They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Radioman Frank McMeel, another of the former C Packet troops, got stuck behind a clump of bushes that offered less protection by the minute, the once-leafy branches pruned by withering enemy fire. Every time he moved, the wood-chipped ground in front of him was sprayed by fire from brush to his right. His uniform became covered with sawdust. The first thump McMeel felt was a joke; a bullet had gone through his C-rations and sent spiced beef flying. “Someone shot my fuckin’ lunch,” he said to his buddy, Donnie Hodges. Then McMeel looked down at his T-shirt and saw blood and realized that he had been hit too, though he was too numb to feel it. He was shot again. And a third time. All became a blur around him. He fell back against his heavy radio and thought to himself, Three strikes so far and I’m lucky I’m still here. Better not get hit a fourth time.

  Specialist Four Mike Troyer had been lighting a cigarette when the firefight intensified. He was near the battalion command post, where he had just undertaken an unfinished effort to evacuate the wounded Captain Blackwell. He and Joe Lovato, the company medic, had placed Blackwell on a stretcher and had started to move out when an officer said they should bring Blackwell back to the command area. The fighting might be over; the captain could be evacuated later, they were told. After leaving the prone Blackwell north of Allen and the anthill, Troyer took his position on the flank, lit his cigarette, and came under fire. He found cover behind another anthill, sharing it with a humble private with the august military name of Colonel Fett. Troyer crouched on the left side of the anthill, in the shade. Private Colonel Fett was on the right side, in the sunlight. Troyer avoided enemy fire. Fett took a bullet in the shoulder. Most of the men getting hit were in the sunlight, Troyer noticed. He rose to his knees and ripped open Fett’s shirt. He had a hard time finding the hole. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be, Troyer thought, because the bullet had entered but never come out. He finally found the wound, started to patch it, and yelled for a medic. Here came Doc Gomez, the second platoon’s aidman. Gomez jumped on Troyer and pushed him facedown into the mulched earth. “You damn fool! What are you trying to do, get killed?” Gomez said, worried that Troyer had made himself an easy target. Then he pulled Fett into the shade and began working on him.

  To his left Troyer saw Melesso Garcia behind a log, gesturing. It seemed that Garcia wanted to say something. He turned on his side and pushed his body up with one hand—and at that moment was shot. A look came over his face that Troyer had not seen before. For two days Garcia had been haunted by premonitions that he should not be out there, and now the realization of his foreboding registered on his face. Troyer had never been hit. He wondered what it would feel like. He could only imagine from Melesso Garcia’s silent expression of horror.

  Tom Colburn was also on the right flank, taking cover behind an anthill, where he had been hiding since the shooting began. He had been “scared shitless” the entire time. His buddies joked that Baby-san was so thin he could disappear behind a bamboo reed, and the anthill seemed to be doing the job now, but his fortunate position brought its own measure of psychological torment. Only a few meters away on the jungle floor another Delta soldier was caught in the sunlight, exposed to a tree sniper. “Colburn! Colburn!” the man yelled when he was hit. Then he was hit again and their eyes met and Colburn could see the look of desperation. The soldier, crying for help, tried to crawl from the line of fire. Each time he moved, he was shot. Five shots. Six. What should Colburn do? The noble response, he thought, would be to leave the anthill and try to pull his comrade to safety. But he could not force himself do it. It would only lead to his own death, he thought. “Charlie wanted you to go out there so he could kill you too.” So Colburn stayed behind the anthill, haunted, as the wounded buddy called his name. He felt helpless, guilty, protecting his own ass, guys dying all around him. He was only eighteen, but he “got old real quick.”

