Death Valley (43 page)

But Norton kept firing. He was raising up with the M16 to fire another burst from the same spot when an AK47 round hit the front of his helmet. The steel pot was blown off and he bounced back, unconscious, blood running from his nose and right ear. Norton awakened only very dimly. When they finally made a break for the high embankment, he didn’t know who dragged him to safety.

As 3d Platoon made its ill-fated rush towards 1st Platoon, the rest of Fox Company shouldered their gear and followed closely behind. PFC Lorne J. Collinson, of the company mortar squad, jogged blindly through the elephant grass. There were empty spider holes in the vegetation. The noise ahead was incredible. Collinson suddenly heard a sharp whiz in the air and instinctively threw himself to the ground.

A ragged chunk of made-in-the-USA shrapnel thudded into the dirt behind him. He was instantly back on his feet and moving towards the fire.

Corporal Bass, chief of the 60mm mortar section, was setting up his tubes in a small clearing. Collinson jogged over, dumped his mortar rounds from his pack, then ran to their hasty perimeter. He and his best friend, Ron McCoy, were about the only security the mortars had out there. The rest of the squad set up the two tubes, prepared the ammunition, then waited for firing directions. None came out of the chaos ahead.

A lieutenant appeared from the brush, jogging back with a wounded man leaning against him. The man’s trouser leg was stained red.

The lieutenant was shouting to get the casualties back.

Collinson left his pack with McCoy, started running forward, and
in short order was forced to low-crawl through the grass as AK rounds whizzed past. He bellied up to the embankment where 3d Platoon had been pushed. Marines were spread along it, firing toward the stream. One grunt lay behind the dike as if asleep. But there was a hole in the back of his flak jacket and Collinson hefted the body into a fireman’s hold and took off for all he was worth. He made it back to the trees around the command post. It was a semicontrolled madhouse. Radiomen shouted into handsets, calling for more air, more arty, trying to maintain contact with the pinned-down platoons. Officers and radiomen were clustered near the dilapidated pagoda, a short, older man gesturing instructions and mouthing words that were lost to Collinson in the din. The air was clogged with the whine of jets. Corpsmen rushed among the wounded being dragged in. They had a dozen KIAs and WIAs in a row and Collinson laid his man with them, numbly noticing that blood was smeared on his T-shirt where his flak jacket hung unzipped.

He took off again. Corporal Bass shouted at him as he ran past the trees, “Get your ass back here! Your job’s with the mortars!”

“Yeah, I know, but the lieutenant said to help with the wounded!”

LCpl Craig Russel, a battalion sniper, found himself belly down in the high elephant grass. Right across the blue line, NVA were screaming fire over his head. He pumped his M14 into the brush, firing frantically and blindly like everyone around him, then popped up to fling a frag at a muzzle flash. The grenade was tossed right back at him from within the tangle and exploded in midair.

That was right outside the 2/7 CP.

In the middle of the fire, a U.S. Army Huey pilot came on their radio. He was responding to their requests for ammunition, “I’m coming in. Pop a smoke, and get this shit off my bird!”

The helicopter barrelled into a bare patch behind the platoon. Corpsmen had a couple of the seriously wounded ready to go, and they rushed them to the LZ as Marines raked the opposite shore with cover fire. Russell sprinted towards the chopper. He could hear rounds cracking past, some impacting metal against metal, and the door gunner couldn’t fire his M60. He could just scream to hurry as Marines hauled off ammo cans, LAWs, a case of grenades, shoved the wounded aboard, then ran for cover as the Huey roared out in a blast of dust.

By the time Fox Company straggled back—unable to reach their lost platoon and forced to leave behind some of those killed in the attempt—the fight along the river had subsided to a cat ‘n’ mouse.
Among others, Collinson and McCoy took up positions on the slope of the streambed. An AK would chop brush in their direction; they’d trigger a return burst, firing blind into the muggy heat, then duck back behind their trees, change magazines, and wait for the next shot. At one point, McCoy cranked off a hurried burst, then shouted he’d seen an NVA darting from one tree to another. He thought he nailed him. Behind them, up the creek-bed slope, other Marines were firing. A LAW flashed across the stream and was instantly answered by an RPG which exploded inside the lines.

Collinson could hear shouts for a corpsman.

The jets came in again. Collinson must have subconsciously heard their supersonic approach, because he happened to glance up just in time to see a silver napalm canister wobbling down. It seemed to be headed for the middle of the stream, and he bolted from his tree, scrambling up the bank. The sudden heat wave enveloped him, seeming to singe the hair on his face and arms, leaving him breathless. He threw himself behind a tree as a second Phantom rolled in low, splashing more nape among the trees across the thin stream. The air reeked with gasoline and smoke.

The NVA snipers were finally silent.

