Among the wounded flowing into the command-post aid station during this brief lull was Specialist 5 Calvin Bouknight, who was the medic with Lieutenant Dennis Deal’s 3rd Platoon. Bouknight had been assigned to the battalion aid station for over eighteen months as one of two medical assistants to the surgeon. By late October, our line companies were short a total of eight platoon medics. We checked battalion personnel records and found some soldiers who had previously served as medics. Some of them were pressed into service; others were given refresher training and were designated reserve medics. Joe Marm describes the situation in his platoon: “My platoon medic was a short-timer and did not accompany us to Chu Pong. SFC [George] McCulley, the platoon sergeant, carried the aid kit, and we planned to use Staff Sergeant Thomas Tolliver as our medic when the need arose. He had been a combat medic during the Korean War and was well qualified.”
Still, we did not have enough medics to go around, so we sent down Specialist Bouknight and Specialist 5 Charles Lose, a senior medical-aid man, as platoon medics to Bravo Company. Now Calvin Bouknight, still alive but mortally wounded, was gently laid on the ground in his blood-filled rubber poncho before the medical-platoon sergeant, SFC Keeton, his friend and comrade of the last two years: “Bouknight wasn’t dead. He was shot between the shoulders, right directly between the shoulders. He reached up and took my hand and said: ‘Sarge, I didn’t make it.’ We got an IV started on him and put a pressure bandage over his back wound. There was just no hope. We were able to get him on an evac ship, but he died.” The Scriptures say that there is no greater love than to lay down your life for your friends. This is what Calvin Bouknight did in that fire-filled jungle. He sheltered the wounded he was treating with his own body, his back to the enemy guns, completely vulnerable.
Up on the line canteens had run dry. Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “Gunga Din,” writes:
But if it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
Kipling had it right. The heat, dust, smoke, and fear dried the mouth of every man in Landing Zone X-Ray. The little bit of water left in our canteens went for our wounded. Says Lieutenant Deal: “By three or four P.M. we had used all our water, mostly on our wounded because they kept begging for water. We were horribly thirsty. It must have been terrible on the wounded who had lost blood. Then we went to our C-rations to drink the liquid out of them. I opened a can, and it was ham and lima beans—the saltiest of all the C-rat meals. I drank the liquid and got twice as thirsty. Incredibly dumb.”
Deal was helping in the evacuation of casualties when he was brought up short by a strange sight. “It was at this time that one of the things I regret most about that battle occurred. I saw a line, not a column, just a line of men, probably two hundred strong, moving on my right flank in the same direction as we were about to turn, the east, and move in with our casualties. I immediately lifted my weapon, had them in my sights with a clear shot. I started to call for those near me to get their weapons up because I thought they were North Vietnamese. But it was just a little bit too far to distinguish if they were Americans or North Vietnamese, so I elected not to fire.
“There was also fear of drawing attention to our depleted platoon. My men were now all killed or wounded except for the equivalent of two squads, about eighteen or so left. These two hundred troops were parallel to us, making their way to the landing zone. Marm, who had been on my right, had already withdrawn. It turned out that they were some of the North Vietnamese we had to fight later that day, who inflicted fearsome casualties on us. I only regret that we didn’t stand there and start shooting them.”
No more than a hundred yards away from Deal, the Lost Platoon clung doggedly to its tiny, tortured piece of earth. By now, Sergeant Ernie Savage and his band of survivors from Henry Herrick’s 2nd Platoon had withstood four separate enemy assaults. The enemy believed they had the Americans in a vise. Three North Vietnamese clothed in camouflage uniforms walked directly into the perimeter from the direction of X-Ray. All three were killed instantly. Galen Bungum saw several enemy, no more than ten feet away, rise to their feet, rifles slung over their shoulders, laughing “like they were out for a Sunday walk.”
From their prone positions, bodies pressed tightly to the earth, the Lost Platoon survivors banged away at a target-rich environment. Ernie Savage rose to fire on three enemy soldiers only a few feet away only to find that his rifle was empty. Savage says: “I didn’t know what to do, so I just said ‘Hi’ and smiled. All three looked at me in confusion, but by then I had slipped in a fresh magazine and sprayed them.”
