By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
I spent too long prowling
around the battle area outside the Special Forces camp at Plei Me. The 2nd Battalion (Airborne), 8th Cavalry
commanded by Lt. Col. James Nix, already had moved out into the brush
on its
way to a hill 2,000 meters away.
The hill was a bare knob
which dominated the surrounding forests.
Its peak and slopes were torn and blackened from the terrific
U.S. air
attacks put down during the siege of Plei Me by the 101st, 66th and
32nd North
Vietnamese Army regiments.
“The companies are about 500
meters out and on their way to ‘Old Baldy’ up there,” Nix said. “They’re really moving and I don’t think you
could catch them.”
He walked to a pile of PAVN
uniforms and equipment which had been gathered from the holes and
trenches
which surrounded the triangle-shaped camp and pointed to it.
“These lads weren’t
guerrillas,” he said. “They were
regular North Vietnamese Army troops.
Did you check the gun positions and the way they had dug in
along that
ridge on the other side of the camp?
They had studied this problem for a long time and they had good
intelligence.
“They could have overrun
this camp. They apparently just kept
the pressure on, laying here and taking the air and artillery, forcing
a relief
to come so they could spring their ambushes,” Nix concluded.
I talked with the commander
for a few minutes, then a series of mortar explosions came from the
hill his
battalion was moving toward.
“Ours! We have
some men set down in the back of it,
too,” Nix said. “They are putting that
barrage down. When it lifts our boys
will go right on in. I’m getting
airborne right now if you want to get up there.”
His helicopter covered the ground
quickly and got me onto the peak just after the first platoon from
Capt. Roger
McElroy’s Company A had moved across it.
The sickening smell of the area around the camp was even worse
up on
that peak.
Capt. McElroy walked over
and shook his head.
“You show up in the darndest
places! I wouldn’t come up here if I
didn’t have to. This place is bad,” he
said.
It was. The
holes contained bodies. I counted four
only a few feet from us. Bombs had buried
some of the dead Communists
but three others were sprawled on down the slope as if they had been
hit in the
open, unawares.
“They were caught moving
down there,” McElroy said. “It looks
like napalm got all of them in here and then the bombs finished the
job.”
U.S. equipment of the type
issued South Vietnamese troops was scattered around.
I saw several old-style canteens and canteen cups - each of
which
was bullet riddled - and web gear around some of the holes. A barbed wire, entanglement around the peak
had holes blown in it.
A small outpost here had
come under Communist attack. Some of
the CIDG (Special Forces - trained Civil Irregular Defense Group)
troops had
managed to escape; others had dies in the same holes where the
Communist bodies
were now lying.
McElroy said there hadn’t
been a shot fired as they moved up the hill and that only the dead
PAVN’s and a
half a dozen automatic weapons (assault rifles from Russia and Chicom
submachine guns) had been found. His
company
would spend the night here, and I didn’t look forward to it.
A helicopter swept up from
the valley then, two gunships following it, one high and one low. It came into the little level space at the
top and I saw Maj. Gen. Harry W. O. Kinnard, the division commander,
get out.
McElroy looked very startled
and hurried away as Kinnard walked across the battle-scarred peak which
had
been secured only minutes earlier. I
kept waiting for him to greet the general as he had me by saying
something
about “seeing him the darndest place,” but he didn’t.
Kinnard inspected the
shattered positions, looked at the bodies of the PAVNs, got a report
from
McElroy, then offered me a ride back to Pleiku.
I had been told that the
brigade headquarters was moving out the next day, as were the 1st
Battalion
(Airborne), 8th Cavalry and the 1st Battalion (Airborne), 12th Cavalry.
The 2nd Battalion, 12th
Cavalry already was holding several landing zones and howitzers from
the 1st
Battalion (Airborne), 19th Artillery had been set up out in these
wilderness
sites by Chinook helicopters.
I also figured I might
wangle a supper invitation out of it if I worked it right, so I climbed
in and
flew back to II Corps (Vietnamese Army II Corps) headquarters at Pleiku.
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