April 30, 2015
I don’t remember the point in time that I wrote this, but it was clear to me that it was a long time ago. I know today my writing style would not wax poetic nor would I have been so verbose. At the very least I now know how to use spell check! I posted it on the internet someplace; I’m thinking it may have been on the original 195th website when it was hosted by Spike Eskin. Anyhow an old friend of mine, Donnie Hines was an administrator of a Gun truckers website and found it while searching my name on the web. He contacted me and asked my permission to post it on their site. I am reposting it today unedited.
Some Stories Dec 16, '01 7:40 PM
by gunner for everyone
We were talkin about SOG teams on another site..I had this story a friend of mine Larry Midash had written.....thought you might enjoy readin it.....gunner
April 30, 1970: The day before President Nixon's "official" invasion of Cambodia it was business as usual for the 195th Assault Helicopter Company. We had a MACVSOG team on the ground in Cambodia and we were sitting just across the border at Bo Dop, a Special Forces "A" camp (A-341). These small outposts were dotted along the border between S. Vietnam and Laos/Cambodia. They were manned by a civilian irregular defense group (CIDG) made from the local ethic people. Generically called Montagnards, they were ethnically indigenous to the region. They were all considered inferior by the uptown S. Vietnamese. They were advised, led by and loyal to a small contingent of American Special Forces troops. Although our mission was not directly connected to theirs, we shared a kind of camaraderie. Our SOG teams (Special Operations Group) were manned by a motley crew of Yards, most appeared to have come from the northern regions. Some were rumored to be former NVA. (Does the word mercenary come to mind here?) They were led by two SF Americans, a team leader and radio telephone operator. We both operated in remote enemy controlled areas with little contact or assistance from the mainstream military establishment. If the terrain allowed, most "A" camps had a short dirt runway, and they let us park our helicopters along side them. This permitted us to be as close as possible to our teams in Cambodia, should they be detected and need to be extracted This was not only a matter of convenience, our "B" and "C" model gunships overloaded with armament, needed a runway to become airborne.
This was all very hush hush back then; it was Nixon’s secret war. We were based in a fenced compound on a small base called Quan Loi. We all had to sign documents insuring our secrecy and were told not to fraternize with the base residents. Some military standards were relaxed, and we often wore mixed uniforms and everyone had his own unauthorized weapon. Our helicopters were painted in jungle camouflage while OD green was still the norm for everyone else. Of course none of this officially existed, we didn’t crossed the border everyday. We called it "going over the fence".
Unbeknown to us the area around Bo Dop was not business as usual, the NVA knew something was in the wind and they were on the move. Our area of operation across the border was part of the southern terminus of the Ho Chi Min supply route. Although geographically Cambodia, it was occupied and controlled by the North Vietnamese Army. They somehow knew about the pending incursion and were moving out. They not only retreated north along the HCM trail and west deeper into Cambodia, but some of them went east across the border into S. Vietnam.
And so it was, the CIDG patrol set out that morning on a routine security sweep of the area surrounding their camp. Little did they know that this day would be anything but routine and they would soon be in dire straits. The terrain to the west and north of the Bo Dop was heavily forested, but enough light filtered though the trees that the forest floor was a "jungle" of vegetation. Although it offered excellent cover if you wanted to infiltrate the AO undetected, it is not conducive to rapid transport. The area to the south was lightly forested, you could see through the trees to the ground in many places and there were large open fields of tall grass. This is the direction the patrol took and that morning it was also the path of a large force of NVA regulars who were moving enmass through the area. The inevitable happened and the little patrol soon made contact with the much larger enemy force. The heavily armed NVA soon had the local militia pinned down and surrounded.
