Chapter Eighteen
If events had gone according to plan, PFC Charly Besardi of Lima Company, 3d Battalion, 7th Marines would have missed his battalion’s redeployment to the Hiep Duc Valley. Two days before the move, Besardi was choppered out of the field, sharing the ride with a wounded NVA prisoner, to attend Mine & Booby Trap School at 1st MarDiv HQ. The chopper was supposed to stop first at LZ Baldy so Besardi could collect his orders from the company office, but it flew directly to Da Nang. Besardi showed up, nonetheless, and was told he had to have the paperwork to get into the school. By the rules, he should have spent the night in a transit hootch at Division Rear. Besardi wanted nothing to do with the lifers and new guys there, so he talked his way into the R and R Center where accommodations were better.
The next morning, he caught a chopper back to LZ Baldy and arrived, showered and rested, at the company hootch. The clerk told him it was too late for the school; the entire battalion was saddling up for a move and he should stay at Baldy. Besardi looked up the company supply sergeant, a good dude, and they bullshitted the night away. They ran a few joints, laughed, told jokes, and for a few hours forgot where they were.
“Geez, Charly,” the supply sergeant sighed, “this is one of the first times I’ve laughed in a long, long time.”
Besardi felt the same way.
He’d come to the Marine Corps the summer after high school, a rough truck driver’s son who grew up with rats in the backyard, neighborhood baseball after school, and girls in the backseat. War seemed like some kind of rah-rah adventure and he and three street buddies signed up. Parris Island was the first slap of reality. Oh my God, what are these people made of, Besardi thought as the drill instructors raged; they’re from another planet come down to kill us! He followed the impersonal conduit to Vietnam; twelve weeks of boot camp, seven weeks of infantry training, four weeks of staging, then the final jet ride.
As the plane descended into Da Nang, Besardi had enough insight to realize that what he was seeing was not really Vietnam.
It became Vietnam to him only after two days of in-processing, of seeing hollow-eyed grunts in weathered fatigues and hearing the steady thump of choppers landing at the NSA hospital. On the third day, Besardi was trucked with forty other replacements to the 7th Marines CP on Hill 55, where a colonel told them bluntly what the area was like and what was expected of them. He ended his talk, “Fifty percent of you people in the first thirty days will be killed or wounded.” From Hill 55, Besardi was trucked to battalion base camp on Hill 10; in the morning, a rocket raid sent him diving head first into a bunker, where he thought, I’m here, this ain’t Vietnam no more, this is the fucking Nam. Within two weeks of joining Lima Company, he was humping along Charlie Ridge on Operation Oklahoma Hills. He was scared, feeling useless. On his first ambush patrol, he walked tail-end-charlie; as they set in, a grunt whispered harshly to him, “You make sure no one was following us? I’ll fucking kill you if anybody was following us.” He sounded as though he meant it. Besardi kept his mouth shut and his eyes and ears open; by the time Lima Company came off Oklahoma Hills, he was walking point.
He was a grunt now, and a different person. The killing had done that. He was on point with his buddy Bailey when they heard music in a tree line. Incredulous, they crept up into it and saw some Vietnamese taking a siesta in hammocks; a radio was playing. There were four men and two women; AK47s were leaning against a tree. Besardi and Bailey didn’t even wait for the platoon to catch up. They crashed in, screaming and firing. In seconds, two of the men and one of the women were dead, the rest wounded. Besardi stood over one who was writhing with two M16 rounds in his stomach, thinking vindictively, wow, man, you’re going to fucking die! Then, mournfully: why? The killing came too easily. Worse, for Besardi, it was as if they killed and suffered in a vacuum, without rhyme or reason. On a patrol in the Que Sons, they had come across an old woman and a little kid who gave them bananas while they paused near their hootch. They had received instructions to destroy the woman’s rice lest the NVA confiscate it, so they lugged her rice baskets to a nearby stream and dumped them. When the patrol leader said to burn the hootch, Besardi had exploded, “What, are you fucking crazy!” The corporal had been disgusted too. “It ain’t me, it’s the people up there.” They had torched the hootch with their Zippos and left, no one saying much, Besardi thinking, this is for nothing, what are we really trying to accomplish?
