5

The Breakout

WORD PASSED FROM foxhole to foxhole at TFP on Sunday morning that they were completely surrounded. Colonel Dick Sweet’s Air Cav battalion was spread out in foxholes that pitted the pointless acre of Vietnam they had purchased at such cost. There were trees and waist-high shrubs throughout the space, so commanders could not take in the whole position at once. Platoon sergeants would run from hole to hole to check on their men and keep the ammo distributed. To the north and west was a curving line of trees. Several small trails and one larger one ran through the center of the position. More enemy were just beyond the tree line to the east. The rice paddy they had charged across opened up to the north and west, where there was now a line of enemy troops.

Inside the Americans’ perimeter there was a small stone hut that served as Sweet’s command center. He had positioned his men to lay down fields of interlocking fire, so any massed charge toward their position, while likely to be successful, at least would be painful. Captain Krohn estimated that an all-out attack by the NVA would potentially sacrifice a thousand men, a price he hoped the enemy would be unwilling to pay.46 There were probes, small charges at spots around the edges that produced ferocious volleys of rifle and machine-gun fire, and here and there Sweet’s men were driven back. They would vacate their foxholes, retreat a distance, and dig new ones—the soil was sandy and easy to excavate. The enemy settled into the ones they’d abandoned. So their boundary was shrinking.

The mist was so thick that even at midday the two sides could not see each other clearly beyond about twenty yards. Despite this, choppers came in to evacuate the wounded and dead. Major William Scudder, the battalion’s executive officer, had scrounged as much ammo and grenades as he could find at Camp Evans, and he’d also collected two hundred and fifty dry socks, not enough to go around but a great comfort to the lucky ones. Scudder defied rules against sending ammo on a medevac mission and delivered them in person Saturday afternoon. All three helicopters were badly shot up, but they made it back to Camp Evans. Krohn had watched the body of Tony Lau, the young medic, being loaded. Before the march had begun that morning, he had been talking to Lau, whom he found to be a literate and cheerful soul, the son of a grocer. They had discussed the best way to prepare beef with ginger, and Lau knew what he was talking about.

Even the small attacks produced prodigious exchanges of gunfire, more than even the most veteran soldiers had experienced before. A probe would start with the pop of an M16, then more and more, followed by the higher-pitched cracks of the AKs, and then the great ripping noise of the machine guns until it reached a volume that compared only to army firepower demonstrations they had seen at Fort Benning. Even with the resupply, the battalion was running out of ammo again by nightfall. The circle kept tightening. Between the snipers, the assaults, and the mortars, they seemed doomed to being whittled away. The wet air smothered them with the smell of cordite.

“I fought the Chinese in Korea,” said Sweet, “but I never fought through any shit like this!”47

Krohn tried not to think about it. He focused on the tasks at hand, keeping his rifle clean and ready. He busied himself by updating his intel estimate, and he calculated when it would be safe to crawl off and urinate. Taller men didn’t dare. They peed into C-ration cans and dumped them outside their foxholes. Alcohol was forbidden, but Krohn carried some brandy—“cough syrup”—in small medicine bottles he tucked into his ammo pouch. At night he dosed the powdered coffee and shared it with the other officers. It helped ease the chill. He was convinced that men lost their nerve in combat when they allowed themselves to think too much. The part movies never got right about war was all the waiting, and all the effort it took not to think.

The plight of Sweet’s battalion had not fully registered back at Camp Evans, mirroring the disbelief that had greeted the marines’ travails in Hue. Like marine general LaHue, army general Tolson seemed reluctant to believe Sweet’s firsthand reports. There was simply no way that the NVA could seriously challenge a full battalion of American infantry in the field! By Sunday afternoon the second of the three battalions in Tolson’s brigade, Vaught’s, had been shifted to PK-17, and Sweet received a bullish communiqué from his brother battalion commander.

“Drive ’em to us and we’ll blow them away!” said Vaught.

Sweet was dumbfounded. How had Vaught or anybody in the rear gotten the impression that they were in a position to drive the enemy anywhere? His men were hanging on for dear life!

