Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [121]
An officer who echoed Greene's unvarnished version of the 25th Division was Capt. Kenneth P. Moorefield, aide-de-camp to General Bautz, who at age twenty-six and career minded was really as disillusioned as the grunts who had taken to calling the division the Electric Strawberry– the shoulder patch being a red taro leaf with a yellow lightning flash– instead of the Tropic Lightning. He too saw the revolving door for commanders, which extended to the company and platoon level, as the main problem. Moorefield had spent the first four months of his second tour as a company commander before being selected as aide-de-camp, but after four months he had volunteered to rejoin his old line battalion:
To my dismay I was told that though I was rated as a highly successful company commander and had more combat experience than any officer in the battalion, they had many new captains. And since most of them never had any combat and needed a company command experience, they couldn't let me take a company. I was outraged… I lost faith…. The system was that you the officer went over, got your company command ticket punched, then you went somewhere else. They put some new guy in as company commander with no experience. Obviously the guy is going to lose more lives while he learns. Maybe that was ultimately good for his career, but this wasn't the way to respect the lives of our young men or to fight a war.
Captain Moorefield wore a West Point ring, as well as a bullet scar on his arm from his 1967-68 tour with the ARVN. Moorefield and the rest of the Class of 1965 had seen Vietnam as their war, and his heart had not begun to go out of it until he lay with his arm in a cast in Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D.C. Federal troops guarded the hospital as he watched 14th and 16th Streets burn in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination. He was shocked by the media reports he was finally seeing that portrayed their victories during the Tet Offensive as defeats. He was appalled by the protest movement. And, like many other potential career officers of his generation who thought they were fighting the right war the wrong way, Moorefield had become similarly disenchanted with the senior officer corps to the point that, after finishing his second tour, on the heels of Cambodia, he resigned his commission. So did well over a third of the USMA Class of 1965. Moorefield's critique of the 25th Division went a step beyond General Greene's, for he felt that his superiors had been seduced into a lethargic style of command by the very technology of the war:
I have been in situations in Vietnam where an infantry platoon or company was fighting on the ground, trying to attack across an open rice paddy. The battalion commander and his operations officer were sitting in a helicopter at a thousand feet. The brigade commander was at fifteen hundred feet. The division commander was at twenty-five hundred feet. The corps commander was at three thousand feet. Now, I can assure you from the point of view of some infantryman who is down there sweating his ass off, facing hot lead at very close quarters, it's very difficult to respect or identify with his leadership sitting up in the clouds in starched fatigues. There wasn't a man, short of maybe the first sergeant or my platoon leaders, who knew the name of our battalion commander.
With the cynicism of the infantry, but also the bravado of their rolling firepower, the attitude of the Triple Deuce when told they were going into Cambodia had been that, as long as we have to be here, let's cause the dinks some grief. So it was in the late afternoon of 6 May 1970 that A and C Companies, 2d Battalion (Mechanized), 22d Infantry, 25th Division, broke out of the jungle and rolled up to the banks of the Rach Cai Bac with a feeling of high adventure. Each man was buttoned