Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [210]
Not his real name.
Sergeant Pullen of D/5-7 Cav, 1st Cav Division, commented that friction between battalion and company commanders could easily arise because “the battalion commander was concerned with mission and body count, while the company commander had the dual responsibility of mission and getting 'his boys' home safely. The company commander was often faced with the aggressive approach that would win him career points, and the less aggressive approach that would win him the respect of his men–men he was beginning to know, how many children they had, what their girlfriend's name was, what they did as civilians. These were men with names, not pawns to be moved on some giant chessboard by a colonel whose name we couldn't even remember who was flying over us at fifteen hundred feet.”
Chapter 38: SALTY'S CACHE
Lieutenant Hudnell of Echo Recon, 2d of the 12th Cav, who considered i his company commander a clear-eyed combat leader and a friend, was nonetheless arguing with Lieutenant Camp, “Most of these guys are druggies and shit. What the fuck you mean bringing these people to the bush?!”
“Ianni said we had to do it.”
Hudnell's bone of contention was a platoon's worth of REMFs that the battalion commander had stripped from their nonjobs in the battalion rear and sent to this latest captured supply point, Salty's Cache, to help back-haul the goods. Camp did not want to belabor the point: Ianni also rubbed him the wrong way, but he had to admit that the colonel knew his infantry. Besides, they needed the extra hands.
They had just descended in Hueys down a mine shaft that had been cleared amid the towering trees on this wide ridge line. The NVA cache sat at the bottom. Alpha Company had originally discovered the rice and salt on 3 June; they were stacked in two-hundred-twenty-pound bags under plastic tarps inside thatch hootches that had no walls. From hovering helicopters the first combat engineers had had to rappel down the shaft with chainsaws and explosives. They had cleared a space large enough for a Chinook. Camp, who as commander of the battalion support company was usually tagged for every ash'n'trash mission that came along, was to secure the site. He was put on the ground with his reconnaissance platoon and the rear-echelon helpers, as well as with a team of riggers to secure the external loads to the helicopters that would be shuttling in and out.
There were fifteen tons of rice and fourteen hundred pounds of salt. It was a five-day job, and on the second or third day, Lieutenant Colonel Ianni flew out to promote Lieutenant Camp. Previously, Camp's father, an active-duty colonel, had mailed Ianni the captain bars that had been pinned to his collar twenty-five years earlier. He asked Ianni to do the honors with these old bars, but as Ianni and Camp stood talking at Salty's Cache, an NVA sniper suddenly opened fire. Ianni scrambled behind one stack of rice bags and Camp behind another as Echo Recon returned the fire. As AK rounds thumped into the giant rice bags, Ianni thought, what the hell, there's no better time than this. He pulled the paperwork from his pocket and shouted over the shooting, “Attention to orders …”
He read the orders and called on the individual to be promoted to step forward. With an open space between them, Camp shouted back that he'd decline the promotion until a more opportune time.
The NVA weren't the only reason that Salty's Cache was a nervous place. Each night, Camp went from position to position around the perimeter to tell his REMFs to shut up and put out their cigarettes. Canteen cups rattled in the dark, and GIs dissatisfied with their C rations would shout across to the next hole, “Hey, you got any beanie-weenies?” One GI left the lines to take a shit, and the next thing anyone knew, one of their tripflares had gone off and a figure lurched through the brush shrieking at them not to squeeze off the claymores. These men thought their lot in life was to sit back at the firebase,