Airmobility, dig it, you weren’t going anywhere. It made you feel safe. It made you feel Omni, but it was only a stunt, technology.
MICHAEL HERR, Dispatches1
Nobody rioted when Bobby Kennedy was shot. No troops in 2-47th Infantry refused to go out on patrol. A gunman from the anxious present, the Cold War, killed John F. Kennedy. A shooter from the sordid past, the American Civil War, murdered Martin Luther King Jr. And now a face from the future, the shape of U.S. wars to come in the Middle East, cut down RFK in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in the minutes after midnight on June 5, 1968. “It kind of broke everyone’s spirit,” Chuck Hagel remembered.2
But he and the rest just kept going.
It was almost like they were used to it, hardened to it, rendered numb at the rate of loss on both sides of the Pacific. The USS Pueblo, Tet, Khe Sanh, Hue; King’s killing, the anguished uprisings that burned American cities, Mini-Tet in Saigon, and now RFK’s assassination—it just ran on and on, a torrent of pain that bore them all relentlessly downstream, day after day, night after night. Robert Kennedy’s death rendered one more tick mark on the long list of things going to hell in 1968 America, one more body to count. And as any rifleman in country knew, there were always more bodies to count.
After Mini-Tet, the VC did what they did best. They seeped into their Mekong Delta haunts, vanishing into midair like tendrils of smoke. Enemy advances, we retreat.
Spurred by Major General Julian J. Ewell, the 9th Infantry Division pursued. It sounded decisive to talk of chasing the slippery Cong, but they defied following. The land itself—thick with undergrowth, swollen with shallow mud-choked waterways, and bereft of decent highways—conspired against the weary Americans. The weather went foul, the wet monsoon blowing ashore weeks late but full of fury. Rice paddies filled, the forest floors went sloppy, and the dirt roads turned to strips of mud. For M113s in 2-47th, most of the region became “no go” terrain.3 The tracks had to stay on the better roads. And Charlie knew exactly where those ran. He didn’t go there.
Ewell did not back off. Driven by his will, 2-47th stayed at it. They took the roadways to dismount points, then pushed off into the lush vegetation, hunting Charlie. The intelligence people thought the VC battalions banged up in Mini-Tet moved to regroup, pulling into the villages and jungles of Long An Province, southwest of Saigon. Some 334,000 Vietnamese lived in Long An. And in the Maoist idiom, in this sea of humanity swam four enemy battalions. The Phu Loi II, 5th Nha Be, and 506th regrouped after Mini-Tet, integrating new arrivals from the north. An NVA outfit fresh off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the 294th, provided a shield for this rebuilding effort.4 When the 9th Infantry Division G-2 guys explained it in their clean office huts, it all made perfect sense, nice and crisp and neat, red dots precisely located in the green forested swaths on the map. Out in the wilds of Long An, finding the VC proved as difficult as ever. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Colonel John Tower’s men of the 2-47th stayed at it.
Operations in Long An stretched the battalion. Camp Martin Cox at Bear Cat, east of Saigon, remained the 2-47th base, with headquarters, supply, and motor pool facilities. But Long An Province lay on the southwestern side of Saigon. To go there, 2-47th units had to traverse the South Vietnamese capital, a distance of fifty miles on dangerous highways and bypasses. And the battalion still had to carry out roadrunner duties to keep routes open, guard the key sites at distant Gia Ray, and keep VC rocket teams away from the division base camp at Bear Cat. The company, sometimes two, sent to Long An had to stay there for weeks. The company left behind had to carry out tasks that before Mini-Tet wore out the entire battalion. It ran the men ragged. And it took a toll.
On May 27, Company C lost a ten-year veteran staff sergeant and a young corporal, both killed by a mine while trying to secure an engineer road-clearing team.5 The staff people at the division headquarters discounted these kinds of tasks—not good for running up the score. But the two men were just as dead as if they’d been killed storming the beach at Normandy on D-Day in 1944.
Two days later, on a similar mission near Bear Cat, in the only too familiar jungle on the outskirts of the Binh Son rubber plantation, Chuck Hagel’s squad held a stretch of a small circular platoon perimeter, right on the edge of a small clearing. It was midday, a hot one, with the skies already clouding up for the afternoon monsoon rain. The humidity, as usual, matched the 90°-plus temperature. No VC had been seen for days. Sergeant First Class William Edward Smith moved slowly from soldier to soldier, making sure guys were drinking from their canteens. The rest of the day promised more walking, more looking, and not much finding.
Hagel recalled: “We’d taken a water break. And they opened up on us as we were sitting there.” The Americans rolled prone and returned fire. As usual, nobody saw Charlie. But the AK bullets kept sizzling overhead. Hagel saw Smith shift position, probably to get the pig gunner going. “And I was just a couple of guys away from him,” Chuck Hagel said. “He was just coming up out of a tree, and a sniper shot him in the head.”6 The Americans drove off the VC. No enemy bodies turned up, just blood drops on the foliage.
Losing William Edward Smith hurt a lot. With him gone, Chuck Hagel became acting platoon sergeant. Chuck had just advanced to Specialist 4. Now, with about a year in service, he had to replace a senior NCO, an eighteen-year U.S. Army veteran. Hagel had to run the rifle platoon, evacuate Smith, and finish the day’s mission. The morrow would bring more of the same, as would every day to come. Tom took over Chuck’s squad. To an outsider, it seemed like some kind of children’s crusade, eighteen-year-olds led by a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old.
