Part 8 (2/2)

The company stepped up about three feet from the paddies onto the slight high ground of Nhi Ha proper with Lieutenant Guthrie's Charlie Two on the right and Charlie Three, under the acting command of a sergeant first cla.s.s, moving abreast on the left. Lieutenant Kohl followed with his command group. The a.s.sault line, with a point team forward of each platoon, closed up to about five meters between men as they pushed through the first thicket of bamboo and brush at the hamlet's edge. The terrain opened up on the other side, and by the time Lieutenant Hieb and Charlie One, bringing up the rear, were inside, the rest of Charlie Tiger had already swept nearly halfway through Nhi Ha. The hamlet, defined by an outer wall of vegetation, was narrow in width but long on its east-west axis. The sweep was from east to west. There were two-walled and three-walled hootches, which were checked as they were pa.s.sed, and hootches so badly shot up that only the cement foundations remained. There were also old entrenchments, both friendly and enemy, but the village appeared to be deserted.

As the two platoons drew to within fifty meters of the brush line that cut the hamlet in half at its narrow waist, Sgt. Paul L. Yost and Sp4 William J. Morse, now on point, stopped to alert Lieutenant Guthrie that there was movement ahead. They could see at least one man wearing a helmet. Guthrie, concerned about an intramural firelight, shouted a warning down the a.s.sault line that there were still Marines in position. But the men they'd seen were not Marines. They were NVA regulars with helmets, fatigues, and web gear, and they opened fire at that moment from their entrenchments in the heavy brush, killing the entire point team before the GIs knew what hit them. Guthrie caught a round in the back of the head that blew open his forehead on the way out. Yost took at least three rounds through his chest, and Morse was shot above the bridge of the nose. The bullet mushroomed and splattered out the back of his skull.

Private Harp of Charlie One was a small, wiry GI. Jolted by the sudden firing, he fell into a low spot of sand, ending up like a turtle on its back because of his rucksack. The ruck weighed almost as much as he did. The fire seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, and when he moved, bullets chewed up the sand beside him. Harp finally slipped free of the rucksack and rolled it over to get the machine-gun ammo off, along with a couple of hand grenades and his spare bandolier of M16 ammunition. He noticed then that the two-quart water bladder that he kept secured on the ruck had taken a round through it and was deflated.

The ambush, which was initiated at 1250, included rocket-propelled grenades. As Sgt. Jimmie Lee ”Red” Coulthard, a machine-gun team leader in Charlie Three, dropped toward the mound to his front, he was eye to eye with an RPG that seemed h.e.l.l-bent on taking his head off. The projectile was slow enough to see, and it whooshed over him just as he slid p.r.o.ne behind the mound. It exploded somewhere behind him. The air above him seemed electrified with death.

Over the cacophony of explosions and automatic fire, the pinned-down grunts tried to make sense of what was happening.

”Get some return fire going!”

”Who's been hit?”

It turned out that while Charlie Two's point team was being shot to pieces on the right flank, the point man for Charlie Three on the left-a private named Adams, who was to pick up three superficial wounds during the battle-had been able to clamber to cover in a gully. Specialist Derryl D. Odom, the backup man, was cut down, but the third man in line, Sp4 Eugene J. McDonald, was also able to find safety behind a brushy mound. Odom lay facedown and unmoving nearby. McDonald thought he was dead, but Odom, out in the open with a bullet-shattered arm, was playing 'possum where he had fallen. He knew that the enemy still had him in their sights, even if he couldn't see them through the brush.

The fourth man in the point team was Sp4 Johnny Miller, who made a dash around McDonald's mound to reach Odom. Miller made it two or three steps before he was. .h.i.t in the head. McDonald heard him moan, and could see him sprawled out just beyond the mound. McDonald saw a second bullet thump into his back.

Johnny Miller was dead. Private First Cla.s.s George L. Cruse, who had gone for the same mound as Sergeant Coulthard, let out an anguished cry-”They got Johnny!”-then shrugged off his rucksack and, acting on impulse and without coordinating covering fire, leapt up to make a run for Miller. It was the bravest, most stupid thing Coulthard ever saw. Cruse was blown away as soon as he exposed himself. The twenty-year-old Cruse had been a shy, quiet, kind of clumsy country boy from Liberal, Kansas. He was white. The man he sought to save was black. Both of them had been drafted. Miller, older than most grunts at age twenty-five, had been appalled by the poverty in the villages they usually operated in, and had written to his mother in North Carolina, asking that her church group send clothes over for the children. ”They were just good, simple guys,” said Coulthard.

