Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [227]
The grunts of Alpha Company were always scared of Captain Younts for his aggressiveness, but they came to trust him for his bush sense.
Soon after moving back into the Memot area of Cambodia from Thien Ngon, Colonel Claybrook was instructed on 11 June 1970 to move again. The 2-47 Mech traveled a major highway–which meant that it had two lanes and was paved–through a rubber plantation village, with C Company riding point, open fields to the right and hootches and lines of rubber trees to the left. Suddenly there was an explosion–RPG– then a second explosion as the ammunition inside the APC detonated. Black smoke boiled up as the NVA opened fire from plywood sheds along the road, and the battalion column halted on the asphalt highway, pivoted to face the plantation grounds, and opened fire in return.
Major Weeks shouted at his APC driver, and they lurched off the road and began rolling toward the hootches from the flank. Weeks was sitting behind the driver's hatch in a real live barber's chair that had been rigged up there, so he could use his feet to tap the driver on the right or left shoulder to indicate turns. Weeks had his dog on his lap– good old JoJo–an ugly mutt who had no idea whether he was in a helicopter or in a firelight; it was all the same to him. Captain Muehlstedt was behind the .50-cal, and they could see his slugs punching right through the hootches. Muehlstedt winced as he fired because the weapon was malfunctioning: The firing pin was hitting each cartridge in the millisecond before the bolt completely sealed, and metal slivers bit into his legs.
The APC jerked to a halt beside the hootches. Toting RPGs and AK47s, the NVA sprinted through the rubber trees several hundred meters away, and Weeks angrily tried to bring them down with his CAR 15 Colt Commando.
The downed APC sat gutted and burning on the road.
Confused and excited GIs pumped bursts into the roadside brush, but Captain Younts radioed his platoons not to fire. Every time you turned around, the civilians were caught in the middle, and as far as he could tell there were no NVA this far down the road. No one appeared to be firing at them, but suddenly several figures burst into view. They scuttled toward the rubber trees, and .50-cals were instantly leveled at them and M 16s shouldered. They wore workers' clothes and held their hands up to make the peace sign as they ran. Cambodian civilians?
Spurgeon wasn't sure he cared, and his finger ached at the trigger of his Ml6 rifle: A dead dink was a dead dink and he very much wanted to kill a dink. He hesitated, and a scared GI suddenly emptied his M16 at them.
Another GI bellowed, “Don't shoot! Don't shoot!”
The nervous burst hit an old man in the group, and he raised his hands. He held a machete in one hand, and blood spurted from a fast-pumping artery in his wounded arm. The medic on Spurgeon's track clambered off, ran to the old man, and hurriedly led him back to the column. They crouched in front of the APC, the old man smiling and nodding his head as the medic wrapped his arm and tried to explain that he should hide until the whole column had passed. Someone pumped his fifty into a hootch and it caught afire. It was always fun to waste ordnance, so Spurgeon sighted in on a water buffalo grazing off in the fields. He fired his M16 on full auto, but all the beast did was raise his head for a look. Finally he asked the track gunner for his M60. The man refused.
“I need it for a target,” Spurgeon explained.
“Show it to me, and I'll shoot at it.”
“Well …it's that water buffalo out there.”
“Goddamnit, let's not fuck around!”
Spurgeon settled with tossing out his GI helmet and bouncing it down the road with a