Catecka tea plantation was
worrying Lt. Col. Harlowe Clark, the 1st Brigade commander during the
1st
Cavalry Division’s initial pursuit of the North Vietnamese regiments
which had
struck the Special Forces camp at Plei Me.
“We’ve been here quite a
while,” I heard him tell his staff at headquarters.
“I know they have us taped out and I don’t like the idea of
staying in one place this long. I want
everybody to have a hole and to be ready for anything.”
The tea plantation boasted
its own airstrip, and this had made it almost indispensable as a
forward
base. Big C130 transport planes -
Georgia products from Lockheed, one Air Force pilot pointed out - were
landing
with huge loads of fuel and supplies from Pleiku or even from Saigon. Caribous hopped in and out at all hours and
helicopters were constantly landing and leaving.
The big CH47 Chinooks by this
time had achieved a fantastic reputation as cargo haulers and artillery
movers.
Battalion Commander
Lt. Col. Joe Bush, the
paratrooper who commands the 1st Battalion (Airborne), 19th Artillery,
had
moved his outfit 39 times by Chinook since the operation had started. He wore a gruesome-looking little doll, a
miniature witch doctor, in his helmet and a vast air of properly earned
pride
when he talked about his cannon soldiers.
“We have been jumping those
105 howitzers around like checkers!” Bush said. “We’ve
put batteries into some of the wildest country you’ve ever
seen. You couldn’t have pulled in there
in a truck in less than a month with a battalion of engineers, and
we’ve put a
battalion of artillery in there in minutes and started shooting for the
infantry. I’ve never seen artillerymen
work harder and accomplish more.”
Sees Acquaintances
I saw a group of old
acquaintances digging in to guard the headquarters airstrip as I went
out to
find a helicopter ride to Lt. Col. James Nix’s battalion headquarters. They were from Company A, 1st Battalion
(Airborne), 12th Cavalry, commanded by Lt. Col. Robert Shoemaker, and I
had
left them clearing out a booby-trapped village called Le Than just a
few days
ago.
I stopped and picked up some
names and met their interpreter, who had done a fine job in getting
local
people to clear a way for the company.
He was Sgt. Tran Van Trach of the Army of Viet Nam.
His companions included:
Sp-5 Jasper Passacacqua,
Sp-4 Anthony DeMayo, Lt. Larry K. Hunter, PFC Kirk W. Knight, Sp-4
Jerry T.
Seirgne, PFC Vincent Arroyo, Sp-5 Billy W. Slott, Sgt. Jose E. Davila,
Sp-4
David S. Mitchell, PFC Roger Wirdling, S-Sgt. Kenneth L. Watson, P-Sgt.
Wesley
E. Frazier and Sp-4 Thomas A. Charo, Jr.
“There are a couple of
newspapermen down the line there who were looking for you,” Hunter told
me. “One of them had a goatee.”
Robin Mannick of the
Associated Press is always easy to remember - there are few burly
Englishmen
with red goatees in South Viet Nam. He
was with Joe Galloway of United Press International, and both were on
the same
mission I was, hunting a ride to the scene of the 2nd Battalion
(Airborne), 8th
Cavalry fight.
Go Beyond Jobs
Mannick and Gallaway are two
correspondents in South Viet Nam who go quite a bit further than simply
doing
their jobs. Both have been along with
the infantry in the middle of fights and have written fine accounts of
what
they saw. They are good companions and
I was glad to see them.
I was particularly glad to
see them at this time because I had made a personal vow the night
before this
that I would never again willingly sleep more than one jump from a hole
in the
boondocks of Viet Nam, and I always believed that three men could dig a
deeper
and more elaborate hole than one.
We caught a ride out to
Landing Zone Falcon on a Jack Cranford’s 227th Assault Helicopter
Battalion and
landed right in the middle of some of Bush’s artillerymen.
One tube was apparently just
waiting for the chopper to get out of the way, because it scared me to
death,
firing just as I jumped out and causing my already fairly tight nerves
to send
me in an arching dive for the nearest cover.
I got up, feeling
embarrassed, to meet the bemused stare of Mannick.
“I would say that you are
quite springy today,” he said.
Gallaway, athletic and
youthful, remarked about the remarkable agility of “some old men he
knew” and
helped collect my scattered gear and offered an elbow to escort me on
across
the field.
I remembered all of that later and pleaded a lame shoulder when it came time to dig the fairly extensive excavation we decided on when we found it was impossible to get the last 2,000 meters to the scene of the fighting.
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