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Thanks for the war story - USAF CAS worked fine for that team because:

a. They were small SF team in an isolated spot and

b. Everything else was bad guys.

Crap, a B2 could've handled that mission!

CAS works better than anything else on the battlefield for crushing enemy strong points. Well-directed artillery, particularly a nice solid Regiment or battalion Time on Target works well and is usable day or night - but when it comes to really hard targets there is no substitute for a nice well-trained stack of close-killers with Mk84s and the will to press in close to make sure they hit them, not us.

This is important to us Crunchies because most of the time the enemy is really close to us. Ever watch a firefight at night? Did you see how short those lines of tracers were? In most real combat, there are large groups of us and large groups of them and when we come into contact, it's usually very, very close.

Some long time ago, I was part of a an infantry battalion that had the job of assaulting a pinned Vietcong battalion headquarters. We had two other infantry battalions in blocking positions and this day, they were the anvils, we were the hammer.

At first light, our leading company hit their defenses and was stopped cold with about 60 casualties. The enemy had concrete bunkers, interlocking fire, barbed wire and lots and lots heavy automatic weapons - at least one was a 37mm AA cannon. I was part of the second assault wave. As I lay down in the tall grass about 200m from where we'd found their defensive line I remember watching long lines of grass fall around me as the enemy grazing fire cut them just inches above us. We had pounded them with artillery (I was an artillery observer) but it didn't seem to slow down the intensity and the accuracy of their return fire. We had run into a real rarity - a major hard-core VC unit and they were staying put.

I had resigned myself to what was going to happen next, getting up into that fire and rushing forward into it when two Marine F-4s showed up. After some careful coordination by the FAC, we marked the target using WP mortar rounds and the first F-4 made a slow pass right over the top of me. I remember that the Phantom was so slow that it made that moaning sound they usually make landing (something about airflow over the boundary layer fences, I heard).

That pass was to make sure he saw where we were with our air panels and where they were. The whole enemy treeline lit up with the most muzzle flashes I had ever seen in my whole 13 months in country. Every damn enemy that could shoot was shooting at that F4 and there were hundreds of them!. He pulled away from that first pass and his Dash-2 took exactly the same pass and released six Snake eyes - you could see the fins pop open and they went straight down the center into the middle of all those muzzle flashes. The whole damn treeline erupted! Trees flew through he air, house tops, everything. The lead went in and did exactly the same pass, low and slow and pasted the target perfectly.

We got up and moved in and there was just wreckage and the few survivors were easy meat.

That baby, is CAS!