Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [63]
Whittecar ordered a pullback to the French Hootch.
They leapfrogged again, scrambling over dikes while others laid down suppressive fire. The NVA waited until they were in the middle of the field, then started walking 82mm mortar shells through them. The paddy was overgrown and deep with dikes for cover; still, it took a dozen more wounded to get back.
Around the French Hootch, there was the semicontrolled chaos of medics rushing among the wounded and grunts rushing into place on the perimeter. The NVA fire had ceased and Whittecar stood beside the cement hootch with his radiomen, requesting fire support and an emergency resupply of ammunition and water. As the first Huey started its approach, a 12.7mm machine gun began pounding, and green tracers burned up from the canopy of the tree line. Then another opened fire, and another, until Whittecar had counted seven separate twelve-seven positions in a circle around his company. He screamed at the Huey pilot to get out, then cut to the 4–31 TOC frequency. He reported his estimate that Delta Company was surrounded by a regiment of 1,200 NVA. At that time, Whittecar had 109 troopers, and that included the 5 KIA and the 21 WIA.
There was, indeed, a regiment around Whittecar and his men. The first two days of the battle were the bleakest for 4–31 Infantry as far as their being greatly outnumbered and not knowing what was going on. As the scenario was later pieced together, the NVA attack plan had two parts. The 3d Main Force Regiment, 2d NVA Division was dug in around Hill 102 in the Song Chang Valley; their mission was to attack LZ West and LZ Center. At the same time, the 1st Main Force Regiment, 2d NVA Division was dug in around Hills 381 and 441 (of the Nui Chom ridge line). While the base camps were being hit, part of the regiment would destroy the Resettlement Village while the rest formed a block across Route 534. This hard-packed dirt road (called the Old French Road) originated at Highway One on the coast and ran all the way to the Resettlement Village, slicing the Hiep Duc Valley horizontally. This would be a likely avenue of approach for any relief force. Supporting these efforts, U.S. Intelligence also placed various headquarters, sapper, mortar, antiaircraft, signal, and transportation detachments; they estimated a total of 3,000–5,000 NVA troops. It was thought that when D/4–31 bumped into the 3d Regiment on 17 August, and B/4–31 the 1st Regiment on 18 August, they accidentally preempted the NVA attack. All that had not become focused on the second morning of the battle. It was figured that D/4–31 had found the main NVA concentration that had hit LZ West a week before. In Hiep Duc Valley, therefore, it was business as usual.
At daybreak on 18 August, Captain Gayler, CO, Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, had his men ruck up and begin their march across Hiep Duc Valley towards the mountainous spur, Nui Chom, which formed the valley’s northern frontier. Bravo had been in the bush since rotating off LZ security a week before, conducting a generally fruitless search for the NVA battalion which had assaulted their base camp. In that respect, it was similar to Gayler’s previous experiences in the war. He’d come in-country in January as the air operations officer and took over the company in April; he held a Bronze Star for the June fight in AK Valley, but most of the company patrols were merely what they called Hot Walks in the Sun.
This did not suit Gayler at all. He’d grown up in the rural town of Mineral Wells, Texas, where his parents owned a mom ‘n’ pop grocery store. He joined the national guard at seventeen, then joined the fire department after a few disastrous, beer-blasted semesters in college. When Vietnam began heating up, he volunteered for OCS and the Regular Army. Captain Gayler was thirty years