think he was knocked unconscious, but I’m sure he was knocked for a loop, dazed and probably very confused. He might have forgotten where he was for a minute, for he did not immediately run straight back to the perimeter.
The three satchel charge explosions signaled the beginning of a furious ground attack. NVA came running out of the tree line and poured up the western slope. The second LP member that survived the blasts was lying in the grass between 1st Platoon’s lines and the tree line—the enemy force literally ran over him in their assault. The brave Marine managed to shoot several soldiers as they ran past him, until he too was killed. Don had to have been right there with this Marine, and I believe he was probably shooting while he thought about how he was going to get back.
Scores of screaming, whistling RPGs began exploding the length of our position. Green tracer rounds from the hundreds of enemy AK-47s ricocheted and bounced in every direction. Grenades and large blocks of TNT went off around the perimeter in rapid succession. We were in for something big, very big.
I couldn’t tell exactly where the NVA were coming from; it seemed like they were everywhere. They attacked at opposite ends of the ridge at first: the western finger where 1st Platoon’s lines were established, and on the eastern end where the already-weary Crow’s Nest Marines were beginning to run low on ammo. It was all we could do to try to survive the brutal incoming RPG attack. Because the NVA were attacking on foot through their own supporting fire, we could not simply sit tight and keep our heads down. Those Marines who did keep their heads down too long without defending their positions were quickly overrun by the enemy. They were either shot in the back of the head or blown up with well-placed grenades and satchel charges.
The 60-mm mortar team was firing rounds practically straight into the air to put them as close as possible to the perimeter. The enemy spotted the mortar tube and immediately focused their attention on it. The M-60 machine gun was two holes to the right of the mortars and they also became a priority target. I think it was the M-60, with its heavy fire power, that was the main reason 1st Platoon’s lines held as long as they did. Almost simultaneously, both positions fell. The M-60 took a direct hit from an RPG that killed both the gunner and the A-gunner, and the mortar pit was emptied when a Chi-Com grenade landed in the hole with them.
Within five or 10 minutes of the attack, the gooks were already jumping into fighting holes and blowing themselves up. Besides the casualties suffered in Don’s LP, six or seven more grunts had been killed, and 15 to 20 wounded, most of whom were all from 1st Platoon and the area on the western finger. As the situation became more hopeless, a few of the guys took it upon themselves to pull back from the perimeter to more secure positions inside the line. They soon found out there was no security anywhere on the hill.
The three-man hole on the northwest corner was like a lookout and was completely cut off from the rest of us now. NVA coming up the western slope had overrun the positions to the left of it and were inside the perimeter. PFC Sherrill and his fire team had nowhere to go; if they pulled back they would have to first get through the enemy, shooting behind the lines. That was not a good idea, since they were likely to hit their own people. The word had already been passed to pull back 20 meters and set up a secondary line of defense, but Sherrill’s team couldn’t do it. Instead, they chose to slide down the steep slope, through enemy lines and the murderous fire of both sides, and hope they wouldn’t be spotted. Once they managed to disappear into the tree line and get away from the ridge line about 50 meters or so, they had it made. None of them stopped until they reached the road, where they met up with the other grunt from the Crow’s Nest who had left his position for slightly different reasons. The four of them spent the rest of the night lying in the drainage ditch alongside Route #9.
Before that grenade forced the 60-mm mortar team out of their position, the fighting had already grown very intense and very close, as was the case in nearly all those positions on our western end of the ridge line. Having received the order to pull back, the four Marines first had to find the opportunity. The newest man left first—he actually split before receiving the order. The team leader, Chief, left next. Chief was a tough Native American very proud of his heritage. When he pulled back he ran into two gooks inside the perimeter. In fact, he actually did run into one of them and knocked him to the ground. Without hesitation, the Chief killed them both by carefully placing one 45 caliber round into each of their heads.
The two remaining Marines in the mortar pit were under such heavy attack that they were unable to get away immediately, but when they saw the sparks shooting from an object that bounced into their hole, they both jumped out very quickly. The Chi-Com exploded before PFC Rob Goodwin could get entirely clear. The grenade peppered him with small pieces of hot shrapnel, stinging the soles of his feet.
PFC Ralph Luebbers and his 1st Platoon fire team were in a hole, west of the now-vacant mortar pit. When he heard the Chi-Com explode he ran over to help, thinking his friend Chief was in trouble. He didn’t know they all had already pulled back. Luebbers was heard to say, “They’ve got Chief, they’ve got 60 mike mikes.” When he reached the mortar pit, instead of seeing his friends, he was confronted by three gooks, whom he promptly jumped on and killed. In his haste to help Chief, Luebbers only brought the one magazine that was in his weapon, and emptied all 18 rounds into the three NVA. Out of ammo, he turned around and started back to his hole, but was shot in the back and killed just as he dove in on top of his two teammates.
