The Magnificent Bastards (41 page)

Lance Corporal Dean, age twenty-two, was from Newnan, Georgia, where his father worked in a cotton mill. Having
served with C/1/3 near Da Nang in 1965-66, he volunteered for a second tour because he was tinkering with the idea of a military career. He was a natural-born rifleman, but he was still only a lance corporal because of numerous reductions in rank. He drank too much in the rear, and was a hothead who loved to fight.

“We got into a big fistfight when he first got there,” recalled Tyrell. “Dean was a wild man, but a wonderful guy.”

Dean was bleeding badly, but there was no time to bandage his wounds. Adrenaline masked the pain. He got to his feet. The only way to survive was to close with the NVA and kill them. Dean began firing his M14 toward the burial mounds ahead of them and to their left. He grabbed Marines who were lying prone behind cover and shouted, “Let’s go! If we sit out in the open, hell, everybody’s going to die!”

Lance Corporal Dean was running forward when another explosion knocked him down, peppering his legs with fragments. Dean got back up and kept moving forward. Lieutenant McAdams was also back on his feet, directing the platoon’s wheeling maneuver into the tree line running along the left flank. Golf Company was on the other side of the trees. McAdams and Dean reached the cover there with about fifteen other Marines, including a machine gunner and grenadier, and they took up firing positions that faced the open field they had just left. At a range of about a hundred meters, they could see NVA bobbing up from behind burial mounds to fire on Foxtrot Two on the far right flank. They opened up on those NVA, but when they fired a LAW the backblast marked them, and still more enemy soldiers blazed away at them from the left flank.

Golf Two advanced through Dinh To on the right and Golf One on the left. Golf Three was in reserve. By the time Foxtrot became engaged, Lieutenant Morgan of Golf Two had experienced four jams with his M16 as they reconned by fire through the thickly vegetated hamlet. He had discarded his fouled-up M16 and was going forward with .45 pistol in hand
when Foxtrot One, on the other side of the trees to his right, began hollering for help with recovering casualties.

The momentum of Golf Company’s assault died then and there as Lieutenant Morgan sent his machine-gun team and several riflemen to help Foxtrot. One of the riflemen was Lance Corporal Parkins, who had picked up an M16, a weapon he hated, to replace the M14 for which he had run out of ammo. Parkins was moving when several NVA with AK-47s popped into view in the brush in front of him. They were not looking in Parkins’s direction, and he fired at them from the hip. The M16 jammed after the first shot. When Parkins looked down to pull back the bolt, he was knocked off his feet as at least one of the enemy soldiers turned toward him and returned the fire. It felt as though a red-hot poker had been rammed into his left shin. The bone was shattered. Parkins, lying prone, quickly pulled out the .45 he had scrounged up that morning along with two clips, and screamed for a corpsman.

The Marines in the machine-gun team were also wounded, and as the casualties were dragged rearward, things got chaotic. The NVA opened fire from the hedgerows to the front, and when Marines with AK-47s returned the fire, other Marines who couldn’t see who was doing the shooting got pretty shook up. It sounded as though the enemy was right there in the bushes with them. Lieutenant Morgan ushered the ten survivors from his platoon into a crater on the left. It was a big crater, probably the result of a five-hundred-pound bomb. They were joined there by Staff Sergeant Wade and Golf One, which had pulled in from the left flank. The NVA fire got heavier, and the Marines expended a great volume of M60 and M79 ammunition in return, without visible effect, while those men who still had M16s kept their heads down and tried to clear jams.

When an enemy soldier stood up about fifteen meters in front of Captain Butler, it was his one and only look at the NVA who had his command group pinned down. The man had an RPG over his shoulder. He had totally disregarded cover, so focused was he on finding a target, but he was hit
before he could fire. When the NVA fell backward, Butler’s senior corpsman, who like Butler had his eyes a fraction of an inch higher than their paddy dike, managed a grin and said, “You know, Skipper, these guys are getting real personal.”

