"I carried 3 M-14 pouches and 1 canteen on my web belt...The M-14 pouches could hold 5 M-16 magazines. We put a piece of black electrical tape on the butt of each magazine to form a tab so we could pull the first 4 out of the pouch easier and sliced the top half inch or so of the pouches so as to lay the 5th magazines across the top. I generally carried 2 of these pouches loaded with tracer every 3rd round and the other pouch had all ball rounds for penetrating heavy growth or for firing without giving my location away so easily. I also carried 2 magazines in my leg pockets loaded with straight tracer for marking my or the enemy location for the fly boys when the radio could not do the job accurately enough. I also had 2 magazines taped together in a V shape in my weapon for quick reaction reloading at first contact. In the really bad areas, I also carried 1 or more 7 magazine bandoleers made of OD cloth and from 6 to 15 grenades of various types and a claymore as well as the PRC-25. Needless to say, when the mud got thick, I was walking deep. Almost forgot the big starlight scope also!
The following mission explains why I was not a fan of all tracer loads. One night in January of 69, Herb Frost, Roman Mason, Leon Moore, Mark Durham and I were on a mission east of Ben Tre in a populated area with much tree growth separated by small rice paddies and Vietnamese hooch's every hundred meters or so. We were moving from hooch to hooch looking for military age males or any sign of weapons when we spotted a man walking at us from a wooded area. When he was about half way across the rice paddy, we called to him to stop. He took off like a ruptured duck and managed to dodge our fire. That SOB could have been an Olympic champion sprinter.
About 45 minutes later a bunch of his friends came into the area to return our greeting. We were in hooch searching for weapons when a large volume of fire went over the roof. The local VC seemed to know there were 2 women and a small kid in the hooch with us so avoided shooting directly into the place. This gave us a definite advantage. I was on one corner and had cut a slit through the thatched wall just above a short mud wall and could see the VC firing positions every time they popped up to shoot. There was enough star light and a few klicks away someone was shooting illumination rounds that partially backlit their position. One of them must have been a FNG VC because he was shooting almost all tracer and each time he popped up to shoot, he cut loose with all 30 rounds just over my head but still above the roof. Keep in mind that this was not a heavy battle but, rather, just friendly exchanges of lead to let each of us know that the other guy was there.
I saw this guy pop up twice from the same spot and empty his magazine so was waiting when he did it for the 3rd and final time. As soon as I saw his solid line of green tracer start, I was aimed in at that spot and cut loose with a full clip of mixed ball and tracer. I bet 3/4th of my load caught him in the upper chest and face. I watched as his tracer line climbed into the sky before stopping. At that point, the other VC reduced fire and quit using tracer.
A few minutes later they must have decided they had enough of us and pulled their X-FNG off for last rites. We also decided that it was time to go so called for extraction. I remember wondering if any had stayed behind to give us a going away party when the bird came but, if so, they did no more shooting as we pulled out. Tracers were a nice tool but they work in both directions. This also shows the kind of problems we had in the delta with LRP missions. Way too much population and too little solid cover in many areas."
Trapped in mud-walled hooch by a superior VC force 29 years ago one of my team scouts went to sleep on rear security......on a night when 60 or more very unfriendly people were out searching for us in at least 3 groups. Unfortunately, one of their elements found us from that direction first and damned near bagged our whole team. Below is the story of that night. An earlier version of it was published in "Behind the Lines" magazine in 1993. For any of you active duty guys, please kick the shit out of anyone you ever find asleep on guard. It might help save the lives of them and others.
A Lurp team fights desperately for survival.
With half the team KIA and the
team leader blinded,
gun ships and medevacs are the survivors' only hope.
January 27, 1969 started out just like many other days for Team 17, with us preparing for yet another night ambush patrol off the Mobile Riverine Force. I served with E/50 Long Range Patrol from April 68 through January 69. We had teams scattered all over the 9th Infantry Division AO. Several months earlier, our teams were kicked off the Mobile Riverine Force for smuggling beer on board. Shortly thereafter a VC sapper team swam out to the USS Westchester County near Toi San Island with a large quantity of plastic explosives and blew two huge holes in it. We were quickly forgiven and invited to return to the ships. We began running ambush patrols along trails and canals within a few klicks of the MRF. In the previous three weeks, we had pulled several effective missions on the south bank area near a major canal intersection called the "cross roads." This area was roughly between My Tho and Ben Tre and consisted of large sections of heavy forest and jungle swamps bordered by kilometers of wide open rice paddies. About half of these missions resulted in contact with a very active local VC force.
