Something strange happens when a man is hit.
JAMES JONES, WWII1
The Hagel brothers walked point. Major General Julian J. Ewell could talk all he wanted about sending out more hunters, finders, beaters, whatever. In concrete terms, that meant groups of young riflemen walking through villages, rice paddies, or jungles, looking for the Viet Cong. And where those men walked, somebody had to go first. For Company B, 2-47th Infantry, Chuck and Tom Hagel were those somebodies.
According to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, the point element consisted of an eleven-man rifle squad led by a staff sergeant. Under that NCO, two sergeants (“buck” sergeants) each led five-man fire teams. Along with the sergeant in charge, each fire team included an M79 grenadier and three riflemen. One soldier carried a flimsy little aluminum fold-up bipod to make his M16 an “automatic rifle.” It was a leftover from another era, as any M16 became “full auto” by a simple flip of the selector switch, easily thumbed on the left side of the rifle, just up and back from the trigger. Anyway, the field manual told you to send the point about two hundred yards forward of the following troops. The book even provided a neat little diagram. 2
War doesn’t follow the book. It never did. Forget about sergeants and grenadiers and the rest of the panoply. In their habitually understrength 2nd Platoon, leading their equally undermanned Company B, the Hagels, both PFCs, were the entire point. And as for being two football fields out front, well, in the dense jungle near Bear Cat, that would be the equivalent of the far side of the moon. The point team stayed about ten yards ahead and you could barely see them, just some waving fronds and an occasional flash of a sweat-stained green fatigue shirt. They needed to be just far enough out to absorb the first shot. And, of course, the VC opened the show 88 percent of the time.3 For point men, it was not healthy to dwell on that particular number.
The first brother looked for trip wires, buried mines, flashes of movement, and physical evidence of the VC: footprints, trash, maybe broken branches that indicated something wicked this way came. The point man also broke brush, often with a machete. Picking the way, hacking a good bit, a hundred yards an hour, head on a swivel, a smart point man took his time. Stands of tough bamboo, replete with rough edges, flayed arms exposed in rolled-up sleeves. The high heat and humidity slowed him down. So did his exhaustion—with night ambushes and alerts, riflemen rarely got more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. There had been method to the madness imposed by the frantic pace of Basic Combat Training back at Fort Bliss. If nothing else, it offered a preview of what to expect. But it didn’t make it any easier.
The second brother, the “slack” man, stayed back about three yards, maybe less. He held the compass, and used it to keep the point man, and thus the platoon, going in the right direction. That’s one reason the second guy had to stay close: to give directions. Talking was kept to a whisper, and preferably not done at all. A gesture sufficed. A good point and slack duo could run for hours without a word. The Hagels were very good.
Some platoons used a separate pace man to measure distance.4 With the Hagels, the slack man kept the pace. A good slack man knew how many steps it took him to move a hundred yards. For a six-footer like Tom about sixty-two would do it. Chuck, an inch or so shorter, needed a few steps more. Each time the slack man hit a hundred yards, he tied a knot on a cord. The second brother also consulted a paper map with the route legs marked—segment by segment, direction and distance through the bush, all the way to an oval blob, the objective, the neck of the woods where Charlie supposedly hung out. The Hagels knew each leg of the route, direction and distance.
Behind the brothers, the lieutenant and platoon sergeant also glanced at their maps, checked their compasses, and kept their own pace counts. Even though they trusted the brothers, the platoon’s leadership double-checked the pair. The NCO knew his stuff. The rookie officer—well, the jokes about second lieutenants and maps reflected only too many actual goofs. As Chuck Hagel commented afterward: “Some of the officers couldn’t read maps very well.”5 The Hagels could and did.
That morning of March 28, 1968, the brothers led a long file of Americans, the entire field strength of Company B. Those pleasant little drawings in the field manual depicted echelons, vees, wedges, and orderly open columns with entire squads pushed out forward, trailing, right, and left to clear the way and push off curious enemies. With less than sixty men—Major General Ewell would not approve at all, but there it was—incredibly tangled undergrowth, and a wary, elusive foe, the company commander, as usual, chucked the Fort Benning school solution. In this endless green bamboo thicket, the captain put out no flankers, judging it better to have clear shooting lanes port and starboard rather than a few more guys on either side seeking trip wires and swinging machetes. For early warning, the captain counted on the Hagels in the lead and a “drag” duo at the very end of the file, ten yards back. The tail-end man spun around every ten steps or so. Sometimes he walked backward for a minute or so.
