02Oct68-Mistake Costs Reds 90 Killed

20 Troopers Fool Two Companies

By SGT. ROGER NEUMANN

Stars and Stripes Staff Correspondent

TAM KY, Vietnam - "they didn't use the mortars or the grenades on us at all. I guess we scared them. If they'd known we only had about 20 able-bodied men, it might have been a different story."

First Lt. John W. Snapp, platoon leader of D Co., 1st Bn., 52nd Inf., 198th Light Inf. Brigade, was describing how he and his handful of Americal Div. troopers fooled two companies of North Vietnamese soldiers into thinking they were outnumbered by an American force that was actually only one-tenth their size.

The mistake cost the Reds their battalion command post-- and 90 lives.

It was part of two-day running battle with NVA soldiers in an area about eight miles southwest of this provincial capital. The fighting claimed 367 enemy dead at the hands of the Americal Div.

Early Thursday, aeroscouts were put into a hamlet by helicopters to search out suspected NVA positions. The scouts were dropped at the edge of a rice paddy just outside the hamlet and walked into a hail of bullets.

The hamlet contained justa few houses, but was on the edge of a small jungle area surrounded by rice paddies. The NVA were dug in along the dikes to protect the commnad post, hidden deep in the undergrowth.

"I think somebody in there got trigger-happy," said a brigade officer. "They were so well camouflaged they might have gotten away with it. But somebody opened up, and from then on they were finished."

For four hours the aeroscouts were pinned down and helicopters couldn't get back in to pull them out.

A platoon from Delta was lifted by choppers to the paddies at the south edge of the hamlet, where they were to sweep north to reinforce the scouts.

"The first slick landed on a dike and a .50 cal. machine gun opened up and wounded five of them right there," said one soldier. "The rest of us had to land further south and work up to them."

Helicopter gunships and jet dive-bombers were called in. But snipers in the hills shot down a Marine A4 Skyhawk and two choppers.

The strikes were called off and the platoon from Delta went in to see what was left.

As the troops stormed the hamlet, the NVA abandoned the command post and fled into the open paddies where gunships cut them down. In the hamlet the soldiers found a small cache of rocket-grenades and 82mm mortar shells.

"They didn't use the mortars or grenades on us at all," said Snapp.

There were an estimated 200 NVA in the hamlet. They survivors scattered into the hills and patrols have gone out to hunt them down.

"We ran into some snipers Friday while sweeping the hamlet but it's been pretty quiet since them," said Lt. Col. William C. Stinson, commander of the 1st Bn. "Now we've just got to go out and find them again."