Having found cover behind a burial mound, SSgt. Richard L. Bartlow, the commander of Foxtrot Two—which was pinned down in the high grass on the right flank of the battlefield—put his M79 into action. Bartlow was a cold, stern, and inflexible NCO, respected but disliked by his grunts. Bartlow was joined by Digger Light, who also carried a grenade launcher, and by a pair of tough Mexican-American Marines from California—Ernesto Tanabe and Tom Alvarado. Bartlow kept rising up to fire from the same spot, and while Light was down reloading, fell back with a neat little hole between his eyes. He died instantly. Alvarado was hit next. He was coming up to fire his M16 when a shot slammed into his helmet, dropping him like a stone. He was only unconscious, though. The bullet had gone in the front of his helmet and skidded around the inside of the steel pot to punch out the back without even scratching him. Alvarado picked his M16 back up as soon as he came around, but when he started shooting again a round hit the weapon’s hand guard, knocking it from his grip. The M16 was rendered inoperable, so Light, who was steadily pumping out M79 rounds, handed Alvarado his .45-caliber pistol.

At that instant, Tanabe, rising up to fire, went down with a terrible backward snap of his head. It looked as though the whole front of his head had been blown away, but although his forehead was laid open and he was temporarily blinded by the concussion and the blood in his eyes, he was very much alive. Tanabe and Alvarado, in fact, got into an argument. Alvarado’s M16 was damaged and he figured Tanabe didn’t need his anymore, but Tanabe held tight. “You ain’t getting my rifle,” he shouted.

“You can’t see anything to shoot!” exclaimed Alvarado.

“I’ll shoot at the noise!”

An NVA jumped up and tried to get around their right flank.
Alvarado shouted a warning to Light, but Light had already seen the soldier and in the same instant had squeezed the trigger on his M79 grenade launcher. The NVA was only twenty meters away, and the 40mm round took his head off. The body continued to run a few more steps before it fell into the tall grass.

Private First Class Light, who was nineteen, was awarded the Navy Achievement Medal for Dai Do. He was from Hurley, Virginia, a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, and he joined the Marines because he’d never seen anything or been anywhere. His people were coal miners, and he had himself worked in the mines during his summer vacations. Light was in Vietnam what he’d been back home: a hardworking, squared-away kid (although the marijuana they smoked in the rear was something new for him), who never reported any of the three superficial wounds he picked up. He was given a job in the company mail room near the end of his tour, but the “maybe-if-I’d-been-there” syndrome pulled him back to the bush. On his first mail run he’d brought all his combat gear along with the mail sacks. When the helicopter dropped him off he approached the company commander with his problem. “Captain, the first sergeant wanted me to be a mail clerk, but I don’t want to be no mail clerk,” he explained. The skipper asked if he’d go back to the rear if ordered, and Light said, “No, sir.” The captain’s solution was simple: “Well, Digger, then get back to your platoon.”

The bag that Light had slung over his shoulder at Dai Do held about ninety rounds for his M79. He shot more than half of them during the fight, especially while firing cover for their wounded, who crawled toward the hasty position Foxtrot One had secured in Dinh To. The trees there provided good protection from the constant NVA fire. One of the casualties, a big guy named Johnny Corey, who’d been hit in the stomach, crawled to Light’s burial mound from the right. Light’s squad leader, Corporal Favourite, had gotten separated from them somewhere over on the right, so Light asked Johnny, “Where’s Fave?”

“Fave’s dead, and Devine’s dead, and the new guy, Dick, he’s dead, too.”

“Are you
sure
Fave’s dead?”

“He’s dead, man. I
know.”

Corporal Favourite had been a much-beloved squad leader, and Alvarado impulsively got up to rush to him. Light had to grab Alvarado and hold him down as he tried to calm him. “Johnny said it wasn’t no use, man. There’s no use gettin’ yourself killed.”

Corporal Ronald L. Favourite, twenty-one, of Bryan, Ohio, had been a great guy in Digger’s opinion—despite the fact that he was a Yankee. He was a stocky man with a sunken chest and a funny walk, but he had a big heart and a subtle sense of humor. He didn’t let anyone get over on his squad. He was a pack mule on patrol, and if one of his guys was fading under the load, he’d help carry the man’s gear without complaint. He would stand extra watches at night. He was a gourmet chef with C rations in an upturned helmet. When they finally recovered Favourite’s body it didn’t have a mark on it. He had apparently been killed by a concussion grenade.

