We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young

by Harold G. Moore

  Bullets continued to hit all around Howard. He grabbed the sergeant and told him they needed to move around to the other side of the anthill. “On the other side we joined up with four other soldiers who were grouped together in the grass. We continued to fire at North Vietnamese soldiers behind trees and anthills and tried to figure out what we should do next.”

  Although they were now out of sight of each other, Lieutenant Bud Alley, the 2nd Battalion communications officer and Howard’s friend, was not far away. “It was consternation,” says Alley. “Men on either side of me were being shot. At that point I had not seen any of the enemy. All I could see was the trees and our guys. I tried to move up to my right. I moved into a hail of bullets. Everyone was trying to keep moving up toward the landing zone. I was at a big anthill, pinned down by a machine gun. Fellow on my right, a Puerto Rican, was wounded. I traded the Puerto Rican PFC my .45 pistol for his machine gun.

  “I took the machine gun and moved around left of the anthill and tried to move forward, firing to my front. I crawled up on a man behind a little tree; then two enemy automatic weapons opened up, cutting that little tree down. He screamed and hit me in the back. I rolled over on top of him and he had both hands over his face. He told me: ‘Don’t worry about me; I’m dead.’ He opened his hands and he had a bullet hole right in the center of his forehead. He pulled two grenades and threw those grenades. I started crawling back to the big anthill where I had come from. I knew we weren’t going forward. By the time I got back to the anthill, the wounded guy, a dead guy or two, another wounded guy, and my radio repairman were there all huddled behind that anthill. Which way do we go?”

  William Shucart, the battalion surgeon, was also in that section of the column. “I got up and started looking for somebody, anybody. I ran on, and encountered a couple of enemy soldiers. This meeting scared the shit out of me and them both. I got the M-16 up and fired before they did. That was the end of that. Then I looked over and saw this sergeant leaning against a tree. He said, ‘Can I give you a hand, Captain?’ Calm as could be. That was Sergeant Fred Kluge of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cav. We went back to a larger group at the rear of the column, maybe fifteen or twenty guys, with several wounded. We were in an area with a lot of wounded and no supplies, only a few styrettes of morphine and some bandages.”

  Just forward of the headquarters section of the column, Charlie Company was beginning to die. Specialist 4 Jack Smith was with the lead elements in the Charlie Company formation, near Lieutenant Don Cornett, the acting company commander, when the company charged into the teeth of the enemy machine guns. In the first seconds Smith saw one of the radio operators fall dead with a bullet through the chest, his eyes and tongue bulging out. The men of Charlie Company were firing in all directions.

  Suddenly, Smith says, he heard a low moan from Lieutenant Don Cornett. He tore off the officer’s green fatigue shirt and saw a bullet wound in his back, to the right of his spine. He and another soldier began bandaging the lieutenant’s wound. Smith thought how dependent they all were on this one man, now badly hurt, who was the only leader in reach. Then a man beside Smith was shot in the arm and a torn artery began spurting blood. Then a round tore through one of Cornett’s boots, tearing away all the toes on his foot.

  Now a North Vietnamese with a Maxim heavy machine gun appeared just three feet in front of Smith. The young soldier flicked the selector switch on his M-16 to full automatic and fired a long burst into the face of the enemy machine gunner. An exploding grenade took down another American close by.

  Only a few minutes had passed, but Jack Smith’s world was being shot to death all around him. Then, he says, something happened that convinced him to keep fighting. Lieutenant Don Cornett, in agony from his wounds, told Smith he was going to do something to try to get his troops organized. Cornett crawled away into the high grass. A brave young lieutenant died doing his duty somewhere out there in hand-to-hand fighting.

  Smith recalls: “Within a span of perhaps twenty minutes everyone around me was dead or wounded, except me. You have to understand that in our area the elephant grass was chest-high; once you hit the dirt your world was about as big as a dining-room table. Your world was completely confined to that area and the six or seven men around you. At that point, we were isolated. Alpha Company was in the same shape. Then the North Vietnamese swept through. I believe they came between Alpha and our company and began to shoot people. We didn’t know if the noise from five feet away, as they began to shoot people, was friendly or enemy.”

