Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [133]
Captain Lowe requested to be sent on an extended operation in the Plain of Reeds. With Lieutenant Sprinkles's men carrying the lion's share of the contacts and with Lowe living in the mud with the other two platoons, the familiarity breeding no contempt, D Company began to change. According to Lowe:
9 March: I relieved the company first sergeant for hitting a soldier. No soldier respected this man because of his laziness, dishonesty, and drunkenness. A race fight broke out earlier at the enlisted men's club. It was broken up by D Company, with black, white, red, and yellow standing together as a wedge between the mobs. I was proud of the men.
14 March: I organized a night patrol. Even my worst problem soldiers were among the volunteers. I decided to take one of them over the grumbling of other patrol members because I saw a glimmer of hope that the man would gain a sense of self-esteem in this special group and would leave the Army a better man than he came.
20 March: One of 3d Platoon's squads sprang an ambush on a group of VC, killing one and capturing an SKS rifle. This was 3d Platoon's first enemy contact since before I joined the company and they were elated to finally see some action.
Three days later, Delta Company stumbled into a network of booby traps. From there, D Company returned to FSB Gettysburg, where contacts increased and where Lowe recorded the frustration of fighting a war according to meaningless traceries on a State Department map:
11 April: Ambush patrols within one kilometer of Ba Thu, Cambodia. On an aerial reconnaissance earlier in the day, I could see boats laden with supplies lined up for nearly a mile along the canal just inside the border. The helicopter I was in took seven hits from small arms fire as we paralleled the border. If I could have called the artillery and air support on the standing boats, there would have been fewer allied casualties in the coming months.
12 April: At dusk I put 2d Platoon into a series of ambush positions… they came under heavy fire as soon as the helicopters lifted off. SGT Cliff Macomber's squad, one of the best in the company, reacted like banshees, killing four NVA at nearly point-blank range…. PFC Osborne and PFC Wood counterattacked and kept the enemy pinned down, allowing SGT Macomber to bring the squad into a skirmish line. I ordered our escorting gunships back to the contact area and accompanied them with my command and control ship…. Rockets and miniguns broke up what had been an NVA platoon, killing five more…. The squad continued to engage small groups of NVA as they crawled around them in the grass. Claymore mines, placed dangerously close to the squad, were soon all fired as was most of the squad's machine gun and 40mm ammunition. Near midnight, SGT Macomber reported continuous movement in the tall grass around him and PFC Osborne was wounded in the abdomen by hand grenade shrapnel. 1st Platoon had become lost and was no help so I had a helicopter bring me in alone with the ammunition resupply. I joined the squad and the rest of the evening passed uneventfully. The next day I put Osborne and Wood in for a Bronze Star.
At dusk on 7 May 1970, when Weed's platoon and their prisoners joined Mize's platoon at FSB Seminole, Cambodia, Lowe finally felt that he had a company that was ready. And he, along with many others, finally felt that they were doing something productive. Ba Thu was actually two villages straddling the border. The Vietnamese side had already been completely flattened. The Cambodian side, however, was honeycombed with tunnels and bunkers. With the leash finally taken off, teams of tunnel rats from the 65th Engineers were brought in to disarm the booby traps rigged at the tunnel entrances, and the enemy equipment was brought up. It felt good. As Lowe noted in his journal, though, on the first day one could barely tell that a war was going on as helos