Sharky
31 December 2004, 01:03
This story was copied here from another thread by me. It was written by Rgrgordo.
Part I
"I was in 2d squad A Co 175. We'd been sent out two times that day to try to locate our JT from 3d plt that got whacked. The time the BTR's hit us, we were out for the second time that afternoon. It was approximately 1430. We had moved about 1500 meters forward of the airhead down a valley and upa hill to a house overlooking a drive-in theater I believe (w/o looking at a map) north and slightly east of the AF approximately 2.5K.
Just as we finished clearing this house and taking up overwatch positions, we were looking NE to see if we could get a bead on the JT at the intersection. We saw the jeep with it's nose pointing generally towards us at the intersection but couldn't ID the team...it was still approximately 1K away from us. My PL Lt Farrar, made the call to seperate the sqd--we didn't have our gun with us (our gunner was Mark Yamane--he was the first Ranger killed that morning)--and leave one team in overwatch and send B tm down the hill to recon for the jeep. Right about then when he was looking towards the theater is when he spotted the BTR's. He immediately grabbed the MX 360 and started calling back to Abizaid...he sent " I have three Bravo Tango Romeo Sixites moving towards me over..." I'm not sure if he got a call back--I was in the prone right next to him but I don't remember the traffic. At that moment he started deploying our squad for an engagement.
He deployed me forward of the sqaud, about 15 meters, with my LAW, while Venden and him moved down the hill slightly in front of us with two more LAWS, one each. They were down behind a slight rise of the ground while he positioned me behind a small stone wall. The rest of the squad was above us about 15-25 meters deployed on line on the porch of the house. As the BTR's rounded the intersection near the remains of our JT, we all extended our LAWS. This gave us about 1 minute to get a good bead on where we were going to shoot--scout out our kill zone. Nobody said anything...we just knew what we had to do. I lost sight of the BTR's as they rounded the corner and were hidden by the grove of trees about 400 meters down from the intersection.
At that moment, Farrar said he would take the lead BTR, Vendon the second and me the trail. He said our initiation would be his shot. About 1 minute after that we could hear them loud and clear--we would each have about, I calculated, a 5-7 second sight of the BTR's to get our LAWS off. That's when they appeared, Farrar waited until all three where abreast of us approximately 75-100 meters to our front. He fired and went hi, Vendon and I fired immediately after him/simutaneously. At that moment, the rest of the squad opened up with the two M203's and there M16A1's. The BTR's also opened up with their main guns. Vendon hit the front right just above the driver, mine hit right at the front of the turret under the gun but seemed to glance off and head into the bush...The second BTR--the one Vendon hit, seemed to slow down and drift right but then I lost sight of it as the other two seemed to gain speed and move around the other side of the hill we were on. At that moment, Farrar thought they might be rounding the hill and thought that since they now had a good idea we were there, were going to come around the back side of the hill and hit us from behind (actually the front of the house). So he redployed me to the front of the house and told me to pull security with Foxworth our squad RTO.
That is when the BTR's moved toward the AF and the battle with the rest of 1 and 2/75 ensued. We were on the other side of that hill catching all of the stray rounds and the deflected 90mm bullets. It was after that fight that one of the BTR's got away from the BN free for all and Specter got him--he was moving back towards us down the same road they had come before. However, when we thought that the threat had been reduced and the BTR's destroyed, Farrar got the complete the mission call and he, Vendon, Doc Bowen and me headed down the hill to find our JT. It was then, as we were moving to that location through the jungle that we made contact, by way of a near ambush which the Cubans initiated (12 Cubans from the BTR's had survived and regrouped and waited for us). That was when Farrar was hit in the left arm (bullet broke his humerous) and twice through the chest giving him a tension pneumothorax...that's when our little fire fight started--trying to recover Farrar and break contact--this was when the closet CAS in Naval Aviation History was called into get us out..."
Part II
I've got some time so I'll try to tell the tale and keep it short....
Just after the BTR's got stopped and the third one tried to escape and got whacked by Specter, we we're given the go code from higher to continue on with the mission. I was summoned by SGT Kraus my SL, as I was on the other side of the house waiting for the counter-attack from the BTR's that would never come. When I got back to the rear of the house and back on the porch, Kraus told me to grab Doc Bowen's aid back and to get a fresh mag in my gun (an XM177A1--Vietnam Era), I was going on the recon with Vendon, Farrar and Bowen to pin-point our JT and ascertain their status and location. While the remainder of 2d squad would stay on the porch of the house in overwatch--they could see the entire valley from there--Farrar, had us lined up in a Ranger File near the bottom of the hill in a little wooded spot about ten meters from a north-south running trail (looked like a drive way--it was paved).
