Ripcord by Keith Nolan

Author:Keith Nolan [Nolan, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307416551
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Piling On

The strength of the enemy positions on Hill 1000 and the ferocity of the attacks on Hill 805 came as a revelation to Colonel Harrison. Contact had previously been too sporadic, the shelling of the firebase too intermittent, to suggest to the brigade commander that a major engagement was in the making. The actions at Hills 805 and 1000 began to bring the situation into better focus. “However, we still did not have a good fix on the size of the force opposing us or a clear picture of the enemy’s intentions,” wrote Harrison. Was the action around the firebase mere harassment, a diversion to draw attention away from something big about to happen somewhere else, or were the NVA, in fact, preparing a set-piece battle to destroy Ripcord?

“It’s easy now to reconstruct the enemy plan, but it was a most frustrating mystery then,” admitted Harrison, who was new to the area, having only replaced Bill Bradley on June 23. “As intense as the attacks on Hill 805 were, there was no evidence of mass numbers of enemy troops being involved. There were, in fact, no sightings of large enemy troop movements anywhere in the area. Not even a company-sized unit had been spotted at that stage. We were still desperately looking for targets. Clearly, we had a paucity of good intelligence.”

The terrain allowed the enemy to mass without notice and inflict heavy casualties without warning on isolated units. “You need troops on the ground to see what’s going on in the jungle,” wrote Harrison. “On the other hand, you simply cannot spread troops out too far in that kind of environment in an effort to locate the enemy.” When Harrison assumed command of the brigade, he found that the line battalions sowed the jungle with platoon patrols. “There was no way in hell that those understrength and widely separated platoons could have supported one another if hit by a large enemy force,” Harrison contended. “I ordered that until further notice units were to operate in company-size elements. One might argue that had I allowed the platoon patrols to continue we may have gained more intelligence more quickly about what was happening in the hills around Ripcord. I considered that and rejected it as too high a risk. Others may have different views.

“What could have been done?” Harrison wrote, dissecting the battle. “Perhaps the best chance of improving our intelligence in that situation would have been more intense reconnaissance by air cavalry of the many routes into and out of the A Shau. I said then, and I’ll say now, I would gladly trade two battalions of infantry for one squadron of air cavalry. As it was, our one squadron of air cavalry was stretched very thin in a large division AO.”

Lieutenant Colonel Robert F. Molinelli’s 2-17th Cavalry had deployed to Quang Tri City, in fact, during the first week of Ripcord in response to intelligence indicating that the replacement-filled 9th Regiment, 304th NVA Division, was going to cross the Laotian border into South Vietnam near Khe Sanh.

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