1

Clusterfucked

MAJOR BOB THOMPSON got his first glimpse of the Citadel on Sunday, February 11, from the south bank of the Huong River. It looked fearsome. Taking it back was now his job.

There had been fighting inside the Citadel since day one. The Front had owned most of it now for twelve days, setting up a revolutionary government, rounding up enemies of the people, recruiting fighters, digging trenches, and erecting barricades. They were fully prepared to hold it, and this was a structure designed for defense. Surrounded by a wide moat, it could be entered only across the narrow bridges that led to its eleven gates. Above most were stone towers from which guns could completely cover any approach. Thompson’s way in would have to be through one of the four northern gates controlled by General Ngo Quang Truong. During World War II, when the city was occupied by Japan, the occupying army had honeycombed the wide expanse at the top of the walls with foxholes, trenches, and tunnels. From that height, the enemy could observe any movement of men and vehicles inside and out, and rain ruinous fire. Rooting them out would be nasty work. Below, in the tight grid of its streets, lived more than half of the city’s population in row after row of one- and two-story homes. Most were surrounded by stone walls or fences and were planted inside and out with trees and vegetation, so in most places the farthest you could see in any direction was about ten yards. At the south center there was, of course, the historic royal palace and its grounds, a protected area surrounded by its own high stone walls, from behind which the enemy could launch rockets and mortars with impunity, at least for now—Thompson would be barred from shelling or bombing it. As he pondered the layout of his objective and the time the enemy had had to prepare, he realized that his men would face hundreds of naturally camouflaged, mutually supporting, well-fortified gun positions. There were also several four- and five-story buildings inside that would have gun positions on the upper floors and rooftops. As of yet, there was no chance of waiting or starving the enemy out, because his supply lines were still intact. The army was stalled in the countryside. Still flying from the monumental platform in front was the galling red-and-blue-striped Alliance flag, with its defiant yellow star. Hanoi still owned the old city.

The imagery was potent. The flag announced Hanoi’s claim, not just to the Citadel but to the city of Hue and, in a sense, to all of Vietnam. The Front professed to be the only authentic nationalists in the field, so the tricolor flag, which they had taken pains to make different from their own or the VC’s, promised a Vietnam for all Vietnamese—our fortress, our royal city, our country. And the fact that it was going to take a foreign army to dislodge them proved their point. The battle was all too real, but it was also theater, as surely as the plays enacted by the Front’s traveling propaganda troupes. Hue was a metaphor for the whole struggle.

A key part of this narrative was the undeniable inadequacy of the ARVN. General Truong’s men had fought bravely to retain their hold on Mang Ca and had, at great cost, taken back almost a third of the Citadel. Truong held several blocks immediately south of Mang Ca and had pushed out along the north side all the way to the west wall, taking back both gates in the northwest corner. His force had fought down the west side to retake the airstrip at Tay Loc but then had lost it again after an enemy counterattack. The most densely populated part of the fortress, its southern half, was still owned completely by the Front, and Truong, having lost much of his force, lacked the strength to drive them out. Even the fierce Hac Bao unit, now reunited with its marine adviser, Jim Coolican, was down to only a fraction of its men. No matter how sincere the ARVN forces were about defending a separate, free South Vietnam, and no matter how few of the residents of Hue had rallied to the Communist cause, AVRN was no military match for the Front. Taking the fortress back required American help, and Truong had asked for it repeatedly.

The recovery effort had fallen to Thompson, a tall, slender, extremely fit1 thirty-seven-year-old career marine officer from Mississippi. He had majored in physical education at Union University near his hometown of Corinth before enlisting. Unlike Cheatham, the giant who had steered the thrust in southern Hue, Thompson had nothing flamboyant about him. He was a serious man who had proved he was good at moving large numbers of men and vehicles and supplies efficiently, a worthy skill, but he had no claim to talent in combat and lacked utterly the bluster and presence that often marked such men. Thompson had an advanced degree in public administration from Pennsylvania State University, and for his first six months in Vietnam he had been an embarkation officer, a glorified cargo supervisor, for the Third Marine Amphibious Force in Da Nang. But he had been given command of First Battalion, Fifth Marines the day after the Tet Offensive started. Thompson had flown to battalion headquarters at Phu Loc that day and landed in a mortar barrage. He spent his first fifteen minutes in command with his luggage at the bottom of a muddy hole with several marines lying on top of him.

