Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [184]
“Why us?”
“Hey, guys, it's because we're the best. We can do the fucking job. We don't make mistakes, we don't screw up, and we're going to do it.”
Commencing at 1100 on 6 May 1970, the 2-12 Cavalry began its CA from the field beside FSB Marisa to a scrubby jungle clearing in the Belly dubbed LZ Myron, in honor of the late Maj. Myron Diduryk. By 1720, when the battalion command post got its radios up at Myron, Companies A, B, D, and E had been landed without opposition, while C Company remained at Marisa.1 The lead company pushed through a nearby Cambodian village, while another company and the headquarters personnel, along with a platoon from C Company, 8th Engineers, got down to the pick and shovel work of turning Landing Zone Myron into Fire Support Base Myron: Chainsaws whirred, bulldozers chugged, and bangalore torpedoes were snaked through the surrounding bamboo and vines to blow fields of fire. Barbed wire and bunker material had not yet arrived, so men placed bamboo atop their foxholes with a layer of sandbags, and registered their mortars to within a hundred meters; the surrounding jungle would loom forebodingly close that night. Meanwhile, D Company made the battalion's first contact across the border.
The village they entered was filled with young men with close-cropped hair. Johnson knew they were NVA, but their search of the hootches turned up no weapons or equipment, so there was nothing he could do about them. He knew they'd been counting his men, noting their weapons, cind he cursed the politicians and the media and all the other geniuses that imposed the impossible rules that fighting men had to live by. During the hootch-to-hootch search, a sniper opened fire on them and there was a quick, loud crossfire in the village.
A child was shot and medevacked.
It was getting late, and Delta Company moved on to find a suitable night defensive position. The ground was too hard to dig foxholes, so the men just kind of scratched out shallow depressions to sleep in. The next day they were humping again when Ianni radioed Johnson and told him to return to Myron. He had another mission for him.
* * *
Earlier that afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Ianni, buzzing the treetops in his C&C to see what their new area had to offer, followed an old French laterite highway to the northeast. West of this road he noticed a stretch of freshly upturned red dirt showing through the green. Tire tracks. Ianni lost the trail as it threaded into deeper jungle–the NVA had apparently carved out roads under the concealing canopy–and returned to Myron as a Pink Team from C Troop, 1st Squadron, 9th Air Cavalry, was dispatched to continue the search. Late in the day, the Cobra pilot rolled in to strafe what his partner in the Loach had managed to spot: three NVA trucks and thirty to forty NVA troops who scrambled from the flatbeds and ran for the trees as the thumping of the rotors reached their ears.
The Cobra reported hitting all three trucks and killing an estimated twenty-three enemy soldiers. The Loach buzzed down again. There were more truck tracks. Several supply pallets were also visible.
The next morning, 8 May 1970, Delta Company, 2d Battalion, 12th Cavalry, loaded up on the Hueys at FSB Myron and came off the skids into an irregularly shaped clearing some five hundred meters north of the previous day's contact. Captain Johnson, who always went in with the initial element and always came out on the last, or next to last, chopper, accompanied the lead platoon as they humped off the LZ. They moved south into the trees in a single file, a fire team or squad out on the flanks of each platoon for security. In short order, two NVA were spotted but disappeared under the Ml6 fire of the point squad. They found a blood trail and continued on into the dense underbrush and hushed stillness of the forest, winding their way among the trees more