TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

Tet
there. What they got was a rude introduction to the
Heisenberg Effect: One bump in the road, north, led to a
crash, south.
The road from Hanoi to Quang Tri passes through
Con Tien, or would have but for fact that it was full of
Marines. Try though Giap had to reduce that bump in the
road, Marines wouldn’t budge off it. Not even when in
September when he hurled a thousand rounds of arty at
them – every day. They had to go around, and that meant
east, out into low paddy­country, Heisenberg’s butterfly
fluttering ahead of them.
January is monsoon season in Quang Tri Province.
Cold wind flows down from the Plain of Jars, in Laos, and
dumps hard rain in the mountains. It all flows down to the
sea. From Khe Sanh it spills down the Thanh Han river to
Quang Tri; from the Rockpile it comes down the Cau Viet
river, right under Ripley’s bridge, and merges with the
Thanh Han. On joining, it floods. Trails wash out. And so
at that spot NVA units got lost, got slowed. Confusion
pushed them down narrowing lanes toward a little district
headquarters that sat on the only dry trail leading to Quang
Tri.
***
District forces ( Nghia Quan; aka ruff‐puffs) were
not legendary fighters, not even in their own minds. And
the poor ARVN major sent out as district chief to Trieu
Thanh district, above town, surely had spilled the nuoc
mam on the wrong tablecloth. But the fellow seemed not
to care. He was irrepressibly cheerful by nature and
wildly optimistic about his fighting farmers. Brave to the
point of foolishness, he’d convinced his small gaggle of
irregulars and farmers that because they had a canal and a
lake to their front, that they could hold off the NVA 812 th
Regiment. You know, whack’em. Actually, they couldn’t;
but damned if they couldn’t slow them down. Not long,
but long enough for them to miss their mark and for
Heisenberg’s butterfly to flutter off toward downtown
Quang Tri.
It flew right over Bill Cowan, a Marine force of one
in the city, and headed downtown to the movie theater,
fluttering to rest on an old ARVN APC. The butterfly and a
50 cal. machine‐gunner in the APC watched in amazement
as a manhole cover opened and NVA sappers popped out.
The corporal waited until one sapper replaced the cover
and he flipped his gun to go. Standing next to a high brick
wall holding bags of TNT is not where to be when that
happens.
Late in attacking, the NVA lost surprise. Nor were
they going to distract and confuse anyone with a dead
sapper platoon. The late‐attacking 812th NVA regiment
got hung up in no‐man’s land, pushing against the 1 st ARVN
regiment, who pinned them where Spookey could work
them over. Pushing up, to add to the squeeze, was Co C,
3 rd Tanks, crunching up Highway 1, all but one of them.
Very happily absent in a non‐hostile engagement was Ty
Trainor, in Hawaii on a R&R inspection trip.
Weirdness apparently follows amazement during the
monsoons. Hue had another month of terrible fighting in
its sights but at Quang Tri the 1 st ARVN regiment and an
A‐43