Chapter 2: Ambush
Written by Kit Jarrell and Heidi Thiess
On 19 November 1968, two twelve-man ‘heavy’ reconnaissance teams were inserted five kilometers apart into the Ruong Ruong Valley south of Camp Eagle, their base of operations near the city of Hue.1 The Ruong Ruong was out in the middle of nowhere; deep in the mountains. The entire map they worked in was a ‘free-fire zone’, meaning anything that moved was a target according to the U.S. Army. Their mission was to locate the base camp of the North Vietnamese Army’s (NVA) 5th Regiment, which was known to be in the area, and to possibly confirm and identify the presence of a second regiment. Above all, their objective was to not get caught by enemy troops. Get in, find the enemy and get out. As members of one of the Army's 101st Airborne Long Range Patrol companies, that was their job: Silent, yet deadly.
The first team, Team 26 led by SSG Richard Burnell, had a primary mission to observe enemy movement and a secondary mission to locate and destroy an enemy radio transmitter near their Landing Zone (LZ). The second team, Team 24 was led by SGT Alberto D. Contreros, a Cuban immigrant from New York City. Their primary mission was to observe enemy movement and their secondary mission, as a ‘hunter/killer’ team, was to intercept and ambush NVA units. Contreros was a highly trained elite soldier, an honor graduate of both 101st Recondo School at Fort Campbell and MACV Recondo in Vietnam. He was also a highly motivated soldier; so motivated, in fact, that he was considered excessively bold by many of the other men. He was a new TL, and had taken over Team 24 from SGT Reynel Martinez just shortly before.2
In Eyes of the Eagle, Linderer said, "I didn't know him well...I think he felt he could march right through the Ruong Roung valley with his twelve-man team, kicking ass all the way."3
"I think [Contreros] wanted a body count," Linderer told us. "He actually seemed to like combat."4
Martinez, who helped train Contreros, echoed Linderer's sentiments. "Contreros was a good guy, but there were some issues."5
There was some swapping done between the LRP teams for assignments. Men jockeyed for positions on teams where they would be with the men they trusted the most. In Sp4 Kenn Miller’s case, he traded places with Sp4 Art Heringhausen so he could go out on Burnell’s team and get experience with the new lieutenant. Heringhausen went to Team 24; as did Sp4 Terry Clifton, who wanted to go on a mission with his best friend, Sp4 Gary Linderer.
Once the team rosters were in place, the men stocked up on ammunition; a few extra clips here, an extra grenade or two there. They knew there would be NVA in the area. They just didn’t know how many. It was best to be prepared. The Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) reports showed massive troop movements within the last 60 days.6 Although the intelligence reports showed at least one regiment, there was no way of knowing if the rest of the enemy troops moving through the area were still there.
Flyovers and visual recon (VRs) of the two Areas of Operation (AOs) had been conducted the day before by the two chopper pilots (CPT Bill Meacham and WO2 W.T. Grant), the Commanding Officer (CO) of F/58th, CPT Ken Eklund, and the TLs and ATLs. Burnell’s team was fortunate that their AO had at least seven good LZs. Contreros’ team, on the other hand, had only one LZ, and a poor one at that. The teams set out for their designated landing zone (LZ) late in the afternoon of 19 November, and from the start, things went wrong.
Having only one LZ was an uncomfortable reality; a single exit if things got bad was not an optimal situation. During the flyover the day before, they thought it looked alright. Unfortunately, once the team was over it and ready to go in, they realized that the elephant grass beneath them was very long and potentially dangerous. How long no one could tell. Two feet was not an issue. Twenty feet would be.
CPT Eklund, in the AO in a LOH (Light Observation Helicopter), wasn’t comfortable with the situation either, and made a last-minute decision to abort the mission. Having only one LZ was bad enough; having a dangerous one was just asking for trouble.
“I was giving the order to abort,” said Eklund, “and then I heard the pilot say that one of the guys was already jumping out of the chopper.”7 That first man out, according to one of the men on the other team, was SGT Albert Contreros, giving the order for the team to jump in behind him.
