Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [5]
The latest encounter in the Arizona was with the 90th NVA Regiment in mid-June 1969. Elements of the 5th Marine Regiment suffered heavily, but they found a dead NVA battalion commander and a dead company commander; the shattered NVA regiment left more than three hundred bodies behind as it limped back to its mountain havens.
Contact tapered off dramatically after this battle. In fact, an unusual calm had settled over most of South Vietnam even before then, and newspapers referred to the Summer Lull. U.S. combat operations continued, men still died, but the NVA were not meeting them punch for punch. The NVA drifted back to their hideaways, and the meaning of this became a topic of political debate. On 8 June 1969, President Nixon had announced the gradual phase-out of U.S. units from the war zone. The discussions centered around dissecting the communist response: was the lull a sign from Ho Chi Minh that the Hanoi regime was more amiable to the new U.S. policy, that the stalled Paris peace talks had a chance for new life?
Major General Simpson would have begged to differ.
The 1st Recon, the eyes and ears of his division, was probing, slipping into Charlie Ridge and the Que Sons. The Recon Marines were more successful than Simpson had first imagined they could be, and their findings were vital (although not surprising)—the NVA were regrouping in strength. In response, in July 69, General Simpson launched another operation—Durham Peak—which saw the 5th Marines helicoptered into the Que Sons. To pick up the slack, the 7th Marines (Col Gildo S. Codispoti) were shifted south from their AO to cover the Arizona; meanwhile, Simpson coordinated with the Americal to screen the Hiep Duc Valley in case the NVA retreated from the 5th Marines in that direction. But Durham Peak was a dry run; the NVA disappeared into their honeycomb of caves and tunnels, even abandoning many of their supply caches and mountain base camps to avoid battle. The communists fought only when they thought they had the advantage.
It was not until the second week of August that the NVA came out of the woodwork. There was a flashpan of fighting all across South Vietnam that first night (including sappers in the wire at 1st MarDiv HQ and rockets on the Americal HQ); then the struggle centered on the Arizona and the Hiep Duc and Song Chang Valleys. It was an eighteen-day campaign (12–29 August), blandly labelled the 1969 Summer Offensive.
The 7th Marines were attacked in the Arizona.
Fire bases of the 196th Brigade, Americal, were hit by sappers.
Outnumbered 196th companies were surrounded in Hiep Duc and Song Chang, and the 7th Marines were committed to assist in halting the offensive, then in pursuing the retreating enemy.
U.S. firepower once again stymied the NVA.
The 1969 Summer Offensive would be another hard-fought American victory but, perhaps, not a resounding one. For one thing, the Marines were gradually committed to the battle. General Simpson noted, “Had we been able to turn the entire 1st Marine Division south, there would have been a far different and far better story to tell. However, this was never considered since we could never leave Da Nang uncovered.”
And there were some battlefield failures.
The NVA goal was, of course, to keep blunting the slow advance into their territory. And they hoped to make trouble extending beyond the battlefield: to kill and to keep killing Americans at a time when Nixon was talking Vietnamization, so that the national confusion and horror over the continuing body bags and amputees would finish what the North Vietnamese Army could only start. In 1969, the commanding general of the NVA admitted that more than a half-million men had been killed, ten times the total U.S. death list. The statistic was offered with a shrug: the number of dead meant nothing; the sacrifice was palatable, because motivation was what really counted. Washington had decided on a war of attrition to combat the communist invasion because they thought Hanoi would blink first. They were wrong.
The 1969 Summer Offensive was unlike