Several dozen meters from the OPs, Spec-4 Bob Walkowiak, one of the company commander’s radio telephone operators (RTO), heard the shooting but did not know what was going on. He was helping the company medic attend to a badly wounded soldier. As the deafening sounds of shooting, explosions, and hollering raged around them, they came to the sad realization that the man was beyond hope. The medic moved on and Walkowiak tried to talk to the dying soldier and comfort him. “As I apologized for our inability to save him, the fight for his life ended. Hopefully, someday I’ll know if he forgave us for failing.” As the soldier expired, Walkowiak rolled over and looked at the clear blue sky above. The air was so thick with bullets and shrapnel that it was “like having stars or streaks in your eyes.”
Medics were braving the worst of the fire, scurrying all over, treating and retrieving wounded men. They dealt with the horrible consequences of combat—the torn flesh, the jagged holes, the broken bones, the gushing blood, the internal bleeding, the crying and screaming of grievously wounded soldiers. With bullets zinging around and explosions cooking off, the medics could only hope to administer some first aid—keep the airways open, apply pressure bandages, stop the bleeding, give morphine shots to those who needed them—and hope for the best. One medic, Spec-4 John Kind, came under enemy attack as he was crouching over a badly wounded man, trying to save him. Kind grabbed the man’s rifle and, according to one account, “began placing accurate fire at the advancing enemy.” When the enemy attack failed, Kind resumed treating the wounded soldier. Another medic from Charlie Company, Private First Class John Trahan, was so busy that he personally treated eighteen wounded men in the first several minutes of the firefight. When he realized Bravo Company’s predicament, he crossed a patch of open ground under intense fire to get to them, even though he himself was wounded, too. At that point, according to one witness, he took the lead in “caring for the wounded and evacuating them to safer positions.”
Spec-4 Walkowiak, the RTO, found a bit of cover with two other men behind a small log. He cautiously peered down the incline of the hill at the foliage beyond and saw that the NVA was overrunning one of the platoons. “On the right, one man raised up to fire as he withdrew and was promptly shot dead. On the left a fellow with a pump shotgun retreated up the hill. He stood tall as he walked backwards, firing every few steps. No panic, just grudgingly giving up ground in that hail of bullets. As he raised his weapon to fire, a bullet went through his jaw.” Enemy grenades soon followed, showering shrapnel in every direction. Employing M72 Light Antitank Weapon (LAW) rocket fire, machine guns, grenades of their own, and accurate rifle fire, Walkowiak’s group managed to slow the NVA into a tense standoff.
4
At about this time, an enemy B40 rocket exploded among Bravo’s command group, killing twenty-eight-year-old Captain John Falcone, the commanding officer, who had been rushing all over the place, positioning his men, hollering orders, and trying to keep his soldiers as calm as possible. The well-liked former Marine and Army Ranger left behind a wife and three children. Lieutenant William Gauff, one of the platoon leaders, somehow made his way through deadly fire to reorganize the survivors around Falcone and assume command of the company, even though he was wounded himself. Another key leader, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ortiz, assumed command of his platoon when his platoon sergeant got killed. Ortiz manned a machine gun and poured belt after belt of 7.62-millimeter ammunition into attacking NVA soldiers. As was so often the case in this kind of desperate combat, the example of a tenacious NCO motivated other surviving members of the platoon to stay and fight. They laced the NVA with heavy fire until they ran out of small-arms ammunition and began hurling grenades at the enemy, finally forcing them away from that spot for good.
The Ivy Dragoon grunts were fighting tenaciously, but without some serious fire support the entire perimeter was in real danger of being overrun by the NVA. Mortarmen set up makeshift gun pits, pointed their tubes straight up, and fired their shells (NVA crews responded in kind). Aided by forward air controllers, jets screamed in to drop 500- and 750-pound bombs as close to the hill as they dared. In some cases, they dropped their ordnance within five hundred meters of the grunts. “They really lit the area up,” Walkowiak later wrote. “The pilots put napalm and CBUs [cluster bomb units] directly on both sides of the perimeter of the hill behind my location.” In one instance, he and several other grunts popped smoke grenades to mark their position for strafing planes. The fighter pilots swooped in and unleashed a stream of 20-millimeter cannon shells on a woodpile that was sheltering several NVA, leaving behind little besides boiling plumes of smoke, dust, and traumatized flesh. Walkowiak estimated that enemy fire diminished by one-third. Another soldier watched the planes drop cluster bombs full of 3-millimeter-long fléchettes or darts. “They’d come down through the trees and, holy cow, were they effective.” Hundreds of tiny darts tore holes into any NVA soldiers who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the kill zone of the cluster bombs. They died, literally, a death by a thousand cuts. In the recollection of one American, he and several others later found, in just one sector, “over a hundred bodies . . . with just little pinpricks over ’em . . . looking like a very fine shot from shotguns.”
