Grunts

by John C. McManus

  Hoping to build irresistible momentum in this attack, Captain Connolly kept pushing his platoons to clear out the bunkers. As he did so, squad after squad got decimated by enemy machine guns and mortars. Some of the men were literally shot to pieces. Others were shredded by mortar fragments. Quite a few collapsed under a flurry of machine-gun bullets. Their blood stained the trees and jungle floor. Medics crawled and sprinted everywhere, tending to screaming, crying men. Connolly believed that in order for the attack to have any chance of success, his 2nd Platoon, under Lieutenant Tracy Murrey, had to destroy one particular machine-gun bunker. “It had a commanding field of fire through the brush and debris,” one Charlie Company soldier wrote. “Anyone trying to move forward was hit.”

  The gun had already cut down several men. The captain told Murrey to throw his last remaining squad at the gun. The bespectacled lieutenant had grown up with no father and had gotten through college on an ROTC scholarship. Most of his lieutenant’s pay went toward his sisters’ college education. As a platoon leader, he had struggled with land navigation and had sometimes clashed with the company NCOs. He hardly fit the recruiting-poster image of a gung ho airborne infantry officer. Connolly’s order was deeply upsetting to him, tantamount to suicide. He pleaded with the captain to change his mind. Connolly appreciated the gravity of the command (he himself was only about fifty feet behind Murrey), but in the desperation of the moment, he felt there was no other option. In response to Murrey’s pleas, Connolly barked: “That’s an order! Out!”

  Murrey may not have been the prototypical platoon leader, but he embodied the first principle of infantry leadership—never ask your people to do something you will not do yourself. Unwilling to send his men after the machine gun, he did it himself. He charged at the bunker, got within a few feet of it, and pitched grenades into it. The explosions killed the enemy gunner. Before Lieutenant Murrey could do anything else, NVA machine guns opened up from adjacent bunkers, ripping into the platoon leader. RPGs streaked from unseen positions, pulverizing Murrey. “The only thing left of him was his helmet and glasses,” Morse, the medic, recalled. “I was one of the [men] that made out the reports of how his remains disappeared.”

  In spite of Murrey’s valor, the 4th Battalion’s attack was at a standstill. One platoon from Alpha Company did succeed in breeching the bunkers and nearing the top of the hill, but they were in danger of being cut off. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, flying overhead in a helicopter, decided to call off the attack. Captain James Muldoon, Alpha’s commander, and Connolly both believed that the hill could still be taken before nightfall, but the order stood. The battalion’s survivors filtered back down the hill, yielding hard-won ground back to the enemy. The grunts were weary, frustrated, and anguished over the loss of so many friends. Another leaden night descended on Hill 875, practically dripping with the smell of death, tension, and desperation. In the darkness, Private First Class Stone, whose platoon had lost twenty-two men in the space of an hour, settled into a small hole. All around him, NVA mortar shells continued to explode. In the distance, he could hear the moans of wounded men. He felt a sharp pain in his back and thought he had been hit. He reached around to check this out and felt an object sticking in his back. He pulled the object out, only to discover that it was part of an American soldier’s spine. The spine “had stuck in my back when I laid down on it.” He had no time for emotion or reflection over the gruesome discovery. “I simply tossed the piece aside and lay back down.”

  For the next thirty-six hours, the Americans contented themselves with giving the NVA bunkers another pasting while they prepared for yet another assault. Artillery and jets repeatedly worked over the NVA sections of the hill. The bombs and napalm jostled the grunts around and took their collective breath away. Captain Leonard later called it “an absolute firepower display.” Amid the endless sound track of explosions, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson finally made it into Hill 875 to meet with Leonard and the other two company commanders. He told them that there was still no doubt among the senior commanders (Schweiter, Peers, and the others) that the hill had to be taken. In fact, General Peers, commander of the 4th Division, was sending two companies from his 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, to help out. The only question was whether the airborne commanders wanted their men to once again take the lead role in capturing the hill. Johnson felt that they should. Muldoon, Connolly, and Leonard agreed. If Hill 875 had to be taken, then Sky Soldiers should do it. For them, the hill had turned into a kind of holy grail, offering closure, redemption, and honor.22

  On Thanksgiving morning, November 23, the costly quest for Hill 875 resumed. The attack was scheduled for 1100. The remnants of the 4th Battalion would attack straight up the hill, in the same place as two days earlier, with Bravo on the left, Charlie on the right, and Alpha following. On the other side of 875, Delta and Alpha Companies, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, would launch a supporting assault from the southeast. These two companies had air-assaulted onto the other side of the hill the previous day. In order to determine which of the two companies would lead the way, Captain George Wilkins, the commander of Delta, had drawn straws with his good friend Captain Larry Cousins, Alpha’s CO. Wilkins had “won,” so his men were in the lead with Cousins’s people trailing behind.

