8

Look at Your Sorry Ass!

CHEATHAM’S MAIN ATTACK didn’t kick off until midafternoon. Smith still hadn’t moved his company into position, and it had taken much longer than expected to satisfactorily batter the treasury.

CBS reporter John Laurence watched as a group of marines wrestled one of the nearly half-ton 106 rifles upstairs to a second-story classroom and aimed it out the window at the treasury’s big steel doors. They set it on a table and with difficulty angled it down. Once they had it balanced and aimed, they fired a tracer round from the gun mounted above the barrel, and then prepared to shoot. Everyone was ordered to back away. Laurence stepped out of the room, watching through the doorway. The crew covered their ears. When it was fired, Laurence heard a sound like a thunderclap that “rocked the floors and ceilings and knocked plaster off walls and brought a shower of debris down on the gun and the men around it.”63

The size of the blast both scared and delighted the marines. Laurence couldn’t see what the shell had accomplished across the street, but the back blast alone had wrecked the classroom. It had blown down the door and torn a hole in the floor. The gun teetered on the lip of it. The crew stood stunned and coated with plaster dust. They pointed at one another and hooted like the teenagers most of them were.

“Oh, man, look at your sorry ass!” one said.64

Downstairs, Laurence managed to pull Cheatham aside for an interview on camera as the fighting raged. The massive colonel was conferring with Downs, Christmas, and Meadows about all the enemy spider holes around the building.

“You’ve got to dig these rats out of their holes,” Cheatham told them. “Got it?”

Then he stepped over to field Laurence’s questions. Cheatham looked to be in his element. He was unshaven and covered with dust, and he had goggles pulled up and strapped over his helmet. He seemed calm and businesslike. Laurence and his cameraman Keith Kay positioned him before a mule-mounted 106. Behind them was a store with an awning that projected over the sidewalk. Laurence held a microphone under Cheatham’s chin.

“What kind of fighting is it going to be?” he asked.

“It’s house to house and room to room,” Cheatham said.

“Kind of inch by inch?”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“Did you ever expect to experience this kind of fighting in Vietnam?”

“No, I didn’t. And this is my first crack at street fighting. I think this is the first time the marines have been street fighting since Seoul in 1950.”

Cheatham stopped to help direct a squad of marines.

“What’s going to happen to civilians who might get caught in there?” Laurence asked.

“Well, we’re hoping that we don’t run into any civilians in there right now. If they are [there]—I’m pretty sure they are civilians we would consider bad guys right now. We have certain areas in there that we have blocked off, that we know there are friendly civilians, and we aren’t gonna take those under fire.”

“And the others?”

“The others—if there’s somebody in there right now, they’re Charlie as far as we’re concerned.”

When they had finished and stepped back, the 106 fired. The back blast kicked up a huge cloud of dust, shattered the storefront, and sent the awning crashing to the sidewalk.65 The twenty-pound round blew a hole just under the roofline of the treasury across the street.

When Christmas’s company had crossed the street on Saturday they had popped smoke to hide themselves, but they had been hit hard just the same. The big gun in the elementary school, most likely a 12.7-mm Soviet machine gun (about the size of the American .50 caliber), had produced devastating grazing fire. The enemy gunners hadn’t needed to be able to see Christmas’s men in order to fire effectively down the street through the cloud. Nothing had changed since then. The gun had been firing at targets of opportunity all morning. There seemed to be no way to silence it. Mortars were too imprecise; it was too far away for the bazookas; and before they could fire a 106 it would have to be moved out from behind cover to be aimed, and aiming, as Laurence had seen up in the classroom, was a production. Its crew wouldn’t stand a chance.

Cheatham studied the problem himself. He crawled out to a telephone pole and waited for the gun to fire. It was using green tracers, so he could see the trajectory of its rounds. He noticed that when it shot at things to its left, toward the treasury and the street directly in front, the rounds were low, but whenever the gun shot to its right, on the university side of the street, the aim was high. This suggested that the gunner’s field of fire was obstructed by something on that side, something that forced him to aim the gun up. If he was right, Cheatham figured there was a spot near him out on the street where a man could stand up and still be too low for the machine gun.

He went back into the university courtyard and worked out the plan with the weapons platoon leader. Cheatham then bet his life on his calculation. It was the sort of thing that had earned him such respect. He stepped out into the street and fired several tracer rounds at the machine gun. It returned fire with rounds that looked as big as basketballs hurtling toward him, but which cracked harmlessly over his head. Thus assured, the 106 gunners rolled the mule out to the same spot and took several shots with the spotting rifle to zero it in.66

At the same time Captain Christmas was assembling his own men for another run across the street. After their experience yesterday, they dreaded it.

