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Preface
Though one of my first books, and that does not imply great things, Death Valley, originally published in 1987, was, nevertheless, the best of my early campaign histories. I think the British magazine Military Illustrated got it right when it observed in its review of Death Valley that the author “is no English stylist,” but that “the relentless accumulation of small-scale detail has a numbingly powerful effect.”
This is a book about war at the grunt level, and another reviewer was good enough to remark that the story is “told straight.”
In telling it straight, I had to acknowledge some depressing realities. There were many good soldiers in the 7th Marines and the 196th Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division, the units described in Death Valley. During the 1969 Summer Offensive, the campaign recounted here, they fought the good fight against the tough, aggressive regulars of the North Vietnamese Army. However, individual heroism was not enough. Morale as a whole was poor, even in some of the Marine units, and to quote the Brits again, the Americal Division troops in particular were mostly “unwilling conscripts, badly trained, badly led, badly motivated … and therefore, consistently outfought by an enemy who lacked anything approaching the Americans’ firepower but had ten times their determination.”
The summer of ’69 was a terrible time to be a grunt in the shimmering-hot rice paddies of the Arizona Territory, or the Hiep Duc and Song Chang Valleys of Quang Tin Province, the three locales where the combat action of Death Valley took place. James Webb, who immortalized the era and the first of these places in his novel Fields of Fire, tells us that four and a half years after the first U.S. infantry units landed in Vietnam, a year and a half after the shattering of the national will during the Tet Offensive, “there was no great effort for anything anymore, only thousands, no, millions, of isolated, individual wars.”
The goal for the grunts was survival, not victory. It could hardly have been otherwise. Only two months before the beginning of the 1969 Summer Offensive, President Richard Nixon had formally unveiled his Vietnamization policy in which U.S. combat units would be gradually phased out and replaced by South Vietnamese units. “As a result,” noted yet another reviewer of Death Valley, “disillusionment had set in among the riflemen, none of whom wanted to be the last man killed in a war they weren’t going to win.”
The whole army had short-timer’s fever. Units with good leaders continued to perform competently, sometimes even with the aggressive elan of the early years—a classic frontal assault by the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines on an entrenched NVA position is described here—but the first recorded combat refusal of the war also took place during the fighting recounted in Death Valley. Frontal assaults were going out of style, while incidents of individual and group refusals would become almost commonplace as the war ground uselessly on.
Modern infantry combat is inherently brutalizing. The enemy is naturally dehumanized. It was worse in Vietnam where the grunts, knowing they were expendable, forgotten, and doing what they did to no good end, had only their buddies to depend on and believe in. Everyone else was the enemy. “At times, the comradeship that was the war’s only redeeming quality caused some of its worst crimes—acts of retribution for friends who had been killed,” writes Philip Caputo in A Rumor of War. The Americal Division had My Lai. The Marines had Son Thang, a hamlet in which night ambush team from the same 1st Battalion, 7th Marines that had performed so well during the 1969 Summer Offensive went on a revenge-minded killing spree that left sixteen dead women and children in its wake. Gary Solis tells the story in meticulous and excruciating detail in Song Thang, An American War Crime. The massacre took place six months after the Summer Offensive and Solis notes that the heavy combat of that campaign had not only “molded the battalion” into a “well-oiled war machine,” but had also “imparted a cold and efficient aggressiveness” in which small scale atrocities “were not unusual. Generals will deny it, colonels and majors may doubt it, but any captain or lieutenant and any enlisted infantryman who was there will confirm it. That’s just the way it was.”
More insidiously, the drug, race, and generational problems tearing the country apart back home, problems which had begun creeping into the war zone after Tet of ’68 and the assassination of Martin Luther King, were firmly entrenched in the larger base areas like those at Da Nang and Chu Lai by the time of the 1969 Summer Offensive. A new word came into common usage that year—fragging—and there were more fatal attacks on U.S. officers by U.S. troops in 1969 than in any other year of the Vietnam War. Fragging was generally a rear-echelon phenomenon, a way for drug users and Black Power militants to carve out some space for themselves inside the Green Machine.
Morale was always higher in the field than in the rear, and in Death Valley there are many heart-breaking examples of young grunts, kids really, as their barely-older lieutenants called them, tearing themselves apart to reach a wounded man or go after a machine gun that had their squad pinned down. When they had every reason to tuck themselves behind a paddy dike and play turtle, there were still soldiers who gave it their all. Too bad it was all for nothing. Too bad they were fighting on ground of the enemy’s choosing. “Death Valley quickly slips into tragedy as units repeatedly get shredded by NVA troops and more men are killed trying to recover the bodies of their buddies,” wrote one reviewer. “Don’t expect to get a sense of the well-won battle after reading this book. Death Valley is a punishing tragic tale that leaves the reader wondering about the futility of what was later hailed by the brass as a victory.”
