HOWARD'S HILL

Howard's Hill

     June, 1966. Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard was in command of an 18-man patrol of Marines from the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. These were the guys we’d see trooping past our tent on their way to the nearby chopper pad on their way to make an insertion like the one today, where a chopper would drop them on an isolated hilltop and they’d call in artillery and air strikes on enemy activity they could see below them. 

     I had come on duty for the midnight to 0400 watch at the Direct Air Support Center. Howard and his seventeen men had been surrounded since dusk on top of Hill 488, named Nui Vu on Vietnamese maps, near Chu Lai. The surrounding force was a highly trained, well equipped North Vietnamese Army (NVA) battalion. 

     Apparently the NVA wanted to eliminate one of the recon units which had caused them so much grief by entering their territory and calling in strikes on their training and staging areas. So they committed over two hundred men in the attempt to kill eighteen Marines whose perimeter was less than twenty meters across.

     The fight went on all night long. The Marines held the crest of the hill; the Vietnamese assaulted again and again with automatic rifles, mortars, machine guns, grenades, bayonets. Several of those charges ended in short, violent, handtohand fights. By the time the second charge was beaten back, every Marine on the hill was wounded, and ammunition was so low that they had to fire semiautomatically. By the middle of the night, the Recon boys could see, by flarelight, NVA reinforcements swarming in the valley below. PFC Joseph Kosoglow said later it had looked "just like an anthill ripped apart."(

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     We sent up flight after flight of helicopter gunships and jets to strafe and rocket the steep slopes around our men. An Air Force flare ship orbited above the hill to drop parachute flares; it was always supposed to be relieved on station when it was low on fuel. We coordinated that relief from the DASC. On the radio, I heard one Air Force pilot say he had to leave before his relief arrived because he was low on fuel, and heard a Marine piloting one of the helicopter gunships - I later heard he was a major - tell the Air Force pilot that he would personally shoot down the flare ship if it left before relieved. The major didn't live to be courtmartialed. He was killed before morning, flying rocket runs again and again down the throat of one of four NVA .50 caliber machine guns that were tearing up the men on the hill. The gun got the major. I don't know if the major got the gun, but he sure kept it busy for a while.

     When I left the DASC just before dawn, I could see the fireworks over Hill 488: flares, rockets, the long lovely parabolic arcs of red tracers. With dawn came better visibility, more air strikes, an airlifted company of Marine infantry. Later, we heard stories from the Recon guys, whose tents were near ours in the 1st MarDiv compound. 

     One Marine and one NVA soldier were found dead with their rifle muzzles touching each other's chests. Two of the Marines' entrenching tools were found, bloody, in a circle of "mangled" NVA. One dead Marine was embracing the last man he'd killed, still gripping his KABAR knife where he'd buried it in the back of the enemy soldier in his embrace.(

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    But they'd held Hill 488. Of the eighteen Recon Marines, twelve were still alive. All were wounded. They had eight rounds of ammunition among them. The hill was called Howard's Hill by Marines after the fight. It still is, among those who remember. But the Marines left the hill the day they won it.

     Jimmie Earl Howard got the Medal of Honor. Years later, I talked with Jack Shulimson, a Marine Corps Museum historian who said that Howard’s hair had turned white within days after that fight, that he’d been a decorated veteran of Korea before he ever went to Vietnam, but had had a rough time of it after Nui Vu.

     Howard's call sign, by the way, was "Carnival Time."