PINNED DOWN

BY HOTEL 2/7

 

Hotel Company, 2nd Battalion

7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division

                                                                  

uring 1967, alternating companies of 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment were rotated to an outpost approximately twenty-five miles northwest of Da Nang, Republic of Viet Nam. Hill 190 was their base and it was located in a real hot spot. Situated at the edge of Elephant Valley, it sat astride one of the main routes of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. My unit, Combined Action Platoon (CAP) Quebec-Three (Q-3) was just a stone's throw away. We were dug in on a much smaller hill located near the village of Quang Nam, in Quang Nam province.  

          Quebec-Three was a small unit of twelve Marine volunteers and about twenty-two Vietnamese militiamen called Popular Forces, or PFs. Our mission was to protect the village, train the PFs, and engage in numerous and various policies involved in the new Pacification Program. The 'grunts' in Hotel/2/7 routinely and aggressively patrolled the jungles, rice paddies & mountains, but not in our Tactical Area of Responsibility (TAOR). We, alone, were responsible for the villages and hamlets around Quang Nam. The grunts were not even allowed in the market place, where we often drank cold soda and 'Ba-Mouhi-Ba' ('33' Beer). The CAP Marines felt safe having a company of riflemen nearby, which is why this story is so hard to tell after thirty years.

On the night of 13 December 1967 a patrol of Quebec Hotel Company pinned down Quebec-Three for hours in a rice paddy...