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NAVIGATION
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Sergeant William Hoekstra
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 Webmaster's Note: Sergeant
William Hoekstra was awarded the Silver Star - the nation's third
highest award for his heroic actions in helping to rescue the
beleaguered recon platoon. When Sergeant Hoekstra recounted his story
of what happened that day and night for the purposes of this website,
he left out a very important fact - that he was one of the few men who
received the Silver Star. It wasn't until several months later that I
was able to learn that he was one of the recipients. Robert Smith, Webmaster |
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"At
the time, I was a Spec 4 in the 2nd platoon of A/5/12/199th Light Inf.
Brigade. We were transported very early in the morning to a small
village where we boarded 3 South Vietnamese Navy boats. These were not
the ramp type landing craft that one might envision. They were actually
steel hulled river boats equipped with .30 and .50 cal machine guns
mounted fore and aft. I recall being on the 2nd or 3rd boat and we
traveled downstream toward what was supposed to have been a jumping off
point for a sweep to reinforce and rescue a platoon under siege..." |
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| "As
on any of these trips, we took advantage of the time to sit around and
wait to reach the landing zone. Suddenly all hell broke loose. There
were RPG explosions and a lot of light and heavy arms fire directed at
the boats. We peered over the sides of the boat and saw that we were
being ambushed from some hootches along the river. The lead boat had
been hit hard and was swinging around. The Vietnamese gunner in the bow
of our boat had been killed and I took over his 50. Our return fire
pretty much leveled the hootches and anything that could have been in
them..." |
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| "The
orders were given for the boats to return to the boarding point and
disembark the dead and wounded. More of our guys came on board and we
returned to the ambush site. We fired some more to make sure the enemy
was eliminated and proceeded to a landing beach, if you could call it
that. I remember jumping off the bow of the boat and sinking to my
waist in the mud. Got to dry land with the rest of the platoon and
followed a heading given us by Bob Caltabiano, the platoon leader. We
hadn’t moved more than a few hundred yards when we discovered a couple
of dead NVA lying in the dry rice field. One was a high ranking officer
with what was thought to be important intelligence info on his person
along with his 9mm pistol..." |
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| "Our
company kept moving in the general direction of a huge treeline in the
distance. As we warily approached, we encountered some fire from the
woodline. We returned fire with 60’s, M79’s and M16’s. Still the fire
from the woods became more intense and attempts to approach were
repelled. I’m certain that we got a few of them. We were ordered to
fall back to a small grove of trees surrounding a sunken area and wait
out a coming airstrike. Man, those planes lit up the trees now about
400 yards in front of us. Seeing the awesome effect of that terror
raining down out of the sky made us all thankful for being where we
were at the time. We just knew that they’d wiped out the NVC and sure
enough, the order came for us to go in and just mop up what was thought
to be a relatively small NVC encampment..." |
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Dedicated to those who died that day
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