Bumblebees Defend Landing Site
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has returned home after four months in Viet Nam. He was with men of the 1st Cavalry Division during many of their recent engagements with Communist guerrillas, and his articles on the war as he saw it will continue in The Enquirer daily.)
By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
The “interesting something”
which Capt. John Oliver of Troop B, 1st Battalion, 9th Cavalry, invited
me to
participate in started at about noon Nov. 3 after an enjoyable day and
a half
spent roving the countryside with Lt. Col. John B. Stockton and his top
NCO,
Sgt. Maj. Tom Kennedy.
Members of Stockton’s
far-ranging outfit were engaged in half a dozen projects at the time I
left 1st
Brigade headquarters south of Pleiku to spend a few days with them. They were scouting for the fleeing PAVN
battalions which Lt. Col. Harlow Clark’s 1st Brigade was harrying.
Stockton finally moved his
choppers and men to a little field near the Special Forces camp at Duc
Co to
serve as a “rear base of operations.”
That field was one of the liveliest ones to secure I can
remember.
There wasn’t any human
resistance, but the entire upper end of it was filled with the burrows
of a
particularly short-tempered species of bumblebee.
The lower end - the clearing
was an old bean field planted by Montagnards - had grown up in
10-foot-high
elephant grass, and landings were made here almost blindly while crew
chiefs
swatted and fought bees which had gotten inside the helicopters on the
first
landing attempt.
The bees attacked a crew
chief on the one helicopter which landed, and their stings were serious
enough
to cause him to be evacuated for treatment at the field hospital set up
by the
15th Medical Battalion at Pleiku’s Camp Holloway.
There seemed to be a line in
the center of the field where the bees marked their territory. Anybody venturing beyond it got stung.
It was a hot day, and
cutting tall elephant grass is a hot job, and by the time the landing
zone was
finally cleared the cavalrymen were putting up as angry a buzz over the
bees as
the bees were over the cavalrymen.
SFC Jose Ortiz-Vasquez,
Oliver’s platoon sergeant, came over from one group of machete-wielding
men,
his handlebar mustache not quite covering a big grin.
“They are all wanting to
call in the tac’ air and have them drop napalm on those bees,” he said.
We walked out of the sun
into the shade of the jungle and found that the whole area had been a
camp for
the North Vietnamese army units which had kept Duc Co under siege last
August.
“They dig good holes,”
Ortiz-Vasquez said. “They get more
cover from their holes than we do from ours.
They know how to use camouflage right, too.
We need to learn some lessons from them on that stuff.”
The holes they dug were
round and had chambers tunneled out from their bottoms.
A soldier crouching in one of these can turn
in any direction to fight and his body is not full length on the
ground, giving
a target to snipers in trees. The
little chamber at the bottom shelters him when rockets, artillery,
bombs and
mortar shells send fragments whistling around.
Fiber Helmet
The camouflage used by the
PAVNs is something which our Army really needs to study.
They do not put branches in their
helmets. They wear only a fiber helmet
designed to shade the head, instead of the heavy steel oven our troops
wear as
fragment protection. The ones I have
seen usually fight with a kind of slouch-brim cloth hat or no hat at
all, in
fact.
I have often wondered at the
reasoning which is used in training American troops to stick branches
and grass
in their helmets. Movement is what
attracts the eye in the woods. An
infantryman who walks looking like an eight-foot-tall potted plant,
branches
waving above his head, is not really camouflaged.
In a fight, an infantryman
has to move his head to look for targets, even if the remainder of his
body is
frozen in position. Once more, our
camouflage efforts wave a signal.
The PAVN has a little,
circular bamboo frame (it looks like a ring sight on an anti-aircraft
gun)
about eight inches in diameter. He puts
grass or twigs into this little frame, forming a shield-shaped circle
of
camouflage material, and two strings secure it to his back. When he is in his hole it forms a cover.
Covers Head
When he lies down, it covers
his head and shoulders and he can look around without moving it. It makes more sense than any American
efforts along this line.
As we talked and walked
along the dug-in PAVN positions, Ortiz-Vasquez put his finger on
another problem
the U.S. soldier faces in Viet Nam.
“It takes a little time to
dig in like this,” he said. “It takes
time and somebody who recognizes how important it is to let the guys
get
camouflaged right. When you are pushing
after them and you are always in a hurry, the troops just don’t get
time to dig
a hole right or to camouflage.
“One thing, we need to have
it straight right up at headquarters about this camouflage,” he
continued. “It has to be realized up there
when an
operation is planned that this stuff can save men’s lives, and they
have to put
out the word and allow the time for it to be done. They have to start
paying
attention to this all over the Army if they want to make it better, and
it has
to start up top.”
Hot Chow
We spent only a little time
at the landing zone after a helicopter brought in containers of hot
chow at
noon. Maj. Robert Zion came by and said
he would be the man in charge. He
unfolded his map.
“We’ll load up and go look
it over if you’re ready,” he said. “I
want to recon’ that area before the others come in.
“We’re going right there,”
Zion continued.
“You’ll get a good look at
Cambodia. We’ll set up a base camp
here, north of this mountain, and set out some ambushes on these
crossing sites
along this river here.”
The river was named the Ia
Drang and the mountain, we finally found after deciphering the fine
print of
the map, which had become water-stained, was Chu Pong.
They are both famous now,
but when Zion pointed to them on the map nobody knew much about them
except
that there seemed to be “a lot of activity there.”
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