Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [17]
Earlier, Brookshire had seen the sergeant with light shrapnel wounds, and he responded,“Doc, I'm not disputing your word, but when I saw the sergeant major he didn't have so serious a wound.”
“He got hit again.”
Sergeant Major Burkett had his arm blown off by an RPG, and Master Sergeant Bolan, the operations sergeant, took over as squadron sergeant major.
Within days of the attack on Fort Defiance, which showed that the NVA had the hill preregistered–not surprising considering it was the main terrain feature in an area fought over for the past four years– Brookshire moved his TOC several kilometers east to a clearing astride Highway 246. The perimeter was dubbed Laager Burkett.
A couple of nights later there was another brisk attack. The crew of an 81mm mortar track walked their rounds right down a trench from which the NVA were laying down covering fire in preparation for their assault. The NVA attack fizzled then and there. Neither attack drew the attention that Brookshire felt was warranted from the unit to which they were opcon, the 1st Cavalry Division. His reading of the situation was that it was a twofold problem: Because of his squadron's relatively light casualties, higher command did not appreciate how large a force they were facing; and higher command suspected that politics were creeping into the squadron's battle reports. Colonel Starry had been fighting the good fight with the 1st Cav to have the Blackhorse reunified under his command to handle the situation in War Zone C, and Brookshire wondered if the suspicion existed in the Headquarters, 1st Cavalry Division, that hard-charging Starry was exaggerating the actual situation for his own purposes.
Such was simply speculation on Brookshire's part, as was his comment that the headquarters of the 1st Cav did not fully understand what a hornet's nest had been stirred up in War Zone C. Such speculations were hotly contested by General Roberts of the 1st Cav–and, by and large, the 1st Cav and the 11th Cav enjoyed a solid combat relationship– but they helped to explain to Brookshire why it was the American bodies that ended up being stacked like cordwood when the NVA counterattacks slammed into the 1st Cav's own firebases in War Zone C.
Loach and Cobra working in tandem.
Each of the three squadrons in the 11th ACR had a headquarters and headquarters troop with M577A1 command post carriers, M125Al 81mm mortar carriers, M132 flamethrower carriers, M578 and M88 armored recovery vehicles, and M548 fuel and ammunition carriers; a howitzer battery with M109 155mm self-propelled howitzers; and a tank company with M48A3 Patton tanks, each with a 90mm main gun and cupola-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. The heart and soul of each squadron, however, was its three cavalry troops whose workhorses were their twenty-five M113A1 armored personnel carriers, known as tracks or ponies, or as ACAVs (armored cavalry assault vehicles) for their armament kits, including gun shields for each vehicle's cupola-mounted .50-caliber and its two M60 machine guns mounted on the back deck. Each troop also had nine M551 Sheridan ACAVs, with a 152mm main gun and coaxial M60 in the turret, and a shielded .50-caliber mounted on the commander's cupola.
War Zone C dominated Tay Ninh Province, which was one of eight provinces around the Saigon-Bien Hoa-Long Binh complex collectively labeled by the U.S. Army as III Corps Tactical Zone. The III CTZ was roughly defined by the Central Highlands to the north, the South China Sea to the east, the Mekong Delta to the south, and