Camp Evans was having problems of its own. The normal land supply routes from Da Nang were down because of the enemy’s hold on Hue, so supplies had to be airlifted. This meant shortages of gasoline, food, and other necessities. The NVA was hammering the base regularly with rocket attacks. Tolson showed signs of wear. He completely broke down after an enemy rocket hit an ammo dump, igniting a series of enormous explosions and fire within the camp. The general appeared in his operations center distraught and babbling incoherently, and he had to be led back to his quarters by one of his staff officers. He emerged later apparently no worse for wear.48

The division’s artillery battery at Camp Evans was still not up. On Saturday two 105-mm howitzers were flown to PK-17 but, wary of the volume of enemy fire around the outpost, the Chinooks dropped the big guns in a field about three hundred yards away. That’s where they had been when Sweet’s battalion stormed the tree line and took TFP. Four more were driven to PK-17 the next day by an artillery officer who ignored orders to stay off Highway 1. Captain Dane Maddox, the battery commander at PK-17, borrowed trucks from the ARVN motor pool to retrieve the two guns in the field. By late Saturday the outpost had six howitzers and quickly fired off its full load of about four hundred rounds.

This was hardly decisive, but it was tremendously satisfying for the surrounded men of Sweet’s battalion. The fields around them erupted dramatically. The enemy didn’t know that this was all they had at that point, so it was hoped the shelling would discourage the all-out attack they feared. Several of the shells exploded inside TFP, but no one was hurt. And things did quiet for a few hours afterward. The men were wet and shivering in their holes. Few slept. Several enemy mortars exploded inside the perimeter shortly before three in the morning, and then, not long after sunrise, came an enormous barrage. Krohn estimated that some two hundred shells fell inside their position, and this time there were casualties.

Private Carl DiLeo was on the receiving end. He and Sergeant Bob Hopkins were in the foxhole where they had killed the three surrendering NVA soldiers the day before. They had dragged the dead bodies a distance away. Then they moved in, huddling together to keep warm. At dawn Sunday they could see that their predicament had grown worse.

The shooting rarely stopped. The lower branches of the trees had all been shot away. DiLeo and Hopkins were in some kind of outdoor patio space. There was a stone table nearby with thick legs and some chairs. Theirs was one in a long row of foxholes spaced about forty feet apart. Their orders were to stay put, to keep close watch on the tree line in front of them, and to shoot at anything that moved.

The enemy made a couple of tries, and each time they were turned back. Hours passed. The Trenton teenager expected the big charge to come at any minute, and he strained to keep his eyes focused on the tree line, but it was dangerous even to put his head up. Judging by the numbers of enemy he could see, their position didn’t stand a chance. And that wasn’t even the worst thing. The worst thing was the mortars, which rained straight down on them. They were being launched periodically from only a few hundred yards away. DiLeo would hear the pock and then the whoosh of its climbing. If he looked up he could actually see the thing as it slowed to its apogee. From that point on it was perfectly silent. There it would hang, a black spot in the gray sky, for what seemed like a very long beat, the way a punted football was captured in slow motion by NFL Films, before it plummeted straight down at them. The explosion was like a body blow, even when it wasn’t close. All of these were close. You opened your mouth and sometimes you screamed out of fear and it kept your eardrums from bursting. It was hell, a death lottery where all you could do was wait your turn. If you stayed down in the hole you were okay unless the mortar had your number and landed right on top of you.

This is what happened to DiLeo’s good friend Walt Loos and the other man in his foxhole, Russell Kephart. They were one hole over. They got plumed. They were erased from the earth. DiLeo watched the round all the way down and it exploded right in their hole, vaporizing them. One second they were there, living and breathing and thinking and maybe swearing or even praying, just like him, and in the next second two hale young men, both of them sergeants in the US Army, pride of their hometowns—Perryville, Missouri; and Willimantic, Connecticut, respectively—had been turned into a plume of fine pink mist—tiny bits of blood, bone, tissue, flesh, and brain—that rose and drifted and settled over everyone and everything nearby. It—or they—drifted down on DiLeo, who reached up to wipe the bloody ooze from his eyes and saw that his arms and the rest of him were coated too. Then there would come another pock! And another whoosh!

He knew his only hope was to be lucky and to keep his head down. Even though he could not tell by watching where the next shell would fall, he could not stop craning his neck to watch. Which is probably why DiLeo got shot on the top of his head. The round hit his helmet and knocked him out cold. He folded over, unconscious, and Hopkins, panicking, jumped out. He moved to the stone table before he, too, was shot in the head. This round hit not his helmet but his forehead, killing him instantly.

