By late afternoon they were finally within sight of the hill. All this time, of course, 2nd Battalion had continued to take accurate mortar and rocket fire, even as they fended off more enemy attacks. They were perilously low on water and ammo. Few of them had any food left. The Bravo Company troopers could hear the shooting. They also were engulfed in the powerful stench of death that permeated Hill 875. Fortunately, the NVA did not hold a continuous line around the hill. The Bravo Company men carefully ascended the ingenious steps that enemy soldiers had cut into the side of 875. Soon the relief force saw the grisly results of the previous day"s fighting. "American bodies along with enemy bodies [were] all entwined on the jungle floor, covered in blood, some blown apart," Private First Cla.s.s Stone recalled. "We saw bodies strewn all along our route. The smell of gunpowder, napalm, and death engulfed the hill and filled our noses." They found Private First Cla.s.s Lozada"s body, still at his gun, with NVA corpses all around him. Everyone was spooked by the sight of the bodies, so much so that some men wondered aloud if they would ever make it off this hill. The horrible cries of the wounded only added to the trepidation. The cries conveyed hopelessness, agony, vulnerability, and even anger. "This sound was one that none of us will ever forget," Stone said.
Somewhere between 1700 and 1730, Sergeant Leo Hill and his point element made contact with the 2nd Battalion. "There were tears in their eyes as they greeted their buddies from the 4/503d Inf.," one report claimed. The 4th Battalion soldiers pa.s.sed out whatever food and water they had left. "It was like stepping into the third circle of h.e.l.l," one soldier later commented. The cratered hill looked like a garbage dump, strewn as it was with discarded equipment, boxes, helmets, weapons, uniforms, and, of course, human remains. Felled trees lay crisscrossed in jagged patterns, making movement difficult. An odor of death, vomit, urine, and human feces blanketed the perimeter. Many of the filthy, dehydrated 2nd Battalion men were in a state of mental shock, gazing with listless, wide-eyed thousand-yard stares at their friends. In the recollection of one Bravo Company man, their faces communicated "relief at seeing us, yet a look of total terror, pain and disbelief." Bravo"s medics began working on the many wounded. One of them treated badly hurt Private First Cla.s.s Clarence Johnson and gave him some water, immediately lifting his spirits. "You knew you were gonna . . . live."20 Alpha and Charlie Companies stumbled into the perimeter a few hours later, after dark. Throughout the night, the three companies and the 2nd Battalion survivors manned the perimeter, expanded an LZ, dealt with the wounded, and called in fire missions on the NVA bunkers. The enemy responded with heavy mortar and rocket fire. The sh.e.l.ling was accurate enough to add to the list of American dead and wounded. In the darkness, some of the Americans, while keeping watch, inadvertently rested their weapons on dead bodies, thinking they were sandbags.
As the sun rose over the eastern horizon on November 21, the paratroopers were busy hacking out a new LZ, tending to the wounded, policing up weapons and bodies, setting up mortars, and planning their next move. Helicopters still had to run a veritable wall of fire to get in and out of Hill 875, but the gutsy crewmen did succeed in dropping off some supplies and evacuating the worst of the wounded.
Lieutenant Colonel Johnson was a no-nonsense, fair-minded leader who was well thought of by his men. Even so, he was not actually on the hill (yet another example of an absentee battalion commander). He was, though, in constant radio contact with Captain Ron Leonard, who was Bravo"s commander and the ranking 4th Battalion officer on 875. At 0900, Johnson told Leonard that, in two hours, he wanted him to launch an attack to capture the summit of the hill. The captain was not surprised in the least by this order. In fact, he fully expected it and agreed with it. Yet, in retrospect, much can be read into this seemingly straightforward command. From Lieutenant Colonel Johnson"s perspective, and that of nearly every trooper on 875, the hill had to be taken. Honor and pride demanded it. The idea of abandoning 875 was anathema to these proud airborne light infantrymen. To them, victory in war meant fighting tactical battles to destroy the enemy and take the ground he occupied. The hill represented a challenging task that must be accomplished, regardless of the cost. American culture frowned on the notion of leaving a job unfinished. In this context, Johnson"s order made perfect sense.
However, from a bigger-picture, more objective point of view, the order was questionable. The NVA had already destroyed the 2nd Battalion. The 4th Battalion was hardly in good shape, having already fought for weeks. The NVA on Hill 875 were hunkered down in well-sited, heavily reinforced bunkers that were connected by tunnels. Some of the bunkers were strengthened by six feet of logs and dirt, and were thus impervious to artillery and air strikes. Nothing short of a direct hit from a B-52 bomber could destroy the bunkers. At any moment of their choosing, the NVA could use their tunnels to escape back into Cambodia. The hill itself was bereft of any strategic value. Taking it would mean nothing to the outcome of the war. Senior American commanders knew that they would eventually abandon it even if the 4th Battalion succeeded in taking it. Not to mention that doing so promised to be a bloodbath. In fact, the Americans were not even likely to compile much of a body count on the hill because NVA defenses were so strong and the enemy soldiers could escape so easily, probably after inflicting heavy losses on the Americans.
Basically, the North Vietnamese had baited the Americans into fighting for Hill 875. They well understood the American mania for body counts. They knew that the Americans would fight them anywhere in South Vietnam, even in places (such as Hill 875) where the communists enjoyed most of the advantages. At Hill 875, they also knew that, once the fighting started, the Americans would sacrifice heavily to take the hill because they believed this equated to victory. The enemy was quite content to let the Americans claim their pyrrhic notions of victory. Their aim was to goad the Americans into fighting for this worthless hill and either annihilate them or bleed them dry. To the NVA this meant victory of their own.
Hill 875, then, amounted to a fascinating but tragic dichotomy. From the ordinary paratrooper"s point of view, the hill absolutely had to be taken-abandoning it would dishonor the memories of so many dead friends. Moreover, many of the troopers were angry at the enemy and wanted payback for the lives of their dead buddies (a common emotion in combat). But, from an outsider"s point of view, taking the hill made no sense, and was actually counterproductive to the American cause. In essence, taking the hill amounted to an American banzai attack.
On November 21, the Americans postponed their attack several times while the choppers braved enemy fire to fly in more water, food, and ammo. All day long, NVA mortar crews, hidden on adjacent hills, hurled sh.e.l.ls at the paratroopers. American artillery and air strikes continued to pound those positions and the NVA-held portions of Hill 875. Air Force F-100s and F-4s dumped nearly seven tons of napalm on the enemy bunkers. The stench of burning trees and benzene infused the air. As was so common, the Americans were convinced that their enormous firepower had killed most of the remaining enemy soldiers on the hill.
