They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Captain George was struck in the face. The sharpest gash was at his left cheekbone, near his eye. His vision was poor already (he had needed glasses but had not been able to get them in Vietnam), and now in the aftermath of the claymore blast his sight was reduced to a blur of silhouettes. The concussion also ruptured an eardrum. He was supposed to be in command, but he was going deaf and nearly blind. On the ship across the Pacific, George had dreamed of killing fields and had grown weary of what he imagined to be the smell of death. Illusion and reality now merged in this jungle south of the Ong Thanh stream. In a fog he crawled back and to the east, away from the dead zone. He tried to stay low, but also told himself to keep his shattered face above the dirt. He yelled for Top Valdez, but his voice was not loud enough, so he sent an aide out to find the first sergeant. He radioed the battalion commander that he had been hit and was trying to break contact and that he had already lost a radiotelephone operator. “I understand,” said Allen, who had been driven by sniper fire to take cover behind a four-foot anthill.

  No sooner had Willie Johnson regained his equilibrium than he was hit again, this time in the leg by AK-47 fire. Valdez reached Johnson and tied a handkerchief around his bleeding leg, then heard George’s shout and moved toward the captain. Take over, George said to him.

  From his position near Alpha’s rear, Lieutenant Mullen, leader of the third platoon, responded instinctively when he heard a radio squawk that Willie Johnson had been hit. Before being promoted to command the first platoon, Johnson had been Mullen’s platoon sergeant in the third, and more than that, his mentor in the field, teaching him much of what he knew about jungle fighting. Mullen rushed toward the point to see if he could help, bringing along one soldier and his radiotelephone operator. They had moved no more than a few dozen meters when they saw Johnson being carried back down the column behind them. Mullen stopped momentarily, then was hit by “a tremendous volume of fire” along the flank that knocked him to the ground, unconscious. Only a few minutes into the fight and Alpha’s command was shattered: the company commander and two of his platoon leaders already were casualties.

  Alpha’s remaining platoon leader, Lieutenant Edwards of the second platoon, had also moved up to help. His intention was to merge his two files into one and link his unit with the right flank of the first platoon. On the way his troops started receiving fire from both sides, left and right, with the heaviest fire now coming from the left flank. It was becoming clear that the Viet Cong had Alpha enclosed on three sides. Edwards was pinned down by tree snipers, then took machine-gun fire from the front. He had brought up a machine-gun team of his own, but the M-60 quickly broke. A grenadier came on line to support, but the cocking lever on his M-79 “got out of position somehow and couldn’t be fired.” Most of Edwards’s men were twenty meters behind him, virtually out of sight. His firepower situation was deteriorating rapidly—broken machine gun, broken grenade launcher, and soon two M-16s were rendered useless by jammed bullets. All Edwards and his party had left were “one M-16 that worked, one grenade, a knife, and a .45-caliber pistol.”

  Privates Costello and Hinger, the last two men in Edwards’s right file, had responded swiftly to the action at the front. Doc Hinger spotted movement in the trees at the exact moment that Michael Arias and Willie Johnson noticed it further to the front, and pointed it out to Costello, who aimed his M-79 at the treetops and lobbed a few grenades in that direction. The movement stopped. A call for medics could be heard in the distance, and with that Hinger scooted forward. Costello asked his squad leader if he should follow the medic forward and give him cover. Do it, came the reply, but by the time Costello turned around, Hinger was at least fifteen yards in front and lost from sight.

  Dodging sniper fire, moving toward the “Medic!” shouts, Hinger made his way to George and the others wounded by the claymore blast. He began working on the first man he encountered, a private who had two massive tissue wounds, one on the leg, another on the elbow. Top Valdez was there, trying to organize the company amid the chaos. Ernie Buentiempo was nearby. After his ominous morning vibes, Goodtimes was already without his radio, which he had thrown off, and his M-16 was jammed by blood. George, barely functioning, struggled to get on the battalion net again with Terry Allen, giving him a situation report. Allen wanted a body count. George thought it was an odd time to ask for a body count. It was hard enough for him to give a reasonably accurate accounting of his own men. He had Alpha soldiers still fifty meters to the front of him, he reported, and about ten casualties in his vicinity, five of whom had to be carried. And he was still receiving fire. Allen told him to mark his position with smoke and move back. They would bring in the artillery. Breaking contact was slow, George told Allen. After that he could hear no more.