Except for the point and drag teams, everybody else followed the man to his front, the classic ranger file, maybe a yard between each man. The Infantry School instructors said that this kind of follow the leader formation emphasized speed over security. In the primordial underbrush near Bear Cat, the file enjoyed no pretense of speed. But by going so cussedly cross-country, Company B confounded preset hostile ambushes. Even Charlie couldn’t tippy-toe through this stuff without raising a racket. If the VC came from the side, as they often did, they’d be heard. Then the formula became right face or left face and cut loose.6
In the long, long row, each sweating soldier carried the usual burden: his M16 rifle (about eight pounds with a magazine loaded), a steel helmet with lime green cloth cover, web gear (a belt with suspenders), two full one-quart canteens (emptier by the hour), a first-aid pouch with sterile bandage pack, belt-mounted ammunition pouches crammed with twenty-round magazines (the army recommended ten and the soldiers doubled that), two baseball-sized M26 fragmentation (frag) grenades, and a rucksack packed with more ammunition (two hundred linked rounds for the M60 pig machine gun and C4 plastic explosive), an entrenching tool (“e-tool,” a little fold-up shovel), a nylon poncho liner (lighter-than-air quilted blanket), rifle cleaning kit (the M16 was touchy), a spare pair of socks (critical to change out to keep feet in good shape), a bit of shaving gear, a toothbrush, the ever popular canned C-rations, and for most, some cigarettes wrapped to stay dry. A few men—short-timers and nervous ones—wore the heavy flak jackets, but most used those only when operating with the tracks. In the bush, you took your chances. You already carried way too much.
While American manufacturers took out every smidgen of excess weight, water and ammunition weighed what they weighed. The field manual estimated it all added up to 78.18 pounds, almost double the amount toted in Basic Combat Training.7 In that regard, the Benning book got it about right. Of course, slight, short Charlie Cong carried much less. The Hagels and their mates struggled along with the equivalent of a Viet Cong wrapped around each tired American. Fleet and nimble they were not.
As they labored ahead, the primeval vegetation hemmed them in. “You couldn’t see the sun,” Chuck Hagel remembered. “It was like you were inside all the time.”8 Gloom, heat, humidity, sleep deprivation, and routine generated tunnel vision. Slowly, slowly, a football field of distance an hour, the troops rustled along, picking their way through the “wait a minute” vines and the dripping leaves. Other than a few leaders and the men at point and drag, the troops droned, heads bobbing, one nylon and leather jungle boot in front of the other. If this constituted hunting, it depended on pursuing some pretty dumb, cooperative, inert beasts. The VC were anything but that.
Company B’s patrol sought a new, particularly dangerous enemy force. The analysts at division G-2, the intelligence staffers, guessed that the opposition brought in some necessary reinforcements—probably true NVA, really from the North—to rebuild after the savaging suffered in Tet. The intel people wanted to locate the VC K-34 Artillery Battalion, an outfit armed with 120mm mortars (3.5-mile range) and 122mm rockets (5-mile range), big, dangerous weapons that caused a lot of mayhem during Tet. A month ago to the day, the VC bombarded Camp Martin Cox itself, dumping rockets and mortar shells all over the Bear Cat base and killing six soldiers and patients in the 9th Medical Battalion area.9 That had to stop.
Thus 2-47th went out without its tracks, looking for the VC shooters, Black Panthers on the prowl in the jungle. It briefed well up at division headquarters. But the daily grind of patrols and nightly ambushes, done “unhorsed” at Ewell’s direction, pulled the battalion one way, keyed on a slippery hostile unit. At the same time, roadrunner missions aboard the M113s, tied to routes 1 and 15, compelled 2-47th to do a very different kind of task. In both cases, whether used for the mission or not, the tracks demanded constant repairs and upkeep. Companies alternated between the dismounted search for the K-34 Artillery Battalion and mounted road security operations. Neither went well. Lieutenant Colonel John Tower felt the heat. Even Chuck Hagel noticed that “there was an additional pressure put on the senior guys.”10 It rolled downhill fast.
One early success only whetted Ewell’s voracious appetite up at division. On March 3, 1968, a patrol from Company B had followed up on the typically vague intelligence and, wonder of wonders, found a massive tunnel network only a few miles from Bear Cat. Not one VC turned up. They’d vanished before the Americans got there. They were good at that.
At the tunnel complex’s entrance port, a medium-sized tree blocked the way. But when you gave the trunk a yank, not even that forcefully, the roots popped loose in a shower of dirt. A passageway opened. Behind it, packed earthen corridors yawned six feet high and showed soot from lanterns. The corridors ran seven levels down, and looked to be some kind of VC hospital. Playing fast and loose with the Geneva Conventions—what else was new—the enemy filled several warrens with mounds of weapons, some dating back to the French era, and some so newly arrived from the USSR and China that they hadn’t been unpacked. Sergeant First Class William Nelson Butler, late of Widows Village, and still working without a lieutenant due to Tet casualties, later said, “We searched the complex and never found the bottom.” For years, American soldiers had laughed at the 25th Infantry Division, which sited its base camp right on top of the intricate, deep Cu Chi tunnels. Well, that was one way to find Charlie.11 Now this underground lair squatted only miles from the 9th Infantry Division’s massive Camp Martin Cox. How long had it been there? Nobody knew. But at least the Americans had a grip on it now.
Very impressive, said the division commander. But it wasn’t the VC K-34 Artillery Battalion. Finding buried treasure was swell. Killing VC would be much better. Ewell applied the screws to brigade, battalion, company, platoon, squad, right down to Chuck and Tom Hagel. When would 2-47th bag some Cong?
