Grunts

by John C. McManus

  The NVA blueprint at Dak To was similar to the Japanese inland defense at Peleliu. Both the NVA and the Japanese found ways to negate American firepower, mainly by digging deeply into favorable terrain and relying upon the willingness of their soldiers to fight to the death. They also both made use of the American tendency to overestimate the effectiveness of their firepower and engage in tactical assaults against heavily defended objectives of dubious strategic worth. They knew that, at times, the Americans squandered the incredible valor of their own combat troops for no ultimate strategic purpose (the Umurbrogol at Peleliu being a prime example).

  In fact, even before the fall of 1967, the Americans had already fought the NVA in several sizable battles around Dak To. The most notorious clash took place on June 22-23, 1967, when the NVA succeeded in cutting off and destroying Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, on a jungle hill in what the paratroopers called the Battle of the Slopes. Of the original 137 men in Alpha Company, 76 were killed and 23 were wounded. One post-battle examination revealed that 43 of the dead paratroopers had suffered fatal, close-in head wounds, indicating that the NVA had killed them execution style, probably as they lay wounded. Most of the Dak To fights were not this grim, but a clear pattern was set. The NVA sought to draw the Americans into close-quarters battles, in the roughest terrain, where air and fire support were negated. Often this meant luring the Americans into costly assaults on heavily defended bunker networks. The enemy also tried to cut off and annihilate platoon- and company-sized units. With the exception of the the Battle of the Slopes, they usually failed. The Americans generally inflicted heavy losses on the NVA, but they were never able to win the decisive victory of annihilation they so badly wanted. Instead, combat would taper off into skirmishes as the surviving communists escaped across the border to their sanctuaries.

  In October, after several months of uneasy calm around Dak To, American intelligence detected the new NVA buildup. Photo reconnaissance flights revealed enemy movement and fresh bunkers. Special airborne sensors that the Americans called “people sniffers” were flown over the jungles. They detected, by the sound of foot and vehicle movement as well as the odor of human urine and feces, the presence of new enemy regiments. The best information came from small, specially trained teams of soldiers who conducted long-range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs) deep in enemy country. Amid constant danger, they spent their silent days skulking around the jungle, observing everything the enemy did. Patrols that made use of local Montagnard tribesmen were especially effective since the Montagnards knew the terrain and the enemy patterns so well. “Putting all that together, we could develop a pretty good pattern of where the enemy was and what he was doing,” Major General William Peers, commander of the 4th Division, recalled.

  In late October, based on this information, Peers moved his 1st Brigade to Dak To. Immediately the soldiers of this brigade detected even more NVA movement along the valleys around Dak To. On November 2, Sergeant Vu Hong, a member of an NVA artillery reconnaissance unit, turned himself in to an ARVN outpost. While operating as part of a scouting team that was plotting ranges and target information for mortar and rocket fire, he had apparently decided to defect. His knowledge of NVA plans was extensive (some thought suspiciously so for an NCO). Hong claimed that, in addition to his own 40th Artillery Regiment, four NVA infantry regiments—the 24th, the 32nd, the 66th, and the 174th—were positioning themselves for a major attack on Dak To, though many 4th Division senior officers were a bit leery of Hong, and suspected that he might be a plant, his information squared with what the Americans already believed. “All of our intelligence indicated that what he said was correct,” General Peers stated. The general immediately arranged for the 173rd Airborne Brigade to reinforce his own 1st Brigade. Together, the two units were to push west, depriving the NVA of the key hills and ridges that overlooked Dak To before the four enemy regiments could take them. Within a few days, the 1st Brigade soldiers and paratroopers were involved in bloody fights with the NVA for Hills 1338 and 823, thus beginning the Battle of Dak To.

