Death Valley (46 page)

The landing zone was chaos. Schuler staggered to a spot in the elephant grass, sat down, and mumbled to the corpsman bandaging his head, “I ain’t leaving.” He had shrapnel lodged in his skull, face, shoulders, and back. But he didn’t want to leave his platoon if there was an attack that night and, remembering the ring of 12.7mm guns, he didn’t want to be a sitting duck in a big, lumbering Sea Knight. Colonel Lugger stopped briefly to check on him. A mustached officer came by minutes later, talking hatefully about fragging Lugger. He said the colonel didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and he was collecting a bounty to get rid of him.

It took thirty minutes for the first chopper to arrive.

Five Cobras rolled in first, one right behind the other, pumping 2.75-inch rockets and 40mm rounds around the perimeter, covering the landing of the medevac. The firepower eased Schuler’s fears—like the cavalry in a war movie, he thought—and he allowed a couple of his grunts to help him aboard. Spooky came in after the Cobras and the two Sea Knights made it in and out without drawing a shot. The interior of his bird was dark, vibrating, and crowded. Schuler noticed one of the chopper crewmen looking at the wounded with tears running down his face. He couldn’t see what that man saw until they unloaded on the flood-lit tarmac of the Naval Support Activities hospital in Da Nang. They were all bloody. Their forward observer stood with a bandage around his face; a corpsman unwrapped it, exposing a hollow, red eye socket with tissue hanging from it onto his cheek.

The wounded were carried or helped into a large room with rows of stretchers over sawhorses. Schuler ended up on one, still dizzy, blinking at the caked blood and the bright lights overhead, hearing screams,
crying, orders being shouted. He faded out, then woke up as a corpsman used long surgical scissors to cut away his flak jacket and fatigues. He began shouting when the man clipped the laces of his prized, battered jungle boots. He suddenly started shivering in the hot box, and a corpsman hooked up an IV. Then he realized he was waking up and a Navy chaplain was beside his stretcher, giving him last rights.

“Get the fuck outta here. I have no intention of dying.”

The aid station became so crowded that Schuler and several others were transferred to the Army’s 95th Evac on the other side of Da Nang. He walked to the Huey, naked, freezing, carrying his own IV.

In the 95th Evac, an Army medic gave Schuler a shot of novocaine, then an Army doctor used pliers to dislodge the fragments in his skull. Another doctor complimented him on his twist; uh-huh, Schuler thought; he must be talking about a good tennis backhand. When the medics were finally done, Schuler looked in a mirror. His handlebar mustache and chest were caked with dried blood, half his head was shaved and marked with stitches, bandages were around his shoulders. All he had on were some pajama bottoms which didn’t fit, perhaps because he’d lost almost thirty pounds in the bush.

During the night, Golf and Hotel had hiked back a kilometer to the denuded knoll where their battle had started. Lieutenant Brennon sat in the dirt. He had never felt worse. They hadn’t put in enough prep fire, they were spread too thin, and five of his men were dead in that paddy field. Another man was missing—dead, wounded, or passed out from the heat, he did not know which. Brennon wanted to go back under cover of darkness and find those men. But battalion denied permission; Brennon thought the denial devastated what little spirit the grunts had left.

What are we doing, everyone was mumbling. No real mission. NVA everywhere. Little food or water. Intoxicating heat. Heavy casualties.

The result was mass confusion and mass frustration.

At first light on 26 August, Lieutenant Brennon asked for volunteers to retrieve the bodies. In nine months in Vietnam, he’d never seen such spirit. Six men immediately stepped forward. That was Brennon’s only satisfaction from this battle, that most of his men—even ones he’d previously had doubts about—were courageously bucking up. With Phantoms
running more air strikes, the seven Marines moved into the paddy. There were only a couple of snipers this time, and Brennon pumped three M16 mags at one muzzle flash. Others fired M60s and M79s on the spot and the aerial observer radioed that he could see a dead North Vietnamese soldier.

Good, Brennon thought, I hope I killed the bastard.

