by Phil Ball
I stood there alone for a moment feeling that I should be going out on this LP with him. We had sworn, after all, to watch each other’s backs, but we had really drifted apart and were no longer as tight as we used to be. I wondered if he felt the same way. Was he angry at me for not going with him? I doubt there was anything I could have done. I wasn’t the one calling the shots; I only did what I was told.
Before heading back to my own hole, I told the guys in mortars that the LP was out in front of them somewhere. “I don’t know how far in front, but somewhere between here and the tree line.” I told them all to be careful. “Don’t blow them away, they’re all FNGs and might come running back in at the drop of a hat.” I told the guys in the holes on either side of mortars the same thing. “Make sure you let them back in if the shit hits the fan; there’s four of them out there, you know.”
Darkness had sneaked up on me completely. Although I knew the general direction to get back to my hole, I quickly lost the trail and found myself plowing through head-high elephant grass.
I cursed myself for such a bonehead mistake. I really wasn’t supposed to be away from my position after dark. Now here I was, lost somewhere inside our own perimeter, stumbling around in pitch blackness.
I started calling out as quietly as possible, “Chico, where you at? “’Bama! Hey 3-Alpha! Chico, it’s me, “Butter Ball.”
I was really getting worried now. Then I recognized the sarcastic mutterings of PFC Holt. Intentionally much too loud he said, “Butterball! Goddamn you, get your ragged little ass over here, you fuck-up!”
“Damn,” I thought to myself. “You don’t have to let the whole world know I’m out here.” But he always had to make a spectacle, no matter what it was.
“Bruce?” I called. “Where are you?” I wanted him to keep talking so I could follow the sound of his voice, but he remained silent now, wanting me to sweat it out a little longer. He saw me before I him; I was only a meter away, crawling on my hands and knees, when he spoke again. “Whadafuck you think you’re doin’ asshole?” Holt nearly always talked to me this way because, in his words, he thought I was “worth saving.” He accepted me only after Chico did, but I felt fortunate to have him as a mentor, no matter how crude his manner. Holt was the kind of guy who would let you wander around in the dark all night long, if he didn’t like you. I was fortunate to have him.
I started to excuse my error by telling him that I’d been down helping with the LP, but Holt had no interest in excuses. He interrupted my story with more of his harsh, yet somehow caring dialogue. “Bull-fuckin’-shit, Butterball, don’t give me no song ’n’ dance. I almost blew you the fuck away, come sneakin’ up on me like that. You know better, asshole.” He talked tough and he was tough, but I could see the most subtle hint of a grin behind his mask that always seemed to say, “Everything’s going to be all right.”
He pointed me toward my position on the perimeter and told me to haul ass. “Your hole is only two or three more over.”
I thought I would be in for a dressing-down from Chico, too, as I quietly announced my arrival as to not startle him or Alabama.
Chico was sitting with his legs dangling into the hole, the radio handset pressed to one ear. Alabama was standing in the hole; both were wearing their helmets and flak jackets for some reason. This equipment was not normally worn unless danger was present.
I sat down behind the hole and quietly asked what was going on. Something obviously had them on alert. Chico looked at me and indicated with one finger that he would be with me in a minute. Alabama told me they smelled gooks.
When Chico signed off, he handed me the handset and announced that we were to go to fifty percent. The normal watch was one man up, two men down, but something was definitely going on and a heightened sense of awareness was called for. I’m not certain if the increase in alert was due entirely to the smell, or if movement had actually been detected. Whatever the case, we really weren’t all that concerned about it yet.
Chico and ’Bama both said they could smell gooks, but I couldn’t. I believed maybe they just had a gut feeling of some kind, that something wasn’t quite right. I was told not to worry, so I didn’t. I curled up in my poncho liner, a couple of feet behind the hole, and drifted off to sleep. I felt secure in knowing I had two very capable men standing guard in front of me. If anything were to happen, they’d surely wake me up in plenty of time.
* Pseudonym.