  Hinger moved from one wounded man to the next. The artillery forward observer, Lieutenant Kay, was a mess: his face bloody, his leg mashed, a big chunk gone from his wrist, two gashes in his shoulder. As Hinger worked on him, the fire was so heavy that he “could almost taste the cordite.” He had tunnel vision now, the commotion around him blocked out, concentrating only on what was in front of him. Someone had taken his M-16, or he had given it away, he could not remember and it didn’t matter. Weapons were moving from one soldier to another and being left and recovered. He took Lieutenant Kay’s .45 and a clip of ammo and moved on to another soldier wounded in the kneecap. He heard someone yell, “Fall back! Fall back!” but it barely registered and he could not leave a wounded man. Riflemen Paul Fitzgerald and Olin Hargrove, along with Private first class James C. Jones, an aide to Lieutenant Kay, stayed with Hinger while the others pulled back.

  Jones emptied the ammunition belt for his .45, then picked up the M-16 of a fallen soldier and fired until it jammed, and finally grabbed a discarded grenade launcher. He saw bushes moving and flashes from rifles but never spotted a single enemy soldier, though he knew they were all around. When he tried to rise up, an AK-47 shot the strap off his radio. His boss, Lieutenant Kay, was unable to call in the fire missions, so Jones would do it himself, even though he was “too scared to think clearly.” He made contact with the First Division’s artillery batteries at Caisson V, who fired 105-millimeter shells within fifty meters of his location.

  Costello had been looking for Doc Hinger. As he moved toward Alpha’s front, the gunfight reminded him of “an extraordinarily good fireworks show.” Time was distorted; a minute seemed like an hour. Men were returning fire, but in the distance behind him he could hear periodic shouts of “Hold your fire! Cease fire!” Were they shooting their own men? Toward the front he was pinned to the jungle floor, hugging the ground, pressing down, anything to get a millimeter lower, his head sideways with the big steel helmet sticking up. There was no brush to cover him, only dirt and smoke. He heard rounds go overhead and felt dizzy, certain one would hit. From the sound he determined that the VC were using a big, .50-caliber machine gun, more of a boom-boom than a brrrr. He looked down and saw ants crawling on his arm. They were biting him, and he knew from experience that it should hurt, but his adrenaline was running so strong that he said to himself, I can’t feel these suckers. From nearby came a yell for help. He looked over at a wounded soldier. The man’s insides had come out, hanging there, suspended. Costello’s first instinct was to stuff them in, but from training films he remembered that was wrong. Cover them and apply pressure, he thought to himself, and that is what he did.

  Another explosion went off behind him. Costello felt a shrapnel sting in his back. He could do no more for the wounded soldier, who was going into shock and probably dying. Try as he might, he could not call up the man’s name. He remembered that the guy had a candy-apple-red ’62 Chevy that he was proud of and a young wife he loved very much and that he didn’t care for Costello at all and Costello wished that he had. With bullets zinging overhead, there was the young grenadier, taking one last look at a dying comrade and thinking strangely, I wish we had been nicer to each other. In the din he could hear Top Valdez yelling, “Fa
ll back! Fall back!”

  Valdez, in command of Alpha now, had radioed Allen with another situation report. Move north, Allen had told him. He was calling in the artillery. Valdez and the soldiers with him moved seven wounded men north and east about seventy meters and formed a makeshift assembly area. He had Captain George there, and Lieutenant Kay. There was Sergeant Pipkin, who had been shot in the leg as he tried to move the first platoon’s left file over toward Gribble’s decimated right squad. Specialist 4 Carl Woodard, a squad leader at age nineteen, brought his men from the second platoon over to provide security on the right flank. Pipkin’s radiotelephone operator, Michael Arias, and rifleman Fitzgerald came stumbling back carrying a wounded comrade, Charles Morrisette. Arias had tried to get two other men to help carry Morrisette, but they were taking cover behind a shrub, pinned down by machine-gun fire; they waited for a lull in the shooting before they too crawled back. “Come to the fire!” Valdez shouted, shooting his .45 twice into the air.

