Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [4]
Simpson was a thoughtful man. When he looked at his rice paddy infantrymen, he reflected that Tarawa had been a nightmare but one that lasted ninety-six hours. And when it was over, it was over. Not so in Vietnam, and that was the peculiar hardship of this war. The young riflemen—the grunts—were not always fighting, but they were always out in the bush where the danger was omnipresent, the privations constant.
In 1969, the four regiments of the 1st Marine Division maintained a brutal routine of 1,000 patrols every twenty-four hours in their Tactical Area of Responsibility of the I Corps Tactical Zone.
The enemy could be anywhere at anytime.
Mostly, though, by the summer of 69, the ground war in South Vietnam had become most actively focused in the southern sector of the 1st MarDiv TAOR; this was where the border between Quang Nam and Quang Tin Provinces ran horizontally across the Que Son Mountains. The 1st Marine Division occupied Quang Nam, while the 23d Infantry Division (Americal), U.S. Army, occupied Quang Tin. In the mountains between them lived the 2d NVA Division. The mountains belonged to the enemy; from there, they kept the pressure on and the cost was almost constant. The area exacted a daily tax from the Marine battalions assigned to patrol it in the form of Viet Cong booby traps and snipers, a cost accentuated every month or two by clashes with battalions and regiments of North Vietnamese regulars.
The killing ground north of the Que Sons was called the An Hoa Basin. The Marine Corps had first landed at Red Beach, Da Nang, on 8 March 1965. It took until early 1966 to stabilize the villages around the city’s airfield sufficiently; then elements of the 3d Marine Division began pushing ten miles southwest into the fringes of An Hoa. Paddied flatlands stretched in from the coast, but mountains rose around the Basin; the Que Sons formed its western and southern frontiers, a spur called Charlie Ridge its northern. In October 1966, the 3d MarDiv HQ displaced north to Phu Bai from Da Nang, and the 1st MarDiv HQ moved north from Chu Lai to their vacated command bunker on Hill 327. In the An Hoa arid basin, it was a war of attrition, one operation always followed by another. Georgia. Liberty. Macon. Independence. Newcastle. Mameluke Thrust. Allen Brook. Henderson Hill. Taylor Common. Pipestone Canyon. The 2d NVA Division, and the numerous battalions that supported it, proved a tough adversary, but—although one could barely perceive it in those glaring, hot paddies—the Marine Corps was accomplishing its mission.
The U.S. Army, which had first moved into I Corps in April 1967 to reinforce the thin Marine line, was also solidly in place by 1969. The lowlands on the southern side of the Que Sons—the Hiep Duc and Song Chang Valleys—were protected by a string of fire bases manned by the 196th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division. Consequently, Hiep Duc was the Americal’s westernmost advance, as was the An Hoa Basin for the 1st Marine Division.
In 1969, the Arizona Territory, in the southern corner of the Basin, was the war’s bloodiest arena. At a time when the political watchwords were Vietnamization, Pacification, and Troop Withdrawal, the grunts in the Arizona were still operating Search & Destroy. Their’s was a stagnated war of attrition which, by 1969, was responsible for most of their casualties (USMC casualties in Vietnam would eventually exceed USMC casualties in WWII). The object was to keep hammering at the communist strongholds, and to maintain whatever gains had been made in four years of war. Da Nang had become the rear in the continuing effort to push the NVA away from the populated coastal lowlands. The farther from Da Nang, the more dangerous