The Magnificent Bastards by Keith Nolan Read Free Book Online Page A

the Wild Bill sobriquet with Foxtrot Company. He ran the men hard every morning, and, taking his cue from the Army Rangers, he emphasized night operations, long marches, and the desirability of taking unconventional approaches through rough terrain that the enemy was unlikely to strongly defend. One night, during a regimental field exercise, Weise used what had been considered an impassable deer trail to move his entire company into the opposing force’s rear. Their surprise was total.
    After the battalion rotated to Okinawa, Weise finished his tour with it as an assistant operations officer. From there, the play-hard, drink-hard, train-hard Captain Weise moved to the super gung-ho world of Marine Recon. He served with the 1st Force Reconnaissance Company at Camp Pendelton in 1960-62, a tour that included airborne and scuba training and attendance at the Special Warfare Officers’ School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Wild Bill was part of the team that developed a method for submarines to recover recon teams from hostileshorelines without having to expose themselves by surfacing. The procedure involved swimming out five thousand meters from shore at night, signaling the sub with an aquahorn, then using a scuba bottle to run a line down from the periscope to the forward escape drop, which each man would then swim down to lock into the sub. It was exciting and risky stuff, as was Weise’s participation in the first night carrier launch of recon parachutists in the Navy’s largest twin-engined bomber, and his team’s free-fall parachute jump through the bomb-bay doors.
    Weise made major during a 1962-65 tour as the Inspector-Instructor, 3d Force Reconnaissance Company, USMC Reserve, in Mobile, Alabama. In 1965-66, he attended the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was then assigned as an adviser to the Republic of Korea Marine Corps via the U.S. Naval Advisory Group, Korea.
    As earlier described, newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Weise’s Vietnam tour began in October 1967 with his surprise assignment as commander of 2/4 following Operation Kingfisher. The battalion was down to about three hundred effectives, one-third the battalion’s normal wartime strength. The NVA had gutted it. Weise knew the wounded lieutenant colonel he replaced to be an intelligent, brave, and conscientious Marine officer. The problem, as Weise saw it, was that the battalion, having fought the VC down south for so long, had been afforded no time to adapt to facing the NVA when it came north. Operation Kingfisher had been the battalion’s first campaign on the DMZ, and its tempo had been intense.
    Captain James Williams, then the battalion’s assistant operations officer, was Weise’s touchstone to what had gone before. Williams participated only in the tail end of Operation Kingfisher, but from what he had seen, it had been “an absolute abomination. There was no security. There was poor light discipline. The battalion wasn’t doing the simplest things that you learn in school, like flank security, or observationposts, or putting out listening posts at night far enough where they can do something. It was a real mess.”
    The 2d Battalion, 4th Marines, had joined Operation Kingfisher from Camp Evans on 11 September 1967, and initially served as the 9th Marines’ roving battalion outside Con Thien. The battalion was shelled every day from the DMZ. On 21 September 1967, it was ambushed by entrenched NVA and, despite a lot of courage and firepower (the battalion claimed thirty-nine confirmed kills), the Marines were forced to withdraw at dusk with 16 KIA and 118 WIA. Fifteen of those dead Marines had not been recovered. The battalion then defended a bridge on Route 561 in Leatherneck Square. The NVA attacked after midnight on 14 October 1967, probing first against H Company. Repelled there, the NVA used tear gas and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) to breach G Company’s sector. The fighting was hand to hand,