  Did the NVA deliberately plant Vu Hong? Many years later, there is still no definite answer to this question. Hong himself has disappeared into the mists of time. Communist sources are mum on the subject (and on most other aspects of Dak To). Peers and his staff seemed to think that Hong was legitimate, as did their ARVN counterparts. The information he dispensed was certainly accurate, but perhaps that was the point. He had nothing necessarily new to say. Everything he told the Americans simply confirmed what they already thought, and reinforced their desire—inculcated in them by Westy’s attrition strategy—to find the NVA regiments and fight them at Dak To. NVA commanders had so heavily fortified the hills around Dak To that it is hard to escape the conclusion that their goal was to lure the Americans into a major fight there. “The enemy continued . . . to choose the time and place in which decisive engagements would be fought,” Brigadier General Leo “Hank” Schweiter, commander of the 173rd, admitted. “Only when and where the tactical situation, terrain, battlefield preparation and relative strengths of opposing forces favored enemy action were significant contacts initiated.” In other words, at Dak To, the NVA commanders only fought where and when they wished to do so, leading to the conclusion that Hong might well have been a plant. As one grunt said, the area was “a lousy place to fight a war.” Like it or not, though, they were in for an intimate showdown with their mortal enemies in this “lousy place.”2

  Ivy Leaves and Blood: Hill 724

  The 4th Infantry Division had a proud history. Nicknamed the “Ivy Division” because of the way the number four looked in Roman numerals (IV), the unit had compiled a distinguished record in the Argonne Forest during World War I. Soldiers from the division had once stormed ashore at Utah Beach, liberated Paris, and struggled through the hell that was the Hurtgen Forest. By the fall of 1967, the division had been fighting in various locales throughout South Vietnam for over a year. Most of the 4th Division grunts were draftees serving a two-year hitch in the Army. This was certainly true for one of the division’s key infantry units, the 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry, whose soldiers liked to call themselves the “Ivy Dragoons.” The vast majority of the riflemen were between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. Following their basic training, most had received subsequent light infantry training at the Army’s Advanced Infantry Training Center, commonly known as Tigerland, at Fort Polk, Louisiana. These grunts came from all regions of the country. Whereas ground combat units in World War II had been all white, reflecting the racist segregation policies so prevalent in America at that time, in Vietnam infantry units were desegregated, with all races represented. This had been the case since the Korean War era, when President Harry Truman had signed an executive order mandating an end to racial segregation in the armed forces.

  On the evening of November 8, two such companies of grunts, a couple hundred men, wearily settled into a knoll-side perimeter, not far away from Hill 724, their eventual objective. These troops from A and D Companies had been humping around this area for several days, engaging in periodic battles with the NVA. Most were carrying fifty to seventy pounds of equipment distributed among their metal rucksacks, their packs, and their web gear. They had already spent the better part of this day fighting hard to ward off enemy attacks before the shooting finally died down and they were able to cobble together defensive positions by hunkering down inside old NVA bunkers. These fighting positions were just over five feet deep and were reinforced with logs and sandbags. Both of the rifle companies were depleted enough by the fighting that they had trouble covering the whole perimeter. Forward air controllers arranged to cover the sparsely manned southern portion of the perimeter with their ordnance in case the enemy attacked there.

  At 2000, to no one’s surprise, the NVA attacked in force. “Supported by B40 rocket fire and mortar fire from the small hills to the west and northwest . . . the ground attack came suddenly from the south an
d east,” a unit after action report stated. All at once, the night came to life with deafening fire and the screams of soldiers. Tracer rounds stabbed through the darkness. Mortar shells whooshed in and exploded. NVA soldiers were seemingly all over the place, running around and toward the perimeter. A couple of them were carrying flamethrowers. Before they could get close enough to roast the American bunkers, they were cut down by machine guns.

  In one of A Company’s bunkers, Specialist Fourth Class (Spec-4) Bill Vigil, a twenty-year-old draftee from Fresno, California, was standing alongside three other men, picking out targets and firing his M16 on full rock ’n’ roll. He shot so much that he melted the barrels of several rifles. Still the enemy kept coming. “They were jumping around from tree to tree and you start popping ’em and getting in the hole,” he said. “We were about eye level to their feet.” Some of the enemy soldiers were only a few feet away. Somewhere to the right, he saw their fire shear off the head of an M60 machine gunner. NVA soldiers were throwing grenades into nearby bunkers. When the grenades exploded—usually with a seemingly innocuous pop—the NVA troopers tried to jump into the bunkers to kill the Americans at close range.

