They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  The key point for Albin’s platoon came when Welch, with a sense of urgency, called for his mortars, but Major Sloan, citing division policy, countermanded the request. The Delta mortar men, in the gun holes, eager to support their company, were ordered to hold fire. At the time, in the heat of the moment, Sloan did not elaborate. He explained later that he was acting on previous standing orders from above, coming all the way down from Major General Hay, the division commander. There had been “some bad luck” with mortars—“several misfortunes of mortars firing on our own troops,” Sloan said, and this made the ever-cautious Hay “reluctant to use mortar support” when soldiers were maneuvering in the jungle. Several months earlier, when Lieutenant Welch was teaching his new soldiers how to maneuver in a firefight with mortar and claymore explosions going off to their front and sides, he had been chewed out by an officious staff officer for ignoring division safety regulations. Welch had responded that he was trying to prepare his men for the realities of battle. He had won the argument that time, but now, when it counted, he could not get the mortars. As it turned out, Sloan in fact sympathized with Welch and disagreed with division policy, believing that mortars were “much more responsive than close artillery support,” but he upheld the order as it came down to him.

  The mortar dispute at the time seemed minor to Sloan. Of greater concern, early in the battle, were the conversations he was overhearing on the radio of Lieutenant Colonel Allen on the ground talking to Colonel Newman in the air.

  The relationship between the brigade and battalion commanders had been somewhat uncomfortable from the time the Black Lions headed out to the Long Nguyen Secret Zone for the start of Operation Shenandoah II. As Sloan saw it, Allen preferred deploying smaller and lighter units, usually single companies, on search-and-destroy missions, with the battalion commander in the air coordinating artillery support, while Newman believed in sending out two companies at a time with the battalion commander on the ground. Now Sloan could sense a tension between Newman and Allen over the use of air strikes. He heard Newman tell Allen that he was check-firing the artillery and wanted to put in six air strikes. Allen did not like the idea and tried to disagree. He wanted the artillery support to continue. As Sloan interpreted the discussion, he sensed that Allen “was forced into…I shouldn’t say forced, but his better judgment told him not to accept the decision. However, he was told by a superior officer and without agreeing, he accepted it.”

  First Lieutenant Lester T. Scott Jr., an aerial observer for First Division artillery, was also witness to the check-fire dispute. His version corroborated Sloan’s, with additional detail. Scott, who maintained contact during the battle with Pinky Durham, Delta Company’s artillery observer on the ground, said that he was ordered by the brigade commander, Colonel Newman, to check-fire artillery for an air strike. He heard Terry Allen try to cancel the check-fire, but “the answer was negative.” Pinky Durham was “begging for artillery because the VC rate of fire was increasing,” Scott reported, but “the check-fire was in effect for more than thirty minutes before the air got there. Then the air went in about six hundred meters to Durham’s west.” The battalion made another request to bring in artillery, but again they were denied. Finally, according to Scott, Durham and the Black Lions were “being hit so hard there was no alternative but to fire the artillery.” But by then, he said, the check-fire had “lasted long enough for the VC to regroup for an overwhelming attack.” It was indeed during that crucial period that Vo Minh Triet brought up his reserve battalion to seal the three-sided attack.

  It was also during that period that many of the Delta and Alpha soldiers on the ground wondered why they were not pulling back to the NDP. Perhaps only Allen could answer that question definitively, and he took his reasoning to the grave with him. There would be conflicting arguments about whether that was a tactical error on his part, but it reflected something larger in any case. His determination to stay on the battlefield was a manifestation of the pressure coming down, all the way down, from President Johnson, who wanted good news and enemy body counts, to General Westmoreland, who wanted more troops and believed the war could be won through search-and-destroy missions in which the First Division pursued the enemy overland relentlessly, to Major General Hay, who was feeling the heat for being too cautious, to Colonel Newman, who wanted the Black Lions and their commander out there on the ground, not just searching but destroying, to Lieutenant Colonel Allen, who wanted to prove that he could do it.

