Part 4 (1/2)

One by one, the planes took off and climbed through the gray overcast sky, over the mountains that surrounded An Khe, and then flew east. A plane carrying Alpha Company's 3rd Platoon, plus a mortar squad, tried to take off and then aborted when the pilot could not get enough air speed. He tried again, this time successfully. The plane climbed through the clouds but then, in one awful instant, it turned downward at a forty-five-degree angle and plunged into a mountain. ”I heard the tremendous crash and explosion as the aircraft augered into the side of the mountain,” Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Mertel, commander of the 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry, recalled. The plane cart-wheeled down the side of the mountain and exploded. The fire was intense. Grenades, mortar rounds, and ammunition were cooking off. Mertel's unit was responsible for securing the crash site, but his soldiers had to keep a safe distance for several minutes until the ammo finished exploding. When they went in, they quickly realized that there were no survivors. The crash killed forty-six men-forty-two from the 3rd Platoon, plus the four-man Air Force crew. ”The bodies were badly torn,” Lieutenant Colonel Mertel said. ”They had to be placed in rubber bags and carried by the troopers several hundred meters to a spot where they could be evacuated by helicopters.” Graves registration teams began the gruesome task of reconstructing the remains into some semblance of identifiable bodies.

When First Lieutenant Larry Gwin, the executive officer of the company, heard the terrible news, he was filled with disbelief. He was still hurting from the horrible experience of Ia Drang, as were most of the company's other survivors, and now this had happened. ”I couldn't believe they were all suddenly gone, crashed into a mountain and obliterated,” he later wrote. As the second in command, he drew the traumatic task of accounting for and identifying the remains. Very few were recognizable, except by their name tags. Gwin was devastated, but he somehow got the job done. The soldiers of the 3rd Platoon may not have been killed in combat, but they were just as dead, and their loss left the same kind of void in the lives of those who knew them. One of the dead men was Specialist-4 (Spec-4) Gary Bryant. His daughter Tammy later wrote that ”his absence has left an unfillable hole in our lives.”4 The crash was a troubling way to start the operation, but of course Masher went on nonetheless. For three days, Moore's battalions encountered little resistance as they hopscotched around the Bong Son plain in a series of heliborne a.s.saults. On the rainy morning of January 28, troopers from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, boarded their Hueys for an air a.s.sault on a series of hamlets that the locals called Phung Du. The Americans called it LZ-4. The differing names may seem like a small matter, but they ill.u.s.trated a problem with the American big-unit war. To the Vietnamese, Phung Du was a singular place with history, ident.i.ty, and a distinct soul. To the Americans, it was just another spot to disgorge soldiers, search for and destroy the enemy. The trouble was that, if places did not really matter, then perhaps the people within them might not either. Few of the Americans knew anything about Vietnamese history or culture. The Army had trained the grunts to fight a conventional war. Yet they were in Vietnam to secure the lives and loyalty of the South Vietnamese people, an objective more akin to counterinsurgency.

Packed aboard their Hueys, many of the troopers were especially nervous about this a.s.sault because their commanders had decided to forgo an artillery preparation on the landing zone. Pre-attack artillery bombardments were naturally a major element of the firepower-centered American way of war. Infantrymen were trained to rely on artillery support. Already, in the first few days of Operation Masher, against almost no resistance, the Americans had expended over two thousand rounds of artillery ammunition (mainly 105-millimeter howitzer sh.e.l.ls). But, in a war with no front lines, and with observable targets scarce, it did not always make sense to precede air a.s.saults with artillery barrages, especially in populated areas where innocent people could, and did, get hurt.

In one instance, early in the operation, Colonel Moore and his command group went into an area called LZ Dog, following a barrage. ”We ran into a copse of trees and into a little village. There in the village was a Vietnamese family. There was a little girl about the age of my youngest daughter and she had been wounded by artillery fire. It broke my heart to see this beautiful little girl bleeding.” Huddled inside their thatched-roof house, the girl's parents looked frightened and bewildered. One minute they had been living their normal lives. The next moment, the Americans had hurled explosives into their village, hurting their little girl.