Just after 1500, the 4th Battalion companies started up the hill. Alpha was on the left, Charlie on the right, and Bravo in the middle. The footing was tricky. The soldiers had to step over and around fallen trees and foliage. In the process they made themselves ideal targets for the NVA, who were in their bunkers, just waiting for the Americans to enter their death zones. With devastating suddenness, they opened up with deadly machine-gun, rifle, mortar, and rocket fire. Several Americans were hit and went down in heaps. Others spread out, took cover, and returned fire, but they had great difficulty seeing the enemy. "The NVA were firing from six-inch slots in their bunkers," one after action report said. "The men crouched behind whatever cover they could find, small trees, logs, or mounds of dirt. The hill was soft from the constant bombardment that enemy rockets slid down the hillside among the troopers and exploded." Tree snipers added to the carnage.
In small groups, the Sky Soldiers poured out fire and advanced uphill in perilous rushes, all the while working against the formidable combination of gravity and savage enemy firepower. The bravest among them stood in the open and sprayed the trees, killing enemy snipers. The Americans tried to blow up the bunkers with M72 LAWs but the slits were so narrow that the M72 rockets bounced off logs, earth, or exploded among the mishmash of trees and other detritus. Mortar sh.e.l.ls were also ineffective. The only way to destroy the maze of bunkers was up close, almost within hand-shaking distance, but this was difficult because they were mutually supporting, capable of sweeping every approach with deadly cones of fire. "They"d have three bunkers dug in the ground, maybe seven yards apart with a connecting tunnel," Lynn Morse, Charlie Company"s senior medic, recalled. "They"d leave ammunition in each one of the bunkers. They"d shoot from this one and move to the last one or come to the middle one. You"re still looking at the first one and they"ve got you in a cross fire." Some of the grunts got close enough to the bunkers to rake their narrow slits with rifle or machine-gun fire. A few even succeeded in dropping grenades inside them. They would no sooner kill the group inside the bunker than more NVA would move through a tunnel and replace them.
Private First Cla.s.s Stone, the Bravo Company machine gunner, was wielding his M60 from the hip, "running up the hill and seeing men on my right, left and even behind me falling to enemy fire, their legs, arms and in some cases, heads blown off." Some of the bodies lay with their veiny guts spilled onto the ground. The air literally buzzed with the sound of bullets and angry fragments whizzing past him. Some of the rounds tore through his clothes and his equipment, yet somehow he remained unhurt. Intense though it was, he felt as if everything was happening in slow motion (the adrenaline rush and the reaction of his nervous system to extreme danger produced that effect). All around him, he saw his buddies go down. As they got hit, he could "see [them] fall, ever so slowly to the ground in a heap of blood; hear the screams [they] made as [they] hit the ground or the silence of [their] death. The roar of gunfire, theirs and ours, was deafening, yet, you could hear the sounds of bullets. .h.i.tting flesh and bone, the last moan of the dying." Stone likened the awful experience to a movie, a common description among modern American combat soldiers whose cultural conceptions are, of course, so powerfully tied to Hollywood images.21 The NVA were rolling dozens of Chinese-made (Chicom) grenades down the hill. They bounced, rolled, and bucked malevolently downward. Often they exploded before the Americans could see them. One of the grenades burst under Private First Cla.s.s Stone"s M60, destroying it. He found himself pinned down by heavy rifle fire from an individual NVA soldier. Stone now had only a .45-caliber pistol. He fired back ineffectually. The AK bullets clipped perilously close to the young machine gunner. He glanced ten meters to his left and saw his platoon leader, Lieutenant Larry Moore, hiding behind a tree. Stone yelled at the lieutenant, asking the officer to lay down cover fire while Stone moved to a less exposed spot. "My pleas for help went unanswered as Lt. Moore never fired or attempted to fire at the enemy I was pointing out to him," Stone recalled. In such searing moments, a soldier"s impression of a leader can forever be etched. As the lieutenant lay still, another soldier ran in front of Stone and promptly got killed by the NVA rifleman. Stone retrieved the dead man"s M16, killed the NVA soldier with it, and then set off in search of another machine gun. Stone never trusted, or respected, Lieutenant Moore again.
About fifty meters to the right of Stone, another young officer was experiencing the extreme challenges of infantry leadership in heavy combat. Captain Bill Connolly and Charlie Company had saved Task Force Black over a week earlier. Now they were fighting among some of the best-hidden, deadliest bunkers. The trees and jungle were so thick that Connolly"s troopers found it hard to move, much less fight. The captain was rushing around, RTOs in tow, constantly exposing himself to enemy fire, barking orders, talking to his lieutenants, trying to find a weak spot in the enemy defenses. "There was still a lot of mortar fire coming," he later said, "the bunkers were very well emplaced. They were situated so that they had interlocking fire. It was very difficult to go after one without getting hit with another one."
Hoping to build irresistible momentum in this attack, Captain Connolly kept pushing his platoons to clear out the bunkers. As he did so, squad after squad got decimated by enemy machine guns and mortars. Some of the men were literally shot to pieces. Others were shredded by mortar fragments. Quite a few collapsed under a flurry of machine-gun bullets. Their blood stained the trees and jungle floor. Medics crawled and sprinted everywhere, tending to screaming, crying men. Connolly believed that in order for the attack to have any chance of success, his 2nd Platoon, under Lieutenant Tracy Murrey, had to destroy one particular machine-gun bunker. "It had a commanding field of fire through the brush and debris," one Charlie Company soldier wrote. "Anyone trying to move forward was. .h.i.t."
The gun had already cut down several men. The captain told Murrey to throw his last remaining squad at the gun. The bespectacled lieutenant had grown up with no father and had gotten through college on an ROTC scholarship. Most of his lieutenant"s pay went toward his sisters" college education. As a platoon leader, he had struggled with land navigation and had sometimes clashed with the company NCOs. He hardly fit the recruiting-poster image of a gung ho airborne infantry officer. Connolly"s order was deeply upsetting to him, tantamount to suicide. He pleaded with the captain to change his mind. Connolly appreciated the gravity of the command (he himself was only about fifty feet behind Murrey), but in the desperation of the moment, he felt there was no other option. In response to Murrey"s pleas, Connolly barked: "That"s an order! Out!"
Murrey may not have been the prototypical platoon leader, but he embodied the first principle of infantry leadership-never ask your people to do something you will not do yourself. Unwilling to send his men after the machine gun, he did it himself. He charged at the bunker, got within a few feet of it, and pitched grenades into it. The explosions killed the enemy gunner. Before Lieutenant Murrey could do anything else, NVA machine guns opened up from adjacent bunkers, ripping into the platoon leader. RPGs streaked from unseen positions, pulverizing Murrey. "The only thing left of him was his helmet and gla.s.ses," Morse, the medic, recalled. "I was one of the [men] that made out the reports of how his remains disappeared."
