George Moses – Battery Commander – Part Three
THE BOYS OF BATTERY B
GEORGE MOSES
BATTERY COMMANDER
PART THREE
In late January, 1968 Captain Moses receives orders to move the battery south from Tuy Hoa to the operational theater around Phan Thiet, a key port on the South China Sea and where the battery will remain for the rest of its time in Vietnam.
Giddy-Up!
It was a two-day road march to Phan Thiet, over 200 miles along Highway 1, the coastal road. We were to overnight at Phan Rang where Camp Eagle was located, the old 101st Airborne base. Now there was an Australian Canberra squadron located there (Australian air force). We were taken out of action there at Phan Rang, which meant we had a free night with no official obligations. I was hoping to be able to go to the Canberra officers club, have a steak and a few beers, but we didn’t get an invitation from the officers club. Instead the officers and the NCOs of the battery got an invitation from their NCO club, where we had a wonderful time. We had a great steak dinner. We sat at the bar and drank whiskies and sodas until the wee hours of the morning.
It was about 1:00 in the morning when the old Aussie sergeant major in charge of the club – and those guys were hard to understand because their mouth didn’t move when they talked – the sergeant major said, “Captain, we have a little game we play here.” Across the dance floor was a wall that had a curtain in front of it. The curtain parts and here’s this large picture of – you see them in old saloons – of a beautiful gal laying back on a cushioned divan. They had it down low on the wall. Then they come out with what looks like a toy hobby horse. The front and rear legs on this hobby horse are hinged so that they move in tandem, the front legs are wired together and hinged at the top, and the rear legs are the same way. If you sat on that hobby horse and rocked it ever so gently it would inch forward. But the kicker was that if you got to aggressive with it that thing would flip right out from under you and you’d be on your butt. The challenge was to sit on that hobby horse after having all those scotch and sodas and inch that hobby horse across that dance floor over to that painting and reach up and kiss this beautiful painting. Only you sergeant majors would think of something like this.
Anyway, a lot of our troopers tried to ride that horse, they were all game, but many of them fell flat on their ass. We had a great time trying to ride that damn horse. Everybody demanded that I do it, and I said the hell with it, I’m going to do it. I got on that thing and I was determined not to get thrown off. I made it, kissed the picture, and the whole damn place went wild. The sergeant major came over and bought another round of drinks.
Now was around 2:30 or so in the morning and the sergeant major said, “I understand you Yanks play a game called softball. We don’t know anything about softball, but we think we can whip your ass in softball.”
That was just the challenge I needed. I said, “8:30 tomorrow morning on the field down the road across from where the Eagles headquarters was.” We were on.
My first sergeant comes over and says, “Captain, it’s 2:30 in the morning, we’re shot to the wind, and you just made a challenge for softball at 8:30 in the morning?”
Sure enough, the next morning we all felt like hell, but we were damned if we were going to let those Aussies get our goat. So we were there and we had our softball gear that we pulled together. I think it was about 8:35 and we looked down the road and here’s this cloud of dust coming. This stake-and-platform truck pulls up and it’s got a pot full of Aussies on it. They jump off and one of the more energetic ones walks up and says, “Good morning, Captain! Where is the ball diamond? We’re ready to play.”
I say, “Do you know what the rules are?”
“Nope, we don’t. But we’ll figure ‘em out as we go.” We then proceeded to play softball for several hours and drink a lot of beer.
That night we hunkered down. I told everybody the partying’s over at 6:00. We got to get a good night’s sleep because we’re roadin’ out at o-dark-thirty before sunrise to finish our road march down to Phan Thiet. Turns out that whole thing was planned. Lieutenant Colonel House had arranged the road march in such a way that we had that break at Phan Rang, and I believe he was behind the party at the NCO club too. The next morning we loaded up and headed south.
Tet 1968
The Tet offensive of 1968 would result in over 4,000 U.S. and ARVN deaths, and 45,000 NVA and VC deaths. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian targets across South Vietnam. Both North and South Vietnam had announced on national radio broadcasts that there would be a two-day cease-fire during the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations. Nonetheless, the Communists launched the attack during the early morning hours of January 30, the first day of Tet.
