Bob,
You got that right. It was New Years Eve, 1969, FSB Beaver. The BN CO and the rest of the lifers decided to retire early and leave us to our own devices. I had only been in country a little less than 2 months and the BN had taken quite a few casualties in Nov and early Dec. The FSB was going nuts. We had 2 Dusters firing red and green airbursts, the 105 battery and the 4.2 mortars firing illumination as fast as they could load. We had run out of beer and pop and guys were drinking straight whiskey out of empty soda cans.
One of the TOC RTOs had just got the Iron Butterfly tape from home. We got all the line companies out in the bush to put one of their radios on the S-4 (Supply) push and played IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA over and over. The company head RTOs hooked up a speaker to their PRC25s so everybody within the company perimeters could hear it. I guess the gooks figured with everybody wide awake and going nuts, they just left us alone. I got up New Years Day first thing in the morning (0600 hours) to start my RTO shift and went down to the one holer to take a dump and it looked like we had been overrun, there were bodies everywhere, all passed out where they fell. To the credit of the BN CO and the rest of the lifers, they never said a word, and everybody went back to work like nothing have ever happened.
George