Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [110]
Captain Mincy and his RTO proceeded alone down the trail on a recon, and, after being lost from sight, they could no longer be raised on the radio.
According to Boudreaux, the company executive officer was then contacted by battalion and told to take command. His wits gone, the lieutenant refused, and a young staff sergeant had to step in. The operations officer then radioed Boudreaux to be prepared to bring Bravo back down the ridge line to reinforce Alpha. Boudreaux was so mad that he called ahead to the lieutenant; “Hey, this is Bravo Six. I'm on my way to your location. If you're there, I'm going to beat your butt.”
Bravo Company was not to move until daylight, so Captain Boudreaux crawled into the trench he had dug wide enough to fit his air mattress. He was exhausted, but had barely closed his eyes when the ridge line began to quake and he was lifted up from the mattress. The explosions lasted three minutes. The rumbling died down, and five minutes passed; then Boudreaux heard a rush in the air that sounded like a Soviet multi-rocket launcher. More explosions and his little trench shook again. Bou-dreaux got the operations officer on the horn, but the major replied only that a B52 Arc Light was in process. Feeling very foolish, Boudreaux finally got some sleep. At midnight, he was startled awake again: An M60 gunner had squeezed off a long burst, and Boudreaux was again at his radios. It seemed that the gunner had come awake during a vivid nightmare of enemy attack and had instinctively reached for his weapon. At first light, as Bravo Company humped down the hill, they found big dead pigs where the GI had fired.
They married up with Alpha Company, and Boudreaux received a situation report from the young staff sergeant who'd taken command during the night. He asked what had happened to the lieutenant who'd balked.
“Oh, he's in base camp.”
Sitting among the trees and drinking some field-brewed charlie rat coffee, the soldiers of Alpha Company told a sad tale. During the night, they could hear their missing captain and radioman screaming.
The staff sergeant suspected that the NVA were still to their front, so Boudreaux placed Alpha and Bravo Companies on line. With twelve machine guns, sixteen grenade launchers, and more than a hundred rifles, they let loose a volley that shook the jungle. Then they swept forward among the thick-rooted trees, reconning by fire, and stumbling across several dead North Vietnamese who were hunched in their spiderholes.
A call went up and Boudreaux walked over to a slit trench. Captain Mincy and his RTO were huddled at the bottom, hands bound behind their backs. They had been shot through the back of their heads.
Around noon, the former CO of A Company, presently serving as the S-4, was helicoptered in to resume command of Alpha Company. With that, Boudreaux and Bravo Company swept east back onto the ridge where they had spent the night. Only several hundred meters south of LZ Phillips, they suddenly entered the twilight zone: Completely hidden under the triple canopy was a well-manicured clearing with hootches aligned in typical military fashion. Bravo Company had discovered an NVA training compound for units marching into South Vietnam. In the center of the camp was a photograph of Ho Chi Minh, three feet in diameter, mounted on red cloth. Unit crests