MIA Rescue: LRRPs in Cambodia

MIA Rescue: LRRPs in Cambodia

by Kregg P. Jorgenson
MIA Rescue: LRRPs in Cambodia

MIA Rescue: LRRPs in Cambodia

by Kregg P. Jorgenson

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Overview

"This is an inspiring story of courage and sacrifice--one hell of an exciting true war story!"
--Kenn Miller
Author of Tiger the Lurp Dog
On 17 June 1970, in Mondol Kiri Province, Cambodia, the five men of Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) Team 5-2 were about to halt for the day. Night was coming, the skies were dark, and so were the men's thoughts--they'd just found freshly dug NVA bunkers inside a scrub-brush tree line and their position was not secure.
As they carefully searched for better night lager, they learned the hard way that they had walked into an ambush kill zone: NVA fire quickly downed two men and wounded two others. In minutes, Team 5-2 had been transformed from the hunters to the hunted. They had no radio comms with their headquarters and had just two rifles and fifteen magazines of ammunition.
Two men were down, but the team was not out. MIA RESCUE is the story of Team 5-2 and the heroic and ultimately successful attempts to rescue them despite extraordinarily bad weather and an angry and aware enemy.
"Seldom can an author stimulate emotions, from the taste of fear to sweaty palms to the feeling of relief when the mission is over, but Jorgenson does and much more. If the reader was never in combat, he will feel like a Nam vet when he finishes this book."
--Jerry Boyle
Author of Apache Sunrise

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307874511
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 11/23/2011
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 375,567
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Kregg P. Jorgenson served in Vietnam with Company H, Rangers, and later with Apache Troop, the 1st Squadron of the 9th Cavalry. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland and City University of Seattle. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
 
 
Hill #717
Mondol Kiri Province,
Cambodia, 17 June 1970
1650 hours
 
The sky was black and ominous, and the cloud cover threatened a heavy early-evening rain. Staff Sergeant Deverton Cochrane’s assessment was just as dismal.
 
His five-man U.S. Army Ranger, long-range reconnaissance patrol, Team 5-2, had found the freshly dug bunkers and enemy fighting positions just inside the scrub-brush tree line atop the small rolling hill, and even though he had called a night halt, he regretted the decision, realizing this wasn’t the place for the team to be for a few very good reasons.
 
First, night was closing and, second, so was the weather. That meant it was possible and damn likely for the North Vietnamese Army soldiers operating in the area to walk right up on the team without the team’s noticing the enemy until it was too late. If the LRRP/Rangers had learned anything by then, it was that a new soldier from Hanoi was just as lost in the sprawling Cambodian and Vietnamese jungles as was a new soldier from Chicago. The NVA knew the locations of the bunker complexes in the region but little of the jungle that surrounded them. All of the myths about NVA super jungle fighters to the contrary, in Southeast Asia, Daniel Boones on either side were few and far between.
 
“Saddle up,” Cochrane whispered to the others, getting to his feet and shouldering a rucksack that held 70 or more pounds of explosive, antipersonnel mines, a spare battery for the team radio, trip flares, and damn near everything else that might come in handy in enemy territory. “We’re moving out.”
 
Just down the slope a few hundred meters away, a thick jungle patch offered more cover and concealment for their activities than the golf-course-like setting they found themselves in. Bright lime-green fields were edged with myriad green-and-brown interlocked plants and bushes. Hundred-foot trees watched over the dense woods like quiet onlookers, saying nothing of the traps and roughs.
 
He’d hide the team there, setting out claymore antipersonnel mines for their protection. Then he’d have Specialist Four Ron Andrus, the team’s RTO (radio-telephone operator), put up the long whip antenna to keep in touch with the Ranger radio-relay station high atop Nui Ba Den, the Black Virgin Mountain in neighboring Vietnam, and the Ranger relay station at Fire Support Base David less than five miles away to the northeast.
 
If the team was compromised on patrol, their only chance for survival, besides their antipersonnel mines and individual weapons, was the backpack PRC-25 radio.
 
Andrus had called in their latest situation report a little over an hour before, and they weren’t scheduled to call in again until 1720. The tearing static of the radio, the white noise of the empty frequency coming from the radio’s handset close to his ear, was barely audible to him and couldn’t be heard by the other members of the team who were studying the wall of jungle less than a few feet away. While the rush of static might have been noise to some, it was satisfying to Andrus.
 
“We’re moving down to the tree line,” Cochrane whispered to Andrus and the others as he took the lead. The veteran staff sergeant kept the barrel of his M16 rifle aimed directly to his front as his eyes scanned the jungle clearing, searching in the twilight for sign of the enemy. Once satisfied, he began the slow, careful trek with Andrus in tow, followed by Specialist Four Carl Laker, the assistant team leader, Specialist Four Royce Clark, the team’s medic, and finally, Staff Sergeant Dwight Hancock, the rear scout.
 
