Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [161]
There were no other American casualties.
On the eastern edge of the cordon, the APCs of Alpha 2d of the 47th Panthers, with the tanks of Alpha 2d of the 34th Dreadnaughts, moved out from the box perimeter they had established the evening before in a clearing that divided the rubber fields of Treak from the woods of COSVN. The plantation sawmill sat deserted to one side of the field. As the mechanized infantrymen conducted dismounted daylight patrols around the night laager, they detected a faint trail that led north into a supply cache of hundred-pound rice sacks stacked two deep and six feet high with fifty feet of frontage. Lieutenant Forster of the Dread-naughts monitored his radio as the Panthers patrols began trudging west into the fringes of the bombed woods. The voices of two different platoon leaders began issuing from the radio, “… we've got three KB As over here on the hillside.”
“I've got two KB As over here in the brush. Make that three. Four.” Pause. “We've found five KBAs at our location.”
Forster asked a grunt what KBA meant.
The answer: killed by air or artillery.
The official count was 151 North Vietnamese Army KBA.
As dusk approached, the blocking positions of the two leg battalions consolidated into night defensive positions, while the scouting patrols of the three armored battalions returned to their night laagers. It had been quite a day, made better for some units by the arrival of resupply Chinooks, as Lieutenant Giasson noted in his diary that night: “… salvation came. Commo section received part of an SP pack–soap, shaving gear, candy, writing paper, a case of coke, and a block of ice. Here we sit in a steaming Cambodian jungle with all the pleasures of life–that's the American GI.”
As for the haggard, muddy men of Charlie 2d of the 47th Panthers, they celebrated their harrowing night passage to the bombed-out forest by preparing for another harrowing night with ambush patrols positioned along several trails near the laager. Sometime before dawn, Captain Kaldi of Charlie Company radioed Claybrook and Weeks at their CP: “… we've got twelve, fourteen coming out. We're going to hit 'em with nails.” A 106mm recoilless rifle, equipped with a Starlight Scope and mounted atop an APC, was sighted down the trail where movement had been spotted. The way the story filtered back via radio to the CP, the gunner watched a figure walk from one side of the road to the other, look around, then walk back to lead the main party across. When they appeared the gunner punched off a fléchette round that shattered the stillness with an explosive hiss of nine-thousand razored darts. For good measure, an artillery battery fired more than a hundred rounds into the kill zone. At dawn there was a Cobra and Loach overhead as Charlie Company counted nine dead NVA on the trail. A survivor stood up with raised hands, and Captain Kaldi reported that according to his Tiger Scout they'd just captured a Chinese officer: “The sonuvabitch is running his mouth too much. I just put my handkerchief in his mouth.”
Major Weeks answered, “You gotta be shittin' me!” The message was promptly relayed to the 2d Brigade, 25th Division, at Thien Ngon.
It was not preposterous to consider that the prisoner may have been a Chinese adviser. They had served such a role in the war against the French, and this particular individual was policed up in an NVA headquarters area that only forty-eight hours before had still been a sanctuary. There was an immediate helicopter pickup of the prisoner.
A 25th Division GI commented to a newspaper reporter, 'They tried to be friendly. They just didn't know any better. One night a tripflare went off and we opened up on them. Killed one of them. It really tore me up. The Vietnamese know not