And yet, even by the standards of the world wars, both Hagels had been through a lifetime of combat: Tet, patrols, ambushes, roadrunner ops, calling in artillery, arranging medevacs, twice wounded, and then Mini-Tet. They knew their jobs quite well, better than some Fort Benning ninety-day-wonder officer candidate could ever absorb from a field manual or a blank-fire game of bang-bang in the Georgia pine woods. It was that Darwinian impulse once more, survival of the fittest. “And both of us were very, very good at killing,” [emphasis in original] Tom recalled. “We were amazingly proficient at it all.”7
For a month, the Hagels kept their platoon going. Above them in the chain of command, nobody felt sorry or backed off. Far from it. Ewell kept bringing the heat. “That was the deal, body count,” Chuck Hagel said. “You used that body count, commanding officers did, as the metric and measurement [of] how successful you were.”8
On June 10, the 2-47th scout platoon went out at night. Their lead track ran into another road mine. Two sergeants died hard. To secure the site, the Hagels’ platoon rolled up the next morning.
When he saw the dead men, Tom Hagel immediately recognized Sergeant Arthur John Enquist, the scout platoon medic, from Columbus, Nebraska. Enquist, aged twenty, had been in country a few days longer than Chuck. In Hollywood, actors in war movies die with a little red spot and some dramatics. But Enquist didn’t go out in any way suitable for family viewing. He would have to go home to Columbus in a closed casket. “He didn’t suffer,” Tom summarized grimly.9
It fell to Tom Hagel to pack up Enquist’s things and send them back home. There wasn’t much to send. Like the Hagels, like all of them, Enquist didn’t have much of his own in his dusty tent at Bear Cat. Tom told himself that when he got home, he’d go see the Enquist family. He never did.10 Anyone who’d never been in combat would wonder why not. Anyone who had been under fire, like brother Chuck or father Charles Dean… well, they’d understand immediately. When you’re already carrying the crushing weight of all those you lost, and all those you killed, you don’t volunteer to add another.
Tom Hagel did mention it in a letter home, another example of both brothers’ tendency to share difficult thoughts with their mother and brothers. After mentioning Enquist, Tom wrote: “Well, last night I was talking to him and messin’ around until they had to go on patrol.” He continued: “Last night some VC snuck up on them and killed four and wounded four. Bad! Enquist was killed.”11 Tom didn’t get the casualty count right—although badly wounded, two scouts he thought dead made it out alive. But it served as a reminder of the steady attrition.
Tom also broke the news of the brothers’ second set of Purple Hearts. Here, he softened the blow as Chuck had in his letter about their first wounds. He described Chuck as burned but “completely healed and no scars.” Tom spared his mother the details of his brother’s post-wound agony. “I had never felt such pain before in my life,” Chuck wrote, although not to his family in Nebraska. It would be decades before Chuck Hagel could shave the left half of his face with a nonelectric razor. In later life, an attempt to grow a beard produced a wild patchwork akin to the surface of the Dakota badlands.12 Not a bit of that made it into Tom’s writing to his family.
Tom tiptoed around his own condition, too. He briefly mentioned his own scorched arms and his head concussion, “which is completely healed.” No more was said, nor could it be. “So no sweat when you get the next set of Purple Hearts,” he wrote.13
But Betty Hagel did sweat. She loved getting the letters. “She lived for the mail,” her son Mike remembered. But she worried, too. What she didn’t know could hurt her, all right. When the phone rang one day in May, her son Mike answered. A distant, static-filled military voice asked for “Mrs. Betty Hagel.” Mike told her it sounded like the U.S. Army. She began crying, fearing the worst. But it wasn’t that. Instead, after Mini-Tet, Chuck and Tom made it to the Bear Cat MARS (Military Auxiliary Radio System) station and phoned home, a bit late for Mother’s Day, but close enough.14 The brothers wanted to give her a surprise. They did.
There weren’t any good surprises in the 2-47th those days, only more of the same. The month after Mini-Tet ended badly, just the way it started. In a major firefight with the 294th NVA Battalion on June 25–26, Company A and Company B joined in an attempted encirclement by parts of five U.S. battalions. The piling on went as well as ever—which meant it didn’t quite work. Charlie ate a great many artillery rounds, helicopter rockets, and aerial bombs. A lot got away. When the gunfire subsided, the Americans claimed 166 foes killed, one captured, and eighty-two weapons found. It cost twenty U.S. dead and eighty-one wounded. The division hailed it as a great success, a worthy next achievement after Mini-Tet.15 You wondered if anybody had whispered to Ewell that after LBJ’s retrenchment of March 31, only the U.S. losses counted. And twenty were twenty too many.
Among those killed were seven men from Company A, including two platoon sergeants. Company B suffered two killed, PFC Dominic Ungaro Jr. and Specialist 5 Phillip “Doc” Rogers, one of the stalwarts of the outfit.16 The doc’s wound in Mini-Tet turned out to be just enough to get him evacuated from South Saigon but not enough to send him home. It was probably the only diagnosis the senior medic ever missed. The VC did not miss. The deaths just added up, one after another.
At the 9th Infantry Division, the bookkeepers didn’t think about William Smith or Arthur Enquist or Doc Rogers, all numbers at that level. It’s not that the staffers didn’t care. They did. But they didn’t know these 2-47th soldiers, any more than they knew Senator Robert Kennedy. What the guys at division headquarters did know was that 2-47th had the worst ratio of American to VC dead in the entire command.17 And that had to change.
On June 15, just before the big operation that took the life of Doc Rogers, a new commander took over 2-47th Infantry. Lieutenant Colonel Frederick French “Fritz” Van Deusen came with a pedigree and a half: son of an army colonel, West Point Class of 1953, veteran of post-war Korean duty and the 1965–66 Dominican Republic incursion. He owned a reputation as a hard-charger. He was also General William C. Westmoreland’s brother-in-law.18 Van Deusen had something to prove. He had never failed at anything in his life.
But as Americans learned over and over in Vietnam, there’s always a first time.