Dorman recalls: “They tried to crawl up on us. We put our guns flat on the ground and laid the fire into them two and three inches high. We fired real low and we stopped them. All this time there were snipers ten to fifteen yards away. If you stuck your head up they shot at it. But we were killing them right and left. Every time they stuck a head up we shot it.”
It was now 3:45 P.M., and, except for the predicament of Sergeant Savage and the cut-off platoon, I was feeling a good deal better about the situation. We had all our men in; massive firepower had been deployed; a company of reinforcements was on the way; our two-chopper lifeline landing zone was secure; most of our wounded were either evacuated or awaiting evacuation; and we were holding tough. I was determined to make one more attempt to rescue Sergeant Savage and all his wounded and dead up on the slope. I ordered Alpha and Bravo companies to evacuate their casualties, withdraw out of close contact with the enemy under covering fires, and prepare to launch a coordinated attack, supported by heavy preparatory artillery fire, to reach the cut-off platoon. I was tortured by the fate of those men and the need to rescue them.
* An overloaded helicopter needs to reach a maximum forward speed before attempting to gain altitude; forward speed translates to lift.
10
Fix Bayonets!
There are only three principles of warfare:
Audacity, Audacity, and AUDACITY!
—GENERAL GEORGE PATTON
Alpha and Bravo companies, the first units to land, had now been locked in violent battle for more than two hours, had suffered no small number of casualties, especially among the sergeants and radio operators, and had shot up most of their ammunition. The two commanders, Tony Nadal and John Herren, needed time to evacuate their dead and wounded, to reorganize and regroup their diminished platoons and designate new leaders, and to replenish stocks of ammunition and grenades. They would have forty minutes to accomplish this; then heavy artillery fire would rain down ahead of them as they kicked off one more attempt to break through the ring of enemy troops and rescue the survivors of Lieutenant Henry Herrick’s 2nd Platoon.
Meanwhile, help was on the way. Back at 3rd Brigade headquarters in the tea plantation the orders were going out: Our sister battalion, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was informed that one of its companies, Bravo, was being detached and sent to Landing Zone X-Ray to reinforce. On arrival in X-Ray, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion would come under my operational control for the duration of the fight.
Three platoons of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion were pulling guard duty around Colonel Tim Brown’s 3rd Brigade headquarters this afternoon, and were closest at hand and the easiest to move when Brown cast about for reinforcements. All the other 2nd Battalion companies were dispersed on patrols in the thick brush and would take much longer to assemble. So Captain Myron Diduryk’s B Company troops won the toss, hands down.
Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion had good, solid, professional noncoms, and its troops had served together for a long time. It was a good rifle company and I was happy to get it. Captain Diduryk was twenty-seven years old, a native-born Ukrainian who had come to the United States with his family in 1950. He was an ROTC graduate of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was commissioned in July of 1960. He had completed paratrooper and Ranger training and had served tours in Germany and at Fort Benn
ing. Diduryk was married and the father of two children. He was with his mortar platoon at Plei Me camp when he got the word by radio of his company’s new mission.
Specialist 5 Jon Wallenius, twenty-two and a native of Gloucester, Massachusetts, was in Diduryk’s 81mm mortar platoon, which had not moved back to brigade headquarters with the rest of the company. He says, “We waited in the red dust outside Plei Me camp. The constant coming and going of helicopters made conversation almost impossible. Word filtered down that 1st Battalion had got themselves into a fight and that we should be ready to go to their relief at any time. I was assigned to the first bird with Captain Diduryk; his radio operator, PFC Joe Keith; Platoon Sergeant SFC John A. Uselton; and his radio operator, Specialist 4 Virgil Hibbler, Jr.”
While our reinforcements were saddling up at Catecka and Plei Me, my Alpha and Bravo companies were about to launch their second attempt to break through to Lieutenant Herrick’s trapped platoon. John Herren and Tony Nadal had pulled their men back to the dry creekbed during the lull, so they would begin the attack from there.
