One of the most remarkable soldiers on Ripcord tuned out to a tough, pint-sized artillery officer serving his fourth year in Vietnam: Captain David F. Rich, B Battery Commander from 2nd Battalion, 319th Artillery. Exposed to incoming mortar and recoilless rifle fire each day during the siege of Ripcord, Capt Rich was everywhere, encouraging his men and directing return fire against the enemy. Because counter-battery fire was at that time much more of an art than a science, and a dangerous one at that, during each barrage Capt Rich typically dashed from crater to crater to analyze the impact angles in order to plot the trajectories back to the firing location. Although wounded on seven different occasions, the Buffalo, New York artilleryman continuously pinpointed enemy positions for his men and assured that all the wounded received medical treatment before he did. During a particularly intense barrage of enemy 120mm mortar fire on July 17, Capt Rich conducted accurate crater analysis amid the hail of enemy shrapnel. Although painfully wounded yet again in the arm, chest, and eye, with multiple shrapnel wounds and a fracture to one of his legs, he refused to relinquish the command of his battery and continued to direct the defensive fire of his men. Inspired by his leadership and determined efforts, Capt Rich’s men never left their guns, resolutely resisting the enemy barrage while maintaining a high level of fighting spirit throughout the ordeal. For his extraordinary heroism, Capt David F. Rich was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.36
On July 18 David Rich’s beloved 105mm battery lost its battle on Ripcord in a bizarre ending. At approximately 1:30 p.m., a CH-47 Chinook hauling a load of ammunition suspended in a sling under the aircraft came under fire from an enemy .51 cal machine gun located at the base of Hill 927. As the Chinook attempted to land, bullets from the gun ripped through the bird, igniting the entire aft section of the big helicopter. The CH-47 plummeted into a 105mm ammunition storage area and burst into flames. The resulting fire and exploding artillery ammunition included Willy Pete rounds that blasted the area with burning chunks of white phosphorus along with choking clouds of tear gas from exploding CS shells. The fires and explosions lasted for three hours, ultimately destroying five 105mm howitzers and badly damaging the sixth. Battery B was out of business, and the fate of Ripcord hung in the balance.37
Directly impacting Ripcord’s future, Alpha Company, 2nd of the 506th, made a startling discovery on July 21 when it located an enemy telephone line strung along the western base of Hill 805. Tapping into the line, the company interpreter listened excitedly as the enemy revealed that Ripcord was surrounded by four NVA regiments. After digesting the disquieting information, Brigadier General Sidney B. Berry, acting commander of the 101st Airborne Division, wrote the following letter to his wife early in the morning of July 22, fully realizing that within the prevailing political atmosphere accompanying Vietnamization, it simply did not make sense to accept heavy casualties to claim victory in a single battle:
We’ve now reached the point when we must question the continued use of Ripcord. Is it worth the casualties for the purpose it is serving? Now we are taking constant casualties from incoming mortar rounds, particularly among our artillerymen on top of the hill. We are taking constant casualties among our rifle companies operating in the mountains and jungles around Ripcord.38
Evacuating Ripcord would prove to be easier said than done. In addition to the firebase itself, there was the daunting task of extricating Alpha Company, still mired in the jungle and under fire over 1,000 meters to the east. En route to the rocky hill designated by Lt Colonel Lucas for the extraction, Alpha ran headlong into three NVA battalions—it was Little Big Horn time for the Currahees. According to the company commander, Capt Charles F. Hawkins, “Enemy soldiers started boiling out of the brush from as close as 50 meters … They came at us in a massed attack, crouching low, running through the undergrowth, shouting and shooting …”39 As Hawkins prepared his men to counter attack the enemy, a squad from the 1st Platoon, led by Sergeant John W. Kreckel, began receiving heavy fire from an enemy machine gun emplacement located on higher terrain. Without hesitation Sgt Kreckel ran into the fusillade and began administering aid to his wounded men. He then organized half a dozen stragglers into an assault force and led them up the hill toward the enemy position. As the assault force neared the enemy emplacement, intense fire forced them to take cover. At this time Sgt Kreckel observed a grunt standing directly in the line of fire of an enemy RPD light machine gun. Leaving his covered position, the 22-year-old Milwaukee man ran to the soldier and pushed him to the ground just as the RPD opened fire. Shot in the head, John Kreckel took the burst that was meant for the other trooper; he died a few minutes later. For his extraordinary heroism, John W. Kreckel was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.40
For Alpha Company the battle raged for five hours. Clinging to the very bottom of their makeshift foxholes, the exhausted grunts, soaked to the deepest marrow of their bones, shaking with malaria, jungle ulcers covering their bodies, their guts gripping with spasms of amoebic dysentery, fought valiantly in the darkness to stop the determined enemy. With help from Cobra gunships, the small band held out through the night with only 20 men who could still fight, and all but six of them were wounded. When Hueys lifted them out the next day, the men of Alpha Company had suffered 12 killed and 51 wounded. They counted 61 dead NVA soldiers.
