Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [137]
No rush. Help was on the way.
Tom Miller, for one, lay on his back in a sweaty daze, eyes focused only on the tracers burning by a few inches above his face.
Chapter 26: CHANTREA
With smoke grenades clipped to the PRC25 radios on their backs and with the aerials waving crazily above them as they walked, Sp4c. Rick Mickels and Sp4c. Gary Moran were Captain Lowe's constant shadows. They were with 3d Platoon when the voice of a battalion radio operator came over one of their squawk boxes in response to 2d Platoon, “… can you give us the line number of the KIA?”
Delta had not lost a man since Captain Keaton.
Unable to hear what 2d Platoon was saying, Lowe and his company headquarters listened as the battalion radioman repeated the line number as he received it for confirmation. Every man had a line number on the company roster, and Lowe pulled out his copy.
When word was passed that John Lonsdale was dead, leaving them all feeling furious and powerless, Lowe and 3d Platoon were on the trail for Samraong. In the shade of the trees along the road, they had been humping through a succession of deserted hamlets, all of them heavily bunkered, littered with green pith helmets and a khaki shirt or two, some of the hootches reduced to charred frames. The only inhabitants were the dogs that the NVA had not bothered to take with them. As they continued on, Lowe radioed Gearin, requesting to be lifted to 2d Platoon's position. On the outskirts of Samraong, an SF major brought out a small party to meet them, and at that point Gearin personally radioed Lowe back that helicopters were inbound. The 2d Platoon had retired to the northwest corner of Chantrea, which was to say at the top of the U-shaped village, and Lowe and 3d Platoon were to land just south of them on the western side of town.
Meanwhile, Gearin was going aloft in his C&C and would have A Company (Capt. George Lavezzi) and B Company (Capt. Steve Francia) “pile on” northeast and southeast of the town, respectively.
Lieutenant Bayer sat beside Captain Lowe and his RTOs, and the two or three infantrymen who had clambered aboard this Huey, as they sped directly toward Chantrea. Bayer's heart was pounding. He had never been so scared, and he was seething. John Lonsdale had been a great kid, and Bayer, the pensive, reluctant warrior with the drooping mustache, finally wanted one of those worthless dinks in his rifle sights. All he could see, though, was dry paddy coming up to meet the skid, and the expended brass and links from the door gunners spilling onto the vibrating metal floor. He was out of the cabin at a run. The tree line facing their landing exploded with AK47 and RPD fire: The gap between the gunships' firing runs and the lift ships' descent had been too great, and the NVA had been able to stick their heads back up from their spiderholes. Bayer went face down behind one of the long, low dikes. The whole place was flat and brown and barren. Bullets zipped past like angry bees, thunking loudly into the dirt behind him, and his whole body seized up in anticipation of a sledgehammer impact. An M16 suddenly tore off a burst right beside his ear: That kid who fired was down flat too, holding his rifle over his head and over the dike and blindly squeezing the trigger. A black grunt on the other side of Bayer broke into obscenities when his M16 jammed up in his hands.
Captain Lowe, trying to make sense of the situation, suddenly realized that they had been landed on the wrong side of town! At the prone, the radio cord stretched to him, Lowe told the lift ships to return, then shouted at Lieutenant Weed and Staff Sergeant Dicerbo to have the platoon crawl into two parallel rows. The Hueys landed between them and the grunts made a mad scramble for the open cabin doors.
Swinging around to the western side of town, the Cobras rolled