18 February 1968
As I stumbled back down the stairs away from the Marine snipers’ lair, conflicting visions and emotions played through my mind like the unpleasant, dissonant counterpoint of a demented symphony. The human being inside me was swamped with frantic thought, threatening at any moment to capsize what was left of my sanity, but the automaton was fully in control of my outward movements, and he faithfully and steadily took the rest of me to find Scott Nelson for the next briefing.
Vivid mental images of the bodies of the four dead NVA soldiers heaped ignominiously in a pile were dominating my thoughts. These grisly images gave rise to vicious thoughts of gleeful vengeance for the deaths of Morgan and Estes and all the others who had lost their lives in the streets of Hue. The pile of dead NVA had been fittingly terminated; the dark robes of justice had visited them and had ended their lives in a very appropriate manner. They had run out into the open, into the kill zone, trying to recover their buddies’ bodies.
At the same time, as these thoughts were swarming around my brain, the scene of the pile of dead NVA played out over and over again in another part of my mind. The moving picture frames of my newly etched memories always ratcheted forward, and my vengeful reverie was again and again shattered by the detonation of the RPG-7 rocket that had exploded uncomfortably close by. As the automaton took me down the stairs, the scene played through my mind. Every time it replayed, the fiery, kaleidoscopic paths of the red-hot shrapnel from the RPGs left afterimages on my eyes and on my mind’s eyes and refused to dissipate. And then, out of a dim corner of my mind, Staff Sergeant Mullan’s confident yet sarcastic voice reminded me of the one lesson worth learning about Vietnam. “Mother” Mullan’s voice said to me, “No shit, Charlie One; you get caught looking too closely at the ’Nam, and you’ll step in shit every time!” It was the memory of Sergeant Mullan’s wisdom that forced the human being inside me to finally shut out the image of the pile of dead NVA bodies and to shut out all thoughts of righteous vengeance. Finally, the automaton allowed the human being inside me to mutter my acknowledgment of the hard awareness of our situation, “What the hell am I thinking about, starting some kind of stupid celebration just because of a few dead NVA. We’ve got six more streets to cross!”
With that, the human being inside me shut down the visions of the dead NVA bodies, tucking the mental film away in a distant corner of my memories, there to be archived until another day, and the automaton took me to find Scott Nelson.
I found him back at the sixty-millimeter mortar pits. When I saw him, I knew something was up, because his face had lost the constant grin that had become, at least for me, his trademark.
Nelson looked at me and said, “We just lost Charlie Two. He’s going to be okay, but I had to medevac him. He and a couple of his men were coming back for this briefing, and when they ran across the intersecting street, the NVA opened up on them with RPG and AK-47 fire. He took some shrapnel in the neck, but he was on his feet and walking around. It looked like he got hit pretty close to his jugular vein, and I was afraid that his wound might get infected, so I sent him back. Staff Sergeant Lunsford is acting Charlie Two Actual. He’ll be here in a few minutes.” Nelson delivered this bad news with a calm demeanor, which didn’t for a moment betray the feelings that I knew had to be raging through him.
2nd Lt. Rich Lowder, the injured platoon commander, had been with us since just before 1/5 left the Hoi An area, and he had become a very close friend and stabilizing influence to all of us. (He was the man who barely escaped death at our hands when we imagined him to be getting more than his fair share of C rations at the Lang Co railroad station in early February.) His troops loved him because he was a very competent tactical leader and strategist, and he did everything he could to take good care of their nonmilitary needs as well. Besides those admirable qualities, his absolutely unflappable nature made him seem fearless. Every one of the Marines of Charlie Two would follow Rich Lowder anywhere.
Rich had experienced several close calls since arriving in South Vietnam; he had already received one Purple Heart before entering the Citadel. Now he had his second Purple Heart medal. His neck area seemed to be a favorite target of the enemy. His first wound was also in the neck, received when a command-detonated Chicom (Chinese communist) antipersonnel mine, the Chicom equivalent of our deadly claymore mine, had exploded no more than fifty feet in front of where he had been walking, up on the Hai Van Pass. Fortunately for everyone in Charlie Two that morning, the Chicom claymore had not functioned properly, and only a small portion of the potentially lethal fragments had been flung in their direction. But one of them had hit Rich Lowder in the neck and had torn a chunk of flesh out of him. He had been medevacced to Da Nang via helicopter, but he had rejoined us after only a couple of days in Da Nang.
And now, once again, Rich Lowder was headed toward a medevac helicopter, and Charlie Two was being led by its platoon sergeant. Not counting Travis Curd, our artillery FO, Charlie Company was down to two commissioned officers—Scott Nelson and me.
