Part 6 (1/2)

Later that day, just as Bravo Company was approaching the perimeter on Hill 724, the NVA attacked. ”B40s were fired en ma.s.se, striking trees and showering positions with fragments,” an officer later wrote. ”Enemy mortar positions had been carefully prepared to fire from at least three directions. They continued to fire even under repeated air attack and counter battery.” Some of the NVA soldiers had tied themselves into the trees, from which they could rain down withering accurate rifle fire upon the Ivy Dragoons. Others were pus.h.i.+ng up the hill, a.s.saulting, as usual, at close quarters. The grunts dropped their heavy rucksacks, fanned out into bomb craters, behind logs, in fighting holes or any other cover they could find and returned fire. From the vantage point of their perches in the trees, NVA snipers could clearly see some of the Americans, even if they were crouching behind trees or logs. This sniper fire was frighteningly accurate, ripping through the heads of several unsuspecting grunts. The Americans learned to spray the trees with automatic fire even if they did not see anything to shoot at.

Charlie and Delta Companies had already carved some semblance of a perimeter with holes and fields of fire from which to fight the NVA attackers. But the Bravo soldiers quickly realized that the NVA had gotten between them and their comrades in the makes.h.i.+ft perimeter. This put them in the desperate circ.u.mstance of taking fire, at close range, from all sides. With a flurry of AK-47 fire, the NVA overran several Bravo soldiers who were manning observation posts (OPs) to protect the company's flanks. The OP soldiers were in a hopeless position but they fought back with everything they had, especially Privates First Cla.s.s Nathaniel Thompson and William Muir, who both were mortally wounded but remained in place, pouring out fire until the end. The NVA wiped out the OPs.

Several dozen meters from the OPs, Spec-4 Bob Walkowiak, one of the company commander's radio telephone operators (RTO), heard the shooting but did not know what was going on. He was helping the company medic attend to a badly wounded soldier. As the deafening sounds of shooting, explosions, and hollering raged around them, they came to the sad realization that the man was beyond hope. The medic moved on and Walkowiak tried to talk to the dying soldier and comfort him. ”As I apologized for our inability to save him, the fight for his life ended. Hopefully, someday I'll know if he forgave us for failing.” As the soldier expired, Walkowiak rolled over and looked at the clear blue sky above. The air was so thick with bullets and shrapnel that it was ”like having stars or streaks in your eyes.”

Medics were braving the worst of the fire, scurrying all over, treating and retrieving wounded men. They dealt with the horrible consequences of combat-the torn flesh, the jagged holes, the broken bones, the gus.h.i.+ng blood, the internal bleeding, the crying and screaming of grievously wounded soldiers. With bullets zinging around and explosions cooking off, the medics could only hope to administer some first aid-keep the airways open, apply pressure bandages, stop the bleeding, give morphine shots to those who needed them-and hope for the best. One medic, Spec-4 John Kind, came under enemy attack as he was crouching over a badly wounded man, trying to save him. Kind grabbed the man's rifle and, according to one account, ”began placing accurate fire at the advancing enemy.” When the enemy attack failed, Kind resumed treating the wounded soldier. Another medic from Charlie Company, Private First Cla.s.s John Trahan, was so busy that he personally treated eighteen wounded men in the first several minutes of the firefight. When he realized Bravo Company's predicament, he crossed a patch of open ground under intense fire to get to them, even though he himself was wounded, too. At that point, according to one witness, he took the lead in ”caring for the wounded and evacuating them to safer positions.”

