TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

Tet
burned up a division in trying, but couldn’t. The cost of
trying was pretty much his 2 nd NVA division, bled dry by the
1 st MarDiv. Battered, the NVA slid off the battlefield before
Tet to refit at Go Noi island (aka Football Is.), down the river
from Hoi Anh. They still had a ticket for DaNang; they
waited for Tet.
DaNang
On January 29 th recon teams screening DaNang
spotted troop movement and started hacking at them with
arty. On the 30 th , NVA sappers went for their key
objectives, the bridges from the city over to the Tien Sha
peninsula (& MAF HQ). Their route resembled the path of
a pinball falling through a gantlet of flippers and bumpers.
Blocking any direct route to the center of DaNang was a
hodge­podge of Marine units of every ilk: MPs, engineers,
busted­track repairmen, communicators, lanyard­snatchers,
box­kickers, and even smatterings of that most rare of all
nineteen year old Marines, the ones imbued with the
magical power to keep a Mighty Mite running. It was the
MPs, however, who wrote the key paragraph to every frag
order repeated throughout the night: location. Only they
knew where everything in that sprawling city was. This
stray­dog detachment or that one got formed up and sent
here and there by God­knows­who to keep DaNang
upright. MPs were the maps.
Top­down planning Giap understood; it was bottomup
initiative that he never grasped. But gunnery sergeants –
which Giap lacked – do encourage that sort of thing.
Following well­rehearsed plans, VC sappers made it all the
way to the downtown bridges. But the spans didn’t get
dropped, the sappers did. This clump of Marines or that
had chipped away at them every step of the way. A few even
got whacked by a CAP unit leading around their village
home­guards. When the sun rose on DaNang the 1 st of
February, Marines­with­no­name had saved DaNang.
At Vietnamese corps­headquarters, chubby,
normally­smiling General Lam entered and pointed to a
spot next to his wire on his maps and told his air force
liaison, “Bomb here.” Whoa! far too close to us, he was
told. “Big bombs,” he answered, knowing exactly where VC
infantry would be hiding in wait. “Big bombs.”
Coming to or going from DaNang proved to be an
equal deadly journey for VC. There was no quick fading into
nearby jungles. Getting out past the Que Sons wouldn’t be
the usual case of hiding from Marine Air, as it had been at
Khe Sanh, but a long walk in which to skirt waiting Marine
infantry – always a dodgy plan.
***
South of DaNang on the 6 th of Feb a battalion of the NVA’s
2 nd Division careened into a company of 2/3, where leaving
DaNang proved to be as dangerous as getting there. The
infantry company had two tanks, which got lined up in an
Arizona minute with a rifle platoon, ready to assault. Air
and arty prepped. Once underway, the rest of the
company enveloped the NVA. Chewed up by the Marines,
the NVA pulled back as darkness fell, but that helped
little. Artillery doesn’t need flashlights. (And Pete Hesser
can see better at night than you’d think.) It was a much
smaller NVA battalion that eventually slunk off.
A‐39