‘We moved closer and got behind a large rock. Then all hell broke loose’: Lt. remembers Nui Chom | Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

The biggest news back home on Nov. 17, 1968, was a decision by one of the three major television networks — NBC — to cut away from the NFL’s Oakland Raiders-New York Jets game to show the movie “Heidi.”

The Raiders, the bad boys of professional football, rallied to win in what simply became known as the “Heidi Bowl.”

It was a decision that became woven into the pop culture that was developing at that time. The country was at war, the political fabric of the nation was unraveling and people were upset a sporting event pre-empted by a movie. It even made the front page of The New York Times.

What didn’t make the newspapers was the 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment was walking right into a real battle — one against the North Vietnamese Army on Nui Chom, a position the NVA controlled.

Lt. Col. Sam Wetzel, who commanded the battalion’s almost 600 soldiers, started the day, like most of his days, in his command helicopter looking for NVA routes and sinking sampans, small boats, operating along the Song Thu Bong River.

About that time, 1st Lt. John F. Dolan was leading a Delta Company rifle platoon along the base of a Nui Chom ridgeline, heading east toward LZ West.

“The experienced men in the platoon and no doubt in the entire company all sensed that this was a bad place,” Dolan said in his recount of the battle to Wetzel years after the fight. “We stopped to do some flank reconnaissance.”

Dolan took one of the teams that included Spec. Jack Walker, Spec. Billie Joe Gillespie and a specialist named Lopez toward the ridge line.

“We were moving through heavy brush for a time and suddenly almost fell into a well-worn trail cut about two feet into the ground and wide enough for wheeled carts,” Dolan said. “It paralleled the trail that Delta Company was moving along at the base of the ridgeline. We followed this trial a short while.”

Dolan then smelled the smoke from a fire.

“We soon came to another trail going directly up the mountain,” he remembered.

That trail, the men would soon discover, led directly to an NVA base camp and the start of the battle.

“We hadn’t gone very far up that trail when I could see in the distance several well equipped men in uniforms sitting around a small cooking fire, talking softly,” Dolan said. “We moved closer and got behind a large rock. Then all hell broke loose.”

The enemy fired their AK-47s and Dolan and his men returned fire with grenades and M-16’s.

Walker was certain he had hit one of the NVA soldiers, who quickly dispersed but not before leaving behind a radio, two AK-47s and two blood trails. One of those blood trails led straight up Nui Chom Mountain. Dolan informed Delta Company commander Capt. Sid Ordway of the enemy contact.

Wetzel was not oblivious to what was happening along the ridge line that day. He had ordered Ordway and his men to move up the mountain and check out the village. Dolan left the recon team radio with his radio operator at the intersection of the trails below the site of the initial contact.

The plan was to have him guide the remainder of the company to the location of the recon team.

“The four of us then started to slowly follow the blood trail up the mountain, wanting to give time to the rest of the company to reach us,” Dolan remembered.

Ordway, 1st Sgt. John Neely and radio operator Butch Harris were the first ones to reach Dolan and the other three.

“They were out of breath and had come up alone,” Dolan said. “It was obvious that we had come upon an outpost for a large NVA force.”

Ordway was anxious to continue to track the blood trail, Dolan said.

“I told him that we should wait for my platoon and the rest of the company to catch up to us so we could move up the mountain as a unit, and have artillery and air ready to support us,” Dolan said.

Ordway said the company was right behind them, then the captain, the first sergeant and the two soldiers who arrived with him began running up the hill following the blood trail. One of those soldiers was Recon Sgt. Stan Satcher.

“I mean, we were running hard,” Harris said. “We had dropped our packs and left two platoons to secure the packs and guard the trail. As we took off running, the blood kept getting better and better.”

Dolan and his men joined the pursuit.

“I couldn’t let him and his group go alone into what my entire team knew was likely to be a large enemy force,” Dolan said.

