Death Valley (4 page)

For others, though, their alienation with the war effort was very real. For example, in November 1969, 3/7 was at LZ Ross preparing for an operation in the Que Sons. Prior to this, the battalion had been reduced to 600 men due to battle casualties and malaria, and Lieutenant Colonel Kummerow—himself a casualty of the Summer Offensive—had just hitchhiked back to Ross after recuperating on a hospital ship. Trouble was in the air. The battalion had just received 300 replacements from the 3d Marine Division, and half these men were black; they were bitter about being sent back to the bush while the rest of their former division sailed for Okinawa as part of the withdrawals. These were the Marines who organized a show of protest in one of the line companies. This particular company was known as a “brother killer”—during Operation Oklahoma Hills, a black grunt had to be dragged aboard a helicopter, and after landing in the bush he accidentally ran into the chopper blades and was killed. As this company formed up to go into the Que Sons again, sixteen blacks didn’t answer muster; a few even crept off to far corners of LZ Ross and disappeared in empty bunkers. Kummerow told the company commander to stand down and round up his missing men. The next day, they held a meeting in the fire base chapel. Kummerow noticed some of these blacks were the finest infantrymen in the company, and he had no doubt they were sincere. They felt that blacks were not only overrepresented in the bush,
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but were given the most dangerous assignments by the company leaders—there was only one black officer in the entire battalion and he had no tolerance for such complaints—and that whites received most of the promotions and safer rear jobs. At this time, all Kummerow could do was to “… assure them that if they truly had a grievance it would be heard out by their chain of command,
and if they didn’t get satisfaction, they had recourse at any level to request mast. I told them they were in trouble, but if they didn’t carry out their orders, they would be getting into deeper trouble. They believed and trusted me.” The company humped off LZ Ross that evening with these men back along.

On one hand, appropriate action was taken regarding specific charges made by the black Marines, and on the other, Kummerow handed out reductions in rank and fines to some of those involved. He discussed the case with General Simpson and Colonel Codispoti, and they agreed “… it was a tough problem and one for which there were no easy solutions. After the company went back to the field, Codispoti recommended no disciplinary action. I think he feared a reaction that would engender a situation worse than that which occurred, and wanted to cool it. I felt I had to do what I did to maintain the status of discipline in the battalion. There were many other Marines, white and black, who didn’t relish the hardships and dangers of patrol, and I didn’t want to invite anyone else to seek an easy out.”

Kummerow saw no other such incidents.

Mostly the men simply did their jobs. “Like going to work in the morning” is how Cpl Lee Dill put it. He was a tank commander with B Company, 1st Tank Battalion, and he spent the summer of 69 escorting supply convoys and minesweeps on the road between An Hoa and Liberty Bridge. He didn’t have much time to worry about anything but doing it right. When they burned down the road, which impregnated everything and everyone with red clay dust, Dill threw power to the black Marines and peace signs to the white Marines.

They had good team spirit and what problems occurred were usually the kind that seem funny later. Like the time in August of 69 when they were supposed to sweep to Liberty Bridge. Dill’s tank, Naturally Stoned, and another tank, Funky Ride, rolled to the An Hoa gate to pick up their infantry support and the minesweep team. They were late and, instead of the team, a staff sergeant showed up drunk and mumbling that “fuck it, we don’t need no support!” He climbed into the lead tank and ordered them to hit the road. Dill reluctantly followed in the second tank. They hauled ass as the sergeant did three-sixties in his turret. Over the radio, his crew sounded mortified. Off the road were some figures who turned out to be Marines but who, in the distance, looked like ARVN. The sergeant suddenly opened fire in their direction with his cupola-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. Dill gulped. Oh shit.
He toyed with the idea of shooting the crazy man, but dismissed it. They finally reached the Phu Lac 6 compound, but old sarge didn’t even slow down. A truck was headed in their direction on the camp road and they passed just as the sergeant rotated his turret again, broadsiding the truck windshield with his 90mm gun tube. They parked on the perimeter and the battalion commander came on the radio, wanting to know what the hell was going on. Dill told him the truth, nervous about being involved with the colonel, even more concerned about the sergeant leering at him, drunk and pissed, his hand resting on his holster. Dill had a .45 on his hip too, and he was thinking, oh man, I ain’t believin’ this! Thankfully, though, sarge only stumbled back to his tank and fell asleep.

The next day he was busted and sent to the rear.

