Death Valley (3 page)

Simpson was a thoughtful man. When he looked at his rice paddy infantrymen, he reflected that Tarawa had been a nightmare but one that lasted ninety-six hours. And when it was over, it was over. Not so in Vietnam, and that was the peculiar hardship of this war. The young riflemen—the grunts—were not always fighting, but they were always out in the bush where the danger was omnipresent, the privations constant.

In 1969, the four regiments of the 1st Marine Division maintained a brutal routine of 1,000 patrols every twenty-four hours in their Tactical Area of Responsibility of the I Corps Tactical Zone.

The enemy could be anywhere at anytime.

Mostly, though, by the summer of 69, the ground war in South Vietnam had become most actively focused in the southern sector of the 1st MarDiv TAOR; this was where the border between Quang Nam and Quang Tin Provinces ran horizontally across the Que Son Mountains. The 1st Marine Division occupied Quang Nam, while the 23d Infantry
Division (Americal), U.S. Army, occupied Quang Tin. In the mountains between them lived the
2d NVA Division
. The mountains belonged to the enemy; from there, they kept the pressure on and the cost was almost constant. The area exacted a daily tax from the Marine battalions assigned to patrol it in the form of Viet Cong booby traps and snipers, a cost accentuated every month or two by clashes with battalions and regiments of North Vietnamese regulars.

The killing ground north of the Que Sons was called the An Hoa Basin. The Marine Corps had first landed at Red Beach, Da Nang, on 8 March 1965. It took until early 1966 to stabilize the villages around the city’s airfield sufficiently; then elements of the 3d Marine Division began pushing ten miles southwest into the fringes of An Hoa. Paddied flatlands stretched in from the coast, but mountains rose around the Basin; the Que Sons formed its western and southern frontiers, a spur called Charlie Ridge its northern. In October 1966, the 3d MarDiv HQ displaced north to Phu Bai from Da Nang, and the 1st MarDiv HQ moved north from Chu Lai to their vacated command bunker on Hill 327. In the An Hoa arid basin, it was a war of attrition, one operation always followed by another. Georgia. Liberty. Macon. Independence. Newcastle. Mameluke Thrust. Allen Brook. Henderson Hill. Taylor Common. Pipestone Canyon. The
2d NVA Division
, and the numerous battalions that supported it, proved a tough adversary, but—although one could barely perceive it in those glaring, hot paddies—the Marine Corps was accomplishing its mission.

The U.S. Army, which had first moved into I Corps in April 1967 to reinforce the thin Marine line, was also solidly in place by 1969. The lowlands on the southern side of the Que Sons—the Hiep Duc and Song Chang Valleys—were protected by a string of fire bases manned by the 196th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division. Consequently, Hiep Duc was the Americal’s westernmost advance, as was the An Hoa Basin for the 1st Marine Division.

In 1969, the Arizona Territory, in the southern corner of the Basin, was the war’s bloodiest arena. At a time when the political watchwords were Vietnamization, Pacification, and Troop Withdrawal, the grunts in the Arizona were still operating Search & Destroy. Their’s was a stagnated war of attrition which, by 1969, was responsible for most of their casualties (USMC casualties in Vietnam would eventually exceed USMC casualties in WWII). The object was to keep hammering at the communist strongholds, and to maintain whatever gains had been made in four years of war. Da Nang had become the rear in the continuing effort to push the NVA away from the populated coastal lowlands. The farther from Da Nang, the more dangerous it became.

The latest encounter in the Arizona was with the
90th NVA Regiment
in mid-June 1969. Elements of the 5th Marine Regiment suffered heavily, but they found a dead NVA battalion commander and a dead company commander; the shattered NVA regiment left more than three hundred bodies behind as it limped back to its mountain havens.

Contact tapered off dramatically after this battle. In fact, an unusual calm had settled over most of South Vietnam even before then, and newspapers referred to the Summer Lull. U.S. combat operations continued, men still died, but the NVA were not meeting them punch for punch. The NVA drifted back to their hideaways, and the meaning of this became a topic of political debate. On 8 June 1969, President Nixon had announced the gradual phase-out of U.S. units from the war zone. The discussions centered around dissecting the communist response: was the lull a sign from Ho Chi Minh that the Hanoi regime was more amiable to the new U.S. policy, that the stalled Paris peace talks had a chance for new life?

Major General Simpson would have begged to differ.

The 1st Recon, the eyes and ears of his division, was probing, slipping into Charlie Ridge and the Que Sons. The Recon Marines were more successful than Simpson had first imagined they could be, and their findings were vital (although not surprising)—the NVA were regrouping in strength. In response, in July 69, General Simpson launched another operation—Durham Peak—which saw the 5th Marines helicoptered into the Que Sons. To pick up the slack, the 7th Marines (Col Gildo S. Codispoti) were shifted south from their AO to cover the Arizona; meanwhile, Simpson coordinated with the Americal to screen the Hiep Duc Valley in case the NVA retreated from the 5th Marines in that direction. But Durham Peak was a dry run; the NVA disappeared into their honeycomb of caves and tunnels, even abandoning many of their supply caches and mountain base camps to avoid battle. The communists fought only when they thought they had the advantage.

It was not until the second week of August that the NVA came out of the woodwork. There was a flashpan of fighting all across South Vietnam that first night (including sappers in the wire at 1st MarDiv HQ and rockets on the Americal HQ); then the struggle centered on the Arizona and the Hiep Duc and Song Chang Valleys. It was an
eighteen-day campaign (12–29 August), blandly labelled the 1969 Summer Offensive.

The 7th Marines were attacked in the Arizona.

Fire bases of the 196th Brigade, Americal, were hit by sappers.

