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Red Gas. Thirty miles to the west of Meloy's encounter, Lieut. Colonel Jack Whitted, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Division's 28th Infantry, was awakened just before dawn by a flare on his command post's perimeter. He had scarcely rolled out of his black silk hammock, strung up beside a 4-ft. anthill, when a bugle sounded and some 100 Viet Cong charged. Three Claymore mines blunted that enemy attack. When a heavy machine gun kept ripping into the U.S. lines, Specialist 4 Kirk James, 26, of Brooklyn, crawled out 50 ft. until he was parallel with the enemy gunner, then took him out with a single blast from his 12-gauge shotgun. Within ten minutes, U.S. artillery had zeroed in on the attackers, and Air Force fighter-bombers were pounding them with 500-lb. bombs and napalm—one of nearly 700 support sorties flown by the Air Force and Vietnamese in the week of Tay Ninh battles. When the Viet Cong finally withdrew, they left 400 of their dead behind.
That was not all: the Viet Cong had been fighting to defend a central cache of arms and food. In nearby bunkers and tunnels, the U.S. infantrymen seized one of the richest hauls of the war: 2,000,000 lbs. of rice, 80 rocket launchers, 25 machine guns, 481 Claymore-type mines, large quantities of rifles, pistols, oil, clothing, even 116 bicycles. It was clearly the guts of any offensive notions that the enemy might have cherished, and it added Attleboro to the select list of major "spoiling" operations of the war. Also in the enemy stores were 23,000 Red Chinese grenades, over 1,000 of them teargas. Though Hanoi had loudly bewailed the U.S. use of tear gas, next day the Viet Cong employed it themselves for the first time in the war, tossing several gas grenades at a U.S. squad on night reconnaissance.