Doan was a prime example of the spirit and toughness that characterized many VC fighters. He and his comrades sought to win through superior human will. By and large, this was a successful formula for them. At Hon Mot, though, they ran into a lethal combination of American firepower and willpower that eclipsed the VC’s strength in morale. Diduryk’s B Company destroyed a force twice its size, at the cost of two men killed and six wounded. In the captain’s own estimation, he was glad to employ “the overwhelming combat power provided by the artillery, mortar and TAC Air fire support systems.” In his view, the supporting fire set the conditions for this major tactical victory, but they were not the most critical factor. “The most essential ingredient which contributed to the success of the battle consisted not of the tools of war but of the men of Company B. It was the leadership of its officers and noncommissioned officers; the gallantry and professionalism of its men; and, finally, its ‘will to win’ ” that proved decisive. The lesson was that this kind of fighting spirit, supported by suffocating firepower, could be a formidable combination.10
Hon Mot began a series of running battles between the 1st Cavalry Division troopers and the communists in the Crow’s Foot area. There were two types of engagements: clashes with retreating VC or NVA formations, and battles when the Americans found their base camps. In an example of the former, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry, on February 17 fought a VC heavy-weapons battalion not far from the site of Diduryk’s battle. They battled along the valley floor among water-soaked craters created by Air Force B-52 bombers several days earlier on pre-operation bombing missions. “Two craters that were half filled with water were . . . full of semi-naked wounded with the medics administering morphine and changing bandages,” Captain Robert McMahon, the company commander, wrote.
As was so often typical in combat, some men were paralyzed by fear, and others invigorated by it. McMahon saw his unwounded mortar platoon sergeant cowering among the wounded soldiers. The captain and his first sergeant gave the man “a severe chewing out” to force him back to the edge of the crater to call down fire on the enemy. By contrast, one of the other NCOs, Sergeant Gary Gorton, a mortar squad leader, was almost reckless in risking his life. When his crews ran out of ammo, he bounded around, hurling grenades at the VC, firing clip after clip of M16 ammo at them. He personally killed and overran one enemy machine gun. Before he could get back undercover, a VC sniper shot him through the head.
Captain McMahon was worried that his company was about to run out of ammunition. He ordered his people to fix bayonets. Upon hearing the order, Private First Class John Martin immediately thought of Custer at Little Bighorn. The enemy soldiers were so close, and so aggressive, that they were rolling grenades into the American-held craters. Fortunately for Martin and the other soldiers, McMahon was able to call down lavish fire support to keep the enemy at bay. Air strikes were especially effective. “[A-1E] Skyraiders dropped napalm so close that one white phosphorous bomb hit the edge of [a] holed-up platoon and one officer threw himself back first in the mud to douse his burning shirt,” Martin said. White phosphorous burns straight through skin, muscles, and bones. Water only feeds it with more oxygen, making it burn more intensely. Mud, though, can douse it. Elsewhere, another soldier watched the planes swoop in for the kill. “The F-4 jets . . . were coming in and they would make a steep dive and shoot these Gatling guns on the front of ’em. It sounded like a cow belching. They were dropping some bombs off their wings and they were dropping some white phosphorous.”
In the end, the combination of air power, and a supporting counterattack by Alpha Company against the rear of the VC unit, ended the battle. The Americans counted 127 VC bodies. The grunts captured several recoilless rifles and mortars.11
Meanwhile, the Americans began to unravel a network of enemy base camps throughout the heavier jungles of the Crow’s Foot that they came to call the Iron Triangle. Ironically, they were aided in these finds by the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Doan. Defiant and proud though he undoubtedly was, he also was garrulous in captivity, revealing much about how VC units operated and, in this instance, the general vicinity where their bases were located.
