Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [76]
Coming in on the next lift, Private Goodwin and part of his squad were crowded into a Huey with their new platoon leader, Lieutenant Tynan, and the hitchhiking Noonan. Starting their descent into the LZ, they could see the downed chopper. Noonan leaned past the door gunner, taking photographs, and Goodwin shouted to his new lieutenant over the thump of the rotors, “Boy, is this a hot LZ!”
Lieutenant Tynan just smiled.
Then Tynan hollered back in the vibrating cabin: as soon as they landed, Goodwin was to lay down some cover fire from the edge of the paddy. They dropped in with the door gunners firing into the far brush lines. The skids touched the dry paddy and everyone tumbled out, unable to distinguish NVA fire amid the racket of M60s and jet turbines. Goodwin tagged Donny Anderson and they jogged towards the far end of the paddy. When the Hueys roared out over their heads, they were abruptly aware of the enemy fire.
“Hey, Donny, let’s just get out of here!” yelled Goodwin.
They ran back to the brushy banana trees where the company was gathering. The NVA strafing had evaporated as soon as the last chopper had beat it out of the landing zone; the nervous pilots in the final lift had dumped the grunts from a six-foot hover.
Then, with the noonday sun frying them, they began the sweep. It was Goodwin’s squad’s turn to be on point, and he already had a volunteer point man. A green seed named Mack had recently received a Dear John and commented apathetically that he had nothing to lose; he’d never walked lead before so he joked, “Yeah, I wanna walk point, I’m going to sniff those dinks out!”
Mack took the point.
Anderson walked cover man.
Goodwin was third; the other five were in line behind them.
They started down a trail which ran from the banana trees into an open patch of waist-high brush with tree lines on three sides. No one really knew what was going on, and Lieutenant Tynan said to be careful because friendlies were in the area. That meant that the point man could not just wheel and deal at the slightest noise. That was fatal because—as it was pieced together later—Mack and Anderson walked right up to two North Vietnamese regulars sitting beside their bunker in the parched scrub brush. The NVA wore standard fatigues, web gear, ammunition pouches, and pith helmets. Mack the green seed—who thought the enemy wore black pajamas—probably wondered if they were ARVN. For his hesitation, Mack and Anderson took a burst of AK47 across their chests.
Goodwin threw himself into the brush off the footpath at the first shots. Another AK opened up from the left, putting full auto bursts over him. Goodwin could hear the rounds snapping over his head. When the NVA changed magazines, Goodwin fired back from the prone—single shots—trying to walk his rounds into the tangle from where he could hear the enemy. He screamed for his point men, but there was no answer. He began crawling back. Down the trail he found Randy Grove and Ralph Poe, his only old-timers besides Anderson. One of the green seeds was shot; the other two were passed out from shock or heat exhaustion.
Goodwin, Grove, and Poe got out on their bellies. The rest of the company was still in the banana tree grove, everyone crouched behind cover from all the stray rounds slashing through the foliage. The men were wilted from the heat. Goodwin came up to his knees and waved at a medic, “We’ve got some dead and wounded, I need you to give us a hand!”
The medic simply shook his head no.
Since the company headquarters medic, a conscientious objector named Doc Peterson, had an excellent reputation, this man was most likely the 1st Platoon medic, another conscientious