Death Valley (34 page)

The platoon had hiked into an open paddy when the point man suddenly shouted, “Gook, gook!” He triggered a couple of hasty shots, then began jogging down the path after the figure. The platoon followed.

Then came the cracking report of an RPD machine gun.

Bleier instantly jumped to his left, off the berm and into the dry paddy. He rolled onto his back to release his pack suspenders, but the easy-snaps wouldn’t budge. He finally slid his arms out, then shoved forward on his stomach, cradling his grenade launcher and ammunition. It was twenty yards to the next dike. He peeked over. Twenty yards farther ahead, the four men in the lead were pressed flat behind a dike. It was only two feet high, and twenty yards beyond it was a wooded knoll. The NVA were firing from within its thickets.

Bleier could see the brush twitch when the RPD fired.

He rolled onto his side, snapped the M79 open, and dropped a fat round in. Just as he propped himself up to fire, he heard Dave shout his name and felt a dull thud against his left thigh. He thought Dave had tossed a pebble to get his attention, but then it stung. Blood was soaking his fatigue trousers from two neat holes, one in front and one in the rear. The round had sheared four inches across his thigh, leaving an inch-deep furrow that gushed red.

“Dave, I’m hit!”

Bleier had moved away from his pack, so Dave dug into his own and tossed him a bandage. Bleier wrapped it around his leg, then looked around; almost everyone else had jumped to the right side of the pathway berm. In a fright, he punched a few grenades at the knoll, then scooted back to his pack. To his left was a hedgerow ten feet high, and he crawled for it. From the cover, he saw an RPD burst splatter across his rucksack ten feet back. Dave was behind a boulder fifteen yards behind him. “Rock, you okay, you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay!”

“I’ll tell Hawaii to send word that you’ve been hit!”

“Okay, okay, get a medic up here!”

Dave hollered for Hawaii over the automatic weapons fire. No answer, no movement. He looked back. Hawaii was face down in the paddy. “Rock, I think Hawaii’s been hit!”

Bleier was frantic, “Hawaii, Hawaii!”

Doc crawled to the slumped man, then shouted, “Hawaii got it, he’s dead!” Bleier could only look down and ask the Lord to take care of him.

What was agonizing and chaotic up front channelized back to Captain Murphy in the tree line. There it was calm. Murphy stood in the ditch with his RTOs, on the blue-leg net to the lieutenant commanding Charlie One. He got the coordinates, then hollered to his FO, 2dLt William P. Wilson, to crank up the artillery. Wilson sat along the edge of the ravine with his recon sergeant and radioman, and pulled his map and phonetic code book from his trouser side pocket. He got on the red-leg net and, in short order, the 105mm artillery pieces on LZ Siberia were raising dust around the enemy knoll. The platoon leader radioed back adjustments, which Wilson relayed.

The NVA must have had solid spider holes, because the arty did not diminish their fire. Charlie One was pinned down in the open with casualties, their response broken down into private, little wars.

Doc was calling to Bleier, “How do you feel?”

“I think I’m okay.”

“You think you’ll be able to walk?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been shot before.”

Bleier lay immobile behind the visual cover of his tangly brush line. He was parched, exhausted, his mind working slowly. Should I get my pack? No, I don’t know how fast I can move. They’ll probably see me. This hedgerow isn’t much protection. That was a terrifying thought. Only Dave and Doc were near him; the rest had worked their way to the right of the path. They had to keep the NVA down long enough to get the point men and their wounded, and the lieutenant was hollering for the grenade launcher.

Dave answered, “Bleier’s got it, but he’s hit!”

“Well, you get it from him!”

“I can’t, I can’t reach him. There’s too much open space!”

“Well, we gotta get some grenades on that machine gun, until we can get our own machine gun set up!”

Bleier could not see the knoll from his position, but Dave to his right-rear could see just past the edge of the hedgerow. Bleier lobbed rounds over the brush, Dave hollered directions, and the fourth M79 grenade exploded in the general vicinity. He kept blasting rounds up and over, emptying his bags, but it had little effect. The NVA kept scything the torrid air. Bleier sank to the ground, the M79 empty beside him. The sun withered him; his leg wound burned under the bandage. He could hear Vietnamese chattering in the brush; over the squawk box of an abandoned radio he could hear the lieutenant calling the captain, “Christ, they’re all around us. There’s no place to hide. There’s no cover over here. They’re everywhere.”

A GI was raging on the other side of the path. His buddy had just taken a burst in the stomach. Up ahead, the four point men were clawing into the sunbaked paddy, trying to get lower under the machine gun fire. One was screaming, “Jesus, they’re moving, I see ’em! Get that fucking machine gun set up!”

Oh God, Bleier thought, they’re gonna overrun us.

