Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [190]
Captain Johnson never forgave Captain McBride.
And McBride later said he never knew he had done anything worthy of contrition. According to McBride's reconstruction of the night's events, he never spoke directly to Johnson but worked through Gatlin, the operations officer, so that although Johnson may have sworn a blood oath against him, Gatlin did not relay this message. Johnson said that Ianni and Gatlin had also tried without success to get McBride to continue his movement. McBride, however, stated that with the pressure on Johnson having eased up, Ianni and Gatlin agreed with his decision to stop with the reserve platoon: He was concerned about what would happen if the NVA hit his strung-out column in a jungle that made it impossible to maintain battle lines. There was also the fear of being shot up by nervous grunts on the besieged perimeter as they approached in the dark.
Whether Charlie Company halted because of the alleged tremblings of its captain or because of logical tactics cannot be resolved–Ianni would be unable to recall if he had explicitly ordered McBride to halt or had simply acquiesced to McBride's opinion that it would be too difficult to continue–but stop Charlie Company did, and Captain McBride tried to push his platoons out into a circular perimeter. One of his lieutenants, Matthews, held up his wristwatch so grunts could follow the faint glow. Matthews was Airborne and Ranger trained, and he positioned each man, deciding not to risk putting out claymores and tripflares and telling them not to dig in because it would make too much noise. He also pointed to the phosphorescent patches of rotting vegetation on the jungle floor. “Stay on the glowing stuff, that's where we stirred up the ground. Outside of that, you are outside of the perimeter, which is a bad place to be.”2
The USAF Spooky fired all night.
Exhausted, those men not on guard passed out behind their rucksacks. As the jungle brightened to a twilight gray several hours later, McBride was appalled at how dangerously compact their perimeter turned out to be. Several dead NVA were noticed in the underbrush around them. One was blown open as if an M79 grenade had taken him right in the chest.
It seemed that the rest of the NVA had pulled out during the night, but to be safe, Captain Johnson told Lieutenant Hudnell to take Echo Recon on a sector recon. They hadn't covered half of their five-hundred-meter patrol route when the point man stopped and motioned Hudnell forward: He had heard machetes striking bamboo. They crept up to a small rise in the jungle overlooking a section thick with bamboo. They could see three NVA in shorts, their AK47s leaning against trees, one using an ax and the others machetes to clear fields of fire in the bamboo. At Hudnell's word, he and the three men up front with him cut loose with their M 16s, but the NVA instantly disappeared, and AK rounds began snapping back through the trees. Hudnell turned his platoon around and reported to Johnson, “The goddamn gooks are digging bunkers two hundred meters from here!”
When dawn spread over Delta Company, Captain Johnson noticed that Chaplain Schaffer, who had exposed himself to help with the wounded during the battle, had overnight gotten a three-days' growth of beard and had added ten years to his thirty-seven. But he had done some hard praying for them, Johnson thought, and it had worked. To finally clear the area, Johnson radioed Charlie Company and his reserve platoon to keep their heads down as the platoons on his perimeter ran a Mad Minute with their captured grenades and almost the last bit of their ammunition. Ianni, overhead in the command ship, then instructed Johnson to get a landing zone cut, and chainsaws were brought in to speed the work of the men using machetes.
Meanwhile, the lead platoon of Charlie Company humped the last leg to Delta and Echo, recovering those dead who'd been left where they'd fallen. Spec Four Cody, the combat correspondent,