Death Valley (5 page)

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.
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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:

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:

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.”