The job of a LRRP/Ranger was simple. Go behind the enemy lines in small five- or six-man teams, stick your nose in the enemy’s business, and if you could, fuck with him.
 
Militarily, the job was defined in more strategic terms. The LRRP/Ranger’s mission was, generally, to gather “hard” intelligence, that is, real proof of the enemy’s strength, location, and movement. Best guesses weren’t good enough; Army planners needed hard intelligence to plan for battles to come.
 
Fashioned after the British jungle-fighting teams of Malaysia and using the knowledge and tactics they themselves had learned from the Viet Cong, the LRRPs, as the Rangers were better known, began to enjoy the success of their commando-like patrols.
 
In jungles once thought of as safe havens by the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong, the U.S. Army’s LRRPs, in this instance the LRRP/Rangers of the 1st Cavalry Division, were ambushing their columns, snatching prisoners, or just monitoring their movement. The data thus gathered resulted in tremendous losses to the enemy forces, especially when the LRRPs themselves pinpointed the enemy’s locations for artillery fire missions, the deadly gunnery of helicopter gunships and ground-attack aircraft, or bomb strikes.
 
When everything went well, the small teams did what they were asked to do and more. When everything went wrong, when it literally went to hell, it went to hell quickly because the five- and six-man teams were almost always outgunned, outnumbered, and well within territory controlled by the enemy.
 
If a team could repel a first attack using its claymore antipersonnel mines, devices that would literally send out a wall of ball bearings and heat blast from the explosion, then their rifles, grenades, and discipline would often be enough to keep the enemy at bay until the cavalry helicopter gunships or extraction helicopters arrived.
 
The one link that kept gunships or the artillery support from the nearby fire support base at their immediate call was the team’s radio. But as Team 5-2 moved down the slope edging the shadowy tree line, Andrus had no way of knowing that the small valley they were walking into and the closing weather had made communication impossible. He and his team were in a dead zone, and until he could set up the long whip antenna, they could receive, but they couldn’t be heard. This is because the transmitting stations he was listening for operated with a great deal more power than the PRC-25 he was using.
 
Skirting the clearing, Cochrane and his people slowly closed the distance, and the team leader breathed a sigh of relief. But it was short-lived. Cochrane heard the voices first, just a few feet in front of him, then saw the enemy soldiers scrambling into their fighting positions as they brought up their weapons.
 
“Gooks! Get down!” he yelled, opening fire and spraying the enemy position to his immediate front. Orange clay kicked up around the earth-and-tree-limb bunkers just a few yards away. At that distance, there was no time to aim. You just pointed and fired.
 
“Contact! Team 5-2, contact!” Andrus yelled into the radio’s handset as he had been trained to, only to get no response. Firing a short burst of his rifle toward the enemy positions, Andrus quickly removed his rucksack and dug for the long whip antenna. His hands trembled but found what he was searching for anyway.
 
“Frag out!” Clark, the team medic, yelled, throwing a grenade into one of the nearby bunkers. The thundering explosion brought a momentary lull in the fighting. Taking full advantage of it, Andrus struggled with the olive-drab, folding metal pole, wiping away the mud from the wet ground.
 
Threading the longer antenna in place, Andrus was about to call again when the first Chinese grenade exploded to his left, sending hot, burning shrapnel fragments into his right shoulder. Fighting the pain, Andrus fired his rifle again, changed magazines, fired a second burst, and yelled into the radio one more time. “Bravo, Bravo … Team 5-2, contact!” he shouted, calling the relay station, his hand squeezing the radio handset so tight the pain hurt more than the shrapnel wound. There was no response from either relay station. Nothing. Team 5-2 was on its own.
 
The small battle continued with Cochrane up on one knee firing. “Back!” he yelled. “Move back!”
 
Raking machine-gun fire from the point-blank enemy positions swept across the Rangers’ positions, and the team leader was the primary target. “I’m hit! Oh God! I’m …” he cried, as he dropped his weapon, then wordlessly slumped forward on his right shoulder. His head canted to the side as his hands struggled to hold in his life.
 
An arm’s length away, Andrus started to reach for Cochrane just as a second explosion from another Chinese grenade shattered the attempt. Grenade fragments fractured his right wrist, and an armor-piercing bullet tore through the radio, burrowed easily into his collarbone and ripped deep into his chest, lodging dangerously close to his heart. What’s happening? he thought. What in the hell’s happening?
 
Laker, the assistant team leader, was yelling over the din of the firefight. “Did you get commo?” he screamed, only to have Andrus pull out of his momentary shock and say, “No,” in a frustrated voice and bring his rifle back up again to fire. Instinct and training were taking over, overcoming both searing pain and fear.
 
“Fall back!” Laker said, motioning Andrus to move away from the kill zone, covering his retreat with M16 rifle fire. To their left, Clark saw an enemy soldier who had started to climb out of his fighting position. He stopped the man’s advance permanently with a burst from his M14. Clark’s quick response gave them a thin avenue out.
 

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