Death Valley (38 page)

Sometimes, Sirianni’s squad would sandbag their patrols. They could find no reason to tread through booby-trapped paddies in the dead of night, looking for people who probably weren’t there. So they’d leave the perimeter, find a spot of cover, and radio in fake checkpoints. In the battalion compound, they dropped out. Lots of rock, some marijuana. But, like it or not, Sirianni mostly had to keep in step with the way things were programmed. In that smaller sense, morale was high. The grunts took care of each other. It was a matter of honor. When he was in high school, Sirianni was always in trouble with one particular teacher, a former Marine; when he enlisted, the man had told him, “When you get under fire for the first time, you’re going to freeze.” In his first firefight, two or three snipers temporarily pinned down his squad and Sirianni ducked behind a small boulder. His foot slipped out, a round kicked up dirt near it, and he yanked it back, terrified. Then his mind flashed to that insult and he thought, I can’t go through my life giving him the satisfaction. He forced himself up to return fire. Before his tour was over, Sirianni made sergeant and was decorated for valor.

Lance Corporal Sirianni, who was twenty and known as Tripper, volunteered to retrieve the bodies—he’d known Cunningham from ITR. Sirianni’s squad leader, Corporal Beckler—skinny, blond, and quiet—looked at him, then to T. J., a taciturn Mexican. They said they’d go too. Two frazzled looking guys from Golf Company led them up, pointed towards the bodies, then slinked back down the hill. The three volunteers crept up to the crest of the knoll while Lieutenant Brennon and his radioman crouched on the slope directing the automatic cover fire. Sirianni glanced over the crest. He could see one of the dead Marines sprawled in the ash a few yards away, mangled by the prep bombardment.

He started over but an AK47 suddenly opened fire, sending him back. Someone yelled, “Chicom!” and, being new, he hesitated a second. Beckler or T. J. shoved him down from behind and his face was in the dirt when the grenade exploded. Sirianni caught a fragment across the knee, a bloodless scratch, and the other two were similarly nicked. They shoved up their M16s to return fire while Lieutenant Brennon urgently shouted into the radio trying to shift Golf Company’s cover fire. It was almost hitting them. There was no response. More Chicoms bounced in.

Brennon finally hollered to pull back.

The retreat left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth—the Marine Corps
does not abandon their dead—but what remained of Adams, Gerald, and Cunningham lay with the North Vietnamese all night.

Colonel Codispoti was with Lieutenant Colonel Lugger when the decision was made to break contact and blast the hill again with air power. The jets tumbled more bombs onto the knoll and, as the vibrations rolled back under their feet, Lugger glanced at Codispoti. Lugger was suddenly aware that his regimental commander was viewing these proceedings with a disapproving grimace. But Codispoti said nothing. Lugger was silently frustrated, thinking, well, what does he suggest I do; if we keep running up the hill without supporting arms, we’ll just take more casualties! Codispoti was probably thinking of Dowd, for whom he had approved a posthumous Navy Cross, and his battalion’s classic use of fire and maneuver. In comparison, Lugger did not measure up. When Codispoti reviewed Lugger’s performance in the current action and that which would quickly follow, his words were damning, “As a matter of practice during this battle period, elements of his battalion pulled back immediately upon being hit with enemy small arms fire.… Guidance, direction, exhortation and positive orders were given over the radio and at daily personal visits by me to this officer to have his units press forward with fire and maneuver on being subjected to enemy small arms fire, but to no avail.”
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Golf and Hotel Companies set their night perimeters along the terraced dikes at the base of the enemy knoll. Sirianni nestled against a berm. NVA on the knoll screamed down, “Marines, tomorrow you die!”

Grunts screamed back, “Fuck off!”

Sirianni, a tough-looking kid with glasses, a tattoo, and thick muscles, was shaking. He didn’t smoke but finally got a Pall Mall from his buddy, cupped it in his hands in the dark, and smoked the hell out of it. It calmed him down. He finally fell asleep.

He awoke the next morning to the rumble of Phantoms flashing in on the knoll ahead. Dirt clods flew back at them. He lay there, miserably hot and hungry, then he stopped sweating and things got foggy. The next thing he knew he was waking up in a dark, vibrating helicopter. The crew chief was bending down to talk with him. It was heat exhaustion
and Sirianni ended up at 1st Med. The place was already abuzz with casualties and he stared stunned at one Marine; the man himself was staring with numb horror at his shredded leg, which had been blown off six inches above the knee.

