Part Il: War story

By Temple Ligon
November 15, 2013

(See Part l: War Story here)

September 5, 1969, was something of an all-afternoon encounter between the North Vietnamese Army Regulars near the Cambodian border and our company patrol of three platoons joined near dusk by another company’s three platoons. By the end of the day our six platoons were still trying to destroy what intelligence later told us was an enemy regiment. We were spread out before them and they were spread out before us, but the majority of them could evade and maneuver deep underground in the incredibly expansive Cu Chi tunnel system.  
 
As an artillery forward observer I was assigned to the artillery battalion while I was actually attached to the infantry company, Charlie Company, 2/27 Wolfhounds, 25th Infantry Division.  I lived and worked with Charlie Company as part of the command and control (C&C) element, but I answered to Captain David Smith, our battalion artillery liaison officer, a k a LNO.
 
The problems on September 5 began the night before, September 4, with an attack on fire support base Kotrc. We, C/2/27, helicoptered in to block any enemy movement between Kotrc and what our maps said was the Vam Co Dong but what we called the Oriental River.
 
Our three platoons walked into an ambush in early afternoon. We couldn’t spot the enemy’s exact location because we took automatic weapons fire from several directions. After the initial outbursts, after we took a count of our dead and wounded from that first blast, we settled in for what began as our artillery barrage called in by me but directed by Smith well above us in the battalion command helicopter – a slick, made by Hughes Aircraft. Flying maybe 1,000 feet overhead, our battalion commander and artillery LNO could oversee the whole show while keeping a relatively safe distance in the air.
 
After we decided we were being hit by a large enemy force coming in and out of bunkers and tunnel access points, we called in fighter jets and their napalm, putting a blanket of fire on top of the enemy and hopefully working the fire into the bunkers and tunnels.
 
As we crawled and maneuvered around to get better positions to locate the enemy and to put our far superior ordinance to good use, we had the help of helicopter gunships. The gunship pilots had the vantage points from their elevation to see and target the enemy with automatic grenade fire and the world’s fastest output machine gun, something based on the Gatling but run with an electric motor called the Vulcan.
 
The day was marked with fits and starts. Like all combat encounters, whatever could go wrong probably would. Every time we thought we should relocate to where we were putting all our ordinance, every time we thought we should call it a day and walk off the kill zone to count the enemy dead, the enemy would open up again. They were using a .51 cal. machine gun, one measurement off our .50 cal. Their ammunition could not fit into out .50 cal. We couldn’t use their ammunition, but our .50 cal. ammunition could fit into their .51 cal. Pretty smart on their behalf, we had to say.
 
My workhorse out of all the firepower I had available was the 105mm howitzer. The 105mm rounds could be called in closer than the 155mm or the 175mm. We even had an eight-inch job, but like everything else bigger than the 105mm, those rounds had a kill radius when they hit the ground that was too big for me to call it in anywhere near us, and when we had contact, the enemy was almost always near us.  We needed to be located parallel with every round’s trajectory. That way, a short round or one that overshot the targeted enemy wouldn’t fall on us.
 
A 105mm battery was six guns, but we had three guns at FSB Kotrc, our closest source of artillery support, and the second three guns were somewhere else within range, counting six guns in that battery. Plus we had a second 105mm battery of six guns also available to us in the firefight. Each 105mm round probably cost about a hundred and fifty bucks in 1969 money.
 
A month or so later I was visiting one of the artillery batteries I used on September 5, my first patrol, and regularly since then. Talking with the fire direction personnel, the people who took my radio calls for support and calculated what charge and what aim to tell the guns to get the rounds out as fast as possible, I was told the action at Kotrc on the night of September 4 and our trouble the following day on September 5 together blew four thousand 105mm rounds. Well, that’s real money, but the tunnel openings were everywhere and the enemy was everywhere, so our artillery had to hit just about everywhere.  
 