The aircraft were hardly impervious to enemy fire. Helicopter crews found it nearly impossible to even approach the hill, much less get close enough to unload supplies and remove the wounded. Enemy rifle, machine-gun, and rocket fire was just too intense. In the recollection of one man, the air was full of so many B40 rockets that “you could almost reach up and catch ’em.” In one instance, Sergeant Steve Edmunds, a squad leader in Charlie Company, saw “a chopper, in an attempt to provide us with food, water, and ammunition was blown out of the sky by an enemy rocket, as it attempted to drop our supplies. The chopper exploded into flames and all the ammunition which was on board continued to explode.” The enemy even shot down a CIA Air America T28 Trojan propeller plane that was operating as a forward air controller. The grunts were able to rescue the two pilots.
Artillery observers were constantly on their radios calling in fire missions. Several miles away, at various firebases the Americans had constructed, artillerymen hunched over their guns, in the synchronized choreography so necessary for well-trained crewmen to do their jobs properly, loading and firing their pieces. Everything from large-caliber eight-inch and 155-millimeter shells to the more common 105-millimeter howitzer rounds crashed into NVA-held portions of Hill 724 (and on some of the American positions, too). One of the observers, First Lieutenant Larry Skogler, was roaming around with his RTO and reconnaissance sergeant in tow, looking for good places to call down fire. From the lip of one bomb crater, he called in so many fire missions he lost track of how many. The low-key Minnesotan had once attended the state university in Minneapolis, but had gotten drafted in 1965 when he lost his student deferment. Well trained and experienced, he possessed the keen forward observer’s feel for terrain, distance, angles, and the capability of the guns. At Hill 724, he had one battery of four guns at his disposal. “The trees were so tall, we couldn’t get good artillery coverage on the ground,” he said. “The one-oh-five rounds would burst in the trees and scatter all over creation. Ninety percent of it would be stuck in the trees.” Even so, it was effective enough to wound and kill many NVA soldiers, if only because of the sheer volume of the American fire.
The more time that passed, the less chance the NVA had to overrun the battalion. Steadily, the Bravo survivors formed a continuous perimeter with hard-pressed Charlie and Delta Companies. With the NVA positions well known, the Americans could unleash a constant barrage of artillery, napalm, and bombs upon the enemy, at a minimum negating their movement. After dark, planes dropped flares to illuminate the area. C47 gunships (nicknamed “Puff the Magic Dragon”) circled overhead, spewing forth laser-beam-like streams of Gatling gun rounds on the NVA. Farther away, B-52 heavy bombers unloaded many tons of explosives on suspected NVA strongholds.
During lulls, amid the dancing half shadows, the Americans heard NVA sergeants blowing whistles, organizing their men for new assaults on the perimeter. Over the course of the evening, they attacked several times. Those who could get close enough to the Americans fought it out in confusing, intimate firefights, with muzzle flashes winking like camera flashbulbs. The fighting was ghastly and brutal, sometimes even hand to hand. Because of the massive amount of American firepower that was raking every approach to the hill, the communists could not reinforce any of their attacks well enough to succeed in their goal of annihilating the hard-pressed American battalion. Gradually, the Americans fended them off and, by daylight, the battle evolved into a stalemate, with the NVA besieging the hill and the Americans keeping them at bay with firepower plus the sheer tenacity of their grunts.
The still-burning wreckage of the downed chopper blocked the small LZ that the soldiers had hacked out. Resupply helicopters could only swoop in and hover precariously several feet off the ground, all the while under enemy fire. The crewmen hastily threw out crates of ammunition, food, and water cans. If possible, grunts loaded the most seriously wounded aboard. Then the choppers took off. The whole process usually took less than a minute or two. The helicopters made operations in this remote area possible, but in such a heavy battle, they were a tenuous supply link at best. Control of all the ground around Dak To and the establishment of a secure land-based supply line was an impossibility under the circumstances (and a major reason why officers like Krulak thought it was folly to fight in the Central Highlands).