At 0500 on 24 August, NVA crept up to Golf Company’s perimeter. They tossed Chicom stick grenades over the dikes, then quickly faded back into the dark brush as the grunts responded with M79 and fragmentation grenades. One Marine was killed in the brief, blind melee.

With daylight, the company prepared to attack the knoll again.

The firepower was turned back on for several hours to strip away the last of the vegetation concealing the snipers. H Battery, 3/11 Marines on LZ Ross sent 155mm artillery shells whistling in; Phantoms and Cobras finished the show. Then the grunts began their uphill sweep. The scorching sun was made even more unbearable now that the knoll was bald. They led their attack with M79 CS rounds, but the NVA had pulled out, leaving only one or two men as a rear guard. Corporal Skaggs’s squad took some fire but his point man—a young grunt with an Italian name—lobbed a frag into the spider hole. An NVA with an SKS carbine scrambled out, and the point man cut him down. Along the denuded slope, Golf Company found results of their firepower: two NVA roasted to death from napalm in a spider hole, still clutching their AK47s, and pieces of bodies scattered in the upturned earth. They also found the remains of the three Marines who’d died for this hunk of dirt, and carried them down to be evacuated.

Meanwhile, Hotel Company was also assaulting but from a different angle. It was their job to secure the top of the knoll, and Lieutenant Brennon led his platoon up in a basic on-line assault. Cobra gunships pumped in their ordnance ten meters ahead of the platoon while AK fire cracked from farther up the ridge. The grunts ran up as fast as they could under their gear, propelled by adrenaline and fear; when they’d secured the top—without casualties—many simply passed out under the noonday sun. The rest of Hotel hiked up after them, unopposed, and dug in on the bald crest.

Resupply helicopters began coming in, but the NVA opened fire on them from the tree lines in the lowland paddies to the west. Air strikes were called in, but the NVA were dug in deeply and a spotter pilot from the 1st Marine Air Wing was wounded in his cockpit seat.

Meanwhile, 2/7 remained in place and rested.

That night, it was back to business. At dusk, LCpl Rolf Parr, a squad leader in Fox Company, took out two men as the platoon listening post. The battalion had a lot of problem children, but Parr was not one of them; he was a twenty-year-old Indiana farm boy who soldiered along, rather uncomplaining, even though he had an NVA bullet lodged in a bone in his foot. It was a souvenir from Operation Oklahoma Hills. Parr’s LP team walked two hundred yards outside their perimeter, set a claymore along a dike, then dropped back fifty yards to set in for the night behind another dike. It was around midnight when the new guy on the team whispered he had movement. He pointed and Parr stared at what appeared to be four posts on the dike a hundred yards ahead. Parr figured the foggy night was playing tricks on the kid’s imagination, but then one of the posts moved. An M60 on the perimeter suddenly opened fire and red tracers snapped past the LP. The silhouettes on the dike instantly disappeared. Parr was more surprised than angry with the jumpy machine gunner: he’s not supposed to do that with us out here! One of the NVA suddenly reappeared, running in a crouch along the dike towards the team’s claymore. Parr tossed the firing handle to the third grunt. They let the NVA get within thirty meters of the mine, then Parr opened fire with his M16. The new guy cut loose too, and Parr shouted at the third Marine to blow the claymore. The figure disappeared in the blast and tracers.

The firing had given away their position and Parr radioed for permission to return to the lines. For reasons not explained to him, permission was denied; it was one long, sleepless night, which turned out to be without further incident. At sunrise, the team heard a single shot from the paddies. Parr’s squad found the dead NVA where the claymore had levelled him. The man’s legs were shattered, bloody tourniquets around them, and his AK47 was locked in his hands, barrel under the chin. He had—it appeared—killed himself at dawn when he realized no one was coming to rescue him. Hard-core. Documents on the body indicated he had been a lieutenant.

O
n 22 August 1969, in Hiep Duc, PFC Michael Kosteczko of B Company, 2d Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, came under enemy fire for the first time. This was not his baptism of fire; that had been provided some days earlier courtesy of a U.S. cavalry troop.

Kosteczko had been with the company a week.

He had been born in France, the son of Ukrainian immigrants who continued their migration to Chicago when he was twelve. They were factory workers intent on keeping their only child out of the mills, and they made sure he got to college. He graduated in 1968 with a business degree and, almost immediately, a draft ticket to Vietnam. His mother cried, and he wrote their senator and petitioned his draft board. It did no good, but it was the only legal option he could accept. His girl friend wanted to go to Canada and get married. It was tempting, but he couldn’t. When his family first came to this country, they had nothing; now they owned their own home. Kosteczko always remembered that.

