Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [138]
Heads popped back up. Everyone was okay.
Captain Francia and Bravo Company clattered in next, and with RPGs trailing smoke across their LZ and mortar rounds whistling down, one of their Hueys crashed. Four men were KIA and eleven WIA, and the rest laid out in the broiling field as flat as nature would allow. Bravo was out of the picture. Captain Lavezzi and Alpha Company came in under AK and RPD fire and took one KIA and two WIA just coming off the skids, but they were able to get into position to support what, it was decided, would be Delta Company's crack at Chantrea.
Captain Lowe wanted to burn the NVA out. Lieutenant Bayer peered over the dike; Chantrea sat about two hundred meters away. At Bayer's words, C Battery at FSB Seminole went to work. They were almost out of range, but their first shell landed right in Chantrea. Bayer requested white phosphorous, hoping to burn down the bamboo screen at the edge of the village, and six rounds detonated in brilliant, smoky white flashes against the green.
Then the artilleryman at the other end of the radio reported that they had only three Willy Peter shells left. Fuck, Bayer cursed inwardly: This is such a half-assed operation! He said to switch to high explosive rounds.
The sky above them dotted with aircraft, the village before them smoking from the prep fire, Captain Lowe told Weed to get his platoon ready for the attack, then radioed Sprinkles to coordinate their support fire. He traded radio handsets, and contacted Francia of B Company. One of Francia's platoons was stuck out in a paddy, a situation that afforded them, however, a line of fire into one of the North Vietnamese Army's RPD positions. The RPD sat among a cluster of hootches that stuck out from the town along a trail leading west from it.
Lieutenant Weed's platoon went over the top.
They made it seventy-five meters to the next low paddy dike, then went flat against it as a withering crossfire cracked just above them. There were only seventy-five meters to go, but Lowe, crammed along the dike with them, decided it was pointless to make another rush. They stayed low while the gunships and redlegs continued to whoop in, until the first shadows of dusk allowed them to crawl a squad at a time back to the dike they had started from.
The firing continued.
Night came, and under cover of darkness, Captain Lowe and Lieutenant Weed, joined by two riflemen, crawled nervously and as silently as possible back toward Chantrea. They made it to the dike where they had been pinned down, then on to the next and last dike, and finally they crouched near the trees on the edge of town. Recon. There was a lot of noise in the wood line, so they inched their way toward the trail that ran out from the trees. Suddenly, five or six NVA broke from the tree line. Carrying AK47s and with good dispersal discipline, they hiked along the dirt path leading northwest to another forested hamlet called Ph Tnaot. Weed whispered, “What do you want to do?”
Lowe, concerned about the prospect of NVA raising havoc from the rear of his company, whispered back, “Shoot now.”
Lowe and Weed opened fire at the same time, followed by their two riflemen, and Lowe saw the red tracers from the GI to his left slam into one of the black silhouettes on the road. Green tracers began to snap back at them from the trail and the trees, and Lowe was blind to everything but the blips and flashes in the black as he tried to get his own tracers low enough to hit about where a man would be lying on the road. But his CAR 15 Shorty,