Spec-4 Walkowiak, the RTO, found a bit of cover with two other men behind a small log. He cautiously peered down the incline of the hill at the foliage beyond and saw that the NVA was overrunning one of the platoons. ”On the right, one man raised up to fire as he withdrew and was promptly shot dead. On the left a fellow with a pump shotgun retreated up the hill. He stood tall as he walked backwards, firing every few steps. No panic, just grudgingly giving up ground in that hail of bullets. As he raised his weapon to fire, a bullet went through his jaw.” Enemy grenades soon followed, showering shrapnel in every direction. Employing M72 Light Ant.i.tank Weapon (LAW) rocket fire, machine guns, grenades of their own, and accurate rifle fire, Walkowiak's group managed to slow the NVA into a tense standoff.4 At about this time, an enemy B40 rocket exploded among Bravo's command group, killing twenty-eight-year-old Captain John Falcone, the commanding officer, who had been rus.h.i.+ng all over the place, positioning his men, hollering orders, and trying to keep his soldiers as calm as possible. The well-liked former Marine and Army Ranger left behind a wife and three children. Lieutenant William Gauff, one of the platoon leaders, somehow made his way through deadly fire to reorganize the survivors around Falcone and a.s.sume command of the company, even though he was wounded himself. Another key leader, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ortiz, a.s.sumed command of his platoon when his platoon sergeant got killed. Ortiz manned a machine gun and poured belt after belt of 7.62-millimeter ammunition into attacking NVA soldiers. As was so often the case in this kind of desperate combat, the example of a tenacious NCO motivated other surviving members of the platoon to stay and fight. They laced the NVA with heavy fire until they ran out of small-arms ammunition and began hurling grenades at the enemy, finally forcing them away from that spot for good.

The Ivy Dragoon grunts were fighting tenaciously, but without some serious fire support the entire perimeter was in real danger of being overrun by the NVA. Mortarmen set up makes.h.i.+ft gun pits, pointed their tubes straight up, and fired their sh.e.l.ls (NVA crews responded in kind). Aided by forward air controllers, jets screamed in to drop 500- and 750-pound bombs as close to the hill as they dared. In some cases, they dropped their ordnance within five hundred meters of the grunts. ”They really lit the area up,” Walkowiak later wrote. ”The pilots put napalm and CBUs [cl.u.s.ter bomb units] directly on both sides of the perimeter of the hill behind my location.” In one instance, he and several other grunts popped smoke grenades to mark their position for strafing planes. The fighter pilots swooped in and unleashed a stream of 20-millimeter cannon sh.e.l.ls on a woodpile that was sheltering several NVA, leaving behind little besides boiling plumes of smoke, dust, and traumatized flesh. Walkowiak estimated that enemy fire diminished by one-third. Another soldier watched the planes drop cl.u.s.ter bombs full of 3-millimeter-long flechettes or darts. ”They'd come down through the trees and, holy cow, were they effective.” Hundreds of tiny darts tore holes into any NVA soldiers who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the kill zone of the cl.u.s.ter bombs. They died, literally, a death by a thousand cuts. In the recollection of one American, he and several others later found, in just one sector, ”over a hundred bodies . . . with just little pinp.r.i.c.ks over 'em . . . looking like a very fine shot from shotguns.”

The aircraft were hardly impervious to enemy fire. Helicopter crews found it nearly impossible to even approach the hill, much less get close enough to unload supplies and remove the wounded. Enemy rifle, machine-gun, and rocket fire was just too intense. In the recollection of one man, the air was full of so many B40 rockets that ”you could almost reach up and catch 'em.” In one instance, Sergeant Steve Edmunds, a squad leader in Charlie Company, saw ”a chopper, in an attempt to provide us with food, water, and ammunition was blown out of the sky by an enemy rocket, as it attempted to drop our supplies. The chopper exploded into flames and all the ammunition which was on board continued to explode.” The enemy even shot down a CIA Air America T28 Trojan propeller plane that was operating as a forward air controller. The grunts were able to rescue the two pilots.

