20 February 1968
After a week of constant, bloody, and vicious house-to-house combat inside the Citadel of Hue, on the morning of 20 February, 1/5 had established full control of two-sevenths of our assigned area of operations. The incredibly harrowing and equally brilliant night movement across phase line orange turned out to be the linchpin that quickly resulted in 1/5’s capture of four more city blocks. Now, 1/5 controlled the eight city blocks contained inside of phase line green on the north, the Citadel wall on the east, phase line black (our next obstacle) on the south, and the Imperial Palace moat and wall on the west. Since the NVA had finally abandoned all efforts to recapture and hold the Dong Ba Porch, the infamous tower that so effectively dominated phase line green, 1/5’s eastern flank was now secure. Although there were many fighting holes built into the eastern wall, the NVA would have had to significantly expose themselves for many long seconds to try to get into those positions, and after the NVA finally lost the tower, they never really tried to use the wall as high ground against us again. Now, 1/5’s Marines could attack across phase line black, or Dang Dung as the Vietnamese had called it, with little concern about our left, or eastern, flank being exposed. There were no more towers dominating the wall on our left flank.
There was, however, a very distinct terrain problem on our right. The NVA inside the Imperial Palace, with the advantage of excellent cover and high ground from their positions atop the parapets of the twenty-five-foot walls of that “fortress within a fortress,” could shoot small arms and rockets with impunity directly down on the Charlie Two Marines who were holding 1/5’s right flank. And, since the Imperial Palace was considered “hallowed ground” and was still protected by the South Vietnamese and American “no fire zone” restrictions (meaning that we could not shoot at any target on the Imperial Palace wall with anything larger than an M-79 round no matter what they shot at us with), Charlie Two had the very difficult task of securing our right flank while not being able to defend themselves from enemy fire from the Imperial Palace with anything larger than small-arms fire.
Late on the afternoon of 20 February, a squad from Charlie Two finally made it across phase line black, Dang Dung, and into a small house on our right flank. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that they could not maintain this foothold for long. The small house was blatantly exposed to small-arms and RPG fire from the NVA on the Imperial Palace wall, and the attacking Charlie Two Marines immediately came under a horrendous volume of enemy fire from a deadly cross fire. The NVA were shooting at them from positions in and around the houses directly in front of them, and from the Imperial Palace walls.
As they were the only Marine unit to make it intact across phase line black, this squad was very exposed, and since there was very little daylight left to work with, Scott Nelson made the decision to pull them back across phase line black. Staff Sergeant Lunsford, the acting Charlie Two Actual and the leader of the heroes of the night movement, radioed me over the company net and asked if we could spare a few men to beef up his forces to lay down supporting fires for their retreat back across the street. So Chief and I led a couple of fire teams across Dinh Bo Linh, the perpendicular street that separated the Charlie Two and Charlie Three AOs, and we joined up with the Charlie Two CP.
After a quick consultation, I deployed my men with the understrength Charlie Two squads facing phase line black and then rejoined Sergeant Lunsford in his hastily occupied command post, the second house in from Doan Thi Diem. Doan Thi Diem was another perpendicular street that defined our right flank and separated us from the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace. The house that had become Charlie Two’s CP faced phase line black and afforded us an excellent view of the street.
The living room of this house had two large windows, the glass panes having long since been broken out by the occupying Marines. The windows afforded us with good fields of fire and reasonably good observation of the street in front of us. The thick mortar walls of the house provided us with good cover from the NVA gunners on the Imperial Palace walls. Fronting the house were a shallow porch and a small front yard, which was surrounded by a low block wall. The wall was subsequently fronted by a sidewalk. A narrow area of struggling, ancient lawn with a row of old, shaggy trees spaced a couple dozen feet apart separated the sidewalk from the street. Phase line black could have been a residential street from any middle-class neighborhood in America. The street had plenty of room for two-way traffic and for parked cars on either side of the street. The street itself was about forty feet wide. The houses that faced each other across the street were perhaps eighty feet apart. At this point, like most streets inside the Citadel, this one was void of vehicles. The terrain on the far side of the street was a mirror reflection of that on our side of the street: starting with a low curb, a three-foot-wide strip of grass hosting well-spaced, but thickly branched and vegetated trees, a sidewalk, a wall with an open gate, a small front yard, and then the single-story house that the beleaguered Charlie Two squad was now hunkering down in. In order to make it back to safety, the young men from this pinned-down squad would have to run across about eighty feet of relatively open ground.