We got into Phan Thiet January 27th, three days before Tet. We set up at LZ Judy about seven miles northwest of the city. We linked up with the 3rd battalion of the 506 airborne infantry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Geraci. It was a very hardnosed, determined airborne outfit. They were good, but they were cocky too. Their headquarters was located at Phan Thiet airfield just west of the city, and he would rotate his companies out from there into the area of operations for search and destroy missions. Our firing fan just touched the airfield at the max range of our 105s.
Initially the infantry provided our perimeter security. They started monkeying with us, playing like they were being attacked through the wire. It spooked us pretty badly. So we fell everybody out on the perimeter and started shooting. Later on I said to myself I think we were had. Anyway, it was a good exercise for us in knowing where we needed to go if we ever did get attacked.
When the infantry moved out we received a section of quad-50 machine guns and a section of 40 mm cannons for our security, two of each. I’ll tell you, they were pee-bringers. Fearful weapons that caused you to pee in your pants. We used those twin 40 mm cannons to fire H&I into the mountains and I would not want to be on the receiving end. And those quad-50s, when they fired up and they got going out there, you just didn’t want to be near it. After we got the quad-50s and 40s we started manning the observation posts ourselves. There were three or four of them around the perimeter.
I started noticing civilians streaming out of Phan Thiet city, carrying everything but the kitchen sink headed toward the mountains. I reported it to the taskforce staff two or three days in a row.
And then the headquarters of 3/506 got attacked with mortars. We were sitting seven miles away watching these fireworks, when suddenly the whole ammunition dump went up. You could feel that alluvial plain vibrate for a minute or so. The shock wave came across the ground, settled in and then rose back up again.
Lt. Col. Geraci came out to the battery at two in the morning and ordered me to move south to an open, dry rice paddy that put our firing fan over the edge of Phan Thiet city. We would be all by ourselves. He ordered us to be ready to fire the next morning before nautical twilight. In order to move that battery, doctrine called for clearance with my battalion artillery commander. So his staff should have coordinated with Lt. Col. House on that. I wanted to make sure of that because he was going to set us up out there without any security.
I told Lt. Col. Geraci, “I’ll inform my battalion commander.”
He said, “You can inform God if you want, but you better be setting there ready to fire when daylight comes.”
“Sir, we’re not going to let you down.” And we were in position to fire by 6:00 that morning.
NVA regulars had tunneled into individual burial mounds at a cemetery that was right along the edge of the airfield at Phan Thiet city, and next to taskforce headquarters. In these alluvial plains they buried people in mounds. The NVA tunneled in among these mounds and created firing positions so that the only thing they had to do was knock out the last little bit of dirt and they were able with impunity to rake the taskforce headquarters area with machine gun and small arms fire.
That’s when we started firing from that open field in support of the 3/506. We were naked out there for three or four days with no perimeter barbed wire and no perimeter defense force.
In Position During TET 1968
It was very risky business for us at that time. I don’t know how much we fired, but it was a lot and we were giving the Viet Cong hell. It would have been a very easy thing for them to turn on us out there in the open. We could have gotten into a major engagement out there, but fortunately that did not happen. We would occasionally get small arms fire that would go bouncing through the area. The rounds were expended, from people shooting at us, but not close enough to hit anything. They were obviously not directed toward us, or it was obviously not a planned attack against us.
The most dangerous place turned out to be the mess truck, which we ran back to LZ Judy for hot food. The truck got blown off the road on one of the trips. Nobody was killed, but one of my cooks was thrown out and injured. We evacuated him, I think he went back as far as Japan. But he came back to the battery several weeks later, and we pinned a Purple Heart on him.
Remains of Mess Truck
B Battery would be awarded the Valorous Unit Award for their service during Tet of 1968. It is the second highest unit decoration which may be bestowed upon a U.S. Army unit, the highest being the Presidential Unit Citation. It is granted for extraordinary heroism in action against an armed enemy, and is the unit equivalent to the Silver Star. Colonel Moses did not learn of the award until after his retirement, in part because it was granted in August of 1970, over two years after his departure from Vietnam. B Battery was the only unit of the 5th Battalion to win the Valorous Unit Award in Vietnam. Today Colonel Moses says of the award, “The men who served at that time need to know about it. It speaks to the soldierly spirit and dedication of all the men of B Battery at the time. They just performed magnificently.”