The fighting that eventuated from these base camp discoveries was ferocious. In most cases, point elements found the enemy the hard way—when they opened fire from prepared, expertly camouflaged fighting positions. For instance, Private Swanson Hudson’s squad from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, was walking point one day for his entire battalion, following a small trail in the jungle. “One second, everything was eerily quiet. The next second, enemy troops opened fire. They were hidden in machine-gun bunkers that had been dug flush to the ground. They cut my squad to ribbons . . . under deadly fire from 12.7mm machine guns, light machine guns, AK-47 assault rifles and some kind of anti-tank weapon—possibly a 57mm recoilless rifle.” As it turned out, they were right at the edge of a major NVA base camp. The two men next to Hudson were killed instantly, as were the squad leader and three other men. The platoon leader was shot through the neck and arm. Hudson fired back as best he could until “my rifle was shot out of my hands. At the same time I was shot in my left thigh-bone.”
In mere moments, everyone in the squad was killed or wounded. NVA snipers were strapped into the trees overhead, shooting anyone who moved. Bleeding and semiconscious, Hudson lay still, worrying that the enemy soldiers would soon come to finish him off. “I still remember the screams of those wounded guys, lying there helpless under the full firepower of both sides. I lay there on the hot, humid jungle floor with the smell of death all around me, a hot, sweet smell of blood.” He and the other wounded soldiers were caught in a no-man’s-land, as both sides poured relentless fire at each other. Lieutenant James Patzwell and several soldiers from another platoon eventually got them out. “They saved our lives that day.” He and the others were later medevaced.
It is an axiom of combat that the experience of a battle can be radically different from unit to unit, or even person to person. Even as Hudson’s squad was caught in the worst of the fighting, Private Joe Grayson’s platoon from Bravo Company of the same battalion was a few hundred yards away, on the fringes of the battle. They got the word that another platoon from their company was in trouble and set out to help them. They could hear the popcorn-like crackle of the firefight in the distance. Grayson came to a sharp drop, when all at once “lots of bullets [were] flying all around me. I could look down and see a dry creekbed, a patch of sand, and I knew if I went there I would be shot dead.” Needless to say, he stayed put. As he took cover and things seemingly calmed down, he had no idea what was unfolding literally within a stone’s throw. “I didn’t know it at the time, but Rip Rubeor, Richard Barnes and James Mize were some ten to fifteen feet in front and below me, taking some cover from the far bank of the creekbed and engaged in one hell of a fire fight. Most of the bullets flying at me were intended for them. Rip was the only one to make it out of there in spite of a bullet hole through his left side.”
In another instance during the fight for the Iron Triangle, soldiers from Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry, got pinned down in a rice paddy by accurate, sharp, small-arms fire emanating from a tree line. As at Hon Mot, the grunts took cover behind paddy dikes and shot back while submerging themselves in the disgusting slime of the paddies. One soldier remembered seeing a wounded sergeant bleeding enough that “the blood from his wound was turning the water and muck red.”
Helicopter gunships screamed in and lit up the tree line with rockets and machine-gun fire, greatly slackening the enemy fire. In the wake of this supporting fire, the grunts picked up their wounded men, stumbled through the shin-deep mud, and made their way forward to the tree line. “Covering one another, we made it to the tree line on the edge of the rice paddy,” Lieutenant Ed Polonitza recalled. “Everyone was covered with muck, soaking wet, bloody from gunshot wounds, or from the blood-sucking leeches that infested the rice paddy.” As Specialist Garry Bowles, a medic, ran across
the paddy dikes, “bullets impacted in the water all around me. I experienced a curious sense of exhilaration.” This odd excitement came from the adrenaline high that occurs when the body goes into an accelerated state of fear-induced arousal.
Later, the company found itself in the middle of an NVA base complex, fighting untold numbers of enemy infantrymen. Bowles saw tracer rounds whiz past his face. He was trying to work on Specialist Dick Marshall, a badly wounded radio telephone operator (RTO), when he noticed the commanding officer, Captain James Detrixhe, load a fresh magazine into his rifle, rise up on one knee, and open fire. “His body suddenly lifted up and spun in midair. He landed on his back, facing me, but his helmet and the top of his head were both missing. He slumped to one side with blood pumping from what was left of his head spraying my face in a sticky mist.” Specialist Bowles shook off his revulsion long enough to feel the pulse of the RTO. He was dead, too. Lieutenant Polonitza took a group of soldiers and maneuvered behind the NVA who had killed the captain and Marshall. The enemy chose to flee.
