Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [198]
The linkup was finally made in the late afternoon, and the Sheridans went on line to send beehive rounds crashing through the forest, allowing 3d Platoon to gather its casualties before pulling back.
It was time to get back to Firebase Brown.
The NVA ambushed the column as it started back the only way it could, on its self-made corridor of flattened brush, vines, and trees, with the first shot being an RPG into the lead vehicle. A second later, the AK47s swept the column. Staff Sergeant Smith was sitting atop an ACAV with Roger Canter, his RTO, when Canter suddenly took two rounds in the chest, which blew him off the track. Smith, holding the radio handset, was jerked over the side with him. Everyone else jumped down into the debris on the trail as .50-caliber and M60 machine gunners blindly pumped fire back at the RPGs and AK47s for the fifteen minutes that the NVA decided to maintain their fire. Then everyone climbed aboard again. It wasn't until after dark that the column rolled into Brown. By then, radioman Canter was drained and yellow. As the medics worked on him–saving his life–his friend, Staff Sergeant Smith, couldn't believe that Canter, who'd been incountry six or seven months and had seen a lot, had really been hit. Another of Smith's buddies, a shake'n'bake squad leader named Gunther, had also been hit, a round in the leg, the bone broken. Gunther was smiling, and couldn't have been happier. He was going home.
Bruised and battered, Bravo Company was kept at Brown to secure the perimeter and receive replacements. The morning after their rescue, most of the company's survivors were lined up at the underground medical bunker with searing dysentery from the stream water. Two days later, the convoy coming in from the rice cache was ambushed on the engineer road. A cool rain began to fall, and fall, and Brown was underwater; it was waist deep in the command and medical bunkers. A radioman from Bravo died in the mud when their night ambush beyond the wire was attacked. In the morning of 20 May, another company made contact; so, wrote Captain Kuter in that day's letter home, “the noise of our artillery, and the bomb strikes do not let up.”
Both Perry and Miller were later relieved, so their real names are not used.
Chapter 36: THE GRIND
May 21, 1970. Unable to see anything through the jungle canopy, Colonel Beckner and Major Blumhardt of the 5th Battalion, 12th Infantry, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, orbited the firefight in separate C&C Hueys and maintained radio contact with Captain Thursam of C Company. They were under heavy fire in the foothills leading up to Hill 428, which was several miles to the northeast of FSB Brown. Although typically calm, Captain Thursam, a blond-haired and boyish-looking officer, was sure of only one thing: He had no idea what the hell they'd run into.
Earlier that morning, Charlie Company had been humping toward Hill 428 through thick jungle where the temperature hovered above a hundred. Helmets became ovens, seventy-pound rucksacks became un-bearable. As the grunts shoved through the tangle, their hands and arms were slashed as if with razors. Sweat stung in the cuts, and minds dulled from the sun and heat silently rebelled against the fucking lifers and the fucking dinks who could obviously hear them coming and who were smart enough not to hang around. So, according to the hearsay that circulated afterward, the lead platoon decided to use the main trail. It made for easier going. It was a mistake that only the most disciplined platoons, with experienced,