He had flown to Phu Bai with three of his companies that Sunday, February 11; there, he was briefed by the commanding general. LaHue told him that General Truong was useless. He had “circled the wagons” on the north side of the fortress and “was just holding on to his ass.” No consideration was given to Truong’s disadvantages. The South Vietnamese general was the victim of the same surprise that had left the MACV compound stranded and the marines at such a disadvantage, and against very large odds he had held on and expanded his position. LaHue was not impressed. Thompson’s point of entry would be the Hau Gate on the east side of the north wall, which opened into Mang Ca. To get there he would have to put his men on Mike Boats (landing craft mechanized, or LCMs) at the boat ramp on the south bank of the Huong and move upriver—the same route that Gene Roberts had taken days before. Anything that moved along that water route would take fire from both banks. One boat had been lost delivering the first of Thompson’s companies, Bravo, to the Citadel the day before. Despite that sinking, the company had arrived intact, along with five Patton tanks and two Ontos.

LaHue, with his unfailing aptitude for selling the enemy short, told Thompson that the “mop-up” shouldn’t take more than a few days. He and his men were under no circumstances to take orders from General Truong, despite the fact that Truong was the ranking officer and the one with the most experience fighting inside the Citadel—quite apart from the fact that it was his country the United States was defending. The innate superiority of the US Marine Corps was a given. Thompson was to take charge. Concerned that Truong (whom LaHue did not know well) might balk at taking orders from a mere major, the general considered making Thompson a brevet colonel on the spot. The major demurred, modestly arguing that since he would not be wearing any sign of rank anyway—it was sniper bait—he could simply present himself as “Colonel Thompson.”

That afternoon Thompson and his three other companies were driven from Phu Bai to Hue, where he met at the MACV compound with Colonel Hughes. The onetime way station for military advisers was now a crowded, busy military base, with traffic roaring in and out at all hours and reasonably secure accommodations. Hughes reiterated that Thompson was to report to him, not Truong—he shared LaHue’s estimation of the South Vietnamese general.2 Thompson was to take his Alpha and Charlie Companies with him into the Citadel to join Bravo. His fourth company, Delta, would stay behind in southern Hue. Once inside, Thompson’s men were to push out of Mang Ca and fight their way to the south wall, then pivot west to take back the royal palace and its grounds. Truong’s men, thus relieved of having to defend the southern perimeter and reinforced by two more ARVN battalions, would devote their efforts to the fortress’s west side, driving the enemy forces back out the gates they had entered, where, with any luck, they would collide with the US Army’s First Air Cavalry Division. That was the plan.

Thompson and his men were sent that night to the soccer stadium, which had become a supply depot and transit center. Most of the field was covered with pallets of C rations and ammunition. The men each grabbed a week’s worth of ammo, stuffing their packs and draping themselves with bandoliers, and each was given a gas mask. They were then moved into homes in the surrounding neighborhoods to spend the night.

In the ones still occupied, residents simply made room or cleared out. They had grown used to hosting uninvited soldiers. The marines were impressed by the modernity of the homes, many of which were nicely furnished and filled with appliances, refrigerators, radios, and TVs. Only the toilets disappointed. They consisted in most houses of a hole in the floor, over which one squatted. Unlike the Vietnamese, for whom squatting was as natural as walking, the marines found the posture challenging. But for a lucky few, the houses provided their first chance to sleep on a mattress in months, even if they did have to share it with one or two others.3

As Thompson prepared to turn in, the battalion chaplain came to see him. He said he preferred to go back and minister to troops at Phu Bai.

“No, you’re going with us,” Thompson said.

The preacher broke down.

“I can’t do it,” he said.

Thompson fired him on the spot. The preacher was not the only one overcome with dread. The upper ranks of the American military may still have been in denial about Hue—just three days earlier General Wheeler had told LBJ that the major enemy threat “is still posed north of the DMZ and around Khe Sanh,” and that Hue would be completely cleared in “several days”4—but the rank and file had sized up the coming fight inside the Citadel as the shit storm to end all shit storms.

Later that night a Jesuit priest, Father Aloysius McGonigal, stopped in to see Thompson. A slight, middle-aged man from Philadelphia with a receding hairline and glasses, he wore the uniform of an army officer, complete with a pistol strapped to his hip. He had a cross on his collar, which was the only thing that identified him as clergy.

