Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [163]
Gaining information in such a manner was forbidden by some battalion commanders, while many turned a blind eye to it in an environment where, as Major Fiore of the 2d Brigade, 25th Division, commented, “the stakes were very real, so what might be an abuse under one set of perspectives became a necessity in a different situation and could only be called an atrocity by someone sitting back in an armchair in the peaceful U.S. of A.”1
In the area being searched by the 3d Squadron, 4th Cavalry, caches were also in abundance. Amid the flattened hootches and torn-down palm fronds of one deserted supply depot, the cavalrymen found a metal-work shop with a soft metal foundry and the capability for electrical arc welding, electrical power generating, metal sawing, and grenade manufacture. There were also field telephones in the camp. When the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Knotts, landed his Loach, he was surprised not only with the sophisticated machinery the NVA had with them in the jungle but also with their talent for improvisation. A pot had been fashioned from the front end of a bomb's metal case, and with handles welded to it had been used in melting aluminum. Scattered around the work area where the melting pot was found were trays of packed-earth molds for the top halves of potato-masher grenades, more tools and implements used to manufacture the explosive-holding portion of the grenades, and also the equipment needed to melt and pour TNT. Knotts commented, “… obviously, dud U.S. bombs provided the explosives, salvaged aluminum provided the metal, and ingenuity provided the wherewithal to manufacture the grenades. Later, at a different site, we even found homemade pouches to carry the grenades, fabricated from apparently ex-U.S. canvas.”
While the cavalrymen who found the supply depot tagged the captured and, occasionally, recaptured equipment and stacked it in clearings for helicopter evacuation, the cavalrymen under Captain Schulcz of C Troop found, on 14 May 1970, what also kept the NVA fighting: rice. One of Schulcz's platoons happened upon fresh tire tracks in the vegetation, and several GIs followed them on foot to two stacks of rice sacks. They radioed Schulcz that “… it looks like a warehouse!”
Schulcz asked if they were talking about the rice socks that NVA foot soldiers carried over their shoulders, and was told negative. On each of the sacks they had found was stamped a number of kilograms equaling one hundred seventy pounds. Schulcz told them to keep looking. The squad of dismounted GIs followed the trails in the forest until they had found almost two hundred tons of rice, neatly stacked five or six sacks high on wooden pallets and covered by sheets of green plastic. This was relayed to Schulcz who blurted, “Are you kidding me?!”
“Hell, no, it looks like a supermarket!”
Schulcz immediately relayed their find to squadron so they would get the credit in case another unit stumbled upon the same cache; then Knotts had C Troop move on as he came up with B Troop to destroy the rice.
In that mission the Three-Quarter Horse was unsuccessful, for no matter what they did to the rice, from dousing it with fuel to packing explosives under the sacks, the fire would usually burn only the outer layer. The rest, even the scattered individual grains, could still be collected, cleaned, and eaten by the NVA, who were sure to move back into this area. The order was thus changed to evacuate the rice to refugee camps in Vietnam. The trails in the forested cache area were only four or five feet wide, too thin for trucks, so the sacks were hefted atop APCs for the ride to an evacuation point where truck convoys made round trips from positions across the border. It was heavy, hot, and monotonous duty, made only a bit easier by the thirty or so Cambodian men who were hired to help in exchange for a sack of rice. A sack would probably feed them and their families for a week. Knotts was hesitant to pay more, lest the NVA reclaim it from the villagers. It took perhaps a week to get all the rice out. Before that last sack went