Orders were given, another star-cluster rocket was fired, and the Marines of Charlie Two and Charlie Three opened up with a tremendous volume of small-arms fire against the known NVA positions. Their fire was supported by a tank/Ontos team that roared down Dinh Bo Linh on Charlie Two’s left flank, continuing to pound the NVA on the other side of phase line black with their heavy weapons. The NVA just opposite us opened up, and their friends on top of the Imperial Palace walls also increased their frantic rate of fire. In the middle of this utter and deadly chaos, the Charlie Two squad started running, in twos and threes, back across phase line black.
Again, time and motion slowed agonizingly. Afterward, it seemed as though many minutes had passed before all the Charlie Two Marines made it back to the north side of phase line black and safety. In reality, it was probably all over in less than ninety seconds. Fortunately, none of the nine Marines was struck down in the middle of the street; unfortunately, two of them were wounded, one horribly.
The first three Marines ran out of the house, sprinted through the yard and across the sidewalk, ducked under the low-hanging trees, and raced across the open street through a ferocious volume of enemy fire striking all around them. The Marine in the middle was hit and then immediately hit again, but somehow he kept running. His buddies, hearing his screams, grabbed his arms and continued the mad dash across the open ground, across the street, under the trees on our side of the street, across the sidewalk, through the yard, and rushed in the front door. All three of them crashed into a heap on the floor. Our house came under heavy enemy small-arms fire, but we were relatively safe because of the protection of the thick mortar walls and the increasingly difficult angle for the NVA gunners. The Charlie Two corpsmen jumped on the three Marines heaped on the floor, sorted them out, and started working frantically on the wounded man, a young black Marine who had started screaming as he ran in the front room, “God damn, God damn, they shot off my dick, them mutherfuckers shot off my dick. Oh, sweet Jesus, they shot off my dick!”
There were still six more Marines on the other side of the street, and a large part of me wanted to watch those men running across the street, but this Marine’s screams captured my attention. As I turned to my left, the cameras of my mind still ratcheting obstinately in slow motion, he came into my view. As he started to frantically rip away his bloody trousers, he continued to scream that the mutherfuckers had shot off his dick, and the more he ripped away his own clothing, the more distraught he became. The camera of my vision zoomed in on his groin area, and it was obvious that this Marine had lost most, if not all of his manhood; there was only a huge amount of blood staining the lap of his trousers and some pubic hair, where there should have been a penis and testicles. His screaming became louder and louder as his frantic search for his penis and testicles continued, and he began to understand with unwanted clarity his awful fate. One of the Charlie Two corpsmen, unable to do much more than apply a wad of thick bandages in an attempt to stop the bleeding, had the presence of mind to immediately shoot the young Marine up with a morphine capsule, which had an almost immediate effect on the shattered young man. His screaming never lost its intensity, but the volume tapered off rapidly, and in a few moments the screams became a frantic, slurred mumbling.
The volume of shooting in the street, which had diminished slightly when the first three Marines had reached the safety of the house, increased again, recapturing my attention. I turned back to allow my mind’s cameras to refocus on the frantic attempts of the Charlie Two Marines to get back across the street. A second group of three Marines had started their run for safety across the bloody gauntlet of phase line black.
Incredibly, two of these three made it across the street without a scratch; the third, well, it is still hard for me to believe what happened to the third Marine.
