Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [103]
Charlie One got moving again down the berm. Murphy counselled them, “Be careful. We’ll be in open territory. Stay about eight yards apart.”
There were twenty-five GIs in the platoon.
Private Bleier was eighth man back in the platoon file. It was another raging hot day; sweat stung down his face from under his helmet, and he looked and felt like a pack horse. He toted an M79 grenade launcher, which hung from a strap around his neck with an o.d. green towel tucked under it. His rucksack weighed about fifty pounds and that weight was doubled by the sixty M79 grenades he humped. Half were in a bag secured at the top of his ruck; the rest were in another bag hung across his chest. Five canteens hung beneath the ruck. Many of the grunts also tied cloth bands around their legs, just below the knee, to keep leeches from slinking up to their crotches.
A GI named Dave was behind Bleier. Behind Dave were his best buddies—Doc, the platoon medic, and Hawaii, a new guy. Hawaii was nineteen, drafted, and had only six months left in the Green Machine when they sent him to Vietnam. Nevertheless, he was a bright kid. His fiancee wrote him daily, and he beamed at the letters. That’s probably why Bleier liked him; too many others in the company were overly sullen about their fate.
The platoon had hiked into an open paddy when the point man suddenly shouted, “Gook, gook!” He triggered a couple of hasty shots, then began jogging down the path after the figure. The platoon followed.
Then came the cracking report of an RPD machine gun.
Bleier instantly jumped to his left, off the berm and into the dry paddy. He rolled onto his back to release his pack suspenders, but the easy-snaps wouldn’t budge. He finally slid his arms out, then shoved forward on his stomach, cradling his grenade launcher and ammunition. It was twenty yards to the next dike. He peeked over. Twenty yards farther ahead, the four men in the lead were pressed flat behind a dike. It was only two feet high, and twenty yards beyond it was a wooded knoll. The NVA were firing from within its thickets.
Bleier could see the brush twitch when the RPD fired.
He rolled onto his side, snapped the M79 open, and dropped a fat round in. Just as he propped himself up to fire, he heard Dave shout his name and felt a dull thud against his left thigh. He thought Dave had tossed a pebble to get his attention, but then it stung. Blood was soaking his fatigue trousers from two neat holes, one in front and one in the rear. The round had sheared four inches across his thigh, leaving an inch-deep furrow that gushed red.
“Dave, I’m hit!”
Bleier had moved away from his pack, so Dave dug into his own and tossed him a bandage. Bleier wrapped it around his leg, then looked around; almost everyone else had jumped to the right side of the pathway berm. In a fright, he punched a few grenades at the knoll, then scooted back to his pack. To his left was a hedgerow ten feet high, and he crawled for it. From the cover, he saw an RPD burst splatter across his rucksack ten feet back. Dave was behind a boulder fifteen yards behind him. “Rock, you okay, you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay!”
“I’ll tell Hawaii to send word that you’ve been hit!”
“Okay, okay, get a medic up here!”
Dave hollered for Hawaii over the automatic weapons fire. No answer, no movement. He looked back. Hawaii was face down in the paddy. “Rock, I think Hawaii’s been hit!”
Bleier was frantic, “Hawaii, Hawaii!”
Doc crawled to the slumped man, then shouted, “Hawaii got it, he’s dead!” Bleier could only look down and ask the Lord to take care of him.
What was agonizing and chaotic up front channelized back to Captain Murphy in the tree line. There it was calm. Murphy stood in the ditch with his RTOs, on the blue-leg net to the lieutenant