Death Valley (35 page)

After the two-week course, Wilson was sent to Fat City, the Division Artillery compound in Chu Lai. It was indeed fat living. The next day, he reported with three others to the air-conditioned office of the DivArty commander, a bird colonel. He gave them their marching orders alphabetically and Wilson fretted; the last one’s always the worst. The first two officers were assigned to batteries in Chu Lai; the third got an aerial observer job; and Lieutenant Wilson—oh no, he thought, the shit’s going to hit the fan—you’re going to Charlie Battery, 3d Battalion, 82d Field Artillery. The next morning, Wilson caught a Loach to LZ Baldy. He wasn’t really aware of the change in atmosphere until he noticed the
Cobra escorting them. He took a photo of it through the window. They landed on the base camp LZ and he hopped from the Loach, feeling like a duck out of water—helmet cover and fatigues unsoiled, jungle boots shiny black and green, his bag in one hand, an unloaded M16 in the other.

Wilson spent two nights at the 3–82 Rear on Baldy, then hitched a ride aboard the 4–31 C&C Huey to LZ Siberia. The hill was very spartan. Wilson met the battery commander, executive officer, and first sergeant, and got a slap on the back, a welcome to Vietnam, and a walking tour of the hill. Within a day, he was choppered over to LZ West where Charlie 4–31 was pulling its week of palace guard. Wilson was their new forward observer. In the TOC bunker, he met Captain Murphy. They shook hands, then Murphy hefted a radio and said, “Let’s do some shooting.” From the bunker line, Wilson could just make out the intended practice target—an abandoned, demolished collection of hootches. He checked his map and read the coordinates to his battery on Siberia; the first round landed halfway up the slope of West. Murphy said nothing for a moment, then very calmly, “Lieutenant, you gotta remember. The French made this map. We didn’t. It’s not accurate. What you see and the coordinates they appear to be on are not where it really is.” Wilson adjusted the fire by sight and hit the huts. Murphy said, “Cancel the fire mission. Let’s go get some chow.”

That’s how Wilson thought of Murphy: friendly, businesslike, intense. He was on his second tour, which gave Wilson much confidence. He needed that because when Charlie Company finally took to the bush off LZ West, Wilson was a walking bundle of nerves. They patrolled Banana Tree Hill and, although the grunts seemed casual about the place, Wilson envisioned snipers behind every tree. He nervously vomitted his meals at night. Murphy was not a pal to anybody, but he was an officer who took care of his men. He talked with Wilson in their poncho hootch at night; he mixed him a canteen of Kool Aid to calm his stomach.

After a while, Wilson’s trauma wore off. In his six weeks with the company, he’d made one contact—a couple of snipers who took off as soon as he called in the arty. His knees were weak, but he’d done his job. After a while, it didn’t seem so bad. The days were long and hot, but the evening resupply bird brought in heated food in mermite cans and Cokes and beers on ice. They had the Arsenal of Democracy backing them up, and the enemy wanted only to avoid them.

It was confidence born of ignorance.

They had walked into this, but what it was he had no idea. The NVA were all around them. They were standing up to gunships and artillery, and Captain Murphy—the heart and soul of the company—was semiconscious in a ditch. He was groaning loudly. It annoyed Wilson, chilled him, unnerved him, made him wonder what the hell was going on.

Wilson felt very alone. No one seemed to be in control. Men just hunkered down behind some cover, glancing around between bursts to make sure there was still another GI on either side of them. Wilson and crew were on their stomachs in the drainage ditch. The raised path ran across their front, and they could see beyond it about six feet into the brush. The wall of vegetation extended perhaps another fifteen yards to the paddies. That’s where the NVA were, behind the last dike and crawling into the trees. They stayed low, pinning the grunts with AK47 fire. Lots of it.

Wilson could see the brushy wall flicker.

He’d drop down and, as soon as the enemy stopped firing, he’d raise his M16 over his helmet and pull the trigger.

