9

La Chu

THE LONGER THE battle went on, the more apparent it was that Westy had been wrong. From the beginning, he denied that the enemy had won any significant ground in South Vietnam. He had portrayed the Front’s presence in Hue as no more than a few companies. At no point had he acknowledged that the city had fallen into enemy hands or that his men were fighting a monumental battle to reclaim it.

Even as the fight stretched into its third week, Westy persistently downplayed it. Hue was rarely even mentioned in his daily dispatches to Washington, and when it was, it was only to say that the enemy was about to be crushed—on February 4 it was “in the next few days”; on the ninth it was “several more days”; on the twelfth it was “a couple of days”; and on the twenty-first it was “by the end of this week.”60

At the same time, Westy continued to send minute accounts of developments at Khe Sanh. He detailed the number of enemy mortar attacks and kept count of the daily B-52 sorties blasting away at the base’s outskirts, noting both the number and the kind of bombs dropped. He scrupulously recorded the seemingly endless train of resupply. All of this for a battle that beyond enemy shelling had yet to begin.

Meanwhile, the real battle, the one actually joined, stubbornly refused to go away. To collapse the Front’s defense of the Citadel required severing its line of supply and, ideally, retreat. Both of the army battalions General John Tolson had marched south from PK-17 had failed to get past the heavily defended villages of Que Chu and La Chu. Colonel Dick Sweet’s, the Second Battalion, Twelfth Cavalry Regiment, had been mauled, reduced by half, and escaped by slipping off in the night. For almost two weeks Colonel James Vaught’s, the Fifth Battalion, Seventh Cavalry Regiment, had been stalled just north of the villages. So long as he remained there, it was likely the enemy flag would continue flying over the Citadel.

On Friday February 16, seventeen days into the battle, the second-­highest American commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, visited Tolson at PK-17. Major Don Bowman, the brigade operations officer, took two minutes to summarize for Abrams the events around La Chu, and then Major Earle Spry, its intelligence officer, briefed him on revised assessments of the enemy’s strength—the experience with Sweet’s and Vaught’s battalions had confirmed that it was far greater than had been thought. When they were finished, Abrams stepped out of the bunker to confer privately with Tolson. Bowman couldn’t hear what was being said, but he could tell that the visiting general was exceedingly displeased. Then Abrams got back in his chopper and flew away.

Bowman immediately went to work, writing furiously in his notepad. A staff colonel asked what he was doing, and the major said, “I’m making a wish list.” If he’d read the scene correctly, he said, “We are going to get called in to see General Tolson in about fifteen minutes, and we’re about to get everything we need.”

The only thing on Bowman’s list that he didn’t get was a tank platoon. The bridges to La Chu were not sturdy enough to support them. Two more full cavalry battalions, approved. Two Quad-fifties and two M42 Dusters, approved. Additional air strikes, approved. Additional artillery batteries, approved.61

Que Chu and La Chu were in a thick stand of trees surrounded by rice paddies. The northern portion of the trees, where Que Chu began, had been dubbed the T-T Woods, for “Tough Titty,” because it had resisted everything thrown at it. A string of bloody skirmishes had been fought before Vaught had fallen back and dug in around the adjacent, smaller village of Lieu Coc, convinced he needed more of everything. Vaught had lost eighty-four men, including most of his junior officers. Most of their ammo was gone, and their mortar crews were down to an emergency supply, enough to maintain their own defenses but not enough to attack.

Gradually, intel reports confirmed the Front’s enormous strength. Two prisoners taken on the previous Sunday night, both NVA regulars, confirmed they were from units that the MACV had believed to be near Khe Sanh. They had been outside Hue since the first night of the offensive. These clues and others made it clear that Que Chu and La Chu were not just an obstacle on the road to Hue but the hub of the entire enterprise. The Front’s command post was in the virtually indestructible three-story concrete bunker at the center of La Chu, and it was defended by thousands of NVA regulars.

