Death Valley (30 page)
Authors: Keith Nolan
That might have been unnecessary; before the arrival of the 3–21 C&C, Lieutenant Shurtz had gone to Specialist Curtis one more time. He made it a direct order and, as far as Curtis was concerned, that was the end of it. He did not consider himself a mutineer, so when the man with the silver bar finally gave him no other choice, he—and the rest of Alpha Company—reluctantly, angrily started moving. Then the C&C landed on the sun-bleached hill, and the grunts sat back in the elephant grass as Waite and Blankenship disembarked. One of the men was crying, and the balking started all over again. Major Waite went to Curtis and asked what the problem was. He sketched out the horrors the company had been through and Waite, considered to be a very good officer, listened patiently. That was one approach. Sergeant First Class Blankenship, meanwhile, was proceeding along a different track. He was sarcastic and ridiculed the men. He made up a story that another company was still on the move with only fifteen men left.
“Why did they do it,” Jay asked, unmoved.
Blankenship sneered, “Maybe they’ve got something a little more than what you’ve got.”
“Don’t call us cowards, we are not cowards,” Jay exploded, running up with balled fists. Who is this turd, Curtis thought; he’d never seen the sergeant before and thought he must be some pompous REMF lifer just arrived in-country.
In fact, Sergeant First Class Blankenship was on his third tour and held a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. He hailed from the coalmining country of Panther, West Virginia, the eldest of eight children to Mose and Wadie Blankenship. He was a hot-tempered, high school dropout, divorced three times. He was a big man, over six feet and two hundred pounds, a hard-core soldier. He’d been made the battalion sergeant major after the command ship was shot down; before that, he’d been serving as battalion operations sergeant. That was a TOC job and he was not as lean as when he’d been in the bush. In fact, when he was rucking up on LZ Center to go out to Alpha Company, Captain Carrier jokingly gave him some salt tablets for the heat. Blankenship laughed back, “You know, I might need these!”
But the men of the Gimlets were especially resentful of their superiors, and bitter that they were chronically short of new weapons and supplies. Platoons were rarely, if ever, at full strength. Many men saw themselves as pawns for someone else to make full-bull colonel. It was this lack of trust which fostered the hostility towards Sergeant Major Blankenship. It also helped spark the refusal to begin with. Perhaps what the leadership lacked was not tactical competence but personality, noted a company commander in the 196th Brigade:
Mostly the problem of command was a lack of understanding on the part of field grade officers of the changes that had come in the civilian world which the troops brought with them when they entered the Army. The new breed of enlisted men demanded a more personal approach from all levels of command. Captains were no longer the remote company commanders they had been in some other wars. In Vietnam the company commander’s headquarters were what he could carry on his back and the radios of the men around him. Orders from battalion and brigade came over the radio and were overheard by many of the troops. The captain could no longer pretend that it was his order that the hill be assaulted, the men had already heard the colonel tell the captain to “take the hill.” Problem was, as the men saw it, the colonel wasn’t out there to lead the charge. He was safely back on the firebase issuing orders from the heavily protected TOC bunker. Most of these enlisted guys were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. They were totally
unschooled in the military arts regarding the proper locations of various headquarters in order to maintain the optimum tactical coordination. All they knew was that the man ordering them to their deaths wasn’t out there taking the same chances with them. Nor was he there to explain why such and such a hill was worth taking—especially when they’d already taken it twice before and walked away from it as soon as the battle was over.
Major Waite lent a sympathetic ear and Sergeant Blankenship pricked at the grunts’ manhood; then they both said it was time to move out. By then, the rest of Alpha Company had rucked up again and gotten back in file formation; the cluster on the LZ broke up and Curtis’s group rejoined them. They began humping downhill towards the bunkers. The NVA really had pulled out, and the only things to be found were the bodies of Lieutenant Kirchgesler and Sergeant Pitts. The sun had done horrible things to them. They pushed them into body bags—those rubberized, green, canvas sacks with a long zipper and carrying handles—then carried them to a clearing and called a medevac.