The third Marine had been with Charlie Two since Hoi An days. I had seen him a couple of times before, and I had once known his name. He was either a lance corporal or a PFC. From the first moment that I saw him running across phase line black that day, I remembered with the clarity of instant recall what had made him famous (or, rather, infamous) to the other Marines of Charlie Two. He wore Coke-bottle glasses. The Marines of Charlie Two called him Coke-Bottle Glasses.
I am certain to this day that this young man was legally blind and that he should never have been permitted to join the Marine Corps, let alone any branch of the service. It was common knowledge by then that the expanding Vietnam War and the directly related increasing demand for new recruits had a deleterious effect on the legendary high physical standards that the Marine Corps is famous for. But even given this understandable relaxing of the standards, none of us who knew Coke-Bottle Glasses could ever figure out how in the hell he had ever gotten into the system.
Shortly after the Tet Offensive broke out, Coke-Bottle Glasses had been accidentally left behind during a night ambush patrol above the Lang Co Bridge. His squad leader had ordered his men to pull out of their positions at about 0400, well before first light, and they were nearly halfway back to the bridge when Coke-Bottle Glasses was reported missing. They backtracked and found him, scared half to death, squatting down in a defensive firing position, slowly turning around in circles, obviously unable to see anything, not even seeing his buddies returning to fetch him. He couldn’t see a damned thing in the early morning gloom, and yet he was wearing his thick-lens glasses that night! Why his squad leader had not reported this before was beyond any of us who watched him, as he ran for his life, back across phase line black.
Here they came, the three of them. Coke-Bottle Glasses was in the middle, running out of the house, across the front yard, through the gate in the wall, and across the sidewalk, into the teeth of the gauntlet. The other two Marines, using their God-given normal vision, ducked low, negotiated the low-hanging trees, quickly ran across the street, and made it to the safety of our house without being hit. Coke-Bottle Glasses, however, did not realize that the branches of the tree that he vaguely saw were low-hanging, and he failed to duck. A thick branch caught him full in the face, and although his glasses survived the collision with the leafy branch, it caused his heavy glasses to turn sideways on his face. One moment he had some vision, the next moment one lens of his glasses covered his mouth, and the other covered the middle of his forehead. Coke-Bottle Glasses, momentarily stunned, was effectively blind, sitting on his ass in the middle of an enemy kill zone.
Valiantly, Coke-Bottle Glasses got up and, knowing from his hearing (which was not in the least impaired) that he was in the middle of a very hot kill zone and not yet understanding why he was blind, started to run in the direction that he thought he should go in. Amazingly, he made it across the street without getting hit. Unfortunately, he did not see the low curb on the north side of the street, and he tripped over it. Coke-Bottle Glasses crashed into the low concrete wall, and once again fell down, this time on the sidewalk, but still completely exposed to the enemy’s deadly gunfire.
By this time, the third and final group of three Charlie Two Marines had started their mad dash for safety, so at that moment some of the NVA gunners probably shifted their fire toward them. Perhaps the gunners thought that they had shot the crazy Marine who had been careening across the street for what seemed like several minutes. Coke-Bottle Glasses once again picked himself up and groped his way through the front gate. Then he stumbled across the front yard as the third group raced past him. Finally, beyond all odds, Coke-Bottle Glasses tripped once again on the front steps, but his momentum carried him crashing through the door into the front room of the house.
Coke-Bottle Glasses had made it to safety. Although he was shaken and winded from the exertion of a hundred-foot dash about as straight and fast as the path of those little steel balls in a pinball machine, he finally realized why he had hit so many obstacles. Breathing heavily, looking at no one in particular, Coke-Bottle Glasses retrieved his battered, but otherwise unharmed glasses from their skewed position on his face. With the unconscious grace of a longtime glasses-wearer, he repositioned them properly on the bridge of his nose and anchored them to his ears. All of us in that room were speechless for at least a couple of minutes, watching this unbelievable finale to an incredibly insane, but extremely lucky performance.
