Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [158]
There had been only a mine, a forty-pounder they estimated, which the first dozen APCs had missed. The body of the unlucky APC had been cracked across the middle, and several road wheels were damaged. A Sky Crane was dispatched to airlift out the hulk. A Huey also landed beside the road to take aboard five of the crew, none of whom had been hit with shrapnel but all of whom had concussions or were bleeding from their ears. They would return in a week, after their eardrums had reconstituted themselves, while Dennis Hiedeman, who was not actually medevacked until the next day, would not return for a month. Jim Ross, refusing to be evacuated, joined another crew.
The Triple Deuce had just recrossed the 65th Engineer's bridge on the Rach Cai Bac, recalled from the Lancer Brigade to reinforce the Fire Brigade's developing encirclement of where COSVN was thought to be. Upon reaching Thien Ngon, the Triple Deuce immediately turned north and retraced the Three-Quarter Horse's route across War Zone C. Within twelve hours of rattling back across the pontoon bridge, the battalion was closing on Krek, where, that night, attention was turned to the operation that was to commence at dawn. Intelligence had tracked elements of COSVN to a hilly, thickly wooded area near the Treak plantation, which was northeast of the original point of entry of the 2d Brigade, 25th Division, and approximately equidistant between Krek to the southwest and Memot to the southeast.
Sometime before twilight, at least four waves of USAF B52 Stratofor-tresses, with six bombers per wave, would conduct a compression strike on the forest headquarters, meaning that there would be a breathing space of only some five minutes between the end of one bombing and the beginning of the next. At least twenty-four B52s would sigh over the target from Guam, flying too high to be seen or heard, each carrying 108 mixed 500-and 750-pound bombs for a pay load of twenty-seven tons per bomber. Two battalions of straight-leg infantry were to conduct airmobile assaults from jungle PZs to jungle LZs north of the bombed woods as soon as the last bomb bay doors sealed back into the closed position, while the tanks and tracks of three thicker-skinned battalions swept toward them. Hammer and anvil: The 4-9 Infantry (Welsh) would CA north of the woods from their current positions near Krek and assume blocking positions. The 2-27 Infantry (Hodges) would do likewise from near Cu Chi. The 3-4 Cavalry (Knotts) and 2-22 Mech (Parker) would drive into the woods from the south and west, respectively, after a dawn road march from Krek. The 2-47 Mech (Claybrook) with A/2-34 Armor (Tieman) would complete the seal to the east after a midnight road march from the Fishhook, where they'd been opcon to the 1st Cavalry Division.
The bombing went off as planned, and at 0430, 11 May 1970, the men of the 2d of the 22d Triple Deuce filled in their fighting positions, packed their tracks, and moved out into the still gray morning. They sped northeast on the dusty plantation roads, passing numerous villages of rubber tree workers, preceded by helicopters that slowly orbited each hamlet and instructed the villagers via interpreters and loudspeakers to stay in their homes. Most did not. Apparently, North Vietnamese or Khmer Rouge, alerted by the broadcasts, were fading away, but only after inciting the villagers with talk of holocaust. Hundreds of Cambodians gathered all the belongings they could carry and streamed along the roads in terror, expecting to be brutalized by