Air support—the Phantoms guiding down the Song Lau and expertly placing their ordnance within fifty meters of the battalion perimeter, close enough for expended 20mm shells to hit the grunts’ helmets—is what finally quieted the firing on the command post. Lieutenant Colonel Lugger grabbed a LAW in frustration and strode to an opening in the trees. He aimed at a hootch several hundred meters away. The LAW misfired, so he threw it down and picked up another rocket. It roared off across the paddies.

Lugger had not seen a single NVA soldier, nor could he tell if he even hit the hootch—a combination which seemed symbolic of the entire battle.

Colonel Lugger was simply boiling.

He had made staff sergeant before earning his commission and had volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam, but this battle—his first—was a mess. Lugger thought he was doing as well as any commander could, considering the circumstances, and he was bitter towards his detractors, who were many:

The roots of disaster ran deeply, not only in the clashes at command level, but in the character of the battalion itself. The recent history of 2/7 had been a harsh one. They saw heavy combat around Da Nang during Tet 1969, and from that time until they came off Operation Oklahoma Hills, 2/7 had been the division’s special landing force. They were sometimes rushed from one hot spot to another so quickly that they didn’t get maps of the new AO until well after they were in the bush. When Lugger took over at the end of April, the lieutenant colonel he was replacing looked drained.

The 2/7 Marines had relocated to Dai La Pass; there they worked with the 26th Marines in the Da Nang Rocket Belt to stem infiltration towards the city and the ridge line housing division headquarters. This was the other type of extreme; it was a quiet time, the battalion was stationary—thus, stagnant—and it was only a ten-minute drive to notorious Dog Patch. The more Lugger looked, the less he liked what he saw. The previous hectic pace of operations had left 2/7 in an administrative shambles, and he had to have his CP reorganized and physically cleaned up. He also had to have the drifters rounded up. Dog Patch offered plenty of diversions, from prostitution to a flourishing black market and drug trade, plus Division Ridge had the Freedom Hill PX and other assorted service clubs. It was a real struggle for Lugger to sort out all the Marines wandering around his CP who had no real jobs and get their asses back in the grass.

The battalion’s line companies were spread out in independent, wire-enclosed
perimeters, running routine patrols and ambushes in the local villes. Virtually all the company commanders and platoon leaders were young lieutenants. Isolated as they were, as far as Lugger could discern, on little hillocks for what became months on end, most fought the war according to their personal interpretation. This meant a certain number were looking for no trouble. That mood trickled down to the grunts. There were some men any unit would have been proud to claim, and a few wild men who took ears from their kills and prodded villagers in front of them during minesweeps. But most were just counting the days until they could get out of the Nam and the Crotch. They were stale and unenthusiastic, fighting a war of “surprise firing devices”—booby traps—in the mind set of withdrawal.

There was another reason for Lugger’s bitterness. One of the men’s jobs was security for Division Ridge, where the living was quite comfortable. Only a few hundred meters away, the grunts were sweating out night ambushes.

Lugger sensed that his orders were often sandbagged.

He repeatedly requested regiment and division to send his battalion on a defined combat operation. That would have increased casualties, but it made sense. The average Marine in a dangerous situation, where his skills must be sharp and where buddies are depending on him, can be a warrior. That same Marine, when hot, bored, and idle, when exposed constantly to the corruptions of the rear, can respond with the restless immaturity of most nineteen year olds.

So it was in 2/7 Marines. The most volatile problem was race relations. If the blacks’ anger could be honed down to one immediate concern, it was that they were being used as cannon fodder in a war that was of no concern to them.

PFC Norton had originally served in the Fox Company mortar squad; he gave up that skating job and volunteered for one of the company’s rifle platoons because the racial situation at battalion rear was intolerable. As far as Norton was concerned, the white corporal was the leader only on paper. He had finally acquiesced to the black bullies in the mortar squad; and their only aim was to “get over.”

Maj Jim Steele, operations officer at Dai La and one of the most respected officers in the battalion, commented on one of the racial outbursts:

These were not isolated incidents, and Private Norton, an eighteen-year-old country boy, finally volunteered for the grunts. Out there, they needed each other to survive; hatred was pushed below the surface. Some men forgot it altogether.

In the bush, they were a team.

A marijuana subculture also existed in the battalion; it was a fixture among the support personnel, something which affected the rifle companies whenever they came to rehab at Dai La. It was the race problem or the drug problem which resulted in a fragging on Lugger’s eleventh day in command. At 0200, an unknown person or persons tossed two fragmentation grenades under a raised hootch used by officers and staff NCOs of H Company. One grenade was a dud, but the other exploded through the plywood floorboard, wounding a captain, first sergeant, and gunnery sergeant, and killing a staff sergeant under whose cot the grenade went off. From what could be pieced together, the first sergeant—a hard-core lifer who liked to ream out grunts for being unshaven the minute they came in the camp gate from patrol—had been the intended victim. The staff sergeant was an innocent bystander.