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Seven I swore up and down this guy was nuts. He wasn’t afraid of anybody. The Delta Raiders’ Bobby Rakestraw, expressing an opinion that many soldiers had about Joe What with the bright orange hunting-style vest he was wearing, Eugene “Raider Rob” Robertson looked out of place on a battlefield. But there he was on February 15 in a nasty firefight, plunking away with his m-79 grenade launcher just about as fast as he could load and aim. For Robertson and other Raiders the arrival of long-delayed mail on February 14 dissipated some of the gloom Harold Begody’s death caused. Henry Tabet received a picture of his wife and their children, which he proudly showed to his good friends. Tabet was doubly fortunate that night since a few mortar rounds crashed into D Company’s position and one of them scored a direct hit on his bunker. Tabet was unhurt, causing more than a few comments about what a lucky man he was. Raider Rob received an especially welcome package. He had previously written his mother showing her a picture of an m-79 round and giving its dimensions, asking her to make a vest to carry the ammo. Opening the package, he saw that the vest was great, just perfect—except for the color. Robertson normally humped several bandoleers of m-79 rounds, plus four old World War II field packs (two slung over each shoulder) crammed with more ammo. The weight rubbed his shoulders raw. Now he unloaded the packs, loaded up the vest, and slipped it on. The evenly distributed weight “felt so damn good,” he recalled twenty- five years later with a delicious savoring in his voice. So he wore the vest when the 2nd and 3rd Platoons conducted a search and destroy mission the next morning. “I looked like a bloomin’ idiot out there in orange. But it felt so good!”1 The two platoons, approximately sixty men, “saddled up” at first light and headed due south from pk-17. They first encountered a graveyard with freshly dug enemy positions that were extensive enough to hold a reinforced company, a disquieting discovery since military intelligence said no more than a platoon was in that area. A few minutes later when the Raiders received sporadic sniper fire, Captain McMenamy maneuvered to get behind the snipers, 3rd Platoon commanded by Lieutenant Bob Brulte on the left with 2nd Platoon under Lieutenant Dave Loftin on the right and slightly ahead of 3rd Platoon, swinging around like a gate. As 3rd Platoon’s scouts reached a sparse treeline and peered across a paddy, they spotted several nva in an island-hamlet, a group of houses entangled in dense vegetation approximately fifty yards away. The scouts reported their discovery to Lieutenant Brulte who relayed the information to Captain Mac. Just as he arrived at Brulte’s position the enemy fired on the scouts who had ventured well into the rice paddy, hitting Sergeant David Cash. No one could tell whether Cash was dead or alive, but either way the Raiders had no intention of abandoning him. Like many units with high esprit de corps, they refused as a matter of principle to abandon anyone, dead or wounded. “We didn’t believe in leaving a dead man behind or waiting two or three days to retrieve his body,” said Joe Hooper. “We always went back —even against orders—to get the men. We never had an mia.”2 Moreover, medical care was so excellent that soldiers survived even monstrous injuries if they got to a hospital quickly, so a sense of urgency attended the retrieval of a wounded man. The unwritten policy was for another soldier or soldiers to sprint into the open, grab the body (which might be alive or dead), and haul it back to safety. Deleterious consequences flowed from this policy. The nva and vc took advantage of the Americans’ dogged practice of never leaving anybody behind, often shooting to wound rather than kill, using the wounded man as “bait,” knowing another soldier would rush to the injured man and stoop to pick him up, thus making an easy target. All too often the sprinter got shot, meaning the number of bodies needing recovery increased. Not only did the number of dead and wounded escalate, sometimes in a cascade that depleted a unit’s fighting strength, but also the attack stalled as men became preoccupied with getting casualties medevaced and virtually...

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