Charlie Tiger was spread across the open ground in scattered bunches wherever the men could find cover. Staff Sergeant James M. Goad, the acting platoon sergeant-and the most respected career NCO in Charlie Three-earned the Silver Star for taking control of the fight in the absence of their platoon sergeant and acting platoon leader, who they a.s.sumed had been killed. ”When the going got really tough, Goad was a good man,” recalled the company's artillery lieutenant. ”He had innate leaders.h.i.+p abilities. When he said something, he said it with such a positive att.i.tude that the men were willing to do it.”

Staff Sergeant Goad wormed his way up to Coulthard's mound, and they returned M16 fire over it on full automatic.

”Get the machine gun up here!” Goad shouted.

Sergeant Roger W. Starr, the platoon's machine-gun squad leader, was behind a berm about forty meters to the rear of Goad and Coulthard. He got a BSMv for his response to their shouts. Starr, an amiable, twenty-one-year-old draftee from a dairy farm outside Sand Lake, Michigan, gave his M16 to one of his gunners, and, taking the man's M60 machine gun in return, rushed forward and clattered in unscathed beside Goad and Coulthard. The mound was too narrow for all of them, so Coulthard slid back into the shallow depression behind it to make way for Starr and his M60. They had to come up to their knees to fire over the shallow slope of the mound, so they took turns, Goad with his M16 and Starr with the machine gun. Starr directed most of his quick, jack-in-the-box bursts at an NVA machine-gun position that he could hear but not see in the hedgerow. Trying to keep low, he ended up shooting the top of their own mound with each burst before getting the weapon all the way up in the enemy's direction. Return fire also kicked up dirt across the mound, and at one point Stan-felt something strike hot and sharp across the upper part of his left arm. He immediately dropped back down and saw that his sleeve had been torn and was b.l.o.o.d.y. He didn't know if the graze had been caused by a bullet or a shard from a bullet-shattered rock.

Staff Sergeant Goad and Roger Starr were about the only men in the platoon seriously engaging the enemy. While Coulthard crawled back to Charlie One to get more ammo for them, Starr and his impromptu a.s.sistant gunner, Sp4 Ray Elsworth-having no time to wait-yelled to Charlie Two on their right that they needed ammunition right away! In response, Sp4 Pierre L. Sullivan, a grunt from the other platoon, ran to their mound and began firing his M16 from a p.r.o.ne position several meters to their right. The position around the edge of the mound was so vulnerable that Coulthard had avoided it when he'd been up there. Sullivan had always been willing to take chances-a trait that earned the nineteen year old the nickname Tunnel Rat because he frequently climbed head first into enemy tunnels with only a .45 and a flashlight. One of his buddies suggested that Sullivan was always going first because he was self-conscious about his small stature. Sullivan was not a draftee; he had enlisted. He wanted to prove himself. He was, however, a short-timer, and some weeks earlier, during a mountain-climbing patrol in the highlands, he had tried to sham his way out of the field by claiming that his eyes were bad. Captain Leach, who was death on malingering, ordered Sullivan to walk point. When he successfully navigated the dangerous crevices of the jungled mountain, the captain, who had been behind him the whole time, grabbed him and barked, ”Don't you ever pull that s.h.i.+t again!”

Specialist Sullivan had been acting like his old self when he made his dash to join Starr and Elsworth. When Sullivan's M16 jammed, he sat up with his back to the enemy, began disa.s.sembling the weapon-and was shot in the head within seconds. He slumped forward and shook for several minutes before he died.

Starr, unable to reach Sullivan because of the fire, muttered, ”I'm going to get sick.”

Elsworth swallowed hard and answered, ”So am I.”

Sergeant Coulthard snaked his way forward again, having gone from man to man back to Charlie One, imploring each for grenades and ammunition. Tall, chunky Red Coulthard-a hard-drinking but level-headed and likeable farm boy from Mount Ayr, Iowa-left the ammo he had gathered with Goad and Starr, then moved to the left with another NCO toward an NVA machine-gun position. Coulthard had been in the Army since enlisting six years earlier at age seventeen. Coulthard and his buddy slid into a gully about fifty meters away from the enemy gun. After heaving grenades at it without effect, Coulthard decided to use a LAW on the bunker, which they could just see at an angle through the vegetation. The other NCO covered him with his M16. On cue, they both popped up, but the instant Coulthard fired the LAW an enemy grenade exploded between them in a shower of debris. They knew that more grenades would be coming, and they almost climbed over each other as they hustled down the ditch. There were no more explosions. They realized then that the first explosion had actually been the LAW's backblast hitting the back of the gully, which was higher than the edge they were shooting over. They started laughing like crazy.

