Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq by John C. McManus

Author:John C. McManus
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Combat, 20th century, 21st century, General, United States, Military, Combat - History - 20th century, Combat - History - 21st century, History
ISBN: 9780451227904
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-08-03T10:00:00+00:00

See the Hill, Take the Hill: The Horror of 875

The tension was palpable, jolting, like an electrical current. Here and there, morning fog hung in the valleys. For three companies of troopers, Alpha, Charlie, and Dog of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, the order of the day from Major James Steverson, the battalion commander, was to take Hill 875. The hill was an unsightly, jungle- and tree-covered pile of woebegone earth a few miles east of Cambodia. It had no intrinsic value except that the NVA was there. The previous day, a Special Forces team had detected their presence and engaged in a brief firefight with them. The Americans had then spent much of the nighttime and early morning hours hurling the usual blend of firepower at the hill.

Now, after sunrise on this Sunday morning of November 19, it was time for the grunts to take it. This order came with little circumspection, no assessment of enemy numbers, no serious analysis of the strength of NVA defenses on the hill, nor any consideration of whether the hill was a worthwhile objective. In the war of attrition, Hill 875 was just one more place to find, fix, and kill the enemy. In the context of the episodic fighting that was raging around Dak To in November 1967, one hill was like any other. As at the Umurbrogol on Peleliu a generation before, American commanders had almost no idea what they were getting into.

But the grunts did. After several days of clashing with the enemy in his Dak To lair, the infantrymen sensed the danger that lurked on Hill 875. They had enough experience that they could sense the enemy’s presence in such recent finds as spools of abandoned communication wire, steps cut into hills, vacant base camps, bloody bandages, and propaganda leaflets. Some of the soldiers even swore that they could feel the enemy’s nearby presence. Many of the paratroopers believed this day would be their last day on earth. Before setting out for the hill, quite a few of them attended a Catholic Mass given by the battalion’s legendary, universally loved chaplain, Father Charles Watters, a forty-year-old priest who made a point of spending most of his time in the field with the grunts. The respected priest even said Mass with camouflaged vestments and a portable altar. Like several other troopers, Sergeant Steven Welch attended the Mass even though he was not Catholic. “I figured I needed all the help I could get because things weren’t looking good on that hill.”

At 0943, the grunts began trudging up the hill, negotiating their way around felled trees and through scrub brush. “There was a heavy undergrowth of bushes, vines and small trees,” a post-battle report stated. “Visibility was restricted generally to 5 to 15 meters and not more than 25 meters.” Farther up the hill, the Americans could detect some gaps in the jungle where bombs and shells had impacted. Everything was quiet, unusually so, as if all the creatures of the jungle understood that the hill was pregnant with menace.

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