13 February 1968
Early on the morning of 13 February 1968, the Marines of 1/5 left the relative safety of the First ARVN Division compound and headed southeast toward our designated line of departure, phase line green. Alpha Company was on point, Charlie Company followed closely behind with Charlie One, as usual, on company point. One platoon from Delta Company provided rear security for the battalion CP group.
Dawn had reluctantly and halfheartedly defeated the dismal darkness of the previous night, but the winter sun could not penetrate a thick, low-hanging, gloomy cloud cover with anything other than a minimum of illumination. The only thing complimentary about the weather conditions was that the rain also appeared reluctant to show itself, and we were dry, at least for the time being.
Walking slowly, keeping at least a ten-meter interval between each man, the Marines of 1/5 maintained a staggered column on either side of the street called Dinh Bo Linh after a fifth-century Vietnamese king. Dinh Bo Linh was a two-lane city street parallel to the eastern wall of the Citadel. Dinh Bo Linh would eventually deliver us from the First ARVN Division compound to phase line green.
Alpha Company, as 1/5’s point element and responsible for coverage of the eastern Citadel wall and the narrow city block adjacent to the wall, would turn left one block before they reached phase line green. Phase line green was, of course, a street, and its actual name was Mai Thuc Loan. Mai Thuc Loan was named in honor of a Vietnamese general who fought against both the Chinese and the French as they both encroached on Vietnamese soil during the sixteenth century.
Alpha Company would make the appropriate turn to the east and then deploy parallel to phase line green and move through the houses until they reached the point of departure. Charlie Company would move up behind them, deploy in a similar fashion along the three blocks of our responsibility, cover each other’s flanks, and move forward until we reached phase line green. Once we were in position on phase line green, we would be given the word to commence a coordinated frontal assault on the NVA who were waiting for us, according to all the available intelligence reports, somewhere south of phase line green.
Because of the ten-meter interval and the deliberately slow and careful pace established by Alpha Company through the quiet, ancient suburbia of Hue inside the Citadel walls, it was very easy to become distracted by the sights. Spacious old estates were the dominant theme along both sides of Dinh Bo Linh, our present route of approach. Dinh Bo Linh was lined by several mansions, surrounded and separated by a mature and somewhat overgrown landscape of trees, shrubs, and spacious grounds, interspersed with reflecting ponds. The mansions were all surrounded by substantial stone walls, four to six feet high, and occupied large chunks of each city block. As we progressed southward, the larger estates gave way to a more normal suburban setting, consisting of many smaller houses in orderly rows facing the east-west-running streets. The only thing consistent about the larger estates and the smaller houses was the distinctly discomforting lack of noise coming from them. It was as though this section of Hue was utterly void of humanity. Inside the Citadel, Hue was a ghost town.
My attention was abruptly wrenched away from the immediate scenery and back in the direction of Alpha Company by the all-too-familiar “whump” of a mortar or rocket explosion, followed by several more of the same, punctuated by a ragged trickle and then a rushing torrent of small-arms fire. Alpha Company, whose point element was several hundred meters ahead of us and who had made their designated left turn several minutes before, had stepped in the shit, no question about it. A healthy firefight was under way, obviously involving Alpha Company.
Without the necessity of commands, the Marines of Charlie Company took cover as best they could along the walls lining Dinh Bo Linh and waited. Finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably only several minutes, the rear element of Alpha Company started to move again, and they turned the corner. Charlie One’s point fire team started to move out after them, following about fifty meters behind Alpha’s rear element. In my normal position, following just behind the point fire team, I was one of the first Charlie Company Marines to find out what had happened to Alpha Company.
As I began to make the appropriate left turn, Benny and I stopped cold as we were confronted by a fearful sight. Walking slowly and painfully toward us, 1st Lt. F. P. Wilbourne, Alpha Company’s executive officer, was carefully making his way on his own, back toward the battalion rear area. Wilbourne had actually been the company commander of Alpha Company for a short time before 1/5 headed toward Hue, but he had been bumped down the ladder of command just a couple of days before by a Capt. J. J. Bowe, and Wilbourne was now the executive officer.
If we hadn’t heard the firefight, if we hadn’t seen the blood that covered his entire body from head to toe, we would have been tempted to ask him if he had shit his pants, since he was walking, with stiff legs and arms, like someone who had rectally embarrassed himself. But as he approached us it quickly became obvious that Lieutenant Wilbourne had been hit by a shower of shrapnel, and though none of his wounds appeared to be life-threatening, the cumulative effect was that Alpha’s XO had become a bloody sieve.
Recognizing me as a Charlie Company platoon commander, Lieutenant Wilbourne stopped his arduous trek momentarily. Although it obviously pained him to do so, he pointed out that several of my men were in an exposed position, still nonchalantly turning the corner of the intersection, and he quietly chewed my butt.
Wilbourne said, “The Alpha CP group just got wasted because we were standing right out in the middle of an intersection, a block behind phase line green, clusterfucked around an M-48 tank. The gooks ran out into the street about a block and a half in front of us and fired three RPG rockets, hitting the M-48 directly in the turret with their first shot. Shit, the skipper and the gunny were both blown away, and Alpha has been effectively eliminated on the battalion’s left flank. Delta is moving up to take our places, and we’ll be falling back to provide rear security. Fuck, the tank commander had his head blown off! Now, you tell your people that if they keep ditty-bopping across the damned streets, they’re gonna get themselves blown away, too!”
Having said his piece, he started his painful trek toward the rear of the battalion column once again. As he walked away, he continued to mutter at me that we should get our collective heads out of our asses, get out of the middle of the fucking street, and make goddamned sure to stay alert and keep our heads down.