HELICOPTERS! They’d carry Fritz Van Deusen and his hard-luck 2-47th to victory. Choppers could zip right across Saigon, from Bear Cat into the Mekong Delta. Forget about those bulky 12-ton M113s. In rural Long An, even a mediocre VC leader could guess which few routes American mechanized forces must use in the wet season. But with aviation, the possibilities for getting out and about mushroomed exponentially. Speed, surprise, flexibility—every tactical buzzword seemed right there for the taking.
Helicopters solved it all in Vietnam. Jungles, mountains, and rivers could be crossed at will. Moreover, choppers landed and took off not from long, prepared runways but out of any reasonable patch of open ground. Whereas World War II parachute drops scattered troops all over the place and gliders of that era delivered key heavy weapons and small troop elements almost on the X (admittedly often by crashing there), by the 1960s, rotary wing aircraft placed formed units together smack atop isolated wilderness locales. Leg infantry slogged at two and a half miles an hour, and M113s on flat hard ground might roll along at ten times that speed. But helicopters raced above it all at a hundred miles an hour. Even guerrillas couldn’t outrun American sky cavalry. The army called it breaking free of “the tyranny of terrain.”19 For a society in love with technology, the helicopter sure looked to be an answer, and probably the answer, to the challenges of finding and killing Cong in the backcountry of South Vietnam.
The enduring image of the Vietnam War must certainly be the bulbous-nosed UH-1 helicopter, skids up, flaring to land on a flattened billow of elephant grass. The army labeled the UH-1 “Iroquois,” adhering to the service’s tradition of naming aircraft for Indian tribes. Nobody but a few purists ever used the official title. Everybody called it “Huey.”
The Huey came in four basic variants. UH-1C “Hog” gunships carried rockets and mini-guns. UH-1 D “slick” troop transports flew riflemen into battle; those had an M60 machine gun swinging free in each open side door, and so the onboard gunners could stitch a hostile treeline as their Huey came in to land. UH-1H “Dust Off” medevac helicopters pulled out the wounded. Finally, the UH-1D and H model “C&C” or “Charlie-Charlie” birds allowed commanders to get up in the air to direct operations.
In addition, the 9th Infantry Division also used little bubble-top OH-23 Raven choppers for C&C and reconnaissance, and the armed AH-1G Cobra (a heavily modified Huey derivative) for rocket and mini-gun missions. Now and then, higher headquarters allocated larger CH-47 Chinook and CH-54 Tarhe cargo craft to move artillery howitzers and other heavy cargo. Those types could even sling a stripped-down M113 on their cargo hooks, one of the reasons the tracks featured lightweight aluminum armor.20 Given a choice, most 2-47th soldiers would have preferred heavier M113 armor and the hell with the mech battalion’s infrequent resort to heliborne mobility. But, of course, none of the weapons developers asked the infantry privates.
The M113’s armor might have been inadequate to stop a .50-caliber machine gun bullet, let alone an RPG, but a track could shrug off the smaller stuff, like AK rounds. Helicopters could not. For all their many advantages, rotary wing aircraft had no armor. If struck in one of their many, many vulnerable spots—engine, transmission, cockpit—helicopters tended to stop running and come apart. It’s probably an indicator that the key connector between the rotor shaft and the main blade assembly went by the name of the “Jesus nut.”21 Only He could save you if that thing got hit. Worse, once the main rotor disk quit spinning, or the tail blades failed, a Huey possessed the aerodynamic qualities of a brick. Army aviators told each other, and their human cargo, that a damaged bird could “auto-rotate” to the ground, the big main blades spinning without power until the thing safely touched down. Nobody wanted to try that, especially with Mr. Charles blazing away during the entire lazy downward spiral.
During the entire war, during 36,145,000 separate helicopter sorties, the enemy, bad weather, mechanical failures, and aviator errors combined to knock down 4,642 aircraft. That number amounted to more than the total number of army helicopters in country in 1968, and far exceeds today’s entire U.S. Army rotary wing fleet.22 If you sifted the statistics like an insurance actuary, comfortably ensconced in an air-conditioned office, the probabilities didn’t sound that dire. About one flight in eight thousand ended in an unpleasant way, not all fatal, and not all nonrecoverable. Many cracked-up helicopters underwent repairs and flew again. So there.
To say that only one in eight thousand crashed might seem pretty acceptable, until you considered that amounted to twice the rate of incidents in nonhostile military helicopter flights. It also mattered what the choppers were doing. Carting Bob Hope and a USO troupe from one U.S. camp to another didn’t risk much. But going into a hot landing zone (LZ) sure magnified the hazard; 57 percent of all helicopters lost went down trying to land or take off under fire. And, of course, if you happened to be aboard unlucky number eight thousand, well… all bad. Army aviators, largely young warrant officers with a bit more time in service than the Hagel brothers, flew these dangerous missions. Almost one in ten Americans killed in Vietnam died during helicopter operations. 23
Most aviation missions in Vietnam occurred in daylight. Two decades later, evolving night-vision technology allowed helicopter operations to benefit from the concealment of night. But in Vietnam, those were unusual. Pushed by Ewell, the 9th Infantry Division carried out more night flights than most, although still less than a fifth of all missions.24 By 1968, though, any novelty in Vietnam helicopter warfare had long worn thin. Airmobility might be new for 2-47th. But Charlie sure knew the deal.