Up at the house in overwatch would be SGT Kraus, Cpl Nunley, Cpl Lyle, PFC Welton, SPC Delo, and PFC Foxworth. On the patrol, Vendon was going to walk point, Farrar was behind him, Bowen was behind Farrar and I was walking slack with Bowen's aid bag. Farrar gave the go ahead signal and we started moving out. As we started out from the tree line to get across this road using "scroll to the road", we headed into the jungle on the other side of the road. When we got on the other side and into the wood line I saw that we were paralleling an east-west running road about 20 meters to our left. We would "handle bar" the road in the wood-line until we got to a point where we could see down where we were headed and then cross the danger area and get to the JT from the east side of the north-south road (on the bay side). We patrolled for about 200 meters in the wood-line and came to the intersection of the north-south/east-west road.
We halted and took a knee. The east-west road was on my left and I was facing at a 45 degree angle to the south and pulling security generally east and south, but I kept looking over my shoulder to see what Farrar and Vendon were doing. They were stopped on a knee looking up the road north towards where the JT would most likely be. Bowen was just in front of me about 5 meters behind a tree. I couldn't get a good bead on anything so I moved up on my knees toward a pile of something (looked like a large ant pile) to get both cover and a better field of view. As I was moving forward, I looked to my half right where the North-South road ran towards the airfield when about 20 meters away in the direction I was looking I saw a ZSU-23-2 that was just sitting there. It was then I remembered BTR number three (in trail) was towing something when they came blowing past us the first time.
I was trying to figure out what this gun was doing just sitting there, when this fella (a black dude) in Russian camo with the Soviet Bloc Helmet, a brown leather belt with a Gold Buckle and a Takarov in a leather holster, stood up to the right of the ZSU and about 15 meters from me with his AK-47 pointing down the road pointing north. I looked over my shoulder to my left to get Vendons attention, when I saw Farrar (he was hard to miss--a big 6-5 inch dude) was standing in the middle of the road with his weapon in the classic Ranger position of the day--forward portion of the mag well hinged against the mag pouch with the firing hand/arm drapped over it--looking north up the road (he had his back to the BG).
I then immediately spun back to my right to find BG shooting three quick rounds at Farrar (I caught Farrar getting hit out of the corner of my left eye--he dropped like a sack of shit). I then got my weapon up in time to squeeze off some rapid shots at the the BG and hit him COM and in the head where he dropped faster then you could blink--I couldn't miss this guy. That's what tripped the ambush. Everything opened up then. Our sqd in overwatch let loose with everything also about that time. It was a pretty target rich environment as I was able to see the BG's I was shooting very clearly. They were only between 10-20 meters from me and not very well hidden so they were hard to miss, plus I had a pretty good covered position which prevented me from being seen--it gave me the opportunity to take well aimed controlled shots.
I went through my thriteen mags pretty quick and although I had two extra bandoleers of I think back then they were 150 rounds apiece, it was hard to get those off and to reload my mags which were piled up all around me. Regardless, there were several lulls that allowed me to do so. I was able to reload 7 of my mags at one point pretty quickly. It was during that reload period that I heard the first A-6 make a fly-by. About 90 minutes of fighting had gone by by that time. The second A-6 came in immediatley after the first one even lower and louder...it was at that time that Vendon looked back at me and told me he was going after Farrar and for me to lay down a base of fire.
Doc Bowen at this point told me we were going to need some help from the squad in overwatch to move Farrar. He told me to move back to the base of the hill where we started from (200 meters back) and yell to Krauss to send some help. I moved back pretty quick. The only thing was, just as I stood up, that gave the BG's time to see me and they just started to shoot everything at me they could muster. At any rate, by the time I started back toward the patrol, the shooting had slowed way down. However, as I got closer, the shit started up again. I got back in time to have Vendon give me the high sign to cover him--I could see his mouth moving but I couldn't hear him because the rounds were so close and the shooting was so loud. However, I could tell what he was saying. Vendon then moved out in the open on the road and grabbed Farrar about ten meters from him--in the middle of the road.