“I understand you don’t have a chaplain,” he said. “I have permission to go with you. May I do that?” Thompson was glad to accept him, and the two men became friends.

The battalion queued up glumly at the boat ramp on Monday morning, February 12. The first of the Mike Boats, loaded to the gunwales with supplies and ammo (including high-explosive mortar rounds and grenades), and filled to capacity with about fifty marines, received such intense fire that it turned back shortly after shoving off.

By late afternoon the volume of fire diminished enough for them to get under way, but they were targeted by enemy guns for the whole trip. The leader of Charlie One, Charlie Company’s First Platoon, was Second Lieutenant Nick Warr, who would later spell out in vivid and often bitter detail his experience in Hue in a memoir titled Phase Line Green. He was twenty-two, a newly minted infantry officer who had attended the University of Oregon before joining the marines with hopes of becoming a pilot. He had been leading Charlie One for about three months. Pressed into the Mike Boat, Warr was so nervous that he felt his testicles retracting before they even got underway. When they did, first one, then two, then three mortar rounds splashed into the river and exploded around them. The boats zigzagged where the river narrowed in the north fork around Hen Island.5 The marines on board could only hope, or pray. A hit would blow them to oblivion before they even heard the blast. But the mortars stopped falling and the shooting eased once they cleared the island. They arrived unscathed before dusk north of the Citadel, sliding up to a ramshackle ferry landing—not much more than a collection of tall sticks jutting from the water and draped with drying fishnets.

They were unopposed as they off-loaded—more boats coming up behind them would deliver the remainder of Thompson’s men. When Warr assembled his squad leaders to go over the route they would take to the gate, he asked if there were any questions and got one.

“Do they expect us to get back in them fucking boats after we’re done in here?” asked Ed Estes, a lance corporal. “Like shit. Ain’t no way I’m getting back in one of them fucking boats, even if I have to swim across that fucking river and hump all the way back to Phu Bai all by myself.”6

The march was short to Hau Gate, with Thompson and his command group leading the way. This was unusual. Commanders ordinarily stayed back from the point. Warr thought it was foolish, with the long antennas on their radios waving over them like “aiming stakes.”7 Friendly villagers had warned them that the Front had prepared an ambush on the direct route, so they went around it. They passed a burned-out ARVN truck with charred and stinking bodies in and around it. They made a wrong turn at one point, and Warr raced to catch up with Thompson to redirect him, but they arrived at the gate without incident. They were met by several ARVN officers and the commander of Bravo Company, Captain Fernandez Jennings. The Vietnamese objected to bringing so many men through at once, fearing it would draw enemy fire.

“If you don’t let us in,” Thompson said, “we’re going to knock down this gate.”

They relented.

Mang Ca was stately by comparison with the crowded MACV compound. There was lots of green space, a parade ground, rows of palm trees, and big buildings in the French colonial style. A canal passed through the center with water so chilly that mist curled from it in daytime. There were bullet holes in the tree trunks and chips on almost every stone surface, testament to the recent intense fighting.

Thompson found Truong with Colonel Adkisson, his adviser, in a command bunker. Both appeared enormously relieved by the battalion’s arrival. Truong showed no concern for Thompson’s rank—he never even asked—and was delighted to turn over the reins of the battle. The marine commander outlined the plan to push directly south. They would set off the next morning.

That night, the major consulted with Coolican. After his heroic efforts in defense of the compound on the first night, the captain had rejoined the elite Hac Bao unit as soon as he could get a chopper into the fortress.

Coolican had stayed despite frightening news from home. Soon after he got there, he was told that he needed to call home immediately. Such a message could mean only bad news. Patched from Truong’s headquarters through the MACV to Hawaii and then to Camp Pendle­ton, Coolican was linked to his wife, Jean, in a radio call—only one could speak at a time. Jean told him that their seventeen-month-old son had just undergone emergency brain surgery. She heard shooting and explosions in the background when her husband spoke. She had no idea exactly where in Hue he was, but it sounded like a tough spot, and she knew from watching the evening news that fighting in the city was fierce. She had already received official notice days earlier that her husband had been wounded there—a minor injury, but the marines had their protocol. Given the crisis with their son, she knew that he could probably qualify for emergency leave, but she made a decision on the spot to urge him to stay. Given the intensity of the battle, she worried that trying to get out might be more dangerous than staying. The surgery was done and their son, while still in critical condition, was recovering. Her husband was due to come home in just six weeks anyway.

