Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [37]
All along the line, everyone was doing the same, but Delta Company was halted. Captain Fagan, crouching with his radiomen behind the lead platoons, tried to assess the situation. His machine gun teams were firing, but he was reluctant to use anything heavier, not even mortars, for fear of shelling Charlie Company. He didn’t know the exact location of their advance; Gunny Richards was over in that direction to ensure they didn’t shoot at each other, but the smoke grenades that Charlie Company had popped at their request were not visible in the bramble. Well, it can only get worse, he thought, and with that, Fagan radioed his platoon leaders to assault into the tree line. That’s exactly what they did, using fire and maneuver, progress measured from dike to dike, until finally the Delta line was in the fringes of the woods.
And there they bogged down again.
Delta Company was assaulting the forested island from the west, gaining a tenacious foothold in the edges. Charlie Company was assaulting from the north. They were still pinned down in the open paddies when Lieutenant Hord, the company radio strapped to his back, got on the horn to his reserve platoon. They were to move up to the firing line.
The platoon advanced through the cover of some high brush and tied in with a squad on a knoll of burial mounds. Lance Corporal Bradley’s squad took up positions on a berm at the edge of the knoll, on line, Mouse to Bradley’s left and the first man of the next squad to his right. They were separated from the North Vietnamese by only forty yards of paddy. Bradley flattened himself behind a grassy burial mound, pack dropped to his left, helmet still on, cranking through mags. He snapped with adrenaline and just happened to be looking at the right place when a bare head popped into view through the vegetation. The NVA was rising up to fire. Bradley and the Marine to his right instantly fired and the head snapped out of sight.
“Didja get him, didja see anything!”
Then Bradley got his, an RPG slamming into the dike several yards to his left, knocking him unconscious the same instant he heard the blast. He came to a few minutes later, head throbbing, dimly aware of a man shouting from behind asking if he was okay. He moved slowly, still flat in the grass of the mound, still under fire, covered by ruptured earth. He checked for wounds. His left ear was bleeding and his right arm burned from a piece of shrapnel, but his gear had taken most of the rocket-propelled grenade. His pack beside him had a large piece of shrapnel lodged in it, his helmet was dented, and the hand guard of his M16 was cracked.
For a moment, Bradley could only lie dazed and hurt. That’s when his best friend, Harvey Peay, rose up to fire over the dike and took an AK47 round in his head. He collapsed onto Wendell Wright, the squad radioman, who could only stare for a horrified moment; then Wright calmed down and, under the steady fire, dragged Peay back over the hill to where the corpsmen were working. Lance Corporal Peay lay in the dirt for more than an hour before the medevac could get in; he died before they reached the hospital.
Litter teams used ponchos to get the wounded back to the Hot Dog, where medevacs were being worked off the slope opposite the tree line. When he later thought about it, Lieutenant Hord was mightily impressed at the courage it took to carry a wounded man back across that paddy. But in the din of firing, he didn’t see or hear a single helicopter. His attention was zeroed in on the enemy tree line ahead.
Fire and Maneuver.
By the fourth hour of the assault, Hord had made it to within a hundred feet of the woods. He hunkered against a three-foot dike with his command group. The air inches above their heads screamed with passing rounds. To his left, several Marines were sprawled in the scrub