Chapter Two
It was almost twilight when Delta Company moved down a weathered railroad trestle without tracks. Nicholas Cominos looked back over his shoulder. It was another hot night in the Arizona flatlands, and in the fading light the company was moving to a new night position to disorient enemy mortarmen. The column was perfectly spaced, everyone silhouetted, faces hidden in the shadows of helmet brims. This is really beautiful, Cominos thought; this is what the poet sees sometimes.
It became his lasting mental portrait of the operation.
The 1st Battalion, 7th Marines entered the Arizona Territory on 1 July 1969 as part of Operation Forsythe Grove. The op had been hastily organized after reports of an impending attack on Hill 65 by six hundred NVA believed to be massing in northern Arizona. To preempt this, 2/5 Marines took up blocking positions in western Arizona, 1/5 Marines in eastern Arizona, and 1/7 Marines were to sweep south between this cordon. Alpha 1/7 (Capt Edward T. Clark III) was helicoptered into southern Arizona at first light to form the final block for the sweep. They took some fire, but gunships quieted it. The assault companies staged on the banks of the Song Vu Gia below Hill 65: Bravo 1/7 (1stLt Allen E. Weh), Delta 1/7 (Capt Brian J. Fagan), and attached Lima 3/7 (Capt Jon K. Rider). Charlie 1/7 (1stLt Raymond A. Hord) was the reserve on Hill 65.
The river crossing commenced at 0600 in a rolling barrage of two thousand tank and artillery rounds. The tanks were firing from atop Hill 65, over the heads of the troops in the river, devastating the tree lines hundreds of yards inland with high-explosive and white phosphorus shells. The arty worked across terrain features which offered good firing vantages and into likely avenues of enemy retreat. Amphibious tractors ferried Bravo and Lima Companies across the Vu Gia; however, loose sand, variations in water depth, and mechanical difficulties left most of the amtracs stuck at midstream. Cables were attached to tow them out. Bravo and Lima fanned out from the opposite beach line, securing it, while Major General Simpson helicoptered to the starting point to confer with Lieutenant Colonel Dowd. Dowd approved of the contingency plan to use helicopters and, within thirty minutes, the remainder of the battalion assault force was across the river. Ahead of them and on their flanks, Phantom jets plastered the countryside with bombs and napalm. The artillery continued to pound in. There was virtually no return fire. The sun was the enemy this day. Alpha Company, the southern block, had deployed on a small ridge called the Hot Dog and it was an eight-klick hump from the Vu Gia to link up with them.
The following day, Operation Forsythe Grove was terminated. Intelligence had been faulty. No large NVA force was detected and “only” five men had been killed: a man from L/3/7 hit by a short U.S. 8–inch howitzer round, and four NVA who were caught in the sweep. At this point, 1/7 Marines withdrew to the corridor between Charlie Ridge and the Arizona; they secured Route 4 as combat engineers reopened it all the way to the Thuong Duc Special Forces outpost deep in the mountains. Then, on 17 July, the battalion conducted a second river crossing. The 5th Marines were leaving An Hoa for Operation Durham Peak in the Que Sons, and 1/7 was left virtually alone to police the Arizona. Their continued operation had no name, but it lasted four more weeks. The Battalion CP set up on the Hot Dog, and the four rifle companies scoured the Arizona flatlands, constantly hunting, moving at least every two days, repeatedly crisscrossing the area. Chasing phantoms.
It was no different from the dozens of continuing Search & Destroy missions being conducted throughout South Vietnam on any given day, all of which could be described with one word: miserable. Every day—every single day—the companies broke up into platoon patrol bases from which the squads went out hunting. The thermometer hovered above 100 degrees, the dust from the paddies covered everything, and the men moved listlessly under eighty pounds of gear: helmet, flak jacket, frag grenades, CS tear gas grenades, M16 bandoliers, extra M60 ammunition, claymore mines, trip flares, an M72 LAW rocket, pack, rifle. At night, they went on ambush patrols. There was little rest from the heat and the humping and, while men looked fit and tanned, their eyes were sunken, their faces drawn. The U.S. Army prided itself in getting a hot meal to the troops every day, even in the field. The U.S. Marine Corps did not have the helicopters or the troops for such a logistical luxury. They got helicopter resupply only every fourth day, usually enough C rations for two or three days, and enough water to drink only sparingly, none to shave. The water was shipped to the field in 155mm artillery canisters and reeked of chlorine. Guys wrote home for Kool Aid just to kill the taste. Bomb crater water was even worse.
