Death Valley (19 page)

At first light, GIs and Marines stood on the perimeter photographing
the NVA bodies in the wire. Lieutenant Pidgeon thought back to that briefing from the Americal colonel. Model pacification? He thought it smelled more like peaceful coexistence. The attitude of the Americal Division, or at least of the GIs he talked to, was: what you don’t find can’t hurt you. Which was all well and good, considering the confused and confusing politics of the war. But you can’t sit out a war when the other side is still out to kick your ass.

Pidgeon was glad his duties took him back to Da Nang. He was glad to be done with the Americal.

I
n the late morning of 17 August 1969, the 110 men of Delta Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, 196th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, began moving back towards Landing Zone West. They humped single file, moving like sleepwalkers under a ferocious sun. It was 110 degrees in the Song Chang Valley and the grunts were humping a heavy load. They had the full rucks they’d left LZ West with four days before, and a full complement of ammunition: their searching had not uncovered the enemy.

The company “zapper” squad was on point. They were the elite of the outfit, all with at least six months in-country, who had volunteered to conduct the scouting and night ambushes. Their radio call sign was Destroyer 6. They followed a trail near the base of LZ West. Specialist Ferris was about three men back from the point, with the squad’s PRC25 radio strapped to his back. It weighed twenty-five pounds, a hefty addition to his rucksack and bandoliers, and Ferris trudged listlessly, dripping sweat. It was nearly 1700.

The point man suddenly opened fire.

Ferris snapped forward. There they were—three North Vietnamese with khaki fatigues, packs, and AK47 assault rifles. He got a quick look at their backs as they bounded down the trail. The two groups had almost walked into each other. The squad gave chase; Ferris jogged with the handset to his mouth, telling the company commander what was going on. The NVA kept running, pausing only to fire quick bursts, dashing deeper into the brush. The squad moved in behind them and was lucky enough to spot one crouched along a stream.

The NVA died in the abrupt explosion of several M16s.

GIs checked the body as others fanned out to secure the area. Ferris casually watched the grunts walk down a berm towards a thick tree line. Then those trees erupted. Ferris instantly dropped, shoving himself into the dirt behind a dike. He’d never experienced such concentrated fire. He forced himself back up, hand tight around his M16 pistol grip, spent shells flying out. He could see muzzle flashes and smoke. The rest of the company was in a grove back across the paddy. Some of them were firing too. Ferris and a buddy low-crawled to them along a dike, chins in the dirt. They shouted for ammunition and grenades from the guys, then started back. Ferris jumped off a berm and landed wrong; his back throbbed. The crawl under fire seemed to take forever. They finally bellied into position along the last berm and slung the bandoliers through an opening in the brush where the rest of the squad was pinned down and returning fire.

They shot it out for almost an hour before the shadows of dusk allowed them to crawl away. They got back to the company perimeter in the trees in absolute wonderment that they were still alive. One GI had been wounded; one had been killed. He was a tall, skinny country boy; his best buddy Harper, another quiet country kid, was an emotional wreck.

The body of James Hurst had been left.

It was already dark as Delta Company dug in. It was a small perimeter with a roofless hut in the center, nicknamed the French Hootch because it had cement walls. The shooting had petered out when the zapper squad pulled back and a resupply chopper, Rattler 26 out of Chu Lai, made its approach; as soon as it came within range of the tree line across the paddy, there was another torrent of fire. Both pilots were wounded in their armored seats, but managed to limp the Huey to LZ Center. Then, at 1900, the NVA made a probing attack on Delta Company. The blind exchange in the dark didn’t last long, but another GI was killed and two more were wounded. From the amount of enemy fire, it seemed they had walked into a NVA battalion. To say the grunts were stunned, tired, and scared would be barely to scratch at the surface of their emotions.

It was a long night.

