Part 1 (2/2)

Captain Mastrion was still on the radio, talking to the intelligence officer. ”You'd better upgrade that report a little because they're here!” he shouted. It seemed that Golf Company's north-moving column had inadvertently intersected a spread-out NVA column moving northeast to southwest in the open paddies. The two lines had formed an irregular X in the dark, which was suddenly exposed as the NVA's green tracers erupted along one leg and the Marines responded with red tracers along the other. There were shouts and shadows and chaos. The weapons section moving with Mastrion instantly went into action. Two 3.5-inch rocket-launcher teams began shooting at nearby NVA muzzle flashes to disrupt that fire, and to give the four M60 crews they were teamed up with time to get into advantageous positions. The machine guns then suppressed the closest enemy positions.

There was a thirty-second crescendo of fire from the NVA soldiers closest to the center of the X, and then it seemed that they had scattered under the heavy return fire. The NVA farthest away were still blazing away. Their AK-47 automatic rifles had a cracking, bone-chilling report. Mastrion tried to count the number of tracers burning over his p.r.o.ne figure, but gave up. There were NVA strung out to the southwest from the point of contact, and still more to the northeast, although he could not get a feel for how many there were in that direction. He estimated that he was up against two companies, and called for reinforcements.

Lieutenant Colonel Weise, in position to attack An My, returned to radio silence after a quick reply: ”This is Dixie Diner Six. You're on your own. If I come over there with Foxtrot or Echo we're gonna be Marines fighting Marines.”

Having been told by Captain Mastrion to bring in the artillery, Lieutenant Acly lay on his stomach with his radioman, fumbling in the dark to find his map and his red-lensed flashlight. The red lens preserved a man's night vision. The light was not invisible, however, and Acly tried to work up the mission as fast as he could-before the NVA phantoms could spot him. Acly got a fire mission from A/1/12, a 105mm battery at Camp Kistler, as well as 81mm fire from BLT 2/4's prepositioned tubes at Alpha 1. The rounds whistled overhead, flashbooming in the dark as Acly walked them to within two hundred meters. A platoon radioman reported on Mastrion's company net that several NVA had broken from cover. Acly copied the grid coordinates and adjusted the arty. The voice on the radio said that it was right on target.

Golf Company was later credited with eight kills. Meanwhile, Marines were shouting and still shooting, and sporadic, ineffective NVA fire was zipping in from a distance as Golf consolidated in an area of low mounds about fifty meters west of the contact area. The company's senior Navy corpsman approached Mastrion then and told him that the man with a head injury was most likely going to die ”if we don't get him out pretty quick and get him to a doctor.” Mastrion turned to his forward air controller (FAC), a young lance corporal instead of the lieutenant normally a.s.signed to the job, and said, ”Okay, have 'Em get an emergency medevac. Call me when he gets here, and I'll try to find out between now and then what the situation is. If we can, we'll get the head injury out; if not, we're going to wave the medevac off.”

The FAC placed four unlit strobe lights at the corners of a fifty-by-fifty-meter square to mark the landing zone. The wounded were gathered there with designated litter teams. A night medevac in a potentially hot landing zone (LZ) was risky, and the FAC had argued against it. Mastrion, however, thought they could pull it off. He calculated that Golf Company was about four hundred meters east of an unnamed hamlet they had reconned that afternoon. He figured the NVA to have retreated to that cover, and he instructed Lieutenant Morgan of Golf Two to dispatch a squad-sized patrol to confirm that the NVA were actually at this relatively safe distance.

Lieutenant Acly ordered the arty to cease fire when the medevac and his wingman came into the area at 0130 with their lights off. The helicopters, Korean War-vintage CH-34 Sea Horses, were from Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 362 (the Ugly Angels), which was colocated with the BLT 2/4 rear aboard the USS Iwo Jima Iwo Jima. The flight leader came up on the FAC's air net and asked how far the NVA were from the LZ. Mastrion told the FAC, ”Tell him I estimate it to be four hundred meters to my west.”

Mastrion turned again to his senior corpsman, who said that the man with the head injury was getting worse. That made up Mastrion's mind about the risk, and he told the FAC to ”bring 'Em in.” The lance corporal moved out then to light the four marking strobes. Brave man, Acly thought: The strobes made the FAC a target for the tracers zipping in from the distance. The helicopters planned to come in one at a time. The flight leader approached first and was in a hover above the LZ when he flipped on his landing lights for just a moment to get the lay of the land before setting down between the strobes.

