Blue's Bastards: A True Story Of Valor Under Fire

By Randy Herrod

Blue's Bastards is an inspiring story of duty and obligation, and of honorable men defending their ideals both on the battlefield and in the courtroom, and, for once, winning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnery
• Release date: Feb 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781621571278

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INTRODUCTION

Delta Med

Dong Ha, RVN

3 Aug 69

Dear Dad,

Please tell Betsy and Mom not to worry about the WIA report. I wasn’t hurt badly at all and am already healing well. Hope to be back with Blue’s Bastards in a day or two, though the 1st Sgt. told me this morning that I may have to give up the platoon and move up to XO. Hard to believe that I’m now the senior surviving Lieutenant in Kilo Co.

Am in DELTA MED—the hospital at Dong Ha—and it’s very strange. We have air conditioning, clean sheets, cold water to drink, hot chow, and aside from an occasional rocket attack, it’s very safe. Last night we had ice cream. Don’t mention this to Mom or Betsy, but I’m sure you understand—it’s very hard to be loafing here when the men I’ve been with for so long are still out there....

The Battalion has moved back into C-2 and Con Thien Combat Base and Kilo Company is supposed to be re-fitting and picking up some replacements. Am hoping to be back with them by the time they have the memorial service for the Marines who were killed. Capt. Wunsch, the Tank Co. commander was at Annapolis with me and LCpl Coulombe had been with Blue’s Bastards for almost seven months. All 17 who were killed and wounded on the night of the 28th, from Kilo Co. 3/3 and Charlie Co. 3rd Tank Bn., were hard, courageous, and experienced men. They will be sorely missed.

There is another reason to hasten back to them. I need to thank one of my machine gunners—a Creek Indian named Randall Herrod. He saved my life. . . ."

The text above is from a letter I sent to my father from the Naval Field Hospital at Dong Ha, Vietnam. It was scribbled on three sheets of paper provided by a U.S. Navy medical corpsman as I was recovering from wounds received in a terrible engagement on the night of 28 July 1969, during which the author of this book had distinguished himself—and saved my life in the process.

The letters I wrote to my father from Vietnam were different from the upbeat, affectionate notes I penned to my lovely young wife, our infant daughter, my mother, or sister. Because my dad had been an infantry officer in World War II, had been wounded himself, and had seen the horror of battle firsthand, my letters to him were more open about my fears and feelings in combat. I trusted his insights, valued his advice, and sought his counsel on leading men in the worst of circumstances. My missives to my father from Vietnam described events that I had never felt comfortable sharing with my wife, my children, or my mother. I knew that he would understand. I was afraid that they would not. I was, of course, wrong. It would have been wiser for me to have let them know that I was sometimes afraid, often uncertain, and frequently in great need of their prayers.

At the time I wrote the letter above, I was commanding 2nd Platoon of Company K, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment. To Captain Paul Goodwin, the company commander and the rest of the Marines in Killer Kilo, I was Blue—a nickname derived from the radio brevity code we used for compass directions. South was gray, West was gold, East was silver, and North was blue. Thus I became Blue to the troops in our battalion, and the Marines in my rifle platoon took to calling themselves Blue’s Bastards shortly after I assumed command in December 1968.

The firefight on the night of 28 July occurred about seven kilometers southwest of Con Thien, the northernmost combat base in the Republic of Vietnam just south of the demilitarized zone—known as the DMZ. The troops called it simply the Z, for it was anything but demilitarized. North Vietnamese army forces routinely used it as a staging area for moving units into the Republic of Vietnam. Because the northern part of I-Corps tactical zone—the region from the Z south to the Dong Ha River—was so hotly contested, the area was practically devoid of civilians. With few exceptions during my entire time in combat, virtually the only Vietnamese we ever saw were North Vietnamese army regulars—tough, aggressive soldiers wearing green uniforms, well-trained, expertly led, and heavily armed.

Violent contact with this enemy occurred on a daily basis in northern I-Corps. Most were small unit engagements—sharp, fierce, and mercifully brief—lasting a few terrifying minutes—though some, like the pitched battle during the darkness of 28 July, went on for interminable, harrowing hours before the issue was finally decided.

