Captain Bill Giolitto was with the 863rd Engineers, Army Reserve.  At the time of this incident, he was a young lieutenant in charge of an armored engineer platoon in an area called "The Iron Triangle" near Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. 

 

Standard operating procedure for the engineers in the field was to setup for the night on the highest ground in the area.  The engineers would setup several hours before sunset, clear a kill zone, set out Claymore directional mines and concertina razor wire, and then circle their APC's and tanks for the night. 

 

On this particular evening, the engineers had finished setting up for the night and were relaxing on top of their tracks watching the on-going war.  In this particular case, it was a UH-1 helicopter doing psychological warfare operations over the jungle.  The chopper mounted a battery of loudspeakers on either side of the bird; these were connected to a tape player.  The operator stuck in a tape and the pilot flew above the jungle with the speaker's blasting.  The engineers watched the chopper pumping its propaganda into the jungle several miles away.

 

After a time, the operator decided he'd had enough of the "surrender to us and you'll be well treated" nonsense.  He popped the tape out and stuck in a tape of Iron Butterfly's 1968 hit "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."  Almost as soon as the first bars of the song began washing over the jungle below, the local VC guerillas were not happy.  [MG Note: To say that Americans and Vietnamese had different tastes in music would be an understatement.  To Americans, Vietnamese music sounded like two cats with their tails tied together and thrown over a clothesline.  To Vietnamese it was a tie over which American music they hated more: hard rock or country and western.] 

 

Suddenly, it seemed like every AK and SKS in the Iron Triangle decided to open up on the helicopter playing the rock music.  Green tracers converged from every point of the compass.  The pilot threw the Huey into a near horizontal right turn in an attempt to evade the pursuing ground fire.  The engineers on their tracks stared dumb-struck at the wildly maneuvering Huey pursued by the green tracers.  Meanwhile, the pilot of the helicopter was up on the radio screaming for help.

 

Help took the form of a USAF Forward Air Controller (FAC) in a Cessna O-1E "Bird Dog" single engine spotter plane orbiting a couple miles away from the beseiged Huey.  Unfortunately for the bad guys on the ground, the FAC had an in-bound ARC LIGHT strike of B-52D Superfortress bombers, each loaded with 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs.  The FAC punched up the BUFF's lead bombardier on the tactical channel and gave him new target co-ordinates.  There was an unexpected flurry of activity among the other bombardiers as they reprogrammed the new target co-ordinates into their computers.  Meanwhile, the UH-1 had escaped from the hail of gunfire and was on its way to home base -- with one very scared and wiser crew.

 

The cell of B-52s approached the target given them by the FAC.  As soon as the lead BUFF's computer recognized the new co-ordinates, the bomb doors opened and the rain of bombs started.  The other B-52s followed in the path of the lead BUFF and dropped their loads.  The bombs rained down from 50,000 feet.  The first bomb explosion was the beginning of what sounded like rolling thunder that went on and on and on and on.  From the tops of their tracks miles away, the engineers watched the fireworks display in jaw-dropping awe.  Each exploding bomb sent out a shockwave that became visible in the hot, steamy air.  The ground beneath the American's feet and vehicles quivered and shook like it had turned to Jell-o.  After a seeming eternity, the thunder of the exploding bombs stopped.  As the smoke and debris cleared, a bare, bomb cratered moonscape revealed itself where impenetrable jungle had just been.

 

The combat engineers spent a uneventful night in their temporary hill top base camp.

 

At first light, the engineers broke camp and moved out to the scene of the previous day's bombardment.  The devastation up close was even more impressive than that they'd witnessed from afar the previous day.  All matter of plants, vegetation, and trees looked as if they'd been thrown in a huge blender and churned-up.  Huge craters pock marked the barren earth.  Even stone had been pulverized by the mighty blasts.  Eventually, they found bits and pieces of their enemy scattered through out the rubble -- except one poor soul.  He'd escaped the devastation suffered by the others only to be killed by the massive overpressue wave generated by the exploding bombs.  There was not a mark on him, but he was dead.  As the Americans pushed on, they found other dead VC that had been killed by the overpressure.  The day was a grim reminder of the B-52's destructive power and how puny, naked, and exposed you were when the first of the bombs hit the ground.