  Vigil had been in country for about three months and he had seen his share of firefights. This one, he knew, would be a fight to the finish. The NVA meant to kill every last one of the Americans in that perimeter. To save ammunition, he and the others began firing single semiautomatic shots at the swarming enemy soldiers. They could only see what was in their immediate field of vision. They vaguely sensed that the fighting was raging all around the perimeter, but, as is so often the case with grunt-level fighting, they were only concerned with the struggle for their bunker and those around them.

  Although he had not volunteered for the Army or Vietnam, Vigil was the product of much military tradition. His father had served in World War II, surviving serious wounds. His uncle had fought in Korea. One of his ancestors had been a Spanish conquistador. Standing in that miserable bunker, he was full of fear. He was angry, too. “You cry and laugh and all the senses humans have are just . . . running up and down your body.” Adrenaline surged through his bloodstream. His stomach was tight and queasy with fear. But, like most of the men around him, he resolved to fight to the end. “We’re not gonna say I give up. That’s not in our deal. I never thought about me just laying down there and dropping my weapon and hanging my head and saying go ahead and kill me. If they’re gonna take me, they’re gonna lose a lot of people.”

  Not everyone was so determined, though. Inevitably, even in the best units, some soldiers will find close combat so traumatic that they will seize up with fear and quit, even if it costs them their lives. On the dirt floor of Vigil’s bunker, a soldier whom he only knew by the nickname “Speedy” was lying down, curled up in a ball, crying uncontrollably. “They’re gonna kill us, Vidge!” he screamed. “We’re gonna die! What are we gonna do?”

  Vigil glanced away from the bunker aperture for a second and hollered: “If you don’t wipe your face and continue to load magazines, we’re definitely gonna die! So load them goddamn magazines and let’s keep going. I’m not asking you to put your head up here. I’m asking you to load the magazines.”

  This was a classic case of the merciless nature of infantry combat. Vigil’s bunker, even with four resolute men fighting desperately, was still only as strong as its weakest man. In the end, through no fault of their own, their lives could have depended on whether Speedy would quit or fight.

  Not far away from Vigil, Spec-4 Cecil Millspaugh was leaning on the trigger of his M60 machine gun. The twenty-pound gun—affectionately nicknamed “the Pig” by soldiers because it could eat up so much ammunition—spat out 7.62-millimeter rounds at a rate of over five hundred per minute. Millspaugh spotted a group of enemy nearing an adjacent bunker. He turned his gun on them and fired several bursts. All at once, he rose from his hole and rushed the NVA, firing all the way. Needless to say, the M60 was not designed to be employed in this fashion as an assault weapon. Like any machine gun, it was heavy and unwieldy, plus it went through ammo so fast that it generally needed to be fed belts by an assistant gunner in a fixed position. This hardly mattered to the adrenaline-crazed Millspaugh. He slaughtered the NVA soldiers at nearly backslapping range. The heavy bullets shredded them, spurting their blood in every direction. Several of them scattered or went down. Millspaugh jumped into the bunker they had assaulted and continued firing at other attackers, preserving that part of the perimeter.

  At one point, the NVA took over the bunker next to Spec-4 Vigil’s, about eight feet away, initiating his own personal duel to the death with a North Vietnamese soldier. Back and forth they went, firing their rifles, throwing grenades. For these Vietnamese and American men, who might well have been friends in another time or circumstance, the entire war boiled down to this personal struggle for survival, a struggle that meant literally everything to them but little in the big-picture context of the Vietnam War. Such is the ruthless calculus of modern combat. “We were playing peekaboo until I got him or he stopped or a frag [grenade] got him,” Vigil recalled. “Something happened, but he stopped. He was laying there dead. There was two of ’em laying there on top of the GIs.”

