Death Valley (51 page)

They had just reached the trees when Reevs looked up and said calmly, “It was really nice knowing you guys.”

The tree line had been secured by other elements of Lima Company, and the corpsmen had set up a hasty collection point among the trees and terraced paddies. They hustled Reevs to a corpsman and set down the poncho; the man quickly went to work. He ripped off the bloody shirt, exposing the two small entry holes in Reevs’s side; he hooked up an IV and tied bandages. His four buddies stood in a huddle around the corpsman until he stopped and looked up.

“I’m sorry, but your buddy’s dead.”

Besardi couldn’t accept it. He just stood there in a daze until one of them mumbled, “C’mon, let’s go back up and help out the rest of the guys.” They started plodding back towards the dike. The first person they saw was Turner, the machine gunner who didn’t have to be there. He was stumbling back between two grunts, arms over their shoulders, blood running from shrapnel wounds in his eye and throat. The entire line was falling back with them.

By the time Besardi got back to the tree line, the casualties of Lima and Mike Companies had been dragged there and the corpsmen were working frantically. Besardi slumped into an exhausted stupor by the well. Four Marines were coming back, carrying the body of a fifth Marine by his arms and legs, chest up, head hanging and flopping grotesquely
as they walked. There was a gaping hole in his chest. Naw, it can’t be, Besardi thought. He looked closer. Aw, no. It was Big Red Davis of Alabama, a buddy from boot camp and infantry training. Besardi had just talked to him the day before on LZ West: he was with Mike Company and in good spirits because he was under the impression that his company was to be the reserve. Besardi wandered back among the casualties. One of the corpsmen, a kid, leaned in a crouch against a berm. He was sobbing hysterically. There weren’t enough corpsmen to help all the wounded, and for a second Besardi had the evil impulse to shoot the bastard. Instead, he tried to coax the kid back to reality. The corpsman couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t respond.

Two NVA 12.7mm AAA positions were firing from the vicinity of Hill 381, mostly at the Phantoms flashing past. The grunts of 2d Platoon, Kilo Company, 3d Battalion, 7th Marines—resting at the base of the ridge line after their bout with snipers that morning—had the misfortune of hearing one of the gun positions. The platoon leader, 2dLt Arnold C. Nyulassy, radioed the company commander and the report followed the chain of command, until it came right back to the platoon.

They were to find and destroy the gun position.

The grunts were fatigued to the bone, murdered by the heat. But when Lieutenant Nyulassy said to saddle up, they pushed themselves one more time with a courage born of pride, discipline, and numbness. They advanced towards the ridge, then slumped into the underbrush as Phantoms ran another mission against Nui Chom and the suspected location of the gun. The grunts didn’t know it but their attack was visible from Landing Zone West, and the command staff of the 7th Marines Regiment trained their binoculars northward. Colonel Codispoti, the ever-present cigar jutting from his jaw, was one observer; so was the reporter, Sterba, who’d hitched to West on the 196th InfBde C&C and who described the air strike:

The last jet screamed over by 1400—the 12.7mm delivering a parting volley—then 2d Platoon of K/3/7 got moving again, trudging uphill through the thick vegetation of the ridge line. Fifty meters up, the AK47s commenced firing and everyone flopped in place as the bullets chopped the high brush above them. The fire seemed to be coming from one spot straight ahead. Lieutenant Nyulassy, who could have been no less tired than his men, was up shouting encouragement and directions, and the grunts fell into a ragged line again. They fired and threw grenades, and scrambled uphill. The NVA fire stopped; they found an abandoned bunker, a couple spider holes, and bloodstains, but no bodies.

The squads maintained their line, then bogged down in a field of shoulder-high elephant grass. Ten meters into the briar—as the grunts were shouldering through the sharp rows of blades, increasing their frustrated exhaustion, getting disorganized in the tangle—the North Vietnamese ambushed them from higher up on the ridge.

The 12.7mm and several AK47s scythed the grass.

Everyone scrambled for cover.

LCpl Danny R. Emery had wandered off to the right before the shooting started, humping his M60, his partner tagging along, humping the ammunition. When the NVA fire hit the center of the platoon, Emery and his partner were able to crawl uphill. The 12.7mm was firing from somewhere to their left, invisible amid the vines and trees; Emery cut loose at it from a crouch, raking his M60 back and forth, his assistant gunner keeping the ammo bandolier from jamming; both men were soaked with sweat. A piece of shrapnel hit Emery. He kept firing.

