Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [123]
After linking up with Lieutenant Colonel Hazelwood's 3-22 Infantry at Tasuos, Lieutenant Colonel Westerman's 1-5 Mech then wheeled southwest toward Kampong Trach. Lieutenant Colonel Parker's 2-22 Mech pushed due south along a different axis, with A Company roaring down one hot, dusty road, and B and C Companies, with the Jump CP, doing likewise on another.
After four years at West Point and six months at Cu Chi and Tay Ninh, Lieutenant Giasson, communications officer, HHC/2-22 Mech, was finally doing what he'd come across the Pacific for. The diary notes he made that night were electric:
My first contact! My first day in Cambodia! I'll never forget this day as long as I live. We got up in the dark and moved out just after first light. In less than an hour our battalion had begun its drive into the triple-canopy jungle. The moving was slow. Ants that had been shaken off the trees fell onto us and bit whenever they got to flesh. After about an hour all hell broke loose. Everyone was firing to the flanks–our extra battalion was in a column with no flank security. Three NVA with rocket-propelled grenades and a machine gun had bumped into our column. Two escaped while the third met his maker…. It all started over again just before lunch. We came to our first NVA base camp. My APC was to the front, and we watched about three squads of NVA run from their hootches to the woods. Immediately two of the line companies flanked the woods and searched–no signs of the enemy. We found an NVA helmet and pistol belt, so we knew we were in NVA land. We sent a flame track in to burn down a warehouse full of rice as we continued to look for Charlie. We stopped a few farmers, but they would only say that they were Cambodians. We continued on. The scouts (platoon) went ahead to clean the road and got a three body count–all were very clean and neatly dressed in the NVA uniform. They all carried new weapons. The battalion followed, and all of a sudden the front and rear of the columns hit command-detonated mines on the same road the scouts had just cleared….
Nearby, A Company, under Capt. William Lechner, torched a deserted NVA bivouac area, the platoon climbed back aboard their tracks, a squad sitting atop each, and continued the drive south. The dirt road they followed passed numerous deserted hootches and cut across many footpaths where small parties of NVA scurried unseen through the thickets: Every now and again, another AK47 burst would crack past. Each time, and there were at least six mini-ambushes that day, the APCs would herringbone on the road to level the brush with .50-caliber fire while the squads piled off the back and opened fire from the depressions along the shoulder. Fifteen minutes of dust and noise later, the squads would remount their tracks, only to repeat the drill at the next curve in the road, so it was one tired, harried, and dust-caked company of grunts that finally laagered off the road as the sun began to sink. Lieutenant Colonel Parker, airborne all day, was dropped off in A Company's perimeter to spend the night in the bush with his men. The APCs deployed in a wagon train circle around several attached self-propelled howitzers. The earth was soft and damp and gave off a stench of decay and rot, and mosquitoes rose in swarms in the muggy twilight. It was too hot for the GIs digging in to cover up. Men slapped all night. The howitzers began firing in the dark, the blast concussion almost knocking men from their sleeping positions inside their tracks. It screeched on the nerves of Alpha Company. Nearby, Bravo and Charlie Companies with the battalion support units were equally unsuccessful in trying to quietly rest their weary bones: At ten minutes before midnight, the NVA began walking mortars into their laager. Green tracers snapped from the sur-rounding wood line. More pissed off than scared, hot