One by one, the planes took off and climbed through the gray overcast sky, over the mountains that surrounded An Khe, and then flew east. A plane carrying Alpha Company’s 3rd Platoon, plus a mortar squad, tried to take off and then aborted when the pilot could not get enough air speed. He tried again, this time successfully. The plane climbed through the clouds but then, in one awful instant, it turned downward at a forty-five-degree angle and plunged into a mountain. “I heard the tremendous crash and explosion as the aircraft augered into the side of the mountain,” Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Mertel, commander of the 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry, recalled. The plane cart-wheeled down the side of the mountain and exploded. The fire was intense. Grenades, mortar rounds, and ammunition were cooking off. Mertel’s unit was responsible for securing the crash site, but his soldiers had to keep a safe distance for several minutes until the ammo finished exploding. When they went in, they quickly realized that there were no survivors. The crash killed forty-six men—forty-two from the 3rd Platoon, plus the four-man Air Force crew. “The bodies were badly torn,” Lieutenant Colonel Mertel said. “They had to be placed in rubber bags and carried by the troopers several hundred meters to a spot where they could be evacuated by helicopters.” Graves registration teams began the gruesome task of reconstructing the remains into some semblance of identifiable bodies.
When First Lieutenant Larry Gwin, the executive officer of the company, heard the terrible news, he was filled with disbelief. He was still hurting from the horrible experience of Ia Drang, as were most of the company’s other survivors, and now this had happened. “I couldn’t believe they were all suddenly gone, crashed into a mountain and obliterated,” he later wrote. As the second in command, he drew the traumatic task of accounting for and identifying the remains. Very few were recognizable, except by their name tags. Gwin was devastated, but he somehow got the job done. The soldiers of the 3rd Platoon may not have been killed in combat, but they were just as dead, and their loss left the same kind of void in the lives of those who knew them. One of the dead men was Specialist-4 (Spec-4) Gary Bryant. His daughter Tammy later wrote that “his absence has left an unfillable hole in our lives.”4
The crash was a troubling way to start the operation, but of course Masher went on nonetheless. For three days, Moore’s battalions encountered little resistance as they hopscotched around the Bong Son plain in a series of heliborne assaults. On the rainy morning of January 28, troopers from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, boarded their Hueys for an air assault on a series of hamlets that the locals called Phung Du. The Americans called it LZ-4. The differing names may seem like a small matter, but they illustrated a problem with the American big-unit war. To the Vietnamese, Phung Du was a singular place with history, identity, and a distinct soul. To the Americans, it was just another spot to disgorge soldiers, search for and destroy the enemy. The trouble was that, if places did not really matter, then perhaps the people within them might not either. Few of the Americans knew anything about Vietnamese history or culture. The Army had trained the grunts to fight a conventional war. Yet they were in Vietnam to secure the lives and loyalty of the South Vietnamese people, an objective more akin to counterinsurgency.
Packed aboard their Hueys, many of the troopers were especially nervous about this assault because their commanders had decided to forgo an artillery preparation on the landing zone. Pre-attack artillery bombardments were naturally a major element of the firepower-centered American way of war. Infantrymen were trained to rely on artillery support. Already, in the first few days of Operation Masher, against almost no resistance, the Americans had expended over two thousand rounds of artillery ammunition (mainly 105-millimeter howitzer shells). But, in a war with no front lines, and with observable targets scarce, it did not always make sense to precede air assaults with artillery barrages, especially in populated areas where innocent people could, and did, get hurt.
In one instance, early in the operation, Colonel Moore and his command group went into an area called LZ Dog, following a barrage. “We ran into a copse of trees and into a little village. There in the village was a Vietnamese family. There was a little girl about the age of my youngest daughter and she had been wounded by artillery fire. It broke my heart to see this beautiful little girl bleeding.” Huddled inside their thatched-roof house, the girl’s parents looked frightened and bewildered. One minute they had been living their normal lives. The next moment, the Americans had hurled explosives into their village, hurting their little girl.