Chapter 7
It Hits the Fan
Deep sleep was not a luxury afforded most grunts in the bush. Three- and four-hour intervals could be considered at best fitful nods, periodically interrupted by the overwhelming urge to sit up and look around. I probably had been lying down about three hours and had sat up a half dozen times, when I began sensing too much activity going on around me. I saw that Chico and Alabama were both standing in the hole, looking vigilant. I asked, “What’s happenin’ bro?”
My fears were confirmed, and I knew it was time to get into the hole with them. “Somebody said they spotted some movement with the green eye [night vision scope] and 60 mike mikes are gettin’ ready to fire,” said Chico. He handed me the horn (handset) as I slipped between him and ’Bama. I could hear the hollow sounds of our 60-mm mortar tube pumping out round after round. They were fired nearly straight up, crashing back to earth almost a minute later in an ear-shattering bombardment somewhere on the far side of the Crow’s Nest. We passed the word to the left and right: “Heads up, heads up, everybody on their toes!”
It’s hard to tell how close the platoon-size NVA unit might have come to the Crow’s Nest perimeter had they not been spotted when they were. As it turned out, when the mortars started pounding away inside the tree line, the enemy came rushing out, sprinting 20 meters to reach the tiny outpost of Marines. Utilizing grenades and satchel charges supported by machine guns and RPGs, the hard-charging NVA assaulted from three different directions.
The artillery FO got some good, accurate artillery fire coming in quickly from LZ Hawk: 105-mm, 155-mm, and 81-mm mortars blasted away at key locations surrounding our position, not knowing for sure how many more NVA were out there. Many of the powerful artillery shells were landing in the valley in front of our 3rd Platoon sector; the enemy had been spotted down there, too. With the artillery pieces and LZ Hawk to our backs, the rounds had to travel directly over us in order to hit targets in the valley. It was unnerving to say the least, with dozens of deadly rounds screamed in at us, barely clearing the top of the ridge. I felt as though I could reach out and touch them; they were that close. I prayed that the dreaded “short round” would not lose altitude and hit us.
Map showing positions in Foxtrot Ridge and direction of NVA attack.
Hillbilly and his A-gunner Mouse went to work with the M-60, cutting down wave after wave of fanatical, suicidal NVA. Camouflaged with grass and brush, the enemy repeatedly attacked different sides of the four-hole perimeter, attempting desperately to get into the holes and blow the Marines up. Gunner Croft’s rhythm started with short bursts of fire, which indicated to me that he was seeing his targets and systematically eliminating them. Within a few minutes, it sounded like one continuous burst of fire, interrupted only occasionally by the briefest of pauses.
The fight escalated to a fever pitch, and M-16 and AK-47 small arms fire melted together in a murderous grind. Artillery and mortar fire shook the earth and TNT charges reverberated throughout. Incoming RPGs covered the entire length of the ridge line, exploding almost continuously in varying degrees of strength. Their power was at times as unpredictable as their ability to aim and travel in a straight line.
It suddenly dawned on me that while these 13 Marines were fighting for their lives (Croft later told me they all thought they were going to die), we had more than 100 Marines on the ridge that weren’t doing anything. “Somebody needs to go over and help those guys,” I thought. With the extraordinarily heavy bombardment of enemy RPGs pounding the whole ridge line and thousands of small arms
rounds flying everywhere, it would have almost been suicide just trying to get out of our hole at the time, much less attempt a rescue or reinforcement effort. It was looking more and more as if that was exactly what was going to be necessary to save the lives of those 13 men.
There was one grunt, an FNG who had come out from Phu Bai with Don and me, who just got up and started running. He did not tell anyone he was leaving. He just slid and rolled down the steepest side of the Crow’s Nest. He didn’t stop running until he reached Route #9, leaving 12 Marines to defend the high ground.
