Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [60]
The point man suddenly opened fire.
Ferris snapped forward. There they were—three North Vietnamese with khaki fatigues, packs, and AK47 assault rifles. He got a quick look at their backs as they bounded down the trail. The two groups had almost walked into each other. The squad gave chase; Ferris jogged with the handset to his mouth, telling the company commander what was going on. The NVA kept running, pausing only to fire quick bursts, dashing deeper into the brush. The squad moved in behind them and was lucky enough to spot one crouched along a stream.
The NVA died in the abrupt explosion of several M16s.
GIs checked the body as others fanned out to secure the area. Ferris casually watched the grunts walk down a berm towards a thick tree line. Then those trees erupted. Ferris instantly dropped, shoving himself into the dirt behind a dike. He’d never experienced such concentrated fire. He forced himself back up, hand tight around his M16 pistol grip, spent shells flying out. He could see muzzle flashes and smoke. The rest of the company was in a grove back across the paddy. Some of them were firing too. Ferris and a buddy low-crawled to them along a dike, chins in the dirt. They shouted for ammunition and grenades from the guys, then started back. Ferris jumped off a berm and landed wrong; his back throbbed. The crawl under fire seemed to take forever. They finally bellied into position along the last berm and slung the bandoliers through an opening in the brush where the rest of the squad was pinned down and returning fire.
They shot it out for almost an hour before the shadows of dusk allowed them to crawl away. They got back to the company perimeter in the trees in absolute wonderment that they were still alive. One GI had been wounded; one had been killed. He was a tall, skinny country boy; his best buddy Harper, another quiet country kid, was an emotional wreck.
The body of James Hurst had been left.
It was already dark as Delta Company dug in. It was a small perimeter with a roofless hut in the center, nicknamed the French Hootch because it had cement walls. The shooting had petered out when the zapper squad pulled back and a resupply chopper, Rattler 26 out of Chu Lai, made its approach; as soon as it came within range of the tree line across the paddy, there was another torrent of fire. Both pilots were wounded in their armored seats, but managed to limp the Huey to LZ Center. Then, at 1900, the NVA made a probing attack on Delta Company. The blind exchange in the dark didn’t last long, but another GI was killed and two more were wounded. From the amount of enemy fire, it seemed they had walked into a NVA battalion. To say the grunts were stunned, tired, and scared would be barely to scratch at the surface of their emotions.
It was a long night.
In the morning, 18 August, Lieutenant Colonel Henry and Sergeant Major Gutterez stood on a bunker at the edge of LZ West with the crew assigned to fly the 4–31 C&C that day. They were charting their flight down to Delta’s position in the valley and, since it would be under fire, they were being very precise: “Okay, we’ll go around that tree, then.…” Delta Company was running low of ammunition. After an emergency resupply of it was stacked in the Huey, the men climbed aboard and the helicopter bore down the jungled hillside. There was not much fire on the way in—Henry thought the NVA were too stunned—and the Huey hovered quickly over a clearing beside the French Hootch. The crew shoved out the ammo, then the Huey orbited around and sailed uphill. This time, they took heavy fire. Henry had told the two door gunners not to fire since Delta’s perimeter was not well-defined in the bramble of trees and bushes; so he and they could just sit white-knuckled