If anyone thought Cavalrymen were wild and carousing...this was a typical night in Tay Ninh. Steve Mabrey (center right) and crew discussing alien lifeforms around a primus stove campfire.

.....and Bill Downs reading 'Famous Atom Bomb Shelters of the 1950's.'

Crewchiefs Lynn Swearingen (on the left) and Larry Simpson fixing the cartridge 'spinning framitz' from a minigun. Both extended their tours to fly as Scout Observers. Larry had a 'need for speed'. He loved nothing better than sitting left seat in a LOH on the return trips to basecamp, taking the controls and doing 135 kts at 3', all the way back. He was in an altered state.

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 B Troop Personnel Roster - July 1967 at Ft. Knox prior to deployment to Vietnam. It's 3 pages in .gif format. Click on each image for larger version. If you want to print this roster, open each page and click your right mouse button to download to your hard drive. It's quite readable at medium/high printer resolution (300dpi). Roster scan by Steve Mabrey

Fierce...the only way to describe the battle when C Troop, 3/4 Cav and the 'Wolfhounds' Infantry clashed with a large NVA force at Hoc Mon, just a few days after our own battle here. C Troop of the 3/4 Cav had spearheaded a successful morning counter-offensive at Tan Son Nhut on that first day, while simultanously, our aircraft hammered it out with NVA at Hoc Mon. Days later, the Armored Cav encountered yet another large NVA force and the fight was on again. The 3/4 Cav were our next-door-neighbors when B Troop deployed to CuChi on the first day of the Tet Offensive. An excellent read on C Troop and the 3/4 Armored Cav's operations in our shared AO, is Dwight Birdwell's "A Hundred Miles of Bad Road".

This is C Troop 3/4 Cav's 'C35' M48 Main Battle Tank. It was ultimately over-run by NVA in the battle mentioned above and was considered to be quite operable. C Troop had pulled back into an adjacent open field and after nightfall began to consider C35 a substantial threat. Fortunately, the NVA had not watched enough TV to know what to do...from the photo it appears that they could only spin in circles with it. The next morning, Mike Vecellio spotted the apparently deserted C35 and SGT O'Brien, with the second team out, fired his CAR 15 into the commander's cupola, causing an explosion and fire. Ironically, this same M48 was crewed by Dwight Birdwell a few days earlier, and was pivotal in the battle at Tan Son Nhut.

Is this a bad time?..while scouting basecamps along the border frontier near Katum, SGT Travis snapped this picture and unknowingly photographed these two NVA in their complex. The one in the middle has just stepped out and is peering up at the OH6. The guy in the floppy hat at lower right appears to be trying to load an RPG and was picked out of this photo by former Wolfhound Coy Adkins. This is an enlarged section of a slide. Jan 1968.

Every picture tells a story....an OH-6A from B Troop sits forlornly in the 'boneyard' at Phu Loi in 1970. Photo: Jon Jay