Colonel Moore arranged for a medical evacuation (medevac) helicopter to pick up the girl and take her, along with her parents, to the 85th Evacuation Hospital. He was dismayed by the entire scene and what it said about the war effort. ”It struck me then that we were not in Vietnam to kill and maim innocent men and women and children and tear up their houses. We were there to find and kill the enemy, and get them out of there.” Quite true, but who was the enemy, where was he, and how could he be destroyed without the use of substantial artillery and air support? These were the troubling questions that bedeviled the American war in Vietnam, especially during the early years of escalation, when General Westmoreland launched his big-unit operations. In World War II, when American firepower hurt or uprooted civilians, even in pro-Allied countries such as France and Belgium, there were few strategic consequences. In Vietnam, when that same firepower injured ordinary people or damaged their property, it could turn them against the Americans and into the arms of the VC, with obviously adverse strategic consequences.

So, for fear of hurting innocent people, and because pre-a.s.sault bombardments often telegraphed the landing zones to the enemy, the Americans declined to soften up LZ-4 with artillery. The infantry soldiers were not pleased. ”What stupid bulls.h.i.+t!” one of them exclaimed. It was hard enough for the men to face the dangers so inherent to combat infantrymen. To do that without maximum support was demoralizing, and even infuriating.

The hamlets that comprised Phung Du were bordered by palm trees, rice paddies, dikes, hedgerows, bamboo shrubs, and fences. At the southern edge of the village was a cemetery with raised burial mounds, reflecting local custom, which decreed that the dead must be buried sitting up.5 Charlie Company went in first. Almost immediately rifle fire pinged off the helicopters. Instead of flying through the intensifying fire and dropping the men in the village, the choppers generally dropped their troops off as quickly as possible, south of Phung Du, in the cemetery, where the fire was lightest. ”We . . . landed in the midst of a North Vietnamese battalion that was reinforced by a heavy weapons company,” Captain John ”Skip” Fesmire, the commander of Charlie Company, recalled. In particular, they were up against the 22nd Regiment's 7th Battalion. Fesmire's company was scattered in isolated groups over several hundred meters throughout the graveyard and the southern approaches to the village. The NVA were shooting from pre-sited bunkers and trenches located mainly in the tree lines that ringed the village. ”The company came under intense and effective automatic weapons and mortar fire,” an after action report declared. Fesmire's company was in a cross fire, with no way out. Any movement could mean death. The men took cover behind burial mounds, paddy dikes, trees, or in muddy folds of ground. The captain saw his radioman and one of his platoon leaders get hit. ”We're in a hornet's nest!” he roared.

All around him, Fesmire's men fought for their lives, often within ten or twenty yards of their adversaries. About two hundred yards east of the captain, Sergeant Charles Kinney, the company's senior aidman, was huddled behind a burial mound, listening to the sonic crack that enemy bullets emitted as they barely missed him. His lift had come in at one of the hottest spots. Three of the other men on his chopper got hit before they even left the chopper. ”They were riddled with bullets and dead before they hit the ground,” he recalled. Although he was a medic, he carried an M16 rifle with several magazines of ammunition. He peeked around the mound long enough to see several NVA soldiers running for a bunker about thirty yards away. He squeezed off several three-round bursts in their direction. ”At that distance . . . it was not hard to hit at least some of the numerous targets presented to me. They just kept coming laterally across my front weapon sight.” Before he knew it, Kinney had expended four or five clips (about eighty rounds). An NVA soldier spotted him and poured AK-47 fire at him. The rounds shattered his M16, wounding him in the face, hands, and wrist.

To Private Charlie Williams, the horrific fighting was surreal, like something out of a movie. Grunts often compared combat with movies, revealing the cultural dominance of film in shaping the perspectives of Americans. This was the only way he could process the horror of watching several men get hit around him. Of course, he understood that, unlike the way many movies portrayed war, the merciless carnage around him was anything but glorious. ”There's nothing exciting about seeing a guy ripped in two by a machine gun or torn in two by shrapnel. I was splattered with blood.” He felt nauseous and wanted only to sit down and cry.

