Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [215]
Crancer returned to Xuan Loc–and ended up in the hospital with malaria he had picked up in Cambodia–while DeLeuil, only two days in command, got a call that Lodoen had hit the jackpot. Bravo Company was humping down a forested hillside when the point man reached the brown stream in the draw below the next parallel ridge line. An NVA bicycle path ran along the stream. Lodoen called up his platoon leaders, all of whom were young sergeants, and their opinion was that something had to be in the area: Three days earlier a squad of NVA had dropped their point man with a round in his leg, then faded away through the tangle under the crash of return fire. They'd found one NVA body, one blood trail. The NVA usually tried to avoid contact. Were they trying to draw them away from something?
The answer was yes. The RTO from Staff Sergeant Orem's platoon walked over to the huddle, “Captain, you got to see what I just fell into.”
The RTO had been walking down the slope when a piece of corrugated tin covered with dirt and brush had given way under his weight. It turned out to be a typical NVA supply cache: A ladder led down the shaft to a chamber about twenty feet long, ten feet high, and ten feet wide. It was sculpted precisely out of the earth and, meant to last, was equipped with bamboo dunnage for drainage. Supplies were stacked to the ceiling on pallets and covered with black plastic tarps. Staff Sergeant Orem, their best platoon leader, went down the ladder and pointed his flashlight into the chamber: “Look what we found. A bicycle shop!”
Lodoen cracked an enthusiastic grin, “I know this guy. He's not going to build one of these beauties and have nothing else around.”
Lodoen left one platoon at the first cache, and had it send one of its squads up to the forested crest with a radio to maintain good commo with battalion. One platoon picked its way north, and Lodoen accompanied Orem's platoon as they followed the ridge line south. The NVA had hacked ribbon-thin paths through the ferociously tangled underbrush, none of which led directly to a cache; but Lodoen knew their system. He instructed his people to move at precisely the same level on the hill as their original find. Sure enough, ten more shafts were discovered and tarps were pulled back to reveal crates of AK47 ammunition, 60mm mortar rounds, and 107mm rockets. Orem's platoon followed a trail into the ravine, and then into an area the size of a football field, where all the underbrush had been scraped away. The thick canopy above hid the clearing, which contained several large sleeping hootches on wooden stilts. Lodoen reckoned that they had stumbled into the headquarters of this logistical complex, and he conferred with his artillery lieutenant: Long-range redleg was on call from a battery of 8-inch and 175mm howitzers, but gunships were not available.
Lodoen decided not to risk it.
The next morning, Lodoen left one platoon atop the ridge to maintain the solid radio link with battalion, and moved back toward the complex in the ravine with the other two platoons. They had redleg and gunships on standby, but DeLeuil's instructions were to proceed with caution: If Lodoen bumped into anything, he was to crank up the arty and immediately disengage while DeLeuil sent in Miller and D Company. Such prudency was a radical departure from the tactics of Lodoen's first tour, when the emphasis had been on body count. Since the Withdrawals, though, subtle messages had filtered down from MACV to get the troops home with nothing worse than mosquito bites. It was a change that commanders like Lodoen found easy to live with: He didn't lose a man in his year with the Redcatchers.2
Lodoen sat his two platoons down at the entrance to the complex; then he and his favorite, Staff Sergeant Orem, along with the forward observer, a medic, and two machine gunners dropped their helmets and unshouldered