Harris was one of the men in the company command post group moving up the mountain who had a radio and a way to communicate with the rest of the company and Wetzel. That also allowed Dolan to communicate with his platoon as he moved up the slope. In what proved to be an exhausting hump up the mountain, the soldiers hiked nearly a mile and climbed about 1,200 feet of elevation before losing the blood trail.

At that point, they found a dozen or so strands of communication wire that continued along the same trail up the mountain. They also found a stream at what appeared to be the outskirts of an NVA camp. Ordway, the first sergeant, Harris and Satcher crossed the stream.

“The first part of the team went to the right and Capt. Ordway and 1st Sgt. Neely wanted to go left,” Satcher said. “So I followed them left. There were only five of us that went to the left.”

Dolan and his team moved off into a different direction toward the brush on the side of the trail and continued to follow the trail and the wire.

“The brush was much less thick there,” Dolan recalled.

Gillespie noticed movement further up the trail, Dolan recalled.

“At the same time we saw an open area up ahead and to the right of us,” Dolan said. “Six or seven NVA soldiers with AKs slung and water pails hanging off their shoulders were walking right toward us.”

An NVA soldier then appeared on the trail in front of Dolan and his men engaged.

“When we later got up to him, we saw that his foot had been blown off,” Dolan said. “At some point he had tied a piece of cloth around his leg to slow the bleeding.”

It was the NVA soldier that Dolan and his men had been following up Nui Chom. There was also a realization of the resolve of the men fighting on the other side.

“He had run all the way up the mountain with his foot blown off,” Dolan said.

The fight had just gotten bigger

The small group of Americans were about to find that the injured NVA soldier was the least of their problems.

“There were NVA soldiers and bunkers all over the place,” Dolan said. “Within a short time, the whole mountain seemed to erupt with enemy fire.”

The NVA on water detail scattered and began firing in our general direction, Dolan said.

“We were in the brush and behind trees and most of them couldn’t see us,” Dolan said.

Gillespie killed an NVA firing from near a bunker to the squad’s right. It was clear, Dolan remembered, that the enemy was totally surprised. That was working in favor of the Americans stuck on the fringe of a large NVA encampment. But the enemy knew they were there.

“We had to take advantage of the element of surprise and aggressively pressure the NVA until the rest of the company was able to get to us and the command group,” Dolan said. “We knew that we couldn’t fall back beyond the stream intersection or the CP group could be enveloped.”

So Dolan and his men gathered behind a small mound and made a plan. They would spread out, stay in visual and/or voice contact with each other, move and fire from concealed positions, and press the attack on bunkers in front of them.

Dolan’s account to Wetzel in the years after the battle is clear and detailed and, a half-century later, is the best available account of how the battle started. Walker and Gillespie spread out into the trees on the high ground to the left and above the first line of bunkers, and were able to direct accurate fire onto the bunkers below as well as to return fire coming from other bunkers further up the ridge line, Dolan said.

Lopez who was carrying an M-79, a short-barreled grenade launcher, stayed with Dolan throughout the fight. They were met with fire from AK-47s initially, then machine gun fire, and at some point grenades and RPG’s. The bunkers were connected to each other by tunnels, creating a challenge as well as great danger.

“As we’d get to one row of bunkers, we’d receive fire from the next set of bunkers a little further up the mountain,” Dolan said.

At this point, Dolan pulled the small team back together and revised the plan.

“I told them that we were going to yell to each other from spread out and concealed positions, as if we were giving ‘orders’ to large numbers of soldiers,” Dolan said.

The orders were to be specific, Dolan told this three men. “‘First Platoon move around to the right, Second Platoon lay down a base of fire, etc. stuff like that — just yelling ‘orders’ to one another to hopefully fool the NVA into thinking that they were being confronted by a much larger force,” Dolan said.

Dolan, a child of the 1950s, developed the plan straight out of a Davy Crockett television episode. The short-lived series was a Disney production that starred actor Fess Parker as the legendary frontier hero.

“In one of those programs, Davy Crockett and Georgie Russell combined aggressiveness and the element of surprise to successfully break the assault of a larger enemy force,” Dolan said.

