Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [148]
In that condition, they attacked.
Echo Company, under 1stLt Paul T. Lindsay, was to lead the westward advance. As the men saddled up in the flattened elephant grass, Lindsay had his doubts—one more time, they were walking undermanned into a hornets’ nest. He thought it would have been wiser to mass the battalion and advance fifty meters at a time, thoroughly digging out the NVA in that area before advancing to the next parcel. He saw no sense in rushing to some slotted coordinates two kilometers forward of their lines. Lindsay’s opinion was worth something. Although he was young and just counting his days, he had plenty of combat time and was highly respected by his grunts. He was like them in many ways; salty, cocky towards his less-exposed superiors.
Lugger and Lindsay did not get along.
But in the recorded history of the Vietnam War, there is not a single instance of a Marine Corps unit refusing a combat mission.
The survivors of Echo pushed into the boiling paddies.
The platoon leader and platoon sergeant of Echo Three had been medevacked, so Gunnery Sergeant Yohe led them. He was up with the lead squad as they entered a clearing, and they got within thirty meters of the opposite tree line before the ambush began. A Marine dropped with a bullet in his arm. Yohe rolled to the kid, grabbed his M79 grenade launcher, and raised up just enough to pump rounds into the woods. He couldn’t see anything. Neither could anyone else, but they kept firing. Two Marines were shot in the chest as they did so. Three others also were wounded, victims of the first fusillade. Only Gunny Yohe and three others of the lead squad were unscathed.
Lieutenant Lindsay brought in the air support: Phantoms dropping napalm thirty meters from the squad, Cobras firing white phosphorus rockets into the trees. Under that cover, the lead squad was able to pull back. In the relative cover of the brush behind them, corpsmen pounded on the chests and gave heart massage to the two men with sucking chest wounds. Both died before the grunts could get them to a landing zone.
The push continued.
Echo had advanced five hundred meters. Fox, moving on Echo’s right flank, came under only sporadic sniper fire as they continued the push.
Then came the mortaring. PFC Lorne Collinson crouched behind a tree. The company, after having humped to a point along a stream where it thinned to a trickle one could hop over, had been taking a break when the shelling began. No matter. It wasn’t a heavy barrage, more a matter of harassment and delay, one round every couple of minutes.
The men could hear the thunk of the round leaving the tube; they were too weary even to be scared as they counted a few seconds, then flattened in the undergrowth. Collinson took off his helmet and flak jacket in the heat and lay on them like a pillow as he kept a watch downstream. A young Marine in the company helicopter support team was not as relaxed. He had been dispatched unwillingly to the grunts from his shore party battalion, and he crouched bug-eyed behind a tree. His hands were sweaty around his M16 and he looked all around him, shouting to Collinson to watch out, man, watch out, the gooks could be anywhere!
Amused, Collinson shouted back, “No sweat!”
Stobie, another new guy, was not as rattled. He trudged past with a mumble, “I gotta take a dump.” When he came back from the bushes, he sat to talk. They were being too cocky; they never heard the next mortar round. Collinson was suddenly bounced up and thrown to the ground. He stood up, wobbly, ears ringing so loudly he couldn’t hear. The bush behind them was shredded and Stobie was still sitting there, leaning forward, helmet blown off. He put his hand to his head and blood rushed over his fingers. Collinson shouted for a corpsman as he took Stobie’s pressure bandage and wrapped it around his head. It quickly soaked