I am sorry, sir, but my men refused to go . . . We cannot move out.
Repeat that, please. Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?
I think they understand, but some of them simply had enough—they are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Viet Nam. They want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.
As it first appeared in newspapers around the world, that anguished exchange by field telephone between a battle-weary young infantry lieutenant on a Vietnamese hill and his battalion commander was disturbingly reminiscent of classic episodes of battlefield rebellion. Ground down to two-thirds of its original strength after five days of sharp combat, a U.S. Army unit—Company A of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade's 3rd Battalion—had balked at orders to advance once again on well-bunkered North Vietnamese positions.
The incident, which took place in rolling, heavily jungled country in the Song Chang river valley, 30 miles south of Danang, came to light accidentally. Associated Press Photographer Horst Faas happened to be sitting in Lieut. Colonel Robert C. Bacon's 3rd Battalion headquarters when it occurred. The brief episode spanned less than an hour, and it directly involved six of Company A's 60 men: five fatigued and panicky G.I.s and Lieut. Eugene Shurtz Jr., 26, a green company commander whose basic error, as another officer put it, was that "he tried to reason with the men when the situation called for a boot in the tail." At the present stage of the war, the Song Chang incident seemed symptomatic of U.S. fatigue with the continuing bloodshed. It hardly presaged, however, any general collapse of battlefield will, as some early reactions to the report seemed to suggest. In the field, in fact, Alpha Company's travail was soon shrugged off as a curious but isolated incident born of unusual circumstances.
A Leadership Problem. The company's ordeal began on Aug. 12, when Communist troops launched an assault on fire-support base "West," an isolated U.S. post on a 1,000-ft. ridgeline overlooking the Song Chang valley. Reconnaissance probes determined that North Vietnamese soldiers, often disguised in South Vietnamese uniforms, were well-entrenched around the base, occupying elaborate bunkers emplaced in rice terraces and on boulder-strewn hills.
Early in the battle, Bacon's predecessor as battalion commander, Lieut. Colonel Eli P. Howard Jr., was killed when his helicopter was shot down; seven others died with him, including A.P. Photographer Oliver Noonan. The 3rd Battalion troops, including Alpha Company, set out to fight their way to the crash site. In temperatures that rose to well over 100° F. in the heavy, stale air trapped among the hills, Alpha Company experienced its first violent contact with the enemy, suffering three dead and two wounded in a fierce firefight at the foot of a low hill called Nui Lon. The North Vietnamese left 20 bodies. There were more contacts during the next two days, then an evening barrage of 82-mm. fire, followed by a predawn fusillade of small-arm fire. After five days of fighting, Alpha Company's mud-caked survivors were exhausted, thirsty, hungry—and scared.