5

Vaught

AFTER ITS DARING nighttime escape from the trap at TFP, Colonel Dick Sweet’s cavalry battalion, now down to less than half strength, had found an ARVN outpost on a hilltop and dug in. From that vantage the men could watch over the main road into Hue from two directions. Sweet had for the time being abandoned orders to march to the city walls. His men were exhausted and had been battered. They needed time to recover. The small band of South Vietnamese soldiers at the camp were thrilled at their arrival. They had been stranded, vastly outnumbered, ever since Tet began, and had survived only because the Front had apparently considered their post too insignificant to attack.

They were there four days. Carl DiLeo, the skinny mortar platoon private from Trenton, was thrilled just to be alive. His platoon, ordinarily about fifty men, was down to just fourteen. He felt they had been put through such a trial that they ought to be pulled from the field and given a break. He felt that LBJ himself in his cowboy hat should have stomped up the hill to shake their hands. DiLeo had been in-country for eight months, and it had been one deadly scrimmage after another. And now this. He felt, How much more can they ask? Morale in his group was at an all-time low. Many of the guys he had been close to were gone—either dead or wounded and evacuated. He felt isolated and had lost trust in his leaders. Who the fuck did this? He felt he and the others were owed an apology.

He was not the only one. The men were surly. Theodore Wallace, by virtue of attrition, was the radio operator for his platoon. Earlier, before he was given the job, he had seen the lieutenant commanding his platoon kick the radio operator in anger. For that reason he always walked about ten feet away, despite being told to stay close. Finally he was confronted over it.

“Wallace, what the fuck are you always doing to the left or right of me?” the lieutenant complained. “When I get a call, you’re always telling the colonel to wait while you walk over to me.”

Wallace leveled his most meaningful Harlem street stare.

“Because, sir, if you lift your leg to me, I am going to shoot you. And I don’t want to have to shoot you.”

Wallace had rapidly soured on the whole Vietnam adventure, although he intended to stay and do his duty. On one patrol he found a pile of what he thought was burning wood. When he got closer he saw that it was the blackened remains of an old woman. She probably had been hit by a grenade they had launched at her village. Wallace wondered what she had been doing when she had been killed like that.

One day he saw an officer casually aim his rifle and try to shoot a Vietnamese boy in the distance.

“Sir, what are you doing?” he’d asked.

“He’s probably supplying the NVA,” the officer said. “What’s he doing out here anyway?”

“It’s his country!” said Wallace. “What’s he carrying? Did you even look through your binoculars to see if he was carrying anything?”

Wallace had pretty much decided that from then on he wasn’t going to shoot at anybody who was not actively shooting at him.

Days later, when the men were delivered food and warm, dry clothes General Tolson, the division commander who had sent them marching toward La Chu with inadequate support, flew in personally. If he had expected to be received as a savior, he was disappointed. He was given a distinct cold shoulder. The men were still digging foxholes, and they kept at it. Some of them stood up to salute him as he passed, but not many. DiLeo felt that instead of offering them goodies and a pep talk, the general ought to have admitted his mistake. Look, I moved you guys too fast. If he’d done that the men might have responded differently—DiLeo would have. He just wanted somebody to admit to having fucked up. But the general didn’t even come close. He just offered canned army rah-rah bullshit.

“They won’t stop digging for me,” Tolson complained to Sweet. As they spoke, inside a small hut, some of the men tore off its roof to use as a covering for their foxholes.50

The general stopped to chat with pathfinder Juan Gonzales and one of his buddies, asking them if they were okay, if they needed anything. They were polite, but they didn’t salute him. When the general walked away, one of the officers on his staff confronted them.

“Don’t you men know enough to salute a general?” he asked them. “He is a general!”

Gonzales said, “Sir, we do not salute officers in the field. Would you like for us to salute you?”

The officer walked off mad.

One of the nights when they were camped on the hill, Wallace got a tape from his family. They found a tape player and all of the guys huddled around to listen. It was a sweet, run-of-the-mill message from home, updates on various family members, lots of love-yous and stay-safes and can’t-wait-till-you-come-homes, and there was not a dry eye in his unit. For those minutes in the chilly darkness on a hillside in Vietnam, those voices from home were, he realized, the voices of everyone’s family.