And that is exactly what Dolan and his men planned to do as they waited for reinforcements. At one point there was a loud explosion near Dolan. Walker and the others got to Dolan where they found the first lieutenant unconscious.

Walker later told Dolan that when they got to him and found a huge hole in front of him, they thought Dolan was dead.

They dragged Dolan into one of the bunkers. Shortly after that, Walker said that Dolan opened his eyes and started to talk to them. It was not long after that, that elements of the Delta Company began to reach Dolan and his men. They set up the machine guns and sent some of the soldiers back for more grenades.

“Men would bring up shirts and pockets full of grenades,” Dolan remembered.

Enemy fire eventually became sporadic and then stopped. It was clear that a much larger NVA force had decided to break contact rather than continue to fight, Dolan said. At that point, the soldiers gathered the NVA equipment, put it in two of the bunkers and burned it.

“We carried some heavy equipment part of the way down the mountain that night and then blew it in place before we got to our night logger,” Dolan said.

While Dolan and his men were in a game of deceit with the enemy, Ordway and his men from the command post were in what they thought to be an abandoned base camp, according to an article about the battle published in 1969 and written by Sgt. George Hawkins.

“The hootches were made of bamboo with thatched roofs,” Ordway said in the Hawkins’ article. “There weren’t any fighting bunkers like we would run into later, higher on the mountain.”

From the position Harris and Ordway held in the enemy base camp, they could hear the fire from Dolan’s unit below them.

“It sounded like a small war had started,” Harris wrote when he put his memories of the battle into words. “... Capt. Ordway stopped for a just a second and listened to the war going on below us.”

The war was about to move into the area Ordway, Harris, Satcher and Neely had found.

“Capt. Ordway started up the trail to the right where the small hill was,” Harris remembered. “Just as he reached the top of the hill, there was gunfire to the front of us. Capt. Ordway went down almost immediately. The first Sergeant yelled he was hit and folded over. The rest of us started to return fire in the direction to the front of us.”

‘I thought I was going to buy the farm’

As the Ordway group took fire, Dolan and his men could hear it from a distance. By the time Ordway’s company reached the north end of the camp, they were hit by machine gun fire.

“Then heavy AK and machine gun fire began from just beyond the first line of bunkers in front of us,” Dolan said. “We began to hear enemy fire from the command group’s location across the stream, and then some M-16 return fire. It was a great relief to hear the M-16 fire.”

The M-16 fire was self-preservation for Ordway’s group. Satcher was standing next to Ordway and Neely when they were struck.

“That’s one of the times I thought I was going to buy the farm,” Satcher said. “The only thing that saved me was a tree was right in front of me and the bullets hit the tree.”

He saw the bullet strike Ordway above the right eye.

“It went through his helmet by the side of his head and came out the back of the helmet,” Satcher said.

After being hit, Ordway did not move, and Harris yelled to him to see if he was hit, but he didn’t move. Neely, the first sergeant, reported he was hit in the hand in the two middle fingers and the pistol grip on his M-16 was broken, but he could still fire it.

Neely and Satcher were both firing away, while Harris was still trying to determine his commander’s condition.

“As the war down the other trail seem to slow down, our gunfire stopped,” Harris said. “I yelled again at Capt. Ordway to see if he was dead or how bad he was injured. I told him that if he could move, to move something.”

Ordway moved his foot, Harris said. “I knew he was still alive,” Harris said. Harris then heard noise from below him behind a tree, coming from Satcher.

“He was doing what we all felt like doing — praying — because we were all scared,” Harris said. “I called his name a couple of times to get him to shut up.”

But things were calming down.

“The fire fight below seemed to stop,” Harris said. “We could hear small firearms occasionally.”

Harris reached out to Wetzel in the command helicopter.

“I called the Battalion radio, ‘This is Delta-6 X-ray,’” Harris said.

Wetzel responded.

