15 Months in SOG by Thom Nicholson

Author:Thom Nicholson [Nicholson, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-78818-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

12

Bomb Damage Assessments

or

Run for Your Life, Charlie Brown

“Nick, I’m sending you back up to FOB One.” Major Skelton held up his hand to stop my protest. “I know, I know, you just got back. Sorry, but something else has come up.” He flashed his most easygoing grin at me. “I hear you had a pretty easy time of it last trip, anyway.”

I grinned back. “Guilty as charged, I guess. Still, it’s just tough to live up there in such close quarters. Life here has softened me. What’s up?”

The major tapped his fancy pointer at an area of the map showing northern Laos. We had already nicknamed the region “the Bottleneck.” It was one of the exit points of the Ho Chi Minh trail from Laos into the northern section of South Vietnam. What the newspapers called the Ho Chi Minh trail was in reality a spiderweb of trails and rough-cut roads leading down from the western side of North Vietnam through eastern Laos and Cambodia. There the trails branched out into western South Vietnam, from the border between North and South clear to the South China Sea. Dealing with NVA infiltration would have been much easier if there had been just a single trail to plug.

“Air force HQ has informed us that they have programmed a series of B-52 Arc Light (the code name for B-52 bombing missions) strikes on suspected supply caches and truck parks in this area, and they want us to run some BDAs on the results.” BDA is the abbreviation for bomb-damage assessment. For reasons I’ll soon explain, nobody liked doing them.

“Oh shit,” I groused. “Major, you sure know how to make my day, don’t you?” I gave him my most appealing grin, but it did not work. He had made his mind up and, once the major had done that, no baby-faced captain was going to whine his way out of the job.

The mighty bombers, usually flying all the way from Guam, or perhaps Udorn, in the southern tip of Thailand, could drop fifty thousand pounds of bombs per plane. The impact zone would be several hundred yards wide and two to three miles long. The damage done was incredible, and causing it was quite an expensive undertaking.

Since the bombing campaign started, the army had been tasked with providing teams of men to run BDAs through the impact zone, evaluating the effects of the bombing strike.

In theory, it should have been an easy and relatively safe operation. A team of men would be waiting in helicopters, orbiting a few klicks away from the bomb run. They would swoop down on the target right after the bombers made their strike and offload at one end of the impact zone. The helicopters would then fly to the far end of the drop site and orbit, awaiting the BDA team’s arrival.

The men on the BDA would run a zigzag course through the bombed area, looking at the damage and attempting to get an idea of the effects of the bombing mission.

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