Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [33]
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas E. Fitzgerald and Maj. Bartley W. Furey, commander and operations officer, respectively, of 2-19 FA, were on their cots in a sleeping bunker at Tay Ninh when the attack began. Roused by a telephone call from the FDC bunker, they quickly pulled on their fatigues and jungle boots. The FDC was bunkered and well lit, and there was no fuss or muss inside–only the continuous low murmur of radiomen relaying the figures they'd computed from their maps and charts. A mistake could have been disastrous, and the pressures were considerable, but the lessons had been hammered into these men and the tone in the claustrophobic bunker was intense but controlled. The fire direction control officers, Capt. Jim Bowers and Ray Blizzard, were busy on their own radios. At their words, redlegs at the firebases around Illingworth cranked up every tube they had, and daisy-chained every round they could get their hands on up to the firing crews, and these wiry kids fired shell after shell into the steaming night sky. B/2-19 FA (105mm) was firing from FSB Hannas, F/2-12 FA (155mm) from FSB Hannas, How Battery/1-11 ACR (155mm SP) from Camp Hazard, B/2-32 FA (-) (eight-inch SP) from Camp Hazard, and B/2-32 FA (eight-inch SP) from FSB Saint Barbara.
CIDG militiamen with two 105mm howitzers were even firing their share from the Thien Ngon Special Forces outpost.
In three hours, 3,372 artillery rounds were fired.3
“Everybody kept their cool,” Major Furey later commented. “In the middle of trying to make sense of a lot of scrambled and excited reports coming in, and standing at the sketch of the firebase and comparing that to the terrain around there, and trying to determine targets–in all that, I can still hear Jim Bowers in a very calm, almost laconic drawl every now and again giving the word to 'Bounce Max.' “ Blue Max was the call sign for the Cobra gunships of A Battery, 2d Battalion, 20th Aerial Rocket Artillery, 1st Cavalry Division; they launched from Tay Ninh on a timetable that Bowers was keeping to insure that the defenders at Illingworth would not be caught with all their gunships back refueling and rearming at the same time.
The Cobra pilots dodged a bit of 12.7mm AAA fire as they strafed the tree lines around Illingworth. The defoliated trees looked like skeletons under the stark light of the parachute flares being jettisoned by orbiting USAF flareships, and the sky rained more fire as two AC 119 Shadow gunplanes orbited in their established aerial tier. Their miniguns shrieked like buzzsaws as they flashed down solid streams of red tracers. Loach pilots from A Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Air Cavalry, and the 1st Brigade Scouts, loaned from E Battery, 82d Artillery (Aviation), assisted in directing the fire. Additionally, the AN/MPQ-4 Countermortar Radar of the 2d Battalion, 19th Artillery, scanned the area from its mobile wooden platform at Thien Ngon, pinpointing NVA rocket and mortar firing positions and relaying those coordinates to battalion head-quarters.
During the height of the attack at FSB Illingworth, 122mm rockets and 120mm mortar rounds began to fall haphazardly around the 2-19 FA battalion headquarters at Tay Ninh. Major Furey, for one, was convinced that the NVA were trying for a lucky direct hit on their sandbagged bunker, or at least for a shot close enough to damage their flock of antennae. The NVA had learned a costly