He gripped a wooden cross that his counsellor at Notre Dame, a priest who’d been in WWII, had given him. Bleier was from Appleton, Wisconsin, the son of a salt-of-the-earth Irish Catholic tavern keeper. He stared at the cloudless sky, the sun like a blowtorch against his face, and he prayed. He prayed more fervently than he ever had. “Dear Lord, get me out of here if You can. I’m not going to bullshit You. I’d like to say that if You get me out of here alive, I’ll dedicate my life to You and become a priest. I can’t do that.…” What he did promise was to take life as it came if he survived.

Five minutes later, Bleier got his answer. Doc had bellied up to the boulder with Dave, then shouted to the hedgerow, “Rock, you and I are getting out of here!” Doc stepped out from behind the rock—and instantly screamed and doubled up. A bullet had split his thumb open, but he tried again. This time he made it. Bleier bandaged his hand, then Doc insisted, “Let’s get out of here.” The medic did not have a weapon—many of the medics in the brigade were conscientious objectors, and he may have been one—and Bleier left his empty M79 in the paddy. They were helpless as they crawled down the hedgerow to the left edge of the paddy. They made a beeline for the CP, pushing straight through thickets and elephant grass up to the last clearing. The medic went first, Bleier hobbled after him, and in the trees they found Captain Murphy and the company headquarters.

“How you feeling, Rock,” the captain asked.

“Fine, sir.”

“Do you think you can hang on for a while?”

Bleier nodded.

“Well, good. I think you’re lucky. It looks like you’ve got a million dollar wound there. It’ll get you out of the field for a month or so, then you might have to come back.” That sounded great. Bleier drained a quart canteen in twenty seconds, then bummed a cigarette to celebrate. He’d never felt so relieved; he was back with the captain which was like, he figured, being back in the womb.

Twenty minutes later, the rest of the platoon made it back in a low-crawling row. By the time they got out, the NVA were firing on them from three sides and Blue Ghost Cobras provided cover. They brought out their five wounded, but left their three dead. Most also left their rucksacks and the LAW rockets secured to them. The rucks must have been like little treasure chests to the NVA emerging from the brush. If they opened Bleier’s rucksack, they would have found a hammock, air mattress, poncho liner, mosquito netting, socks, sandals, cans of fruit and soda, dehydrated LRRP rations, iodine pills, calamine lotion, and a camera.

According to the battalion journal, Charlie One had been ambushed at 1020 and had pulled back to the CP by 1344.

At 1510, the firing resumed.

The NVA had followed the platoon’s retreat and crawled into the fringes of the tree line. There was a smattering of AK47 fire across the path where the platoon was hunkered down. Then came the Chicom grenades. The NVA were that close, although invisible. Lieutenant Wilson was crouched at the edge of the ravine when he saw the grenade come out of nowhere. It landed at the edge of the ditch and he instantly shoved his face into the dirt. An ear-popping explosion left his RTO temporarily rattled; Wilson shoved his M16 up and squeezed the trigger.

He flashed to the training NCO at Chu Lai. They had laughed when he said that many a time they would shove their faces down, raise their M16s over their heads, and fire blind. That’s just what he was doing now on terrified instinct.

When the attack began, Captain Murphy was on his stomach, three radios around him. He was working all three at the same time, propped on his elbows and peering over the brush with his binoculars. Rocky
Bleier sat on the pathway six feet to his right. Tommy Brown was sitting right behind him. Then came a pop!—the sound of a detonation string being pulled from the stick handle of a Chicom. Murphy bellowed, “Grenade!” and ducked his head into his arms. Bleier rolled flat on the trail as Brown hurdled over him trying to escape the grenade which had almost landed in his lap. Boom! Bleier woke up, ears ringing. He looked around. A two-foot hole was blown into the dirt where he’d been sitting. Brown was sprawled a few yards away, his trouser legs shredded with shrapnel, moaning loudly. Bleier’s fuzziness wore off; he realized he was unscathed. He could also hear the AK fire snapping over his head. He had no weapon, no idea what was going on, and could only squeeze into the dirt, head down under the cacophony.

It was five minutes before he could look up; when he did he glanced up at another Chicom coming right down on them. It landed on Murphy’s back, bounced off, deflected towards Bleier. It was top-heavy on its stick handle, bouncing crazily, and it landed at his feet. It was an instantaneous decision, jump back or jump over it, and he crouched to spring forward just as it exploded. The next thing he knew, Murphy was pushing him off, rolling him onto his back with a shove. Bleier stared uncomprehending at Murphy, who was barely out of his daze, groaning, the inside of his legs saturated with red-hot shrapnel.