In spite of Murrey"s valor, the 4th Battalion"s attack was at a standstill. One platoon from Alpha Company did succeed in breeching the bunkers and nearing the top of the hill, but they were in danger of being cut off. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, flying overhead in a helicopter, decided to call off the attack. Captain James Muldoon, Alpha"s commander, and Connolly both believed that the hill could still be taken before nightfall, but the order stood. The battalion"s survivors filtered back down the hill, yielding hard-won ground back to the enemy. The grunts were weary, frustrated, and anguished over the loss of so many friends. Another leaden night descended on Hill 875, practically dripping with the smell of death, tension, and desperation. In the darkness, Private First Cla.s.s Stone, whose platoon had lost twenty-two men in the s.p.a.ce of an hour, settled into a small hole. All around him, NVA mortar sh.e.l.ls continued to explode. In the distance, he could hear the moans of wounded men. He felt a sharp pain in his back and thought he had been hit. He reached around to check this out and felt an object sticking in his back. He pulled the object out, only to discover that it was part of an American soldier"s spine. The spine "had stuck in my back when I laid down on it." He had no time for emotion or reflection over the gruesome discovery. "I simply tossed the piece aside and lay back down."
For the next thirty-six hours, the Americans contented themselves with giving the NVA bunkers another pasting while they prepared for yet another a.s.sault. Artillery and jets repeatedly worked over the NVA sections of the hill. The bombs and napalm jostled the grunts around and took their collective breath away. Captain Leonard later called it "an absolute firepower display." Amid the endless sound track of explosions, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson finally made it into Hill 875 to meet with Leonard and the other two company commanders. He told them that there was still no doubt among the senior commanders (Schweiter, Peers, and the others) that the hill had to be taken. In fact, General Peers, commander of the 4th Division, was sending two companies from his 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, to help out. The only question was whether the airborne commanders wanted their men to once again take the lead role in capturing the hill. Johnson felt that they should. Muldoon, Connolly, and Leonard agreed. If Hill 875 had to be taken, then Sky Soldiers should do it. For them, the hill had turned into a kind of holy grail, offering closure, redemption, and honor.22 On Thanksgiving morning, November 23, the costly quest for Hill 875 resumed. The attack was scheduled for 1100. The remnants of the 4th Battalion would attack straight up the hill, in the same place as two days earlier, with Bravo on the left, Charlie on the right, and Alpha following. On the other side of 875, Delta and Alpha Companies, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, would launch a supporting a.s.sault from the southeast. These two companies had air-a.s.saulted onto the other side of the hill the previous day. In order to determine which of the two companies would lead the way, Captain George Wilkins, the commander of Delta, had drawn straws with his good friend Captain Larry Cousins, Alpha"s CO. Wilkins had "won," so his men were in the lead with Cousins"s people trailing behind.
Up until the last moment, the ubiquitous artillery and air strikes lambasted the hill. Some of the ordnance hit so close to the grunts that they had to dodge fragments. As the paratroopers of Charlie Company prepared to move out, Sergeant Mike Tanner, a mortar RTO, overheard Captain Connolly tell his command group that the hill had to be taken "at all costs." At that moment, the realization hit Tanner that he was probably about to die. A sad pride engulfed him and he sat down to write his wife a last letter. Many others did the same. Having experienced such horrors on this hill, most felt that they could not hope to survive another attack. But, when the word came to get moving, they stood and started up the hill anyway. Mortar crews walked rounds about thirty meters in front of them.
The grunts carefully worked their way over and around the mess of felled trees, sh.e.l.l holes, and other obstacles that honeycombed the ugly hill. They braced themselves for the NVA bunkers to come alive with machine-gun fire, but this did not happen. The Americans did not know it, but North Vietnamese commanders had decided to disengage at Hill 875. They had bled the Americans badly. Fighting to the bitter end for the hill served no further purpose for them. So most of the enemy survivors (from the NVA 174th Regiment) had previously exited the hill through their tunnels, then trekked back to Cambodia, surviving to fight another day.
Plenty remained behind, though, to make the Americans" final push for the top of the hill a very unpleasant quest. Enemy mortar crews on nearby hills hurled accurate mortar fire at the GIs. Well-concealed stay-behind snipers also opened up. Antic.i.p.ating more close-quarters fighting among the bunkers, some of the Americans were carrying satchel charges of TNT. Several extraordinarily brave souls volunteered to lug flamethrowers, although no one really had much training in how to operate them. One mortar round scored a direct hit on Sergeant First Cla.s.s William Cates, who was lugging a satchel charge. The sh.e.l.l disintegrated him and killed several men near him.
The flamethrower men were moving awkwardly under the weight of their smelly, heavy tanks of napalm, enhancing their vulnerability. As Captain Connolly moved up the hill, a flamethrower man named Flatley got slammed by a mortar. The round ignited the fuel in the tanks, detonating a fiery explosion. "He just basically evaporated," Connolly recalled. "I was very lucky. It threw me forward, ten, fifteen, twenty feet. I got up and I was fine." Not far away, Sergeant Tanner and another man slid into a bomb crater to avoid the heavy incoming mortar fire. "There was a flash and a blast of heat. We saw a [flamethrower] volunteer go down. He was struggling, all aflame. He crumpled in a blazing heap with the tanks on his back." In Bravo Company"s line of advance, Private First Cla.s.s Rocky Stone was walking uncomfortably close to Private Mike Gladden, a grunt who had volunteered for flamethrower duty. "A sniper shot the tank," Stone said. "I remember seeing the flame [shoot] out the tip, circle around . . . ignite the tank and totally engulf Mike in flame. I remember watching him spin in a circle totally covered in flames and hearing him scream for someone to shoot him. He was shot by his own men to save him a very painful, slow death."
Still the a.s.sault continued. Small, weary groups of paratroopers huffed and puffed upward, blasting snipers, shooting up bunkers, braving the deadly enemy mortar fire. At 1122, they finally made it to the summit of Hill 875. Stone and his buddy Private Al Undiemi led the charge. By now, Private First Cla.s.s Stone was on his fourth machine gun since arriving at the hill. One had been destroyed by a grenade. Stone had warped the barrels on the other two from having to fire them so continuously. Brandishing his new M60, he jumped up, yelled "Let"s go!" and ran for the top of the hill. He and Undiemi made it there and, finding no more resistance, they hopped into a bomb crater. All around them paratroopers were yelling "Airborne!" "Geronimo!" and "All the way!" in cries of victory. At last, Hill 875 belonged to the Americans.
The price was staggering: 158 killed and 402 wounded. Among the dead were all the members of Stone and Undiemi"s squad, except for one man. When the terrible reality of these deaths sank in to Stone, he leaned, almost involuntarily, against a tree, his eyes cast downward, his mind trying to process what had happened on this troubled hill. "I had the feeling of total sadness as I looked around to see all the bodies and carnage around me and upon learning of the death of so many close brothers." He was proud to have taken the hill, but forever saddened, and troubled, by the irreplaceable losses his unit had suffered. Nearly every other survivor felt the same way.23 As the paratroopers focused on spreading out and setting up a defensive perimeter, the point elements of Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, approached the crest from the south. They had received some sniper fire but little other resistance on the way up. In the confusing smoky haze that hung over the peak of Hill 875, Delta"s point men could see soldiers moving around. "Just as we were preparing to fire upon these soldiers, someone yelled "friendlies! "" Private Dennis Lewallen recalled. "The situation could have evolved into a very serious firefight where many more lives could have been lost. I think of this every time I remember or hear of the battle of Hill 875."