  Moving into the Ambush

  Lieutenant Edwards, who had been separated from his platoon near the front, with two of his men and a useless armory of malfunctioning weapons, could sense that the American artillery was coming in closer and closer to their position and that they would have to move north. They crawled fifty meters, then got up and ran in a crouch. He could hear the artillery but not much enemy fire. The shots he heard seemed spaced and deliberate, as though they were “taking careful shots at the wounded.” They finally reached Valdez and the assembly area, joining the band of Alpha soldiers there who had formed a circle and were taking cover where they could, behind shrubs, anthills, logs. It was a few minutes before eleven.

  AT THAT MOMENT in the American Midwest, the clock read thirteen hours earlier, half past nine on the evening of October 16. The San Francisco Mime Troupe was just reaching the climax of its final performance of L’Amant Militaire at the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis. Sandra Archer, wearing a miter, appeared suspended in air above the stage and brought the house down with the announcement “I’m a da Pope!” Before the play ended and the troupe packed up for the next stop on its college tour, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, all issues of war and peace were swiftly and neatly resolved from on high. “The war is over. Peace is declared,” the pope said. “Pacem in terris. Now, my children, we want to hear no more lies and we want to see no more destruction.”

  But the war in Vietnam was not over, not even close. It would not be over until another forty-five thousand American soldiers were dead. Young infantrymen were dying in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone right then, as the curtain fell at the Firehouse.

  THE BLACK LIONS certainly had found what they were searching for. Now what? Was this an offensive operation or defensive? Would they destroy or be destroyed? How many Viet Cong were out there? Would the enemy stand and fight? That George’s lead company had walked into an ambush became apparent to Clark Welch as soon as he heard reports over the radio that machine-gun fire at the point was coming from enemy bunkers. This signified more than a sniper attack; it meant the Viet Cong had been ready and waiting. But Welch did not yet feel that his own Delta Company at the rear was hopelessly outmanned. Though the enemy fire began simultaneously up and down the line, with Triet’s knocks on the wood block, the opening minutes of the battle had been somewhat less intense in Delta’s area. Only a few men had been wounded in the initial volley, including the battalion’s S-2 intelligence officer, Captain Blackwell. Welch figured that he was dealing primarily with some well-placed machine guns and a squad of snipers high in the trees to his right. He shot the first one himself. “I got that sonofabitch!” Big Rock yelled to a platoon sergeant who had pointed toward the tree. Private Garcia, a rifleman on the right flank, took out another sniper, who fell ten feet and dangled in midair, his legs tied in ropes and vines. In Delta’s lead platoon Peter Miller watched a squadmate fire high above him and was splattered by debris, including a magazine of ammo and what Miller thought was a sack of rice balls. One by one, Delta was quieting the trees, but for every sniper killed it seemed three others appeared.

  Welch’s role commanding the rear company was to serve as a backing force for Alpha, and that is how he now concentrated his efforts. He passed the word to his men to hold fire unless they had a definite target. He called his lead platoon and directed Lieutenant Stroup to link up with the rear element of Alpha. Prepare to take Alpha’s wounded back through your ranks, Stroup was told. And be ready for an about-face on a 360-degree azimuth. The azimuth was the angle of deviation from a fixed direction, which in this case was due north, the location of the NDP. As the first trickle of dazed and wounded Alpha men staggered back, Peter Miller and several other Delta soldiers ran forward to help, crossing the same trail that Gribble had first discovered. There was machine-gun fire ripping straight down the trail. The Delta soldiers tore branches from trees and took off their shirts to form makeshift stretchers. Welch closed his second platoon around Terry Allen to provide security for the lieutenant colonel, who remained behind the anthill as his battlefield command post.

  Stroup and his first Delta platoon waited for the main force of Alpha to withdraw through them. After the first battered group, only a few others came back in a haphazard retreat. Top Valdez had set up his makeshift perimeter to the left of Stroup’s point troops. In the dense forest, it was like being in another world, and they never connected. Valdez and his men thought they heard the Delta troops but could not see them. Stroup wondered what was taking so long, why they were just sitting there. The battlefield slowly quieted. It was by no means silent; the Viet Cong were still firing away, but the volume had diminished considerably. What was happening? The First Division artillery had been stopped, check-fired in army terminology, so that air support could come in. Most of the soldiers lost track of time. The lull seemed like a few minutes to some, forever to others. It was at least a half hour.