The men found their MIA unscathed. He’d been pinned down and, when he saw how close the fire was coming to Brennon’s escaping group, he thought it best to hunker down and hide. They humped back to the denuded knoll and medevacked him along with the bodies. He was a young, wiry kid named Medina. He ended up at the division psychiatrist; reportedly, the NVA had come out that night to loot the Marine bodies and had kicked him as he played dead.

We’re right back where we started from, Brennon thought; every time we gain something, we pull back to consolidate. Three solid days of contact and we haven’t gained one inch!

This operation, he thought bluntly, is a fiasco.

While Hotel Company was recovering their abandoned casualties, Lieutenant Larrison of Golf Company brought in his own Phantoms: 250- and 500-pounders at a hundred meters, napalm parallel to his lines at thirty meters. Under that barrage, a squad and gun team rushed forward to retrieve the body of the point man killed in the previous day’s ambush. The Marines had just gotten into the trees when four North Vietnamese walked past. They had green pith helmets and fatigues; carried packs, ammunition bandoliers, and AK47s; and they moved through the wood line as though it were private property. The Marines’ first volley dropped two of the NVA in their tracks. A short, sharp firefight broke out, but the squad was able to recover the body. They hustled back across the paddy as Lieutenant Larrison brought in the nape again, covering their withdrawal.

G
ySgt William N. Yohe of Echo Company, 2d Battalion, 7th Marines spent the three hours before dawn writing casualty reports. Before that, the company had been stumbling in the dark chaos. Some corpsmen had been wounded; the rest worked feverishly. Casualties had to be found in the dark, lit only by the flashing of minigun fire.

The mortaring had shattered Echo Company; choppered into Hiep Duc with seventy-five men, their numbers were nearly halved in the sixty-second raid. All the officers except the company commander, and all the sergeants except the gunny and one staff sergeant were gone on medevac choppers. Gunny Yohe, in fact, was one of the walking wounded; shell fragments had nicked his arm as he’d jumped from the CP trench and headed towards the company lines.

First light revealed the new shape of their lines. Blood-splattered ground, bloody bandages, torn flak jackets, helmets in the grass. Dead Marines were laid on a cargo net spread out on the ground, and other grunts piled up the discarded and lost equipment. Blood and pieces of flesh were plastered to the gear and to some C-ration cases stacked to one side of the clearing. The rising heat wave brought out the smell and the flies. The survivors were hollow-eyed and haggard, battered into numbness.

In that condition, they attacked.

Echo Company, under 1stLt Paul T. Lindsay, was to lead the westward advance. As the men saddled up in the flattened elephant grass, Lindsay had his doubts—one more time, they were walking undermanned into a hornets’ nest. He thought it would have been wiser to mass the battalion
and advance fifty meters at a time, thoroughly digging out the NVA in that area before advancing to the next parcel. He saw no sense in rushing to some slotted coordinates two kilometers forward of their lines. Lindsay’s opinion was worth something. Although he was young and just counting his days, he had plenty of combat time and was highly respected by his grunts. He was like them in many ways; salty, cocky towards his less-exposed superiors.

Lugger and Lindsay did not get along.

But in the recorded history of the Vietnam War, there is not a single instance of a Marine Corps unit refusing a combat mission.

The survivors of Echo pushed into the boiling paddies.

The platoon leader and platoon sergeant of Echo Three had been medevacked, so Gunnery Sergeant Yohe led them. He was up with the lead squad as they entered a clearing, and they got within thirty meters of the opposite tree line before the ambush began. A Marine dropped with a bullet in his arm. Yohe rolled to the kid, grabbed his M79 grenade launcher, and raised up just enough to pump rounds into the woods. He couldn’t see anything. Neither could anyone else, but they kept firing. Two Marines were shot in the chest as they did so. Three others also were wounded, victims of the first fusillade. Only Gunny Yohe and three others of the lead squad were unscathed.

