LUDENDORFF: The English soldiers fight like lions!
HOFFMAN: True. But don’t we know that they are lions led by donkeys.
ALAN CLARK, The Donkeys1
He knew what they called him. It rolled right off. In fact, he took pride in it. Asked about his reputation, he remarked that “there was a definite group that thought, as I mentioned, that I was Attila the Hun.” He went on: “This guy [himself] was a barbarian or something because I’d get out there and just kick hell out of these people—not our people, but the enemy.”2 Nobody, but nobody, killed Cong like Julian Johnson Ewell.
Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, “Grant the Butcher,” locked in a blood-soaked embrace with the Army of Northern Virginia in 1864–65, recoiled from the sobriquet, and probably didn’t deserve it. Going against General Robert E. Lee and his tough, veteran Confederates pit strength on strength. Maneuvering didn’t work—Lee was always a step ahead, and just as determined. Only killing, slow and ugly, Abe Lincoln’s terrible arithmetic, sorted it out.3 Grant had been a butcher, but he never asked, nor sought, to be one.
Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the “Butcher of the Somme,” mired in the sanguine trench struggle with the Imperial German Army in 1916–18, denied the title altogether, and he had done (and not done) just enough to earn it. On the Western Front, caught under the deadly hammering of Krupp artillery and Spandau machine guns, the British Expeditionary Force labored for years seeking a way out of the morass. Refining assault waves, tweaking barrage timetables, adding numbers—none of it availed. After enough slaughter, and some new weapons called tanks, the Germans slowly fell apart.4 Haig, too, had been a butcher, and he rationalized it to his last days.
And Ewell? He sought the role, embraced it. He’d prepared his entire life to command a U.S. Army division in combat. He didn’t care what the troops or the news media or some swivel-chair whiz kid in Washington had to say. As Chuck and Tom Hagel and so many others soon found out, Ewell was all about killing Cong.
You’d never mistake Ewell for Westmoreland. The latter looked like a general should, tall and bold, stalwart in mien and stature. For his part, Ewell reminded you of an insurance adjuster come to appraise your crumpled fender. He wore the black, horn-rimmed glasses —a tribute to Buddy Holly, and by 1968 about as out of date—issued by the thoroughly unfashionable army medical supply system. His head leaned forward a bit on a stalk of a neck. He was pasty faced, loose limbed, and somewhat awkward when he moved. His voice seemed a bit high pitched, especially when he got angry, as he often did. As one officer wrote of him: “He lacks command presence.”5 But he more than made up for it with brains and guts. Julian J. Ewell had both in spades.
He also had a prominent martial name. In 1968, a few years after the centenary of the American Civil War, some observers noticed. Although he came from a military family, Julian J. Ewell never claimed any relationship to Confederate Lieutenant General Richard Stoddert Ewell, corps commander in Lee’s Army of North Virginia. That officer, “Old Bald Head,” didn’t look the part, either. The Civil War Ewell had his moments, but his men learned that he wasn’t a closer. In battle, most notably at the climactic clash at Gettysburg in 1863, Ewell played it safe. He held back.6 Not so Julian J. Ewell. He never hesitated—not once, not at all.
Young Julian may not have claimed Old Bald Head, but he certainly was born into the army in 1915, two years before the United States joined the Great War. His father, Lieutenant Colonel George W. Ewell, taught military science at Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (today Oklahoma State University) in Stillwater. His mother, Jamie Offutt Ewell of Kentucky, came from the same extended family as Jarvis J. Offutt, the World War I pilot who gave his life in France and his name to the Strategic Air Command’s headquarters base near Omaha, Nebraska.7 In addition, Julian and his parents lived in Panama, California, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC, all courtesy of the U.S. Army. It all clearly influenced Julian’s choice of profession.
He took a long route to the colors. After an initial term at the New Mexico Military Institute, he attended Duke University in North Carolina for two years. He made it to West Point in 1935 and graduated in 1939, a second lieutenant of infantry at age twenty-four, two years older than most of his classmates.8 As the son of a long-serving officer, well aware of the rhythms of the army, he felt like he was already behind. That nagging idea motivated him his entire life, to Vietnam and beyond.
He had an opportunity right away, and he took it. With World War II raging overseas, America reluctantly prepared for war. The draft commenced in 1940, and the army worked to modernize its moribund force structure. Having seen the brilliant exploits of Nazi German paratroopers and glidermen in the Netherlands and Belgium during the blitzkrieg of 1940, the U.S. Army established its own airborne element. Eager to contribute and ever hungry for a challenge, Lieutenant Ewell joined the new 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Tough and willing to experiment, Ewell and his fellow paratroopers figured out how to organize, train, and carry out mass parachute jumps. Their parachutes weren’t the slow, steerable flying wings used today at public sport parachuting. The army used the T-4 parachute, a round hemispheric canopy twenty-eight feet in diameter. Mounted on a man’s back, the T-4 featured a strong cord snapped onto a metal wire inside the transport aircraft, typically a twin-engine C-47 Skytrain, the military version of the popular DC-3. Called a static line, the cord stayed hooked securely to the plane as the jumper went out the door. The cord pulled open the backpack, and the ’chute blossomed out with a strong jerk, which paratroopers called the opening shock. The parachutes dropped men quickly, about five hundred feet in twenty seconds or so. Landings were abrupt and hard. Ewell and the others learned to bend their legs, turn into the wind if possible, and above all, to keep their feet and knees together.9 A lot of ankles and knees paid for that hard-won practical knowledge. Old men, unless in great physical condition, need not apply.
