Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [30]
Lieutenant Hord’s Charlie Company was about two-and-a-half klicks west of the Hot Dog, dug in around a tiny abandoned ville in another tree line island. Lieutenant Colonel Dowd and his jump CP were with them. Captain Clark’s Alpha Company was even farther from the Hot Dog, helicoptered north to positions along the Vu Gia. They were to be the block for the next day’s battalion sweep. This was to be their last night in the infamous Arizona.
Nerves were clicking. It had been too easy.
The tension became real sometime after midnight when all three listening posts from Bravo and Delta began whispering into their radios. There were noises … then murky figures just visible in the paddies … then hushed Vietnamese voices. In the dark, it was impossible to tell what was approaching them, and the teams were instructed to remain in place to further gauge the situation. Sometimes the few are sacrificed to alert the many. At 0415, it happened: a trip flare suddenly popped in the paddies near Bravo Three’s LP on the long finger, followed by a hasty exchange of fire. Lieutenant Weh, half-asleep in a hole with his radioman, instantly rolled out from under his poncho and took the radio handset. He asked the squad leader with the LP what was going on. The response was a strained whisper, “I don’t know, but there’s a lot of people moving out here.”
What was out there was the 8th and 9th Battalions, 90th NVA Regiment, reinforced by a battalion from the 368B NVA Rocket Regiment, and their plan was to completely overrun the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines.
The Marines knew none of this yet.
Moments before the LP was hit, the 81mm Mortar Platoon of H&S Company was alerted. They had four tubes up and their section leader, SSgt “Flash” Gordon, had his radios in a poncho-covered foxhole. He stuck out his head and called to Gun Number One, “Zotter, we got movement in front of us.” LCpl Charles Zotter was on watch at the time; he was a nineteen-year-old high school dropout who’d been given the choice of the Marine Corps or jail because of his street gang activities. He’d been in-country thirteen months, and he moved quickly. He roused his partners in the shallow mortar pit, then picked up an illumination round and clicked the time fuse on the nose to three seconds. That meant the shell would burst before it reached its highest point, before the NVA who heard the pop of the round leaving the tube could run to cover.
Then came that first burst of fire. Zotter instantly dropped the ilium round down the tube, and the black hill was bathed in white light. The next second, the H&S Marines opened fire—a frantic downhill sweep of M16 and M60 fire, a virtual wall of red tracers. There were North Vietnamese all over their hillside. They were NVA sappers, wearing only shorts, coming uphill with satchel charges and grenades and unreeling detonation cord behind them. Someone had jumped the gun, though, for they were only halfway up. They ran back, some tumbling in the fire from the foxholes. Zotter saw one clearly; he was running, clawing at his back as bullets thudded into it, stumbling, finally collapsing on his face.
In moments, the NVA disappeared.
The firing continued, most of it concentrated near that long finger in front of Lieutenant Schirmerhorn’s platoon in the Bravo line. After that first conversation with the LP, Weh had gotten his FO out of his hole. Within fifteen minutes, artillery from the 11th Marines in An Hoa was slamming into that southern tree line and around the listening post. Weh also contacted battalion to scramble air support. That took longer, but within an hour, a USAF C119 prop plane was orbiting, pouring fire down from its electric-powered miniguns (a variation of the old gatling gun).
The grunts called these gunships Spooky; each minigun fired 6,000 rounds a minute, which was good because, by the time it came on station, Weh was up against an