Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [140]
By noon, Delta Company was in Chantrea and by two the town was cleared. They found John Lonsdale where he'd been shot, his hair singed by the napalm. The NVA also lay about, in clusters or individually, burned in their spiderholes or felled at ground level as they had tried to leave town during the night. As 2d and 3d Platoons leapfrogged through the town, covering each other, they tallied up forty-four enemy corpses. Only the dead remained. On Lieutenant Weed's side of the line, two of his men, a pair of soul brothers called Treetop and Tatum, began pumping bullets into the village livestock. Immature, frightened, angry, and worn out, they started to set fire to a hootch. Their blood lust was up.
They were quickly stopped.
Now that Chantrea was secured, Captain Lowe sent Lieutenant Sprinkles back to FSB Keaton with the weapons and equipment of their casualties, and a list of needed supplies, aboard one of the ash'n'trash slicks coming in to replenish empty stomachs and empty rifle magazines. Mean-while, the people of Chantrea, who had spent the battle huddled in a shallow area west of town with a Cambodian flag stuck in the ground, were beginning to reappear among the trees around their village. The Cambodians had never seen American GIs before, and one terrified little group cautiously approached. They were trembling and went to their knees, bowing, with their hands in prayer. The GIs told them to get back up, but not until the grunts pressed bars of soap and C-ration tins into their hands did the Cambodians realize that the communist propaganda had not been true. One of the teenagers even tried to talk with the grunts in halting English. Doc Miller thought of that boy years later when the newspaper would tell of how the communists had sealed their victory in Cambodia by exterminating everyone who had a smattering of education. Doc Miller always knew why he fought.
Chapter 27: A HANDFUL OF REAL SOLDIERS
On the afternoon of 10 May 1970, D Company, 6th Battalion, 31st Infantry of the 9th Division, while humping the several kilometers northwest from Chantrea to Ph Tnaot, found an old Cambodian woman. She was sitting by herself in one of the otherwise deserted hootches along the path. The Tiger Scout fired off questions, but the woman just impassively shook her head. The Scout finally remarked sharply that she was a stupid old hag, then blurted to Captain Lowe, “We gotta get outta here. Beaucoup VC. We die if we go farther.”
The afternoon before, when Colonel Williams and Lieutenant Colonel Gearin had choppered into Chantrea with their operations officers, it had been determined that the NVA had slipped out through the gap between B and D Companies. Estimated to be a decimated battalion carrying their wounded with them, the NVA could not move fast, and Delta Company had been taxed with pursuit. The next morning, 10 May, Lowe had ridden a Loach for an aerial reconnaissance and had spotted numerous tracks and drag marks in the marsh between Chantrea and Ph Tnaot.
Everything was adding up.
Leaving their rucksacks, flak jackets, and night observation devices with a squad at Chantrea, Delta Company had pushed out as the sun rose, noticing NVA pith helmets and empty NVA backpacks along the way. Nearing Ph Tnaot, Weed's platoon discovered an NVA corpse stuffed in a roadside bunker. The smell was unreal. Working off the trail and into the fringe of Ph Tnaot, Mize's platoon happened upon the spot where the NVA had momentarily stopped to reorganize: The brush was littered with bloody bandages.
There were also freshly dug spiderholes. Lowe pulled Mize back to the road juncture at the southern approach to Ph Tnaot where he had moved up with Weed. Lowe decided to bring his two-platoon company up on line, and to move toward the village's common green with Mize's 2d Platoon on the left flank and Weed's 3d Platoon on the right. The CP would advance in the seam between the two platoons. They guided along the village's main dirt road, which ran through the trees, passing an occasional deserted hootch on stilts from the southeast