Then came orders that they were to march back toward La Chu to take part in a pincer move. Colonel James Vaught’s battalion had been moving south from PK-17 and planned to attack the village, which at long last had been recognized as an enemy stronghold. Sweet, whose decision to break out of the encirclement was regarded as faintly cowardly in some quarters, was ordered to retrace his steps, get back, and rejoin the fight by attacking the village from the opposite direction.

So DiLeo, instead of getting thanks, an apology, and a break, now found himself humping his rifle and heavy mortar plate right back into the shit. Right back to the place where hundreds—hell, thousands!—of murderous gooks51 had whipped them days earlier, the place they’d been extremely lucky to have escaped! Jesus, he thought, we didn’t do too good with four hundred, five hundred men, what are we going to do with less than half that? He had this vision of commanders like Tolson sitting in an office somewhere behind the lines looking at maps and talking on phones without a clue about what it was actually like to be out in the drizzly fucking muck watching your friends get torn to pieces or turned into goopy pink mist. Fuck this, he thought, nobody is doing this! Audie Murphy himself wouldn’t do this! This is crazy! He felt as if he were serving some terribly brutal penalty for a crime he had not committed. His purpose in life had been reduced to scheming to get an extra can of C rations or a pair of dry socks. What could he do? He resolved to be more careful than he had been. He certainly wasn’t going to be putting his hand up for anything. As far as the overall purpose of the war, it deserved no further sacrifice from Private Carl DiLeo . . . he was done with that. Nobody seemed to give a damn about him and he could return that outlook with a vengeance.

When the battalion chaplain asked if he might offer a prayer before they embarked, and then asked God to bless “those who were going to die,” Captain Helvey nearly threw something at him. He told Sweet to keep the chaplain away from his men.52

Farther north, setting off from PK-17 on Monday, February 5, Vaught had arrayed his full battalion in a diamond formation, with Delta Company in the lead, commanded by Frank Lambert, and two more behind it to the left and the right, Howard Prince’s Bravo and Robert Preston’s Alpha. Charlie Company commanded by Mike Davison moved behind them in the center. This gave them the flexibility to fight off an attack from any direction without breaking formation. No matter where the enemy approached, the battalion had its flanks covered and had strength to its rear. Vaught and his command staff walked before Alpha Company, stripped of all signs of rank and carrying rifles like everyone else. They moved through rice paddies and villages, retracing the route Sweet had taken days earlier, about a thousand yards to the west of Highway 1.

Andy Westin was walking with Davison’s company. The night before, at PK-17, he had written to his wife, Mimi:

Things are really hot! We’ll probably jump off this afternoon. I guess there are a terrific amount of gooks in the area . . . Somewhere around here is a gook with a mortar and he pops a round or 2 at us every hour or so. I hope somebody spots it and can get rid of him. It’s a pain in the neck! All of a sudden this war has really changed tempo. It was slow and easy. Now it’s fast and furious. There’s something going on all the time. I think the fighting is going to get very heavy before it gets better. I’m glad I’ve got the weapons platoon. I’m a little further back, but not far enough to make me happy. I’d just as soon be home.

As they started walking, the lieutenant was thrilled—all four companies arrayed in the field! Five hundred American soldiers moving together. Vaught had seen big infantry battles before, in World War II and in Korea, but in Vietnam it was rare to perform such an ­industrial-strength maneuver. Westin had never seen more than a company together at once. He was dazzled by Vaught, a gruff, thick man with big facial features and squinty eyes under a hard rim of brow, with bushy eyebrows that arched upward even when his face was at rest, so that when he looked at you, even with indifference, it felt significant, like a leveling stare. Down his cheeks he had deep lines that seemed carved from stone, and he spoke with a slow southern drawl—he was from Conway, South Carolina. Westin and the other officers were in awe of him. When he first met Prince he said, “This is my third war so I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages. In other words, I’m scared shitless and I assume you are too so let’s just get that out of the way and do our jobs anyway.” He exuded confidence. He had a wealth of stories and told them well. He claimed to be a direct descendant of Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” the Palmetto State’s guerrilla general during the Revolutionary War. He was magnetic. If war it is, the young lieutenant thought, please let me go with this guy. And so they were going now, marching south in this enormous formation with artillery rounds making a curious buzzing sound like giant insects as they flew overhead, and then shaking the ground when they exploded several hundred yards ahead. It was like walking behind a moving wall of thunder. After what had happened with Sweet’s battalion, they weren’t taking chances. Westin thought it was the coolest thing he had ever seen.