Lance Corporal Mike Cutri was preparing to move his fire team back when he heard cries for help coming from the tall grass in front of his hole. Unable to ignore the pleas, Mike crawled out to find him. Under murderous enemy fire, he found the wounded man and brought him back in. He carried him back to where a medic had set up a small first aid station and was administering to several wounded Marines.
Cutri could have stayed at the first aid station or pulled back further, but he went back to make sure his team was able to pull back safely. He sprinted back to the fire team’s position on the perimeter and was knocked off his feet by an enemy bullet. He crawled the rest of the way and his team dressed his wound. Together, the three of them made a run for it, but again Cutri was shot, this time fatally.
First Platoon fire team leader Lance Corporal Randy Huber left his hole so he could spot rounds for the second mortar team located near the LZ. From their position, the mortar team could not see where their rounds were landing, so Huber acted as their eyes, exposing himself repeatedly to enemy fire. Huber was eventually shot and killed, when an NVA popped up from a fighting hole previously occupied by 1st Platoon.
Meanwhile, a few holes to my right, the salty veteran PFC Holt was having the time of his life. If he was scared, he never did admit it. His hole was located where 3rd Platoon tied in with 1st Platoon. It was so well camouflaged that the gooks, for the most part, never knew he was there. He and his two teammates were able to lay down a blistering crossfire that continually caught the enemy by surprise, as they rushed up the finger toward 1st Platoon’s lines. He was able to remain in his hole so long after the attack began because he used hand grenades and claymores before allo
wing a single shot be fired from his position.
He yelled over to the 1st Platoon grunts, telling them when to pull back and when he would supply cover fire for them, until everyone who was able had pulled back to safer positions. I don’t believe his two teammates were quite as gung ho as he was, but they hung in there with him until they ran out of ammo. Only after he, too, ran dangerously low on ammo did he toss two more grenades and pull back with the others. Moments later, his position was overrun.
By 0300 1st Platoon lines were completely overrun and approximately 60 NVA occupied the abandoned positions as well as the big bomb craters on the finger. When I heard the report of “gooks in the perimeter,” I assumed that all of 1st Platoon had been killed. I didn’t really know they had pulled back. I couldn’t believe it had all happened so fast, and I wondered if 3rd Platoon’s fate would be the same. I wondered where we would pull back to if there were already enemies behind us.
Hillbilly and his guys on the Crow’s Nest had absolutely nowhere to go if they were overrun. They were being hit just as hard as everyone else on the ridge line, but could only dig their heels in and fight harder. There was no way they could ever make it back across the saddle to our perimeter; that entire area was crawling with NVA. Any hope of getting more men and ammo over to them was practically nil. I think we all felt that the situation was reaching a critical point. If something wasn’t done soon, every Marine on the Crow’s Nest might very well be killed.
If it hadn’t been for the expert job our artillery FO did in getting the artillery fire called in so dangerously close to friendly positions, some believe the Crow’s Nest most certainly would have fallen. Even while under heavy attack, the artillery FO and his radio man huddled in a shallow hole with a map and a flashlight, calling in targets sometimes as close as 10 and 15 meters away. Artillery fire from as close as 2000 meters away is not always an exact science because the high-explosive projectiles didn’t always land where they were supposed to each time. Inevitably, some of the hundreds of rounds fired would hit our own position. Those short rounds killed many of the NVA who were attempting to breach the small perimeter on the high ground as well as those on the ridge who had already overrun certain positions. I don’t know of any Marine KIAs from this instance of friendly artillery fire, but I can certainly testify to their closeness. As long as we were in our holes with our heads down, we were shook up and thrown around some, but not hurt. It was those not in a hole who were killed.
Foxtrot Ridge from 0300H to 0730H.
At my position on the south slope, we were getting hit with incoming artillery rounds easily identified by the preceding whistles, but we really didn’t know if they were ours or theirs. There were a lot of explosions of various strengths and sizes, any of which could blow us up as easily as the next. It didn’t seem to matter which ones were ours and which ones were theirs. It came down to who was down in a hole and who wasn’t.
The FO did not mean to sound cold and callous, nor would he think of ever disrespecting a fellow Marine’s corpse, but when he looked over and saw the two Marines in the hole next to him, dangerously exposing themselves to enemy fire, he questioned their priorities. It seemed they had dragged the body of their friend and fire team leader into the hole with them, perhaps trying to protect the bloody corpse from further damage. The four holes on the Crow’s Nest were much too small to begin with, and the FO told the two grieving grunts to remove the corpse. At first they were reluctant, but after some persuading, they agreed. The body of the dead PFC was placed across the front of the fighting hole and served his friends even in death. Like a large sandbag, the corpse absorbed some of the rounds and the punishment intended for the living. Although it sounds macabre, this ploy might very well have saved the lives of those two Marines. When the shit hits the fan, that’s what it all boils down to.
