Death Valley (22 page)

The NVA finally seemed to fade away.

With Sergeant Allison’s platoon across, Lieutenant Simms’s men followed. First, though, Captain Gayler passed word to leave the bodies in the paddy.
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PFC Bleier, coming across with the last squad, retrieved his M79. The men were moving down the embankment when an AK47 sprayed around them. Bleier dropped into a patch of wet, muddy weeds, then propped up and started slamming grenades in return. They exchanged fire for fifteen minutes, then the NVA once again just stopped. The squad got back up, very anxious not to be left behind, and filed slowly and quietly across the stream. They bunched up nervously on the opposite bank: where did everyone go! No one was in sight. The footpath veered to the right and, after a brief, hushed argument, they decided to follow it.

It was pitch black and they trod slowly, tensing up, expecting another ambush. They had little idea where they were. Within five minutes, the pop of a mortar burst the silence, and four rounds crashed right into the crossing site. It had taken the NVA ambushers too long to relay the coordinates to their mortar crew, and they merely shelled empty space. But it sent Williams’s group into a headlong run, with Williams himself leading the panicked stampede. They could have easily stumbled into another ambush but, luckily, what they ran into was the back of their own column.

The shooting was sporadic all evening around Delta Company’s perimeter, getting concentrated once more around midnight. Whittecar
was taking a quick sleep on the cement floor of the French Hootch, head on his helmet, when the first RPG crashed in. It slammed into a tree limb above him, exploding with a rain of hot shrapnel. Whittecar snapped awake. His helmet was shattered, his head nicked, and a long sliver of shrapnel was burning in his leg. He yanked it out and flipped it away, then called in the dark, “Is anybody else hit!”

SP4 Faraci answered and he crawled quickly to him. The front of the young GI’s jungle boot was torn open, a couple of toes blown off. A medic tied field bandages around Whittecar’s leg and Faraci’s foot; Whittecar asked Faraci if he could still handle the radios.

“Sure,” Faraci said, “I don’t need my feet for that.”

Faraci had been Whittecar’s senior RTO during his previous command of the company, and that’s why he had picked him. The kid was solid as a rock under fire. So was Whittecar. He had the line open to Major Lee in B-TOC and, after getting the wounded taken care of, he laughed into the radio, “That goddamn guy knocked the helmet right off my head!” AKs and RPGs kept flashing from the thick elephant grass thirty meters from the GI foxholes. The NVA also employed a captured M79. At dusk, Whittecar had ordered his men to dig new holes on the assumption that the NVA had observed all their original positions during the day. The ploy worked; most of the RPGs were slamming around the old, empty holes. Whittecar was on the horn to his platoon and squad leaders: fire only if you’ve got a target; don’t give your positions away unless you have to.

He prayed there would be no panic.

Out on the line, Specialist Ferris crouched in a foxhole with another grunt from the zapper squad. They triggered quick bursts at the muzzle flashes. A Spooky gunship orbited them, a brilliant red line of gatling gun tracers stitching a wall around the perimeter. Chunks of ruptured sod pelted back around Ferris. He’d never been so scared. Around the two of them, it was a dark nightmare, silhouetted by quick flashes and weird shadows. There were movements, bursts of fire, shouts.

“Medic!”

“We need more ammo up here!”

Men screamed in pain. Ferris knew he was going to die. Behind him, he could hear AK rounds ricocheting off the cement hootch.

In the middle of it, something exploded near his hole. Ferris was so scared, it took him a few moments to realize that his back, arms, and legs were burning from fragments. He stayed in place, hands tight around his M16. Nearby, Cocoa hollered that he’d been shot through
the hand. He too kept firing. All around the perimeter, very frightened men, some with wounds or concussions from the RPGs, were tight in their foxholes, managing to keep the North Vietnamese back.

There was a lull as the NVA, forever invisible, seemed to ebb back into the elephant grass. That’s when Whittecar decided to gamble with a medevac; some of his wounded were near death. He talked one Huey in, lights off, coming in low over the treetops, several GIs flicking on flashlights in the LZ clearing beside the French Hootch. The pilot flipped on his landing lights at the last moment, flashing on the stark scene of flattened elephant grass and helmet tops in holes. He settled in the low brush. Major Lee had ridden the Huey down from LZ West to get a feel for what was going on; ammunition was quickly shoved out, wounded were taken aboard, then the chopper roared out from its hover and disappeared into the blackness.

