By CHARLES BLACK
Ledger-Enquirer Staff Writer
PLEIKU, Viet Nam - I made a
courtesy call down to the orderly room to make sure that the men who
really
runs things in a company knew I was around.
First Sergeant Herbert L. Gunn shook hands and introduced me to
S-Sgt.
Eddie H. Holloway and S-Sgt. Jonas Vaughn.
S-Sgt. Holloway was able to
give me a tip in the location of a namesake of his, CWO Don Holloway of
the
92nd Aviation Company here, who has achieved a reputation as the most
persuasive salesman in Viet Nam. CWO
Holloway is pilot of one of the detachment of Caribous the Qui Nhon
headquarters of the 92nd keeps at Pleiku to support Special Forces
camps at
such battle scarred locations as Duc Co and Plei Me.
Most of his classmates from flight school at Fort Rucker were
from the north - and included a sizable delegation of ski fans. CWO Holloway is a good Alabama product. The Yankees all went to Vung Tao, which is
far south on the coast of the South China Sea and which, although
beautiful and
picturesque, is also hot. Pleiku is in
the center of a plateau surrounded by the Annamite Mountains.
CWO Holloway ran into his
buddies one day on a hot afternoon while unloading a Caribou at Tan Son
Nhut airport
at Saigon and commenced talking about the cool, beautiful Central
Highlands. As he waxed more poetic for
his sweltering friends from Vung Tao, he mentioned sadly that it was a
shame
such snowsick advocates of skiing as they would miss the season at
Pleiku.
“We have a beautiful ski
slope and ski lodge. Regular winter
paradise there. Snow comes in about six
weeks. People come from all over South
Viet Nam. We have three Ranger
battalions assigned to keep the slope secure.
It is real tough getting reservations, though.
All of us guys at Pleiku buy season tickets in advance,” CWO
Holloway said.
He is very shifty about
answering questions concerning the rest of the story, but others
maintain that
he has sold more season tickets to the Pleiku ski slope and ski lodge
than any
single man in South Viet Nam. The price
is said to vary according to “. . .how
good a friend of his you are. The
better you know him, the more he charges for the ticket.”
I met CWO Holloway while
eating lunch and he told me he was thinking about laying in a sideline
of ski
wax, parkas, ear muffs and such items not generally available in South
Viet Nam
for the simple reason that probably not even in the ice age has a snow
flake
ever been seen in this country.
“There is one guy who
doesn’t have a sense of humor who is asking all over, everytime he
lands his
Caribou, if I’m due to come in there. I
think he has a club he wants to use on me,” CWO Holloway told me
happily.
I found out the
supersalesman of the aviation ranks had not only sold this man a season
ticket
but had taken a down payment on a pair of skis after explaining that
the ones
available for “the ordinary tourist trade” weren’t adequate for a real
ski
enthusiast.
Capt. Gene Hall, whom I had
last seen at a Columbus Lions Club meeting in July, sat down just as I
was
drawing out the last details from CWO Holloway and told me he is
running an
Otter Company at Pleiku.
“If you would like, we can
take a ride up to Duc Co and you can see what happened up there,” Capt.
Hall
said.
Duc Co was the camp which
had been placed under a 70-day siege by the 325th North Vietnamese
Division
(these troops are usually called PAVN’s, from Peoples Army of North
Viet Nam)
in order to lure South Vietnamese or American soldiers into a network
of prepared
ambushes set up around the Special Forces fortress.
The PAVN division had finally relented when Vietnamese Marines
and airborne battalion had cut through to the camp with the 173rd
Airborne
Brigade acting as a reserve force at Pleiku.
The actions around Duc Co
and other camps of this kind seem the standard gambit of a unit of
North
Vietnamese soldiers infiltrating from Laos or Cambodia to support the
efforts
of the hard core Viet Cong or the part time guerrilla.
I wanted to study them. It was also
a pleasure to see Capt. Hall and
I hadn’t had a chance to ride in the big, single-engined Otter, the old
workhorse of Viet Nam, either time I have been in the Central Highlands. While I waited for him to round up CWO Randy
Cochrum, his co-pilot, and PFC Jim Bielaski, the crewchief, I went out
and sat
down on one of the innumerable sandbag shelters built handy to the
hootches.