  Up until the last moment, the ubiquitous artillery and air strikes lambasted the hill. Some of the ordnance hit so close to the grunts that they had to dodge fragments. As the paratroopers of Charlie Company prepared to move out, Sergeant Mike Tanner, a mortar RTO, overheard Captain Connolly tell his command group that the hill had to be taken “at all costs.” At that moment, the realization hit Tanner that he was probably about to die. A sad pride engulfed him and he sat down to write his wife a last letter. Many others did the same. Having experienced such horrors on this hill, most felt that they could not hope to survive another attack. But, when the word came to get moving, they stood and started up the hill anyway. Mortar crews walked rounds about thirty meters in front of them.

  The grunts carefully worked their way over and around the mess of felled trees, shell holes, and other obstacles that honeycombed the ugly hill. They braced themselves for the NVA bunkers to come alive with machine-gun fire, but this did not happen. The Americans did not know it, but North Vietnamese commanders had decided to disengage at Hill 875. They had bled the Americans badly. Fighting to the bitter end for the hill served no further purpose for them. So most of the enemy survivors (from the NVA 174th Regiment) had previously exited the hill through their tunnels, then trekked back to Cambodia, surviving to fight another day.

  Plenty remained behind, though, to make the Americans’ final push for the top of the hill a very unpleasant quest. Enemy mortar crews on nearby hills hurled accurate mortar fire at the GIs. Well-concealed stay-behind snipers also opened up. Anticipating more close-quarters fighting among the bunkers, some of the Americans were carrying satchel charges of TNT. Several extraordinarily brave souls volunteered to lug flamethrowers, although no one really had much training in how to operate them. One mortar round scored a direct hit on Sergeant First Class William Cates, who was lugging a satchel charge. The shell disintegrated him and killed several men near him.

  The flamethrower men were moving awkwardly under the weight of their smelly, heavy tanks of napalm, enhancing their vulnerability. As Captain Connolly moved up the hill, a flamethrower man named Flatley got slammed by a mortar. The round ignited the fuel in the tanks, detonating a fiery explosion. “He just basically evaporated,” Connolly recalled. “I was very lucky. It threw me forward, ten, fifteen, twenty feet. I got up and I was fine.” Not far away, Sergeant Tanner and another man slid into a bomb crater to avoid the heavy incoming mortar fire. “There was a flash and a blast of heat. We saw a [flamethrower] volunteer go down. He was struggling, all aflame. He crumpled in a blazing heap with the tanks on his back.” In Bravo Company’s line of advance, Private First Class Rocky Stone was walking uncomfortably close to Private Mike Gladden, a grunt who had volunteered for
flamethrower duty. “A sniper shot the tank,” Stone said. “I remember seeing the flame [shoot] out the tip, circle around . . . ignite the tank and totally engulf Mike in flame. I remember watching him spin in a circle totally covered in flames and hearing him scream for someone to shoot him. He was shot by his own men to save him a very painful, slow death.”

  Still the assault continued. Small, weary groups of paratroopers huffed and puffed upward, blasting snipers, shooting up bunkers, braving the deadly enemy mortar fire. At 1122, they finally made it to the summit of Hill 875. Stone and his buddy Private Al Undiemi led the charge. By now, Private First Class Stone was on his fourth machine gun since arriving at the hill. One had been destroyed by a grenade. Stone had warped the barrels on the other two from having to fire them so continuously. Brandishing his new M60, he jumped up, yelled “Let’s go!” and ran for the top of the hill. He and Undiemi made it there and, finding no more resistance, they hopped into a bomb crater. All around them paratroopers were yelling “Airborne!” “Geronimo!” and “All the way!” in cries of victory. At last, Hill 875 belonged to the Americans.

