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Meanwhile, to the south near Hue, four U.S. 101st Airborne companies and the Black Panther company of South Viet Nam's 1st Division trapped a North Vietnamese battalion in the village of Phuoc Yen. Throwing a tight cordon around the village, they mercilessly pounded it with artillery for more than a day. As the besieged Communists tried to break out, they were shot down. Then the artillery was stopped, and for an hour loudspeakers in planes and on the ground called on the survivors to surrender.
They did, crawling from the rubble of the village or popping out of the Songbo River, where some had lain submerged while breathing through bamboo shoots. In all, 95 surrendered, one of the biggest such catches of the war. A body count turned up another 135 dead, bringing the total to 352 in the 76-hour battle. Allied losses were eight killed and 37 wounded. Among the Communist dead were the commander of the North Vietnamese unit—the 8th Battalion—his executive officer and three company commanders. All told for the week in eastern I Corps, the allies killed 1,370 Communist troops while suffering 110 dead of their own.
Heart of Hué. Some 25 miles to the southwest of Hue lies the A Shau Valley, a lush, weird world of fogs and swirling mists during ten months of the year. Some 25 miles long, the valley floor is 2,000 ft. above sea level. The jagged, spiny peaks on either side rise 5,000 ft. to 6,000 ft. and are covered with a triple-canopy jungle 100 ft. tall. Ever since a U.S. Special Forces camp was overrun in the valley in March of 1966, only furtive U.S. reconnaissance patrols have set foot in it. The North Vietnamese turned A Shau into a sanctuary and their greatest storehouse in I Corps. It became a key infiltration route from Laos and the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Hue and Danang.
The North Vietnamese had fortified the hills of A Shau with hidden antiaircraft guns, some of them radar-controlled and able to hit a plane at 20,000 ft. Using Russian-made bulldozers, they had widened the old French road running down the valley center, Route 548, to six lanes, and built a brand-new road called 547A that branched off from another road, Route 547, and emerged from the valley aimed straight at the heart of Hue. Such passable weather as A Shau ever knows comes in April and May, and three weeks ago, under the tightest secrecy of any allied operation of the war, Operation Delaware was launched to punch into the Communists' craggy lair.
A Treasure Hunt. Delaware's strategy, planned and executed by Lieut. General William B. Rosson, called for a multipronged drive. The 101st Airborne moved down from the east on the Communists' own new road, accompanied by a regiment of South Vietnamese paratroopers. Another South Vietnamese force also closed in from the east. The job of taking the valley itself fell to the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile), two of whose heliborne brigades began leapfrogging in from the north. The first day was a near disaster, as Communist gunners destroyed or damaged 20 of the Air Cav's helicopters, including the first giant Flying Crane to be lost in the war. Off-and-on weather threw artillery reinforcement and supply drops off schedule.