On the morning of 27 July, Kilo Company—an infantry unit—and Charlie Company, 3rd Tank Battalion, had been dispatched from C-2 combat outpost with orders to conduct an armored-infantry sweep of the rolling hills south of the Z and west of the Con Thien combat base. Early in the afternoon we had a brief contact and killed two enemy soldiers. A search of the area turned up several dozen NVA packs, five AK-47s, an RPG launcher, and several thousand rounds of small arms ammunition. Just before dark we held up on a small knoll for the night and Captain Goodwin, Kilo’s CO, sent the 1st and 3rd platoons out on night ambushes. He ordered the thirty-three Marines of my 2nd platoon into a perimeter, interspersed among Charlie Company’s thirteen M-48 tanks commanded by Captain Wunsch. We dug in well—using entrenching tools to hack away at the red clay until all of Blue’s Bastards were in chest-high fighting positions in a circle roughly a hundred yards in diameter.

A little after 0230, sitting in the cupola of his turret and peering through a night observation scope, Captain Wunsch thought he detected movement outside our perimeter. He radioed, asking me to join him on top of his tank to confirm his suspicion.

I came immediately, for Wunsch—a leader much admired by his troops—was not an alarmist. He was highly respected by his men and had trained them well on how to work with the infantry. His was one of the few armor units that would willingly stay out in the bush at night. Most tankers preferred to bring their expensive, noisy, armor-plated behemoths into a fixed base when the sun went down. But not Mike Wunsch. He was about to complete his thirteen-month tour of duty in Vietnam and had told me earlier in the day that he wanted to go on one last mission with his men before rotating home.

Climbing up on his command tank, I stood beside him to look through the night-vision scope and realized instantly what was happening. A large group of NVA soldiers were approaching slowly and quietly up the north side of a draw on the west side of our perimeter, apparently invisible to my platoon’s listening post. Several of the enemy troops were fewer than fifty meters in front of us—and through the hazy green-tinged lens of the scope, it appeared as though there were many more behind them.

Anxious to alert the perimeter and my listening post, I turned to jump off the back of the tank and had taken only a single step when an RPG struck the front of the tank’s cupola. The missile deflected upward off the curved armor and detonated, killing Captain Wunsch instantly and blowing me off the back of the tank.

If I had waited a second more, the same rocket-propelled grenade would have killed me, for I had been standing right next to Wunsch just an instant before. As it was, the blast threw me about ten feet behind the tank, shredding the back of my flak jacket and peppering the back of my legs, buttocks, and neck with fragments. Even my ears had little pinholes through them.

I awoke moments later to find myself being dragged toward a fighting hole in the edge of the perimeter. Lance Corporal Randy Herrod, my machine gun team leader in the position on the left of Captain Wunsch’s tank, had rushed out from the protection of his hole to drag me to safety.

Despite the gunfire and explosions all around us, every sound seemed muffled. My eardrums, just healed from a battle on 25 May, had been blown out again.

Herrod threw me into the bottom of his fighting hole and was standing on top of me firing his M-60 machine gun as the NVA swept up the side of the hill behind a barrage of mortar fire and a hailstorm of RPGs. I remember trying to push him off me so that I could get out of the hole and to my radio—an effort that succeeded only because Randy had to scramble out of his position to remount his M-60 when it was blown off its tripod by an explosion.

Despite the chaos, it was clear that the full force of the attack was yet to come, as the rain of enemy mortar fire was now shifting to the far side of the perimeter. An NVA ground assault into our lines was imminent.

The air was so thick with enemy fire that even the grass around the tanks was being cut down. Two tanks were now ablaze, silhouetting our position. The west side of our perimeter would have to be reinforced or the NVA would soon be inside and among us. Herrod’s machine gun, its barrel now glowing red, and the grenades he was hurling at our assailants were all that was keeping them from breaking through.

Once out of the hole, I dashed to the back of the command tank. The radio I had left there when I’d climbed up to look through Captain Wunsch’s starlight scope was a shattered wreck, visible in the light of the artillery and mortar flares now popping above our heads. I sprinted to the tank on the other side of Herrod’s machine gun and got on the infantry phone at the tank’s rear. The tank commander, buttoned up inside, immediately rotated his turret, adjusted his fire across our front and mowed down the first wave of the oncoming assault with three quick canister and fleschette rounds.

The tank’s brutal barrage caused a sudden lull in the NVA attack. The enemy pulled back, regrouped, and returned a volley of their own—more mortars and RPGs. Their troops were so close that their rounds had to have caused casualties among their own ranks. One of those incoming rounds landed behind me, blowing me into the air. Once again I landed near Herrod’s hole.

