Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [134]
By then it was 1700.
Before the ambush was sprung on Hotel Company, Golf Company had also been moving west. Lieutenant Larrison was proceeding with extreme caution: he had the platoons of Lieutenants Page and Pickett raise a shattering cacophony of cover fire as 3d Platoon rushed the first tree line facing them. They secured it without contact, and the rest of the company swept in. They prepared to repeat the process on the next wood line facing them.
Then Hotel was hit and Golf was sent in.
Urgency dampened caution as they moved to their right, filing along a stand of trees. The point man was three feet from the first spider hole before the NVA signalled his presence by emptying his AK47. He killed the point man instantly and wounded the next man in line. The wounded Marine squeezed flat behind his dead buddy as a crossfire suddenly electrified the air above him, but he kept his head. He reached over the body to set in his claymore mine, then unreeled the firing wire as he scooted back. When the NVA raised from his hole to fire a fresh magazine, the grunt detonated the claymore. Its one-pound charge of C4 plastic explosive sent out six hundred steel balls like a shotgun blast. Man and brush were shredded.
A squad of entrenched NVA were still firing from the trees, and Lieutenant Page and his radioman ran towards the pinned-down grunts. They made it through a hundred yards of paddy before they too had to hit the deck. Lieutenant Larrison moved his other two platoons into position to provide cover fire; the Marines saw no one to line up in rifle sights, but any suspected firing position was battered with M79 grenades and teargas. The NVA fire did not lessen; Hotel was screaming on the radio that Golf’s stray fire was hitting around them. Golf was screaming the same thing back. It was boiling chaos.
Two North Vietnamese soldiers materialized in one of the tree lines and the Marines—almost dead from the heat in the open paddy—poured fire at them. The NVA appeared to go down in the hail of rounds. Or did they only duck into their trenches? The tree lines were honeycombed with slit trenches and spider holes, and the NVA moved along them—below the Marine rifle fire—until they were firing on Golf Company from three sides. The firefight had lasted two hours, and Lieutenant Larrison finally ordered everyone back. They were forced to leave their dead point man.
Hotel Company was still pinned down.
Meanwhile, Colonel Lugger was glued to his radios; his command post was in a tree grove on the northern bank of the Song Lau River, near a crumbling, concrete pagoda which sat incongruously in the high weeds. Lugger had yet to get G and H Companies out of harm’s way when F Company—which was providing CP security—was ordered on another mission. Colonel Codispoti (operating from his Forward CP in the 4–31 TOC on LZ West) wanted one platoon from Fox to conduct a reconnaissance a kilometer-and-a-half to the west. The mission was to link up physically with Task Force 4–31, a goal which Lugger could not understand. It seemed to play into the hands of the enemy. There were officers who thought he should have quietly ignored the directive from a distant headquarters. But Lugger did not have the advantage of hindsight, nor was he aware of the tactical situation on the Army side of the line.
So the Fox platoon advanced as ordered. They had gone a thousand yards when a sudden ring of mortar, rocket-propelled grenade, and automatic weapons fire slammed down around them, inflicting heavy casualties.
1st Platoon was surrounded.
At the same time, the 2/7 CP came under heavy fire from an estimated seventy-five NVA just across the Song Lau. Fifty meters separated Marines and North Vietnamese, and Lugger and crew hugged earth as RPGs and AK47s screamed in. Mortars began whistling down on their postage-stamp perimeter. Battalion staff officers and radiomen shouldered M16s and returned fire while Lugger