By Jonathan Bernstein, Jim Laurier, Tony Holmes
On 6 March the 4/77 lost its first Cobra and crew. Capt John McDonnell was flying lead in a two-ship section supporting elements of the 101st Airborne operating in Thua Tien province. During a firing pass McDonnell's aircraft was hit by AAA and the AH-1 disappeared into the overcast and crashed into a mountainside. The area was searched, but McDonnell could not be located. His pilot, Lt. Ronald Greenfield, was found and medically evacuated aboard a 2/17 Cav OH-6.
Eleven days later, the 1st Infantry Division and the 11th Armored Cavalry Division caught a large contingent of bicycle-mounted NVA troops in the open in the Michelin Rubber Plantation in III Corps. The rapid response of these units initiated Operation Atlas Wedge to eliminate this threat. It was soon determined that this contingent of NVA was a scouting element for the 7th NVA Division. Led by Lt Col Bill Haponski's 1st Squadron, 4th Cav, the units moved into the plantation on 18 March.
Control of D Troop (callsign 'Darkhorse'), which was Lt Col Haponski's air cav element, was unclear at this point. While technically under his command, division headquarters had taken this troop under operational control at the beginning of Atlas Wedge. However, the unit was partially returned to Hapnoski two days laters.
by Gary Linderer
March 7, 1969
My new platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Bowman, ran into my hootch right after we returned from noon chow and asked for volunteers to rappel onto a mountainside somewhere south of Camp Eagle to rescue the crews of a Cobra that had gone down in the jungle and a LOH with three officers aboard which had crashed nearby trying to locate the gunship. There had to be NVA in the vicinity because the Cobra had taken hits while attacking a bunker complex. The LOH had probably crashed because of equipment failure. They had never radioed that they had been fired on.
There had been heavy fog in the area where the LOH and the Cobra had crashed. No one had spotted any smoke, so there was an excellent chance that the five men had survived. Another LOH went in and located the wreckage of the Cobra but could not find the other bird.
…
I had never worked to the south of Camp Eagle, but I remembered that the same range of mountains that rose to the west of our base camp swung in toward the coast just south of Leech Island. We could see Tomahawk coming up in the distance. It was a typical U.S. firebase. It reminded me of Firebase Jack up near LZ Sally, except Tomahawk sat on a little higher hill than Jack did. Neither of the two firebases was actually in the mountains. They had been established in the foothills to support the troops patrolling the fringe areas.
…
The two downed choppers were within two hundred meters of each other. The Cobra had broken in half on impact was in a double-canopy jungle about two thirds of the way up the side of a steep primary ridgeline that ran through the area. The LOH was two hundred meters west of the Cobra and lower on the mountainside. The Cobra had been shot down assaulting a bunker complex, reportedly by a .51-cal machine gun. The LOH had gone down twenty minutes later. There had been no commo from the LOH warning of any enemy fire. They had just radioed that they were going into a fog bank to look for the downed Cobra. They never came back out. Another LOH had worked its way back in under the cloud cover and located the Cobra and, after a lengthy search, reported what they thought was the crash site of the other LOH.
There had been a lot of enemy activity in the area over the past few days, even though several infantry companies patrolled it on a regular basis. Intelligence reported two separate NVA battalions in the immediate vicinity. He went on to tell us that no maps were available for the particular area we would be going into, but that all precautions had been taken to place us right on top of the crash sites.
…
After about two minutes worth of feeling his way through the dense, almost solid layer of air, our pilot signaled that he was over the wreckage of the Cobra. I looked over the side and could barely make out sixty-to-seventy foot trees shrouded in the mist. I could not see the downed Cobra. The jungle seemed to emit some eerie, almost ethereal vibration that threatened to overpower me. I sensed sheer, unadulterated terror. I fought back panic as it tried to root me in place. I couldn’t drop down into that… whatever it was. It was like something out of a horror movie. The only things missing were the tombstones.
…
We set off up the mountainside, moving slowly and methodically, searching the cover for any sign of wreckage. How could anyone hide a Cobra helicopter? We knew that it would only be a matter of time before we found it. We just hoped that we would find the crewmen alive.
We must have covered a hundred meters before Fadeley located the cockpit and fuselage of the Cobra. He passed the word back down the line that he had found it. When we got to him, he was standing alongside the fuselage, shaking his head. The canopy was open and there was no sign of either of the crewmen. Three Rangers from Fadeley’s team stayed with the wreckage while the rest of us got back on line and resumed our sweep of the area.
Twenty minutes later, we located a jungle boot and a flight helmet, but found no signs of the two men or any indication that they had ever been in the area. There was nothing to lead us to believe that the NVA had gotten there ahead of us. The only conclusion we could draw was that the pilot and his gunner had survived the crash and were hiding somewhere in the area or had attempted to E&E on their own. After all, they would have naturally assumed that no rescue would take place until the fog lifted. We could only guess why one of them had removed his boot and left it behind. It had been unlaced just like someone had taken the time to loosen the strings so that it would have been easy to get off. There was no sign of any blood on it to indicate that the owner had been wounded or injured. None of us could explain it.
…
March 8, 1969
….
An hour passed before Captain Ross came over and told us there had been some question as to the actual crash site of the LOH, and it had just been determined the site was a click west of where they had first thought it had gone in. Our company commander wanted to rappel two more Ranger teams into the general vicinity early the next day, weather permitting.
At dusk, the first platoon returned to the perimeter. They had found no sign of the Cobra pilot and his gunner. They had found signs that the NVA had been all over the wreckage since we first discovered it. The NVA had removed the radio and the ammunition. The guns and rocket pods were still in place, but they could tell that the enemy had attempted to remove them as well.
The line doggies had placed explosives on the wreckage, set to go off in thirty minutes. A sudden blast a hundred and fifty meters down the mountainside came as a complete surprise, even though we had expected it. I only hoped that enemy had returned for the guns and had been caught in the blast.
The first platoon had also discovered the site of our last NDP. The dead NVA’s body had been removed. His friends had come after him sometime during the day. Made sense! He was running downhill after he popped the four paratroopers. Needless to say, he wasn’t running just to get away from the American imperialists. No he had to have been running toward something- like a base camp full of North Vietnamese Soldiers. He would have made it if his path had been ten degrees left or right of the one he had chosen.
It had been his bad luck to choose the only possible route that would mean death for him. He had not reached his destination. But from the direction of his escape path, we knew his friends had to be in the valley below… somewhere. They knew we were in the area, and if they were as good as Captain Ross said, they would be down there waiting for us. My mind kept wandering back to that concrete bunker. If they were holed up in a bunch of those, we were going to be in some deep shit.
by Mark Sauter and Jim Sanders
Teach or Die (pp. 69)
At the end of the Vietnam War, the communists were forcing an American captain under "threat of death," to teach them how to use a 105 mm howitzer, Army intelligence reported in July 1973. At the same Vietnamese POW camp near Ba-To were U.S. sergeants, who were forced to grow their own food. While the Army believed it knew the identity of the American captain, it refuses to this day to release his name. There is no way to tell into what category this hapless captain was placed or whether the U.S. government is doing enough to resolve his case- and the Pentagon is keeping it that way.
