February 22, 1969 – Sapper Attack Phu Cat AB, RVN
By Michael Sipes, Charley 10 Sniper Ambush Team.

Reading Joe Barbarise’s Sapper Attack story jogged my memories of the event so a put together a brief story of my recollections.

My fire team was assigned to the Idaho Mortar Pit, which if memory serves me correctly was located on the northeast perimeter of Phu Cat. We began taking small arms fire at about 2130h and received a mortar fire mission from FDC at coordinates given by a K‐9 somewhere in front of our location. I don’t remember who was with me in the pit that night, but believe it was Henderson and maybe Sopher and Duran. In any event, we fired over 400 HE rounds and a number of flares that night through our gun.

A short while after our fire mission began, the K‐9 working the fence in front of Idaho approached us from the dark after exchanging the appropriate challenges was allow to approach the pit. The K-9 handler had been wounded in the elbow by AK-47 fire and was taken for medical attention up by the duty driver who was resupplying us with mortar rounds. I would be very interested in knowing if anyone remembers who the K-9 handler was, and what was the outcome of his injury’s.

The next morning, I was assigned recon to recover bodies.

All photo’s are by me as I had just received a new Minolta camera that day and had taken with me to the mortar pit that night to read the manual and learn how to use it.

Photos : WARNING - GRAPHIC PHOTOS!
Ton & Half 37th Security Police in ton'n'half Truck, recovering enemy dead, wounded.

After the February attack, I was getting pretty short. I had about 60 days left to mark off on the FIGMO calendar. I continued rotating with my fire team between IRT duty on the APC, working the mortars, and ambushes. I may have also pulled a week up on Hill-151 during my last month also.

Although we didn’t experience any other combat during those last two months, I remember being pretty shaky on ambush during my last week. With only three or four more days of duty in country, I was on an ambush north of the base, set up in a bamboo hedge row, when we heard a disturbance about 70 or 80 meters in front of our position. We unloaded with the M‐40 grenade-launcher, the M‐60, and our M‐16s. After calling for mortar support, we booked it back to Phu Cat under the cover of the mortar fire.

The next morning, a recon team was sent out and found a dead 250 pound boar, leaving me with a new nick-name of “Fearless Pig‐Killer” for my last couple of days in country.