Death Valley (23 page)

Charlie Company survived that night because the men had guts; but of the eighty-nine men who started the fight, only thirty-six were unscathed.

PFC Daniel John Shea won the Medal of Honor.

“A few days like this,” Carrier wrote home, “and it’s looney bin time.” But the action had routed the NVA around Tam Ky, and 3–21 rotated its bloodied companies through Chu Lai stand down. By mid-June, they were back in action again, this time closer to home—in and around AK Valley. Bravo 3–21 (Capt Arthur Ballin) took casualties in a bunker complex—from which the NVA evaporated during the night—and the battalion reconnaissance platoon also pulled out of a bunkered area with several wounded. Delta 3–21 (Capt Steve Sendobry) was CA’d in to relieve Echo Recon. Delta called itself Black Death, and Sendobry was a strong commander on his second tour, but they fared no better; when the Gladiator Platoon, under 1stLt Steve Maness, took point, they came under heavy fire. The point was shot in the head and the platoon sergeant at the rear of the column was shot in the leg. Lieutenant Maness crawled forward with two men and managed to throw grenades into several bunkers; Maness got a hand on the point man, but could not pull him back under the fire. The next day, Maness and a squad got the body, but took more casualties in an ambush.

That night, 10–11 June, Delta humped toward LZ East to reinforce for an expected ground assault; the company was still three hours away when the flares began popping above East. The men could see NVA flamethrowers arching through the black. On LZ East, 1st Platoon of Alpha 3–21 and a detachment of artillerymen from B/3–82 were fighting for their lives. At least one bunker was overrun by NVA; when the only officer on the hill was wounded, the Alpha platoon sergeant, SSgt Bill Cruse, took command. For forty-five minutes, he was everywhere along the bunker line, holding the men together.

The NVA pulled back before daylight, leaving twenty-seven bodies
in the wire; Colonel Tackaberry choppered in to pin Staff Sergeant Cruse with an impact award of the Silver Star.

LZ Baldy was also penetrated.

Charlie Company—its members almost all green seeds now—stumbled into a bunker complex of its own. The point man fired on some moving bushes—the site of the NVA listening post, Carrier would later realize—and turned up two NVA bodies. They continued towards a hootch on the next hill, and an RPD suddenly opened fire from within it, gunning down the point man and the four grunts behind him. Under cover fire, Captain Carrier crawled forward with several men; one GI got close enough to report that three North Vietnamese were standing over the bodies and kicking each one in the head. The company pulled back to another hill and directed in the air strikes; then Charlie Company worked its way back up the blasted slope. There was nothing there: not the five GIs, nothing left of the NVA except a few shattered bodies and weapons. They did find bunkers on the hill, though, lots of them.

The NVA had done their damage and vanished.

To reinforce 3–21’s hunt, elements of 4–31 moved in at the end of June. Delta 4–31 (Captain Mekkelsen) was the first into AK Valley. By this time, the NVA were breaking up into groups of three to five, toting full packs, and hiding what they could not carry. Delta uncovered more than two hundred spider holes and bunkers, connected by a maze of tunnels and trenches, plus rice, ammunition, and enemy documents. Their patrols also crossed paths with some of the evading NVA, and they got credit for twelve kills. Delta eventually secured an LZ for the arrival of Bravo 4–31 (Captain Gayler) and Echo Recon 4–31 (1stLt Barry Brandon); Delta departed on their lift birds.

Bravo took some wounded when they were mortared while crossing an open paddy; on 27 June, Alpha 4–31 (Captain Yates) was CA’d in to reinforce. Alpha unassed their Hueys and began humping off the LZ; almost immediately their point man was killed in an ambush. The company pulled back as Bravo advanced towards an adjacent hill to help direct their supporting air strikes. The men were stopped cold by a barrage of AK47 and RPG fire. The next day, the NVA let Alpha get within twenty feet of their hidden bunkers before dropping the point man with three rounds in the head. Alpha pulled back again as the jets shrieked in. Bravo, meanwhile, pushed uphill again; while most of the men hunkered in the vegetation, some heads down and some returning fire, a foolish few carried the fight to the enemy. They crawled close enough to lob grenades into two spider holes, killing the snipers; the rest of the NVA pulled out. The next day, 29 June, the fight was over. On 2 July, Bravo was to be flown to Chu Lai for stand down; Alpha moved out to secure the extract LZ for them, and an NVA command-detonated mine blew away two grunts and wounded two more. On 5 July, Alpha and Echo Recon were also pulled out to Chu Lai to rehab.

The
3d NVA Regiment
had not been pinned.

A frustrating comment on the war of attrition was that the last position Alpha 4–31 secured before lifting out was Hill 102, which in August the NVA were using as a headquarters and an antiaircraft site. The June operation had not cornered the enemy, and by July activity had tapered off. The Polar Bears pulled out and the Gimlets resumed routine patrolling; the battalion commander rotated and the new colonel—Howard—arrived during the lull. At least on the surface, everything seemed secure.

It was 19 August 1969. Captain Carrier was on LZ Center, bags packed, finally going home. His executive officer, 1stLt James V. Gordon, had taken command of Charlie Company. They were rucking up—3d of the 21st Infantry was humping into AK Valley to relieve the pinned-down survivors of Delta 4th of the 31st Infantry. So Carrier was saying good-bye on a hot, frustrating day. The North Vietnamese had quietly slipped back in from the western mountains and resumed their positions in the bunker complexes. They had picked the time and circumstance to come out of the woodwork; this battle was to be on their terms, and their only goal was to stack up American bodies.

