They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Doc Hinger was a walking skeleton by mid-October, down to barely a hundred pounds on his five-eight frame. His pants were twenty-six at the waist. On most days he armed himself only with a .45 pistol, but today he switched to an M-16 and two bandoliers of ammunition because of the high probability of action. He also carried his C-rations for the day (spicy beef), extra water (three canteens holding a quart each), along with his medical aid bag, which contained field dressings, morphine syrettes, IV tubing, a small surgical kit with scalpel, blades, and sutures, antibiotics, salt pills, pain relievers, and other drugs and ointments. Taped to the side of his aid bag were several heavy cans of blood volume expander, each about the size of a can of tennis balls, containing a ready-made IV kit of serum albumen, a clear, nonperishable liquid that was used to replace massive blood loss in the field until a wounded man could receive a transfusion. In all, it was a seventy-pound burden for the gaunt medic, an almost antlike ratio of load to body mass.

  Fifteen minutes after Alpha’s march began, Welch’s Delta started moving. Sergeant Barrow had counted sixty-eight men at formation before they left—another severely depleted company. At the start there was a break of seventy meters between the two companies, but Alpha had already slowed and the distance separating them narrowed. Delta’s third platoon led the way, marching in a three-squad wedge formation so that Lieutenant Stroup, the platoon leader, could more easily keep visual contact with the rear of Alpha. Doc Taylor, the platoon medic, also known as the Preacher, was praying, softly but audibly, on the way out. Private Peter Miller, the Massachusetts rifleman, walked at the front of the right flank. He was wary now, questioning, his gung-ho attitude shaken by the brush of death he had experienced the day before when Captain Jones’s lifeless body fell against him. Welch and Barrow, the inseparable pair, marched at the rear of Stroup’s platoon, Welch leaning forward, sensitive to every broken twig, Barrow nervously clicking his M-16 from semiautomatic to automatic. The habit annoyed Welch, who would shoot Barrow a smiling glance with every click. Walking with them were Welch’s two radiotelephone operators, Scott Up and Scott Down. Barrow had his own radioman, Raymond Phillips, nearby as well.

  Behind them marched Terry Allen and the battalion command group, which moved in a protective pocket in Delta’s second platoon. Allen wore a pair of binoculars around his neck. Blackwell had his borrowed knife. Then came Pinky Durham, the forward artillery observer, and his radioman, Jim Gilliam, who had just taken the job that morning because Durham’s first RTO had been hit in the leg during the brief firefight the day before.

  Like Alpha’s first platoon, Delta’s second was led by a sergeant, in this case Dwayne Byrd, a sharpshooter from Texas who took over in the field when a young second lieutenant left for Lai Khe with an ailment. Byrd had been shocked that morning when “all the big brass” assembled with his platoon. He had never seen the battalion commander on the ground before, and considered it “strange,” especially since both companies were short of men. Many of the soldiers in his second platoon were among those who had arrived at Vung Tau less than three months earlier aboard the USNS Pope. Mike Troyer was an acting squad leader. On the way across the Pacific he had worried about whether he could kill another human being, but he had long since resolved that question. As he now told new recruits, if you can’t do it, you end up in a body bag. Doug Cron marched in the file across from Troyer, carrying ammo for the M-60 machine gun. Thomas Colburn, recovering from a slight elbow wound, was carrying a rifle instead of his usual grenade launcher. The rifle was less burdensome for Baby-san, as his buddies called him, a kid so thin that it was said he could hide behind a bamboo pole and never get hit. Faustin Sena carried the flamethrower, walking security in the center flank about twenty meters behind the command group. It was a new weapon for him; the only living thing he had killed with it so far was a chicken that popped out of a tunnel. It had surprised him, so he had “toasted it.”

  Fred Kirkpatrick, the skilled rifleman, would have walked point, but he was on R and R, hanging out with a prostitute at the Club Bohemian in Shibuya, Japan, where women took American names and altered their eyes to look more western.

