Destroyed Trucks
You can see a copy of this
picture as photograph 10 on page 77 of The United States Air Force in
Southeast Asia, Office of Air Force History, 1977.
The caption says: Air Force bombers destroyed more than 30 enemy supply
trucks in North Vietnam. The book
is a great reference with many pictures and includes two chapters about Air
Operations over Laos—but they missed it with this picture.
I first saw these trucks on 11
February 1967 from the back seat of an O-1 Bird Dog on my dollar-ride
introduction to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We
were scheduled to check the Nape Pass and the old French Route 8 up at the
northern end of Steel Tiger. The road had been pretty much abandoned with most
of the southbound traffic entering Laos through the Mu Gia Pass and over the
new road built farther south across the Ban Karai Pass in the spring of 1966.
So the mission was more of a
sightseeing excursion to verify that the North Vietnamese hadn’t increased
the use of Route 8 since the last check about a month earlier. The first point
of interest was the wreckage of the A-1 of USN Lt. Dieter Dengler, which was
visible in a large meadow near the lower end of Route 8 about 40 miles west of
Mu Gia.
The other special thing about
Route 8 was this grouping of trucks up on a ridgeline near the summit of Nape
Pass. These rusting hulks sat
side by side in an open meadow. Instead
of having been destroyed by USAF bombers, these are relics of the
French-Indochina War that ended in 1954. The trucks had been destroyed and
abandoned by the French when they left Laos.
Unfortunately, pictures of this grouping of trucks
appeared in at least two Air Force publications as an example of the success
of American airpower in the battle against the North Vietnamese logistics
network. I first saw the
photograph in the Seventh Air Force weekly newspaper soon after I arrived at
Nakhon Phanom in February 1967. The
North Vietnamese did not just line up their trucks in open meadows, but anyone
who never flew (or drove) The Trail might assume otherwise after seeing the
picture with its original captions.
