Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq

by John C. McManus

  For these reasons, and not out of any need for medals or personal glory, Colonel Moore liked to get on the ground during a fight: “You’ve got to be on the ground to sense what’s going on, and the troops like to see you on the ground, sharing the risks too. It’s not to be a hero. It just makes a hell of a lot of sense. You can’t sail around in a helicopter on a radio and really know what’s going on on the ground.” At Phung Du, his personal presence was important to the outcome of the battle. He organized a counterattack that eventually overwhelmed the remaining enemy positions in hard fighting that lasted for the better part of another day as soldiers methodically assaulted the NVA bunkers, tunnels, and trenches. Much of the village was on fire and angry plumes of smoke wafted skyward. “As far as the eye could see the land was under assault,” one witness related, “the full expression of the Army’s war-fighting fury . . . as if waging war against the land itself.”

  The Americans captured a few prisoners, including one frightened man who relieved his tension in a unique way. “The first thing this guy did was squat down and take a crap,” Colonel Moore recalled. “He thought we were gonna kill him. We gave him some water.” They also reassured him that he would not be killed. Moore was a big believer that the better treatment prisoners got, the more information they yielded. This man divulged everything he knew.

  As medevac helicopters swooped in to the now secure LZ to evacuate Sergeant Kinney and several other wounded men, he gazed at the dead, bloated body of one of his friends. “I was suddenly struck by the thought that for the rest of my life, I would be living on borrowed time . . . that had been given to me by all these men who had died on LZ 4 . . . while I had lived.” This was not survivor’s guilt so much as survivor’s determination, and it had positive consequences. As Sergeant Kinney hopped aboard the medevac helicopter, he resolved to heal from his wounds, return to the company, save as many lives as possible, and then live his own life the best he possibly could. “It was the only way I knew to repay the debt I felt I owed.”

  That night, Colonel Moore and Sergeant Major Plumley stayed with the surviving troopers in Phung Du. “It helps the troops to see the colonel down there with ’em sharing the risks. They felt . . . more safe,” Moore said. This command presence also gave the men a sense that someone was in charge, making decisions, looking out for their welfare. Moore’s major concern was to keep the retreating NVA from escaping. On the morning of January 30, he ordered McDade’s depleted companies and 2-12 Cavalry to move north, in hopes of pushing the NVA into the waiting muzzles of 1-7 Cavalry. In some instances, artillery fire, helicopter gunships, and fighters shot up dozens of retreating enemy, the exact sort of scenario Westy would have envisioned.

  Moore’s northward push also sparked a pair of sharp fights against company-sized NVA units in the villages of Tan Thanh and Luong Tho. In the latter engagement, three companies from 1-7 Cavalry were fighting so close to the enemy—ferreting them out of bunkers and spider holes—that, according to one after action report, “heavy fire support could not be used because of the close proximity of the engagement.” Only by withdrawing from the village could the Americans make use of tactical air support and artillery. The communists had learned to negate American firepower by fighting at close quarters. The Americans came to call this enemy tactic “hugging the belt.”

  At Luong Tho, North Vietnamese opposition was so fierce that any helicopter that approached the area risked getting shot down. But, as the sun set on January 31, Captain Ramon “Tony” Nadal, the commander of A Company, had a dozen wounded men who needed immediate evacuation. Although the odds of getting in and out safely seemed minuscule, Major Bruce Crandall, who had performed numerous acts of bravery at Ia Drang, volunteered to fly his Huey through the darkness into a tiny LZ in hopes of extracting the wounded. The LZ was so small, and surrounded by so many trees, that Crandall had to descend vertically, all the while under steady enemy fire. Moreover, the night was so dark that Crandall could not see the trees or the ground as Captain Nadal talked him down. Nadal’s soldiers laid down a powerful base of fire. The North Vietnamese responded with heavy machine-gun fire. Crandall could see their green tracers whizzing uncomfortably close. Somehow, he made it to the ground, picked up six wounded soldiers, took them to a base at Bong Son, and then came back in for another load. “Coming out was tough because I had to pull up and take those people out without any forward movement.” Difficult or not, he pulled it off, saving many lives. Crandall willingly risked such danger not just out of a sense of duty, and not just because he and Nadal were friends, but out of deep mutual respect for the grunts. “You always had great confidence in the infantry. You supported those guys as well as they supported you.”

