PART
Chapter One
On the afternoon of 17 June 1969, LCpl Roger T. LaRue, of D Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, sat against the canvas seat of his helicopter. The interior of the CH46 Sea Knight was vibrating. LaRue’s seven partners sat facing each other. They wore camouflaged fatigues and bush hats; their hands and faces were streaked with green and black paint. K-Bar knives were taped upside down on shoulder harnesses for easy reach. Weapons were locked and loaded.
No one was saying much.
They had lifted off from Camp Reasoner, Da Nang, and they touched down—briefly—on the long spine of Charlie Ridge. The Recon Marines disembarked quickly, then crouched in the deep brush as the Sea Knight pulled out. The noise faded, the ship disappeared, and the silence and heat of the jungle took over. Sweat was already beginning to stain LaRue’s fatigues. He kneeled with the others, eyes flicking into the hillside of trees, hands tight around his stocky M79 grenade launcher.
Any North Vietnamese in eyeshot would have seen their hovering chopper, so the recon team moved out quickly. Their job was not to fight the enemy on this canopied mountain, but to find them and call in the firepower. This ridge line belonged to the North Vietnamese Army. That’s why the Marines travelled small and light. There was no room for slack, and the battalion had a catch phrase: If you can’t pack the gear, don’t ask for the job. LaRue fit in well. He was nineteen and dedicated. Most importantly, he was able to tune out most of his fear until the chopper set them back down at Camp Reasoner. There he would chain smoke; there he would drink himself numb.
On the third day of this patrol, they found it.
The point man led them down a two-hundred-foot escarpment. LaRue was the third one to the bottom. A thin stream cut through a ravine choked with vegetation. The point started towards the sound of running water and suddenly froze, silently raised his shotgun, and glanced back. LaRue caught the look in his eyes. He signalled the fourth man in line, the team radioman, to freeze. Then LaRue edged forward and crouched with the point and deuce among some creekside boulders. He peered through the overhanging foliage. Jesus! There were five North Vietnamese soldiers downstream, talking and laughing as they sunned themselves on a large, flat stone. Beyond them, the Marines could hear the singsong chatter of more Vietnamese. LaRue’s heart was pumping furiously. We’ve just stumbled into a goddamned base camp! The NVA on the rocks, casting a few glances in our direction, must think we’re some of their buddies coming back to camp, LaRue reckoned.
There was no way to climb back atop the ridge without being recognized, and little chance that the others could come down to help. Then LaRue noticed that the radioman was trying to do just that. The radioman—a quiet guy due to rotate home soon—carefully picked his way into the trap, propelled by some unspoken loyalty. He crouched behind their boulders, then calmly whispered into his handset, giving the NVA’s location and requesting immediate air support. The radioman’s name was Kiev Zoller, and LaRue had nothing but admiration for that Marine.
The radio hissed its answer: air on the way.
Minutes crawled by. The NVA sunning themselves kept looking in the Marines’ direction. Finally one picked up his AK47 automatic rifle and disappeared in the direction of the base camp. He came back accompanied by an NVA officer in gray fatigues and polished leather gear; the two strode directly towards the boulders, the officer in front drawing a 9mm Soviet pistol from its holster. The four Marines sucked air. The point gripped his shotgun, the deuce his M14 rifle; LaRue sighted down the stub barrel of his M79. Corporal Zoller held the radio mike with his left hand, his right hand sweaty around the pistol grip of his M16 rifle.
When the North Vietnamese were thirty feet away, the point man suddenly sprang into view, blasting off four incredibly quick shots from his pump gun before the NVA even realized what was happening. The NVA officer bounced off his feet and crashed back down into the brush six feet away, his chest and head pulverized. In the same instant, LaRue squeezed the trigger, felt the grenade launcher buck hard against his shoulder, saw the other North Vietnamese collapse.
The jungle erupted with return fire. LaRue tried to break open the M79 to reload, but his mind choked with panic. He could hear NVA moving at them. Oh God, no, we’re going to die. No way out. His hands shook uncontrollably; the breech wouldn’t budge. The point and deuce were firing furiously. LaRue finally slammed the weapon against his knee, pulled out the spent casing, dropped in another round, and snapped it shut. The safety stuck. He dropped the M79 in a panic and grabbed at his Colt .45, but the pistol holster was twisted around behind him. He couldn’t reach it. He grabbed the stock of Zoller’s M16, but Zoller refused to give it up. LaRue picked up the grenade launcher again, forced the safety off, aimed at the noises, and fired. The round spun from the barrel, but exploded short and blasted shrapnel back over the Marines’ heads. He reached into his ammunition bag and pumped off two more rounds. His terror began to evaporate as he got the M79 working. He became resigned to the fact that they were going to be overrun and killed, that there was no reason to fear the inevitable. All they could do was make themselves expensive; so, while the radioman calmly maintained his vigil calling for air support, the other three laid down enough fire to sound like a small army. LaRue pounded two rounds into a thick tree trunk above a gulley; the NVA who’d been sunning themselves had ducked there when the shooting started, and they did not reappear.
Over the cacophony, they distinguished the propeller buzz of two OV10 Bronco observation planes. Then the cool, reassuring drawl of a pilot came over the radio, “Coffee Time, Coffee Time, this is Cowpoke Three. I hear you got some problems with the little brown people. Well, just mark your pos with an airpanel and we’ll throw around some shit.” The Broncos came in under Zoller’s direction, strafing across the creek with 40mm automatic cannons and 7.62mm machine guns. On their last pass, they laid a grouping of white phosphorus rockets into the NVA camp. Behind them, a flight of F4 Phantom jets rolled in on the hot, white smoke curling up through the green canopy. The Marines hugged earth, palms tight against their ears, under the supersonic scream of dives and the convulsion and concussion of hundreds of pounds of exploding bombs.
