Death Valley (49 page)

On the 12th, General Simpson provided a tour of Division Ridge (complete with a look at the freshly killed NVA sappers); then they boarded a helicopter for an aerial view of the 7th Marines AO, and overflew Dowd’s fight in the Arizona. Kummerow was dropped off at Hill 55 and, within an hour, was accompanying Codispoti as they choppered into the 1/7 CP for a two-hour observation of the battle.

On the 13th, Dowd was killed.

On the 14th, Kummerow was choppered into the 3/7 CP at an old French fort in a picturesque riverside village; on the 17th, they conducted the official change-of-command ceremony. Within an hour of passing the battalion colors, Kummerow was on a chopper to Landing Zone Baldy.

On the 18th, 3/7 Marines relieved 2–1 Infantry.

It did not take Kummerow long to form his opinion of why his Marines were so desperately needed in the Americal AO. The 2d of the 1st Infantry was in the process of moving from Baldy to Hawk Hill (where they worked with the 1–1 Cav in the sand-dune country along the South China Sea). The Marines assuming 2–1’s positions were not
impressed; the bunkers were falling apart and much loose equipment had been left behind, including claymore mines, fragmentation grenades, trip flares with their safety catches missing, and rusting belts of M60 ammunition. The judgement of the Marine grunts about the GIs in the area was that they “weren’t worth a fuck.”

Kummerow would not have put it in those terms, but he was not impressed either. The 2d of the 1st Infantry had secured LZ Baldy, manned checkpoints on the road to LZ Ross, and conducted local patrolling. But they had not secured the land itself, relying instead on helicopter scouts. When and if infiltration was detected, infantrymen were CA’d into the area and, after several hours of beating the bushes, they were picked up and returned to the mess halls and showers of Baldy. Kummerow’s assessment was very subjective—2–1 sometimes did conduct successful extended patrols—but, all in all, he thought the Army was relying on technology and firepower to do what could be accomplished only by men with rifles living in the bush.

So, the NVA infiltrated, dug in, and hunkered down.

While 2/7 Marines were fed into the Hiep Duc battle to the west, 3/7 Marines were committed to Barrier Island to the east. Captain Stanat’s Mike Company was choppered onto the island, which quickly turned into a horror show. From the air, the place seemed as flat as a sandy beach; in fact, it was crisscrossed with irrigation ditches and dotted with spider holes. The VC seemed nowhere but were everywhere, tagging along with Mike Company and sniping at will. Kummerow flew out in an Army Huey to talk with Stanat; as they lifted off, an AK47 suddenly opened fire and six rounds punched through the Huey, wounding the copilot and gunner, and wiping out the radios.

A frustrated Kummerow planned a sweep in force to clear out the VC and, after dusk on 20 August, Mike Company humped to a staging point on the south end of the island where India and the jump CP would join them the following morning. On the morning of 21 August, the Marine artillery battery on LZ Baldy registered its fire on Barrier Island. They used survey data provided by the Army battery they had replaced; the data were inaccurate and the company’s first two 155mm artillery rounds landed smack on Mike Company. Five Marines were killed, seven wounded. As the men evacuated these casualties, Captain Stanat discovered that a corpsman was missing from the night march. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep on a break, but no one knew, so Kummerow cancelled the sweep and choppered in with India Company. The grunts followed
the previous route of march and found the corpsman—dead—his weapon and gear missing, his body booby trapped. VC snipers opened up on them as they recovered the dead man. Kummerow flew back to Baldy with a demoralized M Company.

India Company, under Lieutenant Ramage, continued working on Barrier Island and, on the 25th, they conducted a final sweep with naval gunfire support. They discovered twenty-five VC bodies, rounded up eighty Vietnamese, and ended the sweep on a beautiful sandy beach.

On the 27th, they abandoned Barrier Island.

As soon as 3/7 Marines set up their positions in the Hiep Duc Valley on the evening of 27 August, Kummerow called for his company commanders. The push to link up with 4–31 Infantry would commence at first light. Kummerow was determined not to lose momentum in their attack, and impressed upon his company commanders that, when they made contact, they were to push through.

Kummerow was lucky; his battalion had not been brought in piecemeal.

A
t 0500 on 28 August 1969, 3d Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division began moving towards the objective. The fog on the valley floor hadn’t yet burned off, and the men moved across ghostly green paddies. K and I Companies led the way with L and M Companies following two hundred meters behind; they were in a box formation.