One Marine was killed and another knocked unconscious when a Chi-Com grenade landed in their hole and exploded. The NVA were mixing it up pretty well, concentrating their efforts first on one side of the small perimeter, then the other. In doing so, they could force the Marines to leap from hole to hole and defend whatever area needed them the most. There came a time when Mouse had to leave the gun position to help PFC Lawrence K. Arthur in a hole by himself, defending against a brutal attack by a half-dozen or so NVA. Together, they were quite successful for several minutes, but when a grenade exploded very close by and destroyed Arthur’s M-16, the two grunts were at a serious disadvantage. Ignoring his shrapnel wounds and bleeding badly, Arthur spotted a satchel charge–toting NVA just outside his hole. Armed with the only weapon he had left, the fiery PFC jumped on him and repeatedly stabbed the NVA soldier with his bayonet. It was a violent struggle, the enemy soldier refusing to give up without a fight. But he did die, leaving Arthur covered with not only the enemy’s blood, but a lot of his own blood as well. Exhausted and possibly close to death, the courageous Marine fell back into the shallow hole with Mouse and tried to catch his breath. There was no time to rest, though, for another grenade came flying into the hole and landed between Arthur’s back and the side of the fighting hole. Instead of jumping away, Arthur leaned as hard as he could, pinning the grenade in place, and smothering it with his own body. When the grenade exploded, it blew out Arthur’s back and killed him instantly. The powerful, close range of the concussion knocked Mouse unconscious, but even after Hillbilly revived the A-gunner, he remained in a state of shock for several hours.
With one dead, one wounded, and a third Marine AWOL, the defense of the high ground was in the hands of 10 very determined, highly motivated, slightly battered grunts. But then the tide and the momentum began to turn in our favor. The furor and the ferocity of those 10 men, who were determined to kill as many NVA soldiers as possible before being killed themselves, was nothing short of spectacular. What remained of the original NVA platoon was forced to pull back into the trees and disperse, having lost their will and the means to fight.
Everything stopped at approximately 0200. The fire fight had lasted 30 minutes. That ever-pleasing smell of gun powder filled the air and smoke from numerous brush fires slowly drifted away. The blanket of darkness fell once again and it became quieter. Too quiet, we felt. I listened intently for information on the radio that would give me some sense to the status of the Crow’s Nest, perhaps how many men were still alive. Because Hillbilly and Mouse were the two grunts I knew best up there, it was their well-being I was concerned with the most. Yet the safety of every single Marine and the security status of our positions was very important, too. I wasn’t getting any information at all, except for one or two positions who reported hearing movement out in front of them. Gradually, over a period of nearly 45 minutes, every radio in the company including mine was reporting various degrees of noise or sounds. Then I began to smell what Chico and Alabama had alluded to earlier: the foul, sickening body odor of a very large group of people gathering at the base of our hill. At first it smelled like a bunch of old dirty socks, but it grew into a great, nauseating stench that burned my nostrils and irritated my eyes. Alabama scraped his tongue with his teeth and spat, “Got-dam that’s bad.”
It was bad; it was hard to believe a human being could smell as if he were already dead, but that’s exactly the way they smelled, with a hint of urine and feces thrown in. Over all this, the sweet smell of marijuana and opium smoke broke through, not just a little whiff of someone smoking a joint. It was if they had piled it on a bonfire and were trying to get the whole country stoned. In fact, I became concerned, not wise to the full effect of drugs at the time; I feared that perhaps the NVA were intentionally trying to get us stoned, so that maybe we wouldn’t want to fight, or would otherwise act in an incoherent way. I really had no idea what was going on and neither did Chico.
As time passed, the gooks became more careless and much louder, to the point that we could not only hear their movements and voices, but also sounds of weapons being prepared and the loading of ammunition. It was all we could do to follow the orders of Lieutenant Jones when he repeatedly advised us, “Fire only at targets of opportunity.” In other words, wait until you actually see an enemy, instead of wasting ammo on ghosts and shadows. The trouble was that we wondered if we were ever going to see them. More and more it seemed as if we were fighting an army of ghosts and evil spirits.
A few grunts just couldn’t restrain themselves and occasionally fired a few rounds into the darkness or tossed a grenade. Every time this happened, it would trigger a chain reaction; everyone around the jumpy shooter would instinctively join in, too, creating turmoil and confusion in an already extremely tense and difficult situation. Not once did the enemy shoot back, making us wonder what exactly were they up to.
