Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [145]
By dusk, Private Norton had come to. He sat near the CP pagoda, tagged for a medevac, and talked wearily with some other grunts. Then suddenly, swoosh! swoosh! swoosh! Norton sprang to his feet and ran towards a palm tree. An explosion suddenly blasted him through the air and threw him to the ground like a rag doll. He lay there with a gash from his knee to his butt and shell fragments burned in his stomach and intestines.
He did not pass out again.
Lance Corporal Parr was asleep in the grass, wrapped in a poncho. The first explosion slapped him awake, and he put on his helmet, grabbed his M16, and was pushing up to run to a dike when the world exploded three feet in front of him. The next thing he knew he was mashed against a tree and thinking that the tree was fifteen feet from where he’d been sleeping and, oh Lordy, what the hell’s going on! He didn’t know it, but his entire body was riddled, helmet blown off, right eye blown out, the right side of his skull shattered. Only his left arm was unscathed.
Parr could feel nothing, only a numbness pulsing with hot sensations. The right side of his head seemed hottest of all; he touched his hand to it, feeling neither his head nor hand, thinking, Aw hell, you done it this time!
That was his last thought.
Shields ran up to Norton and got a tourniquet around his leg. Norton was terrified that his crotch had been ripped open, and he argued with his buddy to strike his lighter in the darkness. He finally did. “Naw, man, it’s all right!” Gunships rolled in; then a Sea Knight thumped down. Shields and another Marine rolled Norton onto a hootch door, then laid him on the back ramp of the crammed helicopter. As it lifted up, the crew chief sprawled across him to pump his M16 out the open hatch, and burning hot brass bounced onto Norton’s neck and chest.
The helo flew to Da Nang and Norton finally ended up on a freezing, steel table in the X-ray room, next to a Marine who’d been hit in the chest. Norton suddenly started shivering and yelled for a blanket; then he realized he was going into shock. He’d seen it before and told himself, take it easy, lay back and let it roll.
Norton woke up three days later, in intense pain, tubes sticking out of him; when it was all over, he’d lost part of his intestine.
Parr woke up twenty-seven days later and, when it was all over for him, his skull and face had been reconstructed with plastic surgery and his right kidney and spleen had been removed, as had parts of his right lung, liver, intestinal tract, and stomach.
It was pitch black when the first 60mm mortar round thunked from its tube, but Collinson and McCoy were still awake in their foxhole. Collinson saw the sudden flash across the stream and, before the round impacted, he was shouting, “Incoming, incoming!” and shouldering his M16. He fired rapid, single shots, peppering the brush all around the mortar tube flashes. But he didn’t have tracers and couldn’t tell if he was hitting a thing. The NVA kept pumping and the explosions seemed to walk towards his position. The closest one exploded twenty meters short of his hole, then a few more rounds were lobbed in on the command post area.
The NVA mortar crew ceased firing on their own accord.
Collinson could hear shrieks for corpsmen as he continued to fire his M16 into the darkness. He screamed frantically at McCoy to get the M60 crew, and McCoy hollered for them.
An M79 man ran up, and Collinson, in his excitement and frustration, tried to take the weapon from him. The Marine wouldn’t let go, so Collinson shouted and pointed across the river. The grunt popped off an M79 round but, in the dark, it clipped a tree limb on their side of the stream. They had to duck under the abrupt spray of fragments. They decided not to try a second shot. Collinson stayed in place in his hole, eating at himself—I saw the bastards, why couldn’t I have killed them before they killed my buddies!
Lieutenant Schuler