Kelley was in such a hurry to reinforce the company that he bypassed an NVA machine gun. It was so close that the lieutenant could see “the grass in front of [it] parting” as the enemy gunner fired. “In retrospect, I should have gone ahead and taken care of that then because it was a thorn in our side the rest of the fight.” The gun poured continuous and distressingly accurate fire on Task Force Black. In spite of this fire, Kelley and his people made it to the company, having fought there every step of the way. In the view of Sergeant David Watson, a fire team leader, it was like forcing the NVA to “open a door and then shut it.”9
By about 1045, with the addition of Kelley’s platoon, the mortarmen, and Hardy’s Dog Company troopers, the Americans had established a makeshift perimeter about one hundred meters long and forty meters wide. Bamboo, tree trunks, and bushes offered the only cover. Lieutenant Richard Elrod, the company’s artillery forward observer, and Captain McElwain both called down accurate artillery fire that played a major role in keeping the enemy at bay. Elrod, in particular, was all over the place, crawling and sprinting from one position to another. His RTO was killed and Elrod was wounded several times but, knowing the vital importance of the fire support to Task Force Black’s survival, he kept at it. Many of his shells detonated within twenty-five meters of the American lines, even wounding some of the Sky Soldiers. Air strikes, coming in at greater range, only added to the devastation.
By now, Captain McElwain had ordered Lieutenant Cecil to fight his way back up the trail to the task force position. To cover the withdrawal, Cecil ordered his men to place claymore mines in front of themselves, crawl back as far as the detonation cord would go, and prepare to hit the clackers that detonated the mines. Each mine weighed about a pound and contained dozens of BB-sized steel balls. Many rifle platoons did not carry them on patrol, but Cecil’s did. Against the objections of many in his platoon, he had forced his men to carry the mines. He himself carried two.
Here, in the middle of this fight to the death, the unpopular order paid off. When the soldiers detonated their mines, steel balls filled the air, shredding many NVA attackers. One enemy soldier was even in the process of trying to sneak up and turn a mine in the direction of its American owner when it exploded. The young North Vietnamese soldier literally disintegrated into nothingness, as if he had never existed. This and the other explosions staggered the NVA, giving many of the soldiers in Cecil’s platoon some time to fall back. “I’m convinced, to this day, that me insisting on every man packing a claymore . . . saved us,” Cecil later commented. “The claymores gave us some breathing room. When you hear that thing go off in the jungle and then smell the cordite, that’s a deal breaker if you’re the attacker.”
This hardly guaranteed the 2nd Platoon’s escape, though. The most difficult aspect of the withdrawal was moving the wounded and the dead, an awkward, dangerous, and physically exhausting task. Spec-4 Kelley, the machine gunner, bought his comrades precious time to drag away several wounded men who could not walk on their own. In the process, according to one eyewitness, “Kelley was suddenly wounded himself. He was out in front of the perimeter and moved back [twenty] meters, firing his machine gun as he moved. The enemy shifted their attention to Kelley, who was raising havoc with his weapon. He fired away with long, sweeping bursts.” Other grunts laid down cover fire with their rifles for Kelley. The M60 gunner seemed oblivious to everything. With a look of intense concentration, he focused on shooting at a seemingly endless stream of NVA soldiers who were moving through the trees, trying to get him. “Kelley stayed with his weapon, cutting down one North Vietnamese after another as they charged him.” They finally succeeded in cutting him off and killing him.