When some of those trigger-happy grunts down on 1st Platoon’s finger area opened fire in one of those prolonged scenarios in which a heavy volume of small arms fire ripped into the tree line, I realized Don and his LP might still be out there. If they were, that murderous fire was going right in their direction. I wasn’t sure exactly where he had wound up taking the LP, if he went as far as he was supposed to, or if he sandbagged a little. Whatever the case was, I knew he had better get back to the perimeter and into his hole on the lines ASAP.
Corporal “Silk and Satin” was performing his series of security checks at approximately 0235. As I waited for 3-Alpha to be called, I listened intently as every radioman around the perimeter responded, “All secure, but with sounds of enemy movement everywhere.” I listened and waited, hoping to hear Don report that he, too, was all secure, and perhaps even back in his own hole on the line. Apparently he could wait no longer. I heard his hushed, strained voice, whisper a chilling message I will never forget as long as I live. He interrupted, “Bookoo gooks comin’ straight up the hill—gotta come in—now!”
I nearly freaked out when I heard that, but when I heard some second lieutenant tell him, “Negative LP, just sit tight until I come down for a closer look,” I lost it. I started raising all kind of hell with Chico, hoping to get Don some help out there. But I wasn’t thinking properly, and my trusted squad leader told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to calm down or face the consequences. “Look here, man, listen to me! Just mellow out and do what I tell ya. We can’t have nobody gettin’ all shook up here. Schuck can take care of himself, you’ve got to do the same.” Then he told Alabama to go next door and tell the guys in the hole to our right to watch out for the LP coming back through the lines.
“Let me go!” I pleaded. “I’ll go all the way down to the mortar pit and make sure everyone gets the word.” I wanted to go myself and make sure Don got back, feeling certain that he was probably going to need some help.
“No fuckin’ way, man,” Chico smiled. “You ain’t leavin’ my sight.”
Alabama left the hole to pass the word. While he was gone, I heard Don’s voice again, speaking very softly. It sounded as if he probably had one hand over his mouth to hide the sound from the gooks who must have been only a couple of meters away from him by this time. He said something to the effect of, “They’re right on top of us, we can’t move.”
I don’t know if he did it intentionally or by mistake, but following that last, desperate transmission, Don’s microphone remained open and I thought I heard voices in the background. Indee
d, the NVA were right on top of them, but apparently had not spotted the Marines yet. I couldn’t really tell if the voices were Vietnamese or American. It was a very excited, garbled transmission, and the handset seemed to be getting knocked around a lot.
I couldn’t imagine what was going on out there or what my friend was going through. It was so dark that night, he probably couldn’t see much of anything, but he undoubtedly could hear the enemy, smell them, and feel their presence all around him.
The second lieutenant who ordered the LP to sit tight did in fact go down to the perimeter from his position behind the mortar pit and get a closer look. He and his radioman laid down behind the four-man mortar position and observed what we on the line had been hearing. The FNG officer did not feel this was as serious an emergency as did Don’s LP or the Marines on the line for that matter, and he still hesitated to give permission for the LP to come in.
Perhaps he thought there was just a couple of gooks out there and they weren’t going to do anything. He was acting as if he was more concerned with trying to catch Schuck, the LP, or anyone else doing something wrong or being somewhere they weren’t supposed to. The mortarmen actually questioned his behavior when he ordered one man to toss a frag in the area where he thought he saw something move. “That might be the LP, sir,” said the Marine.
“It goddamn better not be the LP,” spouted the second lieutenant. “If it is, then they’re out of place.”
There was a brief discussion concerning whether or not the LP was where they were supposed to be, then at precisely 0245 three powerful explostions went off almost simultaniously. From my position, nearly 35 meters away, it felt like a 250-pound bomb, jolting the entire ridge line with an unbelievable force. I couldn’t imagine what kind of weapon the NVA had that could possibly pack such a wallop. It definitely made us feel that we were in for something nobody else had ever seen.
