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To: archy

Yep I have seen places ike that and pics of places that stand out as alamo last stands or record......The 051 bunker at Tan Son Nhut Air Base .

Security team there was abandoned as they were thought to have been captured / killed in initial stages of the fight there when the base was overrun.

That bunker was trashed by B40’s PG 2 etc and so many chinks in the concrete bunkers surface it looked like the moon. Those guys had 3 or 4 M-60’s , personal GAU5/A’s XM177’s etc and had the mini gun cans (20mm) of ammo stashed inside. lots of it . The 1:10 ratio of tracer kind in beau coup pucker factor belts. They melted a few barrels and used cases of 40mm fired in old M148’s but those guys took on a hell of a stand against all odds . they found em in day light looking like meerkats in shock.

Last place I saw a floor covered with brass was Kuwait airport when we got jumped by stragglers that tried to take out a team from Campbell I was assigned too (ODA591 ?)...... the then new M249’s w/ 200 hundred round boxes were smoking as we had to shoot and scoot out of a tunnel with no side egress or cover. A poor boy peel of the nth degree as they tried to throw grenades down the long tunnel at us but the wimps never got close with em. LOT’s of brass that few minutes !

Pucker factor was high for me.....the girl scouts I was with were happy as pigs in mud. Go figure.......:o)


89 posted on 11/16/2007 11:16:06 AM PST by Squantos (Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet. ©)
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To: Squantos
Yep I have seen places ike that and pics of places that stand out as alamo last stands or record......The 051 bunker at Tan Son Nhut Air Base .

Security team there was abandoned as they were thought to have been captured / killed in initial stages of the fight there when the base was overrun.

I arrived in-country at Ton Son Nhut on the afternoon of 30 January '68, went through the usual in-processing paper chase and around 1700 was sent off to a casual barracks to get a little rest from the 10-hour flight from Guam. The NVA/VC force hit at around 0320 hours, Bunker zero-five-one being one of their first targets, the 5 USAF Security Policemen inside being hit by a force of 600-750 NVA regulars atrtacking from Highway One. The SPs went down fighting to the last man, taking several hundred enemy along for the trip. One of the 5 survived, continued calling in air support once he got another radio that worked, and got the Silver Star for his trouble 31 years later.

The time they bought fighting and dying gave us enough time- about 20 minutes- to wake up and get weapons and ammo, and get to fighting positions before the rest of several NVA battalions hit us. I was about up by Gate 55 in the Alpha Sector, quarter-mile from the old French runway fort that had formed the Bunker 051 position, and spent the night there with two USAF mechanics with M2 carbines and an M60 MG, which they did not know how to load or run barrel changes on; we had a very short weapons fam class on the spot.

Ammo was not a problem; they'd brought a pair of ammo cans for USAF AC47 *Puff the Magic Dragon* birds; 3000 rounds each. I had a USAF M16 [no bolt assist] with the stock and foreend painted blue and a nice white parade sling for honor guard use. And three full magazines, 20 rounds each for it, two of which I carried in my shirt pockets for web gear, not having been issued LBE yet. The M113 ACAVS of the 235th Infantry did their best imitation of the cavalry riding to the rescue, took seriously brutal B40 fire coming up Route One, and cleared the fence around 0600, when they caught a sizable portion of the NVA force in the open on the runway. And I quit making fun of 25ID guys for their *Electric Pickle* shoulder patch for a long time asfter that....

Amazingly, Bunker 051 still exists today and can be seen, or could be as late as 1968. And the voices of the 5 USAF SPs doing their jobs as long as they could can still be heard.

92 posted on 11/16/2007 12:17:25 PM PST by archy (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno. [from Virgil's *Aeneid*.])
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