Miserable, just fucking miserable.
For Corporal Cominos, a squad leader in Delta Company, the worst thing about the days were the fields of shoulder-high, razor-sharp elephant grass. The men emerged from those briars with their arms and hands bleeding and the leather of their jungle boots peeling. The worst thing about the nights were the mosquitoes. They rose in swarms in the hot night air, and Cominos always slept with his poncho wrapped around him like a cocoon.
One had to find ways to endure. Morale in the battalion was never such that Cominos ever seriously considered bagging a patrol, but he did discard his shirt and T-shirt. He wore his flak jacket over a bare chest, and he shit-canned most of the vest’s fiberglass plates; he left only four—one over his heart, his chest, and two in back over his kidneys. He also threw away his Marine-issue pack and used a captured NVA rucksack; it was more comfortable and utilitarian. The most-used piece of gear was his green towel, tucked between neck and flak jacket collar, to wipe the sweat from his face every couple minutes.
It was a brutalizing existence, made even worse by stagnation. During its weeks in the Arizona, 1/7 Marines made no solid contacts with the enemy. Their prize kept eluding them; mostly what they found were booby traps and stolid, unanswering villagers who populated the few hamlets still left in this free-fire zone. Frustrations simmered in the grunts, but they did not become murderers. Sergeant Lowery noted:
We definitely did not go over and just blow civilians away for no reason at all. We never did that. All these stories you hear about search and destroy where they went through and they killed every man, woman, and child is a bunch of bullshit. We did kill every duck, chicken, and water buffalo that we came across. We poisoned all the wells. We burned all the hootches with the old Zippo lighter. These hootches would go up and you could hear all kinds of stuff popping inside of them—it was ammunition they had hidden inside the straw. These people were all supporters of the NVA and VC, and they deserved whatever happened to them. But unless a gook had a weapon we didn’t kill him.
Still, the psychological pressures of Search & Destroy could be intense. There were too many gray areas. On his first tour, Lowery had taken out a night ambush near a ville. He set his M60 team in atop a small hill, then was placing the ambush below the mound when he noticed the girl—a Vietnamese woman was squatting in the brush, peering intently at the machine gun pos. Lowery ran towards her, shouting, “Halt! Dung lai, dung lai!” The woman bolted and he triggered a hurried burst; her arm jerked, but she kept running. Lowery crammed a fresh mag into his M16, braced, and emptied it into her back. They gathered around the mamasan. She was a pretty girl, they all commented, clean, her teeth unstained by betel nut. And she was still alive, breathing in labored gasps. Their new corpsman looked at her in horror, mumbling, “What do I do?” “Fuck it,” Lowery said, “put her out of her misery.” The corpsman pulled out his .45 automatic and started shooting. He kept pulling the trigger until the slide locked back, and he kept mumbling, “What do I do, what do I do!”
Was that an atrocity? No, it was necessary.
But you gotta understand, Lowery continued, the new corpsman didn’t give a shit what happened to these worthless gooks; and in that, he spoke for a certain percentage of all grunts.
Most did what they had to do to survive in an alien, hostile environment.
Most men didn’t have time for much thinking. Cominos, from a solid Greek Orthodox family, had joined the Marines after college graduation, a rarity in the grunts. What was also rare was that he volunteered for the bush not only because he wanted to prove something—but because he believed. Deep down, though, the only thing that seemed pertinent were the men in his squad. The only questions he asked were how many klicks we going today, which squad’s got point, who’s taking out the ambush tonight? The most lasting impression Corporal Cominos had of the operation in the Arizona was not the daily pain or the occasional cruelties, but the quiet courage of the grunts. They endured and they endured and they endured, he thought. Everyone bitched and cursed, but they had a job to do and they did it. He always remembered his M79 man, “Carbo” Carbahal from California. The man was in intense pain for days, but only when he could barely walk did he report his injuries. He was medevacked and it turned out he had stress fractures in his shins. He had kept his mouth shut because he didn’t want to let his buddies down.
On 16 July, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines walked from Hill 37 to the vicinity of Hill 65, from which they would cross the Vu Gia back into the Arizona. It was a dreary, hot, dusty day as the grunts walked down Route 4, one column on either side of the dirt road. Lieutenant Peters of Delta Company plodded along with his platoon. He had his M16 in the normal bush position: sling over shoulder, weapon hanging at the waist pointed left, left hand gripping the plastic stock, right hand on the trigger guard, thumb on the safety catch ready to push it to semi.
