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there. The attack was to commence the next day, with tank support. In the meantime, the unreinforced ARVN battalions were still heavily engaged on Route 1. If uncontained, the NVA could push on to Dong Ha. To prevent this, division alerted the 3d Marines, who were relatively unengaged on the east flank, to release a rifle company to protect the bridge on Route 1 above Dong Ha.
    Colonel Milton A. Hull, commander of the 3d Marines, placed Captain Livingston’s E BLT 2/4 opcon to division, and Sea Horses lifted the company from Nhi Ha to the north end of the bridge, where it dug in beside a populated hamlet. Propeller-driven Skyraiders were bombing and napalming farther up the highway, and Livingston took a quick jeep ride just as the battle was petering out. The ARVN had held, and they showed Livingston a number of freshly killed NVA who had new uniforms, web gear, and weapons. Livingston was impressed: “It was clear to me we had some fresh troops moving down against us. I knew it was for real.”
    “With everything else that was going on, Colonel Hull had me ‘spread the regiment out along the Cua Viet,’” wrote Maj. Dennis J. Murphy, the regimental S3 at Camp Kistler. “Hull was looking days ahead.” Hull had operational control of three battalions. BLT 2/4 was deployed north of the Cua Viet, and his other rifle battalion, 1/3, was to the south. Hull’s third element, the 1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion, was tied down in strongpoints along the coastal side of the regimental TAOR. Hull realigned all of these units before nightfall, a move that led Murphy to comment, “I was concerned, as was 2/4, 1/3, and the Amtracs, that we were getting too thin, and we’d have some trouble massing force. When I started to resist the‘spreading,’ Hull said, The bastards are going to try to take Dong Ha, and we’ve got to be able to keep them from getting across the river.’”
    Major Murphy added that “by the time Colonel Hull was satisfied that we had all the potential routes covered, the Marine units—especially Bill Weise—were calling me the ‘fastest grease pencil in the East.’”
    Weise was very concerned about regiment’s instructions. To the north of the BLT CP in Mai Xa Chanh West, Vargas’s G Company had to expand the Lam Xuan West perimeter to include E Company’s vacated positions across Jones Creek in Nhi Ha. To the east, Butler’s F Company remained in Mai Xa Chanh East as the BLT reserve, but placed a platoon in My Loc, which was also on the northern shore of the Cua Viet but two klicks farther downriver. Weise could not move F or G Companies without regiment’s approval. His only remaining maneuver element was Williams’s H Company, which was screening the western flank from Objective Charlie and Objective Delta.
    From the roof of his farmhouse CP, Captain Williams had a clear view of the tributary that divided BLT 2/4 from the ARVN TAOR. The area was particularly vulnerable, because the two ARVN battalions previously in position there were the ones that had been moved west to meet the NVA coming down Route 1. The 320th NVA Division would, in fact, exploit this weak seam the next morning, and BLT 2/4 would thus be committed.
    Captain Mastrion, medevacked two days before the battle, was still an immobile patient aboard the USS
Iwo Jima
when a Marine from the battalion rear addressed the sickbay. The Marine said that the battalion was in trouble, and had taken terrible casualties. He said that any of the wounded who could still function should return to the field. The situation was that bad. Several young Marines on the ward, including some with gauze-packed bullet wounds who had just been medevacked from the same battle, got up to go back ashore. Mastrion joined them. He figured that the very least he could do was stand radio watch, from a prone position, at the command amtrac inMai Xa Chanh West. Mastrion had a corpsman tightly wrap his aching back with an elastic bandage so he could stand, then