Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [78]
On the 13th, which was Shimer’s twenty-third birthday, Bravo got the good news. Stand down had been rescheduled for the 16th. Then to prove how really fragile the grunts’ existence was, orders were changed and they humped off Center in a driving rainstorm. Again, they had no idea what was going on. Crossing a swollen stream, Shimer slipped on the rocks and nearly drowned when his pack got up over his head. Halfway to the company’s destination, Hill 352, Lieutenant Turpin took out a short patrol to investigate some hootches. He told Shimer to recon by fire; Shimer blasted some of his misery out the barrel of his grenade launcher.
Bravo Company chopped out a mini LZ atop 352, a mortar tube was airlifted to them, and Shimer wrote home, “… our position is right under the landing pad, and the hooch comes down when the birds come in. The ants regard my air mattress as a freeway.”
On 14 August, Turpin took out a night ambush to the main trail below the ridge. The men dropped their rucks in the company pos, put on war paint, and set in behind a dike. As soon as they got their M60 and claymores in place, everyone promptly passed out from exhaustion. Only Lieutenant Turpin and his RTO stayed awake. As Shimer noted, the platoon leader “could have had us all court-martialled for dereliction of duty, but, being a realist and a decent guy, he just kidded the hell out of us.”
At dawn, the men learned the rest of the company had been mortared during the night and some men had been dusted off. There was an NVA regiment around them, somewhere in these jungled ridge lines.
They patrolled and patrolled, but found nothing.
On 17 August, at dusk, Third Herd went on another wild goose chase while the rest of Bravo Company humped to Hill 200. Third Herd had to make a forced march to rejoin the rest of the company and arrived after dark with no time and little energy to set out their trip flares and claymores.
On the 18th, at dawn, the platoon set out to secure a day laager at the base of Hill 434. The platoon took a helicopter resupply there, then higher sent a change of orders. There was talk of a company from 4th of the 31st Infantry being pinned down, and the platoon was to rejoin the company back at Hill 352. They humped across a stream, then got snarled and lost in the thick brush of the ridge line as darkness fell. Turpin told Shimer to fire an M79 illumination round. This pinpointed them to any lurking NVA, but it was a beacon for Captain Cooper to radio them directions. It was brutal going. When they finally broke into a clearing at the top of the ridge line, they had to medevac one man for a suspected heart attack from the heat. They finally dragged into the company pos one hour before midnight.
On 19 August, Bravo Company filed through the river flats of AK Valley as word filtered down the line that Alpha Company had fifteen dust-offs. They’d finally found the NVA, or the NVA had found them; details were never clear among the grunts. Bravo linked up with Alpha on a hillside of cane and elephant grass. The firing was up ahead, invisible through the brush, and a fire crackled and rolled smoke back over their heads. Shimer donned his gas mask, found a spot of shade to sit in, and figured that at least the smoke was concealing them.
From within the banana trees, Lieutenant Shurtz was on the horn with Lieutenant Colonel Howard who was orbiting in his charlie-charlie bird.
The two men did not get along.
It was a matter of style. Howard was a hot-tempered taskmaster. His enthusiasm, or rather what the grunts thought of it, was noted by Private Shimer when they returned to LZ Center after one particularly exhausting patrol. “… The first sergeant met us with two garbage cans full of cold beer. We needed that. The new battalion commander, a distinguished looking black man, also met us at the wire. We were required to unload our weapons and salute with a snappy, ‘Gimlet, sir!’ We did not need that.”
Captain Carrier—who was called Outlaw and who