Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [66]
The French Hootch became the center of Delta Company’s defense. It had a twenty- by thirty-foot cement foundation, four feet of crumbling walls all the way around, no roof, and a battered front porch still overhanging a doorless door frame. The FO and RTOs set up their radios in it and the grunts dug foxholes in a thirty-meter circle around it. The medics treated the casualties there, the wounded lay in a row along an outer wall, the dead were beside them in body bags. After checking the miniature perimeter, Captain Whittecar talked with SP5 Kim Diliberto, his senior medic. He said one of the GIs would die from loss of blood if he were not immediately medevacked; during the ambush in the tree line, a Chicom had nearly blown off his arm at the shoulder. Whittecar was very hesitant to call in a medevac considering the circle of 12.7mm guns, and he walked over to see the man for himself.
The kid was propped against the hootch, his wound still gruesome to look at despite the bloody bandages over it. He looked pale and weak, but in good spirits. Whittecar knelt beside the soldier. “Do you think you can hold on?”
“Hell yes. We’re gonna kick their ass like before.”
“You got that right.”
His face suddenly drained and he mumbled, “I’m not feeling too good.” Whittecar reached to his shoulder to balance him, but the GI fell forward onto him. “Medic!” Diliberto was beside him in seconds, but the man was already dead. Whittecar stood there shocked as they put him in a body bag and laid him with the others.
They were outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded. Whittecar had never been in such a situation before, had never felt such dread before.
He always remembered this as his moment of truth.
Whittecar was standing beside the crumbling front porch, talking with Diliberto and several others, when the cracking reports of AK47s suddenly blasted from the edges of their grassy perimeter. Everyone dove to the ground or disappeared into foxholes as Whittecar quickly jumped back up and sprinted into the hootch to join his FO and RTOs. The North Vietnamese were attacking. The GIs returned fire, flattening the grass with M16 and M60 bursts and M79 grenades, while Whittecar and his FO brought in 105mm artillery as close as they dared. At the same time, Whittecar cut to the frequency of his platoon leaders and ordered a counterattack. He didn’t want his men sitting in holes dying, perhaps even panicking in their helplessness. Some probably couldn’t face that order and stayed in the womb of their foxholes, but other grunts attacked like the NVA, individuals crawling through the elephant grass on their stomachs, M16s in front of them, tossing hand frags up and over the high grass. Few, if any, of the GIs even saw an NVA in the tangle, even though they were within yards of each other at times. But the maneuver shocked or confused the NVA enough that they withdrew to the paddies and surrounding wood lines.
It was only as the firing slacked off that Whittecar noticed Diliberto. He was sprawled outside the French Hootch where they’d been talking, a bullet hole in his temple. He’d been killed instantly in the first burst.
The FO kept the artillery thundering around them, close enough so that U.S. shrapnel whizzed over the heads of the men in the foxholes and bounced inside the perimeter. At the same time, Whittecar talked in the gunship pilots. He described the location of one 12.7mm position in the bamboo grove, and the Huey bore down on it. The gun crew did not fire—perhaps not seeing the gunship, perhaps afraid to pinpoint themselves—but other 12.7mm guns began snapping tracers at it from hundreds of yards away. The pilot punched off a cluster of rockets, then pulled up, the bamboo