Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [230]
Lieutenant Peske took the point on the dike. Sergeant DeFrank and Sergeant Harris followed. Specialist Spurgeon, fishing out his soaking-wet M60 and ammunition and quickly reassembling the weapon, followed DeFrank and Harris. Light. They trotted down the dike. Dark. They lay down and waited for the next round. Light. Peske, literally trembling on point, kept moving and picked up an AK dropped on the dike, then saw a body slumped over the dike up ahead.
Dark.
Light. Peske walked quickly up to the body, but when he turned it over to search it, the body suddenly sprang to life, pushing him away and sitting up to breathe heavily as if he had been holding his breath. Peske's feet were rooted to a spot beside the NVA as he opened fire in a panic and fell backward, shooting the man six or seven times as he sat there catching his breath. “He's alive!” Spurgeon ran up shouting to Peske to get out of the way; then to his intense pleasure and relief the M60 came back to life in his hands, pouring the entire belt into and around the man.
The 2d Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry of the 9th Division, pulled out of Cambodia on 15 June 1970. The whole battalion assembled the evening before. Spurgeon was sitting around while they dug in, and watched a black guy lean from the crew hatch of his APC to fire a hand flare by striking it against the side of the truck. It discharged at a bad angle and a fishtail of smoke zipped horizontally over Spurgeon's head. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a pair of feet flip up. The feet belonged to a guy in camouflage fatigues from another platoon who'd been setting up tripflares. Apparently, the misaimed flare had ricocheted off the ground into the side of the man's head and he was knocked cold, blood in his hair.
“Who fired that thing?”
Spurgeon started to say something, but then decided no good would come of it and kept his mouth shut. The guilty man climbed off the APC, stood silently for a few moments, then climbed back up and sat staring off into space.
Everyone wanted to celebrate their last night in Cambodia. Spurgeon was pulling guard in the fifty hatch at two in the morning when a tripflare suddenly popped and splashed the laager in a yellow glow. “Tripflare!” Fifties pumped fat red tracers into the black. “Hey, knock it off! Go to sleep!” Thirty minutes later, someone squeezed off a claymore at something either real or imagined, or just for the hell of it. “Incoming!” Spurgeon jumped into a foxhole, and for kicks fired several LAW rockets. More claymore blasts, more glowing tracers. Guys were laughing. Captain Younts came on the radio, angry but calm, and told them to cease fire and cease fire now.
The next morning, they rumbled back down the blacktop. Crossing the border, grunts cheered and popped smoke and fixed captured communist flags to their radio antennae. Approaching Tay Ninh, Captain Younts had his APC turn around and roll past the line of tracks continuing forward. It was not proper to roll into base looking like hippies, so he got on the horn to instruct everyone to “put something on your heads.” Grunts looked over at the captain as he trooped the line, some grinning, almost everyone shirtless and wearing beads, but now all topped with battered bush hats or helmets on backwards or captured pith helmets.
Lieutenant Colonel