Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [39]
Before leaving, General Roberts had told the troops a hot breakfast was on the way and, indeed, powdered eggs and toast were delivered in mermite cans after the medevac and ammunition resupply missions had been completed and the last of the new bunker material had been lifted in, which meant the grunts ate breakfast sometime around dusk. Then, with their ammunition replenished but their parapets barely repaired, they hunkered down for a night that threatened to explode any moment with the assault that would finish them off. It never came.
In and around FSB Illingworth, meanwhile this second morning in April, elements of the 5th Mech and the 11th Cav mounted up to push toward the border, along the likeliest avenues of NVA withdrawal. In A Troop of the 11th ACR, 1st Lt. Paul Baerman, the troop executive officer, had been choppered out to the firebase the day before to take command until their wounded captain had recovered enough to return to the field. As his men ate a breakfast of C rations inside the firebase prior to donning their helmets and flak jackets, Lieutenant Baerman approached the troop first sergeant. In a scene that could have been found in the military biographies that had been partly responsible for propelling Baerman to West Point, he confided that since waking up he'd had the overwhelming premonition that this would be his last day on earth.
Baerman was looking for a little support, but the old soldier rightly passed it off as just one of those things and told him not to worry about it.
His guts knotted, Baerman climbed aboard his ACAV. With their Sheridans leading and their ACAVs spread out behind in column, A Troop rolled north until, cutting through another scrubby clearing some two klicks beyond Illing worth, the NVA ambushed them. Discerning as best he could amid the cacophony that all the AK47 and RPG fire– a platoon's worth–was coming from the left, Baerman brought his ACAVs on line with his Sheridans, and they slowly ground forward with the brush shivering before them at their continuous sheet of machine gun fire and cannister rounds. Artillery fire thudded along a draw behind the NVA positions to cut off any attempted retreat. Pushing through the brush, the GIs spotted the openings to five or six bunkers that had been hastily scooped out of the sandy soil by what Baerman figured was a delaying party for the main group. No more fire was coming at them, but troopers took the precaution to clamber off their tracks and pop grenades into the bunkers.
Climbing back onto his ACAV after grenading one of the bunkers himself, Baerman took the radio as the Cobra gunships he had requested came on station. He brought them in close across the troop's front, but one came in a bit too close. When the pilot punched off his rockets, something smacked Baerman's face and, startled, he realized his hand was covered with blood. God knows what he thought the shrapnel had done to his face, and his mind pulsed,that s it, that's it, the feeling was rightl But he really didn't feel any pain, so he helped get a bandage around his gunner's leg, where the kid had also taken rocket fragments. Rolling then up to an uncrossable draw, A Troop counted twelve enemy bodies, and taking no more fire they retired to where the first sergeant had secured a landing zone for the medevac. Baerman's face was red with dried blood. Walking over to where the first sergeant and medics were, he