  The rear platoon, led by Second Lieutenant Andrew Luberda, also included many former C Packet men. Jack Schroder was back there, marching in the left file. The nickname Machine Gun Red no longer fit. “I got off the M-60 and now carry an M-16 rifle, which is a lot lighter, too,” he had written to his wife, Eleanor, in his last letter from the field. A minor injury had made it hard for him to carry the machine gun. He was still waiting for someone from home to ship him a .38 revolver like the one that Bob Nagy carried, but so far the switch from the machine gun had seemed propitious, as that life-saving bullet notch in his rifle from the previous day’s battle testified. Schroder had something else new—a bold tattoo on his arm with the insignia of the 101st Airborne, which provoked his latest nickname, Airborne Schroder.

  His team leader was the soldier who had taught him how to use the M-60, Danny Sikorski. Just a few more months for Ski and he would be back in Milwaukee, carrying his cue to Mazo’s on the south side for a game of pool. His little sister, Diane, was thinking about him all the time, wondering where he was. That night, in her blue bedroom, she would dream about him. Not far from Sikorski, also marching in the left file, was Steve Ostroff, a Jewish kid from Sun Valley, California. “See you later,” his buddy Steve Goodman, the battalion armorer, had said to him as Ostroff left the perimeter. A few weeks earlier Ostroff and Goodman had been given special leave to go into Saigon, usually off-limits for the troops at Lai Khe, to celebrate Yom Kippur.

  On the right file Greg Landon, the Professor, was hauling a PRC-25 radio for his squad leader, Sergeant Dewey Lester. Landon was a hardened soldier now, ready for battle, eagerly asking his folks to send him a big knife, talking body counts. A copy of an Amherst student magazine had reached him in the field, and he reflected that it seemed surreal to him “to read that stuff now,” when he was “so disoriented” from college life. But even as he adjusted to the infantry, Landon maintained his inquisitive, skeptical nature. On the way out that morning he was grousing about how the battalion command seemed so eager to get in a fight. What are we doing this for? he asked. Behind Landon, holding the rear position, came the first squad, led by Jackie Bolen Jr., the skilled young soldier from Appalachia, homesick and tired of war.

  What are we doing this for? Clark Welch was thinking the same thing, though he would never tell that to his men. There were many aspects of this patrol that concerned him. He didn’t like the direction they were going, or the fact that the battalion command group was on the ground with them. He wished that they had shelled and bombed the target area more beforehand. And even though Terry Allen had virtually accused him of being afraid, and yanked him from the lead position, Big Rock would rather have had Delta out front. In the rear he could only respond, not decide.

  Along with his compass and pictograph map, which superimposed positions over an aerial photograph of the area, Welch constantly recalculated his location in the field by counting paces. It was a way for him to tell reliably how far his company had moved, where it was, and how long it might take to get back. He knew at all times how many paces he had stepped off from the perimeter. His normal pace was thirty-four inches. This morning, with Alpha in front, it was slow moving, and his step was shorter. When his men started to bunch up, he shouted, “Spread out! One peanut butter can would get you all. Spread out!” It was one of his favorite phrases; better peanut butter than some deadlier allusion. Among their field rations were peanut butter cans that the men liked to throw into the fire to watch them explode in a messy effusion.

  With every step southward, the vegetation grew denser and the field of vision narrowed. They moved through tall grass and shrubbery, then edged into the woods. At 8:45 Captain George reported Alpha’s position to the NDP. Forty-five minutes out and they had traveled less than 250 meters. Before proceeding further, George sent teams out to cloverleaf the territory
to his southeast and southwest. The rest of the troops stopped and waited fifteen minutes for the teams to come back. While they were standing around, an F-100 screeched overhead for the first air strike. It was Yellow Bird II, on its way to dropping eight 750-pound napalm bombs and six 500-pound cluster bombs on a preplanned target far to the southeast, beyond where Welch’s Delta company had made contact the day before. The cloverleaf teams came back and reported no movement, no smells, nothing. At 9:10 there was another F-100 overhead, this time Devil II with six 750-pound napalm bombs heading for a target area even further south. Three more F-100s and two B-57s were also on their way to that same target area.