  Smith saw soldiers take machine guns, lie flat on the ground, and begin firing into the grass. “Often they were firing right into the muzzles of other American machine guns. People were screaming to stop the shooting. It began to have all the elements of a massacre. Nobody was in control because all the officers were to the front and our radio operators had fallen dead on their radio sets.”

  Just forward of Charlie Company, with the Delta Company mortars, PFC James Shadden was in agony from his two severe wounds. “By this time, some of the NVA were coming through the area killing all who were screaming and calling for medics. Snyder Bembry was killed in this manner by an English-speaking North Vietnamese, probably an officer. He shot Bembry, as Bembry screamed, with a full automatic weapon, and then spoke these words in English: ‘Wait a minute. Who are we shooting?’ I almost blurted out ‘Americans’ in answer before I realized what was happening. He had an accent.” PFC Snyder P. Bembry of Unadilla, Georgia, was twenty-one years old when he died.

  Unable to fight back or do anything to save his buddies from the Vietnamese executioners, James Shadden took the last course left to him: He booby-trapped his own body. “The shot in the arm left me with nothing but a grenade, which I couldn’t throw left-handed, so I refrained from trying,” Shadden recalls. “And more of the enemy were coming my way from the other side. So I slid the grenade under my armpit, pin pulled. I figured if they got me I might get them.”

  Specialist 4 Bob Towles of the Delta Company antitank platoon had run into a grassy clearing, leading the way for a dozen of his buddies, several of them badly wounded. He stopped and looked back through the woods toward the column: “I peered through the grass and managed to locate our previous position. There were the North Vietnamese, rummaging what we had left behind. Then they fired bursts from their AKs into the ground. Now I realized what else we had left behind. All of us hadn’t made it out of there. I considered shooting at them. Then I thought better about it. It would only attract their attention and we were in no condition to fight.”

  Most of the people with Towles were wounded, sprawling on the ground and lying on top of each other. “We couldn’t function as a combat unit from this pile. At that moment, Sergeant Baker ordered me to move out again. I got up and headed for the wood line on the far side of the clearing. After covering about fifty yards, I noticed movement in the trees off to my right. Americans! I cut to the right and entered the clump of trees. Ten or fifteen yards into the trees two shots rang out. I heard them whiz by behind me. Sergeant Baker lurched and fell. One bullet struck his chest, the other his back. He was a half-step behind and to the left of me. I stopped, knelt, and scanned the trees. Nothing. Sergeant Baker clutched his chest and ordered me to keep going. Just then someone else reached him and helped him to get up.”

  Towles rose and turned in the direction he had been heading before Baker went down. “I saw Sergeant [Miguel] Baeza kneeling behind a tree and got to him. It took a few moments to catch my breath and compose myself. Then I asked him for information about this sector. He wasn’t sure. I informed him the enemy had wiped out the mortar platoon, then overran Charlie Company. Baeza pulled out his bayonet, slit my shirt sleeve, and bandaged my right arm. My hand had frozen to the pistol grip of my M-16, but my trigger finger still worked. No pain; my arm was numb.

  “I looked around our position. It seemed pretty good. Trees large enough to give some protection formed an arc facing a clearing opposite the one we had jus
t traversed. The other men formed up, facing the direction we just came from. A few men guarded off west and north. I noticed PFC Lester Becker off by himself facing east. His large tree could easily be occupied by two men. I told Sergeant Baeza I’d go over with Becker and help cover that area. I ran the ten yards to the tree and took position on the right side of it.”

  From behind that tree Bob Towles and Lester Becker heard moaning nearby in the tall grass of the clearing and decided to investigate. Towles remembers, “I went around the right side of the tree, Becker the left. Instantly two shots. I heard the chilling sound of the bullets’ thump as they both hit soft tissue. I stared paralyzed with disbelief as Becker slumped to the ground grasping his stomach. I couldn’t move. Others ran across and dragged him to the shelter of the tree. At that moment, Captain Hank Thorpe [the Delta Company commander] appeared behind us. He shouted for us to fall back to his position. We obeyed and carried Becker on a poncho. Once there, we left Becker with the medics. He survived to be medevac’d, but died later.” Becker, twenty-five, was from Harvard, Illinois.

