Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [29]
Chapter Three
Contact
Lieutenant Weh, commanding officer of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division, stood on a knoll of the Hot Dog as the sun sank on 11 August 1969. He was looking south. Paddy fields encircled his hilltop and rambled south for several hundred meters to a tree line. It sat like an island in the untilled rice paddies, overgrowing an abandoned village. Weh tried to peer into it. In the fading light, he was doing what he’d done a hundred times before, accessing the terrain, gauging likely avenues of enemy attack. He had an intuitive feeling that night, absorbed from six years as an enlisted Marine, three years of commissioned service, and from fourteen months in Vietnam.
He could feel the enemy in that tree line.
There was no logical explanation. Working in tandem with Delta Company that afternoon, they had picked the wood line clean. They found nothing. But now Weh could feel them watching from in there. If they were going to attack, this would be their last chance. The battalion was preparing to move north in the morning, a final one- or two-day sweep to the Vu Gia, then out of the Arizona and back into Dodge City.
That last night, Bravo was on an eastern knoll.
Delta was on another knoll a hundred meters west.
Charlie was almost three kilometers farther west.
Alpha was already north along the Song Vu Gia.
The Battalion CP and H&S Company were set up near Bravo and Delta on a third knoll of the Hot Dog; from above, their independent but nearby perimeters looked like the points of a triangle. A jump CP was with Charlie.
Everyone was working under standard procedure.
Lieutenant Weh’s headquarters occupied a space perhaps ten square yards atop a twenty-meter mound; it was the center of his company’s perimeter and holes were spaced in the scrub brush for himself, his gunnery sergeant, a company radioman, battalion radioman, and his forward observation lieutenant and radioman (the FO teams were attached from the 11th Marines). Weh had his three rifle platoons deployed in a tight circle at the bottom of his hillock, where the slope meshed with the rice fields. The soil was hard, dry, and rocky; the grunts chipped out small foxholes, no more than three feet deep, and shallow sleeping areas in case mortars hit while they were off watch. 1st Platoon (Lieutenant Campbell) faced south; 3d (Lieutenant Schirmerhorn) faced south and east; 2d (Lieutenant Albers) faced north. Each platoon had a hundred-yard frontage, ten yards between foxholes, two men to a hole. Trip flares were rigged and claymore mines faced forward, detonating cord reeled back to the foxholes.
Two tree-lined fingers jutted from the knoll and pointed at the tree line. The shorter of the two extended from the eastern rim of the perimeter (Campbell), the longer from the western (Schirmerhorn); Weh had both send out squads after dark to avoid detection. They set in as listening posts at the tips to watch that murky tree line and to protect the concealed approaches that these fingers of land provided an enemy.
Bravo’s hillock fell into a saddle which rose to a second hillock some hundred meters west. Captain Fagan’s Delta Company dug in around it. They also were in a tight perimeter, and Fagan too was suspicious of the tree line to the south. A brushy mound sat about seventy-five yards in front of Delta’s lines, and he dispatched a fire team and an M60 team to it.
The saddle between Bravo and Delta rose gently to a third hillock a bit to the north, still on the Hot Dog ridge. The battalion command post, supervised by Maj Robert B. Alexander, the S-3 operations officer, was dug in there with Capt J. W. Huffman’s H&S Company. The CP and H&S personnel performed their own security, but the grunts usually bitched if they had to set up near them. The cluster of radio aerials was an irresistible target to NVA mortarmen;