 What we would do is we would go into basically a company patrol base and then we would send out each platoon or the different asthma for about maybe 300 meters and they would do a clover loop and they would find whatever trails or other signs of activity were taking place and then based on the activity of the trail you know you could see if we call a high-speed hard pack it was about as wide as this table and it was this pounded dirt and you could look at the dirt and see how frequently people had been by there the last time they were there you know if the thing you didn't want to see was tiny little bubbles in the mud because that meant they had just passed and they're very close to you but you don't know where they are but you just saw that they're there they're somewhere and they're going to find you first you hope not any rate we would locate these trails and based on our study of the activities we would set up these mechanical ambushes and I use that rather than put the troops physically across the trail because that put them at too much risk I didn't have enough forces to do very much other than call it light infantry patrol and ambush techniques the TOE of the company I think was like 125 I don't think I ever went to the field with more than 75 and that included like I said the Kit Carson scouts and the dog units and any other hangar on that happened to be there we would do this for maybe two weeks at a time and then we would be rotated back up on the fire base everybody hated the fire base because that was where all spit and polish was and you had all the requirements and people supervising and you know it was just the troops didn't like it because it wasn't a break they always had to fill sandbags or clear brush and all that there was no off time at all you get in the bush you can take things a little easier and you can hey let's quit here for the moment and so you quit and you know you you can relax the troops for a while because it's really exhausting you have to understand the weather you got two seasons dry season and wet season dry season it may be 90 degrees with equal humidity and you're walking around on trails you know on hills that are like that very exhausting and the troops are carrying their whole house with them and all our ammo you know and you you get a troop you fill them up with this stuff and then you say okay you know you got to have a minimum of 450 rounds of m16 you got to have at least 2000 rounds of m60 they all got flares trips claymores everything else plus their own gear and in the dry season water you know you have everybody's got a five quart canteen and at least three one quarts and that's a lot of water and a lot of weight so these guys are just like elephants you know staggering along which is why I use patrol bases because you can't you can't be alert when you're pumping all that stuff you know you got to dump it so you got some ability to maneuver around and look up instead of looking down all the time so that was basically the routine lamson 719 we were given an independent company mission to protect Lao Bao which was the most forward PZ LZ for the invasion into Laos it was right on overlooking my position overlooked the Lao border on QL 5 the main road that went in toward Chipon and we were the it was the LZ for the Rangers that were going in plus some airborne and some other elements we had this place on the high ground that was kind of cleared out and we had a long trench that ran along it my company was responsible for the area security and it was complete chaos if you can imagine just literally 50 to 100 helicopters coming in over the course of two or three hours just you know coming in from case on dropping down picking up the Rangers flying off then coming back there was a refueled rearm point there you had a big talk which I avoided assiduously because it had had the Vietnamese there the core commander the division commander the airborne and regimental brigade commanders and their staff had an engineer US engineer unit that was there that was good people I spent more time with them anyway it was complete chaos in the talk and you want to get out of there because you were within grenade range of anybody that wanted to use you the one defining thing that I remember about that particular issue was that about five miles away in Laos the NVA had dug in 122 guns not how it says but guns and you couldn't get at them and they'd shoot at us and this first time I'd been under artillery fire and it was an exciting experience you actually the round landed before you heard it so there was absolutely no warning whatsoever that you were going to get fired on and they weren't very accurate and it wasn't mass fires but it was still artillery coming at you and so we got down we became troglodytes very quickly underground and in these trenches and bunkers and we came up with a system an early warning system which was to look at the side of you could see the guns wink when they fired and you could see the wink and then bang like that and you had no warning at all you know so we we figured out the only way we were going to do this is we had a guy who's made we had one task for one guy he had an air horn you know the things you bring to football games and all that and he would just his mission was to look at the side of that hill and as soon as he saw a wink he hit the air hit the air horn and everybody would drop down and invariably it was immediately air horn bang you know that was it so that was an exciting experience I'd never been under artillery and that was the only time and I don't want to be under artillery again and the gun the fact that it was a gun and not a howitzer made all the difference with a howitzer you know you can hear the bang and then there's the round like a mortar you know clunk and then bang with a gun it's just so fast you round explodes before you have any inkling that it's coming in yeah in Laobow we were there about a little over a week we were the unit we were the location where they evacuated the fire bases that the Rangers LZ's that the Rangers had been on and it was complete chaos meaning the by the second day of the incursion the NVA had brought in a lot of AAA because they knew helicopters were the secret to success and so they were shooting helicopters down left and right the we'd see these birds come in and they're smoking and limping and going like this and they'd crash basically on our LZ and we had a big huge boneyard we had a bulldozer and the bulldozer's job was just to push the helicopter off to one edge of the LZ to get it out of the way and it became quite a large mound of aviation junk there beginning the end of the second day the third day you could actually see the AAA coming up against the Cobras that were trying to provide fire and they got so bad that all the helicopters had to be about 5,000 feet and you know if you're a Cobra pilot you're not going to be too accurate at 5,000 feet but they didn't have any choice because they get shot out of the air and we could see them get hit and you take immediate evasive action because of it my total tour after I after that I had about six months of command time and then they said okay you got to go you've had your command time you got to go on staff so I got interviewed and ended up being the G2 operations officer for the division which was a great job at that time because I was responsible for all of the arc like programming the B-52 bombers I had operational management of the 17th Cav the aviation Cav Brigade element I was responsible for all of the sensor strings which is like 25,000 project duffel bag in Laos and on the north side of the border and all of the Intel up to the 20th parallel which was about 15 miles inside North Vietnam and had this tremendous array of intelligence stuff and I got a real class on U.S. intelligence capabilities we had overhead we had NSA which was our major asset if you would as well as the Cav you know we'd find targets or think there was something out there we'd send the Cav to go look at it they'd part the canopy and if they got shot at badly we'd mark it and then we would draw an arc light box I got probably one arc light box every other day which was a great many which was really quite high volume and they just were very very effective we sent the Cav in to do BDA immediately after the arc light hit and you know they had some great reports as to the accuracy or not accuracy you know they knew if they got shot at after doing the BDA they the target they didn't get the target but if they went in there and they see guys all kind of stumbling around and the remnants of equipment they knew that they got what they were supposed to get and that professionally it was extremely educational because I was able to see the whole intelligence net at a larger level you know as a company commander I get a report hey you know we got dinks at Yankee tango blah blah blah but at the division with the nature of the requirements the division had the responsibility of everything basically other than the Marines north of the DMZ south and in the louse I just was just really great education and you can see how the intel was put together you know the the calm Intel the Cav birds the reports from other sources we had these whole agent strings that were being run by the CIA they would came in bring me hey we just got a runner here and he tells me there's a NBA battalion that's moving down to Ben Tram 63 at this location blah blah blah and you put it all together and you know it's kind of like a chess game you figure out where the bad guys are and what you've got in the way of assets and then you apply the force necessary so it's one of the best jobs in the world that I had for this period then I came home I was the s3 of the first 503rd the 173rd we became the third brigade of the 80 set of the 101st the airborne brigade the third brigade and then we phased out of airborne and at that point before we went off jump status I joined the first of the 75th when it was started up by General Abrams Colonel Lure the battalion commander was a battalion commander in the 101st when I was there and I knew him we had met I had responsibility for the Danang ASP and I turned it over to him and so we had an interface for about a week and then when he came back and was given the job to start the Rangers with 175 he asked me to come and be the headquarters company commander and plans officer which I did and that started that's my career start with the Rangers through battalion command of the same unit yeah I gotta go to lunch