Death Valley (9 page)

Within days, the experiment disintegrated. People did not return at the end of the work day and others crept off to return to old homes, more concerned with what the VC could do to them than what the Americans could do for them. A few days later, the inexperienced captain walked onto a bouncing betty mine.

He was medevacked minus one leg.

Not long after that, on 28 July, Lieutenant Orefice became a casualty himself. His platoon was manning an observation post on the river below Hill 55; there were bunkers, a watchtower, and concertina wire. Just before dawn, it was Orefice’s turn on watch. It was incredibly boring and, at first, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. There was something in the paddies two hundred meters away. He stared harder and the scene suddenly focused. Gooks! They appeared to be setting a booby trap. Orefice radioed for a fire mission but Captain Stanat went by the book: it was a restricted fire zone because of the villages, and he needed a clearer sighting to ensure the silhouettes were actually VC before 81mm mortars or artillery could be employed. Within minutes, though, another platoon in M Company took sniper fire and the radio net became crowded with their requests for fire support. Orefice took the opportunity to employ his platoon’s own 60mm mortar. Then he took out a squad. A hundred meters from the kill zone, they paused to recon by fire with M16s and M79s; there was still no response. When
they finally swept in, they found a mortar round and two booby traps abandoned in the field.

The squad set up a hasty perimeter so they could destroy their finds. No sweat, Orefice thought; whoever was here is long gone. The squad leader, Corporal Smith, wasn’t so sure. He was a sharp, young man with much time in the bush and he checked out a nearby path with his M16 at the ready.

Orefice walked after him, calling, “Hey, Smitty, don’t go out there. Come on back inside here. Cool it, will ya.”

In that instant, Orefice saw the filament wire, barely visible in the dawn light, just in front of Smith’s foot. He knew exactly what it was: a trip wire staked across the path, connected in the roadside brush to a grenade tucked inside a C rat can, pin removed, safety spoon held in place by the can. Tug the wire, knock the frag from the can, and the spoon pops. Smith was right on it and Orefice was shouting and diving at the same time. “Booby trap!” There was an explosion, then Orefice jumped back up, shaking, and quickly patted himself for wounds. He found none. He rushed to Smith. His legs were shredded and he was dying. Behind them, the radioman was screaming. Orefice rushed back to him as others bent over Smith. The radioman’s flak jacket was hanging open and a piece of shrapnel had slashed his stomach. A loop of intestine squeezed out and the kid was wide-eyed and mumbling. The corpsman knelt beside him, talking him out of his shock and pouring a canteen of water over the exposed guts so they wouldn’t dry out.

They were waiting for the medevacs when one of the grunts told Orefice there was blood running from his cheek and mouth. He tentatively touched his face and discovered that a pellet-sized piece of shrapnel had pierced his cheek, chipped a tooth, and lodged in his tongue. Orefice joined his two casualties on the Sea Knight and ended up at the 1st Medical Battalion in Da Nang. The doctor stitched his cheek, left the shrapnel in his swollen tongue, and gave him a bottle of antiseptic to gargle with.

Within twenty-four hours, he was back in the bush.

Three days later, on 2 August, his platoon was detailed to conduct a predawn cordon around Chau Son 2. At daybreak, another platoon would escort in an intelligence team to question the villagers. Everything went smoothly, so well, in fact, that a VC sleeping in the ville didn’t realize he was surrounded until the intelligence team strolled in. He shot the team leader with a pistol, then bounded off into the brush.
The terrain swallowed him. Orefice heard the hurried exchange of fire, then was radioed to move in and secure an LZ for the medevac. By the time he arrived, the team leader, a black warrant officer, had been bandaged and he was smiling. The wound was small, a clean shot through his arm, and it was the man’s second tour. Million dollar wound, he was saying. The medevac landed near the village, in and out without problem, then Orefice’s platoon searched the place. They found the opening to a small tunnel. They dug around it a bit but it was too small for Torres, their tunnel rat, to get into so they could only pop in a few CS grenades and move on.