“Once one man had gone into the LZ, they would all go. No one on the team would ever allow one man to be left on the ground by himself.” recalled William "Wild Bill" Meacham, one of the team’s chopper pilots.8
The rest of the team had to follow their leader by hanging onto the skids of the helicopter and dropping into the long elephant grass that hid the ground. They immediately found themselves dropping a lot further than they had anticipated; fifteen to twenty feet into a ravine. SGT John Sours hurt both of his ankles on a concealed teak log as the team landed roughly on the ground. Determined to stick it out with the team, he told his teammates his injuries were minor so he could stay with them for the remainder of the mission. As the TL, it was Contreros’ decision to keep Sours in the field overnight, even though Sours’ injuries put the team at a distinct disadvantage if things went bad.
They moved north and quickly found a 'high-speed' trail along a ridgeline three meters wide that was heavily used by NVA troops. Contreros sent two scouts in each direction to recon the trail along the ridgeline and look for enemy activity. Sp4 Linderer went with Sp4 Frank Souza about fifty meters east and found that the trail turned north, climbing the face of the low ridge.
Linderer explains the terrain in Phantom Warriors: Book II:
Contreros had told the men to find a good spot to set up an ambush for enemy troops coming down the trail. LRP rule of thumb: Never ambush a party of more than twice your size. For their 12-man team, that would mean ambushing no more than 24. With Sours injured, that number was perhaps even less. Linderer and Souza found a good site for the ambush on a knoll overlooking the trail where it turned back.
They also found a scout bunker three meters back from the trail. Following the path up the hill, Linderer and Souza saw that the trail turned right again and then continued east.
While inspecting the area around the scout bunker, Linderer and Souza spotted cigarette butts and other signs of recent occupation. They heard a single rifle shot about a klick9 east of their location and knew it was a signal coming from a scout alerting NVA forces that there were men on the ground. Souza and Linderer immediately backtracked to the team, reporting to Contreros. When the team leader heard about the NVA scout and the ambush site, Contreros decided to move the team to the higher ground and set up the ambush.
...He told us
to blow the ambush on the next party
coming down the trail...
By the time the team had set up six claymore mines along the trail and finished their preparations, it was dark. Unbeknownst to them, the twelve men had been inserted into the jungle between two large forces of NVA. Enemy soldiers moved up and down the trail with flashlights throughout the night, searching for the men who had arrived before dark. In an effort to bait the American soldiers, the NVA would send a small squad down the trail; following it a few moments later with a larger force. Contreros decided not to rise to the bait. The team laid still and let them pass, at one point within 10 feet of the men, severely outnumbered and praying they were not detected.
When dawn finally came, it was obvious that SGT Sours was severely injured due to his jump from the helicopter. Both ankles were broken and he was unable to walk. Contreros called for a medevac to pick up Sours, and sent Souza and Sp4 Riley Cox back to the LZ to wait for the chopper with him. Clifton accompanied as security for Souza and Cox, who had to help Sours walk. At this point, Contreros was again faced with a decision. His team was down one member, and there were literally thousands of NVA in the area.10 The young sergeant decided to press on with the mission.
After the extraction of Sours, the men returned to the team and heard two rifle shots; signaling "all clear" for the NVA. After this signal, the team believed that the scout assumed the entire team had left the area on the chopper. The NVA sent a single soldier down the trail soon after and again the team let him pass.
"He [Contreros] told us to blow the ambush on the next party coming down the trail," said Cox.11
Some time after the lone soldier, they heard voices coming down the trail from the east. Contreros gave the signal to start the ambush, confirming his order to blow the mines on his command. At the time Linderer was lying on the top of the knoll. "Heads going by was all I could see at the time," said Linderer. Ten NVA came down the trail, talking amongst themselves, "and we blew the ambush."
Contreros snapped his fingers, and the trail was filled with the sounds and shrapnel of multiple claymore mines detonating. After a few seconds Linderer and Souza saw the point man running down the trail. He was wearing an olive drab green uniform and a towel around his neck. Souza and Linderer both fired at him, and though Souza managed to knock the towel off the soldier's neck as he ran for the jungle, the enemy soldier was able to make it into the thick foliage, escaping to warn the NVA that the men were still on the ground.
