They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Truth and falsehood. Falsehood and truth. To the individual Viet Cong soldier, this battle, like any battle, was a blur of chaotic moments. Nguyen Van Lam, the company commander attached to Rear Service Group 83, who grew up near the battlefield, could remember only moving from one entrenched bunker to another with his comrades that morning, shooting at Americans, listening to the helicopters and high-performance jets, trying to predict where artillery and air strikes would come in, so they could stay away from those places. He felt little threat from the Big Red Brothers on the ground.

  Some American soldiers withdrew from the battle wondering how, with the trap so deadly, with the firepower so massive, the Viet Cong commanders could let even one of them get out alive. But Triet had concerns other than killing every enemy soldier. His men were tired and starving—they still had no rice—and, more important, this fight had not been planned by his superiors and was of little interest to them. For all the ingenuity and agility that Viet Cong soldiers showed on the battlefield, there was an equal and opposite rigidity in their military bureaucracy. A quick ambush was one thing, but a full-blown battle with an entire regiment engaged was quite another. Triet’s superiors were expecting him to get across the east-west corridor and meet them to prepare for the attack on Loc Ninh, a battle that had been in the planning stages for some time, part of a larger high-stakes strategy that eventually would lead to a massive attack on the cities of the South.

  Triet’s reasoning, as he later explained, went like this: His regiment, in its search for rice, was already behind schedule as it moved across the corridor to its next assignment. The fact that the battle was being fought in mature jungle made it easy for him to spring the ambush but difficult to sustain a prolonged fight. The longer the battle went on, the greater the possibility that his unit would take significant casualties, especially from American artillery and air power. His regiment had been badly bruised all year, starting with Operation Junction City, and had only recently been replenished with new recruits. The last thing he needed was to bring a depleted force into the next campaign. When his scouts, observing the action from trees, told him the American forces were withdrawing, he considered the battle over and pulled back most of his troops.

  It would take several hours to sweep the battlefield, dress the wounded, bury the dead, and hole up in bunkers and underground tunnels as protection against late-arriving American air strikes. Much of that work would have to be done at night, when the Americans would cede the jungle. Triet filed a report by Morse code to Ninth Division headquarters, located in what was known as the Fishhook region up near the Cambodian border. They had annihilated an American battalion. The regiment would resume its march the next morning. “We had to get where we were going,” he later explained.

  LIEUTENANT GRADY was in Lai Khe during the battle. As Captain George’s executive officer, he monitored the radios in Alpha Company’s communications center, known as the commo bunker. Protected by sandbags and concrete, he listened to the distant sounds of war on the battalion frequency as the firefight grew more intense and the American position more desperate. Allen was dead. George was being evacuated. Grady’s company and battalion were in disarray in the jungle to the north. At approximately the time that Vo Minh Triet considered the fight over, Grady wheeled a quarter-ton jeep down to the 2/28 Black Lions headquarters at the sprawling base camp. On the way there he encountered the battalion’s executive officer, Robert Gillard. “Get your stuff, you’re going out,” Gillard said. Grady turned around and gathered his combat gear. He stopped at brigade headquarters on the way to the helicopter pad, and just then they were bringing in his boss, Jim George, who had been medevaced directly to Lai Khe.

  The captain was a bloody mess, conscious, but deaf in one ear and barely able to see. Grady, with his light-hearted nature, could not grasp the horror, or perhaps could not yet accept it. He looked at George and blurted out, “You big dummy, what’d you do?”

  During the voyage across the Pacific three months earlier, Grady had tried to ease the concerns of young recruits destined for the Vietnam battlefields. Just one year and you’re home, he would say. And the three weeks aboard the General John Pope counted toward that year. Only a week earlier he had persuaded one of the former C Packet soldiers, frightened and certain that he would die, to overcome his fright and return to the field. “You’re scared? We’re all scared. You just gotta go,” Grady had said then. Now, as he reached the resupply pad and loaded case after case of ammo in the chopper and then climbed in himself, the same fear that he had tried to ease in others washed over him. What the hell…what am I…what the hell am I doing here? he muttered. The helicopter hovered over the treetops and clattered north toward the trouble near the Ong Thanh stream. The rescue mission was under way when he arrived at the perimeter.