“I’m dealing with this situation here,” she told him, “and I don’t want to be dealing with another situation there.”

Which was good, because Coolican didn’t want to leave. It was a critical time in the battle. He’d invested so much of himself in it, and expected the Hac Bao to be in the thick of things at the finish. The ARVN had been unable to push back very far, but Coolican knew that they were far more experienced and skilled at city fighting than the newly arrived marine battalion.

His assessment was confirmed in the meeting with Thompson. The new battalion commander seemed to be starting over from scratch, ignorant even of the lessons learned by Cheatham south of the river. It wasn’t all his fault. There was confusion high and low. The major’s orders from Task Force X-Ray were to avoid destroying the culturally valuable structures inside the fortress, so he was barred from calling in artillery and air support (even if the infernal monsoon clouds ever lifted), and his tanks were prohibited from using their big guns—they were to provide cover on the streets and support fire with their machine guns.

This denial of heavy firepower was especially surprising since Cheatham had gotten around it from the start by using his own version of a mobile battery—tanks, Ontos, mortars, bazookas, and 106s—and was now regularly drawing on the First Marine Field Artillery Group (FAG) at Phu Bai. The FAG had even shifted four of its 155-mm howitzers to Gia Le, a short distance west, in order to have a better bead on targets in the city. Days before Thompson arrived, one of the group’s officers, Lieutenant Alexander Wells, had choppered into the Citadel under heavy fire, landing at the tenuously held Tay Loc airstrip—where he was taken in by a group of Aussie advisers in a Quonset hut who were coolly playing cards and drinking Scotch. Wells had been sent to direct artillery and naval gunfire. He had been instructed by General Truong that the only no-fire zone inside was in the royal palace enclosure.8 The RVN Air Force had been hammering at Front positions inside the fortress for weeks, whenever their Skyraiders could get beneath the clouds. Nevertheless, Thompson’s instructions were to push ahead with small arms alone.

Like most American officers, the major expressed a dim view of the fighting abilities of the ARVN. Coolican urged Thompson to consider coordinating closely with them, but the major just wanted them to stay out of his way. Truong had had his chance; now the marines were going to show him how things were done. This attitude—and the detachment it fostered—was about to contribute to a tragic misunderstanding. Thompson believed—he would always insist he had been told this by Truong—that a battalion of South Vietnamese airborne troopers were holding a defensive position several blocks south of Mang Ca, along Mai Thuc Loan Street. He intended to march his men south in the morning to that line, marked on his map as “Baseline Alpha,” where he would relieve the ARVN force before mounting his own attack. The street ran straight west from the Dong Ba Gate, with its ornate tower.

In fact, the ARVN battalion along that street, which was being advised by marine captain Ty Cobb,9 had departed the previous day. They had been ordered out. The battalion had assembled at the compound that day in broad daylight, boarded helicopters, and flown off to Phu Bai. It was just one move of many in what had been a busy stretch of days, but surely Truong would have known about it. For whatever reason, Thompson believed it was still there, and Coolican didn’t know enough about all the troop movements at that point to correct him.

“So here is what we will do,” Thompson told the captain. “We will jump off at eight hundred hours.”

He pointed out on the map the streets his two companies would march down, and where he wanted ARVN troops to stay, off to their right side.

“No,” Coolican told him, bracing himself—he was outranked but clearly more experienced. “That is not going to work. First of all, do not go down the road at any time because you will get killed, because every house is occupied. Second, we fight at night, because when you are moving you want to move in the dark. You do not want to move in the daytime.”

“Well, if you are afraid,” Thompson said, “then I will take the road,” meaning that he would cover his own flank.

Coolican was insulted, but he knew better than to argue. He had wasted his breath often in the previous week trying to talk sense to Task Force X-Ray. He and the Hac Bao would not wait for morning. They moved stealthily down and into position while it was still dark. They would be waiting when Thompson’s men came down the street in the morning.

The grunts who would carry out Thompson’s plan knew nothing of troop movements or even the overall strategy, but they were also unhappy with it. Why were they being sent forward without any prep fire? Why had they never been given any training on fighting in city streets like this? Their counterparts south of the river had built valuable experience in urban fighting, but this battalion had not. It was all new to them.

