SAPPER ATTACK 6/16/69 - ENEMY ATTACK ON MOUNTAIN

The sapper attack on June 16, 1969, was the climax of my Vietnam war and my time in the Army. It was my chance to find out whether I had what it took to lead men in combat — the courage to face an enemy and beat him.

Months of reinforcing the mountain’s defenses and training the Reaction Team paid off. The Viet Cong breached our perimeter. My team stopped them before they reached the signal equipment. Here is what happened that day.

The months before the attack were quiet. Enemy probing was minor. Even the sensor fields around the perimeter showed nothing.

The quiet bothered me. We had no soldiers to spare for listening posts or patrols, and it made no sense to let the enemy walk right up to our wire and study our defenses at leisure. Major Campbell tried to get patrols approved. Someone up the chain, in their infinite wisdom, kept saying no.

The weather was perfect that morning. I was up at 7:00 a.m. and skipped my usual walk to the mess hall for a detour to the northern perimeter — a spot-check of the bunker line. The north side was always quiet. Too quiet. Was that intentional?

I talked to the men about the defenses, asked if they had recommendations. An hour later I left satisfied — the line was solid, the men alert. My one piece of advice for Major Campbell: schedule more random fire missions along the north to keep the Viet Cong guessing.

At the mess hall, Major Campbell was starting his morning briefing with the three platoon leaders — the daily rundown of everything that had happened on the bunker line in the last twenty-four hours. Those meetings kept every officer on the mountain honest about what was really going on.

Each lieutenant ran six bunkers and reported straight to Major Campbell. I held the title of executive officer for the infantry company, but my other job kept me outside their chain of command. I’d only take over if the major went down.

After the meeting I walked back to the command bunker with him and briefed him on the northern perimeter and my other security projects. Seventeen hours before the attack.

The Viet Cong owned ninety-five percent of Nui Ba Den. One weakness could cost us our lives. In 1968, complacency and boredom cost the mountain twenty-four dead.

I arrived a year after that slaughter. The perimeter had been rebuilt and strengthened in the meantime. But people don’t change, and the same complacency that killed those men the year before had crept back in. There was no place to run on Nui Ba Den. Your life depended on keeping the enemy on the other side of the wire.

After the briefing I checked my three .50-caliber machine guns, set up behind the western and southern bunkers — held in reserve for a major attack, in case the line was overrun. I’d gotten the idea from Special Forces A camps I’d visited my first three months in country. Two men from the bunker line kept them camouflaged and ready. A fourth gun covered the southern boulder field.

Nobody authorized those guns. I ordered them from the 1st Brigade myself. Each M-2 could cover five bunkers. If the Viet Cong came at us in force, they had a surprise waiting.

Next I found Sergeant Meyers and Corporal White at bunker six to check on our herbicide project. I’d had Meyers spray the western perimeter with weed killer earlier that week and wanted to see the results.

The western perimeter was dead — wilted, dying, half the enemy’s camouflage gone in thirty-six hours. If they were smart, and they were, seeing that much cover disappear that fast made them think twice. Maybe it’s why they came earlier than planned, or with fewer men than intended.

The attack was doomed before it started. The sappers hadn’t planned for our Reaction Force. In 1968 there wasn’t one — once the Viet Cong got through the wire, nothing stopped them. They killed everyone they found, blew up bunker after bunker, gathered their dead and wounded, and vanished back into the mountainside. That single attack knocked out radio communications across all of III Corps. God knows how many men died because of it.

With the spraying done, I put off further work until the Army Engineers finished the perimeter lighting.

That lighting was my other priority: high-pressure sodium lights along the western boulder fields, where tanglefoot and concertina wire alone couldn’t stop infiltration. Sappers slipped through barbed wire like smoke — blackened, greased, silent. To stop them, we needed to see them.

Getting the fixtures was its own war. I was told they weren’t available through normal supply. Bullshit — every major base camp in-country had perimeter lighting. Major Campbell called in favors and got the telephone poles and copper wire for six bunkers within a week. All we needed now were fixtures and bulbs.

I don’t usually start a project without all the materials in hand, but this one was different. Nui Ba Den relayed radio traffic for every Army unit in III Corps. Without it, men in the field lost their fire support and their medevacs.

Nobody up the chain seemed concerned that the perimeter sat in the dark. The Army was too regimented to try anything new without orders from above.

That wasn’t how I worked. On that mountain I did whatever it took to kill the enemy and keep my men alive. I wasn’t leaving until the western perimeter was lit.

The mountain hosted eighteen different signal units — a built-in alliance no other Army unit in Vietnam had. Through them I scrounged six light fixtures and bulbs, all clearly “borrowed” from other base camps in III Corps.

