Every ambush patrol seemed to have it's own set of problems. One of them, after we'd set up and been in place for a while was really hard for me to deal with. It took place on an unusually quiet night, when you could almost hear the heartbeat of the squad member next to you. We'd been patiently waiting in complete silence and total darkness for Charlie to walk into our ambush when, once again, the unexpected happened... For some reason, we hadn't been told that one of our other units was also on an ambush patrol not far from us. Without warning, we started hearing a lot of shooting and screaming off in the distance. Judging from their voices, it sounded like a lot of our men were getting overrun and that they were about two hundred yards away, or less. Usually when we got hit with something, it was only two or three of us at a time. This time, Charlie must have really had it together to take out so many of our men...
We wanted to forget about our own ambush patrol and head out to save what was left of our other troops, so we radioed to base camp to get the go ahead. Instead of taking off into total darkness to go after Charlie which would have been next to impossible, we were ordered to stay where we were. Sitting there listening to the screaming was doing a mental number on us. But instead of acting according to our instincts and going after Charlie we followed our orders and just sat there listening. Not being able to lend a hand, when so many of our men were being butchered, was one of the roughest things I had to go through...
At the break of dawn, we headed back, towards our base camp at LZ Dragon. We were walking single file along rice paddy dikes, not far from where the other patrol was ambushed when our point man yelled out, "VC up ahead!" With the screaming still in our ears from a few hours earlier, we all ran to get up onto an abandoned railroad mound. From there it was like target practice at a rifle range, shooting at three VC running through a large open area. They were running full speed, sprinting like rabbits, in three different directions. These no doubt, were the ones who'd pulled off the ambush on our other unit.
The machine gunner said his M60 was jammed. I was shooting at them with my M79 single shot, grenade launcher which I had little confidence in, while the rest of our squad was shooting at them with their M16's. The open area the VC were running through gave me enough time to get three rounds off with my grenade launcher. The first round was short. The second was long, and after adjusting my sights, I put the third round at a little under two hundred meters, right underneath one of them. The blast threw him upward and over into some elephant grass. Everyone started yelling hysterically, "Truman got him!, Truman got him!" About two or three seconds later, he got up and ran away!! Without letting a second go by, I grabbed our machine gunner, who had unjammed his machine gun??, and the two of us took out after this wounded, tall, Chinese looking VC. There was no way I was gonna wait around and call in for some kind of "permission"...
We tracked his blood trail along cow trails and hedge rows which eventually led us into a straw hut where an old lady lived. She had lots of bandages and apparently had patched him up and sent him on his way. It was difficult tracking his trail on main pathways due to momma sons beetle nut spit, which looked about the same as blood on the ground. Talk about frustration? Meanwhile, our Colonel was flyin' over our heads in a chopper yelling at us, demanding over the radio to tell him what had happened to the VC, and why me and the machine gunner were off by ourselves, or something like that...
The M79 makes a nice big bang, but has little killing value. To see what it could do once, while we were way up in the mountains one day, I shot a round into an abandoned sandbag bunker. It barely ripped the cloth off of the outside of a sandbag. The metal I found embedded in it was nothing more than a few small shreds of lightweight, aluminum type fragments. We must realize, (our leading weaponry experts), that the bang alone will not do the job... Seeing how our troops are continuously expected to defend our country, I seriously hope they've made some definite improvements on the effectiveness of this weapon. It was disheartening to say the least, to know that the ones who killed and wounded several of our men at the other ambush sight that night, got away.
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