The warrant officers did, too. Faced by often alerted opponents richly endowed with machine guns, automatic rifles, and RPGs, the aviators argued for strong preparatory airstrikes and artillery fires, cover by helicopter gunships, very careful selection of LZs, and quick dismounting by infantry to permit the most rapid possible trips in and out. If ground commanders tried to get cute, or even worse, if all the pre-assault fires fell flat, experienced flight warrants knew what came next. “We went in there one afternoon,” one account read, “and I never seen such shit thrown at us, from both sides of the mountains and below.” That from below was more lethal. “You get the River Blindness out there,” the speaker said. “It’s when you go down to the river and get your eyes shot out.”25
DOWN TO THE RIVER—that’s where 2-47th went on July 3, 1968. Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Van Deusen read the tea leaves from higher. The G-2 estimates placed a company, maybe less, of the 294th Battalion (supposedly VC, but really NVA) near Hoang Hon Tren, a gaggle of thatched-roof hootches right on the west bank of the meandering, muddy, rain-swollen Vam Co Dong River. Encouraged by his innovative, fire-breathing brigade commander, Colonel Henry E “Gunfighter” Emerson—Ewell’s favorite, but legitimately gifted as a tactician—Van Deusen planned to try a new method called “jitterbugging.”26
In essence, jitterbugging took advantage of the flat terrain in Long An, a mix of open rice paddies, small settlements, waterways, and irregular patches of thick forests. In the jitterbug approach, a battalion gathered every scrap of intelligence: aerial photographs, radio intercepts, airborne radar readouts, agent reports, the ARVN rumor mill, and even the findings of a Huey rigged with an XM-2 “people sniffer” that smelled human body odors (urine and sweat) in remote areas.27 The U.S. battalion staff pieced it all together, a mosaic of suspected enemy positions in woods and villages surrounded by an array of small open rice paddies. Then the commander would pick where to get started, the most likely VC hideout, as well as a series of alternates. Working with the aviators, the Americans then selected the nearest possible LZs.
Rather than rely on company-scale or even battalion-strength lifts into big LZs, jitterbugging went small, at least to begin. The infantry battalion used five Hueys to insert a rifle platoon in the rice paddy closest to the suspected enemy positions—in a village, an overgrown river bank, or a wooded area. If the first spot turned out to be a dry hole, the Hueys came right back and the platoon reboarded and flew to the next location, then the next, until the troops struck pay dirt.
Sometimes the intel really came together, and the Americans plopped down within fifteen yards of Charlie. That got interesting fast. When the bad guys reacted, other platoons would be put in by helicopter, one after another, forming a cordon to keep the enemy trapped in the trees or village. Usually those reinforcements came from the U.S. battalion itself, but they could also be thrown into the fray from other nearby friendly outfits. In one really energetic battalion, the troops carried out sixteen separate jitterbug combat assaults in a single day, often into the teeth of VC fire. Once the blocks were set, the Americans poured in the firepower: artillery, helicopter rockets, napalm, and high explosives.28 It was the field and stream version of what happened in south Saigon during Mini-Tet.
Jitterbugging shocked the Cong in Long An. They were not used to seeing such direct assaults. And it ran up the opposition body count, all right. But it wasn’t free of cost. As Ewell later noted: “This was pushing the balance of the risk of a hot landing zone against the achievement of total surprise to its limit.”29 Well, like the guys in Third Army used to say about George Patton, his guts, our blood.
At the user level, among the sergeants and acting sergeants, hopping right on Mr. Charles didn’t resonate all that well. Asked for his thoughts by an interviewer enthusiastic about Emerson’s jitterbug tactics, Chuck Hagel replied with: “Mm-hmm.”30 His laconic recollection says it all. The bugs were not happy.
Happy or not, first light on July 3 saw 2-47th jitterbugging away. Lieutenant Colonel Van Deusen inserted his lead platoon not long after sunup. They landed a hundred yards west of Hoang Hon Tren, in a rice paddy filled ankle deep with brown water and God knows what else. Mr. Charles welcomed them immediately with AK-47 rifle fire and at least one RPD machine gun. Some guerrilla loosed an RPG, but the Hueys got out okay and headed back to pick up the next platoon. Meanwhile, UH-1C Hog gunships rocketed the hostile treeline.31 Pile on.
The 9th Infantry Division’s massive base at Bear Cat served as the pickup zone for 2-47th. On the helipad waited a single rifle platoon, the next to launch. The riflemen had a new lieutenant, a young guy just in country, and a new platoon sergeant, too. They formed in six-man squads. Each group knelt on the edge of the airstrip, awaiting the inbound Hueys. On paper, a UH-1D could move eleven troops. But in the hot, humid Mekong Delta, ferrying soldiers laden with eighty pounds of gear, water, and ammunition, six about did it, with seven in a pinch.32 That worked out well, as five Hueys could handily pick up one of the 2-47th understrength rifle platoons.
Specialist 4 Chuck Hagel wasn’t with them. He remained on the other side of the huge camp at Bear Cat. Chuck had orders to attend the Reliable NCO Academy, a two-week course that would qualify him for promotion to sergeant. First Sergeant Garcia assigned Chuck to supervise Company B’s detail assigned to the local defense team on the Bear Cat base perimeter. That would allow Chuck to report on time to the training.33 Frankly, with two Purple Hearts already, it was a break. Garcia knew it, and despite the blizzard of orders descending from division about getting a maximum number of infantrymen out into the rice paddies, the first sergeant did it anyway.
Specialist 4 Tom Hagel also received orders to go to the Reliable NCO Academy, and was supposed to be on duty at Bear Cat, too. To allow him to prepare, Tom had been temporarily assigned to the battalion headquarters as an “information specialist,” a nebulous position that envisioned him hanging around inside the wire taking photographs and talking to visiting Vietnamese villagers. But with a big portion of the 2-47th chasing Charlie through the Long An wetlands, Tom redefined his new role. He didn’t have any intention of staying inside the fence line back at Bear Cat. On the busy morning of July 3, Tom made his way to the base pickup zone intending to snap pictures of the troops preparing for the combat assault. But when he recognized riflemen he’d served with during the last few tough weeks, Tom reinterpreted his duties. After Mini-Tet, Tom Hagel had no illusions about the misbegotten nature of the U.S. war effort, dismissing much of the official line as “propaganda.” But for a Specialist 4 and acting NCO, policy and strategy mattered not one whit. “My sole commitment was to my people,” he recalled.34 And although on temporary detached duty, Tom Hagel saw those men as his guys, if only for this day.
