Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [172]
By the evening of 16 May, the command post and artillery had laagered near a large clearing away from the tenuous little road, while the three line companies had deployed like the three corners of a triangle around the suspected enemy headquarters. A deserted ville had already been discovered, and the evacuation of tons of rice had begun. Then another element bumped into AK and RPG fire. They backed off, and the artillery had begun pounding.
On 17 May, the reconnaissances-in-force, or RIFs, had turned up rice, documents, and equipment. It had rained that night.
On 18 May, after another quiet day of RIFs, Charlie Company had been returning to secure the CP, which was in the same place for the third day. The CP usually changed positions every two days so the NVA would not have enough time to conduct recons, align mortars, and dig in for attack or ambush. Charlie Company was caught in the nearby clearing and was hammered.
Ambush Alley was thus born.
On 19 May, Charlie Company took sniper fire from hootches and, per instructions from battalion, returned it, apparently setting off a fuel cache. The entire village was aflame when Colonel Holliday, CO, 2d Brigade, 25th Division, asked harshly from overhead if they intended to burn down all of Southeast Asia. Brigade was operating under strict instructions from division to avoid unnecessary destruction, but Lieutenant Colonel Parker's reactions were closer to ground level, and his response to the question was a piqued, “No, just the part that has some bad guys in it.”
In their APC that night, Parker and Goldsmith received a radio request for artillery fire. Checking the coordinates, they discovered that the fire was being requested on a battalion position, so Goldsmith asked the individual on the radio to authenticate. The individual spoke English but was actually an NVA who had stumbled onto the battalion frequency, and he signed off with, “GI die.”
The rains began a bit later that night, heavier than before, crashing down all night and into the morning as Lieutenant Giasson wrote in his diary, “I woke up all wet. The hole I had been sleeping in had filled up with water. So I put my stretcher in between the track wheels just under the belly of the track and kept dry.”
The increasing tempo of the nightly rains corresponded with that of the daylight contacts along Ambush Alley. The procedure in each case was for the column to halt, herringbone, and level the roadside tangle with the track commander's .50-caliber machine gun, the deck gunner's M60 machine gun, the driver's M79 grenade launcher, and the M16 rifles of the infantry squad that jumped down to fire from the prone. Private Ross, for one, of the 1st Platoon of A Company, faced it well. Some did not. One mini-ambush found Ross returning fire with his squad from the side of the road into vines so thick they couldn't tell where the enemy was firing from. Ross glanced to his right. A man from another platoon lay curled against some brush, not firing, and Ross's first thought was that the man's rifle was jammed. But he wasn't working on it. Ross rolled, then crab-walked to the man.
He asked what was wrong. Without a hint of embarrassment, the GI said that he had no intention of firing. That way the dinks wouldn't know where he was. Ross emptied another magazine and, reloading, realized that this guy was serious: He was still face down. Ross rolled closer to snap, “You better listen to me, buddy! You're not covering that field of fire. You're puttin' me in jeopardy. You goddamn well better start firing that weapon, or get