Trapped
Trapped
I tried to get the MLR on the telephone. It was dead. It had probably been cut. I grabbed the radio microphone from Rosie, and reported in. Capt..Joe Digereo, the company Commander was directly above us in the trenches at the top of the Cone
He said “split into two groups and engage the enemy to the front and to the rear. Keep a tight perimeter. Try to push the group farther out. Try to get a little separation. We will try to bring machine gun fire on the outer enemy force. We can see the firefight with the outer ambush, but it is hard to see who is who.
I said “wait a second Joe, we are catching a lot of hell right now. Let me talk to Sgt. Grole. We were strung out when they hit us. He needs to get the squad leaders to set up. We are surrounded.
“Sgt Grole Capt Digereo will be bringing in machine gun fire on the enemy in front of us, and let us direct it in as close as possible.”
Grole said ” Ok that might work. We will keep them busy with two squads to the front and two the rear.
We have no contact with the sentries at the bottom of the hill. The enemy in back of you is so close to the side of the hill that we can’t see them very well. Keep up heavy fire on them. We can see your automatic weapons when they fire better the small arms fire. That will help us. Force them to return fire. The more we can see the better chance we have to find them. We will start with a thirty caliber machine gun on the outer force. Try to direct us to bring it in as close as possible to your position on all three sides. We will fire very short bursts at first. We will increase the fire and bring the fifty caliber machine guns to bear on them when you think you can direct it with minimum danger to your own patrol. And Dave, there is no help out there. No one close enough to get there in time. It’s too early in the night. We can get this done by ourselves. I think that they are far enough out from the base of the hill that we will be able to bring fire on them pretty effectively. And if we do, we can make it pretty uncomfortable for them. They set up a great ambush for you. They would love to overrun you quickly and head for home, but we will turn the tables on them. Your guys will feel better when they see our fire from up here. When we run off the outer group, we can take care of that bunch close in. I will be sending help down the hill as soon as it makes sense. Right now it’s not easy with that enemy patrol sitting right at the bottom of the hill looking right up at us. We could try throwing or rolling hand grenades, but the risk of hitting your patrol seems too great. We will try the machine guns first. Once we get them distracted we will be coming down the side of the hill. Try to keep those bastards at the foot of the hill around a while.
I would love to mess them up a bit; send a message. Maybe they will think twice about doing this again. We run a lot of patrols out of here. We can’t let this keep happening.”
