NARROW ESCAPE AT AN LOC
The Lockheed C-130E Hercules transport plane flew south toward Saigon with its right wing low and its No. 3 engine trailing smoke and flame. The aircraft was losing altitude fast and wouldn’t get back to Tan Son Nhut Air Base. It was going down. Meanwhile, Saber Flight from Troop F, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, was headed toward its Lai Khe staging base after a reconnaissance mission north of An Loc on April 18, 1972. As the crippled C-130 passed in front of his Huey, Capt. Robert Frank (call sign Saber 32), air mission commander, turned to his pilot in command, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Robert Monette (Saber 20), and exclaimed, “Wow! That looks like a bad day!” It was a classic understatement. Things were about to get worse.
A culmination of circumstances over the past few weeks had put the Hercules and Huey crews in this bad spot. On Thursday, March 30, Easter weekend, North Vietnamese Army troops swarmed into South Vietnam as they moved across the Demilitarized Zone and advanced eastward from Laos in the largest offensive at that point in the war. The Easter Offensive’s thrust into South Vietnam from the north was accompanied by assaults from Laos into the center of the country and from Cambodia into the southern region, threatening the capital at Saigon. The primary target in the southern area was An Loc, about 65 miles from Saigon.
Most of the fight against the communist invasion at An Loc and elsewhere during the Easter Offensive was waged by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam as a consequence of President Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization policy implemented in 1969. Vietnamization gradually transferred responsibility for combat operations to the South Vietnamese as American units were withdrawn. U.S. air support for South Vietnam continued, however.
In spring 1972, most Americans in ground combat roles were military advisers serving with South Vietnamese units. Only two big U.S. ground combat organizations remained in South Vietnam—the 196th Light Infantry Brigade at Da Nang in northern South Vietnam and the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division