Getting at it would be hard. Vaught’s probing had established that the village was protected by lines of trenches and fortified bunkers in the T-T Woods, which had survived intensive bombardment. There were thousands of NVA regulars in the village, perhaps as many as three thousand—there never would be a complete account. As many men were defending the outer entrenchments as Vaught had brought to attack them. The trenches were deep and irregular. Americans dug linear trench lines, either at the front of a position or along a well-­defined perimeter. The NVA, who unlike American troops were accustomed to being attacked from the air, had adopted a far less predictable pattern, digging L-shaped trenches that were sometimes set at odd angles to each other. Most were connected, so the outermost trenches could be quickly reinforced, and defenders could fall back rapidly if necessary. They were set in dense thickets of trees, shrub brush, and bamboo, so it wasn’t possible to map them from above—they threw up torrents of fire at any aircraft that came close. But if it had been possible, the map would have resembled the web of a drunken spider. Its unpredictability meant that an assaulting force could be trapped between two or even three trenches and be fired upon from several directions at once. To prepare for the assault, Vaught resurrected a World War II–era technique for attacking trenches, instructing his men to improvise bangalore torpedoes, long tubes packed with explosives that could be fed out from behind cover deep into an array of trenches and exploded. Bamboo stems were perfect for this, being long and straight and hollow.

To soften the enemy position, the US Air Force began hammering it with bombs and napalm. It used a new technique called Sky Spot, which did not require bombers to get beneath the clouds. Two radar sets at different bases would calculate a line from their position to the target. The intersection of those two lines gave a fairly accurate reading. Then, considering the angle of descent, they adjusted the point of release to account for the bomb’s trajectory. Guided by radar, a bomber would fly out along one of the radar vectors and release its load at the designated point. It was not precise enough when friendly troops were close, but Vaught was far enough back to use it. These bombs arrived without warning. The jets flew too high to be heard above the clouds. Many targeted the big bunker, but none apparently scored a direct hit. When the bombardment was over, there was no way to tell how badly the enemy had been hurt, but the NVA let the nearby American forces know it was still there. Its soldiers blew whistles and sounded bugles at night, which unnerved Vaught’s troopers and kept them on constant alert.

After Abrams’s visit, two more cavalry battalions were moved up to join the ground attack. The final assault was set for Wednesday morning, February 21. Sweet’s was coming north from the hills near Bon Tri, west of the Citadel, where it had taken shelter. He would be attacking La Chu from the south. The two other battalions would attack the long side of La Chu from the West. The primary attack would still be made by Vaught.

His final plan was complex and risky. Directly before their position was a dry rice paddy. About three-quarters of the way across was a dike. A stream roughly defined the enemy’s western and southwestern trench lines. Vaught and his operations officer, Charlie Baker, determined that this was the best place to hit. But getting there meant crossing a lot of open ground. Once their men stepped out from cover they would be under heavy fire all the way across. The tanks Bowman had on his wish list would have made a big difference, but there were none.

Vaught meant to approach the T-T Woods from several directions at once. Davison’s Charlie Company would occupy Phu O, a small hamlet in a stand of bamboo immediately to the west, from which it could provide covering fire. Alpha Company would provide the same from the north. Delta Company would swing south and make a looping approach from the west, taking advantage of the bamboo thickets outside Vaught’s position in Lieu Coc. The central attack, the most dangerous one, fell to Howard Prince’s Bravo Company.

When Prince briefed his platoon leaders on the plan on Monday night, they were not enthusiastic. The T-T Woods were not new to them. They had been probing it without success from various angles for two weeks. Prince had lost four of his five junior officers. All but one of his platoons were being led by noncoms. The remaining lieutenant was very young and very green. The entire company was worn out and scared. Its men had spent most of their time in Vietnam on search-and-destroy missions. That was bad enough, but it was familiar and they were good at it. They were not used to being maneuvered in the field like conventional infantry, particularly mounting charges on an entrenched enemy, and they didn’t like it. They were unfamiliar with bangalore torpedoes and satchel charges—which were dangerous to handle and could get them killed. The attack plan required a lot of preliminary positioning in noisy bamboo thickets in the dark—which could get them killed. They hated the idea of charging across open ground—which was certain to get some of them killed. And, even if they made it to the enemy’s trenches, they were going to have to fight their way single file between narrow walls at close quarters with the enemy—which could get them killed.

After Prince briefed his platoon leaders, the new lieutenant left to explain the plan to his more experienced men, who would be in the vanguard. He returned, troubled.

“Sir, they’re not going to go,” he told Prince.

The captain was stunned. This had never happened to him. There was nothing wrong with the plan tactically, legally, or morally. He didn’t know what to do. He went to Vaught’s operations officer, Baker. The attack was due to kick off in a few hours. He explained that his men might mutiny.