Colonel Moore arranged for a medical evacuation (medevac) helicopter to pick up the girl and take her, along with her parents, to the 85th Evacuation Hospital. He was dismayed by the entire scene and what it said about the war effort. “It struck me then that we were not in Vietnam to kill and maim innocent men and women and children and tear up their houses. We were there to find and kill the enemy, and get them out of there.” Quite true, but who was the enemy, where was he, and how could he be destroyed without the use of substantial artillery and air support? These were the troubling questions that bedeviled the American war in Vietnam, especially during the early years of escalation, when General Westmoreland launched his big-unit operations. In World War II, when American firepower hurt or uprooted civilians, even in pro-Allied countries such as France and Belgium, there were few strategic consequences. In Vietnam, when that same firepower injured ordinary people or damaged their property, it could turn them against the Americans and into the arms of the VC, with obviously adverse strategic consequences.
So, for fear of hurting innocent people, and because pre-assault bombardments often telegraphed the landing zones to the enemy, the Americans declined to soften up LZ-4 with artillery. The infantry soldiers were not pleased. “What stupid bullshit!” one of them exclaimed. It was hard enough for the men to face the dangers so inherent to combat infantrymen. To do that without maximum support was demoralizing, and even infuriating.
The hamlets that comprised Phung Du were bordered by palm trees, rice paddies, dikes, hedgerows, bamboo shrubs, and fences. At the southern edge of the village was a cemetery with raised burial mounds, reflecting local custom, which decreed that the dead must be buried sitting up.5
Charlie Company went in first. Almost immediately rifle fire pinged off the helicopters. Instead of flying through the intensifying fire and dropping the men in the village, the choppers generally dropped their troops off as quickly as possible, south of Phung Du, in the cemetery, where the fire was lightest. “We . . . landed in the midst of a North Vietnamese battalion that was reinforced by a heavy weapons company,” Captain John “Skip” Fesmire, the commander of Charlie Company, recalled. In particular, they were up against the 22nd Regiment’s 7th Battalion. Fesmire’s company was scattered in isolated groups over several hundred meters throughout the graveyard and the southern approaches to the village. The NVA were shooting from pre-sited bunkers and trenches located mainly in the tree lines that ringed the village. “The company came under intense and effective automatic weapons and mortar fire,” an after action report declared. Fesmire’s company was in a cross fire, with no way out. Any movement could mean death. The men took cover behind burial mounds, paddy dikes, trees, or in muddy folds of ground. The captain saw his radioman and one of his platoon leaders get hit. “We’re in a hornet’s nest!” he roared.
All around him, Fesmire’s men fought for their lives, often within ten or twenty yards of their adversaries. About two hundred yards east of the captain, Sergeant Charles Kinney, the company’s senior aidman, was huddled behind a burial mound, listening to the sonic crack that enemy bullets emitted as they barely missed him. His lift had come in at one of the hottest spots. Three of the other men on his chopper got hit before they even left the chopper. “They were riddled with bullets and dead before they hit the ground,” he recalled. Although he was a medic, he carried an M16 rifle with several magazines of ammunition. He peeked around the mound long enough to see several NVA soldiers running for a bunker about thi
rty yards away. He squeezed off several three-round bursts in their direction. “At that distance . . . it was not hard to hit at least some of the numerous targets presented to me. They just kept coming laterally across my front weapon sight.” Before he knew it, Kinney had expended four or five clips (about eighty rounds). An NVA soldier spotted him and poured AK-47 fire at him. The rounds shattered his M16, wounding him in the face, hands, and wrist.
To Private Charlie Williams, the horrific fighting was surreal, like something out of a movie. Grunts often compared combat with movies, revealing the cultural dominance of film in shaping the perspectives of Americans. This was the only way he could process the horror of watching several men get hit around him. Of course, he understood that, unlike the way many movies portrayed war, the merciless carnage around him was anything but glorious. “There’s nothing exciting about seeing a guy ripped in two by a machine gun or torn in two by shrapnel. I was splattered with blood.” He felt nauseous and wanted only to sit down and cry.