Artillery observers were constantly on their radios calling in fire missions. Several miles away, at various firebases the Americans had constructed, artillerymen hunched over their guns, in the synchronized ch.o.r.eography so necessary for well-trained crewmen to do their jobs properly, loading and firing their pieces. Everything from large-caliber eight-inch and 155-millimeter sh.e.l.ls to the more common 105-millimeter howitzer rounds crashed into NVA-held portions of Hill 724 (and on some of the American positions, too). One of the observers, First Lieutenant Larry Skogler, was roaming around with his RTO and reconnaissance sergeant in tow, looking for good places to call down fire. From the lip of one bomb crater, he called in so many fire missions he lost track of how many. The low-key Minnesotan had once attended the state university in Minneapolis, but had gotten drafted in 1965 when he lost his student deferment. Well trained and experienced, he possessed the keen forward observer's feel for terrain, distance, angles, and the capability of the guns. At Hill 724, he had one battery of four guns at his disposal. ”The trees were so tall, we couldn't get good artillery coverage on the ground,” he said. ”The one-oh-five rounds would burst in the trees and scatter all over creation. Ninety percent of it would be stuck in the trees.” Even so, it was effective enough to wound and kill many NVA soldiers, if only because of the sheer volume of the American fire.

The more time that pa.s.sed, the less chance the NVA had to overrun the battalion. Steadily, the Bravo survivors formed a continuous perimeter with hard-pressed Charlie and Delta Companies. With the NVA positions well known, the Americans could unleash a constant barrage of artillery, napalm, and bombs upon the enemy, at a minimum negating their movement. After dark, planes dropped flares to illuminate the area. C47 guns.h.i.+ps (nicknamed ”Puff the Magic Dragon”) circled overhead, spewing forth laser-beam-like streams of Gatling gun rounds on the NVA. Farther away, B-52 heavy bombers unloaded many tons of explosives on suspected NVA strongholds.

During lulls, amid the dancing half shadows, the Americans heard NVA sergeants blowing whistles, organizing their men for new a.s.saults on the perimeter. Over the course of the evening, they attacked several times. Those who could get close enough to the Americans fought it out in confusing, intimate firefights, with muzzle flashes winking like camera flashbulbs. The fighting was ghastly and brutal, sometimes even hand to hand. Because of the ma.s.sive amount of American firepower that was raking every approach to the hill, the communists could not reinforce any of their attacks well enough to succeed in their goal of annihilating the hard-pressed American battalion. Gradually, the Americans fended them off and, by daylight, the battle evolved into a stalemate, with the NVA besieging the hill and the Americans keeping them at bay with firepower plus the sheer tenacity of their grunts.

The still-burning wreckage of the downed chopper blocked the small LZ that the soldiers had hacked out. Resupply helicopters could only swoop in and hover precariously several feet off the ground, all the while under enemy fire. The crewmen hastily threw out crates of ammunition, food, and water cans. If possible, grunts loaded the most seriously wounded aboard. Then the choppers took off. The whole process usually took less than a minute or two. The helicopters made operations in this remote area possible, but in such a heavy battle, they were a tenuous supply link at best. Control of all the ground around Dak To and the establishment of a secure land-based supply line was an impossibility under the circ.u.mstances (and a major reason why officers like Krulak thought it was folly to fight in the Central Highlands).

So the helicopter supply runs were only a temporary solution to this problem. In the words of one after action account, ”Further support was impossible until the enemy could be driven far enough from the landing zone to deny observed fire.” Captain John Mirus, the commander of Charlie Company, and Captain Terry Bell, Delta's commander, were the two highest-ranking officers left on the hill. Both of them understood that they must expand their perimeter to provide necessary breathing s.p.a.ce for the choppers. If they did not, wounded men would die, and supplies of vital ammo and water would dwindle to dangerously low levels. They ordered their men to push the NVA back, away from the hill. ”It took another two days of fighting out from the base to secure the area sufficiently to resume operations,” a unit citation later stated.