I could see Vendon out of my periphery grabbing/dragging Farra and as much as I wanted to lunge out to help him, he was still about 20 meters from me, and I reasoned that if I stopped shooting to help, that would give the BG's the time needed for them to stick their heads up and see what we were doing and they would then be able to gain fire superiority. Regardless, Vendon was able to dragg Farrar back to the wood line while I made my way over to them once they were in the cover of the tree line to help get Farrar under cover. It was just at that time that Cpl Nunley made it down to us. He got to us and told us to get our heads down because the A-6's were on 30 second short final for their first set of gun and bombing runs. We needed to mark our position so I had a red smoke and Nunley had a VS-17 panel.
I threw out the red smoke and Nunley wrapped his VS-17 panel in another smoke and threw it out to mark our position. We marked our positions just as the first A-6 started his gun run about 20-30 meters in front of us. The A-6 made his run. All I remember was keeping my head down in the dirt and thinking that I wish I could pull my steel pot down around my ankles...a few seconds after that I looked up and saw them lining up for for another pass. I could see them off in the distance banking left towards us so I decided to keep my eyes on them while they lined up and hopefully watch as they released or shot--I didn't what they were going to do this time. I saw the first plane drop something which looked like it was coming straight for us but seemed to bank away from us and bounce over us and explode to our right and forward of us--it turned out later to be a 500 pounder. By the time the second one dropped it's load I had my head buried way into the ground and all I saw was blackness and felt like I was lifted up in the air and landed back on stomach (pretty much slammed back into the dirt).
When the smoke cleared and I looked and saw the sky, I knew I was alive. I heard the leaders (I was a E-1 so everyone was a leader to me) yelling to get moving and the LT back up the hill. We were able to take turns moving Farrar back up the hill just as 1st plt and some of our platoon guys (Eddie Payne, Sean Kelly and Doc Donovan) brought a jeep up to extract Farrar back to the airhead and off to the carrier. We then consolidated with the rest of first platoon and started to orient ourselves back toward where we came from and watch the A-6's make two or three other runs before we got the pull back to the airfield call. The move back was pretty much uneventful, although I was pretty pumped up from having been in a pretty hairy gun-fight...total awards given--Vendon (BS w/"V"Device), Bowen (BS w/"V" Device) and Farrar (ARCOM w/"V" Device and Purple Heart). Vendon's act was obviuosly singularly heroic in the most exacting defintion!!! I warned you all that this would be long so sorry for the long winded post...
(Paragraph breaks added randomly by Sharky to make for easier reading....nothing else was edited)
Part I
"I was in 2d squad A Co 175. We'd been sent out two times that day to try to locate our JT from 3d plt that got whacked. The time the BTR's hit us, we were out for the second time that afternoon. It was approximately 1430. We had moved about 1500 meters forward of the airhead down a valley and upa hill to a house overlooking a drive-in theater I believe (w/o looking at a map) north and slightly east of the AF approximately 2.5K.
Just as we finished clearing this house and taking up overwatch positions, we were looking NE to see if we could get a bead on the JT at the intersection. We saw the jeep with it's nose pointing generally towards us at the intersection but couldn't ID the team...it was still approximately 1K away from us. My PL Lt Farrar, made the call to seperate the sqd--we didn't have our gun with us (our gunner was Mark Yamane--he was the first Ranger killed that morning)--and leave one team in overwatch and send B tm down the hill to recon for the jeep. Right about then when he was looking towards the theater is when he spotted the BTR's. He immediately grabbed the MX 360 and started calling back to Abizaid...he sent " I have three Bravo Tango Romeo Sixites moving towards me over..." I'm not sure if he got a call back--I was in the prone right next to him but I don't remember the traffic. At that moment he started deploying our squad for an engagement.
He deployed me forward of the sqaud, about 15 meters, with my LAW, while Venden and him moved down the hill slightly in front of us with two more LAWS, one each. They were down behind a slight rise of the ground while he positioned me behind a small stone wall. The rest of the squad was above us about 15-25 meters deployed on line on the porch of the house. As the BTR's rounded the intersection near the remains of our JT, we all extended our LAWS. This gave us about 1 minute to get a good bead on where we were going to shoot--scout out our kill zone. Nobody said anything...we just knew what we had to do. I lost sight of the BTR's as they rounded the corner and were hidden by the grove of trees about 400 meters down from the intersection.
