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CHAPTER 1
APACHE SNOW
H-hour for Operation Apache Snow was scheduled for 0710 hours. May 10, 1969, though parts of the operation had already been in progress for fifteen days. Daily between April 25 and May 9, Air Force CI30s had been “prepping” thirty possible landing zones in the A Shau Valley with daisy-cutters, giant 15,000-pound bombs designed to explode just above the ground, clearing away all trees and vegetation without cratering the LZ. To confuse the North Vietnamese as to the actual locations of the combat assault, the thirty LZs were scattered randomly across the entire length of the valley, from the southern plains around the abandoned American Special Forces camp to the far northern valley below Dong So Ridge. Of the thirty LZs, only five would actually be used this day.
0600 Hours, LZ 2, Dong Ap Bia
The Montagnard tribes in the area called it “the mountain of the crouching beast,” though there is no mention in their oral traditions that explains why. On maps of Vietnam, it is labeled simply Dong Ap Bia or Ap Bia Mountain. Unlike most other mountains on the western side of the A Shau, it is not part of a larger chain, but stands alone, 970 meters above sea level at its peak, bordered on the west by the Trung Pham River and the Laotian border, on the north by Dong So Ridge, and on the south by the Rao Lao River. From this peak, like the tendrils of some giant sea creature, a number of large ridges and fingers and a labyrinth of deep ravines and wide draws branch out in all directions. Two of these ridges—Hill 937 on the north and Hill 916 on the southeast—form mountains of their own, and, like all the rest of Dong Ap Bia, lie under a thick, double- and triple-canopy jungle. Under this canopy—which in places rises to heights of two hundred feet— grow layers of smaller trees, all interwoven with a tangle of vines, thick brush, and almost impenetrable stands of bamboo.
The OD green UH-ID Command and Control helicopter arrived over the mountain just after first light. Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the commander of the 3/187th, sat in the back of the ship before a bank of radios. Next to him sat his sergeant major, Bernie Meehan; and next to him, Capt. James Deleathe, the artillery liaison officer. The 3/187th was one of the five battalions that would be combat-assaulting into the northern A Shau Valley, and Honeycutt had arrived to direct the prep of its LZ before the landing.
The pilot, with his ship at one thousand feet, flew across the mountain from southeast to northeast, then back in the opposite direction. On the second pass, a heavy machine gun opened up on the ship from a position somewhere on the southwest slope of the mountain. The bullets made a thackthack sound as they passed under the ship’s rotors. The door gunner on the left side of the ship tensed and brought his M60 machine gun around, looking for the telltale sign of a muzzle flash, but whoever had fired had slipped back into cover.
The pilot circled the mountain for a while and then followed a large ridge northwest for eighteen hundred meters, until he came over the small field that would be used as the LZ for Honeycutt’s battalion in less than two hours. The field, covered by waist-high elephant grass and a few stunted bushes, stood in sharp contrast to the towering jungle that ringed it like the walls of a stockade. It was a deep Indochina jungle, a triple-canopy rain forest that, except for the breaks of a few narrow valleys, flowed on without interruption for miles in all directions. Most of the trees in the canopy were from 75 to 90 feet high, but in some places the scattered crowns of trees as tall as 150 feet jutted out incongruously, their brown leafless trunks in sharp contrast to the deep greens below.
As he had the mountain, the pilot circled the LZ so Honeycutt and his staff could have a closer look. The rising sun had burned most of the ground fog off the landing zone, but there were still patches of it scattered around the ridge like small, furry clouds. The draws on both sides of the ridge, however, still lay hidden under a thick, white blanket.
The pilot turned the ship south and went into a hover at four hundred feet over the larger of the two draws. They were all waiting for something, and it came a few minutes later—a loud roar that split the quiet morning air with the ferocity of a thunderclap. Everyone in the C and C ship looked up at once as two black-and-green-camouflaged Phantom jets exploded from the thick, soupy clouds overhead and rocketed downward, trailing white exhaust fumes, their engines opened up in a full throaty roar. Following closely behind the jets was a much slower twin-propelled OV-10 FAC plane.
Honeycutt was on the horn with the forward air controller as soon as he spotted the plane. “Bilk 34, this is Blackjack.”
“Roger, Blackjack.”
“What have you got for me, Bilk?”
“I’ve got some 250-high-drags, napalm, and 20 mike-mike.”
“Okay, Bilk, I want you to give me a pass from northwest to southeast. Start out with the HE and napalm.”
“That’s a roger. Okay, baby, set your ass in. We’re comin’ down.”
“Okay, gunfighters,” the FAC pilot said, talking to the jet pilots now, “if you’re in position, I’ll mark the target.”
“Roger that, Bilk.”
The FAC plane turned back to the field and began a sliding, quick descent.
Wham!
A white phosphorous rocket shot from a rack under the plane’s right wing and, trailing a small thin plume of smoke, streaked toward the ground, exploding in a geyser of white fire directly in the center of the field.
“Can you see my mark?”
“Can see.”
“Make your first run fifty meters to the north of the marking round.”
One of the fighter-bombers pulled away from the other and went into a steep, growling, angry dive. At five hundred feet, he leveled off and cut loose two 250-pounders. They looked like large darts as they streaked in, at first parallel to the ground and then in a gradually tilting plane. Each hit on a different side of the marking round, hit with a red-orange flash and a roiling ball of thick, brown smoke. The sound came a fraction of a second later, a twin crumpcrump.
The smoke was still funneling upward when the second fighter-bomber made his run, diving, leveling off, and finally releasing two fat-bodied, silver, napalm canisters. Unlike the HE bombs, the canisters moved parallel to the ground for just a few short seconds, then plummeted straight down, exploding in a sheet of red flames that rushed forward across the ground like a huge wave, spewing out thick tendrils of fiery jelly which skipped and rolled and splashed forward through the thick elephant grass. In seconds the thick mat of elephant grass for fifty yards was burned and flattened into a residue of smoldering cinders, and the few stunted trees turned into flaming grotesque shapes. The LZ prep had begun. The scenario was being repeated on the four other LZs and would last a total of fifty minutes.