The evacuation of Ripcord began at 6:32 a.m. on July 23 when dozens of Hueys and Chinooks landed on the firebase to lift out the artillery pieces and the men. At 7:40 a.m., the operation degenerated into mass confusion when a CH-47 crashed in flames on the firebase’s large lower landing pad, preventing the other Chinooks from lifting out the rest of the men, artillery, and heavy equipment. With only the smaller upper pad available, the remaining grunts and artillerymen would have to be evacuated by UH-1 Hueys which could carry only six men at a time. As a dozen UH-1s milled around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do, Huey pilot Capt Randolph W. House instinctively knew that a costly screw-up was in the making unless something could be done quickly to help the troopers stranded below. Orbiting above Ripcord, acting as a controller and traffic cop, Randy House directed each chopper into the pad, at least turning pandemonium into organized turmoil. As the evacuation continued throughout the morning, enemy mortar shells constantly rained down on the hilltop while automatic weapons fire tore into the vulnerable helicopters, downing another Chinook and damaging two Cobras and 12 Hueys. The fierce incoming fire was so heavy that it forced everyone on the besieged firebase to take cover—except one man. Leading by example and attempting to calm everyone’s nerves in the chaos and confusion of battle, Lt Colonel Andre Lucas was standing in the middle of Ripcord at 9:15 a.m. when a 120mm shell landed at his feet, the blast severing both his legs. The battalion surgeon loaded Lucas aboard a Huey, but the tough commander died on the medevac ramp at Camp Evans. For his numerous acts of extraordinary valor during the battle of FSB Ripcord, Lt Colonel Andre C. Lucas was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.41
There was little time to mourn as the evacuation continued. By noon, only 18 fighting men remained at Ripcord from an original force of nearly 400—and they were almost out of time. They could see NVA soldiers swarming up the mountainside like ants, breaching the lower perimeter wires less than 100 meters away. Hueys lifted the last men out at 12:14 p.m., and Hill 927 now belonged to the NVA 324B Division. At approximately 2 p.m., a B-52 Arc Light strike leveled what was left of the impregnable fortress known as Fire Support Base Ripcord.42
Several days after the evacuation, General Berry visited with each of the battalions involved, giving impromptu pep talks and doing his best to present the battle as a victory, telling the men that their hasty departure from Ripcord constituted “the most brilliantly planned and executed airmobile operation of the war.” Most of the grunts, especially the Currahees, greeted his comments less than enthusiastically. According to the 2nd of 506th chaplain, “There was a lot of anger from the troops at that time,” feeling that they had been used as bait and le
ft hanging. “The one thing that many people were angry about,” noted the chaplain “was that they didn’t feel we had gotten the support from the higher-higher [division] that we should have.”43 The bitterness manifested itself in numerous threats to refuse to return to the field on the battalion’s next operation—strange behavior for troops who had just been told they had won a major battle. One disgruntled trooper perceptively compared the Currahee ordeal on Ripcord to a stanza from Tennyson’s famous The Charge of the Light Brigade:
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
Arguably one of the most compelling and insightful critiques of Ripcord came from a survivor, Major Herbert E. Koenigsbauer, the Currahee battalion operations officer during the siege. He stated, “Lucas and I made repeated requests that division commit additional forces to the action … but higher command was not prepared to follow through and do what was required to win the battle, and I must admit to a certain sense of disillusionment that after all the sacrifices that had been made to take and hold Ripcord, we just turned around and gave it back to the North Vietnamese.”44
Few people outside the 101st Airborne Division were aware of the dissention and bad feelings. Certainly the media had no inkling; during the battle they had not been allowed to visit FSB Ripcord. What information there was about the battle filtered up to higher headquarters in after action reports that staff members put a positive spin on, then fed to senior commanders who predictably publicized another hard-won victory over the North Vietnamese. Apparently reverting to Westmoreland’s attrition strategy, senior commanders ignored the tactical reality of Ripcord by touting a 30 to 1 kill ratio against the enemy—an unsubstantiated claim since the Americans lost 75 KIA/MIA around Ripcord against a body count of 125 NVA. Whereas the enemy undoubtedly lost many more men—Berry estimated over 500, Harrison 2,400—in the absence of data from Hanoi, American estimates remained guesses.