  The 3rd Brigade patrolled the Bong Son plain for several more days in early February, but the fighting died down into sporadic skirmishes with snipers. With the enemy seemingly gone, General Kinnard hoped that the plain was now secure. He ordered an end to this phase of Operation Masher in favor of a new push into the An Lao Valley. The vital calculus of casualties, of course, meant everything in these big-unit operations. Already, the Americans had lost 123 men killed (counting the plane crash), and another 200 wounded. Division records claimed 603 enemy killed, by actual body count. The reports also claimed, with no real basis whatsoever, that 956 other enemy soldiers were probably dead. The records were, of course, mute on how many noncombatants were dead or if, perhaps, on-site commanders counted some of their bodies as “enemy.” Such were the vagaries and potential inaccuracies of the body-count war. Without question, though, the Americans had inflicted significant damage on the enemy’s 22nd Infantry Regiment.7

  When word of Operation Masher reached President Johnson, his first reaction was quite telling. Instead of asking about casualties, or what results the 3rd Brigade had achieved, he recoiled at the aggressive name the Army had given the operation. From the beginning of his escalation process, he had sought to downplay the size, scale, and violence of the military effort in Vietnam. He did not want the American people to think that their country was truly on a war footing. To his ears, “Masher” sounded too warlike. “I don’t know who names your operations but ‘Masher’?” he said to General Earl Wheeler, the Army’s chief of staff. “I get kind of mashed myself,” Johnson added. McGeorge Bundy, one of the president’s security advisors, asked Wheeler to tell the commanders in Vietnam to come up with less provocative operational names so that “even the most biased person” could not use such names to criticize Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Wheeler passed the request along to Westmoreland, who, in turn, told General Kinnard. The 1st Cavalry Division commander was stunned, and chagrined, by this political foolishness. In his recollection, he changed the name, “partly out of spite,” to the most innocuous, peaceful moniker he could imagine—White Wing. So the campaign came to be known as Operation Masher/White Wing. This naming incident might appear minor, but it illustrated a fatal aspect of Johnson’s war leadership that affected the way Westy carried out his strategy—all too often, Johnson was more interested in appearances than real results.8

  They Must Be in the An Lao Valley

  Once the fighting petered out on the Bong Son plain, General Kinnard felt that the An Lao Valley, a few miles to the northwest, was the logical place to clear next. Intelligence officers believed that the valley comprised an important logistics and transit point for the North Vietnamese. They had pinpointed it as the home for the Sao Vang Division’s headquarters. An Lao was the likely place of retreat for those enemy soldiers who had escaped the fighting around Phung Du and the other contested villages of Bong Son. What’s more, even as that fighting was going on in late January, Special Forces teams had run into a veritable buzz saw while they were reconning the area. They had found that the place was teeming with NVA and VC. One six-man team was lucky to be extracted intact. Two others became enmeshed in desperate firefights against overwhelming numbers of enemy soldiers. “We kept getting fire in on us,” Sergeant Chuck Hiner, whose team was amb
ushed by the VC, recalled. All around him, his teammates got hit. Hiner got on the radio and called for fire support and a rescue attempt. “I could hear Dotson. He was hit through the chest and I could hear that death rattle. This other kid (Hancock) . . . they had stitched him from the ankle to the top of his head.” Sergeant First Class Marlin Cook was nearby, lying still, paralyzed from a crippling, mortal wound. Air strikes by helicopter gunships came right in on his position. “It was either do that or get overrun,” Hiner said. “We were fighting—I daresay the closest—within ten feet of each other. It was that tight.”

  Major Charlie Beckwith, the legendary Special Forces commander, was badly wounded by enemy machine-gun fire when his command helicopter approached the ambush site. Somehow, though, other choppers extracted the survivors. Of seventeen Special Forces soldiers who went into the An Lao, seven were killed and three others wounded. Three of the bodies were never recovered.