DiLeo was out for what he later figured to be about two hours. One of the platoon sergeants, moving from hole to hole to check on the men, found him inert but still breathing. A medic was summoned, who revived him. His helmet had a hole in the top but the round had just grazed the top of his skull. His head was swollen and he had a headache, but there was little blood . . . or sympathy.

“You’ve got to keep the integrity of the perimeter!” the sergeant said, sharply.

A big attack came later Sunday. Fending it off took nearly all of their remaining ammo. Eleven more men were killed, and fifty-one wounded. The battalion was down to half its original four hundred. There weren’t enough medics to treat all the wounded. Every few hours for the rest of the day a chopper would brave the intense fire to come in, sometimes hovering just off the ground as wounded men were thrown aboard. Medics had to triage, choosing which to send back; they never knew what Huey would be the last. By dusk, eleven of the unlucky ones lay side by side, some dead, the others judged too severely wounded to make the cut. One man with a sucking chest wound made awful rasping and gurgling noises as his lungs slowly filled with blood. Finally he stopped. Some of the men started to break under the stress. Krohn stopped one soldier who ran off in a panic, claiming he’d been blinded. A round had creased his brow. Krohn cleaned blood from the man’s eyes, which were fine; calmed him; and led him back to his position. Sweet observed one unharmed soldier escape by throwing himself into the last chopper on the pile of wounded just as it took off.49 The already overloaded aircraft wobbled but righted itself and flew away.

As darkness fell Sunday, Juan Gonzales, the black hat, had just one magazine for his rifle and two clips for his pistol. It was so dark he could just barely make out his hand in front of his face.

That darkness would save them. After the last load of treatable wounded were flown away at dusk, Sweet started planning a breakout. His commanders had put him and his men in an impossible situation. Light infantry battalions in Vietnam, like his, relied on air support and artillery. Without these, they were in trouble if they encountered a larger enemy force. This was rare in Vietnam, but it had happened here. The timing of the Tet Offensive worked perfectly for the enemy. It had come just as Westy was shuffling marines out of Camp Evans and the army in, so the camp had been caught in between and was temporarily weakened as a battle center. That and the weather had combined to leave Sweet’s battalion stranded.

It was impossible for him to complete his mission—to fight his way through La Chu to the outer walls of the Citadel—but the colonel was reluctant to turn around. How would that look? What message would it send to the marines fighting in the city? That the Second Battalion of Twelfth Cavalry had chickened out?50 Such a thing would be a permanent stain on the regiment annals.

Sweet gathered his officers and laid out the alternatives as he saw them: stay and fight on, retreat to PK-17, or escape and regroup well clear of La Chu to resume their march toward Hue. He asked for opinions. Given the glorious tradition of the US Cavalry, staying and fighting to the last man had a certain mythic ring, but there was little enthusiasm for that option. It was clear to all of these men that they had a better grasp of their situation than Tolson or Campbell or anyone else up the chain. Other than the medevac choppers and the one artillery barrage, the division wasn’t helping. And yet the idea of fighting their way back to PK-17 was also unappealing. No matter how justified, a retreat is a retreat. If they were going to break out, the more appealing choice was Sweet’s third.

They’d go that night, aiming for the hills to the southwest. That way they would be continuing their march toward the Citadel, albeit much reduced. If they didn’t encounter still more masses of enemy in the hills, there was a chance of completing their mission. The decision left them with one sad consequence. There was no way they could carry their eleven dead out. They would have to bury them right there in a shallow grave.

Late that afternoon, Sweet sent a coded message to Colonel Campbell: “If we continue on our present mission and attack toward Hue via . . . La Chu, we’ll be cut down. If we defend our present position, we’ll be nickel-and-dimed to pieces. If we are exfiltrated to gain a more defensible position, we can flank the enemy stronghold and disrupt him. I recommend we do it.”51

Campbell mulled this over, consulted with Tolson, and then gave his approval, but he washed his hands of the consequences. As if to say, Okay, but don’t tell anyone this was my idea, he said he would not be responsible if the move failed, and that if they managed to escape, they’d essentially be on their own. Sweet and his men found Campbell’s response galling.52

A black-and-white picture was taken by the battalion’s chaplain, Dan Clem, of Captain Helvey just after this exchange. The captain’s Alpha Company would lead the way out. The picture shows a lean man with a round face and at least a week-old beard. The dirt on his face and hands turns him roughly the same shade as his fatigues. He is squinting into the camera. His rifle is in his right hand. His flak jacket is open and he has a first-aid bandage wrapped around his neck to use as a sweat rag and wipe the dirt from his eyes. There is a rolled-up map resting on his ammo pouch; from his belt hang grenades, ammo clips, and a holster for his pistol; and C rations are draped over one shoulder in a sock. He’s wearing a compass on his wrist. He looks calm and determined . . . even happy.

