Our Year of War Page 14

  One early success only whetted Ewell’s voracious appetite up at division. On March 3, 1968, a patrol from Company B had followed up on the typically vague intelligence and, wonder of wonders, found a massive tunnel network only a few miles from Bear Cat. Not one VC turned up. They’d vanished before the Americans got there. They were good at that.

  At the tunnel complex’s entrance port, a medium-sized tree blocked the way. But when you gave the trunk a yank, not even that forcefully, the roots popped loose in a shower of dirt. A passageway opened. Behind it, packed earthen corridors yawned six feet high and showed soot from lanterns. The corridors ran seven levels down, and looked to be some kind of VC hospital. Playing fast and loose with the Geneva Conventions—what else was new—the enemy filled several warrens with mounds of weapons, some dating back to the French era, and some so newly arrived from the USSR and China that they hadn’t been unpacked. Sergeant First Class William Nelson Butler, late of Widows Village, and still working without a lieutenant due to Tet casualties, later said, “We searched the complex and never found the bottom.” For years, American soldiers had laughed at the 25th Infantry Division, which sited its base camp right on top of the intricate, deep Cu Chi tunnels. Well, that was one way to find Charlie.11 Now this underground lair squatted only miles from the 9th Infantry Division’s massive Camp Martin Cox. How long had it been there? Nobody knew. But at least the Americans had a grip on it now.

  Very impressive, said the division commander. But it wasn’t the VC K-34 Artillery Battalion. Finding buried treasure was swell. Killing VC would be much better. Ewell applied the screws to brigade, battalion, company, platoon, squad, right down to Chuck and Tom Hagel. When would 2-47th bag some Cong?

  If they could be found, they could be killed. But where was Charlie? The intel guys sifted radio intercepts, reviewed tips from village snitches, sorted through soiled captured documents, and plotted historical patterns of VC activity. Clean men in well-lit, pleasant huts measured the ranges of enemy 120mm mortars and 122mm rockets. Pins got stuck into maps. Nicely typed orders went down the line, laying out sequences and schemes. It all made perfect sense at division and maybe brigade. But below that? It devolved into more hot, draining walking around, looking for Charlie.

  “The intelligence sharing with the guys further down was nonexistent,” Chuck Hagel said. “I don’t think even a lot of our senior sergeants were told much. I don’t know how far down the officer corps got [intelligence] on what was going on,” he surmised. “Of course we were never told everything.”12 Maybe the higher-ups knew. But like the VC, they weren’t telling.

  So on the morning of March 28, Company B waded into the bamboo and greenery fringing the old French Michelin Company’s Binh Son rubber plantation. After a draining morning of slashing brush, stepping and halting, sweating and sighing, all the Americans had to show for their toil was an uninteresting nest of eight long-abandoned VC bunkers. The written logs at the various command posts all read the same: NSTR. Nothing significant to report. The Hagels hacked on.

  ABOUT NOON, the Americans had about ten yards to go to reach a shallow stream, a “blue line,” as the soldiers called it, based on how it appeared on a standard military map. Once he sent the point element and then the lead platoon across, the company commander could halt the company, form a tight security perimeter, and fill canteens. Water sure sounded good. Maybe guys might want to gulp down a can of Cs, although in the enervating heat, the desire to drink pushed aside most thoughts of eating. As Rudyard Kipling once wrote of the British regulars slogging through tropical India: “If you wish to talk of slaughter you will do your work on water.”13 Amen, Gunga Din.

  In Vietnam, creek water, no matter how clean it looked, swarmed with nasty microbes. It had to be purified with halazone tablets. The additive gave the water a very strong chlorine tang, like gulping a mouthful from the local public swimming pool. But thirsty riflemen could live with that.14 Canteens nearly empty, the men smelled the stream before they saw it.

  With the little watercourse a few steps away in the convoluted foliage, the captain stopped the column—time to swap out the point. The Hagels had been at it all morning. Another pair got the nod. The two chosen riflemen jostled past the brothers. Chuck and Tom Hagel stood in place, perspiration shining on their faces, to let the file pass them. When they saw their squad come by, they’d fall in.

