"This is a staging area for the VC (Viet Cong) and NVA (North Vietnamese Army," Col. Adolf C. Schwenk, commanding officer of the 27th Marines, had explained to me the evening before at regimental headquarters in Duong Son. The Colonel is a lanky, soft-spoken Marine veteran who is much admired by his men for his "cool." He sat in his green T-shirt on the edge of a table and played his finger over an operations map displayed against a wall of his heavily bunkered Command Operations Center. Radio messages crackled in the background.
"Operation Allenbrook on which we're engaged is designed to destroy the area, to deny it to the enemy as a sanctuary and as a staging area for an attack on Da Nang. Our 3rd battalion was hit hard when we began on May 17, but we've kept pushing and we've uncovered all kinds of enemy installations--arms caches, rice caches, mess hal;l and so on. And as soon as we clear a section of the area our combat engineer comes right behind us with Rome plows to knock the countryside flat. They level everything--trees, buildings, bushes. The whole island will be a desert when we get through."
The colonel put his finger to the map again. "This area," he said, outlining Go Noi Island, "is probably the most booby-trapped area in all Vietnam. We've suffered a lot of casualties from mines and booby-traps, including some KIAs (killed in action) and a lot of double and triple amputations. It can be very demoralizing for the men. They have no way of knowing if their next step is going to blow them 45 feet in the air. It's a vicious phantom war. There's nothing to shoot at. You walk scared all day long. Today we took 11 booby-trap casualties, seven of them in Golf Company."
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