The next morning, Lieutenant Colonel Bacon took his C&C over to Alpha’s position with Capt Bernhard F. Wolpers aboard. There were no charges to be made against anyone involved, but Bacon relieved Shurtz; Captain Wolpers—a tough soldier with a thick, German accent—was placed in command. Bacon was a real pro and this was one of his steps to get a worn-out battalion back on its feet.
Lieutenant Shurtz was shattered. When Bacon took over the Gimlets, Shurtz had thought, finally here’s someone who’s calm and rational that I can work with—and the first thing he does is fire me!
There were tears in his eyes.
Shurtz was removed on 25 August and Alpha Company stayed in AK Valley making no contact until 31 August. They humped back to LZ Center for their turn on bunker watch. A throng of journalists was waiting for them; it was the first time the grunts knew that the conversation between Bacon and Shurtz had been taken down by some reporters who happened to overhear it at LZ Center, and it was making headlines around the world as the first recorded combat refusal of the war. Many of the stories on Alpha Company referred to the “grunt revolt,” with unsettling connotations of a militant underground. Never mind that similar incidents had occurred numerous times during glory days of WWII and Korea. Only a few understood that the young men in Alpha were simply
soldiers in a company that had seen one battle too many. One of the reporters was James Sterba; after noting that Army policy was that a man who reenlisted would be taken out of the infantry, and that the Americal sent a reenlistment NCO to every fire base every two weeks, he commented:
On a sizzling hot day in August, it was less than ironic, then, when a helicopter touched down on Landing Zone Center … and dropped off a reenlistment sergeant. That was the day that a ragged, demoralized, exhausted company—Alpha, Third Battalion, 21st Infantry, Americal Division—trudged up the hill from a week of hell in the valley below with only half the men it had started with. World-famous Company A, the one that had refused, for an hour, to go to war, was being given the opportunity by the United States Army to re-enlist, to serve for three more years, but not “out there.” By the end of the day, the re-enlistment sergeant’s results, remarked one officer, had been “outstanding.”
Lieutenant Shurtz, meanwhile, was being shuffled away. Most agreed his downfall had been born of inexperience, not a lack of courage, and that he’d been made a scapegoat. To his superiors, he had waffled when he should have charged—and he had embarrassed the division in front of a hostile press. For this, he was reassigned as assistant brigade personnel administrative officer on LZ Baldy, then promoted to captain and sent to Chu Lai to complete his tour as the brigade stand down officer.
Two days after securing Hill 102, Alpha 4–31 abandoned it, just as they had done when they took it the first time in July. Two days after that, they got word that they were moving back to LZ West, from where they would CA into Hiep Duc. The action on that side of the ridge was still fierce and SP4 Parsons jotted in his pocket diary, “We’re going over to Hiep Duc Valley tomorrow. Looks like Ass kicking Alpha has too go clean up there own AO now. Boo Coo Dinks over there.”
First Lieutenant Raymond A. Hord, commander of C/1/7 Marines, poses with a captured enemy flag, pith helmet, hand grenade, and 9mm pistol. (Courtesy Col. Raymond A. Hord, USMC, Ret)
Lieutenant Hord (left) with Lt. Col. John A. “Jack” Dowd (right), commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. (Courtesy Barbara Dowd)
Lieutenant Colonel Dowd (left) with a U.S. Army advisor and staff officers of the 7th Marine Regiment. (Courtesy Barbara Dowd)
Lieutenant Hord (right) and Capt. Brian J. Fagan, commander of D/1/7 Marines, at LZ Baldy in late-August 1969. (Courtesy Col. Raymond A. Hord, USMC, Ret)
Lieutenant Colonel Dowd and Capt. James W. Huffman, a company commander in 1/7, are decorated with the Silver Star for their part in the destruction of two NVA companies in April 1969. On 13 August 1969 Dowd was killed during a major battle in the Arizona Territory and posthumously awarded the Navy Cross. (Courtesy Barbara Dowd)