On this mission, I planned to insert by chopper near a heavy wood line and move the team several hundred meters to a position near one of the canals. Late on that afternoon, I flew over the area in a LOH to pick out some possible sites while on the way to drop off George Calabrese and Chuck Semmit at Ben Tre to be our radio relay. Shortly after returning to the MRF, the Huey arrived and carried six of us off into what turned out to be deep shit.
At our first insertion point, we were only on the ground about thirty seconds before a VC strolled out of the woods a hundred meters away with his AK over his shoulder like a hobo's pack. He spotted me and jumped back into the woods just as I cut loose with a burst from my 16. I decided at that point to extract and move a couple klicks to see if we could get a clean insertion. We landed near small hooch I remembered from a previous mission to be a water buffalo shed. It was almost dark as I scanned the wood line. At that point, I decided it was going to be an interesting night, because there was a Vietnamese man in the woods looking right back at me. When I reported this, I was told we were to keep the mission going anyway. I waited until full dark and got the team moving out of there. About an hour later, I heard a brief burst of fire from the vicinity of our last position. I figured we had escaped unseen, but we were not able to get into the woods because of heavy movement of people on their way home. We came to a cluster of five hooch's scattered over an area the size of a football field. All but one appeared to be empty. We entered one that was isolated from the others and found it to be built like a fortress. It had thick mud walls, about four feet high, which ran all the way around except for the door opening and a large above-ground bunker of mud and tree trunks. Because of a dry thatch wall on one side, which would have caused too much noise to remove, I had to deploy two men outside on that corner. This should have caused no problem, as they could quickly jump over the wall and knock holes in the thatching if it became necessary. For the next several hours we waited and watched to see what would happen.
At 2300 hours, I put the team on 50% alert. Richard Thompson, Mark Durham, and Roman Mason took their shot at getting some sleep, while Norman Crabb, Leon Moore and I watched for any activity. Around 2320 hours I thought I saw movement in the woods about 150 meters away. It was a clear night with starlight so bright I could almost read by it. I moved to Moore's position to get the starlight scope. He said there had been no activity on his side of the hooch, away from the wood line. For the next few minutes, Norman Crabb and I observed what appeared to be about twenty people moving around in the woods across from us. I was not overly concerned, because I had claymores set up in that direction.
Just as I decided to wake the team for possible action and to contact base, I heard voices behind me. Thinking it was Mason and Moore, I grabbed my 16 and started around the hooch to shut them up and get them inside. I had just turned the corner of the hooch when I recognized the voices were Vietnamese, and five armed VC stood four feet from me. They were so preoccupied looking down at the sleeping forms of my rear security element; they did not even notice me. I raised my 16 to waste them when I noticed about twenty more VC on the other side of a paddy dike ten feet past Mason and Moore's position. I slipped back around the corner and had Crabb cover the closest VC while I moved inside to wake the other guys. I looked over the wall as I whispered into the radio for assistance. We were unable to figure a sure way to wake Mason and Moore and get them in before they would be hit. There must have been at least twenty weapons trained on them at point blank range. My radio relay people told me that division would not send gun ships until we were in contact. I told everyone to open up at once, hoping that we could put out enough fire to allow Mason and Moore to get inside. It did not work, and they were cut down before they could even start to move.
The mud walls of the hooch held up against the heavy battering from all those AK's, and the thick roof thatching absorbed the blast from several grenades. So far, the people I spotted in the wood line had not started firing. I figured they wanted us to run from the hooch into their ambush, but I was not about to leave Mason and Moore behind, even if I could. I decided to remove my radio and crawl around the hooch to a point where I could fire along the right flank of the attacking force, when I spotted more people on my left flank. We were completely surrounded and taking fire from three sides. About that time, an RPG came in the door and detonated on the ground three feet in front of me. I think the blast caused me to do a complete back flip while flying about fifteen feet across the hooch. For the first few seconds, it felt like someone hit me in the face with a two-by-four, but it quickly numbed into a dull throb. I could not see anything, even though there had been enough light in the hooch before from tracers to see quite well.