As I turned away from Wilbourne’s unwelcome visage, I noticed that I didn’t have to say a damned thing. Most of Charlie One had seen and heard him, and they were taking a distinctly lower stance along the sides of the road and were moving very quickly across the open areas when they had to cross the intersection. Shit. Alpha Company was history before the battle had even begun.
The battalion’s assault was delayed for what again seemed like hours as a platoon from Delta Company moved up and relieved Alpha Company, and we got positioned along Tang Bat Ho, another street named for ancient Vietnamese royalty. The street ran parallel to phase line green, one block north of our point of departure. A shallow, muddy ditch ran alongside Tang Bat Ho, and Charlie One hunkered down in the ditch as the rest of Charlie Company got into position and as Delta switched positions with Alpha. As we waited, I resisted letting my attention wander toward the scene of destruction surrounding the now-disabled M-48 tank about fifty meters away and tried to concentrate on other things besides the frantic efforts to save the critically injured and to evacuate the dead members of the Alpha Company CP, but we couldn’t avoid knowing exactly what was happening. During the first brief skirmish inside the Citadel, the NVA had struck unexpectedly and viciously, and as a result, several KIAs (killed in action) and many WIAs (wounded in action) had rendered the Alpha CP group totally ineffective as a command unit. Alpha would have to fall back into battalion reserve status and regroup.
As Benny’s Prick-25 squawked to life, the orders from Charlie Six tersely broke into my thoughts. “Move out. Maintain contact on both flanks. Move up to the line of departure, and prepare to attack across phase line green.”
Charlie One’s three squads had lined up three abreast, broken into their fire team units. Slowly and cautiously, we moved into and around each house, taking our time, making sure that we weren’t going to accidentally walk past any hidden enemy positions, constantly conscious and fearful of a counterattack from the rear. The houses in this block were much smaller than the estates we had passed on our way; they were very close together and often very difficult to walk around. This was not really a problem, because we had to clear each house anyway, but we still checked the narrow, brushy spaces between the houses to make sure we weren’t missing anything.
The shouts of Marines communicating with each other as they practiced for the first time the tactics of house-to-house fighting penetrated the sullen air, muffled by the walls and the damp morning air. These barking commands, obviously made by Americans, reached my ears and gave me some comfort that at least the men of Charlie One were taking this very seriously. They had seen the instant destruction of the Alpha CP group, and they didn’t want to be hit unexpectedly.
As was normal when Charlie One was in a frontal assault formation, Benny and I tagged along behind the center squad, Ed Estes’s squad, in the middle of the block and kept in touch with the other two squads via their PRC-6 radios, much smaller and much less effective communication devices than the Prick-25. The Prick-6, resembling an overgrown walkie-talkie, quickly proved to be ineffective in penetrating the walls of the houses that the Charlie One Marines were clearing, and it quickly became clear that we would have to rely on runners for a lot of our intraplatoon communications. Each platoon of a Marine company had one Prick-25, for communications with the company CP group and the battalion and support nets for calling in artillery and air support, and we had three or four Prick-6s, which were designed for close-in communications between squads. The Prick-25s worked great; the Prick-6s were completely useless.
Charlie One was organized into three squads, each of roughly thirteen Marines, broken down further into three fire teams and a squad leader. Each squad was further reinforced by a team who lugged and handled the awesome and devastating firepower of the M-60 machine guns. Sometimes they had the added luxury of an M-79 man, who carried the forty-millimeter grenade launcher and somewhere between forty and sixty rounds of accurate and deadly high-explosive firepower. On the morning of 13 February 1968, Charlie One’s table of organization was comprised of a total of fifty-one Marines, including the attached M-60 teams, me, Benny Benware, and the two Navy corpsmen assigned to travel with us.
The Marine fire team is the basic and fundamental tactical unit of the U.S. Marine Corps, and many hours of every Marine’s training after boot camp were focused on the maneuvers of the fire team. The Marines of every fire team were drilled not only on individual movements and covering their buddy’s back, but also on the importance of maintaining the integrity of their fire team. Thus it was natural in our current situation that one fire team would be responsible for clearing one house at a time. This tactic worked out very conveniently in the first block, which contained fifteen or sixteen houses, half of them facing north along Tang Bat Ho and half of them facing south along Mai Thuc Loan (phase line green). In this particular block, unlike most other blocks in southeast Hue inside the Citadel, the houses and their respective yards were separated by a narrow alley. The nine fire teams of Charlie One, with Benny and me trailing the center fire team of the center squad, cleared the first seven or eight houses facing Tang Bat Ho. Then, making sure that their flanks were covered on both sides, the men moved slowly and cautiously across the narrow alley, through old, flimsy gates defining the back yards of the houses facing phase line green, and entered the back doors of the eight or so houses along phase line green almost simultaneously.
As Benny and I waited for the fire team ahead of us to clear their assigned house, I checked out the intersecting alley and noticed that although it was very overgrown, it defined a pathway that went all the way to both sides of the block. I could clearly see both of the streets that intersected phase line green and defined Charlie One’s left and right flanks. As it was very overgrown, I was not at all disturbed that I couldn’t see any Marines across the street on our left flank. An M-48 tank rumbled slowly past the alley on the street to our right and inched toward phase line green. I wondered momentarily how the tank crews were feeling, with their hands tied by not being able to fire their ninety-millimeter cannons and knowing that one of their group had been eliminated from the battle already.
