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Helicopter Night Action Saves Trapped Platoons |
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(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has returned home after four months in Viet Nam. He was with men of the 1st Cavalry Division during many of their recent engagements with Communist guerrillas, and his articles on the war as he saw it will continue in The Enquirer daily.) By CHARLES BLACKEnquirer Military Writer |
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The clearing has grass two
feet high, a few black rocks, some big anthills where brush and trees
grew in
clumps, and was surrounded by hardwood, uplands timber.
Very few of the Americans
involved had been given a chance to dig in and they fought on top of
the
ground. The ferocity of the PAVN fire
and attempted assaults had kept the First Air Cavalry Division fighters
from getting
to the tree line in many places and they fought from the open field.
It was impossible to pull
wounded men from the actual firing line.
In the center of the field, Lt. John Tweedy had dug in his
mortar
platoon and Capt. Thomas Williams, the battalion surgeon, and Sp-5 Jay
Hockenbury, his senior medic, had set up shop before the attack started.
The center of the field was
exactly where all of the streams of tracers from the PAVN weapons made
a fiery
cross hatch and impossible to reach.
That point, the furthest from the firing lines, was the very
hottest spot
of them all, in fact.
Maj. Robert Zion’s command
post, actually a defense strongpoint on the southern perimeter, was
behind an
anthill.
Here the PAVN’s had not been
from the trees and they grew fairly thick.
Bark, twigs and branches kept flying as their bullets zipped in
from all
directions. A bullet fired at the other
end of the fight winged right on through the other side of it, every
place
along the line, in fact.
All around this circle at
about 4 a.m., there came a feeling that the PAVN attack would be pushed
home
with one last attempt to overwhelm us by sheer mass before dawn.
Everyone felt this way and
Maj. Zion had radioed that same feeling to Lt. Col. John Stockton, who
was at
the battalion base near Duc Co sweating it all out.
“Bullwhip Six,” as the radio
call sign for Lt. Col. Stockton had nicknamed him, wasn’t a man to
endure
things passively.
He had sent Capt. Theodore
Danielsen and two platoons from Duc Co in a wild - and absolutely
successful -
night ride on helicopters into the midst of a fierce fire fight. It was the first time in world history that
anyone had put infantrymen out of helicopters into such an affair.
It had been done with a
swashbuckling disregard for certain administrative steps and without
military
precedence of any kind, but it had been done with technical perfection
which
was almost unbelievable.
The armed helicopters, for
example, had laid down “final suppressive fire” at night, a tricky
thing to do
in daytime when pilots can see the perimeter they are shooting close to.
The unarmed lift ships had
landed without lights and under terrific fire, yet only two had been
hit and both
these only because they had tarried over-long to attempt to take out
casualties.
Capt. Danielsen, one of the
finest company commanders I have ever seen work, had taken his men into
a fight
at night on strange terrain and had organized a bristling fire line
which threw
back the best PAVN’s had to offer. The
troops he brought were paratroopers, seasoned and tough and aggressive.
The factors involved all had
to be bound together with combat luck, of course, and since that
quality is
also a precious commodity it is no detraction from Bullwhip Six to say
he
carries it with him.
The men in the clearing that
night had about decided the allotment of luck for them had run its
course at 4
a.m., however.
Without any orders, they
fixed the ugly little bayonets they had carried around on their belts
because
regulations said they should. It showed
me why the bayonet is kept around, in fact.
It became the grim message
from individual soldiers that they were going to fight it out here with
no
quarter asked or given.
Sgt. Gray and I talked about
that later.
“I could see the guys all
laying out their stuff. They put
magazines and grenades out, stuck their knives in the ground, and then,
without
anybody saying anything or any order given, they put those bayonets on
their
rifles.
“I did. I just
decided they weren’t going to get by
me as long as I could pull a trigger or swing a rifle.
I
would have fought them with my
fists. I had a bellyful of that lying
there waiting for them to choose their time.
I wanted them to come on and let’s have it all out right here,”
he told
me.
He grinned rather
sheepishly, then.
“When the sun came up, of
course, I was glad they hadn’t tried it.
I don’t know what came over us but it hit us all at the same
time. I don’t believe they had enough out
there to
have taken us, either,” he said.
The brutal surge of anger
which swept around the perimeter at 4 a.m. came from - of all things -
a sudden
quiet.
The PAVN’s quit firing
altogether. The bullets which beat the
ground, fired from trees, and the tracers which had whined in a low
scything
stream had suddenly quit. Our fire had
tapered and then stopped.
The lull made us very
angry. I believe the feeling was one
every man there had. It was something
which seemed to say they were getting together for the big charge and
that they
were confident they would take us.
It stayed quiet until 4:30
a.m., when there was an extremely violent volley of gunfire from all
sides put
on us.
The volley kept up for
several minutes and was answered with terrific ferocity from the
Americans. It seemed to grow weaker,
then it feel off to sporadic bursts from the trees around us.
I hitched myself around the
tree I had been behind most of the night and looked to the east and
realized
that I could see the other end of the field in gray dawn.
Then a huge, crackling
series of explosions came. Sparks and
flames shot up, seemingly right in the midst of our circle of riflemen.
I cowered behind the tree
and thought the next explosions surely would come near the helicopters. I decided to run for the other side of the
ant hill which covered my back when I saw the shape of a helicopter
swoop in
behind the explosions, machine guns firing.
“We’ve got it made! They’re
coming in with a battalion and we’ve
got gun ships all over the place! We’ve
got it made,” I heard Maj. Zion shout over the din.
The helicopters hawked back
and forth, dodging in and out of trees, shooting rockets, firing
machine
guns. I saw Capt. Danielsen leap up
from the ground and lift a line of his paratroopers with a wave and
send them
whooping and firing into the trees.
“Look at that . . . right
out of the trees. . . look at that,” Maj. Zion yelled.
I saw three bodies tumble
out of trees as rifle and M-60 machine gun slugs ripped at them.
There were more helicopters
now, six at a time disgorging fresh infantrymen from Lt. Col. Kenneth
Mertel’s
Mustang battalion.
The sun was bright. I
saw Capt. Danielsen, cigar, big smile,
eyes shining and followed by his tough “Alphagaters” coming in from
their slash
into the woods.
The fresh companies from his
battalion were already ranging out from the perimeter.
I listened. There was no firing. There was a lot of excited yelling and talking. I did my share of it. There wasn’t a man there who didn’t feel as if he had been born all over again when the sun came up that morning. I felt 10 feet tall but was surprised to find I wobbled when I walked.
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