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Fighting of 1st Cavalry Lieutenant ‘Magnificent’(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 |
Among the 21 men was Lt.
John Hanlon, Capt. Theodore Danielsen’s first platoon leader.
Danielsen had told me that
Hanlon had been hit by a bullet but had kept command of his sector of
the
defense for three hours until the relief force had come.
“John was magnificent,”
Danielsen said. “I don’t know how much
you can say about a man like that. He
fought his platoon when not many men would have even been conscious,
Charlie. He is a real man.”
Welcome Message
I had been with Hanlon on
several operations, and the news later that he was on his way to
recovery was
one of the most welcome messages I’ve ever received.
He had been fighting on a
sector of our little perimeter which had been the most heavily
threatened
during the night, and when the Communist attack there was turned back
it was
probably the turning point of the whole battle.
Lt. John Tweedy, Danielsen’s
weapons platoon leader, had performed magnificently during the night. He had fired his mortars and had taken part
in directing the rifle fight which had swayed dangerously close to his
positions. He fell heir to a rifle
platoon, in fact,
because of his coolness and effectiveness under fire.
“I told him he had better
start training me a new weapons lieutenant because I needed him to take
over a
platoon of Alphagaters,” Danielsen grinned as he punched the
youthful-looking
Tweedy on the shoulder.
His executive officer, Lt.
John Langston, and his forward observer, Lt. John Cavedo, had shown up
at the
field by then.
Very Gung Ho
Lt. Langston is a very gung
ho officer and is constantly maneuvering himself up into the more
active part
of an operation despite the fact that his job would keep him further
back if he
didn’t put a lot of thought into bending the rules about it.
I saw Sp5 Steve Lannegan and
Sgt. Maj. Lawrence (Tom) Kennedy waving at me from Lt. Col. John B.
Stockton’s
helicopter then and got my gear together.
I noticed that somebody had taken a bayonet and scratched a very
profane
jibe about communism into the flat side of the big black boulder I had
first
noticed by the anthill where I had spent the night with Maj. Robert
Zion.
I also let my morbid
curiosity range and was able to count 27 bullet scars on the trees and
bushes
there. They had come from all
directions and all of them were of the proper height to have been hits
if
anyone had been caught sticking his head up.
It was my last impression of
that little field, those white-scarred, splintered reminders of the
death that
had stormed around it for so many hours.
Special Forces Camp
We flew back to Duc Co and
landed at the little dirt strip by the Special Forces camp. Choppers were landing and taking off busily,
and I saw that the two crippled birds from our ambush fight had already
been
recovered and landed.
I shook hands with Stockton,
borrowed a package of C rations from Sp5 Lannegan and hunted a ride to
Catecka
tea plantation, Lt. Col. Harlowe Clark’s 1st Brigade headquarters.
There were many reasons for
going there. One was that hot chow was
usually available from the mess hall set up there. Another was that
Capt. Russ
Bronson, the liaison officer for 1st Squadron, 9th
Cavalry with Clark, had a tent in a pleasant location for a nap, and
the other
one was that I wanted to find out what else was happening.
Clark had kept a hard pace
in his fighting. The relentless pursuit
of the PAVN forces he was waging was unique in Vietnamese history.
Previously the Communist
regulars -- either Viet Cong regular battalions or these North
Vietnamese
regiments sneaked into the country -- had been able to perform their
carefully
rehearsed sieges and ambushes, break the contact when they chose and go
back
into the wilderness to rest, reorganize and move toward the coast and
more
operations.
This time they had been
chased and harried from the start.
The helicopter concept had
arrived and it was working. The air assault techniques I had seen
forged in
those tests back at Fort Benning had effectively multiplied the eight
battalions of the 1st Cavalry Division by mobility.
Even as the 1st Brigade was
hitting the PAVN 32nd, 101st and 66th regiments along Cambodia, in
fact, a
Chinook helicopter-lifted artillery force with an infantry security
element was
supporting the 22nd Vietnamese Division in an operation at Tuy Hoi on
the South
China Sea. Col. William Lynch’s 2nd
Brigade was protecting the area surrounding the newly arrived Korean
marines
and “Happy Valley” which the 1st Cavalry had pacified in its early
operations.
Savage Fight
I had been told, almost when
I got out of the helicopter at Duc Co, that Lt. Col. James Nix’s 2nd
Battalion
(Airborne), 8th Cavalry was tied into a savage fight 20 miles from Duc
Co, over
near Plei Me, with a battalion of PAVNs who had been hiding in the
forest there
and who had not previously been hit by any combat.
“They are having a real
fight over there,” Stockton said. “I
don’t know if you can get into it, but they are flying into Falcon
landing zone
where the battalion headquarters are if you want to go.
You can get back to the tea plantation and
go out from there.”
I caught a ride with CWO
Bill Combs in a Caribou within a few minutes. Combs had been driving
his
transport plane all over the area hauling men, ammunition, fuel and
supplies,
and had unloaded a bunch of fuel bags here.
The 17th Aviation Company had been in the process of
setting
a record for flying time in South Viet Nam during the previous 30 days,
he told
me.
“We put in 2,000 hours,” he
said. “I feel like I’ve been living in this cockpit, in fact.”
I got out at Camp Holloway,
hooked a ride in a helicopter to the tea plantation, and had roast beef
for
lunch, eating it out of a paper plate in the shade of a tea bush while
reading
a letter somebody had managed to deliver to me.
It was rather hard to realize that just five hours earlier I had been cowering behind a bullet-scarred tree 20 miles away on the Cambodian border!
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