One of the three Marines in the final group, who had blown by Coke-Bottle Glasses as he had bounced from tree to wall to porch, had also been hit a couple of times. Although his buddies had helped him make it the final few steps, it turned out that his wounds, although painful, were superficial, and he didn’t even require medevac.
Just before Coke-Bottle Glasses had started his zany dash, Sergeant Lunsford had gone back toward phase line orange with a small group of men who were assigned the task of carrying the young black Marine back to the First ARVN Division compound, and he was momentarily gone from his command post. And although I technically had no business involving myself in his platoon’s business, I simply could not believe what I had just witnessed. By all the odds, Coke-Bottle Glasses should be dead, lying in a pool of blood in the middle of phase line black. All eight other Marines who had run across the street, two of whom had been badly wounded, had probably only been in the street for ten or twelve seconds, total. Coke-Bottle Glasses had been in the kill zone for well over a minute, maybe as long as two minutes, and had been continuously exposed to enemy gunfire during that entire time. He had also fallen down in the street not once, but twice, and here he was, standing unscathed save for a few bruises and bumps, rearranging his glasses as though this was no big deal, as if this had happened to him every day. Perhaps it had.
At that moment, my only thoughts were for the Marines who would have had to risk their lives going after him in the middle of the street if Coke-Bottle Glasses had been hit and wounded, but not killed outright. My decision was made for me. I walked over in front of Coke-Bottle Glasses and said, “Let me see those glasses, Marine.” Good Marine that he was, Coke-Bottle Glasses didn’t bat an eye (at least I think he didn’t bat an eye, because truly his eyes were very difficult to see through the extra-thick lenses). At least he could see that I was his superior officer, and he obeyed me without hesitation. He came limply to attention, removed his glasses, and handed them to me, his vague, watery eyes full of trust. And although I was positive that this young man was very attached to those glasses, he didn’t flinch at all when I dropped them on the hardwood floor between us. I placed my right, size-ten combat boot directly over his glasses and stepped down firmly and deliberately. Then, with all my weight on my right foot, I rotated my boot slowly back and forth, thus ensuring that both lenses of Coke-Bottle’s glasses were crushed into very small pieces. Coke-Bottle Glasses was now truly blind, but he knew perfectly well what had just happened.
I asked him just one question: “Do you have another pair of glasses with you, Marine?”
Coke-Bottle Glasses squinted up at me and answered my direct question without equivocation.
“No, sir.”
Turning to his squad leader, one of the young heroes who had survived the run across the street, I said, “Corporal, this Marine has hopelessly broken his glasses, and he doesn’t have a replacement pair. It is obvious to me that he can’t see without them. For the good of everyone in this city, I believe that he should be medevacced immediately and sent to Phu Bai, or better yet, to Da Nang, so that he can get another pair of glasses. Any questions?”
There were, of course, no questions. Coke-Bottle Glasses, one of the luckiest men alive, was taken in hand and guided by the Marines who were taking the last wounded man back to the First ARVN Division compound.
Late that evening some Marines from Charlie Two shot a few 3.5-inch white phosphorus bazooka rounds into the house that the stranded Charlie Two squad had gotten pinned down in, and it burned to the ground before midnight. Although we could never occupy that particular house, the enemy was also denied that defensive position.
As the flames burned low in the midnight gloom, the Marines of Charlie Company hunkered down in their defensive positions along the north edge of phase line black. I found another corner, crawled into an abandoned bed, and subsided into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Early the next morning, 21 February 1968, our eighth morning inside the Citadel, I met with Scott Nelson and got our marching orders for the day. They were simple. Phase line black was in front of us; we had to cross it and destroy the enemy forces on the other side so that we could continue toward our final objective, the south wall of the Citadel.
