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By Root 640 0

Then, mournfully: why? The killing came too easily. Worse, for Besardi, it was as if they killed and suffered in a vacuum, without rhyme or reason. On a patrol in the Que Sons, they had come across an old woman and a little kid who gave them bananas while they paused near their hootch. They had received instructions to destroy the woman’s rice lest the NVA confiscate it, so they lugged her rice baskets to a nearby stream and dumped them. When the patrol leader said to burn the hootch, Besardi had exploded, “What, are you fucking crazy!” The corporal had been disgusted too. “It ain’t me, it’s the people up there.” They had torched the hootch with their Zippos and left, no one saying much, Besardi thinking, this is for nothing, what are we really trying to accomplish?

He hardened. He was walking point the day in Dodge City when Terry tripped a booby-trapped frag. Terry collapsed, screaming, and Mayhan the radioman was unconscious, his legs and crotch ragged with red-hot shrapnel. The corpsman, Doc Johnson, worked furiously on Mayhan, tying bandages, using mouth to mouth to keep him alive until the medevac clattered in. They were running patrols off Hill 37 then, between Oklahoma Hills and the move to LZ Baldy, coming back each time dusty and exhausted. They rotated, out for four days and three nights, then back to Hill 37 for an afternoon and night of rest. When they came in, they wanted to rest, to talk, to smoke their pot. The company gunnery sergeant wanted cigarette butts policed up, trousers bloused, jungle boots shined. He screamed his demands. One night, someone rolled a frag under the gunny’s hootch. He survived and was medevacked.

Yet Besardi was touched sometimes by the war and a new sense of self respect, but mostly by the people. He barely knew his father when he left; life seemed to offer only some punk job and people looking out for number one. Lima Company gave him something he never had. The grunts were the best people he ever knew. Besardi cursed them. The kindest word he had for his buddy, P. K. Smith, when he saw him sweating along under bandoliers of M60 ammunition, was a laugh, “Fuck you, Smith, you ain’t never getting that gun. You’re gonna be an ammo humper the rest of your tour!”

He loved P. K. Smith.

In the Que Sons, Besardi came down with malaria, but the company had to keep walking to find a medevac landing zone. One of the new guys—a dude from New York who came across originally as a conniving bastard—voluntarily shouldered Besardi’s pack as they walked. A lieutenant from the company headquarters took his rifle and ammo.

He loved them all.

By the time the battalion was saddling up to move into Hiep Duc, Besardi had been with the company, almost constantly in the bush, for a hundred and seventy days. The Hiep Duc Valley was bad, as his friend, the supply sergeant, had been trying to warn him. 2/7 had gone in first, was still out there, and for four days the choppers had been coming into the medical detachment on Landing Zone Baldy. The sergeant had watched from the airstrip as the dead Marines were stacked in trucks. The sergeant shook Besardi’s hand, hugged him, looked him in the face. “You take care out there.”

On the morning of 26 August 1969, Lieutenant Colonel Kummerow, CO, 3/7 Marines, was summoned to Colonel Codispoti’s forward command post on LZ West. From there they helicoptered to the 2/7 CP in Hiep Duc Valley. Kummerow once described Codispoti, with respect, as “… square in stature, his arms hung to his knees, and he was covered with curly hair, giving him much the appearance of a Neanderthal man. When he attempted to smile, he bared two rows of huge, yellowed teeth in more of a grimace than a grin.” Codispoti struck Kummerow as a warrior able to weather the worst. As they conferred, 2/7 was calling in artillery fire and recovering nine of the men left behind in the previous day’s debacle. It was shattering to see the dead Marines being carried back into the perimeter. Codispoti decided on the spot to replace 2/7 with 3/7.

Kummerow helicoptered back to LZ Baldy; on the morning