Legend

by Eric Blehm

  The closer northern thicket was about thirty yards away. Mousseau and his half of the team would dash across the PZ, then provide cover fire as Wright’s team skirted the northern thicket and took cover in the southern thicket with the anthill. Mousseau’s team would also have a field of fire into the edge of the trees where much of the noise was coming from, and Wright’s team could lay a field of fire through the open meadow and roadway intersection where they had previously encountered the NVA.

  Mousseau and five CIDG, including Bao, entered the clearing and reached the first thicket without incident, where they set up a defensive perimeter. On Mousseau’s go-ahead, Wright’s team moved out through the thigh- to waist-high grass, hunched over, and running in a staggered-trail formation. They were short of the second thicket, just beginning to slow their sprint to a trot, when the jungle to their front exploded with automatic AK-47 fire and the slower pounding of a heavy machine gun, the type mounted on a tripod. No first signal shot had been fired, no command had been heard—the team just ran headlong into a wall of steel. One or more bullets slammed into Wright, stopping him in his tracks. He stumbled, spun around, and collided with O’Connor, who took a round to his left wrist as they went down together.

  Beside and behind them, two CIDG took multiple hits and crumpled into the grass, twitching as bullets continued to pound their bodies. Tuan and Chien were flat to the ground but still visible. Wright felt his shoulder and his leg and gave a thumbs-up to O’Connor, who applied a hasty tourniquet to his own wrist as gunfire continued to pour in on them—obviously coming from over the top of the waist-high anthill some fifteen yards ahead.

  “We gotta move,” said Wright. “Let’s go! Get to the hill!” A few feet into their mad scramble, another concentrated strafing hit them and Wright’s body bounced and jerked.

  O’Connor crawled up beside Wright, who was flat on his back, and asked where he was hit.

  “I don’t know,” Wright said. “I can’t move my legs. I can’t feel them.”

  A hit to the back or spine, thought O’Connor. He glanced over at Chien and Tuan, whose eyes showed no fear, but beckoned for an order—or word from the man with the radio that help was on the way. Says O’Connor, “Although far from being out of ammo, we had expended a lot and the enemy could access an endless supply…and was out of sight. Was help on the way? We thought so. Would some of us be sipping an evening brew while mourning our losses? Nobody knew for sure.”

  What O’Connor did know was that shock was setting in on Wright; there was no outrunning that beast, and this was not the place to treat their wounds. They had to get Wright to the anthill.

  “Leroy, are your arms working?” asked O’Connor, whose left hand and forearm were in severe pain and barely functional. “Can you still hold your AK?”

  “Yeah,” Wright responded. “Roll me over. Help me up.”

  Putting his hand against Wright’s chest to block his attempt to rise, O’Connor said, “You gotta stay down. Hold on, we’ll get you going.”

  He motioned Tuan over and handed Wright the translator’s AK-47. “We’re going to pick you up and move, but you’ve got to hold our weapons. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Wright. “It’s good.”

  O’Connor grabbed Wright under his left shoulder with his good right arm while Tuan did the same on his right. Chien made sure Wright held the weapons secure and then rose up from the grass and yelled, “Go, go, go!” He fired into the tree line with his AK-47 on full automatic, covering what was a five- to ten-second pick-up-and-go as Tuan and O’Connor half carried, half dragged Wright. Bullets slapped the ground and snapped through the grass overhead, in front of, and behind them—a hail of lead.

  Then they were all lying flat beside Wright, behind the meager anthill, panting, mouths open and eyes wide. Back where they’d come from, O’Connor could see the two dead CIDG sprawled in the trail of flattened grass, bullets thudding repeatedly as they continued to hit their bodies.

  Looking away from the dead men, O’Connor needed only to point for Chien and Tuan to position themselves so that the four men made a ragged four-cornered defensive position using the anthill and thicket of trees, as well as their rucksacks, for cover. They watched as squads of NVA rushed from the jungle into the clearing and dropped, disappearing into the grass. Automatic-weapons fire intensified from positions within the tree line, covering enemy soldiers as they crept toward the team’s two locations. In return, the team laid down consistent fire into the grass.