Tony Nadal was on the left with his three Alpha Company platoons. John Herren was on the right with his two remaining Bravo Company platoons. Herren would be given priority of supporting fire since he was closest to the cut-off platoon and had only two remaining platoons under his control.
Nadal and his men removed their packs and replenished their ammo. What little water was available was shared out. Nadal was well aware of the threat from the mountain and down the ridge line: “I planned to use an echelon left* initially, since all the enemy movement had been from our left, and then switch to a wedge if we met no resistance.” John Herren planned for Bravo to use “fire and maneuver,” with one platoon moving forward under covering fire from the other.
Nadal called his three platoon leaders to a conference in the creekbed: “I told them what we were going to do and gave them our formation. I also instructed Joe Marm to guide on Bravo Company because we did not know where their cut-off platoon was located. Then I got most of the company together in the creekbed and gave them a pep talk about going out to rescue that platoon from Bravo, and told them how we were going to do it.” Platoon Sergeant Troy Miller remembers the scene: “Our morale was very high after the first contact. Before we went after the cut-off platoon, Captain Nadal got us together, then he said: ‘Men, we’ve got an American platoon cut off out there and we’re going after them!’ The replies were: ‘Yeah!’ and ‘Let’s go get them!’ and ‘Garry Owen!’”
Nadal was worrying over a major problem that he had discovered during the earlier fight: “There was only one artillery-fire-request radio frequency for all the battalion artillery forward observers. It was difficult to get fires in front of more than one company at a time, and the more experienced and aggressive observer, who happened to be with Bravo Company, managed to control the fires. As we prepared to move out, I tried to get artillery fire support but my forward observer was unable to communicate with the batteries.”
The troopers came to their feet at 4:20 P.M. and moved out of the creekbed on the attack. They didn’t get very far. There was an immediate and furious reaction from the North Vietnamese, who had obviously taken advantage of the temporary American withdrawal to move well down the slope and draw the circle that much tighter around us. Some were in the trees. Others were dug into the tops and sides of the termite hills. Still others were in hastily dug fighting holes. They had gotten well inside the wall of artillery fire, and we would pay dearly as a consequence.
Captain Tony Nadal, Alpha Company, was the first man out of the creekbed, leading the 1st Platoon in the assault. He recalls, “We moved out about fifty yards when we ran into the enemy force which had come down the mountain. I presume they were preparing to launch their attack about the time we launched ours. The fighting quickly became very vicious, at close range. We took many casualties. Lieutenant Wayne Johnson, the 1st Platoon leader, was hit. At least three squad leaders were also hit, two of them killed—one while going forward in an attempt to rescue one of his soldiers against direct orders.”
Sergeant Troy Miller was in the thick of the 1st Platoon fight. “I became the acting platoon leader when Lieutenant Johnson was wounded. We got ahead of Marm’s platoon. Right after Lieutenant Johnson was hit, Sergeant Billy Elliott, one of my squad leaders, yelled out: ‘We got a man killed.’ It was Sergeant Ramon Bernard. [Bernard, who was from Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, would have been twenty-six in five days.] We were pushing fast when we started getting heavy small-arms and automatic-weapons fire, mostly AKs.” Sergeant Elliott himself was killed shortly after he reported the death of Sergeant Bernard.
Over on Nadal’s right, John Herren’s Bravo Company troopers had run into the same deadly buzz saw. The “fire and maneuver” plan was forgotten. By necessity, Bravo Company got on line and attacked toward the sizable enemy force in the brush ahead of them.
Lieutenant Dennis Deal, whose platoon anchored Bravo’s right flank, was again in a storm of enemy fire. “We stood up and started the assault—got out of the trench and the whole world exploded. I don’t know how many there were. I couldn’t see ninety percent of them but I sure heard their weapons. We had men dropping all over the place. Finally, the assault line which had started out erect went down to our knees. And then down to the low crawl. One of my men right in front of me absorbed the full impact of a rocket-propelled grenade. His sergeant, to my rear behind a tree, kept yelling: ‘Come on, Joe, come on, you can get back here.’ I crawled up to him, took his weapon, and threw it to the rear. That M-16 landed on top of an anthill in full view of the enemy.