For the second time in less than half an hour, Herrod, though already wounded himself, left the protection of his fighting position, grabbed me by the remnants of my flak jacket, and dragged me to safety.

The second attack broke off under fire from Herrod’s machine gun and the surviving tanks on the west side of the perimeter. Once again I crawled out of the hole, found Jim Lehnert, my radio operator, and started trying to adjust the air support that Captain Goodwin had summoned on his radio, He was broadcasting from the company command post he had set up in a bomb crater near the center of the perimeter. Because I couldn’t hear what was being said over the radio handset, Lehnert passed the instructions to the AC-130 gunship and shouted to me what the forward air controller was saying as they rained death from the heavens to break the third and final attack of the night.

By dawn it was over.

The line had held—but the slaughter was horrific. The tankers, restricted to fixed, exposed positions on the perimeter, had fared worse than the infantry—suffering most of our seventeen killed and wounded. In the first light of dawn we found Private First Class Frank Coulombe’s body. He had been killed by a burst of fire from an AK-47. His teammate on the listening post, unconscious and badly wounded, was medevacked by helicopter to the hospital ship standing offshore.

The outcome of the contest was far worse for the NVA. Despite the ferocity of their assault, only a handful had survived the three waves of attacks. Though Captain Wunsch had been killed in the opening moments of the battle, his tanks were well deployed and his men knew what to do. The NVA had died in heaps as the fleschette rounds from Wunsch’s armor and the grazing fire of machine guns and rifles cut them down in rows. One NVA soldier had been crushed under the treads of a tank as it adjusted its position. Among the enemy dead were two officers. By sunrise, the surviving NVA troops had melted away into the jungle to die elsewhere, to be buried in unmarked graves, or to fight again another day.

The helos came at first light, bringing water and ammunition and taking out the seriously wounded, then the dead, and finally the piles of weapons: AK-47s, RPGs, and M-16s. Before leaving the hill top we buried the enemy dead—more than thirty of them. Thermite grenades were dropped into two tanks that were too smashed to move. As fire consumed the steel hulks, we formed a battered combat column and headed back to Con Thien, undamaged tanks towing those that could not move themselves.

A day or so later our chief medical corpsman insisted that I go to the hospital, since I could neither hear nor, for that matter, sit down. I rode to Dong Ha standing in the back of a truck. There, Navy doctors and nurses at Delta Med amused themselves as they picked pieces of shrapnel out of my backside by inquiring as to which way I was going when I was wounded. And it was there that I wrote—lying on my stomach—the letter to my father that is excerpted at the opening of this introduction. Later that same day I also wrote a draft citation recommending Lance Corporal Randall Herrod for the Navy Cross—our nation’s second highest decoration for valor.

That might have been the end of the story but for what subsequently transpired. A short while after I rejoined Kilo Company, three new lieutenants reported aboard and I was promoted to company XO. Though I was no longer one of Blue’s Bastards, the young Marines I had served with so closely for so long were still much on my mind and I watched them carefully. Along with the rest of Kilo Company, they continued to hump the hills along the DMZ on long combat sweeps, conduct sparrow hawk quick response missions, and stand perimeter security at Con Thien, the Rockpile, and the other combat bases in northern I-Corps. All of these things they did well. But what they continued to do best was surprise and kill the enemy in night ambushes.

For those of us fighting in northern I-Corps, a properly executed ambush was the ideal way to accomplish our mission—killing the enemy—with minimum risk to our troops. In an ambush, every advantage goes to the attacker: surprise, violence of action, and the choice of time, place, even enemy. If too large an enemy force approaches it is allowed to pass and instead attacked with mortars, artillery, or air strikes.

Since a well-executed ambush requires stealth, discipline, and every man involved knowing what everyone else is doing and when—we drilled and practiced how to conduct squad and platoon-sized ambushes every chance we had. All of Blue’s Bastards—no matter how new—quickly mastered the tactics and techniques of the ambush: the best way to select a site, properly position flank and rear security, deploy an assault element, lay in claymore mines and machine guns, signals to use, and how to quickly withdraw after searching a kill zone. While I was with them, we conducted more than seventy such engagements in which we killed our enemies without the loss of a single Marine.