  Back toward the jungle, with Sergeant Mark Smith in the lead, marched most of Erwin’s recon platoon, followed by Kasik’s Bravo Company, Reese’s Charlie, plus Lieutenant Grady and fresh soldiers from Alpha, Delta, and Headquarters, including Ray Albin, the mortar plotter, Steve Goodman, the armorer, and Rick Calef, a senior medic, along with survivors like Private Hinger and Sergeant Valdez who wanted to find their buddies. The force that marched south to extract the wounded and the dead was larger than the force that Terry Allen had taken into battle. Albin borrowed an M-16 from someone in the Alpha weapons platoon, then started worrying whether it would fire properly or if the soldier had forgotten to clean it. Hinger, shaken by Holleder’s death atop everything he had seen earlier, had “broken down pretty bad” at the battalion aid station, where his friend Dave Berry, a fellow medic, tried to tranquilize him by giving him a shot of muscle relaxant, but he could not relax and could not stay in the NDP; he had to get back to find more wounded men, so here he was in the long line heading out again, following almost the same path he had taken seven hours earlier.

  On the way Hinger passed the battalion surgeon and some other medics and noticed that they had four volume blood expanders going into a wounded man, one in each arm, one in each leg. Jim Kasik came across another scene he would long remember. He saw, passing the other way, a black soldier, short and slight, weighing not much over 110 pounds, limping out of the jungle carrying a wounded white soldier over his shoulders who seemed to weigh at least 80 pounds more. Steve Goodman, nearby, helped a platoon sergeant who weaved toward him, weakened by two gunshot wounds. Goodman held the sergeant and started carrying him back. The weight, the heat, the sun pounding down once they emerged from the wood line, the uneven footing through the tall grass and the mushy swamp along the draw—it was a difficult journey for Goodman. He fell flat on his face, the sergeant collapsing in a heap over him. Then he gathered himself, picked up his load, and moved on. Finally reaching the same huge tree under which Major Holleder died, Goodman placed the sergeant down in a dry spot in the sun and collapsed. He needed a short rest before going in for more.

  There was still fire coming at them; snipers from Rear Service Group 83 and the local Phu Loi battalion harassed the Americans after Triet withdrew his battalions. The Black Lions rescue forces maneuvered with great caution as they moved through the jungle, protecting their flanks, sending point squads forward before bringing up the rest of the men, platoon by platoon. Captain Reese, whose company was airlifted to the NDP from the artillery fire support station along Highway 13, considered it his first priority to get his own men in and out safely and not lead them into a second enemy attack. They had heard there would be “Cong on the ground” near the perimeter, and were relieved to find that wasn’t so, but now, as they neared the battle site, they took automatic fire from the right flank. Reese had his soldiers hit the ground and stay prone for fifteen minutes, not moving until the threat diminished.

  Return to the Battlefield

  Recon reached the death zone first, followed eventually by men from the other units. They knew it would be an awful sight, but that expectation could not diminish the shock. There were bodies everywhere. Lieuten
ant Erwin radioed back to Colonel Newman to “report how bad things were, in terms of the numbers” and to request more medical personnel and supplies. The first identifiable casualty was Captain Blackwell. He was prone on the stretcher, his battle wounds neatly dressed. How did he die? During the battle Clark Welch, hovering above Blackwell, had seen several rounds come in and kill him. At least that is what Welch remembered. But when Erwin and Jim Kasik now looked down at him, it appeared that he had been murdered. There was, Kasik noted, a single bullet hole in the captain’s forehead.

  Another fifteen yards to the south, they came to the anthill. There was Terry Allen, a bullet wound through his left temple, his body curled into a fetal position. Sergeant Dowling was off to his left side. From the way their bodies were situated, it appeared to Kasik that Dowling had died trying to shield his commander, but in fact Dowling died first. There was a map in Allen’s pocket, and Kasik removed it, “lest it be left for the VC.” Captain Reese, the third commander in the recovery party, was given the assignment of formally identifying Allen’s body. Arrangements were made for it to be carried back to the perimeter. Nearby Erwin saw Pasquale Tizzio. Guys had been kidding Tizzio about becoming the commander’s radiotelephone operator a few days earlier. Erwin had recommended him for the job. Now he was dead. And there were the bodies of Verland Gilbertson, out on his first photography shoot with the battalion, and Sergeant Plier, also new to the battalion.

