Death Valley (27 page)

The night of 20–21 August was a long one for Alpha Company. Some men with minor wounds had not been evacuated, and their occasional groans during the night were bad for morale; everyone realized there was no guaranty of a medevac if they were hit. Lieutenant Shurtz and Doc Peterson sat bleary-eyed in the grass, filling out medevac slips for the casualties and radioing them in on a secure net with scrambler. Battalion radioed back that one of the men reported evacuated with wounds could not be found in any hospital. As they pieced it together, the missing man had been hit while helping get Bravo’s wounded and, although this was reported to Shurtz who then filled out a medevac slip, in the noise and confusion of the fight, the man had not been dragged back. His body was recovered in the morning; reportedly, he
had an old bullet wound in his leg and a fresh one in his head. His body and the body of the dead lieutenant were zipped into body bags, and Lieutenant Tynan detailed Private Goodwin’s squad to carry them as they saddled up that morning. Goodwin objected that they needed to maintain twenty paces between each man on the march, and a six-man cluster dragging a body bag was too dangerous. The platoon leader reconsidered in their favor and they left the two bodies hidden among some trees in the LZ, to be recovered after the battle.

The previous day, LtCol Robert C. Bacon, who had served as an ARVN advisor his first tour, was helicoptered from his new staff position at Chu Lai to assume command of the Gimlets. The battle between the 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry and the
3d NVA Regiment
centered on pushing through to the C&C crash site to recover the bodies. Few grunts appreciated such reasoning—dying for the dead—and morale was sagging.

On 21 August, A Company took the point.

Machine gun teams moved across the paddy and secured the tree line without incident; then the rest of Alpha Company advanced from the banana grove. From there, they humped over one of the Nui Lon fingers with 2d Platoon leading the way; its commander, Lieutenant Kirchgesler, had told Lieutenant Shurtz that, as the most experienced officer there, he did not resent taking point consistently.

Lieutenant Teeple was in the middle.

Lieutenant Tynan brought up the rear of the column.

At the grunt level, these maneuvers were not seen in ordered terms. There was no rationale. The platoon had not been resupplied in two days, and had to function on a few sips of hot canteen water a day and the few C rations they’d had the foresight to jam into their claymore pouches before being CA’d in. Ammunition was precariously low. Captain Carrier noted what was beating them the most:

The elements had gotten the best of Private Kruch, for one, and he trudged along under bandoliers of M16 and M60 ammunition, hands
wrapped around a battered and unreliable M16 rifle. He was half-delirious from an empty stomach and the heavy, stale air trapped amid the vinery of the windless valley floor; and he was completely terrified by the invisible enemy. Oh God, what a mess, we know there’s another ambush waiting! What are we doing! he kept thinking. The platoon crested a low hill. All Kruch could hear was a ringing in his ears, and the hair on the back of his neck seemed to stand up. NVA fire erupted from nowhere. The platoon was in a network of spider holes and bunkers covered with banana leaves and indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape. The return fire seemed only to chop weeds. Several men had been hit—one was screaming bloody murder that he was shot in the hip, couldn’t move, the dinks were right next to him!—and, as always, Lieutenant Kirchgesler started towards the hottest spot.

The lieutenant was shot dead.

Kruch and his squad had scrambled into a furrow off the path and were returning fire. AK47 rounds suddenly snapped from the rear. Kruch froze as dirt kicked up a yard away; then he dropped into the ditch and shoved his M16 back up, madly squeezing the trigger. The NVA seemed to be everywhere!

Lieutenant Shurtz was down in the crossfire with Specialist Hurley, his senior RTO; it seemed impossible to get Kirchgesler’s body back without sacrificing more lives. Shurtz radioed the point platoon to leave the body and pull back under cover of air strikes and artillery, an order for which he never quite forgave himself but he could think of no other alternative. The rest of Alpha Company was strung out behind the point of contact, having flopped into the vegetation along the trail. They lay there unmoving, unable to fire, ducking even lower as stray bursts clipped foliage overhead. Lieutenant Tynan and Private Goodwin lay beside one another, trying to figure out what was going on. They could hear two NVA machine guns and sporadic AK47 fire. Word came to send men back to secure an LZ for the medevacs, so Goodwin and Grove, the last men in their squad, set out with several others. They found a burnt-out clearing about fifty meters back; it was an old potato field on the opposite side of the terraced hill from the NVA bunkers. Goodwin commented that they’d found their landing zone, and at that moment the first mortar round crashed into them. Over the noise of the firefight, Goodwin hadn’t heard the whistling descent, but the sudden explosion sent him into a frantic run for boulders forty yards away. Several more rounds thumped in, but Goodwin and Grove made it safely to cover.
Then Goodwin realized that, although he was still gripping his M16 in his right hand, his sleeve was soaking with blood. His hand was numb. Grove had caught some shrapnel too, but they were still on their feet and they headed back towards their platoon.

The rest of Alpha Company was pulling back to that potato field. A medevac with gunship escort tried to hover-land against the slope of overgrown terraces. The Huey glided into a hover and Kruch and another GI hefted a wounded soldier above them. They gave a final heave and got the man aboard. Kruch collapsed with a wrenched back.

Goodwin and Grove also boarded, and Goodwin’s biggest worry was that they’d be shot down as soon as they cleared the trees. Medevacs had no door gunners and the medic had taken away his M16. He heard the AK47s as they pulled up, but in seconds they were high and dry.