A few months after America declared war, when a delegation of new airborne generals and colonels came to Fort Benning for a demonstration and a practice jump, Ewell acted as jumpmaster, sending the senior guys out the door of the C-47. His stick (group of jumpers) included a patrician artillery colonel named Maxwell Davenport Taylor. Ever interested in talent that could be helpful to the army and himself, Taylor took note of the all-business Ewell.10 That tough young West Pointer had potential.
On November 15, 1942, Colonel Howard R. “Skeets” Johnson activated the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, and Ewell took command of the 3rd Battalion. Just three years out of West Point, he held a lieutenant colonel’s billet, commanding six hundred paratroopers. When the 501st jumped into the darkness over Normandy to initiate the great invasion on June 6, 1944, Ewell found himself with few followers, about forty in all. Most of his paratroopers had been scattered all over the flooded, marshy stretches west of Utah Beach. Well, U.S. Army paratroopers had long been taught to find who they could and start going after Germans. Ewell and his men did so. His bunch included his 101st Airborne Division commander, Maxwell Taylor. Once again, Taylor noticed this gangly young battalion commander who refused to quit.
Once the Normandy operation wrapped up, the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment returned to England to stage for the next mission. It came on September 17, 1944. The Americans and the British 1st Airborne Division jumped to take a series of bridges leading to the Rhine River. The idea was to get a crossing and force the end of the war. While the daylight drop went well, the operation failed. German tanks counterattacked violently, and British armored forces struggled to link up. The British paratroopers sixty miles north at Arnhem were cut up and forced to pull out. Many didn’t make it.
Neither did Skeets Johnson. On October 8, a German mortar shell killed the charismatic 501st commander. Major General Maxwell Taylor appointed twenty-nine-year-old Julian J. Ewell to take over.11 Johnson had been a larger than life, inspirational commander. He led the regiment on runs and in battle, and carried an M3 “Grease Gun” automatic weapon. He used it, too. Now he was gone.
Ewell had big jump boots to fill. It wasn’t his style to be a “personality,” so he wasn’t. The regiment lost 662 paratroopers, more than a quarter of its strength, in seventy-two days of combat in the cold, dank woods on the border of the Netherlands. The survivors were withdrawn to camps near Rheims, France, to bring in replacements, retrain, reequip, and rest.
The Germans ended that interlude on December 16, 1944, with their powerful Ardennes counteroffensive. Both American airborne divisions were thrown in to blunt the German panzer attacks. The 82nd Airborne Division went to Werbomont and relative obscurity, although the paratroopers fought with distinction. Ewell and the rest of the 101st Airborne Division ended up in Bastogne, surrounded, hard pressed, and soon enough famous.
Ewell lived up to every expectation from his subordinates and his superiors. The 501st led the U.S. truck movement into Bastogne, getting there late on December 18, right ahead of the Germans. Recognizing the unforgiving minute, Ewell didn’t wait for formal orders. After a quick look at the terrain and a glance at the black horizon, already alight with nearby artillery explosions, Ewell led his men out into the frozen fields. His 501st took up positions facing due east, right in the path of Panzer Lehr, the German main effort.
Snow, ice, and bone-chilling cold made it perilous. Day after day, night after night, led by tanks, the Germans surged forward again and again. Fighting was vicious and bloody. But the Americans did not back up. Tireless, courageous, and smart, Ewell roamed the thinly held front lines hour after hour, day and night. He arranged and rearranged the 501st defenses against the successive German attacks. It all cost 580 men, but Ewell’s regiment held. He was badly wounded in the foot on January 9, 1945. That merited the Purple Heart. Maxwell Taylor ensured that Ewell also received the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor.12 Well he should. Ewell earned it.
After less than six years in uniform, Ewell had proven himself. Compared even to known high performers like Westmoreland, Ewell had shown the right stuff. Had he been advanced to general right then, or soon after, the army would have benefited greatly. But left to sit for two decades, restless and frustrated, watching those he considered less able move upward, Ewell stewed. His already acerbic outlook curdled even more. He watched others advance well ahead of him: William Westmoreland, Creighton Abram, Reuben Tucker, John “Mike” Michaelis, and his classmate Harry W. O. Kinnard. And through it all, Ewell marked time.
Maxwell Taylor tried to help him. He put Ewell on his staff in Berlin after the war, helped him get command of the 9th Infantry Regiment in Korea during the last months of the war, and arranged for him to take charge of cadets at West Point. When Taylor came back on active duty under President John F. Kennedy, he sent for Ewell and kept him in his outer office. Finally, in 1963 Ewell pinned on his first star. Making brigadier general at twenty-four years in service matched the usual pace of U.S. Army promotion. But for Ewell, it was far behind the rest of the great colonels of World War II.
From 1965 until 1968, Ewell served in Germany and in stateside posts. Nobody in Vietnam asked for the old 501st commander. Finally, in the wake of the Tet Offensive, Westmoreland gave Ewell a chance. He didn’t offer Ewell the 101st Airborne, the one the 501st veteran really wanted. Instead, Ewell received orders to the 9th Infantry Division—Westy’s World War II division—south of Saigon. Things down there did not look good. Well, as the acid-tongued Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King supposedly said after Pearl Harbor: “When they get in trouble they send for the sonsabitches.”13 On February 25, 1968, they did.
WHAT DID EWELL INHERIT?
Stated briefly: a mess. The Mekong Delta and the area south of Saigon amounted to South Vietnam’s overcrowded, flooded basement. Because the area’s farmers grew rice, the staple crop for the entire country, both sides wanted to control the Delta. The Viet Cong movement originated in Kien Hoa Province, and by February of 1968, the best estimates showed only 38 percent of the northern Mekong Delta under Saigon’s authority. The southern reaches were probably worse, but it was hard to tell. ARVN’s optimistic reporting rarely passed the smell test. One number wasn’t disputed. Only 84 percent of the required rice harvest made it into Saigon’s economy.14 The rest fed the Viet Cong or rotted in the water-logged paddies.
