Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [177]
Lechner screamed for a report, and Yarashas finally screamed back into the radio, “Forget it! I'm flat on my back and I can't see what's going on!”
Silence, then, “Is One Actual one of the dust-offs?”
“You got that right.”
Lechner, a young, brave, impulsive glory hound, with whom Yarashas surprisingly got along very well, climbed off his APC and rushed up the trail. He stood above his downed platoon leader and friend, shaking his finger, “You can't get hurt.”
“You got that wrong.”
While lying on his back waiting to be medevacked, Lieutenant Yarashas had handed his radio codebook to Staff Sergeant Beaudin, the senior noncommissioned officer in the platoon. Beaudin, however, was a new man and reluctant to take command. No matter. His was the point platoon and the point track was commanded by Dave Santa-Cruz, tall and thin, with a pleasant, impossible-to-rankle personality. The squad aboard was commanded by Bucky May, who was strong, bushwise, and perhaps twenty years old. Bucky and Dave were followed in the second track by Jim Ross, who was now TC of the APC that had replaced the one lost to a mine twenty days earlier. Most of the crewmen who'd been injured by that mine were also back on board, and the rest of the company followed their lead, advancing in single file with thirty feet between vehicles.
The trees and brush closed in on the trail, and Ross, ducking vines that hung low, getting switched across his steel pot by branches, silently cursed the battalion commander as he sweated into his flak jacket: We can't see, we can't come on line, there's no room to turn around. This is no place for mech! All was green, shadowy, and claustrophobic. Dave, in the lead, followed a curve in the trail. Ross followed him, hands resting gingerly on the wooden grips of his .50-caliber machine gun. The jungle was right in his face.
CRACK-WHOOSH! CRACK-WHOOSH!
Ross heard the RPG aimed at his track shriek past and explode into the trees to the left. At the same time he squeezed back on his fifty, pouring fire into the green wall, even as he saw and felt the other RPG slam into the track ahead. The squad riding on the back deck jumped down and threw themselves flat amid the roadside saplings as Ross hunkered in his shielded cupola in helmet and flak jacket, his mind a terrified, paralyzed blank; his hands instinctively wrapped tightly around the grips, thumbs pressing the butterfly trigger, pumping the .50-cal in a traversing arc, the noise like a jackhammer. Empty ammo boxes were thrown aside. Smoke. Shivering brush. More RPGs. The .50-cal of the APC behind him also opened fire, raging blindly at the unseen men with the AKs and RPGs who were crouched in the holes off the trail, but the rest of the company was bottlenecked behind them, unable to assist.
The lead APC burst into flames, the detonation of the first RPG feeding on the ordnance stacked inside, including 5,500 rounds for the .50-cal, 25,000 rounds for the M60 and M 16s, a box of grenades for the M79, smoke, gas, and fragmentation grenades, a stack of LAWs, and two crates of C4 plastic explosives. The roar was terrible, lasting an eternity of four, five, six minutes until the NVA, never seen, were suddenly gone and the fire from the GIs atop and flattened beside the three lead tracks slowly simmered down.
Dust coated the leaves.
Men were screaming. Ross stood for a moment to look around from his cupola; then he slumped back. A GI named Ned shuffled past his APC, dazed, battered, maybe wounded, and Ross asked if anyone in the squad was hurt. Ned looked up and said in a flat voice, “Dave's dead.”
It didn't register. Ross stared at Ned,