In the confusion, the Marines who’d been atop the ridge during the firefight slipped down and they all headed down a trail away from the exploding chaos of the camp. They moved for five hours without rest, exhausted bodies spurred on by the knowledge of what would happen if they stopped. They paused once to fill canteens from a creek. They finally stopped when it was too dark to see. Every hour throughout the night they could hear the NVA firing single shots as signals between the hunting parties. When the first fuzz of daylight appeared, the team moved out again. From a field of green elephant grass, razor-sharp and reaching above their heads, they could see the sky become dotted with helicopters. A Sea Knight descended into the waving blades with its back cargo ramp down, door gunners tight behind their fifties. In moments, the recon team was aboard. Then they were up and out.
From December 1968 to December 1969, MajGen Ormond R. Simpson was commanding general, 1st Marine Division, headquartered on Hill 327 three kilometers west of the coastal city of Da Nang, Republic of Vietnam. General Simpson was described by one of his battalion commanders as “… a tall, rawboned Texan who loved his Marines, passionately. He loved to shake their hands, talk to them, find out where they were from and how they were getting along. His warmth was very real. I know he took the casualties hard, and he chose to sign off personally on a letter to every Purple Heart awardee. Some of his nights were very long.”
Simpson was a thoughtful man. When he looked at his rice paddy infantrymen, he reflected that Tarawa had been a nightmare but one that lasted ninety-six hours. And when it was over, it was over. Not so in Vietnam, and that was the peculiar hardship of this war. The young riflemen—the grunts—were not always fighting, but they were always out in the bush where the danger was omnipresent, the privations constant.
In 1969, the four regiments of the 1st Marine Division maintained a brutal routine of 1,000 patrols every twenty-four hours in their Tactical Area of Responsibility of the I Corps Tactical Zone.
The enemy could be anywhere at anytime.
Mostly, though, by the summer of 69, the ground war in South Vietnam had become most actively focused in the southern sector of the 1st MarDiv TAOR; this was where the border between Quang Nam and Quang Tin Provinces ran horizontally across the Que Son Mountains. The 1st Marine Division occupied Quang Nam, while the 23d Infantry Division (Americal), U.S. Army, occupied Quang Tin. In the mountains between them lived the 2d NVA Division. The mountains belonged to the enemy; from there, they kept the pressure on and the cost was almost constant. The area exacted a daily tax from the Marine battalions assigned to patrol it in the form of Viet Cong booby traps and snipers, a cost accentuated every month or two by clashes with battalions and regiments of North Vietnamese regulars.
The killing ground north of the Que Sons was called the An Hoa Basin. The Marine Corps had first landed at Red Beach, Da Nang, on 8 March 1965. It took until early 1966 to stabilize the villages around the city’s airfield sufficiently; then elements of the 3d Marine Division began pushing ten miles southwest into the fringes of An Hoa. Paddied flatlands stretched in from the coast, but mountains rose around the Basin; the Que Sons formed its western and southern frontiers, a spur called Charlie Ridge its northern. In October 1966, the 3d MarDiv HQ displaced north to Phu Bai from Da Nang, and the 1st MarDiv HQ moved north from Chu Lai to their vacated command bunker on Hill 327. In the An Hoa arid basin, it was a war of attrition, one operation always followed by another. Georgia. Liberty. Macon. Independence. Newcastle. Mameluke Thrust. Allen Brook. Henderson Hill. Taylor Common. Pipestone Canyon. The 2d NVA Division, and the numerous battalions that supported it, proved a tough adversary, but—although one could barely perceive it in those glaring, hot paddies—the Marine Corps was accomplishing its mission.
The U.S. Army, which had first moved into I Corps in April 1967 to reinforce the thin Marine line, was also solidly in place by 1969. The lowlands on the southern side of the Que Sons—the Hiep Duc and Song Chang Valleys—were protected by a string of fire bases manned by the 196th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division. Consequently, Hiep Duc was the Americal’s westernmost advance, as was the An Hoa Basin for the 1st Marine Division.
In 1969, the Arizona Territory, in the southern corner of the Basin, was the war’s bloodiest arena. At a time when the political watchwords were Vietnamization, Pacification, and Troop Withdrawal, the grunts in the Arizona were still operating Search & Destroy. Their’s was a stagnated war of attrition which, by 1969, was responsible for most of their casualties (USMC casualties in Vietnam would eventually exceed USMC casualties in WWII). The object was to keep hammering at the communist strongholds, and to maintain whatever gains had been made in four years of war. Da Nang had become the rear in the continuing effort to push the NVA away from the populated coastal lowlands. The farther from Da Nang, the more dangerous it became.
The latest encounter in the Arizona was with the 90th NVA Regiment in mid-June 1969. Elements of the 5th Marine Regiment suffered heavily, but they found a dead NVA battalion commander and a dead company commander; the shattered NVA regiment left more than three hundred bodies behind as it limped back to its mountain havens.
Contact tapered off dramatically after this battle. In fact, an unusual calm had settled over most of South Vietnam even before then, and newspapers referred to the Summer Lull. U.S. combat operations continued, men still died, but the NVA were not meeting them punch for punch. The NVA drifted back to their hideaways, and the meaning of this became a topic of political debate. On 8 June 1969, President Nixon had announced the gradual phase-out of U.S. units from the war zone. The discussions centered around dissecting the communist response: was the lull a sign from Ho Chi Minh that the Hanoi regime was more amiable to the new U.S. policy, that the stalled Paris peace talks had a chance for new life?
Major General Simpson would have begged to differ.
The 1st Recon, the eyes and ears of his division, was probing, slipping into Charlie Ridge and the Que Sons. The Recon Marines were more successful than Simpson had first imagined they could be, and their findings were vital (although not surprising)—the NVA were regrouping in strength. In response, in July 69, General Simpson launched another operation—Durham Peak—which saw the 5th Marines helicoptered into the Que Sons. To pick up the slack, the 7th Marines (Col Gildo S. Codispoti) were shifted south from their AO to cover the Arizona; meanwhile, Simpson coordinated with the Americal to screen the Hiep Duc Valley in case the NVA retreated from the 5th Marines in that direction. But Durham Peak was a dry run; the NVA disappeared into their honeycomb of caves and tunnels, even abandoning many of their supply caches and mountain base camps to avoid battle. The communists fought only when they thought they had the advantage.
