Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [9]
Finally, there were the infantrymen, the grunts, the few who actually lived in the bush. It was not uncommon for rifle companies in the An Hoa Basin to go ninety days straight in the field, their only connection to the world the resupply chopper which came every four days. It was a dehumanizing existence where man became part of the wilderness, subject to the killing heat and chilling rains, to leeches, mosquitoes, and ringworms, where feet rotted and men died. Everyone hated the bush. Yet, it was the real Marine Corps out there. It was all in the bush. The chicken-shit harrassment fell away; the racial problems and the dope were put away for other places and other times. Some men became brothers, and virtually all had the solidarity of shared suffering and shared victories.
The grunts had a saying: For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected can never know. There was pride, cynicism, fatalism, comradeship.
Morale was at its best and worst in the bush.
In many ways, the grunts of the summer of 69 were the same manchildren who took Iwo Jima (the average age of Marine riflemen in WWII and Vietnam was nineteen). The courage was the same, but it was a vastly different war they were fighting. Sometimes the absurdities were all too plain, like the day 2dLt Bill Peters of D Company, 7th Marines, was pinned down with his platoon a klick west of Hill 65. They huddled behind the paddy dikes as a machine gun fired from the village ahead. Peters radioed for a mortar fire mission; a voice said negative, friendly ville in the area. Peters asked for the map coordinates of the village, then exclaimed at the answer, “That’s where they’re shooting at me from!” Too bad. The platoon pulled back then, and it left a bad taste in their mouths. Why are we so stupid, Peters asked himself in frustration; why do we force ourselves to fight like this?
It was a strange war and even though the grunts of 69 were proud, they were children of their times. And by then, the waters were very muddy. Sgt Bill Lowery joined C Company, 7th Marines in May 1969; he’d already pulled a 1966–67 tour in the An Hoa Basin, but it was like returning to a whole different war. The enthusiasm had drained like air from a tire, but everything was still pounding away, grinding viciously, but going nowhere. It was as if the machine was running for no other purpose than its own aggrandizement. It was a sick joke, Lowery thought. He looked at his new company commander, a precisely polished lieutenant, and had no doubts about the officer’s personal courage. But it was obvious he was building a career here; he wanted to win a medal and a promotion, so his radio talk was always formal and when the colonel was around he laid it on thick. When the lieutenant put Lowery in for the Silver Star, Lowery dismissed it as a ploy for the lieutenant’s own Silver Star to be approved.
All we did was our jobs, he thought; now everybody wants to window dress it.
He heard scout dogs in the Americal got Bronze Stars.
It seemed in 1969 that the second string had come to continue a game no one wanted to play anymore. The new grunts seemed hip to the farce and waste. Their hair was longer; the smell of marijuana drifted in the rear. Discipline was beginning to corrode. No one was fighting for God and Country anymore, they just wanted to survive. At least that was the opinion of Sergeant Lowery, and an emotional flak jacket formed around his soul. A dead Marine didn’t affect him anymore; it was more like a blown television tube that needed to be replaced. But he kept humping. To the powers that be it didn’t matter what went on under a man’s helmet, only that he do his duty. And, even in 1969, most never quit.
In this strange, controversial war, there was one constant which tied the grunts of 69 together with every generation of American