Tags
Cold War, dak to, John Tiller, Seven Firefights in Vietnam, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, Vietnam
This is the ninety-second in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series or go back to the master post.
The Squad Battles: Vietnam treatment of the Battle of Dak To is not bad – for Squad Battles: Vietnam, that is.
The Tiller-designed scenario tasks you with taking two somewhat-adjacent hilltops. One (see first screenshot) you must approach on foot and dislodge the NVA units that have prepared to defend it. For the second (the second screenshot, naturally), you can insert your company directly onto the objective, which is an uncontested landing zone.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/dakto10.jpg?w=1024)
The result is that you are fighting two different encounters simultaneously – one offensive and one defensive. Notably (and you can see this in the below screen), you have radios with which to summon air and artillery support. Your major decision during gameplay is how to distribute that support – on offense or defense.
It’s a longer scenario, as far as these things go, lasting nominally 18 turns. However, once the airmobile troops are inserted and once the marching infantry begins to come under fire, the turns fly by pretty fast. Your fellas either don’t want to move (because they already hold the objective) or they won’t move (because they’re pinned down). In the end, I spent most of the last half of the game firing from static positions; not at risk of losing my held hilltop but with no chance of taking the other objective away from the enemy.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/dakto11.jpg?w=1024)
As I said, the battle is not bad for a Squad Battles scenario and I’d probably have more to say in that regard had I not just finished playing the Dak To scenario from Campaign Series: Vietnam. When the two are set side-by-side, the limited scope of Squad Battles becomes all that much more obvious.
I miss the larger context inherent in CS‘s bigger maps. There is also a better sense of realism when the battle is allowed to stretch over multiple days, as it did, as opposed to forcing the scenario’s conclusion into a couple of hours. The only downside (or rather upside, since we are talking about Squad Battles here) in this regard is that this scenario forces the player to take the LZ* by air assault. If I remember my CS scenario correctly, I played more cautiously; securing the hilltop LZ with ground troops before bringing in the choppers. For better or for worse, Squad Battles forced me down that more aggressive path.
*A good chunk of my turn was spent trying to figure out the intended landing site at scenario start. I’ve already grown used to having them clearly marked for me in Campaign Series: Vietnam. I puzzled over the Squad Battles manual for a bit but I’m still not really sure. Squad Battles assigns each hex a “terrain height” which is different than (on top of, quite literally) the ground height of the hex. According to the manual, this terrain height must be less than 2 meters to allow helicopter landings. Hill 823 shows a Jungle terrain at 3 meters. It also has something that looks like rubble augmenting the hex (see 2nd screenshot). I couldn’t find it in the manual, but I’m assuming the prior jungle had been destroyed, allowing the use of the hex for an LZ. I believe the terrain was labeled as XV, but I couldn’t find that in the manual. “X” for destroyed, maybe?
Return to the master post or take a look at (I think) is the same battle but in a different engine.