  The second wave of the enemy attack, when it finally came, started near the front and moved back through the battalion columns with awful fury. Delta was hit from both sides and even some from the rear, but this time the worst was coming from the left, or east. Triet had taken advantage of the pause to bring more elements of his third backing battalion across the draw from the east. He also had moved more men on line from the south and west. The U ambush was complete. With fire pouring in from three sides, it became difficult to distinguish enemy fire from friendly fire. A machine gun pounding at the battalion command area from the east sounded like an American gun and further confused the situation. First Sergeant Barrow heard Terry Allen and other officers shout, “Cease fire! Cease fire! You’re shooting your own men.” Welch thought differently and began yelling “Fire! Fire!” Confused soldiers decided for themselves. Most returned fire. More Alpha soldiers made their way through the crossfire and reached what became a makeshift aid station for wounded men near the battalion command perimeter. Welch, with his familiar forward lean, lurched up toward Stroup’s platoon and back toward the rear, trying to hold his company together, firing his .45 as he went. He calculated on the run that he was now dealing with four machine guns on the east, six to ten from the southeast, and four from the west. The machine-gun fire came at them in fifty- to one-hundred-round bursts, six inches off the ground.

  There was no longer any question as to who held fire superiority. The Black Lions’ lone advantage was artillery support, but that was minimized by close fighting—the enemy’s trademark tactic of hugging the Americans by the belt and holding tight—and by confusion over when and where to stop the artillery to bring in air power, which never came close to the actual battle site in any case. The Viet Cong stayed within fifty meters at all times and often came within ten meters. They were blowing claymore mines, sending in rocket-propelled grenades, and firing down from the trees with AK-47s.

  Welch tried to call in mortar support. Fire the last targets, he radioed back to Sergeant Terry Warner at the mortar station inside the night defensive position. He could not rememb
er the “last targets” (the coordinates he had arranged with his mortar team during the march south), but he intended to adjust the mortars once he knew where they were landing. Wilco! Wilco! Wilco! Warner replied affirmatively. But nothing happened. The orders were countermanded by a battalion officer at the NDP who said it was against First Division policy to fire mortars into thick canopy jungle.

  In the din of war Welch could hear enemy soldiers “yelling, screaming, and laughing back and forth,” especially from the east. Trying to eliminate the enemy machine guns became a task of great courage but Sisyphean frustration. Welch would fix the location of a machine gun and point it out to his men. Two or three would rise up and go after the gun, often taking out the Viet Cong but getting shot in the effort. All those letters home to Lacy about building the best damn company in the First Division, the best damn unit in all of Vietnam, had come down to this—one after another, his kids sacrificing themselves to silence machine guns, if only for a minute. Not long after each enemy gunner was hit, replacements from Triet’s regiment filled the void and the firing started again.

  Though the machine-gun charges proved futile in the face of such a large enemy force, they at least involved clear action with a defined goal. For most Delta men most of the time, the battle was undefined and the enemy unseen. They were pinned down, confused, woozy with fright, fighting to save themselves and their buddies. Dwayne Byrd, the young Texan leading the second platoon, had a sharpshooter’s eyes, but could never find the face of the enemy. He saw only flashes that seemed to be coming out of the ground.

  Jack Schroder was one of the first men wounded when the second round of shooting started. “Airborne Schroder’s hit in the leg,” platoon sergeant Luther Smith shouted, and members of his squad crawled over to help, dragging him toward the battalion command area, which they assumed was secure. “I’ll be all right, I can make it,” Schroder said. A few meters away a rocket grenade hit Sergeant Smith, blowing off much of his left leg. He was still conscious when Faustin Sena reached him. Sena took out his first aid kit and lit a cigarette and gave it to Smith, then moved back when a bullet pinged off his helmet and he heard his squad leader tell him to take over the radio. Machine-gun fire struck Sena in the wrist, making it difficult for him to work the radio and painful for him to crawl.