  As the battlefield situation grew bleaker in the hour after the artillery pause, the soldiers stationed at the NDP could not believe what they were hearing. Craig Watson, a rifleman in Bravo Company, had been assigned to a listening post just outside the perimeter. By the middle of the battle, when it “almost sounded as one loud roar,” his group was called back in and deployed in bunkers circling the perimeter. There was great fear that the camp would be overrun. Don Koch, a Bravo sergeant, “never felt so helpless” in his life. There were snipers shooting at them. They could not leave the bunkers they were guarding. Their battalion buddies, the soldiers he had watched so carefully as they marched away that sunlit morning, “were getting hit, and they were not that far away, but they might as well have been on the moon. There was nothing we could do for them.” Albin and a few others left the mortar gun hole and walked south of the perimeter about fifty meters, and “here comes this GI running towards us with nothing on, no web gear, no helmet, no weapon, no ammo clips, just him.” Before that, they knew the horror of the battle only secondhand, from the radio and the roar echoing back through the woods. Here was the real thing, the first survivor, a soldier “who got the shit scared out of him and took off.”

  Along with Bravo Company, Lieutenant Erwin’s scout platoon had been stationed as a protective force around the perimeter after being called back from their morning march to the west of the battle site. At 1:15 that afternoon Erwin was in the NDP’s tactical operations center and encountered Colonel Newman and Major Holleder, who had just landed. The full extent of the calamity on the ground was becoming clear to them. With Allen dead, Newman had decided to take personal command of the battalion and organize the rescue. He had wanted Holleder, his righthand man, to stay airborne in the helicopter and help run things from there, but Holleder talked him out of that plan. Since his days at West Point, Holly, as his classmates called him, had been a man of action. If soldiers were fighting and dying and in need of help, he wanted to be on the ground to help them.

  During the brief discussion at the battalion operations center, the brigade officers said they intended to march toward the draw, a third of the way to the battlefield past the southeastern edge of the perimeter, where they could set up an evacuation area. Colonel Newman needed a radio operator, and Erwin, who knew the call signs, was pressed into service. As they moved beyond the perimeter, Major Holleder seemed to be pulsating with an adrenaline rush, as if he were leading a squad onto the field at Michie Stadium. “We’ve got to get in there and help them! They’re in trouble and need help!” he kept saying. Newman repeatedly told him to calm down until they had assessed the situation.

  As they neared the marshy clearing, a weary band of soldiers approached from the wood line, some without shirts, helmets, or weapons. It was the Alpha contingent that included Captain George, Michael Arias, Top Valdez, and Doc Hinger.

  Valdez looked up at Erwin and said, “It’s a massacre out there, sir.”

  Newman was finishing his plans. He would send the recon platoon in first, bolstered by Bravo Company, which was marching down from the NDP, and Charlie Company, now being called in from the fire support station at Chon Thon, plus any fresh men available from Alpha, Delta, and the headquarters unit. Holleder was an untamed mustang, pawing the turf, urging Newman to let him run. He had to get in there. The colonel reluctantly relented, again, and Holleder swiftly recruited his little advance team. He rounded up a handful of medics and riflemen from Bravo who had made it to the draw. Erwin gave him a .45 and two mag
azines of ammunition. As Holleder headed out, he saw Doc Hinger, without either weapon or helmet, trudging toward them and told him to get a steel pot on his head and come along. Then Holly accelerated into the soggy marshland, breaking away from his soldiers, his legs churning high, just like he ran as the fearsome end and valiant quarterback at West Point, a hardheaded bruiser, all knees and elbows, bone and muscle, hurtling hell-bent down the field.

