Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [16]
2 April: Cambria's twenty-third birthday.
4 April: Captain Dickerson, whom Cambria considered brave, steady, and extremely demanding–he did not hesitate to shout at his lieutenants– came to the end of his tour, and was replaced by the father of the automatic ambush, Captain Menzel, another screamer whom Cambria came to consider a man who knew no fear but who was preoccupied with body count. The job became that much harder.
8 April: Cambria's night ambush outside artillery range netted eight NVA kills, the most he had seen in a single encounter.
9 April: In the predawn blackness, HHT and H Company, 2-11 ACR, held back a ground assault on Fort Defiance at the cost of two GIs KIA and twenty WIA, while they stacked up twenty NVA before the wire.4 G Troop swept the path of the enemy retreat at daylight, with Cambria's 3d Platoon killing three NVA in a quick skirmish, while Crupper's 1st Platoon and Lieutenant Lewis's 2d Platoon reconned by fire and panicked an NVA ambush team into firing prematurely. Under their own wall of fire, Lewis's platoon chased away the disorganized ambushers and captured a 75mm recoilless rifle.
25 April: Lewis's platoon followed Cambria's platoon down one of the claymore-rigged exit routes from Fort Defiance. Unknown to them, the NVA had found the wires. When Lieutenant Lewis, who was new and had not yet learned to tie down the radio aerials marking his vehicle as a command track, rolled into the kill zone after a dozen other vehicles, the NVA ambushers suddenly detonated the mines. One man was killed instantly, and Lewis ended up on the ground with a piece of his skull blown off. Cambria shouted into his radio for a mede vac, and when Lewis died in his arms, Cambria was reduced to helpless tears. He had been friends with Lewis since Jungle School in Panama. Lieutenant Colonel Brookshire, who Cambria thought cared very deeply but who couldn't afford to show it, was suddenly on the scene, and he abruptly snapped Cambria back to reality by shouting in his face,“This is fucking war! People are going to die!”
1 May: Cambria's second Purple Heart put him in the hospital for thirty days, then it was back to the bush.
Considering that NVA units in War Zone C were desperate for food and ammunition, according to monitored NVA radio conversations, Colonel Starry and Lieutenant Colonel Brookshire realized the enemy would attempt to regain the initiative. The assault on Fort Defiance came as no surprise and was, in fact, just one in a running series of counterattacks.
At Fort Defiance, the command post and medical station had already been heavily sandbagged and their artillery ammunition bunkered in. Brookshire had their attached platoon from the 919th Engineer Company, 1 lth ACR, organized into fire control parties to prevent secondary explosions when the attack did come. When the assault finally materialized on the morning of 9 April, NVA mortar crews began thumping out a barrage, and the tree lines around Fort Defiance lit up with dozens of muzzle flashes and rocket-propelled grenades, bringing to bear on the little bald knob a rain of fire the likes of which Brookshire had never seen. The RPG projectiles glanced off ACAVs with terrifying shrieks, but in the noise, dust, and confusion, the crews of the Pattons and ACAVs manned their guns and returned a sheet of red tracers of their own that was dazzling as it ricocheted against the black ground into the black sky. Flashes boomed from the barrels of the howitzers on the hill, and tracers from orbiting gunships poured from the sky, while flares and illumination rounds lit the hill and woods in a stark white glow. The NVA had dug a battalion's worth of slit trenches from one hundred to five hundred meters from Fort Defiance.