For about ten or fifteen seconds after the detonation, a stunned silence hung over the hill while the survivors shook off concussion and tried to figure out what had just happened. The only noise was the diffuse crackling of small fires. Spec-4 Ronald Fleming’s eardrums were ruptured. Amid the drowsy world of silence around him, he kept screaming for someone to put out the fires. Blood was pouring from Spec-4 Steer’s nose, mouth, and ears. “I noticed my right arm was gone because I went to pick it up and it was just hanging by some tissue. My right leg was almost gone.” Thinking he was about to die, he cried out: “God, don’t let me go to hell!” and then passed out. Lieutenant O’Leary, the Dog Company commander, had a sucking chest wound, but his first sergeant was hurt even worse. As O’Leary struggled to save the sergeant’s life, he saw a man walk past holding the stump of his left arm with his right. “Will someone tie off my arm?” he mumbled to no one in particular and staggered away.
Sergeant Welch awoke to the sound of a man behind him screaming: “My legs are gone! Mom! Mom!” The man bled to death in his lieutenant’s arms. Private First Class Clarence Johnson had been easing into a shallow fighting hole when the bomb hit, flinging him several feet in the air. “It took out my elbow and most of my left arm. My humerus bone and all the bones . . . closest to my shoulder down to the middle of my arm . . . were pretty much shattered.” He lay quietly, fighting off concussion, with no morphine or medical care, all the while bleeding and in pain. Lieutenant Remington, wounded even before the bombing, was now hurt even worse, with shrapnel in his side and shattered eardrums. Even so, he had the presence of mind to crawl past horribly wounded, crying men and body parts to find a radio, get in touch with the firebase, and call off any further air strikes: “Stop those fucking airplanes,” he roared. “Don’t let ’em drop another bomb. They’re killing us up here.” The bomb killed forty-two Americans and wounded forty-five others. It was the worst friendly fire incident of the Vietnam War.
Of the 290 men who had ascended the hill in the morning, 100 were now dead and at least 50 more wounded. Even so, junior people took over leadership positions and began to reorganize the shattered remains of the unit. Within thirty minutes, they had reestablished the perimeter. With little water, no food, and a looming ammunition shortage, they held on, warding off several probing North Vietnamese attacks (by most accounts, the bombing had also hurt the NVA badly). Men slept or fought next to the corpses of their dead friends. Crazed with thirst, wounded troopers lapsed in and out of consciousness. The enemy well understood the importance of psychological warfare. They blew bugles and taunted the Americans with calls to surrender. A few of them got within ten meters of the American positions, but none broke through. “The night was absolutely hell on earth,” Remington later said. “It was just desolate up there, scary, the smell . . . there was just death in the air.”19
Knowing that the 2nd Battalion was in deep trouble, General Schweiter arranged for a relief force. He hopped on his helicopter and flew to see Lieutenant James Johnson, commander of the 4th Battalion. “Jim,” he said, “you’ll have to get your people to that hill. Get them there as fast as you can.” Thus, for the second time in a week, troopers from this battalion were called upon to rescue a stricken group from another battalion. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson’s companies had seen plenty of fighting themselves. They were spread all over the area. He got in touch with his company commanders and they spent the rest of the night hastily organizing a relief mission.
Johnson had less than three hundred men available within his Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Companies. The situation was so critical that Johnson did not concentrate his companies and send them out as one large force. Instead, they set out as they were ready. Bravo was the first. Shortly after sunrise, about one hundred troopers from this company left Fire Base 16, a few kilometers to the northeast of Hill 875. They had spent a long, impatient night preparing for the rescue of their airborne brethren. “There was fear,” one of them later wrote, “but on top of that fear was the driving force that we must get to and save our brothers.” Knowing much about the 2nd Battalion’s plight, they were laden down with extra food, water, and ammunition. Since a favorite NVA tactic was to pin down one unit and ambush a relieving force, Bravo Company proceeded very carefully along narrow trails, through thick jungle and bamboo, even employing a rolling artillery barrage ahead of their line of advance. The going was exhausting and tense. It took Bravo Company the entire day to make it to Hill 875. “We encountered sniper positions, commo wire, well-used trails and various other signs of a large enemy presence,” Private First Class Rocky Stone, a machine gunner, recalled. They found several enemy base camps with bloody bandages, dead bodies, and even parts of bodies. They also discovered, and destroyed, several enemy mortar rounds.