“The soldier was a mess. He asked me if I had any morphine. I said no, nothing. I said: ‘Joe, crawl toward that tree.’ He did. He got there and the sergeant took care of him. I now took his place and was basically a rifleman. As I turned I saw North Vietnamese coming around our right flank, and we were the right flank unit on line. I screamed and yelled and one of my machine gunners got up and walked through all this fire and started shooting them from the hip. I went along with him and we killed them all. We got rid of them. We returned to the assault line, unhurt, and got back down.”
Over in the Alpha Company sector, machine gunner Bill Beck, who had now rejoined his company, was in the first group charging out of the dry creek. Beck says, “Captain Nadal was the first man over the top. I was right beside him, to the left five yards or so. I saw the North Vietnamese out front.” Tony Nadal had ordered his men to fix bayonets for the attack. Bill Beck, firing a burst from his M-60 machine gun to his right front, was transfixed by what he saw just forward: “A tall, thin sergeant bayoneting a North Vietnamese in the chest. It was just like practice against the straw dummies: Forward, thrust, pull out, move on. One, two, three.”
Beck kept moving and firing when suddenly a swarm of wasps or hornets—real ones this time—got inside his helmet. This courageous soldier, who had withstood everything the North Vietnamese could throw at him, was momentarily defeated by a swarm of angry, stinging insects. Says Beck, “For a moment I dropped my machine gun and knocked my helmet off. My head was full of welts. I could not believe anything could make me forget the enemy, but I was in such instant pain.”
Beck was not the only man attacked by those hornets. Others were also distracted by their painful stings.
At the combination battalion command post and aid station, the casualties began to mount rapidly. Captain Carrara and his two sergeants had their hands full treating the wounded, who were lying about them on the ground. We had run into a deadly buzz saw. Still, the enemy commander had not yet attacked us from the eastern side of the clearing. All the fighting that afternoon had been and was now on the western and southern sides of X-Ray. In Hanoi in November 1991, when I told General An that my rear was open all that afternoon, his reaction was one of surprise and chagrin. Then he made a wise comment: “No commander ever knows all that is happening on a battlefield.” Fortunately for us, and because of Major Crandall and his
brave aviators, we were able to get our wounded evacuated, and we were resupplied with ammo and water.
Captain Tony Nadal had four men in his command group as he charged into the brush: his two radio operators—Sergeant Jack Gell, a twenty-five-year-old native New Yorker, and Specialist 4 John Clark of Michigan—plus the company’s artillery forward observer, Lieutenant Timothy M. Blake, twenty-four, from Charleston, West Virginia; and Blake’s recon sergeant, Sergeant Floyd L. Reed, Jr., twenty-seven years old, of Heth, Arkansas. As they moved up Nadal had the radio handset to his ear. A burst of enemy machine-gun fire swept across the group. Sergeant Gell was hit and dropped without a sound. Nadal kept moving until the long black cord pulled back on him. He looked around to see what was wrong. The same burst that killed Sergeant Gell had also killed Lieutenant Blake and struck Sergeant Reed, who died shortly afterward. Sergeant Sam Hollman, Jr., a native Pennsylvanian, knelt beside his mortally wounded buddy Jack Gell and heard him gasp, “Tell my wife I love her.”
Tony Nadal had no time to mourn Jack Gell, a man he greatly respected. Too many other lives were in his hands. He swung back into action: “I removed the radio from his back, had some soldiers near me take Gell back to the aid station, and told another soldier to put on the radio.” That soldier was Specialist 4 Ray Tanner, a twenty-two-year-old trooper from Codes, South Carolina. Tanner was normally Sergeant Steve Hansen’s radio operator, but they had gotten separated and Tanner was tagging along with the 1st Platoon.
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young Page 17
