Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [127]
“The captain said we have to go, so let's go.”
When the platoon finally reemerged from the tree line, they popped smoke and hefted the body of the platoon radioman onto the mede vac. A dozen other men went out with shrapnel wounds from the booby traps. The next day at base camp, a helmet and crucifix were set atop some sandbags and the chaplain said a few words. Sprinkles broke down during the memorial service. It was the hardest moment of his life, and tears rolled down his face. He blamed himself. He should have listened to his men. From then on, it became standard operating procedure to improvise on the radio messages from Captain Busch and his replacement, Captain Keaton. The captains themselves were receiving instructions from a battalion headquarters that was removed one more tier from reality. Night ambushes were assigned at map coordinates that, once the platoon humped there, turned out to be rice paddies with water up to their armpits.
The job did not even begin to get easy until Sprinkles's second month, when twenty replacements arrived at the battalion base camp at Can Giuoc to make up for the men lost on his first patrol. These replacements were all draftees, but their hair was still close cropped from Basic and AIT, and Sprinkles had a chance to mold them. He was demanding and aggressive. He was also a personable, concerned young man who came to be held practically in awe by his young grunts. He looked the part–handsome, square jawed, and muscular, with blond hair and a blond mustache–and he acted the part, listening to his few old hands and counseling his new troops, “Hey, look guys. We're never gonna find more than one or two of these guys at a time, okay, and all we have to do is be quiet. If we walk in without our tin cans clanking, and we're not stomping and singing, and our radios aren't blaring, they're not going to know we're there, 'cause every other GI in this whole damn army is doing that. And if we don't make any noise, we can stand up, walk in, and they'll pop out of the wood line at about five o'clock in the afternoon to go get their chow–and we'll catch 'em.”
Sprinkles showed the way, and it really was that simple. He never lost another man, and his platoon led the battalion in ambush kills. But even for them most days were nothing but hot walks in the sun.
Second Lieutenant John Bayer arrived in February 1970 to serve as the company's forward observer. It struck him that before Cambodia a lot of the grunts were really just playing at war. They were just kids; everyone had his own nickname, and most eschewed the GI steel pot in favor of a bush hat crushed atop long hair. Bayer had no such quixotic impulses. At age twenty-four and with a master's degree, Bayer felt almost like an old man among kids; but, like it or not, he was a grunt too and he articulated the cynicism of most of the teenage riflemen:
I went reluctantly, but it never even occurred to me to go to Canada. But once I got there, I saw how it was being done–the utter stupidity of it. No question we would have won if we had made a full commitment. But it was being done halfway, and guys were getting their shit blown away for no reason. We were pulling out. Guys knew it was already a lost cause. So, there we were. We were cannon fodder. They send you in as bait; you get the shit shot out of you, they pull you back, and