Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [201]
That same afternoon, 22 May 1970, Hill 428 was again under fire. Colonel Clarke had ordered C/5-12 Infantry withdrawn and turned the area over to Lieutenant Colonel Edmonds's 5-7 Cavalry. Edmonds sent Bravo Company and Echo Recon humping to the foot of 428 the evening that the Loach went down, and they had begun pushing uphill the next morning. They were met by heavy AK47 and RPG fire, and pulled back to spend another night below the hill as artillery flashed into it. Making liberal use of tube artillery and aerial rocket artillery, they pressed back up the muggy, thickly forested slope the next morning, 23 May, against an enemy that this time used delaying tactics as they retreated.
After four hours of contact in a monsoon rainstorm, the weary, muddy, soaking-wet grunts of Bravo and Echo 5th of the 7th Cav found themselves the sole occupants of the double-humped hill. The NVA had disappeared. Six men had been wounded and one killed taking Hill 428, which, as a grunt explained to a CBS-TV reporter, they renamed Shakey's Hill in honor of Pfc Chris Keffalos of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the GI who'd died there. “He kind of had a speech impediment, and he always stuttered, so like on the LZ one night we all got drunk, and that's how he picked it up–Shakey. He was only nineteen years old. Well, more or less everybody kind of looked after him because he was the baby of the platoon, you know …”
Shakey's Hill turned out to be a gold mine. The slopes were ringed with twelve-foot-deep supply bunkers. With D Company inserted to assist B and E/5-7 Cav, the backbreaking chore began of lugging up the crates of weapons and ammunition to the hilltop LZ for evacuation. It was no easy task on muscles or on minds because the NVA had booby-trapped the cache area. One grunt stepped on a tripwire attached to a grenade in a can of flamethrower fuel thickener, this booby trap set to detonate a stack of mortar ammunition, but there was no explosion. The tripwire string had rotted and broken off two inches above the grenade. There were other such incidents in the bunker area, which had been nicknamed Charlie's Rod and Gun Club, but there were no casualties. On 2 June, 5-7 Cav pushed on and turned over the hill to the attached 5th Battalion, 60th Infantry, 3d Brigade (Separate), 9th Division. With their command bunker dug into the red clay of Shakey's Hill, this battalion completed the depot clearing despite sporadic hit-and-run counterattacks that killed two men. The final yield was two hundred three tons of captured weapons and munitions.1
While Shakey's Hill became another tourist trap of visiting generals, congressmen, and reporters, the 5th of the 12th Warriors were unceremoniously cleaning up their mess. Captain Lodoen's body-recovery patrol spent a second night in the jungle; then on 23 May 1970, they cut back through the NVA camp they had stumbled upon on their way in. They approached it from a different angle, then ran security patrols, which determined that the camp was too big to go around but that at least this section appeared to be deserted. Captain Lodoen took the point. He was almost back into the concealing jungle when his sniper sergeant at the rear of the column radioed him: A file of NVA were moving through the bunker complex a hundred meters away. The two columns were parallel but going in opposite directions. On enemy turf with three body bags on his hands, Lodoen was in no mood for a fight. He radioed back, “Fine, we'll just continue our route of march, and let them continue their route of march.“ They tiptoed out of the area, then radioed ahead to Brown to mortar the area they'd just come