  So General Kinnard expected a major fight when he sent Moore’s 3rd Brigade and the 2nd Brigade, under Colonel William Lynch, into the valley on February 7. “Numerous valleys and draws were heavily forested, providing many areas in which concealment from aerial observation is afforded,” a 2nd Brigade report stated. Helicopters landed most of the rifle companies on the ridges, from whence they worked their way down the steep slopes into the valley. The soldiers humped through this exhausting terrain, dealing with leeches, ants, heat, rain, mud, and abject weariness. “In a few days they were reduced to sodden, weary, leech-encrusted men,” one soldier wrote. They found many abandoned enemy base camps, along with quite a bit of rice, salt, weapons, and tunnels. They also found plenty of evidence that the enemy dominated the area politically. “Moving through the villages, I was struck by how much anti-American propaganda I saw posted in them,” a grunt recalled. “Some posters [showed] NVA or VC soldiers shooting down American aircraft.”

  But contact with the actual VC and NVA was sporadic to the point of nonexistent. “The hills were honeycombed with recently abandoned bunkers and caches which had to be destroyed before [we] moved on,” the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry’s, after report recorded. The An Lao was typical of what field duty was often like for grunts in Vietnam. They spent most of the day cautiously walking, while carrying heavy loads of equipment, ammunition, and food, sweating in the beastly heat, all the while wondering when danger might beckon. The whole experience was grueling and exhausting, even if they never encountered the enemy, which they usually did not. The old cliché about combat being mostly an exercise in boredom, punctuated by fleeting moments of extreme terror, sprang readily to mind.

  The Americans killed about a dozen rearguard VC. For the rifle company grunts, then, the An Lao was more a place of tedium than danger. Even so, a division report claimed that the operations in the valley “succeeded in throwing the enemy off balance,” and added to “the general turmoil experienced by the VC during current operations.” The author of the report even optimistically asserted that “the adverse effect on enemy forces will have a long-lasting effect in that area.” This was staff officer spin doctoring. The Americans had not come to the valley to find nothing but abandoned camps and replaceable war matériel. Nor did the sweep have a substantial long-lasting effect.

  In actuality, the elusive NVA and VC had somehow melted away, a common problem during the Vietnam War. Search and destroy meant nothing if the actual destroying never took place. General Kinnard and his brigade commanders decided to look for the enemy ten miles to the south in the Kim Son Valley, another obvious spot for base camps.9

  The Crow’s Foot

  On the maps, and even from the air, the Kim Son Valley looked like a crow’s foot (some thought of it as an eagle’s claw). The Kim Son River and its tributaries snaked through a muddy sludge of inundated rice paddies. Brooding over the brownish mess were five jungle-packed ridges that comprised the various toes of the foot. “The ridges and valleys were covered with thick interwoven vines, rocks, crevices, along with leeches and snakes,” Captain Robert McMahon, one of the rifle company commanders, wrote.

  Colonel Moore devised a new way to ferret out the hard-core survivors of the Sao Vang Division. He air-assaulted all three of his battalions into the area. Some established company-sized ambushes “astride probable enemy escape routes in the valley fingers [ridges].” The rest of his brigade landed at LZ Bird, right at the hub of the valley, and established a firebase there from which the infantry then proceeded to “act as the ‘beater’ force, attacking out of the valley forcing the enemy towards the ambush sites.” He called this new approach Hunter Killer. By now, the Americans were beginning to understand how predictable their loud, ostentatious helicopter insertions were to the enemy (that was probably one reason for the heavy enemy presence at LZ-4). So, during the Crow’s Foot insertions, helicopter crews carried out many mock landings to confuse the enemy on the whereabouts of the rifle companies.

  Moore’s concept worked well. Almost immediately, the troopers clashed with the communists. Nearly every company was involved in firefights, often against platoon-sized groups of VC. In just a couple days, they had killed two hundred VC, captured several weapons caches, and overran a base camp, a hospital, and a grenade factory. Documents captured in the base camp revealed the location of a VC main force battalion staging area near the village of Hon Mot. Lieutenant Colonel McDade airlifted his B and C Companies near Hon Mot, just two and a half miles southeast of LZ Bird.

