11Mar67-Test Firing Of M-16 Alerts Choppers To Nearby VC Unit
NHA TRANG, (1st AVN-IO) - An urge to test fire his M-16 rifle may saved
the life of an unidentified Army sergeant and his work detail near Pleiku
recently.
The sergeant headed a seven-man fence building detail stringing barbed
wire around an artillery position northwest of the city. Strolling away
during a break, he decided to test his rifle on automatic fire.
The land to his front was uninhabited and a small knoll ahead would stop
the slugs. He fired few bursts and returned to work, unaware that the noise
had caused, startled artillerymen inside the perimeter to report being shot
at by enemy automatic weapons at close range.
A spotter plane and two armed helicopters of the 17th Combat Aviation
Group, 1st Aviation Group, charged off the Army airfield at nearby Camp
Holloway to find and destroy the attackers.
When the O-1 spotter from the 219th Aviation Company, 223rd Battalion
made a low pass over the fence building detail, the pilot noticed not far
away a heavily armed Viet Cong patrol setting up an ambush for the work
party. He called the gunships and tried a smoke rocket on the VC position.
The guns, of the 119th Assault Helicopter Company, 52nd Combat Aviation
Battalion, turned for the smoke. Vietnamese rice farmers in paddies along
the choppers' path, knowing what to expect, stoically stood their ground and
waved to the gunships roaring toward them. It meant they were unafraid and
had nothing to hide.
The gun pilots had no reason to doubt them. They would not harm the
workers and their door gunners returned the wave.
Less courtesy was shown the VC patrol, hidden now in thick trees with
only the spotter's smoke showing where they had been and his radioed
instructions telling where they had moved.
Rotating-barreled miniguns began hurling their 4500 rounds-a-minute
fusillade at the VC hiding place as the armed pair flashed over the farmers'
heads. High explosive rockets ripped the tree line. Three firing passes by
both ships assured that scarcely an inch of the target area escaped their
saturation fire.
A subsequent sweep by ground reconnaissance elements turned up five VC
bodies, with weapons, suggesting that there may have been no survivors.
Had there been any, they might still be wondering what made the death-dealing
aircraft show up when they did. For only when the sergeant's fence
detail returned, and all accounts of the affair were in, was it learned that
no one but Americans had done any shooting.
The VC had done nothing to give themselves away.