Elsewhere, Staff Sergeant William Guyer, who was in charge of the mortar platoon, was trying to get some rounds out while under intense enemy machine-gun fire. With no baseplate or plotting board, he propped the tube against a mound and fired several ineffective rounds at the NVA machine gunners. He took out his last sh.e.l.l, kissed it, and dropped it down the tube. The 60-millimeter projectile arced slightly and then exploded directly over the gunners, killing them. But another NVA soldier got on the gun and fired a burst. Guyer caught a bullet in the head and went down like a sack of wheat, probably dead before he hit the ground. Sergeant Jose Rivera, another mortarman, killed the new gunner, only to fall prey to an NVA mortar round that scored a direct hit on the shallow hole he had scooped out of the sand. The sh.e.l.l literally tore Rivera's body in half.

Artillery observers were calling in rounds on the various tree lines. Seeing the sh.e.l.ls explode, many of the soldiers angrily thought to themselves that their situation would be much better right now if artillery had pounded the area prior to the landing, before the NVA entrenched themselves in their bunkers. Now, with the enemy undercover, the rounds could not inflict as much damage. Captain Fesmire hollered repeatedly for his company to rally on him. Some did, but the majority of his surviving troopers were pinned down, fighting intimate, private battles with North Vietnamese soldiers. The only saving grace was that the sandy soil absorbed many of the enemy bullets and, in Sergeant Kinney's recollection, ”anything else the NVA threw at us, from hand grenades to 60mm mortar rounds.”

Meanwhile, Captain Joel Sugdinis and the remnants of Alpha Company had landed a couple miles to the south, at a spot the Americans called LZ-2. He had lost his 3rd Platoon in the plane crash, but he was fighting with what he had left. Using fire and maneuver tactics, his two remaining rifle platoons fought their way through rice paddies, into the southern edges of the graveyard. Like their friends in Charlie Company, they too were now in the cross fire, pinned down, fighting at close quarters with the NVA. One of the squad leaders, Sergeant William Bercaw, was seeing his first combat. Like so many other infantrymen, he was trained to close with the enemy and kill him. He told his squad to fix bayonets and charge a machine gun in a tree line. ”I thought the shock effect of a well-determined force would turn the tables,” he said. The squad made it to within fifty meters of the trees before taking cover in a sandy depression. Behind them, someone was calling them back, saying that artillery was on the way into the trees. Sergeant Bercaw covered his retreating soldiers by rising to his knees and firing magazine after magazine on full automatic (”full rock 'n' roll” in soldier parlance). The enemy return fire came back fast and furious. Machine-gun rounds knocked off his canteen, creased his boot, and one even shattered the D ring that was holding the chin strap on his helmet. Then the enemy gun went silent. He beat a hasty retreat, proudly declaring to his men: ”I had a duel with an enemy machine gun and I won.”

In the early afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, commander of 2-7 Cavalry, tried to reinforce his hard-pressed companies by helicopter under cover of a protective artillery barrage. The choppers took intense, accurate fire. Over one hamlet, Warrant Officer Robert Mason, one of the helicopter pilots, spotted an enemy machine gunner who had just shot and killed a pilot in another aircraft. The gunner was standing in the middle of a cl.u.s.ter of villagers, with his machine gun pointed upward on a mount. Not wanting to kill the noncombatants, Mason ordered his M60 door gunner to fire warning rounds, in hopes that the people would scatter. ”The bullets sent up muddy geysers from the paddy water as they raged toward the group,” Mason wrote. No one moved, even when the rounds. .h.i.t within fifty feet of them. In that sickening instant, Mason realized that the people were not going to move. They were more afraid of the enemy gunner than the American helicopters. Mason watched as the door gunner reluctantly fired into the group. ”They threw up their arms as they were hit, and whirled to the ground. After what seemed a very long time, the gunner, still firing, was exposed. [His] gun barrel flopped down on its mount and he slid to the ground. A dozen people lay like tenpins around him.”