Lieutenant Cecil saw two of his men lying badly wounded several meters away, in what was now NVA territory, almost in the spot where the battle had originally begun. Two separate times, he made himself a prime target by crawling out to grab them by the armpits and drag them to safety. As he did so, he felt groggy from the concussion of several nearby rocket explosions and he flinched under the weight of more near-miss bullets than he could ever truly appreciate. “It’s the typical adrenaline story,” he said. “In normal times I couldn’t have carried those guys from here to the door.” After retrieving the first man, he was nearly overwhelmed with fear and wondered if he could bring himself to go back into the kill zone for the second man. “Of course there was . . . only one answer to that. You’ve gotta go ’cos you’re the lieutenant.” He did exactly that. Most of the 2nd Platoon soldiers made it back to McElwain’s defensive position. Cecil had lost four killed. Everyone else, except for one man, was wounded.10
Within the perimeter, the remnants of Cecil’s platoon were in the middle (most of his wounded men simply kept fighting). Brown was on the right and Kelley on the left. Task Force Black was surrounded but intact. Nearly everyone was hugging the ground, getting as low as possible. Much of the time, if they rose up even a foot or two, they risked getting blown away. The NVA attacked from nearly every direction. In the recollection of one soldier, these attacks “were characterized by an intense, concentrated barrage of rockets, mortar and rifle grenade fire immediately followed by a relentless infantry attack. The attackers surged through the bamboo toward [the] perimeter.” The Americans unloaded on them with rifles, machine guns, and grenades in the direction of the movement. The troopers had to be very careful to make sure the grenades did not bounce off trees and roll back in their own direction. “An AK fired at me and four rounds . . . [went] in the ground along my leg,” Sergeant Watson recalled. “We were fighting pretty heavily. Everybody [was], like, laying in a certain position, moving back and forth, trying to get lower. The leaves were covering us, which was probably a good thing.”
Not far away, Watson’s platoon leader, Ed Kelley, was imploring his machine gunners to fire short bursts and then displace before the enemy could pinpoint their location. Kelley’s mouth was dry from fright or adrenaline, he was not sure which. Behind him, wounded and dying men were screaming in terror (the memory of their desperate shrieks haunted him for many decades). Now, he was humbled by the responsibility of command. “What do we do now, L-T?” many of his young soldiers kept asking. This was the essence of combat leadership. In life-or-death situations, soldiers follow an officer or NCO, not always out of military discipline but because they have confidence in their judgment. Lieutenant Kelley was frightened out of his wits but, like any good leader, he knew he could not show that face of fear to his soldiers. “I was just as concerned about how we were gonna get out of there as they were. But they were looking to me. I was moving about pretty much all the time, shifting people here, shifting people there.”
His machine gunners were not following his orders quickly enough, and this allowed the NVA to zero in on them with B40 rockets. One of the rockets scored a direct hit on a team, vaporizing two men. “B40 rockets, you wouldn’t believe the power in them,” Staff Sergeant Curry said. “You get a direct hit, you’re gone, ain’t nothing left. They got hit and they just disintegrated.” A mortar round came in and exploded close to Private Lambertson’s head, bursting his eardrums, temporarily deafening him. Blood streamed from his damaged ears. The same round, plus an RPG, wounded Sergeant Watson, who had fragments in his jaw and an eye swollen shut. Sergeant Curry stayed close to the deafened Lambertson, pointing out where and when to shoot.
Most of the time, the NVA remained unseen, in the trees, like menacing apparitions. “The North Vietnamese presented an eerie picture as they moved ever so slowly,” an after action report stated. “The enemy would spread apart branches, fire one round, and then freeze.” Some of them even got into the American lines. One of them was running right past a shotgun-toting soldier. The American pointed and fired, cutting the NVA in half. Spec-4 Cox was lying on his back, against a log, looking for targets, when he saw two of them materialize right in front of his spot. In that instant, he was sure he would die. He only hoped the pain would not be too great when they shot him. “
One of ’em looked right at me and I looked right back at him. We just sort of made eye contact. He was no more than . . . ten feet away.” Before Cox could aim and shoot his rifle, the man and his partner took off into the trees.
Not long after this, Cox saw Captain Hardy walking toward him. The Dog Company CO was everywhere that day, braving the intense enemy fire, inspiring—and worrying—his soldiers with his courage. Tall and lanky, Hardy was the sort of person whose strides were so long that, when he walked fast, he almost appeared to be running. Several times that morning, his men and his fellow officers begged him to get down. As he loped up to Cox, the young mortarman could hardly believe that the angry enemy bullets and fragments missed the upright captain. The officer peered down at Cox and a nearby soldier: “How are you jaybirds doing down here?”
“We’re doing fine, sir,” Cox replied.
