A Shau Valor

by Thomas R. Yarborough

  With four Marines wounded and at least one killed, Capt Hitzelberger deployed his 1st Platoon in a flanking movement to the far left through a small ravine. It was at that point that Lance Corporal Thomas P. Noonan, Jr., a fire team leader, moved from his position of relative security and began maneuvering down the treacherous slope to a location near the injured men, taking cover behind some rocks. Shouting words of encouragement to the wounded to restore their confidence, he then dashed across the hazardous terrain under heavy fire and commenced dragging a corpsman, with blood spurting from a wound in his neck, away from the fireswept area. Although knocked to the ground by an enemy round and severely wounded, Lance Corporal Noonan nevertheless got up and resumed dragging the man toward the marginal security of a rock. Shielding the other man with his own body, Tommy Noonan was killed in a hail of bullets before he could reach cover. His heroic actions inspired his fellow Marines to initiate a spirited assault which forced the enemy soldiers to withdraw. For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, Brooklyn native Thomas P. Noonan, Jr. was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.17

  After contact was broken, the men of Company G carefully searched the bunker complex and found two enemy bodies and several blood trails. They occupied the remaining hours of daylight by rigging stretchers to carry the 5 dead and 18 wounded Marines down the hill. Because of the steep, slippery terrain, Capt Hitzelberger was forced to allocate half his company to the effort. “At this time the stretcher cases were moving up and down slopes in excess of 70 degrees,” he remembered, “and we had to use six, eight, and at times ten men to carry a stretcher, and it would take us over 30 minutes to move one stretcher case over one bad area.” The exhausted and hungry men used ropes to lower the stretchers down the face of an almost vertical rocky cliff. Throughout the movement off Co Ka Leuye, Capt Hitzelberger employed artillery concentrations around the company with an almost continuous walking barrage 150 meters to his rear, which he called his “steel wall.”18

  At the bottom of the steep escarpment, Company G finally linked up with a platoon from Company E which had brought medical supplies and the first rations the survivors of Hill 1175 had eaten in over three days. With the help of the relief platoon and a brief break in the weather, Company G finally loaded its wounded aboard two medical evacuation helicopters that had flown on the deck down the Da Krong River, and with no LZs available, had landed on the rocks in the middle of the river. When the company at last staggered back into LZ Dallas on February 9, they were filthy, exhausted, uniforms ripped to shreds, but in high spirits, and according to their battalion commander, they were ready for a fight. To a man they praised the efforts of the medevac birds, helicopter gunships, and Army CH-47s, but they had few kind words to say about the other Marine choppers. One of the Company G platoon leaders perhaps summed up the general mood when he observed, “The Marine helicopter support was piss poor.”19

  Although complaints about inadequate helicopter support for the rifle companies of the 9th Marines during the first week of February were commonplace, the disparaging comments concerning helicopters were in all likelihood overly harsh for several reasons. First, none of the Marine helicopter pilots had ever experienced anything like the abysmal weather conditions encountered in the A Shau, nor had they ever run up against the heavy volume of interlocking antiaircraft fire. Second, unlike Army helicopters directly assigned to and fully integrated into the 101st Airborne Division, Marine helicopters were assigned to the 1st Marine Air Wing and not to the 3rd Marine Division. The aviators, therefore, operated under their own rules and procedures, a fact that tended to make them less open to, or perhaps unfamiliar with, infantry needs and requirements. Friction and misunderstandings were bound to develop. Finally, comparisons to Army helicopter support tended to be biased; Screaming Eagle aviators had already logged a year of experience in the Valley of Death while their Marine colleagues had none. In the final analysis, General Davis’ air mobility concept worked well in clear weather, but in the real world—a world defined by the inhospitable A Shau—the steep learning curve generated not only hard feelings but also cost lives and momentum.