It did not take them long to find the enemy. A Huey was hit as it flew ahead of them. It was the command-and-control bird and ordinarily would have been carrying the battalion commander, but since Vaught, like Sweet, preferred to lead from the ground, the chopper had just been providing surveillance. Captain Howard Prince, commander of Bravo Company, had spoken to the crew earlier, advising them to move away because there might be antiaircraft batteries in the vicinity. Minutes later the chopper went down.

Vaught ordered Prince to move to the crash site to rescue the crew. He found it, and the chopper was intact, its nose down in the rice paddy, but the crew had gone. They had already been picked up by a rescue chopper. Prince could tell the area where it crashed had been an NVA camp. There were sandal tracks and dugout fighting positions and communications wires.

Bravo, his company, was then sent by Vaught south across the dry rice paddies toward the wood line at the northern edge of Que Chu to look for the enemy. They were drawn straight into an ambush. It was still early afternoon. The point squad made it to the trees—he later realized that they had been allowed to make it that far—and then were cut down. All ten men were either killed or wounded. As the rest of the company moved up, they took heavy fire. There was no cover.

The captain had been in firefights before, and like everyone else in his company, he was scared, but he had learned to keep his own emotions wrapped and, what was sometimes even harder, to accept that when bullets and grenades started to fly there was only so much he could control. A dark-haired, broad-faced, reflective man, Prince had graduated high in his class at West Point and had earned a master’s degree from American University. This, and the fact that he had been shot in the foot earlier in his tour, was why his radio call sign was “Limping Scholar Six.” Talking to his platoon leaders by radio, he cautioned them to stay calm even when every instinct in their bodies was telling them to panic, as his were now. Just assess the situation and tell me where the fire is coming from, how heavy it is, how many people are shooting at you, and what kind of weapon you think it is. This kind of thing was easier said than done. But his job was to piece together the information and decide what he could do, which was usually less than what he might like.

In this case he could call down artillery on the enemy positions, which was risky because his own men were down in the woods and the rest of the company was less than a hundred yards away. He called for both high-explosive rounds and smoke rounds, and set off moving through the heavy smoke. They were still being shot at, although the fire was now less accurate. It took his men several hours to move back across the rice paddies and rejoin the company.  The fire was so intense that the bodies of those killed had to be left behind—Prince would send a patrol back out after dark and the NVA allowed his men to retrieve the bodies, which were evacuated the next day after the wounded.

At the same time Delta Company was attacked by small-arms fire to its right from a village called Lieu Coc. They, too, had fallen back. Even with the moving wall of fire, Vaught’s battalion had not gotten very far. The seemingly invincible marching formation Westin so admired in the morning was now scattered and digging in on all sides, facing forces equal to or possibly stronger than its own.

That night, Vaught, the veteran, gave his command staff a little lesson in digging a foxhole, which would later be described with admiration by his operations officer, Charles Baker, in his memoir, Gray Horse Troop. Vaught excavated a trench two feet deep and three feet wide and about a foot longer than his body. The dirt he removed was used to form a lip around the edges, and branches from a nearby hut were stretched across the top. Then he put a thick layer of dirt over the branches. He crawled in feetfirst, with the antenna of his radio sticking out the front end. He bragged that it “could take a direct hit from an eighty-two-millimeter mortar.”53

Westin, in his own hole with Charlie Company, wrote another letter to Mimi that night:

Well, we’re really in the thick of it and Charlie apparently doesn’t want to leave. Our entire battalion is working together as one unit. We’re gradually working towards Hue, but it sure isn’t the easiest hike I’ve ever been on. The gooks manage to toss mortar rounds at us about every 15 minutes. Luckily nobody has been killed [in his unit], but we’ve taken a few casualties. I’ve got a flak vest and I just about live in it. The weather is really rotten. Day and night it’s a cold mist. Not heavy enough to really get you wet, but just enough to make us cold and miserable. Ugh!!

