The Magnificent Bastards (34 page)

The Gimlets were quickly learning just how rich in material they were in comparison to the Marines. The GIs, who had begun digging in almost as soon as they got off the helicopters, were accustomed to trip flares, claymore mines, and concertina wire in abundance, as well as to bunkers built with timber, steel runway matting, and multiple layers of sandbags. The Marine bunkers didn’t compare. “The village we occupied
was a mess with nothing significant done in the way of defending it by the Marines,” wrote Sp4 Don Miller of the 106mm recoilless rifle section in HHC/3-21. “The Marines were using NVA trenches (too small for us), and even
punji
stakes within the perimeter hadn’t been removed. One of our guys flopped down in the grass and a stake went through his rucksack. The esprit de corps of the Marines is not in question, but their tactics and leadership always seemed suspect—and I
know
they were poorly supplied. They begged us for the most basic kind of stuff, like rifle cleaning equipment, oil, brushes, bore rods, etc. They seemed so raggedy.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder was immediately impressed with Colonel Hull, who struck him as an experienced old infantryman with a no-nonsense, to-the-point manner. Hull wanted Snyder to seize and hold Nhi Ha and Lam Xuan West. They spoke in front of the operations map in Hull’s CP bunker, and Hull outlined the circumstances that had left these positions uncovered. Whether or not the NVA had already moved back in was an open question. Hull cautioned Snyder that twice before when the Marines had relinquished control of the two hamlets because of other operational commitments they had had to launch attacks to regain the area. Nhi Ha and Lam Xuan West, which straddled Jones Creek and were linked by a footbridge, were important to the NVA because they were situated along the primary infiltration route from southeastern North Vietnam to the enemy base area in the Hai Lang forest south of Quang Tri City. Nhi Ha had served as a way station and rest area for NVA troops on their first day’s march south from the DMZ. Both hamlets provided an ideal location from which to launch operations against the Marines’ logistical lifeline, the Cua Viet River.

Hull and Snyder spoke until after dark about enemy tactics and capabilities in the area. Hull said to anticipate that Nhi Ha and Lam Xuan West had been occupied by the NVA in at least company strength. “Don’t be surprised if the NVA are back in there. Expect them to be in there. We can support you
with artillery and mortar fire. Let me know what you need—and go do it.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder and Captain Householder, along with the colonel’s radiotelephone operator (RTO), departed Camp Kistler at 2130 to join the battalion at Mai Xa Chanh East. They did not travel by helicopter as they expected, but on a skimmer moving at top speed through the dark on the Cua Viet River. Since the young Marine driving the skimmer was nonchalant, Snyder and Householder, figuring that he must know the score, masked their own concerns. Nevertheless, it was an exceptionally hairy experience for the newcomers.

As soon as Lieutenant Colonel Snyder put ashore and was led into rubbled Mai Xa Chanh East, Capt. Jan S. Hildebrand, the battalion surgeon, was at his elbow. The doctor was concerned about medical supplies. Captain Hildebrand and two of his battalion medics arrived on one of the first helicopters. Each had worn a helmet and flak jacket, and carried a pistol and M16 for the flight. They’d added whatever medical supplies they could carry on their backs. Hildebrand had wanted to be on the scene in case of heavy contact near the landing zone. When there was none, Hildebrand had concerned himself with getting a fully stocked battalion aid station established. He told Snyder that he didn’t have enough medical supplies on hand to sustain the unit in the event of battle. “I
have
to get my supplies in!” he implored the battalion commander.

Army Chinooks were shuttling materials in from FSB Belcher, and Snyder replied, “Don’t worry, Jan. I won’t let that last helicopter come in without your stuff.” The very last Chinook of the night did, in fact, bring in a mermite can for Hildebrand, which he immediately opened—only to discover that it was full of beer! “The top sergeant back at Belcher thought we needed beer more than anything,” explained Hildebrand. “I closed that thing so damn fast and hid it from Snyder. Fortunately, nothing happened that night. The next morning, everything came in.”

