________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
A:
I don't remember. I don't remember hearing about it. We typically had the bottoms of our
trucks sandbagged, so that was ready. We went out with trucks in the column filled with
earth in case they had to patch anyplace, but I don't know what prompted me to think of that.
So, I still get a mental picture of a truck with a wheel flying up in the air.
We did not have a horrendous lot of combat operations down in that area, but we had
enough. We had a mounted reconnaissance patrol coming back from the road-clearing
operation ambushed--killed the driver but the others got away.
We were mortared several times. Our team down in Vung Ro Bay was mortared one night,
killing the squad leader and at least one other, and several were wounded even though we
were bunkered in sandbagged culverts.
We had an incident one day where the Vietcong came down the hillside above the laterite pit
where our tractor-scrapers picked up the material to be taken to the highway. They fired an
RPG [Rocket-Propelled Grenade] into the cab of one of the tractors. The operator, taken
under fire, spotted another tractor-scraper coming around the outside of his that had stopped.
The driver jumped into the one coming around the side just as an RPG came into the cab. His
own tractor burned in place.
Down in the Don Duong, Duc Trong area, we had several instances on the highway. One
night vehicles moving from Don Duong to Duc Trong, even as the USARV inspector general
came into our area, were stopped at a toll station. We were out later that night than usual; it
was getting towards dusk. The Vietcong had already set up their toll station along the
highway when the convoy came along. A short firefight ensued.
Another incident that happened was almost amusing, considering the circumstances. We did
have IG inspections over there; even though we were fighting the war, we had to be ready for
inspections.
B Company, our last to move, knowing they were going to go through this IG inspection a
week and a half after they arrived, had meticulously fixed up their prescribed load list in an
express container. They had all the right bins and markings and everything else, had loaded
the container on a tractor-trailer and moved it down to their new location, offloaded it, and
were ready to go for inspection.
They were located with C Company at Duc Trong, and our engineer compound was on the
back side of the compound of the headquarters of the province chief. Well, the Vietcong had
decided to attack the province chief's headquarters. They came around to our engineer side
with their secondary attack. It was a feint, really, just to hold our people in place while they
assaulted the ARVN facilities on the other side. The Vietcong put an RPG right into that B
Company's express container and spewed all over the place the load that had so meticulously
been taken care of and hauled all that way from Tuy Hoa.
Q:
Now, this is not long after the Tet offensive, so, I'm sure people were still alert, on edge, or
whatever from that sort of thing. In some areas, I guess, in the aftermath of Tet there was
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