D Company Contact — 2/8 Cav Engages Enemy, Binh Tuy Province, September 3, 1970
September 3, 1970 — D Company makes contact
On 3 September 1970 at 1420 hours, D Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry engaged an enemy soldier at a position approximately 2.4 kilometres west of where FSB Guin would stand up the following morning. The contact resulted in one NVA soldier killed and an AK-47 captured. No D Company soldiers were wounded.
The battalion was in the midst of a move into a new area of operations. FSB Powder Ridge, 67 kilometres to the northwest, had closed on 31 August; FSB Guin (grid ZT100190, Binh Tuy Province) would be established on 4 September. In the four days between the two firebases, the company was operating in open terrain in a contested area — no fixed perimeter, new ground, active enemy presence confirmed.
B Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry conducted two significant visual reconnaissance contacts the same day, resulting in three additional NVA killed in the same general area.
The following day
On 4 September, the day FSB Guin opened, D/2-8 Cav made contact again — this time at grid ZT075214, 100 metres south of the previous day's position — killing two more NVA and capturing two AK-47s. At 0945 hours that morning, fifteen Hoi Chanh ralliers — one of them armed with a Soviet SS rifle — surrendered to the 2-8th Cavalry at the newly-established Guin. The pattern across both days establishes that the battalion was moving into an area of confirmed, active enemy presence.
Significance
This contact is documented here for its relationship to a loss on the same day. CPL Craig Thomas Waterman, Range Platoon, D Company, was killed on 3 September 1970 in a friendly fire incident — the official record classifies his death as a hostile ground casualty, misadventure. A former comrade recalled being told that he was killed while returning from patrol into a remote base. A unit that had been in hostile contact with enemy forces that afternoon, in unfamiliar terrain with no established perimeter, would have every reason to treat any movement near its position with extreme vigilance after dark. See CPL Waterman's profile and the September 3 KIA page.