I wasn’t worried, however, about the leadership of Charlie Two, because Staff Sergeant Lunsford (not his real name) was an experienced staff NCO and had been “in country” for several months. He was another “Mother” Mullan, although Lunsford was a more typical Marine in stature. Whereas Sergeant Mullan was tall and well built, Sergeant Lunsford’s largest physical feature was his bushy mustache. His shaggy mustache always seemed to me like a caricature, a mustache that a sidewalk artist would draw as an overdone feature on an otherwise unremarkable countenance. He was short, barely over five feet six, one of the many thin, wiry types in the Marine Corps. He had been good company for Rich Lowder, as he was also a man of few words.
While we were waiting for Sergeant Lunsford to join us, Scott Nelson guided me back into the two-story house that the snipers were holed up in, and came right to the point. Nelson grabbed my right shoulder with his left paw, gave it a little squeeze, and said, “I want to do a night movement, Charlie Three. I’m asking for volunteers, a reinforced squad, to move across phase line orange tonight, under cover of darkness, and to occupy that large building, the schoolhouse, in the middle of the block. I think we can take the NVA by surprise. What do you think?”
The automaton did not move, blink, or react in any way. The human being inside of me was screaming, trying to run away, anywhere, away from this moment and from this place. What in the hell is he thinking of? Is he insane? We have been getting the living shit kicked out of us for nearly a week, we are at or below 50 percent strength, and we are just finally starting to get our act together in the daylight, and this idiot wants to do a night movement? All these thoughts and many, many more crammed themselves into the mind of the captive human being inside the automaton, who continued to look Scott Nelson in the eye and who impossibly succeeded in not betraying even a single bit of the turmoil that burned just below the surface. One thing that I knew for sure was that I loathed any kind of night movement.
Memories, long compartmentalized and now clamoring for recognition, shattering memories of our previous attempts to execute night movements—memories of the near-paralyzing fears that accompanied every second of those long nights—now swarmed to the surface:
Taking command of a reaction squad, going through the wire of Charlie Company’s Hoi An compound to rescue a Charlie Three squad that had been shattered by a command detonated mine . . .
Calling in my first medevac chopper to remove the bits and pieces of the several Marines who had been the designated casualties on that particular night. . .
Leading Charlie One through downtown Hoi An during a “zero dark thirty” movement required by some screwed-up thinking at 1/5’s Operations Shop, and nearly shitting my jungle fatigues when my point man shot off a hand-held flare unexpectedly, only avoiding the humiliation of unplanned defecation by the involuntary selection of pissing in my trousers, the lesser of two evils . . .
Leading Charlie One through the CAP Unit outpost west of the Hoi An Charlie Company compound on a night when both the Marine and Vietnamese sentries fell asleep at their posts, and then subsequently attempting to work our way through the protective concertina wire that guarded the bridge entrance to the CAP compound. When Charlie One’s point man that night snagged the trip wire of a ground flare, and our dazzled vision showed us the four claymore mines staring us in the face . . . once again, I nearly shit my drawers. . . .
No, you had to be absolutely nuts to want to move at night in the ’Nam. And this idiot wanted to pull a night movement, right across phase line orange, right into the NVA defensive positions, right where the NVA had blown away that poor mule driver just a few hours before.
I have no idea how long I waited before the automaton allowed me to react to this new development; it could have been several minutes, because all of these memories played across my mind in utter detail. I hope it was only a few seconds. Finally, and still without betraying any discomfiture, the automaton spoke: “Are you ordering me to take Charlie Three on a night movement across phase line orange? If so, I’ll do it.” But before Nelson could respond, the automaton was forced by the human being inside me to add, “But if you’re asking my opinion about such a maneuver, I think it’s crazy. We’re just now starting to get our act together in this hellhole, just now starting to figure out how to fight house-to-house. The area that you want us to go into is crawling with the enemy who are sure as hell waiting for us in fortified or well-dug-in positions. If you’re asking my opinion, sir, I think it’s a suicide mission.”
Scott Nelson received this unwanted editorial stoically, and my only indication that he was the least bit disturbed was that his patented grin was gone. He released his grip on my shoulder, involuntarily stepped back a pace, and then said, “If I was going to order someone to do this job, I’d go myself, and I’d walk point myself. I’m asking for a volunteer to lead a reinforced squad of volunteers.”
The automaton looked at Scott Nelson for a long moment, and finally I replied, “I cannot volunteer for a mission that I believe is foolhardy and that I believe will result in certain death for everyone involved.” There was no emotion contained within these words, but they were spoken with conviction. I knew that if Nelson had simply assigned me with the mission, that the automaton would have taken me across phase line orange in the dead of night. I knew that if the automaton had taken me across phase line orange that night, that I would have assigned someone else to walk point, and probably a fire team would have been in front of me. And I knew undoubtedly that Nelson would have been signing my death warrant and that of all the volunteers.