Walking down the knoll to check the bodies, the team confirmed that the nine remaining NVA had been caught in the ambush.
"They were all wearing olive-drab uniforms and...boonie caps," Linderer stated in 2001 .12 There was an NVA major with a map case full of documents. Four were regular infantry troops carrying AK-47s, but four of them were female NVA nurses, carrying medical supplies in their rucksacks. SGT Jim Bacon, the senior radio telephone operator (RTO), remembers seeing the American prescription drugs and syringes, provided by the Quakers, that filled the rucksacks.13 All but one of the women had .45-caliber pistols. Linderer and Cox both told us that knowing some of the bodies were female was hard for them. "I was engaged to a nurse," Linderer told us. "It was just...it bothered me at the time."
"You gotta understand though," said Cox, "the women were armed." He went on to say that the team didn't know they were female before detonating the mines. The men were told by their team leader to blow the ambush on the next enemy group down the trail, and they did.
Eight of the enemy soldiers had been killed outright, and the ninth was still alive, but barely. Linderer described her injuries to us as "severe...she was missing a limb, she had multiple penetration wounds to her torso." He went on to say that the NVA female lived at most three minutes after the ambush was blown.
The team stripped the bodies and took the NVA equipment and other gear back up to the knoll. When Contreros radioed in the ambush to the CO, he was told to withdraw to the LZ, because a Reaction Force (RF) from 2/17th Cavalry was on its way to “develop the situation”. The team would meet up with the RF, board the choppers and rearm in-flight, and then be reinserted into SSG Burnell’s AO.
Looking to Contreros for the order to move out before being discovered, the team soon found out their leader had other ideas. Sp4 Larry Chambers was on Burnell’s team, five klicks away. He remembers Eklund explaining what happened after the mission:
"He wanted to stay there and develop the situation," Martinez told us. "He knew that staying at an ambush site was the worst possible thing to do...but he thought he could outsmart the enemy." It was Contreros' belief that they could do some real damage if they waited for the enemy to come investigate the explosion, effectively ambushing their own ambush. With a reaction force on its way, Contreros was confident in his bold plan.
Kenn Miller agrees with Martinez. "Sometimes you do something incredibly stupid that ends up being brilliant. In this case, with everything else that happened, it ended up just being stupid."15
The team grew increasingly nervous as the minutes ticked by. Jim Venable, the Assistant Team Leader, pulled Contreros aside, whispering his concern for their safety. Next it was Linderer and Souza, voicing their desire to move out. Contreros listened, but ordered the team to stay put. He had been told a reaction force was coming in to reinforce them, and he wanted to stay and wait. Some of the men sat back down in their ambush positions and hurriedly finished eating their rations, hoping the call would come soon telling them the choppers were on their way.
The original plan had been for Team 24 to scout the area, find the enemy, and then the men would be extracted. A reaction force was to be planted in behind them, who would exploit the intelligence passed to them by the LRP team. However, after more than an hour of anxious waiting, they were told that not only was there no reaction force, but there was no extraction. The choppers normally assigned to wait for their call had been sent to a major infantry exercise miles away. CPT Meacham went ballistic when he found out that his and Grant’s choppers had been pulled from the LRP assignment:
Team 24 was stuck. They were surrounded by enemy soldiers who were undoubtedly closing in on them at that very moment, and they had already spent far too long at the ambush site waiting for help that hadn't come. In order to get out alive, they would have to escape and evade.
