Captain Carrara, Sergeant Keeton, and Sergeant Keith quickly set to work tending the wounded. The dead were gently laid at the edge of the clearing, their booted feet awry and unmoving and somehow so terribly sad. My eyes passed over Sergeant Carl Palmer and, like Larry Gilreath, I was stopped by the peaceful expression, that half-smile, on his face.
Sergeant Gilreath helped cover the faces of the dead with their ponchos and then walked over to Sergeant Major Plumley: “Somewhere along the way I had picked up a .45 caliber pistol and didn’t realize I had it until we got to the CP. Plumley asked me if I knew that it was fully cocked, hammer back, and fully loaded. We decided that I would sit down and safe it.”
The helicopters began coming in. Lieutenant Dick Merchant was now in charge of the landing zone: “I still remember loading Sergeant Palmer and Sergeant Hurdle. I broke away to see John Herren and Bravo Company. He described the magnificent performance by the 2nd Platoon. His first words were, ‘Dick, we almost lost your platoon.’ He was exhausted but still the same solid, thinking John Herren I had known as my company commander.”
As Savage, Bungum, and the others came into the command post, Joe Galloway talked briefly to each of them: “They were like men who had come back from the dead. We were all filthy, but they were beyond filthy. Their fatigue uniforms were ripped and torn; their eyes were bloodshot holes in the red dirt that was ground into their faces. I asked each man his name and hometown and wrote them down carefully in my notebook, along with something of what they had gone through. The headline writers dubbed them ‘The Lost Platoon’ when my story moved on the wire.”
Somehow, Galen Bungum, Joe F. Mackey, and Specialist 4 Wayne M. Anderson, who had not been wounded, were put on an outbound helicopter and ended up back at base camp in An Khe. The four other unhurt members of the 2nd Platoon were sent back to duty on the X-Ray perimeter. Says Savage: “We got back on line in the creekbed not far from the anthill. PFC Russell P. Hicks had brought the machine gun back. There was a lot of firing going on that afternoon—no major attack, but a lot of snipers to deal with.”
Within half an hour after the Tully task force had returned to X-Ray, Brigadier General Richard Knowles came up on the radio asking permission to land. He says, “We came in fast. I jumped out and my chopper departed. Morale was high and the 1st Battalion, 7th Cav was doing a great job. I gave Hal a cigar and he quickly briefed me on the situation. Lieutenant Colonel John Stoner, our Air Force liaison officer, had accompanied me. I had been riding Stoner to get the air support in close. As Hal finished his briefing an air strike hit a target adjacent to the command post. The ground trembled and a bomb fragment flew into the CP area, ten or fifteen feet away from where we were standing. John Stoner walked over and gingerly picked up the smoking shrapnel, came back, and handed it to me: ‘General, is this close enough?’”
Before leaving, General Knowles told us that he would direct Tim Brown to pull my battalion and the attached units out of X-Ray the next day and fly us back to Camp Holloway for two days of rest and rehabilitation. But for now we faced the prospect of another long night defending this perimeter.
Dillon and I worked out a way to integrate Tully’s battalion into the lines. We tightened our own lines and placed Tully’s men on the eastern and northern parts of the perimeter, generally facing away from the mountain toward the valley. I kept my own battalion plus the two attached rifle companies from 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry where they were, covering narrower segments of the line but still controlling the areas where most of the fighting had occurred. The officers and men knew that ground well by now and this was not the time to undertake major shifts in the disposition of our forces.
Tully set up his battalion command post in a grove of trees about forty yards north of mine. Ammunition, water, and rations were distributed, with the primary focus again on getting plenty of ammunition down to every rifleman, every machine gun, and every mortar tube.
The four line companies of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cav were now down to a total of eight officers and 260 men. Charlie Company this morning had lost forty-two men killed—two lieutenants, sixteen sergeants, and twenty-four troopers. They had also suffered twenty wounded—their captain, two other lieutenants, two sergeants, and fifteen troopers. Charlie Company was no longer combat-effective as a rifle company. But we had a fresh battalion plus those two rifle companies from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav. With only light probes of the perimeter during the afternoon, the line companies had ample time to reorganize for the night ahead.