Peters was in the righthand column as they passed a hootch. He turned to his left to tell something to the man behind him just as a figure ran to the gateway in front of the hootch and threw something. In one movement, Peters whipped around into a squat, left hand thrusting the barrel in the direction of the movement, and he found himself a second from firing with his M16 in the face of a four-year-old boy. The kid had run out to throw a rock at the Americans. He stared terrified at the rifle. Embarrassed, Peters walked on.
The next morning, the men helicoptered into the Arizona.
They moved with a steady drumroll of air and arty prepping their path but, like before, they found little except for blood trails. Lieutenant Peters’s platoon was walking point for Delta Company and they paused in one tree line while arty was processed into the next one. When the fires lifted, the platoon started across on line, more concerned about the incredible heat than the remote chance of anybody still being in the tree line. They were about forty meters from it when one of the M79 grenadiers got bored. He called to Peters, “Hey, can I bloop ’em?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” The old recon by fire.
The kid fired a grenade into the tree line—and the woods suddenly erupted with the jackhammering of a dozen AK47 assault rifles. Everyone scrambled towards the dike ahead. Peters was distinctly aware that he was buckling the chin strap on his helmet; that was something he instinctively did when things seemed bad. Heavy fire snapped overhead and the Marines could only shove their M16s over the berm and fire blind. Peters’s heart was racing. He had only one clear thought: where are the bastards! The tree line was a briar patch.
His radioman lay beside him; his shouting snapped Peters back to the business at hand. “It’s the captain! He says pop the gas!”
That’s right, Peters suddenly thought, we can do that. Each platoon carried an E8 launcher which fired CS tear gas. He called up his gas man and told him to fire into the trees. The grunt was on his knees, unshouldering the launcher. “It won’t work ’cause one of the legs is broken.”
“You mean to tell me you’ve been carrying this sonuvabitch for a month, and now you tell me it doesn’t work!” Peters shouted in frustration. “Give me that!” In a rash moment of anger, he hefted the launcher and scrambled over the berm. He became the lone target and dust kicked up around him as he ran to the next dike. He dropped his pack and rested the launcher against it; then he removed the top, yanked the lanyard, and the vials of CS began popping from their foam rubber mounting like champagne corks. The launcher bucked backwards from the recoil, until it was almost shooting straight up. Peters heard one of his grunts yelling, “Lieutenant, you gotta lay on top of it or it’s going to kick back in your face!” He jumped on it, very aware that his nose was six inches from the shells zipping out. He couldn’t hear the M16s or AK47s anymore—he was too engrossed, too scared, almost laughing, you gotta be kidding me, what am I doing!
At the last shot, he suddenly noticed there was a pause. He looked up. Tear gas covered the tree line and the paddy ahead. His first thought was to charge and the hand-and-arm signal to fix bayonets flashed in his head; then he remembered they didn’t carry bayonets. He dropped to his knees and twisted around, raising his hand to wave his platoon forward. He meant to shout let’s go!, but he got only the first word out and the platoon was instantly coming over the dike. They ran right towards the tree line, shouting, coughing from the gas, firing from the hip. Peters—almost aglow with pride—joined their frantic rush and they crashed into the trees with only one man taking a minor graze wound across his arm.
There were no NVA, only more blood trails.
Meanwhile, the battalion command group was being lifted into the area aboard Sea Knights. Air strikes were run to suppress enemy fire and the door gunners pulled long bursts into the dried out tree lines. Still, more than a few AK47 rounds slashed through the elephant grass and thudded into the dirt around the CP Marines as they unassed the birds and organized. No one dove for cover—there really was no place to hide. The platoon finally moved out as the fire petered out. Once again, the sweep’s objective was the Hot Dog and the battalion pushed through the initial, evaporating resistance only to be rubbed raw by the sun and the distance. Lieutenant Peters, for one, had to reach into himself to keep going. The firefight had exhausted them, and they stumbled like drunks under their packs. They bunched up. When the column halted, they could only stand in a sweaty daze; they were supposed to drop to one knee and watch the flanks. Peters and his platoon sergeant walked the line, yelling themselves hoarse.
