Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [46]
Major General Roberts, a tall, thin, white-haired man, all business, was actually due to rotate home after a full year in command, but because of Cambodia he was to be retained for the first two weeks of the operation. Then his ADC for support, Casey, would pin on his new second star and move to command of the division. In the meantime, Roberts turned to his ADC for operations, Shoemaker, to personally command the drive into the Fishhook. Shoemaker and Casey were a pair, both reserved and gentlemanly, excellent airmobile tacticians, and rather popular– Shoemaker was Handsome Bob to the troops. Security was such that as Task Force Shoemaker was pieced together, only Roberts was privy to the scope of the coming expedition. Shoemaker, in fact, was under the impression that he was conducting a relatively limited raid until he read a newspaper account to the contrary. But by then he was already in Cambodia. Shoemaker formed his task force around the 3d Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division (Col. Robert C. Kingston), with 2-5 Cavalry, 1-7 Cavalry, 2-7 Cavalry, 2-47 Mechanized Infantry, 2-34 Armor, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, 1st ARVN Armored Cavalry Regiment, and 3d Brigade, ARVN Airborne Division.
The ARVN code for the drive was Operation Toan Thang 43, meaning it was the forty-third operation called Total Victory.4 The U.S. label was Operation Rockcrusher. As the planning was battened down, Major General Roberts placed a call to Brigadier General Kinnard at II FFV for one of the basics: maps. The 1st Cav had no maps of Cambodia and had been unable to obtain any. Kinnard, suggesting that aerial photographs would be more accurate, phoned G-2, II FFV, and asked him to have J-2, MACV, provide some. The following day, Colonel Meyer, chief of staff of the 1st Cav, began calling Kinnard to complain that neither maps nor photographs had been forwarded to division. Kinnard finally asked to speak directly to the major general serving as J-2, MACV. The general spoke as if the request was news to him. Kinnard stressed that for reasons he was not authorized to divulge, the material was vital, and he asked the general to go directly to the chief of staff, MACV, to obtain it. Finally, the aerial photographs were made available, and viewing them, Kinnard thought he knew why MACV had been so slow to release them: They showed B52 bomb craters on Cambodian territory caused by the raids that only COMUSMACV and a select few others knew about.
The maps and aerial photography revealed the Fishhook as a raised, hilly, densely jungled stretch that pointed east. Then it rolled on north, the jungle thinning with fields of elephant grass and light, leafy forests that ended in cultivated rice paddies and rubber plantations near Route 7, the area's only highway. Small, isolated hamlets were sprinkled between the border and the plantations, and somewhere down under that canopy, intelligence had tracked not only COSVN but the reinforced 7th NVA Division and elements of the 5th VC Division.
In planning to drive into this relatively uncharted slice of Cambodia, Task Force Shoemaker worked under what Colonel Brady, CO, 1st Cavalry Division Artillery, called an intelligence handicap, the handicap being that they didn't have any. The planners could postulate that the NVA were in the Fishhook in great strength, but they didn't know where exactly. They didn't know the enemy's air defense capability; they couldn't even be sure that the NVA didn't have Soviet tanks and artillery in there. Based on a map survey of likely antiaircraft positions, they decided to place air and artillery fires on them all. Similarly, they decided to place artillery along the route of each air