He hardened. He was walking point the day in Dodge City when Terry tripped a booby-trapped frag. Terry collapsed, screaming, and Mayhan the radioman was unconscious, his legs and crotch ragged with red-hot shrapnel. The corpsman, Doc Johnson, worked furiously on Mayhan, tying bandages, using mouth to mouth to keep him alive until the medevac clattered in. They were running patrols off Hill 37 then, between Oklahoma Hills and the move to LZ Baldy, coming back each time dusty and exhausted. They rotated, out for four days and three nights, then back to Hill 37 for an afternoon and night of rest. When they came in, they wanted to rest, to talk, to smoke their pot. The company gunnery sergeant wanted cigarette butts policed up, trousers bloused, jungle boots shined. He screamed his demands. One night, someone rolled a frag under the gunny’s hootch. He survived and was medevacked.
Yet Besardi was touched sometimes by the war and a new sense of self respect, but mostly by the people. He barely knew his father when he left; life seemed to offer only some punk job and people looking out for number one. Lima Company gave him something he never had. The grunts were the best people he ever knew. Besardi cursed them. The kindest word he had for his buddy, P. K. Smith, when he saw him sweating along under bandoliers of M60 ammunition, was a laugh, “Fuck you, Smith, you ain’t never getting that gun. You’re gonna be an ammo humper the rest of your tour!”
He loved P. K. Smith.
In the Que Sons, Besardi came down with malaria, but the company had to keep walking to find a medevac landing zone. One of the new guys—a dude from New York who came across originally as a conniving bastard—voluntarily shouldered Besardi’s pack as they walked. A lieutenant from the company headquarters took his rifle and ammo.
He loved them all.
By the time the battalion was saddling up to move into Hiep Duc, Besardi had been with the company, almost constantly in the bush, for a hundred and seventy days. The Hiep Duc Valley was bad, as his friend, the supply sergeant, had been trying to warn him. 2/7 had gone in first, was still out there, and for four days the choppers had been coming into the medical detachment on Landing Zone Baldy. The sergeant had watched from the airstrip as the dead Marines were stacked in trucks. The sergeant shook Besardi’s hand, hugged him, looked him in the face. “You take care out there.”
On the morning of 26 August 1969, Lieutenant Colonel Kummerow, CO, 3/7 Marines, was summoned to Colonel Codispoti’s forward command post on LZ West. From there they helicoptered to the 2/7 CP in Hiep Duc Valley. Kummerow once described Codispoti, with respect, as “… square in stature, his arms hung to his knees, and he was covered with curly hair, giving him much the appearance of a Neanderthal man. When he attempted to smile, he bared two rows of huge, yellowed teeth in more of a grimace than a grin.” Codispoti struck Kummerow as a warrior able to weather the worst. As they conferred, 2/7 was calling in artillery fire and recovering nine of the men left behind in the previous day’s debacle. It was shattering to see the dead Marines being carried back into the perimeter. Codispoti decided on the spot to replace 2/7 with 3/7.
Kummerow helicoptered back to LZ Baldy; on the morning of 27 August, he and his jump CP choppered back to LZ West to conduct final preparations as giant CH53 Sea Stallions deposited the rifle companies on the dusty staging point. They were flown in at intervals.
I Company (1stLt R. W. Ramage) was lifted out from a sweep of Barrier Island east of LZ Baldy.
K Company (1stLt T. B. Edwards) was fifteen klicks from Baldy when word came to return. It was midnight; they had destroyed a two-ton rice cache they’d uncovered, then made a forced march. They had walked in the Baldy perimeter at 0800, dropped their gear, and had just sat down in the mess hall when the company gunny said they were saddling up again in one hour.
L Company (1stLt J. F. Bender) was flown in from the field.
M Company (Capt C. W. J. Stanat) had been trucked to LZ Baldy from the bush,* then flown to LZ West.
The Marines gathering on Landing Zone West had been humping hard for weeks on end, and they had no time to rest before being committed to the latest action. They wearily sat in clumps around the Army bunkers, weighted under flak jackets, packs, and ammunition, helmets replaced with battered fatigue covers; they barely moved, but the noontime glare drenched them with sweat and the sheets of dust from the LZ coated them. They had no idea why they were being pushed so hard, and they were pissed off and nervous. Mostly, the grunts were bone-weary.