So the helicopter supply runs were only a temporary solution to this problem. In the words of one after action account, “Further support was impossible until the enemy could be driven far enough from the landing zone to deny observed fire.” Captain John Mirus, the commander of Charlie Company, and Captain Terry Bell, Delta’s commander, were the two highest-ranking officers left on the hill. Both of them understood that they must expand their perimeter to provide necessary breathing space for the choppers. If they did not, wounded men would die, and supplies of vital ammo and water would dwindle to dangerously low levels. They ordered their men to push the NVA back, away from the hill. “It took another two days of fighting out from the base to secure the area sufficiently to resume operations,” a unit citation later stated.
In that time, the NVA gradually disengaged and faded away. The Americans later learned that they had destroyed the better part of two NVA battalions. They counted 300 North Vietnamese bodies. A prisoner told interrogators that his regimental commander had been killed. American losses were grim, too. When Bravo Company first went up Hill 724, it had 165 soldiers. When the fighting finally ended there, 19 of the men were dead and another 68 were wounded badly enough to require evacuation. Losses in the other two companies added several dozen more soldiers to the casualty rolls. As the survivors boarded helicopters and left the torn, pockmarked hill behind, their young filthy faces were tinged with the glazed, dazed, exhausted mask of heavy combat. Their bravery, combined with lethal fire support, had won a tactical victory at Hill 724, albeit one that did nothing to enhance American strategic aims in Vietnam. The Americans left the hard-won hill and resumed their pursuit of the NVA. The Dak To pattern was set.
5
“I just knew that nobody was gonna get out of there alive”: Task Force Black on Veterans Day
Most of them were volunteers. The 173rd Airborne Brigade was comprised of young men who had chosen to become airborne infantrymen. To achieve this status, they had endured rugged training. A few of them were draftees, but the vast majority had elected to join the Army, usually out of patriotism, machismo, or a thirst for adventure. Their nickname was “the Sky Soldiers,” but in Vietnam they only made one combat jump. Instead, they functioned as the ultimate light infantrymen, grunts to the core. Their unit was arguably the hardest working in Vietnam. Since arriving in 1965, the 173rd had spent almost all of its time in the field, operating as a veritable fire brigade for Westy. Wherever the action was thickest, wherever the terrain was the most challenging, the Sky Soldiers were there. “We lived like animals,” Private Ken Lambertson said. “We didn’t go back to the rear. We didn’t go back and party and drink and get high and all that.” Sky Soldiers like Lambertson lived “in the elements, [with] the snakes, the critters . . . the leeches.” In this unit, luxuries were unheard of. Troopers subsisted on C rations, coffee, and Kool-Aid. In a one-year tour of duty, a typical Sky Soldier spent all but a few weeks in the field, humping a sixty-pound rucksack, dealing with the heat, digging fighting holes, going without adequate sleep, facing danger day and night. “Such a rifleman was faced with so many hazards and hardships that the cards were completely stacked against him to ever make it out of that jungle without becoming a casualty to some degree or other,” one of the unit’s senior NCOs later wrote.
The paratroopers had fought around Dak To during the summer of 1967, so they knew the place was the NVA’s backyard and that going back there would mean heavy fighting. Many of them had premonitions that they were getting into something terrible. “When we were told we were going back to Dak To, it got really serious,” Sergeant David Watson later said. “We knew it was gonna be serious again.” Now, in November, they were back to this foreboding, unhappy place, on the trail of their old NVA adversaries.
Like their comrades in the Ivy Dragoons, they had little trouble finding their quarry. On the windy evening of November 10, a company and a half of paratroopers laagered atop a hill mass close to Cambodia, over twenty miles west of Hill 724. Like the area that surrounded it, the hill was thick with bamboo trees, vines, and the moldy detritus of the jungle. This Sky Soldier group consisted of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry, along with two platoons of the battalion’s Dog Company. Collectively this force of just under two hundred paratroopers was known as Task Force Black. They were under the command of Captain Thomas McElwain, Charlie’s CO, a self-made former enlisted man from West Virginia who had been in the Army for ten years but was still two weeks shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. Honest, fair, and professional, McElwain had been in command only a couple months but had already built up a strong loyalty among his men, who affectionately called him “Captain Mac.”