  It was hard to look at the dead and not think about fate.

  Lieutenant Grady found the body of the soldier he had persuaded to go to the field. By the positioning of his rifle, it looked as though the kid might have shot himself before the Viet Cong could.

  Ray Albin came across the remains of Melesso Garcia, the rifleman who had had a bad feeling about going on patrol. Thousands of red ants had fallen from a tree and were crawling across his face and body.

  Steve Goodman found the body of his friend Steve Ostroff. Horror has so many faces. Here was a freakish one. Ostroff’s smoke grenades had exploded on him and “he was all different colors; he was yellow and red and green from the smoke grenades.” Goodman was numb. He couldn’t believe this had happened. He could not help thinking, Most of these soldiers were drafted. Were they drafted to get killed?

  It happened more than once, this death-stain of colored smoke. George Burrows, a radiotelephone operator for Bravo Company, got down on his stomach to talk on the radio and found himself right next to a dead soldier. What he saw was his one “clear, hard memory” of the battle’s aftermath. The soldier’s right shoulder was gone, along with the right side of his head. His nose was angled to the left, and a smoke grenade that had rolled next to him had burned a bright yellow slash into the remaining left side of his face.

  Sergeant Mark Smith showed Lieutenant Erwin seven more soldiers stacked up a few yards from a drum-fed Chicom long machine gun. All the Americans were oriented toward the gun, as though they had been trying to silence it. Behind the gun Erwin found a dead enemy soldier, one of the few he saw. He remembered the man’s eyes. They were open. Erwin “looked right into them.” Ray Albin saw the body of another enemy solider, turned it over, and realized that he was looking at an adolescent. He searched the pockets and found some documents, including an identification card with a date on it, 1953. A kid from the north, only fourteen years old. Doug Tallent, another member of Delta’s mortar platoon, saw one dead enemy soldier during the recovery. He was wearing a black uniform, and his orangish face had a single bullet hole in the middle of the forehead. Looks like a jack o’ lantern, Tallent thought.

  Farther back and to the right they started finding the wounded. Private Costello was there with his lost delegation. Doc Hinger spotted him. They hadn’t seen each other since the first seconds of the battle, when they had been walking together in the back of the second platoon and Doc had noticed movement in the trees. Now here was Costello, “somewhat in a state of shock at this time, because everything had wound down,” Hinger thought. Nearby were two medics, Archie Porter and Joe Booker, both seriously wounded. Booker had been shot in the stomach. Someone held his hand and said, “Hey, guy, you’re still alive. You have a chance.”

  On the way into the jungle Sergeant George Smith had been told by a retreating soldier that Delta’s first sergeant, Bud Barrow, was sitting on a log, waiting for them. Where was he? Barrow could hear the recovery forces before they spotted him. Shouts: “Who’s there?” Then, staring down at him, there stood George Smith, and next to Smith was Ray Albin.

  “Thank God, Top!” Albin shouted, seeing that Barrow was alive. There had been reports back at the NDP that he was dead.

  Another soldier called out, “Hey, first sergeant! How ya doin’?”

  Barrow broke down, his relief at being saved overwhelmed by the travail of the bloodbath. He had been shot through both legs and had ninety-two pieces of shrapnel in his knees, back, and buttocks, and more than that, his nostrils were aflame with a smell that he would never forget, the strong, rotten smell of dead bodies.

  “I ain’t doin’ worth a damn,” he said, weeping. “They killed all my boys.”

