Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [165]
Schulcz ordered the fuses lit, and C Troop began to depart the area when battalion called again, “Wait a minute. Cancel that 'fire in the hole.' Brigade wants you to go back and bring that rice in.”
“I'm sorry,” Schulcz answered, “you're a little late. The fuse is lit and I ain't going back.”
After the explosions, C Troop went back only to find some of the sacks blown up into the tree branches. One or two cavalrymen shot holes in the bags and the rice poured out into the high grass.
By and large, the North Vietnamese were invisible as the rice caches were back-hauled. But after dark on 19 May 1970, a miserable, chilly, rainy, overcast night, a platoon or so of NVA slid up through the high brush to the NDP of C Company, 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry, and un-leashed a sudden barrage of AK47 and RPG fire at close range. Almost immediately, two GIs were dead and eight wounded. Battalion commander Welsh was immediately on the horn to C Troop, 3d Squadron, 4th Cavalry, to send one platoon to reinforce his men. With that, Captain Schulcz and First Sergeant Williams climbed atop their command APC in the platoon column and proceeded down a muddy road. Their path was lit by a flareship whose flares Schulcz thought looked like lightbulbs behind many sooty windows because of the low, leaden rain clouds.
The rain was so thick that Schulcz couldn't see through his glasses. The mud spraying up from the track ahead covered him from head to toe as he sat atop his track, trying to establish commo with the company in contact. After some confusion, the platoon outposts along the trail were alerted to their approach. By the time the platoon had made it to the CP, the movement in the brush around the infantrymen had slacked off–the contact lasted only some fifteen minutes–and the tracks pumped machine gun fire into the darkness as a safeguard. With First Sergeant Williams shouting through the rain, the scared, soaking-wet infantrymen rose from the cold mud and began loading their gear on the APCs while Captain Schulcz got the infantry platoons up on his radio net to reestablish some order and let them know that someone out there was interested in them. They set up a new laager in the nearest open area as arty and gunships flashed in on where the enemy might be. After getting everything battened down, Schulcz and Williams crawled into the back of their APC and fell asleep numbly on some ammo cans.
At Cu Chi, before the incursion, Major Fiore had observed MI, 2d Brigade, 25th Division, when civilians“ were brought in from the free-fire zones ruled by the NVA/VC at night. 'The Vietnamese were totally impassive. They wouldn't talk until the price of silence became higher than the cost that would be inflicted on them by the communists, their nocturnal masters, for talking. So, to begin with, the candidates for interrogation were kept for however long it took for their turn to come up, sometimes more than a day, without food or water, in a wire cage only four feet tall. They couldn't even stand up straight. The cage was in the direct sunlight. Then, when they got into the interrogation hut, I saw an interrogator attach wires from a field phone to the nipples of a seventeen-year-old and crank the handle to shock her into telling whatever they thought she knew. These people all looked so innocent and frail that you couldn't help but feel sorry for them, but I made no move to stop or change the tactics so I am as guilty as the whole system.