In that time, the NVA gradually disengaged and faded away. The Americans later learned that they had destroyed the better part of two NVA battalions. They counted 300 North Vietnamese bodies. A prisoner told interrogators that his regimental commander had been killed. American losses were grim, too. When Bravo Company first went up Hill 724, it had 165 soldiers. When the fighting finally ended there, 19 of the men were dead and another 68 were wounded badly enough to require evacuation. Losses in the other two companies added several dozen more soldiers to the casualty rolls. As the survivors boarded helicopters and left the torn, pockmarked hill behind, their young filthy faces were tinged with the glazed, dazed, exhausted mask of heavy combat. Their bravery, combined with lethal fire support, had won a tactical victory at Hill 724, albeit one that did nothing to enhance American strategic aims in Vietnam. The Americans left the hard-won hill and resumed their pursuit of the NVA. The Dak To pattern was set.5 ”I just knew that n.o.body was gonna get out of there alive”: Task Force Black on Veterans Day.

Most of them were volunteers. The 173rd Airborne Brigade was comprised of young men who had chosen to become airborne infantrymen. To achieve this status, they had endured rugged training. A few of them were draftees, but the vast majority had elected to join the Army, usually out of patriotism, machismo, or a thirst for adventure. Their nickname was ”the Sky Soldiers,” but in Vietnam they only made one combat jump. Instead, they functioned as the ultimate light infantrymen, grunts to the core. Their unit was arguably the hardest working in Vietnam. Since arriving in 1965, the 173rd had spent almost all of its time in the field, operating as a veritable fire brigade for Westy. Wherever the action was thickest, wherever the terrain was the most challenging, the Sky Soldiers were there. ”We lived like animals,” Private Ken Lambertson said. ”We didn't go back to the rear. We didn't go back and party and drink and get high and all that.” Sky Soldiers like Lambertson lived ”in the elements, [with] the snakes, the critters . . . the leeches.” In this unit, luxuries were unheard of. Troopers subsisted on C rations, coffee, and Kool-Aid. In a one-year tour of duty, a typical Sky Soldier spent all but a few weeks in the field, humping a sixty-pound rucksack, dealing with the heat, digging fighting holes, going without adequate sleep, facing danger day and night. ”Such a rifleman was faced with so many hazards and hards.h.i.+ps that the cards were completely stacked against him to ever make it out of that jungle without becoming a casualty to some degree or other,” one of the unit's senior NCOs later wrote.

The paratroopers had fought around Dak To during the summer of 1967, so they knew the place was the NVA's backyard and that going back there would mean heavy fighting. Many of them had premonitions that they were getting into something terrible. ”When we were told we were going back to Dak To, it got really serious,” Sergeant David Watson later said. ”We knew it was gonna be serious again.” Now, in November, they were back to this foreboding, unhappy place, on the trail of their old NVA adversaries.

Like their comrades in the Ivy Dragoons, they had little trouble finding their quarry. On the windy evening of November 10, a company and a half of paratroopers laagered atop a hill ma.s.s close to Cambodia, over twenty miles west of Hill 724. Like the area that surrounded it, the hill was thick with bamboo trees, vines, and the moldy detritus of the jungle. This Sky Soldier group consisted of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry, along with two platoons of the battalion's Dog Company. Collectively this force of just under two hundred paratroopers was known as Task Force Black. They were under the command of Captain Thomas McElwain, Charlie's CO, a self-made former enlisted man from West Virginia who had been in the Army for ten years but was still two weeks shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. Honest, fair, and professional, McElwain had been in command only a couple months but had already built up a strong loyalty among his men, who affectionately called him ”Captain Mac.”

