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By Root 875 0

where the Blackhorse had every nook and cranny zeroed in. But when K Troop and the 31st Engineers were on the highway where the drivers had to proceed at a slow pace to keep from sliding off the high-crowned strip, the NVA would position themselves at such distances where they would be hard to spot from the road but where their rocket-propelled grenades would still be within effective range. The NVA also made sure to lie in wait in thickets behind which the terrain fell away, so they could shimmy away from the return fire. Speedy was usually too plugged in to orchestrating their support fire and feeding guidance to his platoon leaders to be scared, but there was the day he was sitting on the back of his command AC A V when a salvo of three RPGs narrowly missed him and exploded against the trees only ten yards away in a blizzard of shrapnel and shattered bamboo. Luckily, the fire support that Speedy received was accurate, responsive, and overwhelming. Cobras from the 11th ACR Air Cavalry Troop escorted each of the road runs and lashed the tree lines along the route. The 155mm SPs from the Howitzer Battery similarly walked barrages along Route 7, and placed H&I fire on the approaches to the highway at all hours of the day and night. Also, Speedy occasionally had CS fired along the way to keep North Vietnamese Army RPG gunners coughing in their holes as his Sheridans and ACAVs drove through the tear gas, crewmen donning gas masks and reconning by fire on the move. Everyone kept waiting to run into an enemy battalion.

This went on for five days.

The troops were filthy from the red mud. Speedy, sharing the deep resentment of many professional soldiers toward the media, found himself musing that although every morning his kids knew they were going to be ambushed again, they stolidly saddled up and did their jobs. The media was so preoccupied pinning tails on donkeys that they were blind to good soldiers.

As for himself, Captain Speedy, better known as Bandit 26, had never been as proud of K Troop. Cambodia had brought them together and cleansed by fire all the rust they'd accumulated at Loc Ninh and Lai Khe. They were better soldiers now, although they looked more like Chinese pirates, he thought. Their security duty during the back-hauling of The City resulted in plundering of the NVA supplies: The troops wore communist boots or maybe a khaki communist shirt, carried communist binoculars and communist packs, and their vehicles were piled with communist bicycles, field phones, rifles, and whatever else had caught a trooper's fancy. Not all of this was approved by the regulations, but Speedy figured that the REMF jerks who wrote the rules were not going to come visiting.

K Troop was doing the job thanks to leadership and comradeship, and to solid individuals. There was Doc Ramey, the chief medic, a hard-nosed guy who was contemptuous of malingerers and who always told it like it was no matter the rank of the man he was addressing. There was Mike Davis, who ran the troop maintenance section, a young man who, without benefit of extensive training or a responsive supply line, simply made sure that their vehicles were always working. Speedy commented, 'This young black man was one of the finest soldiers and mechanics I have ever seen. He had a job lined up with the postal service, so I was unable to entice him into a career that would have led to the star and wreath of a command sergeant major. What a stud!”

K Troop's runs up the Ambush Alley brought them to bridge sites that were so waterlogged that the engineer vehicles ended up stalled themselves, like dinosaurs in the tar pits. The dismounted engineers had to wade through knee-deep mud as they scratched their heads and tried to figure out how to proceed: The mud would not release its grip on the bridges. They tried planting demolitions under them. They tried attaching cables to them from hovering Sky Cranes and tugging them out inch by inch. Those methods eventually worked on the A VLB s, but the Bailey Bridge had been another story. The last bridge put in place and the first