Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [200]
Meanwhile, an Aero Rifle Platoon from the 1st of the 9th Air Cav had been scrambled. The canopy was too thick for them to rappel through, but enough had been burned away to reveal the flaming shell of the Loach. There appeared to be no survivors. That information relayed as his patrol shoved its way through the tangle, Lodoen simmered them down to a cautious snail's pace. As darkness came, they settled in for the night short of the crash.
Thursam and Charlie Company were still pinned down as night fell, surrounded, with little ammunition left, no food, and twelve men seriously wounded. The head medic, out of bandages and all other medical supplies, was on the radio to Kuter, the battalion surgeon at FSB Brown, who told him to plug wounds with socks and bind them with strips torn from fatigue shirts.
The next morning, Alpha Company, evacuating a cache site, came under fire and had its medevac fended off by ground fire while Charlie Company, the pressure off, struggled to a landing zone in the thick jungle where they were resupplied and their seriously wounded finally lifted out. Thirteen walking wounded remained with their platoons.
The day's cache convoy was ambushed, and an engineer bridge just built in the area was blown up.
Also on the move was Lodoen's team, which pushed on, after their night in the jungle, across rugged terrain that was rocky, hilly, and wet from the daily rains. The 1st Cav kept a pair of gunships over them the whole way in, and a scout ship guided them. Nearing the crash site, the patrol filed silently through one of the NVA jungle camps that dotted the area. The bunkers and hootches were deserted, but as they pressed on they kept crossing more NVA trails and bumping into more NVA hootches that were not visible in the tangle until they were right on them. Captain Lodoen looked at his troops and saw a reaffirmation of why he loved the American infantryman: They were sweat-soaked and spooked, but each man sucked up his fear and kept pushing. They found the Loach resting on its left side on a hillside of boulders. The brush around it was burned, as was the foliage above where the helo had exploded against the top canopy and crashed through the next. Lodoen deployed his patrol to secure the site, then approached the Loach with his two medics. The crew was still strapped in place inside the battered shell. They were burned beyond recognition. A helicopter hovered above the burned hole in the canopy and shoved out body bags, but nothing drops straight down in the jungle and they ended up hanging in the trees. Three finally fell to the ground, and the medics began to gingerly remove the bodies from the wreck. One medic tugged at an arm and it came off. The medic's face was a stony mask. He reached back in, and piece by piece each rubberized canvas bag was filled. The place stank. The heat was oppressive. The patrol started back, toting the heavy dark bags, which grew even heavier as the afternoon rain swamped them.
At FSB Brown, one of the 105mm howitzers from the 40th Artillery, routinely lobbing out support fire, had a shell detonate in the breech, and the barrel disintegrated in a screaming flash. One howitzer crewman was blown to bits. One had a leg blown off and an arm mangled. One had internal injuries from the blast. The fourth member of the crew had a large chunk of steel embedded in his leg, and a fifth man, who was two hundred yards away, was lightly wounded. The artillerymen did not know if a bomb had gone off in their faces because the howitzer tube had been cracked or because of