He and his grunts knew the NVA were close. They had skirmished with them several times in the last few days. Moreover, as the troopers of Task Force Black had silently patrolled this jungle, they had found blood trails, empty bunkers, fresh feces, discarded equipment, artificial stairs cut into hill-sides, and, most alarming of all, live enemy communication wire. Beyond all of these visual indicators, the paratroopers could just feel feel the presence of the enemy, particularly the spooky sensation of having eyes upon them. A few of the Americans could even smell the NVA. The mood among the grunts was tinged with the ambivalence of an impending fight. On the one hand, as aggressive combat soldiers, the men were excited at the prospect of a chance to destroy their elusive enemies. On the other hand, everyone understood that, no matter the outcome of the looming battle, death and wounds awaited many of them. ”No one knew exactly what to expect, but we expected it would be something big,” McElwain said. the presence of the enemy, particularly the spooky sensation of having eyes upon them. A few of the Americans could even smell the NVA. The mood among the grunts was tinged with the ambivalence of an impending fight. On the one hand, as aggressive combat soldiers, the men were excited at the prospect of a chance to destroy their elusive enemies. On the other hand, everyone understood that, no matter the outcome of the looming battle, death and wounds awaited many of them. ”No one knew exactly what to expect, but we expected it would be something big,” McElwain said.

November 10 was a tense but quiet night. In the morning, Captain McElwain received orders from Lieutenant Colonel David Schumacher, the battalion commander, to follow the enemy communication wire and hook up with Task Force Blue, a similar-sized element consisting of the battalion's Alpha Company and the other platoon from Dog Company. Unspoken was the expectation that the two task forces would draw the enemy into a sizable battle that would produce a big body count to fulfill the strategic expectations of General Westmoreland and his White House superiors.

Captain McElwain's plan was to send part of his Third Platoon, under Lieutenant Charles Brown, down the hill several meters to recon the laager site, as well as Task Force Black's antic.i.p.ated route of advance, to make sure the enemy was not waiting in ambush. McElwain understood, and appreciated, that moving along trails was dangerous and to be avoided under most circ.u.mstances. But the vegetation in this part of Vietnam was so thick that his unit simply had to move along trails or any other small openings the jungle might occasionally offer. When Brown's patrol was finished, the captain planned to move his company along a narrow ridgeline while the two Dog Company platoons, under the control of their commander, Captain Abe Hardy, moved along a parallel ridgeline.6 At 0800, Brown and his men hoisted their weapons, spread out into a suitable patrol formation, and negotiated their way down the hill. They had not even gone fifty meters when the point man spotted an NVA soldier just down the trail. Intrepid North Vietnamese trail watchers such as this soldier often hid along obvious movement routes, watching, gathering information on the Americans, even shadowing them as they moved. The point man opened fire and wounded the enemy soldier, who then took off. Lieutenant Brown wanted to pursue the man's blood trail and radioed that request to Captain McElwain, but the captain told him to stay put. For all McElwain knew, the enemy soldier was luring Brown's platoon away from the company, into an ambush. At Dak To, American commanders constantly had to beware of these tactics, which, after all, were the product of the enemy's superior initiative and strategic position in the Central Highlands. Since they controlled most of the ground, they could usually do battle at the time and place of their choosing, for maximum advantage. The Americans knew the enemy's goal was to separate and annihilate a platoon- or company-sized unit. To foil this menacing possibility, good commanders like McElwain were intent on keeping their units together, albeit at the expense of mobility and flexibility. What's more, on this morning he was mindful of his orders to link up with Task Force Blue, something he could not do if his unit was absorbed in a rescue operation for a cutoff platoon.

