"It Shook The Ground Under Us"
20 September 1968

        It started off as another quiet uneventful night on ambush when the Viet Cong blew up the Highway 15 bridge over the Buong River this morning and attacked the MACV/ARVN outpost at Phuoc Cang.

The explosion was a big one, it shook the ground under us. We were two clicks away but you would have sworn it was just next door. It scared the hell out of me until I realized it wasn’t one of our outpost disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

Everyone in the ambush team was wide eyed after the shock wave passed and the shooting started. Every now and then you could also hear the thud of an RPG round hitting the outpost watch tower. It would immediately be followed by the familiar sound and tracers of their 50 cal. machinegun returning fire at the VC.

Things are going to be screwed up on the highway for a while until they build a bypass. There was a lot of shooting going on but I didn’t hear anything about any casualties over the battalion radio net. I knew that before the morning light came we would get a radio call from Battalion to proceed to the site and sweep our side of the river below the bridge.

About an hour before sunrise the radio call came in, it was going to be another long hot morning on recon before we could finally get some sleep. We walked out of our position up along the Finger of Land east towards the highway. It was still dark so we waited off in the distance until the safety of the morning light before proceeding on to the highway.

By the time we arrived they already had the engineers out working on building a temporary bypass. There was to much activity and too many unfamiliar units on the roadway for us to chance coming out of the darkness unannounced and getting fired on by some jumpy engineers.

The VC did a good job, the entire span was laying in the water. The old French brick watch tower where the 50 cal. is positioned at the center of the outpost was pockmarked on both sides facing the village where the RPG rounds hit it. Plenty of brass were on the scene surveying the damage.

We started our sweep along the river westward for about half a mile without finding anything of interest. I didn’t really think we would, the VC probably came at the bridge from the east with the outgoing tide.

From the Journal of, CPL Thomas T. Watson, B Company, 720th MP Battalion, March 1968 to March 1969.