The unhappy Delta formed the rickety foundation of the shaky, war-weakened South Vietnamese state. That old soldier Julius Caesar once wrote that all Gaul was divided into three parts.15 For ARVN, South Vietnam split into four: the north (I Corps), the Central Highlands (II Corps), the Saigon region (III Corps), and the Mekong Delta (IV Corps). There were provinces and districts and such, but they didn’t matter too much. The four corps tactical zones did.
Each had its own character. The north, with a population of 3 million in five provinces, abutted Laos and North Vietnam. Most of the people lived in and around the coast, to include the key cities of Quang Tri, Hue, Da Nang, and Chu Lai. The ARVN I Corps (two divisions) tried to secure the populace. For MACV, III Marine Amphibious Force employed two U.S. reinforced marine divisions (1st and 3rd) and the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal). The NVA dominated, and some of the war’s biggest conventional battles, Khe Sanh and Hue city, occurred up north. Westmoreland moved half his maneuver battalions into this area, which he saw as decisive in his quest to find and attrit NVA regiments.
The Central Highlands, with 3 million more people in twelve provinces, bordered Laos and Cambodia. Again, most people lived on the coast, with a number inland around the cities of Pleiku and Ban Me Thuot. ARVN’s II Corps (two divisions) attempted to hold the villages. The U.S. I Field Force included the 4th Infantry Division, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the Republic of Korea forces (two divisions and a brigade of ROK marines). As up north, the Americans sought to engage NVA and VC Main Force units.
The Saigon region, with 4.7 million people in eleven provinces and the capital zone, also fronted on Cambodia. The ARVN III Corps (three divisions) worked on pacifying the towns and hamlets. The U.S. II Field Force included the 1st Infantry Division and 25th Infantry Division, both between Cambodia and Saigon to the northeast and northwest respectively. The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and 199th Light Infantry Brigade also served in this area, as did two-thirds of the 9th Infantry Division, the Australian/New Zealand Task Force, and the Thailand forces. The U.S. units nearest Cambodia sought NVA organizations; the rest tangled with the VC.
Finally, the Mekong Delta population totaled 6.5 million in sixteen provinces. ARVN’s IV Corps (three divisions) tried to keep order in the Delta in the face of a strong, long-standing VC insurgency. One brigade of the 9th Infantry Division, part of a unique army-navy riverine task force, served in the Delta. The United States had largely ceded the fight in IV Corps to the ARVN. Said another way, the VC had pretty free rein down there.
For emergencies, the South Vietnamese relied on their airborne, marine, and ranger units to shift around the country as required to meet emergencies. Westmoreland at MACV used the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile, which is to say heliborne) and the 101st Airborne Division (soon to convert to the airmobile configuration, too). For Tet, both of these divisions had brigades in multiple regions, with most of the 1st Cav up north and two-thirds of the 101st near Saigon.16 Although all American maneuver battalions were quite mobile by both air and ground, they tended to stay in or near their assigned areas. The northward shift of 3-5th Bastard Cav, including PFC Tom Hagel, was unusual in that regard.
Thus the U.S. Army outfits in country came in two major flavors: regional (most of them) and national (1st Cavalry and 101st Airborne). Accordingly, Ewell’s 9th Infantry Division, a regional division, most closely matched the 1st, 4th, and 25th infantry divisions, each with a few armored/mechanized units. The stitched-together 23rd Infantry Division (“Americal,” a World War II nickname), which wise guys called Metrecal after the bland diet drink powder, had been assembled in country from orphan brigades and late-arriving units. All of the U.S. Army divisions fielded three brigades and nine or more maneuver battalions (walking “leg” infantry, mechanized infantry, armor, or cavalry). In both theory and practice, battalions moved between brigades as the mission required. As a highly mobile mechanized battalion, 2-47th switched brigades a lot.
Even though battalions include regimental designations, like Chuck Hagel’s 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry, the numbers amounted to a historical name. In World War II, three such battalions made a regiment, and almost always fought together as an integrated whole. Korea saw the same practice. But a pre-Vietnam conversion junked the World War II regiments. Battalions gave up any semblance of regimental affiliation. Battalions could be, and were, swapped between brigades like Lego pieces. Ewell’s 9th Infantry Division included 6-31st, 2-39th, 3-39th, 4-39th, 2-47th, 3-47th, 4-47th, 2-60th, 3-60th, and 5-60th.17
The 9th’s line-up fielded two mechanized battalions (including 2-47th), five leg infantry, and three riverine infantry outfits. As far as paratrooper Ewell saw it, he had five useful maneuver battalions and five with issues. The division had already sent 3-5th Cavalry (with tanks, APCs, and Tom Hagel) away and gained the 6th Battalion, 31st Infantry in return, a good deal, as the new battalion had just formed at Fort Lewis, Washington, and so came as a cohesive, well-trained team, admittedly having practiced searching mock Vietnamese villages in snow drifts. But the two mechanized battalions, while handy for road clearing and immensely useful in and around Saigon during Tet, really did not seem to have much utility in the marshy Mekong Delta. Ewell wrote later that he assessed mechanized units to be “more of a hindrance than a help” and “more and more difficult to employ,” especially in the May to October wet season when monsoon rains soaked the already soggy ground. He sent one mechanized battalion to the 1st Infantry Division and received a leg infantry outfit in return. Only 2-47th kept their tracks, and by Ewell’s direction: “We finally had to keep them partially unhorsed in order to force them into learning to conduct effective offensive small-unit foot operations.”18 There’s a lot of vitriol behind that sentence. Ewell didn’t trust 2-47th, and that caused him to lean especially hard on the battalion. And Ewell sure knew how to lean hard.
