Just beyond the bristle of big guns where the Eleventh Marine Regiment’s artillery lay quiet, awaiting their inevitable fire missions once the American counterattack ensued and where the Seventh Marine Regiment’s 81-millimeter mortars busily thunked out a mixture of high-explosive, white phosphorus, and illumination rounds, the flickering lightning and ceaseless thunder from the incoming enemy 122-millimeter rockets and 60-millimeter mortars flashed and echoed across the encampment. Red and green tracers crisscrossed inbound and outbound paths on the fringes as the infantry companies hurriedly prepared to launch their retaliation, designed foremost to protect the support base’s helicopter refueling station. On the quieter side of LZ Ross, through the surrealistic nighttime’s amber luminance, the silhouettes of five men dashed from the ground and hurried down a trail toward a pair of unmanned supplementary fighting positions that overlooked an untroubled section of the base’s perimeter wire.
