Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [174]
Albright heard nothing because the explosion instantaneously burst his left eardrum, and all he saw was black smoke. Then he realized that he was on the ground beside his vehicle and had shrapnel in his left leg. He didn't know if he had jumped or been hurled off by the explosion, but, half in shock or not, he scrambled into the roadside gully.
The NVA were still firing.
A medic jumped into the ditch with Albright. Their buddy Wren was also lying in the road, still conscious but opened up from head to toe by the RPG shrapnel, so they rushed out to drag him back to the ditch. Albright still didn't know where the fire was coming from. In the confusion he saw Putterball standing behind their track in shock, bleeding from a shrapnel wound in the back of the neck. Albright ran up to him, slapped him, and jerked him off to the side of the road while Lieutenant Ratka brought in the artillery along the road. Phantoms flashed in at treetop level, and it was all over in fifteen minutes as the NVA broke contact and disappeared. Albright, Wren, Putterball, and their Kit Carson Scout had all been wounded by the RPG, as had the fifth member of the crew, Richard Keith: The back of his head was blown off. As they lay there waiting for the medevac, Keith rolled over to look at Albright, and Albright looked back into glazed eyes that showed no recognition of pain or of what had happened to him.
Keith died in the field hospital.
Claiming five enemy kills from the ambush, the battalion continued on. They passed a village that had been burned, charcoaled frames of hootches standing bare amid the smoking rubble, then laagered for the night. The soil was wet and soft and turned easily as they dug in.
On 22 May, Charlie Company of the Triple Deuce was to take the point as they completed their run back to Krek. Reconning by fire as they rolled through the wet dawn mist, the point platoon hadn't gone two hundred meters when the NVA opened fire from both sides of the road with twelve-seven machine guns, automatic weapons, and rocket-propelled grenades. Two APCs caught fire on the road and a third was heavily damaged. Six GIs were killed and nine others were wounded.
The NVA hefted their weapons over their shoulders and disappeared as the Phantoms and Cobras began to roll in. The burned-out tracks were pushed aside, and the battalion proceeded at a slow roll past tree trunks gouged and splintered by the return fire of the .50-cal, and past the two dead NVA who'd been dragged from the roadside thickets.
Alpha Company, to the rear of the column, had several tracks get stuck crossing a thin stream, and the column halted, put out flank security, and waited for an A VLB to make its way back to the creek. Hootches were visible through the trees ahead, and fifty villagers walked into the hasty perimeter, obviously frightened but trying to show that they were friendly. The A VLB went down. The column continued on and, all over again, the battalion Scout Platoon at the tail was ambushed in the spot where the battalion command post had been halted only ten minutes before. Lieutenant Ratka, a sharp young officer, reported to Lieutenant Colonel Parker, overhead in his command ship, that he had two dead men and eight wounded, and in a warbling voice he added, “We're not going to get out of this. These people are all among us.”
Parker was looking straight down at the halted tracks, talking with the gunships, while Ratka hammered in his other ear, “I need some help! Somebody's got to get me out of here!” Parker didn't know what to do, so he radioed the gunships, “I want you to lay in the rockets on both sides of those guys as close as you can get to them. They're that close.” The flight leader asked for Parker's initials, because rockets were not terribly