The 12.7mm kept firing too, keeping the platoon pinned. LCpl Jose Francisco Jimenez, a small, wiry fire-team leader, got up. No one had ordered him to. He simply crashed through the elephant grass, rushing uphill right into a North Vietnamese who popped from a spider hole to shoot him. Jimenez cut him down in an instant with his M16, then was upon two more of them. He blew them away in their spider holes. He was near the 12.7mm, and he dropped on the tangled slope; yanked the pins from one, two, then a third grenade; and hurled them into the spot of brush from where the gun seemed to be firing, rushing up after the explosions, firing on the run. The 12.7mm gun was in a shallow pit on a tripod, its gunner slumped dead. Lieutenant Nyulassy was on
Jimenez’s heels, shouting the platoon up the fifty meters to the gun pit. Then another group of AK47s screamed from the right flank. Lance Corporal Emery fired his M60 at them as Lance Corporal Jimenez charged again. He threw frags, then ran up to pump his M16 into two North Vietnamese.

In a matter of moments, Jimenez had killed six NVA regulars and silenced the machine gun. He paused for a second near the last two victims when an AK47 suddenly cracked from the left, hitting him in the side of his head.

Jimenez was killed instantly.

Under the renewed fusillade, Lieutenant Nyulassy got most of his men back behind a knoll. He tried to sort out the situation. The parched elephant grass had caught fire, probably from their tracers, and burned out of control. The NVA were firing from above them; they seemed to have a slit trench along the ridge which allowed them to avoid the Marine fire and pop up anywhere along the hill. The NVA were not using tracers, so it was virtually impossible to zero in on them. Jimenez’s body was sprawled by the gun bunker, and the Marine Corps does not abandon their dead. Nyulassy silently cursed the Americal Division for allowing the NVA to dig in so well, then called for volunteers to get Jimenez back. He was mightily impressed by the response. Seven men joined him.

Campos

Bosser

Sherrod

Davis

Jones

Dirken

Doc Sampson

They crawled uphill on their hands and knees, Nyulassy up front and Doc Sampson coming last, heads down under the AK fire and the hot smoke of the brush fire. The NVA went mad behind their guns as soon as the Marines neared the clearing where Jimenez lay, sending everyone down except Sherrod. He fired into the snipers—it looked as though he got one—then tumbled with an AK47 round through his neck. In the next moment, Chicom grenades were thrown downhill onto them. The explosions bowled over Nyulassy, tearing his right arm with shrapnel; Campos was also wounded. They scrambled back. The AKs and Chicoms kept coming. Their return fire seemed to have no effect.

Bosser tried again and was shot in the head.

Sherrod was hauled behind a spot of cover and Doc Sampson patched him. He was dying, and Jones and Dirken sat with him talking simple, reassuring things to him.

Davis was killed trying again.

The fight was in its second hour when they finally pulled back, leaving Jimenez’s body under the guns. An M60 team on the right flank suddenly opened fire; the gunner hollered that he’d seen two NVA creeping up on them. He had nailed one, and chased them both off.

2d Platoon consolidated on the slope as two squads from 1st Platoon, under Sergeant Frank, came up. Lance Corporal Emery and another M60 team blasted uphill, while two men with M79 grenade launchers crept forward and lobbed HE and CS rounds along the ridge. Sergeant Frank led his men up through the burnt patch of elephant grass. Then the wind suddenly shifted and the blaze sprang up behind, driving them forward. They stumbled confused in the smoky tangle right into the snipers’ sights; two Marines were killed and one was wounded in the sudden popping. They fell back, dragging their casualties, as soon as the fire burned down. Another Marine was wounded during the retreat.

Lieutenant Nyulassy noticed that the corpsmen with the re-act platoon seemed stunned. They hid in the deep grass and treated only those who were dragged to them. Doc Sampson, however, was rushing out to help carry back the wounded. Nyulassy got in radio contact with an aerial observer in a Bronco, who fired WP rockets along the ridge. They exploded in a smokescreen of thick, white clouds, and the Marines raised a cacophony of M16, M60, and M79 fire as another team rushed forward. Jimenez’s body was on fire; a grunt got close enough to grab him but Jimenez tore loose in his hands.