. . . I’ve moved underground. No kidding. I dug a hole, then tunneled out from there. I have my air mattress and other sleeping gear about 5' below ground. It’s cool. No wind or cold gets down here and when Charlie mortars us I don’t even have to roll over. The tunnel part is about 3' high and 10' long, with a couple of bends so that if a round lands in the entrance hole, the shrapnel won’t get me. Over my head is about 6' of solid ground. It’s a pretty safe spot. I wasn’t planning on having it, but I got cold and to keep warm I dug. I dug about all day yesterday and this is what I ended up with.

General Tolson had moved his forward tactical command to PK-17, and as a reminder of how little control of the battlefield he had achieved, the outpost was regularly hit with mortar fire. On Friday night, three rounds landed directly on top of the command bunker. Major Don Bowman was inside with the brigade commander, Colonel Hugh Campbell. It was deafening. It felt like being in a metal drum that someone was whacking hard with a baseball bat. Each hit blew out the lanterns and filled the cramped workspace with dust and smoke. Then their communication lines went down—the explosion cut the antenna cable. They were still alive only because the enemy rounds were exploding on impact. If the mortar crew targeting them decided to try one with the fuse set on “delay,” which would give it time to penetrate before exploding, they were done. Surely the enemy had a spotter who would relay this suggestion. Bowman bowed his head and took a moment to silently ask God to please take care of his wife and children. Then he went back to work by flashlight.

“Are you hit bad?” Campbell asked him, alarmed.

“Sir, I’m not hit.”

“Oh, I saw your head drop and I thought you were wounded,” the colonel said.

Bowman explained about the prayer, and they both laughed.

A week later, the enemy mortar crew did as Bowman feared. Trying to grab a few hours of sleep in his bunker after being relieved at midnight, he had stretched out in his flak jacket under two ponchos, resting his head on a canteen. He awoke abruptly with a loud ringing in his ears, tangled in equipment and bedding, as if he and all of the contents of his bunker had been put in a blender. A mortar round with a delayed fuse had exploded just two feet short of the bunker wall. It blew behind Bowman’s head, throwing him clear across the space and slamming him into the wall opposite. He was dazed and slightly concussed, but otherwise unhurt.

Vaught’s battalion continued to walk south, now with a pair of helicopters overhead as spotters—the presence of the choppers made the men feel more secure. When forward elements encountered the enemy, they would dial up the howitzer battery at PK-17, which was at that point delivering strikes on request. Once or twice a shell landed in the middle of their own formation, injuring no one but somewhat reducing their enthusiasm for maneuvering with artillery. Ahead were three more villages: Lieu Coc, where they had been delayed; and then Que Chu; and La Chu, which stood in the shadow of the three-story American-made concrete bunker that was the heavily guarded headquarters for the Front’s assault on Hue.

The artillery battery at PK-17 was having a hard time keeping up with the demand for fire missions. Ordinarily it was resupplied from Camp Evans by helicopter. The need for new rounds was pressing. The Chinooks, big dual-rotor choppers, generally delivered ammo on pallets suspended in a sling. In order to see they had to stay below the clouds, which were so low that the sling kept hitting trees and hills and even the flat ground. So ammo now had to be delivered in much smaller amounts by truck. And once Sweet’s battalion was on the move again, the battery started getting fire missions from it, too.54

Vaught solved this problem by calling the navy, which unloaded with five-inch guns from the deck of USS Lofberg, which was parked out in Yankee Station, the naval staging area in the South China Sea. This chased the enemy out of Lieu Coc. In the village they found bodies of NVA soldiers, lots of dugout fighting positions, food, and ammunition for a large force. The men who had been fighting from there had apparently retreated to their next defensive line. Villagers who survived the shelling assured Vaught’s men that there had been “beaucoup VC” there until hours earlier.

The march continued with daily harassment and delaying actions by the NVA, as it became clear to Vaught that a very large enemy force, much bigger than any of them had imagined, was waiting for them at La Chu, where it had more favorable ground to make a stand. After four days of fighting, his battalion had made it no farther than Sweet’s. They continued probing NVA positions the next day, without success. And the next. And the next. Each morning the company commanders would huddle with Vaught in the field, get their orders, move back to their positions, call in air and artillery support, deploy their men, maneuver and engage the enemy, and attempt to push through. That spot in the rice paddy would be Vaught’s base camp for the next two weeks.

