Main Street
I can only imagine that quite a few of the vets from 1970 and the Cambodian campaign would have read John M. Shaw’s book, The Cambodian Campaign. I will occasionally will pick this up and just look at a random page. Did you know the North Viets had logistic units in Cambodia disguised as commercial companies? This was to bring supplies from ships in the port of Sihanoukville. By 1969, it was estimated that the communist forces in the III and IV Corps areas were receiving up to 100 percent of needed supplies from the Sihanoukville Trail, not the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Obviously, the supplies and ammo we captured and/or blew up were on what was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but they well have come from Sihnoukville via Kratie or one of the other distribution centers.
Regarding O Raing, where we were: I have page 95 marked with a piece of tape. I quote,
“Kingston made a smart decision in moving his command post and supply base to O Raing, about 50 kilometers east-northeast of Snoul. Lt. Col. Joe Anderson’s 1/5 Cavalry had just established a camp there; by colocating with Anderson’s infantrymen the brigade HQ gained better security. Such roads as existed from Vietnam were at best poor, so the brigade’s resupply would be almost entirely by air. The grass airfield at O Raing could handle C-7 an C-123 light cargo aircraft, greatly aiding the logistic effort to sustain the force, etc. Airplanes could carry supplies faster than helicopters and left the division’s 18 CH-47 medium-lift helicopters free to respond to unexpected developments. As the engineers realized, however, ‘a grass strip at the beginning of the rainy season was really going to be a SOB to maintain…as the rainy season approached, that thing kept several of us in a sweat most of the time’. ”
And there it is.
Bird-out
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