Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [152]
The troops loved the squadron, and the squadron loved them. Proof of that came every evening when the Chinooks delivered hot food in mermite cans in such amounts to allow midnight snacking. Cooks with field stoves and breakfast goods also arrived in the evening to make sure that the troops pushed off at dawn with another hot meal. The cav troopers had to eat C rations only for lunch. This system–only one of the ways the squadron looked out for its members–worked only because those in charge really cared. The officers in the Three-Quarter Horse were all Army, deeply committed and easily approachable. Whereas in most units the first sergeants stayed in the rear and there was no great urgency in getting the supplies through, in the cav the top sergeants lived in the bush with their men. It made a real difference.
All in all, a sense of discipline welled up from within the Three-Quarter Horse with, for example, the troops self-policing the marijuana; occasionally, several GIs would approach their troop commander to request that a chronic abuser be sent back to the rear: “Joe's a head. We gotta get him out of here before he hurts someone.” If that did not work, there were metal doors or crates of ammunition that could easily jiggle loose on an APC and fall heavily. After evacuating his third or fourth man from Cambodia with broken arms or legs in what seemed completely careless accidents, Lieutenant Colonel Knotts would come down hard on his troop commanders until “… the living, breathing organization known as 3d Squadron, 4th Cavalry, somehow let it be known to me that not all nonbattle casualties were completely bad. I still do not know how it was made known to me. The 'it' was that any trooper found under the influence by his squad during daytime operations or nighttime guard simply did not stay with the maneuver element of the squadron.”
The squadron's road march north from Cu Chi on 8 May 1970 was uneventful. C Troop, in the lead, established a position in the parched flatlands adjacent to the Thien Ngon airstrip, and conducted local reconnaissance while the rest of the caravan caught up. Major Kremer gave Captain Schulcz a quick briefing. C Troop was to immediately continue north on Highway 22, clearing the dirt road to the invisible border, and establish a night laager into which would soon arrive a battery of self-propelled howitzers from II FFV and an AVLB from the 65th Engineers.
C Troop began rolling. An APC was being used to jump start a Sheridan, but a problem endemic to the Sheridan was that a jump start could produce an arc–an electrical current between parts of the vehicle interior. In this case not only did the crew get an arc but it ignited the combustible cases of the main gun rounds stored on either side of the driver's seat. Sergeant Major Hickey ran up with a fire extinguisher and, as the citation to his Soldier's Medal later put it, disregarding that “… several rounds had already exploded because of the blaze's intense heat, Hickey continued to battle the flaming inferno until it was extinguished.”
Meanwhile, a tracked engineer vehicle attached to C Troop ran over a mine almost as soon as the track rolled onto Highway 22. At that point, two soldiers began hand sweeping the dirt road. It took forever. Captain Schulcz, a bespectacled, normally soft-spoken man, silently fumed as they slowly rolled behind the two men with earphones and minesweepers: He could never understand why they limited themselves to the speed of a man on foot when clearing roads. He had read in engineer manuals and seen demonstrations of mine rollers, which, when fixed to the fronts of tanks, put neither man nor vehicle in harm's way. When he'd earlier served as CO of A Company of the 34th Armor–he spent a total of twenty-eight months incountry–such machinery was part of the TO&E of the 25th Division. Schulcz had looked up that fact after his Patton tanks had been used to clear roads in an unnerving way: The point tank would drive until it hit