The riverine battalions also seemed less than effective. Ewell’s 2nd Brigade had, since June of 1967, affiliated with the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 117 to form the Mobile Riverine Force. At first, the armored gunboats, motorized landing craft, and barge artillery caught the VC by surprise. But the advantage didn’t last. Viet Cong leaders figured out where the boats could go and put themselves elsewhere. “However, after about six months,” Ewell’s division chief of staff wrote later, “the Viet Cong in the upper Delta had pretty much learned to cope with the Riverine Force and, in fact, were beginning to establish ambushes along the waterways.”19 Yet due to the navy’s commitment, the Mobile Riverine Force remained active past its use-by date. Ewell and plenty of others wondered why the marines didn’t pick up this amphibious role. But the Marine Corps units came ashore as the first U.S. ground combat battalions back in 1965, way up north on the coast. And the marines liked to keep their guys together, under their own generals. So the 9th and the navy were stuck with the riverine mission. Ewell didn’t like it. He had to figure out how to make it work.
MAKING IT WORK—MECHANIZED, leg, or riverine—meant finding, fixing, fighting, and finishing the elusive Viet Cong. Ewell had no doubt about his core task: killing VC. In an operational document, Ewell’s staff summarized their commander’s thinking this way: “The simplest and most relevant statistical index of combat effectiveness was the average number of Viet Cong losses inflicted daily by the unit in question.”20 Stack ’em up. That was the gist of it.
That wasn’t easy in the face of an experienced guerrilla foe. As Ewell put it: “You didn’t have any great tactical battles, like the Bulge [1944 German Ardennes counteroffensive], it was just a question of grinding these people down.” He went on: “The only way you could get them out of there was to beat on them until they were so weak that they just didn’t dare come into the populated areas.”21 That was what the new commanding general wanted his division to do.
Before he took command of the 9th Infantry Division, Ewell made a close study of the American tactics used in Vietnam. He had heard plenty about the pluses and minuses of “search and destroy” operations. In the purest form, the term meant looking for NVA/VC units and finishing them off, killing Cong in accord with Westmoreland’s attrition strategy. But by late 1967, search and destroy carried connotations of rogue U.S. units rampaging through the countryside burning villages and slaying civilians. Exaggerated or not, the phrase became toxic back in the United States. So MACV changed the name to “search and clear.” Whatever you called them, in Ewell’s view, “the tactics were pretty well chosen and did the job.”22 So he started there.
The basic American method long predated Vietnam. Ewell knew it well from World War II. Send a bullet, not a man.23 Industrialized and technologically advanced, the United States relied on its mass of quality weaponry to make up for lack of numbers and to keep young Americans alive. Thus Charles Dean Hagel, Curtis LeMay, and thousands of others did their business in 1941–45, death from above, war from the air. Their dangerous bombing missions spared hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and marines from the carnage of an opposed landing on the Japanese home islands. Under the lash of American high explosives, the Japanese, as well as the Germans, and eventually the North Koreans and North Vietnamese, experienced horrors aplenty. But we saved our people. That was hard war indeed.
Rather than throw people at the enemy, Americans used prodigious firepower, an endless, destructive torrent of bombs and shells. Close was good enough, and more was better. At Anzio, Italy, in 1944, it took about 200 artillery rounds to kill one German. By Korea in 1953, it took 300 artillery projectiles to account for one Chinese communist soldier. By Vietnam, the estimate ran to 340 howitzer shells to get a single Viet Cong guerrilla. In the 25th Infantry Division in early 1967, it took an average of 896 rounds to kill one opposing soldier. 24 The profligate outputs amazed even veterans of the worst battering matches in World War II. A quarter century after Vietnam, U.S. information technologies would enable widespread use of precise smart munitions, one shot, one kill. But those armaments were in their infancy in Vietnam. In 1968, we had plenty of dumb and lethal ammunition, and the enemy didn’t. Better to fire away than to lose our guys.
The predilection for firepower led to the second characteristic of U.S. tactics in country: “maneuver and fire.” This varied from the practice of “fire and maneuver” taught in both world wars and Korea. In the standard version of fire and maneuver, at the small-unit level, American infantry relied on a base of fire, usually machine guns or Browning automatic rifles, to suppress the enemy with a high volume of bullets while the rest of the riflemen maneuvered, which is to say advanced by alternate rushes, ducking from cover to cover and crawling when necessary, as it often was. Attacks culminated in an infantry assault, man to man, with grenades, bayonets, and gut-shots in the heart of the hostile position.
In Vietnam, dense vegetation often made it very tough to get right on top of the VC. In addition, close combat negated U.S. firepower, as the explosive radii of 105mm artillery shells and 500-pound bombs proved indiscriminate on the ground. Clever VC commanders taught their men to “hug” the Americans to frustrate the supporting U.S. gunners and pilots. When the Americans tried to back away to use howitzers and air strikes, the VC broke off and escaped. So the more enterprising U.S. colonels reversed the usual formula and taught their men to maneuver up to the enemy, make contact, then try to hold the bad guys in place by rifle and machine gun fire. When the big stuff rolled in, the Americans ducked their heads and brought down the scunion.25 There was no classic infantry assault, just a sweep of the shattered wreckage of the VC position, policing up any prisoners, tending to the foe’s wounded, and counting the enemy dead.