Capt. S. L. Sorenson of the
52nd Assault Helicopter Co., whose home base is at Camp Holloway, came
over and
we talked about the sunny weather and he pointed to the dry-weather
beacon
which pilots use to locate the Camp Holloway airstrip - a towering
cloud of red
dust which is visible from the air for miles. Helicopters and Caribous
operating from the pierced metal airstrip kept the red clay churned
into an
eruption which looks like a cloud of smoke and settles in hair and on
clothing
like brick dust.
“Everybody has a rosy flush
between showers, except when it rains and the stuff turns into red
paint,”
Capt. Sorenson said.
He asked me to “please relay
some greetings to Jack G. Parker of the Columbus Bank and Trust
Company.” I found out from the chopper
pilot that
Parker is a favorite of “. . . a lot of servicemen here in Viet Nam who
have
been to Columbus on duty. He has helped
me with some good service. He is a good
example of the kind of citizens in that town who make a big part of the
Army
consider Fort Benning a second home.”
Capt. Hall came from the
little green house where air operations formalities are conducted and
we all
got into the Otter and launched off into the dust cloud toward Duc Co.
Because
it was Sunday, a nice afternoon and with nothing especially pressing
about the
timetable on the trip, I got a close aerial view of the Duc Co area. This was handy a few days later when the
First Air Cavalry Division went into a battle which saw some of the
actions
taking place within a few miles of there.
This trip and a helicopter tour which set me on the ground in
fields and
on roads around Duc Co (later when the big fight flared up in the area
from
Plei Me to the Cambodian border) kept me from falling into an emotional
trap
which caught several unwary news correspondents.
Exactly the same tactic used
by the North Vietnamese soldiers at Duc Co was used again in an attack
on the
Special Forces Camp at Plei Me. A siege
on an outpost is designed to draw a hasty, ill-planned relief force to
rescue
the men under pressure and to wipe out those units in a network of
ambushes. When Plei Me was hit, the
reaction was not
according to the liking of the PAVN forces. It also was not to the
immediate
liking of the press corps who could not understand why the reaction by
relief
forces was “slow.” (It would have been
even more painful to them, of course, if it had been ambushed and cut
to pieces
as the PAVN plan called for.)
A low level flight in the
Duc Co area revealed that every road which presented an approach for a
relief
column had elaborately dug-in ambush sites and that the same
preparation had
been done around the available helicopter landing areas.
Bombing, artillery, etc., had scarred the
country around the camp, digging great red gouges out of it and searing
away
brush. The areas where the earth lay
bare showed dug-in positions. The final
relief of the camp, even after all of this, had been hard battle which
saw the
column cut in two and heavy casualties.
The punishment to the PAVN force involved had been heavy, but
the
government losses had also been hard ones.
As an exactly similar
situation developed at Plei Me in a few days, and a clamor went up for
the
First Air Cavalry Division to rush into the PAVN set piece situation, I
was
very glad to have made the trip that Sunday with Capt. Hall. I was already educated where such matters
were concerned.
We landed after circling the
area and taking a close look at the camp itself. The
camp is a rectangle, one side slightly shorter than the
others forming a figure I can’t define but which is available from
somebody who
didn’t miss that class in geometry, with two tangles of barb wire, a
ditch and
an embankment closing it in. A Montagnard refugee camp is near it. At
one
corner a knocked out tank has been salvaged and is dug in as a pillbox
with its
still operating turret and gun adding weight to that sector’s defense. Buildings line one side of the inner
perimeter with sandbagged walls forming part of the defense.
If anything, the little strip by the camp is even dustier than the one at Pleiku and the battle-scarred terrain is infinitely less inviting. The terrain was overcome by the welcome given Capt. Hall by Capt. Richard B. Johnson and Lt. Joseph R. Lube of the Special Forces A Team here, however. Capt. Johnson was already on the runway waving when Capt. Hall stopped the Otter’s propeller.
“Those guys are always glad
to see a friendly face around here.
They live right out on the edge of nothing,” Capt. Hall confided
to me
as we unstrapped and climbed out.
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