They had gone a kilometer before the firing started.

Kilo One, on the far-right flank, came under AK47 fire; company commander Edwards ordered Kilo Two into an adjacent tree line to provide suppressive fire. Among the trees, Kilo Company overran a bunker and captured one of the NVA 12.7mm AAA guns; as the companies consolidated, Colonel Kummerow ordered Mike Company to continue the momentum of the attack.

Mike entered the paddies in front of the woods, 1st and 3d Platoons up, 2d back; then they wheeled to the right. The skirmish line swept towards the bouldered slope of Hill 381; seventy-five meters from the base, the NVA opened fire again. 3d Platoon on the right took the brunt of it and were pinned down behind the dikes when Captain Stanat ordered 2d Platoon into the fire. Mike Two, under 1stLt William Donaldson, moved quickly through Kilo’s wood line and across the paddies; they had just gotten tied in with the pinned platoon when the NVA snipers turned their sights on them. At the same time, preregistered 60mm and 82mm mortar fire began landing in the rice paddies.

Donaldson’s platoon sergeant was wounded. The lieutenant in command of 3d Platoon was wounded. So was a score of grunts, and the
snipers on the high ground added to the toll, opening fire on the two platoons anytime anyone moved.

3d Platoon had taken it bad in the first bursts. An M60 crew up front had been shot, and a corpsman sniped trying to get to them. Donaldson’s platoon lay down cover fire to get them back, and one of his grunts shouted he’d seen smoke on the bouldered slope. An M79 grenadier ran up to fire on the spot, and was shot as soon as he raised himself over the dike. Two Marines moved up to pull him back, and one of them was shot. Two more Marines, one slung with several LAWs, crawled up. They blasted out enough fire to allow others to reach the casualties. Artillery began to hammer into Hill 381. Meanwhile, Captain Stanat radioed 1st Platoon, under 1stLt Anthony Medley, to move into the trees at the base of the hill in order to put the NVA on the slope between 2d Platoon’s fire and that of the two platoons in the open. Medley’s men moved in, yet they suffered the fewest casualties in the company: one man shot through the leg.

The rest of Mike Company had been hit hard—three KIA, thirty WIA—and Stanat called Donaldson for a status report. Donaldson said the snipers temporarily had been quieted, but that the NVA would chop them to pieces with mortars if they stayed in the open paddies. Stanat ordered a withdrawal to the trees behind them, which the platoon conducted in good fashion, bringing back all their casualties and all their gear except the M60 of the most forward team that had been sniped (it was recovered in the morning). Medley’s platoon provided the cover fire, coming back last, when they were almost out of ammunition. The NVA had been invisible in the dense vegetation of the slope, which is why Captain Stanat doubted that the air strikes coming in behind their retreat were doing much good. The jets killed at least one NVA, though: a radioman said he saw a body blown into the air.

During the fire, the battalion command post was several hundred meters away on a ripple of high ground. Among those with Kummerow were Maj Dave Whittingham, his S-3; SgtMaj Nick Gledich, his BSM; and Lance Corporal Monahan, his radio operator. They were like family. Whittingham was a sharp, incisive man, very cool under fire. Gledich was a Yugoslavian immigrant who had found his home in the Corps and was—thoroughly—a sergeant major of Marines. A month after Hiep Duc, when the jump CP was humping with India Company in the Que Sons, they had been hit by mortars in a preregistered spot along a ridge. Colonel Kummerow had been standing, his ear to the radio, when Nick
Gledich suddenly shoved him off his feet, tossed his helmet to him, and dove across his legs. Kummerow had cradled his helmet on his head with one arm as a mortar round exploded five feet away; shrapnel punched a hole in his hand, and hit his arm, shoulder, elbow, and foot. But Gledich had absorbed most of the fragments meant for Kummerow—thirty-five pieces in all.

Lance Corporal Monahan was also to become a casualty. Back at LZ Ross after a night patrol, he was unhooking grenades from his flak jacket; the pin on one apparently was corroded, because the safety spoon suddenly popped off, and the explosion blew off his hand. He died of shock. But that was in the spring of 1970, a miserably wet time; this was the summer of 1969, also miserably hot, and Monahan was sweating his ass off. His face was chunky and red under his helmet brim, and his undershirt was soaked under his flak jacket and the tugging straps of his radio, canteens, and equipment. He had a tattoo on one sunburned arm. Monahan was not complaining, though; he was a bright kid from a broken home who had found his place in 3d Battalion, 7th Marines.

