I ran around the old pagoda to our gun position, yelling, ‘Found a hole! Found a hole!’ Later, everybody said I was completely unintelligible. We raced back to the other side of the pagoda with our rifles. The lid was off to the side of the hole, and we heard someone scampering through the tree line.

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We all opened up with our M-14s. The riflemen cursed us because we were shooting from the inside of the perimeter out at them. The sound stopped. We raced to the spot in the tree line where the sound was last heard. Even with five Marines searching approximately 5 yards of tree line we could not locate the hole or tunnel into which the VC had escaped. In the spider trap were three M-1 carbines, two 30-round banana clips taped end to end, two 15-round straight clips, a poncho, a soft cover and a flashlight. This find revealed to our company commander that the VC were underneath us, which explained how the mines kept reappearing each day. That afternoon we moved out to an unpopulated area in some sand dunes.

In Vietnam, the troops gave our battles such names as ‘The Day Sandy Got It,’ ‘Phu An’ and ‘Two July.’ On ‘Two July,’ 1967, our four understrength 125-man rifle companies suffered 84 dead and 190 wounded. We used up our mortar ammo quickly, then moved wounded Marines to the back of the perimeter, hoping to get medevac choppers in. Then the NVA walked their mortars right through our wounded. I held a wounded Navy corpsman and took the battle dressing from his web gear. He was sliced so badly by shrapnel from head to foot that I didn’t recognize him, and I couldn’t figure out where to apply the bandage that would do any good. He began gurgling. I yelled, ‘Breathe, you bastard! Breathe!’ Then he died.

The gunny warned us to keep our heads above the dried-up paddy dikes surrounding our perimeter. A machine-gun position was overrun when the NVA snuck up on them under cover of mortar fire. The gunny put our mortar team in that machine-gun position. After the battle of Two July, the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, was known to other Marine battalions as the ‘Walking Dead.’

We spent three days inside a huge, two-battalion perimeter on ‘the Strip,’ the 500-yard-wide swath through the jungle that reporters called McNamara’s Wall. The two battalions were recovering our dead. The first day was full of bitter complaints–about how so many NVA got across the river undetected; about the M-16 rifles that were still unreliable; and about the rumor that high command was more concerned about the NVA taking military payment certificates off Marine bodies to spend on the black market than they were about the Marine deaths. (Never again would the Marine Corps pay its troops in the field the first day of every month.) And the NVA would use the tactic they called ‘hugging the belt,’ staying so close to American troops in a firefight that the Americans couldn’t call in airstrikes or artillery.

On ‘Six July,’ our battalion–which now consisted of half of Alpha Company and half of Charlie Company (Delta was still at Con Thien, and Bravo was no longer an effective fighting unit)–was assigned to escort four four-man recon patrols north to just below the Ben Hai River so they could see what was out there. We set up our own perimeter while the recon patrols moved north. ‘Better dig in,’ our new company commander, Captain Al Slater, said. ‘We’ll only be here a couple hours, but you never know.’ Slater, who would win the Navy Cross in this action, was more subdued than before Two July, but his advice was the best we ever got. We set up our mortar in a 500-pound bomb crater, and then the three of us–Shea, Lynch and I–dug slit trenches at the top of the crater walls.

One recon patrol soon radioed in: ‘What Marine unit do we have in North Vietnam? They’re moving toward us from the northeast in columns of twos, wearing flak jackets and helmets.’ None, our commanding officer (CO) radioed back. They were NVA, wearing the gear taken off Marine bodies on Two July. Using map coordinates, we fired a single mortar round toward the enemy unit. The recon patrol called in an adjustment, and then we fired for effect. ‘Right on,’ they radioed back ‘but they’re coming on now.’

I saved one mortar round, ready to ‘take 10′ NVA with direct fire if we were overrun. If this NVA unit was going to take on two battalions of dug-in Marines, it could roll right over our makeshift company. But the NVA were caught by surprise. They were excellent fighters if they could rehearse an ambush or an attack, but they couldn’t improvise. American Marines, on the other hand, were brash, cocky teenagers who could think on their feet during a firefight.

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