Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [18]
On 16 July, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines walked from Hill 37 to the vicinity of Hill 65, from which they would cross the Vu Gia back into the Arizona. It was a dreary, hot, dusty day as the grunts walked down Route 4, one column on either side of the dirt road. Lieutenant Peters of Delta Company plodded along with his platoon. He had his M16 in the normal bush position: sling over shoulder, weapon hanging at the waist pointed left, left hand gripping the plastic stock, right hand on the trigger guard, thumb on the safety catch ready to push it to semi.
Peters was in the righthand column as they passed a hootch. He turned to his left to tell something to the man behind him just as a figure ran to the gateway in front of the hootch and threw something. In one movement, Peters whipped around into a squat, left hand thrusting the barrel in the direction of the movement, and he found himself a second from firing with his M16 in the face of a four-year-old boy. The kid had run out to throw a rock at the Americans. He stared terrified at the rifle. Embarrassed, Peters walked on.
The next morning, the men helicoptered into the Arizona.
They moved with a steady drumroll of air and arty prepping their path but, like before, they found little except for blood trails. Lieutenant Peters’s platoon was walking point for Delta Company and they paused in one tree line while arty was processed into the next one. When the fires lifted, the platoon started across on line, more concerned about the incredible heat than the remote chance of anybody still being in the tree line. They were about forty meters from it when one of the M79 grenadiers got bored. He called to Peters, “Hey, can I bloop ’em?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” The old recon by fire.
The kid fired a grenade into the tree line—and the woods suddenly erupted with the jackhammering of a dozen AK47 assault rifles. Everyone scrambled towards the dike ahead. Peters was distinctly aware that he was buckling the chin strap on his helmet; that was something he instinctively did when things seemed bad. Heavy fire snapped overhead and the Marines could only shove their M16s over the berm and fire blind. Peters’s heart was racing. He had only one clear thought: where are the bastards! The tree line was a briar patch.
His radioman lay beside him; his shouting snapped Peters back to the business at hand. “It’s the captain! He says pop the gas!”
That’s right, Peters suddenly thought, we can do that. Each platoon carried an E8 launcher which fired CS tear gas. He called up his gas man and told him to fire into the trees. The grunt was on his knees, unshouldering the launcher. “It won’t work ’cause one of the legs is broken.”
“You mean to tell me you’ve been carrying this sonuvabitch for a month, and now you tell me it doesn’t work!” Peters shouted in frustration. “Give me that!” In a rash moment of anger, he hefted the launcher and scrambled over the berm. He became the lone target and dust kicked up around him as he ran to the next dike. He dropped his pack and rested the launcher against it; then he removed the top, yanked the lanyard, and the vials of CS began popping from their foam rubber mounting like champagne corks. The launcher bucked backwards from the recoil, until it was almost shooting straight up. Peters heard one of his grunts yelling, “Lieutenant, you gotta lay on top of it or it’s going to kick back in your face!” He jumped on it, very aware that his nose was six inches from the shells zipping out. He couldn’t hear the M16s or AK47s anymore—he was too engrossed, too scared, almost laughing, you gotta be kidding me, what am I doing!
At the last shot, he suddenly noticed there was a pause. He looked up. Tear gas covered the tree line and the paddy ahead. His first thought was to charge and the hand-and-arm signal to fix bayonets flashed in his head; then he remembered they didn’t carry bayonets. He dropped