_______________________
Team 26
• Team Leader (TL): SSG Richard Burnell
• Asst. Team Leader (ATL) SGT John Burford
• Senior Radio Transmitter Operator (RTO): LT Owen Williams
• Junior RTO: Sp4 Kenn Miller
• John Meszaros
• Jim Schwarz
• Don Harris
• “Snuffy” Smith
• Jim Evans
• Larry Chambers
• Team Medic: “Doc” Proctor
Team 24
• TL: SGT Al Contreros
• ATL: SGT Jim Venable
• Senior RTO: Sp4 Jim Bacon
• Junior RTO: Sp4 Billy Walkabout
• Sp4 Terry Clifton
• Sp4 Riley Cox
• Sp4 Steve Czepurny
• Sp4 Art Heringhausen
• Sp4 Gary Linderer
• SGT Mike Reiff
• Sp4 Frank Souza
• SGT John Sours
________________________________
1Coordinates for the insertion point are not known, as the Duty Officer's Radio Logs left that out. However, we were able to ascertain the location of the incidents through reconstruction and interviews of personnel on the reaction force, as well as soldiers from D/2/501. See Map.
2From interviews conducted with members of the teams. While they all agreed that Contreros was sometimes overly bold, they all insisted that he was a good team member and knew what he was doing in the field.
3Linderer, Gary. Eyes of the Eagle, p. 174.
4Interview with Gary Linderer, 07/05/05.
5Interview with Reynel Martinez, 07/05/05.
6Estimates of the number of enemy in the area differ; but were consistently in the thousands. It had been confirmed that at least the 5th regiment was in the area, with all assorted support personnel.
7Interview with Kenneth Eklund, 07/05/05.
8Meacham, Bill. Lest We Forget, p.272.
9‘ klick’ = 1 kilometer or 1000 meters
10Interview with Riley Cox, 6/05.
11Deposition of Gary Linderer during legal action brought against him in 2001 by Don Hall.
12Interview with Jim Bacon, 07/05/05.
13Chambers, Larry. Recondo, p. 68.
14Interview with Kenn Miller, 07/05/05.
15Lest We Forget, p.274.
On 19 November 1968, two twelve-man ‘heavy’ reconnaissance teams were inserted five kilometers apart into the Ruong Ruong Valley south of Camp Eagle, their base of operations near the city of Hue.1 The Ruong Ruong was out in the middle of nowhere; deep in the mountains. The entire map they worked in was a ‘free-fire zone’, meaning anything that moved was a target according to the U.S. Army. Their mission was to locate the base camp of the North Vietnamese Army’s (NVA) 5th Regiment, which was known to be in the area, and to possibly confirm and identify the presence of a second regiment. Above all, their objective was to not get caught by enemy troops. Get in, find the enemy and get out. As members of one of the Army's 101st Airborne Long Range Patrol companies, that was their job: Silent, yet deadly.
The first team, Team 26 led by SSG Richard Burnell, had a primary mission to observe enemy movement and a secondary mission to locate and destroy an enemy radio transmitter near their Landing Zone (LZ). The second team, Team 24 was led by SGT Alberto D. Contreros, a Cuban immigrant from New York City. Their primary mission was to observe enemy movement and their secondary mission, as a ‘hunter/killer’ team, was to intercept and ambush NVA units. Contreros was a highly trained elite soldier, an honor graduate of both 101st Recondo School at Fort Campbell and MACV Recondo in Vietnam. He was also a highly motivated soldier; so motivated, in fact, that he was considered excessively bold by many of the other men. He was a new TL, and had taken over Team 24 from SGT Reynel Martinez just shortly before.2
In Eyes of the Eagle, Linderer said, "I didn't know him well...I think he felt he could march right through the Ruong Roung valley with his twelve-man team, kicking ass all the way."3
"I think [Contreros] wanted a body count," Linderer told us. "He actually seemed to like combat."4
Martinez, who helped train Contreros, echoed Linderer's sentiments. "Contreros was a good guy, but there were some issues."5
There was some swapping done between the LRP teams for assignments. Men jockeyed for positions on teams where they would be with the men they trusted the most. In Sp4 Kenn Miller’s case, he traded places with Sp4 Art Heringhausen so he could go out on Burnell’s team and get experience with the new lieutenant. Heringhausen went to Team 24; as did Sp4 Terry Clifton, who wanted to go on a mission with his best friend, Sp4 Gary Linderer.
