Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [202]
Captain Thursam and Charlie Company also humped into FSB Brown that afternoon with thirteen wounded men still on their feet, and everyone else showing the signs of eleven hard days in the bush. In the TOC during the evening briefing, Colonel Beckner congratulated Thursam for making a good fight of it, but then turned around and declared C Company a disgrace to the U.S. Army for leaving its two dead behind in the jungle. He said that the company had dishonored the battalion. These were comments that Captain Kuter found impossible to digest, for he counted David Thursam among his best friends and considered him a brave man, sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of his troops, who had done the best he could in the circumstances. That night, in his culvert-and-ammo-box hootch, which was layered with sandbags, Kuter wrote to Judy, his wife of three years, on battalion stationery. The shelter was wet and musty from the rains, the paper limp from the humidity. Kuter had just enough light to write by from a red Christmas tree light he had hooked to a discarded radio battery:
Now they will risk more lives just to recover some bodies. Already four helicopters have been hit in that area with one of them crashing and three killed. And C Company struggled on for days with no food, little ammunition, and using socks and shirts as bandages for the wounded only to be criticized for not bringing in the dead. Some of America's values are truely sickening? Could the families of those killed men really want another company to go out there at risk of having men killed just to recover bodies. If so I am very saddened.
Such were not the views of most combat infantrymen, but Captain Kuter, wiry, bespectacled, twenty-eight years old, was a doctor who'd been on the fringe of the antiwar movement before being drafted. He had tried everything to avoid duty with a line battalion, but once assigned he had fallen easily into the role of family doctor to the grunts. He came not only to adopt their attitudes toward the protest movement (“I can't help but think that they are violent just for the sake of violence and with total disregard of the men who are over here”) but also, as expressed in one of his daily letters to his wife, their cynicism and sense of loss:
Since in Cambodia we have extracted many supplies and killed sixty-five enemy, but its hard to match that against the 8 killed and 50 wounded which we have had this past week. It becomes more and more hard to take as I am with the battalion longer and get to know the men better. Lately a lot of the men killed I have known quite well. Worse yet, our “lifers” are really in their glory now; they love combat and all this activity is bringing lots of visits from higher headquarters, bound to further their careers.
On 23 May 1970, 2-12 Cavalry departed FSB Myron for LZ Speer, farther to the northeast, while 5-12 Infantry tore down FSB Brown and displaced north to FSB Myron the next day. Three days after that, having been promoted to full colonel and reassigned to II FFV, Beckner turned over battalion command to a lieutenant colonel named Crancer. Six days had passed since C Company had lost those two men on the trail to Shakey's Hill, and Lieutenant Colonel Crancer approached Colonel Clarke about going back in. Clarke denied the request: The trail was now in the 5-7 AO and they would pick up 5-12's dead when their own operations took them through the area. Crancer, who generally respected Clarke, objected, “I'm not about to leave my damn dead out there. It's a sorry turn of events that they were ever left there anyway!”
Clarke said that the matter was closed, and the two missing bodies from C/5-12 Infantry were eventually found by C/5-7 Cavalry and brought to Myron.
The day the 5th of the 12th Warriors moved to FSB Myron, Captain Kuter was dropped off by the C&C Huey in the cache site being emptied by Alpha Company. It was invisible from the air because of the canopy, and even on the ground one had to get within ten feet to see anything because of the thick bamboo. But tucked into the