Estes came back out the back door and signaled that this center house was cleared, and Benny and I moved in through the back door. Although these homes were small by American standards, they were very substantial by Vietnamese standards, at least from our limited experience in the paddies and jungles in other parts of I Corps. We stepped up three low steps onto a raised wooden floor and immediately entered a hallway leading from the rear to the front of the house; a stairway led to a second floor. Walking past the stairway into an empty front room, which was lined at the front by multipaned windows framing the front door, we walked through the eerily empty front room. The dim daylight illuminated the front room, and the street, Mai Thuc Loan, phase line green, was dimly visible through the front windows.
As Estes and Benny, just ahead of me, walked through the front room, through the front door, and out into the street, something nagged at me. Something wasn’t right here. My feet kept walking. My mind knew that something was terribly wrong, but it couldn’t grasp the problem, and my feet kept walking.
As I passed through the front door of that dreary small house out into Mai Thuc Loan and turned my head to the left and then back to the right, I saw my men all standing there along the narrow sidewalk that lined the north side of phase line green. Some of them crouched behind the inadequate trunks of the shade trees lining this side of the street. I couldn’t formulate any of the words in my mind. But I knew then, and I will know for the rest of my life, just exactly what was wrong. They had followed my orders to the letter. None of them had crossed the street, none of them had crossed phase line green, but every damned one of them, every swinging dick of Charlie One, was completely exposed out in the street. Charlie One was a collective sitting duck, standing out in the open along the narrow sidewalk in front of the houses. Some of them were crouching behind the trees, but most of them were just standing there, looking at each other, looking at me as I walked out of the front door of the center house.
My mind had no coherent thoughts in that one moment, that one heartbeat that will live forever as a cancer in my soul. I have had uncounted moments since then, during which I’ve eternally debated what my first words, at that crucial moment, should have been. The raging debate in my soul swings from the extremes of: “Charge!!” to “Shit!!!” to “What the fuck are you idiots doing out in the street? Didn’t common sense tell you to stay inside the houses until I give you the order to attack?” These debates are all totally useless; they are nothing more than a futile raging, and they will never be anything more than wishful thinking.
Here’s what came out of my mouth: “GET THE FUCK OUTTA THE STREET!!”
I wish that the next few seconds had ticked away at normal speed, but with contemptuous certainty, time instantly changed into the slow motion of frustrating nightmares, of trying to run away from unseen but hideous monsters, only to be hindered by glue-covered feet or concrete shoes. I was only in that street that morning for a few seconds, but trying to escape the inevitable explosion of the well-prepared ambush of the entrenched NVA thirty feet in front of us, those seconds seemed like hours. Part of me will be there, in that street, for those terrible moments, for the rest of my days.
I have no idea why I didn’t just turn around and run back inside the house I had just walked out of. That would have been the most obvious and fastest route to safety. I have no idea why I didn’t turn left, or charge straight ahead. I have no idea why I turned to the right, screaming those immortal words at the top of my lungs and running as fast as my legs have ever run before or since, yet taking forever to get to wherever it was that I thought that I was going. I turned to the right, and I was following other Marines, my men, as the shit royally hit the fan.
The NVA were dug in and waiting for us on the other side of the street. They occupied the first- and second-floor windows, and many of the NVA were on the roofs. Several automatic weapons raked the street from our left flank, from the tower that protected the eastern entrance to the Citadel. And I ran, and ran, and ran, and I got nowhere fast.
There was no place to hide; I was shit outta luck.
Just before reaching the intersection of Mai Thuc Loan and Dinh Bo Linh, my first nightmare of that fateful day came to a spectacular and horrible conclusion. I was following a man from Charlie One Charlie, the third squad of Charlie One. He was one of its fire team leaders, a lance corporal named Gibson. Running one step in front of me, he was shot through the back by the NVA. The combined force of his running body and the AK-47 round that had slammed into him proved just enough to flatten a corner courtyard gate, which became my escape valve. As Lance Corporal Gibson’s bleeding body knocked down the gate, my feet propelled me into the safety of the corner courtyard as I leaped over his crumbling body. I was closely followed by Benny Benware, who had gone where his leader had led him, regardless of the insanity of the direction.
The peaceful sanctity of this small corner courtyard had been shattered by our abrupt arrival. The scene was a nightmare, something out of Dante’s Inferno, with the severely bleeding lance corporal sprawled on top of the wrecked remnants of the gate and several other shocked Marines huddled in the corner, protected by a substantial six-foot-high masonry wall but unable to return fire effectively. Doc English, one of Charlie One’s Navy corpsmen, was one of the men in the courtyard, and he immediately began working on the severe wounds that were threatening to take the life of Lance Corporal Gibson. The ferocity of the enemy small-arms fire had not abated; it sounded like an NVA battalion was just on the other side of the street, shooting at us with everything they had. We had really stepped in the shit this time.
I asked Benny Benware to get the other squads on the Prick-6, but after a few frustrating attempts that resulted in a very unsatisfactory and unhelpful squelch of static noise, it was clear that if I wanted to find out what was going on, I would have to communicate by runner. Benny was monitoring the company radio net on the Prick-25, and it was very quickly evident that everyone else in the battalion was fully engaged with an entrenched enemy on the other side of phase line green. Charlie Six’s instructions were to take care of our casualties, make damned sure of the integrity of our present positions, return fire, and await further instructions.
The leader of this squad, Charlie One Charlie, had begun to assert his leadership; he had made sure that the other Marines in the courtyard had good cover and were returning fire to the best of their ability. Doc English was doing everything he could for the wounded man, and it was killing me not to know what was going on with the rest of my platoon. I decided to go find out for myself.
