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Bleier saw Murphy call over the platoon lieutenant. “Make sure each man has his weapon and all his ammo within reach. I want you to take every man who’s able to hold a rifle, and prop him up against a rock or tree stump. We’re going to need everything we’ve got.”

Chapter Twelve

Running

Captain Murphy was a good officer, and the inexperienced, terrified grunts around him were, indeed, giving it everything they had. They could not see the NVA for all the vegetation, but the enemy’s view of them was not clear either; they were raising a hell of a racket with all their firing, and the NVA wouldn’t have been able to guess that only six of the men facing them were not bleeding.

Private Bleier, with two bandaged legs, crawled off to their left flank with an M16 he found in the dirt. Very few GIs were on that side and he figured he’d have to help. He lay behind a thin tree and fingered the M16, wondering how accurate he could be with it. He hadn’t fired one for real since AIT. The biggest problem over there was not the NVA, but a brush fire started by the gunship rockets. Smoke rolled over them and Bleier had a panicked thought: if the flames sweep in, I can’t walk and, between the fire and the shooting, the guys would probably take off without thinking about me.

Nevertheless, he stayed in position. Most of the men in the miniature perimeter were similarly steeling themselves. The attitude was to go down fighting.

But the final assault never came.

Sometime after 1700, the enemy fire tapered off, then stopped completely. Everyone warily stayed in position, wondering what was happening. As it turned out, the NVA had pulled out of the wood line and moved back across the paddies to their entrenched positions. Charlie One had been theirs for the taking, but they had not finished the job. Why not? Murphy speculated that they had killed or wounded the NVA commander. Perhaps the massed firepower had inflicted too many casualties, although the retiring NVA dragged with them however few or many bodies there were.

3d Platoon walked in without being fired upon, and Bleier heard a sergeant say, “All right, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

He closed his eyes and praised God.

A GI ran up and dropped to his knees beside him, talking excitedly, “Rock, Rock, we heard you were dead!”

“No, I’m not, but what do you say we get my ass out of here?”

It was getting dark as the two platoons from Charlie 4–31 made plans to rendezvous with Bravo 1–46. Captain King had come as close as possible; now Captain Murphy had to complete the link up. 3d Platoon was exhausted from a fight of their own; there weren’t enough men to carry all the gear and wounded, so they destroyed two M60s and some other equipment. Captain Murphy was the first wounded man carried out in a poncho. Bleier was next, four grunts from 3d Platoon trudging along with him. It was an ordeal; every time they put him down to rest, they pleaded, “Rock, can’t you walk …? Let us drag you by your shoulders.” Bleier had to beg them to carry him, but after several hundred meters the plastic poncho ripped open. Two of the grunts got him between them, arms over shoulders, and they kept limping along. Bleier put his weight on his “good” leg—the one with the thigh wound—but after perhaps a kilometer, he collapsed. His shoulders just gave out and he moaned, “I can’t go any farther this way.”

That’s when a grunt in the column stepped up and said he’d carry him fireman style. Bleier later wrote:

I never knew his name, and I don’t think he ever knew mine. I didn’t know anything but nicknames for most of the guys. But the Army had a beautiful way of making names seem unimportant, and race, and color, and creed, and social status. We never looked for any of that in each other. The Army is a great equalizer. I was white, this guy was black. We had travelled thousands of miles to meet in a jungle. After this night, I would never see him again. We both knew that. Yet here he was, offering to pick me up bodily and help save my life. That’s a special kind