“I was so glad to hear his voice,” Harris said. “I told him we were in a gunfight and that the CO and first sergeant had been hit and we needed help and a MEDEVAC chopper. He asked for our location and I didn’t have time to code it, so I had to give him the coordinates out in the open. He told me that help was on the way and the chopper pilot said they would be there in five minutes.”

Wetzel and his pilot flew toward the battle.

“I immediately flew back to the area and told Butch Harris to move Capt. Ordway and 1st Sgt, Neely back to the rear security positions and have an LZ prepared for a MEDEVAC,” Wetzel said.

The next step was to call for the helicopter to get Ordway, the company commander, and Neely, the first sergeant, off the mountain. Ordway was hit in the face and blinded, a condition he would live with the remainder of his life. Neely had been hit in the hand and seriously wounded.

With Ordway out of the battle, Wetzel from his helicopter radioed Harris, giving Lt. James B. Gray, Second Platoon leader, command of the company. He then ordered Gray to take Delta Company up the mountain and set up positions to remain in contact with the enemy.

As the retreating NVA were fired upon from helicopters, Harris told the platoon to “pop smoke,” throwing out small smoke bombs that gave those in the air an idea where the U.S. soldiers were Located.

“The pilot said that he could see the NVA soldiers running and to keep our heads down,” Harris said. “The choppers started to work with the M-79, M-60’s, rockets and mini-gun on the side. Man, what a beautiful sight.”

Harris and those with him could hear the NVA firing back at the air attack. As the NVA retreated, they came in contact with Alpha Company, where two more enemy soldiers were killed.

“The colonel said we needed to go back down the mountain and regroup,” Harris said. Wetzel, strategic and calculating, was already thinking about the greater battle and not just the fight that started it.

“I wanted to keep contact with the enemy so we could move other companies up the fingers of the mountain,” Wetzel said.

The objective, at least in Wetzel’s mind, could not have been clearer.

“The mission was to take that hill and kill as many North Vietnamese as we could,” Wetzel said.

He noted that Harris, cool and collected despite firing his weapon to keep the enemy off Ordway and Neely, accurately transferred the commands.

“He did it, in effect, as a company commander would do it,” Wetzel said.

Harris was being told by Wetzel how to put the platoons in defensive positions. But there was one thing Wetzel didn’t know, and neither did Harris.

“I had no idea they had more than 250 bunkers in that area,” Wetzel said.

Neither did anyone else. Harris noted that he was prepared, in part because of his access to information long before the battle started.

“Capt. Ordway had always said he wanted me to carry a map and a codebook,” Harris said. “I was at all the meetings each night, so I knew what was being planned for the next day. He was always checking his map and I would keep mine close just in case I needed it.”

Dolan understood their work on the first day of what was going to be a prolonged battle was done.

“The leaders and men of my platoon and Delta had to act on their own initiative that day,” Dolan said. “The CO was seriously wounded and I did not have a radio when the heaviest contact was taking place. Men and leaders literally moved toward the sound of the gunfire and then took the action that they saw needed to be taken. In so doing, they insured that the lead elements were supported, enemy fire was suppressed, casualties were moved to safety and evacuated, and the NVA force that was fighting from fixed positions and greatly outnumbered our company chose to break contact and withdraw rather than continue the fight,”

Dolan reflects on the efforts of his small reconnaissance team that day with pride.

“The three men who were with me, Walker, Gillespie and Lopez, showed again and again throughout the day the great courage, skill, determination, teamwork, flexibility, and ingenuity that have always been the hallmark qualities of great American infantrymen,” Dolan said.

The Battle of Nui Chom

Part 1: Lt. Col. Sam Wetzel takes command of 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment

Part 2: Getting ready for the fight

Today/Part 3: The first shots are fire on Nui Chom

Part 4: Making a plan on how to attack Nui Chom

Part 5: “He altered the name on my bullet”

Part 6: Finishing off the climb to the top

Last in a series: Thanksgiving dinner on the top of Nui Chom