Word passed quickly from foxhole to foxhole that they were going. DiLeo felt . . . what? “Relief” wasn’t a strong enough word. He felt a stab of hope, of exhilarating hope. He had seen so much in the past two days. He had helped carry the shattered bodies of the wounded to the helicopters for evacuation. He had seen the man whose warmth comforted him in his hole through a freezing wet night lying stiff and dead, a hole in the middle of his forehead. He had seen two men, one of them his good friend, simply erased from existence in an instant and been coated with their mortal remains. He had been shot, albeit not badly. It had made him feel—not imagine or think, but feel—how temporary was his life, and how, from one breath to the next, it could end. He would be no more. This shift in his thinking was subtle but profound. It moved him from fear to acceptance. At a certain point he stopped fearing death or horrible maiming; he just expected it. If not from a football of oblivion overhead, then it would be from a flying chunk of hot metal like the one that tore a hole in the top of his helmet. And now came this: They might get away! He might live! It was the first glimmer of hope in two days. He rejoiced. He knew that any attempt to move would be dangerous, probably fatal, but that was okay with him. He had come to grips with that. This was a chance. Anything was better than waiting in that hole trying to figure out what to think about in his last moments on earth, waiting to be plumed or slaughtered. He’d rather die trying to live.

Preparation for the move began before nightfall. Working deep enough in their holes not to be seen, men used twigs and rags to shape some semblance of a person so that enemy troops watching would believe they were still there after they left. It was a flimsy deception, but it might buy them precious minutes. The weapons and equipment of the dead and wounded were gathered and rigged for demolition. All the equipment they carried would have to be tied down to avoid clatter. No one was to shoot his weapon on the march without an order from the company commander, even if they were fired upon. One of the orders was “no smoking,” which raised a few chuckles. They had run out of cigarettes the day before. The shallow grave for their eleven dead comrades was dug around a crater left by one of the mortars. They left a note on top of the mound, in poor Vietnamese, explaining that beneath were only dead bodies, no weapons or ammo.

That same afternoon, Captain Lewis Jeffries, the battalion’s artillery officer, was finally able to report that his battery at PK-17 was fully up and loaded. Two bigger howitzers had been added to the six that had fired off all their ammo the day before. The bigger howitzers were M110s, whose eight-inch-wide barrels were among the largest in the army’s inventory. They fired high-explosive shells that were three feet long, terrifying rounds that arrived with a bloodcurdling shriek and could gouge a hole three feet square in hard ground. Jeffries arranged for the battery to begin firing about ten minutes before the battalion started its move. The initial fire would be intermittent, the kind that a unit in the field would ordinarily order in at night to establish a defensive perimeter. A sudden dramatic bombardment might arouse suspicion. White phosphorus would be mixed with the explosive shells. Because the air was so wet and heavy, this would create a thick white cloud that would linger.

Keeping two hundred men together on a night maneuver was a challenge in itself, but to do so without flashlights in complete silence while threading through enemy lines on unfamiliar ground—ground that might be wired with booby traps and trip flares, ground that was pockmarked with holes from the artillery bombardments—made the attempt so treacherous it bordered on foolhardiness. But there was no quarrel about its necessity. The battalion officers huddled around Sweet to plot the path they would take. This was something Sweet knew how to do. He had taught night tactics at Fort Benning’s infantry school. Remaining ammunition and food were distributed evenly among the two hundred men so that everyone carried the same size load.