  Up front, barely seen, the new point team moved out. No machete noises now—it sounded like they’d found a narrow trail, some broken bush, maybe from animals, or local farmers, that led right to the brook. If you looked up, right and left, perpendicular to the approaching American file, you could see the break in the tall trees, a dirty gray-yellow sky. In a month or two, monsoon rains would fill up the calf-deep rivulet to chest height. Today, though, the stream ran slow and shallow, more evident on the map than the ground. But the gap in the treetops marked its course.

  A hundred yards back, at the distant end of the snaking file of sweating Americans, the drag man turned around, rotating like a weather vane in a breeze. But there was no breeze. Man, that stream, that welcome water, couldn’t come too soon. No words could be heard, simply the cracking of brush and the soft, wet swishing of overloaded men breasting through dense foliage. A little bit more, a few minutes to go—just lean into it. The two in the lead should be about at the blue line now.

  Wham!

  The point man, Corporal John T. Summers III, blew back like a rag doll. So did the slack man, and Chuck Hagel, and Tom Hagel, and another dozen soldiers, the entire lead squad and most of the next bowled onto their backsides by a giant’s hot hand. A thin curtain of gray dust rose and hung over the trickling waterway.

  Shouldn’t have used that damn trail…

  One AK opened up on auto. Crack-crack-crack-crack. Others joined in, filling the air with metallic hammering. No RPD machine gun yet, but the Americans had men down, and nobody could see anything. Twigs and leaves and bamboo slivers clipped off as the insistent AK slugs whizzed by. Some zipped past at ear level—not good at all.

  A few Americans shot back, not many, not enough. The AK-47 shots all came from up ahead. And the U.S. riflemen at that end were down and dazed. How does a single file sort that out? This could be why the Infantry School manual warned about using this long, strung-out formation due to “limited firepower to front and rear.”15 Too true. In the book, decisive little arrows showed how to swing around to the side and bring up machine guns and riflemen. In this undergrowth, you had to be kidding.

  The captain and his NCOs did what they could, angling up a few able men. After a very long minute or two, a pig, an M60 machine gun in the hands of a confident gunner, ran through a belt, tearing holes in the low bushes up near the bad guy side of the stream. On the radio, the captain called for artillery. Something went awry—seemed like it often did when push came to shove. No artillery rounds fell. Mercifully, while the Americans floundered, Charlie slipped away. These U.S. troops sure weren’t going anywhere for quite a while.

  The AKs had stopped for a few minutes before the platoon sergeants ordered the Americans to cease fire. The hot, dim jungle settled. Breathing hard, hyperalert, the riflemen faced outward, every other man turned right or left. Was Charlie gone? Would he be back?

  You could hear leaves rustling. Guys snapped new magazines into their M16 rifles. Radios hummed with indistinct chatter. And groaning.

  Not a sound came from the crumpled John Summers. The eighteen- year-old African American, a regular army volunteer, sure had been a good point man, quiet and steady. After taking the full impact of hundreds of red hot ball bearings (BBs) from a set of Claymore mines—stolen from Americans, or Chinese knock-offs, who knew or cared—Summers was gone. It didn’t look like there’d be an open casket back in Baltimore, Maryland.16

  Tom Hagel stumbled to his feet and glanced behind him. Brother Chuck, eyes wide, lay on his back. Every time Chuck breathed out, a bit of blood bubbled up from his shrapnel-peppered chest. Tom grabbed Chuck’
s compression bandage from his brother’s web gear. The younger brother slapped it on the gurgling wound and pressed down. Blood seeped out on the edges. Specialist 5 Phillip Rogers, the company’s trusted senior medic, and thus “Doc” to all, materialized beside a drooping nipa palm. Rogers handed Tom two more field dressings. Then the medic moved forward to treat others.17

  Tom mashed down on his brother’s chest. Stop the bleeding. That’s what they taught you back at Fort Bliss. He tied off the first bandage. Then he bore down and tied off another. Then for good measure, he leaned on Chuck’s chest and applied a third. That army training, the hours of doing it and doing it with a drill sergeant right in your ear, paid off.

  As Tom staunched Chuck’s bleeding, he noticed a twinge in his left arm. The elbow was a bloody mess. His shoulder also showed red leaks. More of those blazing BBs, it appeared. The VC must have rigged up a half dozen Claymores, right at head level in trees, facing that trace of a crossing site. “The reason we got blown up,” Tom said, “is that we walked on the trail.”18 Take a shortcut, pay the price. Both Hagels knew better. But the captain took a risk. And the bill came due immediately.