“That’s good to know,” he said breezily and resumed his odyssey, moving from one spot to another to make sure the line was intact. Captain McElwain later saw him running, shooting his rifle, and hollering obscenities at the enemy. When Hardy rested for a moment next to a spot where McElwain was lying, the West Virginian said to him: “Slow down, Abe. You can’t beat them yourself.” Hardy just smiled and took off in the direction of Lieutenant Kelley’s platoon. One of the men was standing up, yelling at the NVA. Another was badly wounded, wandering around in shock, babbling. Kelley tackled both of them and tried to calm them.
Nearby, a gravely wounded man was sobbing and screaming: “I don’t wanna die!” Lieutenant Kelley watched as Hardy stood up, trotted over to where Sergeant Watson was lying wounded and half dazed, and knelt beside the NCO. Watson greatly admired the young captain for his courage and his military bearing. He gazed up at Hardy. The captain yelled some instructions to a group of men, glanced down at Sergeant Watson, and stood up. As he did so, an NVA tree sniper, probably no more than a couple dozen meters away, noticed the movement, aimed at Captain Hardy, and squeezed off several shots. “He took three rounds,” Watson remembered, “one in the head, the throat and the chest and he died on top of me and I couldn’t move him with my arms.” Somebody had to manhandle the captain’s lifeless body off Watson. His dead eyes stared vacantly at Watson, whose trauma over the horrible incident never went away.11
The intensity of the battle ran in cycles. The North Vietnamese kept up a steady volume of rocket and mortar fire. They would attack one part of the perimeter, get repulsed, regroup, and then hit somewhere else. “Sometimes it was really, really intense,” Private Lambertson explained. “Sometimes it wasn’t that bad. When it wasn’t that bad, you were moving around, collecting ammunition . . . getting guys to the middle of the perimeter where the aid station was. There was always something to do.” Some soldiers tried to dig in, using their helmets, bayonets, or even their fingernails. Officers and sergeants were constantly reorganizing and shoring up the firing line. Men were packed close together, facing outward toward the mostly unseen enemy, waiting for bona fide targets before opening fire so as not to waste their dwindling stocks of ammunition.
As Lambertson indicated, medics had collected the wounded in the center of the perimeter only a few meters behind the main lines. Many on the firing line were wounded but could still fight. Those who were lying in the middle of the perimeter were only the most badly wounded. Some of the medics, like Spec-4 Ennis Elliott, who was lugging around a shattered forearm from an AK bullet, along with several other debilitating wounds, were themselves casualties. “When you see somebody else hit, it doesn’t bother you,” he said. “But when you look at your own arm and see the bone and blood, it’s a shock.”
The company’s senior medic, Spec-4 Jim Stanzak, was a highly experienced soldier on his second tour with the 173rd in Vietnam. In that time, he had saved many lives. He had also seen quite a few soldiers die in his arms, their faces full of grief, shock, and sadness. Now he was dealing with more patients than he could handle. For him, the day was a whirlwind of responding to cries of “Doc!” or “Medic!” dragging wounded men to the middle of the perimeter and trying to save their lives. “I was getting guys hit one after another . . . and there was no way in hell that I could stay with [them] personally.” He moved from patient to patient, fighting his own personal battle with death. He was also in extreme danger himself. In one instance, a man next to him took two machine-gun rounds to the head, exploding his skull and brains over Stanzak’s shirt. “Of course, his head was pretty much gone.”
Nearby, when a machine-gun team got killed, Private First Class John Barnes braved withering enemy fire to leap over to the gun and man it himself. The Dedham, Massachusetts, native was on his second tour. He was anything but a recruiting poster soldier, though. He was eager and affable, but he had a permanent slovenliness to him and he always seemed to be the last man ready to move out each morning. He was the type of person who would look dirty three minutes after he took a shower. His buddies liked to call him Pig-pen. “[He] was a sad sack,” one soldier recalled. “I mean, he was never shaven. He had no noise discipline. Lieutenant Brown had to put a man in charge of his rucksack just to keep it quiet.”
What he lacked in field craft he made up for in courage. Several meters in front of Barnes’s gun, NVA attackers were surging ahead, trying to overrun this part of the line. “He was inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy as they made one human wave assault after another,” one nearby soldier recalled. In the recollection of Sergeant Robert Lampkin, his fire “turned back several enemy assaults, preventing that portion of the perimeter from being overrun.” His accurate M60 fire killed between six and nine enemy soldiers (estimates vary). This fire was the only thing that kept the enemy from breaching the line and killing Doc Stanzak and the helpless wounded who were all just a few meters behind Barnes.