Lieutenant McAdams of Foxtrot One, who’d already been wounded by shell fragments, was shot while in the cover of the wood line on the eastern edge of Dinh To. He was up on one knee trying to figure out where Golf Company and the NVA were in the vegetation when a bullet hit the ground beside him and ricocheted into his left leg near the groin. It ended up lodged in his buttocks. McAdams fell forward when he was hit. When he tried to stand he found that he could not. After a corpsman bandaged him, McAdams told his platoon sergeant, Lance Corporal Dean, to take command of the squad-sized group they had in the tree line while he went to round up some help from Golf. He had yet to find a weapon to replace the .45 he’d dropped, so McAdams was alone and unarmed as he snaked his way down a ditch in Golf’s direction. Some forty meters later he bumped into Sergeant Major Malnar, who was in a trench with his pump-action shotgun, talking with another Marine in the command group. Enemy
fire snapped overhead. McAdams was in pain and he excitedly told the sergeant major that he had a lot of wounded men, a lot of jammed weapons, and that they badly needed help on the right flank. Malnar told him that they were doing everything they could and that he should get to the rear. McAdams obliged him, although at his crawling pace it seemed he would never escape the roar of automatic weapons and explosions enveloping the hamlet.
²

Meanwhile, McAdams’s radioman, Corporal Tyrell—who’d been hit in the first volley—crawled out of the killing zone with bullets zinging over his head. When he didn’t hear them anymore, he got up to run but stumbled hard and decided to stay down. He was heading toward a pagoda that was among the burial mounds in the field. When he got close to it, he saw an AK-47 trained on him from around one wall of the pagoda. Tyrell never found out what happened next. He was so scared that his brain turned off. He saw the rifle and the next thing he knew he was on the other side of the pagoda lying beside the body of the NVA who had been holding it. He wondered if the man was already dead, or if he had killed him. He was not carrying his M16 because it had been damaged, but he still had fragmentation grenades clipped to his flak jacket. He kept moving even though he was completely lost. When Tyrell saw a Marine he recognized behind a burial mound he thanked God. The Marine was lying there shouting at him to come on over. Tyrell ran to his position, and the man explained that when he’d first seen the short, wiry Tyrell crawling through the tall grass he’d almost shot him.

“I thought you were a comin’ gook!” the grunt said excitedly.

The man directed Tyrell toward the medevac point. When he got there, a corpsman exclaimed, “Your right shoulder’s a mess!” Only then did Tyrell realize that he had not tripped
when he’d gotten up to run—he’d been shot. The round had skimmed across the top of his shoulder, opening up a large gash. The doctor who checked the wound back aboard ship said, “Whoa, you were lucky—this sonofabitch must have been a twelve-point-seven!”

Other Foxtrot casualties were being treated on the spot by Doc Pittman, who had crawled along the tree line in which the reserve platoon was pinned down and established a hasty treatment area at the southeastern edge of Dinh To. The fire was so heavy that as Pittman had crawled through the shadows of the thick foliage, bullet-clipped banana leaves fell around him. He moved on through an old, overgrown garden on his belly, and was feeling more than a little lost when he finally saw the USMC-issue jungle boot of a man lying in the bushes. He looked around then and saw Marines he recognized from the company mortar section. They were in firing positions around a large bomb crater, and a very relieved Pittman crawled into it to set up shop. Most of the Marines returning fire from the crater’s north lip were struggling with fouled M16s, and one who saw Pittman’s hot little carbine called to him only half in jest, “Hey, Doc, how much you want for that?” Keeping his carbine slung and his pistol on his hip, Pittman replied, “No way!”

The mortarmen around the crater directed the wounded into it as they came back singly or in pairs. “They walked, crawled, and stumbled,” Doc Pittman remembered. “Some didn’t realize they were wounded and had only retreated because they had run out of ammunition, or a limb had stopped functioning, or both. All had that special look about them that said they had just been to hell.” Teaming the badly wounded with the lesser wounded, Pittman sent all the casualties rearward as soon as he got a battle dressing on them, stopped the bleeding, and made sure they were well oriented enough to know which way was south. “Safety was relative, but sending them south seemed like the only thing to do,” he explained. The fight was just north of their crater. Smoke and dust rose from the bushes there, and the able-bodied Marines at the crater’s edge looked
increasingly nervous. Many of the wounded were in shock, and none complained of pain, so Pittman administered no morphine. “The war wasn’t over for those Marines,” he said later. “They could still have had to fight for their lives, and being doped on morphine wouldn’t help.”