At this point Charlie Company’s manpower was down to five under-strength squads. Charlie Three, my platoon, was the most fortunate, still having three squads of either eight or nine men; Charlie Two was down to two squads of ten men each. With only about fifty fighting men left, Charlie Company was just barely effective as a fighting force. Charlie Company’s responsibility along phase line black had been reduced to the one-block frontage on the right flank of 1/5. Alpha and Bravo Companies were given the two center blocks, and Delta was still holding down the left flank, covering the narrow eastern block and the wall.
In planning this next assault, 1/5 had decided that Charlie Company would attack first, with the other companies putting down a base of fire, trying to keep the NVA soldiers’ heads down across the street from them. If we were successful in establishing a firm toehold across phase line black, Alpha Company would send a platoon across behind us—in our wake, so to speak—who would then pass through our “beachhead” and attack the NVA’s exposed flank.
Scott Nelson’s briefing was succinct and to the point. He said, “I think we should try to take the house on the left corner of our AO, Charlie Three. It’s the farthest away from the NVA on the Imperial Palace wall, and the guys from Alpha can give us a good base of fire.” Scott Nelson’s terse order summed up the obvious. We all understood that whichever house we targeted would be difficult to take, since we had to cross the exposed kill zone to get inside the house, and it was very likely that the attacking Marine element would be running right into a waiting NVA position. The house on the left corner was as good as any other.
I returned to my platoon and briefed the squad leaders, and together we picked the point fire team, the four men who would have to run across phase line black first. Scott Nelson headed back to the battalion CP to coordinate our heavy support and the supporting fires from Alpha. Nelson was going to ask for a tank/Ontos team to make a double hit on the house opposite the one we were going to take out, right at the moment of the assault, to keep the NVA on our left front pinned down while the point fire team made their dash across the street.
L. Cpl. Charles Davis and his three men were selected as the lucky point fire team. Although Lance Corporal Davis had been in the thick of the fighting inside the Citadel, you couldn’t tell that from just looking at him. He was a veteran of over seven months in the ’Nam, but since he was a very quiet young man, it would have been very easy to mistake him for a raw recruit.
Lance Corporal Davis was an otherwise unremarkable Marine, much like most of the rest, who simply went quietly and professionally about his assigned duties and complained very little about his lot in life. His fire team was also frequently picked to walk point. Once again, Davis’s team was chosen.
The plan we had agreed upon was that Davis and his three men would start out spaced a few yards apart, having worked their way into four different positions of cover on the northeast corner of phase line black. As soon as the red star cluster rocket signal was fired, they would all run across the street at the same time, converging on the target house, and quickly try to clear the first of two floors. If they could clear the first floor, they would immediately move upstairs and clear the second floor as well. Once they had control of the house on the corner, Chief and I would cross phase line black in their wake, followed closely by another fire team, and we would then consolidate our position.
After that was accomplished, the rest of Charlie Company would follow us. Subsequent fire teams would then attack the next house, clear it, and then allow another fire team to leapfrog through that position. The teams would continue to leapfrog units forward toward our right flank until we had cleared all the houses on the south side of phase line black in our AO, except, of course, the last house, which was now just a pile of charcoal.
The signal for the assault’s supporting fires was the arrival of the tank/Ontos team, who acted on their cue perfectly, nearly demolishing the house catercorner across phase line black in front of Alpha Company. Many of Alpha Company’s Marines opened up with an intense and sustained volume of small-arms fires, and the rest of the Marines of Charlie Company, spread out along phase line black on our right side, joined in ferociously. The steady thunking of sixty-millimeter mortar fire from the Charlie and Alpha Company mortarmen joined the crashing chorus, which hopefully meant that the NVA in front of us had to hit the dirt to avoid being blown away.
I fired off a red star cluster signal rocket as the tank/Ontos team reversed away from phase line black, and Lance Corporal Davis and the three Marines from his fire team unhesitatingly emerged from their positions of safety and ran into and across the street.
