Duty Honor Sacrifice

     Eight hundred yards north, walking toward a small group of huts in a bend in the river, Alpha Company 4/47^th ran into a murderous wall of fire from its front and right flank. The enemy bunkers were so well hidden, Alpha Company troops walked to within forty feet of them before triggering fire. The enemy complex stretched for hundreds of yards along a wood line with numerous bunkers hidden in clumps of trees.

      And then, the whole world seemed to go crazy. A battalion of hard-core Viet Cong opened up with pinpoint accurate machinegun, rocket, recoilless rifle, and mortar fire from close range. Troops were diving to the earth for their lives, crawling to small mounds of dirt berms in the middle of the kill zone, completely exposed. Alpha Company was locked in brutal, bitter combat, being cut down like weeds. No one had ever seen anything like it; the fighting was described by some as “unreal.”

     Charlie Company 4/47^th second platoon point man, Specialist Bill Reynolds, was out front in lead and hit the ground, hearing the deafening sound of weapons fire. Then realizing he was out in the open, he sprang up, dashing back fifty yards through enemy fire to the last rice paddy, where everyone was grabbing cover behind a small berm. His second platoon leader, Lieutenant Jack Benedick, was following Reynolds with the platoon and was near the stream. The mortar squad was quickly loading its equipment into two small plastic boats, when the Viet Cong sprung up firing, catching them in the open. Both boats were immediately sunk, killing six soldiers, leaving several others wounded but able to reach the shoreline. Lieutenant Sheldon Schulman, the mortar squad leader, was next to the stream and quickly became distraught as he stood in the open watching his men being cut to pieces. Failing to take cover, a moment later his shirt had turned red and he fell to the ground dead.

    Second platoon quickly formed a line five feet apart along the berm, which was at the water’s edge, with the stream about five feet below. Lieutenant Jack Benedick, Jimmie Salazar and several others had been hit but were still returning fire. The intense firefight stretched for quite a ways, with contact being made at several points on the line, employing hundreds of men in the battle. The Viet Cong had moved additional fighters into the complex the night before and were ready.

     Communist recoilless rounds, mortars and screaming rockets were blazing and hitting all around them. They could see the Viet Cong - they were close. But there was little they could do but hunker down and return fire, emptying clip after clip, as M16 rifles rammed and misfired. Alpha Company had so many men hit in the first few minutes that their commander had lost sense of where his platoons were and was screaming over the radio that he needed help. But no one dared to call in artillery, not knowing the disposition of the men trapped in the rice paddy.