Once the team rosters were in place, the men stocked up on ammunition; a few extra clips here, an extra grenade or two there. They knew there would be NVA in the area. They just didn’t know how many. It was best to be prepared. The Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) reports showed massive troop movements within the last 60 days.6 Although the intelligence reports showed at least one regiment, there was no way of knowing if the rest of the enemy troops moving through the area were still there.
Flyovers and visual recon (VRs) of the two Areas of Operation (AOs) had been conducted the day before by the two chopper pilots (CPT Bill Meacham and WO2 W.T. Grant), the Commanding Officer (CO) of F/58th, CPT Ken Eklund, and the TLs and ATLs. Burnell’s team was fortunate that their AO had at least seven good LZs. Contreros’ team, on the other hand, had only one LZ, and a poor one at that. The teams set out for their designated landing zone (LZ) late in the afternoon of 19 November, and from the start, things went wrong.
Having only one LZ was an uncomfortable reality; a single exit if things got bad was not an optimal situation. During the flyover the day before, they thought it looked alright. Unfortunately, once the team was over it and ready to go in, they realized that the elephant grass beneath them was very long and potentially dangerous. How long no one could tell. Two feet was not an issue. Twenty feet would be.
CPT Eklund, in the AO in a LOH (Light Observation Helicopter), wasn’t comfortable with the situation either, and made a last-minute decision to abort the mission. Having only one LZ was bad enough; having a dangerous one was just asking for trouble.
“I was giving the order to abort,” said Eklund, “and then I heard the pilot say that one of the guys was already jumping out of the chopper.”7 That first man out, according to one of the men on the other team, was SGT Albert Contreros, giving the order for the team to jump in behind him.
“Once one man had gone into the LZ, they would all go. No one on the team would ever allow one man to be left on the ground by himself.” recalled William "Wild Bill" Meacham, one of the team’s chopper pilots.8
The rest of the team had to follow their leader by hanging onto the skids of the helicopter and dropping into the long elephant grass that hid the ground. They immediately found themselves dropping a lot further than they had anticipated; fifteen to twenty feet into a ravine. SGT John Sours hurt both of his ankles on a concealed teak log as the team landed roughly on the ground. Determined to stick it out with the team, he told his teammates his injuries were minor so he could stay with them for the remainder of the mission. As the TL, it was Contreros’ decision to keep Sours in the field overnight, even though Sours’ injuries put the team at a distinct disadvantage if things went bad.
They moved north and quickly found a 'high-speed' trail along a ridgeline three meters wide that was heavily used by NVA troops. Contreros sent two scouts in each direction to recon the trail along the ridgeline and look for enemy activity. Sp4 Linderer went with Sp4 Frank Souza about fifty meters east and found that the trail turned north, climbing the face of the low ridge.
Linderer explains the terrain in Phantom Warriors: Book II:
The terrain dropped off sharply on our right flank. The crest of the ridgeline above us did a little dogleg before continuing to the east. On our left flank, perhaps two meters above the trail, the ridge top pulled up onto a little knoll overlooking the trail.
Contreros had told the men to find a good spot to set up an ambush for enemy troops coming down the trail. LRP rule of thumb: Never ambush a party of more than twice your size. For their 12-man team, that would mean ambushing no more than 24. With Sours injured, that number was perhaps even less. Linderer and Souza found a good site for the ambush on a knoll overlooking the trail where it turned back.
They also found a scout bunker three meters back from the trail. Following the path up the hill, Linderer and Souza saw that the trail turned right again and then continued east.
While inspecting the area around the scout bunker, Linderer and Souza spotted cigarette butts and other signs of recent occupation. They heard a single rifle shot about a klick9 east of their location and knew it was a signal coming from a scout alerting NVA forces that there were men on the ground. Souza and Linderer immediately backtracked to the team, reporting to Contreros. When the team leader heard about the NVA scout and the ambush site, Contreros decided to move the team to the higher ground and set up the ambush.
...He told us
to blow the ambush on the next party
coming down the trail...
