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TET 1968 at Lia
Khe, Vietnam was started by the incoming 122 mm rockets. Even though we
had repulsed the
human wave assaults on the East side of the compound, we continually
got this rocket fire from the West of
our compound. For the next week, you could almost set your watch by the
incoming rockets. Two, or three,
rockets would be fired at us every quarter of an hour. We got a lot of
exercise running to the bunkers every
fifteen minutes. After a week, the NVA obviously had a supply problem
because the rate changed to on the
hour and on the half hour.
The 1st division laid on a mission to have a fire team
airborne, flying cover West of the compound at dawn
and again at dusk. We called this mission The Dawn Patrol. I had
been scrambled out and given a set of
coordinates of the firing position, to find a scorched mark in the grass
where the rocket had been fired and
nothing else. This is where our experience started paying off. When we
could find where a rocket was fired
we would look for the nearest cover and concealment, They NVA was not
going to fire it off then run 2 miles
to hide. A quick check with Divarty would get us permission to fire
at these coordinates. A general trick that
we would use was to fly 90 degrees to the suspected target, then
turn hard 90 degrees at the target and open
up with the door guns. If there where any VC, NVA, or Charlie, as he
became known to us, in that general area,
thinking that his position was compromised he would return fire. The
mussel flash would then give away their
position and mini-gun fire and our own rockets would be on him like a
flash, from both ships.
We would work this with one ship down low doing the baiting and the other
ship higher covering him. Charlie
did not usually shoot at gun ships it was bad for his health. He
called the gunships "muttering death". He
would shoot whenever he thought his position was compromised, (cornered
rat syndrome). This ploy worked
more often than you might expect, if you read the terrain properly,
and selected carefully the best cover and
concealment.
We also looked for fires, and smoke coming up through the trees. We would
engage these in much the same
manor. Now, I’m sure that we shot up a lot of fires started by the
evenings H & I firings. But we tried to be
through. One evening, I was flying wing on patrol West of our
compound when, over the radio I heard,
"Inbound rockets at Lia Khe, all aircraft in the Lia Khe are be
warned that Lia Khe is under a rocket attack. I
switched to divarty’s frequency and request the coordinates from
them, looking at the coordinates they gave
me on the map. It was right in back of me, we turned around and there in
the grass almost under our tail booms
was a scorched mark on the ground, the nervy little Bas_____ had
fired the rocket just in back of us. This was
all very frustrating for us, we knew we where getting a few NVA when they
would shoot at us, but the rockets
kept coming.
Some time in April, one of our officers was at the 1st
division headquarters and was given a three-page
intelligence report that I got to see. By this time the rockets had
stopped. The report was taken from a NVA
solider that had surrendered. The report started out with his telling of
how he and his friends had happily came
down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Very happy to get the chance to go kick
some American butt. They had a good
time on the trip, but when they got to their operational area, He had not
had a hot meal in over a month. All his
friends where dying daily. Every time they light a fire to cook their rice
the gunships would find them and more
of his friends would dye. It turned out that he was the only
survivor of the rocket battalion that he came down
the trail with. This showed us that our tactics had been most effective,
although we could not always see the
results. We where steady taking a toll on our intended targets. It would
be a finer story if we had gone out
taken care of this problem in one afternoon. But we worked hard for over a
month chasing every puff of smoke
coming out of the brush, and fresh cut foliage has to be used for
camouflage. We got pretty good at reading
the signs. It put me in mind of the Indian scouts.
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