Over Phung Du, all six Hueys carrying soldiers from Bravo Company took hits. Two of them had to retreat. Only about a platoon of soldiers, plus Captain Myron Diduryk, their company commander, got into the uneasy perimeter that the Americans had cobbled together, mainly in the graveyard, over the course of several intense hours. Lieutenant Colonel McDade also managed to land, but he quickly got pinned down in a trench. ”Every time you raised your head, it was zap, zap, zap,” he said. ”The dirt really flew.” A stalemate had set in, ushering in a rainy, frightening night of desultory gun and grenade battles. At McDade's urging, Captain Fesmire gathered what men he could, including eight of his dead soldiers, and made it into the perimeter.6 Needless to say, Colonel Moore was frustrated with the situation at Phung Du. He was not pleased, in particular, with McDade. Moore was not quite sure that McDade was qualified to lead the battalion. ”He had been a division personnel officer for a year or two. He was rewarded for his good service by the division commander who gave him the battalion.” The debacle at LZ Albany back in November had partially resulted, Moore felt, from the fact that McDade did not, at that point, really know his troops. Now, in this operation, McDade just did not seem very aggressive or dynamic in resolving the stalemate at LZ-4. ”I told him in no uncertain terms to get that landing zone cleared up, get that battalion organized, and get moving,” Moore said. ”I let him know I was very displeased with what was going on.”

Throughout the night, Colonel Moore organized a relief force. Elements of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry-his old unit-would maneuver north of the village and block the enemy's escape route from that side. Two companies from the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry, would come from the south and reinforce the perimeter. The colonel decided to lead that part of the a.s.sault himself. After sunrise on January 29, artillery pounded the enemy positions. Then Navy A-1E Skyraiders and Air Force B-57 Canberras attacked the enemy-held positions north and east of the village three times with napalm and high-explosive bombs. This touched off secondary explosions in some of the NVA trenches. Sergeant Kinney, the wounded medic, was still pinned down outside the perimeter. He and several other soldiers, most of whom he had treated for wounds, were in hastily improvised foxholes, perilously close to the air strikes. Kinney was amazed at the courage of one NVA machine gunner, who waited for each plane to release its bombs and ”then while it was in the process of upsweeping, he would fire a burst at the belly of the plane. Right before the bomb hit and exploded, he would duck into his fortified spider hole.” After seeing him do this repeatedly, Kinney fired a 40-millimeter grenade from an M79 grenade launcher and killed the brave man.

At 1045, Moore and the 12th Cavalry soldiers landed south of Phung Du. ”We came across a stream just to the south of LZ-4,” Moore recalled. ”We waded across the stream. It was up to our waists. We were under fire. I joined in the a.s.sault across the stream and we relieved the troops on LZ-4.” Moore met with McDade, heard the battalion commander's situation report, and then strode around with his indomitable sergeant major, Basil Plumley, at his side. One trench was filled with wounded soldiers and a few Vietnamese women and children. Up ahead, scattered throughout the graveyard, he could see the bodies of several dead Americans. In Moore's opinion, far too many able-bodied soldiers were hunkered down, simply taking cover, rather than fighting back. ”You can't do your d.a.m.ned job in a trench,” he told many of them. Sergeant Major Plumley had known his commanding officer long enough to recognize his extreme displeasure with the situation. ”The Old Man was not pleased. We talked to the men. They weren't in too deep spirits although they had lost quite a few men. The biggest thing they needed was leaders.h.i.+p and guidance to move them out of there.”

Moore had something in common with John Corley, the soldier who had commanded the 3rd Battalion, 26th Infantry, at Aachen. Both of them had a great knack for minding the big picture while staying close to the action, and without stepping on the toes of their subordinate commanders. In Vietnam, there was a great temptation for commanders at the battalion and brigade level to remain in their helicopters, where they could see much of the battlefield, and manage the fighting from on high. To some extent this made sense. From a helicopter, the commander could see the terrain well, often to the point of spotting the enemy, even as he remained in direct communication with subordinates and superiors alike. However, from thousands of feet overhead, he had little appreciation for the reality of what was happening on the ground. Terrain often looked quite different from the air versus the ground, especially in jungle-encrusted Vietnam. A man in a helicopter could not feel the heat, smell the smells, hear the screams of the wounded, gauge the mood of the troops. In short, he could become way too detached from his soldiers. In a helicopter, the commander was less of an infantryman and more of an aviator. If he spent enough time thousands of feet overhead, he often came to see the world of ground combat from a pilot's detached vantage point, rather than a grunt's intimate perspective.

