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Authors: Keith Nolan
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suitable body count ratio of enemy to friendly KIAs.” There was, Warren added, intense pressure from regiment “to submit estimates early in a battle when virtually no information was actually available… the early estimates were expected to be revised upwards as the battle progressed.” The result was that regiment “not only allowed but implicitly encouraged their subordinate commanders to become professional liars.”
Whatever career-enhancing juggling was done with the reporting of enemy casualties, the NVA thought well enough of BLT 2/4 to shift their infiltration routes west to the ARVN TAOR around Dong Ha. The Bastards made only infrequent contact during April 1968, usually at night with ambush operations Weise had begun implementing to compensate for the sudden paucity of targets. The lull gave BLT 2/4 time to break in the influx of replacements, and to analyze what had been done right and not so right in its first major campaign under Weise. The result was an updated, Ai Tu-style training schedule out in the sticks at Mai Xa Chanh West.
“People thought Weise must be crazy having us train out there,” Warren noted, although he did not agree. The battalion was surviving, he thought, precisely because of Weise’s exacting standards and unrelenting, train-train-train-to-perfection philosophy. “He believed that his most important responsibility was to make sure not a single life would be lost because the men weren’t properly trained. He never let up. He expected great things of people. He demanded the same things of himself.”
Round One
D ESPITE THE HEAT MIRAGES BLURRING THE VIEW through his sniper scope, LCpl. James L. O’neill could see movement five hundred meters away among the brush and hootches of Dong Huan. The hamlet sat on the far bank of the tributary the Marines were approaching, and O’neill turned to Lieutenant Boyle, the 1st Platoon commander in H BLT 2/4, to report, “Sir, I think we got a whole bunch of gooks in front of us.”
“Take a look again.”
Lance Corporal O’neill, a sniper, brought his scope-mounted, bolt-action rifle back to his shoulder. He was sitting at the edge of a paddy east of the two standing structures of what was marked as Bac Vong on their maps. He looked at the lieutenant again. “Hey, I’m watchin’ a lot of movement out there. I don’t know if it’s ours or theirs. All I see is movement.”
“Shoot one of ’Em.”
“Sir, what if it’s one of
ours?”
“We don’t have anybody out there. Just shoot one.”
O’neill had reason to hesitate: The other side of the tributary belonged to the ARVN. Hotel One’s patrol had departed the company patrol base, Objective Delta, early that morning,Tuesday, 30 April 1968, with the mission of investigating the NVA positions that had fired on a routine, predawn patrol by river patrol craft of TF Clearwater. From Objective Delta, Hotel Company could hear the NVA automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, and see the red .50-caliber tracers streaming back from the patrol boat. The NVA seemed to have been in the vicinity of Dong Huan, which was on the south bank of a Bo Dieu tributary that sliced east to west before curving north. Lieutenant Boyle’s orders had been to move south the thirteen hundred meters between Objective Delta and Bac Vong, which sat on the north side of the tributary five hundred meters above Dong Huan. The thin, head-high tributary between Bac Vong defined the western edge of BLT 2/4’s TAOR. However, the ARVN forces responsible for the opposite side had been committed the afternoon before to the Route 1 battle.
Screw it, O’neill thought as he assumed his prone firing position. If it is the ARVN, I’ll just swear up and down somebody else did it.…
Lance Corporal O’neill, twenty, had chambered a 7.62mm match round in his Remington Model 700, and now, helmet off, he focused through the scope on a shirtless soldier who was unknowingly facing the cross hairs as he walked
Whatever career-enhancing juggling was done with the reporting of enemy casualties, the NVA thought well enough of BLT 2/4 to shift their infiltration routes west to the ARVN TAOR around Dong Ha. The Bastards made only infrequent contact during April 1968, usually at night with ambush operations Weise had begun implementing to compensate for the sudden paucity of targets. The lull gave BLT 2/4 time to break in the influx of replacements, and to analyze what had been done right and not so right in its first major campaign under Weise. The result was an updated, Ai Tu-style training schedule out in the sticks at Mai Xa Chanh West.
“People thought Weise must be crazy having us train out there,” Warren noted, although he did not agree. The battalion was surviving, he thought, precisely because of Weise’s exacting standards and unrelenting, train-train-train-to-perfection philosophy. “He believed that his most important responsibility was to make sure not a single life would be lost because the men weren’t properly trained. He never let up. He expected great things of people. He demanded the same things of himself.”
Round One
D ESPITE THE HEAT MIRAGES BLURRING THE VIEW through his sniper scope, LCpl. James L. O’neill could see movement five hundred meters away among the brush and hootches of Dong Huan. The hamlet sat on the far bank of the tributary the Marines were approaching, and O’neill turned to Lieutenant Boyle, the 1st Platoon commander in H BLT 2/4, to report, “Sir, I think we got a whole bunch of gooks in front of us.”
“Take a look again.”
Lance Corporal O’neill, a sniper, brought his scope-mounted, bolt-action rifle back to his shoulder. He was sitting at the edge of a paddy east of the two standing structures of what was marked as Bac Vong on their maps. He looked at the lieutenant again. “Hey, I’m watchin’ a lot of movement out there. I don’t know if it’s ours or theirs. All I see is movement.”
“Shoot one of ’Em.”
“Sir, what if it’s one of
ours?”
“We don’t have anybody out there. Just shoot one.”
O’neill had reason to hesitate: The other side of the tributary belonged to the ARVN. Hotel One’s patrol had departed the company patrol base, Objective Delta, early that morning,Tuesday, 30 April 1968, with the mission of investigating the NVA positions that had fired on a routine, predawn patrol by river patrol craft of TF Clearwater. From Objective Delta, Hotel Company could hear the NVA automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, and see the red .50-caliber tracers streaming back from the patrol boat. The NVA seemed to have been in the vicinity of Dong Huan, which was on the south bank of a Bo Dieu tributary that sliced east to west before curving north. Lieutenant Boyle’s orders had been to move south the thirteen hundred meters between Objective Delta and Bac Vong, which sat on the north side of the tributary five hundred meters above Dong Huan. The thin, head-high tributary between Bac Vong defined the western edge of BLT 2/4’s TAOR. However, the ARVN forces responsible for the opposite side had been committed the afternoon before to the Route 1 battle.
Screw it, O’neill thought as he assumed his prone firing position. If it is the ARVN, I’ll just swear up and down somebody else did it.…
Lance Corporal O’neill, twenty, had chambered a 7.62mm match round in his Remington Model 700, and now, helmet off, he focused through the scope on a shirtless soldier who was unknowingly facing the cross hairs as he walked
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