Sunday, June 4, 1972
Adviser's 2-Month Nightmare Ends
By George Esper
SAIGON (AP) --Nightmares. Nearly 10,000 shells raining down in the dark of night.A church service turned into carnage by North Vietnamese tanks, their cannon and machine guns blazing into women and children worshippers.An 80-pound Vietnamese soldier with a three-pound weapon fighting a 40-ton tank.A shell whizzing through the air vent of your underground bunker, knocking you dizzy from the concussion. A lucky shot. You are lucky, too. You live.For Capt. Harold Moffett Jr., 29, a U.S. Army adviser, his two months at An Loc were like a bad dream, but they were real enough."An Loc will be forgotten when I return home," he says. "It's like a bad dream."Moffett was ordered out of An Loc on Wednesday because the Army thought he had been in the besieged town long enough."I told them I could stay longer," he said in an interview Friday.But now his second tour in Vietnam is over. Soon he will return to his wife, Peggy Marie, in Nashville, Tenn., and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Moffett Sr., in Haughton, La.He recalls the clear day in April when the first North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city."The people were having services, and the tanks rolled into the church. They fired their cannon and when they expended those, they fired their machine guns. They annihilated well over 100 civilians, mostly women and children.Moffett survived a nearly 10,000-round artillery, rocket and mortar barrage one night."I never dreamed anything like that was possible, to put so many rounds in one small area in such a short period of time," he says.He was wounded once, slightly, by a mortar fragment in the back."My back stung for a few minutes," he says.But he survived more than 50,000 shells.He says the South Vietnamese rangers he advised were outstanding."This little guy goes out to hunt a 40-ton piece of metal with a light antitank weapon on his back weighing two to three pounds. That's beyond belief and it inspired me. How can you describe a little ARVN soldier fighting tanks?"The first sighting of tanks frightened Moffett, he confesses."I was pretty well frightened like everyone else till it was determined we could knock them out with the weapons we had."He estimates 20 enemy tanks were destroyed in the city.Moffett says his weight has dropped from between 185 and 195 pounds to about 160.He recalls An Loc as a once beautiful city."Today," he says, "it looks like Berlin at the end of World War II. Everything is destroyed. The ground is covered with craters from incoming heavy enemy artillery."Although U.S. air strikes also battered the city in efforts to drive North Vietnamese troops out. Moffett says that "no matter what hit in the city, there was nothing more devastating than the enemy's 130mm artillery."During his last four days at An Loc, the barrages eased up, from thousands of rounds a day to less than 400 a day, mostly mortars instead of artillery."Adviser's 2-Month Nightmare Ends", by (AP), published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Sunday, June 4, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.