Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [127]
AK47 fire greeted their flanking maneuver.
Brown and his squad dropped among the trees, boulders, and high grass of a hillside. North Vietnamese were firing from a tree line across the paddy to their front. Before long, the squad could also hear the brush moving below their slight hillock. They chopped M16 bursts at the sounds. Chicom grenades were flung back at them. The NVA had crept that close. GIs ducked, then heaved frags downhill. It was sporadic, off and on. Sergeant Brown sat low, trying to peer through the grass. An AK would cut a burst at them and they’d raise a racket firing back. Then there was silence as both sides changed magazines. The NVA mortar crew was firing again, lobbing rounds over the squad’s heads into the rest of the company. Brown could hear Baird over the RTO’s squawk box: the lieutenant, pinned down with the lead squad, was calmly directing artillery into the tree line from which the ambush had been sprung, and onto NVA who were trying to surround the platoon. Someone near Brown hollered that he saw two NVA running through the trees. A grunt fired a LAW after them. The rest hunkered along the hillside behind spots of cover, trading bursts with the underbrush as the sun beat down.
They too were halted.
As the NVA mortarmen adjusted their fires onto Bravo 1–46 (better known as the Ridgerunners), their sister company, Delta 1–46 (the Vikings), moved to outflank the tube position. Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 46th Infantry, commanded by a black captain named Jesse Sellers, had been airlifted from LZ Professional to LZ Karen the day before.
They had humped to Million Dollar Hill that morning.
SP4 Billy McWhirter, squad leader in the lead platoon, could feel the vibrations when the mortar fired some four hundred yards ahead. He could also hear the flare-ups of automatic weapons fire on the flanks. This was his first big action, but he trusted his platoon and he trusted his officers. That’s what kept him moving forward. He thought his platoon was rare it was so good. Yet Delta Company fared no better than any other Americal unit in the valley; what really seemed rare was McWhirter’s attitude. He’d been working at Caterpillar Tractor when the draft came, nineteen then and supporting a new bride; that would have made a good sob story, but he was from an Illinois farming community and he knew his duty when he saw it. His patriotism was unshakable, and his only gripe was that the Vietnamese didn’t appreciate what the GIs were sacrificing for them. Damn it, he thought, you come in from patrol and here’s some gook at the wire peddling Pepsis at five dollars a bottle! He believed in what he was fighting about, but he never trusted the people he was fighting for.
Delta Company’s advance across Hiep Duc Valley was covered by the rumble of artillery. They reached a muddy paddy boxed in by tree lines, and halted long enough to recon the far side by fire. There was no response, so the point squad hiked into the field, single file atop a berm with twenty feet between each man. SP4 Victor Silvis went next with the M60; then SP4 McWhirter and his squad joined the file into the open.
The staccato reports of AK47s signalled the ambush.
McWhirter was instantly off the berm, splashing into the paddy, pressing into the dike. Everyone was down in the water and mud and, after the initial shock wore off enough for them to get their bearings, they shoved M16s over their helmets and fired back into the tree line facing them. Artillery impacted into the woods, but it had little effect on the entrenched North Vietnamese. It sounded like there was a company of them.
The firefight dragged on inconclusively