Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [10]
Peters, a baby-faced second lieutenant with brown hair in a high crewcut, lost his first man eight days after getting his platoon. It was on a routine squad ambush near the Da Nang Rocket Belt, on a pitch-black night that poured a noisy rain. Peters joined them as they left the platoon perimeter and walked parallel to a brushy riverbank. Out of nowhere, there were hurried, jolting shots from the point, then a continuous exchange.
Peters clawed into the wet grass.
Everyone seemed to be on automatic. The platoon sergeant was up in moments, organizing a hasty defense. The grunts triggered return bursts through the rain. Peters crouched with his radioman, calling in support fire. He had always made a mistake with it at Basic School, had never done it for real before, but now he snapped all directions out correctly. He talked with the chief of the 81mm mortars on Hill 37, giving him his observer target line in degrees.
“What’s that in mils?”
“Seventeen-sixty,” Peters answered instantly. It was 100 degrees with 17.6 millimeters per degree. All his training was clicking right and he suddenly flashed to the time at Basic School when he complained to a captain that they did the same things over and over. The captain said that was so no matter how physically or mentally exhausted you were in combat, the things you needed to know to keep your people alive would be gut reactions. He was right. Peters brought the 81mm rounds in even as the VC firing died down; at the same time, he directed in artillery airburst rounds on the likely avenue of enemy withdrawal.
Their casualties were dragged back then and a Navy corpsman with an enormous mustache approached Peters. “Lieutenant, we got one dead, six wounded, and Doc Flashpool got shot in the chest. If we don’t get him out right now, he’s gonna die ’cause I can’t stop the bleeding.” The point man, a black kid, lay dead in the mud among the wounded. Peters crouched over Doc Flashpool, a nice, skinny kid, the only man among the casualties he really knew. “Doc, it’s the lieutenant. Are you okay?”
Flashpool suddenly grabbed the front of his T-shirt, pulling him closer. “Lieutenant, don’t let ’em do it. Don’t let ’em do it to me.”
“Do what, Doc?”
“Don’t let ’em bury me as a sailor. I’m not a fucking sailor. I’m a Marine! I want to be buried in a Marine uniform!”
“Doc, you’re not going to die. We’ve got a chopper inbound. We’re going to get you out of here.” Peters was saying what he was supposed to, but what he was thinking was—God, I’m twenty-one years old and I’ve got a nineteen-year-old kid hanging on me, giving me his death wish. Oh Christ, don’t let him die! He didn’t.
A medevac helicopter was overhead within minutes. Peters’s radioman walked into an open paddy to signal the orbiting chopper with a strobe light. That made him an outlined target to any enemy who might still be lurking, but someone had to do it. Among the grunts, bravery was often routine. No one opened fire, but the Sea Knight pilot said he had three lights in his sights. The radioman set a second light and the pilot responded, “Roger that.” The chopper touched down in the soggy, black paddy and in seconds it was lifting off, nose down, and disappearing into the rainy gloom with the dead and wounded aboard.
The platoon returned to the perimeter. Lieutenant Peters wrapped himself in his poncho. He did not allow poncho hootches at night for they presented a silhouetted target; so he lay in the rain, his head on his pack. Like every grunt in the platoon, his pack was ready to be shouldered at a moment’s notice, and his M16 rifle was beside it, semidry under another poncho. He listened to the drizzle,