But no one was immune to the real war. One morning the supply convoy brought in new treads to the An Hoa tank park. The men stripped to the waist and spent the day sweating the treads into place with the same care and concern, Dill thought, of pit crews working on Indy cars. They took a break to cook steaks and drink warm Pepsis, and Dill talked with a tank driver named Schreckengost. He started walking away, had gone ten steps, when the air began screaming and he bounded for his tank. The Marine lying across the driver’s hatch was clutching at his bloody legs, and the tarp over the .50-cal. ammo in the gypsy rack was on fire. Goldstein put the fire out as Dill scrambled into his turret, screaming for a corpsman. In seconds, the 122mm rockets had stopped falling. That’s when they found Schreckengost, sprawled unconscious right where Dill had been talking with him; he had a hole in his chest. Jellerson bandaged the wound and they picked up Schreckengost to put him on the stretcher. They saw his back then. It had been blown wide open at the exit of the white-hot chunk of shrapnel. He died on the medevac.

Finally, there were the infantrymen, the grunts, the few who actually lived in the bush. It was not uncommon for rifle companies in the An Hoa Basin to go ninety days straight in the field, their only connection to the world the resupply chopper which came every four days. It was a dehumanizing existence where man became part of the wilderness, subject to the killing heat and chilling rains, to leeches, mosquitoes, and ringworms, where feet rotted and men died. Everyone hated the
bush. Yet, it was the real Marine Corps out there. It was all in the bush. The chicken-shit harrassment fell away; the racial problems and the dope were put away for other places and other times. Some men became brothers, and virtually all had the solidarity of shared suffering and shared victories.

The grunts had a saying: For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected can never know. There was pride, cynicism, fatalism, comradeship.

Morale was at its best and worst in the bush.

In many ways, the grunts of the summer of 69 were the same manchildren who took Iwo Jima (the average age of Marine riflemen in WWII and Vietnam was nineteen). The courage was the same, but it was a vastly different war they were fighting. Sometimes the absurdities were all too plain, like the day 2dLt Bill Peters of D Company, 7th Marines, was pinned down with his platoon a klick west of Hill 65. They huddled behind the paddy dikes as a machine gun fired from the village ahead. Peters radioed for a mortar fire mission; a voice said negative, friendly ville in the area. Peters asked for the map coordinates of the village, then exclaimed at the answer, “That’s where they’re shooting at me from!” Too bad. The platoon pulled back then, and it left a bad taste in their mouths. Why are we so stupid, Peters asked himself in frustration; why do we force ourselves to fight like this?

It was a strange war and even though the grunts of 69 were proud, they were children of their times. And by then, the waters were very muddy. Sgt Bill Lowery joined C Company, 7th Marines in May 1969; he’d already pulled a 1966–67 tour in the An Hoa Basin, but it was like returning to a whole different war. The enthusiasm had drained like air from a tire, but everything was still pounding away, grinding viciously, but going nowhere. It was as if the machine was running for no other purpose than its own aggrandizement. It was a sick joke, Lowery thought. He looked at his new company commander, a precisely polished lieutenant, and had no doubts about the officer’s personal courage. But it was obvious he was building a career here; he wanted to win a medal and a promotion, so his radio talk was always formal and when the colonel was around he laid it on thick. When the lieutenant put Lowery in for the Silver Star, Lowery dismissed it as a ploy for the lieutenant’s own Silver Star to be approved.

All we did was our jobs, he thought; now everybody wants to window dress it.

He heard scout dogs in the Americal got Bronze Stars.

It seemed in 1969 that the second string had come to continue a game no one wanted to play anymore. The new grunts seemed hip to the farce and waste. Their hair was longer; the smell of marijuana drifted in the rear. Discipline was beginning to corrode. No one was fighting for God and Country anymore, they just wanted to survive. At least that was the opinion of Sergeant Lowery, and an emotional flak jacket formed around his soul. A dead Marine didn’t affect him anymore; it was more like a blown television tube that needed to be replaced. But he kept humping. To the powers that be it didn’t matter what went on under a man’s helmet, only that he do his duty. And, even in 1969, most never quit.

In this strange, controversial war, there was one constant which tied the grunts of 69 together with every generation of American soldier. Combat. The tools were slightly different, the emotions were not. S. L. A. Marshall once observed that combat most closely resembled a tumultuous playground in a tough neighborhood. A sense of order appeared only when the commanders, or the historians, pieced together all the fragments into an understandable package. When it was actually happening, no one really knew what was going on from one minute to the next.