Baker was no help.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Howard,” he said.62

Prince stomped around in the darkness trying to figure out what to do. He was both scared and angry. He was furious at the men for balking, and he was scared about what he might have to do if they refused his orders. All he could do, he thought, was the thing he was supposed to be good at. He could explain. He was the most educated man in the battalion—Limping Scholar Six—so he could teach. The plan was risky, but it made sense. He had to make his men see that.

When he approached the balking platoon, the men refused to make eye contact.

“What’s going on?” Prince asked.

“Sir, we think you’re trying to get us all killed so you can get a medal tomorrow,” one of the men said.

That floored him. He hadn’t imagined that their refusal was personal, that they believed he would put his own career before their lives. It was insulting. But he ignored it. He got down in the dirt and drew up their position, the location of the enemy positions, and how they intended to attack. Realizing that they were unfamiliar with this kind of assault, right there in the dirt he taught them a class on fire and movement, how one squad would fire at the enemy while the other tried to move up, and then the lead squad would halt and provide covering fire while the one behind them moved up closer still. They weren’t going to charge blindly into machine guns; they were going to cover their own advance—in addition to having the supporting fire from the other ­companies—effectively leap-frogging their way across the open rice paddy.

There was silence when he finished. Finally the same man who had made the accusation said, “Okay, sir, we’ll do it.”

That same night Andy Westin—since Winfield Beck’s death he was once again Davison’s XO—noticed that Charlie Company was being issued huge amounts of ammo, along with a new supply of stretchers. That gave him pause. He took five hundred rounds for himself, even though his job was going to be running the medevac pad well behind the front line.

It was still dark on Wednesday morning when the three companies moved out to their assigned positions. Charlie Company set off through a thicket of bamboo to the right, pushing down toward Phu O, tasked with silencing guns that could sweep across the rice paddy. Prince’s Bravo Company edged up to the point in the bamboo thicket on the edge of the open rice paddy.

They were glum. They believed that many of them would be killed or wounded. Prince felt this way, too. His guts were in an uproar. He found a spot to the side, slid off his pack, dropped his pants, and violently emptied his bowels. Despite lingering worry about his men’s willingness to fight, they were all in their jump-off position when the artillery barrage began shortly before sunrise.

And when it started, they took off across the rice paddy, a swarm of men in muddy green, moving forward as he’d instructed, leapfrogging their way toward the exploding tree line. The enemy trenches were deep, so it was hard to see exactly where they were. The lead platoon, the one led by the green lieutenant, made it all the way past the dike and close to the edge of the woods when it came under intense fire from several directions. In addition to machine-gun and rifle fire, the enemy started hurling grenades and lobbing mortars into their ranks. Some of the trenches were now behind them and others to the front and side. The lieutenant panicked.

“We’re under heavy attack!” he radioed Prince, who was watching from the dike 75 yards out in the rice paddy from La Chu. “We can’t see the enemy. They’re going to kill everybody! We’ve got to come back!”

“Stay where you are,” Prince ordered.

He took off with his small command group: two radio operators, Jim Wilson and Dennis McGuire; his forward observer, Lieutenant Bob Childs; and Childs’s radioman, Henry Winston. They made it to the dike, where there were small burial mounds raised up just under two feet. Prince paused there to get a better fix on the trenches that were blistering his forward platoon. He was doing this when he heard and felt an enormous blast to his right. Prince and McGuire were closest to it; Childs was behind them, about ten feet away. Childs felt a few pieces of shrapnel ping off his helmet, but that was it. Prince’s right side was torn up from head to toe. McGuire was down with shrapnel wounds to his right arm and shoulder.

With all of the shooting and explosions, Childs was too busy calling in artillery strikes to help either of the wounded men. Prince had also been shot in the knee, although with all his other more severe wounds he wouldn’t realize it until much later.63 He managed to crawl back toward his original position before passing out.

Medevac choppers were orbiting behind the fight. One of those watching the attack unfold was Juan Gonzales, the pathfinder in the black cap who had been with Colonel Sweet’s battalion weeks earlier. Always moving to the point of most action, Gonzales had left Sweet’s battalion to join Vaught’s days earlier. Following the radio traffic, he heard a chopper called in when Prince and his command group were hit. Gonzales was in a copse of trees adjacent to the rice paddy.

One of the other radio operators called to him, “Hey, Black Hat. That medevac, he is turning back.”