For these reasons, and not out of any need for medals or personal glory, Colonel Moore liked to get on the ground during a fight: ”You've got to be on the ground to sense what's going on, and the troops like to see you on the ground, sharing the risks too. It's not to be a hero. It just makes a h.e.l.l of a lot of sense. You can't sail around in a helicopter on a radio and really know what's going on on the ground.” At Phung Du, his personal presence was important to the outcome of the battle. He organized a counterattack that eventually overwhelmed the remaining enemy positions in hard fighting that lasted for the better part of another day as soldiers methodically a.s.saulted the NVA bunkers, tunnels, and trenches. Much of the village was on fire and angry plumes of smoke wafted skyward. ”As far as the eye could see the land was under a.s.sault,” one witness related, ”the full expression of the Army's war-fighting fury . . . as if waging war against the land itself.”

The Americans captured a few prisoners, including one frightened man who relieved his tension in a unique way. ”The first thing this guy did was squat down and take a c.r.a.p,” Colonel Moore recalled. ”He thought we were gonna kill him. We gave him some water.” They also rea.s.sured him that he would not be killed. Moore was a big believer that the better treatment prisoners got, the more information they yielded. This man divulged everything he knew.

As medevac helicopters swooped in to the now secure LZ to evacuate Sergeant Kinney and several other wounded men, he gazed at the dead, bloated body of one of his friends. ”I was suddenly struck by the thought that for the rest of my life, I would be living on borrowed time . . . that had been given to me by all these men who had died on LZ 4 . . . while I had lived.” This was not survivor's guilt so much as survivor's determination, and it had positive consequences. As Sergeant Kinney hopped aboard the medevac helicopter, he resolved to heal from his wounds, return to the company, save as many lives as possible, and then live his own life the best he possibly could. ”It was the only way I knew to repay the debt I felt I owed.”

That night, Colonel Moore and Sergeant Major Plumley stayed with the surviving troopers in Phung Du. ”It helps the troops to see the colonel down there with 'em sharing the risks. They felt . . . more safe,” Moore said. This command presence also gave the men a sense that someone was in charge, making decisions, looking out for their welfare. Moore's major concern was to keep the retreating NVA from escaping. On the morning of January 30, he ordered McDade's depleted companies and 2-12 Cavalry to move north, in hopes of pus.h.i.+ng the NVA into the waiting muzzles of 1-7 Cavalry. In some instances, artillery fire, helicopter guns.h.i.+ps, and fighters shot up dozens of retreating enemy, the exact sort of scenario Westy would have envisioned.

Moore's northward push also sparked a pair of sharp fights against company-sized NVA units in the villages of Tan Thanh and Luong Tho. In the latter engagement, three companies from 1-7 Cavalry were fighting so close to the enemy-ferreting them out of bunkers and spider holes-that, according to one after action report, ”heavy fire support could not be used because of the close proximity of the engagement.” Only by withdrawing from the village could the Americans make use of tactical air support and artillery. The communists had learned to negate American firepower by fighting at close quarters. The Americans came to call this enemy tactic ”hugging the belt.”