He lined up at the tail end of one of the rows of riflemen awaiting the Hueys. Tom carried a cheap camera and a .45 automatic pistol, not exactly the right load-out for a combat assault into a hot LZ.35 At about 8:30 a.m., he went anyway.
THE HUEYS DESCENDED swiftly to the open rice paddy surface, throwing a light spray of dirty water as the birds flared to land. The left-door gunner pounded away with his M60 machine gun; the right guy held fire, as a ragged rank of prone American troops huddled off to that side, using the shelter of a paddy dike. Beyond them to the east stood the ville. Smoke from rocket fire rose in the bright-green trees on either side of the huts of Hoang Hon Tren. If there were Vietnamese civilians still in there, they’d better get into their little scrape-outs and start praying. Charlie wasn’t backing off today.
The UH-1D’s skids barely touched and Tom Hagel and the other men tumbled out into the wet brown mud. Tom described the scene as “absolute chaos.”36 Enemy fire raised spouts in the paddy puddles. The VC popped bullets into the thin-skinned Hueys, even as the choppers barely touched and then sprang up. At least one lift helicopter looked to be in bad shape, but it got out somehow. Americans on the ground fired back, red tracers versus green tracers, the usual sound and light show. Naturally, nobody saw Mr. Charles. But he sure seemed to see all the Americans. And the VC had no shortage of ammunition.
Hagel and the rest of the platoon, heads down, helmets bobbing, sprinted and sloshed to the paddy dike. There they intermixed with the unit already there. Nobody went forward. Most of the riflemen shot back, especially the M60 pig gunners. Some Americans did not fire at all. One panicked guy even stuck up his M16 rifle and pulled the trigger, a futile gesture at best. Whatever nifty Fort Benning scheme of maneuver had been devised back at Bear Cat went right out the window. “It never seems to happen the way it’s supposed to,” Tom Hagel said.37 Pinned along the west flank of the dirt berm, the U.S. troops counted on the armed choppers to suppress Charlie.
A UH-1C Hog gunship came in, mini-guns roaring like berserk chainsaws. A VC machine gunner went right back at the aircraft, green tracers spearing into the Hog’s hull. The aviator on the stick pitched violently to shake off the guerrilla shooter. But he didn’t let up on the mini-gun. The stream of 7.62mm bullets raked through the paddy dike. The soldier next to Tom Hagel had his rear end blown open, no laughing matter. A sidelong glance showed white pelvic bone in the oozing red gash.38 Good God.
The gunship’s run quelled the VC some. A platoon sergeant urged the Americans to their feet, setting the example. He went down. But the lieutenant, the rah-rah Joe College type leading Hagel’s adopted platoon, kept the men going.39 The Americans slipped past an enemy bunker and reached the edge of the hamlet.
Veteran Hagel, with many firefights as an acting NCO, immediately saw the rookie mistake. That VC bunker hadn’t been cleared. It was, Hagel observed, a “cardinal rule” that if you see an enemy position, “you never pass it.”40 In all the confusion, the inexperienced lieutenant did so.
Mr. Charles provided the standard dose of education. From behind the upright U.S. infantrymen, an RPD machine gun rasped, and then an RPG rocket whooshed out of the nearby trees. You could see those coming at you. The thing barely armed before it blew. Hot fragments cut into Tom Hagel’s neck, back, and leg. The savvy nineteen-year-old dropped into the corner of a dike to get out of the line of VC fire. He had three rounds left in his pistol. The other Americans had to get shooting.
Except they weren’t there.
Tom Hagel watched as the surprised U.S. riflemen ran away. What the hell. In prior firefights, Hagel had sometimes been compelled to make his own guys fire back, to “literally yell and kick at people—start shooting.” But these soldiers just skedaddled. Tom had never seen such a thing.41 Holding only a pistol, all Hagel could do was fold himself into his covered chunk of ground and hope the VC didn’t notice him.
Somebody rallied the gun-shy Americans. The continued pounding by the armed helicopters helped, as did the arrival of more troops, more from Company B and more from Company A, too. Charlie had enough. Leaving his dead, the opposing force pulled back to the riverbank. The strengthened U.S. ground force again entered the village. Tom found the men he knew and went with them in among the hovels.42
With the shooting over, the Americans set out a security perimeter. Sergeants started redistributing ammunition—they’d gone through a lot. Wounded Americans were moved to the LZ for pickup. A few soldiers began to drag over individual NVA bodies. That’s how you usually saw them, dead or captured. But live and shooting—not likely. During all of this, the villagers of Hoang Hon Tren, those few still in town, wisely stayed inside.
In one humble shack, movement flashed in the doorway, a person coming out. Joe College, the lieutenant Hagel labeled “shaky,” shot immediately, quick kill, right out of the infantry training course. Shoot at movement. Shoot at a ripple of clothing, the black pajamas. Shoot first. He did, from a few feet away.