Of course, reliance on supporting air and artillery firepower and stopping when in contact gave the VC yet another immediate option to engage or leave. Even the best American artillery fires, prearranged and ready to go, took a few minutes to begin impacting on the ground; as an area weapon, the big shells had to be “walked” onto a furtive foe half seen at best in the scrub brush. And artillery came in relatively quickly. Helicopters and jet fighter-bombers took even longer to come on station. As no U.S. squad, platoon, or company had unlimited bullets, after the initial high-volume exchange, the firefight often petered out a bit. All too often, the VC and NVA used that breather to get away.26 This came atop the already preponderant enemy capacity to avoid or accept battle in the first place.
To take away that hostile initiative, the Americans preached “pile on.” Colonel George S. Patton III, son and namesake of the World War II great, commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment from July of 1968 to April of 1969. He explained piling on as “literally throwing forces together from all directions in order to first encircle or fix, then compress and finally destroy the enemy.”27 It sounded good, but rarely worked out. Even with tanks, tracks, helicopters, and a cascade of artillery, rockets, and bombs, the Americans were just too slow and too ham-handed to pull it off. The trap never quite closed, and a lot, if not most, of the enemy always seemed to wriggle free.
The 2-47th firefight on January 31, 1968, at Widows Village showed these tactical ideas in execution. Having figured out they had enemy in the houses, the Americans, including PFC Chuck Hagel, searched for their hidden opponents, covered by their track-mounted .50-caliber heavy machine guns. When the VC made contact—they opened up first, as usual—the Americans responded with all they had. No artillery was permitted, and that was a deviation from the typical solution, but armed helicopters participated with both rockets and machine guns. Company B/4-39th Infantry landed by helicopter to pile on. And despite a good number left dead, most of the VC got away.
Why?
Ewell though he knew the answer. By his reckoning, he had the big guns and attack helicopters to kill VC. What he needed were more riflemen—more beaters—to find his prey.
When Ewell ran the numbers for his new division, the result stunned him. At any particular time, of 16,000 or so troops assigned, about 1,000, including Chuck Hagel, were actually out in the bush hunting Charlie. Some of the rest guarded base camps, protected construction sites, defended a petroleum tank farm, and secured a radio relay site. Although the army filled divisions to 102 percent of their authorized strength, most rifle companies ran with about 65 to 70 men in the field, less than half their paper strength of 164. The other infantrymen existed on the rolls, but were not out on patrol. These 11Bs filled headquarters billets, attended unit schools (including training for young NCOs), recovered from wounds and illness (malaria and immersion foot predominated in the 9th Infantry Division), and came and went from rest and recreation (R&R) leave. At any one time, about a sixth of each company (one-twelfth in, one-twelfth out) processed to and from Vietnam, yet another curse of the individual replacement system.28 Each base camp sucked in 11B manpower like a stellar black hole pulling in matter and light itself.
And what of those brave few who did go out? Chuck and Tom Hagel could have told Ewell the way it went, but the restless general found out for himself. The units took turns, as would be expected in a lengthy war characterized by days and days of routine, unopposed patrolling. While one company walked out in the woods, the other rifle companies operated from a firebase, flying out every other day on airmobile missions. Every night, each company sent out an ambush patrol.29 The battalions kept a schedule, sharing the burden. Given the hot, humid weather and lack of worthwhile targeting intelligence, it made sense.
Ewell didn’t agree. For him, to get the VC required “excruciating pressure” 24/7, day patrols and night ambushes. He couldn’t get more men. So he elected to make those he had work harder, much harder, as both Hagel brothers would find out. He thought he increased “paddy strength” by demanding to see daily roll-ups at rifle company level.30 Well, he certainly increased reporting. But hounding from a major general, even one as insistent as Ewell, didn’t change the institutional inertia of individual replacements, R&R, base camp defense, and individual one-year tours.31 The numbers went up some, but never enough to suit Ewell.
The division commander did more. He reorganized the leg battalions to add a fourth rifle company, then demanded that each lieutenant colonel keep three of four companies in the field day and night. The VC still refused contact almost 90 percent of the time. To his endless consternation, Ewell couldn’t change that. But he could increase the number of his own units finding the VC 10 percent of the time, a brute force solution for sure. By flooding the zone with patrols, Ewell generated more contacts.32 And that led to more kills.
Ewell ordered day and night “constant pressure,” with few stand-downs. One of the reasons the major general didn’t care for Chuck Hagel’s 2-47th involved their M113s, which required regular maintenance to keep running. So he made them work without tracks on many occasions. The mechanized infantry battalions only had three rifle companies. Ewell kept at least two in the bush, and it galled him to think a third of the battalion wasn’t out there.33 It ensured that 2-47th stayed in the commanding general’s doghouse.
As helicopters also needed a lot of maintenance, Ewell went after them, too. He recognized that airmobile insertions, like Company B/4-39th at Widows Village, and helicopter gunship attacks, also seen in that engagement, both greatly increased the effectiveness of combat actions, doubling or even tripling enemy casualties inflicted. So aviation mattered. To get more flying time out of his helicopters, Ewell insisted on night maintenance work in lit hangers—the threat of VC mortar barrages notwithstanding—more tools, more spare parts, and, of course, direct reports to him on progress or lack thereof. By his hounding, Ewell squeezed an extra 30 percent of flying hours out of the division’s fleet of Hueys, Cobras, and OH-23s.34 The division’s aviators contributed their share to the constant pressure mantra.
