The First Battle by Otto J. Lehrack

Author:Otto J. Lehrack
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781932033274
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2004-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THE TAKING OF AN CUONG 2

An Cuong 2 was heavily wooded and fortified. Among its twenty-five to thirty huts were bunkers, trenchlines, and pillboxes. Most were covered over with logs and then with banana leaves to camouflage them.

As the India Company, 3/3, Marines moved toward the village the firing picked up again. A machine-gun team moved across a paddy and ran into a buzz saw of automatic weapons fire, probably a machine gun. Private First Class Howard Miller was the only survivor of his four-man team, from which Pfc Gilbert Nickerson, Pfc Walter Smith, and Pfc James White were all killed. As the junior man in the team, Miller carried his rifle and two hundred rounds of M60 machine-gun ammunition in a metal box. After his team members were lost, he slung his rifle over his back, carried the ammo box in one hand and the machine-gun in the other.

Miller looked for cover and spotted what seemed to be an artillery crater. When he leaped into the hole he accidentally smacked another Marine hard in the helmet with the ammunition box. The Marine interrupted Miller’s apology with a command to stop worrying and keep digging. “We got to get deeper!”

Many Marines moved forward alongside rice paddies and an overgrown drainage ditch just outside of An Cuong 2. Several 60mm mortar rounds dropped among the attackers, but amid all the noise and confusion some of the Marines didn’t believe they were really mortars.

Mortars are fearsome because they don’t make much noise in flight. If you do not know they have been fired, they suddenly intrude on your world with explosions that hurtle dozens of hot, razor-sharp, life- and limb-taking fragments. Under the right conditions of range and relative noise level it might be possible to hear them leaving the tube. From that point it is usually a matter of wait and see. They are an indirect-fire weapon; the projectile travels in a high arc and, inasmuch they make little noise in flight, those on the ground have no indication where the rounds are going to impact. If they are heard leaving the tube, someone will usually yell, “Incoming!” and everyone will hit the deck, hopefully in a hole or behind something, and try to make themselves as small as possible. There is no real way to hide from a mortar. Their high angle of fire may bring them on your side of an obstacle rather than the enemy’s side. Even being in a hole is no guarantee for survival as the rounds can, and have, found their way to the inside of deep holes and trenches. Knowing that mortar rounds are in the air in your general vicinity inspires a wide variety of fears, hopes, and “let’s make a deal” with your God. For those untouched by an incoming barrage there is a great sense of “anybody but me” relief to hear the rounds impact and then know that you have bought another tenuous hold on life.

In this case, the action around them prevented the India Company, 3/3, Marines from hearing the mortars being fired.

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