Chapter 4: The Absence of All Hope
Written by Heidi Thiess and Kit Jarrell
Before the explosion ripped through the jungle and the men desperately defending the small area, Linderer had been inching up the hillside backward dragging his rucksack in front of him for cover. Flattened by the explosion, he felt something slap at his legs as a “large, black cloud of smoke rolled over the top of the hill.”3 Linderer turned to see Clifton a few feet away, his throat torn open by the blast and bleeding out. As Clifton reached toward his friend, he collapsed, dead. Linderer looked over to where he’d last seen Contreros and Bacon kneeling by the radio, but no one was there. He peered around the perimeter. “Where seconds before ten men stood fighting for their lives, now there were none.”
After several frantic radio calls from Eklund, the otherwise steady voice of SGT Bacon, now struggling for strength, came over the radio. “Cease fire, cease fire! Everyone’s down!” He told us later that it was Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to call a “Cease Fire” in that situation in case the team had been hit by a rocket from the overhead gunships.4 Cox remembers thinking the explosion was a rocket at first, too, because Contreros had wanted to tighten the perimeter so the Cobras could maneuver closer, but rocket fire was sequenced and this was a single explosion. “Surely the Cobras hadn’t caused that kind of explosion with their 2.75-inch rockets,” said Meacham.5
The team’s chopper pilots, Meacham and Grant, sprang into action. Grant radioed for a 'dust off' (medical chopper), while Meacham circled his Huey overhead to try and get a look at what remained of the team on the ground. Enough low-hanging foliage had been blown away by the blast that he could see the numerous bodies of dead NVA encircling the team’s tiny defensive position atop the knoll. Grant could also see the team members lying where they’d fallen. Bacon, half covered with Contreros’ unmoving body, was struggling with the radio and it appeared that only Walkabout and Linderer were still moving. While waiting for the dust off, Meacham attempted to drop his McGuire rigs6 through the treetops to the team below, but they kept getting hung up on the trees. He withdrew, knowing that none of the injured men on the ground were in good enough shape to maneuver bodies into the harnesses anyway. Eklund continued to control the Cobras from his vantage point in the C&C chopper as they raked their gunfire and rockets over large areas of the ridgeline.
The LRPs on the ground started to take stock of the situation growing more dire with every minute that passed. Linderer was wounded in his legs, and SGT Billy Walkabout, who had been nearest to Linderer in the perimeter, had lost the use of his hands; they were pierced through with shrapnel. Steve Czepurny’s feet were hit by shrapnel, but he turned back to cover the trail with his M-16. Sp4 Art Heringhausen, who replaced Kenn Miller on Team 24, lay facedown on the jungle floor. Clifton was dead, his throat torn out by shrapnel. On the upper part of the perimeter closest to the explosion, SGT Michael Reiff’s lifeless body was pinned to a mahogany tree by the shrapnel that had killed him.
Bacon was missing a huge chunk of flesh from his thigh, but was still lucid enough to man the radio though he was fading. Linderer and Walkabout shifted Contreros’ body off of Bacon and saw that Contreros had a small dime-sized hole above his ear but a much larger exit wound out of the top of his head. His pulse was weak and faltering. As the men moved on to Souza to address the man's wounds, they saw a neck wound and a sucking chest wound and attempted to plug the holes. While wrapping the bandage around their comrade, they realized he had wounds to his back as well. Turning him over, they saw a back wound that had ripped open his chest cavity; he was missing a lung and some ribs. They rolled him into a poncho to drain the wound and moved onto Cox. “Dozer”, as the men affectionately called him for his physique and constitution, was hit everywhere. His right forearm was shattered and he had tied his flopping hand back to his forearm to keep it out of the way. Cox explained to us the extent of his injuries.
Cox grinned ruefully at his teammates and scooped his entrails back into his body. Stuffing a green sweat towel into the wound to try and keep everything inside, he calmly picked up his shotgun with his left hand and turned to cover the perimeter, continuing to fire down the hill.
“I could hear [Cox’s] shotgun firing when I was on the radio with anybody on the ground that was communicating to me," CPT Eklund said. "He continued to fire until he ran out of ammo.”8
Only three men were able to guard the others. Walkabout and Linderer agreed that if they were overrun, they would shoot their fellow LRPs and then themselves rather than be captured by the NVA.