The other 4th Division company soon arrived. Together these Ivy Division troops extended the perimeter, circulated around, and attempted to comprehend what the paratroopers had been through. They were shocked at the sight of their hard-bitten airborne colleagues. "They were good guys but, boy, they were beat up," Captain Wilkins said. "That"s a very proud tradition in that organization. They"re pretty elite guys. You could tell they"d been in the fight of their lives." Even more troubling were the other sights that greeted them all over the hill. "Not one major tree seemed to be standing," Private John Beckman, a Delta Company rifleman, remembered, "and the whole side of the hill looked like toothpicks burning and smoking. It was the scariest sight I"d ever seen." Spec-4 Bill Ballard, an RTO, shuddered at the carnage and the putrid smell of death that engulfed the hill. "The upper . . . quarter of the hill was just totally nude. No trees, no stumps, no nothing, just dirt. It had been bombarded with artillery and air strikes so heavily that it was just clear." He and the others saw bodies and parts of bodies strewn all over the place, rotting in the midday sun.
Captain Larry Cousins, Alpha"s commander, was in his second tour in Vietnam, but he had never witnessed anything like this. "There were helmets with heads in "em . . . GIs, arms, legs, body parts everywhere," he said. He and his first sergeant saw the grisly remnants of a Sky Soldier"s head hanging almost neatly from the twigs of a tree. "It was just like somebody scalped him right about where his ears were on both sides and just peeled all the skin off. You could see the eye holes. It was just sickening. It was kind of like a Halloween mask. It was . . . revolting to see Americans like that."
The hill was still under periodic mortar fire, but helicopters could now get in and out with some semblance of safety. The chopper crews evacuated many of the wounded and dead. They also flew in a special Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and pie. Some of the men welcomed this meal as a morale booster. Others thought it was unthinkable, to the point of obscenity, to dine on such fare amid the dismembered, decomposing remains of their dead friends. Two days later, the helicopters came and took the paratroopers from the hill back to the main Dak To base, where they held a subdued ceremony to mourn their dead.
The 4th Division soldiers stayed on the hill for a few more days, taking casualties of their own from NVA mortar and rocket fire. Eventually, though, they abandoned the hill to resume the endless search for and pursuit of the NVA. The hard-won hill was now the enemy"s to reclaim, thus ill.u.s.trating the essential absurdity of expending so many lives for a worthless geographic objective. "A week or so later," Spec-4 Ballard recalled, "we were flying by that hill, going somewhere in our helicopters . . . and we could see "em already up there, moving around, building bunkers, resettling." When paratroopers like Private First Cla.s.s Stone found this out, they were understandably bitter. "This told us that all we had done, all we had gone through on that Hill was basically for naught," he wrote. "This . . . was an insult to us who survived and a bigger insult to those of us who gave their lives." The anger and bitterness never went away for him or for the other survivors of Hill 875. Fighting raged at 875, and Dak To, for the rest of the war.
Of course, American commanders could hardly have chosen to remain on Hill 875. It was deep inside enemy country, at the edge of a perilous supply line, and it had no intrinsic value. They only fought there because the NVA was there. When the NVA left, they had to as well. The Americans were much like tethered goats being led to and fro by their enemies. Nothing could ill.u.s.trate the inherent worthlessness of the attrition strategy more than these unhappy realities. This cold a.s.sessment does not, in the least, diminish the extraordinary valor of the soldiers who took Hill 875. If anything, it only adds to it, since superhuman gallantry in the service of strategic aimlessness is even more impressive than bravery demonstrated for a clear objective, such as the Normandy beaches or Paris. The 173rd Airborne Brigade earned a well-deserved Presidential Unit Citation for its exploits on the hill and elsewhere at Dak To. The 4th Division"s 1st Brigade also was a deserving recipient for its important part in the fighting.
The Americans found a grand total of 22 NVA bodies on Hill 875. Certainly they killed many more than that (probably about a battalion, according to captured doc.u.ments), but the communists dragged most of them away. In the November 1967 battles at Dak To, the Americans expended over 151,000 artillery sh.e.l.ls. Air Force, Navy, and Marine aviators flew nearly 2,100 close air support sorties for the grunts. B-52s even flew 257 sorties, blasting suspected enemy troop concentrations. By their own admission, the Americans lost nearly 300 men killed and about 1,000 wounded. The numbers were probably slightly higher than that since commanders notoriously tried to downplay their losses in hopes of showing favorable kill ratios. Every rifle company in the 173rd Airborne Brigade lost more than 50 percent of its troopers. The Army claimed that 1,644 NVA were killed in the battles at Dak To, but this figure is suspect. Westmoreland himself later put the number at 1,400. Many other officers, including one general, thought the number was closer to 1,000. Even if the high number is correct, the United States expended a monumentally inefficient 92 artillery rounds and one and a half air strikes for every enemy soldier killed.
As the battle raged, General Westmoreland was in the United States, briefing President Johnson, addressing Congress, and generally attempting to build public confidence in the administration"s policy in Vietnam. General Westmoreland insisted that the United States was winning the war and he even optimistically ventured the possibility that, if the war continued to go this well, the troops might start coming home by 1969. In a press conference, when reporters asked the general if Dak To was the beginning of the end for the NVA, he responded: "I think it"s the beginning of a great defeat for the enemy."
Sadly, the general was wrong. Dak To was not necessarily a defeat for the United States, but nor was it anything approaching a victory. It was true that the Americans decimated three enemy regiments at Dak To and foiled any communist plans to cut South Vietnam in two by pushing east from the Central Highlands. But the enemy"s purpose was still served by fighting the Americans on even terms, bleeding them badly, and inconclusively. The longer the war dragged on, and the worse losses that piled up from such aimless tactical tests of bravery, the more the American public"s appet.i.te for the war diminished. In short, stalemate favored the communists and Dak To was, in the end, an inconclusive stalemate. Westy could inflict substantial casualties on the enemy, but not mortal losses, thus guaranteeing the failure of attrition. Dak To was the prime example of this unhappy circ.u.mstance. It was also a bitter tale of the price grunts pay for the poor strategic choices of their generals and political leaders. At Dak To, even the combination of extreme valor and overwhelming firepower could not produce any semblance of strategic victory for the United States.24
CHAPTER 8.
Eleven Mikes and Eleven Bravos: Infantry Moments in the Ultimate Techno-War.
I Volunteer . . . Twice.