He preached it. He enforced it. “You operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day, and you just kept grinding the enemy down.”35 Aboard his command chopper, Ewell ranged far and wide, day and night, making a lot of it happen exactly as he prescribed.
He also prevailed on II Field Force to reduce his area of operations and thus allow him to focus his effort. The 9th Infantry Division got rid of Bien Hoa and Long Khanh east of Saigon and shifted fully to the upper Mekong Delta. The division kept Long An (334,000 people) and Dinh Tuong (548,000) and added Kien Hoa (531,000) and Go Cong (173,000). This permitted Ewell to hand over the Bear Cat base to the Thais and move the division headquarters to Dong Tam, squarely in Dinh Tuong Province, and previously held only by the riverine 2nd Brigade and the sedentary ARVN.36 Why did Ewell go there? In the new commanding general’s estimate, that’s where the VC had been most active. And he was all about hunting VC.
The commanding general also put paid to the escapades of the vaunted Mobile Riverine Force. Before Ewell’s time, the army-navy contingent managed six operations a month, way below anything that the new commander would tolerate. Plus, the VC avoided the slow-moving armored watercraft or, worse, nailed them on terms favorable to the enemy. So the 2nd Brigade got new orders. “It was put into Kien Hoa Province—a real Viet Cong bastion,” said Ewell, “taken off its boats, and buckled down to work.”37 There were still some riverine missions, but for the most part, the three battalions of 2nd Brigade worked on foot, slogging through the rice paddies and marshes.
To keep track of all of these tactical actions, Ewell insisted on regular, detailed reports, and woe to those who did not measure up. The general’s investment in statistics bordered on mania. He looked hard at the kill ratio, “a very good measure of skill.” Ewell put his finger right on the key question: how many U.S. soldiers killed did it take to kill X number of communists? Well, that sure cut to the chase. What was a dead American worth? Ewell proposed to settle on a value.
He then developed criteria, rating unit performance by kill ratio: one to fifty, highly skilled; one to twenty-five, fairly good; one to fifteen, low but acceptable, good for ARVN; one to ten was the historical U.S. average; one to six was the historical ARVN average. “We wouldn’t wipe our shoes with one to ten in the Ninth,” concluded Ewell. He claimed to run at one to eighty, with up to one to a hundred at times.38 It was amazing what a determined man could wring out of the division.
And wring it he did. Everything came down to killing VC. Captain Ronald Bartek, a West Pointer, remembered an early briefing with the new division commander: “He wanted to begin killing ‘4,000 of these little bastards a month’ [Ewell’s words] and then by the following month wanted to kill 6,000.” To a struggling commander, Ewell barked: “Jack up that body count or you’re gone, colonel.”39
This driven man drew his fair share of detractors in 1968 and in the years to follow. One perceptive officer wrote that “he is a superb Division commander—for the infantry or armored infantry war in Europe in the 1940s. He fights in Vietnam using the methods that would have made him a successful and popular commander with his superiors and with the public in World War II.”40 Many made that charge, less eloquently but no less forcefully, and it matches nicely with the old saw that generals always fight the last war. But it misses Ewell’s true achievement.
Very much a creature of America’s Vietnam War, Julian J. Ewell figured out how to get the most out of his division. Some generals—George Casey of the 1st Cavalry Division and Keith Ware of the 1st Infantry Division, both killed while in command—were more beloved. Ewell wasn’t. Others—Olinto Barsanti of the 101st Airborne Division and Bill DePuy of the 1st Infantry Division—were tough on subordinate colonels. Ewell was tougher. And a few—Lew Walt of the 3rd Marine Division and Fred Weyand of the 25th Infantry Division—showed a lot of tactical acumen. Ewell outdid even them in the narrow sphere of killing Cong. He, above all division commanders who served in country, understood exactly what Westmoreland wanted. And Ewell sure delivered it. There was only one problem. He showed up three years too late.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME Julian J. Ewell began wrestling with his tactical situation in the upper Mekong Delta, General William C. Westmoreland decided to follow up what he saw as the successful pummeling administered to his NVA/VC opponents in their failed Tet Offensive. Working closely with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the MACV commander sought to exploit his perceived gains. He asked for another 108,000 troops, with a marine regiment and a brigade from the 82nd Airborne to deploy immediately, a down payment on the big reinforcement to come. He actually had ideas of invading Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.41
The Joint Chiefs, running out of draftees, saw the MACV request as their chance to replenish America’s strategic reserve, the troops held in the homeland for other emergencies. A week before Tet erupted, the North Koreans had gone off the rails, sparking firefights in the demilitarized zone, seizing the surveillance ship USS Pueblo and its eighty-two sailors, and launching a special forces raid to kill South Korea’s president. In Europe, the Soviet army continued to build up its armored regiments in and around Czechoslovakia, where a reforming government’s days seemed numbered, with unknown repercussions for NATO. Israel, Egypt, and Syria remained locked in a simmering conflict that threatened to go hot at any time. The Cubans stirred the pot in the Caribbean and Latin America. And who knew what the election year of 1968 might bring to America’s restive inner cities and college campuses. So the Joint Chiefs saw Westmoreland’s request and added to it, topping out at 206,000. This would require President Lyndon Johnson to call up the National Guard and the service reserves. It would fully commit the nation.
To what?