  In another dugout, Private First Class Clinton Bacon saw a B40 rocket score a direct hit on an adjacent bunker. The logs and sandbags collapsed onto the men inside, wounding and partially burying them. Bacon surged outside and, while machine-gun and rifle bullets snapped around him, he crawled to the wrecked bunker and dug out the stricken men. “He began removing them, insuring that they received medical treatment,” a citation later related. After that, he stacked some of the unscathed sandbags and resumed shooting back at the enemy.

  According to one account, soldiers from Delta Company were “in close hand-to-hand combat” with the NVA. It is well to consider once again what this really meant. They were struggling at intimate, body-groping distance with other men, using any weapon at their disposal to kill them—bayonets, can openers, rifles, ammo boxes, helmets, anything. Death came in ugly fashion, with crushed skulls, severed larynxes, punctured abdomens or throats, gouged eyes, or from point-blank gunshot wounds. Warm, sticky blood bathed the victor and vanquished alike. The trauma was beyond description.

  Because the fighting was going on at such close quarters, it was difficult for the Americans to employ artillery. This was no accident. The enemy liked to fight at this close range precisely because it could negate American firepower. Alpha and Delta Companies were forced to call down 105-millimeter artillery fire within their own perimeter. As long as the Americans remained in the bunkers, and the NVA continued to move about in the open, the shell bursts were likely to do more damage to the enemy than the GIs. Explosions mushroomed and flashed in seemingly random patterns, sending hot deadly fragments in every direction. In some cases, the fragments sliced into attacking enemy soldiers, killing a few of them, but wounding many more.

  Air support only added to the carnage. “As the enemy crawled up the slope from the south, napalm was dropped in continuous strikes to within 25 meters of the perimeter,” an after action report said. Guided by forward air controllers, Air Force F-4 Phantoms and other close air support planes screamed in and dropped large quantities of the jellied gasoline along every NVA avenue of approach. The ensuing flames consumed the jungle and men alike. “It takes . . . oxygen to make that napalm really work,” one soldier said. “So if you’re real close to it, you’re gasping for air.” Like the artillery shells, the napalm was especially deadly to troops on the move, rather than the Americans in their bunkers. In some cases, NVA soldiers simply expired in flames. Most of the time, the flames roasted them or even melted limbs or other body parts. The Americans could hear their bloodcurdling screams.

  One napalm canister burst so close to Spec-4 Vigil’s bunker that he could smell the acrid, almost sweet odor of the weapon’s chemical ingredients (probably its benzene components). When the flames died down, he peered out of his bunker and saw,
in the distance, an enemy soldier melted to the wheels of his .51-caliber machine gun. Other enemy soldiers were turned by the napalm into “frosty critters. They looked like charcoal. Some of ’em were even halfway running and then they’re charcoaled. They were melted to the trees or wherever they were at.”

  The pilots were so skilled that they were dropping bombs, by the light of flares, on the edges of the perimeter. Sometimes, the grunts could see the bombs descend, and they generally looked to each man as if they would hit him personally. “I mean, the noise, it’s unbelievable,” Vigil recalled. “The ground would just jump up maybe two feet, right in front of you. The ground actually lifts so all that sand and dirt and everything is all over you. It just slaps you, like you’re standing in a sand blasting machine.” Undoubtedly the bombs, exploding as they were so close to the U.S. positions, wounded or even killed some Americans, but they did tremendous damage to the NVA.

  At around 0200, the enemy attack tapered off. The NVA used long hooks to drag away their wounded and dead. After a lull, they hit the perimeter several more times, but never with as much ferocity as that first push. The next morning the Americans combed the area and counted 232 NVA bodies. Some had been killed by concussion and looked as if they were only sleeping. Others were torn apart by shrapnel or punctured with holes from rifle or machine-gun bullets. Some were little more than globs of dismembered flesh or, as Vigil mentioned, charcoaled remains of human beings. All of them emitted disgusting odors in the tropical heat.