Ghosts and Shadows by Phil Ball

Author:Phil Ball [Ball, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2015-11-03T05:00:00+00:00

* Pseudonym.

Chapter 10

Hot LZ, Friendly Fire

Early morning on July 17, 1968, the troop lift began. As we nervously awaited our turn, I saw young Marines writing letters home as if it might be their last. The fear of the unknown had our imaginations getting the best of us; the mere mention of a hot LZ has the ability to create terror. The thought of being blown out of the sky or gunned down trying to get away from a chopper on the ground is one of the worst scenarios in a grunt’s nightmares. Compared to what some of our sister companies and battalions had been going through recently, I felt that Fox Company had been relatively lucky, having escaped being overrun and wiped out the past six weeks. I couldn’t help but think it was our turn.

PFC Bruce Holt was one of the few grunts around me who remained genuinely cool and calm under this immense pressure. He was perhaps the only one of us who had been through it before. I stuck to him like glue, hoping some of his luck and good fortune would rub off on me. He certainly knew what he was doing. He told me to stick with him and I wouldn’t have anything to worry about, either.

The 9th Marines and the ARVNs went in separate from us, and from different LZs. I think the 9th left from Camp Carroll and the ARVNs from Cam Lo. Right away, 3/9 engaged when they landed close to a company-size NVA unit who were dug in on a ridge line. Fox Company lucked out again; we were one of the last waves to go in. Due to the lack of helicopters available, we waited most of the day at LZ Stud, listening to terrifying stories about what was going on at the site.

The mountains on the DMZ were more rugged than any I had seen around Khe Sanh, and the jungle was much thicker, too. As we flew low over the jagged peaks approaching our LZ, our chopper began receiving a heavy volume of automatic small arms fire from the ground. The crew chief grabbed Holt and me and directed us to return fire out the rear ramp. While a couple of guys held our ankles, we lay down and fired at the source of the green tracers coming up at us. There were NVA in a big bomb crater and several more running away from it. I couldn’t tell if I hit any of them, but we weren’t hit ourselves.

I was taken aback somewhat by the complete destruction and total devastation of this area as our chopper swooped in low to land behind a large ridge line. Several days, if not weeks, of bombings and artillery prep fire had just about reduced this place to a pile of rubble. Twisted, broken trees and mounds of brush and debris were all that was left of this once-thriving rain forest. It had been a healthy, triple-canopy jungle that concealed the NVA’s backyard, so to speak.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.