  Phase III of Operation Dewey Canyon kicked off on the morning of February 11, when three battalions of the 9th Marines moved out on foot across Phase Line Red and proceeded south toward the Laotian border, approximately five miles away. Unlike Phase II when the NVA generally opposed the Marines with squad-sized units or smaller, enemy contact during Phase III consisted of formidable attacks by entire platoons or companies, all highly disciplined troops who remained in their bunkers or spider holes until they were overrun or destroyed. To meet the larger threat, a Marine rifle company moved forward on line, with a second company following just behind it, said to be ‘in trace.’ If the lead company became heavily engaged, the company in trace acted as a maneuver element, assisting the lead company as necessary and securing LZs for resupply or medical evacuation. If required, the company in trace could pass through the engaged company and continue to press the attack. According to the 9th Marines’ commander, the maneuver worked well “and was masterfully done. Battalion commanders went right along with [their troops], no jeeps obviously, nor any of that nonsense.”20

  Throughout Vietnam, including the A Shau, February 17, 1969 ushered in the Year of the Rooster. In the Chinese zodiac calendar Roosters were noted for becoming overly stubborn and close-minded in their thinking. Considered in that light, it was no surprise that the Rooster was not the most active practitioner of flexibility. The issue surfaced when, in observance of Tet, the North Vietnamese unilaterally declared a weeklong truce, but for some reason the NVA commander in the northern A Shau used the Tet holiday to attack.

  At 3:45 a.m. on February 17 an enemy sapper platoon, supported by a reinforced rifle company from the NVA 812th Regiment, launched a vicious attack on FSB Cunningham where the sappers broke through the defensive wire and raced through the firebase, tossing grenades and satchel charges into every bunker. During the initial mortar attack, the officer in charge of FSB Cunningham was partially buried in a caved-in bunker. As he crawled out of the debris he came face to face with one of the sappers. The Marine had a grenade in his hand but was too close to the enemy to use it, so he jumped on the surprised sapper and bludgeoned him to death with the heavy base of the grenade. Just a few yards away the company gunnery sergeant, using only his personal knife, killed several of the sappers in hand-to-hand combat. Initially caught by surprise, Marines of Company L fought off the attack and secured the FSB. Marines from the 106mm recoilless rifle battery, manning a machine gun in the southeast portion of the Cunningham, assaulted and killed six NVA soldiers inside the perimeter. The cooks from India Battery joined the close quarters fight when they manned a .50 caliber machine gun and accounted for 13 enemy killed.

  During the initial moments of the attack, 1st Lieutenant Raymond C. Benfatti was severely wounded by an RPG explosion. Ignoring his extremely painful injuries, he refused medical evacuation and, boldly shouting words of encouragement to his men, directed their fire against the marauding NVA sappers. Ignoring the enemy rounds impacting near him, he quickly organized a reaction force and supervised his Marines in evacuating the casualties and in replacing wounded Marines in defensive emplacements. As the large enemy unit continued their attack against the perimeter, Lt Benfatti fearlessly continued leading his company, repeatedly exposing himself to intense hostile fire as he directed the efforts of his men in repulsing the enemy attack, until all were driven off or killed. When the sappers withdrew, he supervised the medical evacuation of casualties and ascertained the welfare of his Marines, resolutely refusing medical assistance until all other injured men had been cared for. His bold leadership and dogged determination inspired all who observed him and were instrumental in his company’s accounting for many North Vietnamese soldiers killed. For his conspicuous gallantry Lt Raymond C. Benfatti was awarded the Silver Star.21

  At first light they
found 37 NVA bodies around the FSB, 13 of them inside the perimeter. During the three-hour fight the Marines suffered 4 killed and 46 wounded. Interestingly, on the NVA dead the Marines found significant quantities of marijuana and other drugs. In an interview shortly after the battle at Cunningham, 2nd Lt Milton J. Teixeira explained that NVA troops hopped up on narcotics “made them a lot harder to kill. Not one of the gooks we had inside the perimeter had less than three or four holes in him. Usually it took a grenade or something to stop him completely.”22