Instructing Benny to stay with Doc English in case he needed help evacuating the injured man and to monitor the company net, I took off out the back gate of the corner courtyard into the alley. Turning right into the alley that would allow me to get to the other squads, I started running down the narrow, vine-draped alley. As I ran past a well, I tripped on something and nearly fell on my face, but whatever I had tripped on was a small hindrance, and I kept my feet and continued running. Two more heartbeats went by before the booby-trapped grenade exploded, knocking me forward onto my hands and knees, but my feet kept pumping, and I kind of skipped off my hands and knees, bounced back on my feet, and just kept running. The force of the grenade’s explosion had hit my legs and lower back, but nothing hurt at the moment. My mind didn’t even register that I might be wounded and numb. I just kept running. (I didn’t think much about the incident until three weeks later, back in a GP tent in Phu Bai, when I was finally able to take off my utility trousers for the first time, and four small pieces of shrapnel clinked to the floor. I had been running so fast, and the NVA had been so inept at setting up booby traps, that I was out of the effective range of the shrapnel by the time it had exploded. When I saw those pieces of shrapnel fall from my trousers in Phu Bai, I thanked my lucky stars that it had been an NVA who had set up the booby trap, and not a Viet Cong. The latter would have known to remove the time-delay fuse from the detonator of the booby-trapped grenade, creating an instant explosion rather than one that happened a few seconds after the pin had been pulled out by the trip wire.)
Crazily at that moment, running down the alley, I was taken back to my childhood for a few seconds. Once again I was sitting by my four brothers in the living room of the farmhouse on the Coos River in southwestern Oregon, watching the family’s eight-millimeter home movies. We were all laughing like crazy as we made my older brother, Steve, go back and forth, forward and reverse, from the back door of my grandmother’s house to her outhouse. My father, who had been a fanatic with the old hand-crank eight-millimeter movie projector and who was also a frustrated actor/director, had on many occasions enlisted us boys to be actors in his crackpot, slapstick productions. On this particular occasion, Dad had thought it would be hilarious if Steve would burst out the back door of Grandma’s old house, run down the four back steps, along the fifty-foot boardwalk that connected the back of the house with the outhouse, running as fast as possible, with the obvious theme that Steve was running to save his clean britches. In one of those rare and impromptu moments, Steve had slipped on the rain-soaked, ancient wooden slats of the boardwalk while Dad was filming and had fallen on his butt when his feet flew out from under him. But he had amazingly kept his feet pumping, and without losing any ground speed, Steve had bounced off his butt, regained his feet, and completed his urgent journey. All of this had been captured on film, and with the help of the reverse switch on the ancient eight-millimeter projector, my family spent many hilarious evenings forcing Steve to run back and forth, back and forth, while assaulting him verbally with appropriate comments like, “Hey, Steve, why’d you keep running? You probably did it in your pants when you hit the boardwalk, so the emergency was over.” You get the drift.
At that moment, running down that shrouded alleyway, I giggled, just briefly, at the similarity of the events, but I quickly smothered that thought because there was nothing funny about any of this. I needed to know what was going on with the other squads, and fast.
Running to the opposite end of the alley, I ran inside the last building on the east corner of the block and found the squad leader of Charlie One Bravo, the squad who had covered the left side of our frontal assault formation. I quickly discerned that our situation was not good. Staff Sergeant Mullan, who had been traveling with Charlie One Bravo on our left flank, was gone. He had been standing out in the street like the rest of Charlie One and had been shot in the head during the initial burst of fire. The squad leader shakily told me that although Sergeant Mullan had been alive when they took him on a quickly improvised stretcher back toward the battalion rear for medevac, it didn’t look like he could possibly survive. The side of his head had been severely wounded, probably by an AK-47, and he was unconscious and just barely breathing when he was carried away. Doc Loudermilk, who had administered first aid, didn’t give him much hope of survival.
The blow of losing Sergeant Mullan, who had truly been the leader of this platoon and my mentor while I was going through on-the-job training, was devastating, but there was no time to mourn or even to consider this loss, because we had a much worse situation on our hands. According to the squad leader, there were at least three dead Marines still out in the street, and he thought that Estes’s squad had a wounded man down in the street as well. The wounded man was still alive, but stuck out in the street and exposed to enemy gunfire.
Making sure that Charlie One Bravo kept returning fire at the suspected enemy positions and that they kept their heads down as much as possible, I ran back into the alley and retraced my earlier steps following Estes’s squad through the back yard and into the back door of the house that had been my initial entry into phase line green.
Bedlam greeted me. Exposed as they were in the front room, several Marines were returning fire toward the enemy across the street. Estes was hunched down in the hallway and was using the stairway for cover. When I came up behind him, he turned toward me with a look of anger and frustration that immediately spelled out the disastrous situation. There truly were three men down in the street right in front of this house, right where I had stood when I had first walked into phase line green and screamed those immortal words. I realized momentarily that if I had turned around and tried to go back inside this house through the front door, there was a very high likelihood that either Benny or I would have been one of the Marines down in the street.
Estes looked at me with a terrible burning fire in his eyes, and he quickly summed up the most serious problem. “Morgan is still alive, Lieutenant. He’s hit bad, but we could hear him yelling at us to come get him just a couple of minutes ago. He’s totally exposed, but he’s hit bad and he can’t move. We gotta get him outta there.”
Enemy gunfire continued to rake the front room of the house, having long since shattered the windows, and effectively pinned down the Marines in the front room, making the effectiveness of their return fire questionable. From our position in the hallway, I couldn’t see Morgan, but I could see two other green-clad bodies a little further out in the street. “How about those other two guys, Estes?”
“They’re definitely wasted, Lieutenant. They were knocked down in the initial burst, and they’ve taken a lot more hits since. Neither of them have moved, and we haven’t heard any sounds from them at all. But Morgan is still alive. What the fuck are we going to do?”