The CP column was moving slowly too. They were burdened under radios and mortars, and some men wished they would take fire just so they could lie down. As it was, they paused only to put the torch to any hootches in their path. Guys heaved rice baskets and work benches into the fires, and took photographs. The CP finally set up on the Hot Dog before nightfall, and Alpha Company dug in around them. The Hot Dog became the CP’s home for the remainder of the operation. They moved every two days from knoll to knoll so the NVA could not zero in on them, until by the end of the op they had humped up and down the Hot Dog three times. Even in the bush, it was mostly a routine.
Every day was the same, but a little different.
On their sixth day back on the Hot Dog, General Simpson helicoptered in for a brief visit. That night, LCpl Donald R. Wells, the new battalion radioman, saw his first North Vietnamese regulars. He and a buddy were sitting on a boulder on the perimeter, checking out the lowlands with a GreenEye night scope. About four hundred meters away they spotted six figures crossing a paddy, hunkered under packs, AKs, and B40 rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They quickly radioed the CP but it took fifteen minutes to get the 81mm mortars ready. Their first shot was way off, and Wells watched disgusted as the NVA ran and disappeared into a tree line. A few more rounds impacted into the paddy and finally the battalion liaison officer, a mustang lieutenant, got an M14 rifle with a night scope and opened up. It was impossible to tell if he hit anything.
They moved out the next night in a drizzle. Wells humped the PRC25 radio behind Lieutenant Colonel Dowd, M16 muzzle down over his shoulder, the radio handset wrapped in plastic to keep out the rain. They left a crew with their 106mm recoilless rifle on the hill, dug in and hidden by brush; Dowd planned to double back and catch any NVA who might move into the area after their apparent departure. As soon as they began hiking downhill, villagers—mostly women and kids who’d been congregating from the moment the Marines began saddling up—swarmed into the perimeter. The Marines burned their trash pits so the enemy couldn’t use anything, but a few C ration cans always survived. The CP humped a thousand meters through the paddies, and it was pitch black when a call came over Wells’s radio: the group on the hill had twenty NVA moving near them. Dowd grinned widely and told Wells to pass the word that they were turning around and heading back. A second call came: the NVA had disappeared before they could sight the 106. They were almost back to the Hot Dog when the group called again: four NVA had just reappeared. The black stillness was suddenly cracked by a quick roar and flash from the 106, then the explosion of a beehive round shredding foliage. The subsequent patrol found heavy blood trails.
Bravo Company took a few RPGs and Chicoms that night; they medevacked six wounded in the morning, then moved on. The CP moved in after them, setting up for two days and one night in their old foxholes; Lieutenant Colonel Dowd split the CP and took a dozen men in a “jump” group to Charlie Company. They moved out at night through the thick mud of the paddy lowlands. A killer hump, Wells thought; the muck extracted much energy. The area was pocked with shell craters, thirty feet across and deep with muddy water, and they skirted along their rims. Wells was deathly afraid of them. Cripes, he thought, with this radio and pack and ammo, batteries, and junk strapped to my back, I must weigh 250 pounds. If I fell in, I’d drown before they could pull me out.
The men finally got across and were setting up in a tree line when the point men trotted back with five Vietnamese males they’d surprised. The radio reported other successes that night: Delta spotted fifty NVA with a GreenEye moving in a wood line, called in artillery airbursts, and Bravo swept in to count a few bodies. In the morning, Dowd set his jump CP into position, then took Wells and a few grunts on a hike to Charlie Company. Lieutenant Colonel Dowd and Lieutenant Hord were talking, and Wells waited and munched on some wild sugarcane. One of the daylight patrols moved past; a skull was affixed to the back of a grunt’s pack, its jaw bouncing as he walked so it looked like the skull was talking. Wells and the grunts shouted their approval.
The jump CP spent four days with Charlie Company, the last day being the only eventful one. Wells was sitting around on the perimeter when a Vietnamese appeared from a far tree line. There were shouts, then a grunt opened up with his M60 and the man dashed away with rounds kicking up dirt all around him. There were hoots and laughs when the man jumped, unscathed, into some trees. Later that day, Lieutenant Hord radioed the CP to complain that a certain scout-sniper was zeroing in his rifle by shooting water buffalos. The sniper had a good reputation; Dowd cracked a grin and told Wells to radio back that they must be enemy transport. The day after the execution of the buffs, Lieutenant Colonel Dowd took his jump CP back to the main group on the Hot Dog. That afternoon, a helicopter from battalion rear dropped off a small generator and electric hair clippers. Lance Corporal Wells spent the day making himself scarce. His hair was long by Marine standards and he intended to keep it that way. Besides the peace symbol drawn on his helmet cover, it was the only symbol of his minor rebellion against the lifers.