It was not until the second week of August that the NVA came out of the woodwork. There was a flashpan of fighting all across South Vietnam that first night (including sappers in the wire at 1st MarDiv HQ and rockets on the Americal HQ); then the struggle centered on the Arizona and the Hiep Duc and Song Chang Valleys. It was an eighteen-day campaign (12–29 August), blandly labelled the 1969 Summer Offensive.
The 7th Marines were attacked in the Arizona.
Fire bases of the 196th Brigade, Americal, were hit by sappers.
Outnumbered 196th companies were surrounded in Hiep Duc and Song Chang, and the 7th Marines were committed to assist in halting the offensive, then in pursuing the retreating enemy.
U.S. firepower once again stymied the NVA.
The 1969 Summer Offensive would be another hard-fought American victory but, perhaps, not a resounding one. For one thing, the Marines were gradually committed to the battle. General Simpson noted, “Had we been able to turn the entire 1st Marine Division south, there would have been a far different and far better story to tell. However, this was never considered since we could never leave Da Nang uncovered.”
And there were some battlefield failures.
The NVA goal was, of course, to keep blunting the slow advance into their territory. And they hoped to make trouble extending beyond the battlefield: to kill and to keep killing Americans at a time when Nixon was talking Vietnamization, so that the national confusion and horror over the continuing body bags and amputees would finish what the North Vietnamese Army could only start. In 1969, the commanding general of the NVA admitted that more than a half-million men had been killed, ten times the total U.S. death list. The statistic was offered with a shrug: the number of dead meant nothing; the sacrifice was palatable, because motivation was what really counted. Washington had decided on a war of attrition to combat the communist invasion because they thought Hanoi would blink first. They were wrong.
The 1969 Summer Offensive was unlike many Vietnam campaigns only because of its mood. It was the first major engagement after the announcement of U.S. withdrawals. A new slogan was heard: Why be the last man killed in Vietnam? Such sentiments were rarely expressions of cowardice or antiwar protest. More simply, a cynicism that always had existed among the grunts about the validity of attrition tactics became crystallized. They knew they were leaving, and they knew the job wasn’t done. A spiritual malaise began to affect the entire war effort. “Nothing much of anything was decided by the summer campaign,” commented SP4 Bob Hodierne, U.S. Army combat photographer. “I don’t believe any Medals of Honor or court-martials for cowardice were its fruits. It, in fact, could be seen as painfully typical of the whole damn experience. Pain, death, little private acts of heroism and cowardice, individuals changed forever, and when it was done—what? As the GIs said, ‘Fuck it, it don’t mean nothin.’ ”
The grunts who fought the 1969 Summer Offensive were the smallest part of the Green Machine, the slim end of a funnel that yawned wide at the top. Only a relative handful did the actual fighting. For every grunt in the bush, there were from five to ten men supporting him in base camps. For this campaign, there were two anchors of command and support and both were located along Highway One on the coast: Da Nang for the 1st Marine Division and Chu Lai for the Americal Division. Both sites had been secured by the Marines in 1965; by 69, they were insulated by miles of barbed wire and guard towers, and within, living was physically comfortable. And boring.
An arc was drawn around Da Nang to indicate the maximum range of NVA 122mm and 140mm rockets; the 1st and 26th Marines conducted saturation patrols in this Rocket Belt. Base camps of the 5th and 7th Marines were sprinkled across the flatlands between Da Nang and An Hoa, bridges between the rear and the bush. Hill 55 (7th Marines Command Post) sat east of the northern tip of Charlie Ridge; the villages there were replete with guerrillas and the Marines jocularly nicknamed the area Dodge City. Rivers running down from the Que Sons twisted in several directions towards Hill 55, and numerous battalion base camps for the 7th Marines were constructed near the banks: Hill 10, Hill 37, Hill 65. A dirt road called Route 4 (or Thunder Road) ran west from Highway One to Charlie Ridge; smaller convoy roads radiated from it to connect the various bases.
Four miles south of Hill 55, the rivers isolated a stretch of land called Go Noi Island; it was a bleak, desperately hot place which resembled a moonscape covered with tall elephant grass. It had a bad reputation and there were no permanent positions on it. Nor were there any in the Arizona Territory. The Arizona was isolated too, blocked by the Que Sons to the south and west, the Song Thu Bon River to the east, and the Song Vu Gia River and Charlie Ridge to the north. Directly east across the Song Thu Bon was the An Hoa Combat Base (5th Marines Command Post); it was a red clay hill, circled by wire and bunkered in with four million sandbags. Since it sat at the base of the Que Sons, it was called Little Dienbienphu. Route 537 ran north from An Hoa to Dodge City, crossing a curve of the Song Thu Bon over Liberty Bridge. The bridge was the work of Navy Seabees; the perimeter compound, called Phu Lac 6 after a nearby hamlet, was an artillery fire base for the 11th Marines.
Morale in these cantonments was better than in places like Da Nang and Chu Lai. There were frequent rocket raids and infrequent sapper attacks, living conditions were more spartan, and there was enough to dispel complacency and forge some comradeship. But these base camps were also hot, boring, and dusty, and an occasional problem did crop up. A platoon leader noted some of the reasons:
The nature of the war dictated that there would be numerous fortified strongpoints, surrounded by no-man’s-land. Most of the rear echelon Marines were eighteen to twenty years old, surrounded by barbed wire with nothing to do except mundane, boring jobs. There was little entertainment or diversion, so oftentimes there would be problems in the rear. These could be booze, drugs, or racial. More often than not these problems resulted from boredom and idleness rather than viciousness or premeditation. By this I mean few people enlist in the Marines during wartime to smoke dope or raise hell in a little American island surrounded by barbed wire and rice paddies. But idle minds are the devil’s workshop. Now add to this the fact that the rifle companies dumped their pot heads and troublemakers back in the rear. To protect lives in combat, it was easier to send malcontents back to be supervised by the companies’ first sergeants and gunnery sergeants, who were generally less than sympathetic to any complaints that these castoffs would have. This is what usually caused fraggings.