By late afternoon they were finally within sight of the hill. All this time, of course, 2nd Battalion had continued to take accurate mortar and rocket fire, even as they fended off more enemy attacks. They were perilously low on water and ammo. Few of them had any food left. The Bravo Company troopers could hear the shooting. They also were engulfed in the powerful stench of death that permeated Hill 875. Fortunately, the NVA did not hold a continuous line around the hill. The Bravo Company men carefully ascended the ingenious steps that enemy soldiers had cut into the side of 875. Soon the relief force saw the grisly results of the previous day’s fighting. “American bodies along with enemy bodies [were] all entwined on the jungle floor, covered in blood, some blown apart,” Private First Class Stone recalled. “We saw bodies strewn all along our route. The smell of gunpowder, napalm, and death engulfed the hill and filled our noses.” They found Private First Class Lozada’s body, still at his gun, with NVA corpses all around him. Everyone was spooked by the sight of the bodies, so much so that some men wondered aloud if they would ever make it off this hill. The horrible cries of the wounded only added to the trepidation. The cries conveyed hopelessness, agony, vulnerability, and even anger. “This sound was one that none of us will ever forget,” Stone said.
Somewhere between 1700 and 1730, Sergeant Leo Hill and his point element made contact with the 2nd Battalion. “There were tears in their eyes as they greeted their buddies from the 4/503d Inf.,” one report claimed. The 4th Battalion soldiers passed out whatever food and water they had left. “It was like stepping into the third circle of hell,” one soldier later commented. The cratered hill looked like a garbage dump, strewn as it was with discarded equipment, boxes, helmets, weapons, uniforms, and, of course, human remains. Felled trees lay crisscrossed in jagged patterns, making movement difficult. An odor of death, vomit, urine, and human feces blanketed the perimeter. Many of the filthy, dehydrated 2nd Battalion men were in a state of mental shock, gazing with listless, wide-eyed thousand-yard stares at their friends. In the recollection of one Bravo Company man, their faces communicated “relief at seeing us, yet a look of total terror, pain and disbelief.” Bravo’s medics began working on the many wounded. One of them treated badly hurt Private First Class Clarence Johnson and gave him some water, immediately lifting his spirits. “You knew you were gonna . . . live.”20
Alpha and Charlie Companies stumbled into the perimeter a few hours later, after dark. Throughout the night, the three companies and the 2nd Battalion survivors manned the perimeter, expanded an LZ, dealt with the wounded, and called in fire missions on the NVA bunkers. The enemy responded with heavy mortar and rocket fire. The shelling was accurate enough to add to the list of American dead and wounded. In the darkness, some of the Americans, while keeping watch, inadvertently rested their weapons on dead bodies, thinking they were sandbags.
As the sun rose over the eastern horizon on November 21, the paratroopers were busy hacking out a new LZ, tending to the wounded, policing up weapons and bodies, setting up mortars, and planning their next move. Helicopters still had to run a veritable wall of fire to get in and out of Hill 875, but the gutsy crewmen did succeed in dropping off some supplies and evacuating the worst of the wounded.