  Big Red One officers were reasonably sure that they knew where the enemy base camp was, but in the end it was only a guess, just as their depth of knowledge about who was out there, and how many, was only a rough estimate. In fact, the napalm bombs were being dropped too far south. The preplanned strikes had been called in by the air liaison officer for the Big Red One’s First Brigade, who was supporting the mission even though it was outside his normal tactical area of operations. The forward air controllers working under him were also new to the area and had not had time over the previous week to conduct visual reconnaissance of the territory. They were relying on intelligence provided by people on the ground. The air force had its own team of forward air controllers, part of an overlapping network of army and air force bureaucracies that required great coordination and often led to confusion. Starting at eight that morning, just as the 2/28 Black Lions were leaving their NDP, the only air force forward air controller in the area “was busy for several hours putting in eight preplanned missions on suspected base camps and bunkers several miles away,” according to a combat evaluation report later prepared by the air force.

  On the ground George’s men were humping the jungle. Their noise discipline up front was excellent, he thought. They seemed focused, not distracted. Some of them had cut grass and bamboo and used it around their helmets as camouflage. After another three hundred meters, the growth thickened. Doc Hinger, in the second platoon, could see only ten meters in front of him. It seemed like triple canopy jungle overhead, with “towering trees and vines.” Moving up behind Hinger was an RTO from the third platoon, who came close enough that Hinger could overhear a conversation on the company radio, or “push”—something about a trail. Word came back that there would be another cloverleaf. Costello took a few furtive puffs on a cupped cigarette, swigs from the canteen. A guy near him took a piss. The same all the way back to the rear of Delta. Smokes for Jackie Bolen and Mike Troyer. Doug Cron snuck a bite of pound cake. And they waited some more.

  The trail ahead was discovered by Alpha’s first platoon at 9:56. It was a well-used path running southeast to northwest. Fresh sandal tracks—the Americans called them Ho Chi Minh sandals—led in both directions. Trees nearby seemed newly cut. Willie Johnson radioed the sighting to Captain George and requested permission for his platoon to investigate further. George said okay. Johnson sent cloverleafs to the left and right within sight of the trail. At fifty yards out, the point man on the right cloverleaf team reported seeing several Viet Cong moving through the jungle toward the southwest. George got on the battalion frequency and conferred with Terry Allen. They agreed on a plan. They would stop the cloverleafs and have the point squad set up a hasty ambush at the side of the trail.

  From his position with Delta, Clark Welch received word that Alpha had spotted “seven to ten” Viet Cong. By counting paces, he estimated that the lead elements of the battalion were now about two hundred meters short of the point where the day’s marching orders called for them to turn east. Welch sent word to his platoon leaders. “Alpha’s seen seven,” he reported up to Stroup and back to Luberda. “Seven means seventy. Let’s get ready. It’s going to start.” From the platoons the heads-up went down to the squads and teams. By the time it reached Paul Giannico, a team leader in Delta’s rear platoon, the message was reduced to its rawest form: Gooks on the trail. We’re setting a hasty ambush. Many of Welch’s men, along with Allen and the command group, had come to a stop in a hazardous zone in the jungle, an oblong stretch of smaller trees and thick shrubs surrounded by bigger trees, some a hundred feet tall, that flanked them on the east and west. The platoon leaders pushed their security flanks out another twenty-five meters toward the tall trees.

  Rifleman Peter Miller, in Delta’s lead platoon, was puzzled when he got word about the plans. Ambush? Who the hell are we gonna surprise? More than a hundred guys crashing through the jungle here, and we’re gonna sneak up on somebody?

  Ray Gribble led his lead Alpha squad across the trail and began setting up the ambush. Willie Johnson nudged forward with his right file, and Top Valdez brought the left file up and angled it to the right, or west. The troops behind them held in place. Time seemed to stop. Nothing, silence, for a minute, two, three, five. The jungle air was heavy. There was no breeze.

  Finally, in Alpha’s second platoon, Doc Hinger heard a rapid click-click-click above him. Other men up and down the columns were startled by the same sound. Private Arias saw something flash above him. Sergeant Johnson got on the radio with an urgent message to his company commander.

  “The trees are moving,” he said. “And I think someone’s in them.”