Lieutenant Lindsay brought in the air support: Phantoms dropping napalm thirty meters from the squad, Cobras firing white phosphorus rockets into the trees. Under that cover, the lead squad was able to pull back. In the relative cover of the brush behind them, corpsmen pounded on the chests and gave heart massage to the two men with sucking chest wounds. Both died before the grunts could get them to a landing zone.

The push continued.

Echo had advanced five hundred meters. Fox, moving on Echo’s right flank, came under only sporadic sniper fire as they continued the push.

Then came the mortaring. PFC Lorne Collinson crouched behind a tree. The company, after having humped to a point along a stream where it thinned to a trickle one could hop over, had been taking a break when the shelling began. No matter. It wasn’t a heavy barrage, more a matter of harassment and delay, one round every couple of minutes.

The men could hear the thunk of the round leaving the tube; they were too weary even to be scared as they counted a few seconds, then
flattened in the undergrowth. Collinson took off his helmet and flak jacket in the heat and lay on them like a pillow as he kept a watch downstream. A young Marine in the company helicopter support team was not as relaxed. He had been dispatched unwillingly to the grunts from his shore party battalion, and he crouched bug-eyed behind a tree. His hands were sweaty around his M16 and he looked all around him, shouting to Collinson to watch out, man, watch out, the gooks could be anywhere!

Amused, Collinson shouted back, “No sweat!”

Stobie, another new guy, was not as rattled. He trudged past with a mumble, “I gotta take a dump.” When he came back from the bushes, he sat to talk. They were being too cocky; they never heard the next mortar round. Collinson was suddenly bounced up and thrown to the ground. He stood up, wobbly, ears ringing so loudly he couldn’t hear. The bush behind them was shredded and Stobie was still sitting there, leaning forward, helmet blown off. He put his hand to his head and blood rushed over his fingers. Collinson shouted for a corpsman as he took Stobie’s pressure bandage and wrapped it around his head. It quickly soaked red, so he pulled his out too. Then the corpsman who’d run up tied on a third.

There had been other casualties. A Sea Knight landed on a sandbar. Collinson helped Stobie down the bank, rambling on about nothing to keep him out of shock, even though he couldn’t hear his own words for the continuing ringing. A body lay in the sand, wrapped in a poncho, face covered.

The Sea Knight pulled up before the NVA could adjust their mortar tube, and the company got moving again single file atop a paddy dike. The grunts were spaced at twenty-five-yard intervals in case of another mortaring. There was a tree line to their right and an NVA was hunkered in it with an RPG launcher. He must have had plenty of ammunition because he started screaming off shells at individual Marines. He didn’t hit anybody, but the grunts began running hard down the dike, not even wasting time to fire back, as fireballs sailed between them in line and exploded in the next paddy.

A brushy knoll sat like an island in the middle of the field, where the Marines flopped amid the concealing shrubbery. An opening through a hedgerow led them back onto the dike and they got moving again, one man at a time sprinting out. Collinson got up to the opening when a grunt lying there said something. Collinson’s ears were still ringing,
so he bent down to hear the man—just as an RPG whooshed over them. It exploded harmlessly in the paddy, but Collinson mumbled, “Aw, Jesus!” as he dashed onto the dike.

That had been the last shot. The column returned to a walk.

Fox Company stopped in a tree line that elements of Echo Company had secured; it was approximately where the platoon had been surrounded the day before. Sniper fire kept everyone’s heads down, but this time they did not pull back. Collinson was nestled low in the bushes when several grunts moved past. They said they had seen two NVA on their flank and had fragged their spider hole; they showed off a pair of 1942 Westinghouse Rangefinder binoculars and a Soviet infrared sight for an RPG launcher.

Echo 2/7 was stalled.

Fox 2/7 was stalled.

With Colonel Codispoti on the radio demanding they reach the rendezvous coordinates regardless of casualties, Golf 2/7 was thrown into the attack. Previously, when Fox moved out, Golf had humped into the 2/7 CP to provide security; there they had received a resupply of C rations and oranges, plus mail and ammunition. When word came to advance, they left the CP site with two platoons in the lead, followed by Colonel Lugger and his staff, with the third platoon sewing up the rear.