At 2300, Lieutenant Colonel Snyder called his company commanders to the small, roofless building in which he had
established his command post. They stood outside in the glow of the illumination rounds going up to the southwest over Dai Do, and northwest over Alpha 1, where an NVA probe was being repelled with massed artillery. Snyder pointed out across the flare-lit paddies, and explained to his company commanders what their objectives were and who was to do what when their attack kicked off in the morning. The terrain ahead of them was bleak and foreboding, like a photo of Verdun.

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder, who was not a harsh man, also expressed concern about their night defensive positions. He told his company commanders to get tied in better so they wouldn’t be in too bad a shape during the night. “It was really screwed up. My S3 wasn’t on the scene yet himself, so until I got back those guys didn’t have a clue as to what they were supposed to do, or who they might be on the lookout for,” Snyder later commented. A perimeter had been established in his absence, and while the individual companies were reasonably well deployed, “they didn’t have any good sense of how they were located in relation to one another. It’s hard to form a night defensive position when you’ve never been there before, don’t know where to go, don’t know what you’re going to be expected to do, and it was a troublesome scene because it was dark, people were tired, and they didn’t know where they were. I mean we were vulnerable. If we’d been hit that night we’d have been in some trouble.”

Search and Destroy

L
IEUTENANT
C
OLONEL
S
NYDER ASSUMED COMMAND OF
the Gimlets on 1 February 1968. They were based at the time on FSB Center and operating in the Hiep Due and Song Chang valleys of Quang Tin Province. It was Snyder’s first infantry assignment in twelve years, and he decided to visit each of his companies in the bush. The first time that Capt. Dennis A. Leach, CO of C/3-21 (and recognized as the best company commander in the battalion), saw Snyder, the new colonel stumbled as he jumped from his Huey. Leach concealed a grimace. He knew that Snyder was a West Pointer with a Ph.D. from Princeton, but he also knew that the new battalion commander had no combat credentials. Leach saw Snyder as another of the Army’s fair-haired boys sent to get a minimum of six months of battalion command time and the basic load of hero medals as he got his ticket punched on the way to full colonel.

Captain Leach, who was on his second tour, knew that Lieutenant Colonel Snyder was going to be a disaster. Snyder had chosen to visit Charlie Tiger at that time because Leach had reported a body count. When alerted that the new colonel was on his way, Leach had grinned and said, “Well, guys, dress ’Em up a little bit. Lay ’Em on the rice paddy dike and gun
’Em a couple more times so we’ll have a nice little picture here for the colonel.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder looked at the thoroughly blasted Viet Cong as Leach had the squad leader involved describe how they’d originally bagged them. Snyder was a thin, medium-sized family man with eyeglasses and a soft-spoken manner; as he walked back to his helicopter with Leach he remarked, “You know, those are the first dead people I’ve ever seen.”

Jesus Christ, thought Captain Leach. Here we go again.

Leach could not have been more wrong, however, as he himself soon recognized. “Colonel Snyder turned out to be just a prince of a guy and a good commander,” Leach said later. “He didn’t come in with a big ego, and he learned fast.” Thoughtful, intelligent Bill Snyder, age thirty-nine, may have been in combat for the first time, but he’d been around the Army since he was an eighteen-year-old private. The son of a railroad man, he’d grown up poor on a farm outside Xenia, Ohio, and had enlisted primarily to qualify for the GI Bill so he could go to college after his two years in uniform. Snyder began basic training at Fort McClellan, Alabama, in September 1946, and was assigned as an orderly room clerk with Headquarters, Atlantic Section, at Fort Davis, Panama. A year and a half later he had three stripes and was selected to attend the U.S. Military Academy prep school.