There had been no NVA fire. Why not? Whittecar reckoned that the NVA were maneuvering into new positions for a renewed assault and didn’t want to expose themselves. Which didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t think those chopper crewmen were among the bravest men on earth.

It started all over again, AKs and RPGs.

Whittecar was too aware of the desperation welling in his chest. There was no doubt in his mind they were going to be overrun and killed. He decided to break up the company, every man on his own to get back to LZ West any way he could find. He almost passed that order, but the wounded gnawed at him. There were still casualties around the hootch who couldn’t walk. He couldn’t abandon them. Hell with it, he finally resigned himself; we’re going to die, but they’re going to pay too. It was no small solace to him that he thought his men would fight to the last man.

All night, Whittecar was on the radio to Lee; this was his umbilical cord. Inside the TOC bunker, under fluorescent lights, Lee was urgently working several radios to bring their firepower to bear. He had gotten the USAF Spooky gunship over Delta Company only after much arguing with brigade operations to convince them he was not exaggerating. Once the Spooky came on station, Whittecar took over and brought the minigun fire in a circle around his perimeter, thirty meters out. He joked over the radio to Major Lee as calmly as he could, “I finally got the sonsabitches where I want ’em. They’re all around me and they’re not going to get away this time!” Lee laughed, as did the CP GIs in the hootch. Which
is exactly what Whittecar wanted; keep their spirits up, because it’s not going to do these men any good to know they’re going to die tonight.

Bravo Company linked up with Charlie Company around three in the morning. Captain Murphy told Captain Gayler to get his exhausted GIs inside the perimeter; his men would handle all the security watches. The grunts spread out in the elephant grass and fell into a comatose sleep. Before passing out himself, Gayler called up his platoon leaders to check that everyone had been accounted for after their long, confused march. Everyone had been.

In the morning, however, Lieutenant Maurel said there’d been a mistake. One of the RTOs, PFC Marion Feaster, a black kid from Florida, was missing. An angry Gayler radioed Lieutenant Colonel Henry to alter his initial report. He’d just gotten off the horn when AK47s cracked from outside the perimeter, and a lone GI came crashing and hollering through the brush, diving into the perimeter as others returned fire.

It was Private Feaster himself.

He reported to Gayler. As it turned out, he’d been coming up the stream bank when the ambush was sprung. He spun back to seek cover in the water, dropping his M16, and the GI ahead of him thought he was dead and grabbed the rifle. Feaster hugged the bank during the fight, finally slipping into an exhausted sleep as the cat ‘n’ mouse dragged on. He was jolted awake by the mortaring. Armed with only two fragmentation grenades, his ruck, and a radio ruined by shrapnel, he waded down the Song Lau in the general western direction the column had been moving. He came upon two NVA chattering on the bank. Feaster tossed a frag in their laps as he scurried up to the trail. He was walking down the path when AKs suddenly cut loose from behind; apparently, the NVA had let him pass through an ambush, realizing too late that he was not the point man for a bigger catch. Feaster paused long enough to hurl his last grenade at a party of NVA coming after him, then ran back to the stream and moved quietly along it until dawn. Then he returned to the trail and had almost made it back to his unit when he saw a couple of NVA about the same time they saw him.

That was the firing everyone had heard. Feaster, who was built like a black bull, pounded down the trail as fast as he could, bellowing out the battalion’s running password, “Polar Bears, Polar Bears, I’m a comin’ in, Polar Bears!”

Feaster shook like a leaf as he told his tale.

Gayler smiled, “Well, looks like you’re going to have a good story to tell your grandchildren!”

Medevacs were called into Charlie’s perimeter for the last twelve of Bravo’s seriously wounded. One of those going out was Lieutenant Shortround. His recon sergeant told Gayler that he’d taken a piece of shrapnel in his heel while directing arty from the garden. He hadn’t even told Gayler. The sergeant also said that during the night march, the lieutenant was toughing it out but was almost delirious with pain; several times he had to grab his ruck to keep him from passing out on his feet.

