With Hanoi 150 miles away to the east, and the refueling depot at Ban Lot behind them, the command helo and the three big “bananas,” or Chinook troop carriers, carrying Freeman’s interdiction force, two Huey gunships on the flanks, approached the Laotian-Vietnamese border in a mist that wreathed the hills and filled the valley around Dien Bien Phu.
The joint U.S.-British Ranger/SAS/Gurkha Special Forces group was under the overall command of U.S. Army Colonel Berry, with British SAS Major Anthony Leigh-Hastings and U.S. Ranger Captain Walter Roscoe, Jr., assisting. The three-platoon-sized force had been ordered by Freeman to go in four miles south-southwest of Dien Bien Phu along the valley floor to a point one mile west of the Ban Cong Deng road junction near the southern end of the valley.
Their secret mission was to interdict the road that wound eastward out of Deo Tay Chang, a small Vietnamese settlement only a mile east of the Laotian border. It was hoped the Special Force would engage and stop the infiltration of any Khmer Rouge-led enemy column before the latter could reach the Ban Cong Deng junction and have the luxury of either heading north to Dien Bien Phu, just inside Vietnam, or east, farther into Vietnam.
As the big Chinooks descended into the mist, their woka, woka, woka sound beating the air, curdling the mist, the thirty men in each helo gripped their weapons and their bulletproof Kevlar vests, which most of them had been sitting on against the prospect of losing their genitals from ground fire, a fear they shared with all heloborne troops.
The two M-60s on each of the two gunships opened up, pouring down what the gunners hoped would be suppressive fire in the event that, contrary to Green Beret recon team info, the Khmer-led insurgents had already reached the Ban Cong Deng junction east of the landing zone.
The moment the first helo landed, Rangers and SAS fanned out forward and aft of the Chinook to establish a fire perimeter, the rotor wash sending shivering waves of water in a nearby paddy, rice stalks bending in the fearsome wind and howl of the man-made storm. There was no return fire, and soon all three LZs were declared secure. The helos disappeared into the mist, the chopping of their rotors growing fainter. Suddenly, as the jungle swallowed up the last of the ninety commandos of the Ranger/SAS/Gurkha force, it was as if nothing had ever disturbed the stillness of this remote valley where, over four decades before, the French had met their modern Waterloo.
“Now the tricky part’s over,” Major Leigh-Hastings said. “The hard part begins.” He meant setting up ambush in terrain where the difference between being the hunted or the hunter could be a matter of seconds, the movement of a leaf, the crack of a twig.