I crawled back across the floor, feeling for my 16 and the radio, when I heard another large blast to my right. Thompson fell to the floor and died almost immediately. Only about five minutes had passed since the first shot, and half my team was KIA, and I was blind. I found my 16 and asked my radio relay team where the Cobra's were. I was told they were on the way and Hotel-Volley 27, the call sign of a 105 battery at fire base Claw, came up on my frequency and asked if we wanted artillery support. With VC within 10 to 20 feet away and me blind, I said no. I could not pull one of my last two men off the wall long enough to call in 105's on our own heads.
After about fifteen minutes of heavy firing, Crabb came to me to say he was out of ammo and Durham was on his last magazine. Since I had been blinded so early in the fight, I had plenty left. I started handing magazines to them and then finally handed my web gear to Crabb after removing a grenade to keep just in case we were overrun. I noticed that the VC firing was also slacking off and figured they were also running low. I told Crabb and Durham to start shooting semi-automatic at selective targets to keep us going as long as possible. I called once again to ask where the hell our gun ships were and to advise that in a few more minutes they would only need to send graves registration for a reaction force. One of the sweetest sounds I can remember hearing was when Charger 21 told me to mark my position so his gun ships could open up. I had Crabb throw my strobe light out the door and said anything more than twenty feet from it was all theirs. The VC that could, hauled ass out of there as rockets and mini-guns started tearing up the area. I told Crabb and Durham that we would first drag out our dead teammates when the extraction ship landed, and if there was no effective sniper fire they could go back for our equipment. A chopper crew with balls like King Kong landed in that mess and waited on the ground for us to load. Crabb led me to the bird to keep me from walking into the tail rotor. The gun ships did such a great job of building a wall of lead and fire that we had no problem extracting.
I spent the next ten and a half months recovering from wounds and learning how to live as a blind man. Well, it could have been a whole hell of a lot worse. I recently got back in touch with some of the old gang and it is great. My times at the Ranger reunions and at the Wall have been a terrific way to heal many of the old wounds.
On occasion a LRRP team will get lucky and find something big. That was the case on 25 January when a team led by Michael O'Day exposed an NVA company, called in gunships, were extracted, and turned the action over to the 3rd Brigade. A text book mission, one of many, conducted by the LRRPs.
At dusk on 26 February 1969, the Hunter Killer team was inserted into an LZ in an open rice paddy by two HUEY slicks, escorted by a pair of gun ships. It was a cold LZ.
SGT David Stone was point man and the team leader for the Hunter team. On landing, Stone noticed many places on and around the LZ where the reeds were bent over as if someone had recently been sitting on them. He reckoned a large enemy force had just vacated the area because the reeds were bending back up as he watched.
Most likely, it was a large infiltrating enemy force coming out of Cambodia with orders not to get decisively engaged who were taking ten when they saw the insertion birds, realized trouble was on its way and hightailed it into the woods. Some thing gave Stone an uneasy feeling. The terrain did not jive with the map and the matted down grass bothered him.
Stone was a veteran Ranger leader. It was probably his sixth sense, developed during dozens of such missions, shouting: danger, danger, danger. He quickly moved the force off the LZ and into the nearby woods, stopping when they came to a clearing. He then wisely called for a marking round to check his position, in case he was in the middle of a large enemy force; he'd be able to bring in the artillery big stick. Just at that moment, SGT Wesley Watson, who was at the rear of the column, saw an armed enemy soldier dressed in Khaki about 15 meters from him. Before he could get a shot off the guy disappeared into the darkness. Then a single shot was heard.
Not knowing what was going on in the rear of his column, he realized the team had lost surprise when the signal shot was heard, and trouble was on the way. He set his force up in a tight perimeter and waited for the artillery marking round. Suddenly four dinks walked into the clearing. A Ranger yelled 'La Dai' and when they ran; they joined the ranks of the KIA.
Stone threw a grenade. It hadn't gone more than a foot when an explosion went off behind him and blew him out of the wood line and into the clearing. He was hit in the back by shrapnel and momentarily stunned, his shocked brain trying to connect his grenade with the explosion that came from the opposite direction. Then more explosions clobbered the perimeter as incoming M- 79 rounds, hand grenades and B-40 rockets were fired at the ranger position. The common quote from all the survivors was "all hell broke loose".