“Fuck, we’re more likely to blow each other away than the gooks,” said Corporal Estes when Warr outlined the plan that evening. There were lots of questions but the lieutenant had no good answers. He shared their misgivings. What little training he’d had in house-to-house combat, and it was mini­mal, was that small-unit coordination was essential to avoid marines killing other marines. He spent much of that night trying to recall what else he learned and relaying it to his men. You held a grenade for a few seconds after releasing the spoon before throwing it into a window in order to prevent the enemy from picking it up and tossing it back out at you. Glass should be broken or shot out of windows immediately for a host of reasons, not the least of which was that grenades sometimes bounced off glass and back at you. Inside a building, it was critical that squads keep calling out loudly to each other to make sure they knew exactly where each one was.

On Tuesday morning, February 13, it finally stopped raining. The battalion moved out right on schedule, expecting no resistance until they reached Baseline Alpha. But during the night the Front had moved up to reclaim the positions vacated by the withdrawn ARVN battalion the day before. So instead of walking down the street to relieve a line of friendly troops, Thompson was walking his men straight into the enemy’s guns. They went in two columns: Alpha Company on the left in the front with two tanks down Dinh Bo Linh Street, which ran parallel to the treacherous inside wall. Bravo and Charlie companies would trail. It started out as a nice walk, with beautiful homes, even mansions, on both sides surrounded by lawns and gardens and high stone walls.

The enemy waited until Alpha Company was well down before opening fire. In minutes the entire unit was down. Thirty men were hit, including all of its officers.

Grenades pelted down on Vic Walker’s squad. It was part of the First Platoon, to the left of the formation, the one closest to the eastern wall, and had turned left three blocks shy of the baseline, walking toward the Dong Ba Tower. Then the gunfire and explosions started. His point man went down. Walker took a shred of shrapnel in his hand. He and his men scrambled for cover, firing up at the three-story tower, but they couldn’t see anyone to aim at, and the grenades just kept coming and coming. They finally took shelter in buildings near the base of the wall, dragging their wounded with them. They were stuck there. Machine-gun fire echoed off all the stone walls so it was impossible to tell exactly where the shooting was coming from.

Thompson ordered a retreat, and the riddled company came running back into Mang Ca dragging and carrying their casualties. The com­pany’s executive officer, Frank Wilbourne, limped back alone, stiffly, as if the joints in his arms and legs were locked, covered with blood from head to toe. He had been riddled with shrapnel. Two dead marines were still out on the street. Wilbourne told Warr, whose platoon was several blocks back with Charlie Company, that they had been “cluster­fucked.” He said the commander of the tank with them had had his head blown off. He told Warr, “Get your head out of your ass and move your men off the street.”10

Up and down Baseline Alpha and the streets that fed into it, marines were being cut down. Dennis Martin, who was driving a Patton on the right side, watched as a driver sped past him on one of the four-wheel-drive mules. Martin thought, Oh, shit, he’s lost. The driver was shot and killed and his vehicle ran off the road. It came to rest squarely in front of the tank, where it seemed to Martin that the enemy was using it for target practice. The driver’s body jerked every time a round hit home. No one dared leave cover to go after him. So Martin rolled his tank up and placed it between the dead mule driver and the enemy guns. With rounds pinging off his tank, he waited until the body was lifted from the vehicle and carried back.

In the hasty retreat, another of the tanks backed over and killed a wounded marine. Driver Joe Graham’s commander was wounded by a rocket that exploded against the side of the tank. He fell from the top hatch and ordered Graham to back up. Marines on the street screamed for it to stop, and Graham did, but too late. They dragged the dead, mangled grunt’s remains from the tank treads.

Thompson ordered Charlie Company to move up. This took several hours. It was already afternoon when Warr’s platoon, Charlie One, moved gingerly forward, surveying the wreckage. Warr walked in the front door of an abandoned house on one side of Mai Thuc Loan Street, pleased to hear his men calling out to each other loudly as they moved, just as they had discussed the night before. When he stepped back out of the house he saw them arrayed down the street, some of them crouching behind trees too small to provide adequate cover. Why were they not being shot at? He realized at once that the enemy, just across the street, was holding fire deliberately, waiting to see how many more Americans would show up. His men were sitting ducks.

