Place of duty--1

Place of duty--1

        Robert Kincaid came back to the war because of a woman. Kincaid told the story his fifth day with the platoon, the night of the day Hueys came to an LZ in the bush and flew the platoon to Fire Base Angelique.

        The platoon had been more than a month in the bush. All of us looked forward to down-time, even if comforts at Angelique consisted only of showers and a small PX tent. Water in the showers was warm if you got there in the afternoon, when the sun heated the steel containers that held water for the showers.

        Fire Base Angelique covered four hundred acres of a large clearing northwest of Tay Ninh City. Jungle surrounded Angelique. The jungle was not as thick as in Tarzan movies; large trees and underbrush mostly. A village once was in the clearing, and the cleared area had been rice paddies. The village was destroyed during the French war, almost fifteen years before. There were two wells where the village once was. Now, water purification trucks sat near the wells. The trucks were equipped with pumps and filters and chemicals to purify water pumped from the wells and into two large rubber-lined containers the size of swimming pools. The armored cav troops of Second Squadron and the artillery batteries each sent a water truck to the pools every day. Operators of the water purification detachment filled the trucks, and the trucks returned to the troop areas and battery areas and filled the shower containers and water trailers. In dry season, Chinook helicopters brought additional water in 500-gallon rubber blivets.

        Along with the cav troops and the rifle platoon, four artillery batteries occupied Angelique. The artillery batteries had 105-millimeter towed howitzers, 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzers, eight-inch howitzers and 175-millimeter long guns. The sixteen guns fired daily at pre-planned targets or on-call targets when units in contact with NVA or VC required support and at night fired harassment and interdiction (H&I) at places VC or NVA might use as assembly areas. The 175-millimeter guns sometimes fired on called targets in Cambodia.