Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [32]
Wells really couldn’t see a thing.
Nearby, the 81mm mortars were pumping out a constant barrage. High explosive, white phosphorus, illumination. An occasional line of green tracers punched across the hill. Mortars impacted; a few RPGs whirl-banged in. Zotter caught fast glimpses around his mortar pit. Ilium rounds floated down on parachutes and tracers arched through the black. A corpsman was shouting, “Bring your wounded over here!” Four silhouettes at a time moved towards the shout, a fifth Marine invisible between them in a poncho. There were moans. An officer shouted, “Keep your eye on that body!” There was a dead NVA near the perimeter, naked except for shorts, lying on his back with one knee up. A gangly, crazy hillbilly named Pridemore took up a position near the mortar pit. He had a night scope mounted on his rifle and shot an NVA creeping up to retrieve the body. Zotter saw Pridemore in the morning; he had the scope carefully wrapped and he nodded to it, grinning, “That makes nine.”
These actions constituted the dangerous periphery of what had become a focused attack on Bravo Company and, more specifically, Lieutenant Schirmerhorn’s platoon. He and his acting platoon sergeant, a black corporal, had their men on a hundred-yard line at the base of the hill.
From atop the hill, all Lieutenant Weh could see of their fight was tracers and flashes from fragmentation grenades. Weh reckoned that the LP had broken the momentum of the attack before being swallowed up, and that the quick artillery barrage had shattered the following waves of troops. But the first wave was sizable and Schirmerhorn was glued on the radio to Weh; Schirmerhorn said it was a free-for-all, gooks all around. As long as the young lieutenant was on the radio, Weh felt secure that the line was holding. But things were tense. For one thing, the 105mm battery supporting them from An Hoa reported running low on ammunition. To deplete an artillery battery’s stock and still have NVA coming at you meant many bad guys, and Weh was praying for daylight.
With the sun came the Phantoms and the rest of the battalion. Weh was thankful that the NVA hadn’t launched their assault just one hour earlier. It was 0600 by then; given an extra hour, he thought the NVA could have forced their way all the way up to his CP before dawn. They seemed to have the numbers for it.
Weh radioed Albers to send one of his squads up to the CP. He was also on the horn with Fagan; Dowd had directed Delta to come to Bravo’s aid. They decided that at first light, one platoon from Delta would physically tie in with Schirmerhorn’s besieged platoon, thus containing the NVA and allowing the jump CP and Charlie to sweep in. From there, they could retake the finger where the listening post had disappeared.
With dawn, the NVA were ebbing away.
There were still stragglers in the line, and Lieutenant Weh wanted to get down to 3d Platoon with the attached squad. Time, he thought, to let them know they were not all alone.
A fire team went down the hill first, followed by Weh and his two radiomen, then the rest of the squad. The sight of a Marine carrying only a .45 and flanked by two waving radio aerials was an irresistible target. As soon as they reached the base of the hill, Weh could see in the gray twilight the North Vietnamese soldier getting up from behind a paddy dike twenty feet ahead. It was like slow motion to Weh as he instantly dove to his right, the AK47 emptying the thirty-round banana clip in one burst, Weh able to see green tracers snapping past his left