  O’Connor nudged Wright up a bit onto the slope of the anthill and pointed out fields of fire to him. Wright’s rucksack remained on, which helped him to stay propped in a semi-seated position. He had carried the boxlike PRC-25 radio inside the top of his pack, which wasn’t unusual for a team leader to do, even with an experienced commo man on his team. “Just set me up good,” Wright said as O’Connor lined up extra magazines of ammunition at his side, then slid his own rucksack off to access his medical gear.

  The bullet that went through O’Connor’s wrist had shattered bone and torn muscles and tendons, but the bleeding was kept under control with a tourniquet fashioned from a stout branch he found on the ground of the thicket. He tore Wright’s shirt open to look for wounds, and Wright grabbed the bandage from O’Connor’s hand and said, “I got it; I just gotta find it. Everything is numb.”

  There were some lulls in the incoming gunfire, and in those moments of quiet O’Connor heard “an increased crackle of branches and limbs and movement behind the tree line,” but there was no attack, which was “eerie,” he says. “The NVA seemed to be going about their business without too much concern.” A few volleys from weapons, including machine guns, continued, and from where they were hitting the ground, O’Connor could tell the enemy was also firing from up in the trees, from the south and southwest down toward their position behind the anthill and through them to Mousseau’s position in the northern thicket.

  Certain help was on the way, O’Connor’s main concern now was making contact with the FAC or C&C slick—neither of which he could see overhead. He passed Wright the handset and powered up the radio. Wright made repeated attempts, then gave it back to O’Connor. “I can’t get through,” he said. “It’s all garbled—I don’t think it’s English; they’re jamming us. Can the NVA do that?”

  Listening in, O’Connor quickly identified the problem. “Two, three, or four people in the air were trying to talk at the same time on a radio system designed for only one voice to be heard at a time,” he says. “I picked up hints and bits of a conversation; some crisis was in play.” Knowing his attempts to join the conversation would only add to the garble, O’Connor asked Wright to continue listening, wait for a break, and try to jump in.

  The volume of enemy fire increased again, and squads of NVA began to assemble in the field. The gunfire from the two thickets took them down, one at a time.

  Wright and Chien were covering the tree line, Tuan and O’Connor, the open PZ, when a thunderous roar of firepower erupted, hinting to O’Connor that there was a commander out there coordinating the enemy movements. They pressed themselves against the ground, and during a slight lull O’Connor heard Mousseau call out, “I’m hit!”

  A group of at least eight NVA broke from the edge of the clearing and charged Mousseau’s position, supported by at least two heavy automatic-weapons crews. O’Connor, Wright, and Tuan shifted fire and raked into the NVA with both AK-47 fire and M-79 grenades, perfectly aimed by Chien.

  Mad Dog Three and Four roared overhead with fast, low-level passes that scattered and dropped many of the NVA soldiers who had moved into the open. Wright gave O’Connor a thumbs-up. He’d gotten through to somebody on the gunship and directed them to the areas where the enemy fire was strongest. Rockets from the helicopters exploded in the trees, but the enemy continued to maneuver forward in far greater numbers now.

  —

&nbs
p; A COUPLE thousand feet overhead, Tornow could hear the incredible volume of gunfire over the radio and knew the situation on the ground was dire. Then he heard the report that Mad Dog One had gone down somewhere to the east.

  Taking his Bird Dog Cessna into a shallow dive for a closer look, Tornow was dismayed by the number of NVA converging on the team’s position. Everywhere he looked, there were green uniforms, around two hundred fifty NVA visible in the PZ. It was impossible to tell how many were in the surrounding jungle, but it was obvious that this was not just a patrol: this was an enemy base camp.

  Taking a deep breath, Tornow took quick stock of the facts. Mousseau had managed to report that two of the original twelve team members were dead and three were seriously wounded. That left seven men against all those he could see—and likely double or triple that number. Enemy vehicles were arriving on all visible roads to bolster the siege.

