Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [153]
Chapter Eighteen
Realignment
If events had gone according to plan, PFC Charly Besardi of Lima Company, 3d Battalion, 7th Marines would have missed his battalion’s redeployment to the Hiep Duc Valley. Two days before the move, Besardi was choppered out of the field, sharing the ride with a wounded NVA prisoner, to attend Mine & Booby Trap School at 1st MarDiv HQ. The chopper was supposed to stop first at LZ Baldy so Besardi could collect his orders from the company office, but it flew directly to Da Nang. Besardi showed up, nonetheless, and was told he had to have the paperwork to get into the school. By the rules, he should have spent the night in a transit hootch at Division Rear. Besardi wanted nothing to do with the lifers and new guys there, so he talked his way into the R and R Center where accommodations were better.
The next morning, he caught a chopper back to LZ Baldy and arrived, showered and rested, at the company hootch. The clerk told him it was too late for the school; the entire battalion was saddling up for a move and he should stay at Baldy. Besardi looked up the company supply sergeant, a good dude, and they bullshitted the night away. They ran a few joints, laughed, told jokes, and for a few hours forgot where they were.
“Geez, Charly,” the supply sergeant sighed, “this is one of the first times I’ve laughed in a long, long time.”
Besardi felt the same way.
He’d come to the Marine Corps the summer after high school, a rough truck driver’s son who grew up with rats in the backyard, neighborhood baseball after school, and girls in the backseat. War seemed like some kind of rah-rah adventure and he and three street buddies signed up. Parris Island was the first slap of reality. Oh my God, what are these people made of, Besardi thought as the drill instructors raged; they’re from another planet come down to kill us! He followed the impersonal conduit to Vietnam; twelve weeks of boot camp, seven weeks of infantry training, four weeks of staging, then the final jet ride.
As the plane descended into Da Nang, Besardi had enough insight to realize that what he was seeing was not really Vietnam.
It became Vietnam to him only after two days of in-processing, of seeing hollow-eyed grunts in weathered fatigues and hearing the steady thump of choppers landing at the NSA hospital. On the third day, Besardi was trucked with forty other replacements to the 7th Marines CP on Hill 55, where a colonel told them bluntly what the area was like and what was expected of them. He ended his talk, “Fifty percent of you people in the first thirty days will be killed or wounded.” From Hill 55, Besardi was trucked to battalion base camp on Hill 10; in the morning, a rocket raid sent him diving head first into a bunker, where he thought, I’m here, this ain’t Vietnam no more, this is the fucking Nam. Within two weeks of joining Lima Company, he was humping along Charlie Ridge on Operation Oklahoma Hills. He was scared, feeling useless. On his first ambush patrol, he walked tail-end-charlie; as they set in, a grunt whispered harshly to him, “You make sure no one was following us? I’ll fucking kill you if anybody was following us.” He sounded as though he meant it. Besardi kept his mouth shut and his eyes and ears open; by the time Lima Company came off Oklahoma Hills, he was walking point.
He was a grunt now, and a different person. The killing had done that. He was on point with his buddy Bailey when they heard music in a tree line. Incredulous, they crept up into it and saw some Vietnamese taking a siesta in hammocks; a radio was playing. There were four men and two women; AK47s were leaning against a tree. Besardi and Bailey didn’t even wait for the platoon to catch up. They crashed in, screaming and firing. In seconds, two of the men and one of the women were dead, the rest wounded. Besardi stood over one who was writhing with two M16 rounds in his stomach, thinking vindictively, wow, man, you’re going to fucking die!