It seemed a shame to break up such a well-trained unit, but that’s just what happened when the 3rd Marine Division was withdrawn from combat in November–December 1969. Those who had completed more than seven months in-country redeployed to Okinawa, Japan. But Marines who had served less were rotated to other combat units for six more months in Vietnam. By the time I returned to the U.S. in December 1969, eight former Blue’s Bastards were serving in the 1st Marine Division—and Randy Herrod was among them.

The America I returned to just before Christmas was decidedly different than the country I had left thirteen months earlier. While I was gone, the antiwar movement in America had grown dramatically. Protests were frequent and often violent. The big Marine base at Quantico, Virginia—just thirty-five miles south of our nation’s capital—was an island of military discipline and decorum in the midst of this chaos, but we were cautioned not to commute in uniform. Those of us who returned home that winter of 1969–1970 had to adapt to many changes.

And those we had left behind had to adjust as well. The Marines who had served in northern I-Corps, where virtually the only Vietnamese they ever saw were wearing NVA uniforms, were now assigned to units near Da Nang, a major city surrounded by South Vietnamese troops, civilians—and the Viet Cong. For Randy Herrod and the other stay behinds, this was an entirely different kind of war. There were different tactics, a different enemy, and different rules of engagement.

Herrod had come from Blue’s Bastards, where he and his comrades were justifiably proud of having killed the enemy in scores of successful night ambushes. They had never been bested in a firefight. They had run aggressive combat patrols day and night knowing that if they met anyone out there it was the enemy and the only way to survive was to shoot first and ask questions later. They had chased the NVA into the DMZ, hunted them in their own lair, and captured prisoners at every opportunity. Their job was to kill the enemy and they were good at it. Despite heat and cold, hunger and thirst, fatigue, battered weapons, dented helmets, ragged uniforms, torn flak jackets, worn-out boots, and long marches with heavy packs up and down mountains, they looked after one another and kept each other alive.

But for Randy Herrod and those others left behind when the 3rd Marine Division pulled out, the small unit cohesion and comradeship that had held them together were gone. Herrod found himself in a new unit and in new terrain, facing an unfamiliar adversary—the Viet Cong.

When I next heard about Randy Herrod, in the summer of 1970, I was teaching tactics at the Basic School—where all new Marine officers learn the fundamentals of air-ground combat and amphibious warfare. A copy of Stars & Stripes, the overseas military newspaper, described how Randy was to be tried on capital murder charges for deliberately killing Vietnamese civilians. In the superheated, politically volatile aftermath of the My Lai massacre—and accusations that the U.S. Army had tried to cover up the crime—the Marine Corps was adamant that those who committed offenses against civilians would be punished.

While I fully subscribe to that principle—then and now—the stories I was reading about Herrod did not fit the man that I knew: the Creek Indian machine gunner who had saved my life. I involved myself in the case because I did not believe justice would be served by wrongfully convicting a man of a crime he did not commit. Though I was counseled not to interfere in this matter, I did so, believing two wrongs don’t make a right—and because I would very likely be dead had Randy Herrod not risked his life to save mine. While I feel no animus toward those who referred him for a court-martial nor to those who prosecuted him, I am convinced that the outcome was just.

In the pages that follow, Randy Herrod offers a riveting, firsthand account of what it was like to be one of Blue’s Bastards—and of his subsequent travail. He did not consult with me before he wrote this book and I did not see what he had written until after he had submitted the manuscript. Understandably, his recollection differs somewhat from mine when he describes certain events—but not to any significant degree. His colorful images of the Marines he served with in 2nd Platoon, Company K, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines are dead on. Randy’s subsequent vivid descriptions of the terror and trauma troops experience in combat against an enemy garbed like the civilian population are being replicated today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The privilege of serving with Randy Herrod and the other brave young men who called themselves Blue’s Bastards made the hardship and horror of Vietnam tolerable. Though he credits me with more virtue, skill, and courage than I deserve, I’m grateful for his accolades. The greatest tribute I was given from my time in Vietnam isn’t a medal hanging on my chest. The officers always get more medals than they deserve and the troops are rarely awarded the recognition they earn. For me, the greatest honor I received in that thankless war was to have any one of Blue’s Bastards refer to me not as "the Lieutenant but as my Lieutenant." They weren’t mine. I was theirs.

Oliver L. North

Lt. Col. USMC (Ret.)

PART I

CHAPTER 1

BNG

AS OUR COMMERCIAL JET nosed down toward Saigon airport, I studied the landscape below. At thirty thousand feet it looked green and untroubled, like a travel poster