Also going out on the medevacs were the National policemen and their chieu hoi. Grunts were mumbling bitterly that that fucking dink had led them into the ambush with his tale of a rice cache. Perhaps, perhaps not, but if Gayler had not put his foot down, they would have executed the NVA on the spot. Some men never quite forgave Gayler for not allowing them their revenge. Their ARVN interpreter also tried to leave on the medevac. Gayler was on the radio with the pilot who said no way, he was already overloaded. The arty recon sergeant was near the Huey. Gayler pointed at the deserter and signalled to keep him back. The sergeant shoved him back three times, but the man kept trying to edge around. Finally, the husky sergeant cold-cocked him, dropping the little ARVN like a sack of oats. The ARVN retreated back to Gayler, screaming that he was going to report the incident.

“Go right ahead.”

The survivors of Bravo Company—about 40 percent of the company had been medevacked—were ferried to LZ Siberia aboard two Chinooks.

Delta Company was not in a position to be extracted that morning, but they did not die as Captain Whittecar had feared. At 0700 on 19 August, there was another attack, but this one was less fierce and another barrage of artillery and mortars ended it quickly.

Reinforcements arrived, in the form of Charlie Company, 2d Battalion, 1st Infantry, airmobiled in from the vicinity of Hawk Hill. Battalion had requested reinforcements from brigade, and these were the first to be piecemealed in. They had landed on LZ West on 18 August and Henry conferred with their CO, Capt Rudolph Yap, an Oriental-American. In the morning, they pushed downhill and Delta Company fired a Mad
Minute, a deafening, small-arms barrage designed to keep the NVA down while they hiked in. Whittecar met briefly with Captain Yap, then Charlie Company dug in adjacent to Delta Company, expanding the perimeter around the French Hootch.

Medevacs came in too, landing unopposed in the LZ clearing. Specialist Ferris got his reprieve, climbing aboard a Huey in ripped and bloody jungle fatigues. It was a crowded ship, but only a short flight up to Landing Zone West.

Relief had come, but the battle was not over. From positions around their base camp, LZ Center, the 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry was making a helicopter combat assault into the Song Chang Valley. The CA was hot. Whittecar saw the 3–21 C&C Huey buzzing around the gun positions on Hill 102 to the east. He screamed at his RTOs to tell that ship to clear the hell out. He didn’t know 3–21 radio frequencies, so he could only call the 4–31 TOC and tell them to relay the message to the pilots. It was too late. He watched the Huey corkscrew down, a body falling from the open cabin door, then impact in flames behind the tree lines.

Captain Whittecar screamed at no one in particular, “How goddamn stupid can you be! This ain’t a sightseeing tour!”

T
he battle which B/4–31 began in Hiep Duc, better known as Death Valley, became the responsibility of 4–31 Infantry. The battle which D/4–31 began in Song Chang, better known as AK Valley, became the responsibility of 3–21 Infantry. The 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry, its command standard recently passed to LtCol Eli P. Howard, was headquartered on LZ Center (seven kilometers east of LZ West) and was also responsible for LZ East.

The 3d of the 21st Infantry had been making contact since May.

The recent history of the Gimlets, as the battalion called itself, could be traced most actively through C Company. Its commander, Capt Ernie Carrier, was a hard-core Cajun who won his third Silver Star and third Purple Heart during Operation Frederick Hill. The operation began on 12 May 1969, when an NVA regiment overran a South Vietnamese militia outpost in the coastal plains of Tam Ky. The 3d of the 21st Infantry was committed, and Carrier—who’d come in-country as a second lieutenant in November of 67—had not seen worse. On 14 May, Charlie Company was moving across an open rice field toward a tree line pounded by Marine Air when they found themselves in the middle of an NVA battalion. They took withering fire from all sides, including mortar and recoilless rifle rounds; an assault sent them scrambling back. Carrier got the survivors into a hasty perimeter, and there they halted the attack. A medic named Shea ran out four times to drag wounded into their little island; crawling towards a fifth man, he was wounded, then finally shot and killed as he continued his efforts. A GI who was separated from his platoon in the paddy was dragged off as a prisoner. Helicopters
carrying ammunition resupply were almost shot out of the sky above Charlie Company; they were driven away. With darkness, artillery and gunship fire shook around the miniature perimeter. Illumination splashed above the company but, in the seconds of darkness between each flare, the NVA scrambled closer with RPGs and grenades. North Vietnamese were gunned down within yards of the perimeter. They pulled out only when the dawn brought reinforcements; they left more than thirty bodies behind.