Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [216]
They were going in first.
The recon team walked down the main path in the complex, moving tree to tree with hand signals and dry mouths. They peered into the first six hootches: nothing but ashes from cooking fires. They approached a larger hootch at the end of the path. Three large wooden crates, painted orange, were stacked outside it. Lodoen dragged up a small box to stand on and reached into the top crate, hoping to come up with a Soviet SKS rifle. They could be taken home as souvenirs, so finding them was great for morale.
The AK burst nearly propelled him out of his skin.
He looked up from the dirt: Holes had been shot through the top orange crate. Orem shouted to him that they had better do something, and Lodoen shouted back his intentions, then called out, “One, two, three!”
On three, the six of them scrambled to their feet and sprinted toward the ravine stream. They crashed into the concealing creekside brush with bullets smacking the tree branches, then Lodoen stopped to level his Ml6 back toward the clearing as he flagged the others across. The last GI was panting up the brushy hillside as Lodoen spun to follow, then he instinctively dove into the shallow, muddy stream as another AK burst tore holes in the vegetation above his head.
Orem was most of the way up the hill. “Captain, I think I got it spotted. There's a bunker on the other side over there!”
Orem was one of the best soldiers in Bravo Company. A bright young man who had been denied conscientious objector status when drafted, he'd proven a natural leader in his platoon. Orem shouted to Private Pallamoor, who was humping the M60. Pallamoor was another character: an illiterate dropout from Detroit who had developed into a hate-filled militant and been transferred into B Company after proving too trouble-some in his original outfit. He nonetheless was solid in a firefight.
Pallamoor started pouring fire into the spot Orem pointed out, and Lodoen came scrambling out of the creek. He dove into some brush and opened his Ml6 bolt to drain the water. Their second machine gunner was scything the underbrush across the creek, and Orem screamed down to Lodoen, “Get up the hillside nowl”
“You gotta be kidding!”
Lodoen shouted at them to cease fire, then sat listening. There were only heat and silence. He didn't move. He heard something and listened hard: About ten yards on the other side of the stream was the chatter of Oriental voices. Oh God, F m going to die. He looked up at Orem who was barely visible as he lay in some brush, “Orem, tell Pallamoor to start firing! I'm coming up the hill on the count of three!”
Under the cover fire, Lodoen sprinted up to the crest. The recon team then moved back to the other two platoons and unleashed the artillery and gunships. After the barrage, the platoons moved back in and found a network of deserted spiderholes along the two hillsides looking down into the hootch clearing. They were reinforced with logs. From one near the streambed they dragged out two North Vietnamese soldiers who'd been shot full of holes, prompting Lodoen to recommend Orem and Pallamoor for Silver Stars.
The NVA had faded away for now.
Bravo and Delta Companies worked this area for more than a week, and every day more treasure chests were found under camouflaged pieces of tin. Engineer teams were dispatched to chainsaw or blow down enough trees to allow choppers to hover down for the crates of NVA ammunition amd the jumbo bags of NVA rice, but problems developed when it was discovered that the enemy had booby-trapped some of the underground chambers with hand grenades. The tripwires were rigged so the NVA could release them when they climbed in, then hook them back up when they were finished. The tripwires could be neck high, ankle high, or even be attached to the plastic rain tarps laid over the crates inside each chamber. No one was hurt, though, until a young blond-haired lieutenant named Olson in Bravo Company, just back from R and R, climbed into a cache