Back to the end of the day, September 5, after the second infantry company had met up with us, their captain told me our extraction was in another 15 minutes or so, and we should take the helicopters out first since we had been there all day and his company had been there for just the past hour. My radio telephone operator Chapman was running all over as a replacement medic after our regular medic got hit, so I had his radio on my back, which worked well as I still directed the helicopter gunships.
 
Then everything got worse.
 
Our company commander, a good-guy captain with whom I had worked little more than a week and whose name escapes me, heard a few of the enemy yell out some kind of broken English volunteer talk about surrendering and about becoming Kit Carson Scouts, the same way the U. S. Army in the 19C American West recruited Indians to work as scouts.
 
The American Kit Carson scout program screened NVA and Viet Cong walk-ins and POWs who wanted to work for our side. The pay was good and life overall was even a little cushy when compared to the day-to-day struggles fighting the Americans and the South Vietnamese and sometimes the Australians and the Thais. There was even a few Kiwis – New Zealand forces – to worry about. And don’t mention the South Koreans, probably the meanest mothers in the military. And then there were the B52 bombing raids down the Ho Chi Minh Trail while the NVA tried to infiltrate South Vietnam. Enough was enough, they thought; this scout deal was worth looking into.  
 
So our captain and a platoon sergeant call Sgt. Ranger – he really was, wore the tab and all – walked towards the enemy into what they thought was temporarily neutral territory, even if there was no white flag. In intelligence value, POWs and Kit Carson Scout volunteers were big deals. The so-called scout volunteers opened up with their .51 cal. machine gun and a few AK47s. The captain’s legs were shot up with .51 cal. rounds, and Ranger went down with AK47 wounds. Both were still alive deep down in the mud just below the top of a rice paddy berm on their enemy side and a second berm about 30 feet back on our side. Between the two berms, they were hopefully hard to hit for the time being.
 
I didn’t see all of this, but here is the account of what little I saw combined with what I was told later. At first I didn’t know about Ranger. All I knew was what I heard about the captain and his shot-up legs. With the captain gone, I was too new to know who was our new company commander, who was senior in command. I imagined our leader was likely 1LT Bob Vadnais, a seasoned platoon leader from Virginia on his second combat tour in South Vietnam, whom I had known for the same week I knew our captain.
 
The captain was pulled away. He was big and heavy and difficult to drag to safety, but he was relocated to a relatively safe spot to wait on the medevac.
 
After our captain was pulled out, I crawled up to the berm facing the enemy where I counted four of our men laid out flat to the ground behind the berm, somewhat safe but altogether worthless. The buttons on their fatigues added too much to their supine profiles. They weren’t shooting and they weren’t moving. They just lay there flat, as flat as possible as the bullets whizzed overhead, popping as they broke the sound barrier. There was no leader. I asked in singularly impolite terms what they were doing. They pointed to Ranger flat on his back about 30 feet out from us and 30 feet closer to the enemy’s .51 cal. position. Ranger was waving his hand. I told the four to shoot for the .51 cal. to keep Ranger protected. The .51 cal. was shooting intermittently with green tracers, while we had red tracers; approaching nightfall, we were having some kind of a Christmas.
 
I was still carrying Chapman’s radio and I was still in contact with the gunships, trying to keep the .51 cal. down in the bunker and out of action and trying to keep the bullets off Ranger.
 
Out of nowhere, unannounced and uncalled, along crawled Spec. 4 William J. Hurley Jr., the man on his last patrol with two months left in-country, the last man I would expect to see taking risks.
 
He said, and I quote, I’ll get him, sir, if you can keep that effing .51 cal. from shooting us.
 
With the four men and their M16s at the berm and the gunships overhead, I told Hurley to hurry it up. Let’s get out of here, I said in more far more emphatic terms.
 
Hurley crawled out to Ranger and proceeded to drag him back, at least tried to drag him back. Like our company commander, Ranger was too big. So it was my turn. I couldn’t ask any of the four to do this.  
 
I dropped my radio to crawl over the berm after Hurley and Ranger. I discovered muscle I didn’t know I had when I thought about that .51 cal. machine gun. Hurley did, too.
 