More war? Ultimate victory? Was that even possible? At what cost? Outgoing secretary of defense Robert McNamara, heartsick over doing just enough to get the United States into Vietnam, nothing to guarantee victory, and not near enough to get us out, offered his opinion. No. That’s it. Stop bombing the North. Negotiate. Turn it over to Saigon’s troops. Pull out.42
His successor—shrewd Washington attorney, presidential counselor, and consummate DC insider Clark Clifford—probed the Joint Chiefs for answers. His account is damning indeed:
How long will it take? They didn’t know. How many more troops would it take? They didn’t know. Would 206,000 answer the demand? They didn’t know. Might there be more? Yes, there might be more. So when it was all over, I said, “What is the plan to win the war in Vietnam?” Well, the only plan is that ultimately the attrition will wear down the North Vietnamese and they will have had enough. Is there any indication that we have reached that point? No, there isn’t.43
With both the old and new secretary of defense skeptical, LBJ did what he did best. He equivocated. He sent the marines and paratroopers, 10,500 in all, to meet Westmoreland’s immediate request.44 But he well understood that this was the moment of decision.
Johnson summoned the wise men, the best and brightest from Vietnam, the Cold War, Korea, and World War II. Generals Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway, and Maxwell Taylor (Ewell’s World War II commander) came together to offer their judicious counsel. It’s noteworthy that LBJ didn’t ask Curtis LeMay, although the retired air force four-star was certainly available. LeMay’s notoriously blunt brand of strategic thinking apparently wasn’t welcome. In any event, the approved trio of generals, well spoken and housebroken, joined the other luminaries: Dean Acheson, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Dean, Douglas Dillon, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, Arthur Goldberg, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Robert Murphy, and Cyrus Vance. New secretary of defense Clark Clifford participated, too.45 The wise men would tell LBJ what to do. Then he’d do it. And this, too, would pass.
Out on the far side of the world, Westmoreland waited. Up north, at beleaguered Khe Sanh Combat Base, marines fought and died. So did the NVA. So did soldiers on both sides all across South Vietnam. In the northeastern reaches of the Mekong Delta, Ewell and the 9th Infantry Division hunted Cong. The war hung in the balance, awaiting the word of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
AT THE PFC LEVEL, none of this mattered much. Not yet. Up north with the marines, Tom Hagel and 3-5th Cavalry stayed busy, and not in a good way. “They were hard core NVA up there,” he remembered. “Everybody was just getting blown away constantly.”46
Hagel wasn’t speaking idly. In two weeks spent supporting the 7th Marine Regiment near Dong Ha and other areas north of Quang Tri city, Troop A lost two killed, Troop C lost three more, and one man from the Headquarters Troop was killed, too. The NVA wounded nineteen troopers. It amounted to a platoon gone, a rude introduction to the new area. The marines suffered two wounded in action. In return, the Americans believed they killed four NVA and wounded an unknown number. The marines dropped five tons of bombs and assessed four “structures” and eight sampans destroyed.47 Who could know for sure?
East of Saigon, PFC Chuck Hagel continued operations, too. After losing Captain Keats on February 2, Company B/2-47th worked through some other neighborhoods around Long Binh Post and in other hot spots around Saigon. Nervous MACV logistics and headquarters people saw a lot of VC in the weeks after Tet. Some were there. Most were not. Hagel and the other riflemen spent many days looking for Charlie, and finding him now and again.48 Once things settled down in Saigon, the company returned to Bear Cat to fix their worn-out M113s, bring in new guys, and then resume the route security mission. Routes 1 and 15 hadn’t gotten any better since Tet.
In between dealing with the Tet Offensive and its aftermath, both brothers endeavored to link up. For two junior soldiers in a war zone, that was easier said than done. They talked very briefly on the telephone and swapped notes via the army post office.
Tom thought he had heard somewhere that two brothers couldn’t be sent to the same theater of war at the same time. He guessed that if he was in country, maybe Chuck could go home. Of course, he never asked Chuck, who had no intention of leaving. But the younger brother figured why not try it. Some barracks lawyer convinced Tom that the Red Cross would sort it out. When Tom tracked down a Red Cross representative, the person gave him the penguin salute, arms up and flapping—never heard of it.49
But Tom had read a lot, and his memory served him pretty well. He was indeed on to something. There was a protocol, the so-called Sullivans Rule, that said something about brothers or sisters serving together in the same unit. It stemmed back to the sinking of the light cruiser USS Juneau, torpedoed by the Japanese on November 13, 1942, following a fierce night naval clash off Guadalcanal. Sailors George, Frank, Joe, Matt, and Al Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, had asked to serve together. They died together, too. Their sacrifice became a rallying cry on the home front in World War II and resulted in posters, a movie, and a destroyer named USS The Sullivans.50 It was a noble and heart-rending episode.
And the U.S. Congress, overseeing a military composed of citizens in uniform, had no intention of letting it happen again. In 1948, congressional legislation established the Sole Survivor Policy, which most people knew as the Sullivans Rule. It provided that if one child had been killed, gone missing, or declared captured, any sole survivor could apply to be discharged from the armed forces or excused from the draft if not already in the ranks. The policy did not require the services to separate siblings in units, nor did it compel them to release sole survivors automatically. An individual had to apply. In addition, any potential sole survivor might waive eligibility.51 Unless or until one died in Vietnam, neither Hagel brother qualified.
But with one door closed, another opened. Nothing prevented the brothers from serving together voluntarily. So both soldiers made application to serve together. Chuck applied for 3-5th Cavalry. Tom asked for 2-47th Infantry. The documents got typed up by bored base camp clerks. Signed off, the forms vanished into the gaping maw of the U.S. Army Adjutant General Corps. As Chuck recalled: “And we decided that I would put a transfer request in to go where he is, and he would put a transfer request to come to where I am, knowing full well the way this all works, we would never ever see each other, but maybe once during the time we were there in Vietnam, we might run across each other.”52 The Hagel brothers gave it a shot, then kept right on going, as did the war.
