"Our Fire Base codenamed Riley was sitting along the Cambodian Border, and about 4 in the morning, our crew-chief scout, a VC who was working for us, told his interpreter: ‘I can smell the opium used by the enemy.’ The next thing you know, we got overrun by NVA and VC; wave after wave, after wave attacked our artillery base.
They attacked us with Ak-47 assault rifles, 9 millimeter pistols and satchel charges. One of them would lay on the barbed-wire around our perimeter and the others would step on him to cross the wire.
We had a moat filled with water around the outside of the firebase. In the moat were 55-gallon drums filled with fu-gas. Fu-gas is gasoline and detergent mixed. When we exploded the barrels the stuff went up like napalm. They negotiated the moat, the fu-gas and the barbed wire and were inside the compound. By then, our artillery was firing at the attackers point blank with barrels level.By 9 a.m. the next morning the battle was over.
About 80 dead NVA and VC soldiers lay inside and outside the compound. After the fighting they brought in the engineers with a bulldozer. They dug one huge grave with the dozer and pushed all the dead enemy in the trench. We lost 10 dead and another 20 wounded in the fighting.
On a separate battle, my buddy Frank had one of his legs blown off and the other one was mangled when he was hit by shrapnel from an RPG. I was also hit in both arms by small pieces of shrapnel from the same rocket propelled grenade. It was minor. We put Frank on a helicopter and I never saw him again.
My platoon sergeant wanted to put me in for a Purple Heart. I thought about Frank with both his legs gone and another guy in our outfit who had a bullet wound in his chest and told him, ‘Forget it.’” - Sp.-3 Jim Miele, Charley Company, 1st. Engineering Battalion, 1st Division, Vietnam, 1968 #stayzero #zerofoxtrot #war #reality