Chief and I could easily see the action on the corner, and we held our breath, expecting one or more of Davis’s men to be hit and knocked down in the open ground. Amazingly, however, they all made it across safely and disappeared quickly into the front door of the target house. In spite of the almost constant din of the supporting fires, I heard Chief’s next words, and my veins turned to ice. As I said, Chief was a man of few words, so when he spoke, I listened.
“Ontos coming!”
I wondered what in the hell another Ontos was doing up here. We were supposed to get a tank/Ontos team, but they had been here already and done their thing. No one had said anything about another Ontos. I heard the screaming, high-revolution engine straining toward phase line black, and I knew that something wasn’t right.
And then I saw it. It was another Ontos, all right, only this one had gotten its orders screwed up. It screamed up and slammed to a stop at the intersection, pointed right at the house that Davis and his fire team had just entered. There was no time for slow-motion cameras; before I could even scream out the one word that I did, the Ontos had fired off all six of its 106-mm recoilless rounds of high-explosive death and destruction and had quickly reversed its course and started screeching back away from phase line black.
“Nnnoooooooooooo!!!” That was it; one word, the most futile and negative word in the English language. That was all I could say. Davis and his men were surely dead, slaughtered by friendly fire.
Dust and cordite smoke enshrouded the house, and for a few moments the supporting fires tapered off and died out. The Marines on both sides of us had seen what had happened, although none of us wanted to believe it. Davis’s fire team had all made it across the damned street safely and for all appearances had seized control of the target house. Then this damned Ontos had come out of nowhere and had blown them all away. What else could possibly go wrong?
About that time, L. Cpl. Charles Davis, his entire body covered with a thick coating of white plaster dust, emerged, or should I say, ejected himself out of the dust cloud that was once a house, his three team members right on his butt, in the famous “asshole-to-belly-button” formation. Davis’s eyes were as big as saucers; his helmet was tilted at a ninety-degree angle and right now only covered the right side of his head. His knees were damned near smashing into his chest as he and his buddies ran for dear life out of the death house as fast as they had ever run in their lives.
In a typical Vietnam anticlimax, it turned out that they all made it back across the street unscathed, and none of them was really hurt by the Ontos attack. But they were, to a man, shaken by the experience of having a house they were standing in disintegrate around them. Their only problem was a distinct ringing in their ears that stayed with them for several days. The simultaneous explosions of six 106-mm high-explosive shells detonating in the second floor of the house had given new meaning to the expression “rattling their cages,” but they were, after all, okay.
As the dust finally cleared away, we could see that the first floor of the house was still mostly intact, but the house was now a single-story structure. Fortunately for Davis and his team, the errant Ontos had put some elevation on his tubes before blasting away, and the shells had all hit the second floor and roof.
We quickly sent another fire team across the street, and they were able to hold the position. Shortly thereafter, Chief and I ran across the street with a dusted-off Davis and his team, and we consolidated our position in the nearly demolished corner house. After Chief reported our progress to Charlie Company headquarters, Scott Nelson started moving the rest of Charlie Company across phase line black immediately. The NVA on the other side of the street were gone. I guess, by now, they must have thought we were totally insane, that our immensely superior firepower had gotten out of control, and that we had taken to blowing away even houses that we had occupied.
A distinct pattern had begun to emerge in the fighting inside the Citadel. Once we had established a firm foothold in a new block, once we had successfully gotten a significant fighting force across another phase line, the enemy would quickly withdraw from the houses in that block on the entire four-block frontage, cross the next phase line, and take up defensive positions that they had prepared long before our arrival inside the Citadel. Apparently, the NVA commanders understood clearly that they could not afford to be caught with their flanks exposed, so they had decided upon a strategy which forced us to limit our tactics to the costly frontal attack, assaulting across the phase lines into the teeth of the well-prepared positions. So far, it had worked very well for them, because after eight days of fighting, the NVA still held over half of the southeast corner of the Citadel and the Imperial Palace.