Pinned down on the left flank, Specialist McDonald of Charlie Three squeezed off single shots into the hedgerow ahead. He couldn't see anything, but the point man, Adams, was still down in his gully directing fire. Adams kept shouting for him to aim higher. Adams also hollered at McDonald to toss him some grenades since he was closer to the enemy. McDonald never had the chance. As he rose up to fire his M16 again, a round caught him in his left arm and flipped him over onto his back. His gla.s.ses and M16 were gone. Shocked and in pain, he did not look for either. A small bit of his thumb was missing, and blood bubbled up from where the round had lodged in his arm. McDonald yelled that he was. .h.i.t, and a GI crawled up to pull the bandage from his medical pouch, wrap the wound, and then start back with him. They were eventually able to move in a running crouch, and McDonald joined a number of other walking wounded near the village well, where the company command group was in position.

The initial eruption of fire that killed Lieutenant Guthrie of Charlie Two also dropped his platoon sergeant, Sfc. Eugene Franklin, with a round in the thigh. Pinned down, the thirty-year-old Franklin-a black career soldier-bled to death. Nearby, Pfc. Thomas M. Walker, age eighteen, also lay dead in the brush. Another man in Charlie Two hit right off the bat was Sp4 Larry C. Schwebke. He was shot in the stomach just as he reached a little stucco-type hootch that the rest of his fire team had already pa.s.sed, all of them moving upright in those last seconds before the ambush was sprung.

Schwebke cried out, ”Oh, my guts!” as he fell.

Under fire, Pfc. John C. Fulcher spun around and dragged Schwebke up to the cover of the hootch, then pulled him as far down as he could into a small crater in the floor. Fulcher's best friend and fellow team member, Pfc. Douglas D. Fletcher, joined them inside. The roof of the little, twelve-by-twelve structure had long since been blown off, and the wall to the left was also missing. Fulcher and Fletcher, pressed against the inside of the hootch's front wall, slid to its left edge to return M16 fire-then ducked back as AK-47 rounds thudded into the stucco on the other side of the wall. Their buddy Schwebke held his b.l.o.o.d.y stomach, but apparently because of damage to his spine he moaned that it was his legs that hurt. Lying in an awkward position in the crater, he asked the other two to drag him back out and lay him in such a way that his legs would not hurt so much.

”Larry, they're Marines' at us,” Fulcher answered. ”They're goin' to shoot you again if I move ya.”

Schwebke mumbled, ”Okay, okay ...”

Their squad leader, Sgt. Donald G. Pozil, made it to the rear wall of the hootch. A draftee, he had taken command of the platoon in the absence of Guthrie and Franklin-for which he would receive the Silver Star. His concern was to get his casualties to the rear. There was no door or window to pa.s.s Schwebke through, and moving him around the exposed edge of the wall seemed suicidal. Pozil had the GIs with him use their E-tools to chop a hole through the stucco. When the hole was big enough, Schwebke stretched out his arms so that the men on the other side could reach him and pull him through. He cried out in pain as he extended his arms. It seemed an eternity since he'd been shot.

Larry Schwebke, a farmer's son with a young wife in Iowa, died sometime between being dragged back by Sergeant Pozil's group and finally being lifted onto a medevac Huey. He was twenty-two years old and a draftee. Meanwhile, Fulcher and Fletcher, feeling very much alone, resumed their fire-until Fletcher's M16 jammed. Fletcher did not get shook. He simply sat back against the hootch wall and methodically disa.s.sembled the weapon, cleaned it, and slapped it back together. He thumped in another magazine, recharged the weapon, and rolled back into his firing position in the rubble.

Charlie Tiger received neither tac air nor guns.h.i.+p support-nor any direction from the company command group. Lieutenant Kohl, who was near the village well when the ambush began, stayed there for the duration of the fight. Crawling forward under heavy fire, Lieutenant Jaquez, the artillery spotter, found Kohl sitting up against the cement well on the side opposite the enemy. He had his helmet and flak jacket on, and both of his radios were on the ground beside him. No one else was there, and Jaquez realized that Lieutenant Kohl was physically shaking. Kohl was not giving orders on the radio. He was simply listening to the company net with a handset held to one ear, numbly relaying to battalion on his other radio that they were pinned down and needed help.