If they could be found, they could be killed. But where was Charlie? The intel guys sifted radio intercepts, reviewed tips from village snitches, sorted through soiled captured documents, and plotted historical patterns of VC activity. Clean men in well-lit, pleasant huts measured the ranges of enemy 120mm mortars and 122mm rockets. Pins got stuck into maps. Nicely typed orders went down the line, laying out sequences and schemes. It all made perfect sense at division and maybe brigade. But below that? It devolved into more hot, draining walking around, looking for Charlie.
“The intelligence sharing with the guys further down was nonexistent,” Chuck Hagel said. “I don’t think even a lot of our senior sergeants were told much. I don’t know how far down the officer corps got [intelligence] on what was going on,” he surmised. “Of course we were never told everything.”12 Maybe the higher-ups knew. But like the VC, they weren’t telling.
So on the morning of March 28, Company B waded into the bamboo and greenery fringing the old French Michelin Company’s Binh Son rubber plantation. After a draining morning of slashing brush, stepping and halting, sweating and sighing, all the Americans had to show for their toil was an uninteresting nest of eight long-abandoned VC bunkers. The written logs at the various command posts all read the same: NSTR. Nothing significant to report. The Hagels hacked on.
ABOUT NOON, the Americans had about ten yards to go to reach a shallow stream, a “blue line,” as the soldiers called it, based on how it appeared on a standard military map. Once he sent the point element and then the lead platoon across, the company commander could halt the company, form a tight security perimeter, and fill canteens. Water sure sounded good. Maybe guys might want to gulp down a can of Cs, although in the enervating heat, the desire to drink pushed aside most thoughts of eating. As Rudyard Kipling once wrote of the British regulars slogging through tropical India: “If you wish to talk of slaughter you will do your work on water.”13 Amen, Gunga Din.
In Vietnam, creek water, no matter how clean it looked, swarmed with nasty microbes. It had to be purified with halazone tablets. The additive gave the water a very strong chlorine tang, like gulping a mouthful from the local public swimming pool. But thirsty riflemen could live with that.14 Canteens nearly empty, the men smelled the stream before they saw it.
With the little watercourse a few steps away in the convoluted foliage, the captain stopped the column—time to swap out the point. The Hagels had been at it all morning. Another pair got the nod. The two chosen riflemen jostled past the brothers. Chuck and Tom Hagel stood in place, perspiration shining on their faces, to let the file pass them. When they saw their squad come by, they’d fall in.
Up front, barely seen, the new point team moved out. No machete noises now—it sounded like they’d found a narrow trail, some broken bush, maybe from animals, or local farmers, that led right to the brook. If you looked up, right and left, perpendicular to the approaching American file, you could see the break in the tall trees, a dirty gray-yellow sky. In a month or two, monsoon rains would fill up the calf-deep rivulet to chest height. Today, though, the stream ran slow and shallow, more evident on the map than the ground. But the gap in the treetops marked its course.
A hundred yards back, at the distant end of the snaking file of sweating Americans, the drag man turned around, rotating like a weather vane in a breeze. But there was no breeze. Man, that stream, that welcome water, couldn’t come too soon. No words could be heard, simply the cracking of brush and the soft, wet swishing of overloaded men breasting through dense foliage. A little bit more, a few minutes to go—just lean into it. The two in the lead should be about at the blue line now.
Wham!
The point man, Corporal John T. Summers III, blew back like a rag doll. So did the slack man, and Chuck Hagel, and Tom Hagel, and another dozen soldiers, the entire lead squad and most of the next bowled onto their backsides by a giant’s hot hand. A thin curtain of gray dust rose and hung over the trickling waterway.
Shouldn’t have used that damn trail…
One AK opened up on auto. Crack-crack-crack-crack. Others joined in, filling the air with metallic hammering. No RPD machine gun yet, but the Americans had men down, and nobody could see anything. Twigs and leaves and bamboo slivers clipped off as the insistent AK slugs whizzed by. Some zipped past at ear level—not good at all.
A few Americans shot back, not many, not enough. The AK-47 shots all came from up ahead. And the U.S. riflemen at that end were down and dazed. How does a single file sort that out? This could be why the Infantry School manual warned about using this long, strung-out formation due to “limited firepower to front and rear.”15 Too true. In the book, decisive little arrows showed how to swing around to the side and bring up machine guns and riflemen. In this undergrowth, you had to be kidding.
The captain and his NCOs did what they could, angling up a few able men. After a very long minute or two, a pig, an M60 machine gun in the hands of a confident gunner, ran through a belt, tearing holes in the low bushes up near the bad guy side of the stream. On the radio, the captain called for artillery. Something went awry—seemed like it often did when push came to shove. No artillery rounds fell. Mercifully, while the Americans floundered, Charlie slipped away. These U.S. troops sure weren’t going anywhere for quite a while.
The AKs had stopped for a few minutes before the platoon sergeants ordered the Americans to cease fire. The hot, dim jungle settled. Breathing hard, hyperalert, the riflemen faced outward, every other man turned right or left. Was Charlie gone? Would he be back?
