Cambodian Neutrality Nearly Violated
(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
Maj. Bob Zion slanted his
helicopter out of Duc Co in approved cavalry style, tree-top high, and
suddenly
I was looking out of the open door at a river he had pointed out on the
map,
the Ia Drang.
The stream looked swift and
about 100 feet wide. A heavy growth of
bamboo jungle along its twisting course abruptly gave way to open
woodlands in
the hills to the north and south of its westerly current.
White water around rocks jutting from a
shallow stretch showed that it had fast water.
There was an old,
triangular, mud-walled fort off to the north where a heavily traveled
trail
came down to a ford in the river and apparently ducked under the trees
toward a
good-sized mountain to the southwest.
The fort was a deserted relic of the French Army.
The crew chief, Sp5 Lynne A.
DeFleron, grabbed my shoulder and pointed, shouting in my ear as he
indicated
the mountain.
Points Out Valley
“That’s the one we looked at
on the map - Chu Pong they call it,” he shouted. “That
back slope goes into Cambodia. See that
valley? The one
which runs on over into Cambodia? There
is another one behind that other ridge just like it, and it’s all in
Cambodia. Trails run up there that look
like highways.”
I could see the red ribbon
of the beaten paths flashing under the trees in the deep green of the
grass. Chu Pong is a steep-sided,
heavily timbered ridge which sprawls like a figure “3,” with its center
bar
being a ridge running along the border with two valleys opening to the
north.
Zion edged his chopper over
to the west and suddenly, with a big grin, whipped it into a tight turn. The door gunner, S-Sgt. Frank Knackstedt,
turned to me.
“By golly, we just almost
violated all of that fine old Cambodian neutrality!” he shouted. “I believe we missed it by at least six
inches.”
Zion got back to business
and zoomed to grass-top level across a clearing about the size of a
football
field. Trees grew close to the edges of
the irregular rectangle, pinching it in on the south.
Big anthills loomed up among
black boulders and the grass was short, meadow-like.
The anthills in this country
are a kind of compound product of ants, burrowing animals and erosion
of the
ground not held in by the brush and saplings which grow on the anthill. They are 10-foot-high mounds covered with
the thick brush and grass and often are the major local terrain
features and
become important during fighting.
The rocks were coal black,
rounded and weatherbeaten. One of them, six feet high and with a flat
side,
looked like a black monument. The
chopper suddenly lifted over the trees again and circled around for
another
look.
When my side of the chopper
was turned toward the field, I saw six helicopters diving in and troops
fan out
in the familiar air assault landing.
Then Zion was coming back into the clearing for his landing.
He had picked a quiet
field. A little red deer bounded across
it as his helicopter settled at the south end.
He landed close to the big boulder and a king-sized anthill
which
cropped up just where the trees began.
Lt. Col. John B. Stockton,
commander of the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry was already landing to have
a last
conference with Zion, Capt. Don Valley, Capt. John Oliver and Capt.
Robert
Knowlen, who were commanding the rifle platoons which would be involved
in the
night’s work.
Knowlen would take his men
from C Troop to the crossing I had seen from the air and set up an
ambush. Oliver would take the B Troop
rifle platoon
to a crossing about 1,000 yards downstream.
Valley would keep his Troop A rifle contingent here, guarding
the patrol
base.
I had heard reports that
there was an entire PAVN regiment prowling this area, and knew that the
nearest
government outpost was at Duc Co, 20 miles away through territory the
Viet Cong
had claimed for months. This added a
certain tenseness to my own attitude concerning what the night would
bring.
Volunteers Company
I decided I was nervous
enough without listening to the commanders run through the program
again, so I
wandered over to the group P-Sgt. Jose Ortiz-Vasquez was with and
volunteered
my company for the night.
Ortiz-Vasquez is a small,
wiry, tough soldier with a big mustache.
He has a way of making you feel he can get you out of trouble if
you
just stick with him.
He introduced me to the rest
of Capt. Oliver’s platoon and I took down their last names from their
name
tags, saying that there would be plenty of time during the night to get
the
first ones. The night was long, but
there never was time to add to the original list. The
platoon roster included:
Sgt. Kilcrease, Sgt. Gloyd,
Sgt. Gee, Sp4 Phillips, Sp4 Chester, PFC Charles, PFC Lopez, PFC Cook,
S-Sgt.
Gray, Sgt. Carr, S-Sgt. Johnson, Sgt. Ashmore, Sp4 Dinkin, Sgt.
Stanyard, Sp4
Yarnell, PFC J. Gray, PFC Daily, PFC Cercemont, PFC Ciccoto, PFC Bell,
Sp4
Perrichon, Sp4 Bevers, PFC Mabe and Sp4 Byrd.
I had seen Byrd over on the
hospital fight two days before. He had
accounted for three PAVNs over there, one of them in a stand-up
gunfight. Byrd had put a burst into the
Communist as
the man shot at him with an automatic rifle.
He had also knocked a sniper out of a tree who had been causing
us
trouble.
One-Man Army
Sp4 Nolen King, who had been
a kind of one-man army on that fight, was with Valley’s platoon.
Sp5 Jay Hockenbury, the
medic, and Capt. Thomas Williams, the battalion surgeon, were out in
the center
of the patrol base field with Lt. John Tweedy’s mortar platoon. (Tweedy was from Capt. Theodore Danielsen’s
Company A, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 8th Cavalry. This
company was supporting the cavalry, guarding the Duc Co main
base and reinforcing this operation.)
Hockenbury, I found out, was
the medic I had seen knocked out by a mortar round during the fight
near Plei
Me. He said he had no ill effects from
it but that “somebody had put a KIA tag on me while I was unconscious.”
“I have to keep telling people it’s really me, now,” he grinned.
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