D Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, was not given its usual maps. Instead the soldiers received black and white topographic charts that required specialized training to read. They were airborne longer than the distance to their assigned landing zone should have required. When they touched down, the terrain did not match what their maps showed — the maps said they were on a hill; they were not. Lieutenant Nolan and Captain Yamashita, among others, drew a conclusion that they have maintained for decades: D Company was operating in Cambodia, not Vietnam, when it recaptured two M101 howitzers from the PAVN in early March 1969. Eight days later, US Strategic Air Command began its secret bombing campaign against Cambodia. The timing was not coincidental.
By late January 1969, captured documents and prisoner interrogations were telling a consistent story. The PAVN 66th Regiment, 24th Regiment, and elements of the 40th Artillery had moved north into the Chu-Mom-Ray mountain range and were constructing roads — roads deep enough into those mountains that aerial reconnaissance could see the vehicle traffic. The destination of these roads was clear: they ran from the Cambodian border into the eastern Plei Trap Valley, aimed at Kontum City and Polei Kleng Camp.
Operation Wayne Grey launched on 1 March 1969, the 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division sweeping into the Plei Trap and the Chu-Mom-Ray simultaneously. Artillery units set up at firebases in advance. Companies inserted by helicopter into landing zones scattered across the operational area. The objective was to sever North Vietnamese lines of communication and prevent the regiments from retreating when American pressure forced them to move.
The operation's most significant single fight came at Landing Zone Brace, beginning 3 March. A Company of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry, inserted into a hilltop and immediately encountered a battalion of PAVN troops — the enemy's headquarters was on that hill. The company took heavy casualties and was forced to withdraw, extracted the following day after a brutal night in contact. B and C Companies pushed up the same hill on 6 March and succeeded where A Company had not. A firebase was built on the site.
Simultaneously, D Company, 3/8th, seized Hill 947 to block PAVN forces retreating from the LZ Brace fighting. Between 3 and 8 March, the position was attacked repeatedly and subjected to continuous mortar and artillery fire. D Company held. By the afternoon of 8 March the PAVN had given up on taking the hill — a recognition that the blocking position was too costly to overcome. Operations along the Plei Trap road, meanwhile, had destroyed communications equipment, supplies, and vehicles and recovered the two howitzers that North Vietnamese forces had previously captured.
Phase II of the operation reorganized the surviving companies into Task Force Alpha, which established blocking positions along the Plei Trap road from Hill 467 to Firebase 20. The mission was methodical: identify supply convoys, call in fires, use cratering charges to render the road impassable to vehicles. Through the last two weeks of March, the task force worked this stretch of road systematically, halting the flow of supplies that had been sustaining the 40th Artillery.
The PAVN adapted, as they always did. Mortar and artillery fire fell regularly on the 4th Division's firebases throughout the operation. North Vietnamese propagandists distributed leaflets urging American soldiers to surrender — a tactic that produced no defections but illustrated something about the confidence with which the PAVN operated even under pressure. Task Force Alpha was extracted on 30 March, its work done.
The hardest fighting of Phase II came at Cu-Don Mountain, a known PAVN base on a ridgeline south of LZ Brace. The 3/12th Infantry's mission was to block the PAVN 66th Infantry from withdrawing to this sanctuary. What followed was nearly two weeks of back-and-forth over a bunker complex that resisted every assault. D Company reached the bunkers on 18 March, broke contact under fire, watched artillery and gunships pound the position all day on the 19th, assaulted again on the 20th and was driven back, finally seized the hill on the 22nd after another heavy barrage found it empty.
A Company had worse luck. Forced to leave its wounded while retreating on 27 March, the company tried to recover its missing men the following day and was driven back again. They tried once more on 30 March and finally succeeded in reaching their men — but were then forced to withdraw yet again under mortar fire. The location was subsequently hit by multiple B-52 strikes. On 14 April the operation officially ended. The 1st Brigade declared it a success: Kontum had not been attacked, and the PAVN 24th and 66th Regiments had paid heavily. Whether that success had been achieved entirely within Vietnamese territory remained, then and now, an open question.
Operation Wayne Grey centered on the Chu-Mom-Ray mountains and Plei Trap Valley at approximately 14.429°N, 107.627°E, in western Kon Tum Province close to the Cambodian border. The terrain is dramatically folded highlands — deeply cut river valleys between steep ridgelines, much of it still densely forested. The Cambodian border lies roughly 30–40 km to the west. Polei Kleng Camp, a key reference point, is north of this position near the Vietnam-Cambodia boundary. Pleiku Airport (VVPK) is the nearest airfield with regular service, approximately 55 km to the southeast. At 10,000–15,000 feet the full extent of the Plei Trap Valley and its relationship to the Cambodian border is visible. Chu-Mom-Ray itself is now a national park — the highland ridgeline visible to the northwest from this position.