Outnumbered 196th companies were surrounded in Hiep Duc and Song Chang, and the 7th Marines were committed to assist in halting the offensive, then in pursuing the retreating enemy.

U.S. firepower once again stymied the NVA.

The 1969 Summer Offensive would be another hard-fought American victory but, perhaps, not a resounding one. For one thing, the Marines were gradually committed to the battle. General Simpson noted, “Had we been able to turn the
entire
1st Marine Division south, there would have been a far different and far better story to tell. However, this was never considered since we could never leave Da Nang uncovered.”

And there were some battlefield failures.

The NVA goal was, of course, to keep blunting the slow advance into their territory. And they hoped to make trouble extending beyond the battlefield: to kill and to keep killing Americans at a time when Nixon was talking Vietnamization, so that the national confusion and horror over the continuing body bags and amputees would finish what the North Vietnamese Army could only start. In 1969, the commanding general of the NVA admitted that more than a half-million men had been killed, ten times the total U.S. death list. The statistic was offered with a shrug: the number of dead meant nothing; the sacrifice was palatable, because motivation was what really counted. Washington had decided on a war of attrition to combat the communist invasion because they thought Hanoi would blink first. They were wrong.

The 1969 Summer Offensive was unlike many Vietnam campaigns only because of its mood. It was the first major engagement after the announcement of U.S. withdrawals. A new slogan was heard: Why be the last man killed in Vietnam? Such sentiments were rarely expressions of cowardice or antiwar protest. More simply, a cynicism that always had existed among the grunts about the validity of attrition tactics became crystallized. They knew they were leaving, and they knew the job wasn’t done. A spiritual malaise began to affect the entire war effort. “Nothing much of anything was decided by the summer campaign,” commented SP4 Bob Hodierne, U.S. Army combat photographer. “I don’t believe any Medals of Honor or court-martials for cowardice were its fruits. It, in fact, could be seen as painfully typical of the whole damn experience.
Pain, death, little private acts of heroism and cowardice, individuals changed forever, and when it was done—what? As the GIs said, ‘Fuck it, it don’t mean nothin.’ ”

The grunts who fought the 1969 Summer Offensive were the smallest part of the Green Machine, the slim end of a funnel that yawned wide at the top. Only a relative handful did the actual fighting. For every grunt in the bush, there were from five to ten men supporting him in base camps. For this campaign, there were two anchors of command and support and both were located along Highway One on the coast: Da Nang for the 1st Marine Division and Chu Lai for the Americal Division. Both sites had been secured by the Marines in 1965; by 69, they were insulated by miles of barbed wire and guard towers, and within, living was physically comfortable. And boring.

An arc was drawn around Da Nang to indicate the maximum range of NVA 122mm and 140mm rockets; the 1st and 26th Marines conducted saturation patrols in this Rocket Belt. Base camps of the 5th and 7th Marines were sprinkled across the flatlands between Da Nang and An Hoa, bridges between the rear and the bush. Hill 55 (7th Marines Command Post) sat east of the northern tip of Charlie Ridge; the villages there were replete with guerrillas and the Marines jocularly nicknamed the area Dodge City. Rivers running down from the Que Sons twisted in several directions towards Hill 55, and numerous battalion base camps for the 7th Marines were constructed near the banks: Hill 10, Hill 37, Hill 65. A dirt road called Route 4 (or Thunder Road) ran west from Highway One to Charlie Ridge; smaller convoy roads radiated from it to connect the various bases.

Four miles south of Hill 55, the rivers isolated a stretch of land called Go Noi Island; it was a bleak, desperately hot place which resembled a moonscape covered with tall elephant grass. It had a bad reputation and there were no permanent positions on it. Nor were there any in the Arizona Territory. The Arizona was isolated too, blocked by the Que Sons to the south and west, the Song Thu Bon River to the east, and the Song Vu Gia River and Charlie Ridge to the north. Directly east across the Song Thu Bon was the An Hoa Combat Base (5th Marines Command Post); it was a red clay hill, circled by wire and bunkered in with four million sandbags. Since it sat at the base of the Que Sons, it was called Little Dienbienphu. Route 537 ran north from An Hoa to
Dodge City, crossing a curve of the Song Thu Bon over Liberty Bridge. The bridge was the work of Navy Seabees; the perimeter compound, called Phu Lac 6 after a nearby hamlet, was an artillery fire base for the 11th Marines.

Morale in these cantonments was better than in places like Da Nang and Chu Lai. There were frequent rocket raids and infrequent sapper attacks, living conditions were more spartan, and there was enough to dispel complacency and forge some comradeship. But these base camps were also hot, boring, and dusty, and an occasional problem did crop up. A platoon leader noted some of the reasons:

Fragging was the nickname for assaults on superiors, usually with a fragmentation hand grenade. But such incidents were few and far between, and the real problem for the Marine Corps in 1969 was an undercurrent of black militancy. There existed a terrible frustration among many blacks that their deaths in Vietnam would serve no purpose, and that their place was really with the civil rights movement—or The Revolution—back home.

When LtCol Ray G. Kummerow assumed command of 3d Battalion, 7th Marines in August 1969, he encountered a smattering of this discontent. Kummerow, who was unusually attuned to the social revolution being exported to the battlefield, noticed the young black Marines arrived already extremely sensitive to any real or imagined discrimination. The
battalion operations officer had created a Watch & Action group to investigate all charges of prejudice. Most were unfounded, but a few were not; for example, some officers and staff NCOs would not allow Black Power bracelets, made from woven bootlaces, but ignored the peace medallions worn by white grunts. To a certain percentage of blacks in 3/7 Marines, these incidents became their excuses for malingering.