The surface vegetation on the knoll had been blown away by the explosion, and the men wondered why the NVA didn’t follow up their advantage. The answer came as they heard choppers overhead drawing the enemy fire away from the team. It was 1535 and the first medevac had arrived.
A jungle penetrator9 was lowered to the men on the knoll. As the chopper took fire from the NVA, the penetrator drifted down the hill toward the enemy positions as the pilot attempted to move out of range of the rounds. Seeing that the pilot couldn’t get help to them, Walkabout leapt down the hill after the penetrator straight toward the enemy positions, chasing down the help they needed. Reaching the penetrator, he wrapped his damaged hands around the steel shaft and staggered back up the hill with it. Cox had grabbed a CAR-15 rifle from one of his fallen teammates next to him to provide covering fire for Walkabout. The NVA troops were too concentrated on downing the choppers and at first they didn’t even realize Walkabout was in their position. Making back inside the perimeter safely, Walkabout and Linderer strapped Contreros’ inert body to the shaft but as the chopper started to lift it, they panicked. The chopper had drifted again, and the penetrator would whiplash Contreros’ body into the trees! Walkabout wrapped his arms around the penetrator with Contreros in it and lifted both clear off the ground. He staggered down the hill carrying both the penetrator and Contreros until he was directly under the chopper again and the penetrator could be raised without harming Contreros. Linderer recalled, “I watched in disbelief. A hero was earning a Medal of Honor before my eyes, and I wasn’t going to survive to attest to it.”10
Meanwhile, Cox was keeping his side of the hill defended as best he could. CPT Eklund recalls looking down from his C&C chopper onto the carnage just below.
The next medevac immediately replaced the first, and again drew heavy NVA fire. As the second penetrator was lowered, it too drifted toward the enemy positions. Walkabout again dashed toward the enemy positions to retrieve the penetrator; dragging it back to the center of the perimeter. Walkabout and Linderer tried to convince Cox to go out on this medevac, but he yelled back “I’m okay, get somebody else out!” Souza looked like a goner, so the two men strapped him to the penetrator, and he was raised through the trees. Walkabout told Cox that he was going out on the next bird.
The Cobras continued to swarm over the hillside, providing cover for the 5 remaining living men on the ground. Eklund was doing everything he could possibly do to get help to his men. The next series of medevacs would be onsite in another 40 minutes.
Meanwhile, Burnell’s team had been ‘laying dog’ in their own AO five klicks away. They were anxious to get back to their LZ so they could lend support to Team 24. The SOP was that when one team made contact, the other would go to ground and stay concealed for the duration. Listening to the disaster on the radio was torture for Burnell’s LRPs. Larry Chambers, a member of Burnell’s team, described as best he could what the men of his team were feeling; listening to the ongoing firefight:
Grant remembered it similarly:
Next: To Save Our Brothers
____________________________
1Interview with Riley Cox, 07/02/05
2 Interview with Jim Bacon, 7/7/05
3 Linderer, Gary, The Eyes of the Eagle, pg. 184.
4 Interview with Jim Bacon, 07/05/05.
5Meacham, Bill, Lest We Forget, pg. 288.
6A description of McGuire rigs and a photo are available in Chapter 3.
7Interview with Riley Cox, 7/02/05. When asked how he could focus enough to keep firing in the face of these injuries, Cox simply said that his brothers needed him to.
8Interview with Ken Eklund, 07/07/05.
9A compact device somewhat resembling an anchor, attached to the winch cable of a rescue helicopter and used for extracting a person from dense vegetation or other extreme terrain conditions; also called "forest penetrator".
10Eyes of the Eagle.
11From a letter written by Eklund in support of Cox’s nomination for the Medal of Honor. Eklund went on to mention that “Years later he [Cox] told me this act bothered him as much as anything he was forced to do. Potential instant castration was not an option he wanted to consider.”
12Linderer, Gary, The Eyes of the Eagle, pg. 189.
13Chambers, Larry. Recondo, pg 64.
14Miller, Kenn, Six Silent Men, Book Two, pg. 257.
15Grant, W.T., Wings of the Eagle, pg. 241.
A tremendous explosion had ripped through the jungle and not a single man from Team 24 appeared to be left standing. What happened? CPT Eklund desperately tried to raise his team on the radio with no response.