Back at the airstrip we were close enough that we could hear the gunfire as they tried to fight their way out. The machine guns of the enemy had them firmly pinned to the ground; any attempt on their part to maneuver was met with fierce gunfire. The SF commander of the base asked if we could help them. There was no hesitation on our part, we immediately cranked up our gunships and flew the short distance to the fight. The patrol leader, a SF Sargent gave us his position and the coordinates of the area he wanted us to suppress. We rolled in doorguns and miniguns blazing, Spanky, our pilot punched off a salvo of 2.75 inch rockets each armed with a 10lb HE warhead. We were followed by our partner gunship, a hog armed with a 40mm grenade launcher and 2.75 rockets. The enemy did not break contact, you could never tell whether they would melt away or stand and fight. Today they decided to fight. We set up a racetrack pattern each helicopter circling around to start it’s gun run as the previous ship was pulling out of it’s dive. With the visibility the terrain provided the enemy machine gunner teams could duck under cover during the gun runs and start shooting as the helicopters passed overhead. This shielded them from the blanketing fire of the miniguns. It was now up to the doorguners to suppress the enemy machineguns as the aircraft climbed out of its dive. Every run resulted in a machinegun duel. They also had enough visibility to fire RPG’s (rocket propelled grenades) at us. They looked like black baseballs. Kind of like a pop fly to center field, except you don’t want to catch it. We expended all our ammo and still the enemy remained entrenched around our comrades. We flew the short distance back to Bo Dop where we had a portable refueling station and a small cache of ammo. We quickly rearmed and returned to the siege. We resumed the attack, the enemy persevered, they had these 20 men surrounded and wanted blood.
Our weapons systems were getting hot and dry. My M-60 machine gun jammed when a shellcasing didn’t eject and it fed another shell on top of it. Just as I opened the receiver to clear it the live round cooked off from the heat. My visor protected my eyes; the powder flash peppered the lower half of my face. My gloved hands stopped most of the brass, but one of the casings shot forward and bounced off the inside of the windshield. I squeezed a half a bottle of LSA (a milky white lubricant developed for the M-16s) into the receiver to cool the gun and lubricate it. I gave the other half to my partner in the left door Tommy W. affectionately called "the Germlin". We were firing almost none stop as there were targets everywhere, and they were all shooting back at us or so it seemed. My 60 started to slow down; I looked at the gas chamber under the barrel. It was glowing red! I cleared the gun and brought it inside the copter, even with an asbestos glove I could not touch the barrel. I used my spare barrel to knock it out of the receiver. When it hit the LSA splattered floor it sizzled like a steak on one of those preheated serving plates. One of the miniguns stopped firing; still spinning it was dumping unfired ammo. I knew the problem was the safety solenoid, the next time we rearmed I used safety wire to lock it in the fire position. This meant any time the barrels were turned it would fire, there was no way to clear the gun before returning to friendly territory. This was somewhat dangerous because to clear the gun you had to remove the bolt cover and clear the live rounds, but you never knew if a bolt was about to fire and the smallest movement of the barrels would fire off a round. I also dumped a half a bottle of LSA into each minigun to lubricate the bolt rollers. The fight continued.
We had used up all the HE rockets from our supply at the airstrip. The only thing left were fleshette rockets. These are a 2.75 rocket motor with a canister type warhead. It is filled with 6000 hardened steel darts (each one of the aprox. one inch nails had four tiny fins at the tail end). We had never used them before, as they were not very effective in the thick jungles of Cambodia. They had been out here so long we were not even sure if they would fire, but we loaded them in the rocket pods anyway. It was all we had left.
These rockets called for a different firing strategy; you had to be high enough that the rocket motor burned out while still in flight. At motor burn out a small charge pushed the darts out of the casing. A red powder they were packed in would signal this to the pilot, allowing him to adjust his altitude on the next run for proper dispersal of the darts.
We called our friends on the ground and told them to take cover and made our first run a conservative distance from them. The team leader on the ground gave us adjustments for our next run "Hit them again" he said " I can hear them screaming". We made our next run, "THE’RE RUNNING, THE’RE RUNNING, HIT THEM AGAIN, HIT THEM AGAIN!" the RTO was ecstatic. We opened up a hole in the enemy line and the reconesence patrol wasted no time in making an excape. They carried all there wounded out with them, miraculously none were KIA.
Nobody stuck around to make any body counts or gather any intelligence. We were clearly outnumbered and considered ourselves lucky to have come away unscathed. After the incursion into the "Bode" started the next day it became a small incident and was largely forgotten. I think I remember it so well because it was my 21st birthday.