Later, the company had to clear out the complex bunker by bunker. “Once we started to advance,” Lieutenant Polonitza recalled, “all hell broke loose, and you could see NVA soldiers all over the place. Their heads were popping out of their holes as they fired down on us. We were throwing hand grenades and firing our M16s at the bunkers as we advanced. Each time we passed a bunker, one of us would unload a magazine into the opening and then move forward, bunker by bunker. In some instances, our riflemen crawled into the bunkers and ripped the enemy virtually in two with their M16s firing on full automatic.”
The Americans tried no less than thirty-three assaults, ranging from platoon to company size, on the Iron Triangle without fully overrunning it. Finally, the commanders decided to pull back and give the area a thorough pounding. Initially, fighter-bombers and helicopter gunships raked it over. Then Air Force B-52s disgorged hundreds of tons of bombs on the Triangle. When the grunts came back—sometimes aided by tear gas that planes dropped into the area—they hardly recognized the place. “Bomb craters were smoking everywhere,” Private Bill Nixon recalled. “All the trees were down . . . not a bird, not even a bug was left alive. All the NVA had headed for the river nearby. There were so many bodies in the river that they formed a dam.” Engineers actually had to blow the bodies up to get the river flowing again. The Americans counted 313 dead NVA. For the Americans, one brigade alone had lost 23 killed and another 106 wounded. Six of the dead men were in Private Hudson’s squad. Contact with small groups of enemy survivors diminished and then died out altogether. An eerie stillness descended on the traumatized Iron Triangle, and indeed, all over the Crow’s Foot.12
What If Winning Battles Doesn’t Matter?
On March 6, soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division were still looking for the remnants of the Sao Vang Division, but they were finding next to nothing. The fighting in Binh Dinh province was over for the moment. Sensing this, General Kinnard declared an end to Operation Masher/White Wing. This declaration made sense in the context of an operation like this, but really, the whole thing was a bit of an artificial construct. The Americans had, in a way, created their own battle narrative—conceiving of an operation, carrying it out in the way they hoped to fight the whole war, and then pronouncing an end when it suited them. The enemy obviously did not think of Masher/White Wing as a “battle” in the same way as, for instance, the Germans and Soviets would have acknowledged in World War II that they were engaged in battles for such places as Stalingrad or Kursk. To the NVA and VC, the six weeks of Masher/White Wing stood out only as a period of intense American harassment of their presence in Binh Dinh. Such temporary setbacks meant little to them. Only the long-term goal of uniting Vietnam under their control truly mattered.
Like any good narrative, the authors of Masher/White Wing pointed to supposedly dramatic results. General Kinnard correctly believed he had destroyed five of the Sao Vang Division’s nine battalions. The 1st Cavalry Division records asserted that, in six weeks, the unit had killed 1,342 VC and NVA soldiers by actual body count, while capturing 633, including Lieutenant Colonel Doan and two other prominent officers. The reports also claimed—with no substantive corroboration—that the 1st Cavalry Division probably killed another 1,746 enemy. This may have been 100 percent true. It might also have been total fiction. Certainly other enemy fighters were killed besides those whose bodies the Americans found and counted. But one must be skeptical of any estimate, not just because of the inherent guessing nature of such permutations, but because it was so clearly in the interest of officers to inflate the numbers. Indeed, the Americans only captured 208 individual and 52 crew-served weapons, and that casts some doubt on even the confirmed body counts since the bodies of dead soldiers often lay next to their weapons. Undoubtedly, the enemy was able to recover many of their weapons, if not always their dead, but the gap between a few hundred weapons captured and over 1,700 bodies counted seems rather considerable.
For the Americans, the operation was quite costly. “We can have the best army in the world, with all the electronic gear, and yet, those little suckers could inflict unbelievable casualties upon you,” one medic succinctly put it. Kinnard’s division lost 228 killed and 788 wounded. Masher/White Wing lasted forty-one days, so that meant 25 American casualties, including about five men killed, per day. And, of course, this was just one operation, in one part of the country, at a time when fighting raged over much of South Vietnam.