Fragging was the nickname for assaults on superiors, usually with a fragmentation hand grenade. But such incidents were few and far between, and the real problem for the Marine Corps in 1969 was an undercurrent of black militancy. There existed a terrible frustration among many blacks that their deaths in Vietnam would serve no purpose, and that their place was really with the civil rights movement—or The Revolution—back home.
When LtCol Ray G. Kummerow assumed command of 3d Battalion, 7th Marines in August 1969, he encountered a smattering of this discontent. Kummerow, who was unusually attuned to the social revolution being exported to the battlefield, noticed the young black Marines arrived already extremely sensitive to any real or imagined discrimination. The battalion operations officer had created a Watch & Action group to investigate all charges of prejudice. Most were unfounded, but a few were not; for example, some officers and staff NCOs would not allow Black Power bracelets, made from woven bootlaces, but ignored the peace medallions worn by white grunts. To a certain percentage of blacks in 3/7 Marines, these incidents became their excuses for malingering.
For others, though, their alienation with the war effort was very real. For example, in November 1969, 3/7 was at LZ Ross preparing for an operation in the Que Sons. Prior to this, the battalion had been reduced to 600 men due to battle casualties and malaria, and Lieutenant Colonel Kummerow—himself a casualty of the Summer Offensive—had just hitchhiked back to Ross after recuperating on a hospital ship. Trouble was in the air. The battalion had just received 300 replacements from the 3d Marine Division, and half these men were black; they were bitter about being sent back to the bush while the rest of their former division sailed for Okinawa as part of the withdrawals. These were the Marines who organized a show of protest in one of the line companies. This particular company was known as a “brother killer”—during Operation Oklahoma Hills, a black grunt had to be dragged aboard a helicopter, and after landing in the bush he accidentally ran into the chopper blades and was killed. As this company formed up to go into the Que Sons again, sixteen blacks didn’t answer muster; a few even crept off to far corners of LZ Ross and disappeared in empty bunkers. Kummerow told the company commander to stand down and round up his missing men. The next day, they held a meeting in the fire base chapel. Kummerow noticed some of these blacks were the finest infantrymen in the company, and he had no doubt they were sincere. They felt that blacks were not only overrepresented in the bush,* but were given the most dangerous assignments by the company leaders—there was only one black officer in the entire battalion and he had no tolerance for such complaints—and that whites received most of the promotions and safer rear jobs. At this time, all Kummerow could do was to “… assure them that if they truly had a grievance it would be heard out by their chain of command, and if they didn’t get satisfaction, they had recourse at any level to request mast. I told them they were in trouble, but if they didn’t carry out their orders, they would be getting into deeper trouble. They believed and trusted me.” The company humped off LZ Ross that evening with these men back along.
On one hand, appropriate action was taken regarding specific charges made by the black Marines, and on the other, Kummerow handed out reductions in rank and fines to some of those involved. He discussed the case with General Simpson and Colonel Codispoti, and they agreed “… it was a tough problem and one for which there were no easy solutions. After the company went back to the field, Codispoti recommended no disciplinary action. I think he feared a reaction that would engender a situation worse than that which occurred, and wanted to cool it. I felt I had to do what I did to maintain the status of discipline in the battalion. There were many other Marines, white and black, who didn’t relish the hardships and dangers of patrol, and I didn’t want to invite anyone else to seek an easy out.”
Kummerow saw no other such incidents.
Mostly the men simply did their jobs. “Like going to work in the morning” is how Cpl Lee Dill put it. He was a tank commander with B Company, 1st Tank Battalion, and he spent the summer of 69 escorting supply convoys and minesweeps on the road between An Hoa and Liberty Bridge. He didn’t have much time to worry about anything but doing it right. When they burned down the road, which impregnated everything and everyone with red clay dust, Dill threw power to the black Marines and peace signs to the white Marines.
They had good team spirit and what problems occurred were usually the kind that seem funny later. Like the time in August of 69 when they were supposed to sweep to Liberty Bridge. Dill’s tank, Naturally Stoned, and another tank, Funky Ride, rolled to the An Hoa gate to pick up their infantry support and the minesweep team. They were late and, instead of the team, a staff sergeant showed up drunk and mumbling that “fuck it, we don’t need no support!” He climbed into the lead tank and ordered them to hit the road. Dill reluctantly followed in the second tank. They hauled ass as the sergeant did three-sixties in his turret. Over the radio, his crew sounded mortified. Off the road were some figures who turned out to be Marines but who, in the distance, looked like ARVN. The sergeant suddenly opened fire in their direction with his cupola-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. Dill gulped. Oh shit. He toyed with the idea of shooting the crazy man, but dismissed it. They finally reached the Phu Lac 6 compound, but old sarge didn’t even slow down. A truck was headed in their direction on the camp road and they passed just as the sergeant rotated his turret again, broadsiding the truck windshield with his 90mm gun tube. They parked on the perimeter and the battalion commander came on the radio, wanting to know what the hell was going on. Dill told him the truth, nervous about being involved with the colonel, even more concerned about the sergeant leering at him, drunk and pissed, his hand resting on his holster. Dill had a .45 on his hip too, and he was thinking, oh man, I ain’t believin’ this! Thankfully, though, sarge only stumbled back to his tank and fell asleep.
The next day he was busted and sent to the rear.
