Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [226]
The new company commander, Capt. James O. Younts III, had to call in a second dust-off. He raised hell with Peske that maybe the medevacs were needed elsewhere, and he should have come back with the others. “Now we need a special helicopter just for you! Who the hell do you think you are?”
Captain Younts rarely raised his voice (and, in fact, he recommended Peske for a Bronze Star for his courage that day),1 but he had to somehow impart the lessons he had learned the hard way. When he'd been a platoon leader with Charlie Company, they and another platoon had set up on one side of a blue while the company headquarters, mortar platoon, and the third rifle platoon moved onto the other side. Inside of thirty minutes, every officer save Younts was dead or wounded from booby traps. After a mede vac for the first casualties, Younts requested an urgent dust-off for those hit later on his side of the canal. The lieutenant with him had taken shrapnel through his eyes into his brain, and Younts was on the medevac net for forty-five minutes, but all he could get was a resupply slick with no medical equipment on board. If the lieutenant had had a chance, he lost it then. Younts never forgot that, but it was more important to remain dry-eyed and take note: If you abused the medevac system by dispatching a separate helicopter for every wounded man, someone else somewhere else could die.
Captain Younts was a professional who had extended his tour in order to get a company command. He had graduated near the bottom of the USMA Class of 1968, which proved little really, because in the field Younts was recognized by the battalion leadership as perhaps their finest junior officer. He made captain after command of a platoon in Charlie Company and of the Battalion Scouts, but had been on R and R in Hong Kong when Cambodia broke. When he finally got Alpha Company from Muehlstedt (who became S-3A), he immediately set about restructuring and tightening up the outfit. He was an apolitical man who'd come to do a job he loved, and although he was steady and soft-spoken, he was also domineering, icy, and demanded that things be done his way. After he issued an unpopular directive only two days in command, some-one came up on the company net at dusk to give him a laconic warning, “Well, Alpha-six is going to have to be fragged now.”
Younts took it with a grain of salt: The men were scared and fatigued, but most of all they were young. He chalked it up to adolescent bravado.
He was half right. Private Spurgeon was in a troop tent after the pullout from Cambodia. The guys were in a black mood about the new captain, and one of them, sitting shirtless on his cot, a tough kid with a round face and a shock of red hair, spoke up: “The only body count he's going to end up getting is us.”
“Yeah,” a second GI said, “somebody's gotta stop that man. He's gonna get somebody hurt.”
He put a GI steel pot down at his feet. Six hundred dollars in MPC went into it, and the bounty was to go to whoever pumped a bullet into the captain's back the next time they made contact. Spurgeon couldn't quite believe what he was hearing: He had served under Younts in the Scout Platoon, and had requested a transfer into Alpha Company precisely because he considered him capable.
No one ever went through with the fragging, and the citation to the Silver Star that Younts earned with Charlie Company helped explain why. They had killed several VC in a line of nipa palm one hot day at dusk, but when Younts radioed the captain to crank up the arty, the fire mission was misplotted and geysers of mud began erupting in the paddy around his platoon. In the confusion, the VC opened fire again, and Younts told his platoon sergeant to move everybody over a hundred yards. He stayed put with an M60 gunner to cover the move, and when the gunner fired at a movement, Younts moved up to it. He almost