Alpha with a
Fresh Bomb Crater.
The road through this marshy
valley alongside this isolated karst outcropping in central Laos was
designated as Interdiction Point Alpha. As the war against the Ho Chi Minh
Trail expanded in 1966, USAF leaders decided to concentrate attacks against a
few vulnerable segments of the road. Actually the karst at Alpha stood up more
than is obvious in this picture. I
believe the top of this picture is to the south as I remember the karst being
on the east side of the main road.
Note the fresh bomb crater on
the road just below the center of the picture. A closer look at the original
picture shows that trucks already have driven over the fresh dirt between the
two segments of the road now covered by the debris. This illustrates that closing the road with general-purpose
bombs was almost impossible unless the road had to pass between tight confines
forced by karst, steep mountains, and rivers.
Even if a time-delay bomb hit precisely on the road and created a huge
crater, the next convoy of trucks often just drove around the crater.
After 10-20 trucks had packed down the earth alongside the crater, a
new segment of the Trail had been created, and it was as if the crater had
been a near miss instead of a direct hit.
In addition, thousands of laborers supported the Trail and would come
out almost immediately to move aside downed trees or fill in minor craters.
When we were patrolling The Hub in March 1967 trying to keep a single
segment of the road closed and under surveillance 24-hours-a-day, my flight
leader suddenly called out that he could see a single laborer with a shovel
working on a crater while we held overhead.