At Luong Tho, North Vietnamese opposition was so fierce that any helicopter that approached the area risked getting shot down. But, as the sun set on January 31, Captain Ramon ”Tony” Nadal, the commander of A Company, had a dozen wounded men who needed immediate evacuation. Although the odds of getting in and out safely seemed minuscule, Major Bruce Crandall, who had performed numerous acts of bravery at Ia Drang, volunteered to fly his Huey through the darkness into a tiny LZ in hopes of extracting the wounded. The LZ was so small, and surrounded by so many trees, that Crandall had to descend vertically, all the while under steady enemy fire. Moreover, the night was so dark that Crandall could not see the trees or the ground as Captain Nadal talked him down. Nadal's soldiers laid down a powerful base of fire. The North Vietnamese responded with heavy machine-gun fire. Crandall could see their green tracers whizzing uncomfortably close. Somehow, he made it to the ground, picked up six wounded soldiers, took them to a base at Bong Son, and then came back in for another load. ”Coming out was tough because I had to pull up and take those people out without any forward movement.” Difficult or not, he pulled it off, saving many lives. Crandall willingly risked such danger not just out of a sense of duty, and not just because he and Nadal were friends, but out of deep mutual respect for the grunts. ”You always had great confidence in the infantry. You supported those guys as well as they supported you.”

The 3rd Brigade patrolled the Bong Son plain for several more days in early February, but the fighting died down into sporadic skirmishes with snipers. With the enemy seemingly gone, General Kinnard hoped that the plain was now secure. He ordered an end to this phase of Operation Masher in favor of a new push into the An Lao Valley. The vital calculus of casualties, of course, meant everything in these big-unit operations. Already, the Americans had lost 123 men killed (counting the plane crash), and another 200 wounded. Division records claimed 603 enemy killed, by actual body count. The reports also claimed, with no real basis whatsoever, that 956 other enemy soldiers were probably dead. The records were, of course, mute on how many noncombatants were dead or if, perhaps, on-site commanders counted some of their bodies as ”enemy.” Such were the vagaries and potential inaccuracies of the body-count war. Without question, though, the Americans had inflicted significant damage on the enemy's 22nd Infantry Regiment.7 When word of Operation Masher reached President Johnson, his first reaction was quite telling. Instead of asking about casualties, or what results the 3rd Brigade had achieved, he recoiled at the aggressive name the Army had given the operation. From the beginning of his escalation process, he had sought to downplay the size, scale, and violence of the military effort in Vietnam. He did not want the American people to think that their country was truly on a war footing. To his ears, ”Masher” sounded too warlike. ”I don't know who names your operations but 'Masher'?” he said to General Earl Wheeler, the Army's chief of staff. ”I get kind of mashed myself,” Johnson added. McGeorge Bundy, one of the president's security advisors, asked Wheeler to tell the commanders in Vietnam to come up with less provocative operational names so that ”even the most biased person” could not use such names to criticize Johnson's Vietnam policy. Wheeler pa.s.sed the request along to Westmoreland, who, in turn, told General Kinnard. The 1st Cavalry Division commander was stunned, and chagrined, by this political foolishness. In his recollection, he changed the name, ”partly out of spite,” to the most innocuous, peaceful moniker he could imagine-White Wing. So the campaign came to be known as Operation Masher/White Wing. This naming incident might appear minor, but it ill.u.s.trated a fatal aspect of Johnson's war leaders.h.i.+p that affected the way Westy carried out his strategy-all too often, Johnson was more interested in appearances than real results.8 They Must Be in the An Lao Valley.

Once the fighting petered out on the Bong Son plain, General Kinnard felt that the An Lao Valley, a few miles to the northwest, was the logical place to clear next. Intelligence officers believed that the valley comprised an important logistics and transit point for the North Vietnamese. They had pinpointed it as the home for the Sao Vang Division's headquarters. An Lao was the likely place of retreat for those enemy soldiers who had escaped the fighting around Phung Du and the other contested villages of Bong Son. What's more, even as that fighting was going on in late January, Special Forces teams had run into a veritable buzz saw while they were reconning the area. They had found that the place was teeming with NVA and VC. One six-man team was lucky to be extracted intact. Two others became enmeshed in desperate firefights against overwhelming numbers of enemy soldiers. ”We kept getting fire in on us,” Sergeant Chuck Hiner, whose team was ambushed by the VC, recalled. All around him, his teammates got hit. Hiner got on the radio and called for fire support and a rescue attempt. ”I could hear Dotson. He was. .h.i.t through the chest and I could hear that death rattle. This other kid (Hanc.o.c.k) . . . they had st.i.tched him from the ankle to the top of his head.” Sergeant First Cla.s.s Marlin Cook was nearby, lying still, paralyzed from a crippling, mortal wound. Air strikes by helicopter guns.h.i.+ps came right in on his position. ”It was either do that or get overrun,” Hiner said. ”We were fighting-I daresay the closest-within ten feet of each other. It was that tight.”