You could hear leaves rustling. Guys snapped new magazines into their M16 rifles. Radios hummed with indistinct chatter. And groaning.
Not a sound came from the crumpled John Summers. The eighteen- year-old African American, a regular army volunteer, sure had been a good point man, quiet and steady. After taking the full impact of hundreds of red hot ball bearings (BBs) from a set of Claymore mines—stolen from Americans, or Chinese knock-offs, who knew or cared—Summers was gone. It didn’t look like there’d be an open casket back in Baltimore, Maryland.16
Tom Hagel stumbled to his feet and glanced behind him. Brother Chuck, eyes wide, lay on his back. Every time Chuck breathed out, a bit of blood bubbled up from his shrapnel-peppered chest. Tom grabbed Chuck’s compression bandage from his brother’s web gear. The younger brother slapped it on the gurgling wound and pressed down. Blood seeped out on the edges. Specialist 5 Phillip Rogers, the company’s trusted senior medic, and thus “Doc” to all, materialized beside a drooping nipa palm. Rogers handed Tom two more field dressings. Then the medic moved forward to treat others.17
Tom mashed down on his brother’s chest. Stop the bleeding. That’s what they taught you back at Fort Bliss. He tied off the first bandage. Then he bore down and tied off another. Then for good measure, he leaned on Chuck’s chest and applied a third. That army training, the hours of doing it and doing it with a drill sergeant right in your ear, paid off.
As Tom staunched Chuck’s bleeding, he noticed a twinge in his left arm. The elbow was a bloody mess. His shoulder also showed red leaks. More of those blazing BBs, it appeared. The VC must have rigged up a half dozen Claymores, right at head level in trees, facing that trace of a crossing site. “The reason we got blown up,” Tom said, “is that we walked on the trail.”18 Take a shortcut, pay the price. Both Hagels knew better. But the captain took a risk. And the bill came due immediately.
From the side, a hand, another medic, passed Tom another bandage. He tied it off on his own elbow. Next to him, Chuck sat up. He wasn’t okay, but given the state of the others, he was at least conscious and mobile and, in a pinch, able to shoot back. The Hagel brothers rolled over and faced outboard with their rifles—one left, one right.
At the front end of the ragged file, Doc Rogers and the other medics worked on the casualties. To ease pain, delay the onset of shock, and quiet the wounded, no small thing with VC in the neighborhood, Rogers jabbed those worse off with a 5cc morphine syrette, a tiny toothpaste-style tube with a needle and the drug inside. If a man received such a shot, the medic who gave it hung the little injector on the fatigue shirt collar. It kept men from getting too much morphine.19 The medical corpsmen also started intravenous drips. They wrapped gauze and bandages, plugging gushing holes, blocking horrific cuts, and tying off the heavy packings.
As the French army first taught it in the Napoleonic Wars, Doc Rogers did triage, the separation into thirds. Poor Summers was dead, and thankfully, nobody else looked “expectant,” which is to say, so far gone that working on them wasted medics’ time and precious medical supplies. Another bunch would make it, but required treatment sometime soon. Both Hagels fell into this group, although Chuck certainly needed a good going over with an X-ray machine, then cleaning up and stitches. Finally, there were those whom the medics could coax into surviving, in some cases just barely, until they could be evacuated. Those who showed up alive at a field hospital usually made it. During the Vietnam War, the army said their doctors and nurses saved 98 percent of them.20 It sure was a comforting statistic—if evacuated.
That was a big “if.” On that dank, bathtub-warm midday, Company B had penetrated into the deep jungle, with a full verdant canopy soaring overhead. No medevac helicopters could land in this tangled wilderness. In certain situations, the soldiers might pool their C4 plastic explosives and blow down trees to clear a circle. But jungle this thick defied a few blocks of C4. Making a landing zone in such a godforsaken place required something like an M121 Daisy Cutter, a 10,000-pound megabomb trundled off the back ramp of a C-130 Hercules transport plane. That thing could blow out a 150-foot clearing. In March of 1968, though, the M121 ordnance still lingered in testing.21 So that wasn’t going to happen.
When the first medevac chopper arrived overhead, clattering above the treetops, the UH-1 Huey pilots offered to use their onboard hoist to lower Stokes litters.22 As some men had exposed bones and missing arms and legs, that seemed like a decent compromise. The badly wounded would never make it being lugged out for six hours on slippery, jouncing stretchers. Plus, given the number of immobile casualties, more than half of Company B would be carrying stricken buddies. Defending the column would be pretty problematic. The VC lived to tear up that kind of vulnerable target.
So out by hoist it must be. Summers and the rest had already paid full price to buy this crack of a creek bed. Looking up, soldiers could see the bottom of the Huey hanging overhead. While their mates pulled security facing outward, about ten of Company B’s fit and near-fit soldiers went at it with machetes, knives, and the edges of e-tools. As well as they could, the men cut away enough underbrush to widen that patch where the trail met the blue line. From that wet, muddy bottom of the green chimney, the wounded would ascend.