15
Night Fighters
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.
—WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN
Captain Myron F. Diduryk, commander of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, had a strong hunch that he and his men, now occupying the old Charlie Company positions, would be attacked in strength this night, and he lost no time convincing his men that the enemy were coming and they had best get ready for a fight. In Myron Diduryk and Lieutenant Rick Rescorla, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion had two foreign-born officers whose accents and gung-ho attitudes lent a touch of Foreign Legion flair. The Ukrainian Diduryk and the Englishman Rescorla were destined, over the next seventy-two hours, to become battlefield legends in the 7th Cavalry—as much for their style as for their fearless leadership under fire.
Having spent the afternoon preparing his platoon positions, Rick Rescorla walked back to Diduryk’s command post—Bob Edwards’s old foxhole—just about dusk. “Are your men up for this?” asked Diduryk. “Do you feel they can hold?”
Rescorla replied: “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be. But if they break through us, sir, you’ll be the first to know. This CP is less than fifty yards behind us.” The Mad Cossack had no patience now for Rescorla’s usual banter. “Dammit, Hard Corps, cut the shit,” Diduryk snapped. “Stay alert. We’re counting on you.”
Diduryk, then twenty-seven, had commanded this company since May. He was eager and aggressive yet totally professional; over the next three days and nights he would emerge as the finest battlefield company commander I had ever seen, bar none. He operated on the basic principle of maximum damage with minimum loss.
Diduryk’s men had had three or four quiet hours of daylight to prepare for what was coming, and they made the most of it. His company, with the 3rd Platoon, Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cav attached, now held the same 140 yards of perimeter that Bob Edwards’s men had secured. Lieutenant William Sisson’s platoon of the same company was on the left; PFC John C. Martin, twenty-five, of Wichita, Kansas, among them.
Martin says, “We set up our perimeter and started digging our two-man fighting positions. I remember Platoon Sergeant Charles L. Eschbach came around to each position: ‘Dig it deeper and build a bigger and higher parapet. Set up fields of fire. Stay alert!’ We were all scared out of our wits, but we put being scared in the back of our minds and concentrated on what we were told. We continued to improve our positions even though the ground was hard. It was like digging through concrete. I remember, I’ll always remember, First Sergeant Frank Miller standing there, no helmet on, his bald head shining, smoking a cigar.”
Myron Diduryk and his soldiers had not yet been sorely tested, but soon they would be. During that lull Diduryk made certain that fields of fire and observation were cleared out to beyond two hundred yards; that good fighting positions were dug; that machine guns were placed in positions that assured flanking, interlocking fire; that trip flares and anti-intrusion devices were installed as far as three hundred yards out; that every man was loaded down with ammunition and that ammo-resupply points were designated; that all radios were checked and double-checked. Then Diduryk worked very carefully with the artillery forward observer registering preplanned fires all across his front. The officer, Lieutenant William Lund, had four batteries, twenty-four howitzers, registered and adjusted and on call.
Bill Lund, a twenty-three-year-old native of Edina, Minnesota, was an ROTC g
raduate of the University of Minnesota. He spent his first night in Landing Zone X-Ray learning the real world of close-in fire support. Artillery school solutions in those days considered four hundred yards dangerously close. Lund discovered that in X-Ray the big shells had to be brought down to within forty to fifty yards if you wanted to stay alive. Says Lund, “Myron Diduryk and I were side by side all the time, so I had an Infantryman’s knowledge of what was happening.”
Rick Rescorla, 1st Platoon leader, was six months out of OCS at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. But he had arrived there with a wealth of good training already under his belt. He had served in the British army in Cyprus and with the Colonial Police in Rhodesia, and he knew what soldiering was all about. What he did to prepare his position and his men speaks for his professionalism:
“I met with Lieutenant Bill Sisson, A/2/7, who would be on my left flank. Sisson, a personal friend from OCS class of April 1965, looked around at the dead NVA soldiers and wrinkled his nose. They were starting to get ripe. ‘Wish you were back in submarines?’ I asked. Sisson wore twin dolphins on his chest from Navy Reserve duty in Rhode Island. Convinced that the NVA would come back that night, we vowed to tie in our sectors tight as a duck’s ass. No weak links.”