In the flash of the landing lights, Captain Mastrion noticed to his horror a small building directly to the south. He recognized the building from the afternoon recon as one on the outer edge of another small, unnamed hamlet that sat near the village to the west, where the NVA had retreated. According to Mastrion's estimate of his position, that building should not have been to the south. It should have been to the southwest, and Mastrion recognized instantly that he had miscalculated his pos. He was four hundred meters farther west of Jones Creek than he had thought, almost on top of the hamlet the NVA were in. The fire he thought he had been taking from that hamlet had actually been from NVA even farther away.

It was too late to wave off the lead helo-it had already landed. At that moment, contact erupted between Lieutenant Morgan's recon squad to the west and an NVA element out looking for the Marines. The NVA, at the edge of the LZ, began raking the medevac s.h.i.+p with fire. Mastrion later said with remarkable honesty: I really miscalculated the distances. I thought I was farther towards the creek, but it was so dark that we must have wandered over. Out in those sand dunes at night you really don't know where the h.e.l.l you are anyway. It was almost like navigating at sea. There are many decisions I made in the many months I was in combat that you could second-guess, but this is one decision that I never had to second-guess-that was a bad, bad, bad, bad decision. We had been up for a long time. It may have been fatigue, it may have been the pain from the injury, it may have been blatant stupidity, or a combination, but it was a very bad call and it got that medevac shot up.

Though Mastrion may not have called in a medevac had he correctly understood his nose-to-nose position with the NVA, the flight leader, Capt. Ben R. Cascio, an experienced and aggressive pilot, would have attempted such a mission. The Ugly Angels had that reputation when it came to emergency evacuations. Cascio, however, would have handled the mission differently, pausing in the LZ only long enough to take aboard the man with the critical head injury before pulling pitch.

As it was, the misinformed Captain Cascio powered down to settle completely into the LZ and give the Marines rus.h.i.+ng to his Sea Horse time to get all the casualties aboard. The crew chief and door gunner were just helping the first wounded man into the cabin when the NVA suddenly opened fire. The Sea Horse was taking hits as Cascio brought his RPMs up so that he could lift out of the LZ. It seemed to take forever. Green tracers were flying everywhere. Sparks shot out of the exhausts. The whirling rotor blades filled the air with sand. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded in front of the Sea Horse, shattering the Plexiglas winds.h.i.+eld. A sudden scream came over the air net, then obscenities mixed in with, ”We gotta get outta here.... We gotta get outta here ...!”

Captain Cascio's left eye had been blown out and everyone in the crew was wounded. When the RPG exploded, Staff Sergeant Del Rio, who was helping Lieutenant Morgan load the wounded, went p.r.o.ne in the blinding whirlwind. The helicopter blades were right above him. He just knew that the shot-to-pieces helicopter was going to roll over on its side. The blades were going to kill him. He started to scramble away on his hands and knees, but then, to his amazement, the Sea Horse lifted off even as bullets continued to thump into it. Everyone in Golf Company watched anxiously as the helo headed south, making it only about three hundred meters before coming down hard. The copilot somehow got it airborne again and, trailing sparks, made it all the way to the boat ramp at the 3d Marines' CP at the mouth of the Cua Viet River. There the wingman sat down to take aboard the wounded crewmen and infantrymen and fly them to the medical facilities aboard the Iwo Jima Iwo Jima.

The next morning, when Weise went to Camp Kistler to personally brief the regimental commander on Night Owl, he inspected the damaged helicopter. It had bullet holes through the engine, some of the controls were shot away, and the c.o.c.kpit was spattered with blood. ”How that thing got off the ground, I'll never know,” Weise said later. ”It was just unbelievable. It was a miracle.”

But it was an incomplete miracle. In the confusion, the man with the head wound had not been placed aboard the medevac. He continued to cry out incoherently. ”There was this mournful yowl, like a banshee crying,” said Lance Corporal Lashley. It sent chills down his spine. Lashley was sitting in a little hole of scooped-out sand, with his extra machine-gun ammo un-shouldered and ready for use by his nearby M60 team. They wanted the head-shot Marine put out of his unholy misery. They wanted him to die fast. He was going to die anyway. They wanted the corpsman to take him out with a morphine overdose so he would stop giving away their position.

”That was the thought that night,” Lashley remembered. ”It may have been me who said it. I know I thought it.”

At that point, Lieutenant Colonel Weise instructed Captain Mastrion to pull out of Lai An and move back to Pho Con. Mastrion agreed. Golf Company had a paddy strength of only about 150 men, and he was convinced that they were terribly outnumbered. But Lieutenant Ferland, the company's longest-serving officer, with six months in the boonies, was flabbergasted when Lieutenant Deichman, their exec, pa.s.sed the word to him. Ferland wanted to hunker down in their freshly dug holes among the burial mounds, call in artillery around them, and ride out the night. He did not like Deichman. ”I want to stay here,” Ferland said angrily. ”When you're in an ambush zone, whenever you move, there's great potential of being hit again. As far as I'm concerned, we're surrounded. If we pull back we're going to run into more s.h.i.+t.”

