Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [156]
It took six hours—from noon until dusk—to get the entire battalion to the valley floor. From there, they pushed west down the Old French Road. Another column approached them, headed in the opposite direction, and Besardi hollered to their point man, “Hey, what company you guys from!”
“Well, I’m Fox Company. The rest of these guys behind me are what’s left of Two-Seven.” Jesus Christ, Besardi thought as they passed. The grunts coming out looked drained and beaten. Noting their relief’s lack of gear, they handed over helmets, flak jackets, ammunition; some shook hands, hugged them, beseeched them, “Be careful out there, man. There’s some bad fucking gooks out there. Please be careful.” The survivors’ faces were either blank or set in a horrified grimace.
Third Herd found out why when they crossed the stream. The valley changed there. The smell of death hung in the muggy air, and the downed Sea Knights sat abandoned in the grass-covered paddies. At that sight, the murmurs went up and down the column again.
The grunts knew what they were up against.
They made no contact that night, but it was still touchy going. For one thing, the last of 2/7 had pulled out before the last of 3/7 had conducted the passage of lines. Colonel Kummerow, walking with Lima Company, was unpleasantly surprised when Fox 2/7 suddenly appeared on the dirt road and passed them. “Thus, at dusk,” he noted, “3/7 found itself on a route march in no-man’s-land, not knowing what lay ahead. I ordered my point company to secure an area suitable for a battalion perimeter defense and to establish guides to bring each of the other companies into their sectors. Every man did a beautiful job of quickly and quietly getting secured after a hell of a day, to say nothing of the preceding several days.”
The enemy offensive had indeed brought a frantic pace to 7th Marine operations; even Colonel Kummerow—a low-key Annapolis graduate who had fought as a rifle platoon leader in Korea—couldn’t help but be impressed. On 11 August, he had just checked in at the 1st MarDiv CP when the attacks began. There were rockets and sappers against the Division compound.
On the 12th, General Simpson provided a tour of Division Ridge (complete with a look at the freshly killed NVA sappers); then they boarded a helicopter for an aerial view of the 7th Marines AO, and overflew Dowd’s fight in the Arizona. Kummerow was dropped off at Hill 55 and, within an hour, was accompanying Codispoti as they choppered into the 1/7 CP for a two-hour observation of the battle.
On the 13th, Dowd was killed.
On the 14th, Kummerow was choppered into the 3/7 CP at an old French fort in a picturesque riverside village; on the 17th, they conducted the official change-of-command ceremony. Within an hour of passing the battalion colors, Kummerow was on a chopper to Landing Zone Baldy.
On the 18th, 3/7 Marines relieved 2–1 Infantry.
It did not take Kummerow long to form his opinion of why his Marines were so desperately needed in the Americal AO. The 2d of the 1st Infantry was in the process of moving from Baldy to Hawk Hill (where they worked with the 1–1 Cav in the sand-dune country along the South China Sea). The Marines assuming 2–1’s positions were not impressed; the bunkers were falling apart and much loose equipment had been left behind, including claymore mines, fragmentation grenades, trip flares with their safety catches missing, and rusting belts of M60 ammunition. The judgement of the Marine grunts about the GIs in the area was that they “weren’t worth a fuck.”
Kummerow would not have put it in those terms, but he was not impressed either. The 2d of the 1st Infantry had secured LZ Baldy, manned checkpoints on the road to LZ Ross, and conducted local patrolling. But they had not secured the land itself, relying instead on helicopter scouts. When and if infiltration was detected, infantrymen