UPI EDITORS NOTE:  UPI correspondent Alvin B. Webb Jr. suffered shrapnel wounds while helping rescue a wounded Marine shortly after filing the following dispatch.

By ALVIN B. WEBB JR.

HUE , Vietnam (UPI) – SSgt Bob Thoms, of Baton Rouge , La. , got his fourth Purple Heart. A little lance corporal got killed, a bullet shredding the Purple Heart citation in his pocket and a battalion chaplain was shot in the back of the head.

The Marine battalion began the drive up one block of “Rocket Alley” led by five tanks. We had one left at the end of the block.

At block's end, three blocks short of the Hue Citadel wall, Marines skipped like children playing hop-scotch to avoid stepping on bodies. Between the bodies in Rocket Alley lay trash of war, a French vitamin bottle boasting “to build up the blood,” American candy bar wrappers, a schoolboy's satchel spilling out with what looked like homework splotched with blood, a tiny yellow kitten dead in a cage, a one-legged chicken thrashing about in someone's blood.

This was the end of the block but not the battle. As I write the lone candle I use for light shivers from the concussion of incoming Communist mortar rounds. A young radio man steps inside the door to tell me, “Charlie (The Communist force) is getting resupplied. They are advising us.”

Alert For Action

I write faster now. The sergeant is alerting Delta Company for action. The battle for this block began with the explosion of a Communist B40 rocket.

The rocket hit a truck full of Marines. A Leatherneck jumped out and tried to push the truck. Shrapnel tore his face but still he pushed. “Grenades!” someone yells. The Marines scramble for cover.

The pusher did not make it. He died, kneeling.

Sgt Thoms , 23, has his men charging over a broken wall. They hurl grenades on the run. Their rifles eat up a clip of ammunition in seconds. The Communists had been waiting and the rubble explodes in clouds of dirt and lethal steel.

Up ahead, about 25 yards, a North Vietnamese soldier leaps from the rubble and starts firing at Thoms. The sergeant already has three Purple Hearts, enough for a guaranteed trip home. A bullet gave him one, recoilless rifle shrapnel another, a B40 rocket the third. Thoms picks off the Communist with his M16. A bit of shrapnel nicks the sergeant – good for his fourth Purple Heart. One too many, says Thoms.

Will Stick Around

“Hell, we don't seem to have many staff sergeants left around. Guess I'll stay around,” he said. Thoms grinned.

“Okay, saddle up!” he yells to Delta Company. “We're moving out.”

He turned toward me. “Guess it's a good thing we started talking,” Thoms said, his eyes twinkling. I had moved away from a door to talk with him. Several seconds later, a .45-caliber slug, accidentally fired by a Marine behind the door, ripped through the wood where my head had been.

I timed my moves between rockets and run across the street, up a broken flight of brick stairs over a two-foot-high stretch of barbed wire. A wild dive into a shallow hole puts me behind a sheet of tin riddled with bullet holes. Bullets zing over my head. I peep up and see Lance Cpl Selwyn Tate , 20, of New York City and I think he looks like John Wayne in a war movie.

Tate had taken an AK47 automatic rifle form a North Vietnamese soldier 24 hours ago and now he had a chance to fire it. Tate stood up.

He fired all the AK47 rounds he had. Then he began tossing grenades – one, two, three, all of them landing up on the high wall in front.

Needs More Grenades

“Grenades! I need more grenades,” Tate yelled.

He did not wait for them. He began scrambling up the terraces toward the top of the wall, past the shack “hootches” the social dropouts of pre-battle Hue had built. Delta's “front” was now a jagged line in front of the wall's top.

“We are now in the foremost unit in the battalion,” mutters with a grin Pfc Stanley Surtaip , 19, of New Orleans .

The gunfire picks up. Someone shouts in my ear. I cannot hear. And then it is over. The Communists have fallen back to fight for another block.

There lay the body of the young corporal. A friend gathered the pieces of the Purple Heart citation the youngster had received the day before. I went looking for Chaplain Eli Takesian of Methuen , Mass.