Peters, a baby-faced second lieutenant with brown hair in a high crewcut, lost his first man eight days after getting his platoon. It was on a routine squad ambush near the Da Nang Rocket Belt, on a pitch-black night that poured a noisy rain. Peters joined them as they left the platoon perimeter and walked parallel to a brushy riverbank. Out of nowhere, there were hurried, jolting shots from the point, then a continuous exchange.

Peters clawed into the wet grass.

Everyone seemed to be on automatic. The platoon sergeant was up in moments, organizing a hasty defense. The grunts triggered return bursts through the rain. Peters crouched with his radioman, calling in support fire. He had always made a mistake with it at Basic School, had never done it for real before, but now he snapped all directions out correctly. He talked with the chief of the 81mm mortars on Hill 37, giving him his observer target line in degrees.

“What’s that in mils?”

“Seventeen-sixty,” Peters answered instantly. It was 100 degrees with 17.6 millimeters per degree. All his training was clicking right and he suddenly flashed to the time at Basic School when he complained to a captain that they did the same things over and over. The captain said that was so no matter how physically or mentally exhausted you were in combat, the things you needed to know to keep your people alive would be gut reactions. He was right. Peters brought the 81mm rounds in even as the VC firing died down; at the same time, he directed in artillery airburst rounds on the likely avenue of enemy withdrawal.

Their casualties were dragged back then and a Navy corpsman with an enormous mustache approached Peters. “Lieutenant, we got one dead, six wounded, and Doc Flashpool got shot in the chest. If we don’t get him out right now, he’s gonna die ’cause I can’t stop the bleeding.” The point man, a black kid, lay dead in the mud among the wounded. Peters crouched over Doc Flashpool, a nice, skinny kid, the only man among the casualties he really knew. “Doc, it’s the lieutenant. Are you okay?”

Flashpool suddenly grabbed the front of his T-shirt, pulling him closer. “Lieutenant, don’t let ’em do it. Don’t let ’em do it to me.”

“Do what, Doc?”

“Don’t let ’em bury me as a sailor. I’m not a fucking sailor. I’m a Marine! I want to be buried in a Marine uniform!”

“Doc, you’re not going to die. We’ve got a chopper inbound. We’re going to get you out of here.” Peters was saying what he was supposed to, but what he was thinking was—God, I’m twenty-one years old and I’ve got a nineteen-year-old kid hanging on me, giving me his death wish. Oh Christ, don’t let him die! He didn’t.

A medevac helicopter was overhead within minutes. Peters’s radioman walked into an open paddy to signal the orbiting chopper with a strobe light. That made him an outlined target to any enemy who might still be lurking, but someone had to do it. Among the grunts, bravery was often routine. No one opened fire, but the Sea Knight pilot said he had
three
lights in his sights. The radioman set a second light and the pilot responded, “Roger that.” The chopper touched down in the soggy, black paddy and in seconds it was lifting off, nose down, and disappearing into the rainy gloom with the dead and wounded aboard.

The platoon returned to the perimeter. Lieutenant Peters wrapped himself in his poncho. He did not allow poncho hootches at night for they presented a silhouetted target; so he lay in the rain, his head on
his pack. Like every grunt in the platoon, his pack was ready to be shouldered at a moment’s notice, and his M16 rifle was beside it, semidry under another poncho. He listened to the drizzle, and he reflected. He was nervous as hell. But he also felt a certain calm, a realization that he had not panicked, probably would never panic. The job never got easy but Peters was beginning to realize what most Marines come to know: I can hack it.

The border between Quang Nam and Quang Tin Provinces ran a twisting but generally horizontal line from Laos to the South China Sea. The TAOR of the 1st Marine Division ended on the northern side of this line. The TAOR to the south was the responsibility of the U.S. Army and, in the summer of 69, that meant the 196th Infantry Brigade (Col Thomas H. Tackaberry) of the Americal Division (MG Lloyd B. Ramsey). The 196th had four line battalions: 2–1 Infantry to the north on LZ Ross and to the east near the coast on LZ Baldy; 3–21 and 4–31 Infantry in the center of the brigade area on LZs East, Center, West, and Siberia; and 1–46 Infantry to the south on LZ Professional. The other two brigades of the Americal Division operated even farther south in an area of guerrilla ambushes and booby traps; it was the 196th which made the nose-to-nose contacts with the communist regulars. There were two main areas of NVA infiltration in the 196th AO—both valleys below the Que Sons. Hiep Duc Valley consisted of cultivated rice fields with a Que Son spur (the Nui Chom ridge line) to the north and an unnamed spur to the south. This second spine provided the northern frontier for a deserted area called the Song Chang Valley for the river that ran through it.