“I know what to do, Skipper,” said one of the 106 crew. “You know how big the round is. They [the enemy machine gunners] will pull in their heads. And, sir, you know this thing’s back blast. You can run the whole company across the street if you want.”

Christmas had no better ideas. His men waited as the gun’s crew counted down, and with a final chorus of “Fire the one-oh-six!” it popped one round toward the target. The round flashed by so close to Downs’s lead platoon, which was waiting behind a wall down on the street, that it seemed to brush their noses. There was plenty of fire when Christmas’s men took off, but the dust kicked up by the back blast hid them. More important, the enemy machine gun stayed silent.

The public health complex was quickly retaken—it also had been under mortar and gas bombardment. Hoang’s remaining men retreated when they saw the marines coming, and it was hard for Christmas’s platoon leaders to stop their men from giving chase. One squad, led by Corporal Robert Hedger, pressed on past the buildings and blew a hole in a wall with a C4 charge. Hedger was weighted down with bazooka rounds, but no one with him had one of the tubes. He fell hard when he was struck in the chest and neck. His buddy Lyndol Wilson crawled out to him, called for a corpsman, and saw that Hedger, although still alive, was not likely to survive. Infuriated, Wilson emptied his rifle on full automatic toward the enemy positions across the street, even though he couldn’t see any targets. When he’d used up all his rifle magazines, he drew his pistol and emptied that. His furious efforts enabled the men behind him to drag Hedger back. One was shot through the leg. Hedger was soon dead.67

With Christmas’s company now in position to provide flanking fire from his right, Downs ordered the assault on the treasury. The 106 had knocked the steel door off its frame, but it was still upright. A bazooka finished the job, and the lead platoon, all wearing gas masks, led by Lieutenant Hausrath, took off across the street.

Ronald Frasier was in that group. He had lined up with the rest of the men in his platoon behind a wall, waiting. When they were told that they were going to be first across, no one said a word. Frasier, a nineteen-year-old corporal, was petrified. He had been wounded the day before by a rocket fragment. It had torn through his upper right leg and exited his right buttock. He had been patched up. The wound was judged borderline, ugly but insufficient for a ticket back to Phu Bai. Now it hurt. His leg and butt were swollen and stiff. He smelled tear gas and smoke and cordite, and the sound of gunfire and explosions was deafening. The order to charge seemed suicidal but he knew the second he heard it that he would go. There was no way he was not going to go. His buddies were going so he was going too. Having seen what had happened to Washburn and Barnes the day before, the way they both lay on the street for hours, he knew what to expect. But despite his fear and the pain he ran when he was ordered to run. He ran as fire erupted in front of him and behind, no longer even aware of what was going on around him, but especially fearful of the big gun in the distance to his left that had been hurling huge rounds down the street for the last two days. He was wearing a gas mask, which made it harder to look around, so he just kept moving forward. He felt that he was moving faster than he had ever moved, but it was still the longest sprint of his life. To his amazement he made it across the street, along with others from his platoon, and then they all just kept going. There were no tactics. It was just move and shoot.

In the midst of it all, Lieutenant Hausrath climbed to the top of a wall to shout directions to his men, exposing himself needlessly. Jim McCoy, his platoon sergeant, made a mental note. Danger made most men cautious, but with some it had the opposite effect. Hausrath, with his nickname “Rat” scrawled on the front of his helmet, had warmed to street fighting a bit too much for McCoy’s liking. That was Hausrath’s business, of course, but the sergeant felt it was his own responsibility to keep his men—and himself—from being swept up in the lieutenant’s enthusiasm.

Dan Allbritton, the drawling corporal from Arkansas, was first to the treasury door, which was about twelve feet back from the front gate. A Patton tank was blasting the front of the building with machine-gun fire. Allbritton could hardly hear himself think. He threw a tear gas grenade inside and then stepped through, firing his rifle on automatic. There was no one there. The first floor looked like a grand bank lobby, with counters and barred teller stations. It was full of dust and gas and smoke. Dongs, South Vietnamese currency, were scattered everywhere. It was hard to look around with the gas mask on, but right away he saw that the staircase he’d been told would be right in front of him when he got in—it was never if he got in—was not there.

