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Smell of Battle Worst Experience For Person Moving Into Combat |
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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 BLACK Enquirer Military Writer |
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There is the greasy stench of napalm, the sickening smell of rocket explosions from the 2.75 missiles carried on helicopters, and the smell of death. It is a smell which seems to sink into your clothing and to coat your skin.
Coming into a fight on the
second day is always hardest for me, anyway.
The fever pitch of the initial contact, the tensions and strains
of the
first fighting, leave little facilities for sensing the tragedies of
battle. That impact comes when there is
time to
recognize wounded men, to feel the grief of knowing the ones who died.
We walked through the woods
toward the sounds of the fighting and I could already smell the battle
ahead. I wished then I had stayed back
at Pleiku or Landing Zone Columbus. There
was a sudden burst of explosions ahead of us and I forgot the kind of
thoughts
I had been having in a rush for cover.
Lt. Col. Robert McDade had
brought Company A, 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry and
one
platoon of his Company B, along with Capt. Forrest’s B Company from Lt.
Col.
Fred Ackerman’s 1st Battalion 5th Cavalry, through the woods on this
reinforcement mission without incident until now. I
heard his very calm voice on Capt. Forrest’s radio in a few
minutes.
“We’ve taken two casualties
in all. No problem. The
way is clear right on up to X-Ray now so
let’s move out,” he said.
We walked ahead and I saw
two men being bandaged by combat medics, the heroes of every action I
witnessed
in South Viet Nam. They didn’t seem to
be badly wounded. (Two helicopters had
come in and pounded the area with rockets to clear out some light
opposition, I
found out later, and fragments from this fire had wounded the soldiers,
the
only casualties of the incident.)
Armed helicopters kept
bobbing up over the trees, I got just fleeting glimpses of them as they
dove
down trailing smoke from rockets and machine gun bursts.
The “whoosh” of the rockets and the rattle
of their guns was almost covered up in the general racket of the fight
up
ahead.
Landing Zone X-Ray was just
another elongated clearing. It was
seared with napalm, the bordering trees shattered and splintered by
bullets and
shrapnel, the haze of smoke, piles of equipment and supplies, the
turmoil and
uproar all seemed too terribly familiar to me by now.
I felt that I had been around these clearings too long. I wanted to somehow get away from this one
but we kept walking toward it through the thinning trees.
I left Capt. Forrest and ran
across the landing zone itself. The
poncho-wrapped bundles of our dead, the pile of our equipment dropped
by
wounded and dead soldiers, was close by the huge mound of weapons and
equipment
from the enemy dead.
I saw Lt. Col. Moore
standing near a big ant hill, pride in his face but crying, smiling
with tears
on his face.
“We whipped hell out them
but I’ve lost some good boys,” he said as I stopped.
“These boys are
magnificent. I feel so much pride in
them I can’t even express it and my God how I hate to think about the
brave
ones I’ve lost! You’ve got to tell the
people back in the United States what these boys are like!
Nobody can realize how wonderful these boys
are unless they’ve seen them here. . . kids with two weeks to do in the
Army
fighting their hearts out like this.
We’re winning a battle here, but the credit goes to those
soldiers,” he
said.
Air Force jets suddenly
roared down and smashed at the timber to the southeast.
A splinter from one of the 250 pound bombs
they hurled into the woods landed between us.
A roll of M-16 fire came from that area as the four F-100’s
pulled out
of their screaming dives.
“I’ve got a company moving
in over there. That was where Charlie
Company fought it out with a PAVN battalion.
They were fighting in their own positions at the last. They put three mass charges in on Charlie
Company and didn’t budge it. There are
stacks of PAVN bodies in front of them, more than 250 right in one
little
area. The company you came up with from
the Second of the Seventh is going in there now and they will get a
fight,” he
said.
We sat down by the anthill
for a few minutes and he told me what had happened, pointing to the
places
where it happened, taking time to send out a reassuring message when
sniper
fire crackled from one quarter that “. . . there are men going in to
clear that
area, don’t worry about it, they’ll get them.”
Charlie Company had landed
and cleared the landing zone.
“They were starting to open
some C’s, we had been here about an hour getting our perimeter set up
and
ready. One platoon of Bravo Company
went up that little finger of high ground to our southwest there. We caught two prisoners then, found them in
the brush over there. They said they
were too sick to run when the rest of their outfit pulled out of here. They said there were two battalions of
PAVN’s on the mountain waiting to kill Americans and that they were
coming. They hit us then.
“Charlie Company pushed out
to the southeast and stopped a battalion coming on that approach. A wonderful sergeant, Sgt. Myron Savage had
to take over the Bravo Company platoon.
He was wonderful, just wonderful.
He piled up more than 60 North Vietnamese in front of one
machine
gun. That platoon was cut off for 20
hours and when they came out they still had ammunition to fight with. They kept the PAVN’s from using that
approach, in fact. Sgt. Savage called
in air and artillery and adjusted it and kept that outfit fighting. We assaulted three times trying to get
through to them the first afternoon, we just got men up there to get
them out,
in fact.
“The Air Force forward air
controller radioed us that the other side of that mountain was alive
with men
coming out of the valley back there. We
had everything waiting for them! We had
artillery, aerial rockets, Air Force and Navy air support, and these
great kids
we have just outfought the enemy rifle to rifle! There are PAVN dead
piled up
in front of every position. We’ve
counted more than 800 of them already,” Col. Moore said.
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