Lieutenant Kohl had seen a lot of action as a platoon leader, and had breathed a sigh of relief when his six months were up and he got a rear-echelon a.s.signment. Now he was back in action and it was proving to be one firefight too many for him.

Jaquez screamed at Kohl to ”get up and lead!”

Kohl yelled back incoherently, and Jaquez, with his radioman in tow, finally crawled forward and away from the immobilized company commander. Operating on his belly, Lieutenant Jaquez-a Mexican-American from Los Angeles-got Charlie Tiger some artillery support from three Marine artillery batteries. He worked their fires in as close as he dared in coordination with grunts up front who answered his radio calls, then he and his RTO crawled forward themselves to the point where they could hear enemy soldiers yelling back and forth in Vietnamese. Jaquez could see some of them hustling past several hootches on the left flank. After adjusting fire onto that area, he shouldered his own M16 in the excitement. Between radio transmissions, he used the ammo magazine already in the weapon and the six others in the bandolier hanging down from his shoulder.

Lieutenant Jaquez was awarded the BSMv. So was Charlie One's Lieutenant Hieb, a slim, bespectacled draftee commissioned from officer candidate school (OCS), and a twenty-four-year-old native of Twin Falls, Idaho. Hieb, holding open Nhi Ha's back door with his platoon, also moved from position to position under fire to organize individual and fire-team efforts to drag the casualties back from up front. His RTO was right behind him. When Hieb got up to run, his RTO got up to run. The RTO was such an obvious target that Hieb finally took the radio from him, slipped his arms through the shoulder straps, and told the GI to grab some cover. One of Hieb's better squad leaders, Sp4 John H. Burns, anch.o.r.ed their right flank with his troops behind an earthen berm that was some three feet high. Along with Burns, there was Brooks, Hobi, Harp, and a guy named Meister. When the NVA tried to move in on that side, their M16 fire was overwhelming. Their machine gunner, Pope, who had set up beside Burns, burned out his barrel with sustained fire. The NVA went to the ground. Burns's people kept pouring out rounds, and Harp ended up making three trips back to get ammo from the other squads. He got lost each time on his way back. The situation was that confusing.

The GIs in Charlie One could not fire to their front for fear of hitting Charlie Two and Three. Most of the survivors in Charlie Two had made it to a large crater and were pinned at the bottom of it. One soldier near the crater began digging a shallow trench toward it. When he got close enough, he heaved another E-tool to the men inside so they could dig from their direction, link up, and get out under cover. The digging seemed to take forever.

During the wait, Specialist Burns asked for a volunteer to help him drag back Sergeant Yost's body. Harp said he'd go. Their maneuver required them to crawl past a certain NVA position, and although high gra.s.s offered some concealment and the NVA appeared to be firing in a different direction, it was a risky prospect. The medic said to be careful, adding that he didn't want to lose anyone ”trying to recover guys who are already dead.”

”There's gotta be a better way to do this,” Harp chimed in.

Burns exploded. ”Harp, you chickens.h.i.+t!”

Harp was always in trouble with Burns, mostly because he was so afraid he would screw up that he usually did. Burns tagged him as the squad dud, and in this instance he took Brooks with him to drag Yost's body back. There was a hole in Yost's chest and back that a fist could pa.s.s through, and he was blue around his lips and eyes and fingernails. It was a devastating, infuriating sight, and when an NVA on the right kicked up dirt around them with a sudden burst, Harp had to shoot back. He had seen the smoke rise from where the NVA had fired on full automatic, and he ran over to Pope, whose machine-gun position afforded a clear line of fire.

Harp jumped down beside Pope and shouldered his M16, exclaiming, ”This little motherf.u.c.ker is mine!”

Harp pumped two magazines into the spot-silencing the NVA, maybe temporarily, maybe for good-then rushed back to where Burns and the medic were getting Yost's body on a stretcher. Burns cranked up again, ”G.o.dd.a.m.nit, Harp, if I need you to shoot, I'll tell you to shoot. Right now I need you to lift, so get on the G.o.dd.a.m.n stretcher and leave the Marines' to Pope!” A Marine Otter had moved up behind the village well to evacuate casualties. With Burns and Brooks up front and Harp and the medic in back, they moved out with Yost's stretcher in a running crouch, only to get hung up on a tree stump. By then they were all moving sluggishly, but in the heat of the moment Burns snapped around to scream at Harp again, ”Harp, pick your f.u.c.king end up ...”