I said, “Let’s try to give him some cover with smoke grenades, and then ask for a volunteer to go out and get him.” Morgan’s fire team leader, hunkering down under the window sill in the front room, immediately volunteered to make the effort. After sending two other Marines via the alley to the adjacent squads to tell them to lay down a heavy volume of fire when they saw the smoke pop in the street, we executed the plan.
Two smoke grenades went out the shattered front window, one on either side of Morgan’s position, and the fire team leader, a lance corporal named Michaux, rushed out into the hellfire. The volume of the small-arms fire, both incoming and outgoing, increased immediately, and after three long seconds, Lance Corporal Michaux staggered back into the front room, blood gushing like a water faucet from his lower left leg. He collapsed in the hallway, screaming and holding his leg, as Doc Loudermilk pounced on him and started the first aid necessary to stop the flow of blood and save the young man’s life. Although the bone was most likely broken and he was in a great deal of pain, the young man had a hard time keeping a grin off his face, because he knew that this wound would put him on the sidelines and get him the hell out of Hue. But the grin vanished immediately when we asked him about Morgan.
Michaux looked up at me through his pain and said, “Fuck me, Lieutenant, I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. The shit is really hitting the fan out there, and I lost my grip on him when I got hit. I couldn’t drag him over the curb, he’s just too goddamned heavy. He might still be alive, but he’s unconscious for sure. I think he got hit a couple more times when I tried to get him.”
Estes and I helped Doc Loudermilk carry the young hero out to the back yard and assigned another Marine to help him limp back to the battalion rear for medevac. As I watched them leave out the back gate, my mind was racing a million miles per hour, but none of my thoughts were at all helpful. Morgan was still down in the street, and we didn’t know for sure if he was dead or alive. The Marine Corps has long had a proud tradition of making every effort possible to evacuate the dead and wounded from the battlefield, but the cards were stacked against us. Every time we sent more men into the street to try to recover the wounded or dead, even with the cover of smoke, it looked like we were just going to take more casualties, making a terrible situation even worse.
As I turned back toward the house, my vision fixed on L. Cpl. Ed Estes, who was obviously having the same terrible thoughts, but who was now insanely maddened by one other fact: Morgan was not just another Marine, he was his friend. They had been together for over six months, had survived the daisy-chain command-detonated mine outside Hoi An together, and had shared many night ambush patrols and uncountable daytime hours filled with terror and uncertainty. And now Morgan was down in the street and probably still alive. Estes was his squad leader, and he felt completely responsible.
As these thoughts surged through his mind, they were obvious to me as the emotions played across his angry face. Estes was turning slowly in place, walking in a tight circle, frustrated by Morgan’s situation, scared to death like the rest of us about the prospects of making another attempt to go get him. As I watched this horrible internal struggle with himself, Estes made a complete 360-degree pivot, as though his right foot was staked to the ground. Our eyes connected for only a moment, and I instantly knew what Estes was going to do. I froze, unable to move, unable to make a sound. Estes completed his pivot, and when he saw the back door to the house, he screamed in fury, “Morgan!!” Unable to believe that Estes was going to run out into that damnable hell, I could only scream his name, “Estes!!!”
L. Cpl. Edward S. Estes knew what he was running to face, but Ed Estes was unable to stop himself. His friend, PFC Charles R. Morgan, was down in the street, and it was up to Estes to help him. Estes ran into the house, down the hallway, through the front room, and out the front door into a terrible hail of enemy gunfire, which was now concentrated on the front door. The smoke in the street was dissipating, and by the time I got inside the back door, finally able to move, Estes was lost to my view for a moment in the smoke. But just for a moment.
Ed Estes didn’t even make it to Morgan. He had hardly stepped outside the doorway when an AK-47 round tore through his neck, entering his Adam’s apple. Knowing then that Morgan was dead and that he was also probably dead, Ed Estes turned around and, still trying to run, stumbled back into the house, back through the front room, and collapsed at my feet in the hallway. He had been grasping his neck, but I had clearly seen the entry bullet hole in his Adam’s apple. A thick, steady stream of blood was gushing from the hole, leaking heavily through his fingers.
Doc Loudermilk was also Ed Estes’s friend, and now Ed was dying. Doc Loudermilk jumped on him and rolled him over on his back and onto my lap. Doc pulled Ed’s hand away from his neck so that he could assess the damage and do what he could to save his friend’s life.
Doc looked over at me with despair in his eyes and said, “We gotta do an emergency tracheotomy; his windpipe’s crushed. I need a tube, something to stick into the opening when I cut into his windpipe.”
I was stunned, stupid, unable to think or to move. None of the other Marines was any more help. Estes was dying on my lap, making feeble convulsive motions, and I couldn’t move.
“Break down your .45, Lieutenant, goddammit. I can use the barrel as a temporary airway.”
Still stunned, I was just barely able to pull my never-used pistol out of my Marine Corps-issue holster and break it down without looking at it as I had done so many times at Quantico and Basic School. I handed Doc Loudermilk the barrel after he cut Estes’s throat, and then he inserted the barrel into the bloody opening. Estes had stopped breathing, and Doc Loudermilk started to push down on his chest to try to jump-start his breathing, when he noticed the terrible pool of blood forming under Estes and leaking from under his body.
Doc Loudermilk gently turned Estes over, and we all knew at that moment that Estes was beyond any help that we could give him. The NVA bullet had entered his windpipe, and if it had gone straight back out his neck he might have had a chance for survival. But this particular NVA must have been shooting through a second-story window or from the roof of the house across the street, because the trajectory had been downward. The bullet had traveled through Estes’s heart and out his lower back, probably shattering his spine for good measure.
Ed Estes, Squad Leader for Charlie One Alpha, was dead.