Meanwhile, back on the ridge line, the NVA attack was growing more intense with every second. We had seen a lot of tiny, flashing lights out there from the beginning, and assumed that they were coded messages for organizing enemy movement through the dark tree line. We found a flashlight once with a lens assembly that, with a flip of the wrist, could change from green to red. This is what they used instead of radios. In conjunction with the blinking light system, the NVA were also using green pop up flares, or pencil flares, to coordinate their troop movements. They fired the hand-held flares in various directions; one was actually fired directly at my hole at one point, making me think that the NVA were just fooling around. Like a ball of green fire, it rocketed toward me, skipping off the ground. It hit the reinforced build-up in front of my position and ricocheted high into the night sky. I could not understand why the gooks would bother firing flares of this nature, unless they were trigger-happy and they got off by shooting anything they could get their hands on. I was not aware that they were communicating with each other at this point. They looked like the very same flares we used ourselves. Most radiomen carried them, along with smoke grenades, to alert a chopper pilot to our location, among other things.
First Lieutenant Jones and Gunny Larsen carried some of these flares, too. When they observed the NVA using them, they figured, “Why not fire a few of our own, just to see what, if anything might happen?” At best, it might confuse them a little; it certainly wouldn’t make them attack any harder. They were already hitting us with everything they had. First Platoon had already been overrun and it was beginning to look like the entire company would suffer the same fate. The NVA had the momentum going for them and we weren’t able to slow them down.
The very first pair of red pencil flares fired from our company CP had unbelievable results, astounding every Marine on the ridge line. Apparently mistaking our flares for theirs and interpreting them to mean “cease-fire,” the brutal enemy onslaught suddenly changed. The locomotive-like assault that hadn’t missed a beat started to slacken; the grenade and RPG fire stopped. The small arms and the machine gun fire dwindled to practically nothing. The gooks stopped fighting and the attack came grinding to a halt.
It had taken only 15 minutes to breach 1st Platoon’s lines and overrun the western portion of our perimeter. It all happened so fast it made our heads spin. Now it appeared as though we might get a much-needed break. Our own artillery fire stopped and was replaced with illumination rounds. High-altitude flares popped overhead and lit up the countryside like a football field, drifting slowly to earth by parachute. An eerie silence fell over the ridge line, with long, ghostly shadows created by the falling flares marching across like an army of giants. The contrasting light and darkness made it appear as if everything was moving, yet the enemy was nowhere to be seen.
I could hear them talking excitedly. They obviously thought we had left and they had won. They acted as though they didn’t know what to do with themselves once they were on top of our position. I knew they were down there on 1st Platoon’s finger, but because of the curvature in the terrain I could not actually see that far. I saw green tracer rounds being fired straight up and a few RPGs too. More celebrating and hollering continued. Finally, I crawled out of the hole and up the hill a way to see what was going on and there they were—a terrifying sight. There must have been 50 to 70 NVA soldiers milling around 1st Platoon’s abandoned lines. Several brush fires were burning, and with the illumination I could clearly see them rummaging through backpacks and gear, some actually argued over who would get what. They were looking for souvenirs and American cigarettes. I saw others who were more serious, poking and slashing at the tall grass with bayonet rifles, and wandering up toward 1st Platoon’s secondary line of defense.
It was a stroke of genius combined with unbelievable good luck when Lieutenant Jones and Gunny Larsen stopped an entire NVA battalion simply by firing a couple of flares. Now, there was only one other thing to do, and Jones radioed over to Blunk to tell him to get ready to call in artillery on the western portion of the perimeter. He told the FO to be careful; he wanted those rounds in very close, but did not want our own people hit.<
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Before any artillery could be called in that close, all our casualties had to be pulled out of the area and 1st Platoon grunts would have to find cover, although there was very little on that end. This pause in the action gave us the critical time we needed to regroup. With 1st Platoon now stretched out across the top of the ridge, tied in with 2nd and 3rd Platoons, the 360-degree perimeter was once again whole. During this 15- to 20-minute break, many heroes in Fox Company unselfishly risked their own lives to rescue those who were unable to pull back on their own. Twenty-year-old PFC Rob Goodwin from Rochester, NY, was one of the brave Marines who helped save lives that night. He had already pulled back and although his feet were badly bruised from the Chi-Com exploding in the mortar pit earlier, he did not hesitate to leave his secondary position when he heard a wounded Marine’s cries for help. The NVA were visible only 10 meters from where Rob suspected the WIA Marine to be. He wanted some back-up, but when he found none, he crawled out into no man’s land alone. He could see and hear the NVA all around him and knew he would be killed if he was spotted, but he kept moving, hoping to come across the wounded grunt.
When Goodwin finally found wounded PFC Weaver*, they were in an area where a half-dozen gooks were standing only five meters away. He could see them smoking cigarettes and joking around with each other. Had they not been cutting up, they would have heard Weaver cry out when Goodwin tried to move him. Goodwin wondered how he was going to get the big, slightly delirious Marine out without being spotted. Weaver began to moan too loudly; fearing being heard, Goodwin clamped his hand over the guy’s mouth and whispered in his ear, “You son of a bitch, I’ll leave your black ass out here if you don’t shut the fuck up. You’re gonna get us both blown away.”