The material expenditure revealed as much about the lavishness of the big-unit war as the impressiveness of American capabilities. During the operation, Kinnard’s helicopter units flew over 73,000 sorties, amounting to some 26,000 man-hours of flying time. Helicopters and transport aircraft airlifted 93,351 passengers (most of whom, of course, were repeat travelers). Artillery units carried out 15,621 fire missions, shooting 141,762 shells. Tactical aircraft, mainly fighter-bombers, flew 600 sorties, dropped over 692 tons of general-purpose bombs, 165 tons of napalm, and 80 tons of white phosphorous bombs.
In an after action critique conducted a few days after the operation ended, General Kinnard told his commanders that he was delighted with what the division had achieved. “We struck a very hard blow at enemy units which had long threatened Bong Son” and the road network around the province. The general was impressed with his unit’s airmobile capability and the valor of its soldiers. He was right to feel that way. His commanders coordinated air and ground operations very well. His soldiers fought with great bravery. When his units made contact with the enemy formations, they inflicted major damage on them.
But he was on shakier ground when he claimed, in another post-battle statement, that “as a result of Operation Masher/White Wing 140,000 Vietnamese were returned to government control. There is much evidence that the GVN [South Vietnamese government] intends to reestablish civil government in this area.” In fact, nothing of the kind happened. The Saigon government was too corrupt, too ineffective, and too distant from Binh Dinh to succeed in that vital pacification task.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the many refugees directly created by the operation. Here was an essential problem with the big-unit war. When the Americans fought within populated areas, they risked killing and wounding innocent people. In the words of one grunt, this “made the countryside less secure, and alienated the very people we were supposed to be helping.” Whether correctly or not, Kinnard and his commanders believed that Operation Masher/White Wing accounted for remarkably few noncombatant casualties. Without question, the Americans tried very hard to spare innocents, but firepower could be merciless—with over one hundred thousand shells flying around, some inevitably hurt the wrong people, as Colonel Moore’s experience so vividly demonstrated.
The other option was to uproot them from their homes and evacuate them to safer areas. During Masher/White Wing, the 1st Cavalry Division processed over twenty-seven thousand refugees. In the An Lao Valley alone, the Americans evacuated, at the locals’ request
, about forty-five hundred of eight thousand people who lived in the area. Civil affairs officers tried hard to dispense food, water, and medical care to the refugees of Binh Dinh, but, in reality and of necessity, most of the divisional effort went into operations. South Vietnamese officials proved unable to fill the void.
For the unfortunate refugees, the experience was frightening, bewildering, and sometimes cruel. They were uprooted from the only homes they had ever known, where their ancestors were buried, where they generally had lived in some semblance of peace as small farmers. At times, their property was destroyed or damaged by vehicles, soldiers, or the fighting itself. John Laurence, a CBS news correspondent, remembered encountering an anguished group of about one hundred refugees at the edge of one village during the height of the fighting. “Their faces were twisted in contortions of grief, their mouths open, long strands of saliva spilling on the soil. Their noses dripped. Tears ran down their cheeks.” Artillery boomed nearby, and the sound of the guns only added to their misery. “They shrieked and sobbed and wailed with choking throats and fluttering lungs, one after another.”
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Craig, the division civil affairs officer, was trying to comfort them as best he could. Like so many other soldiers, his intentions were decent, but he knew next to nothing of the language, culture, history, and politics of Vietnam. Since there were so few interpreters in the division, he could barely communicate with the people. He gave them C rations and chocolate, but this hardly improved their mood. One of Laurence’s Vietnamese crewmen spoke to them. The people understood that the American and South Vietnamese soldiers were moving them away from their land, and they were deeply upset about it. They wondered who would tend to their crops and the graves of their ancestors. No one had an answer for them. “To take them away from their land was to take away more than their lives,” Laurence wrote. “It was to condemn their souls.”
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 25