Rescorla walked the terrain and tried to see it from the enemy’s point of view. Scrub trees, elephant grass, anthills, and some ground cover stretched to the front. The ground was not as flat as it first appeared, but had seams and thick ruts stretching off to the south, with a slight incline away from his positions. The hasty prone shelters dug by Charlie Company, 1st Battalion had been dug after nightfall under enemy pressure. Rescorla moved his men back fifty yards, which not only shortened the sector but meant the enemy would now have to leave the trees and cross forty yards of mostly open area to reach the Bravo Company foxholes.
Rescorla recalls, “Because of our shortened lines, I decreased the number of foxholes. Three-man holes were constructed. The M-60 machine guns were set on principal directions of fire from which they could switch to final protective grazing fire, interlocking with each other and with the machine guns on our flanks. Foxholes and parapets were built in detail. I tested the holes. Some were so deep the occupants could not even see over the parapet. In these cases firing steps were built back up. Two hours before dusk Sergeant Eschbach, A/2/7, and Sergeant Thompson organized a booby-trap detail. Carefully they rigged grenades and trip flares far out on the main avenues of approach. Claymore mines would have iced the cake, but somewhere they had been lost. A screwup, but I felt we were ready to tangle with the best of the North Vietnamese.”
Then, after talking with Captain Diduryk about defensive air, artillery, and mortar fires, Rescorla made a final walk of the line, visiting the neighboring 2nd Platoon. He says, “The gap-toothed James Lamonthe was part of the group on our right flank. He was the loudest mouth in the company, but a hard worker and good for morale. I asked: ‘When the firing starts are you guys going to stick around? If you are going to bug out, let me know’ By this time they understood my gallows humor. ‘Sir, we’ll still be here in the morning. Just make sure the Hard Corps [Res-corla’s platoon] doesn’t cut and run.’ The troops let their macho humor run wild.
“Sergeant Eschbach, a slightly built, hard-bitten forty-three-year-old NCO out of Detroit, walked over from Lieutenant Sis-son’s platoon and joined in. ‘I’m selling tickets on the next chopper to Pleiku,’ I told him. ‘Shit, sir, I wouldn’t miss this one,’ Eschbach said, then looked down at the Randall knife on my belt and added: ‘But if I decide to bug out, I’ll come over and pick up that knife from you.’ This kind of spirit showed the confidence I was looking for. Men scribbling forget-me-not letters to their next of kin were worthless. But these were men who believed they could win. I left them with some last words of advice: ‘They will come at us fast and low. No neat targets. Keep your fire at the height of a crawling man. Make them pass through a wall of steel. That’s the only thing that will keep them out of your foxholes.’”
PFC Richard Karjer, a native of Los Angeles who, at nineteen, was one of the youngest soldiers in the outfit, asked Lieutenant Rescorla: “What if they break through?” Rescorla’s response: “If they break through and overrun us, put grenades around your hole. Lay them on the parapet and get your head below ground. Lie on your back in your hole. Spray bullets into their faces. If we do our job, they won’t get that far.” The troops walked back to their holes and Rescorla moved off to his platoon command post, a small termite hill that had been used by Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan the night before. Geoghegan’s body had been found there. It was only twenty yards behind the line of new, deep foxholes.
Back at the battalion command post I made my own final checks. We were in excellent shape and morale was high. The perimeter was beefed up; we had plenty of ammo and medical supplies; all our casualties had been evacuated; air and artillery had us precisely fixed and ranged in. Continuous, close-in H and I (harassment and interdiction) fire would begin at dusk and continue throughout the night. Instructions were passed demanding tight fire-and-light discipline. No mortar fires would be permitted without my personal approval, and especially no mortar illuminating rounds. I wanted the mortars to hold back their illumination rounds for our last light in the sky in case the air and artillery folks used up all their flares.