Lieutenant Colonel Johnson was a no-nonsense, fair-minded leader who was well thought of by his men. Even so, he was not actually on the hill (yet another example of an absentee battalion commander). He was, though, in constant radio contact with Captain Ron Leonard, who was Bravo’s commander and the ranking 4th Battalion officer on 875. At 0900, Johnson told Leonard that, in two hours, he wanted him to launch an attack to capture the summit of the hill. The captain was not surprised in the least by this order. In fact, he fully expected it and agreed with it. Yet, in retrospect, much can be read into this seemingly straightforward command. From Lieutenant Colonel Johnson’s perspective, and that of nearly every trooper on 875, the hill had to be taken. Honor and pride demanded it. The idea of abandoning 875 was anathema to these proud airborne light infantrymen. To them, victory in war meant fighting tactical battles to destroy the enemy and take the ground he occupied. The hill represented a challenging task that must be accomplished, regardless of the cost. American culture frowned on the notion of leaving a job unfinished. In this context, Johnson’s order made perfect sense.
However, from a bigger-picture, more objective point of view, the order was questionable. The NVA had already destroyed the 2nd Battalion. The 4th Battalion was hardly in good shape, having already fought for weeks. The NVA on Hill 875 were hunkered down in well-sited, heavily reinforced bunkers that were connected by tunnels. Some of the bunkers were strengthened by six feet of logs and dirt, and were thus impervious to artillery and air strikes. Nothing short of a direct hit from a B-52 bomber could destroy the bunkers. At any moment of their choosing, the NVA could use their tunnels to escape back into Cambodia. The hill itself was bereft of any strategic value. Taking it would mean nothing to the outcome of the war. Senior American commanders knew that they would eventually abandon it even if the 4th Battalion succeeded in taking it. Not to mention that doing so promised to be a bloodbath. In fact, the Americans were not even likely to compile much of a body count on the hill because NVA defenses were so strong and the enemy soldiers could escape so easily, probably after inflicting heavy losses on the Americans.
Basically, the North Vietnamese had baited the Americans into fighting for Hill 875. They well understood the American mania for body counts. They knew that the Americans would fight them anywhere in South Vietnam, even in places (such as Hill 875) where the communists enjoyed most of the advantages. At Hill 875, they also knew that, once the fighting started, the Americans would sacrifice heavily to take the hill because they believed this equated to victory. The enemy was quite content to let the Americans claim their pyrrhic notions of victory. Their aim was to goad the Americans into fighting for this worthless hill and either annihilate them or bleed them dry. To the NVA this meant victory of their own.
Hill 875, then, amounted to a fascinating but tragic dichotomy. From the ordinary paratrooper’s point of view, the hill absolutely had to be taken—abandoning it would dishonor the memories of so many dead friends. Moreover, many of the troopers were angry at the enemy and wanted payback for the lives of their dead buddies (a common emotion in combat). But, from an outsider’s point of view, taking the hill made no sense, and was actually counterproductive to the American cause. In essence, taking the hill amounted to an American banzai attack.
On November 21, the Americans postponed their attack several times while the choppers braved enemy fire to fly in more water, food, and ammo. All day long, NVA mortar crews, hidden on adjacent hills, hurled shells at the paratroopers. American artillery and air strikes continued to pound those positions and the NVA-held portions of Hill 875. Air Force F-100s and F-4s dumped nearly seven tons of napalm on the enemy bunkers. The stench of burning trees and benzene infused the air. As was so common, the Americans were convinced that their enormous firepower had killed most of the remaining enemy soldiers on the hill.
Just after 1500, the 4th Battalion companies started up the hill. Alpha was on the left, Charlie on the right, and Bravo in the middle. The footing was tricky. The soldiers had to step over and around fallen trees and foliage. In the process they made themselves ideal targets for the NVA, who were in their bunkers, just waiting for the Americans to enter their death zones. With devastating suddenness, they opened up with deadly machine-gun, rifle, mortar, and rocket fire. Several Americans were hit and went down in heaps. Others spread out, took cover, and returned fire, but they had great difficulty seeing the enemy. “The NVA were firing from six-inch slots in their bunkers,” one after action report said. “The men crouched behind whatever cover they could find, small trees, logs, or mounds of dirt. The hill was soft from the constant bombardment that enemy rockets slid down the hillside among the troopers and exploded.” Tree snipers added to the carnage.