  When Holleder arrived in Vietnam in late July, a few days before the shipload of C Packet soldiers, the glow from his years of athletic glory at the U.S. Military Academy a decade earlier had barely dimmed. He had washed out of flight school at San Marcos, Texas, after graduation, but then rose through the infantry, commanding a company in the Seventh Infantry Division in Korea, serving as aide-de-camp at the Continental Army Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and attending Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. During much of that time he also played football or coached, including a stint during the early sixties as an assistant at his alma mater. Still and always he was a winner and golden boy, and his celebrity not only made him the young officer every general wanted nearby, but it also could have kept him safely away from Vietnam had he wanted to skip the war. The same characteristics that sent him rushing down the draw in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone pushed him to get sent to Vietnam, even though by then he had a wife and four young daughters. He burned to go places. Some of his superior officers thought he was on the path to becoming a four-star general, much like another hard-charging member of the cadet class of 1956, H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

  Holleder had the instincts of a leader, if not refined intellect. He fared only slightly better in his West Point studies than Terry Allen Jr., who had graduated second-to-last in the class of 1952. In the order of merit, Holleder ranked 444th out of a graduating class of 480, and did that well only because of the nightly tutoring of his scholarly roommate, Perry Smith, a future Air Force general. But in that regard Holleder would be only another in the long gray line of officers who proved that there was not necessarily a correlation between class rank and military achievement. This duality was apparent all through his cadet years. “His uphill battle for tenths left him with two turnout stars,” the 1956 Howitzer yearbook noted, using academy jargon to convey that he nearly flunked out twice and had to take special exams to avert dismissal. Yet his leadership skills were so evident that he was appointed a cadet captain and commander of his company, M-2, the Mighty Deuce, comprising the tallest cadets in the corps.

  With some men the gap between performance on a football field and how they live the rest of their lives is so vast that not much can be learned about one from the other. Holleder played the way he lived, and his football career at Army went a long way toward explaining him. He had been a schoolboy star at Aquinas Institute in Rochester, New York, and was recruited to West Point by Doc Blanchard, the great former Army star, and an assistant coach named Vince Lombardi. By his junior year he was regarded as one of the elite ends in the country, a six-two, hundred-and-eighty-seven-pound All-American who made devastating tackles on defense and was a cunning receiver who could outjump defensive backs for the ball. He and his quarterback that season, Pete Vann, working on pass routes seven days a week, became so attuned to one another that when Holleder flicked an eye, Vann knew precisely where he was going. They hooked up on nine touchdowns and nearly eight hundred yards of completions, even though Holleder had to sit out two games because of the minor infraction of leaving his post to call his girlfriend.

  Though he had a body that seemed sculpted in iron, it was not athleticism that set Holleder apart but his presence. In a culture of toughness, he was toughest. Vann remembered “a look in his eye, this look of ‘Don’t screw with me, baby, and you better do it right.’” People either loved or hated Holly. If he was not on their side, they might consider him a bully, another one of Blaik’s thugs. But he made the men around him believe that they were going to win. Even as an underclassman, from his position on the flank, he was the undisputed leader of the team. Vann, who began West Point a year ahead of Holleder, flunked a semester and ended up graduating in the same class, but he had exhausted his eligibility by the 1955 season, forcing Red Blaik to find another quarterback. Not satisfied with the apparent choices, the coach decided to try to turn a leader into a quarterback rather than a quarterback into a leader. Just before spring practice he asked Holleder if he would make the switch. “Colonel, I have never played in the backfield in my life,” Holleder responded, but he did what his coach wanted, turning in his old jersey for a new one—number sixteen. “I knew he could learn to handle the ball well and to call the plays properly,” Blaik later wrote in his autobiography, You Have to Pay the Price. “Most important, I knew he would provide the bright, aggressive, inspirational leadership at the key position of the game.”

  If this was a daring move, its wisdom was not universally accepted. Old Army mules groused that Blaik had stripped the team of its best player by moving him out of position. Why make him start all over again at something unfamiliar? The pessimists were fortified by a weakness that became obvious from the first day of practice: Holleder passed like a misfired howitzer. Vann tutored him as best he could in the mechanics of throwing a football, but the spiral was not in his repertoire. “He had trouble throwing anything but a kickoff, if you know what that looks like,” Vann would joke later. Distance, no problem. Holleder could wind up and heave the thing seventy yards. Velocity, he had it. Even without a spiral, his ball had juice. But timing the pattern, judging the proper arc, using the right touch—those quarterback skills were slow in coming. Before the season started, even Blaik’s closest pals in the New York press corps thought he had made a grave mistake. The second-guessing intensified during the season when Army lost to Michigan, Syracuse, and Yale. The quarterback switch became known as “Blaik’s folly.”