Snyder graduated in the top 15 percent of the USMA Class of 1952 and wound up as a platoon leader in I Company, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82d Airborne Division, at Fort Bragg. A year later, he joined the 5th Regimental Combat Team in postwar Korea for a 1953-54 tour as a platoon leader and battalion adjutant. He redeployed with the regiment to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he spent a year as a company commander and another as a platoon leader with the regimental tank company. From 1956 to 1958, Snyder was aide to the commandant of cadets at West Point, and he spent the next year at the Infantry Officers’ Advanced Course at Fort Benning. After being promoted to captain, Snyder was a semicivilian from 1959 to 1962 as he pursued his doctorate in
political science at Princeton University. He finished his dissertation in 1963, and it was published as a book,
The Politics of British Defense Policy, 1945-1962
, by the Ohio State University Press. He started his next book,
Case Studies in Military Systems Analysis
, during a 1962-66 tour as an economics and political science instructor at West Point. By then he was a major, and he finished that book while at the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth in 1966-67. The book was published by the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, as was a chapter-length contribution he made to another book,
Issues of National Security in the 1970s
, during his year in Vietnam.

Upon graduation from CGSC, the freshly minted Lieutenant Colonel Snyder began his Vietnam tour in July 1967 with the G3 section at Headquarters, U.S. Army Vietnam (USARV). Snyder spent six months with USARV in Bien Hoa near Saigon, then six months with the Gimlets. That was his last assignment with a maneuver unit. After Vietnam, he went to the Pentagon, then graduated from the War College, where he remained as an instructor. He rounded out his career heading the ROTC unit at Princeton. Snyder had sandwiched in those six months with the infantry in Vietnam during this mostly academic career because “if you’re a Regular Army officer and you don’t command something, you’re out of luck. This was my chance. This was something I had to do and wanted to do. I was green in the sense that there were a lot of new weapons and radios I didn’t know anything about, but everybody pitched in. If you told people you didn’t know, they were glad to explain it to you.”

Most considered the 196th LIB, known as the “Chargers,” to be head and shoulders above the other two brigades, the 11th and 198th, with which the 196th had been melded to form the Americal Division. The Gimlets saw themselves as the best battalion in the best brigade, so when Snyder showed up from USARV with his transparent career intentions, no one had been much impressed at first glance—to include Major Yurchak, the S3, who served an incredible five tours in the war
zone. “The guy he took over from was a rompin’, stompin’ mean-ass, and here comes smiling Bill Snyder—and the guy was fantastic,” said Yurchak. “He was sort of a nice guy, and he smiled a lot and laughed a lot, but he was a wonderful, strong-willed combat commander. He knew what the hell was going on, and he never, never lost his cool.”

Lieutenant Colonel Snyder came to be regarded as a breath of fresh air. His predecessor had been known by the call sign Steel Gimlet, and though Yurchak had considered him a “very strict, very good battalion commander,” he added that “it was almost impossible to deal with the guy because he was always angry.”

Steel Gimlet’s command style had been dictatorial and verbally demeaning. He had also been relentless in his career-building determination to bring home the bodies, especially after the 3-21st Infantry moved out of Chu Lai (where the pickings had been slim) and up to FSB Center. Center was situated atop a ridgeline northwest of Tam Ky that overlooked NVA infiltration routes and populated valleys known for guerrilla activity.
¹
Contact, however, was infrequent. To catch up with this enemy that seemed to be everywhere but nowhere, Steel Gimlet, who was under pressure himself from brigade and division, began taking enormous chances. Captain Leach had just moved Charlie Company into a night laager, and was in the process of establishing his listening posts and night ambushes, when the battalion commander called him. Steel Gimlet had a “hot intel report” indicating that an enemy unit would be moving into a certain location at dawn. That location was ten klicks from Leach’s current position, and Steel Gimlet wanted Charlie Tiger to conduct a night march so as to be in place by 0500 to ambush the enemy. Such a schedule did not
allow for proper planning or a cautious, cross-country approach, but demanded that Charlie Tiger make use of the trails that the enemy often booby trapped or ambushed. Leach later commented: