Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [89]
Kirchgesler moved after them and, within fifteen minutes of disembarking, Alpha Company was in contact. Browne was sent to outflank the firefight. He got his grunts on line and asked them their names. They were almost all replacements out of the Americal Combat Center and handed to him just an hour before at the Chu Lai helipad! He was thinking with a weariness that did not allow irony, “Oh well, here’s another goatfuck.” They got into a tree line. The contact sounded to be a few tree lines away, so Browne crawled fifteen meters into the grassy paddy ahead, then got up to appraise the area. An AK47 instantly punched him down. The bullet drilled through his left forearm and through an M16 magazine in the bandolier across his chest, then thankfully stopped halfway into a green army note pad in his pocket. His spacey but occasionally valiant medic, Doc Sanders, quickly crawled out to him, grabbed his shoulder harness, and dragged him on his back as he pedalled with his feet. The operation sort of fizzled out as he was loaded on Lieutenant Colonel Howard’s C&C for medevac; in the meantime, the NVA unit melted into the vegetation.
Lieutenant Browne was given a Silver Star and Purple Heart, and he was medevacked to the United States.
Staff Sergeant Cruse rotated in days.
Captain Chudoba departed.
Chudoba and Howard mixed about as well as oil and water, and the confusion of the 4 August contact further deteriorated the battalion commander’s view towards this cautious, thin, bespectacled subordinate. On 6 August, Alpha’s night perimeter took fire; Chudoba wanted massive artillery, but Howard thought he was exaggerating and shouted at him to get his ass to the point of contact and determine exactly what was going on. In the morning, Lieutenant Shurtz—recently choppered to LZ Center as a replacement—was told to ruck up. He was the new commander. “What, did Chudoba get wounded?” asked Shurtz. “No, the colonel fired him.” A Huey lifted Shurtz down to Alpha’s bush position, and he disembarked from one side as Captain Chudoba boarded from the other.
Shurtz walked up to his headquarters group. The senior RTO introduced them, “I’m Chuck. This is Doc Peterson.” He pointed to their lieutenant from the Field Artillery. “This is the FO, Al. What should we call you?”
“Well you’ve got two choices. It’s ‘Lieutenant Shurtz’ or ‘Sir.’ ”
Their jaws dropped.
The company seemed lax, and this was a first step to bring back old-fashioned discipline. Shurtz was Regular Army, a distinguished military graduate of his ROTC class and Ranger-qualified, a man who intended to follow in the footsteps of his father, a career lieutenant colonel. But his first operation with Alpha Company was not a textbook affair, and the realities of the bush began to stun him. The company kept pushing for the NVA column, but the only contact they made was with snipers. They swept towards each one, only to find farm villages each time, complete with Vietnamese going innocently about their chores. Per training, Shurtz had the males of military age rounded up—the village children, meanwhile, were peddling plastic baggies of marijuana—and choppered out. The results were negligible and the colonel finally choppered in to administer a pep talk and ass-chewing. The colonel was in his best form.
“What’s your company nickname, lieutenant?”
“Alpha Annihilators, sir,” Shurtz answered.
“Do you know the definition of Annihilator? It’s not going to do any good to send these people in for interrogation, so they can come right back out here and shoot at you again.” The colonel raised his voice. He didn’t want any prisoners. He wanted body count!
Shurtz couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
The battalion commander promised the men hot pizza for kills and, getting none, it was as if they made the colonel’s shit list. Their resupply became sporadic, as if they were being punished.
It was all flaky.
Then came the battle