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He awoke the next morning to the rumble of Phantoms flashing in on the knoll ahead. Dirt clods flew back at them. He lay there, miserably hot and hungry, then he stopped sweating and things got foggy. The next thing he knew he was waking up in a dark, vibrating helicopter. The crew chief was bending down to talk with him. It was heat exhaustion and Sirianni ended up at 1st Med. The place was already abuzz with casualties and he stared stunned at one Marine; the man himself was staring with numb horror at his shredded leg, which had been blown off six inches above the knee.

At 0500 on 24 August, NVA crept up to Golf Company’s perimeter. They tossed Chicom stick grenades over the dikes, then quickly faded back into the dark brush as the grunts responded with M79 and fragmentation grenades. One Marine was killed in the brief, blind melee.

With daylight, the company prepared to attack the knoll again.

The firepower was turned back on for several hours to strip away the last of the vegetation concealing the snipers. H Battery, 3/11 Marines on LZ Ross sent 155mm artillery shells whistling in; Phantoms and Cobras finished the show. Then the grunts began their uphill sweep. The scorching sun was made even more unbearable now that the knoll was bald. They led their attack with M79 CS rounds, but the NVA had pulled out, leaving only one or two men as a rear guard. Corporal Skaggs’s squad took some fire but his point man—a young grunt with an Italian name—lobbed a frag into the spider hole. An NVA with an SKS carbine scrambled out, and the point man cut him down. Along the denuded slope, Golf Company found results of their firepower: two NVA roasted to death from napalm in a spider hole, still clutching their AK47s, and pieces of bodies scattered in the upturned earth. They also found the remains of the three Marines who’d died for this hunk of dirt, and carried them down to be evacuated.

Meanwhile, Hotel Company was also assaulting but from a different angle. It was their job to secure the top of the knoll, and Lieutenant Brennon led his platoon up in a basic on-line assault. Cobra gunships pumped in their ordnance ten meters ahead of the platoon while AK fire cracked from farther up the ridge. The grunts ran up as fast as they could under their gear, propelled by adrenaline and fear; when they’d secured the top—without casualties—many simply passed out under the noonday sun. The rest of Hotel hiked up after them, unopposed, and dug in on the bald crest.

Resupply helicopters began coming in, but the NVA opened fire on them from the tree lines in the lowland paddies to the west. Air strikes were called in, but the NVA were dug in deeply and a spotter pilot from the 1st Marine Air Wing was wounded in his cockpit seat.

Meanwhile, 2/7 remained in place and rested.

That night, it was back to business. At dusk, LCpl Rolf Parr, a squad leader in Fox Company, took out two men as the platoon listening post. The battalion had a lot of problem children, but Parr was not one of them; he was a twenty-year-old Indiana farm boy who soldiered along, rather uncomplaining, even though he had an NVA bullet lodged in a bone in his foot. It was a souvenir from Operation Oklahoma Hills. Parr’s LP team walked two hundred yards outside their perimeter, set a claymore along a dike, then dropped back fifty yards to set in for the night behind another dike. It was around midnight when the new guy on the team whispered he had movement. He pointed and Parr stared at what appeared to be four posts on the dike a hundred yards ahead. Parr figured the foggy night was playing tricks on the kid’s imagination, but then one of the posts moved. An M60 on the perimeter suddenly opened fire and red tracers snapped past the LP. The silhouettes on the dike instantly disappeared. Parr was more surprised than angry with the jumpy machine gunner: he’s not supposed to do that with us out here! One of the NVA suddenly reappeared, running in a crouch along the dike towards the team’s claymore. Parr tossed the firing handle