Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [220]
Staff Sergeant Smith of 2/B/5-12 commented, “Captain Perry was a fine commander but he definitely burned out. The company was not the same company after Cambodia. We took a top-notch company, and the whole company was a lot of old-timers, and we lost a lot of experience through wounds and death, and a lot of guys were shaken up so bad they weren't really worth a whole lot afterward. I hate to say it. We started losing some people, and we weren't used to losing people like that, and most of our wounded guys, they weren't light wounds, they were head, neck, and jaw wounds– serious wounds, versus light shrapnel in the shoulder or something–and most of the guys that got wounded were medevacked all the way. They weren't all lightly wounded and came back. That was a difference, and the company was getting gun-shy. It was the worst fighting I'd seen since Tet of ' 68 and I was getting a little nervous myself. Captain Lodoen came in, very cool, very methodical, used a lot of artillery, used good principles in crossing danger areas, and he did a lot for the company. The company just wasn't the same experiencewise or in ability, and Captain Lodoen really held that company together.”
Captain Ramsey, Avn Set, 199th LIB, explained, “It was axiomatic among company-grade officers that the key to our job performance was the preservation of lives. Without hesitation, we would spend a million dollars in artillery rather than risk one GI's life. Mission, which was taught to us as the number one priority, became secondary to saving lives. There were no apologies for this attitude either. Don't misunderstand, the junior leadership was motivated to do a good job, but after you've taken the same piece of real estate for the third and fourth time, cynicism and pessimism become rampant. The war was clearly a political farce by 1970. Vietnamization was the magic word, and it was crystal clear that we did not intend to win the war, but were intent on finding a face-saving exit with our honor intact. It was a lie, and Vietnamization was a joke, and the mission was not to be at the expense of our soldiers' lives.”
PART TEN: ABOUT FACE
Lieutenant Colonel Reed, the thoughtful, steady, professorial commander of a squadron in the Blackhorse, had found, like his peers, the timetable of the U.S. withdrawal from Cambodia to be an impediment made even more exasperating when the powers that be decided that every scrap of U.S. war material had to be taken out with them, no matter what its condition, presumably so the communists could not take celebratory photographs of it. The rain, mud, lack of recovery vehicles, and the enemy–whose actions increased as the days ran out–made this task near impossible. Reed was finally able to convince his commanding general, Casey of the 1st Cav, to land and look at an ACAV, previously disabled and abandoned, they had recovered from the jungle. All that was left of it were six sheets of armor plate, a cupola, and a few other burned odds and ends. To retrieve this, Reed told Casey, he had lost one man wounded and had two vehicles damaged. The way they were leaving made about as much sense as the original order to withdraw from Cambodia. One was no way to risk young soldiers' lives, the other no way to win a war.
Chapter 40: AND I'M CHANGING IT BACK
Not long after Lieutenant Colonel Vail came on the scene, Sergeant Sewall, a young platoon sergeant with A Company, 2d Battalion (Mechanized), 22d Infantry, 25th Division, was told by Captain Lechner that the new battalion commander wanted to go out with a night ambush.
Sewall politely refused the honor.
The ambushes were hairy enough, he figured, without the presence of a lieutenant colonel and his RTOs, whose radios would hiss in the dark if anything happened anywhere in the battalion. Vail did accompany another ambush team, though. The very point he was trying to make was made on Sewall and most of the Triple Deuce: The new colonel was as tough as they.
Lieutenant Colonel Vail was tough, and he was respected because he knew his