THE WAR WAS LIKE A video game. Even its official moniker, "Desert Storm," sounded less like a real war and more like a cleverly packaged, and marketed, game-the kind that Americans of the early 1990s could find on the shelves of prosperous computer stores at a time of explosive growth in home personal computer ownership. The 1991 Persian Gulf War was the first conflict to be covered round the clock on television, most famously by CNN. It was information-age war, bombarding viewers with images and facts yet telling them surprisingly little about the real war. Footage-hungry television outlets broadcast the apparent new face of modern war-laser-guided munitions, "smart" bombs. .h.i.tting precision targets, the "luckiest man in Iraq" scurrying away in his truck as an adjacent bridge implodes under the weight of new-age bombs. All of this made for great television, and presented modern war as technological, clinical, precise, at a distance . . . sort of like a video game, actually. It was vicarious, even voyeuristic. The images showed buildings and bridges going down in destruction, not people. There was no blood. There were no clumps of seared human flesh, no cries of agony, no sense of the profound, tragic waste that always always accompanies war, techno or otherwise. It conveyed a sense of air power"s invincibility and the individual soldier"s irrelevance. It all seemed so clean. It reinforced the wrongheaded idea that wars can be fought exclusively at a distance, technologically, by small groups of highly trained professionals who a.s.sume minimal risk. accompanies war, techno or otherwise. It conveyed a sense of air power"s invincibility and the individual soldier"s irrelevance. It all seemed so clean. It reinforced the wrongheaded idea that wars can be fought exclusively at a distance, technologically, by small groups of highly trained professionals who a.s.sume minimal risk.
Stung badly by Vietnam-era media criticism, the armed forces during the Gulf War severely limited reporters" access to the fighting, especially ground combat. The vast majority of reporters got their information at military briefings, not from troops on the ground, particularly not from infantry soldiers. The briefing officers fed reporters carefully selected, and edited, images that resonated perfectly with a society already becoming inured to desensitized violence. Everybody was reasonably happy, though. The media got drama (and good ratings). Military authorities got to control the story of the war, with little probing or criticism. The sad result was a popular misperception that the war had been a detached experience, more of a spectacle than a traumatic event to the partic.i.p.ants. "Oh yeah, I remember that," one civilian breezily told a combat veteran when the topic of Desert Storm came up, a mere two years after the war. Or, as one acerbic commentator wrote in the early 1990s: "Remember the Gulf War? Or was that last season"s. .h.i.t show?"
In the longer run, when most people thought of the war, they thought of the devastating effectiveness of air power, a notion reinforced dramatically by the video briefings. There was nothing inherently wrong with this conclusion. In the Gulf War, as always, the power of American air attacks was extraordinary. No one could reasonably deny that. The problem was in the unfair overestimation of this fearsome weapon. Fed by the usual yearning for bloodless wars of technology, the notion grew among Americans, from the ordinary person in the street to security experts, that air power and precision-guided munitions had made infantrymen obsolete. One advocate, in a statement typical of many others, a.s.serted that "the Persian Gulf War . . . confirmed a major transformation in the nature of warfare: the dominance of air power. Simply (if boldly) stated, air power won the Gulf War." Quite a neat trick! This author apparently missed the fact that, in spite of a sustained six-week aerial campaign, Saddam Hussein only exited Kuwait after the American-led multinational coalition defeated him in a decisive four-day ground war.
Such fallacious notions were eerily similar to those espoused by many military strategists in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when nuclear weapons were supposed to have banished riflemen from existence. "We have heard this siren song before," Colonel Daniel Bolger, an infantry officer, wrote in 1998. "The nukes meant no more infantry, no more mess and fuss, death from above. Instead, Americans inherited two very big, dirty Asian wars [Korea and Vietnam] that swallowed riflemen like Moloch. The great hydrogen bombs have yet to be used in anger. Now the snake oil salesmen are at the door again, this time hawking precision strike, victory through air-power. n.o.body wants to pay for any infantry. Let the airplanes do it."
As Bolger indicated, the reality of the Gulf War was quite different from popular memory. In fact, 92 percent of munitions in the war were unguided. Indeed, a congressional investigation, conducted several years after the war, revealed that manufacturers and military leaders had significantly exaggerated the effectiveness of air attacks during the war. "Air power was clearly instrumental to the success of Desert Storm," the authors of the report wrote, "yet air power achieved only some of its objectives, and clearly fell short of achieving others. Even under generally favorable conditions, the effects of air power were limited. After 38 days of nearly continuous bombardment, a ground campaign was still deemed necessary." Lack of credible intelligence on targets-in other words, information on where to drop the bombs-also limited the reach and power of the American planes. The investigators found that, ironically, older-generation planes, such as B-52 bombers and A-10 Warthogs, inflicted more damage on the enemy than the newer-generation planes. They also found that precise accuracy was rare, even with guided munitions. " "One target, one bomb" efficiency was not achieved. On average, more than eleven tons of guided and forty-four tons of unguided munitions were delivered on targets a.s.sessed as successfully destroyed; still more tonnage of both was delivered against targets where objectives were not fully met."1 Packed with data and statistics, the report merely stated something that common sense should have made clear: air power was highly important but, by its very nature as a standoff weapon, air power was limited in its effect in achieving strategic goals, even in a war that conformed perfectly to American strengths. Combined arms was the key to success. Everyone was needed. Everyone contributed something valuable, especially the underappreciated ground units. In fact, ground forces inflicted the majority of the damage on Saddam Hussein"s army, accounting for 79 percent of the tanks destroyed, 57 percent of the armored personnel carriers destroyed, and more than three-quarters of the artillery pieces eliminated by the coalition.
The truth was that, even with all the firepower of modern ground and air weapons, infantry soldiers played a significant role in the Gulf War. Every single one of these men was a volunteer. As an unhappy coda to the unpopular Vietnam War, Congress abolished the draft in 1973. From then on, the military would be stocked with people who chose to sign up. In fact, infantry soldiers volunteered twice, once for the Army and once for the infantry. In most cases, they had to actively try to get into the infantry, and then maintain high physical fitness and training standards to stay there.
In the 1980s, Congress and President Ronald Reagan made a point of compensating servicemen and servicewomen well, enticing them with such benefits as money for college, health, and family care. The result of all this was an educated, motivated, well-trained combat force. By 1991, 98 percent of soldiers had a high school diploma, three-quarters scored in the highest mental category on cla.s.sification tests, and 41 percent were enrolled in the Army College Fund. More than one in four were African-American.
As always, infantrymen were in the minority. Indeed, the Army had more than 115 military occupation specialties (MOS), of which infantry jobs comprised only a few. Every soldier was trained as a rifleman, but few actually served in that capacity. The Marines had a higher percentage of manpower devoted to the infantry, but riflemen were still the minority. These late-twentieth-century grunts were armed with a new a.s.semblage of weapons, including new-generation M16A2 rifles, M249 Squad Automatic Weapons (SAWs), and a variety of handheld and vehicle-mounted ant.i.tank missiles. They were outfitted with coal scuttle Kevlar helmets and st.u.r.dy battle dress utilities (BDUs).
