In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

19 2: Sparrow Hawk and Operation Colorado, June– December 1966 B uck Darling’s career continued to advance steadily. Promoted to first lieutenant in early June 1966, Buck became the Charlie Company executive officer, and a week later Lieutenant Colonel Coffman made him the company commander of Charlie Company. The Marines of 1/5 went back aboard ship and a few days later got orders to organize another combat operation. The TAOR for Operation Desoto/Deckhouse V was out in a very bad area in the Quang Ngai province. The enemy shot down two helicopters during Desoto/Deckhouse V, but 1/5 didn’t take many casualties, and they killed many Viet Cong soldiers. The operation started when the Marines took over a hill that a South Vietnamese Regional Forces (RF) company held. The Marines started patrolling right away, and that didn’t sit well with the regiment or so of Viet Cong that had occupied the area around the hill. The VC had stayed fairly safe because they operated so close to this hill, which was inside a save-a-plane area.1 Very rapidly, an entire regiment of Marines landed in that area to fight the VC. The Marines, expanding the perimeter at Chu Lai, moved west toward the mountains . When Operation Desoto/Deckhouse V concluded, 1/5 stayed at Da Nang for a day or two and then went back to Chu Lai. Almost immediately they moved to Hill 54, located a few kilometers northwest of Chu Lai, and started building a new combat base there. Fairly flat, and not a very dominant terrain feature, Hill 54 was completely surrounded by rice paddies, so the Marines of 1/5 stayed secure there. Later on, when it started raining, it got muddy, but other than that, life at Hill 54 Combat Base seemed good. “Except for that damned bomb that got the Crocodile and the others,” Buck Darling said, “we hadn’t taken any casualties until we got to the Chu Lai area. After we set up the combat base at Hill 54, we started having problems with enemy snipers and started to take casualties. We had a sniper named Terry Redic, a Marine who I Charlie One Five: 20 had trained in Hawaii. I told Terry to go out there before dawn one morning, and when that Viet Cong sniper started shooting at us, Terry took him out from a range of about twelve feet. The Cong had fired a couple of rounds at us, and tried to run away right over Terry, but it didn’t work out very well for him.” Combat activities continued at a steadily increasing pace for 1/5 in the area surrounding Chu Lai Combat Base complex. May and early June staggered forward, one long, hot, dangerous, sweaty day after the other. Then, in early June, 5th Marines assigned Charlie Company to a “Sparrow Hawk” mission. Those assigned to Sparrow Hawk formed a rapid reaction unit that would stand by, loaded up and ready to go at a moment’s notice, in the event something bad happened and friendly forces needed help. In addition to the commanding officer, 1st Lt. Buck Darling, the leaders of Charlie Company included 2nd Lt. Rob Enaiko, 1st Platoon commander; 2nd Lt. Ronald W. “Stumpy” Meyer, 2nd Platoon commander, and Staff Sgt. John Gall, 3rd Platoon commander. On 16 June 1966, something very bad happened. The reconnaissance team of Staff Sgt. Jimmie E. Howard stepped on a hornet’s nest, a main force NVA battalion. The recon team, surrounded and overwhelmingly outnumbered, tried futilely to break contact with the enemy. The large enemy force of an estimated five hundred soldiers had trapped Staff Sergeant Howard and his twenty-man recon team, intending to systematically destroy them. Immediately, the call went out for the Sparrow Hawk team. Buck Darling remembers this day with great clarity: “I got a call about 0300,” he said, “informing me that a recon team had gotten hit and that they were surrounded and in grave danger of being overrun and wiped out. All kinds of rumors about where we were going flew around the combat base. It turned out to be a very large lift, with about forty CH-34 helicopters; seemed like damn near every one of the CH34s located in the Da Nang/Chu Lai AO [area of operations].” Even given the dire circumstances of Staff Sergeant Howard’s recon team— surrounded, outnumbered, and suffering—the Sparrow Hawk rescue effort...

Share