But no one was immune to the real war. One morning the supply convoy brought in new treads to the An Hoa tank park. The men stripped to the waist and spent the day sweating the treads into place with the same care and concern, Dill thought, of pit crews working on Indy cars. They took a break to cook steaks and drink warm Pepsis, and Dill talked with a tank driver named Schreckengost. He started walking away, had gone ten steps, when the air began screaming and he bounded for his tank. The Marine lying across the driver’s hatch was clutching at his bloody legs, and the tarp over the .50-cal. ammo in the gypsy rack was on fire. Goldstein put the fire out as Dill scrambled into his turret, screaming for a corpsman. In seconds, the 122mm rockets had stopped falling. That’s when they found Schreckengost, sprawled unconscious right where Dill had been talking with him; he had a hole in his chest. Jellerson bandaged the wound and they picked up Schreckengost to put him on the stretcher. They saw his back then. It had been blown wide open at the exit of the white-hot chunk of shrapnel. He died on the medevac.
Finally, there were the infantrymen, the grunts, the few who actually lived in the bush. It was not uncommon for rifle companies in the An Hoa Basin to go ninety days straight in the field, their only connection to the world the resupply chopper which came every four days. It was a dehumanizing existence where man became part of the wilderness, subject to the killing heat and chilling rains, to leeches, mosquitoes, and ringworms, where feet rotted and men died. Everyone hated the bush. Yet, it was the real Marine Corps out there. It was all in the bush. The chicken-shit harrassment fell away; the racial problems and the dope were put away for other places and other times. Some men became brothers, and virtually all had the solidarity of shared suffering and shared victories.
The grunts had a saying: For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected can never know. There was pride, cynicism, fatalism, comradeship.
Morale was at its best and worst in the bush.
In many ways, the grunts of the summer of 69 were the same manchildren who took Iwo Jima (the average age of Marine riflemen in WWII and Vietnam was nineteen). The courage was the same, but it was a vastly different war they were fighting. Sometimes the absurdities were all too plain, like the day 2dLt Bill Peters of D Company, 7th Marines, was pinned down with his platoon a klick west of Hill 65. They huddled behind the paddy dikes as a machine gun fired from the village ahead. Peters radioed for a mortar fire mission; a voice said negative, friendly ville in the area. Peters asked for the map coordinates of the village, then exclaimed at the answer, “That’s where they’re shooting at me from!” Too bad. The platoon pulled back then, and it left a bad taste in their mouths. Why are we so stupid, Peters asked himself in frustration; why do we force ourselves to fight like this?
It was a strange war and even though the grunts of 69 were proud, they were children of their times. And by then, the waters were very muddy. Sgt Bill Lowery joined C Company, 7th Marines in May 1969; he’d already pulled a 1966–67 tour in the An Hoa Basin, but it was like returning to a whole different war. The enthusiasm had drained like air from a tire, but everything was still pounding away, grinding viciously, but going nowhere. It was as if the machine was running for no other purpose than its own aggrandizement. It was a sick joke, Lowery thought. He looked at his new company commander, a precisely polished lieutenant, and had no doubts about the officer’s personal courage. But it was obvious he was building a career here; he wanted to win a medal and a promotion, so his radio talk was always formal and when the colonel was around he laid it on thick. When the lieutenant put Lowery in for the Silver Star, Lowery dismissed it as a ploy for the lieutenant’s own Silver Star to be approved.
All we did was our jobs, he thought; now everybody wants to window dress it.
He heard scout dogs in the Americal got Bronze Stars.
It seemed in 1969 that the second string had come to continue a game no one wanted to play anymore. The new grunts seemed hip to the farce and waste. Their hair was longer; the smell of marijuana drifted in the rear. Discipline was beginning to corrode. No one was fighting for God and Country anymore, they just wanted to survive. At least that was the opinion of Sergeant Lowery, and an emotional flak jacket formed around his soul. A dead Marine didn’t affect him anymore; it was more like a blown television tube that needed to be replaced. But he kept humping. To the powers that be it didn’t matter what went on under a man’s helmet, only that he do his duty. And, even in 1969, most never quit.
In this strange, controversial war, there was one constant which tied the grunts of 69 together with every generation of American soldier. Combat. The tools were slightly different, the emotions were not. S. L. A. Marshall once observed that combat most closely resembled a tumultuous playground in a tough neighborhood. A sense of order appeared only when the commanders, or the historians, pieced together all the fragments into an understandable package. When it was actually happening, no one really knew what was going on from one minute to the next.
Peters, a baby-faced second lieutenant with brown hair in a high crewcut, lost his first man eight days after getting his platoon. It was on a routine squad ambush near the Da Nang Rocket Belt, on a pitch-black night that poured a noisy rain. Peters joined them as they left the platoon perimeter and walked parallel to a brushy riverbank. Out of nowhere, there were hurried, jolting shots from the point, then a continuous exchange.
Peters clawed into the wet grass.
Everyone seemed to be on automatic. The platoon sergeant was up in moments, organizing a hasty defense. The grunts triggered return bursts through the rain. Peters crouched with his radioman, calling in support fire. He had always made a mistake with it at Basic School, had never done it for real before, but now he snapped all directions out correctly. He talked with the chief of the 81mm mortars on Hill 37, giving him his observer target line in degrees.
“What’s that in mils?”
“Seventeen-sixty,” Peters answered instantly. It was 100 degrees with 17.6 millimeters per degree. All his training was clicking right and he suddenly flashed to the time at Basic School when he complained to a captain that they did the same things over and over. The captain said that was so no matter how physically or mentally exhausted you were in combat, the things you needed to know to keep your people alive would be gut reactions. He was right. Peters brought the 81mm rounds in even as the VC firing died down; at the same time, he directed in artillery airburst rounds on the likely avenue of enemy withdrawal.
Their casualties were dragged back then and a Navy corpsman with an enormous mustache approached Peters. “Lieutenant, we got one dead, six wounded, and Doc Flashpool got shot in the chest. If we don’t get him out right now, he’s gonna die ’cause I can’t stop the bleeding.” The point man, a black kid, lay dead in the mud among the wounded. Peters crouched over Doc Flashpool, a nice, skinny kid, the only man among the casualties he really knew. “Doc, it’s the lieutenant. Are you okay?”
Flashpool suddenly grabbed the front of his T-shirt, pulling him closer. “Lieutenant, don’t let ’em do it. Don’t let ’em do it to me.”