At that moment, Farrar said he would take the lead BTR, Vendon the second and me the trail. He said our initiation would be his shot. About 1 minute after that we could hear them loud and clear--we would each have about, I calculated, a 5-7 second sight of the BTR's to get our LAWS off. That's when they appeared, Farrar waited until all three where abreast of us approximately 75-100 meters to our front. He fired and went hi, Vendon and I fired immediately after him/simutaneously. At that moment, the rest of the squad opened up with the two M203's and there M16A1's. The BTR's also opened up with their main guns. Vendon hit the front right just above the driver, mine hit right at the front of the turret under the gun but seemed to glance off and head into the bush...The second BTR--the one Vendon hit, seemed to slow down and drift right but then I lost sight of it as the other two seemed to gain speed and move around the other side of the hill we were on. At that moment, Farrar thought they might be rounding the hill and thought that since they now had a good idea we were there, were going to come around the back side of the hill and hit us from behind (actually the front of the house). So he redployed me to the front of the house and told me to pull security with Foxworth our squad RTO.
That is when the BTR's moved toward the AF and the battle with the rest of 1 and 2/75 ensued. We were on the other side of that hill catching all of the stray rounds and the deflected 90mm bullets. It was after that fight that one of the BTR's got away from the BN free for all and Specter got him--he was moving back towards us down the same road they had come before. However, when we thought that the threat had been reduced and the BTR's destroyed, Farrar got the complete the mission call and he, Vendon, Doc Bowen and me headed down the hill to find our JT. It was then, as we were moving to that location through the jungle that we made contact, by way of a near ambush which the Cubans initiated (12 Cubans from the BTR's had survived and regrouped and waited for us). That was when Farrar was hit in the left arm (bullet broke his humerous) and twice through the chest giving him a tension pneumothorax...that's when our little fire fight started--trying to recover Farrar and break contact--this was when the closet CAS in Naval Aviation History was called into get us out..."
Part II
I've got some time so I'll try to tell the tale and keep it short....
Just after the BTR's got stopped and the third one tried to escape and got whacked by Specter, we we're given the go code from higher to continue on with the mission. I was summoned by SGT Kraus my SL, as I was on the other side of the house waiting for the counter-attack from the BTR's that would never come. When I got back to the rear of the house and back on the porch, Kraus told me to grab Doc Bowen's aid back and to get a fresh mag in my gun (an XM177A1--Vietnam Era), I was going on the recon with Vendon, Farrar and Bowen to pin-point our JT and ascertain their status and location. While the remainder of 2d squad would stay on the porch of the house in overwatch--they could see the entire valley from there--Farrar, had us lined up in a Ranger File near the bottom of the hill in a little wooded spot about ten meters from a north-south running trail (looked like a drive way--it was paved).
Up at the house in overwatch would be SGT Kraus, Cpl Nunley, Cpl Lyle, PFC Welton, SPC Delo, and PFC Foxworth. On the patrol, Vendon was going to walk point, Farrar was behind him, Bowen was behind Farrar and I was walking slack with Bowen's aid bag. Farrar gave the go ahead signal and we started moving out. As we started out from the tree line to get across this road using "scroll to the road", we headed into the jungle on the other side of the road. When we got on the other side and into the wood line I saw that we were paralleling an east-west running road about 20 meters to our left. We would "handle bar" the road in the wood-line until we got to a point where we could see down where we were headed and then cross the danger area and get to the JT from the east side of the north-south road (on the bay side). We patrolled for about 200 meters in the wood-line and came to the intersection of the north-south/east-west road.
We halted and took a knee. The east-west road was on my left and I was facing at a 45 degree angle to the south and pulling security generally east and south, but I kept looking over my shoulder to see what Farrar and Vendon were doing. They were stopped on a knee looking up the road north towards where the JT would most likely be. Bowen was just in front of me about 5 meters behind a tree. I couldn't get a good bead on anything so I moved up on my knees toward a pile of something (looked like a large ant pile) to get both cover and a better field of view. As I was moving forward, I looked to my half right where the North-South road ran towards the airfield when about 20 meters away in the direction I was looking I saw a ZSU-23-2 that was just sitting there. It was then I remembered BTR number three (in trail) was towing something when they came blowing past us the first time.
I was trying to figure out what this gun was doing just sitting there, when this fella (a black dude) in Russian camo with the Soviet Bloc Helmet, a brown leather belt with a Gold Buckle and a Takarov in a leather holster, stood up to the right of the ZSU and about 15 meters from me with his AK-47 pointing down the road pointing north. I looked over my shoulder to my left to get Vendons attention, when I saw Farrar (he was hard to miss--a big 6-5 inch dude) was standing in the middle of the road with his weapon in the classic Ranger position of the day--forward portion of the mag well hinged against the mag pouch with the firing hand/arm drapped over it--looking north up the road (he had his back to the BG).