Doc Rogers nodded his head. He had ten to go out, including Summers. The dust-off aviators never wanted to pull out the deceased. But as Rogers pointed out, as an enlisted medic, he couldn’t formally declare anybody dead. Only a physician could do so. Rogers let Summers go last, as he was past caring, and it got him safely out of the jungle and off the hands of the beaten-up company. The captain got on the radio. Lower away.
Down through the greenery came a wobbling Stokes litter, a stretcher inside a wire-mesh basket braced by a tubular metal frame seven feet long, two feet wide, and eight inches deep. The chopper’s downdraft spun the thing like a slow propeller. Doc Rogers and the platoon medics guided it down and strapped in the first wounded soldier, a man with a reddened bandage-swathed stump for a right leg. As Tom Hagel remembered, the bright blood looked “like Campbell’s tomato soup.”23 It took about twenty minutes from the first appearance of the device until the laden basket cleared the treetops. At tremendous hazard, the Huey hovered stationary overhead. Thankfully, the VC did nothing.
So the Stokes litter lifts began. The effort took a lot longer than anyone expected. The army rated the Huey to haul six litter patients, but not the basket types, and not in the drenching humidity and shimmering heat in the jungle southeast of Bear Cat, Vietnam.24 Airborne medics, essential to stabilize the patients, used up vital weight, too. Straining their engines and gulping fuel to do so, each helicopter loitered overhead, pulled out one man, then headed back to Long Binh Post to the helipad at the 24th Evacuation Hospital.25 The tenth, eternally silent Summers, left about 5:45, just before sunset.
SPENDING THE ENTIRE AFTERNOON pulling out casualties reduced the options for the company commander. He might have had his troops rip out more of the overgrown plants and bushes to spread into a legitimate perimeter, clear fields of fire, scratch out some soggy foxholes, and settle in Company B for a night defense. But that presumed Company B to be fresh, alert, and fully manned, rather than drained, dazed, and short on numbers. The catastrophic bloodying at the brook stunned the Americans into a dull stupor. Instead, the soldiers lapsed into the same old, same old inculcated as far back as basic training. They focused only on the here and now. They pulled static security, watching for Charlie, as the wire baskets slowly fell and rose. Their universe closed in to the next ten yards, the next ten minutes. Hold this ground. Send up the Stokes litters. Get our wounded out.
So now, too many hours later, that was complete. Now what? To stay in an unprepared thicket invited the VC to finish off the work the Claymores started. True, nobody had seen Charlie all day—who ever did—and nobody had heard from him since the shoot-out after the explosion. But it was like swimming in the ocean. Just because you didn’t see the sharks, it didn’t mean they didn’t see you. The VC were out there. They loved the night, too.
With the sun going down, the Americans had to get moving. Few relished the prospect of chopping a route out from the fatal streambed. The captain well understood, thanks to the day’s painful tutelage, not to try the morning’s already slashed path. Charlie surely had rigged that up already.26 Company B faced a long night trek to reach a decent-sized opening along Route 15.
Like a few more of those less seriously cut up, both Hagels remained with the company. Categorized as walking wounded, they had to get out under their own power. As the brothers and the rest of the riflemen stood up and got ready to go, the company commander sought Tom and Chuck.
“Can you guys make it?” the officer asked.
Both Hagels said they could. The captain stood there, hesitating. He spoke again.
“Can you get back on point and lead us out?”27
SO THERE IT WAS. A superpower at war, a half million men in country, the famous 9th Infantry Division charging hither and yon applying Major General Julian J. Ewell’s patented “excruciating pressure” to the enemy, and it came to this. Forty-odd smoked, scared infantrymen counted on a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old—both bloodied up, neither in the army an entire year yet—to get them out to safety.
The U.S. Army put itself in this mess. The official table of organization depicted Company B as having 164 soldiers, including 6 officers and 50 NCOs.28 Units came to Vietnam that way. But after arrival as a cohesive unit, a year later, the individual replacement system took hold—the insidious widgets and screws drill—and the numbers went haywire. The paper total, the “aggregate,” in adjutant general lingo, ran right around 164, full strength. But, of course, once you deducted the sixth joining up or departing, the sixth headed out or returning from R&R, the men recovering from minor wounds, the guys at division sniper school or the like, the men fixing the M113s (a unique drain on mechanized outfits), and the sick, lame, and lazy, somehow 164 at the base camp became 60 out in the bush. And then the VC voted with hot metal, as they did to Company B around midday on March 28, 1968.
On top of the overall short-handed roster, the lack of experienced sergeants hurt more. During Vietnam, the army’s best NCOs came into country as each division and separate brigade deployed. After a year, when the formed units disintegrated, the veteran sergeants left Vietnam. As they did, some backfill sergeants came out from the training centers, stateside outfits, European divisions, and other nooks and crannies of the service.29 Even so, the figures never quite matched up.
