Vietnam Story

Out near the dry creek bed, machine gunner Bill Beck was doing double duty while his best friend, Russell Adams, poured fire on the enemy. Beck alternated between patching up wounded Americans and firing at the North Vietnamese with a notoriously inaccurate .45-caliber automatic pistol. He spotted Captain LeFebvre, "moaning, his hand blown apart and his thigh equally bad." Beck bandaged him up and yelled for a medic. LeFebvre was hauled back to the landing zone, where the battalion intelligence officer, Capt. Tom Metsker, wounded in the shoulder, helped him onto a waiting helicopter. Metsker was hit again and killed at the chopper door.

Back on the line, Beck heard someone scream, "Adams is hit." He ran forward to find his fellow Pennsylvanian lying beside his silent machine gun. "The side of his head was a mess. He was trying to talk to me but nothing was coming out. His helmet lay in front of me with a bullet hole in it, and I turned it over. It seemed like Adams's entire brain fell out in front of me. I was horrified. I screamed over and over for the medic."

Beck took over his friend's machine gun. He was now holding the battalion's left flank, directly in the path of the enemy. Alone, mumbling every prayer he could remember, Beck stopped them. "They were shooting at me, bullets hitting the ground beside me and cracking above my head. I was firing as fast as I could in long bursts."

Landing Zone X-Ray was shrouded in thick smoke and dust. "It was a bedlam of men yelling and screaming in English, Vietnamese and Spanish, a constant roar of rifle and machine-gun fire punctuated by the shocking explosions of bombs, artillery shells and rockets," Moore says. He was on the radio to the 3rd Brigade commander, Col. Tim Brown, asking for reinforcements. Brown had a company on alert.

Late afternoon. At about 3:45, Moore ordered Nadal's and Herren's companies to pull back, to evacuate their wounded and dead and to prepare for an attack, preceded by air and artillery barrages, to rescue the Lost Platoon. It began at 4:20. But the enemy had moved forward and dug shallow foxholes; snipers had climbed into the treetops. "We stood up, got out of the trench and the whole world exploded," recalls Lt. Dennis Deal, one of Herren's platoon leaders. "Men were dropping all over the place. The assault line first went to their knees, and then to a crawling position."

Deal's platoon was pinned down by machine-gun fire from a termite hill when suddenly Deal saw "someone get up and charge, just like in a John Wayne movie." Deal adds: "He ran 25 yards across the open ground while all of us were crawling -- the firing was so intense. I saw him throw a grenade behind a termite hill, wait for it to go off, move around to the rear of the termite hill and empty his rifle. Then he fell to his knees. I said to myself: Please get up, whoever you are, don't be hurt."

It was Lt. Joe Marm, another Pennsylvanian who was Nadal's favorite junior officer, another of the batch of green lieutenants who had joined the battalion that summer. Marm had first tried to take out the enemy machine gun with a shoulder-fired light antitank (LAW) rocket. Later, he said he charged the machine-gun nest simply "to get the job done and save time." He destroyed the gun and killed a dozen North Vietnamese operating and protecting it. As he mopped up the last of the enemy, a sniper round smashed into his face and out through his throat. The medics performed a battlefield tracheotomy. Marm survived to receive the Medal of Honor.

Nadal says, "By this time, all my platoon leaders had been killed or wounded and a number of my squad leaders killed." Herren's men gained only about 100 yards; Nadal's moved forward 150. It was now 5:40, and Moore reluctantly ordered them to pull back again. The artillery batteries had no smoke shells but offered to substitute white-phosphorus shells -- the fearsome "Willie Peter" rounds that scattered tiny flaming fragments and laid down a choking cloud of white smoke.