Because of the 12.7mm AAA fire covering the valley, Codispoti and Kummerow decided 3/7 would have to hump off the mountain rather than risk it in choppers. The hill was 445 meters high; Henry and Lee noted there were good trails down to the valley floor, and lent the Marines their Echo Recon Platoon. They pushed off at noon, but no trails were visible; instead, the point became immersed in high elephant grass. The Army platoon apparently had not been briefed on their specific mission, so Kummerow finally had them pulled back to West; his column, following compass azimuths, kept pushing downhill through the tangle. It was brutal going. Marines who fell out from the heat or who tripped and bruised themselves sat in the brush to recuperate, then tagged along at the rear of their company files. Corpsmen hooked IVs to the heat casualties who could not be revived, and medevacked them aboard the resupply helicopters that landed in clearings along the mountainside. The birds dropped off water blivets, plus helmets and flak jackets for those platoons who’d been on light patrol when scrambled.
It was probably close to 120 degrees under the canopy.
The column, which stretched for almost a mile, was like an accordion and Lima Company was at the end. More specifically, Third Herd was the last one off LZ West. Previously, Lieutenant Ronald and Sergeant Fuller had gotten the men lined up off to the side of the dusty LZ, making sure the ammunition and water resupply were broken down and passed out evenly. While the men saddled up, Lieutenant Ronald spoke to them. He repeated what they’d been hearing, that the valley was going to be bad. He said he knew Brown and Turner were due to rotate home soon and they now had the opportunity not to go. There would be no hard feelings. The grunts mumbled in agreement; a man owed it to himself not to get killed so close to going home. Decent.
Brown said he wanted to stay on the landing zone.
Turner was P. K. Smith’s partner on the sixty. He was a black man from the South who’d already been wounded once, and who talked with hostility about the white man’s war. But then he said, “Fuck it, I’m going.”
There is a special bond only grunts know.
Third Herd finally got moving through the breaks in the perimeter wire. Ten minutes out, the GIs on the LZ detonated some old crates of small arms ammunition, and rounds cooked off in hundreds of streamers over the men’s heads. Besardi sweated his way down beside Vaughn, the squad M79 man, mumbling that this valley was going to be the baddest of the bad. Someone started singing the “Fixin’ to Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish, and the platoon took it up … “What are we fighting for, don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam, whoopie, we’re all gonna die!” Lieutenant Ronald and Sergeant Fuller ignored the mutinous words because they knew what it was, the grunts’ way of spitting in death’s face.
It took six hours—from noon until dusk—to get the entire battalion to the valley floor. From there, they pushed west down the Old French Road. Another column approached them, headed in the opposite direction, and Besardi hollered to their point man, “Hey, what company you guys from!”
“Well, I’m Fox Company. The rest of these guys behind me are what’s left of Two-Seven.” Jesus Christ, Besardi thought as they passed. The grunts coming out looked drained and beaten. Noting their relief’s lack of gear, they handed over helmets, flak jackets, ammunition; some shook hands, hugged them, beseeched them, “Be careful out there, man. There’s some bad fucking gooks out there. Please be careful.” The survivors’ faces were either blank or set in a horrified grimace.
Third Herd found out why when they crossed the stream. The valley changed there. The smell of death hung in the muggy air, and the downed Sea Knights sat abandoned in the grass-covered paddies. At that sight, the murmurs went up and down the column again.
The grunts knew what they were up against.
They made no contact that night, but it was still touchy going. For one thing, the last of 2/7 had pulled out before the last of 3/7 had conducted the passage of lines. Colonel Kummerow, walking with Lima Company, was unpleasantly surprised when Fox 2/7 suddenly appeared on the dirt road and passed them. “Thus, at dusk,” he noted, “3/7 found itself on a route march in no-man’s-land, not knowing what lay ahead. I ordered my point company to secure an area suitable for a battalion perimeter defense and to establish guides to bring each of the other companies into their sectors. Every man did a beautiful job of quickly and quietly getting secured after a hell of a day, to say nothing of the preceding several days.”
The enemy offensive had indeed brought a frantic pace to 7th Marine operations; even Colonel Kummerow—a low-key Annapolis graduate who had fought as a rifle platoon leader in Korea—couldn’t help but be impressed. On 11 August, he had just checked in at the 1st MarDiv CP when the attacks began. There were rockets and sappers against the Division compound.