By 4:00 p.m. we’d run the last of the cable. The engineers finished the generator hookup two days after the attack.

If that lighting had gone live before the sappers came, I think the attack might never have happened. Once it did go live, the western perimeter looked like daylight — our most dangerous stretch of wire became our safest. Nine and a half hours before the attack.

Around 5:30 p.m. I met Sergeant Meyers in the Fire Direction Center. The 1st Brigade had finally cleared us to fire on a moving light I’d been tracking. We picked the target, worked the artillery options, and plotted two fallback zones in case the enemy scattered when the barrage hit. I always wanted a second plan ready if a target of opportunity showed. He promised someone would be awake in the FDC all night. I went back to my bunker and waited for dark.

At 11:00 p.m. I climbed the pagoda stairs, set up my Starlight Scope, and waited. The view from up there was something — clouds drifting through, wrapping me in white, cold. My target appeared on schedule, moving northeast off the mountain, steady and bright — mounted on a vehicle, had to be. What was following that light? A squad? A company? A convoy? I tracked it twenty minutes before calling in the fire mission. See “Nui Ba Den Fire Mission.”

I left the tower at 1:30 a.m. Heading back to my bunker, I heard a burst of AK-47 fire near the pagoda behind me. I didn’t know it then, but two sappers were assembling satchel charges under those very steps as I came down them. They could have killed me on the spot.

The next day I found seven satchel charges and a pile of Russian and Chinese grenades under those stairs. I’ve always taken steps at a run. A 180-pound soldier pounding down wooden stairs in the dark must have startled them badly enough that I was gone before they knew what hit them.

That first burst of AK fire — whether it came from the sappers under the stairs or somewhere else, I still don’t know — woke the whole western bunker line. Within seconds every weapon on the mountain was firing into the dark.

The noise made me think the mountain was already overrun. I raced for the command bunker, crawling through the open stretches while bullets ricocheted around me.

I got there just as Major Campbell was warning the line: mortar attack, stay under cover. Forty 82mm rounds hit our perimeter that night, across three separate sectors.

At 1:40 a.m. Sergeant Meyers stumbled in covered in blood. Sappers had breached the western perimeter and were blowing bunkers. Probe or full attack — that question was answered.

When the mortars stopped, the satchel charges started — dull, muffled thuds inside our own wire. I checked the alarm board. Every light was lit except bunker 7. That meant it was gone, and so were the men in it. With sappers loose inside the perimeter, they could move bunker to bunker and kill everyone they found.

Meyers, Campbell, and I made a quick decision: they’d run the defensive fire missions, I’d take the Reaction Force and hunt the sappers before they reached the signal site.

Gearing up, I ran the checklist in my head: M-16, thirty loaded magazines, three frag grenades, .45 cocked and locked, flashlight, radio on the company frequency. In the rush I left my smoke and white phosphorus grenades behind.

I chambered a round, flipped to full auto, and stepped into the dark. My pucker factor was high.

First stop: the pagoda, to check the radios. The door was barricaded from inside. The men shouted through that they were fine and everything still worked. I went to find my team.

The second I stepped off the pagoda porch, an explosion on my left threw me across the walkway, nearly into a boulder. When my vision cleared, fear had its hands on me. I felt alone.

I had to find my team before the enemy found me. Crawling toward the A-324 Special Forces bunker, I found four of them waiting. Short two-thirds of my squad, but I wasn’t wasting time looking for the rest.

Good men, all four. We agreed the enemy fire was coming from around bunkers 6 and 7 — that was our target. I radioed the major, who warned me the bunker line had bad communications and itchy trigger fingers.

The straight line to the bunkers ran across the helicopter pad — no cover, flares lighting it up like a stage. Suicide. I chose a double flank instead.

I told the command bunker to warn the western line we were coming and to hold fire unless they had a clean ID. I took one man south around the pad. The other three went north. We’d meet at bunker 7. If it went wrong, everyone made for the nearest bunker.

Every flare sent us freezing in place, moving again only when the dark came back — every two minutes or so. The boulder fields threw a hundred shifting shadows. We couldn’t tell shadow from enemy. Twice I fired at nothing.

I took the lead, staying off our usual paths. Every boulder was a possible ambush. I moved from rock to rock in a crouch, finger on the trigger, certain a sapper waited behind each one. I wasn’t scared so much as wrung out — running on adrenaline and nothing else.

Near the bunker line we spotted three sappers moving through the rocks, too close to the bunkers to risk firing. No way to warn the line. They melted back into the boulders without setting anything off.

The 1st Brigade responded fast. Spooky circled the perimeter, Gatling guns working. Fire bases hammered the mountainside with 105s and 155s. Three sorties of B-52s dropped 1,000-pound bombs on the western slope.

