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By Root 656 0

Wadie Blankenship. He was a hot-tempered, high school dropout, divorced three times. He was a big man, over six feet and two hundred pounds, a hard-core soldier. He’d been made the battalion sergeant major after the command ship was shot down; before that, he’d been serving as battalion operations sergeant. That was a TOC job and he was not as lean as when he’d been in the bush. In fact, when he was rucking up on LZ Center to go out to Alpha Company, Captain Carrier jokingly gave him some salt tablets for the heat. Blankenship laughed back, “You know, I might need these!”

But the men of the Gimlets were especially resentful of their superiors, and bitter that they were chronically short of new weapons and supplies. Platoons were rarely, if ever, at full strength. Many men saw themselves as pawns for someone else to make full-bull colonel. It was this lack of trust which fostered the hostility towards Sergeant Major Blankenship. It also helped spark the refusal to begin with. Perhaps what the leadership lacked was not tactical competence but personality, noted a company commander in the 196th Brigade:

Mostly the problem of command was a lack of understanding on the part of field grade officers of the changes that had come in the civilian world which the troops brought with them when they entered the Army. The new breed of enlisted men demanded a more personal approach from all levels of command. Captains were no longer the remote company commanders they had been in some other wars. In Vietnam the company commander’s headquarters were what he could carry on his back and the radios of the men around him. Orders from battalion and brigade came over the radio and were overheard by many of the troops. The captain could no longer pretend that it was his order that the hill be assaulted, the men had already heard the colonel tell the captain to “take the hill.” Problem was, as the men saw it, the colonel wasn’t out there to lead the charge. He was safely back on the firebase issuing orders from the heavily protected TOC bunker. Most of these enlisted guys were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. They were totally unschooled in the military arts regarding the proper locations of various headquarters in order to maintain the optimum tactical coordination. All they knew was that the man ordering them to their deaths wasn’t out there taking the same chances with them. Nor was he there to explain why such and such a hill was worth taking—especially when they’d already taken it twice before and walked away from it as soon as the battle was over.

Major Waite lent a sympathetic ear and Sergeant Blankenship pricked at the grunts’ manhood; then they both said it was time to move out. By then, the rest of Alpha Company had rucked up again and gotten back in file formation; the cluster on the LZ broke up and Curtis’s group rejoined them. They began humping downhill towards the bunkers. The NVA really had pulled out, and the only things to be found were the bodies of Lieutenant Kirchgesler and Sergeant Pitts. The sun had done horrible things to them. They pushed them into body bags—those rubberized, green, canvas sacks with a long zipper and carrying handles—then carried them to a clearing and called a medevac.

The next morning, Lieutenant Colonel Bacon took his C&C over to Alpha’s position with Capt Bernhard F. Wolpers aboard. There were no charges to be made against anyone involved, but Bacon relieved Shurtz; Captain Wolpers—a tough soldier with a thick, German accent—was placed in command. Bacon was a real pro and this was one of his steps to get a worn-out battalion back on its feet.

Lieutenant Shurtz was shattered. When Bacon took over the Gimlets, Shurtz had thought, finally here’s someone who’s calm and rational that I can work with—and the first thing he does is fire me!

There were tears in his eyes.

Shurtz was removed on 25 August and Alpha Company stayed in AK Valley making no contact until 31 August. They humped back to LZ Center for their turn on bunker watch. A throng of journalists was waiting for them; it was