Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [12]
That was overly optimistic; the NVA wanted this advance halted and the 1969 Summer Offensive would be one of the Americal’s toughest battles. The division had a spotted history. Among the men who wore the Southern Cross patch of the Americal Division were many brave and dedicated ones, but there were those who said the Americal was the worst component of the U.S. Army, Vietnam. The three brigades of the division had arrived piecemeal and the first in-country, the 196th InfBde, began its new war on a sour note. In its first major engagement—in War Zone C of Tay Ninh Province, III Corps—the brigade commander lost control of the heavy fighting and was removed from command. That was in November 1966; in April 1967, the 196th was airlifted to Chu Lai, where it operated under the auspices of Task Force Oregon with a brigade each from the 25th and 101st Divisions. In October, the 198th arrived by air and sea to Duc Pho, and in December, the 11th joined them. At this point, TF Oregon was dissolved and the union of the 11th, 196th, and 198th Infantry Brigades heralded the uncohesive rebirth of the Americal Division. The 11th had made an emergency deployment from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and its officers were generally marginal performers. The 198th had worse problems. It had been hastily formed from the armored divisions at Fort Hood, Texas; when unit commanders were instructed to release men for the new unit, they reportedly purged their worst troops.* The conglomeration became known, derisively, as the Dollar Ninety Eight Brigade.
SP4 Hodierne, U.S. Army photographer during the 69 Summer Offensive, was in 1967 a civilian reporter on hand for the Americal’s introduction to war. He wrote:
They were frighteningly green. I remember choppering in to some makeshift LZ near one of their first fights late one afternoon. The place was chaos, guys walking around in the open, supplies dumped everywhere. I headed up the trail where I was told the contact was. About fifty meters up the trail, guys are coming my way, running, dropping gear, just running full tilt. Retreat would dignify what they did. The next morning, we all went back up the trail to where they had been hit. I don’t remember much more than the body of a medic on top of a wounded guy he had been treating. It was clear to me they had fled, leaving their wounded behind. I didn’t have much use for the Americal Division. It scared me to go out with them.
Such a characterization does injustice to most of the men in the Americal. Still, the division operated with a sense of disorder and dispirit which set it apart from the rest of the U.S. Army. Continued Hodierne, “The Americal had conscripted enlisted men, rookie NCOs, ROTC and OCS platoon leaders who planned to do their three years and out, company commanders with little more experience than their platoon leaders, and field grade officers all looking to get their tickets punched in the hole that read, ‘combat command.’ It could not have been a starker contrast to the units I saw in 1966, outfits like the 101st Airborne or the 1st Air Cav. In those days, fully half the enlisted men were volunteers, the NCOs were seasoned pros, and the company commanders knew what they were doing.”
In addition, the Americal operated in one of the areas of South Vietnam where the population did not try to sit out the war, but where the people were the enemy. It was a brutal war of snipers, ambushes, and