  From the side, a hand, another medic, passed Tom another bandage. He tied it off on his own elbow. Next to him, Chuck sat up. He wasn’t okay, but given the state of the others, he was at least conscious and mobile and, in a pinch, able to shoot back. The Hagel brothers rolled over and faced outboard with their rifles—one left, one right.

  At the front end of the ragged file, Doc Rogers and the other medics worked on the casualties. To ease pain, delay the onset of shock, and quiet the wounded, no small thing with VC in the neighborhood, Rogers jabbed those worse off with a 5cc morphine syrette, a tiny toothpaste-style tube with a needle and the drug inside. If a man received such a shot, the medic who gave it hung the little injector on the fatigue shirt collar. It kept men from getting too much morphine.19 The medical corpsmen also started intravenous drips. They wrapped gauze and bandages, plugging gushing holes, blocking horrific cuts, and tying off the heavy packings.

  As the French army first taught it in the Napoleonic Wars, Doc Rogers did triage, the separation into thirds. Poor Summers was dead, and thankfully, nobody else looked “expectant,” which is to say, so far gone that working on them wasted medics’ time and precious medical supplies. Another bunch would make it, but required treatment sometime soon. Both Hagels fell into this group, although Chuck certainly needed a good going over with an X-ray machine, then cleaning up and stitches. Finally, there were those whom the medics could coax into surviving, in some cases just barely, until they could be evacuated. Those who showed up alive at a field hospital usually made it. During the Vietnam War, the army said their doctors and nurses saved 98 percent of them.20 It sure was a comforting statistic—if evacuated.

  That was a big “if.” On that dank, bathtub-warm midday, Company B had penetrated into the deep jungle, with a full verdant canopy soaring overhead. No medevac helicopters could land in this tangled wilderness. In certain situations, the soldiers might pool their C4 plastic explosives and blow down trees to clear a circle. But jungle this thick defied a few blocks of C4. Making a landing zone in such a godforsaken place required something like an M121 Daisy Cutter, a 10,000-pound megabomb trundled off the back ramp of a C-130 Hercules transport plane. That thing could blow out a 150-foot clearing. In March of 1968, though, the M121 ordnance still lingered in testing.21 So that wasn’t going to happen.

  When the first medevac chopper arrived overhead, clattering above the treetops, the UH-1 Huey pilots offered to use their onboard hoist to lower Stokes litters.22 As some men had exposed bones and missing arms and legs, that seemed like a decent compromise. The badly wounded would never make it being lugged out for six hours on slippery, jouncing stretchers. Plus, given the number of immobile casualties, more than half of Company B would be carrying stricken buddies. Defending the column would be pretty problematic. The VC lived to tear up that kind of vulnerable target.

  So out by hoist it must be. Summers and the rest had already paid full price to buy this crack of a creek bed. Looking up, soldiers could see the bottom of the Huey hanging overhead. While their mates pulled security facing outward, about ten of Company B’s fit and near-fit soldiers went at it with machetes, knives, and the edges of e-tools. As well as they could, the men cut away enough underbrush to widen that patch where the trail met the blue line. From that wet, muddy bottom of the green chimney, the wounded would ascend.

  Doc Rogers nodded his head. He had ten to go out, including Summers. The dust-off aviators never wanted to pull out the deceased. But as Rogers pointed out, as an enlisted medic, he couldn’t formally declare anybody dead. Only a physician could do so. Rogers let Summers go last, as he was past caring, and it got him safely out of the jungle and off the hands of the beaten-up company. The captain got on the radio. Lower away.

  Down through the greenery came a wobbling Stokes litter, a stretcher inside a wire-mesh basket braced by a tubular metal frame seven feet long, two feet wide, and eight inches deep. The chopper’s downdraft spun the thing like a slow propeller. Doc Rogers and the platoon medics guided it down and strapped in the first wounded soldier, a man with a reddened bandage-swathed stump for a right leg. As Tom Hagel remembered, the bright blood looked “like Campbell’s tomato soup.”23 It took about twenty minutes from the first appearance of the device until the laden basket cleared the treetops. At tremendous hazard, the Huey hovered stationary overhead. Thankfully, the VC did nothing.