By 7:30 P.M. it was dead dark. We looked forward to the moon rising, it was so black. But in those first four hours of night, except for light probing fire here and there on the perimeter, the North Vietnamese made no moves against us. Before midnight we got a transmission from brigade headquarters: My battalion would be pulled out of X-Ray the next day and sent back to Camp Holloway. The word came down to Dillon through the operations channel.
A bright, near-full moon was out by 11:20 P.M. Around midnight, Lieutenant Colonel Edward C. (Shy) Meyer, 3rd Brigade executive officer, passed me an astonishing message: General William Westmoreland’s headquarters wanted me to “leave X-Ray early the next morning for Saigon to brief him and his staff on the battle.” I could not believe I was being ordered out before the battle was over! I was also perplexed that division or brigade HQ had not squelched such an incomprehensible order before it reached me. My place was clearly with my men.
Even as that message arrived, North Vietnamese automatic-weapons fire opened up forward of Rick Rescorla’s platoon, and a stream of green tracer fire hooked over his command post at a height of fifteen feet. Rescorla and his radio operator crawled forward and rolled into a hole, joining PFC Curtis Gordon, from Detroit. Rescorla, estimating that the enemy guns were at least five hundreds yards out, suspected that the enemy was just testing the perimeter, and ordered his men to cease firing.
Then, at about one A.M., a five-man enemy probe was launched against the center of John Herren’s Bravo Company, 1st Battalion lines forty yards due west of the battalion command post. Some enemy rounds snapped over our heads. Two of the five enemy were killed; the others slipped back into the jungle shadows. That probe, added to the firing forward of Rescorla’s lines, was ominously similar to the enemy actions of the previous night and a clear-cut warning that the North Vietnamese hadn’t given up on X-Ray yet.
Tied up with these actions, I had not had time to respond to the order for me to leave for Saigon. Finally, around 1:30 A.M., I got Shy Meyer on the radio and registered my objections to the order in no uncertain terms. I made it very clear that this battle was not over and that my place was with my men—that I was the first man of my battalion to set foot in this terrible killing ground and I damned well intended to be the last man to leave. That ended that. I heard no more on the matter.
Out on the line it was quiet but tense. Myron Diduryk says, “During the hours after midnight I received reports from my platoon leaders of strange sounds forward of our lines. In addition, a high-pitched sound of some type could be heard during the stillness between firing of artillery H and I fires. Whistles later found on dead enemy soldiers provided the answer. The enemy apparent
ly used the whistles and a prearranged number of long and short blasts to control the assembly and movement of troops as they massed for attack.”
Rick Rescorla says that during the periods of silence he encouraged talk between the foxholes to ease the tension. When all else failed, Rescorla sang “Wild Colonial Boy” and a Cornish favorite, “Going Up Camborne Hill”—slow and steady tunes, which were answered by shouts of “Hard Corps!” and “Garry Owen!” that told him his men were standing firm.
Just before four A.M. Captain Diduryk saw and heard indisputable evidence that the enemy was moving against his lines. “At approximately 0400 warning devices—trip flares and anti-intrusion devices—indicated quite a bit of movement in front of the 3rd platoon A/2/7 and my 1st and 3rd platoons. Some devices were as far forward as 300 yards. It appeared that the enemy was spreading out along a probable line of attack. It also appeared that they were executing a non-supported night attack since supporting weapons other than the 40mm rockets were not used by the enemy.”
Although the hand-grenade booby traps and trip flares were exploding, no enemy could yet be seen. That rapidly changed. At 4:22 A.M., Lieutenant Sisson radioed Diduryk: “I see them coming. Can I shoot at them?” (The platoons were under strict fire discipline to conserve ammo.) Lieutenant Lund recalls Captain Diduryk asking Sisson, “How close are they?” When Sisson replied, “I can almost touch them!” Myron’s immediate response was “Go! Kill them!”
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young Page 25