In mid-February, just in to the battalion tent city at Bear Cat following another ambush patrol, a sergeant handed Hagel orders for the 25th Infantry Division. So maybe that was the plan—get him and Tom together in another unit. The sergeant offered zero explanation, only instruction in the unmistakable army style: “Pack your bag. Grab your rifle. Get your ass on that fucking truck.” Hagel complied. The truck loaded up with other men, then headed out the gate.
Unexpectedly, just past the exit, the vehicle stopped with a screech. A military police soldier, “MP” on his shoulder brassard, just like stateside, walked to the back of the truck. The MP looked down at a clipboard. Then he spoke.
“Is there a Private Charles Hagel on the truck?”
No answer. Hagel wondered, “What now?”
The MP grimaced. “Are you so dumb, soldier, that you don’t know what your name is?”
This time, Hagel acknowledged.
“Get down here, Private Hagel,” said the MP. “The captain wants to see you. Bring your bags.”
The captain told him to get back to his platoon.53 He headed out on operations shortly thereafter. Chuck Hagel never did go to the 25th Infantry Division, and as for what became of the orders, who can say? The ways of army administration can be mysterious indeed.
Without fanfare, the big green machine ground its cogs and spat out one more unanticipated event. As March of 1968 began, PFC Chuck Hagel found himself, as usual, out on foot patrol, screening for the column of tracks, clearing yet another stretch of roadway. Around midmorning, as the men finished one segment of their route, they formed a roadside perimeter to take a break. A sergeant motioned to the PFC.
“Hagel, come on back here. There’s a chopper coming in to pick you up and take you back to base camp,” he said. Hagel didn’t get it.
“Well, why is that?” asked the PFC.
“Well, I don’t know. They didn’t tell me,” the sergeant answered. “They said get Hagel out of the field. Bring him back to base camp.” “They” said a lot of things in the army, especially to a PFC, and to sergeants too, evidently.
Hagel connected some dots. “Well, sergeant, is this about my brothers or something there that I need to know about?” He thought of Tom up north, but Mike and Jimmy back home also crossed his mind. Things happen to young men all the time, and not just in wars.
The sergeant shrugged. “If I knew, I’d tell you,” he said, “but you don’t need to know that. Your instructions are to get on that chopper, it’s going to be here in an hour, and get the hell out of here.” Okay then. Like the good PFC he was, Hagel got on the Huey when it briefly touched down.
In a few minutes, the helicopter landed on the dusty helipad and Hagel clambered out, more than a little disoriented to be back in Camp Martin Cox while his unit stayed out on patrol. Nobody met him. He didn’t know what else to do, so he went to his tent. Using excellent PFC logic, he figured if they needed him, they would send for him. Trust in “they.”
Nothing happened.
Just before the evening meal, Hagel decided he had waited long enough. He went to the company orderly room. The clerk looked up. Hagel asked why he had been flown back from his platoon. “We don’t know,” the office soldier said.
“Do I have orders to leave?” Hagel asked. He wondered if the 25th Infantry Division assignment had come back into play.
“Well, I don’t know.” Nobody seemed to have a clue. Yet Hagel was right there. Somebody summoned him, and thought enough to send a Huey.
At a time like this, a good infantry soldier’s thoughts turn to the fundamentals, i.e., food. Lacking any other instructions, Hagel went to the mess hall to eat. There he ran smack into First Sergeant Martin M. Garcia of Killeen, Texas. “And he was not a particularly [sic] favorite of mine or I don’t think anybody’s,” Hagel noted. A hard-bitten, busy first sergeant rarely had anything good to say to a PFC.
But that night, Garcia had the word.
“By the way, Hagel,” he said, “your brother’s coming down. He’s been transferred to your unit.”
“When’s he going to arrive?” asked Hagel.
“He’ll be here tomorrow morning,” answered Garcia. At eight the next morning, Tom Hagel showed up, duffle bag in hand. If he ever heard of the Sullivan brothers, First Sergeant Garcia did not let it affect assignments in Company B. As promised, the first sergeant put Tom into Chuck’s platoon. And the platoon sergeant figured what the hell and assigned Tom to Chuck’s squad.54 They served together from that time onward.
THE HAGELS FOUND OUT that the 2-47th scout platoon also included two brothers, big men from Michigan with bright red hair and matching handlebar mustaches. It seemed like someone somewhere up the chain decided to honor these kinds of requests. A week or so back—hard to remember, the days and nights ran together—Chuck Hagel had mentioned his request to serve with his brother to a visiting general. Had it been Ewell, full of energy as he grabbed hold of the 9th Infantry Division? Chuck Hagel definitely met the new division commander later, and saw him often, out and about, “a very hands on general.” 55 Ewell very much wanted to keep his infantry soldiers happy and out fighting. If the Hagels asked to serve together, that worked for Ewell. And it kept riflemen in the field, chasing VC.
Back in Columbus, Nebraska, Betty Hagel and sons Mike and Jimmy waited for every letter from Vietnam. Mike realized that Tom had done a good amount of hunting, so that boded well as far as protecting Chuck, who didn’t do much with firearms before the army.56 Betty said, “I was just glad they were together. That they would be company for each other.” Aside from the odd snatches of televised “bang-bang” on the nightly news, the raw details of infantry combat in Vietnam remained opaque on the home front. It was just as well.
The prospect of losing a son, let alone both, lurked somewhere back in Betty Hagel’s mind. But she dared not think about it. As she remembered: “If I had seen an Army officer walk up the front steps, I would have probably run out the back door as fast as I could.”57 Like Charlie in the Delta, she could run, but she couldn’t hide.