  The first extraction attempt had narrowly escaped disaster, with two slicks limping back to base and six of the eight crewmen critically wounded. One gunship had been shot down and was in enemy-occupied territory. The other was too shot up to fly. It was as bad as Tornow had ever seen it for a team, probably “as bad as it gets,” he later told a friend.

  “In an impulsive reaction,” Tornow proceeded to risk his career by breaking the explicit rules of engagement. “I turned my radio to the international emergency frequency and called, ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Any fighters in the area, I need anything I can get. Vector ten miles southwest of Loc Ninh. I need to put you in immediately. Troops in heavy contact. This is a Daniel Boone tactical emergency.’ ”

  This “Daniel Boone tactical emergency” or “TAC-E” was a coded distress call that cut in on all radio frequencies across Vietnam. It meant that a team was about to be overrun, and it summoned all available aircraft to converge immediately, especially “fast movers” such as jet fighters and tactical bombers—which were forbidden to cross into Cambodia, even in support of teams that were in heavy or overwhelming contact. What Tornow had just requested in order to save the team had all the makings of an international border incident, and maybe even a court-martial.

  “I repeat,” Tornow continued to call out over the radio, “this is a Daniel Boone tactical emergency.”

  —

  AROUND 1:30 p.m. on May 2, Sergeant Roy Benavidez awoke in a steam bath known as the Hilton—a sandbag-and-canvas-walled, dirt-floored tent designated for “visiting campers” at the Loc Ninh Special Forces camp. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat.

  Having worked a late shift the night before—monitoring a team that had been inserted near the border at dusk—Roy had no orders for the day and would have slept longer but for the heat. He rose from his cot, pulled on his fatigues, jungle boots, and bush hat, and tightened his belt, which held his sheathed SOG recon knife with its eight-inch blade. Then he stepped outside, his mind set on coffee and chow. Whatever culinary surprise awaited him would be doused with a dozen drops from the bottle of Tabasco sauce he always kept in a pocket of his pants.

  Roy walked away from the barracks, easing out the stiffness in his body, residual pain from his first-tour wounds. “Mind over matter,” he liked to say. “If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” He paused when he saw a chaplain, Bible in hands, sharing the Gospel with a group of men who had gathered in front of a makeshift altar: a white cloth spread across the hood of a jeep. At its center was a small cross.

  Removing his hat, Roy made the sign of the cross and listened to the sermon: no matter what trials they might be confronted with, God would always be beside them.

  “Amen,” Roy said as the service ended. He crossed himself again, and the chaplain said, “May the peace of God be with you.”

  Roy saluted him, as he often did chaplains, regardless of rank, turned, and continued his journey to the mess hall. He’d only made it a few more steps when two pilots carrying flight helmets burst from a side trail onto the path, running toward the helicopter pads. He changed direction to the tactical operations center, where he found a Special Forces radioman he recognized sitting alone at a desk, dwarfed by the equipment before him.

  “What’s going on?” Roy asked.

  “Heavy contact in Daniel Boone,” the radioman said with a forlorn look. He flipped a switch, and Roy heard the discord of battle from a small speaker that buzzed with static: the sharp, repeated crack of rifle fire, the muffled impact of explosions, and, most unnerving, the cursing and urgent calls for air support and extraction.

  “Who is it?”

  “Don’t know,” said the radioman, “but they’re catching hell out there.”

  Hurrying from the tent, Roy climbed the embankment onto the tarmac and headed to the group of uniformed soldiers and airmen huddled around a radio and keeping watch on the western horizon.

  “A team is taking a beating,” a crewman explained to him. “Two slicks got shot up trying to pull them out. Lost a gunship, and they’re trying to pull that crew out now. The FAC called a Daniel Boone TAC-E on the guard channel—I never heard anybody call that before. It’s bad.”

  “Any idea who it is?”

  The crewman shook his head. Daniel Boone meant Cambodia, and if it was Cambodia, then it was likely somebody from B-56. They were all his fellow Special Forces brothers, and Roy hated hearing they were in it that bad, but knowing “who” it was meant that he could add specific names to the prayers he was repeating in his head.

