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and staff. With the events fresh in mind, they discuss what went right and what went wrong—not for the historian, but rather to improve the next operation. In the earlier U.S. operations these critiques were particularly important, as is shown from the following excepts of the meeting after the assault of the 173d into War Zone D.
In his critique of the operation, General Williamson said:
In all candor I must admit that I did not expect to find as many enemy in that area as we did... We did a lot of things that we could not even have considered six weeks ago. As you recall when we first arrived in Vietnam we started off doing one thing at a time. On this operation, at the extraction time, we took 3,000 troops out of three different landing zones in three hours and ten minutes. We wouldn't have moved troops that fast or afford to bring our troops that close together at one time unless we had a lot going on at one time... As I looked at it from above, it was a sight to see. We were withdrawing from the center LZ while some friendly troops were still in the western LZ. We had a helicopter strike going in a circle around the center LZ. The machine gun and rocket firing helicopters kept making their circle smaller and smaller as we withdrew our landing zone security. Just to the west side we had another helicopter strike running north to south. We also had something else that was just a little hairy but it worked without any question, the artillery was firing high angle fire to screen the northern side of the landing zone. The personnel lift helicopters were coming from the east, going under the artillery fire, sitting down in the LZ to pick up troops and leaving by way of the southwest. In addition to that, we had an air strike going to the northeast. All of these activities were going on at the same time. We could not have done that a few weeks ago.
The 173d found that they had to go to unusual lengths to clear new landing zones for medical evacuation. The commanding officer of the 1st Battalion (Airborne), 503d Infantry, told how one of his company commanders tried to hack out an emergency landing zone in the jungle. "They used over 100 pounds of C-4 explosive that they had with them, and they had a couple of axes and hacked away with their machetes. The C-4 took the bark off and made a few splinters, and that was about it. These trees were almost totally resistant to the charges."
The S-3 of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, noted one problem as he saw it in working with the helicopters. "I would like someone to make an assessment to what extent do we lose the initiative by the excessive use of helicopters. By the use of them, the enemy can determine where you are, and the strength you are in."
The Air Force liaison officer remarked: