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By Root 742 0

and cans in the company billeting area. This had been going on for approximately thirty minutes so I went down to the company area to see why they hadn’t stopped the guy. As I approached the tent area the only Marines I saw were on the ground hiding behind the two-foot high sandbag walls that honeycombed the area. As I approached, voices yelled at me to get down. “He’s still shooting,” they called as if powerless to do anything. I asked if anyone had been shot. The answer was that no one knew. I really exploded; I told them that if someone might be on the deck needing medical attention while they were all hiding this would be the most sickening spectacle I had ever seen. I moved in the direction they had indicated until I found the guy. He was standing between two rows of tents still holding the rifle, talking to two other blacks. I walked up and the other two became highly agitated and told me to get back because the guy hated honkies and might shoot me. I couldn’t believe my ears! I told the shooter I was counting to three and if he hadn’t dropped the rifle, I was going to blow half of his guts out of his back with my .45. I assumed the classic movie gunfighter stance; I counted to two and the turd suddenly came back to reality and dropped the rifle just in time.

These were not isolated incidents, and Private Norton, an eighteen-year-old country boy, finally volunteered for the grunts. Out there, they needed each other to survive; hatred was pushed below the surface. Some men forgot it altogether.

In the bush, they were a team.

A marijuana subculture also existed in the battalion; it was a fixture among the support personnel, something which affected the rifle companies whenever they came to rehab at Dai La. It was the race problem or the drug problem which resulted in a fragging on Lugger’s eleventh day in command. At 0200, an unknown person or persons tossed two fragmentation grenades under a raised hootch used by officers and staff NCOs of H Company. One grenade was a dud, but the other exploded through the plywood floorboard, wounding a captain, first sergeant, and gunnery sergeant, and killing a staff sergeant under whose cot the grenade went off. From what could be pieced together, the first sergeant—a hard-core lifer who liked to ream out grunts for being unshaven the minute they came in the camp gate from patrol—had been the intended victim. The staff sergeant was an innocent bystander.

The 2/7 Marines had one of the highest crime rates in the division.

Colonel Lugger had indeed inherited a mess, and he busted his ass trying to pump up morale, decipher the troops’ discontent, and punish those who refused to reform. His methods would never have won him a popularity contest; he never had a positive word for anyone, only red-faced screaming over the problems he found.

Lugger thought things were improving slowly. Perhaps they were. Others thought the mutiny had only been shoved beneath the surface. There was talk of military justice being meted out by throwing Marines in barbed wire cages or beating them with rifle butts. “The steps Lugger took to help morale just didn’t work,” said a staff officer. “He used strictness to the point of harassment. This was applied arbitrarily in such a manner as to appear irrational. The troops responded by retaliation. There was a reward on him before we ever went to LZ Ross.”

If any one man ould take credit for being the battalion’s rock as it sat rotting on the Da Nang line, it was Major Steele, who was on his third tour. Unfortunately for all concerned, Steele was rotated to the Division Surveillance Reconnaissance Center the day 2/7 trucked into LZ Baldy.

The battalion was not a cohesive fighting force.

The men had sat stagnant too long. Too many of their officers were brand new, and too many were considered “crap” by the enlisted men. LZ Baldy was their first real operation in months, and the Hiep Duc Valley was no place to clean off the rust they’d accumulated. They were not prepared for the hornets’ nest they’d walked into and, despite the heroism of many of the players,