By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
AN KHE, Viet Nam - The
helicopter assault by the First Battalion 502nd Airborne Infantry,
101st
Airborne Division hadn’t gone as planned.
The unit had been due to hit
8,000 meters from a little village on a creek in a valley which was a
well-known Viet Cong training area manned by one and sometimes two
hard-core
Communists battalions.
Lt. Col. Willford Smith, the
assault commander, had changed his mind and picked a landing zone
almost at the
foot of the little village. He had no
reason not to do so. One LZ was like
another in this area. It was marked on
the maps with a big square, and no real hard information was available
concerning the VC headquarters location.
His force was simply to sweep through while a pair of blocking
forces
made up of the First Battalion 327th Infantry Task Force Hansen lay in
wait for
fleeing Viet Cong.
The almost accidental change
in landing zones, done to eliminate the long approach march to the
actual
suspect area, changed every feature of the operation.
PFC Steve Van Meter, a photographer with the First Brigade,
101st
Airborne Division public information office, had tried to go with Task
Force
Hansen, the unit I accompanied during the four-day operation, but was
assigned
to the helicopters. He had been
disappointed because, he said “it looks like another operation where
you won’t
see anything and just walk yourself to death.”
The 19-year-old Wheeling, W.
Va., paratrooper sat down with me the night I came in from four days of
walking
and talked about what he had seen and one.
I had just received a tape recorder through the mail with some
rather
confusing instructions from George Gingell of WRBL about its operation. Gingell had put the instructions on a tape
which I had to play in order to find out how to play the machine. I succeeded in erasing the first half of
them before getting the right buttons, but an influx of radio and
television
experts since the battle near here saved the day. I
recorded PFC Van Meter’s account. This,
with parenthetical notes to fill in details, is from that
recording.
(The tape was played over by
a group of late-comer reporters, so PFC Van Meter’s account is probably
fairly
famous by now. Steve told a saga of the
courage of outnumbered paratroopers, caught in a prepared ambush, who
simply
killed Viet Cong at a rate of four and five to one in a gunfight.)
The young soldier landed
from the fourth helicopter in the first assault wave, a Marine H-34,
and said
that he thought “sure enough, another operation where I won’t see
anything.”
“Then in about five minutes
I heard some firing to the rear and I walked over that way thinking I
could get
some pictures,” he said.
He met a squad of troopers
hurrying along a trail and joined them.
A burst of firing came.
“The man on my right was hit
over the left eye. . . the man on my right yelled; he was hit in the
arm. I emptied the magazine from my M-16
at a
group of about 25 VC firing at us from a hill and took off. I could barely see them. They
were well camouflaged; you could just
see them when they moved,” he said.
An after-action report said
the dead Viet Cong had wire-mesh disks which they tied to their
clothing and
which they covered with vegetation.
They popped up out of small spider holes, firing at close range,
and
their machine gun and mortar positions had been carefully located and
prepared
long in advance.
PFC Van Meter said the heavy
firing commenced when the second wave landed about 25 minutes later. The first wave had been pinned down and had
never been able to completely secure the landing zone.
Most of the helicopters hit (four were shot
down and later evacuated; 24 more were hit with 20 seriously damaged. Two helicopter crewmen, including a member
of the 1st Cavalry making a medical evacuation run to the battle scene,
were
killed during the afternoon ahead.)
“Mortars, heavy machine
guns, automatic weapons - everything opened up then,” he said.
He told of being pinned down
behind a paddy wall with a platoon while a heavy machine gun snapped
rounds
just overhead.
“There was a time when I
felt just plain terror. I could hear
those bullets; they sounded as if each one kept getting closer and
closer, and
I thought then that I was going to die.
Then I got over it just as the machine gun quit and it got very
quiet. The captain by me raised up to
see what was going on. It was a
mistake. A machine gun burst struck him
and he fell back. The medics tried to
save him but he was killed instantly.
It was very sudden, it was just after the first shock I had gone
through
and it was very unsettling,” PFC Van Meter said.
He said then that he heard
“a bunch of screaming and yelling and guys were running across the LZ
up a
hill. We didn’t know if they were ours
coming to help or what. Then I saw the
major, the battalion executive officer.
He was in front shooting his .45 and taking the attack up. They tried twice and I saw three Viet Cong
pop up out of a hole just as the major was hit by a machine gun burst
and pump
bullets into him and a soldier who ran up to try to help him. A guy took care of those three with an M-79
grenade round. I saw a PFC, nobody
knows who but they are trying to find out, run over to the mortar up
there and
actually tear the sight off of it and throw it away,” PFC Van Meter
said.
He said that the mortar fire
was “inaccurate and ineffective” later in the evening and through the
night,
and said the PFC, probably one of the casualties, “deserves credit for
saving
a lot of people. It
was a real brave thing.”
Airplanes had been kept out
of the fight by bad weather until the afternoon. M-Sgt.
Thomas J. Boudin and Platoon Sergeant (first name still
unobtainable) Whitman were given credit for bringing in A1E skyraiders
when the
weather broke.