I then immediately spun back to my right to find BG shooting three quick rounds at Farrar (I caught Farrar getting hit out of the corner of my left eye--he dropped like a sack of shit). I then got my weapon up in time to squeeze off some rapid shots at the the BG and hit him COM and in the head where he dropped faster then you could blink--I couldn't miss this guy. That's what tripped the ambush. Everything opened up then. Our sqd in overwatch let loose with everything also about that time. It was a pretty target rich environment as I was able to see the BG's I was shooting very clearly. They were only between 10-20 meters from me and not very well hidden so they were hard to miss, plus I had a pretty good covered position which prevented me from being seen--it gave me the opportunity to take well aimed controlled shots.
I went through my thriteen mags pretty quick and although I had two extra bandoleers of I think back then they were 150 rounds apiece, it was hard to get those off and to reload my mags which were piled up all around me. Regardless, there were several lulls that allowed me to do so. I was able to reload 7 of my mags at one point pretty quickly. It was during that reload period that I heard the first A-6 make a fly-by. About 90 minutes of fighting had gone by by that time. The second A-6 came in immediatley after the first one even lower and louder...it was at that time that Vendon looked back at me and told me he was going after Farrar and for me to lay down a base of fire.
Doc Bowen at this point told me we were going to need some help from the squad in overwatch to move Farrar. He told me to move back to the base of the hill where we started from (200 meters back) and yell to Krauss to send some help. I moved back pretty quick. The only thing was, just as I stood up, that gave the BG's time to see me and they just started to shoot everything at me they could muster. At any rate, by the time I started back toward the patrol, the shooting had slowed way down. However, as I got closer, the shit started up again. I got back in time to have Vendon give me the high sign to cover him--I could see his mouth moving but I couldn't hear him because the rounds were so close and the shooting was so loud. However, I could tell what he was saying. Vendon then moved out in the open on the road and grabbed Farrar about ten meters from him--in the middle of the road.
I could see Vendon out of my periphery grabbing/dragging Farra and as much as I wanted to lunge out to help him, he was still about 20 meters from me, and I reasoned that if I stopped shooting to help, that would give the BG's the time needed for them to stick their heads up and see what we were doing and they would then be able to gain fire superiority. Regardless, Vendon was able to dragg Farrar back to the wood line while I made my way over to them once they were in the cover of the tree line to help get Farrar under cover. It was just at that time that Cpl Nunley made it down to us. He got to us and told us to get our heads down because the A-6's were on 30 second short final for their first set of gun and bombing runs. We needed to mark our position so I had a red smoke and Nunley had a VS-17 panel.
I threw out the red smoke and Nunley wrapped his VS-17 panel in another smoke and threw it out to mark our position. We marked our positions just as the first A-6 started his gun run about 20-30 meters in front of us. The A-6 made his run. All I remember was keeping my head down in the dirt and thinking that I wish I could pull my steel pot down around my ankles...a few seconds after that I looked up and saw them lining up for for another pass. I could see them off in the distance banking left towards us so I decided to keep my eyes on them while they lined up and hopefully watch as they released or shot--I didn't what they were going to do this time. I saw the first plane drop something which looked like it was coming straight for us but seemed to bank away from us and bounce over us and explode to our right and forward of us--it turned out later to be a 500 pounder. By the time the second one dropped it's load I had my head buried way into the ground and all I saw was blackness and felt like I was lifted up in the air and landed back on stomach (pretty much slammed back into the dirt).
When the smoke cleared and I looked and saw the sky, I knew I was alive. I heard the leaders (I was a E-1 so everyone was a leader to me) yelling to get moving and the LT back up the hill. We were able to take turns moving Farrar back up the hill just as 1st plt and some of our platoon guys (Eddie Payne, Sean Kelly and Doc Donovan) brought a jeep up to extract Farrar back to the airhead and off to the carrier. We then consolidated with the rest of first platoon and started to orient ourselves back toward where we came from and watch the A-6's make two or three other runs before we got the pull back to the airfield call. The move back was pretty much uneventful, although I was pretty pumped up from having been in a pretty hairy gun-fight...total awards given--Vendon (BS w/"V"Device), Bowen (BS w/"V" Device) and Farrar (ARCOM w/"V" Device and Purple Heart). Vendon's act was obviuosly singularly heroic in the most exacting defintion!!! I warned you all that this would be long so sorry for the long winded post...
(Paragraph breaks added randomly by Sharky to make for easier reading....nothing else was edited)