[Hermit]

As we began to move forward, the enemy pounded the dirt road with 122mm heavy artillery. I was orinally a little ticked off at the Colonel for not allowing us to ride the tanks down the road until the heavy jungle and steep hills began, but I'm beginning to see his wisdom now. It wouldn't have been pretty to have been caught in that barrage. Heck, I didn't even know they had 122mm artillery. I thought the biggest thing they had was the 85mm stuff. At the last minute, division called and said that we'd receive some artillery support ourselves, two batteries of 105mm howitzers that would be dedicated to us.

After plastering the mountain peak above with 8-inch SPA fire, the heavy helos dropped two platoons of scouts and three platoons of our infantry on our side of the ridge to the NE of the central horseshoe ridge. No enemy fire was received during the offload, but as soon as the troops crested the ridgline, the fight was on. The enemy has at least two platoons on the reverse side of the slope, and elements of several other platoons fired at us from the SE ridgeline as well. The helos went back for another load of troops while our vehicles from Bn B navigated the heavily forested plateau to make a screened approach to the northern side of the ridge. Scouts sent ahead of the vehicle column spotted two ambushes by enemy soldiers, which were quickly neutralized by helos spraying the canopy with MG fire. The suppressed enemy units were then overrun by our vehicles.

Rounding the northern foot of the ridge was not as easy. The column came under fire from three B-10's somewhere on the lower slopes of the NW ridgeline from long range, and despite the column's multiple eyeballs, the launchers could not be located until after the lead Patton was lost. When the B-10's were eventually spotted, they were fired at with everything the column had. While the enemy attack did succeed in destroying one tank with a lucky shot, they paid dearly. All three B-10's were destroyed. I'm guessing they knew what would happen once they were located, but they just kept shooting round after round until they scored a hit. You have to admire the courage of those guys!

In the southern area, the tanks of Bn A eventually took a quick jaunt down the dirt road after it had been cleared up to the crest of a smaller hill. On the other side, our infantry once again came under intense MG and small arms fire. Two of the MG's were spotted, and tanks moved into place to take out their positions. An SKZ launcher popped up from over the crest of the hill, having crawled their way through a broken area unspotted by our now suppressed troops. Fortunately the Colonel had the column headed by the slower, but more protected, M103 tanks since they can still manage a good pace on the road. Two shots from the SKZ hit home, but neither penetrated, and as you can imagine, there were no more chances given to the enemy. At the same time, we dismounted all the heavy MG crews of our own that had been piggybacking on the rearward tanks. Just in time too, as the enemy had two heavy MG's of their own somewhere on a ridge about 1 click to the south that began raking the column with bursts of 12.7mm bullets. Everyone hunkered down for a few minutes, until one of the scout teams got the courage to give the enemy the finger before popping a few smoke grenades and screening us from the incoming rounds. Now we'll have to decide whether to move forward and push through the enemy blocking force, or deploy more spread out around the road to avoid incoming artillery until we can neutralize the enemy. We know better than to just sit here too long. Gotta move, shoot, move.