North Vietnamese Near Helpless When Cut Off From Food Supply
By CHARLES BLACK
Ledger-Enquirer Staff Writer
The
little asphalt road which led from Pleiku to the Cateka Tea Plantation
where
Lt. Col. Harlow Clark’s First Brigade had its headquarters had become
one solid
line of trucks and jeeps during the afternoon.
Lt. Col. Clark told me he was pulling his men out of the fight. They had been in the field almost 30 days by
now at Binh Khe, the Mang Yang Pass and during the Plei Me campaign.
The trucks were bringing in
men and equipment of Col. Thomas Brown’s Third Brigade, an outfit with
a
penchant for naming its operations to include the word “bayonet.” I met Col. Brown, in company with Lt. Col.
Harold Moore, Lt. Col. Fred Ackerman, Lt. Col. Walter Tully and Lt.
Col. James
McDade who commanded the three battalions of First Air Cavalry soldiers
who
would take up the fight.
Lt. Col. Moore’s First
Battalion Seventh Cavalry and Lt. Col. McDade’s Second Battalion
Seventh
Cavalry are units steeped in the old “Gary Owen” spirit of the plains
days. Lt. Col. Ackerman’s outfit, the
First Battalion Fifth Cavalry, was one I had been with on a previous
operation
and Lt. Col. Tully was an old friend from Fort Benning.
I had been up with his unit on the perimeter
defense around the An Khe base when that was a hectic undertaking but
had not
been in the field with it.
The Third Brigade’s
operation seemed aimed at the area north of Pleiku, between Pleiku and
Kontum,
and Lt. Col. John B. Stockton’s hard flying scouts from the First
Squadron
Ninth Cavalry were already swooping over that terrain in search of
targets.
It didn’t work out quite
like that, however. The fights which
the Third Brigade found have been entered in Vietnamese history now as
the most
effective defeats of North Vietnamese Army forces in the course of the
war, and
they came in the ominously familiar locations of Chu Pong mountain and
the Ia
Drang River in quick succession.
The original operations plan
was aimed at finding and fighting the 32nd PAVN Regiment which had fled
the
Plei Me area after ambushing a South Vietnamese relief column. The 66th had been hit by Lt. Col. Stockton’s
ambush on the Ia Drang and was know to be lurking around Chu Pong
Mountain.
The 101st PAVN Regiment,
according to one of the many prisoners questioned in the days past, had
been
riddled and the remnant of it formed into a “provisional battalion,” an
understrength and ruined outfit which would never perform the tasks the
Communist strategy in the Central Highlands had envisioned for it.
The bag of prisoners was
high and the little North Vietnamese soldiers, some bandaged for
wounds, some
shivering and weak from beri beri or malaria, all near starvation and
with
their morale described by Lt. Col. Clark as “rock bottom,” intrigued me. I kept going over to the compound and
watching the interrogation process and listening to the interpreters.
I found that a brownish
powder many of them carried in a ration can was a mixture of ground
peanuts,
soy beans and sesame seeds and that they used a teaspoonful of it to
supplement
their daily rice ration. When they ran
out of this concentrated food they turned to cornmeal and it is
possible to
identify men who have just arrived from North Viet Nam by a look at
their food
supplies.
If North Vietnamese soldiers
are placed in a set-piece battle, such as at Plei Me, they turn over
the rice
they carry tied in a cloth roll to the company cook.
He cooks them a daily ration early in the morning and delivers
it
to their positions once each day. On the march he takes a carefully
measured
amount of rice from each man and cooks it while the men carry their own
rice
bags.
The company cook must know
more about the plans and movements of PAVN troops than any other
enlisted man
and he is always a good source of intelligence when he is captured. A simply inspection of the rations found on
the battlefield again tell the story of the PAVN posture at the time of
the
fight. If they were in a prepared
ambush site, they will have only cooked rice and will not have their
rice
bags. If they were on the march, they
carry their rations.
The PAVN battalions are in
deep trouble where food is concerned when they are forced into extended
operations in the highlands near the Cambodian border, as were these
men when
pursued by the First Cavalry Division battalions. There
just isn’t sufficient rice grown there by the seminomadic
Montagnard tribesmen for the soldiers to survive very long. Food was an overwhelming problem with them.
Oddly enough, they knew very
little about living from the country.
South Vietnamese soldiers can turn up an astonishing amount of
edible
items on a patrol through the jungles.
The North Vietnamese solider
is almost helpless when cut off from his regular food supplies or is
forced to
exit in an area without villages to supply his wants.
He knows few of the long list of professional attainments in
which any American Infantryman who has finished Advanced Infantry
Training is
skilled.
He does, however, have
thorough training in camouflage and concealment - which our men have
only
sketchy ideas concerning - is silent on the march - our men are prone
to have
radios turned up high and shout to each other as they walk - and knows
how to dig
and shoot. He also is heavily drilled
in small unit maneuver.
More, because of a system which has individual soldiers indulge in “self-criticism” before their comrades, a consistent high motivation is apparent when the PAVN is under the discipline of his regular unit in combat. It falls apart when he is left on his own, but the desire to do well because of the inspection of his actions by his comrades is a powerful factor in the bravery and fanaticism he shows in battle.
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