A good amount of ammunition, charlie rats, and water blivets had been shoved out the cabin door before the Huey banked away. Those items were more precious than gold, and it must have been a mob scene because the only thing left for Kruch and his squad was a can of peaches. They angrily split it; then the company dug in around the potato patch, expecting to be mortared, praying they wouldn’t be overrun. Gunships orbited them and illumination was fired when night fell, but there was no attack. The only reason the NVA don’t attack, Kruch thought, is because they don’t know how exhausted and undermanned—and green—we are. He did, however, hear Vietnamese voices only a hundred feet from their ring of holes; he crawled back to the company headquarters to report it. He noted with disgust that “… some of the officers had two or three full canteens, and I found empty C cans and everyone asleep.”

By dawn the next day, 22 August 1969, A Company, 3d Battalion, 21st Infantry existed mostly on paper; but they had really died on 4 August.

Even then, they were not all they could have been. The former company commander, Capt Dennis Chudoba, USMA class of 1965 and veteran of a 1966–67 tour with the Gimlets, was a decent enough guy but he did not have the aggressive nature required of a combat leader. If a squad was suspected of faking an ambush, or if Search & Destroy became search & evade, nothing was really done about it. This problem
was most severe in 3d Platoon, which had been without an officer for too long. 2d Platoon was lucky to have had Lieutenant Kirchgesler. 1st Platoon had 1stLt Harvey Browne, who joined them after four months with division surveillance, and Staff Sergeant Cruse, who had risen from private to staff sergeant in his eighteen months with the company; they tried to convince their reluctant draftees that the only way to go home alive was to find the NVA first and kill them.

The beginning of the end for Alpha Company came on 3 August, when they and Echo Recon were lifted to Chu Lai for stand down. There was some animosity between those infantrymen and the reconnaissance troopers. The story was that their ineptitude in okaying an LZ actually covered by the enemy had resulted in the death of a popular Alpha short-timer. Whatever the truth of that, when a Filipino band started a shrill Beatles’ imitation during the floor show that night, the place suddenly erupted in a chair-throwing, fist-swinging donnybrook between Alpha GIs and Echo GIs. As punishment, Lieutenant Colonel Howard cancelled stand down and assembled Alpha Company at the Chu Lai helipad the next morning. Lieutenant Browne thought the punishment was a complete bust. Everyone expected to be sent to LZ Center, so some grunts had cases of soda strapped to their rucksacks. Others were still blitzed from the previous night. Still others were missing; they were at the beach and hadn’t gotten the word. They were hustled aboard a Chinook—then got word in flight that they were to make a combat assault. No one knew what was going on. They CA’d into a paddy secured by some headquarters personnel. Browne’s platoon was first in; as they came off the Hooks, the battalion operations officer grabbed GIs and rushed them into defensive positions. Kirchgesler’s platoon came in next, and the grunts suddenly realized they’d been landed next to an NVA company. Figures with AK47s and RPGs could be seen moving away through the trees.

Kirchgesler moved after them and, within fifteen minutes of disembarking, Alpha Company was in contact. Browne was sent to outflank the firefight. He got his grunts on line and asked them their names. They were almost all replacements out of the Americal Combat Center and handed to him just an hour before at the Chu Lai helipad! He was thinking with a weariness that did not allow irony, “Oh well, here’s another goatfuck.” They got into a tree line. The contact sounded to be a few tree lines away, so Browne crawled fifteen meters into the grassy paddy ahead, then got up to appraise the area. An AK47 instantly
punched him down. The bullet drilled through his left forearm and through an M16 magazine in the bandolier across his chest, then thankfully stopped halfway into a green army note pad in his pocket. His spacey but occasionally valiant medic, Doc Sanders, quickly crawled out to him, grabbed his shoulder harness, and dragged him on his back as he pedalled with his feet. The operation sort of fizzled out as he was loaded on Lieutenant Colonel Howard’s C&C for medevac; in the meantime, the NVA unit melted into the vegetation.

Lieutenant Browne was given a Silver Star and Purple Heart, and he was medevacked to the United States.

Staff Sergeant Cruse rotated in days.

Captain Chudoba departed.

Chudoba and Howard mixed about as well as oil and water, and the confusion of the 4 August contact further deteriorated the battalion commander’s view towards this cautious, thin, bespectacled subordinate. On 6 August, Alpha’s night perimeter took fire; Chudoba wanted massive artillery, but Howard thought he was exaggerating and shouted at him to get his ass to the point of contact and determine exactly what was going on. In the morning, Lieutenant Shurtz—recently choppered to LZ Center as a replacement—was told to ruck up. He was the new commander. “What, did Chudoba get wounded?” asked Shurtz. “No, the colonel fired him.” A Huey lifted Shurtz down to Alpha’s bush position, and he disembarked from one side as Captain Chudoba boarded from the other.

Shurtz walked up to his headquarters group. The senior RTO introduced them, “I’m Chuck. This is Doc Peterson.” He pointed to their lieutenant from the Field Artillery. “This is the FO, Al. What should we call you?”

“Well you’ve got two choices. It’s ‘Lieutenant Shurtz’ or ‘Sir.’ ”

Their jaws dropped.

The company seemed lax, and this was a first step to bring back old-fashioned discipline. Shurtz was Regular Army, a distinguished military graduate of his ROTC class and Ranger-qualified, a man who intended to follow in the footsteps of his father, a career lieutenant colonel. But his first operation with Alpha Company was not a textbook affair, and the realities of the bush began to stun him. The company kept pushing for the NVA column, but the only contact they made was with snipers. They swept towards each one, only to find farm villages each time, complete with Vietnamese going innocently about their chores. Per
training, Shurtz had the males of military age rounded up—the village children, meanwhile, were peddling plastic baggies of marijuana—and choppered out. The results were negligible and the colonel finally choppered in to administer a pep talk and ass-chewing. The colonel was in his best form.