The Hill Fights by Edward F. Murphy

Author:Edward F. Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307417121
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Kilo 3/9 had spent the morning of 30 April near Mike 3/3’s night defensive perimeter. While it waited, artillery forward observer LCpl. Robert W. Stewart and his radioman, Pfc. John A. Krohn, watched a distant action involving a company of BLT 2/3.

Sometime before noon, word was passed to Stewart that Captain Giles wanted him to scan Hill 881S with his binoculars. Dutifully, Stewart and Krohn moved past their comrades to the top of the ridge finger. Stewart sat down, raised the binoculars to his eyes, and started focusing on Hill 881S. All of a sudden he felt a sharp, burning pain in his buttocks and he yelped.

Krohn turned. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

Stewart did not know what to tell him. At first he thought a snake had bitten him. Then it dawned on him. With his binoculars to his eyes, he must have been taken for an officer by a distant sniper.

“I’ve been shot,” Stewart blurted out.

In an instant, several Marines pulled Stewart back down the side of the finger. A corpsman appeared. “How’re the family jewels?” Stewart demanded.

The doc assured him that everything important was intact. The sniper’s round had torn into his right butt cheek and come out the left. In a few minutes Stewart was on his way to an LZ to await the arrival of a medevac.

Krohn shouldered his radio. Although he was alone and now the sole FO for the company, he was grateful that his buddy had made it out alive.

In the meantime, Giles moved his company to the base of Hill 881S. “I sent Lieutenant Woodall’s platoon up on the far left, where they’d be able to flank the NVA on top. The Second Platoon, under Lieutenant Stephen Hepner, went up on Woodall’s right, while I kept Staff Sergeant Stephen Cobb’s Third Platoon in reserve,” Giles recalled.

Woodall’s platoon started uphill just after noon. Lance Corporal Flowers had the point. Fifth in line was Woodall, followed by his radioman, LCpl. John Rapp, a red-headed Hoosier. Lance Corporal Arthur V. Gennaro was the fourteenth man in the column. Just in front of Gennaro walked his buddy, LCpl. John B. Appleton, a native of Louisville, Kentucky. The platoon’s other two squads were strung out behind Gennaro.

“The hill was covered with tall grass and thick brush, and very steep,” Gennaro recalled. “Sometimes it was so steep we had to pull ourselves up by tree roots and branches. We were about two-thirds the way up the hill when the head of the column crossed over a slight rise. Just as I came up to it a sniper fired. Someone yelled, ‘Corpsman up!’ In front of me, a machine gunner fell. A second later another man’s helmet flew off and he went down. Then it was like the whole world exploded in fire. Rockets, mortars, and small-arms fire were coming from a tree line to our left.”

Gennaro hit the ground. Most of the Marines around him were firing at the tree line. Worried there might be

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