Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [47]
… the amount of detailed fire planning involved was staggering and had to be done sufficiently in advance to ensure that each artillery unit received its plan, computed its firing data, and was in position ready to shoot at H Hour. Most of the credit for accomplishing this must go to Major Pokorny, the division artillery operations officer. The job normally goes to the sharpest lieutenant colonel not commanding a battalion. Major Pokorny had the job simply because he was the brightest, hardest working, most dedicated officer that I have known. Thank God, he was also tireless.
In order to keep air traffic near a normal rate in the area of the planned crossing sites, division headquarters set in place strong controls so that, for example, instead of having each artillery commander conduct an aerial reconnaissance to select his own firing position, it was decided that Colonel Brady would select them all in one flight. He was also to select the eight landing zones to be used by the assault units in Cambodia. A rated aviator, Brady went aloft not with a Loach or Huey but with a pair of Cobras so as to look like just another fire team skimming the border for infiltrators and, lost, occasionally crossing it.
On 30 April, when Task Force Shoemaker had been originally scheduled to go but was checked while final political considerations were tamped out in Washington, Brigadier General Shoemaker established his command post at Quan Loi to control the invasion force of 10,000 U.S. and 5,000 ARVN troops. The next morning, Friday, 1 May 1970, two hours after the artillery of Task Force Shoemaker had begun booming and the helicopters had begun lifting off–it was nine o'clock in the evening of 30 April, Washington time–President Nixon, in a televised address, announced the attack to a stunned nation: not an invasion, an incursion at an ally's request. Abrams had suggested a routine announcement at the daily MACV briefing, but Nixon went for the dramatics. He couched his explanation of a wholly necessary tactical maneuver in terms of global strategy and with language that, while designed to show courage in the face of his critics, had a jingoistic edge to it that set those critics afire with offended rage.
The campuses instantly exploded.
At the Plantation, Brigadier General Kinnard, chief of staff, II FFV, and his friend Mr. Whitehouse, COORDS advisor to II FFV, were equally if not violently unimpressed with Nixon's address, which they watched on the television in Kinnard's quarters. The night before, the two had shared drinks and the prediction that the operation would “bring down the house” in the United States, overshadowing whatever military good might come of it. Watching the president using his pointer and map to lend an air of climactic victory to the incursion, Kinnard considered it all a meaningless media ritual. He was also flabbergasted when Nixon announced that they were going to capture COSVN, for MACV and II FFV intelligence had indicated that the key members, anticipating the attack, had already retreated deeper into the interior, and that whatever personnel and modest installations they left behind would not satisfy the media or the public, who had been led to expect destruction of a communist pentagon complete with concrete bunkers in the jungle. The COSVN had never been such a static, reinforced complex, but rather, as one intelligence analyst noted, “a kind of permanent floating crap game of communist leaders.” But such information had a way of losing its clarity at each level of transmission, Kinnard mused, so that he had already learned to be wary of any pronouncement from the Oval Office. Kinnard the West Pointer was no longer a believer and, in fact, had already taken his name off the list for major general and was planning to retire from a war he considered mismanaged and not to his nation's benefit. He in no way felt altruistic about his dissent, for he had always