Bleier looked at his own legs. The right one was quivering uncontrollably. It scared him and he grabbed at it, suddenly feeling his blood-soaked trousers and the stab of pain in his right foot. His trousers were ripped from dozens of fragment holes, but it was his foot that was throbbing. One toe was shattered, the skin ripped open.

The platoon medic was wounded so Doc Smith, the headquarters medic, had his hands full. He crouched beside Bleier and used his long surgical scissors to cut off his jungle boot; he tied gauze around his foot and said, “That’s all I can do for you right now.” Others dragged a dazed Captain Murphy into the safety of the ditch. Bleier lay where he’d been wounded and watched as Doc Smith “… low crawled away like an alligator down the pathway.”

The unwounded returned fire as fast as they could.

2d Platoon of Charlie 4–31 humped off Million Dollar Hill to reach Captain Murphy’s besieged group. As soon as they reached a clearing at the base of the hill, the NVA dropped mortars on them. They fell back to medevac their casualties. 3d Platoon also tried to move in, but were caught in a firefight of their own. Lieutenant Simms, the platoon
leader, was considered the best one in the company. (During a later fight on Banana Tree Hill, Lieutenant Wilson saw Lieutenant Simms walk up to a hole where two replacements had thrown themselves when the bullets started flying. Under fire, Simms stood at the rim of the hole, pointed his AR15 at the trembling kids, and said, “You either come out on your own, or we’ll have somebody drag you out.” They scrambled out and joined the firing line.)

Today, even 3d Platoon couldn’t break through.

A pair of Blue Ghost Cobras did, however, get above 1st Platoon. Bleier was lying among the three abandoned radios of the company headquarters when a pilot came on, “Pop smoke, pop smoke, mark your position.” No one had any smoke grenades; they’d been on their rucks which the NVA now had.

“Well, what are your coordinates?”

From above the tree line, neither U.S. nor NVA soldiers were visible. Bleier concentrated through his pain; had he heard the captain mention the map coordinates? He couldn’t remember. The situation seemed hopeless!

A GI finally calculated their azimuth with a compass and range finder; it was relayed to the pilots along with instructions to strafe the open paddy to destroy the packs and LAWs, and to strafe only ten yards into the edge of the woods. That’s where the NVA had crawled. The grunts were deeper into the tree line island. The first Cobra probably did some damage to the NVA, but he also fired a 2.75-inch rocket into the platoon’s farthest hole. Lieutenant Wilson was crouched along the ravine when a skinny, red-headed Tennessean ran back. He was miraculously unscathed, but the M60 in his hands was totalled, and he was screaming bloody murder about gunship pilots. The friendly fire had killed one rifleman and gravely wounded the platoon’s last grenadier with shrapnel.

This mess of a firefight was Lieutenant Wilson’s first. In the weeks before, he’d seemed to be the caricature of the green second lieutenant: skinny as a rail, thick glasses, his fingers and arms bandaged by Doc Smith from all his elephant grass cuts. He was walking on glass his first operation; if a leaf dropped from a banana tree, he nervously pumped an M16 burst into it.

Wilson was a pleasant North Carolina Baptist who simply did not
have the warrior’s streak in him. He had enlisted for Artillery OCS after college to avoid the potluck of the draft, and had landed at the 90th Replacement Battalion, Bien Hoa, in the third week of June 1969. He toted his duffel bag through in-processing, rolling sweat, miserable and excited, amazed that such a place really existed. What am I doing here? he wondered. At the O Club, he ran into one of his OCS instructors, a gung ho captain also just arrived for his first tour. He was insisting on duty with the 1st Air Cavalry Division and wanted Wilson to join him.

Wilson begged off. He wasn’t looking for such trouble. So it was, on his second morning, he was put on a transport plane to Chu Lai. He and the others were driven in jeeps from the airfield to the Americal Division Combat Center. It was a beautiful area; blinding white sand and an inviting ocean view. Wilson hated the concertina wire and guard towers dotting the beach. It was like a ruined paradise. Introduction classes were conducted on bleachers built into the sandy hills with awnings over them. One class was on marijuana. The instructor NCO said it was very prevalent and he passed a lit butt through the circle of officers, telling them to smell it and sample it if they wished, so they would recognize when one of their men was stoned. It was the first and last time Wilson saw marijuana and he wanted nothing to do with it. The mine and booby trap class was the most interesting. The sergeant started it off in a colorful manner, tossing a defused grenade into the bleachers, then laughing as everyone ate sand. He took them down a path in a jungled training compound. An E-tool was stuck in the middle of it, and the sergeant sounded as though he were counting cadence. “Okay, gentlemen, now it’s decision time. What do you do? Go around it, move it …?” Smoke grenades were rigged as booby traps and it was scary and fun.