  To the rear on the right flank Greg Landon, the Professor, had taken off his PRC-25 radio and was trying to unjam his squad leader’s faulty M-16 when he got shot in the back. Like Troyer and most Delta infantrymen who had come to Vietnam on the USNS Pope three months earlier, Landon had never been shot before and did not know how it would feel. It was just a thud, and he remained conscious and kept moving. A machine-gun bullet from the south had grazed his back, cutting through his skin in a long, ugly, but superficial slice. Reynolds Lonefight crawled over and tried to patch him with bandages, but it was “like trying to put a hamburger bun over a plate of spaghetti.” Lonefight had discarded two faulty weapons already, first his M-79 and then an M-16 that jammed on his fourth magazine, and now he took Landon’s rifle and started covering the right flank. A claymore mine went off and sent shrapnel flying into his wrist, hip, and leg. Nearby, another grenadier, Robert Jensen, saw a soldier from Alpha running toward them with no weapon, no shirt, and no helmet, screaming, “Get me out of here!” It appeared as though medics had worked on this soldier’s wound-ravaged body once already. He had been hit in the groin, chest, arms, testicles, and right leg and was bleeding badly. Jensen jumped up, stopped the man, placed him against a tree, gave him water, and started to bandage him. Landon crawled over to help.

  At their makeshift assembly point to the southeast, Top Valdez and his weary band of Alpha survivors decided to withdraw. Captain George had wanted to hold there until he had collected all of his men, but with machine guns spraying around him and with friendly fire coming closer every minute, it became clear that if they stayed any longer, casualties would only increase. In the turmoil of the moment, rank mattered little, and it fell to Michael Arias, a private, to calculate the way out. They had come down on a 180 and so they would return on a 360-degree azimuth, he said. He read the compass and pointed the way. The order spread around the perimeter and through the woods: Three sixty! Three sixty! Valdez, afraid of being overrun, had sent security teams to his left and right flanks; he now tried to call them in for the withdrawal. Privates Fitzgerald and Hargrove, who had been sent to the east flank, had not come back when the Alpha group started moving. Doc Hinger could not find them. Ernie Buentiempo saw a claymore mine exploding over where they might have been, but no one knew for sure. Goodtimes took Arias’s machete and started hacking a trail back, and the ragged line of withdrawal began, slowly, with two fit soldiers needed to carry each wounded one.

  Pinky Durham, Delta’s artillery forward observer, had been stationed near the battalion commander, where the firefight was most intense. His radiotelephone operator, Jim Gilliam, saw a rocket grenade explode nearby, knocking Durham down. Durham’s glasses dangled from his left ear. He tried to hook them on and they dangled from his right ear. Someone on the other end of the radio wanted to stop the artillery fire again to bring in more air, but Durham, with Welch on his side, vehemently disagreed. “No,” he said. “Hold that air strike. Keep sending us artillery. It’s what I need. I know what I need.” Then Durham took off, heading for the Alpha front, where he thought he could be more effective since the Alpha observer was wounded. He left without his radioman, telling Gilliam to stay near the battalion command. Durham moved the artillery fire to the eastern edge of the battlefield for a brief spell, hoping the Black Lions could use the time to gather up their wounded. Then he started moving back toward Delta and was hit again.

  On the other end of the radio Sergeant Calvin Moore, an artillery liaison man at the fire base near Chon Thanh, noticed that Durham’s transmissions were growing weaker. His voice “no longer sounded natural” and sometimes faded away altogether. High above the battlefield, an airborne observer in a helicopter urged Durham on by his call sign. Please, ninety-three, old boy, just tell me right or left. I know where you are. Durham kept calling in the fire closer to his own position. Shell fragments were now splattering over the Black Lions, but bringing the artillery in that close was the only way to deal with an enemy that was hugging them by the belt. “I can’t see it, but it sounds good, bring it closer,” Durham told Sergeant Moore. Delta’s first sergeant, Bud Barrow, stationed near a t
ree a few meters away, had been knocked out by a rocket-propelled grenade. When he came to, he saw Durham straining to lift himself slightly and get a message to Barrow. “Top!” Durham shouted to him, using the nickname for any first sergeant. He pointed toward two enemy soldiers advancing with AK-47s. As Durham fell, mortally wounded, Barrow turned and fired. Pinky’s last word had saved his life.

