Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [124]
No casualties.
The 1st of the 5th Bobcats were not as lucky that night: A patrol from Lieutenant Doucette's Scout Platoon came under AK47 and RPG fire, losing one man killed and one wounded. Captain Laubecher's Bravo Company reacted to the contact, claiming four kills. Track driver Tinsley, from Charlie Company, watched the flashes and tracers from his laager. From his angle, it appeared that the NVA had opened fire with a Cambodian village as their backdrop so that the Bobcats could not respond with their heaviest fire support. When medevacs thumped through the darkness above the Scout Platoon, Tinsley watched the tracers stream at them. He experienced the deepest respect for the pilots and crews of those unarmed medevacs, along with an intense hatred for those gooks behind the guns.
His view of their flame tracks changed completely.
Chapter 22: CHARLIE MECH
May 12, 1970, 0400. Specialist Fourth Class Robert W. Gunn, a Southern boy with the Mortar Platoon of C Company, 1st Battalion (Mechanized), 5th Infantry, 25th Division, had just been wakened by Staff Sergeant Garcia to take his turn on guard. He was sitting in his APC lacing up his jungle boots when the first rocket-propelled grenade sizzled out of the blackened wood line.
More RPGs. Lots of them.
At the same time, a company's worth of AK47s also began jackhammering into Charlie Company. They were laagered in a clearing, with their tracks separated by thirty feet, foxholes dug between them. The command and mortar tracks were parked forty feet to the rear in the middle of the circle beside the two six-foot-deep bunkers that had three layers of sandbags and pierced-steel planking.
Bareheaded, Gunn tumbled out the back hatch of his APC to follow his lieutenant who, panic-stricken, had grabbed the helmet and flak jacket closest to him on the track floor. They were Gunn's and Gunn was pissed. Outside was all blind noise and confusion. The lieutenant bolted toward another track. Green and white tracers cut the air, ricocheting off the APCs even as the machine gunners aboard pounded back red tracers at the blips in the far tree line. Both mortar tracks were also returning fire, until an RPG slammed into one of them. The lieutenant and Gunn scrambled into another track, but then the lieutenant suddenly jumped back outside. Gunn obediently followed, until he realized that the lieutenant was only trying to get to their underground and sandbagged bunkers. Gunn reversed directions. Back at his APC, Staff Sergeant Garcia, young, stern, radio in hand, was calmly issuing instructions, and their gunner was pumping out rounds from the 81mm mortar mounted on a swiveling base plate on the floor of the track. There were six hundred rounds stacked beside the APC, three to a crate and sealed in individual cannisters. Gunn and the other assistant gunners ended up lying on their sides, smashing open the wooden boxes with fire axes as tracers passed overhead. The only thing Gunn was aware of was the word FRAGILE stamped on the wood inches from his face.
No NVA appeared in the clearing, but helmets bobbed in the foxholes under the flarelight as Ml6 rifles, M79 grenade launchers, and LAW rockets added to the .50-caliber and M60 machine gun fire punching through their own RPG screens in front of each vehicle.
Someone was screaming.
Doc Tapp bellowed, “What the hell you need?”
Doc Tapp and Gunn hustled to one of the foxholes. They carried an unconscious man back to the underground bunker where the company medic was collecting the wounded. Flarelight came in, and Gunn saw that the man they'd brought in was one of their replacements, with the company only two or three days. His skull was split open. Gunn tried to hold the new kid's head together as Doc Tapp wrapped a bandage. The kid died.
More shouts for help.
Doc Tapp, Gunn, and several others went out again for the wounded. Gunn's body was functioning but his mind was unplugged. After the contact, several of the walking wounded