  Nine miles to the west, the two split teams continued to get hammered by the concentrated small-arms fire and RPGs that whooshed in from the jungle wall to the south—some sailing overhead, some exploding as they hit trees—and to the north, where the cart path began to cross through the PZ. It was not a cross fire, but if the NVA continued to push to the east on both sides of the clearing, the teams would be flanked. Through the hail of fire, they had to resist the urge to return fire unless they had a clear and lethal shot. Ammunition had become too precious.

  A half-dozen NVA rose from the grass and ran toward the southern thicket, their AK-47s chattering on full automatic, and Wright, O’Connor, and Tuan aimed from the perimeter they had formed behind the sloping shoulders of the anthill and took them down. The men dropped in the grass a few yards away.

  Two stick grenades simultaneously flew through the air toward their position. The lower one landed directly in front of Wright, who leaned forward, grabbed it, and threw it back. The grenade exploded before hitting the ground, peppering them with burning hot shrapnel. The second came in on a high arc, accompanied by shouts of “Grenade!” in both English and Vietnamese. The high toss meant it had been timed to explode at any second, depending on how long the NVA had held it after pulling its pin.

  O’Connor watched it land in the middle of their tiny perimeter, almost hitting Chien. “Get down!” Wright yelled, and then, says O’Connor, “Leroy rolled himself over, and in a heroic but futile attempt, he tried to move and pull himself toward the device. He reached for it with an outstretched arm, but it was just beyond his grasp.”

  In a flash of movement, Chien scrambled toward the grenade, outstretched his leg while lying on his side, and kicked it a yard or two away—but not far enough. It had been an expert toss from the enemy.

  The grenade exploded “in a brown-gray cloud,” says O’Connor. “Wright’s legs flew into the air and Chien sailed upward with an arched back, while on the periphery Tuan lifted and began a lateral roll.” Almost immediately upon hitting the ground Tuan and Chien were up on their knees firing in the direction the grenades had come from. All four men were wounded from the blast, but “Wright was the worst of the lot because of his proximity to the grenade. If Chien had not kicked it away, Wright would have been decapitated. As it was, his wounds were severe. I thought he was dead.”

  Rising to his knees, O’Connor joined Tuan and Chien, firing over Wright’s body, then he crawled toward Wright to retrieve the radio, “but
the twisted and tangled straps of his gear and his body position posed problems. I rolled him on his stomach, reached for my boot knife to cut the straps—and he moved, and not a small twist or a lift of the head.”

  Though his body was torn up from grenade fragments, his clothing bloody and shredded, Wright rose up on his elbows and asked for his weapon.

  At that instant another grenade sailed over O’Connor’s head and exploded out of lethal range, and a familiar voice shouted, “Get down! Get down!” Mousseau had left his position in the northern thicket with a CIDG at his side. Seriously wounded, with a bandage or a dressing on his head and face, he limped forward toward the southern thicket. He chucked a grenade and dove for the dirt still yelling, “Down! Get down low!” As it exploded, Mousseau and the CIDG sprayed a burst of fire over O’Connor, Wright, and Tuan, and the enemy grenades temporarily stopped coming.

  Crawling toward the body of a CIDG, Mousseau grabbed the shoulder-fired light anti-tank weapon that was strapped to the dead man’s rucksack, and headed back to the northern thicket, leaving a trail of blood in the matted grass. Wright—who was fading in and out of consciousness—shouldered his AK-47 and joined O’conner and Tuan as they covered Mousseau. At the same time, O’Connor was on the radio, ready to coordinate air support. Instead he was dismayed to hear segments of a heated conversation—Major James on the C&C slick berating the Special Forces major for not pulling the team out earlier, when they’d first made contact. While the major defended his decision, saying he had direct orders to keep the team on the ground, the FAC, Tornow, was unable to break into the argument that was jamming the public channel instead of going on over the onboard intercom.