  While many around him were ducking for cover, Clark Welch remained on his feet. Since Alpha’s command was knocked out early in the fight, he had been working with Durham to call in artillery fire. He had wanted more artillery support from the beginning, and now he was calling in all that he could. He was also “shooting like a madman.” He killed one rocket-propelled grenade gunner with his .45 and shot another sniper out of a tree. The body didn’t fall this time, just a waterfall of blood. At first Welch stood up so that he could see the action. With his men taking cover behind anthills, tree stumps, and bushes, he felt that he should maintain a wider view of the battle as it unfolded and redistribute ammunition and weapons to men in need. For a brief time the battle seemed like Clark Welch against an entire regiment. It was not long before he was hit. The first bullet pierced his back and cut between two ribs, causing a sucking chest wound. If he leaned over, he could not breathe. If he stood straight, he could breathe. So he stood during the battle, his uniform drenched in blood. Men were moaning all around him. He estimated that fifty percent of his company was down by then, dead or wounded. He made his way through the clutter of fallen soldiers inside the battalion command area and checked on Captain Blackwell, still prone and woozy on the abandoned stretcher. Blackwell said something and Welch tried to lean over, and as soon as he moved, the bullets came in, ripping into Blackwell, killing him.

  A battle is riddled with inexplicable events, odd twists of fate determining who will live and who will die. Blackwell might have lived had he been evacuated earlier, and now, at the moment he was killed, Welch was by far the easier target, standing there with his chest wound, stiff and dazed. Yet the shooter for some reason aimed down at Blackwell.

  People passed through the forest as if in a dream. There were Captain George and Top Valdez and the Alpha command group, stumbling in and out of the shadows, hacking their way back toward the NDP. Other soldiers filtered north in ones and twos. A helluva lot fewer going back than came out, Joe Costello thought to himself as he joined the ragtag line. He was perhaps halfway out when he heard someone say that there were still many soldiers huddling near the battle front who needed help. The news stopped him. He had to go back. He had to turn around and find the soldiers left behind. He did not feel careless or daring. He wanted nothing more than to get home to his parents and girlfriend waiting on Long Island. But something told him to return to the battlefield. Later he would dismiss his decision as guilt avoidance, a way to prevent “having bad feelings for a long time.” It was self-serving, he would say. It was Catholic, he would say. But mostly it was the instinctive response of one of many brave men on both sides of the battlefield that day. As soon as Private Costello turned around, another feeling washed over him. He felt numb, confident. He was overcome by a sensation that he would live and that this moment would shape how he felt about himself the rest of his life.

  Another soldier joined Costello for the return trip. As they passed men going the other way, eyes met, but there was no conversation. Nothing to be said. Most of those retreating north were wounded. Even though Costello felt protected, his trip to the front was perilous. Fire was still coming from both flanks. And he was without a weapon. He had gone through four already during the battle and figured he could find another along the way. The jungle floor was strewn with discarded rifles. On his return trip he passed the battalion command area and encountered Lieutenant Colonel Allen. The commander was seated near the anthill. Captain Blackwell was dead. One of the radiotelephone operators was dead. Sergeant Major Dowling was wounded. There was chatter on the radio. Allen seemed to be in control, though his face looked shell-shocked. Where’s your weapon? Costello was asked. Don’t have one now. I’ll get one, he said. Someone gave him a short, snazzy Car-15, and Costello tucked it under his arm and moved on.

  Raymond Phillips was behind another anthill nearby, watching. He was Sergeant Barrow’s radiotelephone operator but had been separated from the Delta first sergeant in the every-man-for-himself moments after the Viet Cong unleashed their second attack. He saw Lieutenant Welch get hit in the shoulder. Then he saw a round of antitank rocket-propelled grenades explode near the battalion command post, killing the already wounded Sergeant Dowling and striking Terry Allen in the face. Phillips saw “blood everywhere.” Allen stared at the dead sergeant major, then gazed silently at Phillips. He “looked numb.” From his position on the battalion command’s right flank, Mike Troyer also noticed blood streaming down the side of Allen’s face. But it seemed to Troyer that “there was still a lot of fight in him.” Pasquale Tizzio, one of Allen’s radiotelephone operators, was sprawled facedown with part of his shoulder ripped off. “I want to get this radio off him,” Allen said. He stepped around Tizzio and straddled him with the body between his legs and started to pull the radio off. At that moment Troyer heard an AK-47 and saw Allen hit the ground.