Just after seven, when it was completely dark, the exhausted men emerged from their foxholes and formed two close columns toward the center of their perimeter, a long line of one hundred men, two abreast. Helvey’s Alpha Company took the lead, led by its point man Hector Comacho. Per the infantry manual, the man behind him, Sergeant Henry Paschal, would keep track of how far they had gone by counting his steps and tying a knot for every three hundred, marking one hundred yards of progress. To DiLeo it seemed like a conga line, each man holding on to the soldier in front, moving in quiet unison. They took turns carrying the wounded on their backs. The walk started north, across the rice paddy they had charged through two days before. Sweet had noticed a small gap in the forward enemy line, about ­seventy-five yards wide. Once they were clear of that, he would turn them southwest. Everyone understood that this first part of the walk was the most risky. The ground was so muddy that sometimes a man’s leg would sink to the knee. If he stumbled, others stumbled. The orders were: if you fell down and the column moved away from you, you were to stay down and silent until dawn. Of course, by then, you’d be alone and surrounded by the enemy. Theodore Wallace vowed to himself that he would not, under any circumstances, fall down. If the enemy had set mines or flares, or if they drew attention to themselves in any way, they were done. They’d be lined up in the open field like victims before a firing squad.

For the first dark minutes of the march, the gently sloshing sounds of two hundred pairs of boots emerging from the mud and the occasional scrape or ting of metal on metal sounded like a racket. At one point the men distinctly heard the familiar click of a round being chambered in a machine gun. Just a solitary but distinct click! Every man in the column turned his head toward it at the same time, waiting for the slaughter to commence.

DiLeo knew exactly what he had heard, and everyone else’s reaction confirmed that he had not imagined it. Some enemy soldier out there in the darkness had spotted them. He put himself in the man’s place. What would he do? Before him was a column of hundreds of men. If he fired, he’d alert his own force and the American column would be killed where they stood, but he would also be committing suicide. Every gun on the column would be trained on him. DiLeo figured, if it were him, he wouldn’t fire, he’d crawl off looking for help—which is apparently what the enemy gunner did. After an agonizingly long moment of silence the column began shuffling forward again. No one fired.

They moved in fits and starts. When a man stumbled or paused, everyone behind him would be held up, but once he let go of the man in front of him, that man would pass word up to the front of the column to halt. The front part of the column would wait for the detached portion to catch up. None of the men had slept in days, so whenever they stopped, some would fall asleep standing and be jarred awake only when they started moving again. One man accidentally pulled the trigger on his grenade launcher. The grenade was engineered to avoid such an accident. It would not go off until it had traveled some distance. So it did not explode; it just hit the mud with enough force to make a very loud thwack! that could be heard clearly across the field. Nothing happened. They kept walking.

When they got to the small cemetery at the far end of the field, they breathed more easily. They had made it past the first enemy line. Sweet turned them toward the southwest. This took them to a river, fifty to sixty feet wide. Comacho waded in looking for a place to cross and promptly dropped in over his head. He came swimming back. Through trial and error he found a point shallow enough, just barely. Anyone on the short side of six feet had to turn his head up and bounce to keep his nose and mouth above the water. DiLeo was tall, and for the first time in days this felt lucky.

When they were safely across the water, their abandoned position, TFP, erupted. Jerry McLain saw first the trip flares they had planted around their position going off, illuminating enemy soldiers moving in. Then came an enormous blast. The explosives they had placed on their discarded equipment detonated, and then came the extended and intense bombardment.53 Captain Jeffries had contacted the USS McCormick, a destroyer with five-inch guns that was a few miles east in the South China Sea. He was informed that the ship was ready to fire as many as five hundred rounds, and noted that this would set a record for the most ever fired by a US destroyer in a single day.54 It came at a slow-rolling pace at first, and then, after a delay, it accelerated into an all-out roar. Captain Jeffries’s hope was that the enemy would have overrun the position by then, placing themselves squarely in his crosshairs. The battery at PK-17 fired off hundreds of rounds. To the men in Sweet’s escaping columns the mist far behind them lit up like a circle of hell.

They walked on through the rest of the night, at one point passing within two and a half miles of the Citadel’s north walls, close enough so that the descending flares cast shadows. Sweet sent an urgent request that this stop, and, after a few minutes, it did.

At sunrise Monday morning they had reached the foothills. Surrounded by large boulders under a still drizzling, gray sky, the men could at last relax. They had made it. There was no enemy in sight, and the rocks provided cover. Krohn felt a joy that he would later compare to a religious experience. It wasn’t a glorious military achievement but it had been a brilliantly executed maneuver. Sweet’s men would remain grateful for his skillful leadership. They owed him their lives.