Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [15]
The Blackhorse had good soldiers, not supermen.
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The war was especially hard on the young leaders, like Sgt. Michael G. Hackbarth, who came to H Company, 11th ACR, via Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He had enlisted as a personal protest against the campus demonstrators and because of faltering marks from a beer-blasted semester at the state college, his parents had pressured him into attending. Within months of Basic, he was stitching sergeant stripes to his sleeves. At twenty, Hackbarth didn't want the responsibility, but like most Middle Americans in a corner, he did his best, even volunteering to join a line platoon so a short-timer buddy could have his previous job as a radioman in the company commander's track. They put him on tank number two-two. Several weeks later when the tank commander was relieved for cowardice and sent to the rear, the great green beast was Hackbarth's. So were its three crewmen. The gunner was William Conkright, a good guy putting in his time. The loader was El vin Langston, a gangly Texan better known as Bumper, who was so tall that when he stood on the floor of the tank his head would still stick out of the turret and he would look up at Hackbarth in the cupola with that friendly, dufus, gap-toothed grin of his. The driver was Mike Edwards, a small, cocky, streetwise punk from Chicago who knew his job but who constantly jockeyed with Hackbarth for control of the tank. Hackbarth answered to Lieutenant Anderson, whom he rated as a hardheaded damn fool, and Platoon Sergeant King, a hard-core but approachable professional who ran the platoon well, although he might have growled too often that his troops were all fucking duds. That was how Hackbarth, who, in the middle and sensitive to criticism, sized up the situation. He wasn't sure how to be buddies with his men and, at the same time, be impartial in responding to orders from Anderson and King. So, mostly he was taciturn, an uncomfortable compromise that many of the instant leaders had to make. As Hackbarth said,“Decisions were difficult to make regarding subordinates, especially when we were all the same age and of the same general background. One must follow orders at the expense of developing a close friendship with one's crewmates. I tended to stay apart from the others because that is what one is supposed to do. My men did everything before I did: eat, sleep, shower, mail. …”
Lieutenant Cambria of G Troop would have understood. It was on 17 March 1970, Cambria recorded in his diary after three weeks of in-processing and introduction classes, that he came off the resupply Chinook in the jungle laager where Captain Dickerson, CO of G Troop, welcomed him to the bush and turned him over to Lieutenant Crupper, the troop's best platoon leader. Trained as an infantry officer, Cambria knew nothing of armor maintenance, had never even seen a Sheridan before. Gordy Crupper, a calm, cool, and collected West Pointer with a good sense of humor, gave him a crash course on their methods.
19 March: On what was Cambria's first patrol, he volunteered to accompany Crupper to recon a base camp that had been hit by air strikes, but they and the six GIs with them walked into a barely upturned complex with NVA soldiers sitting and talking atop their bunkers. Skirting along the edge of a dried-up pond as they backed out, the patrol was ambushed, but before anyone was killed Dickerson and the rest of G Troop appeared from behind, coming through the trees at a slow roll and firing over their heads. Walking backward, coming out last, Cambria was firing his M16 when he was suddenly blown off his feet by an RPG that shattered against a tree a few paces to one side. His glasses gone and blood leaking from a shrapnel wound in his left arm, Cambria stumbled to an ACAV. His wound was treated in the field.
21 March: Cambria's first successful automatic ambush netted three NVA bodies.
31 March: Having been taught the fine art of the automatic ambush by Crupper of 1st Platoon, and accustomed by now to searching the shattered bodies and bloodstained