Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [212]
That's why Eleven Bushes were the finest kind: They looked out for each other.2 One evening at Salty's Cache, one of the line companies made contact four hundred meters off the ridge line. The company commander radioed Lieutenant Camp that one of his sergeants had been peppered with shrapnel from an NVA claymore mine. None of the wounds by itself was fatal, but he was oozing blood from a multitude of holes, and the company was in woods too thick to allow a medevac. The decision was made to drag the sergeant in a poncho up to Salty's Cache where, at least, they had a mine-shaft landing zone. Two other walking wounded were also sent along.
It was dark by then, and a torrential monsoon rain began pelting the squad that was hiking uphill with the casualties. Halfway up the ridge, they got hopelessly lost in the blackened, wet tangle. Camp was on the radio with them, and had his men fire into the air. “Can you hear the shots?”
“I think so.”
“Well, move toward the shots.”
Camp's men fired signal shots for an hour, but in the thunderous downpour and thick woods the sounds echoed crazily. The squad had no idea where they were. Camp told his men to trigger several of their flares: “Can you see the tripflares?”
“No.”
Sometime around midnight, the litter squad, soaked and cold and exhausted both mentally and physically, finally dragged into Salty's Cache. It had been six hours since the sergeant had been wounded, and he had by then passed out in the poncho. The medic said that he was going into shock. A Huey beat through the driving rain and came to a hover over the hole in the tall trees. The night was too dark, rainy, and windy to land, so the pilot tried to steady his machine in the buffeting winds and lower a jungle penetrator. The wind kept pushing the Huey away from the hole.
The pilot tried again and again for an hour, then finally radioed Camp. He sounded on the verge of tears. He had only enough fuel left to return to base; he had to leave.
Camp joined the medic and the wounded sergeant in the CP hootch, made from several of the giant rice bags stacked up like a snow fort with a poncho secured across the top. Camp and his RTO held the unconscious sergeant across their laps while the medic desperately hooked up an IV and held up the plasma bag. The sergeant was really just a kid, and so was the medic; he too seemed on the verge of tears as he explained that all these wounds were minor by themselves, but that he couldn't stop the bleeding and he didn't think he had enough plasma to last until daylight. Camp sat cramped with the medic. The medic cradled the sergeant in his arms. At three in the morning the man died.
This militancy was manifested in the 2-12 Cav by men refusing to go to the field and claiming it was a racial issue. One company commander commented on such an incident that involved two men, “…matter of fact, they beat their court-martial on one of those great technicalities that the UCMJ got into in those days, like I didn't give them the tail number of the helicopter they were supposed to get on.”
Sergeant Pullen of D/5-7 Cav, 1st Cav Division, explained: “…In the field everyone was family. The war was the first time I really talked to a black man. I mean talk as in share your dreams. It was an experience that has stayed with me. We have gone our separate ways and erected the same old walls but this time maybe not as high. When I went to Washington for the dedication of The Wall, I could see my wife wonder as I would approach a group of black men on a corner, men dressed in cammies, and begin a handshake that seemed to take forever.”
Chapter 39: SLOW AND CAREFUL
On the morning of 3 June 1970, Captain Lodoen, CO of E Company, 5th Battalion, 12th Infantry, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, was sitting atop his hootch at FSB Myron. The hootch was actually just a culvert half that had been layered with sandbags, but it was good enough. He had a beer in hand and had just shaved after having returned