The Americans were taking rifle, machine-gun, grenade, rocket, and even recoilless rifle fire. Men were getting hit left and right. “There is no sound in this world like a bullet tearing through a human body,” Private Joe Aldridge said. “It sounded like slaps.” Sergeants kept imploring their men to get up the hill, but that was impossible. The Sky Soldiers were actually right in the middle of a mutually supporting, expertly built NVA bunker complex, exactly where the enemy wanted to fight them. Some of the soldiers were no more than five meters away from bunkers. The enemy fighting positions were so well camouflaged in this mazelike jungle that it was quite difficult for the Americans to see them at all—at least until it was too late. Many of the bunkers were connected by underground tunnels. Even when the troopers succeeded in pitching grenades into apertures or killing enemy soldiers, others soon came through the tunnels, into the same bunkers, replacing their dead comrades. For the most part, the grunts were shooting blind. Many of them simply pointed their weapons in the vague direction of danger and snapped off shots.
Sergeant Welch was hugging the ground, listening to AK-47 and machine-gun bullets impact around him. In nearly a year in Vietnam, he had never experienced fire this intense. A medic crawled up next to Welch. The sergeant ordered him to go help a wounded man. He crept a few feet forward but got killed before he could get to the soldier. As in any firefight this serious, people were shouting, crying, and raging. The average soldier saw only a few feet in any direction and had no clue what was happening. “Everybody that moved seemed to get hit,” Lieutenant Bart O’Leary, Dog Company’s commander, recalled. “Progress sort of stalled at that time.” Throughout the morning, at Major Steverson’s behest, the paratroopers tried multiple assaults up the hill. Every one of them failed.
Finally, Captain Kaufman, the senior company commander, decided to call off the attack and pull everyone into a perimeter. While the soldiers laboriously extricated themselves from the kill zones of various bunkers and crawled back down the hill, fighter planes dropped bombs and napalm near the crest. Under fire all the way, the grunts managed to set up mutually supporting positions about twenty meters down from the initial point of contact. “The men began to dig in with knives, steel pots or anything else they could work with,” an officer later wrote.
16
A few dozen meters down the hill from them, Captain Michael Kiley, commander of Alpha Company, ordered his Weapons Platoon to cut an LZ and a collecting point for the wounded while his other platoons fanned out. His 1st Platoon protected the rear flank, closer to the bottom of the hill. The other two tried to tie in with Dog and Charlie Companies, a difficult task because the Alpha soldiers were spread very thin, mostly along the trail, in thick vegetation. They could hardly see the next squad, much less the other companies.
Nearer the bottom of the hill, about forty meters away from the company, four 1st Platoon soldiers were on OP duty, guarding the rear of the entire American force on the hill. Private First Class Carlos Lozada, a tough twenty-one-year-old kid from the Bronx, was lying just to the left of the trail, in a nice firing position, hunched over an M60 machine gun. Beside him was Spec-4 John Steer, his assistant gunner. His team leader, Spec-4 James Kelley, and Private First Class Anthony Romano were hiding behind some bushes to the right of the trail. Romano was incensed: “This is stupid . . . a fucking suicide mission,” he huffed. The others shushed him and then he stalked away, back to the company. Soon thereafter they heard mortar shells exploding behind them. The rounds were detonating near the company command group, but the outpost men did not know that. The three men peered down the trail and noticed movement. A column of NVA soldiers emerged, no more than about twenty or thirty meters away, and walked right toward them. “They had on regular uniforms with bushes tied on them and black painted on their faces to camouflage themselves,” Steer said. “Also, they had burlap sacks tied around their weapons.”
Lozada waited until they were within fifteen meters and then opened up. “Kelley, here they come!” he yelled. He unloosed a long burst that caught the NVA by complete surprise and scythed through several of them. The rest scattered in every direction. On the other side of the trail, Kelley hurled two grenades and emptied a full magazine of M16 bullets in their direction. In spite of the heavy American fire, the enemy soldiers fired back with rifles and RPGs and kept coming. “They were trotting toward us in rows,” Steer said, “they would run, drop down and get up and run some more. And they kept coming. They got real close.” Steer kept feeding ammo into Lozada’s gun. The two soldiers screamed at each other over the din of the weapons, intently looking for new targets. Steer saw an NVA only a few yards away. “I don’t know how this guy got so close. I emptied an entire magazine into him.”
