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20 May 1969
For two hours, beginning around dawn, the air force jet and Skyraider
pilots bombed all four sides of Ap Bia with every type of armament they could "scarf
up" at their bases. Like the sequence of the previous ten days, when the pairs of
planes left the area, the artillery blasted the NVA positions with tons of 105mm, 155mm,
and 8-inch artillery rounds. At 1000, the four infantry battalions assaulted the burning,
scoured, denuded mountaintop. In 3/187th area, the lineup had A Company on the right, C
Company in the center, and A/2/506th on the left. When the troops reached the base of the
mountain, they formed long skirmish lines and began to move cautiously up the slopes. They
were surprised when they were not fired on with the usual heavy bursts of fire at close
range.
The hill was eerily silent. And in ten minutes, the three companies had
reached the first bunker line - now seemingly deserted. As a precaution, the troopers
destroyed the bunkers with grenades and satchel charges. Twenty minutes later, their lines
were just a hundred meters from the military crest of Ap Bia and closing in on the second
bunker line.
 The mountain was
quiet for ten minutes. Then, at about 1040, when the skirmish lines were just seventy-five
meters from the top, the bunkers came alive with a rain of RPGs at point-blank range. Ten
to fifteen NVA hit C Company, wounded seven Rakkasans, and continued the fight by rolling
grenades down the slope. Sp4 Tyrone Campbell and his assistant gunner rushed forward with
a 90mm recoilless rifle and scored a direct hit on one bunker and, a moment later,
another.
On the right flank of C Company, Sp4 Edward Merjil, 2d Platoon, was a
one-man commando team. He knocked out two bunkers with a grenade launcher, and then,
"with his squad on both sides laying down covering fire, rushed a third," wrote
Samuel Zaffiri. "While his men poured fire on the bunker, pinning down the enemy
soldiers inside, Merjil took careful aim from ten meters away and shot a grenade right
into the aperture, killing the two NVA soldiers huddled inside."
"Merjil reloaded quickly, then rushed forward with the rest of his
squad up the steep side of the mountain. Ten meters later, the men topped the mountain.
They did not realize it at the time, but they were the first Americans to set foot on Dong
Ap Bia. The time was 1145, exactly nine days and five hours after Bravo Company first made
contact on the mountain."
"Still, Merjil and his men had taken only a few square feet of the
mountain. The NVA were still dug in all over the top of it, and before the squad could
move any further, they were pinned down by fire coming from a half-dozen enemy
positions."
 Behind
them, Lt. Donald Sullivan was pushing his 2d Platoon as hard as he could. To his left, Sp4
Lionel Mata and another squad moved up. Mata laid down a base of grazing fire with his
machine gun, and within fifteen minutes, his squad had moved around the area and knocked
out ten bunkers with smoke and fragmentation grenades taped together. Then, C Company, two
or three men at a time, reached the top of the mountain. The surviving NVA deserted their
bunkers and ran down the west face of the mountain in the draw between Hills 900 and 910
toward Laos. Overhead, Honeycutt directed 81mm mortar fire into the draw while B/1/506th
sent a force below the draw and waited for the NVA to emerge. When they did, they ran into
a wall of fire. But the NVA was aggressive: two platoons of B/1/506th fought hand-to-hand
with the fleeing NVA.
On the western face of the mountain, C/187th set up a perimeter.
Honeycutt ordered Captain Harkins to move his A Company up the mountain to reinforce C
Company. A Company was fighting a hard battle just below the crest of Ap Bia, in which
Harkins had already lost Lt. George Bennitt and fifteen men. Harkins rallied his troops
and moved up. About thirty meters from the top, Harkins took a shot through his neck that
lodged in his back. He staggered a few feet and fell into a shell hole. Overhead,
Honeycutt urged him on even after Harkins told him that he had been wounded. "I've
been hit bad," Harkins told him. Honeycutt said, "I know you've been hit, but
you still gotta keep pushing." A medic bandaged Harkins, and Harkins staggered almost
blindly ahead, holding on to his radio operator's backpack.
The NVA in the last bunker line refused to give up, pinned down A
Company's troops, and rolled grenades down on them. At the same time, an NVA squad hit C
Company's right flank.
 "Pinned down on the far right side of Alpha's skirmish line," wrote
Samuel Zaffiri, "Sp4 Johnny Jackson, a machine gunner in the 3d Platoon, huddled
behind a log and thought: Here we go again. Another attack failed. As he cowered there,
though, he suddenly remembered what he had boastfully told a friend earlier in the
morning. 'I'll tell you what,' he had said, 'if we go up that sonofabitch this time, I'm
staying up. I ain't gonna be run down again and let them assholes shoot me in the back.
I'm through with this retreating bullshit.'
"He kept thinking of his words now, and then on impulse stood up
and shouted out loud so everyone in the 3d Platoon could hear him, 'Fuck this bullshit!'
