by Wayne Wade
Richard “Dick” Cavazos commanded the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment—the “Dogface Battalion”—in Vietnam before becoming the Army’s first Hispanic four-star general. Wayne Wade served in Cavazos’s battalion and, in his new memoir, Legacy: A Pathway in the Darkness, draws on his own experience, research, and interviews to tell its story.
This excerpt takes place during the Battle of Lộc Ninh on November 1, 1967. After two assaults by Col. Hoàng Cam’s Viet Cong 9th Division had failed against the Dogface Battalion’s perimeter, one small American ambush patrol remained isolated outside the lines in near-total darkness. As Cam’s forces prepared to attack again, the men faced a desperate race to get back.
After Acting Commander Cam’s second attack failed as miserably as the first, he assembled the survivors, along with his remaining fresh conscripts, to launch a third attack. The show went on, not because Cam’s boss, Tran Van Tra, had any hope of breaching Dick’s defenses but because he had every hope of breaching the resolve of the American people themselves. Cam’s conscripts were now formed up in a staging area several hundred meters north of the last lonely ambush patrol still in place. That patrol was Mac’s second squad of Lima Platoon. Mac was now acting as the platoon leader and was well aware of their situation.
When the battle first started, O’Be and the rest of that patrol lay low and listened warily to the familiar sounds of a big battle. From the first moment they heard mortars explode inside the perimeter, their priority changed from waiting to shoot a few VC to making sure that everyone could be ready to run and run fast. However, they stayed put because that seemed like the safest thing to do. The new guy, David Gilbert, moved closer to his team leader, Ray Etherton, and kept his mouth shut.
It was a long time before they heard noises coming their way. I have no idea what kind of noises they heard because no one said. Witnesses just said they heard noises. I went on a lot of ambush patrols, but I missed that class where we were in imminent danger of being discovered and overrun by an overwhelming enemy force. I can only give a scanty report of O’Be’s situation at best.
What I do know is this: the second squad heard noises.
They would not have been able to see anything because on November 1, 1967, the moon was a 1 percent crescent moon. That meant that under the canopy of those rubber trees, they could not have seen their hand in front of their face.
Time sped up as soon as O’Be radioed Mac about the noises coming from their front. Mac immediately permitted the patrol to blow Claymores and run for their lives, although he didn’t say it quite that way over the radio. Mac, in turn, had already been permitted by Captain Bill A. to do what he thought best.
In a similar situation, my squad would have used our red lens flashlights to help us stay together in the darkness. I assume this is what they did, too, although I don’t know for sure.
The enemy’s green tracers initially flew in every direction when the patrol popped their Claymores, but that was okay. In the darkness, those wildly fired enemy bullets were not their greatest threat. Getting separated in that darkness was.
The next greatest danger was being shot by their own men when they approached the perimeter. However, everything was going well. They were halfway home. The point man was doing a good job of following the return azimuth, which lined up closely with the distant glow of artillery flares lighting up Mac’s open side of the perimeter. O’Be was the rear guard covering their backside.
Then, it happened.
It may have been a reflex action coming from O’Be. Perhaps O’Be believed that those enemy soldiers following them were getting a little too close. I can only guess. However, if that was the case, O’Be was no novice. He was not about to let an enemy come close enough to get the drop on him.
Whatever the reason, O’Be opened up with his M14, spewing red tracers into the darkness and toward the sounds. He got an immediate response of green tracers coming at him and the squad from scores of enemy automatic weapons. O’Be kept returning that fire. Finally, after Etherton screamed at him to stop shooting, he realized that he was giving away their position and stopped.
O’Be stopped firing, but the return fire did not die down. It became so intense that one in a thousand of those blind rounds pierced one of the men’s straps on his web gear, and another went through the stock on an M16.
Americans inside the perimeter saw the muzzle flashes and green tracers and started returning fire. The ambush patrol was now caught in a crossfire. Fortunately, the terrain dipped about ten meters lower than the terrain around the perimeter, so the fire from the perimeter went over the patrol’s heads.
Mac was horrified at what he was seeing. Tom Mercer and Johnny O. later agreed that it looked like Hell was chasing behind the ambush patrol as they ran toward the perimeter.
It was a miracle that every man returned without a scratch. It was also a miracle that the young grunt, Mac McLaughlin, was saved from that most gut-wrenching experience of command, which would have been the loss of those men in less than an hour after taking over. Fortunately, Mac was spared dealing with that for the rest of his life.
That most terrible weight of command was lifted off him, like a millstone off a drowning man’s neck, as he watched each man’s smiling face trickle through the wire into the relative safety of the NDP.
Dick was busy when he got the news, but not too busy to look up toward the night sky and say, “Thank you.”
That third assault was launched shortly after O’Be’s men made it back to the safety of the NDP. That attack was repelled quickly. The attack lost any element of surprise when Cam’s conscripts opened up on O’Be’s retreating ambush patrol.
After this third attack, Cam was running low on naive teenage conscripts to throw at my Dogface Battalion. However, that was okay. It was even expected. There were millions of other warm bodies from which these came. Cam would hold up in a jungle hideout somewhere in War Zone C and wait for his ranks to be replenished. Those replacements would be marched down a spider web of oxcart trails to swell his ranks again within a matter of days, not weeks.
As the sun rose on November 2, 1967, the Battle of Lộc Ninh could be chalked up as one more victory for the Big Red One. We Americans were two steps closer to losing the war.
My Dogface Battalion continued to camp in the rubber trees until November 6 and then returned to Quản Lợi, where most considered it downtime. Never mind that my fellow grunts were pulling perimeter guard and sleeping on the ground while I was sleeping on a cot in the mess hall tent.
Mac survived Lộc Ninh. He completed his tour of duty in Vietnam in January. After completing his service to his country, he went home and finished college. He then obtained a law degree. Early on, he also found an excellent partner in life when he met Christine. In the 1980s, Mac served his country again when he was appointed as a federal prosecutor for the Northern District of Ohio.