By most estimates, Lozada alone killed as many as twenty enemy soldiers. Kelley and Steer killed six more. Still the NVA kept coming. These men represented the vanguard of two NVA companies that were leading a battalion-sized assault on the rear of the attacking American force. To get in position, they had moved along carefully prepared and concealed trails and hillside steps. The NVA was planning an elaborate bait and switch. While the American force was pinned down by the formidable nest of bunkers on Hill 875, these two NVA companies were to attack from behind, cut off and isolate the paratroopers, and kill them. The outpost men held them up for several valuable minutes while Alpha Company reacted to the surprise attack.
Several men from the 1st Platoon heard the sound of the shooting and ran to help the outpost men. At least three got wounded. Private First Class Romano carried one of them farther up the hill. He and several other soldiers yelled at the OP men to retreat. “They either didn’t hear or refused . . . as they continued to fire and to throw grenades at the advancing enemy, who by now had gotten on both sides of us and threatened to surround us,” Romano recalled.
At the outpost, the situation was getting critical. Spec-4 Kelley yelled for his machine-gun team to displace to his side of the trail. As Lozada kept firing, Steer dashed over to Kelley. Lozada stood up, held his M60 at the hip, and blazed away until he made it behind the log where Kelley and Steer had taken cover. The NVA were all over the place now and Kelley knew they had only moments to escape. “Lozada refused,” Kelley said. “He would not pull back even when [the NVA] were just meters away.” Kelley shot and killed one nearby camouflaged enemy soldier and then his weapon jammed. He got it fixed and hollered at his men to retreat. Lozada also had a jam but he cleared it, resumed firing, and told his buddies to fall back. In the confusion, as Steer was turning to go, he glanced to his right and saw enemy soldiers tromping past them. “Get down, Carlos!” he roared. In the next instant, two bullets slammed into Steer’s back and his left arm. He spun around and saw Lozada up on the trail, starting to fall back. A bullet tore through the New Yorker’s head and he went down in a heap. “He died in my arms,” Steer said. “My eyes were wild and crazy. I was crying and saying how they had got Lozada.” Kelley hurled a couple grenades, keeping the NVA at bay long enough to somehow collect the hysterical Steer and run up the trail, back to the platoon. Lieutenant Joseph Sheridan, leader of the 3rd Platoon, believed that the young machine gunner “gave the company the time to regroup and rejoin the task force.” Lozada earned the Medal of Honor for his bravery in holding off the enemy attackers. In Kelley’s estimation, the Bronx native “gave his life so that his comrades could be saved.”
17
In the meantime, the two NVA companies, with plenty of supporting mortar and rocket fire, were assaulting all out against the rear of the American perimeter, hitting Alpha Company especially hard. “Nothing was stopping them,” Private Miguel Orona, a rifleman, recalled. “They kept coming. It was like we were shooting through ’em.” Some of the NVA soldiers were emboldened by narcotics. “Several had strange grins on their faces,” a paratrooper later wrote. “One trooper reported seeing an NVA charge into a tree, bounce off and continue his charge.”
The situation was so desperate that they overran and killed the company command group, including Captain Kiley. They also executed several of the nearby wounded men. Lieutenant Tom Remington, the 2nd Platoon leader, led an abortive attempt to rescue Kiley and his men but ran into heavy opposition. Remington himself got seriously wounded. “I had a bad shrapnel wound in my leg and then a few seconds later, I was shot in the shoulder. Of . . . ten men with me, I think maybe five were dead and [the] other five were wounded. So . . . we never got to Captain Kiley.” The company’s survivors carried out a harried, fighting retreat up the hill, into the perimeter established by Dog and Charlie Companies.
They placed their many wounded in a bomb crater in the middle of the perimeter. Eventually there were close to one hundred wounded men in and around this spot. Some could still fight. Others were too badly wounded to do anything but lie still and cling to life. Men were crying, pleading for their lives, raging at the enemy or their wounds, and calling out for their mothers.
