Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [205]
It was the only time Lodoen had seen him lose his cool, but that was that and the next moment Beckner was calmly on the radio again.
Lodoen had previously served as CO of B Company before being hospitalized with malaria and reassigned to E Company, and he recognized the voice of the scared radioman: a great young guy, really. Lodoen turned to Beckner, “I know these kids, and I'm going out to get them.”
“Go ahead.”
Lodoen tripped back through the mud to where his snipers were saddling up. No helmets, no rucksacks, but plenty of ammunition, grenades, and flares. He explained the situation, shouting to make himself heard over the crashing downpour. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face except when the lightning flashed, and there was a real possibility that the Bravo platoon would shoot them in the confusion. It was going to be hairy, Lodoen shouted in the rain, “…and you don't have to go if you don't want to!”
No one backed down.
Four ACAVs from the 11th ACR had churned up to FSB Brown. As the snipers hauled themselves aboard, the RTO gurgled over the radio, “…ah, I'm hit, F m hit!”
Lodoen's stomach sank. He was sitting beside the TC hatch of the ACAV platoon leader, and he shouted at the lieutenant to turn on the headlights and haul ass. They bumped down a thin trail that the engineers had carved out of the jungle to where they thought the ambush platoon was set up. No one was shooting anymore. Lodoen told the cavalry lieutenant to swing his lights across the field to their left, and to be ready to suppress any NVA fire with his .50-caliber machine guns. Bravo GIs waved as the headlights washed over their position, and a few stood up in the tall grass. Lodoen quickly shouted to kill the lights. He left four men with M60s at the edge of the clearing, then jogged over with the rest of his snipers. The Bravo grunts were mostly new guys, wet, muddy, and petrified, and they were all wearing ponchos and doing everything else you're not supposed to do in an infantry platoon. You don't wear ponchos in an ambush position: The sound of rain hitting them is distinct, and moonlight glistens off them when they're wet.
Everyone began pulling back toward the ACAVs as Lodoen and his medic rolled over the RTO in the mud. He was still warm, but the medic said he was dead. Lodoen couldn't believe it: There was only a tiny hole in his throat. It appeared that the kid had been so scared that when he was hit he went into shock so deep it was fatal. They carried his body to the tracks in the downpour. Captain Lodoen realized that, for the only time in his two years in Vietnam, he was crying.
Shakey's Hill was visited by a presidential delegation, amid television cameras and staged air strikes, as was a cache captured by 5-12 Infantry, prompting Captain Kuter, battalion surgeon, 5-12 Infantry, to write his wife, “When a company discovers a cache, the individuals are allowed to keep one weapon apiece as a souvenir. These are collected and recorded by serial number and returned to BMB for the individual to claim there when we get back, then the bulk of the weapons are shipped to the Cambodian army. Well, when the president's fact-finding tour of congressmen and governors went through here about two weeks ago, they were shown some of our souvenir weapons. Since they were also looking for souvenirs, they claimed seventeen of the weapons that had already been assigned to individual soldiers. Thus