  Chapter 16

  Ambush

  THE FRESH TRACKS along the trail, the sighting of enemy soldiers in the distance—these were lures designed to draw the Black Lions deeper into a trap. Scouts from Vo Minh Triet’s First Regiment and Rear Service Group 83 had been watching the American soldiers for two days. From Jim George’s point patrol all the way to the last man in Clark Welch’s rear platoon, every step the Americans took from the perimeter through the tall grass and into the ever-denser jungle had been noticed. Triet was back in his command post a few hundred meters south of the point where Alpha’s lead platoon saw the trees move. He was receiving constant updates on the approaching force over a telephone line. Through hand signals, scouts stationed high in trees sent word down to camouflaged comrades below, who then reported the American positions to the command post.

  The tree scouts armed with AK-47s and captured American radios, some of them tied into position with ropes and vines, were instructed to look and listen only. They were not to use their radios until Triet told his communications officer to flip the switch so everyone could talk. That order came simultaneously with the signal to attack. When the trap was set, when the American soldiers were just where Triet wanted them to be, moving down and to the right, on a line facing his camouflaged bunkers and the machine guns and preset claymore mines, two of his battalions ready on the west and the third moving into position from the east—at that moment he gave the signal.

  Three knocks on a block of wood.

  Life absurdly mocking art: How could Sergeant Willie Johnson’s favorite song, his superstitious incantation, knock, knock, knock on wood, carry such lethal meaning?

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS BREEDEN was the first to die. Clifford Lynn Breeden Jr., aged twenty-two, from Hillsdale, Michigan. He was point man in Gribble’s squad on the front right file and the first to cross the trail. A burst of enemy fire struck him as he was setting up his own hasty ambush. Six bullets ripped open his chest and guts. He fired a clip from his M-16 and slumped to the jungle floor.

  The opening spray slanted down from trees to the right, or west, followed by a thrum of machine-gun fire coming in low from the front. Jerry Lancaster fell next, and Leon East, and Gribble was losing his squad. He called to Sergeant Johnson that his men had been hit—Ray Neal Gribble’s last transmission. Johnson moved the remainder of the right file forward, directing his troops to get down and face the front and right. The point squad from his platoon’s left file cut across toward the right, and Captain George called his second platoon forward to reinforce the first.

  The opening fusillade echoed back through the woods to the rear platoon of Delta. What was it? Some soldiers in the rear assumed it was Alpha springin
g its ambush. It sounded like the sort of skirmish the Black Lions had been getting in day after day that October. Contact, a quick firefight, the Americans pulling back to call in artillery and air, the Vietnamese disappearing as suddenly as they came. But this time, up and down the line, sniper fire started pinging down from the trees.

  Terry Allen called Alpha and asked the company commander for a situation report. Jim George relayed what he heard and saw in front of him, but he could not say much about the first platoon because he was having trouble raising anyone on the radio. He yelled for Sergeant Johnson. No reply. It sounded bad, but was it? Allen told George to move forward to survey the scene. George crawled through heavy brush with the five-man Alpha command group. It was slow moving, but they eventually found Johnson and the point troops pinned down by machine-gun fire. The machine gun was hidden behind a low bunker protected by a dirt-covered log. It was about fifteen meters away, pointing east and detectable only by the trace of bullets. George pulled a hand grenade and flipped it over his shoulder in the direction of the fire, and in so doing revealed his position. The enemy gun turned on him, but the bullets missed and George could see the muzzle flash. He opened up with his Car-15 and silenced the machine gunner.

  Movements of 2/28 Black Lions

  Moments later one of Triet’s men sprang from the thicket with a thirty-six-inch handmade claymore mine and faced it toward the Alpha soldiers. It popped prematurely, killing the man who carried it and ripping out a tree, tearing it to pieces, yet the detonation was so close and powerful that it lacerated George’s command group and soldiers nearby. The blast zone was littered with blood and body parts. His company radioman, Michael Farrell, was dead. Others were wounded, including Alpha’s artillery forward observer. Men screamed for medics. “I’m hit, Top!” Willie Johnson yelled to Top Valdez. Welts were forming along his arms from the hot, flying shrapnel.