In the morning, 18 August, Lieutenant Colonel Henry and Sergeant Major Gutterez stood on a bunker at the edge of LZ West with the
crew assigned to fly the 4–31 C&C that day. They were charting their flight down to Delta’s position in the valley and, since it would be under fire, they were being very precise: “Okay, we’ll go around that tree, then.…” Delta Company was running low of ammunition. After an emergency resupply of it was stacked in the Huey, the men climbed aboard and the helicopter bore down the jungled hillside. There was not much fire on the way in—Henry thought the NVA were too stunned—and the Huey hovered quickly over a clearing beside the French Hootch. The crew shoved out the ammo, then the Huey orbited around and sailed uphill. This time, they took heavy fire. Henry had told the two door gunners not to fire since Delta’s perimeter was not well-defined in the bramble of trees and bushes; so he and they could just sit white-knuckled as several rounds punched loudly through the floor and out the metal roof. Back on Landing Zone West, they counted bullet holes in the rotor blades.

Henry was very concerned about Delta Company’s situation. The new company commander, the senior first lieutenant who had taken over ten days earlier, was too green. From monitoring the radio transmissions within the company net, Henry got the impression that the platoon leaders and troopers did not have the same confidence in him that they’d had in Whittecar and Mekkelsen. Captain Whittecar was having the exact same thoughts. From the LZ bunker line, he’d watched the entire action with binoculars and, since he knew both the terrain of the valley and the men of Delta like the back of his hand, he had been in radio contact with the new lieutenant throughout. The man sounded like he was in over his head and knew it: his voice cracked with fear, confusion, almost shock. The company had frozen in place. The North Vietnamese now had the upper hand.

That’s when Henry asked Whittecar to resume command of Delta Company. He eagerly agreed. Whittecar then radioed the lieutenant, noting that he’d be pulled back to LZ West as soon as he could get the helicopter in.

The sigh of relief in his response was obvious.

Whittecar had a Huey on the LZ West pad loaded with ammunition and water containers; then they made the short hop down the mountain. They kicked out the supplies in that grassy clearing beside the hootch, then he hopped out and headed for the command post. He walked fast, helmet on, M16 in his hands, pumping adrenaline. He was only vaguely
aware of the lieutenant passing him to board the helicopter. Whittecar didn’t trust him enough for a situation report and they didn’t even exchange glances.
^*
Whittecar, who wore eyeglasses and had an angular jaw and was thirty-one years of age, was something of a hero to the nineteen-year-old grunts of Delta Company; as he strode through the high elephant grass, the looks of dejection turned to astonishment and relief.

One trooper was young enough, scared enough, and proud enough to exclaim, “My God, I’m glad you’re back!”

“Well, let’s get this damn show on the road!”

John Whittecar had grown up in Glenrock, Wyoming, the son of an oil field worker. His early years were routine. He graduated from high school, did a hitch in the Navy, then joined the men in the oil fields. It wasn’t the life he wanted, so in 1961 he reenlisted, this time in the U.S. Army. His company commander in West Germany recommended him for OCS, and he was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1965. Whittecar was soon leading a rifle platoon of the 1st Infantry Division in III Corps, north of Saigon. That was a 1966–67 tour, and afterwards he contemplated taking his Silver Star and Purple Hearts and quitting the service. Things just didn’t make sense. The national leaders did not seem able to come to grips with what was necessary to finish the job they’d started. His platoon had operated near the Cambodian border and their observance of that imaginary line had aided only the enemy. That was just one example of their self-imposed restraint, and the enormous waste of it ate at him like acid. What hurt even worse was his homecoming; if he wore his uniform in public, there were strangers who’d call him a baby-killer and his wife a whore.

Whittecar stayed in the Army. He focused on doing a job and in November 1968 he was rotated back to Vietnam with captain bars and orders for HQMACV in Saigon. He pulled strings for another combat command in the Big Red One. The night before he was to ship out to them, an allotment came down from the Americal Division for captains, and he found himself on a transport plane to Chu Lai.