While Hurley and I were pulling Ranger back, our four riflemen were doing their job suppressing the .51 cal., and the gunships overhead didn’t need any further direction. A frightening situation, yes, but the situation was well in hand, as these things went.
 
But all of a sudden we had an instruction-barking, order-giving first lieutenant on our team. 1LT Bob Vadnais, former Special Forces and current platoon leader for Ranger and our four riflemen at the berm, was telling Hurley and me what to do, how to pull Ranger to safety behind the berm where our four riflemen and 1LT Vadnais lay. Vadnais was our senior lieutenant and thereby our company commander after the captain got shot up, so I guess there was a certain command efficiency in not helping Hurley and me drag Ranger but still telling us how to drag Ranger.
 
Put his arms around your necks, Vadnais kept screaming while we kept crawling and pulling and dragging.
 
In fairly short order Hurley and I got us out of the hellhole. Two of the men helped Hurley and me pull Ranger over the berm, and there was a stretcher waiting. Four of us grabbed the four handles and carried Ranger farther to safety where he could wait with the captain for the medevac. I remember George Leedy, our company’s best poker player, helping with the stretcher. Carrying his pack and his weapon, Leedy had only one hand on the stretcher, and he dropped his fourth of Ranger, who cried out something unprintable about our need to be more careful. Ranger had picked up a war trophy AK47 off a dead enemy that afternoon, and he wasn’t letting go of it. Leedy pulled his M16 shoulder strap up high to allow for the use of both hands to keep a grip on Ranger’s stretcher and to allow Ranger to keep a hold of his souvenir AK.
 
I recently saw a list of our men who had kept in touch for the past 44 years or so, and Leedy was on the list. Vadnais was not. I’d like to think Leedy saw the whole thing from when Hurley first crawled up because here’s what I have to do: Get Hurley his Silver Star he so richly deserves.
 
Since Vadnais was senior in command, I naturally assumed he would handle whatever was necessary to officially thank Hurley for his heroism. I’m just guessing here, but Hurley might have been awarded the Bronze Star for his day’s work, not specifically for his heroics retrieving Ranger. Vadnais might have let that story remain under a lid. Looking back on it, maybe Vadnais was quietly embarrassed he never really did anything to help us pull Ranger to safety. And maybe he couldn’t help us because we had already lost one company commander. Hard to say.
 
Hurley left our company for his headquarters job, and I guess everybody who saw Hurley’s heroism assumed the Silver Star stuff was automatically handled by the proper channels. After all, besides Vadnais, I saw it, Leedy saw it, the four riflemen saw it. And Ranger sure as hell saw it. Hurley, the short timer, crawled up out of nowhere and said, I’ll get him, sir. Extraordinary.
 
There’s a Charlie Company reunion this summer in Branson, Missouri, and I’ll be there. Charlie Company, Second Wolfhounds of the 25th for its time in South Vietnam is fairly well organized, and by then I should have all I need to try to see to it Hurley gets his. Vadnais might be a problem because he was the problem in September 1969. He saw it all and he did nothing. On the other hand, I saw it all and I did nothing in the aftermath. I was new on the team, and I just assumed these things were taken care of by the people responsible. At the time I had no sense of relative worth of risks taken, a gauge for heroism, the value of brass balls, and I wasn’t at all familiar with the process connected to awards and decorations. I was too new. I had been the company’s FO for a bit more than a week. Now, of course, all I can say is Hurley’s actions were more than exemplary. Again, they were extraordinary.
 
I have five American Bronze Stars, three for individual acts of heroism and two for both performances as a forward observer. I served a second tour of six months with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, mostly as a forward observer. I have the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Bronze Star. I know what Hurley did is where a Silver Star should be awarded. I now know that.
 
Hurley married, had four children, and he was a career policeman in Massachusetts. He died several years ago. His widow Patricia hasn’t heard from me yet, but I don’t want to connect until all this is put together. That’s my job. That’s my regret.
 
 (To be continued.)

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