He and his RTO were glued to each other, the line open to LZ Siberia to bring the 105mm shells within thirty meters of their perimeter. It was hairy; Wilson would scream, “Danger Close, Danger Close!” and concussions slammed under their chests as they ducked. Shrapnel oscillated overhead. Tree branches and clods of dirt crashed down. The Cobras darted in between artillery salvos. The North Vietnamese kept firing; they survived because they were daring, crawling into that insulation space around the U.S. perimeter. They were hidden there among the trees.

The company Kit Carson Scout scrambled to Wilson’s group. His name was Nguyen Van Ly, but he was better known as Twenty, and he had a good reputation. He had been an NVA and he knew of their low-crawling tactics. He rushed from side to side in the loose circle, firing his M16 and throwing grenades. He pitched one a mere fifteen feet in front of them, and everyone ducked as the explosion kicked their brains and sent frags whizzing through the brush around them. As soon as it went off, Twenty jumped up, emptying his rifle at what to an untrained eye was nothing. During a lull, Wilson tried to raise B-TOC on LZ West. The NVA were jamming the primary frequency. He
switched to the secondary and, when the TOC answered, he burst into an excited, profane dialogue to let the world know they were still out there and needed help right now!

Lieutenant Colonel Henry came on the line, “This is Cave Man One. Calm down. What exactly is Captain Murphy’s status?”

“Murphy’s been hit in the legs. I can’t get to him, I’m too busy where I am. When are we going to get some help!”

“Help is all around you. It’s just a matter of time before it gets to you. So relax and take care of your situation.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean!

Captain Murphy’s first tour was cut short when he was wounded. He thought he was going to end his second tour by getting killed. The company had started this patrol with thirty-three men; now six were dead and twenty-one wounded. That left six unscathed and, judging from the amount of fire their little circle was taking, there were no fewer than a hundred NVA around them. He looked at his grunts and thought he was seeing men about to die. There was no stopping it. Murphy called Twenty to his side. He gave him the headquarters PRC77 radio and said, “If they make an assault, we won’t be able to hold them. When that happens, I want you to get away. Take this radio and put it in the hands of an American officer. Do not give it to anyone else. If it looks like you’re in danger of being killed, destroy it.”

When Wilson crawled down into the ditch to check on the captain during a lull, he found Murphy propped up, legs bandaged. Murphy took his radio code book from his baggy trouser pocket and began tearing each page from its staples and burning them one at a time with his cigarette lighter. He looked at Wilson, “You might as well burn yours too.” Wilson didn’t.

He didn’t want to accept what was happening.

Bleier saw Murphy call over the platoon lieutenant. “Make sure each man has his weapon and all his ammo within reach. I want you to take every man who’s able to hold a rifle, and prop him up against a rock or tree stump. We’re going to need everything we’ve got.”

C
aptain Murphy was a good officer, and the inexperienced, terrified grunts around him were, indeed, giving it everything they had. They could not see the NVA for all the vegetation, but the enemy’s view of them was not clear either; they were raising a hell of a racket with all their firing, and the NVA wouldn’t have been able to guess that only six of the men facing them were not bleeding.

Private Bleier, with two bandaged legs, crawled off to their left flank with an M16 he found in the dirt. Very few GIs were on that side and he figured he’d have to help. He lay behind a thin tree and fingered the M16, wondering how accurate he could be with it. He hadn’t fired one for real since AIT. The biggest problem over there was not the NVA, but a brush fire started by the gunship rockets. Smoke rolled over them and Bleier had a panicked thought: if the flames sweep in, I can’t walk and, between the fire and the shooting, the guys would probably take off without thinking about me.

Nevertheless, he stayed in position. Most of the men in the miniature perimeter were similarly steeling themselves. The attitude was to go down fighting.

But the final assault never came.

Sometime after 1700, the enemy fire tapered off, then stopped completely. Everyone warily stayed in position, wondering what was happening. As it turned out, the NVA had pulled out of the wood line and moved back across the paddies to their entrenched positions. Charlie One had been theirs for the taking, but they had not finished the job. Why not? Murphy speculated that they had killed or wounded the NVA
commander. Perhaps the massed firepower had inflicted too many casualties, although the retiring NVA dragged with them however few or many bodies there were.

