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During the night, Golf and Hotel had hiked back a kilometer to the denuded knoll where their battle had started. Lieutenant Brennon sat in the dirt. He had never felt worse. They hadn’t put in enough prep fire, they were spread too thin, and five of his men were dead in that paddy field. Another man was missing—dead, wounded, or passed out from the heat, he did not know which. Brennon wanted to go back under cover of darkness and find those men. But battalion denied permission; Brennon thought the denial devastated what little spirit the grunts had left.

What are we doing, everyone was mumbling. No real mission. NVA everywhere. Little food or water. Intoxicating heat. Heavy casualties.

The result was mass confusion and mass frustration.

At first light on 26 August, Lieutenant Brennon asked for volunteers to retrieve the bodies. In nine months in Vietnam, he’d never seen such spirit. Six men immediately stepped forward. That was Brennon’s only satisfaction from this battle, that most of his men—even ones he’d previously had doubts about—were courageously bucking up. With Phantoms running more air strikes, the seven Marines moved into the paddy. There were only a couple of snipers this time, and Brennon pumped three M16 mags at one muzzle flash. Others fired M60s and M79s on the spot and the aerial observer radioed that he could see a dead North Vietnamese soldier.

Good, Brennon thought, I hope I killed the bastard.

The men found their MIA unscathed. He’d been pinned down and, when he saw how close the fire was coming to Brennon’s escaping group, he thought it best to hunker down and hide. They humped back to the denuded knoll and medevacked him along with the bodies. He was a young, wiry kid named Medina. He ended up at the division psychiatrist; reportedly, the NVA had come out that night to loot the Marine bodies and had kicked him as he played dead.

We’re right back where we started from, Brennon thought; every time we gain something, we pull back to consolidate. Three solid days of contact and we haven’t gained one inch!

This operation, he thought bluntly, is a fiasco.

While Hotel Company was recovering their abandoned casualties, Lieutenant Larrison of Golf Company brought in his own Phantoms: 250- and 500-pounders at a hundred meters, napalm parallel to his lines at thirty meters. Under that barrage, a squad and gun team rushed forward to retrieve the body of the point man killed in the previous day’s ambush. The Marines had just gotten into the trees when four North Vietnamese walked past. They had green pith helmets and fatigues; carried packs, ammunition bandoliers, and AK47s; and they moved through the wood line as though it were private property. The Marines’ first volley dropped two of the NVA in their tracks. A short, sharp firefight broke out, but the squad was able to recover the body. They hustled back across the paddy as Lieutenant Larrison brought in the nape again, covering their withdrawal.

Chapter Seventeen

Buzz-Saw

GySgt William N. Yohe of Echo Company, 2d Battalion, 7th Marines spent the three hours before dawn writing casualty reports. Before that, the company had been stumbling in the dark chaos. Some corpsmen had been wounded; the rest worked feverishly. Casualties had to be found in the dark, lit only by the flashing of minigun fire.

The mortaring had shattered Echo Company; choppered into Hiep Duc with seventy-five men, their numbers were nearly halved in the sixty-second raid. All the officers except the company commander, and all the sergeants except the gunny and one staff sergeant were gone on medevac choppers. Gunny Yohe, in fact, was one of the walking wounded; shell fragments had nicked his arm as he’d jumped from the CP trench and headed towards the company lines.

First light revealed the new shape of their lines. Blood-splattered ground, bloody bandages, torn flak jackets, helmets in the grass. Dead Marines were laid on a cargo net spread out on the ground, and other grunts piled up the discarded and lost equipment. Blood and pieces of flesh