Elsewhere, Staff Sergeant William Guyer, who was in charge of the mortar platoon, was trying to get some rounds out while under intense enemy machine-gun fire. With no baseplate or plotting board, he propped the tube against a mound and fired several ineffective rounds at the NVA machine gunners. He took out his last shell, kissed it, and dropped it down the tube. The 60-millimeter projectile arced slightly and then exploded directly over the gunners, killing them. But another NVA soldier got on the gun and fired a burst. Guyer caught a bullet in the head and went down like a sack of wheat, probably dead before he hit the ground. Sergeant Jose Rivera, another mortarman, killed the new gunner, only to fall prey to an NVA mortar round that scored a direct hit on the shallow hole he had scooped out of the sand. The shell literally tore Rivera’s body in half.
Artillery observers were calling in rounds on the various tree lines. Seeing the shells explode, many of the soldiers angrily thought to themselves that their situation would be much better right now if artillery had pounded the area prior to the landing, before the NVA entrenched themselves in their bunkers. Now, with the enemy undercover, the rounds could not inflict as much damage. Captain Fesmire hollered repeatedly for his company to rally on him. Some did, but the majority of his surviving troopers were pinned down, fighting intimate, private battles with North Vietnamese soldiers. The only saving grace was that the sandy soil absorbed many of the enemy bullets and, in Sergeant Kinney’s recollection, “anything else the NVA threw at us, from hand grenades to 60mm mortar rounds.”
Meanwhile, Captain Joel Sugdinis and the remnants of Alpha Company had landed a couple miles to the south, at a spot the Americans called LZ-2. He had lost his 3rd Platoon in the plane crash, but he was fighting with what he had left. Using fire and maneuver tactics, his two remaining rifle platoons fought their way through rice paddies, into the southern edges of the graveyard. Like their friends in Charlie Company, they too were now in the cross fire, pinned down, fighting at close quarters with the NVA. One of the squad leaders, Sergeant William Bercaw, was seeing his first combat. Like so many other infantrymen, he was trained to close with the enemy and kill him. He told his squad to fix bayonets and charge a machine gun in a tree line. “I thought the shock effect of a well-determined force would turn the tables,” he said. The squad made it to within fifty meters of the trees before taking cover in a sandy depression. Behind them, someone was calling them back, saying that artillery was on the way into the trees. Sergeant Bercaw covered his retreating soldiers by rising to his knees and firing magazine after magazine on full automatic (“full rock ’n’ roll” in soldier parlance). The enemy return fire came back fast and furious. Machine-gun rounds knocked off his canteen, creased his boot, and one even shattered the D ring that was holding the chin strap on his helmet. Then the enemy gun went silent. He beat a hasty retreat, proudly declaring to his men: “I had a duel with an enemy machine gun and I won.”
In the early afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, commander of 2-7 Cavalry, tried to reinforce his hard-pressed companies by helicopter under cover of a protective artillery barrage. The choppers took intense, accurate fire. Over one hamlet, Warrant Officer Robert Mason, one of the helicopter pilots, spotted an enemy machine gunner who had just shot and killed a pilot in another aircraft. The gunner was standing in the middle of a cluster of villagers, with his machine gun pointed upward on a mount. Not wanting to kill the noncombatants, Mason ordered his M60 door gunner to fire warning rounds, in hopes that the people would scatter. “The bullets sent up muddy geysers from the paddy water as they raged toward the group,” Mason wrote. No one moved, even when the rounds hit within fifty feet of them. In that sickening instant, Mason realized that the people were not going to move. They were more afraid of the enemy gunner than the American helicopters. Mason watched as the door gunner reluctantly fired into the group. “They threw up their arms as they were hit, and whirled to the ground. After what seemed a very long time, the gunner, still firing, was exposed. [His] gun barrel flopped down on its mount and he slid to the ground. A dozen people lay like tenpins around him.”
