Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [240]
…All members of the First Team have done their part. Each one of you, doing his own job each day to the best of his ability, has contributed to the team effort…. You killed enough of the enemy to man three NVA regiments; captured or destroyed enough individual and crew-served weapons to equip two NVA divisions; and denied the enemy an entire year's supply of rice for all his maneuver battalions in our AO. You captured more rocket, mortar, and recoilless rifle rounds than the enemy fired in all of III Corps during the twelve months preceding our move into Cambodia….
“It is my honor to have served alongside you during this crucial and historic period,” George Casey signed off to his troops. “Congratulations and best wishes to each of you!”
The next morning, General Casey climbed into the copilot's seat of his Huey in order to fly north from Phuoc Vinh to visit those of the division's wounded who had been medevacked to Cam Ranh Bay. This required him to pass over the Central Highlands, where an unusually heavy monsoon storm had interrupted normal flight operations. Casey's staff had urged him to simply send his written congratulations and wait for better weather. The monsoon front, which had shrouded the mountains with leaden clouds, would require that they fly on instruments using an unreliable navigation system, but Casey knew that the most seriously wounded of his troops at Cam Ranh Bay were already scheduled for further evacuation to Japan and the United States–if they did not die first–and he wanted to give each a personal report of their operation in Cambodia. General Casey's helicopter never made it to Cam Ranh Bay. On 9 July, two days after it disappeared into a thick cloud bank, aerial scouts located the wreckage on a jungled mountainside in the Central Highlands. All aboard, including the division commander and sergeant major, had been killed on impact.
These men died in Vietnam, but their deaths, so soon after the incursion and on a mission so emotionally tied to it, became the symbolic final casualties of Cambodia. The actual casualties for the Americans in the Cambodian Incursion (1 May-30 June 1970) came to roughly forty-three a day: 284 killed in action, 2,339 wounded in action, and 13 missing in action.
The South Vietnamese, restrained by neither the White House's territorial limit nor schedule of withdrawal, ranged deeper into Cambodia than the Americans and stayed longer. During just the two-month period of the U.S. incursion, their casualties had been heavier than those of their allies: 800 killed and 3,410 wounded.
Damage done to the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong was not as great as had been hoped, because in the weeks between the removal of Prince Sihanouk and the beginning of Operation Rockcrusher, entire NVA/VC regiments had marched west from the border area to do battle with the Royal Cambodian Army and spread Hanoi's control over Cambodia. Consequently, those units were absent when the allies swept into their former base camps. The II FFV intelligence further estimated that COSVN, having anticipated the incursion, had ordered the border caches to be evacuated. However, although the communists could not be brought to full-scale conventional battle, the U.S./ARVN operations killed 11,349 and captured 2,328 NVA/VC in sixty days. Although the evacuation order had been passed to the communist support units, II FFV intelligence surmised that because of the time lag between policy enunciation and its execution, only 400 to 600 tons of material had been moved out. The majority of the caches–more