In the Army, the infantry branch was divided into two major areas (some would argue two distinct cultures). Mechanized infantry formations were built around the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Army"s newest armored innovation. To the average person, the Bradley looked like a tank. It was tracked and heavily armored. It had a turret, with a 25-millimeter main gun. It was equipped with a side saddle box that could fire TOW missiles (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) to kill tanks. The thirty-three-ton Bradley was a formidable beast, but it was not a tank. It was an infantry carrier. Crewed by a driver, a gunner, and a commander, who themselves were infantrymen, the Bradley carried several more infantry soldiers in its crowded rear compartment. The Bradley provided these grunts-generally called "dismounts" in the mech world-with transportation and considerable fire support. Once outside the Bradley, their job was to fight as machine gunners and riflemen, the traditional role of the grunts. The Army MOS for mechanized riflemen was 11M, eventually sp.a.w.ning the nickname "Eleven Mikes." Similar to armor, the mech infantry world was about fire support, vehicle formations, gunnery, and cooperation.
Light infantry comprised the other half of the infantry branch. These were the traditional ground pounders who carried heavy rucksacks, usually walked wherever they went (at best they might have access to Humvees, the successor to the jeep), and fought as regular infantry. Some of them were paratroopers. Others were air a.s.sault specialists who rode helicopters into battle. They were the descendants of General Kinnard"s 1st Cavalry Division troopers. Others served in straight leg infantry outfits like the 7th and 25th Infantry Divisions. The elite among them were Army Rangers. The MOS for light infantry riflemen was 11B, generally known as Eleven Bravo. Most of them were trained to manipulate a variety of small arms and ant.i.tank weapons. Theirs was a life of privation and deprivation, with long marches, patrols, small-unit live fire training events and the like. Light infantry units emphasized physical conditioning, discipline, camaraderie, teamwork, and patrolling. They were the purest of the pure, the last riflemen in a world full of wonder-weapons. Yet they and their mechanized brothers were among the central characters in the Desert Storm video game.2 Crammed in a Bradley and Acting Like Tankers.
In a Bradley, everyone was usually uncomfortable. The driver was perched on a small seat, crammed into a narrow rectangle in the front left of the vehicle. In this cramped compartment, mobility was only a dream. Ventilation consisted mostly of an open hatch, although as he drove he usually had to keep the hatch shut. Mostly he just sweltered and focused on maneuvering the vehicle. A couple feet above and behind the driver, the gunner sat scrunched in the left hatch of the turret, with his thermal sights directly to the front of him. He could stand on his little seat, exposing about half of his torso, or he could sit down, b.u.t.ton up his hatch, and squeeze himself into the turret"s confined s.p.a.ce. Immediately left of the gunner was the TOW box, arguably the most vital piece of equipment on the vehicle since it served as a launcher for the missiles that allowed Bradleys to destroy enemy tanks. To the gunner"s right, the commander had about the same amount of limited s.p.a.ce. Directly to his front was a coaxial 7.62-millimeter machine gun. When the vehicle was running, dust, dirt, and exhaust fumes blew into the faces of the gunner and commander alike. The three crewmen wore special radio-equipped helmets, rather like tankers.
The dismounts wore Kevlar helmets, BDUs, chemical overgarments known as MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) suits, and boots. They secured their M16s and machine guns and kept them pointed downward, at the ready. Jammed in the back of the Bradley, theirs was a life of cramped misery. During Desert Storm, a typical Bradley carried anywhere from four to six such infantrymen. In some vehicles they sat on hard metal seats; others perched on benches. Sometimes, in an effort to create more s.p.a.ce, they removed the seats altogether and sat packed together on the floor. The unluckiest soldier (usually the junior guy) sat in the most confined area, right behind the driver in a spot known cheerfully as the h.e.l.lhole. Personal s.p.a.ce, as Americans generally think of it, did not exist in this enclosed world. The men sat draped against, sometimes even over, one another. Any movement affected the others. Few of these grunts were diminutive. One rifleman even remembered a squad mate who somehow wedged his six-foot-six frame into the unit"s Bradley. The men had no windows. The only route of egress was through the rear ramp.
The Bradleys were crammed with an amazing amount of stuff: ammunition, cardboard TOW tubes, MREs (meals ready to eat), tools, water bottles, canteens, wrappers, books, magazines, and other a.s.sorted personal items. The Bradley"s engine noise made conversation difficult. When the gunner shot the 25-millimeter gun, the whole vehicle shook. The noise of it all could be deafening. The stench of sweat, pungent feet, and gaseous emissions-of the human variety-mixed with engine fumes, weaponry, and metal to produce an unforgettable odor. Colonel Bolger wrote of the typical Eleven Mike: "He rides for hours and hours-often for days-in the back of a dimly lit metal box with five or more of his closest friends crammed into a s.p.a.ce about equal to the back end of an average American family"s minivan. As for heating, it exists . . . with two options: red hot and broken. If you want air-conditioning, take up a different line of work. The suspension system does what it can, but forget about a smooth ride. The track pitches and shimmies, jumps up and plops down. The men in the aft end hang on for dear life." The grunts sardonically referred to their Bradleys as "sardine cans" and "death boxes."3 By the late afternoon of February 26, 1991, the troopers of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment had endured these conditions for more than two days. These soldiers, like Kinnard"s people in Vietnam, called themselves cavalry (even referring to each company as a "troop"), but, in effect, they were mechanized infantrymen. In fact, during Desert Storm, commanders took the venerable idea of combined arms to a new level. They cross-attached infantry, armor, and artillery units into task forces and protected them with forward-deployed helicopter squadrons. Forward air controllers added to the party with a dizzying array of close air support planes, such as F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Warthogs. Each troop in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment consisted of thirteen Bradleys and nine M1 Abrams tanks, the veritable kings of the desert battlefield. The Abrams was, by that time, the most formidable tank in the world, with the best protective armor, the best suspension, the most effective flame suppression system, and the deadliest main gun in existence.
On that February afternoon, the lead vehicles of the 2nd Armored Cav were pushing east through the featureless desert, looking to cut off Saddam"s line of retreat. Two days of ground war had beaten his forward-deployed units to a pulp. Many in those units had surrendered in droves to the 2nd Armored Cav and the other divisions that comprised Lieutenant General Fred Franks"s VII Corps. Saddam had ordered his conquering legions out of Kuwait, and his elite units, most notably the Tawalkana Mechanized Division, were charged with the mission of holding off the advancing Americans long enough for the remnants of the Iraqi Army to escape. The Tawalkana soldiers were members of Saddam"s vaunted Republican Guard. Most were from the Sunni tribes that provided a foundation of support for Saddam"s Baathist regime. Unlike many of their Iraqi countrymen, they were determined to stand and fight.
At 1600 the lead tanks and Bradleys of the 2nd Armored Cav crested a slight rise in the desert and came upon a carefully prepared defensive position with tanks, infantry, personnel carriers, artillery pieces, and antiaircraft guns. Many of the enemy weapons were dug into cleverly concealed revetments. Most of the dismounted soldiers were in bunkers. The Americans were actually outnumbered, right in the middle of the Tawalkana"s most powerful units. Both sides were surprised to see each other.