Major Charlie Beckwith, the legendary Special Forces commander, was badly wounded by enemy machine-gun fire when his command helicopter approached the ambush site. Somehow, though, other choppers extracted the survivors. Of seventeen Special Forces soldiers who went into the An Lao, seven were killed and three others wounded. Three of the bodies were never recovered.

So General Kinnard expected a major fight when he sent Moore's 3rd Brigade and the 2nd Brigade, under Colonel William Lynch, into the valley on February 7. ”Numerous valleys and draws were heavily forested, providing many areas in which concealment from aerial observation is afforded,” a 2nd Brigade report stated. Helicopters landed most of the rifle companies on the ridges, from whence they worked their way down the steep slopes into the valley. The soldiers humped through this exhausting terrain, dealing with leeches, ants, heat, rain, mud, and abject weariness. ”In a few days they were reduced to sodden, weary, leech-encrusted men,” one soldier wrote. They found many abandoned enemy base camps, along with quite a bit of rice, salt, weapons, and tunnels. They also found plenty of evidence that the enemy dominated the area politically. ”Moving through the villages, I was struck by how much anti-American propaganda I saw posted in them,” a grunt recalled. ”Some posters [showed] NVA or VC soldiers shooting down American aircraft.”

But contact with the actual VC and NVA was sporadic to the point of nonexistent. ”The hills were honeycombed with recently abandoned bunkers and caches which had to be destroyed before [we] moved on,” the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry's, after report recorded. The An Lao was typical of what field duty was often like for grunts in Vietnam. They spent most of the day cautiously walking, while carrying heavy loads of equipment, ammunition, and food, sweating in the beastly heat, all the while wondering when danger might beckon. The whole experience was grueling and exhausting, even if they never encountered the enemy, which they usually did not. The old cliche about combat being mostly an exercise in boredom, punctuated by fleeting moments of extreme terror, sprang readily to mind.

The Americans killed about a dozen rearguard VC. For the rifle company grunts, then, the An Lao was more a place of tedium than danger. Even so, a division report claimed that the operations in the valley ”succeeded in throwing the enemy off balance,” and added to ”the general turmoil experienced by the VC during current operations.” The author of the report even optimistically a.s.serted that ”the adverse effect on enemy forces will have a long-lasting effect in that area.” This was staff officer spin doctoring. The Americans had not come to the valley to find nothing but abandoned camps and replaceable war materiel. Nor did the sweep have a substantial long-lasting effect.

In actuality, the elusive NVA and VC had somehow melted away, a common problem during the Vietnam War. Search and destroy meant nothing if the actual destroying never took place. General Kinnard and his brigade commanders decided to look for the enemy ten miles to the south in the Kim Son Valley, another obvious spot for base camps.9 The Crow's Foot.

On the maps, and even from the air, the Kim Son Valley looked like a crow's foot (some thought of it as an eagle's claw). The Kim Son River and its tributaries snaked through a muddy sludge of inundated rice paddies. Brooding over the brownish mess were five jungle-packed ridges that comprised the various toes of the foot. ”The ridges and valleys were covered with thick interwoven vines, rocks, crevices, along with leeches and snakes,” Captain Robert McMahon, one of the rifle company commanders, wrote.

Colonel Moore devised a new way to ferret out the hard-core survivors of the Sao Vang Division. He air-a.s.saulted all three of his battalions into the area. Some established company-sized ambushes ”astride probable enemy escape routes in the valley fingers [ridges].” The rest of his brigade landed at LZ Bird, right at the hub of the valley, and established a firebase there from which the infantry then proceeded to ”act as the 'beater' force, attacking out of the valley forcing the enemy towards the ambush sites.” He called this new approach Hunter Killer. By now, the Americans were beginning to understand how predictable their loud, ostentatious helicopter insertions were to the enemy (that was probably one reason for the heavy enemy presence at LZ-4). So, during the Crow's Foot insertions, helicopter crews carried out many mock landings to confuse the enemy on the whereabouts of the rifle companies.