Torres took the point as they left the ville, the platoon following in file. It was just another hot day. They were walking up a grassy knoll when an explosion came out of nowhere, enveloping Orefice in a sudden blast of noise, concussion, hot wind, and pain. His M16 was blown from his hands, but after the explosion he realized he was still on his feet, wobbly, singed, but still standing. Pain pulsed through his body. His left arm hung useless, a piece of the forearm suddenly gone, the bone broken. A chunk of shrapnel the size of a golf ball burned fiercely in his lower right leg. Smaller bits of metal had nicked his arms, legs, and face, and some of the red-hot pieces were embedded in his flak jacket, smoke curling from them. Thank God I had it buttoned up, Orefice thought through the haze; then he felt something warm and wet in his crotch. A corpsman and a grunt helped Orefice to the top of the hill, where Staff Sergeant Hebert was deploying the men into a hasty perimeter. They helped him sit down; then the corpsman unbuttoned his trousers. Orefice stared horrified as the doc wrapped gauze around his penis. A chunk of flesh had been torn off, and it was like trying to patch a garden hose. Each layer of gauze instantly soaked crimson.

Within the hour, Orefice and Torres were medevacked to the U.S.S.
Repose
, anchored in Da Nang Bay. The Sea Knight landed on the deck pad, corpsmen hustled them off on litters, and they ended up side by side on stainless steel tables. The air conditioner was on full, the steel was like ice, and the two naked grunts, used to hundred degree heat, couldn’t help but shiver violently. They started talking to keep their minds off the pain and the cold, joking about having a good vacation in the hospital. Orefice liked Torres. He was a little guy with dark skin and curly hair—a quiet, respectful, gutsy kid. Whenever they found a tunnel, he was the one who stripped off his helmet and flak jacket, got a .45 and a flashlight, and climbed in. He was small enough to fit into
the Vietnamese tunnels, so small, in fact, that his flak jacket hung low even when it was zipped up. That’s where he’d been hit, a single piece in the upper chest. It didn’t look too bad.

The next day, Orefice was stitched up and in bed. He asked the doctor about seeing Torres; the doctor said he was dead. Orefice could feel something drain in him. Why had Torres died? It had been only a single piece of shrapnel in the place where his flak jacket didn’t fit.

On 5 August 1969, things began happening to the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines in the Arizona. At twilight that evening, Lieutenant Colonel Dowd and his radioman, Lance Corporal Wells, sat in the trampled grass of the CP, quietly monitoring the radios. Wells was down to his blue jean cutoffs and his jungle boots in the night heat, finally relaxing. The day had been another bummer of humping to a new location on the Hot Dog, then unpacking and digging in. Poncho hootches were up, fighting holes ringed the perimeter, and everyone was unwinding, eating Cs, smoking, sleeping in the raw earth.

The first explosion impacted right to their front.

Dowd and Wells bolted up, and the colonel turned to him, “Call Charlie Company and find out what’s going on.” Wells picked up the hand mike and, thirty feet behind him, a mortar round exploded—the same instant that AK rounds began zipping overhead. For a second, everything seemed paralyzed. Then in an unthinking lunge, Wells hurled himself into a slit trench in front of them. He instantly realized he’d left his radio and jumped up, grabbed it, and slammed back into the trench. He became tangled in a bush but couldn’t even feel the stickers. Lieutenant Colonel Dowd bounded into view within seconds, jumping, hitting the edge of the trench, and tumbling in. Right behind the colonel, the rest of the battalion staff clambered in.

Dowd took the radio, so Wells crawled back to his foxhole, grabbed his M16 rifle, and put on his flak jacket and helmet.

The firing had stopped.

The NVA must have had the CP knoll mapped out because, in one quick volley, they placed twenty rounds of 60mm mortar, RPG, and M79 fire, and several hundred AK47 rounds right into it. Just as quickly, Marines on the perimeter fired at muzzle flashes, the mortar crews pumped out illumination, and it was quickly ended. Men on the hill were shouting
now. There were moans. Wells’s poncho hootch was blown down. The one beside his, the corpsmen’s, had taken a direct hit and torn ponchos, helmets, plasma bottles, and gear were scattered in the dirt. Three corps-men were sprawled in the wreckage. Wells and a sergeant named Herb, also from the Communications Platoon, carried one of the corpsmen to a trench. He was hit in the ass and grazed in the head; a surviving corpsman patched him up by flashlight. Wells and Herb held a poncho over them so no NVA marksman could zero in on the light.