Vietnam meant nothing to him, but America did.

He didn’t tell his parents when he was ordered to Vietnam, and they didn’t know until he got back. Because they barely understood English and because the acronyms of the Army APO mailing system were vague, it was easy to make them believe he was in Korea.

Kosteczko lasted five months in the bush. On 13 December his best buddy, Soupy Campbell, took his place on the trail. Soupy carried an M79; the lieutenant wanted him behind the point, and Frenchy Kosteczko next with an M16 in case of ambush. A few minutes after trading
places, a booby trap cleaned Soupy off the path. KIA. Kosteczko became fatalistic to the point of being careless. On Christmas Eve, the company commander sent him to Hawk Hill to finish his tour working in the ammunition dump. Kosteczko finally came home with his Bronze Star, but in the same funk. The nightmares were the worst part; he tried to forget by locking himself in his bedroom in his parent’s home, lights out, shades down. Every day was the same: he got drunk alone in the dark and tried to forget as the rock music screamed.

When Kosteczko had first joined Bravo Company on Hawk Hill, he was just like all the other new guys—nervous and green. He rolled through the gate in the back of a truck with Soupy Campbell, fresh from the Americal Combat Center, their new fatigues covered with road dust. That was right after the sapper attack on Hawk Hill and everyone was talking about it; they said the NVA had gotten through the wire, past the bunkers, and weren’t stopped until they crossed the camp road and the cav tanks and tracks chopped them down. Dawn had brought the Cobra gunships that hosed their miniguns into the retreating enemy. North Vietnamese bodies were still being policed up. Chicom stick grenades littered the perimeter road.

Kosteczko had spent his first week with Bravo on Hawk Hill. They filled sandbags and strung new wire. They smoked grass and paid the high-class whores five dollars a lay; the local girls would do it for a pack of cigarettes or a bar of soap. They tossed C rations to Vietnamese who begged along the perimeter wire. Some GIs threw the cans hard and aimed for their heads. They finally humped to the bush and by dusk were spread along a hillside. Kosteczko was asleep on his air mattress when he suddenly awoke to the whine of ricochets and the blipping of tracers, and he squeezed down, eyes tight, scared shitless. It turned out the strafing had been courtesy of F Troop, 17th Armored Cavalry, Americal, and the Mad Minute from their night defensive perimeter.

On 20 August, Bravo 2–1 was flown to ARVN LZ Karen.

On the 21st, they humped to Million Dollar Hill and secured it while the survivors of Charlie 4–31 and Bravo 1–46 staggered in.

On the 22d, Bravo 2–1, commanded by Capt Dwight D. Sypolt, led the first counterattack from Million Dollar Hill. Artillery rolled ahead of them as they pushed east, forming the sweep to 2/7 Marines’ blocking positions.

By noon, Private Kosteczko’s platoon took a break from the heat
of the paddy beneath the trees of a little knoll. Several GIs set out to find water and were at the base of another hillock fifty yards ahead when a fierce eruption of AK47 fire suddenly cut loose from it. Kosteczko made a panicked scramble for cover, finally tumbling into a natural trench facing the hillock where the others had rushed. No one was firing back: the water detail was somewhere in the bushes from which the NVA were shooting. The GIs finally crawled back, minus one. They said the NVA had ambushed them from the top of the hill, and one GI had made a run for it. An AK round had hit the LAW hanging across his back, and they’d left his body. GIs were firing back, rising up to squeeze off full auto bursts, flopping back to reload. Kosteczko was not firing. He hugged dirt, confused, bug-eyed with fear.

Someone was asking for volunteers to get the body, and Kosteczko saw two black GIs run up. It surprised him; in base camp, the blacks looked out only for their own. The volunteers clambered forward into the brush. They came back without the body, but one black was dragging the other brother. He’d been shot in the stomach. Another GI sat in the ravine, shot in the knee. Kosteczko felt sick. A medevac landed for the twelve wounded men; then Bravo Company broke contact and pulled back to Million Dollar Hill. By the time Kosteczko’s squad pulled back, the scene was getting chaotic. The GIs scrambled from the ravine and hit the trail at a jog, firing into the underbrush to discourage pursuit. Kosteczko was the last in line, panting hard on the run, his M16 locked and loaded, full auto, his finger on the trigger. He was so scared he might get left behind, he kept running into the guy ahead of him—his buddy Foxhole—who was saying, “Watch it, man, before you trip and shoot me in the ass!”