McElwain's most experienced platoon leader was First Lieutenant Jerry Cecil, a member of the West Point cla.s.s of 1966, a group made famous by a Newsweek Newsweek article (and subsequent book) on them. Twenty-four years old, Cecil hailed from a rural Kentucky family with a long tradition of military service. For him, West Point offered a free college education, a chance to serve the country, and an exciting career as a soldier. He had thrived there and, like many of his infantry officer cla.s.smates, he was a graduate of Ranger School, one of the most formidable combat training courses in existence. He had been in command of the 2nd Platoon since June. Knowing Cecil's background, his experience, his knowledge of this terrain, and his quality as a small-unit leader, McElwain decided to put his platoon on point after Brown's encounter with the trail watcher. This decision reflected Cecil's excellence more than any deficiency on Brown's part. Brown was a fine officer, just not as experienced as Cecil. article (and subsequent book) on them. Twenty-four years old, Cecil hailed from a rural Kentucky family with a long tradition of military service. For him, West Point offered a free college education, a chance to serve the country, and an exciting career as a soldier. He had thrived there and, like many of his infantry officer cla.s.smates, he was a graduate of Ranger School, one of the most formidable combat training courses in existence. He had been in command of the 2nd Platoon since June. Knowing Cecil's background, his experience, his knowledge of this terrain, and his quality as a small-unit leader, McElwain decided to put his platoon on point after Brown's encounter with the trail watcher. This decision reflected Cecil's excellence more than any deficiency on Brown's part. Brown was a fine officer, just not as experienced as Cecil.

Lieutenant Cecil and the nineteen other men who comprised his platoon slowly walked down the trail, pa.s.sed Brown's group, and moved on. Like most of the other men in Task Force Black, the 2nd Platoon had trained and fought together for several weeks. They were as close as brothers, and they had developed a strong sense of teamwork in combat. The jungle they traversed grew progressively thicker as they descended the hill, the trees taller, the shadows longer. Cecil had several men deployed on either side of the trail in a cloverleaf formation to guard against ambush from the flanks. For several more meters, the soldiers followed the communication wire. Then the point man, Private First Cla.s.s John Rolfe, spotted another trail watcher. Rolfe raised his arm to signal for a halt and turned his head slightly back with a finger against his lips to call for quiet. He turned back again to the front, took aim on the NVA soldier, and fired one shot. The soldier went down.

The Americans moved a few more meters down the trail to look at the dead man. Cecil radioed back a report to Captain McElwain and he came up to have a look, too. Immediately the two officers and everyone else noticed how well equipped and fresh the dead NVA appeared to be. Lieutenant Cecil noticed that his AK-47 rifle had Cosmoline on it, indicating a brand-new weapon, and speculated that he had probably just come south. Captain McElwain knew that this probably meant that a new, reinforced enemy regiment was somewhere nearby. A chill ran down his spine. ”They're out there, Jerry,” he told Lieutenant Cecil. ”This really is looking bad. I can feel 'em. We're gonna have to be really careful going down this ridge.” Cecil readily agreed.

His platoon resumed its steady advance, in the same manner as before. The ridge narrowed. The sides of the trail grew steeper, making the footing tricky for Cecil's flankers. They covered several dozen more meters, to a saddle of low ground that formed at the bottom of the ridge, before the ground sloped upward into the next ridge. All around them were tree trunks, bamboo groves, and tangled green foliage. The sun could hardly penetrate this canopy. The air was moist and sodden. An eerie, unnatural silence hung over the jungle. ”All the sights and sounds of the jungle just ceased,” Cecil recalled, ”you'd normally hear monkeys . . . walking through the jungle . . . you'd hear birds flying.” Instead, now, there was nothing, as if the animals were hushed into an awed or frightened silence by something, or someone. The quiet was so alien it was almost earsplitting.

Every member of the 2nd Platoon knew that the silence meant big trouble, none more so than Cecil. He had learned much about ambushes at Ranger School, and had even taught ambush techniques at Fort Hood. He knew, with a powerful certainty, that danger was imminent. He thrust his clenched fist in the air, signaling his men to stop, and then twirled his index finger, ordering them to fall back into a mutually supporting semicircle. The lieutenant whispered: ”Guys, I think we're in it. The gooks are here. When I give the signal, start . . . spraying at your feet like a garden hose.” He figured this would kill any potential ambushers with grazing fire.

