Quote:
Originally Posted by Oberon
A wise move, I think quite a few lateral thinking soldiers would take a similar route. Of course, sadly, it doesn't always work that way otherwise things at Balaclava would have gone somewhat differently.
As the old saying goes "Theirs was not to reason why..."
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True it does not always work and sometimes it comes with other risks.Sometimes a unit would choose to stay in a free-fire zone to avoid going through land where the enemy was heavily entrenched which would be suicide for a single unit with no direct support of course the risk was that in the free-fire zone someone could put arty or an airstrike in the round about area.Even some of the best combat leaders in Vietnam choose to do this when the order was poor enough to warrant. Just like in Band of Brothers which of course the book is true some guys are foxhole Normans and others are Captain Speers.My father told me you always want a combat leader who is a good man not one that is a nice guy.Those guys where lower tier officers Colonel and up a good one macro manages and lousy one micromanages because he or she has poor confidence.
For example once on a recon patrol some dufus ordered my fathers unit to set up an ambush which would have been utter suicide and it should have been clear to the CO in the process of this recon they had a clear understanding of the enemy disposition they pretty much could not move at one point for 6 hours because there where so many NVA in the area.
Despite this the CO wanted them to perform an ambush 8 men in an area where several hundred NVA would appear in seconds if the hornets nest where to be kicked.Recon LRRPs they can pull ambushes but you do not do them in such under such heavy enemy presence.That is the point where you have the recon keep observing and you plan a battalion or brigade sized operation.
Anyway the captain heard the order and then said(or rather whispered) to his RTO "this guy is nuts if we do pull an ambush here we will maybe kill 10 or 15 NVA and then get over run where the rest show up we have no place to fall back to." Luckily the order was to perform the ambush in the early morning.What they did instead was sneak around and found a more secluded rest and supply area.They snuck into an ammo cache and sent some delayed C-4 inside some mortar rounds still inside the rest of the team set up claymores along a small road and when the entire team was ready they zapped the next group of NVA that came past checked the bodies for Intel and destroyed their weapons about the same time they split the delayed C-4 set off which provided an excellent distraction.
An effective ambush was pulled off and the CO got his body count and no Americans got killed.One advantage of LRRP was that they typically reported in only this was to avoid radio when the team was in a situation where silence was golden.Now a regular unit they can get nagged by a lousy officer nearly constantly.