  The price was staggering: 158 killed and 402 wounded. Among the dead were all the members of Stone and Undiemi’s squad, except for one man. When the terrible reality of these deaths sank in to Stone, he leaned, almost involuntarily, against a tree, his eyes cast downward, his mind trying to process what had happened on this troubled hill. “I had the feeling of total sadness as I looked around to see all the bodies and carnage around me and upon learning of the death of so many close brothers.” He was proud to have taken the hill, but forever saddened, and troubled, by the irreplaceable losses his unit had suffered. Nearly every other survivor felt the same way.23

  As the paratroopers focused on spreading out and setting up a defensive perimeter, the point elements of Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, approached the crest from the south. They had received some sniper fire but little other resistance on the way up. In the confusing smoky haze that hung over the peak of Hill 875, Delta’s point men could see soldiers moving around. “Just as we were preparing to fire upon these soldiers, someone yelled ‘friendlies! ’” Private Dennis Lewallen recalled. “The situation could have evolved into a very serious firefight where many more lives could have been lost. I think of this every time I remember or hear of the battle of Hill 875.”

  The other 4th Division company soon arrived. Together these Ivy Division troops extended the perimeter, circulated around, and attempted to comprehend what the paratroopers had been through. They were shocked at the sight of their hard-bitten airborne colleagues. “They were good guys but, boy, they were beat up,” Captain Wilkins said. “That’s a very proud tradition in that organization. They’re pretty elite guys. You could tell they’d been in the fight of their lives.” Even more troubling were the other sights that greeted them all over the hill. “Not one major tree seemed to be standing,” Private John Beckman, a Delta Company rifleman, remembered, “and the whole side of the hill looked like toothpicks burning and smoking. It was the scariest sight I’d ever seen.” Spec-4 Bill Ballard, an RTO, shuddered at the carnage and the putrid smell of death that engulfed the hill. “The upper . . . quarter of the hill was just totally nude. No trees, no stumps, no nothing, just dirt. It had been bombarded with artillery and air strikes so heavily that it was just clear.” He and the others saw bodies and parts of bodies strewn all over the place, rotting in the midday sun.

  Captain Larry Cousins, Alpha’s commander, was in his second tour in Vietnam, but he had never witnessed anything like this. “There were helmets with heads in ’em . . . GIs, arms, legs, body parts everywhere,” he said. He and his first sergeant saw the grisly remnants of a Sky Soldier’s head hanging almost neatly from the twigs of a tree. “It was just like somebody scalped him right about where his ears were on both sides and just peeled all the skin off. You could see the eye holes. It was just sickening. It was kind of like a Halloween mask. It was . . . revolting to see Americans like that.”

  The hill was still under periodic mortar fire, but helicopters could now get in and out with some semblance of safety. The chopper crews evacuated many of the wounded and dead. They also flew in a special Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and pie. Some of the men welcomed this meal as a morale booster. Others thought it was unthinkable, to the point of obscenity, to dine on such fare amid the dismembered, decomposing remains of their dead friends. Two days later, the helicopters came and took the paratroopers from the hill back to the main Dak To base, where they held a subdued ceremony to mourn their dead.

  The 4th Division soldiers stayed on the hill for a few more days, taking casualties of their own from NVA mortar and rocket fire. Eventually, though, they abandoned the hill to resume the endless search for and pursuit of the NVA. The hard-won hill was now the enemy’s to reclaim, thus illustrating the essential absurdity of expending so many lives for a worthless geographic objective. “A week or so later,” Spec-4 Ballard recalled, “we were flying by that hill, going somewhere in our helicopters . . . and we could see ’em already up there, moving around, building bunkers, resettling.” When paratroopers like Private First Class Stone found this out, they were understandably bitter. “This told us that all we had done, all we had gone through on that Hill was basically for naught,” he wrote. “This . . . was an insult to us who survived and a bigger insult to those of us who gave their lives.” The anger and bitterness never went away for him or for the other survivors of Hill 875. Fighting raged at 875, and Dak To, for the rest of the war.