On the 12th, General Simpson provided a tour of Division Ridge (complete with a look at the freshly killed NVA sappers); then they boarded a helicopter for an aerial view of the 7th Marines AO, and overflew Dowd’s fight in the Arizona. Kummerow was dropped off at Hill 55 and, within an hour, was accompanying Codispoti as they choppered into the 1/7 CP for a two-hour observation of the battle.
On the 13th, Dowd was killed.
On the 14th, Kummerow was choppered into the 3/7 CP at an old French fort in a picturesque riverside village; on the 17th, they conducted the official change-of-command ceremony. Within an hour of passing the battalion colors, Kummerow was on a chopper to Landing Zone Baldy.
On the 18th, 3/7 Marines relieved 2–1 Infantry.
It did not take Kummerow long to form his opinion of why his Marines were so desperately needed in the Americal AO. The 2d of the 1st Infantry was in the process of moving from Baldy to Hawk Hill (where they worked with the 1–1 Cav in the sand-dune country along the South China Sea). The Marines assuming 2–1’s positions were not impressed; the bunkers were falling apart and much loose equipment had been left behind, including claymore mines, fragmentation grenades, trip flares with their safety catches missing, and rusting belts of M60 ammunition. The judgement of the Marine grunts about the GIs in the area was that they “weren’t worth a fuck.”
Kummerow would not have put it in those terms, but he was not impressed either. The 2d of the 1st Infantry had secured LZ Baldy, manned checkpoints on the road to LZ Ross, and conducted local patrolling. But they had not secured the land itself, relying instead on helicopter scouts. When and if infiltration was detected, infantrymen were CA’d into the area and, after several hours of beating the bushes, they were picked up and returned to the mess halls and showers of Baldy. Kummerow’s assessment was very subjective—2–1 sometimes did conduct successful extended patrols—but, all in all, he thought the Army was relying on technology and firepower to do what could be accomplished only by men with rifles living in the bush.
So, the NVA infiltrated, dug in, and hunkered down.
While 2/7 Marines were fed into the Hiep Duc battle to the west, 3/7 Marines were committed to Barrier Island to the east. Captain Stanat’s Mike Company was choppered onto the island, which quickly turned into a horror show. From the air, the place seemed as flat as a sandy beach; in fact, it was crisscrossed with irrigation ditches and dotted with spider holes. The VC seemed nowhere but were everywhere, tagging along with Mike Company and sniping at will. Kummerow flew out in an Army Huey to talk with Stanat; as they lifted off, an AK47 suddenly opened fire and six rounds punched through the Huey, wounding the copilot and gunner, and wiping out the radios.
A frustrated Kummerow planned a sweep in force to clear out the VC and, after dusk on 20 August, Mike Company humped to a staging point on the south end of the island where India and the jump CP would join them the following morning. On the morning of 21 August, the Marine artillery battery on LZ Baldy registered its fire on Barrier Island. They used survey data provided by the Army battery they had replaced; the data were inaccurate and the company’s first two 155mm artillery rounds landed smack on Mike Company. Five Marines were killed, seven wounded. As the men evacuated these casualties, Captain Stanat discovered that a corpsman was missing from the night march. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep on a break, but no one knew, so Kummerow cancelled the sweep and choppered in with India Company. The grunts followed the previous route of march and found the corpsman—dead—his weapon and gear missing, his body booby trapped. VC snipers opened up on them as they recovered the dead man. Kummerow flew back to Baldy with a demoralized M Company.
India Company, under Lieutenant Ramage, continued working on Barrier Island and, on the 25th, they conducted a final sweep with naval gunfire support. They discovered twenty-five VC bodies, rounded up eighty Vietnamese, and ended the sweep on a beautiful sandy beach.
On the 27th, they abandoned Barrier Island.
As soon as 3/7 Marines set up their positions in the Hiep Duc Valley on the evening of 27 August, Kummerow called for his company commanders. The push to link up with 4–31 Infantry would commence at first light. Kummerow was determined not to lose momentum in their attack, and impressed upon his company commanders that, when they made contact, they were to push through.
Kummerow was lucky; his battalion had not been brought in piecemeal.
* M/3/7 lost a man even before their helos arrived. Three Vietnamese children came to the wire with three M79 rounds and two 4.2-inch mortar shells, and the company scout paid them a cash bounty for turning them in. The children ran away and the ordnance exploded, killing the scout. It was unknown if the ammunition had been mishandled or booby-trapped.