Essentially the story of Ripcord languished buried and forgotten until Keith Nolan’s definitive book Ripcord: Screaming Eagles Under Siege appeared in 2000. His detailed and unvarnished account sparked renewed interest along with a modicum of debate. While some saw the valor and tragedy of Ripcord, still others rehabilitated the finger pointing game, accusing the liberal press, anti-war protesters, revisionist historians, and Washington politicians of turning an American victory into a defeat. Did we win or did we lose? Theories and opinions poured in from all quarters. Claims of a U.S. victory at Ripcord began to take a decidedly convoluted turn into the twilight zone when a former company commander, who ran a tour agency after the war in Vietnam, was thrust forward as an expert. He maintained that since Hanoi only lionized the battles they claimed to have won, the simple fact that Ripcord went unreported proved that the battle was an embarrassing failure to the North Vietnamese. Adding fuel to the fire, he also offered emotionally unsupported claims—that of all the significant engagements fought during the U.S. troop drawdown, “Ripcord stands as a monument of success during that entire period of time.” Somehow linking the battle to the Easter Offensive of 1972, he speculated that “Without the success of Ripcord that offensive would have been advanced a full year.”45
Since Keith Nolan’s book, most discussions about Ripcord have tended to focus much more on the bravery and glory of the Currahees than on the military blunders involved, with a perverse effect that, according to noted psychologist Norman Dixon, “did much to strengthen those very forms of tradition which put such an incapacitating stranglehold on military endeavor.”46 A U.S. victory at Ripcord became urban legend unsupported by facts.
Consequently, for over 40 years the mantra among Vietnam veterans has been “We won every battle but lost the war,” a myth that still persists. The tour agency operator’s unsubstantiated claims notwithstanding, Ripcord seems to shoot a gaping hole in that time-honored axiom. The enemy initiated the attack with ferocity backed by overwhelming numbers, and at the end of the day the Screaming Eagles, valorous men all, evacuated Hill 927, leaving the NVA in control of the battlefield. As General Berry wrote at the end of the siege: “I made the most difficult professional decision of my life: to get out of Ripcord as quickly as possible.”47 His admission does not sound much like a victory statement. The battle’s outcome was and remains a bitter pill to swallow—the United States was defeated at Ripcord.