The jumpy lieutenant killed a young woman, about twenty years old. To add to the misery, she was pregnant. She held no weapon and wore no web gear. Although Tom Hagel and the other experienced infantrymen had seen more than one female guerrilla, this one wasn’t VC. It was a horrible screw-up, face to face. That officer would have to live with it for the rest of his life. Some callous Americans didn’t care about Vietnamese casualties, friendly, neutral, or enemy. Not so Tom Hagel. “I could not separate myself from that,” he said, “and if I had, I’d really worry.”43
Hagel and the rest of the platoon finished searching the village. Beyond the one dead civilian, a few enemy corpses—VC, NVA, NVA acting as VC, whatever—and some damaged enemy rifles, gear, and affiliated ammunition, nothing else turned up. By midafternoon, about three o’clock, Tom Hagel and his fellow riflemen made it to the edge of the Vam Co Dong River. The adrenaline rush of the morning clash had long since dissipated. With the searing tropical sun high in the sky, heat left the men “dazed” and “exhausted,” as Hagel recalled. The Americans panted, out of water. Although they’d shared their bullets to ensure everybody had some, ammunition had run short.44 A resupply would be useful.
At about that time, Company A’s commander, Captain Richard K. Holoday, reported losing radio communication with one of his rifle platoons. That could mean a battery problem, a failed radio, or VC trouble. A burst of automatic fire to the north indicated that Charlie hadn’t left the area yet.
That brought Lieutenant Colonel Van Deusen to the ground. The 2-47th commander had landed his UH-1D C&C chopper a few times during the morning firefight, mostly to place arriving units, but also to assess the situation. Now with Holoday’s platoon off the net, Van Deusen touched down. After spending some time with Company A as they traded shots with Mr. Charles, the lieutenant colonel took off again. Holoday and his two radiomen joined the battalion commander inside the aircraft.
Van Deusen told the aviators to circle slowly as Holoday and his two NCOs scanned the rice paddy dikes for the separated platoon. The C&C ship orbited at low level above the river.45 Numerous radio calls brought no replies. The rifle platoon had seemingly vanished without a trace. That was unlikely, but such friction predominates in combat. Maybe the captain wasn’t as sure as he thought of where that platoon really had ended up.
An alert Viet Cong guerrilla took advantage of the low-flying Huey. The enemy had been paying close attention to previous U.S. jitterbug operations. In an order sent to all units in Long An Province, the VC Military Region 2 headquarters directed countertactics. Ideally, communist forces had to avoid getting trapped near obvious landing zones. If found and attacked by a U.S. jitterbug element, a portion of the unit must furiously fire back, tearing up the American aircraft and buying time for the guerrillas to escape. Finally, the VC commander told each of his regiments to select and train several helicopter ambush squads. “The function of the sniping cell will be to shoot down the CP [command post] chopper.”46 In other words, take out the brain of the jitterbug.
Van Deusen probably didn’t mean to do it. But by swinging low over the open waterway, trying to locate Company A’s orphan platoon, the 2-47th commander made it easy for the enemy. A single marksman with an AK-47 opened up, burping out a series of high-velocity 7.62mm rounds.
The bad guy was right near Tom Hagel and his enervated platoon mates. The AK cracked away, “a very distinct sound,” well known to Hagel and the other veterans.47 A dense wall of greenery hid the busy hostile gunman. The VC quickly ran through a full thirty-round magazine, but not just yanking the trigger. This one was aiming his shots.
From Tom Hagel’s vantage point, the Huey suddenly “stopped dead in the air over the river.” It almost appeared the helicopter hit an invisible wall in the sky. Then it “fell like a rock,” straight down into the river. It belly-flopped into the water and broke apart, a shattered mess. Several misshapen olive-drab pieces sank swiftly. Twenty seconds later, three struggling figures bobbed to the surface. The VC kept methodically banging away, determined to administer the finishing touches of a fatal dose of the river blindness.
Hagel had “never seen anything like it.” He described the event as “stunning,” which it was, and “incredible” in the absolute sense—not able to be believed. Yet there it was, right in front of him. The gaping troops around Hagel, eyes wide, did nothing. The guerrilla shot again.48 The Americans in the water, ducking from the AK bullets, had nowhere to go but down.
Yes, there was a lot of undergrowth between that sharp-shooting VC and Hagel’s men. Nobody could tell if there were friendlies over on the other side, especially with a platoon from Company A out there somewhere. Tossing grenades or blazing away through the bush might work, but both techniques threatened to rip up any Americans stuck in the line of fire. And unlike on television, real bullets from modern military weapons move with nearly irresistible force. The slugs keep going and going, even after punching holes in men or foliage. So firing blindly wouldn’t work. Meanwhile, the AK guy gave no indication of quitting. “Somebody had to do something.”49
That somebody was Tom Hagel.
The Specialist 4 picked up a battered Viet Cong M1 carbine, a U.S. World War II surplus weapon taken from the ARVN, used by Charlie, and then repossessed that morning by the Americans. The weapon had a weathered wooden stock and, more importantly, a thirty-round magazine inserted. How many bullets did it still have? Hagel couldn’t tell. Hefting it up, the carbine felt like it had some rounds left. It would have to do.
In seconds, although it seemed to unfold in an unreal slow-motion tableau, Hagel plunged through a narrow gap in the lush bushes. The opponent had his back turned. He was still engaging the floaters. Crack. Crack.
The leaves rustled. The VC turned, his powder-smudged AK barrel coming up. He looked right at Tom Hagel, ten feet away. The American squeezed the trigger once. “And I just shot him right in the forehead.”50
Six other soldiers, two from the 2-47th Infantry battalion headquarters, the pair of radiomen from Company A, and both crew chief/gunners from the 240th Aviation Company, died in the Vam Co Dong River with Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Van Deusen. The two pilots and Captain Holoday survived. When they pulled out the next morning, the Americans claimed a body count of twenty-four VC.51 Tom Hagel for sure knew of one. Any way you did the arithmetic, it sure didn’t feel like a victory.