“Get the fuck outta the street!” he shouted.

Gunfire erupted from the front and from both his left and right flanks. The enemy was shooting from first- and second-floor windows and from the rooftops. In the chaos that ensued, several of Warr’s men went down on the street—two of them dead; the third, Charlie Morgan, wounded, alive, and fully exposed. Morgan called for help. When his team leader tried to retrieve him, he was shot through the leg. Then Ed Estes, Morgan’s squad leader, the corporal who had so vigorously disliked the boat ride, paced violently for a few seconds and then abruptly raced out toward Morgan and was immediately cut down, shot through the throat. Both Estes and Morgan died.

Despite this carnage, Charlie Company’s commander, First Lieutenant Scott Nelson, kept ordering the First Platoon to advance. Warr resisted, trying to explain that they didn’t have a chance against such massed enemy fire, but Nelson was insistent. Warr then argued that his men were completely exposed on their left flank, from which the enemy could pour down fire from the tower, but Nelson wasn’t buying it. He said that Major Thompson had assured him that Bravo Company had moved up far enough to cover the left flank, which Warr could see was not true. There was a tank to his left that could have moved up to help cover an assault, but its commander refused to budge. Despite having these things pointed out to him, Nelson reiterated that they were going to drive the enemy back across Baseline Alpha before the day was done. It was an order.

Feeling numb and helpless, Warr withdrew. He found a rocking chair in the house where he had taken shelter and began rocking, stirring only when his platoon sergeant took him by the shoulder and insisted he had to get back on the radio with his superiors. Finally, resigned to the implacable stupidity of the order, he set about launching several futile attacks. On the first, with one fire team from each squad attempting to cross the street while the others covered them, the men did not make it halfway. This left several more downed marines in the street, one of them dead. Nelson ordered another attack, and again they were forced back, leaving yet more wounded and dead.

After this try, the ranking sergeant from another of Charlie Company’s platoons, Robert Odum, came running to tell Warr that one of his men was down on the street in front of the tank. This the lieutenant already knew. He could see the man’s inert form. Warr strongly suspected that he was dead. He had been shot in the head. The lieutenant argued that it was foolish to send more men out to get shot trying to retrieve a dead body, but Odum insisted, and did so in a way that seemed to challenge Warr’s commitment to his men. Young lieutenants were loath to earn the disdain of seasoned noncoms, so against his better judgment he acquiesced. Odum adjusted his helmet chinstrap and set out to perform the rescue personally. He crept out to the front of the tank and then jumped into the street to grab the downed man. An enemy round took off the bottom of Odum’s face. The round entered just below his left eye and exited below his chin, exploding through his mouth and jaw.

He fell back to the tank without the marine, who was in fact dead. His wound was horrible. He had no more mouth or jaw. He calmly poured water from his canteen over the shattered remains of his face, as if, Warr would later write, “he believed that he could simply wash out this nightmare,” and, stubborn to the last, refused to be carried off on a stretcher. Bandaged, Odum walked alongside the wounded on stretchers toward the rear.11 After that, Warr ordered his men to retrieve bodies only at night.

Nelson ordered a third attack, and this time two marines actually made it across the street. Two more lay dead, and several more were wounded. The two who had made it were stranded, unable to move without drawing fire. They waited until dark and then ran back.

Nelson finally came to inspect the situation himself. He was built like a linebacker, tall and thick, and made an impressive show when angry. He was angry now. Charlie One had failed repeatedly. Warr walked him down and showed him the position of the tank, still in the same spot, and the location of Delta Company. His left flank, contrary to Major Thompson’s insistence, was completely exposed. Nelson didn’t say anything, but he did seem surprised that Warr had been right and his commander wrong.

The debacle of the first day in the Citadel would live with Thompson the rest of his life. He spent the remainder of the day trying to get his men back to Mang Ca in one piece. More were killed and many more wounded in the effort.

Alpha Company was so badly mauled that it was no longer an effective combat unit. The fight would be pressed the next day with Charlie and Bravo. Both had been hard hit as well. Charlie One alone, with eight dead and twenty wounded, had fewer than half of its original complement of fifty-one men. Warr was effectively demoted. His men would be distributed to other units, and he would take charge of the company’s weapons platoon, functioning primarily as its forward observer and radio operator.

Charlie One was no more.