Chuck Ekker, his squad leader, came behind him with the rest. The men spread out, looking for a way upstairs. They had been shot at from the roofline and second floor on every attempted assault, so they had every reason to believe there were enemy soldiers upstairs, but how to get there? Behind a heavy door down the hall, Allbritton heard Vietnamese voices. The door was locked. He shot through it, and another marine came up from behind to spray it with his heavier M-60 machine gun. It still would not budge, even when they threw themselves against it. They placed grenades at its foot, pulled the pins, and ran far back. The explosions blew the door off its jambs, but it was still standing. The top tilted inward but the bottom stayed in place. They threw some more grenades into the room through the opening at the top. When they were finally able to push past the door the room was empty. Big chunks of the stone wall blown away earlier had been piled against it. There was a spiral staircase in the middle of this room. At the far end was an open door. They found only one wounded soldier upstairs.

Ekker had waited momentarily in the downstairs hall to assemble his squad. Through a hole in the ceiling, he saw someone who seemed to be gesturing for him to move back. He thought at first that it was Allbritton, but then the man dropped a grenade, the Chinese variety that looked like a tin can on a stick. It rolled to the floor beneath his feet. Frantic, he tried to move away but ran into a wall. The hallway was narrow, and men were scrambling into each other as they tried to back off. The grenade exploded, disintegrating the handle of Ekker’s rifle, and shrapnel cut through the lower part of his left leg. Jerry Dankworth, who was directly behind him, received the blast’s full force in both of his legs.68

Just across the street, Hausrath radioed Downs to say that Ekker’s squad was down and they needed to bring them back.

“No!” Downs shouted into the radio. “Bring back be damned! You get going!”

Ernie Weiss and Mike Sowards were among those poking farther into the hazy mess of the building. Weiss found an abandoned enemy radio pack; inside was an NVA flag, which he took as a souvenir. On one side of the building, in a small courtyard, he and Sowards found a wounded enemy soldier crawling away. Weiss had never seen an enemy up close. He called for help.

“We’ve got a wounded gook over here,” he said.

Another marine lifted his rifle and shot the man dead.

In the end it was almost anticlimactic. When the attack was over, the building was so full of holes that it resembled a worn sponge. Its defenders either were dead or had run by the time Downs and his third platoon fully occupied the building. None of his men had been killed, but eighteen had been wounded. Hoang would report losing seven men.69 In their haste to clear out, the Front had abandoned weapons and ammo at various firing positions. In one of the outbuildings behind the treasury, the marines found about thirty civilians hiding. One spoke English well and convinced them that they had been trapped there since the previous day. They were let go.

Downs’s second platoon then moved on the big post office building next door. That went more easily. Clearly Cheatham’s bombardment and Salvati’s gas cloud had made a difference. The enemy had cleared out.

Most of them, anyway. On the southwest side of the post office they found a vault with heavy steel doors at both ends. Some of the marines swore they had been fired at from it and that they had seen enemy soldiers just outside it, but by the time they reached the bunker its doors were closed and locked at both ends. It was about twenty feet long and covered with earth and had grass growing over it in a large mound, with concrete porches at both ends. They tried blasting through one of the doors with a bazooka but it didn’t budge. One of the men who spoke a few phrases in Vietnamese called for those inside to surrender. There was no response.

Chris Brown, the dancing marine from Brooklyn, had a suggestion. He noticed four small air shafts emerging from the grass.

“Why don’t we put some gas in there?” he said.

So as they backed off and covered the doors David Kief ran up the grass mound and dropped a gas canister down one of the shafts. It took a few moments, but then the steel door in front opened a little. The marines didn’t wait to see if the men inside intended to surrender. They opened fire. One fired a rocket into the bunker and it exploded. Then came a secondary explosion from inside. After a few moments, those inside who could still move began to emerge from the door at the opposite end. They were shot one by one.

Inside and outside the bunker they found the remains of two dozen men. Inside the marines found a stash of rifles, a machine gun, rocket launchers, and satchel charges. The bodies were laid out in the courtyard, more enemy soldiers than any of them had ever seen at one time, alive or dead. To Brown they seemed oddly young and small and skinny, until it occurred to him that he and his fellow marines were all young and skinny, too, only taller, most of them. All of the dead men had new dark green uniforms. Some of the marines searched them for souvenirs—pistols, rifles, canteens, knives, binoculars, cameras. They would send the loot back to the compound, where friends would tag it and load it on a small trailer for shipment back to Phu Bai.

One, Reymundo Delarosa, opened the dead men’s mouths and examined their teeth. He produced pliers from a side pocket and extracted gold fillings, a practice even the hardened men in his squad thought grotesque.