Captain Clark of Alpha and Captain Fagan of Delta were both calm professionals on their second tours. Lieutenant Hord of Charlie was also good but, in comparison, an eager youngster. Weh of Bravo was also a lieutenant, but of a harsher cut. An aggressive and blunt man, he had originally enlisted at seventeen; after college and OCS, he’d spent three months in 1967 as a platoon leader with 3d Recon before being wounded and evacuated. He rotated back in September 68, spent four months as an air observer, then requested infantry duty again. Weh prided himself in melding his company into a well-oiled killing machine, and his diary notes from the Arizona operation sound as if in war, he had found his natural state:
I planned a platoon ambush about 400–500 meters down the trail west of our pos the night we set up (July 20th). At dark the platoon moved out and within 45 min had a meeting engagement with four gooks—result 1 dead NVN and about 4 of my Marines wounded by grenades they threw. I sent a squad out to pick up the casualties and bring them back so they could continue to establish an ambush. We called a Med-evac and waited. About 2330 the chopper came in and with his lights on came down right outside our lines. As it settled it was hit by mortar and an RPG rocket and concurrently automatic weapons fire opened up on us from all over. The chopper took off (luckily he made it) and as he did his trigger happy gunner raked our position with a burst of .50 cal M.G. fire.… We then took some mortar rounds, RPG rockets, and AK47 fire that was exceptionally well placed grazing fire for the next two hours.
Bravo and Delta Companies usually worked in unison, so it was on 25 July that Lieutenant Peters made a mildly horrified note in his own diary concerning Bravo. Three NVA had been killed in one of Bravo’s ambushes; the grunts ripped one’s shirt off and carved “B 1/7” in his back. The head was hacked off another corpse. Peters had never seen anything like it. The rumor was that the NVA had treated some of Bravo’s dead in a like manner, and the frustrated grunts were taking their payback. That was how the Marines put it: Payback is a Mother Fucker.
Morale among the grunts could not have been described as enthusiastic. The sweat and dust of the Arizona did not allow for that. But the men of 1/7 were remarkably untouched by the problems beginning to plague other units and they performed the mean task at hand professionally and, on occasion, with elan. They were one of the best battalions in the division.
The character of a unit begins at the top, and that was most clear with John Aloysius Dowd. He looked like a football tackle and was the father of six; he’d put in two years with the Merchant Marines and at age twenty joined the Corps; he was commissioned via OCS after enlisted boot camp. Vietnam was his first war and one of his company commanders, Weh, described him as a “hound straining at the leash.” Dowd took over the battalion after seven months on the staff at 1st MarDiv HQ, and he literally revelled like a Patton in his first combat command: toting a grease gun, unflappable under fire, a shamrock drawn on his flak jacket. He led from the front.
That was one side of Dowd, the tough-guy image. To his company commanders, he was known as Uncle Jack and they appreciated his style of delegating and supervising. He did not ram orders down his captains’ throats, but assigned a mission, offered a positive attitude and motivation, and let them run their own shows. Dowd appreciated the stress the men were under and he made an effort to appear relaxed and to keep everyone informed and involved. He spent a good portion of his time with the line companies, talking with the captains and lieutenants, but mostly with the grunts, just shooting the breeze and quietly trying to get a feel for morale.
He appeared a happy man.
Lieutenant Colonel Dowd took over in March, and on 21 April 1969, he won a Silver Star. When a night listening post spotted two hundred NVA preparing to cross the Vu Gia in sampans, Dowd joined the small group and helped direct the subsequent barrage. The NVA unit disintegrated in confusion and by morning light, the Marines counted seventy-one bodies in the streambed weeds. One Marine had been slightly wounded. Eight days later, Dowd took B Company into the Arizona. Captain Fagan’s D Company had led that first foray, conducting a quiet night crossing of the Vu Gia and securing the shore for the arrival of Dowd and B Company the next morning. B Company immediately kicked off towards a suspected NVA concentration. Intelligence was right this time and, in short order, Bravo was bogged down under automatic weapons and mortar fire with heavy casualties. Fagan led Delta on a flanking attack which overran the mortar site and an NVA battalion camp. They consolidated for the night and weathered a mortar raid. At dawn, the NVA were still around them. The air and arty were brought in Danger Close and drove off the enemy.