In Vietnam the LRPs didn’t worry much about the “bullet with your name on it. It’s the 'to whom it may concern' shit you gotta worry about,” said Riley Cox.1 Whatever it was, it had come from their 6:00 position. Cox remembers how the force of the explosion lifted his 220-lb body along with his heavy rucksack and flipped him over like he weighed nothing. It seemed like the explosion just “rolled across us”, said Cox. The low-hanging foliage was “rolled back” and sunlight filtered down through the remaining jungle cover onto the wounded men scattered around the hillside.
Bacon remembers the explosion too:
“[After the blast,] Contreros was laying across my legs. I knew…oh, I knew I’d been hit, but I had no idea how bad. I was on my side, in like a fetal position, and the first person I could see was Riley [Cox]. He was wearing woodland [camouflage fatigues]…and he started to turn into a Christmas tree, across his chest and his belly. I could see the blood, you know, coming out of the holes.
I tried to turn over and I couldn’t. I finally managed to turn over and Contreros was laying across my legs…I thought he was dead….I could see in his head, you know, in his brain.
I started looking around and the first thing I heard was Gary [Linderer] moaning behind me. Otherwise, I thought I was the only one left.”2
Before the explosion ripped through the jungle and the men desperately defending the small area, Linderer had been inching up the hillside backward dragging his rucksack in front of him for cover. Flattened by the explosion, he felt something slap at his legs as a “large, black cloud of smoke rolled over the top of the hill.”3 Linderer turned to see Clifton a few feet away, his throat torn open by the blast and bleeding out. As Clifton reached toward his friend, he collapsed, dead. Linderer looked over to where he’d last seen Contreros and Bacon kneeling by the radio, but no one was there. He peered around the perimeter. “Where seconds before ten men stood fighting for their lives, now there were none.”
After several frantic radio calls from Eklund, the otherwise steady voice of SGT Bacon, now struggling for strength, came over the radio. “Cease fire, cease fire! Everyone’s down!” He told us later that it was Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to call a “Cease Fire” in that situation in case the team had been hit by a rocket from the overhead gunships.4 Cox remembers thinking the explosion was a rocket at first, too, because Contreros had wanted to tighten the perimeter so the Cobras could maneuver closer, but rocket fire was sequenced and this was a single explosion. “Surely the Cobras hadn’t caused that kind of explosion with their 2.75-inch rockets,” said Meacham.5
The team’s chopper pilots, Meacham and Grant, sprang into action. Grant radioed for a 'dust off' (medical chopper), while Meacham circled his Huey overhead to try and get a look at what remained of the team on the ground. Enough low-hanging foliage had been blown away by the blast that he could see the numerous bodies of dead NVA encircling the team’s tiny defensive position atop the knoll. Grant could also see the team members lying where they’d fallen. Bacon, half covered with Contreros’ unmoving body, was struggling with the radio and it appeared that only Walkabout and Linderer were still moving. While waiting for the dust off, Meacham attempted to drop his McGuire rigs6 through the treetops to the team below, but they kept getting hung up on the trees. He withdrew, knowing that none of the injured men on the ground were in good enough shape to maneuver bodies into the harnesses anyway. Eklund continued to control the Cobras from his vantage point in the C&C chopper as they raked their gunfire and rockets over large areas of the ridgeline.
The LRPs on the ground started to take stock of the situation growing more dire with every minute that passed. Linderer was wounded in his legs, and SGT Billy Walkabout, who had been nearest to Linderer in the perimeter, had lost the use of his hands; they were pierced through with shrapnel. Steve Czepurny’s feet were hit by shrapnel, but he turned back to cover the trail with his M-16. Sp4 Art Heringhausen, who replaced Kenn Miller on Team 24, lay facedown on the jungle floor. Clifton was dead, his throat torn out by shrapnel. On the upper part of the perimeter closest to the explosion, SGT Michael Reiff’s lifeless body was pinned to a mahogany tree by the shrapnel that had killed him.