1st and 2d Platoons finally fell back as Phantoms came in; between each pass, they could hear one or two AK47s firing into the sky.

The men had shown a lot of guts taking out that 12.7mm, and they’d paid the price. Six Marines were dead, nine wounded. Although the subsequent morning sweep found two NVA in a shallow grave, the platoons were credited with a total of only twelve kills. The sweep also found the burnt body of Jimenez. For their valor in dying to recover a dead buddy, LCpl Johnny S. Bosser and PFC Edward A. Sherrod were posthumously awarded Silver Stars; PFC Dennis D. Davis was awarded a Navy Cross. LCpl Jose Francisco Jimenez—who was from
Mexico City and nicknamed JoJo by a squad that considered him one good dude—was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

For a moment, as he sat atop the paddy dike, Besardi thought he might be going insane. He slumped head down, his weapon heavy in his hands, hair soaked with sweat, face dripping. The heat was incredible. So was the stench. The corpsmen had lined the wounded and dead below the berm in preparation for the medevacs, and Besardi stared at the bodies. They’d been covered with ponchos, so only battered jungle boots showed, but he knew Big Red and John Reevs were among them, and they’d been good dudes, damn good men. A group of villagers tramped down a nearby dike, herded along by Gunny Martinez. The company gunnery sergeant, a ferocious-looking and respected man, had cleared them out of the family bunkers of some hootches discovered in the woods. Besardi looked at the bodies and the villagers, his mind burning up. Oh what the fuck, what the fuck are we doing, all these dead and you fucking cocksuckers are helping the NVA! Besardi was eighteen and couldn’t cope with what he was experiencing. He wanted to blow them all away, shoot them off the dike. He didn’t.

A wounded grunt walked up and told him, “Hey listen, Bailey wants to talk to ya.” Bailey lay in the paddy, a thick bandage around his neck. His voice was scratchy. “You were right, I should’ve listened to you,” he whispered to Besardi, who was kneeling beside him. Bailey was a spunky kid who always wanted to walk point. He was too reckless, though, and Besardi had tried to slow him down. Now he lay there, tears in his eyes, thinking he had somehow walked his platoon into the ambush on the dike. His voice cracked. “You told me to go slow, you told me to go slow.”

Most of Besardi’s squad were casualties.

Reevs was dead. Bailey was shot in the throat. Turner had shrapnel in his eye and throat. Roy Lee Hammonds from Texas had a bloody, ten-inch gash down his arm. Vaughn was hit by shrapnel. So was P. K. Smith. P. K. had taken a blast while he and Turner were manning their M60 on the dike. He moaned, sounding very frightened and very homesick, “This is it, this is it, I’m going home, this is my last one, I’m going home, I’m going home.” It was P. K.’s third Purple Heart
and everyone was glad he was going home, but grunts aren’t very maudlin and Besardi chided him, “Fuck you, Smith, that’s just a little scratch. You ain’t goin’ nowhere!”

The truth was he wasn’t out yet. Mortar rounds began exploding around their position. Grunts and corpsmen rolled for cover and the wounded lay terrified and immobile, but the NVA didn’t have their exact location. None of the rounds hit home.

Finally, a Sea Knight came in behind the tree line and landed in a dry paddy, rotor wash swirling dust high; the back ramp was down and grunts hustled through the whirlwind, humping in the loaded ponchos. No sooner had they gotten the last casualty inside than the mortar tube began thumping again. The overloaded Sea Knight pulled pitch, then banked to gain altitude and passed too near the side of Hill 381. Green tracers began whizzing past the helicopter, but somehow it rose through the fire and flew out of sight.

Besardi stood rooted, amazed, thanking God.

Lieutenant Ronald came up with the platoon’s reserve squad. He’d taken some RPG shrapnel but had refused evacuation. He told Besardi he was the squad leader and that they were moving back towards Hill 381. Besardi didn’t have much of a squad left—only Ball, Dean, Johnson, and Sterling—but they scrounged what ammunition they could from that left in the LZ by the casualties and got going.

Lieutenant Ronald said to move out.

“Okay,” Besardi replied, “I’ll walk the point.”