Guiding choppers in was his specialty, so Gonzales got the pilot on the radio.

“I understand you’re turning back,” he said.

“That’s right,” the pilot said. “There is no communication from their position and I understand it’s a hot LZ.”

Gonzales, who could see the chopper overhead, said he was going to lead it in himself.

“I will be coming out of the tree line at your eleven o’clock,” he said. “Just follow me.”

He started running. He had the radio on his back, the handset in one hand, his rifle in the other, and the chopper flying low right behind him. Bullets kicked up at his feet. Damn, with this black hat and this chopper following me they must think I’m somebody really important, he thought. It was a long run and he started to zigzag. He threw himself down, exhausted, beside the wounded men. The chopper passed directly over his head, swung around, and landed between him and the enemy guns. Gonzales helped carry McGuire and Prince to it. When he picked up Prince, whom he had been with the night before, he reeled. He liked the captain. Now he was covered in blood, cut up from head to toe, unconscious, and his skin going gray from shock. Gonzales thought he was dead. And we were just talking a few hours ago!

Major Baker took over Prince’s company. He regrouped them and determined where the NVA trenches were. The frightened lieutenant had fled the field, so Baker put two experienced sergeants in charge of his platoon. One of the newly authorized Dusters rolled out from the bamboo thicket toward the dike and directed its enormous firepower in a stream at the targets, while soldiers crept up to the edge of the trench lines. A satchel charge rigged at the end of a ten-foot bamboo pole was dropped into the first one, killing the two enemy soldiers at the near end. A third was shot and killed when he popped out of the back side. The Americans had broken into the first trench.

What followed was hard, gradual work. A squad of men would crawl down the trench toward a firing position. They would mark the bunker with smoke, and the Duster would hammer away at it. Then they would move on to the next one. The woods were laced with them.

One squad cleared a trench only to face another inside a dense stand of bamboo. Even the Duster’s two big guns could not penetrate the thick stems around it. A private carrying a flamethrower was called forward. He reported to Baker, and forthrightly told him, “I can’t do this.”

It was easy to see why. To attack the bunker with the flamethrower meant standing up before the enemy’s guns with a huge tank of napalm strapped to his back.

“Sure you can,” said Baker.

The private, who looked to Baker as if he was all of sixteen, reluctantly edged down to the end of the trench, and when the signal was given he did what he felt he could not. He stood up, lit his flamethrower, and hosed the bunker with fire. A single gunner immediately jumped out and fled.64

Back at the LZ, Westin waited until the steady stream of casualties reached enough for a chopper load, and then he would call the next one in.

“I’ve got three guys for you,” he would say.

“Do you have any incoming?” the pilot would ask.

“No,” Westin said.

Then, as the chopper descended, rounds would zero in, dinging off its metal frame.

“You told me there was no incoming!” the pilot would complain.

“There wasn’t until you showed up!” said Westin.

He particularly enjoyed watching the Duster. He was dazzled by its firepower. A weapon designed to shoot at aircraft, the Duster would lower its twin 40-mm guns to spray its extremely rapid fire at ground level. It looked like it was throwing flame and chewed up almost everything in its path. He hadn’t seen one of the Quad-fifties yet, but he’d been told those were even better.

The lieutenant had a clear view of the battlefield across a wide expanse. He was relatively safe, far enough from the action to get hungry, but when he pulled out one of the two cans of C rations from his pants pocket—peaches—he found that it had been punctured by a piece of shrapnel. The juice had all leaked out. He was, first, shocked that the metal shard had hit so close to him without his even knowing it; second, delighted that he hadn’t been hit himself; and third, disappointed because the chunk of metal had come to rest inside the can and fouled his peaches. The other can held pound cake, which Westin felt was the finest item on the C-ration menu. He had planned on eating it with the peaches, but he settled for eating it plain. He was on his knees watching the Duster do its thing, taking bites out of the delicious cake, when his elbow was whacked with what felt like a three-wood.

The pain was blinding. His arm went completely numb, like when you hit your funny bone . . . times ten. His pound cake was in the dirt. His ears were ringing. A mortar had landed about fifteen feet behind him in a furrow of loose dirt, which had fortunately absorbed most of the blast. His radio operator, who was next to him, had gotten hit with a piece of shrapnel that passed through his cheek and out his mouth somehow without touching his teeth. The men around him were lying as flat as they could make themselves. One’s backside looked as if it had been scraped hard with long fingernails. It dawned on Westin then that he’d also been hit.

