Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [49]
… the major ran into our office. His face was ashen and he was shaking. “Is your pack ready to go?” he asked. “Can you catch a chopper in fifteen minutes?”
“ Yes,” I answered. “Why?”
“ We're going into Cambodia,” he said.
This was it! The war was back on. I had a pretty good idea that it was going to happen. My friends at the two e vac hospitals had called a few days before and told me that they were clearing out 600 beds. Preparing for an operation that expected twenty percent casualties. … I went over to the hospital. All afternoon, no casualties. Almost spooky. Everyone primed and then nothing. Early in the evening they began to trickle in. But the kids told of almost no resistance–it was if the NVA had just vanished…. And the invasion of Cambodia became the Great Souvenir Hunt.
Chapter 9: JUMPING THE FENCE
At 0945, 1 May 1970, the men of C Company, 2d Battalion (Mecha-L nized), 47th Infantry, 3d Brigade (Separate), 9th Division, and the two attached tank crews from A Company, 2d Battalion, 34th Armor, 25th Division, became the first ground troops across the border. When their column of armored personnel carriers passed through the first Cambodian hamlet, they were received as few soldiers in this war were: as liberators. Villagers along the road laughed and waved, and some tossed pineapples or stalks of bananas to the GIs on the moving vehicles. Others placed their hands together before their foreheads, as if in prayer, in the traditional Buddhist gesture of greeting. Some soldiers returned the gesture.
The Cambodians were simply playing it safe.
Nevertheless, it was a fun moment, especially since this battalion had been expecting an NVA regiment, not smiles.
A stream intersected the battalion's route of advance, and Lt. Col. John H. Claybrook, CO, 2-47, and Maj. Tom Weeks, S-3, 2-47, scouted the jungled banks from their C&C Huey. They found a shallow site, which appeared fordable without using an armored vehicle-launched bridge (AVLB), and contacted their column with a PRC10 FM radio that they had brought aboard along with their rucksacks. They could not, however, communicate with higher headquarters or the fire support networks: The multichanneled radios aboard the command helicopter had malfunctioned. Previously, to halt the prearranged artillery fire being processed through their area, they had had to physically return to Brigade Forward in Vietnam. They had requested a replacement bird, but every helicopter in the task force had been committed for D-Day. That being the case, Claybrook and Weeks could only hope that they didn't run into anything that required talking to anyone else. Since intelligence had placed an NVA regiment in their area, the pucker factor was high. So was the fatigue factor. They had been on the go for four days.
The scramble for the border had been set in motion on 27 April 1970. Then 2-47 Mech was located a hundred miles to the southeast and Colonel Claybrook was airborne over a contact made by his A Company. In the middle of that firefight, Claybrook received a call from battalion rear at Bear Cat on Highway 15: He was to report immediately to the corps commander at Long Binh. Claybrook radioed his company to break contact, then flew up to II FFV HQ, where he was ushered into General Davison's office for a one-on-one conference. Cautioning Claybrook to tell no one, Davison let out the magic word:Cambodia.
Claybrook was to be the first one in, and the 2d of the 47th Panthers were ready to go. They had already been organized into a self-contained battalion task force with no permanent base camp. At the time, the 2-47 Forward Command Post was in the territory of the 2d Brigade, 25th Division, and had circled their wagons in a cleared rubber field in the Nhon Trach Subsector of Bien Hoa Province near Saigon. While Lieutenant Colonel Claybrook got the big picture from the corps commander, a Huey–the Tropic Lightning flash painted on its nose–landed inside the battalion laager to give Major