| Summary: | Mr. Nale continues his description of the Dak To November 1967 battle and his being wounded again.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Mike Nale
Part G
September 13, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Patti Hannah and Rhonda Haygood
Mike Nale: It was about 4:00 in the afternoon and we had just did what they call a elephant. We had just sat down. And we were on a hillside. We were fixing, it was a big enough place where we were operating and I think there was, there was B Company, A Company, and I think D Company was with us and and maybe C, too. And but we had, they called it logger sights where you were going to stay for the night. And I just, you take your rucksack and you kind of lean back on it and you're kind of sitting down, kind of like in a squatted position with all the weight off your back. I heard one round go off. It's like 4:00 in the afternoon. And I listened and then started hearing more rounds. And then I heard the 90 recoilless rifle go off and then it was like all hell broke loose. And what it was, we had walked around the ridge the other way and we were walking right in one of their base camps. So we started shooting it out at 4:00 that afternoon. I got hit at 4:01. Again I got blown over three teakwood logs and landed behind an ant hill. I got hit in the elbow that time. And ah, I noticed there was a sniper. I kept getting fire down on me. And a rucksack was out in front of me and I could just see it dancing. A RPD like machine gun and it was shooting and it was just, looked like it was walking by itself. I thought, "They know where I'm at, which is not a good, not a good thing." And so pretty soon I started hearing, "Medic, Medic!" and people, when people died that- war isn't like you see on TV. It's, they were calling for their mothers, they were calling God, you know, they’re just – and I thought, "We are fixing to get overrun." And I turned nineteen October 2 and this was November 13. And it got so bad, pretty soon I couldn't even hardly move. I'd raise up and shoot and it was just, it was like two or three machine guns were on me. I had a sniper shooting down on me. I couldn't find him and kill him. And so I pulled two M26 frags out of my claymore bag and pulled the pins almost all the way. And I said if they overrun you, they didn't take prisoners, they'd stick their fingers up your nose, if you’re breathing they'd shoot you in the head. So I said, "Well, I'm going to die today and I'm going to take somebody with me." And I thought at the time, nineteen years old, I had already developed that attitude. And the firing kept on going and they say you see your life flashing before you. It was like somebody taking a book and flipping pages, chu, chu, chu. And I said, "I'm fixing to die." And then intervention set in and it was like I heard – I heard, oh it was like angelic music and something that said, "You're going to live." The fire fight kept going on and that night I was, I was still shooting it out. And I had stayed out front. And that night I was throwing grenades rather than shooting so they could see, they could see your gun blast. One guy was within twenty-eight feet of me cause he got a hold of somebody's M79 grenade launcher and fired it and didn't detonate so I knew he was close. So I threw a grenade over the log, I waited about three and a half seconds, threw it up high and let it hit cause I knew when the firing stopped. But, ah, after that, the next morning, well that evening, I didn't know it at the time, both radios were shot up. And so we had no contact and I had a E7 sergeant, Doc Cotney, and he had just run by me and I said, "Did you hear me when I told you to get down?" And he said, "No." And he got shot. I saw him. He got shot right through the face. And Sergeant Kitchen walked up and I thought, "You know, this ain't right." He was standing up and they were cutting bamboo down this high over my head. And he was standing ten feet away from me or closer, holding his rifle by the carrying handle and I said, "Something ain't right about this." I said. And he said, "Where they at?" And I said, "The bastards are everywhere." And if you look around right in the area I was in, the fighting got up close and personal that night. It was hand to hand, man to man combat and point blank range. We fixed bayonets and it's point blank range, firing on automatic weapon fire. And that night two helicopters came in and dropped supplies. And them trying to get the wounded out and they couldn't. And there were thirty-six in my platoon and we were on point. The next morning, 8:30, around that time, ah, I thought, "I'm the only one left alive." There were dead bodies all around me. The log I was on, there was like six dead NVA on this side of the log, six dead GIs on this side, one NVA officer grabbed the guy's rifle and the guy killed him. He pulled his trigger and the NVA officer died just like this. That's the way he was looking the next morning. He was, he had got shot through the head. When he grabbed his rifle the guy pulled the round off before he died. And all of this happened within, from as far as from here to this door [about ten feet]. I mean this is how close we were. It was up close. And so out of thirty-six of us there was eighteen killed and thirteen wounded by that next morning. I thought I was left there. And three machine gunners came up and tapped me on the shoulder and they said, "Come on, we're pulling back." And we were spraying the jungle pulling back. And when I came back I realized how much carnage there was. There were three or four people who were shot through the face. There were so many snipers that day. There was one sniper that was within ten meters of me. And he had two pieces of that big water bamboo tied up about ten feet high and he was squatted in it with his rifle. That was the one that was shooting down on me. He probably killed three or four people at least. Two hours later he moved and he knew I saw him move. And a guy named Sgt. Funderburk and another soldier we called Tiger, I said, "There he is!" And Funderburk had his shotgun so we all opened up on it and you could just see the bamboo slump. And it went like that all day. We started finding the snipers and taking them out and things got a little better. And then we started getting artillery strikes, you know. But we nearly got run- over run. The other side of the log, ah, over there nearly everybody got killed over on the right side. I was on the left. I think I was about the only one on the left for a long time. Another company came up and pushed them back. They came up outside of us and pushed them back. But the helicopters got hit so bad they had to go back in, none of the wounded got out. So, like I said, it wasn't a good situation. It wasn't good. I, when I came back, I'd been up forty-eight hours and it was another twenty-four hours before I saw a doctor. And my arm, to this elbow I still can't straighten that arm out. It's contract- they call it contracture of the elbow. And during war you can't just say, "Hey, I'm hurt." And it's- you just- the adrenalin is flowing it's, it's almost a euphoric feeling. It's almost kind of like [Mr. Nale makes sound] you know, I'm alive and the adrenalin is- I smoked then and like I said, a cigarette, I couldn't hold it. It was, it was falling out. It wasn't I was scared it was just the adrenalin was going through me so much. And I had to hold it like this to smoke it. [Between his thumb and index finger.] But ah, and you look and you see all the carnage. You see the bamboo blown away. All around you see the trees. You see all the dead bodies and you smell so much gun powder that you get sick, nauseated. It's like smelling fire crackers only about three hundred times worse. And so at that time that was one of the first deadly, or one of the first several of the deadliest battles. I was with B Company, 2nd Bat. '67 November 27 battle of Dak To, took nineteen days, Battle of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and elements of the 4th Infantry division fought off 6,000 North Vietnamese. U.S. , 192 killed in action, 642 wounded in action.
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