The April operation had solidified Dowd’s standing in the battalion. It had much the same result for Captain Fagan of Delta Company. He had taken over only weeks earlier from a steely and effective commander, but by the time D Company walked out of the Arizona, he had won the trust of his men and the first of his Bronze Star recommendations. The harshest review of commanders comes from the grunts on the firing line, but most echoed the appraisal of Lieutenant Peters and Corporal Cominos. They thought Fagan was the absolute best; he was a concerned man with a dry wit who, most importantly, had mastered tactics and supporting arms.
Fagan was twenty-five years old. He was from Warren, Ohio, one of seven children of an insurance salesman whom the WWII draft had sent to Patton’s army and who came home with a battlefield commission. Fagan went Navy ROTC in college and received his gold bars and degree the same day in 1963. He married right out of Basic School and took his wife to Hawaii for his first duty station. In the spring of 65, his unit deployed to Da Nang as part of the buildup. He completed that tour as a battalion staff officer with the 4th Marines and, in 1967, was prepared to leave the Marine Corps. He had a wife and three children and had already lined up a civil engineer position; but for reasons he could not fully articulate, Fagan turned down the job and stayed in the Corps. He was training the new lieutenants at Quantico when he made the decision, and everything in his upbringing told him his place was really with the young Marines in combat. To temper such idealism with the cynicism of Vietnam, he should have felt alienated from the rest of the war effort. Unfortunately for the novelists, Fagan happened to be an exceptional leader with compassion for his men who also believed in the cause. His only complaints were those typical of hawks.
Captain Fagan had a good company in a good battalion. Still, there were occasional problems. Marijuana had been an unknown his first tour. It was not apparent in Delta Company, but occasionally the company gunnery sergeant would report that a man was not ready to go on an operation. They’d leave him in the rear and only later would Fagan hear that the man’s buddies had caught him smoking grass and refused to have him along. Fagan had Delta for six months and they were in the bush for five and a half; he volunteered to keep them out precisely because he didn’t want them exposed to the corruptions of the rear. The grunts bitched about his enthusiasm for the field and, if he’d been a marginal performer, there might have been problems. As it was, most grunts seemed proud of their reputation. It was a matter of risking death in combat but having a common goal versus disintegrating in rear-area squabbles. A third of Delta Company was draftees, but Fagan couldn’t tell them from the volunteers. They did their best and he tried to do his best by them. They were youngsters, he thought, unlettered kids, tough, humorous, sarcastic, faithful, and loyal to each other. And vulnerable. He’d seen men cry with hurt and frustration after the frenzied efforts to patch up and medevac a grunt who’d just lost his leg to a booby trap; then they’d pick up their rifles and keep going.
LCpl John G. Bradley, of Charlie Company, was the eternal kid Marine: skinny, red from the sun, impatient with the boredom and sweat of humping, exhilarated in a way, though, with the unshakable feeling of adventure.
Bradley grew up in Marysville, Washington, living off and on between his divorced parents and graduating from high school as a Boy Scout and the All American Boy. In 1968 when he graduated, the counterculture hadn’t yet made an impact on his hometown, and his reactions to the campus protesters on television were traditional. He had no sympathy for the messages on the placards held by his peers, and all he saw was anarchy. All in all, though, the war seemed very distant until that summer after graduation when a local boy was killed. Bradley was a supporter of the war but, most of all, he was young and curious; two months out of school, his mother signed the papers so he could enlist at age seventeen.
He volunteered for Vietnam and reported to C Company in February 1969; it was still an adolescent adventure at first and, although mortars hit the battalion rear his first night, excitement overrode fear. His first firefight was an adrenaline high. Such spirit was soon rubbed raw in the unglamorous sweat and dust of the repetitious patrolling and ambushing. Fatigue became the byword. Bradley made his first kill in April; walking point for his squad down a paddy trail as they returned from a night patrol, he saw something hunched over the path in the dawn light. He shouted to halt, then pumped his M16 into the figure when it bolted. He approached the body, rushing with the thrill of getting a confirmed kill; then he almost vomitted when he saw it was an unarmed mamasan. They found a booby trap on the trail, which they blew in place, and Bradley’s mind flashed between excitement and revulsion, finally clearing the slate with the thought: fuck it, if we’d gotten here fifteen minutes later, the bitch would have blown my legs off.