At the same time that Charlie Tiger was ambushed, Captain Corrigan and Barracuda, across the stream in Lam Xuan West, also began taking AK-47 and M79 fire from Nhi Ha. Corrigan remained in position to provide suppressive fires into the left flank of Kohl's fight. It was Corrigan's second big action. The son of a West Pointer, twenty-six-year-old Corrigan was an ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate. He was a low-key, highly intelligent man and he ran a good company, although Snyder did not think he had the battlefield instincts of Leach or Humphries. Nevertheless, the battalion commander noted that Barracuda 6, however green, was a cool customer on the radio despite the bullets snapping over his head. Corrigan, lying p.r.o.ne, had called several of his lieutenants and platoon sergeants to his position beside the stream. There were no trees or bushes there, but the crown of the bank, which was three feet above the creek, provided some cover. The Barracuda GIs deployed along the southern bank could not see the NVA blasting away from the other side. The brush in Nhi Ha was too thick. Nor could they see Charlie Tiger. Until they determined who was where in the vegetation, Corrigan instructed them to return fire only with M16s, adding, ”Don't use your machine guns, and no LAWs or M79s. We don't want to be killing our own people over there.”

Barracuda began taking casualties at that point. The first to be hit was SSgt. William F. Ochs, a twenty-year-old career soldier a.s.signed as the platoon sergeant of Bravo One. Ochs, who had been with the platoon for almost nine months and was a highly respected NCO, should have crawled when he returned from Corrigan's meeting and started pa.s.sing the word. Instead, he ran along the bank in a crouch, shouting at his men not to fire their M60s and LAWs. Almost immediately he was blown off his feet by a round that caught him high up on his right leg. The bullet tore a four-inch-long gash where it went in, shattered the bone, and then exited just below his b.u.t.tocks, taking a grapefruit-sized chunk of muscle and flesh with it. Ochs, in excruciating pain, screamed obscenities until a medic crawled over and thumped a morphine Syrette into his leg. The whole leg went numb. Ochs was still shook up because his leg, which seemed held together by only a few strands of muscle, was bent crazily so that his foot was up by his ear. One of Ochs's squad leaders and good friends, Bob Waite, who had also crawled to him, placed a helmet under his head to make him comfortable and spoke encouragingly to him, doing for Ochs what Ochs had done previously for so many of their casualties. Hoping to distract Ochs, Waite got a can of beer out of Ochs's rucksack and opened it for him. Ochs managed a few sips. Meanwhile, Ochs could hear someone trying to organize a medevac on the radio: ”The guy's bleedin' like a stuck pig. He's not going to last long. We can't stop the bleedin'!”

The helicopter pilot's response came in broken over the radio: ”Get him ... wood line behind you ... we'll pick him up.” As gently as he could, Waite straightened Ochs's leg so it would fit in the poncho they lifted him on, and then several other grunts carried Ochs toward the wood line. It was a hundred-meter trip. Under fire the whole way across, the litter team had to tug and drag Ochs along as they struggled on their hands and knees. They made it, though, and Ochs was medevacked within fifteen minutes of getting hit-quickly enough to save his leg.

At about the same time, approximately 1400, a rifleman in Bravo One, Pfc. Robert A. Romo, a twenty-year-old draftee from Rialto, California, caught another of the bullets snapping at them from across the creek. It hit him in the neck and killed him. Afterward, Romo's body was escorted home by his uncle, an OCS graduate serving as a platoon leader in the Americal Division. They were the same age and had been raised as brothers. Romo's death was a deciding factor in his uncle's decision to join the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and to throw away his Bronze Stars during the organization's 1971 protest on the Capitol steps. One of Romo's Barracuda buddies wrote home that he couldn't understand ”why G.o.d would take his life. He never cussed, drinked, or smoked. The guy was twenty and never had s.e.x with a girl... everyone else would seem like a devil compared to him.”

At 1410, Captain Corrigan requested another dust-off for another wounded man, and the C&C C&C Huey was dispatched without the colonel. Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, coordinating

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