Lieutenant Cecil raised his CAR-15 rifle and opened fire, as did several others. At that exact moment, a host of hidden NVA soldiers began shooting, too. ”You've never seen a Fourth of July display like this one-the noise was like ten million firecrackers,” Spec-4 Ken c.o.x, a mortar forward observer who was standing a few paces away from Cecil, later commented. ”They literally stood up in front of us,” Cecil said. ”It was like walking into a dark room, turning on a light, and seeing someone there. They literally stood up within arm's reach.” The adrenaline rush was profound, almost like a narcotic, as the body's natural self-preservation mechanisms kicked in. Enemy soldiers popped out of holes and materialized out of the bushes. Everyone on both sides poured out as much fire as he could. Many of the platoon members were already on the ground when the shooting began. Those who were still standing flung themselves onto the trail and blazed away with their M16s. Quite a few of the NVA went down. Others tried to press forward, crawling or hurling themselves at the Americans. Intense enemy machine-gun, rifle, and rocket fire swept up and down the column. The AK-47 fire was so thick that the distinctive cracking sound of the enemy rifles sounded, to some men, like bullwhips snapping. Some of the fire hit home, wounding or killing grunts. One trooper caught a round in the face, instantly blowing out the back of his head in a red spray.

Spec-4 Jerry Kelley, one of Cecil's machine gunners, was with the point element, right in the worst of the kill zone. Most platoon leaders preferred to place their machine gunners in the middle of their formation for the sake of protection and flexibility, but on this day Cecil had fortuitously put Kelley's team up front where they were in a position to do major damage to the attacking NVA. The machine gunner was leaning on his trigger, pouring deadly fire into the shapes of enemy soldiers. ”Oh my G.o.d, they're everywhere!” he roared. ”Here they come!” He alternately stood and squatted along the trail, firing long bursts.7 In the meantime, Lieutenant Cecil was keeping his platoon together as best he could. With his RTO in tow, he lunged around, telling his men where to position themselves and what to do. In his recollection, he was attempting ”to get some kind of perimeter that straddles the trail and hugs over to the right and left as it drops off. It's obviously pandemonium, chaos, shooting.” Spec-4 c.o.x saw him repeatedly expose himself to enemy fire as he directed the battle. ”This is when Lieutenant Cecil becomes the hero that he is, as far as I'm concerned,” c.o.x later commented. ”That guy stood up and placed everybody. He walked. He didn't run, but he walked fast and he placed everybody. He . . . made sure somebody was covering the wounded. He put that small perimeter in place, the whole time talking on the radio with the company commander.” When it came to combat, infantry officers like Cecil were taught to guard against inertia, to do something-maybe even anything-no matter the circ.u.mstances. In this perilous situation, that philosophy proved appropriate. With his flurry of activity, the young West Pointer penetrated through the inherent confusion of this horrendous firefight and held the platoon together as a cohesive fighting ent.i.ty. He also personally shot several enemy soldiers who were charging his position.

Lieutenant Cecil and his men did not yet know it, but they were at the open end of an NVA horseshoe-shaped ambush. The enemy had deployed the better part of a battalion along either side and in front of the trail where the saddle morphed into the higher ground. ”Had we gone another thirty or forty yards, we would have been completely surrounded,” c.o.x said. This would have put them right into the NVA kill zone. Few, if any, would have survived. Instead they had stopped short before the enemy could bait them into this trap. This was not the result of luck. These troopers were experienced, well led, and wise to the ways of the NVA. Because of deduction, prior experiences, and pure intuition, they stopped short of the kill zone, forcing the enemy to spring their ambush in the thicker foliage around the trail, where the Americans had a chance to fight back on something approaching even terms.

