Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [141]
A footpath paralleled the main road fifty meters to the west, and Sergeant Macomber moved down it with one squad on the extreme left of the company line.
In the trees to the right of Macomber and his squad, and to the left of the main road, Lieutenant Mize advanced with one squad while Ser-geant Alvarez led the platoon's remaining squad through the trees to the right of the main road, with Captain Lowe behind them on the road itself with Lieutenant Bayer, Specialist Mickels, and Specialist Moran.
Lieutenant Weed and Staff Sergeant Dicerbo moved their platoon as a single group into the woods on the extreme right of the company line.
The vegetation limited visibility. Nearing the pagoda, though, Macomber's squad spotted something on their trail. It was a man in a black shirt and black shorts riding a bicycle. The grunts on the trail followed his approach in the sights of their M 16s, but before he came close enough to holler to, he saw them and pedaled furiously back the way he had come. No one fired. Chances were he was an NVA scout going back to alert his unit, but he appeared unarmed and no one wanted a civilian on his conscience.
They pressed on. Sunlight flooded through the treetops. And that's when it began.
Sergeant Macomber and Danny Wood were walking beside one another when the first shot seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere. A milli-second after the AK47 exploded in his ears, Wood was looking right into the face of the man who'd fired at him. The NVA was six feet away, literally at his feet, nestled in a tunnel opening. One burst, then the AK must have jammed, because Wood found himself on his ass on the trail, stunned, terrified, but very much alive. He rolled off the trail, scrambling for cover in the brush, and went flat in a small depression, with one shoulder pressed against a small earthen berm.
That berm was an NVA bunker.
Wood froze. He tried to melt into the dirt. He shrieked, “He's right there! Kill 'em, kill 'em!”
Wylie Walker and Doc Miller kneeled behind the trees on the opposite side of the path with an M60 gunner who'd scrambled over with them. The gunner squeezed a long burst into the bunker and Wood made a frantic rush back to them, pushing through the brush on his elbows and knees at an astonishing speed. By then, shots were beginning to crack through the branches, so Walker hunkered down behind his tree with an M79 grenade launcher and slammed the fat shells into the earthen bunker until the brush atop it caught fire. That's when Miller suddenly noticed that the bushes around them were rustling. There was a pith helmet and a face flashing between two trees here, an arm momentarily visible there: Reinforcements were rushing to the spiderholes and bunkers that honeycombed the village. Miller sputtered, “Walker, there's people out there!”
“What?!”
Doc Miller shouldered his M16 and had just squeezed off his first shots when an absolute wall of enemy fire began jackhammering from three sides. An NVA mortar crew somewhere behind the pagoda began thumping out shells.
Chaos.
When the firing started in earnest, Sergeant Alvarez's squad, anxious to reach the pagoda right ahead of them, had advanced far ahead of the company line, and coming under the worst of the crossfire, had leaped into the drainage ditch running down the right side of the main road. Captain Lowe's command group had been right behind them, and, coming around a hedge, had been fully exposed when the shooting started. They too ended up in a ditch, but one running down the left side of the road and not quite as far forward as the pinned-down squad across from them.
Captain Lowe stuck his head up. A footpath cut across the main road, filling in the drainage ditches on both sides at that point, thus giving the command group a shield to its front, but making a barrier so the pinned-down squad up ahead and across the road could not simply crawl back down the ditch. They could not get over that hump under such fire.