“Do what, Doc?”
“Don’t let ’em bury me as a sailor. I’m not a fucking sailor. I’m a Marine! I want to be buried in a Marine uniform!”
“Doc, you’re not going to die. We’ve got a chopper inbound. We’re going to get you out of here.” Peters was saying what he was supposed to, but what he was thinking was—God, I’m twenty-one years old and I’ve got a nineteen-year-old kid hanging on me, giving me his death wish. Oh Christ, don’t let him die! He didn’t.
A medevac helicopter was overhead within minutes. Peters’s radioman walked into an open paddy to signal the orbiting chopper with a strobe light. That made him an outlined target to any enemy who might still be lurking, but someone had to do it. Among the grunts, bravery was often routine. No one opened fire, but the Sea Knight pilot said he had three lights in his sights. The radioman set a second light and the pilot responded, “Roger that.” The chopper touched down in the soggy, black paddy and in seconds it was lifting off, nose down, and disappearing into the rainy gloom with the dead and wounded aboard.
The platoon returned to the perimeter. Lieutenant Peters wrapped himself in his poncho. He did not allow poncho hootches at night for they presented a silhouetted target; so he lay in the rain, his head on his pack. Like every grunt in the platoon, his pack was ready to be shouldered at a moment’s notice, and his M16 rifle was beside it, semidry under another poncho. He listened to the drizzle, and he reflected. He was nervous as hell. But he also felt a certain calm, a realization that he had not panicked, probably would never panic. The job never got easy but Peters was beginning to realize what most Marines come to know: I can hack it.
The border between Quang Nam and Quang Tin Provinces ran a twisting but generally horizontal line from Laos to the South China Sea. The TAOR of the 1st Marine Division ended on the northern side of this line. The TAOR to the south was the responsibility of the U.S. Army and, in the summer of 69, that meant the 196th Infantry Brigade (Col Thomas H. Tackaberry) of the Americal Division (MG Lloyd B. Ramsey). The 196th had four line battalions: 2–1 Infantry to the north on LZ Ross and to the east near the coast on LZ Baldy; 3–21 and 4–31 Infantry in the center of the brigade area on LZs East, Center, West, and Siberia; and 1–46 Infantry to the south on LZ Professional. The other two brigades of the Americal Division operated even farther south in an area of guerrilla ambushes and booby traps; it was the 196th which made the nose-to-nose contacts with the communist regulars. There were two main areas of NVA infiltration in the 196th AO—both valleys below the Que Sons. Hiep Duc Valley consisted of cultivated rice fields with a Que Son spur (the Nui Chom ridge line) to the north and an unnamed spur to the south. This second spine provided the northern frontier for a deserted area called the Song Chang Valley for the river that ran through it.
Hiep Duc was the AO of the 4th Battalion of the 31st Infantry, Song Chang the AO of the 3d Battalion of the 21st Infantry; the battalion rears were at Landing Zone Baldy (along Highway One on the coast) but the grunt companies operated from small, bunkered hilltops along the southern ridge. They were situated successively inland across the forested spine: East, Center, West, and the fourth and newest fire base, Siberia, named in deference to its isolation and to the 31st Infantry Regiment’s combat expedition during the Russian Revolution. LZ Siberia was the last outpost into the Que Son Mountains, and it overlooked the Hiep Duc Resettlement Village. It was beautiful land, undulating down from the canopy of lush greenery to the artfully terraced rice fields. Everything was brilliantly green and alive and, because of its rambling thickness, very dangerous for men on ground patrol.
“It was forbidding terrain, the most scary I was ever in,” commented Capt Jerry Downey, a company commander and staff officer in the 196th InfBde. “One could feel the presence of the enemy or the ghosts of those who had gone before whenever one moved through. It was positively eerie.”
Many new ghosts would come in the summer of 69.
The hamlet where the Hiep Duc Resettlement Village was eventually erected had been overrun by the VC on 17 November 1965. Communist revolutionary justice took effect; as one reporter noted, “Officers who flew over the town Wednesday saw no sign of life. They saw the bodies of the district officials impaled on tall spikes around the headquarters building.” ARVN troops retook Hiep Duc after tough fighting, but due to a lack of manpower, they abandoned the prize.
It wasn’t until November 1967 that Operation Wheeler/Wallowa began finally to destroy the enemy stronghold. The push was spearheaded by the 1st Squadron, 1st Armored Cavalry, Americal Division, and supported by infantrymen of the 196th Brigade. Elements of the 1st Air Cavalry and 101st Airborne Divisions were also committed. Casualties were heavy but Hiep Duc was finally “pacified” in November 1968 after a final action along Nui Chom involving the 4–31. In March 1969, the civil affairs section of 4–31 had the Resettlement Village constructed in the ashes the NVA had left behind. LZ Siberia was also bulldozed out of the nearest hilltop for the village’s security, and the former inhabitants were trucked and helicoptered in from refugee camps at Tam Ky and Nui Loc Son. Others were forced in from the tiny hamlets that still dotted the valley. There were 4,000 residents and the place garnered the nickname Tin City because the bamboo huts were sided with U.S.-made tin sheets. For the first time since 1965, the farmers of Hiep Duc returned to their fields. The communists’ opinion of all this was made clear in May 1969, when sappers infiltrated the village and killed fifteen civilians. After that, enemy activity dropped to a low ebb and the 4–31, operating off LZ West and LZ Siberia, found little evidence of their presence. Direct defense for the village came from a small ARVN garrison on LZ Karen (located between West and Siberia on the ridge). The area, at least in MACV briefings, was being showcased as a model pacification zone.