  Welch passed through again on his way north to his rear Delta platoon. He glanced over and saw that Dowling was dead, battalion operations sergeant Eugene Plier was dead, the radioman was dead. Allen was “covered with blood,” working the radio, talking to officers in the air above. Allen saw Welch and yelled out orders: Start getting your company out of here. Move back on a 360!

  Welch found his medic, Doc Lovato, and instructed him to come forward and assist the battalion commander. Lovato said, “Yes, sir,” started crawling toward Allen with his big aid bag, and was killed. “Heavy machine-gun fire killed him,” Welch would remember. “Boom, boom, boom.” “God damn, lieutenant, whenever you go out, guys get hurt,” Lovato had said the morning before, explaining why he was heading into the jungle with two stretchers. The medic had meant it as a rugged compliment. Hurt, yes, but not killed. Men wanted to fight for Welch because they knew they would see action but return alive. He had tried to keep them out of this mess but had not prevailed, and now they were dying—boom, boom, boom—and Lovato himself was gone.

  Upright and hurting, Welch kept moving. He found Lieutenant Luberda near the rear. We’re moving back on a 360, he said. If nothing else, don’t let them get around to the north of us. It was a few minutes after noon now, the battle almost two hours old. Welch found shelter behind another anthill. There was a ten-yard clearing that he wanted to cross. Halfway to the other side, he was hit, this time in the arm. Machine-gun fire ripped through him with such power a biceps flew out and fell to the ground, a piece of muscle wriggling like a hooked fish. He looked down and thought, what the hell is that? He assumed a biceps muscle would be red, but it was blue. Scott Down—company radioman Paul D. Scott—came up, removed C-ration tins from a sock, and used the sock as a tourniquet on Welch’s arm. Blood was still gushing out of the bullet hole. Welch was beyond pain now, just numb. He was having difficulty breathing. It helped to stand erect, but he was too tired to stand any longer. He slumped down behind a tree and passed out briefly. I’m not going to die, he told himself as he drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point he came to and in the haze thought he saw Sergeant Barrow pointing a machine gun directly at him and firing. In fact Barrow aimed slightly above Welch and killed a Viet Cong soldier who was trying to remove the lieutenant’s shoulder strap. I know I’m not going to die.

  At the Delta front Peter Miller’s M-16 jammed. He “hated the damn rifle,” especially compared to the M-14 that he had trained with at Fort Polk. But in this situation he was not sure what good the weapon was doing him anyway, even when it worked. He had been firing away at his flank since the second round of the firefight began, yet in all that time he had not seen a single enemy soldier. He could sense movement, but that was all. As the battle wore on, he experien
ced a sensation common to many soldiers that day. He knew that there were other men out there, yet he felt “absolutely totally alone and hopeless in the whole freaking world.” At some point he looked around and it seemed that everyone was gone, so he started moving back. There were dead bodies to his left and right as he crawled north. He found a wounded machine gunner from his platoon and started to take out his aid pack to treat him, but an explosion knocked him to the ground and tore the machine gunner in half. This was friendly fire, he determined; they were being shelled by the American artillery. Miller crawled forward and found an abandoned radio and started pushing it until he found the battalion frequency. He hugged the ground, his arms outstretched in front of him toward the radio. Another explosion, and Miller was hit, a hunk of shrapnel ripping through the earth and into his right arm.

  Miller’s platoon leader, Lieutenant Stroup, at that time estimated that he had only five to eight men who were not casualties. From radio reports he had heard that his battalion commander was wounded and his company commander had been shot. Welch, struggling to keep conscious, had called and told Stroup to leave on a 360. “We’re getting the hell out of here,” Stroup said to his platoon sergeant, George A. Smith, and his radiotelephone operator, David Laub. They started moving back, every soldier “crawling more or less on his own,” a few inches at a time. On the way, as he encountered more soldiers, Stroup passed the word about the 360. He came to an area where many of the wounded had been treated, just in front of the battalion command area. The machine-gun fire seemed fiercest there. The Viet Cong were zeroing in on the wounded. Unarmed and unconscious soldiers were being hit a second, third, fourth time. Sergeant Barrow witnessed it and could not clear his mind of the savage tableau—the bodies “bouncing up and down” as rounds hit them.