By the time the team had set up six claymore mines along the trail and finished their preparations, it was dark. Unbeknownst to them, the twelve men had been inserted into the jungle between two large forces of NVA. Enemy soldiers moved up and down the trail with flashlights throughout the night, searching for the men who had arrived before dark. In an effort to bait the American soldiers, the NVA would send a small squad down the trail; following it a few moments later with a larger force. Contreros decided not to rise to the bait. The team laid still and let them pass, at one point within 10 feet of the men, severely outnumbered and praying they were not detected.
When dawn finally came, it was obvious that SGT Sours was severely injured due to his jump from the helicopter. Both ankles were broken and he was unable to walk. Contreros called for a medevac to pick up Sours, and sent Souza and Sp4 Riley Cox back to the LZ to wait for the chopper with him. Clifton accompanied as security for Souza and Cox, who had to help Sours walk. At this point, Contreros was again faced with a decision. His team was down one member, and there were literally thousands of NVA in the area.10 The young sergeant decided to press on with the mission.
After the extraction of Sours, the men returned to the team and heard two rifle shots; signaling "all clear" for the NVA. After this signal, the team believed that the scout assumed the entire team had left the area on the chopper. The NVA sent a single soldier down the trail soon after and again the team let him pass.
"He [Contreros] told us to blow the ambush on the next party coming down the trail," said Cox.11
Some time after the lone soldier, they heard voices coming down the trail from the east. Contreros gave the signal to start the ambush, confirming his order to blow the mines on his command. At the time Linderer was lying on the top of the knoll. "Heads going by was all I could see at the time," said Linderer. Ten NVA came down the trail, talking amongst themselves, "and we blew the ambush."
Contreros snapped his fingers, and the trail was filled with the sounds and shrapnel of multiple claymore mines detonating. After a few seconds Linderer and Souza saw the point man running down the trail. He was wearing an olive drab green uniform and a towel around his neck. Souza and Linderer both fired at him, and though Souza managed to knock the towel off the soldier's neck as he ran for the jungle, the enemy soldier was able to make it into the thick foliage, escaping to warn the NVA that the men were still on the ground.
Walking down the knoll to check the bodies, the team confirmed that the nine remaining NVA had been caught in the ambush.
"They were all wearing olive-drab uniforms and...boonie caps," Linderer stated in 2001 .12 There was an NVA major with a map case full of documents. Four were regular infantry troops carrying AK-47s, but four of them were female NVA nurses, carrying medical supplies in their rucksacks. SGT Jim Bacon, the senior radio telephone operator (RTO), remembers seeing the American prescription drugs and syringes, provided by the Quakers, that filled the rucksacks.13 All but one of the women had .45-caliber pistols. Linderer and Cox both told us that knowing some of the bodies were female was hard for them. "I was engaged to a nurse," Linderer told us. "It was just...it bothered me at the time."
"You gotta understand though," said Cox, "the women were armed." He went on to say that the team didn't know they were female before detonating the mines. The men were told by their team leader to blow the ambush on the next enemy group down the trail, and they did.
Eight of the enemy soldiers had been killed outright, and the ninth was still alive, but barely. Linderer described her injuries to us as "severe...she was missing a limb, she had multiple penetration wounds to her torso." He went on to say that the NVA female lived at most three minutes after the ambush was blown.
The team stripped the bodies and took the NVA equipment and other gear back up to the knoll. When Contreros radioed in the ambush to the CO, he was told to withdraw to the LZ, because a Reaction Force (RF) from 2/17th Cavalry was on its way to “develop the situation”. The team would meet up with the RF, board the choppers and rearm in-flight, and then be reinserted into SSG Burnell’s AO.
Looking to Contreros for the order to move out before being discovered, the team soon found out their leader had other ideas. Sp4 Larry Chambers was on Burnell’s team, five klicks away. He remembers Eklund explaining what happened after the mission:
“I told Contreros to take his team and get out of there. I wanted them to lay dog some place safer until we could get choppers and reinforcements. But he didn’t want to leave the ambush site.”14
"He wanted to stay there and develop the situation," Martinez told us. "He knew that staying at an ambush site was the worst possible thing to do...but he thought he could outsmart the enemy." It was Contreros' belief that they could do some real damage if they waited for the enemy to come investigate the explosion, effectively ambushing their own ambush. With a reaction force on its way, Contreros was confident in his bold plan.