3d Platoon walked in without being fired upon, and Bleier heard a sergeant say, “All right, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

He closed his eyes and praised God.

A GI ran up and dropped to his knees beside him, talking excitedly, “Rock, Rock, we heard you were dead!”

“No, I’m not, but what do you say we get my ass out of here?”

It was getting dark as the two platoons from Charlie 4–31 made plans to rendezvous with Bravo 1–46. Captain King had come as close as possible; now Captain Murphy had to complete the link up. 3d Platoon was exhausted from a fight of their own; there weren’t enough men to carry all the gear and wounded, so they destroyed two M60s and some other equipment. Captain Murphy was the first wounded man carried out in a poncho. Bleier was next, four grunts from 3d Platoon trudging along with him. It was an ordeal; every time they put him down to rest, they pleaded, “Rock, can’t you walk …? Let us drag you by your shoulders.” Bleier had to beg them to carry him, but after several hundred meters the plastic poncho ripped open. Two of the grunts got him between them, arms over shoulders, and they kept limping along. Bleier put his weight on his “good” leg—the one with the thigh wound—but after perhaps a kilometer, he collapsed. His shoulders just gave out and he moaned, “I can’t go any farther this way.”

That’s when a grunt in the column stepped up and said he’d carry him fireman style. Bleier later wrote:

Lieutenant Wilson was near the front of Charlie Company’s column. By the time the re-act had arrived, he was out of grenades and into his
second and last M16 bandolier. He also carried 250 spare rounds in his rucksack, but he’d fired all that and passed out the rest to the grunts around him in the ditch. The dog handler from Bravo Company met them along the path and led them back to where Bravo had reorganized. Every fifty feet, the German shepherd would alert to things in the tree lines, and the handler would have to break him from his point and keep moving. The NVA are there all right, Wilson thought, but if we don’t mess with them, they don’t look like they’re going to mess with us anymore tonight.

The columns were getting strung out.

By the time Captain King and Lieutenant Baird’s platoon had linked up with the rest of Bravo Company, it was dark. They reorganized along a path in the pitch-black. Private Tam and a buddy named Steve Larado were the last men in their platoon file. They whispered with the point men of the next platoon about what had gone on, until one of them suddenly said, “Hey, man, I think your platoon just took off.”

Tam turned around. No one was in sight.

They started down the trail, Tam in front, Larado a bit behind, growing more and more apprehensive when they realized their platoon was not just a few steps ahead. It was dark and the brush was higher than their heads on both sides of the path. Tam’s heart was beating furiously, hands clenched around his M16, expecting the worst. They walked slowly and softly, whispering into the black void, “Hey, hey, 2d Platoon.” There was no answer. About eighty yards into their terrified march, the trail forked. For no real reason, they took the left fork. They had crept about forty more yards when the path entered a clearing. They crouched in the bushes at the edge, ears straining until, hearing nothing, they decided to double back.

A squad leader stood invisible back at the fork, hissing in the dark, “Tam. Larado. Where are you guys?”

“Yeah, we’re right here.”

The squad leader whispered harshly, “What the hell’s the matter with you? You want to die or something?”

He led them about fifty yards up the right fork to where Bravo 1–46 had collected the dead of Charlie 4–31; they were wrapped in ponchos and tied with GI bootlaces to bamboo poles. All you could see were the jungle boots. Chilling. The men were scared, weary, depressed, their emotions amplified when Charlie Company linked up with them. Actually, they simply straggled past them on the trail to take the lead,
and Bravo Company became the tail. A touch of panic was beginning to affect each of them. American soldiers were not trained to operate at night. The darkness belonged to the enemy, and the GIs were scared shitless.

Bravo and Charlie Companies were humping for Million Dollar Hill which, because the battalion was spread so thinly in two valleys, was defended only by Major Lee and three young soldiers. Two of the GIs were from Charlie Company; the third was an anonymous enlisted guy who Lee had grabbed at LZ West. The GI was not very inspired by the mission and sat down on the helipad, mumbling, “I’m not going out there.” Major Lee had to drag him physically onto the C&C Huey.