Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [36]
Pete Lemon mostly considered himself a guy who did what he had to do, and even after he'd been decorated by President Nixon in the White House he felt uncomfortable in the spotlight:
I've always felt as though when they decorated me, they decorated the unit. That's the only reason I accepted the award. Everybody in my unit was a hero. The thought I have and will always carry is that I, as an individual, could have done more. Lot of guys got killed, lot of guys were wounded, and I wish I could have done more to keep that from happening. It's a very hard emotion to live with. Every day I think about the action and the guys in my unit. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about it, just in a flash or I may ponder it. I thank the Lord he was with us.
Among those plugging the gap with Staff Sergeant Taylor was Pfc Ken Valldejuli and several men who had previously been firing from the bunker on the extreme left of the Echo Recon line, out of the worst of the crossfire. Valldejuli laid an M60 machine gun across the berm and got off a few shots before the filthy weapon jammed up, then he quickly shoved it aside and shouldered someone's lost M16 rifle. The GIs who'd departed with the litter cases rushed back to join him on the firing line. Although there were only four or five of them, they were all that was left of Recon.
“ There's one, there's one!”
It was impossible to tell if they were hitting any of the shadows that flickered in the dust fifty meters ahead. The NVA attack had fallen apart, but there were still plenty of them squirreling around, as Valldejuli put it. Apparently leaderless, they neither charged nor retreated but only fired an occasional AK47 burst or RPG projectile.
One of the guys beside Valldejuli fired an M79 grenade launcher. The recoil, or sound, was odd, so, without thinking, the kid looked down the barrel. He was lucky it didn't blow his head off because a dust-coated round had stuck in an equally grimy barrel. Everyone and everything, in fact, was coated with dust and stained with gunpowder. Faces were black.
Lieutenant Peters had been tossed and battered by the ammunition explosion, so Staff Sergeant Taylor was running the platoon and, with the NVA pulling out and the sun coming up, he led them across the berm and toward the shattered tree line that sat smoky and silent in the gray twilight. They walked past dead NVA, small and frail-looking now that the life had been punched out of them. Many still held their weapons in deathgrips. The platoon had just started into the trees when the armored vehicles from one of the relief columns, the 5th Mech or the 11th Cav, appeared around the side of the firebase in a column of twos. An officer in a track waved the foot patrol out of the way as his line of armored vehicles rumbled and chugged and smashed its way into the forest. “Hundred-year-old trees falling over and stuff,” commented Valldejuli, “it was a good feeling. We knew we were safe then.”
Private First Class Rappaport was not with Echo Recon at Illingworth. Several days before, during a security patrol around the firebase, the platoon had discovered an NVA trot trail through the trees. They rigged a mechanical ambush and had not moved far when three NVA walked into the claymores. The GIs went through the NVA's gear, and Rappaport had to turn away from the bodies: They looked like fourteen-year-old boys. Rappaport had been in the bush seven months and was no longer able to stomach seeing the faces of those they killed. The next resupply bird took him to Tay Ninh so he could take the flight physical to become a door gunner instead. He didn't get