A Company, 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry, 196th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, under 1stLt Eugene Shurtz, Jr., was to lead the Gimlets into AK Valley. They were on a hill called the Birthday Cake, so named because it terraced to its low peak, the handiwork of rice farmers long gone. Alpha Company had humped up it the previous day with PFC Thomas G. Goodwin walking point. Halfway along, Lieutenant Shurtz had halted him to show him his map and confirm where they were.

Shurtz was brand new and trying hard.

Goodwin, on the other hand, was twenty-one years old and had been in the bush ten months. He was never exactly clear
why
he was
there, but his father had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and his older brother had also done his time. He was from a solid, patriotic family, and when the government asked, he did not think to resist. Actually, Goodwin was a grunt because of a fluke. He dropped a class in junior college, knowing that cancelled his student deferment, but figuring he could slip by to the next semester when he’d resume a full load. Think again. After the draft finally deposited him in Vietnam, he decided what the hell, it was time to see what he was made of. He refused an assignment as the platoon RTO and instead volunteered to walk point. Because of heavy casualties in the recent heavy fighting, he’d even served as acting platoon leader. On the Birthday Cake, Private Goodwin was acting squad leader, first squad, 3d Platoon; of those men, he’d written his parents recently that he had, “… a good squad. In fact, it’s so good it makes the other squads look sick.”

Before Alpha Company departed for AK Valley, the 3–21 C&C landed on their hill. Lieutenant Colonel Howard was there to see Lieutenant Shurtz; A Company was to conduct an airmobile combat assault into the paddies between Hill 102 and the Nui Lon ridge line. The men would be going in with as much ammo as they could carry, but no rucksacks and only two canteens per man; there was no reason to carry C rations. Howard obviously was not expecting a prolonged fight; but as things developed, the Gimlets’s piecemeal response to the NVA attack was unwise. The cadre of leadership in their foe, the
3d NVA Regiment
, was most likely unchanged from the battle in June, and their bunker tactics were the same as they had been then and many other times in the past. But it was extremely difficult for the U.S. Army to take advantage of this repetition because the leaders at battalion and company level changed so often.

The C&C also dropped off Ollie Noonan of the Associated Press; he had been covering the 11th Brigade at Duc Pho and had just returned to the Da Nang press center when the action broke. He and his partner, Richard Pyle, were the first reporters on the scene, having choppered up only that morning. Pyle went to LZ West while Noonan went to LZ Center and thumbed a ride aboard the C&C to get to the bush. He was a tall guy with a handlebar mustache and a Boston clip, who was affable to the curious grunts. Men were shouldering ammunition bandoliers and checking rifles as they talked, getting ready. Hueys began orbiting their green hill. Smoke grenades were tossed out.

Alpha Company left the Birthday Cake in intervals.

The first lift was greeted by AK47 fire from the trees as the Huey settled into a sun-blasted paddy in AK Valley. Lieutenant Shurtz disembarked from the second lift. One of the birds was coming out when an RPG shrieked past it; the pilot veered to avoid a possible second shot, the tail rotor smacked into a palm tree, and the Huey did an uncontrolled spin at fifteen feet before crashing to the ground. The crew grabbed their M16s and scrambled aboard another Huey that had just off-loaded its grunts. Shurtz hiked to the abandoned Huey to turn off the engine before it caught fire. He couldn’t figure out how, and the engine pumped away until it ran out of fuel at dusk. Before retiring to the cover of a banana tree grove, Shurtz made a point of spinning the radio dials to get them off the frequencies, and he policed up the maps and code books the rattled pilots had left behind.

Coming in on the next lift, Private Goodwin and part of his squad were crowded into a Huey with their new platoon leader, Lieutenant Tynan, and the hitchhiking Noonan. Starting their descent into the LZ, they could see the downed chopper. Noonan leaned past the door gunner, taking photographs, and Goodwin shouted to his new lieutenant over the thump of the rotors, “Boy, is this a hot LZ!”

Lieutenant Tynan just smiled.

Then Tynan hollered back in the vibrating cabin: as soon as they landed, Goodwin was to lay down some cover fire from the edge of the paddy. They dropped in with the door gunners firing into the far brush lines. The skids touched the dry paddy and everyone tumbled out, unable to distinguish NVA fire amid the racket of M60s and jet turbines. Goodwin tagged Donny Anderson and they jogged towards the far end of the paddy. When the Hueys roared out over their heads, they were abruptly aware of the enemy fire.

“Hey, Donny, let’s just get out of here!” yelled Goodwin.

They ran back to the brushy banana trees where the company was gathering. The NVA strafing had evaporated as soon as the last chopper had beat it out of the landing zone; the nervous pilots in the final lift had dumped the grunts from a six-foot hover.

Then, with the noonday sun frying them, they began the sweep. It was Goodwin’s squad’s turn to be on point, and he already had a volunteer point man. A green seed named Mack had recently received a Dear John and commented apathetically that he had nothing to lose; he’d never walked lead before so he joked, “Yeah, I wanna walk point, I’m going to sniff those dinks out!”

Mack took the point.

Anderson walked cover man.

Goodwin was third; the other five were in line behind them.

They started down a trail which ran from the banana trees into an open patch of waist-high brush with tree lines on three sides. No one really knew what was going on, and Lieutenant Tynan said to be careful because friendlies were in the area. That meant that the point man could not just wheel and deal at the slightest noise. That was fatal because—as it was pieced together later—Mack and Anderson walked right up to two North Vietnamese regulars sitting beside their bunker in the parched scrub brush. The NVA wore standard fatigues, web gear, ammunition pouches, and pith helmets. Mack the green seed—who thought the enemy wore black pajamas—probably wondered if they were ARVN. For his hesitation, Mack and Anderson took a burst of AK47 across their chests.