During the first night of the TET68 offensive I was in a tent at
the edge of Camp Coryell airfield. In front of us were at least four, maybe
more, of our slicks. Just past them was the perimeter, a road, and an Esso gas station. It appeared well maintained and was painted "I surrender white". They probably would check oil and do your windshield,( that i remember).
About 7pm (always had a hard time with the 24 hour thing) an old
Citron four-door came bouncing past the base side of our tent. The car was
packed with five or six dusty nuns working their beads a mile a minute...i remember thinking,.... this is not a good sign. This was soon confirmed by a member of the 155th who popped into our not very fortified tent and droped off a case of grenades. I guess we were supposed to hide behind these ......as throwing grenades in a tent probably wouldn't have worked out . So we turned in.. secure in our tent surrounded by our new friends the grenades and knowing that somewhere in the compound we had us some nuns with beads!
Sometime later the shooting started. Not being much fun from the
inside of a canvas tent and in order not to miss anything, i did the
low crawl out of the flaps and under the maintenance trailer where I found Don Smith. We decided there wasn't much we could except watch the laser (tracer) light show and keep an eye out for somebody smallish coming toward us. I asked Smitty if maybe we should get some of the grenades, just in case.
"dumb-ass, he said, how you going to throw a grenade from under here?"
Good point! Well the shooting went on for quite some time.....quite possibly not as long as it seemed ...eventually petering out. It seemed to me most was out-going anyway as evident in the holes in our slicks.....and the poor Esso station. What had been a pristine little 30ish gas station was now more like
swiss cheese world.
Well that's it! don't remember anything else.....wait a
minute ....what about that home grown explosive device we found?......
later,
sp5 Pete Wootton