Moore's concept worked well. Almost immediately, the troopers clashed with the communists. Nearly every company was involved in firefights, often against platoon-sized groups of VC. In just a couple days, they had killed two hundred VC, captured several weapons caches, and overran a base camp, a hospital, and a grenade factory. Doc.u.ments captured in the base camp revealed the location of a VC main force battalion staging area near the village of Hon Mot. Lieutenant Colonel McDade airlifted his B and C Companies near Hon Mot, just two and a half miles southeast of LZ Bird.

On the morning of February 15, Captain Myron Diduryk's B Company found the VC. His 2nd Platoon was moving through a rice paddy just outside of Hon Mot when they came under heavy small-arms and mortar fire. They took cover behind paddy dikes and returned fire. The experience of doing this was terrifying and nauseating. As enemy bullets snapped around them and splashed into the rancid paddy water, the grunts kept low, while propping their rifles and machine guns atop the muddy dikes to fire back. Everyone was wet, filthy, and rife with the fecal, moldy stench of the paddy. At first Captain Diduryk thought he was up against a VC platoon. Actually, he was facing two companies dug in along a jungle-covered embankment and hillside.

Diduryk had fought in the Ia Drang battle so he had a firsthand understanding of how effective American firepower could be in this kind of pitched battle. As his mortar crews pounded the enemy-held embankment, Diduryk's artillery forward observer called down 105-millimeter fire from tubes at nearby LZ Bird. ”In the left sector of the 2d Platoon,” Diduryk wrote, ”artillery fire was brought to within 25 meters of friendly troops due to proximity of the enemy.” The howitzer sh.e.l.ls exploded up and down the length of the VC line. Air strikes from helicopter guns.h.i.+ps firing rockets and A-1E Skyraiders dropping cl.u.s.ter bombs eventually followed. Under cover of this awesome array of weaponry, four Hueys swooped in to resupply B Company with mortar and small-arms ammunition.

Captain Diduryk planned an all-out a.s.sault, led by his 3rd Platoon, for the minute the bombardment lifted. Sure enough, at the appointed moment, his grunts rose up and went forward. They even had their bayonets fixed. ”The platoon moved forward in determined, rapid and well-coordinated bounds employing the technique of fire and movement,” the captain recalled. Infused with adrenaline, they soon began advancing at a dead run, screaming ”like madmen” in the recollection of one soldier. This combination of posturing and aggressiveness overwhelmed the entrenched Viet Cong. As the 3rd Platoon soldiers approached them, firing deadly volleys from their rifles, the enemy soldiers broke and ran. As they did so, they exposed themselves to fire from the 2nd Platoon, which was still hunkered down in the rice paddy. Then, Captain Diduryk sent in his 1st Platoon, adding to the rout. Hollering groups of grunts spotted the fleeing VC and mowed them down. ”The enemy was on the run,” the captain commented. Those VC who stood and fought were slaughtered by the B Company soldiers. Many of those who took off, usually in groups of three or four, came under saturating fire from hovering helicopter guns.h.i.+ps. The whole experience must have been awful beyond description for them-dodging the ubiquitous American fire, seeing comrades tattered by bullets or torn apart by shrapnel, fleeing from blood-crazed gun-toting Americans who were twice their size.

In two hours of one-sided fighting, two VC companies ceased to exist. Diduryk's grunts counted 57 enemy bodies and estimated, on a fairly sound basis, that they had probably inflicted another 150 casualties on the VC (counting wounded who escaped and bodies that were not found). ”VC bodies were piled near a bunker,” one soldier later wrote. ”Some were missing limbs and heads. Others were burnt, facial skin drawn back into fierce, grotesque screams. [The grunts] were policing the dead for weapons and piling what they found in a growing heap. Most were smiling with victory. Wood smoke from the hootches mixed with the stench of burnt hair and flesh.”