Death Valley_ The Summer Offensive, I Corps, August 1969 - Keith Nolan [93]
Kruch was blasted into an old crater, the new kid landing on him. Kruch couldn’t breath, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get the kid off him. He felt two more rounds exploding. GIs were screaming. Then it was quiet and Kruch realized he was numb. No pain. Grunts clambered down into the hole and hauled him up. He reached back and his hand slipped into a hole the size of a grapefruit blown out of his lower back. That chunk of shrapnel had destroyed his kidney. He’d also been ripped by fragments in his butt, lower back, and legs.
Four men had been hit, and they were dragged to a level spot on the ridge as medevacs were called.
Kruch lay flat on his back in the dirt. He could see another man from his squad sitting there with light shrapnel wounds. The kid had taken the brunt of the explosion, inadvertently saving Kruch. He was dead. The fourth GI, the man kneeling with the C rations, lay beside him. His face was hamburger, but air gurgled in his throat and he seemed coherent. A grunt crouched beside the man, trying to keep him out of shock. “You’re going to be okay, just hang in there.”
A medevac was orbiting the peak in twenty minutes.
A smoke grenade was tossed out and the Huey began descending. Then came the whine of incoming mortar rounds. The GIs around the wounded dove for cover. Kruch was lying in the open, unable to move as the second salvo crashed in, but he was not worried. All he felt was a wonderful release of tension that it was all over, that he was getting out. He couldn’t even imagine that he could be hurt again or killed.
Cobras came in, clearing their guns around the hill, and the Huey darted in. Grunts grabbed Kruch by his arms and legs and hefted him into the cabin. The GI with the mashed face was shoved in beside him and, in seconds, they were lifting off, the metal floor vibrating fiercely under their backs. Then the pain began, and the medevac medic gave Kruch a shot of morphine. The GI beside him stopped his gurgling, labored breathing. Kruch watched as the medic quickly moved to his side and slid a plastic trachea tube down his throat.
In the joint perimeter of A and C/3–21 atop Nui Lon, Lieutenant Shurtz sat with his artillery lieutenant and his two surviving platoon lieutenants. The platoon leaders were frustrated, and commented that what they were doing was stupid and suicidal. The conversation drifted into an angry search for reasons why any of them were even in Vietnam. Shurtz couldn’t believe what he was hearing; it was like some leftist bullshit on a college campus. By the standards of 1969, Shurtz was either a superpatriot or a cornball; they had to follow orders, he countered, and don’t you think you owe it to the nation to serve here, perhaps even die here?
“That would be the biggest waste,” one of the platoon leaders said bitterly; Shurtz finally understood how culturally isolated he was from his young grunts and officers.
He was alone in many ways.
Sometime during the hours of darkness, an NVA 60mm mortar tube began lobbing rounds onto their hilltop. Chicoms and M79 grenades started exploding too. Lieutenant Shurtz had not had time to dig a foxhole and had not ordered anyone to do it for him; he ended up on his back in a one-foot sleeping trench with a radio to each ear. One was to his platoon leaders, who had their men returning fire; the other was to battalion, which got a Spooky on station. Most of the Chicoms thrown into their circle were duds, but the captured M79 rounds exploded against boulders and sent fragments whizzing through the darkness. Two GIs were wounded, but when the miniguns started screaming from above, the NVA fell back downhill. Alpha Company found their blood trails at dawn.
On 22 August, Private First Class Shimer awoke in a hospital in Da Nang and watched