He felt someone rip his watch off before he blacked out again. Williams, concerned about the weaponless medic, returned to the ditch. As he arrived, an incoming ‘C ration’ grenade bounced off his back. The blast wounded him in the arm. The platoon medic, who had remained in the ditch, yelled that he, too, had been hit. While attemping to calm the man, Williams asked Click if he could spare some ammunition. Click grinned at his platoon leader, threw him a magazine, and said, ‘We sure are kicking some ass, aren’t we.’

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That was not completely true, but the 2nd Platoon had certainly held out against a superior force. Smith had spread fire across his front by rapidly switching his machine gun between the bunker’s three apertures. Automatic weapons are prime targets; before long an incoming M-79 round filled the air with fragments and wounded him. It was the first of three wounds Smith would suffer that night.

Conditions around the pagoda also were dire. The national policeman guarded two male and two female VC who had been captured earlier in the day and were confined within the building to await evacuation. When a rocket-propelled grenade struck the pagoda, the policeman decided to seek cover in the trench. He was mortally wounded by a grenade as he jumped from a window.

Around 0420, a man from the west side of the perimeter came screaming into Click’s position: ‘I’m out of ammo. They’re going to overrun us. They are going to get us all.’ Click gave the man ammunition, told him to snap out of it and shoved him between himself and Chapman. When that did not calm him, Click backhanded him across the mouth, and told him to get back to his position. The man then left the ditch to get more ammunition from his gear.

Williams was also empty, so Click tossed the lieutenant four magazines and started back for the ditch. The man who had panicked was returning to his bunker when the VC machine gun opened fire. Click felt a sting in his right thigh and his leg went numb. The other man was hit in both legs. Click dragged him back to the ditch and fashioned a tourniquet with web gear.

That was about the time Spc. 4 Green yelled that the gunships had arrived. Green later recalled: ‘When the first chopper got there, the lieutenant called out to throw flares. Smith threw a flare and it caught a hooch on fire. I asked the chopper pilot if he could see the hooch on fire, and he said yes. I explained where we were at.’

Shortly afterward, Williams reached Green and took over the radio. One of the gunships fired on Captain Ruane’s column when it was about 500 to 600 meters north of Van Tuong. No one was wounded, but the incident infuriated Ruane.

Williams, meanwhile, had redirected the gunships to make a south-to-north pass. Specialist 4 Greg Kitchen, Captain Ruane’s radio operator, cut in when he heard Williams’ instructions, ‘Negative, we are to the north, come east to west.’ Staff Sergeant Daetweiler radioed, ‘Negative, we are coming in from the east.’

Williams said later, ‘So we all compromised and they [the gunships] came in with their runs southwest to northeast.’ The VC began to withdraw soon afterward.

Captain Ruane described his first look at Van Tuong 1 as surreal: ‘The smoke from burning hooches was hanging around four to five feet from the ground, the villagers were screaming and crying; some tracer was going by–mostly red, some green.’ As they reached the perimeter boundary, Sergeant Iafrate tripped a flare, and Ruane and his men hit the ground. Kitchen yelled, ‘The 2nd knows we’re coming, don’t they?’

Ruane yelled, ‘Let’s go!’ and they raced the final distance into the perimeter. The 3rd Platoon arrived a few minutes later. Colonel Smith flew into the position just minutes after daylight. The brigade and division commanders arrived shortly afterward.

The 1st and 3rd platoons fanned out and set about treating the wounded, retrieving the dead and picking up scattered gear. Shortly after 0500, Captain Ruane reported the area secure and requested three medical evacuation helicopters.

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