“Somebody heard Whitman on
the PRC 25 radio talking to the pilots.
The pilot said ‘what’s this about a machine gun, babe? Just
point him
out.’ Whitman told him where it was
located and that plane came down and hit its first strike.
They came in then and worked over that area
around us. From the air it looked like
a ring had been blasted when I left the next
morning. Shrapnel from the bombs
fell around us it was so close, they sure helped, they deserve credit,”
PFC Van
Meter said.
The major who had been killed
was Maj. Herbert J. Dexter, the battalion operations officer who took
over in
the fighting when all three company commanders on the ground had been
knocked
out of the fight, one killed and two wounded.
“It was just a fight made by
a small unit against a big unit that had every advantage, and the big
unit got
whipped. Lt. Col. Smith was on the
radio at the last, directing squads and platoons. I
was near him. He was
very cool. He was concerned, but he was
very cool,” the photographer-soldier said.
The paratroopers commenced
getting artillery as well as air help then.
A battalion of the 1st Cavalry Division’s artillery was
airlifted into a
position where they could support the action.
The 101st Airborne artillery, which had been caught on the move
when the
fight started (the changed landing zone had forced them to change to
another
position), got into it.
As darkness fell, the
paratroopers (about 300 of them, counting both lifts which had gotten
into the
fight) had cleared the village and held a perimeter there.
A smaller group of about 35 men were located
south of the village and fought off harassing attacks until they were
down to
14 rounds of ammunition per man. A
relief force from the 327th Infantry walked to within a mile of the
area and
settled in for the night. Task Force
Hansen had been switched from an earlier blocking position and walked
14 hours
to a perimeter under a high ridge traversed by a one-man trail, the
back door
to what had now become a trap for the Viet Cong if the beleaguered
paratroopers
in the village were not overrun during the night.
They held their ground. “Smoky
Bear,” the nickname for C123s and
Caribous which fly flare missions at night, kept the entire village and
ridgelines around it lighted all night with the eerie illumination cast
by parachute
flares.
During the afternoon when
the supporting aircraft and artillery seemed to have hammered out a
secure
area, medical evacuation of the 25 wounded men then at the landing zone
was
attempted unsuccessfully, PFC Van Meter remembered.
“The VC quit firing and the
choppers came in. I knew what would
happen, but I was praying I was wrong.
The wounded were out in the field in the open.
The VC cut loose with mortars and machine guns.
There wasn’t anything else for the choppers
to do; they would all have been zapped right there.
The took off with only four wounded aboard.
We got our first reinforcement then - a crew
chief was left behind and spent the night with us.” PFC Van Meter said. (The 1st Cavalry Division crew chief listed
as a casualty was hit here.)
The Viet Cong attempted
individual attacks during the night but withdrew before daybreak. There was hand-to-hand fighting then, he
said.
“Some of the men wounded
during the night were hit from six feet away.
Some had powder burns, in fact.
Our guys were grabbing VC and dragging them into their holes and
knocking
hell out of them, killing them right in the holes,” PFC Van Meter said.
He said that the camouflaged
spider holes used by the VC had been deadly during the early fighting.
“Our guys would go down a
trail and a VC would just pop up from the ground. I
was with some men and this happened. Two
of them just came up behind us. The guys
were too fast for these two, though. They
whirled and blew them apart with M-16
rounds,” PFC Van Meter said.
“I’m proud to have been
there. I was proud of our men. They fought their way out of a trap and won
a victory. We proved we can whip them
when they even have everything they want to fight us, when we’re
outnumbered
and when it is just our men against their men,” he said.
I was one ridge away from
the fighting during the night. I had
been slogging from a perilous river crossing made by Task Force Hansen,
a
composite group of soldiers from the First Infantry Division, the
Second Battalion
(Airborne) 17th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, and from other units,
commanded by Maj. Marcus Hansen of the 101st Airborne, toward a narrow
pass
which would close the door to the Viet Cong trying to escape.
A group of men from the
First Squadron Ninth Cavalry were with Task Force Hansen for “on the
job
training” before their squadron, commanded by Lt. Col. John D.
Stockton, went
into operations here. They came from
Capt. W. P. Gillette III’s Troop D and included Capt. Gillette, S-Sgt.
Joseph
N. Falabella, Sgt. Don F. Ritter and Lt. Daniel Isacowitz.
We heard the firing and air
strikes and had our perimeter lighted by the same flare planes keeping
illumination on the paratroopers’ fight in the next valley when we
finally
collapsed at the foot of the trail at about 8:30 p.m. on a miserably
rainy
night. A burst of sniper fire from
automatic weapons on the ridge above showed that the Viet Cong had also
arrived.
Lt. Wilson, commander of A
Troop, which I had walked with during the day, radioed in that we were
in
position and that we would go up the trail at dawn.
It didn’t seem possible that anybody who had been on the march
we
had just finished would be able to roll over at dawn, but he sounded as
if he
meant it.