Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [171]
Charlie Company was pinned down. The company commander was on the radio with Lieutenant Colonel Parker, battalion commander, and Captain Goldsmith, operations officer, requesting mede vacs and reinforcements. Charlie Company had been heading back to secure the battalion command post when ambushed, and with no line units in his laager, Parker had to radio Captain Lechner of Alpha Company, which was already laagering in for the night some kilometers away. Alpha saddled up and roared toward Charlie, but then bumped into five earthen berms that the enemy had quickly constructed across the road. The berms were booby trapped. Captain Lechner asked for volunteers to destroy the obstacles, and Sergeant Sewall, a shake'n'bake platoon sergeant, and two privates went to work. It was twilight by then, but with artillery illumination being fired above, Sewall's team scooped out holes in the berms by hand to insure that they didn't trigger any of the booby traps with a shovel. They placed C4 in the holes and, berm by berm, blew them away.
With Alpha stalled at the dikes and Charlie still pinned in the paddy, Lieutenant Colonel Parker and Captain Goldsmith finally took two APCs up to within two hundred meters of Charlie Company and halted on the highway. It was dark and misty, but with their artillery liaison officer aboard, the canebreak was brought under heavy fire, first with the battal-ion's own four-deuce mortars, then by three artillery batteries. They proceeded in the next few hours, even after the fight was over, to hang 162 illumination rounds above the field and to pound 578 high-explosive rounds in and around the canebreak, and along any escape routes the NVA might use as the RPG and AK47 fire began to diminish. A flareship further turned the field, now misty with dusk's rain clouds, into a stadium, and while flares guided the medevacs, gunships rolled in to pump rockets. Alpha Company arrived on the scene and deployed in blocking positions several hundred meters from the paddy, while Parker requested the Phan-toms that had been scrambled overhead to napalm the canebreak to give Charlie Company a clean break.
The flight leader said he couldn't see in the dark and drizzle, but Parker asked again, “I need some help. Can you bring it on in?”
The Phantoms broke through the low ceiling and, tightly sandwiched between the rain clouds and the ground, flashed past at treetop level, the canebreak pulsing red and yellow in their wake. After two hours, it was the air strike that broke the contact. The NVA pulled out and the official body count was seven. If that was correct, the supporting fires must have killed six as they retreated, because, as Lieutenant Giasson of the battalion communications platoon wrote in his diary,
We had thirteen WLVs and three KIA's, while we could find only one dead enemy body. The CO, S-3, A & C Companies came limping back at midnight. C Company had run out of ammo and burned up all its .50 Cal machine gun barrels. The entire firefight had been a nightmare to those involved. To us back at the CP, just a few hundred meters from all the action, we were scared to. A small enemy force could have easily diverted both A & C Companies, while the main force annihilated the BN CP Group. Thank God this was not the case…. The rest of the night passed slowly as all the guards kept awake and the artillery blasted its defensive targets all around our small perimeter.
The windy dirt road where Charlie Company of the Triple Deuce was shot up went by the nickname Ambush Alley from then on.
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The Triple Deuce had road marched into this area, one of thick jungle, marsh, and stream more than eight kilometers northwest of Krek, two days earlier, on 16 May 1970, in a battalion task force with HHC, A, and C/2-22 Mech, C/1-27 Infantry, a platoon of tanks from A/2-34 Armor, and a battery of howitzers from 25th Division Artillery. Their target