It wasn’t as precarious as it had been for Sweet’s battalion. In addition to the artillery, both his own and the navy’s, Vaught had the advantage of better understanding. His men had painstakingly cleared his flanks on the way down. So Vaught was in a much more stable position than Sweet had been. Diminished enemy fire now enabled regular helicopter flights, so his men stayed well fed and supplied.

They even got mail.

Westin got a letter from Mimi that really pissed him off. Thirty guys from his unit had been wounded. He was in constant danger. He was living in a fucking hole in the ground. And Mimi was worried about him fooling around with other women.

One of her former boyfriends, a Vietnam veteran, had said something to her about how easy it was for guys to get laid there. Aggravating matters were some photos he had sent her from his brief R&R, when he and his buddies had posed with several scantily clad showgirls. He had not even danced with them! He had taken a few admiring pictures, and some—particularly of Joyce Grayson, “Miss Las Vegas Showgirl”—from admittedly provocative angles, but that was it! He curled into his underground bunker and fired back in thick pencil:

Just because a guy you used to go with went away and got some, you seem to think that I am. The side view of Joyce is because you had to see her to believe her. I took them primarily for 2 horny bachelors. If I hadn’t enjoyed taking them, I would say that I wasn’t normal . . . Grow up!

Two days later he was distraught. Men in combat form close ties, but often even more important is the admiration they feel for especially skilled leaders, the kind who, usually just a few years older, seem to know everything and to be immune to fear and danger. You were glad to have these men with you not only because they knew what to do, but because their very presence was reassuring—if you were with them, you felt you would survive. In Charlie Company that man was Lieutenant Winfield Beck, the burly, round-faced, unflappable lawyer from Pensacola, who was on his second tour. He was the platoon leader who had taken reporter Denby Fawcett on that village sweep three months earlier. Beck was the same age as Westin, but his experience and poise made him seem older. He had such a clear, logical way of thinking that he just seemed always to know exactly how to handle a problem. The two had swapped jobs a few weeks earlier, Westin leaving his position as company executive officer (XO) and taking over a weapons platoon. When he was killed, Beck had been stretched out alongside Davison—right where Westin would have been if they hadn’t traded jobs. They had been assaulting a tree line. Beck lifted his head and was shot through the throat. He choked and bled to death as the captain held him and tried to figure out what to do. There was nothing to be done. Beck’s death hit Westin hard.

In his hole, he wrote to Mimi:

My Darling, For the first time since I came here, last night, I cried. I wasn’t the only one. From the CO on down, our men were crying. Our XO, Lt. Beck, got killed in a fight yesterday. He was probably the most liked and respected officer in the company. Our entire battalion got caught in a gook trap. I still don’t know how many killed and wounded we took, but there were a terrific amount. It was a slaughter!

All the brass thought the gooks had moved out, so we just went waltzing into this woodline. The gooks had hundreds of grenades and anti-personnel mines. They waited until our people were right on top of them, then cut us down.

We finally got out about 11:00 PM and pulled back. My platoon ran out of ammo (we’d been supporting from the rear) so we made stretchers out of ponchos and went out to help carry wounded. None of my people were killed, but 2 got light wounds. The rifle platoons were really surprised to see myself and my platoon come charging across the field with stretchers on our backs. Once we got our people out, we went to the other companies and helped them. I’ve never seen anything like it and I hope I never do again. I’m now the XO again.

Positioned near such a large enemy force, Vaught and his men knew that they were vulnerable to being overrun if caught by surprise. Nerves were taut, especially at night. When a trip flare went off suddenly on their perimeter one night, the men panicked. Vaught received an urgent request to fire illumination flares—but this would be like turning on a floodlight over their position.

He refused. He also issued crisp orders that no one was to fire a rifle or a machine gun—the barrel flashes would also mark their position. He did allow several small rockets to be fired at the point where the flare had gone off, because the LAW barrels had no muzzle flash.

In the morning they found a very dead pig.55