Saturday, May 13, 1972
Death In The Afternoon - The Route 13 Battle
by Allen Schaefer
NORTH OF CHON THAHN, Vietnam --An ebony and ocher-dappled butterfly floats over an ashen crater and alights on a bush next to a South Vietnamese soldier who squats tense in tall grass waiting for the point man in his squad to advance. He does not notice the insect, whose broad wings lend the olive drab field its only hint of color. His eyes are fixed forward, cautiously scanning a wall of foliage for movement or sound. Ahead of him some 200 yards is a nest of North Vietnamese Army regulars dug into bunkers who have been defending this patch of barren field against repeated ARVN assaults. The afternoon stillness is fractured with a sound that sends the soldier to his knees for cover and the butterfly aloft -a sound like the runners of a child's sled skittering over glare ice, a harbinger of a 122mm rocket that impacts in the field throwing up a funnel of dirt. It has begun. The daily push to wrest Highway 13 from Communist control and open it up for a relief column to An Loc has started with automatic weapons fire and another round of enemy mortars and rockets. To the north, Communist soldiers, most of them recently drafted farm boys who have been battered with tactical air strikes and artillery barrages, throw everything they can muster at the advancing force. To the rear, the ricochet of a sniper's bullet makes the battalion commander and his aides crouch behind a mound of dirt. Earlier in the day, when the men had scooped their lunch of rice from cups and sat silently on charred stumps and in one-man bunkers, they showed a resigned weariness acquired through weeks of combat and enemy shellings. They moved slowly as they resupplied, talking little and perhaps thinking of this afternoon and what it holds for them. As part of the 21st Div. called up from the delta region when the Communist offensive began, they finally have become used to the searing heat of the flatlands and the constant thirst for water. But now, as they push forward trying to gain ground that has been out of their reach for 10 days and link up with an airborne element driving down from the north, the soldiers shakeoff their fatigue. There is a lull in the ground fire and they halt. Air strikes are called in close enough to make the men duck their heads. Thirty minutes after the first contact, six men laboring with a stretcher make their way back from the forward area. One of the litter bearers stumbles into a hole and the men almost drop their companion. Yet the man on the stretcher is unconcerned. He lies perfectly still, impervious to the delay and to the sound of small arms that has picked up again. He stares off into the woodline, his eyes open very wide -to be shut by the hand of a medic. An American colonel, the advisor for the division, watches the procession pass in silence. "Poor trooper," he says in the voice of a soldier who has seen death many times. "These guys are out here fighting every day, but they don't know what for. They don't know that everyone from their president on down is depending on them to open up this road.""Death in the Afternoon - the Route 13 Battle", by Allen Schaefer, published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Saturday, May 13, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.