  After the Michigan game, in which Holleder had completed only one of eight passes, the coach and his quarterback met privately. Holleder approached Blaik’s office prepared to end the experiment even though he secretly hoped to get another chance. “It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks or says around this place,” Blaik told him. “I am coaching this Army team, and you are my quarterback.” As the coach later recounted the scene, Holleder’s hard eyes glistened with tears.

  Blaik’s reasoning all along was to have his quarterback ready for the most important game of the year, against archrival Navy, played at the end of the season in Philadelphia. The best Army season could be ruined by a loss to Navy, and the worst season salvaged by a win. Army had lost in 1954, and Blaik did not intend to lose again. He was a coach who believed in traditions. One of his annual rituals came the night before the big game, when he would take his squad out for a walk and tell them a motivational story. He concluded this time by saying that he had “grown weary of walking across the field” after games to offer congratulations to winning coaches on the other side. “Now, I’m not as young as I used to be, and that walk tomorrow, before one hundred thousand people…would be the longest walk I’ve ever taken in my coaching life.”

  There was a long silence, finally broken by Holleder.

  “Colonel,” he said, “you are not going to take that walk tomorrow.”

  The next day the big lefty completed no passes, but it did not matter. Running sweeps and sneaks, handing off, blocking, pushing his team-mates, he was the point man in a ferocious infantry attack that leveled Navy fourteen to six. He was the leader Blaik needed.

  Now, twelve years later, another autumn afternoon, and here came Holly rushing down the draw, through the tall grass, water splashing left and right, losing his balance and regaining it, lunging on with his long stride and big thighs, his knees pumping high, breaking away from his men, filling the breach.

  Doc Hinger was far behind, watching this officer, a man he had never met before, lead the way toward the jungle and the fallen Black Lions. He saw Holleder reach a point near a large tree where the draw narrowe
d, and he heard the AK-47 shots ring out and he saw the major go down. The other soldiers edged to the sides of the draw, looking for cover, keeping low as they moved forward to reach him. Hinger, protected by a sergeant who sprayed overhead with a machine gun, tried to drag Holleder to the safer side of the big tree, but he was too heavy. It took two men to pull him. He had been hit twice, once in the chest, once in the thigh. He was ashen gray, unconscious, his eyes closed, but still breathing when Hinger went to work on him. As the first bandage was being applied, he died.

  Jim Kasik of Bravo Company reached the clearing at the front of the draw a few minutes later. A small helicopter was idling there, and as Kasik approached, he saw three soldiers loading a mud-splattered body into the passenger side. “Who the hell is that?” he asked. “Some major,” one of the men replied. “Some major who just landed here and told us to go running into the jungle with him. And when we told him that there were VC out there, he just said, ‘Come on!’ He got some yards on the rest of us and they nailed him.”

  Soon after the helicopter lifted off, Colonel Newman came by and asked if Major Holleder was in the area. He was told the story about the big officer running down the middle of the draw ahead of his men and getting shot by a sniper. Newman twice had tried to hold Holleder back, keep him in the helicopter, station him at the NDP, but there was no way, and now the bull-rushing quarterback was stone dead at age thirty-two. “You gotta watch out for these young ones,” Newman said, taking in the news.

  IN THE ANTI-U.S. war of resistance for national salvation, the actions of Vo Minh Triet’s regiment that October morning were by the book, right out of the combat manuals of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Plan the operation in detail. Conduct reconnaissance. Rehearse in detail. Use the three-pronged attack. Maintain complete security during movement. Conduct a sudden assault with maximum firepower. Retain a reserve element. When the enemy believes you are attacking from the west, attack from the east. When he believes you have stopped, attack again. When he believes you are advancing, stop. Plug the ears and blind the eyes of the enemy, the generals in Hanoi would say. Create surprises. Walking in the middle of the night, a man is deadly frightened if he is struck from behind. It is the same in the military field. The side which is caught by surprise will be embarrassed and be unable to capture the initiative. The side which is caught by surprise will be at a loss and be quickly annihilated.