Stunned as we all were in that dim hallway, we were all forced to start living again when another Marine from Estes’s squad was shot through the chest. He had been in the front room sitting up against a side wall, and an NVA gunner had moved into a position where he could shoot down into the front room. We dragged him out of the front room, and I yelled at the rest of the Marines in the front room to get out of there and to take up positions upstairs or on the roof. This particular front room had become way too deadly.
We carried Estes’s body out of the house into the back yard and laid him out on an old outdoor table. The firing in the street had diminished to a less frantic and more sporadic level, and I stood there for a while, looking at Estes. I was in shock, and I think I would have remained standing there for a long time, but flies started to buzz around Estes’ head, and his face started to take on the ugly greenish cast of the newly deceased. I couldn’t bear to look at him any more. I pulled this wasted young man’s poncho over his face, picked up his discarded M-16 rifle that had been propped up against the table by one of the other men, and turned my back on Ed Estes forever.
I don’t remember too much about the next hour or so. I think time stopped for me. I vaguely remember returning to the house and walking into a back room that the owners had stuffed with the furniture from the front room and sitting down in a rocking chair. I closed my eyes and started rocking.
I remember rocking in that chair and thinking about the small dairy farm where I had grown up in Coos River, Oregon, and my pet cow, Honey, and the peaceful summer afternoons when I would lie on Honey’s side and soak up the welcome and infrequent sunshine. Those were the most peaceful and least disturbing moments of my life, and my mind was subconsciously trying to submerge itself in memories of a peaceful moment. I could just not deal with the cruelty and savagery of our situation on phase line green and the death of many good men, in particular the death of Ed Estes. He was a young man who had accepted the responsibility of fighting for his country, of taking care of his men, and who had paid the ultimate penalty for facing up to those responsibilities.
So I sat in that rocking chair, holding Estes’s M-16 in my hands between my knees, and rocked away God knows how many minutes. The other Marines from what remained of Estes’s squad were reluctant to disturb me, and I probably spent nearly a half hour as a seven-year-old again, finding some peace with a cow named Honey.
Finally, Benny Benware brought me back into the present. He had left the corner courtyard and followed my footsteps into that house. Seeing me sitting there, blank-eyed, rocking gently and quietly, he probably figured I had gone off my rocker, so to speak, but he had summoned the courage to shake my arm and force me back into the present.
Benny spoke quietly but insistently: “Lieutenant, the skipper is trying to reach you. We’ve got orders from battalion to attack across the street.”
Part of me came back to life and I somehow reassumed the role and responsibilities of Marine platoon commander, Charlie One Actual. Another part of me stayed in that rocking chair and is still there today, rocking away, thinking about the torn lives and destruction focused on that bloody street. Many of the events I witnessed and participated in on that street that day and the terrible days that followed are so etched in my memory banks that I can hear the sounds, smell the smells, and scream the screams in my mind as though they happened yesterday.
Charlie One was ordered to attack across phase line green three times that day, so the Marines of Charlie One attacked across the deadly avenue three times that day. After the first attack, it quickly became obvious that the main concentration of the NVA’s forces were established right across the street from Charlie One, and our battalion commander had now decided that if we could successfully attack and penetrate the enemy’s defenses at this point, we could break the back of their resistance and overwhelm them.
Repeated attempts were made to reverse the orders that restricted our heavy support. I pleaded with Scott Nelson to plead with Major Thompson to get us some artillery or air support. At least the major could allow the M-48 tanks to fire their ninety-millimeter cannons into the enemy positions, to soften the positions somewhat, to do something to force our enemy to get his head down, so that we had even a shred of a chance at success in a frontal assault.
My frantic requests for heavy firepower were all turned down flat. At one point, Charlie Six Actual got on the radio with me directly, reminded me of our orders, and told me to pull my men together and to assault the enemy. Running from position to position, Benny Benware and I set up the initial attack as best we could, which required one fire team in each squad to attack across the street, while the other fire teams provided covering fire. It didn’t work; no one even got halfway across the street. The awful result was several more wounded Marines and another KIA. Now there was yet another dead Marine down in the street.
During the first abortive assault, I noticed that we were taking a high volume of enemy fire from our left flank, from the tower that guarded the east entrance to the Citadel. The NVA apparently occupied the tower in force and had many automatic weapons. From about a block and a half away, a distance of little more than a hundred meters, this firepower was devastating to the Marines who were trying to cross the street in full view of the NVA gunners in their tower positions.
After reporting back to Scott Nelson that we had been unsuccessful in getting a foothold on the other side of the street, he maintained that our orders hadn’t changed and that we should get ready to try again. I was getting an awful feeling about the security of our left flank, so Benny and I took off down the alley to its intersection with the street that defined our connection with Delta Company on our left. When I got to the corner of the alley and the street, my heart sank. The M-48 tank that had been the center of the attack on the Alpha Company CP group, having been assigned a new tank commander and put back into action (albeit still under strict orders not to fire its cannon) was now positioned behind the intersection of the alley and the street. Furthermore, I couldn’t see any Marines from Delta Company in their assigned positions along phase line green.
Benny and I ran across the street and dived behind the tank, as enemy gunners spotted us and started shooting in our direction. I asked for the whereabouts of the Delta Company platoon commander who was responsible for covering our left flank, and I finally found him in a house behind the alley. When I confronted him and tried to explain that they were not in position at phase line green, he looked at me like I was crazy and said that his men were in position where they were supposed to be and that they were taking terrible enemy fire from the tower. The Delta Company platoon had stopped their forward movement at the alley, and the platoon commander refused to look closely at his map or even consider that they were a half block back of their assigned positions.
