Ambush Set Up on Trail Beside River
(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
Two files of men carrying
weapons and a minimum of anything else
filed out of the little clearing Maj. Robert Zion had selected
as his
patrol base, putting the bulk of Chu Pong Mountain behind them and
walking toward
the Ia Drang river and the Cambodian border two miles away.
I fell in with Capt. John
Oliver’s file of 27 riflemen (three of these fine soldiers were killed
during
the night, so I only listed 24 men in the platoon in my roster). Capt. Robert Knowlen’s 27 men walked a
divergent course to our right. We could
see them through the park-like expanse of open trees.
Lt. Col. John B. Stockton,
commander of the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry; Capt. Don Valley, whose
platoon
would guard our home base in the little clearing, and two television
newsmen,
Vo Vynn and Ron Nesson of NBC, stopped beside one of the big black
boulders a
quarter of a mile out into the brush and watched us go by.
Vo Vynn, a Vietnamese
cameraman, is one of the most interesting Vietnamese I have met. He is a sturdy man whose bravery is a
legend.
Lonely Mission
Vynn once crawled at night
inside of Viet Cong lines, gathering ammunition and weapons and aiding
South
Vietnamese wounded, on a lonely mission which enabled a surrounded
airborne
battalion he was with to survive one last assault from the Communists.
He was high in the Diem
government, being chief of the secret police.
He left Viet Nam until his status was finally settled after the
overthrow of Diem, and came back as a news cameraman.
Vynn is constantly on the scene during the very toughest fights,
and he is respected by troops and newsmen alike.
Vynn knows more about the
Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese invaders than any man I have met,
and I
spent a lot of time plotting ways to get the reticent cameraman to give
me an
education in those matters.
Ready for Argument
I respect him as much as
anyone I have met anywhere. He is not
untypical of the Vietnamese nation in his bravery.
That is one of the reasons I am optimistic about the eventual
outcome of the struggle.
Valley signaled me over to
the rock. I thought perhaps there were
some last-minute qualms about me going out on the ambush, and was ready
for an
argument. However, he leaned over and
slipped me two M-16 grenades.
“These might come in handy,”
he whispered. “I’ve got a feeling it is
going to be a noisy night. You guys get
your job done and get back here in one piece!”
Stockton and the newsmen
were returning to Duc Co, he told me.
We kept on moving, fast and
quiet, with P-Sgt. Jose Ortiz-Vasquez, a PFC Gray and a PFC Daily
ranging ahead
as scouts. We walked about an hour in
the dwindling light. The going was easy
but treacherous. The short curling
grass covered round rocks and little holes and gullies so that an
unwary foot
could be ambushed.
Any noise grated on our
nerve ends, and when men stumbled it brought a quick hiss from the man
nearest,
usually something like “. . .pick up your feet. . .” except with more
decorative adjectives.
Animal Tracks
The bamboo along the Ia
Drang was as thick as it had looked from the air, but our aerial
surveillance
had caused one miscalculation. What had
looked like a series of trails beaten into the river bank, indicating
fords,
held the prints of tiger paws and deer hoofs.
Animals had used those approaches for watering places. The river was swift and deep, and they just
didn’t pan out as ambush sites.
We fought our way through
bamboo and thorns. The sun was waning
and there was a feeling of some trepidation as we climbed into a deep
gully
leading to the river, followed it down and once more found that it
wasn’t a
crossing site.
“We will go up the bank
until just before dark,” Oliver said during a halt.
“Then we’ll set up a perimeter and sweat it out.
There is a crossing east of us, all right,
but it’s too far away.
“Knowlen and his bunch are
on a trail at the river right over on the border right now,” he said. “If we don’t find one in 30 minutes, we’re
out of the ambush business.”
Slow Progress
It was very rugged walking
along the river. We made only slow
progress because it wasn’t healthy to make too much noise and our
scouts had to
pick paths we could follow without using machetes.
The platoon was sweaty and thorn-scarred when the sun went
down. We had finally found a trail
along the river, however.
“This is it. We
aren’t going to thrash around in the
dark,” Oliver said.
Our position was in a
semi-circle, both ends of the arc hard on the Ia Drang.
I got a big tree allocated as my portion of
the line, and I could sit against it and look at the other bank of the
river.
There seemed to be a trail a
few yards in from the brush screen over there.
I spotted it just at last light and crawled over and told Oliver. (He had appropriated another big tree for
his command post in the center of the semicircle.)
“I wish we were over there,”
he said. “The only problem is, it would
amount to suicide. We’d never get
across this river if we made a hit over there.
We have to get back to the base, if we don’t intend to settle
down in
this part of the country and farm or something.”
Explains Setup
He explained the defense
setup, which was really an ambush put out at a second-best location and
almost
a duplicate of the one which Capt. Knowlen’s platoon was operating at
what now
looked like the choice spot for business.
This ford was about 1,000 yards from us. The
patrol base, our ambush and Knowlen’s described a triangle
with the apex -- the patrol base -- aimed at Chu Pong Mountain three
miles
away.
“We have ten claymore mines
set out along the trail,” Oliver said.
“Eight of them aim directly into it, covering about 80 meters of
the
trail. I think it is just a game trail,
but you never know.
“There is a four-man
security team on each end of the perimeter, just to your right over
there, with
a claymore aimed up and down the trail,” he continued.
“I’ll set off the first one right into the
center of any column moving along the trail.
The others go on that signal.
“We shoot and grenade on
through then and rendezvous down at that gully we crossed,” he said. “Everybody can find that thing just be
moving along the river. The password is
any two numbers which add up to nine, for the 9th Cavalry.
“You keep your eye on the
river,” Oliver ordered. “There may be
some sampan traffic. Anything here is
our enemy.”
SP4 Chester came by then,
collecting canteens to fill from the Ia Drang.
I eased away from the command post with him and we crawled down
to the
river.
It was fast, clear and cold
water, and we filled up two canteens for everybody.
I put iodine tablets into mine and noticed how noisy the night
was along the river as I went back to my tree and laid out ammunition,
grenades
and worries in a row so any of the three could be found
in the darkness.
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