  IT WAS EASIER to find the fallen Black Lions than to get them out. Triet’s harassing units kept up enough fire to make the Americans uneasy. General Coleman, circling above the battlefield, spotted a point in the denseness where they might clear enough space to bring in evacuation helicopters. A small squad arrived from the NDP with chainsaws and was assigned the task of cutting down four trees. In comparison with all else that day, it seemed a simple task, yet it turned into a mess. The chainsaws were heavy and old and kept breaking. (“The U.S. Army has the sorriest chainsaws in the world,” Colonel Newman reported.) It took almost an hour to cut what became known as the Hole. The helicopter evacuation effort was led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul B. Malone, commander of the Big Red One’s First Aviation Battalion, who had been in the air with his operations officer, Larry E. Lowe, when they were called to the scene. They got on the 2/28 Black Lions’ radio frequencies and quickly analyzed what could be done with the Hole. Lowe estimated that the trees around it were 100 to 110 feet high. At first they thought of using big UH-1s, the transport-and-attack helicopters, and dropping a hoist and harness down into the Hole. But this process was too slow, so they brought in the little OH-13 bubble helicopters that could descend straight down to the stamp-sized landing area.

  Except for Allen and Blackwell, whose bodies were carried back by stretcher to the clearing near the opening of the draw, priority in the jungle was given to the wounded. A form of triage was set up: wounded before dead. Sergeant Barrow, his pain dulled by morphine, was lifted in and sent away. Private Costello came soon thereafter, and as the chopper rose straight up above the trees and headed north, he was struck by how detached the pilot seemed. This hump isn’t even asking what happened, for God’s sake, Costello thought to himself. What’s the matter with him? You’ve got to be at least curious about what’s happened here. This was a common feeling among the survivors, but of course those who had not been there could not feel what Costello was experiencing at that moment, and even he would be hard put to describe it.

  Lieutenant Mullen, who had been unconscious, awakened to find someone bandaging his wounds. It was an old supply sergeant who had no business being in the field, Mullen thought, but had come because of the emergency. In a matter-of-fact way the supply sergeant told Mullen that he had found a couple of pairs of rolled-up socks to stuff in the hole in his left leg and that he had placed the lieutenant’s left index finger in the lieutenant’s shirt pocket. He also gave Mullen some morphine. The next thing Mullen remembered, they were loading people into the chopper and he heard someone yell, “This is the last one in good-enough shape to fly out.” Mullen, in his semiconscious state, shouted “Bullshit! There’s no reason I can’t be flown out.” So he was next.

  They placed him on the passenger side of the bubble. It was “awash with blood from the previous occupants”—pools of blood that sloshed around e
very time the chopper moved. That was the least of the pilot’s worries. His blades had been striking the jungle canopy every time he came in and out. The “vibration was frightful” to Mullen, who was both concerned and amazed. This brave pilot, this young warrant officer, he thought, must have needed a wheelbarrow to carry his balls around.

  The evacuation was going well but seemed excruciatingly slow. Four helicopters received enemy fire as they dropped into the Hole, but they escaped damage. There was room for only one or two wounded men on each little chopper. At one point the recovery team on the ground used explosives to expand the hole so that a big UH-1 might be able to land. The wounded were all evacuated by then, but there were still dozens of dead. The medevac pilots, who were not attached to Malone’s aviation unit, told him they were done for the day. If there was still enemy fire, they would not risk going in to take out the dead. Malone decided that he and Lowe would start that process themselves, but as they hovered over the Hole, six rounds of enemy fire poured in. Malone was wounded in the foot. Lowe abandoned the mission and headed away to assess the damage.

  Darkness comes fast and early in the jungles of Vietnam. It was now quarter after six, and Colonel Newman had a crucial decision to make. General Coleman had asked him to try to get the dead out before nightfall, but the task seemed impossible. The last thing he needed was a helicopter crash at the end of this awful day. With enemy snipers still active and the light fading, he called off the aviation rescue. But he also realized that “transporting the dead by litter back to the NDP was not feasible considering the number to be evacuated, the exhaustion of the troops and the problems this might cause if necessary to fight en route.” Newman saw only one solution, unpalatable as it seemed. He would stack the dead in a concentrated area near the Hole, box the area with artillery fire overnight, and come back to pick them up the next morning. He discussed the decision with Coleman, who agreed with him even though it violated the Big Red One policy of never leaving a dead comrade on the battlefield.