Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [169]
“Hey, listen,” Besardi snapped, “if you wanna be the fucking squad leader, you go right ahead. I’ll give it to you right fucking now, if you want the responsibilities!”
“No, no, no.”
“Okay, then shut the fuck up.”
He turned to Johnson. “Joe, I need a point man.”
“What the fuck, Charly, I’m …”
“Yeah, man, I understand where you’re coming from. But I still need a fucking point man.”
“All right, I’ll walk it for ya.”
With Johnson on point and Besardi walking slack, the platoon finally hiked up the bouldered slope. The NVA were gone. They humped most of the afternoon, searching the abandoned dugouts, until the acting platoon leader called a break near a stream. Besardi was loaded under extra M60 ammo he had scrounged from the medevacs, and a U.S. Army flak jacket one of the casualties had previously liberated from Baldy or West and left lying in the dirt. He was really dragging and his good buddy Dean took his canteens to fill them up.
They set up atop Hill 381 for the night, then hacked through some thick brush to rejoin the rest of the company. They found them on one of the knolls of the ridge line, and from there they eventually were choppered to LZ Ross for a rest. A lot of replacements were milling on the LZ. Besardi noticed one of them and thought shocked, oh my God, this can’t be. It was a hometown buddy.
He grabbed him. “Pizza Paul, what you doing!”
Paul stared at Besardi for a long second. He finally recognized him and blurted, “Charly, you look fucking terrible.”
“Don’t worry about that, pal, you’ll look the same way in a few months too.”
Lima 3/7 had disembarked at Ross in the late afternoon, then erected tents in the rain. The monsoon was beginning. Around 2100, word came to saddle up. The battalion was taking to the bush again in order to thin out the congestion atop LZ Ross in case of a rocket attack, and to investigate a sighting of North Vietnamese in nearby foothills. Besardi trudged bleary-eyed through the mud, his helmet cover soaked, his uniform soaked, his gear soaked, his skin shrivelled from the constant dampness. He rounded up his squad; they were bitching as they reshouldered packs and bandoliers, too tired to accept any rationale of why they were moving again. The acting platoon leader finally addressed them, “Listen, people, this is a W-A-R and we got fucking things to do. So, let’s go do it.”
They filed out of the fire base gate and down the muddy slope in the rainstorm, humping from ten at night until five in the morning in the direction of LZ Baldy. When they stopped, Besardi wrapped himself in a poncho liner, put his helmet over his face to shield the rain, and slept in the wet grass for two hours. Then they were up again, shivering and soaked, back on patrol.
Chapter Twenty-One
Continuum
To cap the victory, Colonel Codispoti presented Colonel Henry with a silver bugle. According to MACV’s very subjective distillation of prisoner statements, Hanoi did not consider their campaign in Hiep Duc a success. Some said that the commander and executive officer of the 1st NVA Regiment were relieved after pulling back into the mountains. Others said that a B52 arc light along Nui Chom had found the 2d NVA Division Headquarters and pursuing units killed dozens of North Vietnamese. It was impossible to verify the prisoners’ statements. Scores of NVA stragglers were picked off by the pursuing units. An NVA battalion commander was captured by M/3/7 Marines; he was found in a cave with three soldiers, all of whom surrendered after the Marines fired in a few rounds. The enemy colonel would not budge, so they tossed in tear gas and had to drag him out physically.
An ARVN battalion was brought in to help with the mop-up, and they spotted a withdrawing NVA column. U.S.