(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
I could see running figures about 100 yards from the bullet-scarred saplings growing from a huge anthill (they get 10 feet high in South Viet Nam) where Lt. Col. Hal Moore had commanded the battle at Chu Pong Mountain.
The infantrymen were
throwing grenades and I heard firing.
They seemed to be working their way into a thickly brushed rise
of
ground. Men crouched in holes to my
right front, watching the action narrowly, sticking close to business
even
while the troops taking over from the 1st Battalion 7th Cavalry moved
ahead.
I went up to some holes
occupied by Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion 7th Cavalry, who had come in
and taken
the pressure off the long-embattled Charlie Company of the 1st of the
7th. Sgt. Robert Goodson made room for me
in his
hole.
“Get in here, we’re still
getting fire from over there. I thought
sure that was the last of them and they just opened up again,” he said.
I got into the hole and took
note of the litter of M-16 brass and empty magazines around it. The PAVN fire was light and not particularly
aimed at our sector, apparently. I looked
over the edge of the hole and I could see the greenish-gray bundles of
clothing
that were North Vietnamese soldiers killed in front of this position
during
their desperate attacks.
“We had to move some of the
heaps of bodies out there. They were in
our line of fire. Just as far as you
can see up that slope there are bodies piled up. There
must be 2,000 of them killed around here,” Sgt. Goodson
said.
The firing took on the
continuous, crashing uproar of heavy contact then.
I still couldn’t determine if there was anything coming in but
the M-16s around us suddenly opened up, lacing a line of trees to the
left of
where the Americans had been maneuvering when I came up.
“Hold that fire! They’re
clearing that area, hold your fire,”
somebody shouted and the rifles around me stopped.
The shooting in the woods kept hammering and then it stopped.
“They ran into some of
them. They took care of them,” Sgt.
Goodson said grimly after the shooting tapered away.
I was with Capt. Myron
Diduryk’s company. Lt. Henry Dunn and
Lt. Bill Lund were running sections of this perimeter and both
maintained they
had “the best bunch of people in the U.S. Army” in the holes in their
sector. The company had made a fierce
assault in
clearing the area of PAVNs and relieving the men who had made the
do-or-die
stand here in the battle’s opening hours.
I heard about Lt. Joseph
Marm’s now-famous feat in this section of the fight.
His platoon had been held up by heavy automatic fire from behind
a big anthill. PAVNs had dug in behind
its shelter, turning the mound into an impromptu fortification.
“He shot a LAW rocket into
it and blew it half away. Then he
assaulted with a sergeant, throwing grenades.
The sergeant was killed but Lt. Marms got right into them. He threw grenades over the mound and then
went around it shooting with his M-16.
There were 18 dead men when he got finished.
He got hit going on into
the next PAVN defense line. He was hit
in the neck but he was in good shape when they put him on a chopper for
evacuation,” Sgt. Goodson told me.
Choppers were coming into
the landing zone behind us now and I heard no fire in our vicinity so I
moved
back from the perimeter. Lt. Col. Moore
was talking to Brig. Gen. Richard Knowles and Col. Thomas Brown, who
had just
come in.
Men were now laying smoke
screens, throwing smoke grenades along the edges of the perimeter to
veil the
landing zone from the commanding heights of Chu Pong Mountain.
I joined what had turned into a sizable group of reporters around the assistant division commander and third brigade commander after they finished their conference with Lt. Col. Moore. Joe Galloway of United Press International was there, looking very tired and dirty. Lt. Col. Moore came over and pointed to Galloway.
“He was here with me right
from the start. He got in on the whole
fight” he told me.
I
felt jealous of Galloway for a minute and then realized that I was too
tired
after the last 30 days or so to have had any business in the early,
desperate
part of this battle. I still felt as if
I had not quite done what I was supposed to do by taking that day in
Saigon and
not going in with my friends from the “Gary Owen” battalions.
I told Galloway I was glad
he had been along with them and he made me very proud of the 1st
Cavalry
Division then.
“Charlie, these are the
greatest soldiers that have ever gone into a fight!
There hasn’t been any outfit like this one before.
It’s something I wish every American in the
world could understand, what these kids did here. Look
over there, doesn’t that make you feel good?” Galloway said.
He was pointing to a tree,
shattered and broken about 10 feet from the ground.
Some tired soldier has
climbed it and put up an American flag, a very small one tied to a
little stick
he had cut from the South Vietnamese undergrowth. He
must have carried it in his pack for a long time waiting for
the best possible moment to put it up.
He couldn’t have found a
better one. The flag had never had a
prouder moment than here at the foot of Chu Pong Mountain.
Henri Huet, one of
Associated Press’ very best and very bravest photographers, whom I had
met
during a 101st Airborne Division operation three months ago, came over
to where
Galloway and I were sitting.
“They are going to pull back
from here. Gen Knowles said it is to
expand the killing zone. This is a bad
place anyway, right under that ridge, but I think what he
meant was that they have something else up
their sleeve. If you want to go back to
Pleiku, we can catch that chopper over there,” Huet told us.
I was tired, physically and spiritually beat and feeling the first twinges of some kind of vague ailment (Vietnamese ailments are often the bane of medics trying to get descriptive information from feverish, stomach-troubled, aching men who can’t quite explain it all) and I was glad to get the ride.
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