He never told his parents the truth about the kill.
There was only one saving grace out in the mud—the professionalism and camaraderie of his squad. Harvey Peay, the squad leader, was sharp. A tough Kentucky boy, he ignored rules and regs and talked mostly about going home, buying a GTO, and marrying his girl friend. He also seemed to thrive in the bush. Mouse Cullen, his fire team leader, was saving his money so he could go to college. Schaffer was a big guy who loved good times and, deciding that Australia beat Vietnam, never came back from R and R. Dutch Sterling, a grenadier, was a mustached kid from California who loved to bullshit about surfing and who had a peace medallion around his neck (taped to his dog tags so it wouldn’t jingle on patrol). Buttons just wanted to finish his tour and get back to the farm.
They were a little world unto themselves, bound together, as far as Bradley was concerned, by an unspoken sense of friendship and dedication as Marines. They never discussed the war. Between patrols, they played cards in the dirt and talked of hunting trips; past contacts; some lifer who pissed them off; and girls—those they’d screwed, those they wanted to screw, those they wanted their buddies to think they’d screwed. Just plain old good guys, Bradley thought. They were typical of all Marines, he reckoned, their ambitions honed to a few essentials: killing gooks in the bush and, in the rear, figuring ways to sneak into the ville to get laid.
The new operation was more of the same—hot and plodding. Lance Corporal Bradley made cryptic notes in his diary, an eighteen year old’s view of the Arizona Territory:
July 5th: The damn gooks are raising a storm shooting the hell out of the birds, tracer all over, and we go next hope this isn’t my last entry. I love you mom and dad and be proud of me if something goes wrong. Gotta sky now here come our birds love John.
July 10: Gues what an asshole I must have been worried to death. “Orders” kill & destroy every moveing body shoot. We had light contact yesterday and got a gook. Burned our first vill were to serch and burn all hootchs and food. Good thing we packed loads of chow. Water is going to be a hassle though.
July 11th 1969: Change of orders again, question the people and don’t destroy there homes. What the hell is this war comeing to. We had a good thing going now there fucking it up. Thats officers for you.
July 13th: Got hit last nite and a real mess, mortars and hit from 3 sides. We had security for the bn CP when at about 8:30 we got hit. I was sitting with pay & sterling have some chocolate when they hit. We started thoughing out some shit when sterling started to run out of Bluper rounds. I ran from cover to get some more when a 30 opened up. The rds were flying all around. I could see and feel the tracers. When I got the rds then got to cover. Sgt Schick said he was putting me up for the bronze star the next morning. That be great the kid will even have a medal when he gets home. We didn’t take any casualties which is fine! Well gotta go. Miss you all so very much.
Aug 2: Haven’t had much to write till today. Last nite when we came off our ambush I popped a green pop up and it started a fire. We were up till about 3 in the morning putting the damn’d thing out. Yours truly got chewed out roally. But I give a fuck. Were not doing much except moveing continuelly to keep the gooks off-balance.
Aug 3rd: Schick though a gas gernade into a hotch today and mouse and sterling got the gas in the face when a change of wind came up. funnist thing in a good while.
August 5: Rocky hit a booby trap today. Messed him up pretty bad. Rodriguey had a hell of a concusion an shrapmetal in the leg. wish it had been me god I’d love to get off this operation.
Lance Corporal Bradley saw living North Vietnamese only once during the operation, near the end of July. He’d been walking point that day, leading the platoon down a narrow trail in a thick tree line. They stopped for a break and Bradley gave his camera to Peay and posed, leaning against a boulder, sweaty blond hair on his forehead, cigarette dangling, sweat towel and undershirt soaked under his flak jacket, his M16 resting on his thigh in one hand, his helmet in the other. No sooner had Peay snapped the photo than Bradley surged with adrenaline—four NVA, in fatigues and bush hats and toting AKs, walked unaware from the bamboo. They were right over Peay’s shoulder, maybe seventy yards away, and Bradley shouted and opened fire the same time Dutch Sterling did. Peay instantly spun and fired too, as one of the NVA fell heavily in the brush. Two comrades grabbed him under the arms and ran back into the tree line as Bradley, Peay, and Dutch sprinted after them. It was incredible, Bradley unable to describe it: heart pounding, sweat glistening on his arms as he fired on the run, and the NVA running, right there in the open on the trail, bobbing in his gun sights. Dutch halted long enough to drop two M79 rounds amid the fleeing NVA; the explosions were on target but they disappeared into some thick vegetation around a bend. The Marines halted, wary of an ambush, and were suddenly exhausted, coming down from the adrenaline. The rest of the platoon jogged up, asking what the hell was going on, and they checked out the only signs that the North Vietnamese had even been there—a splash of blood and a dropped canteen where the first man had fallen.