A Marine turned on a strobe for the medevac, and the Sea Knight came in lights off, as gunships fired into the tree lines as cover. Wells held up one end of a poncho litter and hustled towards the cargo ramp, convinced the NVA were going to cut loose with an RPG any second. A supply man, peppered with shrapnel, was in the poncho and a corpsman trotted beside them carefully holding up a plasma IV. The Sea Knight pulled out, the NVA did not fire, and Wells suddenly noticed it was pitch black.

It had gone from dusk to dark in a flash.

Two hours before midnight the next night, a couple Chicom grenades were tossed into Alpha Company’s lines, wounding two Marines. Their injuries were minor enough so they could wait until daylight for medevac. Several hours later, a Marine from Alpha was killed. He’d been on guard in a two-man hole when he had to take a piss. He walked a few yards into the brush and was coming back when his sleeping buddy startled awake and fired his M16 at the noise on the perimeter. The man who’d done the shooting was walked up to the CP by some grunts. Wells awoke to hear the Marine hysterically sobbing that he’d killed his buddy.

He too was slated for a medevac.

On the evening of 10 August, PFC Charly Besardi and PFC Tom Bailey were walking point for 3d Platoon, Lima Company, 3d Battalion, 7th Marines. They were in Dodge City, following a path below Charlie Ridge. The sun was setting behind the mountain and, in the hazy silhouettes of twilight, Besardi suddenly noticed the movement. A hundred meters ahead, men were crossing the path, north to south, one right after the other; he could just make out the outlines of pith helmets, packs, AK47s, and RPG launchers. It seemed there were hundreds of them.

Besardi and Bailey hustled back to the rest of the platoon. The
platoon leader, 2dLt Jeff Ronald, quickly got the men on line across the dirt road and everyone cut loose at the same time. Red tracers whizzed towards the silhouettes and, instantly, the NVA on the road bolted and disappeared. In seconds, fire was being returned from deep within the roadside thickets. Explosions began bursting about forty feet ahead of them. Besardi noticed his buddy Vaughn to his right, firing an M79. He called to him in his clipped Massachusetts accent, “Vaughn, shoot that seventy-nine out farther, man! You’re shootin’ ’em too short!”

Sergeant Fuller, the platoon sergeant, shouted back amused, “You stupid asshole, Besardi, those are RPGs being thrown in on us!”

In the middle of it all, Marines started laughing.

The firing lasted maybe thirty minutes, a noisy exchange that claimed no Marine casualties. It finally ended when the last of the NVA fell back into the night. A flare ship droned overhead, turning the fields into a stadium, and word was passed for Besardi’s squad to sweep forward and make the body count. He almost balked in fear: nine Marines strolling into hundreds of North Vietnamese! They waded forward through the thick brush under the weird light, and Besardi noticed that Lieutenant Ronald and Sergeant Fuller were with them. His fear did not evaporate then, but his hesitation did. He looked upon them much like older brothers he wanted to impress. They always did right by the platoon, took more than their share of chances, and, although Besardi was convinced they were all going to be killed, the idea of refusing them was unfathomable.

No one died. The NVA were gone, leaving only a few pith helmets and packs. In the morning, the platoon searched along the road and up into the foothills of Charlie Ridge. They found at least part of what they were looking for: three NVA stragglers sitting in the brush of a creek bed, eating rice, their packs unshouldered beside them. The lead squad opened fire and, in that screaming instant, one of the NVA lurched violently while the other two rolled, grabbed their AK47s, and bounded into the brush. Besardi saw one dash down the creek, splashing through the shallow water, and he lunged after him. Besardi wasn’t thinking; it was all just go, go, go, get the bastard! The NVA lost his helmet as he tried to clamber over the creek berm and into the thickets. He was forty feet away. Besardi halted in the middle of the creek, firing his M16 madly at the scrambling figure. The NVA slammed face first into the embankment, dropping his AK. Besardi’s M16 suddenly jammed. He frantically tugged at the bolt, trying to clear it.