The medics had suffered devastating casualties. Many were dead. Others were wounded.
Father Watters was on a one-man mission of mercy, risking his life all over the hill, retrieving and tending to wounded men, whether in or out of the perimeter. He moved around so much, amid such devastating fire, that it hardly seemed possible he could remain unscathed. Lieutenant Bryan McDonough saw him scurry through snapping bullets and plop down beside one of the dying medics. “He cradled him in his arms, saying a quick prayer over him. After giving him last rites and blessing him, he moved forward toward the enemy to the next wounded man.” He did this more times than anyone could count. In the lieutenant’s estimation, the brave priest’s actions inspired the soldiers “on to greater risks and very brave deeds.”
He carried or dragged an untold number of wounded men to the relative safety of the bomb crater. He distributed ammo and water. In spite of the extreme danger he was in, he hardly seemed to notice. “He showed no strain or stress especially when among the wounded,” one soldier later wrote. “The men talked to him freely and I’m sure he prevented several from going into shock.” Several of the soldiers pleaded with him to get down but he paid them no heed. When Captain Kaufman urged him to take cover, he replied: “It is all right, someone has to do it.” He moved among the wounded, dispensing water, praying with them, talking to them, keeping their spirits up. With water and medical supplies running perilously low, he used his holy water and wine to bring some relief to wounded soldiers. “He was my hero,” one soldier later said. “He cared so much for us. He was always there. There was no task that was too difficult.”
It is fair to say that no one was more inspirational that day than Watters. Although he was a man of peace who carried no weapon, no one instilled more fighting spirit in the troopers. He was the very embodiment of mercy, self-sacrifice, and duty. To frightened young men in a life-and-death situation, he was the face of God. He took crazy chances yet he did not get hit. To some, it seemed as if God was protecting him from the enemy bullets and fragments, as if a miracle was happening before their very eyes. At one point, Spec-4 Zaccone happened to glance over and see the priest with a dying soldier in his lap, administering last rites. “The sun happened to be shining down through the trees. He smiled at me. It was like this reassuring smile, his way of giving me some encouragement.” The two men waved at each other.
Watters’s smile was so peaceful, so reassuring, that it gave Zaccone some measure of peace himself, even amid such violent circumstances. “No one could quite believe the things that Father Watters did unless they had witnessed it,” another man later said.
18
As had occurred with alarming frequency throughout the Dak To campaign, the NVA at Hill 875 had forced a potent American ground force into an isolated, surrounded, hard-pressed perimeter. From well-hidden—and expertly displacing—positions on adjacent hills, NVA mortar and rocket crews hurled their deadly projectiles at the Americans. All over the perimeter, their comrades probed and attacked, provoking ruthless firefights between small groups of frightened men. “I was between two riflemen,” Sergeant Welch recalled, “and I looked to one side and saw the right eye explode in the guy’s head as the bullet went through it. Then, when I looked to my right, the other guy caught one in the forehead and he flopped down and . . . died.” As always, the Americans fought back with stubborn determination and almost incomprehensible valor. They huddled in their shallow holes, picked their targets carefully, and held the line.
Try as they might, the NVA could not breach the perimeter. But they made it nearly impossible for helicopters to resupply the hard-pressed paratroopers. Any chopper approaching the hill flew through a gauntlet of small-arms, machine-gun, and rocket fire. The lower they flew, the worse the fire. Six helicopters were hit so badly that they were barely able to limp back to their base a few miles away at Ben Het. One crew did succeed in dropping, from an altitude of eighty feet, a couple pallets of ammunition into the perimeter. Sergeants distributed the ammo—mainly grenades and M16 magazines—as evenly as possible. Another pallet of ammo landed fifteen meters beyond the American lines on a downslope halfway between the opposing sides. Rushing beyond the perimeter, a recovery team attempted to recover the ammunition. The NVA reacted quickly, spraying machine-gun and rifle fire all around the pallet. Several soldiers tried to drag the crates back to friendly lines while Lieutenant Peter Lantz, another member of West Point’s class of 1966, unleashed covering fire in the direction of the enemy. An NVA sniper squeezed off a perfect shot, killing the lieutenant instantly. The men had to leave his body where it fell.