Once again they could have told me what was going on. The first I heard of the move was a day or two before, and this was more of a rumor than anything else.
The move of the 7th Marines 54 kilometers to the southeast was fraught with problems from the beginning. This was not to be a short tactical move, but a permanent one. In addition to men and equipment based at the regiment's seven cantonments scattered throughout the soon-to-be-vacated area of operations, all property assigned to the regiment would also be moved, necessitating use of the division's entire rolling stock. first to go would be the 2nd Bn. By the morninng of the 15th, Lt. Col. Lugger's Marines and their equipment were loaded on board 120 trucks at Dai La Pass and ready to head down Highway 1. "This was," according to Major Peter S. Beck, Regt. S-4, "the greatest single mistake we could have made, since it become readily apparent that it was absolutely impossible to control 120 vehicles in one convoy on a narrow dirt road, many sections of which were only passable one way at a time."
What occurred later in the day on the 15th could only be termed a fiasco. As Lugger's Marines moved south, without the aid of control vehicles or military police stationed at obvious choke points, unbeknownst, a 35-truck, 9th Engineer convoy, loaded with wide-angle-bladed Eimco tractors, was moving north from Chu Lai. They met at the one place on Route 1 that could have precipitated the worst bottleneck possible: a one-way, one-vehicle-at-a-time, pontoon bridge. (I remember sitting alongside the road for a long time, of course nobody told us anything. We hadn't been there very long when the Coke Kids showed up and started hustling beer and pop. They had just changed the money and several of us still had some of the old, no-longer-any-good, MPC. We rolled up some of the bad money with a nickell or dime on the outside and paid for our drinks. The kids cried and carried on something fierce when they saw they'd been had. We thought it a fine joke, though I sort of felt sorry for them, but not so sorry that I paid them. When we got close to where we were going we quite doing this, no use making trouble for ourselves.) Riding in front of the 120-truck convoy was Major Beck, and as he later reported:
Needless to say, the tractor-trailors going north completely blocked the road so that
the southbound convoy could not cross and could not pass if they could cross.
And the northbound convoy, which was the tractor-trailors with the bulldozers,
completely blocked their portion of the road. Consequently, we had a four-and-one-half-hour
bottleneck at this bridge, which ate up most of the day, and additionally, at one point
in the road, concentrated in excess of 150 pieces of large rolling stock plus all the
equipment that they werecarrying and troops....We finally managed to unsnarl the
bottleneck, by allowing the northbound convoy,with the wide-load angle blades, to pass
first because there was no way possible for the southbound convoy to pass. In doing
this we had to back up the 120 trucks off the right shoulder of the road, so that
the truck convoy going north could pass. This was an unbelievable task, since
Marines who can't move in either direction become very fustrated and all of a
sudden we had 1,000 traffic control personnel: everybody thinking they knew
exactly what they were doing.
The Marines finally resolved the problem and the convoy continued: however, it was so late in the day when it arrived at LZ Baldy that it could not proceed to its final destination, LZ Ross, 16 kilometers inland. (At this time Baldy was still an Army base. I remember how suprised we were at the amount of shooting and grenade throwing went on all night. I don't think anything was going on, they just shot at any real or imagined cause. The truck I was on spent the night parked next to a supply area. There were several pallets of stuff stacked up against the wire fence that surrounded it. I took a couple of guys and went over to see what was there, and LO AND BEHOLD they were crates of Long Rats. Having once been a Boy Scout I was ready with my handy knife. It was quick work to cut the back out of a crate and start pulling out cases. We all grabbed two each and took off. For the next few weeks we had some welcome additions to our C-Rats.) Again, this presented an unacceptable tactical situation: 120 trucks and a large proportion of Lugger's Marine's sitting on Baldy's landing strip - a lucrative mortar target. The battalion convoy was in fact mortared on the night of the 15th, but fortunately only one Marine was wounded. The following morning, the convoy traveled the 16 kilometers along Route 535 to LZ Ross without incident.
With one battalion's move completed, the movement procedures and schedule of the remaining two had to be revised due to the problems encountered on the 15th. In discussions which followed the move, division and regimental planners decided that instead of trucks, CH-53 helicopters would be used to move,troops, while equipment would be carried by 30-truck convoys spaced over a period of days, instead of a single, 120 truck vonvoy. In addition, military police would be assigned to each bridge, choke point, and curve, and "roadmaster" jeeps would patrol Highway 1, regulating the flow of traffic. (Even though 2nd Bn. was moved they took several of us back to Dai La to hold the place, I guess whoever was supposed to take over for us didn't make it. It was really spooky, there were only about 10-15 of us there. I remember looking around that big area and wondering what we were supposed to do if they made a effort to take it.) Beginning on the 17th, men and equipment of the 3rd, and the then the 1st Bn., moved without incident to LZ Baldy, and by 23 August, the regiment had settled into its new area of operations, which encompassed a large portion of the Que Son Valley.
Lying south of the rugged, jungle-covered Que Son Mountains, the fertile Que Son Valley spread northeastward from its head at Hiep Duc into the costal plain between Hoi An and Tam Ky. Running through its center, in an easterly and then northeasterly direction, was the Song Ly Ly which marked the boundary between Quang Nam and Quang Tin Provinces, and also the new areas of responsibility of the 1st Marine and Americal Division.