In the seven weeks that 2dLt Lawrence H. Orefice commanded a platoon of Mike Company, 3d Battalion, 7th Marines, three of his men were killed and six wounded. All the casualties came from booby traps.
That’s how it was in the An Hoa Basin. It could change a man. Orefice learned that on his first night patrol. His platoon had palace guard for the regiment on Hill 55 when movement was detected; it appeared that a mortar tube was being set up in the tree line near the local ville. They reconned by fire from the bunker line; then Orefice took out a squad. They found nothing. The squad leader entered the nearest hootch and dragged out a young papasan, shaking him by his shirt front, slapping him, shouting questions in his face. The Vietnamese did not resist, nor did he whimper. He just kept repeating, “No VC, no VC.” Orefice shouted to stop it. The young corporal did, then said simply and without sarcasm, “We gotta do this, lieutenant. They’re all a bunch of VC sympathizers out to get our ass. And if we don’t get rough with them, they’re not going to do anything for us.”
The corporal was a good Marine and Orefice looked at the stoic papasan. He knows, Orefice thought with a burning frustration that would become a daily pill; this gook knows exactly who was here and he won’t tell us!
Lieutenant Orefice had few answers.
Orefice had come to the Marines out of Windsor, Connecticut, for the same reasons many of his generation joined the Peace Corps: the patriotic challenge evoked by JFK, the desire to help. He went to Vietnam, though, with doubts, not about the validity of that country’s goals, but about the realism of attaining them. Can the ARVN carry the ball? Such thoughts evaporated once he joined his platoon. He was now directly responsible for thirty lives and the daily pressures of that allowed for little reflection. He thought his company commander, Captain Stanat, was good, as was his platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Hebert, as were the grunts. His total allegiance was to them.
If Orefice never stopped feeling sympathy for the plight of the common villager, he also grew to view them all as potential threats. One of his sergeants carried a few Chinese Communist grenades in his pack in case they accidentally killed an unarmed Vietnamese; place the grenades on the body, radio in a confirmed kill, avoid a hassle. They never had occasion to do this, but it seemed judicious.
The enemy was all around and invisible.
In July, they evacuated the Chau Son Village and resettled the people in a controlled zone near Hill 55. Without the support of the populace, coerced or voluntary, the local VC would dry up. It sounded good on paper. An Army captain from civil affairs, a gangly fellow with glasses, was put in charge of the project. Orefice’s platoon was teamed with the captain’s Vietnamese militia to do the legwork. They cordoned off each hamlet and marched the people to Hill 55. The villagers carried what they could, showing no emotion. They’re pawns, Orefice thought, they have to go whichever way the wind is blowing; and today we’re the wind. The resettlement ville was surrounded by wire and guarded by the captain’s militia; every morning, the people were allowed to return to their fields under the watch of the Marines. This was all well and good, except for the local VC who relied on their nighttime visits to hamlets for food and shelter. One night, finally, a VC sapper squad crept expertly into the resettlement ville; the men wore only loincloths and carried only wire cutters and sacks of U.S. M26 grenades. They sprinted through, tossing grenades into the hootches, and in the time it took Orefice and a squad to rush down and link up with the militiamen, everything was over. All that was left was to call the medevacs. Orefice walked among the smoking huts. It had been a slaughter. About ten people were dead; others with limbs shattered or blown off stared in shock. The survivors were wailing, crying, staring in hate. Orefice could almost smell the anger: the Marines had put them in such a position and then not defended them.
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.
The terror lasted only seconds. Lieutenant Ronald had been just behind him, and he sprinted past Besardi and pumped his M16 into the gook until he stopped moving. They policed up the area, searching the bodies and the three packs left behind. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Besardi. The NVA had many people on that path and they’d been fully equipped. Why did they retreat from a platoon?
