Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [24]
Aug 3rd: Schick though a gas gernade into a hotch today and mouse and sterling got the gas in the face when a change of wind came up. funnist thing in a good while.
August 5: Rocky hit a booby trap today. Messed him up pretty bad. Rodriguey had a hell of a concusion an shrapmetal in the leg. wish it had been me god I’d love to get off this operation.
Lance Corporal Bradley saw living North Vietnamese only once during the operation, near the end of July. He’d been walking point that day, leading the platoon down a narrow trail in a thick tree line. They stopped for a break and Bradley gave his camera to Peay and posed, leaning against a boulder, sweaty blond hair on his forehead, cigarette dangling, sweat towel and undershirt soaked under his flak jacket, his M16 resting on his thigh in one hand, his helmet in the other. No sooner had Peay snapped the photo than Bradley surged with adrenaline—four NVA, in fatigues and bush hats and toting AKs, walked unaware from the bamboo. They were right over Peay’s shoulder, maybe seventy yards away, and Bradley shouted and opened fire the same time Dutch Sterling did. Peay instantly spun and fired too, as one of the NVA fell heavily in the brush. Two comrades grabbed him under the arms and ran back into the tree line as Bradley, Peay, and Dutch sprinted after them. It was incredible, Bradley unable to describe it: heart pounding, sweat glistening on his arms as he fired on the run, and the NVA running, right there in the open on the trail, bobbing in his gun sights. Dutch halted long enough to drop two M79 rounds amid the fleeing NVA; the explosions were on target but they disappeared into some thick vegetation around a bend. The Marines halted, wary of an ambush, and were suddenly exhausted, coming down from the adrenaline. The rest of the platoon jogged up, asking what the hell was going on, and they checked out the only signs that the North Vietnamese had even been there—a splash of blood and a dropped canteen where the first man had fallen.
In the seven weeks that 2dLt Lawrence H. Orefice commanded a platoon of Mike Company, 3d Battalion, 7th Marines, three of his men were killed and six wounded. All the casualties came from booby traps.
That’s how it was in the An Hoa Basin. It could change a man. Orefice learned that on his first night patrol. His platoon had palace guard for the regiment on Hill 55 when movement was detected; it appeared that a mortar tube was being set up in the tree line near the local ville. They reconned by fire from the bunker line; then Orefice took out a squad. They found nothing. The squad leader entered the nearest hootch and dragged out a young papasan, shaking him by his shirt front, slapping him, shouting questions in his face. The Vietnamese did not resist, nor did he whimper. He just kept repeating, “No VC, no VC.” Orefice shouted to stop it. The young corporal did, then said simply and without sarcasm, “We gotta do this, lieutenant. They’re all a bunch of VC sympathizers out to get our ass. And if we don’t get rough with them, they’re not going to do anything for us.”
The corporal was a good Marine and Orefice looked at the stoic papasan. He knows, Orefice thought with a burning frustration that would become a daily pill; this gook knows exactly who was here and he won’t tell us!
Lieutenant Orefice had few answers.
Orefice had come to the Marines out of Windsor, Connecticut, for the same reasons many of his generation joined the Peace Corps: the patriotic challenge evoked by JFK, the desire to help. He went to Vietnam, though, with doubts, not about the validity of that country’s goals, but about the realism of attaining them. Can the ARVN carry the ball? Such thoughts evaporated once he joined his platoon. He was now directly responsible for thirty lives and the daily pressures of that allowed for little reflection. He thought