My Vietnam War - Part 3

We arrived from the US at Cam Ranh Bay, where we waited for a plane to Dong Ha. I remember looking at a map there, where the dot for Dong Ha would not fit entirely in South Vietnam, but jutted across the DMZ into North Vietnam. This was what the Army called northern I Corps. From Cam Ranh Bay we flew to Da Nang, where I was amazed at the busiest airport I had ever seen, with fighter jets and transports tailgating each other down the runway. In the terminal, however, things looked pretty normal. Everybody was pretty clean and relaxed looking. One soldier, though, looked like someone out of the old Willie and Joe cartoons from World War II. He was dirty, his uniform was ragged, and he had a glazed, far-away look in his eye, the only one like that of the hundreds in the airport. My friend asked him where he was from. It turned out that he was from the DMZ. When my friend told him we were going to Dong Ha, he said something like, “I just came from there. I heard the A-2 base was overrun the night before last. I suppose you are going to replace some of the men who were killed there.” We were not pleased to be going to where the one man in the airport who looked like he had been in a war had just left

I remember flying into Dong Ha on a C-123 transport plane. I don’t know whether the pilot was putting us on or not, but he said that they had had a lot of planes blown up on the ground in Dong Ha, so they were not going to stop. They would land, slow down, lower the back cargo door, and we should grab our stuff and run away from the plane as fast as we could. We did, and the plane accelerated and took off without turning around. There we were in the bright sunshine, in the middle of a quiet, green grassy landing strip that could have been a park in any American city.

That night we joined twenty or so other men in a tent waiting for assignment. There was a lot of drinking and poker playing going on despite some shooting heard outside, until someone came running in to say that we were under mortar attack and Vietcong were using the lights in our tent as their target. The next day I was assigned to A battery of the 2/94th Artillery, a heavy artillery battery with eight inch howitzers and 175 mm guns, which was stationed with one brigade of the 101st Division at LZ Sally, near the town of Quang Tri.

It felt pretty good to be stationed with 101st Airborne. The LZ Sally base camp was on a ridge looking north, and we could often watch the firefights in the valley below. From our safe distance the tracers were like a fireworks show. There was another fireworks show every night when another artillery battery would adjust fire for defensive targets on our perimeter using white phosphorous rounds which lit up the sky so that you could see them easily.

During one firefight, the battleship New Jersey was off shore, and she joined us in providing support to the troops in the field. When we talked to her on the radio, it was like listening to a commercial FM station back in the states, compared to the weak hissing and cackling communications we had with individual forward observers with the infantry. When it shoots close support for troops, an artillery battery tells them, “Shot” when the guns fire and “Splash” about five seconds before the rounds hit, so that they know to duck to avoid shrapnel from the friendly fire. When the New Jersey told the troops, “Splash,” everyone in our battery who could, ran outside to try to see the 2,000 pound rounds go off, but we never saw or heard them.

There were some Cobra helicopters stationed on the LZ which would periodically go out and shoot at stuff on our perimeter. Watching the Cobra miniguns fire a solid stream of tracers was pretty impressive. Even more impressive was watching the occasional visit of “Spooky” to shoot around the perimeter. An even bigger column of tracers streamed out of the side of the converted cargo plane. During these operations there were usually loud speakers broadcasting the “Chieu Hoi” invitation to the enemy to surrender.
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