The evacuation of FSB Ripcord did not equate to a lull in the fighting for the Screaming Eagles. Operation Texas Star pressed on with its efforts focused just north of the A Shau around Fire Support Base Barnett, a joint U.S.-ARVN position overlooking the Khe Ta Laou River in Quang Tri Province. Some of the toughest fighting took place on August 19 when Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry, attacked a small hill infested with enemy soldiers dug in and ready to fight. As the lead platoon, under heavy enemy fire, approached the hilltop, Private First Class Frank R. Fratellenico crawled right up to the first bunker and tossed a fragmentation grenade through the firing port, killing all five of the enemy soldiers inside. Without hesitation he was moving to a second bunker when the 19-year-old trooper from Connecticut took a machine gun burst in the chest. Stunned and knocked to the ground, PFC Fratellenico dropped the grenade he was about pitch into the bunker. Realizing the imminent danger to four of his friends in the immediate area, PFC Fratellenico had the presence of mind to retrieve the grenade and pull it under his body an instant before it exploded. For conspicuous gallantry, extraordinary heroism, and intrepidity at the cost of his life, above and beyond the call of duty, Frank R. Fratellenico was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.48
With NVA units once more controlling the inhospitable A Shau by late summer of 1970, American ventures into the valley reverted to small patrols by the 101st and clandestine raids by LRRP and SOG recon teams—all of those missions as frightening and as deadly as ever. The month of September proved to be particularly unnerving. For example, just before dawn on September 11, a LRRP team from the 101st tangled with an enemy unit just northeast of their position on the A Shau’s east wall. The NVA counter-recon platoon was delivering a hail of B-40 rockets and automatic weapons fire on the team until a pair of Marine A-4s came to the rescue. The on-scene FAC worked the Skyhawks in close, but on his second napalm pass the lead A-4 was struck by 23mm fire, burst into flames, and crashed into the ground. The pilot, 1st Lt Bernard H. Plassmeyer, did not have time to eject.49
Later that same day, a Screaming Eagle platoon from the 1st Battalion, 501st battled with NVA soldiers in yet another bunker complex. When the enemy opened up with automatic weapons and RPGs, five out of eight men in the point squad had been wounded. After medevacing their injured friends, the severely depleted platoon, now with only 14 men remaining, called on the services of one of the most lethal standoff weapons of the entire war. Cruising just off shore, the battleship USS New Jersey aimed her massive 16-inch guns, firing 2,000-pound projectiles into the A Shau Valley and the enemy bunker complex. Immediately after the first shells hit, one of the platoon members standing over a kilometer away from the impact point felt a rush of hot air past his head. He was amazed to discover a glowing red, four-pound piece of shrapnel on the ground nearby—a souvenir from the New Jersey.50
Just two days later SOG inserted RT Moccasin into Base Area 607 on the southwest corner of the A Shau. The team’s mission was to observe enemy troop concentrations fording a fairly large river. The following day the RT made contact and called for an extraction, but the only open area near them turned out to be a clearing situated on a steep mountain slope. Under covering fire from two Cobra gunships, the lead Huey moved in for the pick-up. Rather than land on the s
teep incline, Lead tossed out a ladder and went into a hover while half the team attempted to hook on. At that instant a B-40 rocket exploded in some tree branches just above the hovering chopper, pelting the entire area with deadly shrapnel. The damaged helicopter staggered like a wounded animal, went into an uncontrolled turn to the right and slammed into the ground, flipping over several times as it rolled down the steep hill. While the Cobras beat up the tree lines suppressing the small arms fire, the second Huey hovered over the wreckage and managed to rescue all four crewmembers. Next, the third UH-1 picked up half the team while the fourth plucked out the remaining members of RT Moccasin and flew them back to Firebase Birmingham. Later it was learned that one of the indigenous team members had been crushed to death when the chopper rolled down the hill, pinning him underneath the wreckage. Ironically, the team One-Zero did not seem that upset at the loss of one of his men; he suspected the dead soldier was actually an NVA infiltrator.51
In mid September, SOG’s most successful mission—and its most controversial—launched from Kontum. Most people simply refer to it as “Operation Tailwind.” As originally conceived, Tailwind began as a diversion to draw NVA units away from devastating attacks against Royal Laotian forces operating along Route 23 on the Bolovens Plateau, approximately 100 miles south of the A Shau. The job went to Hatchet Force commander Captain Eugene McCarley. The Hatchet Force was SOG’s strike arm, either quick reaction platoons or companies whose short duration missions involved a reconnaissance-in-force against lucrative enemy targets. For Operation Tailwind, McCarley led a Hatchet Force whose mission was to create a diversionary ruckus around the strategic area of Chavane, a key sector right on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By SOG standards, McCarley fielded a huge contingent composed of 16 Americans and 110 Montagnards. The size of the company and the distance to the objective precluded the use of Hueys, so SOG enlisted the help of much larger U.S. Marine Corps CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters. On September 11 the raiding party boarded four CH-53s escorted by 12 Marine Cobra gunships and flew to the target area.52
A Shau Valor Page 27