Suddenly, a well-camouflaged enemy soldier snuck to within a few yards and hurled a grenade through the dense bamboo. In one surreal moment the grenade somehow sailed through several stands of bamboo, over the machine gunner’s head, and landed a few yards behind, right among the wounded. Spec-4 James Townsend, lying only a few feet away, saw the menacing grenade and noticed a flurry of motion from Barnes’s direction. “[He] leaped from his position and threw himself on the grenade.” Doc Stanzak had actually talked one time with Barnes about just such a situation as this. Barnes had assured the medic that he had too much to live for and would never hurl himself on a grenade. But, now, amid this anonymous stand of Vietnamese jungle and bamboo, when there was little time to mull over choices, Barnes made the ultimate sacrifice. Stanzak was only a few feet away. In the instant before the grenade detonated, the young New Englander happened to turn and look right at the medic. Stanzak saw “fright and fear” all over Barnes’s face, but his expression also seemed to convey a question: “Doc, didn’t I say I wasn’t gonna do this?”
The grenade exploded, lifting Barnes’s body about a foot off the ground, shredding his abdomen, almost cutting him in half. In a matter of seconds, he bled to death. Stanzak caught some shrapnel from the grenade, as did Sergeant Watson and a couple other men, but none of these wounds were life-threatening. Barnes had saved the lives of an untold number of his friends (one soldier estimated the number at ten). Why did he sacrifice himself to save the others? Perhaps out of love, perhaps out of obligation, perhaps just in the heat of the moment. His friends could never know for sure, but they were forever grateful to him. Glancing over at the brave man’s body, Lieutenant Kelley was struck by how frail he looked. “The grenade had blown a huge hole in his torso and penetrated different parts of his equipment. His face was completely intact.” For his heroism, Barnes earned a well-deserved Medal of Honor.12
Captain McElwain knew that, even though his men were fighting well, holding off powerful enemy attacks, time was not necessarily on their side. After all, they were surrounded, cut off from resupply, with many casualties, separated even from their rucksacks. Minute by minute, their stocks of water, medical supplies, and ammunition dwindled. Eventu
ally, if Task Force Black did not get some serious help, the NVA would overrun the perimeter and probably kill everyone. Some of the men were down to only a few magazines of ammo, and were even saving their last bullet for themselves. “I just knew that nobody was gonna get out of there alive,” one of them later said. Lieutenant Kelley, like many, believed he would certainly die and found a strange sort of peace in accepting that sad reality. “A calmness . . . came over me. I guess it goes along with pure acceptance of the fact that this is gonna happen.”
McElwain was moving around frenetically, constantly on the radio, imploring higher command for help. On several occasions he had to personally fight for his life. “Each time the enemy carried the attack to the perimeter, CPT McElwain moved to the critical area killing the enemy when they started to break through and urging his men to hold the position,” a post-battle report chronicled. “He personally killed six or seven North Vietnamese that day.” In one such instance, several NVA soldiers came within fifteen feet of him but probably could not see him because of the dense bamboo. He raised his CAR-15 rifle and opened fire. “[The bamboo] was so thick in there that you could almost walk on top of somebody and not even see ’em,” he said. “I hit four of them.”
As McElwain’s RTO, Sergeant Chuck Clutter’s job was to stick close to him, no matter the danger. “I just never understood how anyone could pass through all that flying lead and . . . come out . . . unscathed,” he said. “He was just living right that day, I guess. There’s no answer to that.” Clutter himself took an AK round to the leg, breaking a bone, and it felt like “a thousand volts of electricity . . . attached to a baseball bat.” As medics tended to Clutter, Sergeant Jacques “Jack” deRemer, another member of the command group, took the radio from Clutter and gave it to another man. The wounded Clutter remembered that the fire around them was so thick that, as he lay bleeding, water from bamboo stalks kept splashing on him as bullets struck the stalks a couple feet overhead.
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 34