guys got a little banged up with twisted ankles and the like, but not enough to take them out of action.
Our climb down the jagged rocks was tricky and painfully slow, but everyone got down with only a few bruises and cuts and moved quickly to our objective rallying point at the base of the rocks. From there we dispatched the four-man security teams that would cut off the village from the north and south. To avoid premature discovery, we tried to synchronize our movements to place the security teams and the assault force in position at the same time.
I moved with the attack force down the beach toward a long, north-south-running sand dune we were using as our line of deployment. This was an ideal place for launching the assault. It was about a hundred meters from the edge of the village and allowed us to come up on line for the attack from a covered and concealed position, with the crashing surf providing noise cover.
Things went well as we moved to our release points and began coming on line at the base of the dune. I hoped both of our main assumptions were correct — that the enemy’s defense would be oriented inland and that we were facing only a squad-sized unit.
Both assumptions were wrong.
We weren’t facing a squad but a reinforced company; and their defense was either oriented toward the sea or out over a full 360 degrees.
We crossed the crest of the sand dune and slowly started down, waiting for the signal to start the assault — the firing of the machine guns on our flanks. This was to lead us by fire to the edge of the village, then the machine guns would displace forward to join the attack and protect our flanks.
But before that happened, the enemy spotted us and opened up with machine guns and everything else they had. We immediately responded and went into the assault.
As we raced down the dune firing away, I saw the enemy tracers streaming over our heads, flying everywhere. Too many for just a squad, I realized. I also realized that their defense was facing the sea… and us. I could tell it was a well-organized defense, with the fires interlocking — a wall of flame, not something you want to move into — but, fortunately, all the fire was high. This can happen when a defense is oriented on a piece of terrain, like the dune, that slopes upward. In those seconds it took us to close on their lines, I said a quick prayer of thanks for that. Another prayer of thanks came a couple of seconds later, when it became clear that our fire, unlike the enemy’s, was effective, and their line was breaking.
As they retreated back into the village huts, we began a house-to-house fight, trying to stay on line so no enemy would get behind us. This meant we had to scrap our plan to race some troops through the village to the western end to cover the paddies, but there were too many bad guys and too many places to hide to take a chance with fire from our rear.
Meanwhile, I could also hear firing from our security teams covering the north-south trails.
The systematic clearing of the village took the remainder of the night (we fired flares to illuminate the area).
We were scheduled for a helo pickup at first light, and I hoped we wouldn’t be hit by VC reinforcements before then (though we had a plan to bring in a reaction force of Vietnamese Marines if we ran into a tough spot).
By sunrise, we had cleared the village, consolidated our position, and secured the landing zone for the helos.
The Vietnamese Marine captain who was our raid force commander then received the reports: We had taken a considerable number of wounded, but remarkably none had been killed, and none of the wounded had life-threatening injuries. We counted nineteen enemy killed and thirty-two captured. From these we learned that the American POW had indeed been with them, but he had been moved out across the paddies when the shooting started.
I immediately requested that air observers try to pick up any fleeing VC, but they saw nothing, and when our reaction force came in to search the area later that morning they also had no luck. A disappointing end to an extremely well-executed raid.
The key to the Vietnamese Marines’ success was their superb set of battalion and company commanders. At one time or other, I operated with most of the infantry companies, so I had a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
Only one commander failed to reach the high operational standards I’d learned to expect. His leadership ability was poor and his tactical skills were marginal. He was also unusually vain and prissy for a Marine (he always had much more “stuff” with him than the normally lean-traveling Marines); he seemed to have the “privileged” attitude that you more usually found in ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers. But his major problem was his inability to handle more than one thing at a time — a critical requirement for a combat leader. A combat commander in a fight has to do twenty things at once. This almost cost me and his men our lives.
At that time, we were operating among the deserted villages near the coast, continuously moving a company through them to keep the VC from establishing a base of operations — and to keep the former inhabitants from sneaking back home. Though we rotated companies every couple of weeks to give them a break, junior advisers were scarce, and I stayed out to join each company returning to the area.[16] After a while, some company commander must have noticed that I was looking haggard and mentioned to the battalion commander that I should get a break. I didn’t like that idea. A lot was going on out there that only an adviser could take care of.
But on the next turnover the commander ordered me to come back to base. “You come in with the company coming in,” he told me, “and we’ll just put a company out there without an adviser.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m staying. We can’t have a company out there with no adviser.”
“Well, look,” he said, “come in with a company. Get cleaned up. Take a break. We’ve got mail back here for you. Just take a day, at least, and then you can go back out. We’ll hold a platoon commander and a squad back from the company going out to accompany you back to the unit.”
“Okay, I’ll come in and take a day,” I said. I had to admit that a break was tempting; it didn’t seem like there was a hell of a lot going on; and a day was not a long time.
I had one major concern, however. The company going out was the one commanded by the weak officer. It was actually a good company with good platoon commanders, but the short time I’d already spent with them had given me worries about his competence in a tough situation on his own.
At any rate, I came in and cleaned up, got my gear squared away, ate a decent meal, got caught up on my mail, and had a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
About midday, I got together with the lieutenant platoon leader to go over the patrol route and review the procedures for our move. This was bad guy land, and we took no chances. I was impressed with this savvy young man; he was mature and proficient beyond his years.
We met early the next morning at the agreed time and departed friendly lines.
As we got closer to the company’s position, we heard firing. That was a surprise. There had been no reports of their contact with the enemy; and when I called back to battalion to check, they didn’t have any reports, either. Since it was obvious we had to find out what was going on, we stopped the patrol close to their lines and got hold of the company commander on the radio.
“I have VC on three sides and am under heavy fire,” he told us. The volume of fire we could hear seemed to confirm this.
A lot of questions instantly ran through my head: The VC and the NVA were a very sophisticated enemy. They almost always initiated contact — always probing and testing to see how good you were. If you responded and you nailed them hard, they’d break off quickly and fade away. But if they saw they weren’t getting hit hard, they’d press the attack and bring in reinforcements, hoping for an easy kill. My experience was that if we burned them right at the start, they’d break off. No way were they going to get into a pitched battle with somebody