“Medic!” he shouted. “Medic!”

“Shut up, Lieutenant, I’m right here,” the medic said. “Where are you hit?”

Westin tried to move his arm. Blood poured out the cuff of his sweater. A piece of shrapnel had hit his elbow and just exploded, sending tiny bits of hot metal up and down his arm. Nearly a half century later, whenever he lifted that arm, the fourth and fifth fingers of that hand would go to sleep.

Captain Davison called on his radio.

“Anybody hurt over there?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Westin said. “Me.”

It was a blow to the captain, who had already lost several of his officers.

“See you later, boss,” Westin said.

He went out on the next bird.

The four-pronged assault on Que Chu and La Chu was successful but proved anticlimactic, as so much fighting in Hue did. After the attacking cavalry units broke through its outer defenses, NVA melted away. Nguyen Duc Thuan, the veteran NVA commando who had been shot through the knee on the first morning of the offensive inside the Citadel, had to be carried out during this quiet retreat. He had been fighting in La Chu ever since the night of the assault on Hue, enduring hellish aerial attacks and shelling, with his wounded knee all the while becoming more and more swollen and painful. On the night before Vaught’s assault he was evacuated with the rest of his men to their old mountain camp. There was no one inside the three-story bunker when Vaught’s forces reached it later that day. Seeing the forces arrayed around them and closing in, and feeling the heat of increasingly precise aerial and artillery bombardment, the NVA had quietly pulled up stakes, perhaps as many as three or four days earlier. It was hard to tell.

Tolson’s troopers were now less than five miles from the gates of Hue, and the command center for the enemy’s armies had fallen.

Andy Westin was in a hospital room on clean sheets in Cam Ranh Bay that evening. He had flown there inside a C-130. The walking wounded, like himself, were seated along the edges of the plane’s body, while those in worse shape were strung up in heavy canvas stretchers suspended from overhead. The guy directly in front of Westin, who was up high enough so that he could just see the underside of his stretcher, began leaking blood through the canvas shortly after they took off. Westin pondered how much blood there would have to be for it to soak completely through such heavy material. He doubted that this fellow would make it.

He wrote to Mimi en route:

My Darling, The helicopter is an amazing thing. It only took 20 minutes for me the get to Bn aid-station and another hour to get to a big hospital. Tonight I’ll be in Cameron Bay [sic].

Oh yes. I get a purple heart, too. Before you panic, I’d better give you the details.

Our Brigade (not Bn) attacked this morning and I had our second platoon (the usual plt ldr is on R&R) and actually was (should have been) in just about the safest place around.

Well, anyway, to make it short. A gook mortar round hit about 15´ behind me. We’re in a freshly ploughed field and it dug in before going off. As it was, I took 2 chunks of shrapnel in the left elbow and a nick in the right one (it now sports a band-aid).

The doctors X-rayed and probed and couldn’t find a piece big enough to pull out. The metal disintegrated when it hit. It didn’t hit the bone or anything else that could mess me up.

In short, I got a $100,000 wound. Bad enough to go to Cameron Bay, but not bad enough to due [sic] anything permanent.

Actually, except for a damn sore elbow, it’s a good deal. Cameron Bay is far, far from the fighting and I figure it will be at least a month before I get back to work. By then, I should be getting a staff job anyway.

Westin was given a pass to recuperate in Japan. He flew to Tachikawa, on the western edge of Tokyo, where he reported to North Camp Drake. There he was placed in a bed alongside Prince, who had lost a lot of blood but survived. Prince’s right arm was useless, so Westin wrote letters for him—“I’m your right-hand man!” he told the captain. Shortly after Westin arrived, an officer came to present him with his Purple Heart.

“What’s your rank?” he asked.

Westin said he was a lieutenant, and what his last job was, and how long he had been in Vietnam, which was six months.

“I’ll give you a choice,” the officer said. “You can go home or you can go back.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look at it this way. If you’re going to stay in the army, go back. You’re certainly not going out in the field again.”

Westin knew that “not being in the field” did not necessarily mean he’d be somewhere safe.

“If you go home,” the officer continued, “what you’ve done does not count as a full tour.”

Westin didn’t think long. Mimi popped into his antlered head.

He said, “I think I’ll go home.”