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conditions our troops were facing—I was much more comfortable being back in the field with one of our rifle companies that I was inside the Battalion perimeter. On the night of Feb 26, 1966 I was inside the battalion Command Post when we started receiving a radio transmission from the first platoon, A Company—my old platoon that I had just left on 12 Feb. The platoon outpost at Ky Phu was under attack by an estimated VC company plus.@38 I was monitoring the communications with A Co and Battalion HQ. This initially wasn’t alarming to me —I knew what my old platoon could do—we had laid out the perimeter before I transferred out to S-2. I knew that the outpost had overlapping fields of fire for the four m-60 machine guns— I knew we had carefully placed our claymore mines around the base of the perimeter—each squad leader had the switch for those claymores. I knew we had laid concertina barbed wire around the entire perimeter several meters below our dug in positions—I also knew that we had rehearsed just such an attack from each side of the perimeter—we had our grenade boxes and extra ammo placed near each squad for easy access and I knew we had ‘laid in’ our coordinates with artillery and the mortar section—just as we had done several times before. I also knew that we had weathered an assault just before my transfer to the S-2 job. The platoon was fighting for it’s life but I felt it was secure because of the planning we had done before. A ‘company’ sized VC unit would not take this platoon down—this I knew for sure. As I learned later part of the perimeter security had been turned over to the ARVN by the platoon Sgt. —who was also new to the platoon (operation Mixmaster ). That part of the perimeter was ‘breached’ by VC infiltrators who had spent some time wriggling
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