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Mix-Up in Reports Is Explained To Correspondents by General |
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(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 Write |
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Brig. Gen. Richard Knowles,
assistant commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, called in the entire
press
corps billeted at Pleiku MACV compound and talked to it about the
mix-up in
reports concerning what had happened out on the battlefield where the
Second
Battalion Seventh Cavalry had made its heroic fight the previous day.
The word back at Pleiku (and
it was the same for everybody, military or civilian) had been that the
fight
was not a big one. The next day it
became very apparent that the Second of the Seventh had been in a
savage
battle.
The question most
correspondents were asking concerned the fact that the fight had been
conducted
in a kind of communications vacuum.
Brig. Gen. Knowles, for example, had been in the dark concerning
its
early intensity, and he said so at once when his quarters had become
filled
with reporters.
I had already talked to some
men returning from the scene and they had told me that there was a good
tactical reason for the guarded communications from the battlefield.
“Lt. Col. Robert McDade had
air and artillery, he had control of his fight, and he knew that his
communications were being monitored by the enemy and that there had
been some
American radios and SOI cards captured,” one officer told me.
(SOI means “signal
operations instructions” and contains the radio code used for
operational
reports. Anyone possessed of this card
and a radio able to pick up the right frequencies could have monitored
and
understood the battalion’s radio messages.
Lt. Col. McDade, according to the officer I talked to, didn’t
choose to
give the enemy information.)
I left the conference
quickly. The major single fact I wanted
to hear had come already.
The Second of the Seventh
had fought to a remarkable success after having all of the cards
stacked
against it and the PAVN battalions which had struck it by surprise
while the
American units were strung out in columns had once more been hacked to
pieces.
There had been more than 400
Communist bodies counted and the American units had pushed on out of
their
perimeters and recovered their wounded and dead, while capturing the
litter of
equipment and casualties left behind by the fleeing Communists.
Capt. Myron Diduryk, whose
Bravo Company had been called out of church to go to the fight, had
once more
come onto the scent of battle when the scales seemed delicately
balanced.
His company had been the one
which had assaulted into the fight at Chu Pong mountain and had turned
the tide
around Company C, First Battalion Seventh Cavalry, when that unit had
been in a
fierce brawl with a full battalion of PAVN’s who had tried to overrun
the
company in three “human wave” attacks.
When Capt. Diduryk’s company
arrived at Landing Zone Albany, where the Second of the Seventh fought
its
historic day and night battle, the Communists had already been battered
by air
and artillery and the heroic defense of the surprised Gary Owen units.
The extra riflemen had
smashed the hopes of the PAVN commanders and the hardest single contest
of
American troops in South Viet Nam had tapered into mopping up
operations by the
GIs.
Nov. 17’s action had been
the subject of confused reports in the beginning, but the final ones
filed when
it was all understood made the Second of the Seventh a name which will
be
associated with heroism in the war in South Viet Nam.
During all of this, the
Third Brigade had been turning over the rest of the campaign to Col.
William
Lynch’s Second Brigade and the final action of the campaign was quick
in
coming.
Col. Lynch put his
battalions into a blocking position and the Vietnamese Airborne Brigade
had
moved in a sweeping action from Duc Co to the Ia Drang river.
The tough paratroopers had
cornered a PAVN force and had killed and scattered the remnants of the
Communists still in the area. Once more
that helicopter-borne artillery of the 1st Cavalry Division had been a
telling
factor.
A Vietnamese radio message
had come to one of the batteries firing typical close support for one
of the
paratrooper battalions. Translated, it
had said:
“Artillery too close! Artillery
is too close. . . but very
nice! Keep shooting.”
The pinpoint accuracy of the division’s artillery had been thoroughly appreciated when the Vietnamese troops came back to Du Co.
One of their advisers told
me that “. . . they were all still talking about it when the fight was
over. I guess they will be talking
about that close support the rest of their lives, in fact.
They haven’t seen artillery like that.”
Col. Lynch’s joint operation
had produced a final body count of 188 PAVN dead and more loads of
captured
weapons and equipment. He met correspondents at his headquarters at
Catecka Tea
Plantation the day before Thanksgiving and made a terse and nationally
televised announcement which ended the campaign. He
said the PAVN’s had had enough and had run to Cambodia.
I went over to Camp Holloway
where the Second of the Seventh was getting aboard trucks to ride down
Highway
19 to An Khe. It was raining hard and
there were less miserable methods of transportation available, but it
seemed
the right way to go.
Highway 19 had been the
scene of historic events in 1954. It
was a highway the Viet Cong had controlled often enough since.
I liked the idea of sitting
on top of a load of equipment with half a dozen young infantrymen
wearing
American fatigues. They answered the
hails of Montagnard and Vietnamese peasants, who waved and cheered as
we rode
through villages, with a big shout of “Gary Owen!”
I don’t imagine the peasants knew what the words meant, but I’m certain they got the message of victory from the ones shouting them
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