Lieutenant Deichman, who had a pretty strong personality himself, and who respected Mastrion, told Ferland to move out. Ferland then called Mastrion directly to make his case as respectfully as he could with a skipper he did not like. ”We're okay here, we have to stay here,” he said. Mastrion, thinking of the S2's report of two thousand NVA, which his platoon commanders did not know about, replied, ”No, you have to pull back. I understand you're okay there, but the fact is we've been told to withdraw.”

Mastrion doesn't have it together, he just isn't rational, thought Lieutenant Morgan, who also believed that the order to move was crazy. Mastrion's compliance with the order to pull back could certainly be second-guessed. The man was not, however, flipping out. Mastrion conferred with Acly. He wanted artillery called in behind them and adjusted at hundred-meter intervals as they withdrew; he also wanted artillery fire worked along their flanks. Acly complied. Mastrion then turned to Del Rio, telling him to get a head count and ensure that no one was left behind. Del Rio was the acting gunny: Armer had accidentally been medevacked when he jumped into the shot-up Sea Horse to help a wounded man aboard.

Golf One, now commanded by its platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Wade, moved out behind Lieutenant Ferland's Golf Three, which again had the point. Moving east until they hit Jones Creek, the two platoons then swung south and reached Pho Con without incident. Lieutenant Morgan's Golf Two remained with the company headquarters, which was taking care of the man with the head wound. When Ferland informed Mastrion that they were in position at Pho Con, Mastrion told Morgan to start moving. Morgan's first two squads disappeared into the darkness, but Morgan and his third squad stayed with Mastrion and the senior corpsman. They were not going to move until the wounded Marine died. They didn't want to carry him when he was still alive because every time they tried to lift the poncho in which he lay, he let out a terrible groan.

Mastrion hoped that the NVA would not discover their vulnerability. The young Marine finally died about five hours after having been shot. When one of the men helping carry the body fell and twisted his ankle, a limping and disabled Captain Mastrion took his place. Lieutenant Morgan sent his last squad ahead to secure the litter team, then positioned himself at the rear of the column with a young grenadier. Morgan had also picked up an M79, and the two of them operated their single-shot, breech-loading weapons as fast as they could, pumping a barrage into the hamlet behind them. The NVA did not return the fire.

Golf Company completed its withdrawal to Pho Con by 0300. Meanwhile, the rest of the op was on schedule, and at about 0400 on Sunday, 28 April, Echo Company crossed the line of departure north of An My and commenced an on-line, firing-as-they-walked a.s.sault into the tiny, blacked-out hamlet. There was no response. The NVA had bugged out. All that remained were the still-warm coals of doused cooking fires, indicating that the NVA squatters had only recently vacated the premises. They left behind nothing of value.

”There was a great feeling of disappointment,” said Major Warren. There was also suspicion about the ARVN at lonely, vulnerable Alpha 1. The ARVN were only trying to survive, not win, their endless war. One does not live to hide another day by picking fights with a better-led, better-equipped opponent. Weise and Warren were convinced that their allies had forewarned the NVA about Operation Night Owl. The troops had other explanations. ”We had to tape everything down to make it silent,” commented a regimental sniper attached to Echo Company, ”but if you ever heard a Marine company going through the night, especially when they're tired, you'd know we were fooling ourselves.”

Come daylight, the companies returned to their patrol bases. Just east of Lai An, the Vietnamese scout with Echo Company talked a wounded NVA out of a bunker in which he'd been discovered. Skirting on past Pho Con, Echo came under a thirty-two-round barrage of 130mm artillery fire from the DMZ while crossing the big, calf-deep rice paddy. It offered no cover, and Echo made a run for it. ”h.e.l.l, the CP group got in front of the platoons,” remembered the company's forward observer (FO). ”We were really humping to get out of that G.o.dd.a.m.n place.” The soft paddies absorbed the sh.e.l.ls before they exploded. ”You'd hear these things come in and you'd dive under water with your mouth open for the concussion,” commented the attached sniper. ”The thing would blow up, then you'd hear shrap-metal just raking overhead. You'd get up and run again-and then you'd dive underwater, get up, and run again....”