Visibility was severely hampered by a raging sandstorm. Clouds of grainy orange and beige sand swirled randomly in whooshes. The two sides were separated by about fifteen hundred meters. Even with thermal sights and laser range finders, the American crewmen only caught glimpses of their prey. Iraqi artillery exploded overhead, forcing the Americans to slam their hatches shut.
Captain H. R. McMaster, whose Eagle Troop was in the middle of the American line of vehicles, ordered an immediate attack. He sensed that he was in a tight spot, almost within a U-shaped enemy ambush position, and his instinct was to be aggressive, to unleash the full killing power of his troop and all its supporting firepower before the enemy could adjust to the American presence. He had placed the troop"s nine tanks, including his own, in the middle of his wedge formation. His Bradleys were on the flanks. At McMaster"s command, his gunner, Staff Sergeant Craig Koch, and his loader, Specialist Jeffrey Taylor, fired two 120-millimeter main-gun rounds in less than ten seconds, destroying a pair of Soviet-made T72 tanks. "Two enemy tank rounds impacted next to my tank," McMaster recalled. Koch fired at another T72. "The enemy tank"s turret separated from its hull in a hail of sparks. It burst into flames as the round penetrated the fuel and ammunition compartments." The heat was so intense that Captain McMaster could feel hot wind blowing into his face.
What did all this really mean for the Iraqi crewmen? In a word, catastrophe. They died horrible deaths, burned to a crisp, thrown from their vehicles, shredded by the shrapnel of the American sh.e.l.ls and their own as well. Some died of blunt trauma, their heads exploding into little more than shards. One crewman, burning from head to toe, managed to exit his tank, only to go down in a hail of machine-gun bullets. The American Bradley and Abrams crewmen knew they had to work together quickly, almost perfectly, to avoid the same fate themselves. There was always a chance that, at any moment, an enemy sh.e.l.l or missile could tear through their own vehicle. The danger was especially real for the Bradleys since their armor was not as thick as that of the tanks.
In mere seconds, the encounter turned into a full-blown desert brawl with both sides firing everything at their disposal. The unit radios were clogged with excited voices as commanders and crewmen alike called out targets, bellowed orders, and relayed information. "All of the Troops" tanks and scouts [infantry Bradleys] were now in the action," one of McMaster"s platoon leaders later said. "Enemy tanks and BMPs [armored personnel infantry carriers] erupted into innumerable fireb.a.l.l.s." A dizzying array of Iraqi military hardware went up in flames as depleted uranium, 120-millimeter Abrams rounds, and TOW missiles struck them. "Enemy tank turrets were hurled skyward," one soldier later said. "The fireb.a.l.l.s . . . hurled debris one hundred feet into the air. Secondary explosions destroyed the vehicles beyond recognition."
The Americans maintained a disciplined formation, advancing and firing in rushes. Vehicles generally operated in pairs, employing Air Force wingman tactics. American artillery observers, riding in thinly armored M577 personnel carriers, called down devastating, continuous 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzer fire on the Iraqis. The M577s were b.u.t.toned up and almost unbearably hot. "We all stripped down to our boots and underwear, drenched with sweat," Specialist David Battleson, one of the crewmen, said. Another observer, Specialist Chris Harvey, peeked outside of his vehicle at the chaos raging around him. The panorama of destruction took his breath away. "All I saw were things burning. For three hundred sixty degrees. Nothing but action."
Several thousand meters to the rear, the howitzer crews worked without interruption, priming, loading, and firing. "No one could do the same job all night," Specialist Adeolu Soluade recalled. "I think I did almost every job on the gun that night." Some of the crews actually ran out of ammo until resupply convoys caught up with them. Flames shot as far as twenty feet from the muzzles of the guns. The noise and concussion waves of the shooting were immense, like an earthquake. "The guns had been firing so long that carbon was building up in the tubes," one soldier said.
While the tanks took the lead, the Bradleys pummeled the flanks. Their 25-millimeter rounds easily penetrated the armor of Soviet-made BMPs and even some of the tanks as well. Deadliest of all were their TOWs, which Bradley commanders fired at tanks, bunkers, and antiaircraft guns. One Bradley commander remembered rotating his turret just in time to see a T62 tank fire at his vehicle. "The enemy tank missed, throwing dirt in the air." The explosion was frighteningly close. "After we fired a TOW at the tank and destroyed it, we had to get out and clean off our weapons optics so we could continue." The Bradley crewmen, with help from their dismounts, had to do all this under extreme stress. "Violent explosions followed the impact of the perfectly aimed and guided fires," McMaster recalled. "All vehicles were suppressing enemy infantry to the front, who fired machine guns at us and scurried back and forth among the endless sea of berms which comprised the enemy position."
For the men in the Bradleys, the battle amounted to a constant struggle to keep up with the tanks, sight targets through the blowing sand, figure out their range, and engage them. The TOWs were like grim reapers stalking their prey. They flew within a few feet of the ground, trailing their guiding wires, seemingly picking victims with relish. One soldier saw a TOW score a direct hit on an Iraqi APC, exploding it "as if it were made of plastic. The metal armor shot up into the air accompanied by a fireball and it seemed to rise and fall in slow motion. In the blink of an eye a perfectly functional vehicle had become a burning heap of metal."
Lieutenant Daniel King and Alpha Troop, 4-7 Cavalry Regiment, were a few kilometers to the south, covering 2nd Armored Cav"s flank. To the left of King in the turret of their Bradley, his gunner spotted, through the foggy mists of sand, a large heat blob on their thermal sight. "We raised our TOW missile, fired, and it exploded almost right away," King said. "I put my head up out of the turret and saw a T72 tank in a fireball about 300-400 meters away." Jumping up and down in the turret, he and his gunner exchanged high fives and whoops of pure elation. For them, the killing was impersonal, as if they had only destroyed a vehicle and not people. Armored combat tends to be that way. It also tends to be solitary, with crews in their own vehicular world.
But other men saw enemy soldiers and shot them, especially as Iraqis attacked from behind or fled when American columns advanced past destroyed vehicles. Amid the smoke and dust, Iraqi soldiers with machine guns, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) found concealment from which to hit the Americans. Some of the Republican Guard soldiers even had Sagger missiles, capable of penetrating the armor of an Abrams if fired from a close enough range. McMaster saw his Abrams and Bradley crews "cutting down hundreds of infantry fleeing to subsequent positions. Some tried to play dead and pop up behind the tanks with rocket-propelled grenades. They fell prey to the Bradley 25mm and coaxial machine guns." Of course, "fell prey" meant that they got torn up by machine-gun bullets or blasted into pieces by the 25-millimeter rounds. "Men were cut in half right in front of our eyes," a soldier later wrote. One Bradley commander even mowed down several with an M16 rifle and a few grenades. For the Americans who unleashed this storm of death, the killing was personal. "They kept dying and dying and dying," First Lieutenant Keith Garwick, a platoon leader in Ghost Troop, at the northern edge of the American advance, recalled. "Those guys were insane. They wouldn"t stop." The twenty-five-year-old West Pointer and his men mowed them down in droves, but still the Iraqis kept counterattacking or stubbornly defending revetments and berm-side bunkers. For Garwick and company, the horror of it all was deeply troubling. "A certain part of you just dies . . . somebody trying to kill you so desperately, for so many hours, and coming so close. I still don"t understand it. I couldn"t wait to see combat. What a fool I was." To another soldier, the experience was "intoxicating . . . also macabre."