That was overly optimistic; the NVA wanted this advance halted and the 1969 Summer Offensive would be one of the Americal’s toughest battles. The division had a spotted history. Among the men who wore the Southern Cross patch of the Americal Division were many brave and dedicated ones, but there were those who said the Americal was the worst component of the U.S. Army, Vietnam. The three brigades of the division had arrived piecemeal and the first in-country, the 196th InfBde, began its new war on a sour note. In its first major engagement—in War Zone C of Tay Ninh Province, III Corps—the brigade commander lost control of the heavy fighting and was removed from command. That was in November 1966; in April 1967, the 196th was airlifted to Chu Lai, where it operated under the auspices of Task Force Oregon with a brigade each from the 25th and 101st Divisions. In October, the 198th arrived by air and sea to Duc Pho, and in December, the 11th joined them. At this point, TF Oregon was dissolved and the union of the 11th, 196th, and 198th Infantry Brigades heralded the uncohesive rebirth of the Americal Division. The 11th had made an emergency deployment from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and its officers were generally marginal performers. The 198th had worse problems. It had been hastily formed from the armored divisions at Fort Hood, Texas; when unit commanders were instructed to release men for the new unit, they reportedly purged their worst troops.* The conglomeration became known, derisively, as the Dollar Ninety Eight Brigade.
SP4 Hodierne, U.S. Army photographer during the 69 Summer Offensive, was in 1967 a civilian reporter on hand for the Americal’s introduction to war. He wrote:
They were frighteningly green. I remember choppering in to some makeshift LZ near one of their first fights late one afternoon. The place was chaos, guys walking around in the open, supplies dumped everywhere. I headed up the trail where I was told the contact was. About fifty meters up the trail, guys are coming my way, running, dropping gear, just running full tilt. Retreat would dignify what they did. The next morning, we all went back up the trail to where they had been hit. I don’t remember much more than the body of a medic on top of a wounded guy he had been treating. It was clear to me they had fled, leaving their wounded behind. I didn’t have much use for the Americal Division. It scared me to go out with them.
Such a characterization does injustice to most of the men in the Americal. Still, the division operated with a sense of disorder and dispirit which set it apart from the rest of the U.S. Army. Continued Hodierne, “The Americal had conscripted enlisted men, rookie NCOs, ROTC and OCS platoon leaders who planned to do their three years and out, company commanders with little more experience than their platoon leaders, and field grade officers all looking to get their tickets punched in the hole that read, ‘combat command.’ It could not have been a starker contrast to the units I saw in 1966, outfits like the 101st Airborne or the 1st Air Cav. In those days, fully half the enlisted men were volunteers, the NCOs were seasoned pros, and the company commanders knew what they were doing.”
In addition, the Americal operated in one of the areas of South Vietnam where the population did not try to sit out the war, but where the people were the enemy. It was a brutal war of snipers, ambushes, and old women who planted booby traps—and where the Search & Destroy doctrine was most cruelly interpreted by frustrated and inexperienced U.S. forces.
My Lai tainted the entire division.
By 1969, the Americal Division was improved, but not shining. It now received its replacements like any other unit, and an effort was made to infuse better leadership; still, first impressions are lasting and the division’s initial reputation turned away many of the Army’s most ambitious and talented men. And, turning specifically to 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, 196th Infantry Brigade, to the men out on LZ West and LZ Siberia who would bear the brunt of the 1969 Summer Offensive in Hiep Duc Valley, there was another dilemma—stagnation. Since reclaiming the valley in November 1968, the Polar Bears, as the battalion called itself, had encountered little resistance. June of 69 had seen sappers in the wire at the 4–31 Rear on LZ Baldy, and the line companies had made a ten-day foray into the adjacent Song Chang Valley. That had been about it, though. Their patrols were generally quiet and, thus, routine; and routines are very dangerous in war.
They were to bleed for their rustiness.
PFC Charles Jandecka, who joined Bravo Company 4–31 in August 1969, began his tour at the Americal Division Combat Center on the beach at Chu Lai. He hated it. Their hootches were overcrowded and scurrying with rats. The days were occupied with introduction classes, but the nights were hot, loud with rock music, depressing, and menacing. Throngs of GIs roamed about looking for diversions; some were stoned, some drunk; troublemakers hunted for other troublemakers or for scared kids. Fistfights broke out. Grunts called these men REMFs. Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers.
But there was camaraderie out on LZ West and LZ Siberia. There were also men who arrived with a sense of duty. PFC Robert Bleier, who came to Charlie 4–31 in May 1969, was one of them. A Notre Dame football star and a professional with the Pittsburgh Steelers, he hadn’t joined the reserves fast enough to beat his draft notice. Mouthing the right cliches, he could have resisted it fashionably, but he didn’t. Instead he thought, how could I explain shirking out to a son I may someday have? The battalion surgeon on LZ West remembered him for what he did not do. Of all the GIs lining up at his medical bunker looking for a way out of the field, Rocky Bleier, who had good reason to bitch, was never one of them. Such devotion could be tempered. The first afternoon Bleier arrived at LZ West as a replacement on a resupply bird, several GIs took him aside. They asked if he was a head or a juicer. Bewildered, he answered, “Well, I like to have an occasional martini, you know, on the rocks with an olive.” They laughed. They said marijuana was on the decline, although at a recent pot party in the perimeter bunkers interrupted by NVA sappers, several American soldiers had died because they let their boring surroundings override their common sense.
The NVA regulars were trying to avoid a fight and Charlie Company’s sweeps found little action. The men looked at patrolling as hot, trudging, and useless. Bleier saw more than one GI drop his rucksack during a rest break and kick it, screaming helplessly, “You goddamn green monkey! You sonuvabitch, you’ve been kicking my ass all day, now I’m going to kick yours!”
That was good for a laugh, good for morale. Other forms of catharsis were not. Bleier’s platoon chased a running figure into a tree line. There they found several hootches and some people—one of the little groups that lived free of the wire-enclosed Resettlement Village—who probably supported the local NVA and VC with rice and places to hide. The GIs exploded. They fragged the family bunkers, then started burning the thatch hootches; the women wailed hysterically as their few belongings were consumed in the fire. Bleier could only think, this is absurd. One of the GIs grabbed an old papasan, kneed him in the crotch, then bashed him on the head with the butt of his M16. The man dropped to his knees in agony, and the kid screamed at him, “You motherfucking, slant-eyed dink! You’re the reason we’re over here!”