Juggling the books, the army had no choice but to tap the first batch again. By 1968, the initial wave of sergeants, the 1965–66 Vietnam deployers, were just starting to get orders for round two in Vietnam. Some of the senior sergeants, veterans of World War II and Korea, had enough, and exercised their right to retire at or after twenty years of service. Other older men, especially in the infantry, bore wounds and injuries that disqualified them for grueling duties in a rifle company. Plus, more new units had been added to the rolls, and each of them required a replacement rack of NCOs, too.30 The green machine found itself staring at a yawning gap between sergeants needed and NCOs available.
As MACV strength rose, the army brought in enlisted volunteers and draftees by the hundreds of thousands, by definition all “privates and second lieutenants” in the words of General Creighton Abrams, MACV deputy commander in early 1968. The army didn’t have a proportionate number of solid sergeants, and no way to get them unless President Johnson mobilized the entire National Guard and Army Reserve. He did not. As for growing the NCOs over time, well, it took five years to develop a buck sergeant, ten to create a squad leader, and fifteen to make a platoon sergeant. They just weren’t there, and they would never be there, unless the war lasted two decades.31 That wasn’t much of a plan.
So like so many others in country, Company B played short. The unit had some fine NCOs: First Sergeant Martin M. Garcia, Sergeant First Class William N. Butler, Sergeant First Class Lawrence E. Pugh, Sergeant First Class William E. Smith, Specialist 5 Phillip Rogers. As Chuck Hagel stated: “The senior sergeants were the reassuring, calming guys. And in many cases, many cases, these were the guys that didn’t fall apart.”32 Under fire, the privates and the young officers watched the steady older sergeants. As they went, so went the company.
But a rifle platoon had at most a single experienced sergeant first class or staff sergeant, maybe one buck sergeant with some time, and all the rest young guys.33 With or without enough veteran sergeants, though, squads still must be led. Somebody had to take charge. As a result, the old imperative took over. Again, the prescience of Basic Combat Training applied. The smart, strong, large, and alert rose to take charge, to lead the way in the field. Both Hagel brothers fit that description. The two were acting NCOs almost from the day Tom arrived, “the fighting Hagel brothers,” as the younger one put it.34 They could be trusted.
Moreover, they wanted to be trusted. They sought point and slack duties. As Chuck said, he “always felt a little better” with him and Tom in the lead. Fellow Company B soldier Edward E. “Gene” Bacon, with two years of college under his belt, explained why. Chuck came across as “very articulate, very bright” and “commanded real respect from the officers right away.” Tom, too, stood out. He made the other soldiers laugh. Exceptionally well read and perceptive, he asked the right questions before and during missions. And he never forgot anything.35
TO THESE TWO, the captain entrusted the fate of the truncated ranks of Company B. Tom Hagel knew the company had to “chop our way out—every step of the way [italics in original].” With the light fading, Chuck led on what he later called “the path of most resistance,” right through the heaviest vegetation. Better bamboo than booby traps. Tom pulled slack, compass in hand.
Chuck whanged away with the machete. Before each cut, he scanned the darkening shrubbery. Tom hung close in the dusk.
About twenty-five yards from the start, Tom spat out urgent words in a low tone: “Stop. Don’t move.” Chuck immediately froze in place, no answer, fist up. Tom raised his fist, too, and the gesture rippled down the file, right out of the Fort Benning infantry manual. Halt.
There. There it gleamed in the fading light, a gossamer filament. Trip wire? Looked like it. So the VC had in fact been right nearby, the hungry sharks skimming just past where you could see them. They left this piece of death behind.
Tom traced the taut string to a can nailed to the crotch of a thin softwood tree trunk. From the can’s open mouth, like an evil chick ready to hatch, poked the top of an American M26 hand grenade.36 Very sporting of us to supply both sides. If Tom pulled the wire, the pinless grenade would slide out, its handle would pop off, and four seconds later, goodbye Hagel brothers.
Tom studied the thing like a surgeon sizing up an especially tricky open abdomen. With trip wires, a point man had three choices, all perilous. He could cut the wire, which left the grenade in its hole, harmless. Sometimes, though, Mr. Charles rigged the lines so that releasing tension blew the device. It might be possible to avoid the snare, and swing wide of it. But the VC liked to use more than one. Any attempted bypass could run into more booby traps, and thus be equally deadly. Finally, and most tricky of all, a soldier might attempt to remove the grenade and keep the handle down, then toss it far aside to blow in the distance. In this twilight stretch of jungle, with low-hanging branches all around, such a throw might very well bounce back in your face.
Tom went with cutting the cord.
Nothing.
He and Chuck then sidestepped quietly away.37 The file followed. Like they used to say at Fort Bliss: “Pay attention, soldier.” The life you save may be your own… and your brother’s.
NOT LONG BEFORE MIDNIGHT, one by one, the company’s riflemen emerged from the rough green treeline into the cleared area along Route 15. Along the highway, America’s big Rome plows had clear-cut the jungle. Out among the stumps and deadfall, the battered riflemen looped into a wide circle. Men took a knee and exhaled. It had been a wearing night march through the swaddling, steaming vegetation, darker than dark. For most of the long row of exhausted soldiers, as Tom noted, “All you could do was hold to the back strap of the one in front.”38 But the Hagels got it done. Company B made it.
