Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [5]
Major Franks braced in his seat, covering the door gunner with his CAR 15 Colt Commando as the door gunner scooped up two NVA ruck-sacks by their shoulder straps and hustled back to the aircraft.
That's when an NVA stuck his head up from the brush.
As the NVA stared dumbfounded, Franks hollered at him over the propellors to surrender and tried to gesture him toward the helicopter. The NVA bolted toward several other bunkers that suddenly became apparent in the trees, and the pilot pulled out as the door gunner squeezed back on his sixty. It had been worth it, though, because from the rucksacks Franks pulled out an enemy map with a detailed breakdown of the NVA infiltration and resupply trails from Cambodia through War Zone C. This map would prove key to the operations of the 2d Squadron of the Blackhorse along Highway 246, allowing them to ambush those trails and to pile up NVA bodies by the dozen at the cost, for the squadron, of only one of their own.
Chapter 2: RUNNING THE TRAPLINE
The troops were angry and scared, and the platoon sergeant was simply angry about the patrol order, but 1st Lt. Frank R. Cambria, 3d Platoon leader, G Troop, 2d Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry, really didn't have much say in the matter. The squadron tactical operations center suspected that an NVA unit of some hundred men was going to attempt a night crossing of Highway 246 from Cambodia, and if interdicting them required placing a platoon outside the range of their self-propelled howitzers at Fort Defiance, so be it. Lieutenant Cambria, an enthusiastic volunteer who came on strong, was nonetheless as unenthusiastic over the patrol order as his men. He had only thirty-five men, but he also had nine Sheridans and ACAVs, tracked armored cavalry assault vehicles with heavy firepower centered around the 152mm main gun of each Sheridan. The opinion was that two of them gave an armored cavalry platoon enough firepower to hold off an enemy battalion until reinforcements could arrive. Consequently, the squadron commander was willing to send his platoons out on a longer string than he would straight-leg grunts. Cambria had developed a bedrock faith in Battle Six, as the squadron commander was known because of his radio call sign, so after haggling with his troop commander, Captain Menzel, to borrow the mortar track–whose 81mm mortar was capable of firing within fifty meters off their own position–Cambria and his platoon departed the troop laager in the woods near Fort Defiance at the crack of dawn.
With troopers walking ahead of the column with minesweepers, the platoon rolled west on Highway 246 at a snail's pace. The trees were cleared back for up to two hundred meters on either side of the dirt highway to deter ambush, so it was, as always, a miserably hot and dusty trip. The pulverized soil of the road hung in the air behind each vehicle, and by the time the platoon closed on the suspected enemy crossing site, everyone and everything was coated with yet another layer of red dust. It dried on sweaty arms and faces like a crust and in sweaty hair like shellac.
Red was the color of War Zone C.
Lieutenant Cambria checked his map, then stopped his platoon where a creek formed a gulley through the forest and ran under the highway through engineer culverts. While some of the men remained behind the machine guns atop the tracks, the rest jumped down and went to work along the streambed.
Their tool was the claymore antipersonnel mine, rectangular in shape, no bigger than a book, with a concave surface of fiberglass, whose explosive backing would unleash seven hundred tiny steel balls in a sixty-degree forward arc with a lethal range of fifty meters. Since the NVA were known to move down streambeds, the first claymore was stuck in the ground nearby (by the four prongs that swung out from its base) and pointed in the appropriate direction–FRONT TOWARD ENEMY was stamped on the surface–then covered with leaves and twigs. The blasting