Secret Commandos by John L. Plaster

Author:John L. Plaster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

10

Operation Ashtray Two would assemble a twelve-man team of eight Americans and four indigenous soldiers. From my RT California that meant Sergeant First Class Rex Jaco and Staff Sergeants John Yancey and Richard Woody, along with my two superb M-79 grenadiers, Wo-One and Wo-Two. Captain Fred Krupa’s RT New Hampshire contributed Sergeants Paul Kennicott and A. Michael Grace, along with a medic, Specialist Five Jim Galasso. Krupa also brought his Nung point and tail men, Phung and Pheng, who would carry AKs and wear NVA uniforms.

We began our Ashtray Two preparation in the intelligence office, scouring every file, debrief, and report we could find concerning enemy trucks, NVA convoy procedures, and Laotian Highway 110. Krupa and I spent hours studying photographs of Soviet-built trucks.

Like American vehicles, Russian trucks put the driver on the left where, conveniently, there was a running board beside the door. Unless it was raining, the driver’s-side window usually was rolled down, we learned. The truck’s shifting and steering would occupy the driver, so even if he had a weapon he couldn’t grab it quickly. If guards were riding in back, the cargo compartment’s wooden slat sides would force them to stand and raise their heads to fire down on us, silhouetting them for our return fire. Since these trucks were diesel-powered, fuel was unlikely to ignite easily, giving us latitude to employ gunfire and explosives.

An NVA driver, we discovered, stayed with his assigned truck, every night traveling the same stretch of road so he could master it despite darkness or rain. He spent his days in carefully hidden truck parks, resting and maintaining his vehicle and refreshing its camouflage. Drivers were usually draftees with little combat training and unlikely to offer much resistance. Still, with Ashtray One’s recent ambush, the NVA may have added an armed assistant driver, or increased firearms training for drivers. One agent report said that drivers sometimes were chained to their steering wheels, so they couldn’t abandon their trucks during an air strike.

Enemy convoys of up to 100 trucks were the norm early in the war, but night prowling by FACs and USAF AC-119 and AC-130 gunships had reduced each convoy to ten or so well-dispersed vehicles to make them more difficult to detect. On east–west Highway 110, these convoys followed a simple pattern: Eastward-rolling convoys carried cargo toward the border with South Vietnam, while westward-rolling trucks mostly were empty. Using no lights or only tiny blackout lights, they finished their runs before daylight and rolled into truck parks containing about a dozen vehicles, wisely dispersed to limit damage from B-52 strikes. Of no small concern to us, convoys sometimes were escorted by armored cars and even light tanks.

Dismounted security concerned me the most. For five years, American-led SOG teams had been making life difficult for NVA forces along the Laotian highway system, and following each successful blow, the NVA had responded by layering more security. By 1970, with tens of thousands of soldiers defending the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.