Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [189]
* * *
Delta Company had one misplaced tanker in it, a runt with a funny little mustache. He'd been on the machine gun team that had silenced the ambush on the recon platoon. As dusk fell, a lost NVA walked up the trail toward the machine gun. The man was later classified as a chieu hoi, so maybe he had been looking to surrender, but whatever the case, the tanker lunged into the NVA, beat the living shit out of the startled soldier, then dragged him over to where Johnson was hunched over his radios.
“Hey, Six, you got wounded?! How ya feeling?”
“Ah, I guess okay.”
“I got something to cheer you up.”
The Kit Carson Scout sat the NVA down, stuck the muzzle of his M16 under his nose, and fired off questions. The Scout reported that the NVA were finally massing for a major attack on one point on the perimeter, and he gave their direction and distance to the northwest. With that, Johnson directed onto the spot the minigun fire from a USAF Spooky, which zigzagged above all night, placing the 6,000-rounds-a-minute bursts so close to the perimeter at times that they could hear the rounds hitting the ground before they heard the report of the weapon. As Johnson began to doze off as the night wore on, he was reassured each time he jerked awake to hear the high-pitched wail of the miniguns and see solid red and yellow lines of their tracers.
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Ianni had lifted his companies into Cambodia in the order of the experience level of their commanders, so it was on the battalion's third day across the border that Captain McBride's company was still at FSB Marisa in Vietnam. As darkness fell and the situation around the cache site remained tense, Ianni decided to reinforce. Since McBride's was the only company with a ready-made PZ, it happened that Charlie Company, 2d Battalion, 12th Cavalry, made an impromptu CA from FSB Marisa to the clearing where Delta Company and Echo Recon had originally landed. By the time they got into march order, the night was a black blanket, clouds covered the moon, and the grunts, tense, with only rudimentary training in night maneuvers, began groping forward. It took almost two hours to move over two hundred meters; then McBride had to halt the column when one group radioed that it was lost.
A GI with the CP rapped his M16 barrel on a steel pot to give the lost men a sound bearing to return to.
The jungle sounded, thought one soldier, like a screaming steam kettle as its hundreds of thousands of nocturnal insects and lizards called to one another. With the thump of invisible helicopters joining the chorus, McBride ordered each man to grab hold of the rucksack of the man ahead as they continued on in the obstacle course, “…this time through the shifting, dappled shadows of parachute flares.” Specialist Fourth Class John Cody of the Stars and Stripes tagged along and later wrote:
They couldn't see anything at all, not even the vines that caught their throats, seized their packs and grabbed their ankles. The struggle through the vines and trees had rubbed nerves raw. Two friends began fighting there, grunting and shoving in anger. Other grunts moved in, slamming their buddies to the ground. The anger passed, apologies were mumbled. Neither man knew what the fight was about. They groped for the packs they had dropped….
It took Charlie Company three hours to claw their way four hundred meters from the LZ to where the reserve platoon from Delta Company was circled around the company's rucksacks. At this point controversy arises. According to Johnson, he explained to McBride via radio that he was almost out of ammunition and had twenty wounded on his hands, and told him to continue to his position; but although Johnson literally begged, McBride refused to budge. McBride had come as far as he dared and, finally, furiously, thinking you absolute blatant fucking coward, Johnson barked into the radio mike, “You