condition to handle another attack from fresh troops.
A short time later, these assumptions proved to be true. They’d taken far more casualties than we’d thought: Our Marines had uncovered mass graves behind the enemy fighting positions — large pits containing piles of bodies hastily covered with palm fronds. We estimated there were as many as eighty bodies in one, and the others contained perhaps ten or twenty apiece. (I learned later that a total of 650 VC had been killed before the Marines arrived. This had been a major battle.)
By then I was up on the radio reporting our situation to our task force headquarters. Though Kinh did not want to be careless with such a potentially large force in front of us, he was an aggressive commander and eager to move out fast to catch the retreating VC.
In the light of this chance to grab more enemies, the reply from the task force was incredible. “The Corps command wants you to count the bodies in the pits,” they told me. Americans had a fixation on body counts. It was some mad managerial types’ way to “statistically” measure battlefield success. And it was senseless. Counting dead bodies was always nuts, but in this case it was triple nuts: Many of these corpses been in the pits for days; the intense heat had made the stench unbearable. But far more important, our troops were ready to move on. There was enemy out there that was reeling and vulnerable.
When I told Kinh what Corps command had ordered, he quietly said, “We don’t count bodies,” and gave the order to move out. That was good enough for me; and I happily told higher headquarters we weren’t going to do it. I took a lot of grief for that; but I’d been in Vietnam for ten months by then, and telling the rear to go pound sand no longer bothered me.
Soon we were moving into the remains of the village I remembered so well — an eerie scene that will always haunt me. The once-beautiful village was now rubble, the houses blown apart, the palm trunks snapped and twisted. There was a strong stench of dead bodies and animals; and a gray fog-like mist hanging over the place at treetop level made it difficult to see beyond a few dozen meters. (I guessed it had been caused by dust stirred up by the bombs and shells that had impacted in the area.)
The ghastly scene spooked the Marines. The VC didn’t scare them; but their highly superstitious nature was clearly convincing them this was a bad place.
We slowly moved on line across the destroyed village, staring intently into the mist. At one point we noticed a large portion of an animal hanging in a tree — a section of a water buffalo that had been blown apart. A little later, we came upon a man’s body, his face pale gray and the top of his head blown off. As we stared at him, we were startled by a sudden movement — a snake crawling out of his open skull.
To the Vietnamese troops, this was definitely a bad omen.
We nervously pressed on.
A little later, I dimly made out a motionless figure in the haze. The Marines, seeing it too, began to ready their weapons. The figure remained motionless. As we got closer, we began to realize it was a small boy. He was frozen, just staring straight ahead, totally unaware of us. When we reached him, a Vietnamese Marine took his hand and brought him along with us. He trotted along, still mute.
We continued on for several days[19] through many more equally horrific scenes.
Though we made occasional contact with the enemy, the VC was not interested in a fight. They’d just throw out a few shots to slow us down. We took some wounded from these small contacts, but nothing serious.
An officer lying next to me during one exchange of fire was hit by a round that penetrated only about an inch deep into his thigh — evidence that the enemy was shooting at us from a great distance, desperately hoping to keep us off their back. He easily popped it out.
After a time, intelligence reports from prisoner interrogations and accounts of villagers who had made their way out of the battle area began to filter down to us. The enemy unit we were chasing was identified as the 22nd NVA Regiment, augmented with some local VC elements. Badly mauled, the remnants were cut off by other U.S. and South Vietnamese units and further hammered as they fled for the hills to the west.
Some reports claimed the NVA commander was a woman, but that was never verified. We often got similarly crazy reports: A commander was seen riding a white horse or was a Chinese officer or a Russian. I put this report in the same category.
Our mission ended when we reached Highway 1, the western boundary of our assigned zone of action — now cleared. The enemy escaping to the west were now in zones of other units. We’d suffered a few wounded and bagged a number of the enemy; but, overall, the fighting was a lot lighter than we’d anticipated. Our troops were drained from several days of continuous movement and running firefights, but even more from the horrible sights they’d witnessed. The small boy, though, was still with us, cared for by the Marines. He never spoke a word. Later, we turned him over to civilians on Highway 1 who knew him.
Much of Highway 1—as the main thoroughfare of South Vietnam — was a commercial strip, with small shops, cafes, market stalls, and restaurants all along it. Normally there was heavy traffic on the highway; but this had been swelled by crowds of refugees who had fled the fighting, many of them injured.
As we started heading south along the highway, we came upon an ARVN mechanized unit at a semidestroyed railroad station who didn’t look like they’d done any fighting. When our Marines spotted the unit, I sensed some bad blood; but didn’t think much about it.
Meanwhile, we learned that trucks were on the way to take us back to our original bases to the south. Since no one knew exactly when they would arrive, the commanders decided to let the troops take advantage of the cafes and soup stalls along the road for a rare time-out from more serious business. Hoa invited me to join him for noodle soup and a beer in one of the shops. It sounded great.
Hoa and I were enjoying our bowls and beers when we noticed Marines in combat gear moving past the shop’s open entrance, stealthily creeping forward as though to an enemy target. Curious, we went to the doorway to see what was going on. Kinh was directing the Marines, getting them in position for an attack.
“Kinh,” I called to him, “what’s going on?” But he ignored me.
Suddenly the street erupted in fire.
Hoa and I ducked down inside the shop, and I grabbed my radio to find out what was going on. The shopkeeper repeatedly motioned for us to get into the family protection bunker he had built into the floor. “No, no, you go in,” we told him. We had to try to sort out what was happening.
When I contacted Bob Hamilton, he told me that the Marines seemed to be deliberately attacking another South Vietnamese unit. I could see from the doorway that the Marines were firing at the ARVN mechanized unit we’d seen earlier. By now the firing was heavy and rounds were zinging all over. We were at the point of contact between the two units.
The task force senior adviser came up on the radio, really energized. “I’ve got the U.S. Army adviser of the ARVN unit on the radio net,” he told me. I acknowledged that. “What we’ve got to do is get our units to stop this intramural firefight,” he continued.
“I’ll go out into the street to try,” I said. I thought that if I went out and both sides saw my uniform, they might stop this thing.
“I’ll go with you,” Hoa said. I passed that on to the senior adviser.
I also linked up with the Army adviser to the ARVN unit. But when he chimed in that he didn’t get paid to stop friendly firefights and refused to leave his bunker, I decided I wouldn’t get anywhere arguing with him. I had better things to do.
When Hoa and I looked out into the street again, we realized that many of the rounds whizzing past were.50 caliber rounds from the ARVN armored personnel carriers. And the Marines were firing recoilless rifles. Really heavy stuff was whizzing back and forth through the space we intended to occupy. We looked at each other, shrugged, then went slowly out into the street yelling in Vietnamese: “Cease fire!”
As we moved farther out into the street, and the guys on both side saw who we were, they all sobered up, and the fire began to drop off a little… though not before some.50 caliber slugs had zinged by my ear. At that moment, a figure came running toward us from the ARVN unit and met us midway. It was a black U.S. Army staff sergeant, one of the advisers.
“I was cleaning up,” he said, “when I heard the firing. I rushed out as soon as I