Within a half hour or so, helicopters fluttered down onto the makeshift pickup zone. A night lift was unusual, but the company had taken quite a beating. Fortunately, one of Ewell’s many initiatives required helicopter crews to fly more night missions. Two decades later, army aviators used purpose-designed night-vision goggles for such tasks. In 1968, they took risks by relying on onboard lighting, ambient horizon glow, sticking to familiar routes, and taking it slow.39 Lucky for Company B, the aviators capably dealt with the cleared shoulder of Route 15. The Hagels and the rest flew back to Bear Cat.
The company’s mission amounted to a failure, redeemed only by the successful extraction of all those hit. In a war impelled by a strategy of attrition, carried out by young Americans on individual one-year deployments directed by but a few veteran front-line leaders and opposed by a guerrilla foe who opened almost nine of ten engagements, Company B’s vexing day matched far too many similar experiences. Yes, the U.S. infantry drove off the VC and held the field, a traditional mark of victory in conventional wars. But once the stricken departed, so did Company B.40 If that was winning…
On the 9th Infantry Division scoreboard, the stark numbers spoke for themselves: one U.S. killed, fourteen U.S. wounded, VC body count zero. The dispassionate analysts at division G-2 rated the VC K-34 Artillery Battalion as “combat effective” and not located with any precision beyond somewhere in southeast Bien Hoa Province. But to throw the beat-up 2-47th a bone, and perhaps spare Lieutenant Colonel Tower the considerable wrath of Ewell, the intel staffers found that “the measure of success” for the March 28 firefight and related operations lay in this finding: “The enemy had not been able to renew his offensive attacks against Saigon despite rumors and intelligence reports that such attacks had been planned.”41 Five weeks later, events in greater Saigon put paid to that hopeful supposition.
At his level, Chuck Hagel harbored no illusions. In a multipage letter home, he excoriated Tower’s “asinine policies,” mentioned the enemy’s use of “ingenious homemade booby traps, constructed with our material,” and wrote that it resulted in fifteen men wounded. He didn’t mention Summers, killed in action.42 In World War II, some lieutenant might well have censored every one of those burning lines out of Hagel’s missive. But by Vietnam, that no longer happened. It wasn’t the whole story, but it was all Betty Hagel was going to get, and probably more than she wanted.
WITHIN AN HOUR of landing at Bear Cat, the brothers arrived at the 50th Medical Company’s clearing station, and then found themselves packed into another bird, headed to the 24th Evac at Long Binh.43 They got there well after midnight.
The 24th Evac had already seen the rest of Company B. Some kept right on going, heading for Japan. A few stayed over, as doctors and nurses worked to keep them going long enough to fly out. The Hagels showed up in the receiving area, two filthy, bloodstained, bone-tired, gaunt, hungry young men in a well-lit facility. To the overworked medical people, some of them female Nurse Corps officers, the brothers must have resembled hoboes in jungle fatigues.
Under the bright lights of the treatment suite and the knowing gaze of the experts, the clumsy, messy field dressings on Chuck and Tom stood out as amateur efforts, kindergarten finger-painting intruding into the studio of master artists. Without a word of judgment, the medical people went to work. The blood-crusted, sweat-stained wrappings went away to be burned.
Cleaning up took a few hours. Both men got washed thoroughly, not as pleasant as it sounds. Infantrymen accumulate a lot of grime. Hospitals don’t approve. So hot water and scrubbing took a while.
The doctors—real physicians, not the brave but much less well-trained field medics—dug a lot of ball bearings out of both men. Because Chuck’s scatter pattern hit him smack over the heart and lungs, the diggers left a few in there, nestled between the ribs. “And so it’s interesting when I get chest x-rays,” Chuck noted later.44
To be sure nothing became infected by the ubiquitous tropical germs of Vietnam, the brothers both stayed a few blessed days. The price of admission for this hotel ran pretty high. But it had its pluses: food, rest, the presence of women (admittedly mostly officers). The leaders at 24th Evac understood that riflemen had it tough. If two nights under clean sheets helped, all to the good.
This is when Chuck found time to write his family his long letter about the incident. Author Myra MacPherson read it years later, and referred to the way both Hagels explained their experiences to their worried mother Betty and brothers Mike and Jimmy as The Hardy Boys Go to Vietnam.45 While few could dispute MacPherson’s deep insight into the Vietnam generation as a whole and the brothers Hagel in particular, she owed the guys a bit more credit. Chuck to a great extent, and Tom for sure, had plenty to write about some rather disturbing aspects of the war. Where they pulled up short involved all references to their own personal experiences. Some of it reflected their upbringing. Young men from small towns in Nebraska didn’t trash-talk or beat their chests. Things happened, you stated them plainly, and you moved on. In addition, both Chuck and Tom were looking out for their single mom, already carrying a hell of a burden.
