Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [132]
The kid probably wasn't brutal by nature, and Lowe responded, “No, damnit! If any harm comes to those prisoners, I'm coming after you for it.”
Fifteen minutes later, the Cobras rolled in, followed closely by a pair of jets that pulled up with 250-pound bombs wobbling behind them into the trees. The NVA fire simmered down, allowing five Hueys to land fifty meters from the mud fort. With the prisoners in tow, Lowe and Weed's platoon ran for the birds, then headed south to rejoin Mize's platoon, which was sitting quietly on the new line at FSB Seminole. The job in Cambodia was just beginning. Fortunately for Captain Lowe, the Delta Company that he now led bore little similarity to the one he had originally joined four months earlier. At that time, January 1970, Lowe had noted in his journal:
Captain Keaton's D Company had “berm guard” duty. I was astonished and angry to find much of the camp a filthy cesspool. The camp was built in the rice paddies and, except for the laterite pads on which the barracks and bunkers were built, the camp grounds were covered with stinking, stagnant paddy water. The troops seemed to wear anything they wanted (blue jeans, fishnet T-shirts, cutoff khakis, mixed jungle fatigues, and even Vietnamese uniforms). In one bunker I found four men smoking marijuana. In several places I found mattresses thrown across the perimeter tactical wire to let prostitutes in at night. Equally disturbing, I found that many of the claymore mines in the tactical wire were empty. The men had used the C4 explosives from the mines to heat their rations.
Lowe's observations to the battalion commander (Gearin's predecessor) were made while he was acting battalion executive officer, and he was still in that position when another discipline problem exploded:
While sitting on a sundeck after the evening meal with several other officers, a soldier clad only in his undershorts and an untied pair of jungle boots came running up the steps screaming profanities and that he was going to kill the battalion chaplain for not carrying through on his promise to help get him back to the States. He had a hand grenade and was high on something that made all of his veins seem to bulge and made him wide-eyed and sweat heavily. The Reconnaissance Platoon leader, a huge ex-football player, and two other officers grabbed the man, wrested the grenade from his hand (the pin was already removed), and threw it into a water-filled paddy, where it exploded harmlessly.
Captain Keaton may have been inexperienced, but he was trying hard, and on 20 January 1970 he took the point with his Tiger Scout. The booby trap wounded the Scout. It killed Captain Keaton.
When Delta Company returned to Can Giuoc that evening with Keaton's body, Captain Lowe gathered the lieutenants to introduce himself as their new company commander. He told them that from now on the company would wear their helmets and flak jackets, officers and NCOs would wear their rank insignia, and they would carry only those weapons authorized in the company's table of organization. The next morning, Captain Lowe gathered his company and reminded them that they were American soldiers. He told them that they were members of the 31st Infantry Regiment that had fought the Bolsheviks in Siberia, the Japanese on Bataan, and the Chinese on the Yalu River. He told them that their challenge was to make the ghosts of the past look on their regiment proudly as it fought yet another war. Talk completed, they prepared for a riverine operation, but a grunt whose father was a master sergeant tested him by refusing to go to the field. Lowe, under considerable internal pressure, wrote in his journal, “I quietly took his weapon away and ordered the first sergeant to escort him to the battalion sergeant major pending court-martial charges. I think the