Whittecar had never even heard of the Americal, but he did know about the 196th Infantry Brigade. In 1966, his battalion of the 1st Division
had been rushed in to bail them out after their disastrous operation in War Zone C. He was not impressed when he joined his new company in the bush, initially viewing his reluctant draftees with the thought: you guys aren’t going to get me killed, and I’m not going to let you commit suicide. He had learned his tactics from the hard-nosed Big Red One—and from the North Vietnamese Army—and this experience made him credible to the grunts as he began to tighten up the company. He fired one, young, scared lieutenant. He started operating at night. He organized the zapper squad to muster some esprit de corps.

He screamed, cajoled, consoled, and after awhile it began to pay off. The young grunts seemed proud to realize how good they really could be.

Delta Company became the best.

Whittecar knew his maps, his tactics, and his soldiers. He was respected by his grunts, and the mutual feeling was the cornerstone to their new spirit. He was not a buddy to his men. He loved them like a father, but it was a restrained feeling. He allowed himself to become close to only a very few. To know their personal stories and hopes would have drained him of the ability to push his young draftees into the aggressive mind set needed to prevail against an aggressive enemy. Whittecar was a promoted grunt. His loyalty channelled down to the GIs and he could bullshit easily with them. He could also be icy tough on them. He was brave. He won his second Silver Star during a routine patrol in Hiep Duc. The point man had spotted a hootch in a clearing and Whittecar lay with him in the tall grass along a path, discussing the best way to get to the hut without being spotted. Just then, two Viet Cong appeared on the trail. The point man hollered and sprang up in front of Whittecar. His M16 jammed. Whittecar instantly shoved him down, stepped forward with his AR15 automatic rifle, and chopped down both Vietnamese.

In June, he turned over the company to platoon leader Mekkelsen. In the seven months that Whittecar had commanded Delta Company, they had the highest body count and the lowest casualty rate in the battalion.

Not a single man had been killed.

The first order of business on 18 August was to retrieve Hurst’s body. Whittecar huddled with his senior RTO, SP4 Jerry Faraci, and his platoon leaders. He decided to leave a group in position at the French
Hootch while two platoons swept into the tree line, the company headquarters in trace behind them with the last platoon. It was hot and unnerving crossing that field, but there was no firing and the GIs fanned out along the last berm, facing the woods. They found Hurst and zipped him into a body bag. It was then that Whittecar saw the movement: where a sixty-foot field of parched grass rolled into the tree line, he saw something move behind a screen of bamboo. He shouted a warning to his men, then heaved two grenades into the bamboo. There was no response, so he tapped a GI and they pushed forward on their stomachs. Twenty feet from the bamboo, a single shot cracked at them. The grunt took it in the leg, and Whittecar triggered a quick M16 burst into the bamboo. Again, there was only silence.

Whittecar helped the wounded man crawl back behind the berm. Then he deployed Delta Company for the counterattack; one platoon was to remain in place with the CP along the dikes while the other two moved around the tree line from two sides. The maneuver was to be like a horseshoe around the bamboo grove, the open end pointing to their paddy. Whittecar reckoned that whatever the company had bumped into the day before had pulled out, leaving only a delaying force; he hoped to sweep them into that open field in front of his berm. He kept in contact with the two platoon leaders as they slowly pushed through the thick underbrush of the woods. They had nearly closed the horseshoe when heavy automatic weapons fire suddenly erupted.

The platoon leaders screamed on the radio that NVA were suddenly materializing from spider holes amid the vegetation. Casualties were heavy.

It was 1210.

The firing was enough for a battalion, and Whittecar quickly ordered the platoons to pull out. They leapfrogged back through the trees, some firing and some running crouched and dragging the casualties, those dropping behind trees to fire cover for the others. By the time they crawled back into the paddy, the NVA were in the brush on three sides of them. It seemed there were hundreds of North Vietnamese around Delta Company, although none were visible as they seared the paddy with a barrage of AK47s and RPGs.

Whittecar ordered a pullback to the French Hootch.

They leapfrogged again, scrambling over dikes while others laid down suppressive fire. The NVA waited until they were in the middle of the field, then started walking 82mm mortar shells through them.
The paddy was overgrown and deep with dikes for cover; still, it took a dozen more wounded to get back.