What else could they do? No civilian would ever understand the real deal. And if you loved them, you made sure they did not:
It’s time now for another episode in “Surprise Surprise.” I hope you haven’t received anything from the Army as yet. [She had not.] But (oh yes, light a Camel, get a cup of hot coffee, and then sit down) your two sons have earned a distinguished medal, the Purple Heart. Now please stay calm.46
Hagel went on to explain that he received “a pellet” in his chest “which was no problem” and Tom got “a pellet” in his elbow “which was easily popped out.” Those statements were true, but greatly understated the number and impact of scalding ball bearings that slammed into each man. Chuck went on: “So No Problems. No sweat!” And then he invoked “the Good Lord, the Saints, Dad” for their evident efforts to keep the brothers safe.47 It was one way to describe the outcome.
Both brothers, then and now, downplayed their injuries. “Our wounds were no big deal,” said Chuck later. “There was nothing that was life-threatening.” But Tom, ever thoughtful when he had time, remembered the rest of the awful scene: streaks of blood swirling in the stream, bright red swathes smeared on spring green leaves, the abject confusion, soldiers too stunned to talk, others unable to stop moaning, the men down, some without legs, a few without faces, the one who didn’t make it, and then that long, slow walk out through darker woods than Dante Alighieri ever imagined on the lip of hell. “It was one of the most terrible times,” said Tom.48
Tom got at the deeper meaning of the wounding, one seen a quarter century earlier by another rifleman in a jungle war, Corporal James Jones of Company F, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division. Later the acclaimed author of the novels From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, Jones thought hard about what it meant to get hit by the enemy. “They had crossed this strange line,” he wrote of the wounded.49 They knew something that those not struck would never know.
The infantryman’s war in Vietnam, like the way into Dante’s pit of hell, passed through descending circles: arrival in country, first live patrol, first contact with the enemy, first wounded friendly seen, first wounded foe encountered, first dead GI right there, first dead VC observed, first time shooting back, first prisoner taken, first enemy shot close enough to recognize him as a man, and first time wounded. There was only one more step. Those who took it, like John Summers of Baltimore—well, they never reported back.
That was the line Jones mentioned. Now the Hagels had stuck their toes across, and pulled them right back. But for a few minutes, they’d been there. For a lot of men, even those “lightly” wounded like the Hagels, once was enough. A good number of them never really went back to the war. They found ways out, some acceptable, some less so. It’s easy to get the curious types, the bravado boys, to go to the first firefight. But the second, or the twenty-second, or the one after Charlie put a hole in your hide? No way. Yet Chuck and Tom went back.
Why?
The brothers returned to Company B because they figured out one of the dirty big secrets of the army. For all the laws, regulations, and orders, for the enlistment contracts sworn in front of the flag and the mandatory “greetings” of Selective Service, for the many articles in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, for all the bluster of generals and colonels and sergeants major, in the end, Americans in Vietnam who stayed at it, who kept going out to hunt Charlie, chose to do their duty. They chose it every day in country. They were not compelled, and could not be.
If you asked the Hagels (and people did, even in 1968), they’d say they did it for the country, or to honor their father, or to protect America. Yes, Old Glory gets you into the induction station. Out in the lethal greenwood southeast of Bear Cat, though, abstract patriotism doesn’t go too far.
Soldiers don’t fight for the grand old flag. They fight for each other. America shrinks to the men to the right and left willing to shoulder a rifle and go at it. They keep each other going. Chuck and Tom sure did.
Think about it. Does the threat of court-martial motivate a man to go out on patrol? Hardly. The worst army stockade offers three hots and a cot, and nobody stays there more than a few years, if that, just for shirking. As for officers or sergeants intimidating guys, or threatening to shoot them, well hell, the privates far outnumber the leaders. And every rifleman has his own loaded weapon. It almost never came to that, despite the fondest hopes of overwrought Hollywood screenwriters.
The low field strength of a rifle company in Vietnam, or in the world wars, Korea, Afghanistan, or Iraq for that matter, reflected those few, those tough few, willing to keep going. The faint hearts flaked off along the way, and the army let them. It was just as well. On patrol, nobody wants to hear that the man next in line doesn’t care to fire his M16 today. Good men kept going. Chuck and Tom Hagel were such men.
So was John Summers.
IN THE WELL-KEPT WARD of the 24th Evac, the brothers had some time to catch up on the wider world. Like most soldiers in country, they relied on the Stars and Stripes, a semi-official daily newspaper that mixed accounts by uniformed military public affairs writers with wire service clippings and other articles drawn from the press in the United States. Because the Stars and Stripes sometimes went its own way, the generals didn’t care for it. But the troops did. As Chuck said, “I don’t know if there were really any other newspapers that we ever looked at or saw.”50
The brothers paged through a stack of back issues. One caught their eye. The March 7, 1968, edition featured a big black front-page headline: “Youth Slain as Wallace Visit Ignites Violence in Omaha.” A big photo showed Alabama governor George Wallace getting pelted by debris.51
What was George Wallace doing in Omaha? And why did his visit result in a riot? That kind of stuff didn’t happen in Nebraska. Something had gone very wrong back home.