Vietnam Story

Pfc. Willie Godboldt was hit and yelled for help. Jemison was leaving his hole when the platoon commander, Lt. John Geoghegan, stood up, saying, "I'll go." Geoghegan was shot in the head and killed. He was an honors graduate of Pennsylvania Military College. He had deferred his Army commitment for two years to earn a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1964 had married his college sweetheart. John and Barbara Geoghegan spent the next year working for Catholic Relief Services in Tanzania. Their daughter, Camille, was born two months before he left for Vietnam.

At 7:15, Delta Company had come under heavy attack, and X-Ray was under pressure from two sides. "Hand grenades were exploding all around us," recalls Sgt. Warren E. Adams. "One fell in the mortar guys' hole. Sergeant Niemeyer threw a leg over it and his leg was blown off. Nobody else was hurt. I decided the grenades were coming from an anthill nearby, so I grabbed my radio operator and took off with a grenade in each hand and we cleaned up six or eight Vietnamese."

Specialist 4 Willard Parish, 24, of Bristow, Okla., was a Charlie Company mortarman, but this morning he manned a machine gun. "I looked to the front, and it seemed like the North Vietnamese were growing out of the weeds," he remembers. "The training took over. I just fired that weapon, totally unaware of the time, the conditions. I remember a lot of noise, a lot of yelling, air strikes. Then quiet." When he ran out of machine-gun ammunition Parish stood up with a .45-caliber automatic pistol in each hand and kept shooting. Later, they counted more than 100 enemy dead in front of his machine gun. Parish was awarded the Silver Star for valor.

By now Captain Edwards was urgently calling for reinforcements. As Nadal sent one of his platoons to help Edwards, the North Vietnamese charged Nadal's own position. The landing zone was now being hit from three sides. Machine-gun fire swept over the landing zone and through Moore's command post. The colonel's radio operator, Bob Oullette, a bespectacled young French Canadian, slumped over. The crusty medical-platoon sergeant, Thomas H. Keeton, walked over: "I thought he'd gone to sleep. I kicked the hell out of him, told him to get off his ass and help us load the wounded. I picked up his helmet and a bullet fell out of it. It had knocked him cold."

Moore asked for more reinforcements; brigade commander Col. Tim Brown had Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry on alert.

The North Vietnamese were pressing their attack against Edwards's Charlie Company. "I stood up to observe better and saw the North Vietnamese at a distance of 150 yards, a very large force," Edwards recalls. "I saw a couple of them in hand-grenade range moving toward us. I threw a grenade and was shot under the arm and in the back. I didn't lose consciousness, but I couldn't stand up." Though badly wounded, Edwards remained in command for 3 more hours, until the attack was finally beaten off. Then his radio operator, Ernie Paolone, who was also wounded, dragged him to the aid station. The 1st Platoon commander, Lt. Neil Kroger, 24, was found dead in his foxhole, surrounded by four North Vietnamese he had killed with his bayonet. A fifth, strangled to death, was in the hole with him, with Kroger's hands locked around his neck.

At around 8, with the North Vietnamese pressing their attacks against Edwards's Charlie Company and Nadal's Alpha Company, the Delta Company antitank platoon, which had traded in its unneeded antitank weapons for six .30-caliber M-60 machine guns -- each with a full four-man crew and triple the usual load of ammunition -- came under heavy attack. The three M-60 machine guns of the reconnaissance platoon also had been added to that sector of the line. "They picked the wrong place," Moore says. "Adams's machine guns chewed them up; they were killing guys 700 or 800 yards out."