Over Phung Du, all six Hueys carrying soldiers from Bravo Company took hits. Two of them had to retreat. Only about a platoon of soldiers, plus Captain Myron Diduryk, their company commander, got into the uneasy perimeter that the Americans had cobbled together, mainly in the graveyard, over the course of several intense hours. Lieutenant Colonel McDade also managed to land, but he quickly got pinned down in a trench. “Every time you raised your head, it was zap, zap, zap,” he said. “The dirt really flew.” A stalemate had set in, ushering in a rainy, frightening night of desultory gun and grenade battles. At McDade’s urging, Captain Fesmire gathered what men he could, including eight of his dead soldiers, and made it into the perimeter.6
Needless to say, Colonel Moore was frustrated with the situation at Phung Du. He was not pleased, in particular, with McDade. Moore was not quite sure that McDade was qualified to lead the battalion. “He had been a division personnel officer for a year or two. He was rewarded for his good service by the division commander who gave him the battalion.” The debacle at LZ Albany back in November had partially resulted, Moore felt, from the fact that McDade did not, at that point, really know his troops. Now, in this operation, McDade just did not seem very aggressive or dynamic in resolving the stalemate at LZ-4. “I told him in no uncertain terms to get that landing zone cleared up, get that battalion organized, and get moving,” Moore said. “I let him know I was very displeased with what was going on.”
Throughout the night, Colonel Moore organized a relief force. Elements of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry—his old unit—would maneuver north of the village and block the enemy’s escape route from that side. Two companies from the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry, would come from the south and reinforce the perimeter. The colonel decided to lead that part of the assault himself. After sunrise on January 29, artillery pounded the enemy positions. Then Navy A-1E Skyraiders and Air Force B-57 Canberras attacked the enemy-held positions north and east of the village three times with napalm and high-explosive bombs. This touched off secondary explosions in some of the NVA trenches. Sergeant Kinney, the wounded medic, was still pinned down outside the perimeter. He and several other soldiers, most of whom he had treated for wounds, were in hastily improvised foxholes, perilously close to the air strikes. Kinney was amazed at the courage of one NVA machine gunner, who waited for each plane to release its bombs and “then while it was in the process of upsweeping, he would fire a burst at the belly of the plane. Right before the bomb hit and exploded, he would duck into his fortified spider hole.” After seeing him do this repeatedly, Kinney fired a 40-millimeter grenade from an M79 grenade launcher and killed the brave man.
At 1045, Moore and the 12th Cavalry soldiers landed south of Phung Du. “We came across a stream just to the south of LZ-4,” Moore recalled. “We waded across the stream. It was up to our waists. We were under fire. I joined in the assault across the stream and we relieved t
he troops on LZ-4.” Moore met with McDade, heard the battalion commander’s situation report, and then strode around with his indomitable sergeant major, Basil Plumley, at his side. One trench was filled with wounded soldiers and a few Vietnamese women and children. Up ahead, scattered throughout the graveyard, he could see the bodies of several dead Americans. In Moore’s opinion, far too many able-bodied soldiers were hunkered down, simply taking cover, rather than fighting back. “You can’t do your damned job in a trench,” he told many of them. Sergeant Major Plumley had known his commanding officer long enough to recognize his extreme displeasure with the situation. “The Old Man was not pleased. We talked to the men. They weren’t in too deep spirits although they had lost quite a few men. The biggest thing they needed was leadership and guidance to move them out of there.”
Moore had something in common with John Corley, the soldier who had commanded the 3rd Battalion, 26th Infantry, at Aachen. Both of them had a great knack for minding the big picture while staying close to the action, and without stepping on the toes of their subordinate commanders. In Vietnam, there was a great temptation for commanders at the battalion and brigade level to remain in their helicopters, where they could see much of the battlefield, and manage the fighting from on high. To some extent this made sense. From a helicopter, the commander could see the terrain well, often to the point of spotting the enemy, even as he remained in direct communication with subordinates and superiors alike. However, from thousands of feet overhead, he had little appreciation for the reality of what was happening on the ground. Terrain often looked quite different from the air versus the ground, especially in jungle-encrusted Vietnam. A man in a helicopter could not feel the heat, smell the smells, hear the screams of the wounded, gauge the mood of the troops. In short, he could become way too detached from his soldiers. In a helicopter, the commander was less of an infantryman and more of an aviator. If he spent enough time thousands of feet overhead, he often came to see the world of ground combat from a pilot’s detached vantage point, rather than a grunt’s intimate perspective.
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 23