  Of course, American commanders could hardly have chosen to remain on Hill 875. It was deep inside enemy country, at the edge of a perilous supply line, and it had no intrinsic value. They only fought there because the NVA was there. When the NVA left, they had to as well. The Americans were much like tethered goats being led to and fro by their enemies. Nothing could illustrate the inherent worthlessness of the attrition strategy more than these unhappy realities. This cold assessment does not, in the least, diminish the extraordinary valor of the soldiers who took Hill 875. If anything, it only adds to it, since superhuman gallantry in the service of strategic aimlessness is even more impressive than bravery demonstrated for a clear objective, such as the Normandy beaches or Paris. The 173rd Airborne Brigade earned a well-deserved Presidential Unit Citation for its exploits on the hill and elsewhere at Dak To. The 4th Division’s 1st Brigade also was a deserving recipient for its important part in the fighting.

  The Americans found a grand total of 22 NVA bodies on Hill 875. Certainly they killed many more than that (probably about a battalion, according to captured documents), but the communists dragged most of them away. In the November 1967 battles at Dak To, the Americans expended over 151,000 artillery shells. Air Force, Navy, and Marine aviators flew nearly 2,100 close air support sorties for the grunts. B-52s even flew 257 sorties, blasting suspected enemy troop concentrations. By their own admission, the Americans lost nearly 300 men killed and about 1,000 wounded. The numbers were probably slightly higher than that since commanders notoriously tried to downplay their losses in hopes of showing favorable kill ratios. Every rifle company in the 173rd Airborne Brigade lost more than 50 percent of its troopers. The Army claimed that 1,644 NVA were killed in the battles at Dak To, but this figure is suspect. Westmoreland himself later put the number at 1,400. Many other officers, including one general, thought the number was closer to 1,000. Even if the high number is correct, the United States expended a monumentally inefficient 92 artillery rounds and one and a half air strikes for every enemy soldier killed.

  As the battle raged, General Westmoreland was in the United States, briefing President Johnson, addressing Congress, and generally attempting to build public confidence in the administration’s policy in Vietnam. General Westmoreland insisted that the United States was winning the war and he even optimistically ventured the possibility that, if the war continued to go this well, the troops might start comin
g home by 1969. In a press conference, when reporters asked the general if Dak To was the beginning of the end for the NVA, he responded: “I think it’s the beginning of a great defeat for the enemy.”

  Sadly, the general was wrong. Dak To was not necessarily a defeat for the United States, but nor was it anything approaching a victory. It was true that the Americans decimated three enemy regiments at Dak To and foiled any communist plans to cut South Vietnam in two by pushing east from the Central Highlands. But the enemy’s purpose was still served by fighting the Americans on even terms, bleeding them badly, and inconclusively. The longer the war dragged on, and the worse losses that piled up from such aimless tactical tests of bravery, the more the American public’s appetite for the war diminished. In short, stalemate favored the communists and Dak To was, in the end, an inconclusive stalemate. Westy could inflict substantial casualties on the enemy, but not mortal losses, thus guaranteeing the failure of attrition. Dak To was the prime example of this unhappy circumstance. It was also a bitter tale of the price grunts pay for the poor strategic choices of their generals and political leaders. At Dak To, even the combination of extreme valor and overwhelming firepower could not produce any semblance of strategic victory for the United States.24

  CHAPTER 8

  Eleven Mikes and Eleven Bravos: Infantry Moments in the Ultimate Techno-War

  I Volunteer . . . Twice

  THE WAR WAS LIKE A video game. Even its official moniker, “Desert Storm,” sounded less like a real war and more like a cleverly packaged, and marketed, game—the kind that Americans of the early 1990s could find on the shelves of prosperous computer stores at a time of explosive growth in home personal computer ownership. The 1991 Persian Gulf War was the first conflict to be covered round the clock on television, most famously by CNN. It was information-age war, bombarding viewers with images and facts yet telling them surprisingly little about the real war. Footage-hungry television outlets broadcast the apparent new face of modern war—laser-guided munitions, “smart” bombs hitting precision targets, the “luckiest man in Iraq” scurrying away in his truck as an adjacent bridge implodes under the weight of new-age bombs. All of this made for great television, and presented modern war as technological, clinical, precise, at a distance . . . sort of like a video game, actually. It was vicarious, even voyeuristic. The images showed buildings and bridges going down in destruction, not people. There was no blood. There were no clumps of seared human flesh, no cries of agony, no sense of the profound, tragic waste that always accompanies war, techno or otherwise. It conveyed a sense of air power’s invincibility and the individual soldier’s irrelevance. It all seemed so clean. It reinforced the wrongheaded idea that wars can be fought exclusively at a distance, technologically, by small groups of highly trained professionals who assume minimal risk.