Marine artillery fired counterbattery missions, followed by three air strikes on suspected enemy gun positions. There were seven secondary explosions. Echo Company had one man slightly wounded. Before Echo pushed on for Nhi Ha, a medevac landed for the wounded prisoner they had in tow throughout the barrage. Talk was that the enemy soldier had been hit again by his own artillery. Whatever the specifics of his injuries, he did not survive, as was recorded in the BLT journal: ”POW was DOA at DHCB.”

Captain Mastrion did not make Golf Company's early afternoon hump back to Lam Xuan West. After bringing in a Sea Horse for the last of the wounded-and their one poncho-covered killed in action (KIA)-Mastrion wanted to get in a quick catnap before they saddled up to depart Pho Con. He woke up in excruciating pain. His back muscles had spasmed, and he could neither feel nor move his legs. Mastrion was finally medevacked.

Lieutenant Deichman, the exec, got Golf Company moving again after taking some twenty rounds of flat-trajectory artillery fire-and after Lieutenant Acly laid in a smoke screen to cover their movement. Golf's hump back to Lam Xuan West and Echo's return to Nhi Ha relieved a squad-sized detachment that had been sent up from battalion to guard the footbridge between the two hamlets during the night. The Marines had set up on the Nhi Ha side with a dangerously thin half-moon of one-man fighting holes.

”Without a doubt, this was the most hair-raising night I spent in Nam,” wrote Cpl. Peter W. Schlesiona, late of Golf Company. He had been sent back to battalion with severe jungle rot and ringworm, and was the man in charge of the detail. He and another corporal alternated between radio watch and walking the line to keep people awake. During the night, they heard the sounds of Golf's fight and of the helicopters. ”As it was night, we rightly a.s.sumed these were medevac choppers,” wrote Schlesiona. ”This made us particularly bitter the next morning as we helplessly watched Vietnamese civilians looting the personal effects that Golf Company Marines had left at their positions in Lam Xuan West. The most we could do was fire, uselessly, over their heads, as any direct action would have meant deserting our positions.”

The battalion's a.s.sistant operations officer, Capt. ”J. R.” Vargas, took command of Golf Company after its return to Lam Xuan West. His was only an interim command-until a full-time replacement could be found for Mastrion-but Golf was glad to have him aboard. More precisely, they were glad to have him back back aboard: Captain Vargas had previously commanded the company for more than two months and was, in fact, the soft-spoken, paternalistic skipper whom Mastrion had replaced. ”When the word circulated that Vargas was coming back, people were ecstatic,” Acly said later. At the time, Acly wrote in his pocket notebook, ”Everybody loves him, and he seems to be a rather charismatic personality.” aboard: Captain Vargas had previously commanded the company for more than two months and was, in fact, the soft-spoken, paternalistic skipper whom Mastrion had replaced. ”When the word circulated that Vargas was coming back, people were ecstatic,” Acly said later. At the time, Acly wrote in his pocket notebook, ”Everybody loves him, and he seems to be a rather charismatic personality.”

On Monday, 29 April 1968, BLT 2/4 became involved in the opening act of a major, across-the-DMZ offensive by the 320th NVA Division that would be met at a number of far-flung locations and be known collectively as the Battle of Dong Ha. The NVA objective was probably the Dong Ha Combat Base, which was a kilometer south of the town of the same name. The DHCB was the major logistics base and headquarters location of the 3d Marine Division. ”The establishment of these functions at Dong Ha was logical,” wrote one of the division's a.s.sistant operations officers, ”since it was situated at the junction of the only major north-south (National Route QL 1) and east-west (National Route QL 9) land lines of communications in the area of operations, as well as being accessible to shallow-draft cargo craft from the Gulf of Tonkin via the Cua Viet River and its tributary, the Bo Dieu.”

The first contact of the offensive occurred in the afternoon of 29 April when two NVA battalions were engaged on Route 1 as they marched south from the DMZ. The NVA were met only seven klicks above Dong Ha by two battalions of the 2d Regiment, 1st ARVN Infantry Division, whose TAOR extended to both sides of Route 1 and included Dong Ha and the DHCB. The NVA offensive had been antic.i.p.ated to some degree. Task Force Clearwater, colocated with the 3d Marines at Camp Kistler, had advised division two days earlier that a number of incidents, ”each in itself relatively insignificant,” led to the conclusion ”when taken as a whole that the enemy might be preparing to interdict the waterway.” These incidents included knowledge of a VC platoon that had been detailed to diagram the waterway between Camp Kistler and the DHCB, and to collect data on the number of boats plying the rivers. There had also been, noted the report prepared by the a.s.sistant ops officer, ”a substantial increase during the last week of April in attacks by fire, generally by rockets from the local area and by tube artillery located north of the DMZ, against both the port facilities at the mouth of the Cua Viet and the offloading ramp at Dong Ha.”

