Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [35]
For what!?
The company clerk typed up the formal condolence letter to Cashman’s parents for the company commander to sign. Peters also wrote. He received a reply from the father, a sad letter with one message. Why my son? Peters wrote back that Cornelius Cashman was a Marine fighting for his country, which is how Peters always saw things. He didn’t hear from the father again until Christmas; there was ten dollars in the envelope and a note to buy some booze for his son’s platoon. Peters sent the bottle out to them in a mailbag. It wasn’t until ten years later that he worked up the courage to fulfill a promise he had made to himself. Mrs. Cashman answered the phone; he was very nervous, had no idea what to say, but she was a kind woman who remembered his letters. She made it very easy to talk.
That was all for later. When Peters returned to the company area, he told First Sergeant Headley, “Top, I can not hack this. Anymore IDs, you got it. I can’t hack this stuff.”
Chapter Four
What Marines Do Best
It took Charlie Company and the Battalion CP two hours to reach Bravo Company’s hillock, after having moved out at first light on 12 August. In the rising heat spreading across the dead paddies, Lieutenant Hord saw the most startling sight of his year in Vietnam. It was the black communications wire that the NVA had strung, the guides for the NVA infantrymen as they crept in the dark towards the Marines. Bodies were clustered stiffly along the guides, some of the dead NVA still clutching the wire. Lieutenant Hord examined the dead as the company filed past. He could see thirty of them. They had new green fatigues, pith helmets, full web gear, two canteens, AK47 automatic rifles, and a few SKS carbines. Some had whistles and pistols. But what hit Hord hardest was how diminutive and young they looked. He would have sworn some couldn’t have been more than thirteen years of age.
Hord glanced at his own men. They were looking at the bodies too, their faces filled with looks of surprise, fear, retribution, anticipation. Hord could feel it. It was electric. They all knew what was waiting.
This is finally it, he thought.
Atop the low knoll, Hord joined the huddle of commanders and radiomen. Lieutenant Colonel Dowd quickly sketched out a counterattack scheme. B Company was to secure the Hot Dog and the Battalion CP. C Company was to sweep the several hundred meters south into that tree line island; it was dense with thickets of bamboo and elephant grass, beaten-down hootches, and old trails, and it seemed the likeliest place for the NVA to have retreated to. D Company was to stand by to reinforce C Company.
By 0900, Charlie 1/7 stepped off in the attack.
The men moved with two platoons on line, one platoon back, and with Lieutenant Hord’s command group twenty meters back in the seam between the two lead platoons. They had barely reached the paddy when the far tree line erupted into an absolute roar of sustained, concentrated fire. At first, most of it was too high or too low, and the Marines pressed on. Then the whole tempo increased as the air cracked with close AK rounds and dust kicked up in the paddy. Grunts collapsed as they ran for cover. Hord was on the horn, his radiomen trotting alongside, urging on the platoons fifty more yards to the cover of a large dike.
Hord too was jogging for it in a crouch—seconds seeming like hours—when his company radioman abruptly collapsed. He was dragged up to the high dike, an AK round in his chest. Lieutenant Hord crouched beside him, helping get the radio off and shouldering it himself. The radioman was scared but composed, talking with Hord as a corpsman taped a compress bandage over the sucking hole. He was an Irish kid from New York and he mumbled, “I guess I just bought my ticket home.”
“Yeah, you sure did. Take it easy.”
But the air was already escaping from his lungs, his breathing labored, his lips turning blue. The radioman was dying.
And the rest