With a fluid motion, Jackson brought his M60 up to his chest and raked the enemy position
above, then charged up the side of the mountain, wildly spraying bullets from side to
side."
On his way to the top, Jackson stumbled into a spider hole occupied by
two enemy soldiers. Before they could grab their weapons, Jackson sprayed them with his
M60. Then he raced upward and found himself looking into the aperture of another bunker.
He fired into it and scrambled up the remaining twenty or so meters to the top of the
mountain.
Below him, his friend, Sp4 Michael Vallone, frightened but inspired by
Jackson's charge, yelled. "Follow me," fired short bursts from his M16, and led
his squad, then the platoon, and the rest of A Company, up the mountain. At the top, A
Company rolled over the last bunker line and made it to the top. The wounded Captain
Harkins set up a perimeter defense tied into C Company, turned the company over to Lt.
Gordie Atcheson, and then began his laborious trek down the mountain.
 To the southwest,
B/1/506th was in a tough battle. The 3d Platoon attacked up Hill 900 but, about a hundred
meters from the top, met a grim fate. Claymore mines hidden in trees blasted the point
squad, killing the point man and wounding seven others. Two platoons of NVA, firing
satchel charges, roared down the hill through the shattered platoon, then raced back up
through it again. Fighting was close and brutal. Fifteen minutes later, the 3d Platoon had
ten dead and was surrounded by a pile of NVA KIAs. Lieutenant Colonel John Bowers, CO of
1/506th, ordered Capt. William Stymiest, C Company CO, to send a force up the hill to
relieve the battered 3d Platoon. In a two-hour fight, C Company made it to the top, where
sixty-five dead NVA littered the area.
By the end of the day, most of the troops of the 29th NVA Regiment had
been killed or were trying to escape across the border to Laos. From his helicopter,
Honeycutt could see the NVA running in all directions off the mountain. B/1/506th was
still in a blocking position to cover the southwestern draw. Honeycutt brought in two
fighter-bombers to strafe up and down the draw and then brought in artillery fire.
The Rakkasans on the top and slopes of Dong Ap Bia found a landscape
that resembled what they imagined hell must be like. Throughout the area, they found NVA
pith helmets, AK-47s, stick grenades, bloody bandages, and RPGs. In the center of Hill
937, a line of Rakkasans came across a group of fifteen NVA who were apparently
shell-shocked. Without waiting, the Rakkasans killed them all. Four of the NVA had been
chained to trees. All of them wore patches that read: "Kill the Americans."
Honeycutt began the mop-up operation at about 1500. One POW,
eighteen-year-old Pham Van Hai, told his interrogators that 80 percent of his hundred-man
company and the 29th NVA Regiment's 7th and 8th Battalions had been nearly wiped out.
Later, Sp4 Johnny Jackson and his squad, searching the top of the mountain, found an
underground room containing the stripped and stacked bodies of more than forty NVA
soldiers. Other Rakkasians searching the mountaintop discovered in its deep tunnels, a
huge hospital, a regimental CP, and many storage areas containing 152 individual and 25
crew-served weapons, 75,000 rounds of ammo, thousands of mortar and RPG rounds, and over
ten tons of rice.
The 3d Battalion of the 187th suffered 39 killed in action and 290
wounded. The total casualties of the American taking of Dong Ap Bia was 70 dead and 372
wounded.
The losses inflicted on the NVA in Dong Ap Bia are debatable. The G2
Section of the 101st estimated the NVA dead at 633, based upon actual body count. But no
one could count the NVA running off the mountain, those killed by artillery and air
strikes, the wounded and dead carried into Laos or the dead buried in collapsed bunkers
and tunnels.
The 3/187th's battle for Dong Ap Bia was over. For the next seventeen
days, the other three battalions would continue to mop up the mountain. But on 21 May, the Rakkasans were evacuated from the
area to Camp Evans for a stand-down at Eagle Beach.
 While the other battalions were policing the Dong Ap Bia
battlefield, one imaginative soldier found a piece of cardboard C-ration box, wrote on it,
"Hamburger Hill," and nailed it to a charred tree trunk. Shortly thereafter,
another, perhaps more practical and blunt soldier, had added beneath the sign, "Was
it worth it?"
His question would be debated in Congress, in the administration, in the
media, and in many a gathering of military officers and men for months to come. Shortly
after the battle, a spokesman for Gen. Creighton Abrams, Gen. Westmoreland's successor as
COMUSMACV, said, "We are not fighting for terrain as such. We are going after the
enemy."
General Zais said, "The hill was in my area of
operations. That was where the enemy was and that was where I attacked him." When
someone asked him why he didn't blast the hill with B-52s and spare the infantry assault,
General Zais said, with some rancor, "I don't know how many wars we have to go
through to convince people that aerial bombardment alone cannot do the job." But the
debate about the value of Hamburger Hill was far from over.
From THE RAKKASANS -- The Combat History of the 187th Airborne
Infantry
By Lt. General E. M. Flanagan, Jr., USA (Ret)
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