Bacon was missing a huge chunk of flesh from his thigh, but was still lucid enough to man the radio though he was fading. Linderer and Walkabout shifted Contreros’ body off of Bacon and saw that Contreros had a small dime-sized hole above his ear but a much larger exit wound out of the top of his head. His pulse was weak and faltering. As the men moved on to Souza to address the man's wounds, they saw a neck wound and a sucking chest wound and attempted to plug the holes. While wrapping the bandage around their comrade, they realized he had wounds to his back as well. Turning him over, they saw a back wound that had ripped open his chest cavity; he was missing a lung and some ribs. They rolled him into a poncho to drain the wound and moved onto Cox. “Dozer”, as the men affectionately called him for his physique and constitution, was hit everywhere. His right forearm was shattered and he had tied his flopping hand back to his forearm to keep it out of the way. Cox explained to us the extent of his injuries.
“I looked down and saw there was a hole in my boot, so I wiggled my foot and saw blood bubbling out so I thought, ‘I probably shouldn’t do that’. Then I looked down and saw the ration I just ate a while before…it was in my stomach. My guts were hanging out in my lap.”7
Cox grinned ruefully at his teammates and scooped his entrails back into his body. Stuffing a green sweat towel into the wound to try and keep everything inside, he calmly picked up his shotgun with his left hand and turned to cover the perimeter, continuing to fire down the hill.
“I could hear [Cox’s] shotgun firing when I was on the radio with anybody on the ground that was communicating to me," CPT Eklund said. "He continued to fire until he ran out of ammo.”8
Only three men were able to guard the others. Walkabout and Linderer agreed that if they were overrun, they would shoot their fellow LRPs and then themselves rather than be captured by the NVA.
The surface vegetation on the knoll had been blown away by the explosion, and the men wondered why the NVA didn’t follow up their advantage. The answer came as they heard choppers overhead drawing the enemy fire away from the team. It was 1535 and the first medevac had arrived.
A jungle penetrator9 was lowered to the men on the knoll. As the chopper took fire from the NVA, the penetrator drifted down the hill toward the enemy positions as the pilot attempted to move out of range of the rounds. Seeing that the pilot couldn’t get help to them, Walkabout leapt down the hill after the penetrator straight toward the enemy positions, chasing down the help they needed. Reaching the penetrator, he wrapped his damaged hands around the steel shaft and staggered back up the hill with it. Cox had grabbed a CAR-15 rifle from one of his fallen teammates next to him to provide covering fire for Walkabout. The NVA troops were too concentrated on downing the choppers and at first they didn’t even realize Walkabout was in their position. Making back inside the perimeter safely, Walkabout and Linderer strapped Contreros’ inert body to the shaft but as the chopper started to lift it, they panicked. The chopper had drifted again, and the penetrator would whiplash Contreros’ body into the trees! Walkabout wrapped his arms around the penetrator with Contreros in it and lifted both clear off the ground. He staggered down the hill carrying both the penetrator and Contreros until he was directly under the chopper again and the penetrator could be raised without harming Contreros. Linderer recalled, “I watched in disbelief. A hero was earning a Medal of Honor before my eyes, and I wasn’t going to survive to attest to it.”10
Meanwhile, Cox was keeping his side of the hill defended as best he could. CPT Eklund recalls looking down from his C&C chopper onto the carnage just below.
“[Cox] had to expend his last few grenades by wedging them between his blood-soaked legs, and pulling the pins with his left hand…He smiled at me [and] made a thumbs–up signal with his left hand. The right hand was too badly mangled for him to move, as I noticed it resting against his side; probably attempting to keep his intestines in.”11
The next medevac immediately replaced the first, and again drew heavy NVA fire. As the second penetrator was lowered, it too drifted toward the enemy positions. Walkabout again dashed toward the enemy positions to retrieve the penetrator; dragging it back to the center of the perimeter. Walkabout and Linderer tried to convince Cox to go out on this medevac, but he yelled back “I’m okay, get somebody else out!” Souza looked like a goner, so the two men strapped him to the penetrator, and he was raised through the trees. Walkabout told Cox that he was going out on the next bird.
“Dozer jacked another round in his shotgun and shouted back that he wasn’t going until he ran out of shells. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I ain’t hit so bad!’ I screamed back at him, ‘Riley, you fuckin’ bullshit artist! You’re goin’.’ He flashed back a big grin. I knew he wasn’t going.”12
The Cobras continued to swarm over the hillside, providing cover for the 5 remaining living men on the ground. Eklund was doing everything he could possibly do to get help to his men. The next series of medevacs would be onsite in another 40 minutes.
