LZ Vandegrift

Submitted by Ron Griffin, SGT. A/1-82 FA
October 1970

In Oct. of 1970, I was assigned as a young "Shake and Bake" E5 Gunner/Section Chief to A Battery 1st of the 82nd FA with the American Div. near Chu Lai Combat Base in South Vietnam.

In late January through April of 1971 our Battalion (less D Battery) moved north to the DMZ area as part of Operation Dewey Canyon II/Lam Son 719, the ARVN incursion into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Ming Trail.

A Battery along with a Platoon from our B Battery spent most of the operation on LZ Vandegriff, along Route 9 south of Khe Sanh.

In March word came down that Intel. suspected that an NVA Division was massing in the "Rockpile" area east of Vandegriff for an attempt on cutting the highway by over-running the fire base.

At the time, there were six guns from A Battery and three from B Battery of 1/82. All were M114 155-mm towed howitzers. Also on Vandergriff was B/5-4 with six M109 howitzers.

Beginning around 8:00 a.m. all 15 guns were used to fire at suspected assembly areas within a four or five grid square area. Fire missions lasted all day and during that time it was estimated more than 7,000 rounds of 155-mm high-explosive rounds were expended.

The number of rounds expended that day would have been greater if it was not due to several A Battery guns, including mine, being so displaced and mired in their muddy gun pits that they had to be pulled back into place by tracked tank recovery vehicles

The M114 howitzer was a split trail design that fired off of a firing platform and the two trail spades. In Nam, because the soil was often saturated and muddy, we often placed trail stops behind the gun to keep it in place.

In this case I had placed several six foot lengths of 12 x 12 timbers in a semicircle behind the primary direction of fire and had staked them down with fence posts driven about four feet into the ground behind the timbers. It took only about 500 rounds fired over 15-20 minutes to push two of these timbers back almost 10 feet and bury the trail spades four feet in the mud.

It took all eight members of my gun crew almost two days to rebuild the gun pit.