Somehow, the CP’s flock of antennas drew no fire.

Colonel Kummerow was on the radio with Captain Stanat. Stanat was a handsome West Pointer and veteran of a previous tour with the 5th Marines, and Kummerow had allowed him to use his discretion in pulling back. Kummerow had his doubts, though; Stanat struck him as burned out and he wondered if the NVA had gotten the upper hand because of a lack of aggressive action.

He eventually transferred Stanat to regiment.

Kummerow ordered Lima Company to continue the frontal attack on Hill 381. There were those who called the Marine Corps the greatest invention for killing young American men, but that connoted that the commanders were stupid or callous. Kummerow was neither. There was no way to rationalize what the Marines were doing, he thought; you just have to do the job. Falling back was out of the question. From what he could tell, that’s what the Americal had been doing for the last ten days. He called it floundering.

Lima Company had pulled off to the right of the Old French Road. Ahead, the firing had grown into a constant cacophony, compounded by the roar of jets and artillery. Word came for two squads from Third Herd to continue down the trail; as always, the grunts had no idea
what was going on and just kept walking until Lieutenant Ronald and Sergeant Fuller waved them off to the right. They hiked down a river bank, waded the stream which stank of napalm, then climbed the opposite shore and proceeded into the paddies. Private Besardi trudged along as his squad hiked through the banana trees and heavy brush, draining with each step. The woods were like an oven. The squad finally reached the tree line where Kilo Company had consolidated. Mike Company was firing ahead of them and they pressed on.

Seven bodies greeted the men in the next tree line. The dead were all Vietnamese, lying side by side and riddled with bullets, shot in the head execution style. There was an old man, a husband and wife, three children, and a baby. What in the fuck is going on, Besardi thought. It appeared to be the work of the NVA, an act of vengeance or a warning to the villagers that the NVA withdrawal was only temporary. The scene did not inspire revenge in Besardi, only revulsion at the cruelty, and fear that they were up against such ruthless bastards.

Ten minutes away, Lieutenant Ronald got off the radio and hollered, “All right, everyone on line!” The two squads swept on a skirmish line towards a brushy knoll on which they could see grunts from Mike Company. A kid grunt was wandering below the knoll.

“Hey, who you with!”

The kid was gripping a .45, dazed and helmetless.

“Where’s your company!”

He spoke slowly. “They’re around somewhere.”

The platoon continued into the tree line, past a large village well tucked among the trees, then walked out into the paddy. The boulder-strewn and forested face of Hill 381 faced them. The mud was knee-deep in the first field and Besardi trudged through it as fast as he could, sweating hard, not wanting to be caught in the open. The paddy rose in terraces ahead of them. His squad was behind a grassy knoll; the other squad was to the right of it. To his left, some of his buddies—Reevs, Bailey, Chico with the M60—trotted down a dry path. Besardi headed towards them and was twenty feet away when Bailey hiked up a berm. As soon as he came into view over the earthen wall, the slope of Hill 381 suddenly erupted with AK47 and RPG fire.

Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry rucked up as the sun rose; they were to lead the battalion’s push west to link up with the
Marines. Captain Gayler held a quick briefing in their night bivouac—the brushy ditches running through the trees near the Old French Road—and Specialist Hodierne, the reporter, just off the morning resupply bird, photographed them. Hodierne looked around the ragged spot of poncho hootches. The grunts looked drained already, he thought; the heat was smothering in this windless valley and the dust from the ancient paddies practically clogged men’s pores.

He’d never seen a more miserable place.

Captain Gayler knew his men were wrung out; he knew they wanted only to sit there in the shade. But that’s not the way the game’s played. He put his helmet back on, and the company began a cautious hump. They stopped eventually in one part of a tree line facing a hillside of elephant grass dotted with overgrown hootches; that was where Gayler thought Delta 1st of the 46th had been halted three days before. With Lieutenant Maurel’s platoon on point, Bravo Company began moving into the sun-blasted paddy between their tree grove and the hill. The North Vietnamese—who were still in place—let them get halfway into the clearing. Then an NVA with a captured M60, tucked in one of the hedgerows at the base of the hill, opened fire.