Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [70]
It was pitch black and they trod slowly, tensing up, expecting another ambush. They had little idea where they were. Within five minutes, the pop of a mortar burst the silence, and four rounds crashed right into the crossing site. It had taken the NVA ambushers too long to relay the coordinates to their mortar crew, and they merely shelled empty space. But it sent Williams’s group into a headlong run, with Williams himself leading the panicked stampede. They could have easily stumbled into another ambush but, luckily, what they ran into was the back of their own column.
The shooting was sporadic all evening around Delta Company’s perimeter, getting concentrated once more around midnight. Whittecar was taking a quick sleep on the cement floor of the French Hootch, head on his helmet, when the first RPG crashed in. It slammed into a tree limb above him, exploding with a rain of hot shrapnel. Whittecar snapped awake. His helmet was shattered, his head nicked, and a long sliver of shrapnel was burning in his leg. He yanked it out and flipped it away, then called in the dark, “Is anybody else hit!”
SP4 Faraci answered and he crawled quickly to him. The front of the young GI’s jungle boot was torn open, a couple of toes blown off. A medic tied field bandages around Whittecar’s leg and Faraci’s foot; Whittecar asked Faraci if he could still handle the radios.
“Sure,” Faraci said, “I don’t need my feet for that.”
Faraci had been Whittecar’s senior RTO during his previous command of the company, and that’s why he had picked him. The kid was solid as a rock under fire. So was Whittecar. He had the line open to Major Lee in B-TOC and, after getting the wounded taken care of, he laughed into the radio, “That goddamn guy knocked the helmet right off my head!” AKs and RPGs kept flashing from the thick elephant grass thirty meters from the GI foxholes. The NVA also employed a captured M79. At dusk, Whittecar had ordered his men to dig new holes on the assumption that the NVA had observed all their original positions during the day. The ploy worked; most of the RPGs were slamming around the old, empty holes. Whittecar was on the horn to his platoon and squad leaders: fire only if you’ve got a target; don’t give your positions away unless you have to.
He prayed there would be no panic.
Out on the line, Specialist Ferris crouched in a foxhole with another grunt from the zapper squad. They triggered quick bursts at the muzzle flashes. A Spooky gunship orbited them, a brilliant red line of gatling gun tracers stitching a wall around the perimeter. Chunks of ruptured sod pelted back around Ferris. He’d never been so scared. Around the two of them, it was a dark nightmare, silhouetted by quick flashes and weird shadows. There were movements, bursts of fire, shouts.
“Medic!”
“We need more ammo up here!”
Men screamed in pain. Ferris knew he was going to die. Behind him, he could hear AK rounds ricocheting off the cement hootch.
In the middle of it, something exploded near his hole. Ferris was so scared, it took him a few moments to realize that his back, arms, and legs were burning from fragments. He stayed in place, hands tight around his M16. Nearby, Cocoa hollered that he’d been shot through the hand. He too kept firing. All around the perimeter, very frightened men, some with wounds or concussions from the RPGs, were tight in their foxholes, managing to keep the North Vietnamese back.
There was a lull as the NVA, forever invisible, seemed to ebb back into the elephant grass. That’s when Whittecar decided to gamble with a medevac; some of his wounded were near death. He talked one Huey in, lights off, coming in low over the treetops, several GIs flicking on flashlights in the LZ clearing beside the French Hootch. The pilot flipped on his landing lights at the last moment, flashing on the stark scene