Vietnam Story

Nightfall. With his reinforcements, Moore beefed up the lines. His tally showed that on Day Two his battalion had lost two officers and 44 men killed, three officers and 22 men wounded; the four line companies were down to eight officers and 260 men. Charlie Company had started the day with five officers and 102 men and ended it with no officers and 45 men. A bright moon rose in a clear sky before midnight and lighted the battlefield.

CHECKMATE: Driving off the enemy

Day 3: At 4:22, an estimated 300 North Vietnamese attacked Capt. Myron Diduryk's sector from the southeast. Diduryk, 27, a native of the Ukraine who had emigrated to the United States at age 12, was, in Moore's words, "the best battlefield company commander I've ever known, including myself in Korea."

Diduryk had prepared for the possibility of a night attack. His men were dug in deeply, two to a foxhole, and the holes were spaced to provide interlocking support. Before nightfall Diduryk and his artillery observer, Lt. William Lund, had registered the artillery ranges so the 105-mm howitzers at Landing Zones Falcon and Columbus could fire instantly. Now, by the light of parachute flares kicked out of an Air Force C-123 overhead, Diduryk's men poured rifle and machine-gun fire on the attacking North Vietnamese while Diduryk and Lund directed artillery fire back and forth across the killing zone. The North Vietnamese broke and ran.

Nine minutes after the first attack, they tried again, this time with about 200 men. Again, American artillery and rifle fire chewed them up. The attack shifted to the southwest. The North Vietnamese were thrown back a third time.

"I heard bugles blowing," says Specialist 4 Pat Selleck, a 24-year-old rifleman from New York City. "I saw, in the light of the flares, waves of the enemy coming down off the mountain in a straight line. The company was shooting them like ducks in a pond." Twice during the attacks, Moore's reconnaissance platoon had carried huge loads of ammunition out to Diduryk's men. Less than 2 hours later, at 6:27, the North Vietnamese attacked again, this time directly at Diduryk's command post. Now, in less than 15 minutes, the attackers were dragging off their dead. Diduryk had only six men lightly wounded, but the field in front of him was piled with enemy dead. Diduryk would return to Vietnam for another tour of duty with the 1st Cavalry. In the spring of 1970, in another landing zone, he was killed by a sniper.

Moore now invented something that would be widely used for the rest of the Vietnam War. Finding that his companies had plenty of ammunition, he ordered every man on the line, on a signal at 6:55, to shoot anything in front of their lines that worried them. When this "Mad Minute" of random firing began, 50 North Vietnamese leapt up 150 yards forward of Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry. The North Vietnamese had been sneaking up and assumed the firing meant they had been spotted. They were shot down. Elsewhere along the line, the "reconnaissance by fire" killed six other North Vietnamese, including two snipers shot out of the trees. A third sniper was spotted an hour later trying to climb down and get away. He, too, was killed.

At 9:55, Moore ordered the nine companies now on the line to move forward 500 yards. Within the first 50 yards, Diduryk's men came under heavy fire. Moore pulled them back and called in artillery and air bombardment that killed another 27 of the enemy. The rest of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry, under Lt. Col. Robert McDade, now began arriving at X-Ray from Landing Zone Victor. Specialist 4 Jack Smith, now an ABC-TV correspondent, later wrote: "The 1st Battalion had been fighting continuously for three or four days, and I had never seen such filthy troops. They all had that look of shock. They said little, just looked around with darting, nervous eyes. Whenever I heard a shell coming close, I'd duck but they kept standing. There must have been about 1,000 rotting bodies out there, starting at about 20 feet, surrounding the giant circle of foxholes."