Meanwhile, Burnell’s team had been ‘laying dog’ in their own AO five klicks away. They were anxious to get back to their LZ so they could lend support to Team 24. The SOP was that when one team made contact, the other would go to ground and stay concealed for the duration. Listening to the disaster on the radio was torture for Burnell’s LRPs. Larry Chambers, a member of Burnell’s team, described as best he could what the men of his team were feeling; listening to the ongoing firefight:
“Contreros had been Burnell’s best friend. The loss showed on his face. He dropped the towel he had draped around his neck. He sat against a tree staring into the radio’s handset, a look of shock and utter disblief on his face.
…We all felt totally helpless. The anger and frustration was clearly visible on the faces of my teammates, who stood waiting, wanting to do something – anything to help our comrades."13
Earlier Burnell had radioed Eklund and offered to take his team overland to aid the firefight. They’d been told to sit tight, but now after the explosion they were told to get back to the LZ where they’d be picked up and reinserted as a reaction force for Team 24. While they were racing back toward their LZ, they were told to go to ground again because a reaction force was already on its way, but then it wasn’t and Burnell’s team was up and running again toward the LZ. The frustration of the chaos was infecting more than just a few of the men. “There was plenty of grief, plenty of worry, plenty of misery, and plenty of anger at the division for pulling support from teams in the field and not getting back when they needed it,” said Kenn Miller, one of Burnell's men.14
Meanwhile, Meacham and Grant arrived back at Camp Eagle. They had radioed ahead for 16 men to be ready for a hastily formed reaction force mission to go save their fellow Rangers. The LRPs and their support personnel had been worriedly monitoring the contact on the FM radio back at camp and jumped at the chance to help.
Meacham described the sight in his book, Lest We Forget:
“People were milling all over the hillside between the helipad and the tents. None of them seemed to be wearing any standard uniform, if you could accuse them of being in uniform at all: some were wearing civilian shorts and tiger-striped shirts, others were not even wearing shirts…However, they all had two things in common. One: they all had weapons. And two: they all had their load-bearing equipment harnesses.”
Grant remembered it similarly:
“The whole company had turned out. They didn’t look like LRPs, the faces weren’t painted. They weren’t all dressed in tiger stripes. Some wore flower-power cammys. Some wore tigers. Some were hardly dressed at all...Tony “Ti Ti” Tercero wore army issue, olive-drab boxer shorts and shower shoes. Of course, he had his weapon, LBE, and several bandoliers of ammo. He obviously didn’t want to be overdressed for the occasion. It wasn’t just LRPs either; the company clerk, Tim Long was there; the supply sergeant, Phil Mueller, was there and ready to go. It was one thing to fight hard when things got hot, but these guys were climbing over each other to go on a ten-minute flight into hell.” 15
Next: To Save Our Brothers
____________________________
1Interview with Riley Cox, 07/02/05
2 Interview with Jim Bacon, 7/7/05
3 Linderer, Gary, The Eyes of the Eagle, pg. 184.
4 Interview with Jim Bacon, 07/05/05.
5Meacham, Bill, Lest We Forget, pg. 288.
6A description of McGuire rigs and a photo are available in Chapter 3.
7Interview with Riley Cox, 7/02/05. When asked how he could focus enough to keep firing in the face of these injuries, Cox simply said that his brothers needed him to.
8Interview with Ken Eklund, 07/07/05.
9A compact device somewhat resembling an anchor, attached to the winch cable of a rescue helicopter and used for extracting a person from dense vegetation or other extreme terrain conditions; also called "forest penetrator".
10Eyes of the Eagle.
11From a letter written by Eklund in support of Cox’s nomination for the Medal of Honor. Eklund went on to mention that “Years later he [Cox] told me this act bothered him as much as anything he was forced to do. Potential instant castration was not an option he wanted to consider.”
12Linderer, Gary, The Eyes of the Eagle, pg. 189.
13Chambers, Larry. Recondo, pg 64.
14Miller, Kenn, Six Silent Men, Book Two, pg. 257.
15Grant, W.T., Wings of the Eagle, pg. 241.
posted by Kit Jarrell at 18:44
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