Leaving him in disgust, I returned to the back of the tank, got on the direct telephone that was designed for the trailing infantry to communicate with the tank commander, and ordered him to move up past the alley to the street corner and at least open up with his machine guns. The tank commander, repeating what the Delta platoon commander said, refused to budge. Charlie One’s left flank was totally exposed, and it looked like it was going to stay that way.
Running back across the street into the alley, I called Scott Nelson and reported this news. He said he would check it out with battalion and get back to me, and in the meantime, we were to get ready to attack.
After only a couple of minutes, Nelson called me back, forcefully letting me know that I must be mistaken, because the Delta Company platoon commander had assured battalion that he was in the correct position, right on the north side of phase line green. Another frantic request to provide artillery or air support was immediately rejected by Nelson. We were on our own, and we were to attack again within the next ten minutes.
Our second attack involved selecting one squad—the right-most squad (the furthest from our left flank)—to be the assault force, with the remaining two squads setting up covering fire. As ordered, the Marines from Charlie One Charlie, the right-flank squad, attacked across the street, but they were again forced back by a ferocious concentration of enemy fire. The results were predictable: more wounded and yet another dead Marine down in the street.
Benny and I found ourselves back in the corner courtyard after the second assault, trying to assess the damage. Doc English was still there in the courtyard, working frantically on two more wounded Marines who had been hit in the second assault. Doc told me about the Marine down in the street; he could see him through the knocked-down gate from his position, which provided some security from the enemy fire because of the angles, and he knew that this Marine was dead. There were now, by my best count, five dead Charlie One Marines in the street; two more dead, including Estes, who had been evacuated; and many, many wounded. Our fighting strength had been cut in half, and we hadn’t been able to budge the enemy an inch.
At this point, as I pleaded yet again with Scott Nelson that our left flank was exposed and that we needed artillery and air support or at least let the goddamned tanks start firing their cannons, SSgt. Robert H. Odum came running into the small corner courtyard from across the street that separated our platoons. He was the platoon sergeant for Charlie Three, the Charlie Company platoon that was assigned the next block on our right flank and that was taking heavy enemy fire from its immediate front. His platoon, however, had yet to be ordered to attack and had not had any Marines knocked down in an exposed position in the street. He was obviously pissed, and although he handled the situation with respect for my rank and the chain of command drilled into all Marines throughout their careers, he was obviously upset with me, that a Marine platoon commander could allow one of his men to stay out in the street without some attempts being made to recover his body.
“Lieutenant, one of your men is down in the street, right out in front of that tank. Maybe you weren’t aware, sir?” Sergeant Odum’s voice barely covered the sarcasm that was obviously intended to urge me to action.
I replied, “I am well aware of that, Sergeant Odum, and while I appreciate your efforts at running over here to inform me of this fact, I’d appreciate it if you would go back to your men.”
Sergeant Odum said, “Sir, with all due respect, we must try to get that man back out of the street.” Sergeant Odum was a very good staff NCO, well liked by his platoon commander and his men alike, and he was going to persist.
Rather testily now, I said, “Sergeant Odum, that man is dead. Doc English saw him get hit. He took at least one hit in the head, and he’s been shot several times since. He’s dead. I’ve lost several other Marines attempting to get their buddies out of the street, and while I appreciate your concern for that Marine and for the Marine Corps’ traditions, I will not lose another Marine trying to get dead bodies out of the street. If I had any hope that he was still alive, which he is not, I’d be making the effort to get him right now without your help. Now, go back to your platoon.”
Sergeant Odum looked me right in the eye, started taking his pack off, and said, “Well, Lieutenant, if you won’t make an effort, I will. If it’s not too much trouble, sir, have your men give me some covering fire.”
No more words were spoken. He was determined, and there was no way that I was going to stop him. The few remaining Marines from Charlie One Charlie didn’t have to be told to start shooting at the enemy positions across the street. Sergeant Odum tightened up his helmet’s chin strap, made sure his flak jacket was buttoned all the way to the top, set his M-16 aside temporarily, took out his .45-caliber pistol, pulled back the slide, and seated a round in the chamber. His plan was to go back to the alley and crawl back forward behind the M-48 tank sitting just on the other side of the courtyard wall. Then he would crawl between the tank and the wall, until he got to the street. When he finally got into this position, he would leave his position of cover, rush to the downed Marine, and drag him out of the street in between the wall and the tank.
The Marines in the courtyard increased their covering fire, and Sergeant Odum crawled forward.
I couldn’t directly see what happened to Sergeant Odum out in the street, but Doc English could, and since I had a clear view of Doc English’s face, I could watch the events in the street by watching the changing expressions on Doc English’s face. Doc English saw, from his barely protected position as he worked frantically on a wounded Marine, everything that happened in graphic detail. He could not avoid watching what happened to Sergeant Odum, and I could see it all very clearly, reflected on Doc English’s face. When Sergeant Odum made his move, the enemy gunners, no more than fifty feet away from him, saw him immediately and opened up. Doc English’s face was already filled with anguish at everything going on all around him—the wounded man in his lap, the dead man in the street, and the heroic and very dangerous effort Sergeant Odum had decided to make to recover the dead Marine. Then the expression on Doc English’s face got worse; for a moment his face looked like death itself: I am absolutely positive that this one second in Doc English’s life will remain with him forever; the look on his face will remain seared into my brain forever. Sergeant Odum was shot in the face, his lower jaw blown off by an AK-47 round.
I thought from the look on Doc English’s face that Sergeant Odum was dead, but he was not. Sergeant Odum did realize then that he would not be able to save the poor dead Marine in the street, though, and he had the presence of mind or enough life-preserving instincts to abandon the dead Marine and crawl back behind the tank and back into the courtyard.