Two hours of that turned night into day. The whole mountain shook. Boulders rolled downhill. Bunkers shifted on their footings. I was more scared of our own ordnance than the Viet Cong. Every ricochet off the boulder field threw white sparks along the bunker line. Between the explosions and the gunfire, I started to think the mountain really was being overrun.

We kept moving through it and stopped at our first body. Sergeant Hughes — the Air Force generator mechanic I’d brought up the mountain the day before — sat against a boulder with three bullet holes in his chest. He’d made it out of his bunker before the satchel charge hit it, then ran into sappers.

The line had broken near bunker 7. Rocket-propelled grenades had torn the top off it and killed two more men.

I spread my men across the bunker’s field of fire and went to check the two bodies. Corporal Bender was slumped against a support post, half his face gone. The other man lay face down in the mud, a thin trail of blood running downhill from him.

I took him for dead too and started crawling back to my men. Halfway there I turned around. I couldn’t leave without knowing for certain. I crawled back, checked him for a booby trap, rolled him over. Shot through the forehead. Eyes open.

I didn’t recognize him. I found his name tag by flare light — couldn’t read it — and cupped my hands around my flashlight to try again. W. Then HITE.

“NO, THEY KILLED MARVIN!”

I screamed it loud enough that my whole team opened fire into the dark. One man, who hadn’t heard me, thought I’d been shot and panicked. Two of them told me later that the way I moved scared the hell out of them.

I lay on my side next to Marvin for five minutes and did nothing. What was he doing out of his bunker? Empty casings all around him, but no rifle, no helmet. All he did to help hold that perimeter, and this is how it ends for him.

That’s combat. Green Beret or mess hall cook, death doesn’t care. Wrong place, wrong time, and you’re gone. See my letter to Marvin’s family.

One of my men, worried, pulled on my leg until I closed Marvin’s eyes and crawled back to the team.

Gunfire was still going everywhere. I started thinking the other side of the mountain might already be overrun, which meant this side was next. Then my radio died. Nothing brought it back.

We were on our own now. I decided we’d hold bunker 7 until relief came at dawn or the Viet Cong found us first. Either way, we weren’t moving. I had the men check ammo and split it evenly, then found a spot between two boulders and settled in to wait.

Within minutes, the gunner in bunker 6 spotted three Viet Cong working through the boulders in front of us. He opened up with his M-60. Another man threw a white phosphorus grenade that landed close enough to douse us both in the plume.

I came up screaming at them to stop. When they didn’t hear me, I put a burst into the side of their bunker to get their attention. They waved back and pointed toward my men — message received.

Five minutes later the same soldier signaled where the Viet Cong were hiding, out of my sightline. I told my men to get down and threw two grenades at the spot.

The instant they went off, two of us rushed the position and fired until we’d each burned three magazines. Then the perimeter went quiet, and we settled back in, waiting for the attack that never came.

At sunrise our men moved down to relieve the line. None of us got up from our positions until we were sure it was really over.

Our uniforms were soaked through with sweat and red mud from a night spent crawling the mountainside. We could barely stand, let alone walk.

I thanked the team for saving my life and every other life on that mountain. I gave them time off. They wanted breakfast instead. I had Meyers call the mess hall and tell them to start cooking extra.

Walking up the incline, men came down to meet us. By the time we reached the mess hall, thirty of them had gathered around my team — like a high school team carrying in the winning shot. Filthy didn’t matter. They picked my men up and carried them inside. I’ve never seen that many smiling faces at once.

People still ask why I left the safety of my bunker that night and walked into the unknown. Same answer every time: it was my team, and I knew what would happen to them if we didn’t find those sappers first.

The year before, the Viet Cong killed everyone they found. Why would this time be different?

The attack cost four American lives — three Army, one Air Force — and left twelve more wounded, mostly shrapnel. My team killed two sappers in the sweep; an unknown number of others died or were wounded along the line. A patrol went out later that day and found nothing but blood trails leading away from bunker 7. The Viet Cong take their dead when they can.

Not one Army unit in III Corps lost communications that night. I can only guess how many American and Vietnamese lives that saved.

The lighting and the herbicide did their job. The Viet Cong never attacked Nui Ba Den again — not until we handed the site to the Vietnamese in 1972.

My mission there was done. On October 15 I was reassigned to Tay Ninh Base Camp, working under the 1st Brigade signal officer. Not much of a job, but it came with two hot meals a day and a bunker dug deep enough to sleep in.

I left Vietnam on January 5, 1970, with all my parts and no serious wounds. What I lost was weight — 180 pounds going in, 155 coming out.

The adventure was over. I was going home.