Kenn Miller agrees with Martinez. "Sometimes you do something incredibly stupid that ends up being brilliant. In this case, with everything else that happened, it ended up just being stupid."15
The team grew increasingly nervous as the minutes ticked by. Jim Venable, the Assistant Team Leader, pulled Contreros aside, whispering his concern for their safety. Next it was Linderer and Souza, voicing their desire to move out. Contreros listened, but ordered the team to stay put. He had been told a reaction force was coming in to reinforce them, and he wanted to stay and wait. Some of the men sat back down in their ambush positions and hurriedly finished eating their rations, hoping the call would come soon telling them the choppers were on their way.
The original plan had been for Team 24 to scout the area, find the enemy, and then the men would be extracted. A reaction force was to be planted in behind them, who would exploit the intelligence passed to them by the LRP team. However, after more than an hour of anxious waiting, they were told that not only was there no reaction force, but there was no extraction. The choppers normally assigned to wait for their call had been sent to a major infantry exercise miles away. CPT Meacham went ballistic when he found out that his and Grant’s choppers had been pulled from the LRP assignment:
“That didn’t make any sense to me, or maybe wasn’t ready to accept what I was hearing. ‘If all of the aircraft are going to be committed [to divisional troop movements], who’s going to cover the teams we have in?
MAJ Addiss sat there staring at me, shaking his head, and said, ‘Nobody.’”16
Team 24 was stuck. They were surrounded by enemy soldiers who were undoubtedly closing in on them at that very moment, and they had already spent far too long at the ambush site waiting for help that hadn't come. In order to get out alive, they would have to escape and evade.
_______________________
Team 26
• Team Leader (TL): SSG Richard Burnell
• Asst. Team Leader (ATL) SGT John Burford
• Senior Radio Transmitter Operator (RTO): LT Owen Williams
• Junior RTO: Sp4 Kenn Miller
• John Meszaros
• Jim Schwarz
• Don Harris
• “Snuffy” Smith
• Jim Evans
• Larry Chambers
• Team Medic: “Doc” Proctor
Team 24
• TL: SGT Al Contreros
• ATL: SGT Jim Venable
• Senior RTO: Sp4 Jim Bacon
• Junior RTO: Sp4 Billy Walkabout
• Sp4 Terry Clifton
• Sp4 Riley Cox
• Sp4 Steve Czepurny
• Sp4 Art Heringhausen
• Sp4 Gary Linderer
• SGT Mike Reiff
• Sp4 Frank Souza
• SGT John Sours
________________________________
1Coordinates for the insertion point are not known, as the Duty Officer's Radio Logs left that out. However, we were able to ascertain the location of the incidents through reconstruction and interviews of personnel on the reaction force, as well as soldiers from D/2/501. See Map.
2From interviews conducted with members of the teams. While they all agreed that Contreros was sometimes overly bold, they all insisted that he was a good team member and knew what he was doing in the field.
3Linderer, Gary. Eyes of the Eagle, p. 174.
4Interview with Gary Linderer, 07/05/05.
5Interview with Reynel Martinez, 07/05/05.
6Estimates of the number of enemy in the area differ; but were consistently in the thousands. It had been confirmed that at least the 5th regiment was in the area, with all assorted support personnel.
7Interview with Kenneth Eklund, 07/05/05.
8Meacham, Bill. Lest We Forget, p.272.
9‘ klick’ = 1 kilometer or 1000 meters
10Interview with Riley Cox, 6/05.
11Deposition of Gary Linderer during legal action brought against him in 2001 by Don Hall.
12Interview with Jim Bacon, 07/05/05.
13Chambers, Larry. Recondo, p. 68.
14Interview with Kenn Miller, 07/05/05.
15Lest We Forget, p.274.
posted by Kit Jarrell at 18:49
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