The only comfort that we could take from any of this was that at least we were making progress. It was a very expensive progress, because at this point 1/5’s fighting strength wasn’t much more than 50 percent effectiveness, and we still had a long way to go, with four more phase lines to cross. But now that we had the distinct advantage of heavy firepower support and we had gained some dearly earned experience in how to cross the streets and how to clear the houses, the pace of our progress had quickened. If we could continue at the present pace, we might just crush the NVA defenders against the south wall of the Citadel or force them to move back inside the Imperial Palace grounds within a few more days. On the other hand, without reinforcements, there might not be too many of us left after a couple more days of this kind of fighting. Attrition was our worst enemy, since, so far, we hadn’t seen a single replacement.
Late on the afternoon of 21 February, Charlie Company and the rest of 1/5 crept carefully into the houses facing the next phase line. I have by now forgotten the next, or fourth, phase line’s color; it may have been yellow or red. By this point the colors of the phase lines had lost any meaning. I remember phase line green with an absolute clarity, an instant and persistent recall that will never leave my mind, and I remember orange and black because they followed green so closely. But the fourth and all the subsequent phase lines will remain forever in my mind without a color designation.
The Vietnamese name of the fourth phase line is Hung Vuong. Slightly narrower than green, orange, and black, it had very few trees to brag about.
Chief and I had taken up residence with one of the Charlie Three squads in a small bedroom in a narrow, two-story house facing the next street. This bedroom was situated just off a central hallway that ran without interruption from an enclosed front porch through the middle of the house to the rear. From our cautious vantage point in this middle room we could see that this house had sustained very little damage thus far. The glass of the front porch windows was all intact. The bedroom barely had enough room for a tall, full-size, brass-framed four-poster bed and a large glass-fronted hutch. The hutch was a very ornate piece of furniture that was still filled with china. It sat snugly and confidently against the bedroom wall, facing the bed and looking away from the street. There was a space of only a couple of feet separating the hutch from the bed. Chief and I were sitting on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor in the narrow space between the bed and the hutch, and I would occasionally peek out into the hallway to look through the porch into the street.
As soon as we had occupied the houses fronting Hung Vuong, the NVA had greeted us with a fierce rate of small-arms fire from their defensive positions on the other side of the street, so there was no doubt that the familiar pattern was continuing. The NVA were waiting for us on the other side of the street; this phase line would certainly be another killing ground.
Since it was late in the day, 1/5 decided to hold what we had. Travis Curd, our company artillery FO—he of the “Lost Outpost” fame—and his radio operator had entered our house a few minutes before and had climbed the back stairs to the second floor of this small house. He was trying to get into a position that offered both some cover from the enemy gunners as well as a view of the other side of the street. Battalion was becoming increasingly concerned with calling in artillery support, because as we advanced slowly toward the wall, the space that could be safely bombarded was becoming smaller, and battalion was understandably concerned about taking casualties from friendly fire. So Travis had come up to the front line to take a look-see. I asked Chief to switch frequencies on his Prick-25 so that we could monitor Travis’s comments back to battalion as he described the enemy’s positions across the street.
Travis called in his report. “Millhouse Three, this is Firecracker Three. Our front positions are now within six hundred meters of the south wall. We should be able to continue artillery fire support for at least two more blocks, over.”
The squelch and static of the interplay between Travis Curd and Major Wunderlich, the battalion’s operations officer, was very clear when Travis spoke and slightly garbled when Major Wunderlich replied, but it was still quite understandable.
Major Wunderlich said, “Roger, Firecracker. Get some target coordinates and go for it. Keep your targets at least fifty meters south of our positions, over.”
Travis Curd said, “Roger, understand, Millhouse Three. The houses just across the street are very close together, and all of them are two stories high, so we have plenty of protection from any errant shrapnel. . . . Shit, what the fuck is that asshole doing?”
Whatever had caused Travis’s momentary breakdown in radio discipline had really rattled him, because although he was obviously no longer looking for targets and communicating with Major Wunderlich, he continued to hold down the transmit button on his Prick-25 handset, so we could hear him clearly. What we heard in the next few moments made our blood run cold.