The Americans dominated the battle, but they were hardly impervious to damage of their own. Lieutenant Garwick found that his company radio net was so jammed with frantic voices that he often had to dismount and run, under heavy fire, to the artillery forward observer"s vehicle. In one instance, enemy artillery fire was so accurate that he and another man had to take shelter under the lieutenant"s Bradley. "We just sat there crying, just shaken. The air bursts were coming right on top, ricocheting around us. We were in a corner of h.e.l.l. I don"t know how we made it out of there." Specialist Patrick Bledsoe, a Bradley driver in Ghost Troop, was absorbed with the movement of Iraqi infantrymen moving toward his track when a tank sh.e.l.l ripped into the turret behind him. "It was just like somebody hit us with a sledgehammer," he said. In the turret, the gunner, Sergeant Nels Andrew Moller, asked, "What was that?" A second later, another sh.e.l.l hit in nearly the same spot and exploded, killing Moller. Bledsoe got out of the destroyed Bradley and crawled to safety, as did the track commander.
Sergeant Roland Jones"s Bradley in 4-7 Cavalry had dodged several near misses from enemy tanks or infantry, he was not sure which. As sparks and dirt kicked up around the Bradley, the engine got stuck in neutral. A track commanded by his platoon leader, Lieutenant Michael Va.s.salotti, drove up to shield him. Jones ordered his people to abandon the track. They no sooner got out than a Sagger missile struck it in the turret. "My whole right side felt it," Corporal Darrin McLane, Jones"s gunner, said. "I caught some shrapnel in the arm. I . . . staggered a couple of steps, then started running." He and the others made it into the lieutenant"s Bradley just in time for it to absorb two T72 hits just behind the driver, below the turret. "It was smoky inside," Jones said. "Everyone had been injured in some sort of way. I had flash burns to the side of my head and the back of my neck." Lieutenant Va.s.salotti and Corporal Jones also took flash burns to the face. Even as 25-millimeter rounds began to cook off in their casings, the men evacuated the Bradley. Not long after this, another tank round smashed through a nearby Bradley, shearing off the gunner"s leg, mortally wounding him. The commander remembered experiencing "a big flash and a big wind, and the next thing I knew I was burning. I jumped out of the hatch." Other soldiers extinguished the fire. Fortunately the man"s body armor absorbed much of the flames and shrapnel.
After dark, the battle petered out amid the horrendous stench of burning metal, rubber, fuel, and flesh. The noxious smoke of death-from men and vehicles-hung over the cold desert. The 2nd Armored Cav, and its friends from 4-7 Cavalry, had wrecked much of the Tawalkana Division. Infantry grunts herded thousands of enemy soldiers into captivity. There was little else to do with them except give them some water, MREs, medical care if they needed it, and wait for support troops to come up and take them away. For lack of any other defining feature or objective, American commanders called this engagement the Battle of 73 Easting, after the map coordinates of this otherwise nondescript patch of desert. In the battle, the Americans destroyed 161 tanks, 180 APCs, 12 artillery pieces, and half a dozen antiaircraft guns. Eagle Troop alone accounted for 28 tanks and 16 APCs. No one knew, or was much interested in, exactly how many enemy soldiers they killed-a telling contrast from the body-count obsession of the Vietnam War.4 Tawalkana was not finished yet, though. Like a runner accepting a baton in a relay race, the 1st Infantry Division"s 1st Brigade advanced through the 2nd Armored Cav and kept up the pressure on the Republican Guards. Just after midnight, this combined arms force from the Big Red One collided with them at Objective Norfolk, another artificial American name for a patch of desert. The fighting was pure chaos, a three-hundred-sixty-degree struggle that was the very embodiment of modern combat. Commanders had a difficult time maintaining unit integrity and order of movement. The lack of navigational equipment on most of the Abramses and Bradleys made it easy to get lost. The night was windy and chilly, specked with sheets of light rain. These conditions, combined with the fire and smoke of burning vehicles, made it quite difficult for crews to identify targets through their thermals. Visual identification was a near impossibility in the dark and smudge. "At night, war becomes even more difficult as you try to identify friend and foe," Father David Kenehan, the chaplain of a nearby cavalry unit, wrote in his diary. "Some guys will shoot first & question later in order not to endanger their crew."
The Republican Guards, in hopes of foiling the American heat-seeking thermal sights, shut their engines off or abandoned their vehicles until the Americans got within range or bypa.s.sed them. Then they attacked, either on foot or after jumping back into their vehicles. "They were shooting us from the rear, which is the only way a T55 or T62 [tank] can hurt an M1," a tank commander recalled. "We were "coaxing" [machine-gunning] guys running between tanks, running between our tanks and bunkers, as we were moving through. It was really hairy. There were rounds flying all over the place." The Americans learned to shoot at all tanks and APCs, even those that looked empty because of cold signatures on the thermals. Surrendering enemy soldiers were sometimes interspersed with the attackers, making it very hard for the Americans to know when to shoot and when to hold their fire. "The pa.s.sage into enemy-held territory was an eerie, almost surreal experience," Colonel Lon Maggart, the brigade commander, later wrote. "The night sky was filled with catastrophic explosions and raging fires the likes of which I had never seen before. Horrible fires roared from the turrets of Iraqi tanks with flames shooting high into the night air." He and the other soldiers were inundated with the unforgettable odor of burning oil, rubber, and flesh.
The air was thick with the thunderous booming of Abrams main guns and Bradley chain guns. Muzzle flashes and tracers flickered in the night like flashbulbs. Coaxial machine guns, firing at small groups of dismounted, RPG-toting attackers, could be heard chattering tinnily when the bigger guns paused for ammo. One Bradley gunner alone killed six attacking RPG teams. The American gunners blew up several ammo-laden trucks and dumps, creating dangerous fireb.a.l.l.s and secondary explosions. Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Fontenot, commander of Task Force 2-34 Armor, finally ordered his crews to stop shooting up the trucks. "As we made our way through the trucks, many of which were on fire and a hazard to us, we found many enemy soldiers attempting to surrender." His armor heavy task force had few grunts to disarm the prisoners and move them to safety. Fontenot took to running over their discarded weapons with his tank.
"We were bypa.s.sing BMPs, MTLB [perso