Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [131]
Doc Miller got a real scare. He and his good buddy, Danny Wood, were walking across the paddy when Miller suddenly felt something tug at his foot. A wire was stuck under the rim of his jungle boot where the strip of leather holding the eyelets was stitched to the nylon. “Wood, don't move, there's a booby trap!” He slowly moved his foot back. The wire moved with him. His legs wobbled and he hollered and screamed, and frantically tried to see where the explosive was. Miller had his flak jacket on, and Wood took off his own and draped it over Miller's legs. Wood backed off. Everyone was watching. Miller tensed to jump and duck, but then the booby trap suddenly came into sweaty focus. The grenade to which the wire was attached was itself secured to a stake stuck in the dirt. It was as plain as day, and the pin was already pulled.
It had been a dud.
Lieutenant Colonel Gearin and his jump command group landed next, and set up their radios in a hootch on the fringe of Ba Thu village. Many of the houses were only charred frames after the ARVN push. Gearin's radios were buzzing: Alpha and Bravo Companies, along with Echo Recon, were landing, as Delta already had, and scouts and gunships were rolling in on parties of NVA moving out of the area. The LZ was dubbed FSB Seminole, and the 105s were already firing. A CIDG group swept one bombarded area and reported eight NVA dead. Maybe there would be something left over, after all, for the Polar Bears.
Chapter 24: SOLDIERING
May 7, 1970. Captain Lowe stood beside the dirt trail in steel pot and flak jacket, CAR15 Shorty in hand, watching what seemed to be an endless stream of refugees pass by with their belongings on their backs or in ox carts. They were Vietnamese who had settled in Cambodia, many the families of NVA and VC soldiers, and they were trying to flee the slaughter that Cambodians were now unleashing upon their ancient enemies. Fluent in Vietnamese, Lowe pulled from the line any young men with close-cropped military haircuts, muscular frames, and, in some cases, old combat scars.
They were all too exhausted to resist.
Lowe had one squad in the wood line north of the dirt road, and each time he called a suspect out of the column, a GI would trot down and escort the prisoner back to the trees. Lieutenant Weed had the rest of the platoon positioned to the south, across two hundred meters of barren dirt; they covered Lowe's group from the vicinity of a mud fort that had been a Cambodian border post but that was now shot up and deserted.
As Lowe pulled his twelfth prisoner from the refugee column, the young man turned to ask for instructions from the hapless older man behind him. The older man, probably an officer, became prisoner number thirteen, but by then word has passed through the chain of refugees. A figure toting a weapon broke from farther down the tree line, saw what was happening, and ducked back into the trees. Lowe saw another group moving through the trees of a parallel wood line. They shouted something to the refugees, and the string broke on the road; the people fanned across the field in confused groups. Lowe shouted at his squad in the trees to hustle the prisoners back to the mud fort.
He dropped to one knee to cover them, then saw an NVA rush from the trees with an RPG over his shoulder. He aimed at the fort, then collapsed in a hail of M60 fire from Lieutenant Weed's covering group.
Lowe took off in a dead run.
Lowe and Weed quickly positioned the platoon along the walls of the mud fort, and herded their prisoners into the crumbling command bunker in the center of the miniature outpost, with a GI crouched beside each of the two apertures. Figures with AK47s and RPGs could be seen moving forward in the tree lines to the north and west, and a noisy exchange of fire soon built up across the open field. The NVA set up a mortar behind one of the tree lines; so with enemy shells exploding far behind them at