Sergeant Odum couldn’t say anything. He tried, looking me right in the eye, but I had no way of knowing if he was saying that I had been right or if he was calling me a cowardly asshole. The AK-47 round had entered his face just below his left eye and had exited his face below his chin. Everything below his upper lip had been blown into mushy strips of flesh and blood. There was no mouth; there were no teeth. There were just shreds of bloody skin.
Sergeant Odum stood up, carefully holstered his pistol, and pulled out a canteen from his utility belt pouch. He calmly poured the contents of his canteen over his shattered lower face, as if he believed that he could simply wash out this nightmare as he would wash out a badly done watercolor portrait and then attempt to paint his lower jaw back in. Doc English quickly finished his bandaging efforts on the other wounded Marine that he had been working on, broke out several more bandages from his medical kit, and crawled across the gate’s opening to assist Sergeant Odum. There wasn’t much he could do for him except apply the bandages and hope the bleeding would slow down long enough to get him safely medevacced. Without my needing to speak a word, Doc English knew that I wanted him to help Sergeant Odum get to the rear. Sergeant Odum resisted all attempts to have him lie down on a poncho stretcher, however, and the last time I saw him he was walking under his own power, with Doc English and a small entourage of Charlie One Charlie Marines carrying the other wounded men back to the battalion rear for medevac.
That was the last time, with one notable exception, that Charlie Company made any attempts to recover dead Marines from an exposed position in a street during the battle for Hue. There were many heroic efforts made to help wounded men while they were still alive, but after Sergeant Odum walked away from phase line green, all recovery efforts for the dead were made after darkness provided at least the illusion of cover. The only other time that an obviously dead Marine was recovered from the street in daylight hours took place several days later, and it was under highly unusual circumstances. But that story will wait.
As harsh as it sounded, and although it was very contrary to Marine Corps tradition, I gave direct orders to the rest of Charlie One that no further attempts would be made to get any dead Marines out of the street. We would do whatever we could to help save wounded men in exposed positions, but we would take no further risks by trying to retrieve dead bodies during daylight hours. After my brief and unhappy debate with Sergeant Odum on the subject, there were no further arguments.
One more attempt was made to assault across phase line green in the waning hours of that miserable afternoon. Scott Nelson and Major Thompson still did not believe that our left flank was exposed, and they resisted all pleas to provide heavy firepower. The powers that be had established the rules of engagement, and we would go forward across phase line green using the limited firepower of our small-arms weapons, or we would die. And, so, Charlie One died.
Our third attempt to assault across phase line green resulted in getting two Marines completely across the street, but it also resulted in several more wounded and two more KIAs. The two Marines who made it across the street were immediately pinned down behind two separate, low walls. They had made it across the street, but both of them were totally pinned down, unable to move right or left without dying. One of these men, an E-5 sergeant named Erskine, who had taken over as Charlie One’s platoon sergeant after we lost Sergeant Mullan, had a PRC-6 radio with him. Since he was out in the street and we had good line of sight from the roof of the house that Estes had died in, we could talk with him. He didn’t want to talk above a whisper, because he could hear the NVA talking very close by, and he was afraid that if they knew he was across the street and still alive, they’d find him and blow him away. He could communicate, by hand signals, with the other Marine who had made it across further down the street. Sergeant Erskine was able to tell him to hold on until after dark and then run back across the street to our side when he thought it was safe.
Benny and I had climbed up on the roof of the two-story house along with a couple more Marines from Charlie One Alpha before the third assault, but we couldn’t stay on the roof very long before several NVA gunners spotted us and started pouring small-arms fire in our direction. After we had lobbed some M-79 grenades from the blooper, they had quickly figured out where we were and we had to get back down off the roof post haste.
Returning to our right flank once again for the umpteenth time that day, I crawled out behind the M-48 tank that had sat on the corner all afternoon long without once firing its cannon and got the tank commander on the phone. In as demented and angry a voice as I could muster, I told him that if he didn’t start shooting his cannon at the enemy across the street, I would blow his tank up with a satchel charge. Either I wasn’t very convincing, or he just didn’t give a shit. He repeated that his orders were not to fire the cannon, but his machine guns did start shooting faster than they had up to that point.
I finally convinced Scott Nelson that there was no way that we could effectively assault an entrenched enemy across that street without heavy support, and that our left flank was exposed to boot. A few minutes later, he showed up in the corner courtyard.
Without speaking, I led him down the alley to our exposed left flank, and pointed out Delta Company’s positions, half a block behind phase line green. He finally agreed that our left flank was exposed. As we moved back down the alley, we made contact with each squad, and by the time we got back to the corner courtyard, our head count was down to twenty-three Marines still able to fight. Eight Charlie One Marines had died that day, 13 February 1968, and twenty more had been seriously wounded and had to be medevacced.
As we huddled in that shattered courtyard, I think Scott Nelson was just starting to believe me, and he started to get just a little pissed off at Major Thompson. He got on his Prick-25, gave a terse report, and after a long wait, he was told to move back away from phase line green after we had recovered the two live Marines who had made it across the street and our dead bodies in the street and to take up defensive positions in the houses on the north side of the alley. The decision had been made to replace Charlie One with Alpha Company (complete with a newly assigned company commander) the next morning, so that they could execute the attack orders that we had not been able to carry out.
Late that night, after we had recovered our lost Marines under the cover of darkness and after I had made sure that both our flanks were secure and our defensive positions were well prepared to repel any counterattack or any attempt to sneak through our lines, I told Benny to wake me for the early morning radio watch. I found a dry bed in a corner of a small house, crawled under the mosquito netting, and dropped immediately into the sleep of the damned.