PLEIKU, South Vietnam (UPI) -- A scream for mercy. Mother of God, no don't... A burst of fire from an automatic weapon. Those were the sounds of night on the mountain. A night of hell - American soldiers prayed and fought.
The next morning, when the fire died down a bit, a couple of members of a trapped and outnumbered platoon crawled out from the position where they had been pinned down. They found the kid. He had just turned 20.
His hands, had been tied behind his back. He had been captured, dragged behind a bush and executed. There was no mercy. His face had been blown off by bullets from a light machine gun fired at such close range that there were powder bums on some of the flesh.
It Is a dirty war. This was part of it.
The platoon was part of the U.S. Army's Air Cavalry that landed at the foot of Chu Pong Mountain to force a regiment of North Vietnamese into a fight.
We were in reserve when another platoon to the front got hit, said ''Spec. 4 Marlin Dorman of Windsor, Ont., Canada.
"We were moving up to relieve them, and somehow we moved too far forward. We got sniper and mortar fire from the mountain. We ran to get out of the mortar fire and ran right into 12 Communists. There were snipers on both sides of us and in front, too. We looked over and there were all kinds of gooks coming in on us. We lost three men right there. The lieutenant commanding the platoon was trying to organize defense. He ran around from man to man and suddenly he was hit. The platoon sergeant took over and in minutes he was hit too."
The North Vietnamese snipers were deadly accurate. And they picked out what appeared to be the leaders. Even two men carrying coils of rope were shot down, apparently because they appeared to be specialists of some sort.
"We were all on the ground now and if you moved you got hit," Dorman continued.
"Our training really showed up then. As we shifted into defense positions we were okay. We had five killed in 23 minutes. Then, all of a sudden, they tried a mass attack. They came from three directions. They were running from bush to bush and laying the fire on us,"
"We put our M16S on automatic fire and killed damn near all of them."
Sgt. Clyde Savage of Birmingham, Ala., said the Communists were suicidal. "It seems like they were doped up," he said.
"They just didn't give a damn how many of them were killed. Some of them were stumbling, wading right into us. Some of them were so fogged up they had their guns slung on their backs and were charging bare-handed."
Savage said that later they found packets of morphine and cocaine on some of the bodies. And they found Communist wounded who were lashed to trees, pumped full of narcotics and given a sniper rifle to use on American troops moving up.
"We broke that attack," said Pfc. Russelhicks of Kansas City, Mo. "Then they pulled back, regrouped and tried it again."
"This time they were a little more careful," Dorman said.
"They tried, to crawl up on us. We put our guns flat on the ground and laid the fire ip to them two and three inches high. We fired real low, and we stopped them. All this time we had snipers 10 to 15 yards away. If you stuck your head up, they shot It off. But we were killing them right and left. Every time they stuck their head up, we shot it off."
Reinforcements had tried to get through to the trapped platoon. But each time they moved up the slope, they took so many casualties they had to fan back.
"The wounded couldn't dig their own holes, so each one of us took one of the wounded with us and dug a hole big enough for two," said Pfc. Joe F. Mackey of Fairfax, Alaska.
"We were very low on water and had no rations for almost two days because we had been in the field before we landed. We gave our wounded a Q of our water and the few cans of fruit we had in our packs. By this time It was dark. A patrol of Communists tried to come in on our right. We threw grenades and beat them off. We tried to set up our Claymore mines, but the snipers were so close we couldn't crawl, out far enough to keep them from killing ourselves with them. The artillery and mortars were the only thing that saved us that night. We could hear them moving around out there, talking and policing up their dead and wounded. We had a 30-caliber machine gun with us," Dorman said.
At one time, during the afternoon, the crew fought for 30 minutes straight even though all of them were wounded.
"They really killed the gooks. Later, the platoon counted bodies stacked up in front of the machine gun emplacement. They stacked them up around that gun," Dorman said. "But they finally were overrun in a mass assault and the Communists took out guns and turned it on the company that was trying to relieve us."
Sgt. Emanuel McHenry of Tampa, Fla., said he was scared. "But I knew the company would return and rescue us if it was humanly possible," he said.
VI was confident we would survive if only, we could hold out until the next day . . . and we did."
When the company moved in to rescue the platoon, the Communists who did not get killed faded back to the sides of the platoon. Eighteen men out of the platoon survived. Every one of them had an injury of some sort. Only seven of them did not require hospitalization. None of the men wanted to be heroes, but they were.
There will be medals for the cavalrymen, both to those alive and dead. At least three recommendations for the Medal of Honor are being sent in. One of the recommendations for the nations highest military honor is for Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley, a huge, bear of a man who makes his home in Columbus, Ga.
A flare landed in the middle of a supply dump. It was burning fiercely and the supply dump would blow up at any moment. Plumley could have run the other way. He didn't.
Plumley charged into the stacks of high explosives and, using his bare hands, picked up the flare and hurled it away to a safe distance. His hands and arms were burned, and he will carry the sears for life.
Plumley did not want to be a hero. He just did his job. It happens that way.