Even as the fighting raged, Lieutenant Cecil was on the radio, hollering over the din, reporting what was happening to Captain McElwain, who was about one hundred yards away, back up on the hill. At first, Cecil thought he was up against a squad, then a platoon, and then some sort of undetermined larger unit. When the enemy fire showed no signs of abating, McElwain grew concerned. He called Lieutenant Brown and ordered him to reinforce Cecil, but enemy opposition was so formidable that Brown and his people could only get within shouting distance of Cecil's platoon. Moreover, enemy rifle, machine-gun, rocket, and mortar fire was now coming from the front and both sides. This meant that the NVA was enveloping Task Force Black, attempting to surround and destroy the unit. ”It was difficult to see the enemy,” an after action report explained. ”The jungle was closing in on the troopers as the enemy, completely covered with natural foliage, moved forward.” Copying a tactic from their brethren at Hill 724, some of the NVA even tied themselves into the trees and poured intense fire down on Task Force Black. One of them dropped a grenade between Cecil and his RTO, Preston Prince, wounding both of them. Cecil got hit in the left hip, Prince in the right. They looked up and shot the NVA. His dead body tumbled out of the tree and hung several feet above the trail.

About half an hour after the battle erupted, Captain McElwain and his command group moved from the hill to link up with Brown's platoon. The captain could now see firsthand how desperate the fighting had become. He sensed that, somewhere out there in the trees, the enemy was moving along adjacent ridges, trying to get between the various American platoons to destroy each one of them in detail. This was exactly what they had done at the disastrous Battle of the Slopes in June. He understood that Task Force Black was now in serious danger of experiencing the same fate. To forestall such a bloodbath, McElwain knew that he had to get the entire task force together, into one continuous, defensible perimeter.

He actually found this to be a bit frustrating. McElwain, like many other combat arms officers of his generation, was taught to fight aggressively-close with the enemy and destroy them through fire and maneuver. ”I was eager to . . . fight in battles instead of going into defensive positions. That's the way I had learned in all my experiences, was to fix the enemy, maneuver against him, and destroy him.” In Vietnam's Central Highlands, though, that was not the name of the game. Here such aggressive tactics invited ma.s.sacre because they made it easier for the NVA to surround units, fight them at close enough range to neutralize American firepower, and then inflict horrendous casualties on the GIs. Instead, the Americans, especially after the Slopes, learned, upon making contact, to peel back into a perimeter, hold it, and unleash their firepower at the communists, in hopes of keeping them at bay and inflicting a large body count. These tactics, effective though they undeniably were, reflected the unhappy reality that, in the Highlands, the enemy held the strategic initiative. By and large, the communists chose where they wanted to fight and they controlled most of the terrain. The Americans controlled only enclaves. Only in this sort of environment could such defensive tactics make sense.8 Be that as it may, Captain McElwain knew, on the morning of November 11, that Task Force Black's survival depended on forging and holding a strong perimeter. Knowing that time was short, he radioed Captain Hardy and had him move his two platoons back to Charlie Company's position. McElwain's Weapons Platoon, under Lieutenant Ray Flynn, and his 1st Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Ed Kelley, were both still on the hill. He radioed Flynn and Kelley and told them to come off the hill and join up with everyone else at the base of the hill, where the perimeter was forming roughly around Brown's platoon. Ordinarily, Flynn's mortar crews would have had their tubes set up and firing. So far, though, they had remained inactive because the trees on the hill were so dense that the crews had no fields of fire. The situation was now so serious that Flynn's people buried their mortars, picked up their rifles, and dashed down the hill. They had to fight their way to the rest of the company. Most of the soldiers even left behind their rucksacks, taking only weapons and ammo with them.

The same was true for Kelley's riflemen and machine gunners. Knowing the company's predicament, they moved with great haste, in rushes, down the hill through the bamboo-riddled foliage. ”We were in a . . . line going down,” Private Lambertson remembered. ”We'd stop and then move on a little bit. We could hear all the firing down below.” Lieutenant Kelley constantly prodded his men to keep moving. The group was hunched over, pus.h.i.+ng through the brambles, adrenaline coursing through their veins. ”We literally fought our way down to where the rest of the company was,” Kelley later said. ”It was like a hundred d.a.m.ned Harley motorcycles all revving up. That's the only way I can explain the noise. It was absolute bedlam.”