  So the Stokes litter lifts began. The effort took a lot longer than anyone expected. The army rated the Huey to haul six litter patients, but not the basket types, and not in the drenching humidity and shimmering heat in the jungle southeast of Bear Cat, Vietnam.24 Airborne medics, essential to stabilize the patients, used up vital weight, too. Straining their engines and gulping fuel to do so, each helicopter loitered overhead, pulled out one man, then headed back to Long Binh Post to the helipad at the 24th Evacuation Hospital.25 The tenth, eternally silent Summers, left about 5:45, just before sunset.

  SPENDING THE ENTIRE AFTERNOON pulling out casualties reduced the options for the company commander. He might have had his troops rip out more of the overgrown plants and bushes to spread into a legitimate perimeter, clear fields of fire, scratch out some soggy foxholes, and settle in Company B for a night defense. But that presumed Company B to be fresh, alert, and fully manned, rather than drained, dazed, and short on numbers. The catastrophic bloodying at the brook stunned the Americans into a dull stupor. Instead, the soldiers lapsed into the same old, same old inculcated as far back as basic training. They focused only on the here and now. They pulled static security, watching for Charlie, as the wire baskets slowly fell and rose. Their universe closed in to the next ten yards, the next ten minutes. Hold this ground. Send up the Stokes litters. Get our wounded out.

  So now, too many hours later, that was complete. Now what? To stay in an unprepared thicket invited the VC to finish off the work the Claymores started. True, nobody had seen Charlie all day—who ever did—and nobody had heard from him since the shoot-out after the explosion. But it was like swimming in the ocean. Just because you didn’t see the sharks, it didn’t mean they didn’t see you. The VC were out there. They loved the night, too.

  With the sun going down, the Americans had to get moving. Few relished the prospect of chopping a route out from the fatal streambed. The captain well understood, thanks to the day’s painful tutelage, not to try the morning’s already slashed path. Charlie surely had rigged that up already.26 Company B faced a long night trek to reach a decent-sized opening along Route 15.

  Like a few more of those less seriously cut up, both Hagels remained with the company. Categorized as walking wounded, they had to get out under their own power. As the brothers and the rest of the riflemen stood up and got ready to go, the company commander sought Tom and Chuck.

  “Can you guys make it?” the officer asked.

  Both Hagels
said they could. The captain stood there, hesitating. He spoke again.

  “Can you get back on point and lead us out?”27

  SO THERE IT WAS. A superpower at war, a half million men in country, the famous 9th Infantry Division charging hither and yon applying Major General Julian J. Ewell’s patented “excruciating pressure” to the enemy, and it came to this. Forty-odd smoked, scared infantrymen counted on a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old—both bloodied up, neither in the army an entire year yet—to get them out to safety.

  The U.S. Army put itself in this mess. The official table of organization depicted Company B as having 164 soldiers, including 6 officers and 50 NCOs.28 Units came to Vietnam that way. But after arrival as a cohesive unit, a year later, the individual replacement system took hold—the insidious widgets and screws drill—and the numbers went haywire. The paper total, the “aggregate,” in adjutant general lingo, ran right around 164, full strength. But, of course, once you deducted the sixth joining up or departing, the sixth headed out or returning from R&R, the men recovering from minor wounds, the guys at division sniper school or the like, the men fixing the M113s (a unique drain on mechanized outfits), and the sick, lame, and lazy, somehow 164 at the base camp became 60 out in the bush. And then the VC voted with hot metal, as they did to Company B around midday on March 28, 1968.

  On top of the overall short-handed roster, the lack of experienced sergeants hurt more. During Vietnam, the army’s best NCOs came into country as each division and separate brigade deployed. After a year, when the formed units disintegrated, the veteran sergeants left Vietnam. As they did, some backfill sergeants came out from the training centers, stateside outfits, European divisions, and other nooks and crannies of the service.29 Even so, the figures never quite matched up.

  Juggling the books, the army had no choice but to tap the first batch again. By 1968, the initial wave of sergeants, the 1965–66 Vietnam deployers, were just starting to get orders for round two in Vietnam. Some of the senior sergeants, veterans of World War II and Korea, had enough, and exercised their right to retire at or after twenty years of service. Other older men, especially in the infantry, bore wounds and injuries that disqualified them for grueling duties in a rifle company. Plus, more new units had been added to the rolls, and each of them required a replacement rack of NCOs, too.30 The green machine found itself staring at a yawning gap between sergeants needed and NCOs available.