  Towles’s small group of Delta Company survivors had reached the Albany clearing. They joined the thin line of defenders in the cluster of trees where the battalion command post was located.

  At the other end of the column, Captain George Forrest was now herding his men of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry off the trail and into a defensive posture.

  Alpha Company rifleman James Young remembers Forrest ordering their withdrawal across a grassy clearing that was under enemy fire and then asking for a volunteer for a dangerous mission. Alpha Company was taking incoming fire from a machine gun that, by the sound of it, was an American M-60. Forrest wanted someone to crawl out into the tall grass, locate the machine gun, and tell the gunners that they were shooting fellow Americans.

  Young, who had grown up in the Missouri backwoods and knew something about stalking, said he would go. “Another rifleman, a PFC from Chicago, Ronald Fortune, said he would go with me. We started crawling with that machine gun firing over our heads. It was an M-60 and we all assumed it was Americans. When we got close, fifty or sixty yards away, we started yelling at them. Then I realized that they were enemy. It was as though someone told me: ‘These are not our men. They are not responding to our calls.’”

  Young told Fortune to stop yelling. “I continued to crawl in their direction, trying to locate their exact position. I intended to take them out. Then a bullet struck me in the head. I knew I was hit in the head, and I thought I was going to die. It dazed me good but didn’t knock me out. I had my chin strap on so it didn’t knock my helmet off. I asked Fortune if he would get in touch with my parents and tell them that my last concern was for them. I thought it was over for me. I asked him to bandage me. He took the bandage off my belt and he patched me up. He was telling me it wasn’t too bad, that I was going to be all right.

  “Then I tried to crawl in the direction of the machine gun again. Fortune thought I was out of my head and tried to stop me. We were both down low. Every time I would move he would grab me by my legs and hold me. After struggling with me for a while, he said, ‘I’m going back,’ and he left. I told him I was going to get that machine gun. What it was, I really was afraid to turn my back on that machine gun.”

  The machine-gun bullet had pierced Young’s helmet and crushed his skull on one side of his head. But he was still determined to take out that gun. “As I moved I heard the Vietnamese calling out something. After that I never heard the gun fire again. What I heard were orders for them to pack it up and move. I moved to where I thought it was, still afraid to raise my head on account of snipers. There was lots of shooting. I never found the gun. They were gone.”

  Lieutenant Enrique Pujals—a Pennsylvania Military College classmate of Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, who was killed at LZ X-Ray—was leading the twenty-four-man 3rd Platoon of Captain Skip Fesmire’s Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion. His platoon, bringing up the rear of the company, was just ahead of the headquarters detachment. Pujals says he had his men in column formation, but not in single file, when the shooting erupted.

  “Then I got the order on the radio: Deploy your platoon and maneuver right. I used hand and arm signals to get the platoon on line. When I looked back, I was several yards ahead, on my own, and the platoon was still in their positions. I went back, giving verbal commands to get on line and follow me, and to pass the word. Some were getting together when the radio operator called me and said the Company Commander had a message for me: ‘Hold where you are. Stop the maneuver and fire only at a target.’ I tried to get information on what the hell was going on, but he said, ‘Out.’

  “The firing was still going on up to my right front. Then bullets started to come our way. I thought they were from the lead American elements. Not many, but they caused me concern. I tried to raise anyone on the radio to get them to watch where they fired and to give me a situation report. Still nothing. I tried to form a perimeter of sorts. Meanwhile, up front, the screams kept on as part of the weird symphony of battle sounds.”

  Pujals couldn’t believe that the entire battalion was firing everything it had just because of a couple of snipers. “I told my radio operator that I was moving up to find the weapons platoon leader. The vegetation changed as I moved. Where my platoon was there were trees and shrubs 10-15 feet apart and waist-high grass (for me, 5 foot 6 inches tall, sometimes it was nearly neck high). But the weapons platoon had entered a very thick spot with thick grass, and very, very tall clumps of bushes. We were moving in column. The weapons platoon was in file.”

