Eddie Watson, Were you with the 168th Engineers?
Were they involved digging the trench along the Loc Ninh runway for the burial of the NVA?
Richard Magner
rwmagner@gmail.com
Eddie Watson
27-Sep-2021 13:42
The 168th Combat Engineers were a part of this.
Jeff Harvey, A/1-28
10-Jul-2014 23:02
I was with the 1-28th. We were about 4 Ks east of Loc Ninh strip. When they lifted us out 9 or 10 Nov, they droped us on the strip. What I remember about it was the large ditch that had been dug along the east side of the strip that was being used as a mass grave for many VC KIA. There had to be 100s of bodies in the hole. Reading the comments has made me curious. Who was MAJ Maxim and what did he do or no do?
We were bivouacked just off the airstrip, 2/34 th Ar. We left and three or four days later they hit Loc Ninh. Guess they waited til our tanks were gone.
Steve Simms
02-Feb-2013 19:39
Who was Major Maxim and what is the story about him?
Steve Simms I was at Loc Ninh with the 1/26, Author of Common Valor: Ambush At Srok Rung
Dave
28-May-2012 19:11
The artillery battery was at the south west end of the air strip. The fire direction control in Quan Loi was in communications with the battery and forward observers. A line east of the air strip for air support. Artillery fire was directed to the west and south of the air strip as soon as the VC hit. Several of the 105s was doing direct fire into the rubber trees and up the runway. I was stationed with Col Serio of 6th of the 15th Artillery in the First Division. What I do hope is that Major Maxim is suffering in hell.
Mark Brown
21-Jan-2012 05:03
Wonder what happened to the towed quad-fifty that the attackers abandoned as they withdrew from their initial assault on the SF & ARVN forces near the airstrip? I've read a few first-person accounts of this event, but no one mentions the communist quad-fifty that had been positioned to dominate the runway or directly support the assault on the ARVN HQ compound.
What a mess!
Gary Sykes
18-Sep-2009 21:02
I was with A btry 6th/15th at Loc Ninh. Our 6 guns were set up at the end of the airstrip like the drawing shows. My gun is the one that fired down and across the airstrip. Our gun was about 40 yards south of the airstrip and the 2/28th was east and south of us on our perimeter. There is an areial picture online of the positions made a couple of days after Nov. 1st. I know the picture was taken after the first night of that part of the battle because the 1st night we had no parapits or bunkers.
The diagram was very loose as far as scale. You are right that our positions were at the end of the runway, but we were on the perimeter and the guns were actually behind us, since we were providing security for them.
John McCoy
31-Oct-2008 00:39
One thing that gets me about this map...where the howitzer is shown at the bottom of the runway...that is about where my machine gun bunker was, and about where the wheels of the howitzer are is about where the VC Rocket blasted a hole big enough to drop a pickup truck into. There were no howitzers there, they were farther up the runway. Everything else looks accurate to me.