Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [213]
Lodoen was to replace Perry in B Company.
Everyone had seen it coming. Soon after the move to FSB Myron, Crancer had directed Captain Perry and B Company into an area where several more caches were thought to be located. Bravo Company had set up on one side of a jungle stream and sent patrols toward the suspected caches, but for three days Perry had relayed back only his lieutenants' reports of negative results. The impression that Crancer had was that the platoons were only moving far enough to be out of sight of the company command post, and that Perry was too tired out to push them on. That was his sense of it, but as Colonel Selton of the Redcatcher Brigade noted, it was almost impossible to prove:
Search and evade? This is very difficult to pin down in the jungle. The battalion commanders and myself had the only helicopters available. We were usually in the air over a platoon or company that was in triple-canopy jungle. The unit identified itself by popping a colored flare. Several times I found a platoon other than where I thought it ought to be. Who is lost–the operations center who reports where the platoon should be, or the lieutenant hacking a trail through the jungle? Only once did I find a platoon I was sure was guilty. They were in an opening near a road when their mission was to search a streambed deep in the jungle.
Captain Lodoen had commanded Bravo Company before coming down with malaria three months earlier, and the evening he returned from the sniper patrol, Colonel Crancer had had supper with him in the battalion mess tent. Crancer's patience had been wearing thin, “I'm having trouble with B Company. I can't get Gordon Perry to move. The troops aren't going. Can you give me any suggestions to give him to get his boys moving, because they're going to get someone killed out there.”
Lodoen didn't say it, but if anyone was going to get killed, he reckoned it would be Captain Perry. Fragged, that is.
Battalion commander Crancer afforded a lot of latitude to any captain who was competent, stern, and aggressive, but if one showed any weakness he might approach the problem in a manner more crusty than the average lieutenant colonel. So, that night after the mess-hall conversation, Lodoen could hear Crancer cussing up a storm in the TOC, “Goddamn B Company! Blumhardt, goddamnit, do something. Get in your helicopter tomorrow morning and get out there and talk to 'em, or / will!” Crancer finally made up his mind and radioed Perry to tell him that he was not being relieved of command, but that he was being reassigned as the battalion supply officer.
Perry's response was a sigh of relief.
The next morning, 3 June, Captain Lodoen followed Lieutenant Colonel Crancer to the LZ on FSB Myron with his steel pot, rucksack, and M16, and they were soon orbiting B Company's position. The pilot hovered them down through a small mine shaft in the double canopy, and Crancer impatiently waved Perry aboard. Perry grabbed his pack; Lodoen disembarked and walked up to a group of grunts, “Okay, guys, I'm in command. Bring me the platoon leaders now.”
Bravo was moving inside of thirty minutes.
To get the troops' blood pumping and to chase away any ambushers Lodoen arranged with Crancer for massive fire support across the creek: redleg, gunships, fixed wing. Lodoen then accompanied Staff Sergeant Orem's platoon across the small bridge and they secured the bank, then brought across the rest of the company. The lead platoon had gone only two hundred meters down a hillside of bamboo thickets when they found what they'd come for: a dilapidated NVA base camp containing spare parts for bicycles and American-made quarter-ton jeeps. Moving on, their route of march took them into another cache tucked at the base