  Pujals asked a couple of the men he met where their platoon leader was, and was told: Up ahead. Very few men were prone; very few were facing out toward the firing. Most were leaning on something or other, resting. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. “I moved ahead. I was on the outskirts of the thicket when I felt a stabbing shock on my left heel. I thought I had stepped on one of those infamous punji stakes. I grabbed my left leg to pull it off, when I felt like I’d been struck with a sledgehammer on my right thigh. I saw it out of the corner of my eye—a little puff of dust and the trouser leg split and I knew I was hit.

  “My thoughts were silly, a little phrase we had used back in the world to signify something was amiss: ‘There goes the weekend.’ My right leg just twisted all out of shape and began to crumple under me. I tried to shove myself as far back as I could to avoid having it fold under me as I fell. I made it. My leg was stretched in front in a more or less normal position. My thigh was broken. No doubt about it. I was now flat on my back and useless and helpless. What could I do? Yes, call for the medic. But what if they killed my medic as he came to help me? I was bleeding and if I kept this up I’d bleed to death so I chanced it and called.

  “He came over with one of my fire-team leaders. They patched me up. I had them splint my M-16 to my right leg, up high. Then the medic took out a morphine ampule. I refused, protested, tried to avoid it, but I still got stuck. They pulled me up to a tree and helped me take off my pack. I had 15 loaded magazines in it and 800 rounds extra I’d picked up at Chu Pong. The guys from the 1st Battalion 7th Cav had said to take as much ammo as you could carry, and then more. I asked for my two canteens and they got them for me.”

  Pujals called to his platoon sergeant and told him to take command, and as he did the firing shifted. “My platoon began to get it. The blades of grass were cut at the level of my chest and fell on me. Now the screams were from my men. I did not see them die, but I certainly heard them. One of them screamed, ‘Oh my God, forgive me!’ I still believed we were under fire by our own troops. I was extremely angry. My men were dying around me and I could do nothing. Those were my thoughts. Later I learned the truth and was ashamed.”

  At the head of the column, the small group of men and officers with Lieutenant Colonel McDade was locked in a heavy firefight with an enemy determined to overrun them. Captain Joel Sugdinis of Alpha Company, 2nd Ba
ttalion, still worried about his missing 2nd Platoon, had shifted to the southeastern side of the grove of trees to watch the area across the clearing where his men had disappeared.

  Sugdinis recalls, “I could see movement, but I couldn’t tell whether they were our people or the enemy. I saw one soldier stand up and start helping a wounded soldier hobble away from the battle. I picked up binoculars. When I focused in on the two, they were North Vietnamese and the more healthy one was firing his AK-47 from his hip at what appeared to be objects close to his feet. My thought was that he was executing our wounded. I fired one shot and they both went down. After the battle we removed many of our 2nd Platoon dead from that area and several had been shot in the head.

  “Someone from the vicinity of the command group yelled that the North Vietnamese were crawling up on us from the south. There was an open area on the south side with knee- to waist-high grass. Those of us who were standing turned and began firing into the grass. Several North Vietnamese attempted to flee. One North Vietnamese stood up and continued to advance directly toward us firing his AK-47 from his hip, John Wayne style. I think everyone who saw him fired directly into him. I’m sure it was only a second or two, but it seemed he would never go down.”

  Lieutenant Pat Payne and his recon platoon had been in the thick of the fight around the Albany clearing since the beginning. “During the first hour, at least, we did not have any artillery coverage at all. We were learning a bitter lesson. The second thing is we had no helicopter coverage. We had no gunships overhead. For that first hour or two, it was belly-to-belly and man-to-man. It didn’t make any difference if you were a major, captain, sergeant, or private; we were all standing shoulder to shoulder, shooting it out with the NVA. I can hear the cry ‘Here they come!’ and we would all rise up and cut loose. There was fear in the air, but I never sensed panic, at least not after the first ten or twenty minutes.”