In small groups, the Sky Soldiers poured out fire and advanced uphill in perilous rushes, all the while working against the formidable combination of gravity and savage enemy firepower. The bravest among them stood in the open and sprayed the trees, killing enemy snipers. The Americans tried to blow up the bunkers with M72 LAWs but the slits were so narrow that the M72 rockets bounced off logs, earth, or exploded among the mishmash of trees and other detritus. Mortar shells were also ineffective. The only way to destroy the maze of bunkers was up close, almost within hand-shaking distance, but this was difficult because they were mutually supporting, capable of sweeping every approach with deadly cones of fire. “They’d have three bunkers dug in the ground, maybe seven yards apart with a connecting tunnel,” Lynn Morse, Charlie Company’s senior medic, recalled. “They’d leave ammunition in each one of the bunkers. They’d shoot from this one and move to the last one or come to the middle one. You’re still looking at the first one and they’ve got you in a cross fire.” Some of the grunts got close enough to the bunkers to rake their narrow slits with rifle or machine-gun fire. A few even succeeded in dropping grenades inside them. They would no sooner kill the group inside the bunker than more NVA would move through a tunnel and replace them.
Private First Class Stone, the Bravo Company machine gunner, was wielding his M60 from the hip, “running up the hill and seeing men on my right, left and even behind me falling to enemy fire, their legs, arms and in some cases, heads blown off.” Some of the bodies lay with their veiny guts spilled onto the ground. The air literally buzzed with the sound of bullets and angry fragments whizzing past him. Some of the rounds tore through his clothes and his equipment, yet somehow he remained unhurt. Intense though it was, he felt as if everything was happening in slow motion (the adrenaline rush and the reaction of his nervous system to extreme danger produced that effect). All around him, he saw his buddies go down. As they got hit, he could “see [them] fall, ever so slowly to the ground in a heap of blood; hear the screams [they] made as [they] hit the ground or the silence of [their] death. The roar of gunfire, theirs and ours, was deafening, yet, you could hear the sounds of bullets hitting flesh and bone, the last moan of the dying.” Stone likened the awful experience to a movie, a common description among modern American combat soldiers whose cultural conceptions are, of course, so powerfully tied to Hollywood images.21
The NVA were rolling dozens of Chinese-made (Chicom) grenades down the hill. They bounced, rolled, and bucked malevolently downward. Often they exploded before the Americans could see them. One of the grenades burst under Private First Class Stone’s M60, destroying it. He found himself pinned down by heavy rifle fire from an individual NVA soldier. Stone now had only a .45-caliber pistol. He fired back ineffectually. The AK bullets clipped perilously close to the young machine gunner. He glanced ten meters to his left and saw his platoon leader, Lieutenant Larry Moore, hiding behind a tree. Stone yelled at the lieutenant, asking the officer to lay down cover fire while Stone moved to a less exposed spot. “My pleas for help went unanswered as Lt. Moore never fired or attempted to fire at the enemy I was pointing out to him,” Stone recalled. In such searing moments, a soldier’s impression of a leader can forever be etched. As the lieutenant lay still, another soldier
ran in front of Stone and promptly got killed by the NVA rifleman. Stone retrieved the dead man’s M16, killed the NVA soldier with it, and then set off in search of another machine gun. Stone never trusted, or respected, Lieutenant Moore again.
About fifty meters to the right of Stone, another young officer was experiencing the extreme challenges of infantry leadership in heavy combat. Captain Bill Connolly and Charlie Company had saved Task Force Black over a week earlier. Now they were fighting among some of the best-hidden, deadliest bunkers. The trees and jungle were so thick that Connolly’s troopers found it hard to move, much less fight. The captain was rushing around, RTOs in tow, constantly exposing himself to enemy fire, barking orders, talking to his lieutenants, trying to find a weak spot in the enemy defenses. “There was still a lot of mortar fire coming,” he later said, “the bunkers were very well emplaced. They were situated so that they had interlocking fire. It was very difficult to go after one without getting hit with another one.”
Grunts Page 37