  Some of the heaviest fighting of the campaign occurred on the Laotian border between 18 and 22 February, within a sector assigned to the 1st Battalion. On the 18th, Marines from Company A engaged in a tough fight along a densely wooded ridgeline five kilometers south of FSB Erskine. With assistance from artillery and very limited close air support, the company overran the enemy bunkers, killing more than 30 NVA defenders. A day later Company C moved through Company A’s lines, engaging an even larger enemy force hunkered down in yet another camouflaged bunker complex. Not only did the Marines of Company C kill 71 NVA soldiers, they also captured two Russian-made 122mm artillery pieces and a large tracked vehicle used to move those guns. As the attack continued, Company A again took the lead, killing 17 more NVA and capturing a large truck and a stockpile of artillery and antiaircraft ammunition. During these engagements the Marines suffered 6 killed and 30 men wounded.23

  In the Marine Corps, the valor displayed by Navy corpsmen assigned to each rifle platoon was legendary. In the heat of battle these incredibly brave men, under constant fire and in the open, moved around the battlefield saving the lives of countless wounded Marines. The story of Hospitalman Third Class Mack H. Wilhelm is representative. On February 19, when the 1st Battalion’s Company D came under a heavy volume of fire from an enemy force occupying a well-concealed bunker complex in the northern section of the A Shau Valley, Petty Officer Wilhelm observed a seriously wounded Marine lying dangerously exposed to the intense hostile fire and quickly raced across the open terrain to the side of the casualty. Although Wilhelm was painfully wounded in the shoulder, he skillfully administered emergency first aid to his companion, picked him up and, shielding him with his own body, commenced to carry him to a sheltered position. Once again wounded, this time in the leg, Mack Wilhelm nonetheless managed to evacuate his patient to a relatively safe location. The 23-year-old native of Rockport, Texas, then returned through the hail of fire to the side of another critically wounded Marine and was in the process of treating the casualty when he himself was cut down by a lethal burst of enemy AK-47 fire. For his extraordinary heroism Navy Corpsman Mack H. Wilhelm was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.24

  Operating on the far western flank of the 9th Marines, Company H of the 2nd Battalion was on the Laotian border by February 20. Sitting on a ridgeline overlooking the border and the all-important Route 922, the Marines watched in disbelief as an enemy truck convoy rumbled unimpeded along the road below. Company commander Captain David F. Winecoff remembered, “The company, of course, was talking about ‘let’s get down on the road and do some ambushing.’ I don’t think they really thought that they were going to let us go over into Laos.”25 The Company H Marines were correct: the convoluted rules of engagement did not permit U.S. combat forces to enter neutral Laos. However, there was one small area of interpretive ‘wiggle room,’ a provision that allowed commanders to execute necessary counteractions against VC/NVA forces in the exercise of selfdefense. In the estimation of Colonel Robert Barrow, those NVA forces on Route 922 were moving to attack his men, while 122mm field guns on the Laotian side of the border constantly shelled his troops. “This was a pretty unacceptable situation,” he observed, “and it cried out for some sort of action to put a stop to it.”26 The action came the following afternoon when Capt Winecoff received a message from Colonel Barrow directing him to move across the border that night and set up a company ambush along Route 922. The instructions further stipulated that Company H must be back in South Vietnam by 6:30 a.m.

  Late on the afternoon of the 21st, Capt Winecoff led his 1st and 2nd Platoons down the ridgeline, leaving his 3rd Platoon as security. The 3rd platoon commander was quite upset that his platoon had been chosen to stay behind; however, since the company’s position was periodically being probed by small enemy sapper squads, it was imperative that a platoon be left behind as a rear guard.

  Before even setting the ambush in motion, the men were exhausted from the strenuous action on the day before when every squad in the company had been in contact with the enemy. The 1st Platoon’s encounter had been the most exciting. They had located a small bivouac area, and while checking it out spotted three NVA soldiers bathing in a creek. The platoon literally ran down and tackled their first live prisoner. When the other two soldiers scrambled for their weapons, a firefight developed. Three additional NVA soldiers responded to the brief shoot-out—all five resisters died in a hail of M-16 fire. According to the company commander, such activities were the reason that most of the company’s Marines were still worn out even after a fitful night’s sleep. Working the rugged terrain under the obvious tension of combat in the A Shau was a tiring, emotionally draining experience. The long night ahead would add to the men’s weariness.