THERE WAS MORE. It seemed like there was always more misery in Vietnam, especially now, with the war going slowly sour, the homeland in an uproar, and the likes of Julian J. Ewell pressing one and all to stack up more Cong. Thus Charlie had been well and truly slain on July 3. And with Westmoreland’s brother-in-law and six more souls fallen into a watery grave, staff officers from the 9th Infantry Division headquarters came down from the clouds like gods to grub among the yeomen. Apparently, they flew out at Ewell’s direction to determine what happened. The major general expected plenty of queries from Washington and MACV. As always, Ewell’s instincts served him well.
Sweat-stained, bloodied by the RPG blast, thirsty and forlorn, Tom Hagel described what unfolded next. Three Hueys fluttered into the clearing just west of the village. The riflemen watched as “all these sucky-faced colonels with all their shiny shoes and shit got off.”52 Having just been in a big two-way firefight that killed a good number of hostile soldiers and left several Americans dead and badly wounded, seen a village woman cut down by accident, witnessed a horrific helicopter shoot-down, and then drilled a man eye-to-eye, Tom Hagel was in no mood to entertain visitors from on high. Wisely, he stepped aside and kept his mouth shut. A smart specialist 4 knows when to do that.
The staff officers, lieutenant colonels and majors, examined the uneven lineup of dead communists. The headquarters people noticed the relatively fresh khaki uniforms, the new web gear, and the well-maintained AKs, RPDs, and RPG launcher. It all suggested that NVA regulars really were filling in the depleted VC units, just as the division G-2 analysts forecasted. Did these fallen foes come from the 294th Battalion?53 Nobody could really tell. Such considerations occupied minds up at division.
A few officers stripped watches off the guerrilla corpses. In an odd action, “the only atrocity I ever witnessed,” Tom Hagel saw a major tell an ARVN soldier to slice a ring finger off one of the lifeless Cong. The body was already swelling in the heat, and the ring could no longer be yanked free. It’s possible these officers needed these items to try to confirm the unit of those killed. But to Hagel and his jaded comrades, it sure appeared to be souvenir hunting.54
Of course, no one in authority explained anything to the riflemen. Their interests satisfied, the well-scrubbed staff officers departed in a flurry of Huey rotor blades. Soon afterward, those on the ground also boarded helicopters, but not to leave. Instead, they executed another jitterbug move. The aircraft moved the soldiers across the river, near where the C&C Huey splashed down. The riflemen spent the night in an ambush position. Fortunately, Charlie wasn’t interested. Although sore and smarting from embedded RPG fragments, Tom Hagel stayed with his adopted platoon. At long last, he’d gotten something that put him ahead of his high-achieving brother Chuck: a third Purple Heart. When the lift birds came in the next morning, Tom Hagel went out the way he’d gone in—with his guys.55 He’d seen some things Chuck had not. And it stuck with him, a stain that never washed out.
VAN DEUSEN’S DEATH made the papers. For William C. Westmoreland and his wife, Katherine Van Deusen Westmoreland, July 3 had been set aside for the general’s swearing in as U.S. Army chief of staff. The ceremony happened as an afterthought as the devastated Westmoreland household absorbed the tragic message from Vietnam.56 Six other American families received that same dreaded news. You could leave the war, but it followed you home.
The 9th Infantry Division kept right on jitterbugging, even as Charlie wised up. The division’s canny adversaries took down thirty-one helicopters in July and August of 1968; seventy-four other aircraft sustained substantial damage from hostile gunfire. Put another way, jitterbugging pretty much erased an entire army aviation battalion. Mr. Charles killed another battalion commander on the ground and on August 26 nearly finished off Colonel Emerson himself in another successful Huey shoot-down. The division recorded a body count of 563 NVA/VC, plus 37 captured. The Americans secured only 166 rifles and 14 crew-served weapons, generating some concern among those inclined to take an interest in such details. (Exactly how many actual guerrillas, rather than unlucky civilians, had been killed in Long An Province?) In any event, chest-thumping 10:1 kill ratio aside, it all cost way too many Americans: 58 killed and 263 wounded, effectively the field strength of a U.S. infantry battalion.57 That kind of trade-off might have been acceptable in the trench-line abattoir of World War I. But in post-Tet Vietnam, on the ground and at home, it led to only one question, the one without an answer: Why?
In Fritz Van Deusen’s brief tenure (June 15 to July 3), 2-47th registered eighteen U.S. killed. Even by generous accounting, during that period the battalion got credit for fifty-seven dead opponents, two dozen of them in the extended July 3 firefight. For his bravery, the fallen commander earned the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second-highest award for valor. 58 It was something. But no award, not matter how prestigious, could ameliorate the sorrow in the Van Deusen home. Just because he was a long-serving professional didn’t make his passing any easier.
Lieutenant Colonel James L. Scovel took over 2-47th Infantry not long after Van Deusen died.59 The army didn’t like to leave a major in command of a battalion, especially in the high-energy 9th Infantry Division. Scovel became the fourth 2-47th Infantry commander in a bit more than fourteen months. Two—Van Deusen and William B. Cronin in late April of 1967—fell by the enemy’s hand. Add that to the turnover at the company level, such as the six commanders (one killed, one badly wounded) in Company B since January, not to mention the revolving door of lieutenants and the steady churn of killed and wounded NCOs, and it’s no wonder young men like Tom Hagel grew up fast out in the bush.
In the aftermath of the July 3 action, at least one senior officer recommended Tom for the Silver Star, third in precedence among U.S. valor awards, to go with his third Purple Heart. He eventually received the Bronze Star with “V” (valor) device, the nation’s fourth most prestigious medal for bravery, which he certainly deserved.60 For that matter, Tom had more than met the criteria for the Silver Star. For what it was worth, both brothers also rated official commendation for their gutsy effort, although wounded, to lead the company out of the VC-infested jungle back on March 28, but that water had long ago passed under the orderly room bridge. Given the haphazard nature of awards procedures in Vietnam, even Tom’s Bronze Star for July 3 came as a welcome surprise.