Scott Nelson considered my words for a few seconds and, with no further conversation or discussion, dismissed me. He looked at me with a forced grin on his face and said, “Go on back to your men, Charlie Three. Keep your head down.”
A few minutes after I left and headed back for the relative comfort of the remaining daylight, Sergeant Lunsford, the new Charlie Two Actual, finally reached the Charlie Company CP area. Sergeant Lunsford had the same or a similar conversation with Scott Nelson, and the required volunteers were produced. I will never know the details of that conversation or if Scott Nelson had let Sergeant Lunsford know that I had been the first to receive this wonderful opportunity and had politely declined. I only know that Sergeant Lunsford and about fifteen other Marines volunteered to make the night movement, and that the night movement was the single most successful and decisive maneuver in the battle for the Citadel.
There was no possible way that this crazy venture should have succeeded. Charlie Company had been engaged in constant firefights with the NVA dug in on the other side of phase line orange for two days, so we knew that they were there, waiting for us.
The penetration point that was selected for the daring night movement was about fifteen feet to the right, or west, of the corner, a position occupied by a significant force of NVA, the same enemy gunners who had blown away the mule driver. Marine tanks and Ontos crews had been pounding this corner position and had taken return gunfire from the NVA during each armored attack. The night movement mission required the small volunteer force to cross the open ground of phase line orange, find the breach in the wall that had been blown by the M-48 tanks and Ontos, and sneak or shoot their way through the NVA defenders. The volunteers would then occupy the three-story schoolhouse most certainly occupied by a significant force of NVA, as evidenced by the pile of NVA bodies in the courtyard. (The target schoolhouse was the building that defined the left, or east, boundary of the open courtyard that had proved to be the fertile killing ground for the Marine sniper team.) Once inside the schoolhouse, the Marines would hole up until daylight and then hold out until the rest of Charlie Company could cross the street and reinforce them. It was a bold and baldly reckless chess move and, in my opinion, would very likely end in disaster.
This was the one night that I spent inside the Citadel when I didn’t get any sleep at all. Oh, no, there were no internal recriminations that night, no self-loathing for behavior unbecoming a combat Marine officer, for having “chickened out”; those thoughts didn’t start until several weeks later, after the automaton had slightly loosened its grip on the human being inside me. Those recriminations, however, have continued inside my soul almost every day of my life, for over twenty-five years.
But the self-loathing was not what bothered me that night; I was still mentally very numb from the devastating events on the first day on phase line green. No, I couldn’t sleep, because I had helped Sergeant Lunsford and his volunteers get ready, helped check them for noise abatement and ammo loads, and had looked into the faces of every man in that volunteer force. I knew from their faces that every one of them knew where he was heading and that every one of them had accepted his fate. I knew also that they were all doomed.
The sad look on Sergeant Lunsford’s face at 0200 hours the following morning, 19 February, as he followed his lead fire team into the gloomy night and disappeared toward phase line orange, was resigned. His eyes were filled with pure sardonic humor, as if to say that he too was a captive of his own automaton. He was like a young boy, riding on a rickety old roller coaster that scared him to death, but he was too addicted to the adrenaline rush it gave him to ever get off. One more ticket, one more ride.
A few minutes after 0200, Sergeant Lunsford and his volunteers crept quietly across phase line orange, crawled through the shattered opening in the wall on the corner, sneaked breathlessly across the open ground to the schoolhouse, and quietly occupied and cleared all three floors of the schoolhouse within fifteen minutes of their departure. Not a single shot was fired. The NVA had abandoned their positions in the schoolhouse before Lunsford and his volunteers had arrived. The company radio net’s static was abruptly interrupted by a whispered, abbreviated situation report that summed up the impossible, “Objective secured. Out.”
Then, just before first light the next morning, the Marine volunteers occupying the schoolhouse opened up with a shattering volume of M-16 fire and wiped out about twenty NVA soldiers who were crossing some open ground about fifty meters south of the schoolhouse. Most of them were killed outright by the Marines’ concentrated firepower at nearly point-blank range, and the killing zone quickly became another pile of dead NVA bodies. A couple of wounded NVA managed to escape the killing ground, and they most assuredly let their leaders know that they no longer controlled the block, because it quickly became evident that the NVA had pulled back across the next street. Sergeant Lunsford’s volunteer force had the high ground, and the rest of Charlie Company moved across phase line orange with no further casualties.
Scott Nelson’s idiotic idea had turned out to be the genius move of a master strategist; more importantly, it had saved many Marine lives. I don’t know if he had gotten some indication that the NVA had left their murderous corner positions at night, and I didn’t really care that I had been so wrong. Sergeant Lunsford and all of his volunteers deserved recognition for undaunted bravery in the face of certain death.