Some of the Polar Bears were getting flaky. Patrols were faked. GIs assigned to listening posts off the LZs often just holed up in an empty perimeter bunker. Men fell asleep on guard duty in the bush even though sometimes when they moved out the next morning, they found their claymore mines turned around to face them and the trip handles of flares secured with string. Ammunition was quietly tossed into the brush on patrols to lighten the load. Shamming became popular because it was mildly punished at best; GIs could stretch out R and Rs for days by hanging with buddies in the rear. So could men who dreamed up any excuse to get out of the bush for awhile.
“It was a ludicrous way to run a war,” Bleier wrote.
SP4 Barry Parsons rotated to Alpha 4–31 in April 1969, after three months as a security guard in Chu Lai. He described ten of their hard, drab days in and around Landing Zone West in his pocket diary:
Beginning to hate Jim Dean more everyday. Matt is a pain in the ass too. If he doesn’t watch him he’ll be walking around with a busted mouth.… They sure do like to hassel you up here on LZ West. The CO jumped in Sticks shit & mine. Told us both to shave off our side burns. They finally had memorial services for those two fellows who were killed.… We’re walking a little over 6 klicks one way. Down Nui Liet. What an ass kicking walk it was. All of us are burning up from the sun. When we were at the top of Nui Liet the CO told us to go back down the hill again to the same place. 3 Dinks were spotted there. Boy was everyone mad about it. A lot of us didn’t want to go at all, and LT Rice almost had a mutiny on his hands. CO wouldn’t even drop us in water or food either. That really gave everybody the ass. Walked down and everybody is either sick or getting there. Got almost to our position when guys started falling out left and right.… Our squad almost got caught not going out on LP last night by LT Rice and Top Price. They walked right pass Sticks and didn’t see him. I thought it was all over for us.… Pat and I are taking out the LP tonight. Probably go to Bunker 29 too. We waited for Pat to show up but at 9:00 we went down to B-29 without him. Finally he came down all fucked up on pot. Rayborn crashed on guard twice last night which gave me the ass. He could have gotten us all in trouble.… By the way they act you’d think it was stateside up on a LZ.… Today is just another detail like always, and we’re still working on wire laying.… Sometimes a fellow can get real depressed over here in Nam. It’s the same routine every day.
These men were draftees, but they were not antiwar. They saw problems in their units but did not consider them on the verge of collapse. Sure, we smoke Mary Jane on the LZs, Parsons reckoned, but there’s a time and place for everything. He saw only one man in his platoon smoke grass in the bush; some GIs caught him and punched him around.
SP5 Joseph Kralich, a conscientious objector and senior battalion medic, noted that once the battle started, malingering stopped. He saw only one patient on LZ West who was not physically injured: the man’s best friend had been killed with him in one of the first, violent contacts, and he was in a trance. As for the rest, Kralich commented, “Most were tired and in physical and emotional pain, but still resolved to survive. Out of water, ammo, and medical supplies, they were forced to survive on instinct and training, but with solid leadership being there when called upon.”
Combat finally turned many of them into real soldiers.
“Considering the conditions and horrendous odds,” Private Jandecka wrote after the summer battles, “the men of 4–31 performed markedly well. In spite of their battle weary condition, the men followed orders faithfully. Oh yes, often with much grumbling but always as ordered.”
On 23 February 1969, the NVA staged a midnight sapper attack on the 1st MarDiv HQ and 26th Marines CP on Division Ridge. They breached the wire and captured several bunkers, but were driven off after a night of close combat. At the same time, NVA and VC units attempting to sever Highway One were beaten back by the 1st Marines and the 1st Military Police Battalion. Other NVA units approaching Da Nang under cover of these attacks were intercepted by the 7th Marines and routed after a brutal, three-day battle which included hand-to-hand combat.
On 19 March, NVA sappers and infantry breached the wire at Liberty Bridge, manned by a company of 1/5 and an artillery battery of 2/11, and gutted three bunkers with flamethrowers before a heroic, hasty counterattack plugged the gap and artillery fire was brought to bear at point-blank range.
On 31 March, the 7th Marines began Operation Oklahoma Hills, an eight-week foray into and around Charlie Ridge. At the same time, on 29 April, B and D Companies of the regiment conducted a bloody foray into the Arizona.
On 9 May, the 5th Marines executed an expert deployment around a large NVA unit moving through the Arizona, then devastated them with air and arty. (“We caught them with their pants down,” said 2dLt James Webb, platoon leader with D/1/5. “Our FO was calling for artillery on four hundred NVA and he was sixth on the priority list!” After recovering, the NVA struck back at the isolated companies; this was later immortalized in Webb’s novel, Fields of Fire, and it was the day his Marine called Snake posthumously won the Navy Cross for dragging wounded men through a withering crossfire.) The battle lasted three days.
On 7 June, the 90th NVA Regiment attacked 1/5 Marines in the Arizona, sparking a week-long battle. The NVA retreated to Charlie Ridge.
What followed those four months of sustained activity was called the Summer Lull. It was during this time that the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division, under the command of LtCol John A. Dowd, crossed the Song Vu Gia into the Arizona Territory. Their operation continued through the last six weeks of the lull; then the 1969 Summer Offensive almost buried them.
* This was true for these men, and many blacks concluded from such personal observations that their sacrifice was out of proportion to their numbers in society. Many thought this was no accident; however, of those who died in Vietnam, 12.5 percent were black while 86.3 percent were white. This corresponded roughly to racial demographics in the United States.
* Captain Downey noted another initial problem. “There was a rumor, one I was never able to substantiate, that the Americal had received the bulk of McNamara’s Hundred Thousand, troops of very low IQ who had been drafted to take the place of those able-bodied men who had run to Canada and Sweden.” To carry this further, these were the men most prone to getting themselves killed and committing atrocities.