The first of May was considered a likely candidate for the timing of any spectacular Communist maneuver. The division-level report continued: ”Given the intelligence available and the approach of Mayday, the contact of the 2d ARVN on the 29th was not a great surprise.”

With the ARVN and NVA engaged above Dong Ha, Maj. Gen. Rathvon M. Tompkins, who had been in command of the 3d Marine Division since November 1967, when Major General Hochmuth was killed in a chopper crash, committed part of the division reserve. Task Force Robbie, as the reserve was designated, was at Cam Lo, ten klicks west of Dong Ha in the 9th Marines' TAOR. A light force consisting of a rifle company from 1/9 and a tank company from the 3d Tank Battalion was organized, and together they moved out posthaste on Route 8B, a provincial road running east from Cam Lo to intersect Route 1 about two klicks north of Dong Ha. It was the most direct route to the battle. It was also the most predictable, and the reaction force, while traveling in column through Thon Cam Vu three kilometers out of Cam Lo, encountered mines and entrenched NVA with rocket-propelled grenades. Although claiming twenty-six NVA killed, the Marines had four tanks damaged and were forced to extricate themselves from the hamlet with four dead and twenty-nine wounded. In addition, seven Marines were reported missing after the fighting withdrawal. Their bodies were subsequently recovered.

In response to the disaster in Thon Cam Vu, Major General Tompkins instructed 3/9 to reduce the NVA positions there. The attack was to commence the next day, with tank support. In the meantime, the unreinforced ARVN battalions were still heavily engaged on Route 1. If uncontained, the NVA could push on to Dong Ha. To prevent this, division alerted the 3d Marines, who were relatively unengaged on the east flank, to release a rifle company to protect the bridge on Route 1 above Dong Ha.

Colonel Milton A. Hull, commander of the 3d Marines, placed Captain Livingston's E BLT 2/4 opcon to division, and Sea Horses lifted the company from Nhi Ha to the north end of the bridge, where it dug in beside a populated hamlet. Propeller-driven Skyraiders were bombing and napalming farther up the highway, and Livingston took a quick jeep ride just as the battle was petering out. The ARVN had held, and they showed Livingston a number of freshly killed NVA who had new uniforms, web gear, and weapons. Livingston was impressed: ”It was clear to me we had some fresh troops moving down against us. I knew it was for real.”

”With everything else that was going on, Colonel Hull had me 'spread the regiment out along the Cua Viet,'” wrote Maj. Dennis J. Murphy, the regimental S3 at Camp Kistler. ”Hull was looking days ahead.” Hull had operational control of three battalions. BLT 2/4 was deployed north of the Cua Viet, and his other rifle battalion, 1/3, was to the south. Hull's third element, the 1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion, was tied down in strongpoints along the coastal side of the regimental TAOR. Hull realigned all of these units before nightfall, a move that led Murphy to comment, ”I was concerned, as was 2/4, 1/3, and the Amtracs, that we were getting too thin, and we'd have some trouble ma.s.sing force. When I started to resist the 'spreading,' Hull said, The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are going to try to take Dong Ha, and we've got to be able to keep them from getting across the river.'”

Major Murphy added that ”by the time Colonel Hull was satisfied that we had all the potential routes covered, the Marine units-especially Bill Weise-were calling me the 'fastest grease pencil in the East.'”

Weise was very concerned about regiment's instructions. To the north of the BLT CP in Mai Xa Chanh West, Vargas's G Company had to expand the Lam Xuan West perimeter to include E Company's vacated positions across Jones Creek in Nhi Ha. To the east, Butler's F Company remained in Mai Xa Chanh East as the BLT reserve, but placed a platoon in My Loc, which was also on the northern sh.o.r.e of the Cua Viet but two klicks farther downriver. Weise could not move F or G Companies without regiment's approval. His only remaining maneuver element was Williams's H Company, which was screening the western flank from Objective Charlie and Objective Delta.

From the roof of his farmhouse CP, Captain Williams had a clear view of the tributary that divided BLT 2/4 from the ARVN TAOR. The area was particularly vulnerable, because the two ARVN battalions previously in position there were the ones that had been moved west to meet the NVA coming down Route 1. The 320th NVA Division would, in fact, exploit this weak seam the next morning, and BLT 2/4 would thus be committed.

Captain Mastrion, medevacked two days before the battle, was still an immobile patient aboard the USS Iwo Jima Iwo Jima when a Marine from the battalion rear addressed the sickbay. The Marine said that the battalion was in trouble, and had taken terrible casualties. He said that any of the wounded who could still function should return to the field. The situation was that bad. Several young Marines o

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