Andy Mohr, from his Vietnam Memoir
There was an ambush out on Highway 1 south of the Long Song River. A lone jeep had been attacked. Little Six, our Lieutenant, came running over, “Mount up! Ambush on the highway!” The entire platoon sped out of the fire base. We soon found a bullet-ridden jeep with two wounded GIs. Immediately, the armored vehicles lined up side by side and began sweeping the area looking for culprits. About a click off Highway 1 (about 1,000 meters), we spotted the trail leading to a nearby date palm plantation. Little Six’s track pulled up to the front gate of Phong Plantation and the manager came running out shouting, “Do not enter!” With all the contempt of a warlord, Little Six yelled back, “Send us the bill!”
I remembered short timers back in the Central Highlands telling us new guys about the Catecka Tea Plantation, which illustrated the absurdity of the Vietnam war. Troopers had discovered at this plantation that the enemy had turned it into a base camp. Our U.S. government and plantation owners had agreed that our military would pay for any damages caused by combat operations. Fighting within a plantation, short timers had a cynical saying, “Don’t shoot the trees!”
We smashed through the gate and proceeded down the rows of date palms to the end of the plantation’s property, where there was a dense thicket of jungle. While we had been chasing our own tails around the Song Mao mountains for months, searching for the enemy, we found the enemy right under our nose. A barrage of AK-47s, heavy machine guns, and B-40 rockets started firing at us. With vehicles side-by-side, firing all our weapons, we slowly moved toward the hidden enemy.
Since Tank Two-Five was on my left, I couldn’t use my left-side-mounted M-60, so I fired to the rear from my M-79 grenade launcher with high explosive rounds. I caught a glimpse of Sergeant Pudimat on Tank Two-Five firing his 50-caliber machine gun, standing behind the turret like John Wayne. At the same time, I poured 30-weight oil on my Track Commander Harms’ 50-caliber machine gun barrel to keep it cool. As Harms kept firing, clouds of oily smoke roiled off the hot barrel, while I kept pumping out M-79 High Explosive rounds.
Three tanks in the center continually fired beehive rounds to strip away the enemy’s camouflaged log bunkers, while other platoon tracks were firing their heavy machine guns. Red and green bullet tracers crisscrossed the sky, while blue trails streamed from the enemy’s B-40 rockets. Then the platoon’s three tanks switched to High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds, penetrating the enemy’s log bunkers, blowing up their sides and roofs.
Out of the sky, our long-lost cousins, Delta Troop, flew in with nine Cobra gunships firing 30mm cannons, mini-guns, and rockets. As they flew over, I swear I felt their weapons’ hot brass casings drop down on me. Nice to have friends in high places.
The terrible swift sword of the Cavalry had been unleashed. Our 52-ton tanks crushed the enemy’s bunkers. Nearly one hundred Viet Cong were killed. The escaping stragglers were pursued to a nearby pagoda. We gave them no sanctuary. Our tanks destroyed the pagoda and, in a hail of heavy fire, thirty more enemy were killed. The image of the destroyed pagoda stuck in my mind for a long time.
After the battle, we questioned if any of the enemy’s weapons were supplied by Mama San. Remember our ice run to downtown Tuy Phong? Was the Military Payment Currency we shelled out for ice used to purchase these weapons?
On the way back from the fire fight, I was mentally rewriting Bob Dylan’s lyrics to his song, Highway 61 Revisited – “Abraham said to God, where do you want this killing done? God said, out on Highway 1.”
Back in 1953 the French called Highway 1, la rue sans joie, the street without joy, but I renamed it Insanity Road. We, like the French, found ourselves pursuing the same enemy, spinning our wheels along the same highway.
Déjà vu all over again.
Andy Mohr was born at the end of WWII in England. His father was a GI who fell in love with his future English wife who was in British military service. Their son Andy returned from Vietnam, attended graduate school, became director of a museum in the Adirondacks. He was PR director for the D&H Railroad, worked as a train dispatcher for its XO Tower in Mechanicsville, and retired after 33 years in Rail Division of NYDOT. Both Andy and Liesse Chable, his wife, have been OLLI members since moving near Tampa where they live close to their son, his wife, and their three grandchildren.
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