Infantry units in country were notoriously poor on paperwork. If rifle company leaders liked to fill out forms, they’d have gone into the Adjutant General’s Corps. As a result, relatively noncontentious matters, like Purple Hearts and Combat Infantryman Badges, went right through. But valor awards required a carefully worded, properly typed citation and supporting statements. Overworked officers and sergeants didn’t always get around to the write-ups. The company clerks had to peck it all out, along with administrative directives, promotion orders, personnel evaluations, supply forms, combat plans, periodic reports, and a thousand other demands of the official U.S. Army. Shooting war or not, the paper chase never let up. Maybe it could have worked out at Fort Bliss or Fort Ord. But at Bear Cat, let alone at forward firebases with a twelfth of the outfit changing out monthly? Forget it.
As a result, all too many times, awards in MACV somehow struck the exact wrong note. As one 9th Infantry Division officer put it: “The awards system was an atrocity.” Not in the same league as cutting off a finger to get a ring, but the harsh accusation rang true enough. The officer went on: “It was used more as a morale builder and for other political reasons than to reward true valor in combat.”61 Overly ambitious officers and even some careerist sergeants wrote up their own narratives, citations, and even witness statements, which they pleaded with privates to sign. Draftees were overlooked, as few of those temporary troops cared all that much about such army formalities. But the junior soldiers knew what really went down in firefights. When the younger enlisted men saw the deserving ignored and the undeserving feted, it grated. Over time, the entire awards drill built resentment between draftee riflemen, including acting NCOs like the Hagels, and the lifers.
The Bronze Star marked a critical day in Tom Hagel’s evolution as a soldier. On July 3, he killed a foe, a fellow human being, one on one. Even in a rifle company, and despite the high volume of gunfire traded in the claustrophobic jungles and villages of Vietnam, few men on either side dealt that brand of close-quarters death. Movies and television love to portray personal combat, especially hand-to-hand encounters, punching, wrestling, stabbing, and so forth. While quite exciting, such jarring events are also extraordinarily unusual. Most enemy troops in Vietnam died under the stand-off flensing of aerial bombardment, helicopter gun runs, and artillery barrages. Almost all of the rest fell to infantry machine gun engagements and rifle fire at midrange, often through heavy foliage. American riflemen aligned on motion, muzzle flashes, or spots of colored cloth near or far, but definitely not close enough to see a face. The average U.S. infantry soldier met his opponent in person only when the VC lay dead or stood mute in hang-dog captivity.62 When American troops saw slain enemies, lots of the riflemen had just squeezed their triggers. But who knew whose bullet did the final deed? That had been Chuck Hagel’s experience—plenty bad, certainly unnerving, but still allowing for the barest wisp of a distance, and so a thankful degree of impersonality.
Yet after July 3, Tom Hagel had been denied that slim comfort. He saw the man he shot through the head. Certainly it had been him or Tom, shoot or die, the classic showdown. Tom Hagel did just what the drill sergeants taught him to do, that ultimate feat so often discussed and so rarely executed. When lesser men might have frozen and paid with their lives, and those of other Americans, Tom acted like a soldier.
Still, he did it, he alone, eyeball to eyeball, and no rationalization would ever alter that stark fact. Moreover, scant hours earlier, Tom had stood a few steps away when a keyed-up lieutenant blew away an unarmed young female civilian. What a day—a twofer from hell. Now and again, always unbidden, never wholly forgotten, and never really forgiven, those extremely disturbing images came swimming up from the depths.63 A true psychopath or a person of limited intellect might have let it go. Tom Hagel could not. It changed him for the rest of his days.
SPECIALIST 4 TOM HAGEL’S SAFE RETURN, even if a bit worse for the wear, calmed Chuck. At one point, the rumor mill at Bear Cat listed Tom as missing in action. Given the days it took to extract the waterlogged remains of those killed in the helicopter crash, not to mention the distance to Long An Province and Tom’s rather unusual role as a self-motivated supernumerary—and one with boundless tactical initiative—it took a few days to shake out. Chuck wisely chose not to pass any of that anxiety back to Nebraska.64
From the modest home in Columbus came news from brother Mike. Eager to do his part like Chuck and Tom, Mike had notified the draft board he wanted to go, too. When he went for the medical screening, the doctors flunked him, 4F, medically unfit, due to a knee problem incurred while playing high school football. The result greatly frustrated Mike, who very much hoped to join his brothers in uniform, although even the most speeded-up timeline wouldn’t get him to Vietnam until well into 1969. For her part, Betty Hagel breathed a sigh of relief.65
So did Tom. He had seen enough. In a letter to Mike, written not long after the searing events of July 3, Tom Hagel pulled no punches. “It is just that joining the Army at the time of the Vietnam crisis is rather foolish,” he wrote. “This war is completely immoral. We are losing more every day.” Tom added a postscript: “You don’t have to go into the Army to have my respect. To the day I die, I will be ashamed I fought in this war.”66
Chuck wouldn’t agree, and Tom knew it. Ever the All-American big brother, Chuck nursed his own reservations. But he kept them to himself. In Vietnam, and back home in America, even in the crazy, awful year of 1968, Chuck retained his optimism. With two Purple Hearts already and many more patrols to come, the alternative was too grim to consider. Like any rifle platoon NCO hopeful to stay on his feet, Chuck saw the glass as half full.
For his part, Tom wouldn’t say the glass was half empty. No, when you looked into the unblinking eyes of the dead—“river blindness” indeed—the body counts and the body bags, the upheaval at home with King, the riots, RFK, and all the rest, the level of the water ceased to mean anything. In the high summer of 1968, America’s glass sure as hell wasn’t half full, or even half empty. It was broken.