  On the morning of February 15, Captain Myron Diduryk’s B Company found the VC. His 2nd Platoon was moving through a rice paddy just outside of Hon Mot when they came under heavy small-arms and mortar fire. They took cover behind paddy dikes and returned fire. The experience of doing this was terrifying and nauseating. As enemy bullets snapped around them and splashed into the rancid paddy water, the grunts kept low, while propping their rifles and machine guns atop the muddy dikes to fire back. Everyone was wet, filthy, and rife with the fecal, moldy stench of the paddy. At first Captain Diduryk thought he was up against a VC platoon. Actually, he was facing two companies dug in along a jungle-covered embankment and hillside.

  Diduryk had fought in the Ia Drang battle so he had a firsthand understanding of how effective American firepower could be in this kind of pitched battle. As his mortar crews pounded the enemy-held embankment, Diduryk’s artillery forward observer called down 105-millimeter fire from tubes at nearby LZ Bird. “In the left sector of the 2d Platoon,” Diduryk wrote, “artillery fire was brought to within 25 meters of friendly troops due to proximity of the enemy.” The howitzer shells exploded up and down the length of the VC line. Air strikes from helicopter gunships firing rockets and A-1E Skyraiders dropping cluster bombs eventually followed. Under cover of this awesome array of weaponry, four Hueys swooped in to resupply B Company with mortar and small-arms ammunition.

  Captain Diduryk planned an all-out assault, led by his 3rd Platoon, for the minute the bombardment lifted. Sure enough, at the appointed moment, his grunts rose up and went forward. They even had their bayonets fixed. “The platoon moved forward in determined, rapid and well-coordinated bounds employing the technique of fire and movement,” the captain recalled. Infused with adrenaline, they soon began advancing at a dead run, screaming “like madmen” in the recollection of one soldier. This combination of posturing and aggressiveness overwhelmed the entrenched Viet Cong. As the 3rd Platoon soldiers approached them, firing deadly volleys from their rifles, the enemy soldiers broke and ran. As they did so, they exposed themselves to fire from the 2nd Platoon, which was still hunkered down in the rice paddy. Then, Captain Diduryk sent in his 1st Platoon, adding to the rout. Hollering groups of grunts spotted the fleeing VC and mowed them down. “The enemy was on the run,” the captain commented. Those VC who stood and fought were slaughtered by the B Company soldiers. Many of those who took off, usually in groups of three or four, came under saturating fire from hovering helicopter gunships. The whole experience must have been awful beyond description for them—dodging the u
biquitous American fire, seeing comrades tattered by bullets or torn apart by shrapnel, fleeing from blood-crazed gun-toting Americans who were twice their size.

  In two hours of one-sided fighting, two VC companies ceased to exist. Diduryk’s grunts counted 57 enemy bodies and estimated, on a fairly sound basis, that they had probably inflicted another 150 casualties on the VC (counting wounded who escaped and bodies that were not found). “VC bodies were piled near a bunker,” one soldier later wrote. “Some were missing limbs and heads. Others were burnt, facial skin drawn back into fierce, grotesque screams. [The grunts] were policing the dead for weapons and piling what they found in a growing heap. Most were smiling with victory. Wood smoke from the hootches mixed with the stench of burnt hair and flesh.”

  The company also captured four VC, including Lieutenant Colonel Dowwng Doan, the battalion commander. The thirty-seven-year-old Doan was a professional to the core. He had joined the Viet Minh in 1949 and had spent several years fighting the French. When Colonel Moore later interrogated him, he looked the American commander right in the eye and said through an interpreter: “You will never win.” Doan firmly believed that his side would wear down the Americans as they had worn down the French. “He was a hardcore Viet Cong,” Colonel Moore commented. “He was tough. He was not frightened a bit. I admired this guy for his absolute strength of spirit.” He also respected him as a fellow military professional.