Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [185]
The line walked right into another contact.
Instantly, at Captain Johnson's word, the rear platoon formed a hasty perimeter while the three platoons in the lead dropped their heavies– their rucksacks–with the rear platoon and fanned out on line facing the invisible enemy positions. Then the on-line assault began. The NVA fire was almost constant, and the GIs of Delta Company advanced straight into it at a slow, cautious walk between the trees, bent forward at the waist, steel pots on, each man glancing at the guy to his left and to his right between return bursts to make sure they were still in the line. The line was right on top of the forward spiderholes. The NVA began popping out of the holes and trenches, trying to pull back, firing a few rounds apiece before they spun around. In several cases, they were shot down before they could make good their retreat. Captain Johnson had just crossed a little road with Lieutenant Huessed, his FO, and their three RTOs, plus his Kit Carson Scout and Captain Schaffer–the battalion chaplain who had requested to accompany his men on this mission–when he happened to glance to his left, just as an NVA jumped up from the debris atop his spiderhole. The NVA bolted through their sweep line in the direction of the reserve platoon's perimeter.
The two GIs on Johnson's left turned around and emptied their magazines on full auto, and the running NVA bounced off his feet and came down dead.
Johnson figured that the NVA were trying to break contact, so he had Huessed bring down a wall of artillery fire two hundred meters ahead of their sweep to force the NVA to either retreat through the barrage or to hunker down and fight. The enemy chose the latter. Thirty meters off to one flank, a young buck sergeant from Puerto Rico ran into several bunkers with his squad. A sergeant was hit, and a medic running to him was killed.
The bunkers were silenced with grenades, and the Puerto Rican sergeant pulled his squad back to where the CP had stopped. The contact had dried up. The sergeant was in tears over his dead medic, who'd been left where he'd fallen. Before the sergeant went completely to pieces, Johnson shouted at him to take his squad down the trail on one flank where the trucks had previously been spotted by the Loach. The sergeant came back to reality. The squad moved out, alert for more contact any second.
On the opposite flank, Johnson sent another platoon on a sector recon. Their report soon came back that they had found crates of weapons and ammunition in a neat stack as large as a conex container and covered by a black plastic rain tarp. Two or three more minutes down the trail another cache was found, and then another. Still, there was no more NVA fire. Johnson radioed the platoon that he would be moving up with the CP to secure the area and see what they had, then he radioed the platoon recon on the other flank–which had located the trucks and was gathering the letters and maps found in them–to pull back to the CP. After they did, the Puerto Rican sergeant came up to Johnson, “Thanks for sending us back, because that's what it took to get us back together, and I was the worst.”
Captain Johnson was sitting against a tree as he gave the order for one platoon to move with him to the platoon at the cache site. A young black sergeant in the platoon staying behind gave Johnson a hand up. As they began to hump off, Johnson glanced back to see the sergeant taking his spot under the tree. After linking up with the platoon at the cache, Johnson planned to bring up the reserve platoon with their rucksacks to where the black sergeant's platoon was waiting, then bring them all into the perimeter around the captured enemy supplies.
But Johnson had not walked twenty meters before the jungle exploded with automatic weapons fire and the black sergeant–who was awaiting word any day now about his wife