  In the pitch black of night, Capt Winecoff led his platoons through the dense jungle in single file with each man holding on to the pack of the man in front to maintain contact. The column stopped often to listen for enemy movement, but the only sounds were occasional mortar rounds fired by the 3rd Platoon and the cacophony of gnats and mosquitoes buzzing around each man’s head, the insect bites becoming ulcerated wounds constantly irritated by salty sweat, and every sore turning into jungle rot. As the column approached the north side of Route 922 at approximately 8:30 p.m., Winecoff sent the 1st Platoon leader and an experienced sergeant forward to scout the road for ambush sites. When they finally returned two hours later and were asked what took so long, their response reflected the menacing aura surrounding their venture into Laos. The platoon leader confessed, “Every fallen tree looked like an enemy soldier. We pounced on one log with drawn knives because we were so sure.”

  After discussing the ambush site with his scouts, Capt Winecoff, carefully employing a halt-listen-move technique, led his force south across Route 922. The ambush plan called for establishing the ambushing force on the Laotian-side of the road so that any assault through the killing zone would be to the north in the direction of the withdrawal. Halfway across the road, Winecoff was startled when the drivers of several unseen NVA trucks just to the west of the crossing site started their engines. The surprised Marines dashed 25 meters up a gentle slope on the far side of the road; the 1st Platoon commander led his platoon members to the right, the command group remained in the center, and the 2d Platoon settled in on the left. The raiding party quickly took up firing positions facing down on the road. Next, three officers moved forward to place claymore mines in front of their positions. To achieve maximum damage, the company commander passed the word along the line that he would not initiate the ambush against singles or even pairs of trucks—he was after bigger game.

  With the ambush in place, a long and agonizing waiting game began. Several enemy trucks came into view using an unnerving technique. The truck driver would move about 200 meters along the road, then stop, cut his engine and lights, and remain motionless, listening for minutes at a time, a practice known as “recon by silence.” Then, at about 1 a.m. on the morning of February 22, the increasingly antsy members of Company H heard shots being fired to their west. The source of that firing turned out to be an enemy patrol working its way along Route 922, firing into suspicious areas as they moved. To preclude his men from triggering the ambush in reaction to the patrol’s shots, Capt Winecoff passed the word not to respond to their fire when they walked by. Fortunately, the patrol apparently turned back several hundred meters before reaching the company’s location.

  At 2 a.m. a single truck entered the killing zone fro
m the west and was allowed to pass. The tired but keyed-up Marines sat in total darkness watching the drama unfold, poised for an ambush but mildly irritated by the sound of chirping crickets and mosquitoes buzzing around their ears. Then, at 2:30 the start up of many engines all at once shattered the silence. Blacked out headlights turned on, which created a visible line as the convoy of eight trucks moved east. As Capt Winecoff watched and waited, the lead truck rounded the corner popping into sight; he allowed it to pass the center claymore into the 1st Platoon’s area. Then the next two trucks came into the company commander’s field of vision, and when the second truck was abeam his claymore, he triggered the ambush at 3:03 a.m.

  Winecoff’s claymore lit up the night and caused the center truck to burst into flames, while the 1st Platoon leader’s claymore missed the cabin of his truck, failing to stop it. Fortunately a quick thinking NCO observed the miss and fired his light anti-tank weapon (LAW), knocking out the lead truck. The 2d Platoon leader’s claymore failed to fire, and the alert driver of the third vehicle threw his engine into reverse and began backing out of the killing zone. At that point all the Marines opened fire with their M-16s and machine guns, shredding the trucks with a hail of lead. The wild scene became even more spectacular when ammunition aboard the burning center truck cooked off. In short order the forward observer also had artillery fire falling on the company’s flanks along the road, and in the eerie light of the burning trucks, Capt Winecoff gave the signal to move forward through the killing zone and back across the road to a rally point approximately 500 meters to the north. In addition to the three destroyed trucks, Company H counted eight NVA dead. Not a single Marine had been killed or wounded during the ambush on Route 922.27