Travis Curd, his voice rising into an involuntary squeakiness, shouted over the radio, “Oh, fuck, he must be lost. This street isn’t secured and here comes a fucking Ontos. Oh shit, he’s coming fast, and he’s pulling up right in front of us!”
By this time, Chief and I could hear the Ontos screaming up to a stop right out in front of us, and we no longer needed Travis’s commentary to figure out what was going on. Here came another lost Ontos, and who the hell knew what was going to happen next.
An Ontos was definitely a “two-edged sword.” Now, I never, ever wanted to be the target of the six 106-mm HEAT (high-explosive antitank) rounds that an Ontos could fire simultaneously, and I would much rather be behind an Ontos than in front of one when it decided to launch its ordnance. But every Marine that had made it through boot camp, ITR, or OCS had been drilled on the fact that a 106-mm recoilless rifle had a significant kill zone behind it. The gases from the fired round escaped out of a rear vent, thus eliminating much of the recoil that was related to a standard artillery piece. Our Marine instructors had placed cardboard boxes and other large objects behind a single 106-mm recoilless rifle within the kill zone, which extended about forty feet behind the breech, and we had seen these items become instantly shredded by the fiery back blast. No, you don’t want to be the target of an Ontos, but you also don’t want to be right behind an Ontos when he shoots. No way.
Travis Curd continued his frantic commentary, “Oh Jesus Christ, he’s pivoting left. Shit, he’s right in front of us! Get your heads down!!” By now Travis was screaming at the top of his lungs, so we didn’t need the radio any longer to hear him clearly. Chief and I looked at each other momentarily and thought about all the glass in the front of the house and the heavy hutch sitting right next to us. We knew that we had only a couple of seconds to get out of the danger zone and that it wasn’t enough time. Fortunately, we had both removed our packs and had placed them on top of the bed, and Chief had set his Prick-25 down on the floor, so we were both able to squeeze under the bed and cover our heads with our arms just as the stupid, damned Ontos let loose with all six tubes. A million shards of glass departed from the front porch and funneled themselves down the hallway.
Since this street was narrower and there was no front yard, we figured afterward that the back of the Ontos was about twenty feet in front of our house. The front porch was demolished by the force of the back blast, which also blew the hutch down, along with all the glass from it. As we heard the Ontos crank itself into reverse and start its escape, Chief and I, shaken but otherwise unhurt, looked up and realized that we were trapped under heaps of glass and the hutch.
Travis had also hit the deck in his upstairs hideaway, but despite his shouts he hadn’t had much of a problem with the back blast since he was on the second floor. Fortunately, none of my Charlie Three Marines in the back part of the house had been standing in the hallway, so no one was hurt. But neither Chief nor I were going anywhere without some help.
A few moments later, Travis tromped down the stairs to see if everyone was okay, crunched through about a three-inch layer of broken glass in the hallway, and found us, trapped like a couple of chipmunks in a cage, under the brass bed.
Travis said, “Shit, Charlie Three, what the hell are you two girls doing under the bed? You know there are rules against fraternization.” Travis was obviously amused by our predicament and didn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to help us out.
I looked up at him through the plumbing of the brass bed and said, frustration obvious in my voice, “Shut up, Travis, and get a couple of the guys to help pull this damned thing off us. I don’t want to be under here when another Ontos decides to get lost again. Shit, why doesn’t someone tell us when them damned things are going to visit our neighborhood?”
I was getting sick and tired of this; if it wasn’t the NVAacross the street, it was an errant chunk of shrapnel from an F-4’s bomb or a damned naval gunfire short-round or a friendly sixty-millimeter mortar round dropped within six feet of me or the back blast zone of an Ontos. If the enemy didn’t get me before I got out of the Citadel, my own friends were sure to.
As darkness settled uneasily over the Citadel, Chief and I left the suspect shelter of the brass bed and moved back a half block to a safer position for the night.